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Episode: On Clouds and Cosmic Law

Author: Joshua Schrei
Duration: 01:58:12

Episode Shownotes

In the modern world, words like 'law' and 'order' carry with them a good deal of sociocultural baggage, and are often associated with restriction, burden, and arbitrarily imposed rules. Yet historically, tradition after tradition sees an innate, artful order to the natural world and views the Law of the Land

as something vibrant and alive, present in the breath and in the waters and in the endless cycling of the clouds. In this living vision of Law, nature unfolds along particular patterns and pulses, and the task of the human being is to understand what it means to align to this inherent pattern. The culture attunes itself to the Law of the Land — and its dances and its artworks, its ceremonies and its cycles of planting and harvest are a reflection of this living Law. At the heart of this Law is a responsibility to give back to the living web of which we are a part, and the understanding that in the very act of being alive, we owe debts to the larger cycle of creation. Talk of shared responsibility and debt can seem at odds with a modern culture that focuses on individualist freedoms. Yet traditional visions of Law remind us that our responsibility to nature is not burdensome. In fact, to align to the larger web of life alleviates a great modern burden — the burden of isolation. So Law, ceremonially enacted, places a person in direct somatic relationship with the community and the ecology and the larger cosmos. In this vision, Law is not something that can be theoretically imposed. It must be felt, and it is traditionally felt ritually. So any discussion on Law — Natural Law, environmental law — that does not include a sacred, ceremonial component, is incomplete. For the Law of the Land, as it is traditionally seen, is alive, and what matters most is our communal ritual connection to it. Nyoongar Elder Noel Nannup, Native American activist and author Jose Barreiro, and author Bill Mahony join for this vibrant journey into Law... and clouds. Featuring original music by Marya Stark, Nivedita Gunturi, and Andy Aquarius. Support the show

Full Transcript

00:00:06 Speaker_05
Hi everyone. I'm Josh, and this is The Emerald. Currents and trends through a mythic lens. The podcast where we explore an ever-changing world and our lives in it through the lens of myth, story, and imagination. The Emerald.

00:00:28 Speaker_05
All that's happening on this green jewel in space. So a few announcements here right at the start. The first announcement is that I will be offering a year-long deep dive into mythic study starting in early November of 2024. A year-long deep dive into

00:01:01 Speaker_05
mythic study and animacy and ritual foundations called The Mythic Body. And this is a course I've offered a couple times before, and I'll be offering it again.

00:01:12 Speaker_05
It's a year-long journey, and it's for students of the mythic, students of the animate, who want to better understand the ecstatic animate heart of myth and story, who want to deepen their access to the imaginal core of human experience.

00:01:29 Speaker_05
and really specifically to explore foundational knowledge that is common to global ritual traditions, animate traditions, in order to enhance their practice in their own traditions.

00:01:41 Speaker_05
Through mythic study, somatic practice, ritual repetition, nature immersion, threshold exploration, and shared story, we will recalibrate together and deepen our relationship with body, community, and cosmos together.

00:01:59 Speaker_05
It's a course that has deep relevance and deep applicability for body workers, for somatic instructors, for therapists, for depth psychologists, for psychedelic facilitators, for storytellers, for artists, for writers, for activists, for policymakers, for community builders, and sustainable systems thinkers, really for all knowledge seekers.

00:02:22 Speaker_05
So this course, again, will start in November of 2024. And applications are open starting May 1st. And if you'd like to be added to the mailing list so that you'll receive announcements when the announcements come, email themythicbody at gmail.com.

00:02:41 Speaker_05
and asked to be put on the mailing list for the course. It's a course that historically has filled up and there has been a waiting list.

00:02:49 Speaker_05
So if you're interested in the course and you want to spend time really diving deep in a day and age when a lot of our models of learning are not so deep, if you really want to dive deep, this is an opportunity to do so.

00:03:04 Speaker_05
And I look forward to spending a year together. Second thing I want to say is just an encouragement that I give at the beginning of nearly every episode, just a reminder that this podcast runs on patronage.

00:03:25 Speaker_05
I'm able to do this full time to help bring this unique concoction of music and storytelling and sonic narrative to life because of the support of patrons.

00:03:40 Speaker_05
So if you listen to the podcast and you feel like you're receiving something from listening to the podcast, then I ask that you consider becoming a patron.

00:03:49 Speaker_05
It costs as little as $6 a month, and it's a great way to support the artistic vision of the podcast. and to open yourself up to a whole other realm and range of content offerings, because there are a lot of discussions.

00:04:06 Speaker_05
At this point, there are a lot of discussions archived for patrons that cover a range of topics that I haven't yet gotten to on the podcast.

00:04:16 Speaker_05
So if this sounds intriguing and interesting, please consider becoming a patron, and you can find out more at patreon.com slash The Emerald Podcast.

00:04:30 Speaker_05
Finally, there's something exciting in the works for podcast patrons and for everyone else also coming up that I wanted to talk about just a little bit.

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So, as I think you can probably feel, as I think you probably know, the Emerald is dedicated to fostering and growing an animate vision at a time when such a vision is deeply necessary.

00:04:56 Speaker_05
And for me, this vision, the vision of the Emerald, even pre-dating the podcast, has always been about community and about giving back. So I'm starting a granting program that's going to be run through the Patreon site.

00:05:11 Speaker_05
It's going to be small, at least at the beginning here, but it's going to be something, and who knows what it may grow into. This means that there are going to be small grants available for patrons starting in 2024 to support your projects.

00:05:28 Speaker_05
This program is a partnership with the Fetzer Institute. Some of you may have heard of them.

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Fetzer has generously agreed to underwrite these grants because they share a vision of applying spiritual solutions to social problems and of centering the sacred in these times.

00:05:46 Speaker_05
You might recognize the name from some work they've done with the On Being podcast, and I'm really grateful to them for connecting with me and conspiring together on this project. If you're interested in checking them out, the site is fetzer.org.

00:06:01 Speaker_05
That's F-E-T-Z-E-R. And Fetzer is also going to be providing some much needed structural support for the Emerald, as I have entered the phase where I simply can't do it all alone.

00:06:15 Speaker_05
So it's nice to find others who are committed to community and movement building, and Fetzer shares these values, and it's really good to receive some help.

00:06:24 Speaker_05
What this granting program means for podcast patrons is that there are multiple small annual grants available for projects that are dedicated to keeping animacy alive.

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Right now, the grants will be in the $3,000 to $5,000 range, and there will be two basic categories.

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One is for small-scale projects that are designed to keep traditional spiritual animate visions alive, and the other is for artists and innovators who are exploring themes of spirit and bringing the animate to life in new and innovative ways.

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So this is an invitation to use your creativity and dream a bit and possibly receive funding to help grow this vision.

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For example, under the first category, you might be an indigenous researcher documenting and reviving traditional ceremonial songs, or songline lore, or reassembling the animate pieces of medicine traditions, or documenting all the traditional names for water spirits in a particular geographic region.

00:07:27 Speaker_05
And in the second category, you might be a theater producer exploring how to reintroduce rituality to theater, This is about a spark, a spark of life, and how to foster it and keep it alive.

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There'll be an intro video up on the Patreon site, and more detail will be coming out soon on how to apply and all that good stuff. So I hope this excites you as much as it excites me, and I'm looking forward to bringing it to life with you.

00:07:56 Speaker_05
And you can find out more at patreon.com slash The Emerald Podcast. So now on with our episode. Hi, everyone. So I'm taking a little bit of a breath after that last episode on justice. That was a big one, right? Take a breath with me.

00:08:27 Speaker_05
Yes, let's feel the breath of life together. how it flows freely, how it gathers and disperses and gathers again, in a movement as timeless and inevitable as the pulse of the tides, as the movement of clouds. We're here.

00:08:53 Speaker_05
And we've all got different opinions. And we've all got differing thoughts of how it should be. Let's breathe. So, in the last episode, I spoke of how tradition after tradition speaks of law. The law of the land.

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And how law is at the heart of animate tradition. And like I said in the episode, law is a heavy word, right? I might say words like law and order and you might start hearing this in your head.

00:09:33 Speaker_05
And in a modern culture where law tends to be associated with arbitrary rules handed down from above, with rigidities and regulations and with a history of commandments and boarding schools and Catholic nuns smacking people with rulers, it's understandable that a conversation on law could seem removed from the animate heart of what this podcast is all about.

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Like, how did we get from universal adornment and speaking stones and trance mediumship and ecstatic ritual to law, right? I think it's fair to say that many people have a knee-jerk reaction to the word law.

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In this country, anyway, many of our cultural legends pride themselves on having fought the law or stood up to the law. Our founding fathers were trying to get away from oppressive laws, right?

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Laws that impinged the inalienable rights and freedoms of the human being. There's an ongoing culture war about law here in the States. And there are a whole lot of people in that culture war that say less is more. The fewer laws, the better.

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So there's that vision of law. law as arbitrary human rules, law abstracted from natural systems, law as basically a societal, civilizational invention. But that vision of law is a function of modern abstraction and separation.

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It's not reflective of what law traditionally is. And if we go too far down the road of seeing law as arbitrary,

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heavy, burdensome, as a set of confining human rules, we can forget something a whole lot deeper about law and how it's been traditionally understood.

00:11:20 Speaker_05
We can forget that law, for example, is the clouds, the movement of the cloud, how they gather and disperse, how they billow and how they thunder. how they cascade in an outpouring of fertility of life.

00:11:43 Speaker_05
All of this movement in some visions is an expression of a great law. A law that plays itself out in seasonal cycles, in monsoon cycles, in lunar cycles, in continuities of flow. Do you feel me? What some call the law of the land. the law of the land.

00:12:11 Speaker_05
So it's not law as we might talk about law as, you know, the inevitable row of beige books on the shelves behind the lawyer's desk.

00:12:22 Speaker_05
Tradition after tradition talks about the law of the land as something vibrant, alive, present in the waters, present in the spaciousness of the great dome of sky. The great sky does not obstruct the drifting of the white clouds, says Shito.

00:12:44 Speaker_05
And that just might be a law. And in this great sky of existence, there is space for all things to express, unfold, come to be and pass on. To articulate in their particular shape and way. To pass on like clouds on the plane.

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Pass on in pattern like clouds on the plane. Unfold in pattern like clouds on the plane. I saw us, beloved, like clouds on the plain. Cloud shadows drifting, in time, across the plain. So, law is the understanding that there's a green.

00:13:40 Speaker_05
order to nature, a pattern. There's a way that the cosmos unfolds and this law, this order of creation is expressed everywhere. The word cosmos itself means what? It means order.

00:14:01 Speaker_05
But before we go thinking that that sounds boring or restrictive or impinging, remember that the or in order is the same or as in ornament, as in adorn. The sense is not of some rigid, soulless, impersonal order.

00:14:22 Speaker_05
Like the universe is a big military academy, right? The sense is that of embroidery. Of a repeated pattern. That this universe unfolds according to a pattern. A shining pattern. A reverberant pattern. A fractal pattern that is present in how waves move.

00:14:45 Speaker_05
and how galaxies unfold, how cultures organize, how institutions arise, how human undertakings gather and disperse, so that if you look at a map of nations over the past 800 years and speed it up on time-lapse, what you see looks a whole lot like gathering and dispersing clouds.

00:15:14 Speaker_05
gathering and dispersing and gathering again. This is the law of the cosmos. This is the law of the clouds. In the traditions of the Indian subcontinent, there's a word for the pattern that articulates and defines the very cosmos.

00:15:33 Speaker_05
The word is ırta, the pattern, the order of creation. And ırta, as those who take my courses know, is a word that I really like to talk about. Because ırta is related to the word order, and also related to the word art.

00:15:53 Speaker_05
The universe, as scholar and author Bill Mahoney tells us, is artful. Implicit in its artfulness is an underlying order. And implicit in the order is sublime artfulness. Not one without the other, in fact.

00:16:11 Speaker_07
If you look it up in a dictionary, you'll see things like universal law, or cosmic order, or foundational truth, those sorts of meanings. And I think we can begin talking about it by thinking of it as

00:16:26 Speaker_07
an integrating principle by which the divine and the natural and the human worlds are all connected.

00:16:32 Speaker_07
So it's a principle of integration, a principle of integrity, where all things in the world and the universe are in some way connected to each other through this dynamic principle of harmony and balance.

00:16:46 Speaker_07
So the idea of rita has a sense of balance and harmony and connection, interconnection and interconnectivity.

00:16:54 Speaker_07
It's spoken of, referred to, with a number of metaphors, one of which is like a smoothly turning wheel, a cosmic wheel, in which everything in the universe is turning with everything else in this smooth, balanced, sukka, means, you know, good space.

00:17:13 Speaker_07
In fact, the word for season, you know, the cycle of the season, the word for season is rtu, they're related to each other.

00:17:20 Speaker_07
I became really interested in it when I made a connection in my mind between the Sanskrit word rita and not only the English word order. That word order can sound a little bit too static to me, a little bit frozen, if you will.

00:17:35 Speaker_07
It's more like the Chinese notion of the Tao. It's a kind of moving and dynamic principle of balance and harmony. I'm intrigued by the fact that linguists tell us that the Sanskrit word rita

00:17:48 Speaker_07
is actually related to the English word art and therefore artistic and artful. It helped me kind of put into words what I sort of deeply intuitive and that is that the universe is artful, that it is artistic, that the universe is a work of art.

00:18:15 Speaker_05
So the modern Western mind often has to do some re-patterning around the word order. The modern mind in a state of PTSD from religious orders and marching orders and on and on rejects a lot of what we associate with order.

00:18:30 Speaker_05
The Western mind makes a dichotomy between that which is restrictive and that which is liberating. Either it's free or it's ordered. So order and free expression, order and art, can't possibly be the same thing.

00:18:46 Speaker_05
Yet, art teems with symmetry, unfolds from symmetry. All the free spontaneity of the music that transports us into liberated states unfolds from highly structured mathematical ratios.

00:19:01 Speaker_05
All music springs from a very distinct and prescribed mathematical order. There is order in the artfulness, and artfulness in the order. like the infinite carnival shapes of clouds that arise from a defined pattern of water and wind.

00:19:19 Speaker_05
within a sky that holds space for it. An artful order and an ordered artfulness are inherent to creation. And it's all around us. Right here. The order of the universe isn't some faraway law proclaimed by an absent god. The waters flow with Urta.

00:19:41 Speaker_05
The clouds gather and disperse with Urta. The river flows Urdhva. Dhanajankola quotes the Rig Veda as saying, the year is the path of Urdhva. The gods themselves are born of Urdhva. And the sun is called the wheel of Urdhva.

00:19:58 Speaker_05
Urdhva is what holds everything together. Law, as the Orphic hymn to Law says, quote, is the order that places the stars, gives earth and ocean their right place, steadies nature's balance.

00:20:20 Speaker_05
The substrate of the universe, this artful order, this ephemeral yet adamantine law. When we get past the associations with the word order, we can see a universe that very clearly unfolds in spirals, in fractals, in waves.

00:20:40 Speaker_05
It unfolds in a sea of vibrational responsiveness. as immediate as the sound of an echo, the ripple in a pond. Yes, it is shaping faraway galaxies, but it's also right here, in the curve of an eyelash, in the branching of the placental tree.

00:21:01 Speaker_05
which is why Urta has been translated as the cosmic order and also the regular course of things. And when we start to talk about this pattern, this deeper pattern of creation, I've seen here how the Western mind wants to say, but what about chaos?

00:21:22 Speaker_05
What about pattern breakers? What about tricksters and disruptors and all that they bring? We'll get there. But first let's steep in this for a moment. There is inherent pattern to the universe.

00:21:36 Speaker_05
And that pattern can be seen in the wave dynamics of all that is. What we call randomness, Wendell Berry says, is simply failure to see the larger pattern, the inherent pattern of creation, the way the cloud shadows move upon the plane.

00:22:00 Speaker_05
The suggestion that something might be inherent to the universe, that there might be a pattern inherent to creation, that there might actually be a there there, like there might be a way things are beyond relativism. at the postmodernist mind.

00:22:19 Speaker_05
You're telling me that there's a pattern and that's just how it is? Well, what about my truth, your truth? What about it all depends on how you see it? Feel into this. Clouds gather. Clouds disperse. You feel that? Clouds gather. Clouds disperse.

00:22:41 Speaker_05
There's very little that your truth or my truth can do to alter that. We breathe in, we breathe out. This is the pattern. It's inherent. So let's say for the moment that law is definitive. Let's say that law is exactly as definitive as cloud.

00:23:06 Speaker_05
In that, its cycles are inevitable, tangible, real. But its actual play is whimsical, expressive, transparent, light. That's the law. The animate vision of our ancestors sees inheritance in the patterns of creation.

00:23:31 Speaker_05
You're not going to find too many traditional cultures say that all this is a projection of your individual consciousness, or that all forces we encounter are subjective forces, or that it's all random.

00:23:43 Speaker_05
So, even if you see all this as an ultimately non-dual expression of Shiva consciousness, you understand if you really grasp the Shiva-Shakti traditions, you understand that there are definitive patterns along which it self-organizes.

00:24:00 Speaker_05
ley lines along which it vibrates, mandalas of cause and effect along which it hums. It bends outward from source in definitive harmonic structures. This is what mandalas, what yantras are.

00:24:16 Speaker_05
Definitive and stable as the sky, ephemerally patterned as cloud. infinitely creative as the artful order it is. The goddess is this geometry of creation in many traditions. She is this matrix of pattern in expression.

00:24:37 Speaker_05
She is the intricacy of the mandala pattern that says what goes up comes down. She is all of it. If you want to see the infinite creativity of the pattern of creation, look to the clouds and how they change shape. Now a feather. Now a weasel.

00:24:58 Speaker_05
Now a camel. Now a whale. Just ask Hamlet. Do you see on the cloud that's almost in shape of a camel?

00:25:08 Speaker_06
By the mass, and it is like a camel indeed. Methinks it is like a weasel. It is backed like a weasel. Or like a whale.

00:25:19 Speaker_05
Very like a whale. But as free as clouds are, there are definitive ways that they arise and those are all the predetermination of patterns of sun and water and wind.

00:25:33 Speaker_05
So the Order contains within it all the space for infinite expression that it needs for its own replenishment and renewal.

00:25:40 Speaker_05
All creative expressions, all tricksters and waves of rebellion, and the periodic smashing of social orders, and the ritual refreshing of that Order, is ultimately, ultimately part of the Order itself.

00:25:56 Speaker_05
There's no music that you could sing, nothing that you could create, Iluvatar the One tells the rogue singer Melkor and Tolkien's Silmarillion. There is nothing you could create that does not have its uttermost source in me.

00:26:13 Speaker_05
All this is held within the stability of what the Mongols called Tengri, the eternal blue sky. Eternal. Definitive. That's law. Ever-replenishing. Ever-creative. Ever-expressive. That's law, too.

00:26:37 Speaker_05
So, even if you're really big on impermanence and emptiness, even if you've adopted the Heraclitian view that the only thing stable is change, That doesn't mean that the universe is centerless, rudderless, anchorless, nothingness.

00:26:55 Speaker_05
Within the wave dynamics of creation, all things change. But the way that they change, the pulses and cycles along which they change, The bright invisible laws around which they spiral are inherent.

00:27:11 Speaker_05
Even the impermanence traditions still see inherent law to creation. Karma as the inherent law. Dharma as the inherent law. Love and kindness as an alignment to that law.

00:27:26 Speaker_05
There's a reason why even the most ardent emptiness practitioners still see an inherent difference between being a bully and being kind. Because there is, in fact, a there-there.

00:27:40 Speaker_05
Everything is in flux, yes, yet the karmic framework of the wave dynamics of cause and effect persists. and clouds arise from causes that precede them and return to Earth when conditions are right for their return. See them? Sinuous. Ephemeral.

00:28:00 Speaker_05
Spiraling along spiral dance paths forever. What were they like, those skies? What were the skies like when you were young? They went on forever.

00:28:18 Speaker_02
What were the skies like when you were young? They weren't on forever. We lived in Arizona and the skies always had little fluffy clouds in them and they were long and clear and there were lots of stars at night.

00:28:43 Speaker_05
So, from an animate perspective, yes, there's inheritance. There's a way things are. There's an order to nature, a pattern. Hungarian philosopher László Földényi says it like this,

00:29:07 Speaker_05
Just like the movement of the stars in the sky, or the passage of time, it can never be susceptible to influence. This order is cosmic. To revolt against it would be as futile as revolting against the rhythms of birth and death.

00:29:23 Speaker_05
Native author Leigh Maracle says, quote, natural law is when the earth comes up with something herself and so we recognize it. When the clouds gather, it rains. Rain comes from the ocean and so on and so forth.

00:29:41 Speaker_05
Everything is dependent upon something else and draws from something else. and feeds back into a greater cycle of interconnectivity. That's the law of the land. What we do to the web of life we do to ourselves. That's the law of the land.

00:30:00 Speaker_05
And the stars hum with law, and the land sings with law, and when humans are attuned, they receive law directly from the land, and build their entire cultures around that law.

00:30:16 Speaker_05
I spoke with Nyungar elder Nol Nanup about law, and how it flows forth from nature, and how it determines everything. Cycles of food and harvest and water use, and even marriage among clans.

00:30:32 Speaker_06
The law is determined by the spirit of the place. So many people in today's world are so far away from it, it's completely foreign to a lot of people, that a spirit in the land could possibly determine a law for that place.

00:30:51 Speaker_06
And basically, that law is to be connected. And through that connection, we don't just talk about your connection to

00:31:02 Speaker_06
other people and ourselves, we talk about a connection to others and to nature itself and then the really deep part of it takes us into the cosmos and it's from that cosmos that comes the law that you're asking about.

00:31:22 Speaker_06
We have a marriage law that comes from a planet called Jupiter. So that's a marriage law. And it's associated with the moons of Jupiter. So when I say that, we're not talking about the 76 to 83 moons that are being found all the time by new telescopes.

00:31:43 Speaker_06
We're talking about the four that are visible and used to be visible even more clearer than it is now. and those four moons give us our marriage law.

00:31:55 Speaker_06
Then there's a law that comes with that through that same Cosmos connection that allows us to then know and understand that coming with the marriage law is a food law and what you eat comes from the totemic system that exists within the confines of that marriage law.

00:32:20 Speaker_06
So that determines all the things that you need according to your blood group, which is determined through that marriage law.

00:32:30 Speaker_06
And then we can go through processes slowly because there's a water law and there's a law that connects you to the little piece of country that your spirit comes from. And that's within a catchment, an area that's designated

00:32:48 Speaker_06
to you through your ancestral lineage. And once you have those connections, there's a six season cycle that allows you to travel through your, what we call Kala Gur, your home run. Kala is fire and Gur is like a cup shaped nest.

00:33:14 Speaker_06
So you travel within that area. And as you do, You have members of your immediate family who were responsible for different locations in that Kullukur. And you have this holistic picture that each and every one has a little piece of.

00:33:34 Speaker_06
And then as you travel across your piece of country, your ancestors, through your ancestral lineage,

00:33:41 Speaker_06
and also the totemic system which is imprinted in your gene and your geniality through the atoms allows you to sit on a piece of country where your ancestor is sat and shed the atoms into the soil and you connect to those and the information then through osmosis becomes part of you

00:34:12 Speaker_06
a new part of it. That's our ancient world. And somewhere within all of that is what you would refer to as law.

00:34:26 Speaker_05
So in the aboriginal vision, as I'm coming to some infinitesimally small understanding of it, everything in this animate world, everything comes from and revolves around what is translated as law.

00:34:40 Speaker_05
Everything in creation unfolds according to a great law.

00:34:43 Speaker_05
And the role of the human being is to ensure that one's dances and one's artworks, one's culture building projects and one's relationships, one's ceremonies and offerings, one's food acquisition and water treatment and birthing practices and grieving practices and funerary rites and stories and songs are connected to that law and reinforce that law.

00:35:06 Speaker_05
Stories and songs, the ones that last, come through law and they point back to law. Lore and law, especially if you have an Australian accent, are very deeply linked. There are laws that come through the clouds.

00:35:23 Speaker_05
There are laws that come through the stars. Laws that govern what foods ripen when and how humans are to use them. Laws that govern water use and our interrelationality with streams. Quote, we know of a time when the animals and foods could speak.

00:35:40 Speaker_05
Each of those foods spoke a promise. They spoke a law. The law they spoke has to do with how we walk the land and how we treat others in accordance with the great harmonic pattern of all that is. These laws aren't so much your truth, my truth.

00:36:01 Speaker_05
These are embedded in the land and known across a thousand generations. And the cultures that decide, oh, it's all relative and I don't need to pay attention to the inherent nature of a place.

00:36:14 Speaker_05
I can just graze sheep on this land in which the soil and the river and the grasses share a very delicate, inherent relationship. And it'll all be fine because my truth is that I get to graze sheep here.

00:36:25 Speaker_05
And whoops, look, the whole thing's a dust bowl now. These cultures don't last. So it's good to examine those truths, those laws. Because the land is the judge of whether your truth or my truth or somebody else's truth prevail.

00:36:46 Speaker_05
And the land sings with law. There is a signal to the law of the land, says Tyson Yonkaporta, and the songs live in the land and transmit from land to people, and the stories and songs replenish and reawaken the land again.

00:37:04 Speaker_05
The stories that are passed on from generation to generation are stories of law. of ancestral lawmakers and lawbreakers. The stories sing of the delicate balance of the cosmos.

00:37:16 Speaker_05
A cosmos in which everything plays its part in the overarching pattern, and each has a part to play. So it is, the Tibetans say. So have I heard. Some stories start and end like this, right? Why? It's a reaffirmation of law. The story isn't about law.

00:37:40 Speaker_05
The story is law resounding. And stories aren't there to teach a nice little abstract moral. The story is meant to strike a reverberatory note with the law of the land so the story and the land hum together. So have I heard.

00:38:02 Speaker_05
So have I heard it resound in the reverberatory matrix of creation. So have I heard it whispered in the mossy creek bed. So have I heard it passed from mouth to ear for ten thousand generations. So have I glimpsed it in the unending spiral of stars.

00:38:21 Speaker_05
So have I seen it in the dance of wisps of cloud. So, as I say the words, clouds gather and clouds disperse. Clouds gather and clouds disperse. Clouds gather and disperse. So it is. things start to move, you feel that, because it resounds with law.

00:38:48 Speaker_05
Whereas if I say something preposterous like clouds never move or economies grow forever, those sentences don't reverberate in the same way, because there's no law there.

00:39:02 Speaker_05
But if I say, like Shito said, if I say, look, the great sky does not impede the drifting white clouds, Look, beloved. The great sky does not impede the drifting white clouds. Maybe that hums with a little more law.

00:39:28 Speaker_05
This law of the land isn't an abstract far away. It's near. It's here. It's in the breath. As present as wet mist breathed by the mountain. As the little droplets of condensation on each hair-pore of the body. In the dozens of Hawaiian words for cloud.

00:39:50 Speaker_05
Mother pig and piglet clouds. Mackerel cloud. Continually growing cloud. Sheltering cloud. Long cloud. High cloud. Cloud with the rainbow woven right in. Creation invites us to wake up to her flows and patterns. To align ourselves to her harmonies.

00:40:19 Speaker_05
If a particular wind bends the ferns towards the mountain, that's the wind that brings rain. A particular bird has a particular song for storms. We start to feel the pattern.

00:40:32 Speaker_05
We start to feel within how each part reflects the whole and each part reverberates with law.

00:40:40 Speaker_05
And as we ritually align to the cycles of law around us, the waters pouring with law, the clouds raining law, knowledge of the pattern of creation and how to live within it streams in.

00:40:56 Speaker_05
Which is maybe why the Yajur Veda says that clouds are one of the sources of knowledge of cosmic law. Feel into that. Clouds are one of the sources of knowledge of cosmic law.

00:41:12 Speaker_05
And in the Hawaiian tradition, there's a proverb that says, knowledge is built on cloud billows. Knowledge is set up in the clouds, it's sometimes translated. Is that just poetry? Is that just a metaphor? How is knowledge built on cloud billows?

00:41:32 Speaker_05
There's a very practical piece to this, of course. Clouds tell us things about where we are and what's coming. Clouds deliver signs and omens, not abstractly, tangibly.

00:41:46 Speaker_05
So Polynesian wayfinders, Wade Davis tells us, would read the reflection on the underside of the clouds to know where they were in the vastness of the Pacific. Certain cloud formations form above certain atolls and island groups.

00:42:03 Speaker_05
Certain seas around certain atolls reflect in certain colors. Certain iridescences along the underside of clouds. This is law.

00:42:16 Speaker_05
The particular silver-green shine on the underside of that cloud and what it tells you about where you are and what's coming next. clouds tell us a whole lot about the cycle of life because they are the cycle of life.

00:42:35 Speaker_05
Native sculptor Rose B. Simpson told me once how when she was a kid she would go to the Pueblo dances at Santa Clara and on those days, those dance days, she would look out across the vast New Mexico sky and see columns of clouds in the distance.

00:42:55 Speaker_05
columns of cloud building over each pueblo that was dancing on that day. And that's how she'd know that the dances were doing what they were supposed to do. That's how you know the ritual is humming with law.

00:43:13 Speaker_05
I remember, thirteen years old at San Ildefonso Pueblo, a dancer in many colors, a bundle of feathers against a billowing black cloud, a crack of thunder, a crack of holy thunder, the skies split open. Mother, the skies split open, do you hear?

00:43:37 Speaker_05
Clouds gather. Sometimes they disperse. But sometimes when the conditions are right, they keep gathering. They keep gathering, do you feel? They accumulate. They build.

00:43:51 Speaker_05
And the friction of that accumulation reaches a certain point and then it ruptures and it rains. It rains with sacred law. I watched as they ruptured, sings Mirabai. Ash black and pallid, I saw mountainous clouds split and spew rain for two hours.

00:44:15 Speaker_05
Everywhere water, plants and rainwater, a riot of green on the earth. My lover's gone off to some foreign country, sopping wet at our doorway. I watched the clouds rupture. Mirabai's songs to the clouds brim with longing.

00:44:38 Speaker_05
Longing without consummation as that endless cycle of gathering and dispersal seems to go on forever. And then finally the monsoon arrives. That longing is consummated in outpourings of rain. And life springs anew. What came from that gush?

00:44:58 Speaker_05
That downpour from the splitting clouds? Life. So the Hawaiians say that life is in the clouds. Great life, broad life, deep life, elevated life. Life is in the clouds. The cloud is the fertile outpouring of life.

00:45:21 Speaker_11
Oh, the clouds, oh, the clouds, see the break in the clouds. Feel the sun shining down, shining down through the clouds. Oh, the clouds, oh, the clouds, see the break in the clouds. Feel the sun shining down, shining down through the clouds.

00:45:44 Speaker_05
From My Wings Are Shaken wrote Shelley in his Ode to the Clouds. the dews that waken the sweet buds every one.

00:45:55 Speaker_05
For Wordsworth, Martin Heuser says, clouds represent, quote, fecundity, a reification of organic nature's ability to reproduce and replicate.

00:46:06 Speaker_05
In To the Clouds, Wordsworth imagines clouds emerging from what he considers an originary region of becoming, the fount of life invisible.

00:46:17 Speaker_05
So the clouds speak not only to the fertility that comes with rain, but to the infinite expressions that flow from source and return to source. to a universe that regenerates, re-expresses, replenishes in an infinite dance.

00:46:36 Speaker_05
Quote, just as clouds appear, Longchenpa the Dzogchen master says, just as clouds appear, remain. and finally fade back into the southern sky. All phenomena arise within the expanse of awareness.

00:46:54 Speaker_05
They dwell within awareness, and at length they sink back into it. So the cloud is an eternal recurrence, an infinite pulse of birthing and dying. Shelley sees in the cloud, quote, eternal recurrence or life eternal.

00:47:14 Speaker_05
Although subject to continual change, the cloud in the poem with the eponymous title is immortal. I change, but I cannot die. I silently laugh, says Shelley, at my own cenotaph.

00:47:28 Speaker_05
And out of the caverns of rain, like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I arise and unbuild it again. Clouds never die, says Thich Nhat Hanh.

00:47:44 Speaker_05
Law is as eternal and definitive and stable as the eternal, whimsical, replenishing dance of cloud. So, yes, knowledge is built on the clouds. We start to understand source and movement from it and the return to it.

00:48:05 Speaker_05
We start to understand that journey mirrored in the pattern of breath, of thought, of feeling, of phases of life, in ritual, in birth and death. We start to feel all phases of the cycle within us.

00:48:22 Speaker_05
The rising, the gathering, the accumulating, the bursting, the raining down again. We feel this regenerative law in us. In order for something to be born, to crack open, to precipitate, a certain amount of accumulation is necessary.

00:48:41 Speaker_05
So the tapas of the sages, the heat, the spiritual potency, the reverberatory accumulation of energy, builds over time like rising thundercloud, like cumulus.

00:48:58 Speaker_05
This knowledge of gathering, accumulating, billowing, building informs everything from why the inner sanctum of a temple is a womb space, free of wind or disturbance, so that energies can gather, to why rituals need a good container, to why practice is done in an enclosed space.

00:49:22 Speaker_05
Accumulation. If you want rain, you need accumulation. Gathering. Gathering magic. Gathering and accumulation. Do you feel law present in the wisdom of how clouds gather? I spoke about this in the intuitives episode.

00:49:40 Speaker_05
You ever feel that you had a profound experience? A potentially life-altering experience? But then you overshare it, you share it on social media and it's gone. Dispersal. Like clouds that never rain. It dispersed before it ever gathered.

00:49:59 Speaker_05
And because it dispersed, no, rained. This isn't a metaphor. This is how energy actually moves. So it is, as in the clouds. So here in me. Dispersal can be important. It can be important to disperse.

00:50:17 Speaker_05
Energy gets too thick in the ritual space, it's good to have practices of dispersal. But it's also good to have practices of gathering, of accumulation, of building and holding, so that it can rain.

00:50:35 Speaker_05
Precipitation comes only if there's been sufficient accumulation. The outpourings we want, the creative outpourings, the nurturance of all that we want to grow in our lives, only comes through constructing a container for accumulation.

00:50:51 Speaker_05
But then the clouds teach us accumulation is not meant for accumulation's sake alone. The cloud does not accumulate so that it can possess or hoard. It accumulates so that it can share. It can pour forth with life.

00:51:06 Speaker_05
As we come to know cycles, as we come to know the spiraling law of the land, we come to know ourselves. Clouds are the source of water. The mantra Pushpam of the Yajur Veda says, The one who knows this becomes established in themselves.

00:51:27 Speaker_05
Water is the source of clouds. The one who knows this becomes established in themselves. The one who knows the source of water becomes established in themselves. The monsoon is the source of water.

00:51:43 Speaker_05
The one who knows this becomes established in themselves. Water is the source of the monsoon. The one who knows this becomes established in themselves. The one who knows the source of water becomes established in themselves.

00:52:14 Speaker_05
How does the one who knows that clouds are the source of water become established in themselves? They know the pattern. And the pattern reinforces their relationality to all of it. Law is the larger pattern as it reflects in us. We feel it in us.

00:52:32 Speaker_05
And when it feels distant, we sing it out and the world around us reverberates and that reverberation leads us home. Our song goes to the clouds as we walk to our homeland, say the Guywu group of women.

00:52:49 Speaker_05
I quoted this in the Trevor Hall episode, and I'm going deeper into it now. The clouds collect the sound, they say, and later it will rain. Just feel into that. The clouds collect the sound, and later it will rain. Accumulation. Gathering. Gathering magic.

00:53:10 Speaker_05
In the ceremony we sing the song and then another clan sings the song, they say. It gathers in and eventually it rains. As we walk, the sound of our walking goes up to the clouds.

00:53:25 Speaker_05
Our sounds, our voice, our footsteps, the sound of our existence are woven into the clouds. We are singing to the clouds and the chanting goes up, up, up, out of our mouths and up to the clouds. Like a vibration of our existence, they say.

00:53:41 Speaker_05
talking to the clouds, singing to the clouds, sending our song to the clouds, because when they hear, the clouds gather.

00:53:51 Speaker_05
Knowing the cloud is there, knowing that we are always connected, that is our kinship, our pattern of interconnection, and our law.

00:54:02 Speaker_05
Law, the Guywu group of women say, is the underlying rules and connections that bind us together, that tell us what to do. It's a respect. The law tells us that we are always connected even as we separate, even as the clouds.

00:54:20 Speaker_05
This is in the song Spirals. The law and the song spirals like the clouds that gather and separate tell us to live life to its fullest.

00:54:29 Speaker_05
Life is precious and we must do what we have to do before we go so that later, when we're gone, others will respect us. The clouds tell us what to do. What does that mean?

00:54:45 Speaker_05
What does the movement of clouds have to do with respect and living kindly and walking well? There's an inextricable relationship between knowing the movements of nature, the pattern of law, and knowing what it means to walk through this world well.

00:55:05 Speaker_05
So that, as Padmasambhava says, our view is as vast as the sky and our conduct is as fine as barley flour. The law translates from the dance of the cosmos to the dance of how we treat others.

00:55:22 Speaker_05
The experience of connecting to this world of great cycles, the rapturous connection to greater cycles, takes us to the place of empathetic connection where we want to fulfill our custodial role, where we want to reinforce our deep connectivity to each other.

00:55:39 Speaker_05
Me to you and you to me. It doesn't matter if we disagree. We are wisps of cloud. Let us be held in the same sky together. Let us be held, you and I.

00:55:55 Speaker_05
There's a word in the Walpiri language, say Langton and Korn in their book Law, the word wala that describes feelings of trust, ease, happiness, gladness and satisfaction that flow when law is properly observed and all things in creation are moving and working in harmony.

00:56:17 Speaker_05
The Hopi express the understanding of living in harmony with the law of nature as, and you're going to have to forgive my pronunciation on some of these next words, the Hopi express it as Novoiti. The Tlingit refer to it as Shogun.

00:56:33 Speaker_05
Anishinaabe and Cree people call it Minobima Titsiyuin, or the good life. which also translates, as Anishinaabekwe activist Winona LaDuke explains, to continuous rebirth.

00:56:49 Speaker_05
She goes on, quote, two tenets are essential to this paradigm, cyclical thinking and reciprocal relations and responsibilities to the earth and all creation. Cyclical thinking, common to most indigenous or land-based cultures and value systems,

00:57:06 Speaker_05
is an understanding that the world flows in cycles. Within this understanding is the knowledge that what one does today will affect one in the future on the return.

00:57:17 Speaker_05
Reciprocal relations defines responsibilities and ways of relating between humans and the ecosystem.

00:57:23 Speaker_05
Simply stated, the resources of the economic system, whether they be wild rice or deer, are recognized as animate, and as such, gifts from the Creator. There must always be this reciprocity. So we have responsibilities.

00:57:44 Speaker_05
Not arbitrary, human-imposed responsibilities, but responsibilities to the larger flow of the cosmos, to align to a living matrix around us. To find balance within its great architectures, within its seasonal and cyclical flows.

00:58:04 Speaker_05
In the episode called Inanimate Objects Aren't Inanimate or Objects, Rose and I talked about how waking up to an animate world isn't just about seeing fairies everywhere. It's about understanding that we're being watched.

00:58:18 Speaker_05
It's about understanding I am in a living vibrational matrix and everything I do matters. That's the order I've been born into. The order I've been born into is not actually a blank slate. It is a responsibility. Debts are owed.

00:58:37 Speaker_05
Relationships exist that we are entering into upon taking our very first breath. Relationships that may have been established generations and generations and even lifetimes before.

00:58:49 Speaker_05
So if someone asked me what it means to embrace an animate vision, I could talk about waking up to a living world. I could talk about nature spirits and ecstatic states and wonder and trance. And I do talk about these things, right?

00:59:06 Speaker_05
Or I could just as easily say that animacy is about law, order, and debt. Just to mess with postmodern minds and recovering religious minds and humanist minds, maybe I'll start doing that. What's animacy all about? Beautiful soundscapes?

00:59:25 Speaker_05
Singing back to nature? No, it's about law, order, and debt. But, of course, to pay our debt to nature requires that we sing and that we dance. It requires art. Nature requires from us an artfulness of being. That's the beauty of the order.

00:59:50 Speaker_05
Roberto Colasso says, quote, Existence, all existence, begins in debt to something else, having borrowed from something else. First and foremost, life itself. Between erna, debt, and erta, cosmic order, there is a restless wavering.

01:00:12 Speaker_05
Debt is born out of order and given back to order. Otherwise the balance would be upset and life could not continue. It's a process that takes place at every instant.

01:00:23 Speaker_05
The elaboration and exchange of a substance that can be called ana, food, but incorporates within it the word, the gesture of offering, the yielding of the substance itself. But if there is no beginning, will there ever be an end?

01:00:40 Speaker_05
No, for every offering leaves a residue, and this residue sets off a further chain of acts. I take, I give back, forever.

01:00:52 Speaker_05
I'm responsible in this sensitive vibrational matrix for what I put forth and what I claim as mine, and what I kill and what I gather, and what I break apart and what I join together, and how I proliferate and what I create.

01:01:07 Speaker_05
And in this living web of cause and effect, excess has consequence. Failure to offer back has consequence. This is right at the heart of animist understanding.

01:01:20 Speaker_07
Ritta is always threatened by forces of un-ritta. That, if you can imagine the Roman a-n, un, which negates the following word, you know, ritta. and its opposite would be Amrita. What humans can do is to support being, can support existence.

01:01:38 Speaker_07
There's a huge and vital importance in human beings remembering their responsibility and living responsibly and to resist those that would threaten it.

01:01:50 Speaker_07
You know, that there are values in the world, there are perspectives that actually degrade the integrity of the world, that quite literally degrade it.

01:02:01 Speaker_07
And because it degrades the integrity of the world, it also involves the kind of degradation of the human spirit and the insult to the inner integrity of beings. We could talk about that for a while.

01:02:14 Speaker_07
The ridicule and the sarcasm and all that sort of stuff, that needs to be resisted. Those are forces of anorita, if you will. And so I think there's a kind of call to say yes to the world by resisting that which says no to the world.

01:02:29 Speaker_05
It can be difficult for Western humanist minds to really grasp this, because we really want the deep wisdom of the ages to speak to us of liberation, freedom from debt, rather than responsibility and order.

01:02:43 Speaker_05
We really want to find worldviews and ideologies that reinforce our predilection towards individualist freedoms. So we extract pieces of animate traditions that seem to us to reinforce what we want to hear about freedom.

01:02:57 Speaker_05
Says Fouldenier, quote, modernity parrots ever more convulsively the slogans of freedom, considered to be irreconcilable with any sort of concession towards the concept of any higher order. And this reflexive freedom impulse runs deep.

01:03:15 Speaker_05
But there's a simple truth here. Animate traditions aren't based on modernist notions of freedom. Animate traditions are utterly based on, steeped in, replete with law.

01:03:29 Speaker_05
Noel Nanop directly tells me that adherence to law is how Aboriginal tradition has survived for 70,000 plus years. Living in deep relationality with land. But that doesn't mean just hanging out being free on the land.

01:03:46 Speaker_05
It means that there are protocols around absolutely everything. And don't fear my friends, we're not talking about judiciary law. We're talking about something so much more luminescent, so much airier, so much freer. We're talking about the clouds.

01:04:05 Speaker_05
We're talking about the stars. Quote, for Torres Strait Islanders, the sun, moon, and stars form all law for navigation, calendars, weather prediction, seasons, food economics, ceremonies, and social structure.

01:04:22 Speaker_05
This knowledge underlies all Torres Strait Islander traditions. as recorded and handed down through traditional songs, dances, and designs. Stars, for many cultures, are not just things for Jiminy Cricket to wish upon.

01:04:37 Speaker_05
Fanciful invitations to dream of how far you can go and how you're someday going to make it and marry that handsome prince and have a reality show. Or whatever it is that we're taught to dream about these days. To shoot for the stars, you know.

01:04:52 Speaker_05
In many traditions, stars are beings in a great web of interbeing. And those beings have histories, and those histories are embedded in the fabric of the sky, and therefore the fabric of consciousness.

01:05:04 Speaker_05
And those stories run the full spectrum of the experience of being. The stars are stories. They echo and reverberate brightly with the consequences of violence, with the struggle to transform, with the value of selfless giving.

01:05:22 Speaker_05
They echo with birth story and death story. They echo the tales of tricksters, stories of excess and stories of balance. And the stars reinforce both the inarguable fact of a greater pattern and what happens to those who veer from it.

01:05:40 Speaker_05
The constellation Orion in multiple traditions serves as a big reminder of what not to do, how not to overstep. Nature emanates story and that story reverberates with responsibility. Responsibility not as a dry abstract burden.

01:05:59 Speaker_05
but responsibility as the very flow of life. Quote, everything in law and life requires constant effort and work, from good governance and decision-making among leaders to maintaining harmony within your own family and peace within society.

01:06:16 Speaker_05
The Southern Cross is a permanent reminder, Langton and Corn say, that we must always strive through our observance of law to achieve and sustain this balance.

01:06:28 Speaker_05
Imagine looking up at the sky and seeing not only the invitation to hope and dream of faraway things, but to feel tangibly one's interconnection. And in that interconnection is a great responsibility.

01:06:43 Speaker_05
But it is a responsibility that is never tackled alone. Alone. What's that alone? Ever seen that single cloud? That lone cloud? Is it alone? Or is it a punctuation mark of a great conspiracy of forces? Is it a singular expression of interconnection?

01:07:08 Speaker_05
Just like you and I. Just like you and I, beloved. Interconnection, everything is offering to something else. Everything arises from something else.

01:07:21 Speaker_05
From Thich Nhat Hanh, If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain. Without rain, the trees cannot grow, and without trees, we cannot make paper.

01:07:36 Speaker_05
The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud's not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. Interbeing is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, he says.

01:07:54 Speaker_05
But if we combine the prefix inter with the verb to be, we have a new verb, interbe. Without a cloud, we cannot have paper, so we can say that the cloud and the paper interare. Everything is in relation to everything else.

01:08:28 Speaker_05
Everything is adoring everything else. Everything owes a debt to everything else and receives back from everything else. For the gods, says Colosso, must also sacrifice, must also perform ritual acts in the Deva Yajna, the cosmic offering place.

01:08:47 Speaker_05
Since the gods too have ancestors, forebearers, the gods before, the circulation of substance,

01:08:55 Speaker_05
is not limited to Earth or to the intermediate space between Earth and sky, but pervades the whole cosmos, as far as the celestial ocean that can be recognized as the Milky Way. See the Milky Way. That cloud chain of offering fires.

01:09:14 Speaker_05
Every fire up there a song. Every fire up there a sacrifice. See the clouds? Those are offering clouds. Look around you. Every place you see marks a place of offering.

01:09:31 Speaker_02
The skies always had little fluffy clouds in them, and they were long and clear, and there were lots of stars at night. And when it would rain, it would all turn. They were beautiful, the most beautiful skies, as a matter of fact.

01:09:49 Speaker_02
The sunsets were purple and red and yellow and on fire, and the clouds would catch the colors everywhere. That's neat, because I used to look at them all the time. You don't see that. You might still see it in the desert.

01:10:04 Speaker_05
Every place marks a place of sacrifice. Every place is the place where oneness sacrificed her body on the altar of immediacy. Every place lifts you up and takes you in and reinforces responsibility as much as it opens a path to freedom.

01:10:22 Speaker_05
So, story embedded in the stars, in the land and water and cloud, It charts a path for human beings through a world of forces and distractions and dangers and a thousand ways to go astray.

01:10:37 Speaker_05
Story reminds us we're no better than anyone else, and tells of what happens in culture after culture for all time when someone starts thinking they are. Story makes you live right, as Keith Basso recounts in Wisdom Sits in Places.

01:10:53 Speaker_05
Noel Nenop speaks about how somatically embedded law is in Aboriginal tradition. This is deeper than simply growing up with a respect for nature. So deeply embedded the law of the land, that to violate law, for many, was somatically untenable.

01:11:16 Speaker_06
and you're terrified of breaking the law because the ramifications of that and the judge and the jury are not necessarily your fellow people. It's the spirit and it's so strong and innate.

01:11:34 Speaker_06
that if you do do something wrong, you within yourself become the judge and the jury because of your consciousness and your subconscious nags away at you and says you've done the wrong thing, you've told a lie, you've eaten the wrong food.

01:11:55 Speaker_06
And you just begin to spiral out of your system and your metabolism completely collapses and breaks down to the point where you get into a fetal position because you just can't cope anymore and you die.

01:12:18 Speaker_05
Oh, that's a strong one. Hold it for a moment, and then let it disperse like cloud. Maybe it'll gather when the time is right for it to gather.

01:12:29 Speaker_05
If you've heard a story, and that story made you bow your head before the waterfall, or before the high windswept peaks, then that story was humming with law. Story infuses us with respect.

01:12:44 Speaker_05
Not an abstract respect, but an embedded, felt respect for a world of great forces. So steeped in law, our Aboriginal children, says Noel, that from a very early age they're taught to be profoundly aware of their own shadow.

01:13:03 Speaker_06
So as a child, you're given two of the greatest gifts that a child can be given to set them up for the rest of their lives. One of those gifts is the ability to never put yourself first. You're always looking to others.

01:13:23 Speaker_06
And being totally responsible for your own happiness. How does that happen? You listen carefully and you will hear what it is that allows you as an individual to do that.

01:13:39 Speaker_06
Firstly, and not necessarily in this order, you're not allowed to put your shadow on an older person. And you're taught this from when you're old enough to understand. Hey, careful where you're putting your shadow.

01:13:55 Speaker_05
And that can sound different for us in the Western world, right? Different way of child-rearing. And just feel for a moment. What deeper somatic embedded reminder of the fact that actions have consequence? That what you do matters?

01:14:11 Speaker_05
Could there be than growing up physically aware of where you are throwing shade? Seems like a lot of folks these days never grew up learning that there are consequences to throwing shade. Know what I mean?

01:14:29 Speaker_06
By the time you're two, you're being taught not to even point your shadow, most definitely at an ilter. So you become a person who is learning discipline, and you're self-disciplining, because you look, where is that person?

01:14:48 Speaker_06
By the time you're five, it's almost innate. By the time you're seven, you can run through a group of people running as fast as your feet will carry you and not put your shadow on anybody.

01:15:02 Speaker_06
Because what you're doing is you're looking where everyone else is. The last person you're thinking about is yourself. Pretty straightforward. No rocket science, just what we can call good old common sense.

01:15:17 Speaker_06
Now the other discipline, to get to the point where you're responsible for your own happiness, is when you understand that your aunties, that's your dad's sisters, are instructed by your great-great-grandmother

01:15:34 Speaker_06
to bind seeds from a little plant that has aromatic properties. That means you crush the leaf and smell it. Oh, it's beautiful. So they'll find your plant.

01:15:50 Speaker_06
And your great-great-grandmother had a teacher, and that teacher has told her that one day a child will be born that carries the same name as that teacher. And your teacher is also your friend, and they'll never let you down, no matter what.

01:16:11 Speaker_06
And they help you to understand that the best way to learn is through experience. It's okay to make a mistake. But don't keep making that same mistake. And they'll drop those seeds from that aromatic plant directly above where your placenta is buried.

01:16:34 Speaker_06
So our placentas were buried under different trees. So when we talk about a family tree, we don't talk one with the straight lines, these two married and their dear sibling, their children here. We're talking about a physical tree.

01:16:50 Speaker_06
And for my own personal family, it's the Jarrah tree. Beautiful tree. It's also aromatic.

01:16:57 Speaker_06
As that placenta is in the ground in the drip zone of that tree, that tree takes into it through fine feeder roots that come up, nutrients are taken from that placenta via those fine feeder roots. into the tree.

01:17:15 Speaker_06
So what has then happened is the same placenta that nurtured you as an individual is now also in that tree. So your deoxyribonucleic acid that we refer to as DNA is now in the tree.

01:17:31 Speaker_06
You cannot have a closer relationship with something in the natural world than for it to carry your same DNA. This is part of that first law. This is part of that marriage law. This is part of that food law.

01:17:48 Speaker_06
This is part of that little piece of country that you're connected to spiritually. And these are where the expended genes are left for you.

01:18:00 Speaker_06
Because as you travel in that six-season cycle, you travel past that ancestor who told the great-great-grandmother that you would be born and carry the same name and the same suite of totem as they carried. Isn't that beautiful?

01:18:19 Speaker_05
So, law travels through fine feeder roots, connects us, literally, atomically and anatomically to the world around us. Law is how the baby knows to reach for the mother's breast. Where is that knowing? Is it genetic knowing?

01:18:36 Speaker_05
Yes, for genes themselves are spiraling ladders that unfurl around. Law. Law is in the matrix fractal tree of the placenta. I've seen the holy architecture that drives the newborn still wet to its mother. I've seen the law that drives that.

01:18:56 Speaker_05
And the only possible way to respond is with respect. Quote, the need for people to approach life with underlying respect and humility, as the ceremonies teach, is essential for the proper functioning of societies in keeping with ancestral law.

01:19:14 Speaker_05
Ceremonial participation starts from infancy, because babies are said to crawl with law, and dancing in public ceremonies is encouraged as soon as a toddler can walk. Ceremonial participation.

01:19:30 Speaker_05
What is law without ceremony, without ritual, without sacred enactment? How can law seep into bones? How can the seriousness of responsibility and the deep alleviation of individual burden possibly be embodied without ceremony?

01:19:51 Speaker_05
Why would we care about the law of the land if it's something happening out there to everyone else? We've got to feel it in our bellies, in the deepest part of our bones. Oh, feel the living law in the belly and in the bones.

01:20:09 Speaker_05
There's no way to feel what law is without ceremony. There's no way. Law is danced. Law is sung. It's impossible to extract law from its spiritual root. The sweat of our ritual spaces should rain back down upon us. We should feel it.

01:20:29 Speaker_05
Steam should rise from the friction of prayer spaces. Steam should rise. No steam, no rain. We have to exhaust ourselves. until our heads are bowed and we pass the night into the dawn together and we rise to a world of hummingbirds.

01:21:04 Speaker_05
We can have all the abstract conversations we want about ecological law, and unless it's been somatically enacted, embedded, felt, ritually reinforced through ceremony, it won't stick. I'll say it very plainly.

01:21:21 Speaker_05
Climate science won't stick without ritual embodied enactment. So that word rta that we are exploring before, that is etymologically related to art and order, is also related to the word ritual.

01:21:38 Speaker_05
Ritual is the path back to the artful order of creation, to the patterned artfulness of creation. Art, order, ritual.

01:21:48 Speaker_07
It's also interesting in that rta implies a kind of activity, a being in the world, where some other traditions kind of turn away from being in the world. But Brita implies this artfulness, implies, well, you can be an artist yourself.

01:22:03 Speaker_07
Your own life can be art. Your own life can be a work of art. And so it implies a kind of action, a kind of an active engagement with the world.

01:22:12 Speaker_07
And in ancient India, kind of a primary way to do this was to perform sacred rituals in honor of the various gods and goddesses who themselves lived their divine lives within this principle of Brita.

01:22:23 Speaker_07
so people could support it by offerings to fire and that sort of thing.

01:22:28 Speaker_07
And this idea of sacred activity within the world, kind of a world-affirming activity expressed in the ancient world through ritual and sacred ceremonies also lays a foundation for ethics, for kind of a social ethics.

01:22:42 Speaker_07
Ways of being in the world that support the goodness of the world rather than ways of being in the world that kind of fracture this artful quality of it.

01:22:53 Speaker_05
When I spoke with native activist and author Jose Barrero, he emphasized how much ceremony is tied in with law. There isn't law without some type of spiritual practice that reinforces law. But a lot of conversations on law

01:23:08 Speaker_05
want to leave out the ceremonial part. So in the past few years, indigenous law has entered into the discussion of global environmental law.

01:23:19 Speaker_05
And indigenous law and indigenous thinking are being used as a framework for discussions on environmental and social justice in some circles. And this is a good start. I'm totally in favor of it. But it also misses something.

01:23:35 Speaker_05
Law, as I understand it, is more than a template for how to treat watersheds and to restrict salmon overfishing and approach ecology in terms of its material ethical relationality.

01:23:47 Speaker_05
At its heart, law is the acknowledgment and embodied enactment of the breath of life that is the architecture of the world. The acknowledgement that spirit moves everything, infuses everything. And I have to enact that in me too.

01:24:04 Speaker_05
So if you just take the material ecological applicability and you leave out the whole spirit part, you miss the heart of the law of the cosmos. And as usual, modernity wants to adopt everything but the core thing. Because the core thing is animacy.

01:24:26 Speaker_05
Natural law, says Stephen Wall, defines the relationship between humans, between humans and non-human entities, and with spiritual forces. Spiritual forces, which can only be interacted with ritually and ceremonially.

01:24:47 Speaker_05
So the term natural law is popular these days, right? But once it's abstracted from place and ritual, abstracted from the body and from the breath of life, people can take natural law to mean whatever they want.

01:25:02 Speaker_05
Here's where we're at with what sometimes is called natural law. The left seemingly wants to adopt the ecological and material part and leave out the spirit and ceremonial part.

01:25:16 Speaker_05
The spiritual but not religious crowd sometimes seems to want the free-spirited part without any of the structure. The political right wants to claim spirit as theirs and own a vision of natural law that is totally removed from its roots.

01:25:32 Speaker_05
Natural law as the law of the jungle. the law of the open market, libertarianism, permission to do whatever we want free from accountability. And let's just say no traditional understanding I know of has ever viewed the law of nature that way.

01:25:50 Speaker_08
You know, I've heard of you. You're one of those constitutional sheriffs.

01:25:56 Speaker_04
Yes, I am. Defender of freedom and protector of the common man against the tyranny of the state and all its wicked demands.

01:26:05 Speaker_09
Taxes?

01:26:06 Speaker_04
Oh, yeah.

01:26:07 Speaker_09
The social safety net? Oh, well, I'd spit, but, uh... Respect for the otherly abled?

01:26:12 Speaker_04
The whole multicultural panoply.

01:26:15 Speaker_09
So, you... you want freedom with no responsibility? Son, there's only one person on Earth who gets that, yeah.

01:26:26 Speaker_10
Hmm. President.

01:26:27 Speaker_09
A baby.

01:26:28 Speaker_10
You're fighting for your right to be a baby.

01:26:39 Speaker_05
Yeah, traditional cultures don't tend to be particularly libertarian. I mean, I've actually got a couple of native friends who are now libertarian, so they might be loading up their rifles right now.

01:26:50 Speaker_05
But traditionally, I'm talking, it's a free-for-all doesn't tend to be the ancestral worldview. So what if natural law was more than climate science? More than the God-given right to do whatever we want, whenever we want?

01:27:06 Speaker_05
Or the reason that festival dude won't wear a condom? Natural law is a deeper understanding of how the land actually works. The movement of nature is the ultimate determiner of truth.

01:27:19 Speaker_05
Not your truth, my truth, but what actually lasts, what actually harmonizes with the way the living land unfolds over time. And natural law is the ceremonial enactment of that understanding.

01:27:32 Speaker_05
The enactment of law itself until humans and land reverberate as one thing. Through this barometer, we can start to understand what laws, what human laws, are upheld by the land, and what laws do not pass the actual test of cause and effect.

01:27:50 Speaker_05
Remember how Nietzsche said, let's take the idols one by one and shake them and see if they ring? Let's see if the laws ring, and if the land rings in response.

01:28:04 Speaker_05
Like, does the land ring in response when I say everyone is entitled to the pursuit of happiness? As it says in the Declaration of Independence. Why would anyone want to spend that much time pursuing happiness?

01:28:20 Speaker_05
Pursuing and happiness sound like two different things to me. That law speaks of a culture that will exhaust itself, pursuing happiness so frantically like that. That law doesn't ring.

01:28:34 Speaker_05
Does a law that allows billion-dollar corporations to exist free from accountability in a universe of debt ring along with the law of the land? How about a law that permits wanton environmental devastation?

01:28:49 Speaker_05
Tyson Yolkaporta quotes Auntie Mary Graham, a Kombu Mary woman who has done a whole lot of work on law, as saying, quote, Settler law is incomplete because it's possible, even commonplace, to commit immoral and unethical acts of destruction that are not illegal.

01:29:08 Speaker_05
If one can devastate a forest, relocate and kill its residents, and all that is legal, and there is seen to be no debt incurred, then that law bears no resemblance to how nature functions.

01:29:22 Speaker_05
So natural law is the alignment of law to the actual land, and the alignment of the lawmakers ceremonially to that living pulse of law. For how can our lawmakers hope to get anything done if there are no offerings first?

01:29:40 Speaker_05
if there is no ritual, if there are no gratitudes spoken aloud, no circle of sweat pouring and pounding feet. Those laws are doomed to disperse before they ever reign. Do our forms of governance acknowledge spirit? Do they acknowledge a living world?

01:30:00 Speaker_05
Are they anchored in ceremony? Here's what José Marrero says about the interweaving of the law of nature, the community, and ceremony.

01:30:10 Speaker_01
Indigenous government has so much to do with attention to the natural world. For activities, for economic activities, whether it's planting and harvesting and hunting or fishing or farming generally, there's so much that has to do with activity.

01:30:27 Speaker_01
And if the traditional is working, all of those have a ceremonial foundation attached to them. So here in the longhouse, you have the midwinters, which just happened. Midwinter ceremony is the turning of the ashes in the fire. It's a renewal new year.

01:30:45 Speaker_01
Pretty soon comes Ogiwe, which is a dead feast. Then comes the blessing of the seeds ceremony. Everybody brings their seeds. Sometimes seed exchanges happen and so forth.

01:30:56 Speaker_01
Then there's a planting ceremony, the strawberry, when the strawberries first come out. And like that, through the year, as things are happening that had to do with normal life, there are ceremonies attached to them.

01:31:12 Speaker_01
that have a whole cycle of ceremony, sometimes overnight and often all day.

01:31:19 Speaker_01
The longhouse gets full and there's, you know, the ceremonies include dancing, include the music, speeches, grandmothers, chiefs, different ones put each other up to speak, to explain things. And each ceremony has its own rituality.

01:31:34 Speaker_01
That enlivens quite a bit your psycho-spiritual basis, you know, mind and spirit. get enlivened by that, get refocused by it.

01:31:45 Speaker_01
The law, as you find it, again, going to this example of the great law of peace, which is the basis of the Iroquois Confederacy government of six nations united, each with its own clan systems and its own chiefs that meet and represent all of the nations.

01:32:02 Speaker_01
In these days, 21 reservation communities. That happens in a spiritual context. starts with the tobacco burning, that Thanksgiving address. There's no meeting that doesn't start with the tobacco burning. So already you have that as the basis.

01:32:19 Speaker_01
The basis is, what are we doing here today? We're putting our minds together to give thanks to this element, this element, this element, this element, what makes it the creator, the unseen force.

01:32:32 Speaker_01
Great spirit in some places, Wakan Tanka with the Lakotas, like that. There's ceremony attached to many things of life. If there's going to be a birth, the midwives have ceremonies. The folks burn tobacco. They have their cycle of songs.

01:32:48 Speaker_01
A lot of births, my wife's a traditional midwife. And almost always, there's a singing going on. The men are outside singing that baby into being. There are songs that go with that.

01:32:59 Speaker_01
So the culture is very rich in bringing these things out and creating the spiritual openness. for things to happen. And then it's not lost on people that at those times, when there's a lot of that motion, life motion, things happen.

01:33:20 Speaker_01
Signals happen, messages happen that have a real binding reality, you know. Coincidences happen. People in the know go, yeah, there it is. They don't have to discuss it. It's just knowing because it's in the culture. It's not a big surprise either.

01:33:39 Speaker_01
And the more you concentrate, know about ceremony, the more you like to guide your day that way because it brings a lot to your day to concentrate in the spirit of thankfulness. Everything in the universe wants to be appreciated.

01:33:56 Speaker_01
It's one of the principles of that. So, you know, you have that world alive appreciation in everything. You have reciprocity as a major concept in everything among humans, among families, community, and with nature, with everything in the world.

01:34:15 Speaker_01
So that reciprocity is a big one. Maya villages have been in places where People meet in the morning, early morning, and everybody tells their dreams to the elder.

01:34:26 Speaker_01
A couple of elders are sitting there listening to the dreams, and then they correspond that to the day in the calendar, you know, the Maya calendar, and what that means, and what time of the night, or what was the narrative, or what was the sequence, and what does it mean to us as the village.

01:34:42 Speaker_01
And these things are going on, you know, so that's government. That's actually government, in a sense of how a village gets organized. And in the morning, well, we're going to plant this field today.

01:34:54 Speaker_01
Let's everybody go over there and help so-and-so out. And that's reciprocity.

01:34:59 Speaker_05
appreciation and gratitude, recognition of debt and offering, recognition of the great law of the world that is sung and danced together and that then makes its way into the community and how we treat one another and how we embody interconnectivity.

01:35:15 Speaker_05
This, perhaps, is what binds human beings together. It's what makes life life. It's what human beings are.

01:35:24 Speaker_01
I've told this story before, but at Geneva again in 77, when it was a conference, the first conference ever in 1977, where indigenous delegations came and presented largely around human rights issues.

01:35:39 Speaker_01
Horrible things going on at the time from Brazil to Guatemala, you name it. Very directed at Indians, at Native people.

01:35:49 Speaker_01
One afternoon, the human rights lawyers, even the native ones, were trying to define the sense of unity that there was going on in the

01:35:57 Speaker_01
in the conference and one fellow got up and said, well, I think our unity comes from our mutual history of oppression, our mutual histories of oppression. That was decent enough definition. People were starting to nod.

01:36:12 Speaker_01
And this elder from the Seneca nation, one of the six nations, Corbett Sundance, the chief, he got up and says, no. He says, no. He says, that's what happened to us. But that's not who we are. That's what happened to us. Let's share who we are.

01:36:30 Speaker_01
Tomorrow, I invite you to come to my tobacco burning. First thing in the morning, we're going to do a Thanksgiving address. And come and I'll show you.

01:36:41 Speaker_01
And sure enough, early morning, a lot of the elders, Monongwe among them, David and others, showed up for.

01:36:50 Speaker_01
classic oration, the Iroquois Thanksgiving address, which is precisely about another one of those principles, which is appreciation, of appreciation of being alive.

01:37:02 Speaker_01
Almost every ceremony that's ever done in the Native world, I don't think I can point to any that are not, always begin with the thread of focus of offering appreciation for breathing, for being alive,

01:37:19 Speaker_01
for the food, for the water, for the air, for the stars, for the sun, for the earth, for what ties it together, intelligence that ties it together somehow. All of that comes together.

01:37:37 Speaker_01
And that's appreciation, and that's a Thanksgiving address, which starts with the people first and then the earth, the shrubs, the medicines, the trees, the four-legged, goes up into the cosmic family of the sun and the moon, grandmother moon.

01:37:56 Speaker_01
It's a prayer that my own cacique there in the eastern mountains of Cuba, Cacique Panchito, when he makes his tobacco burning, that's exactly what he prays. That's exactly what he does.

01:38:10 Speaker_01
And if you go to the Maya, their days, the ceremony of the Mayan days for the particular day, and you see that altar, the form of that altar is the same. And that was at the

01:38:28 Speaker_01
In the birth, the formative moment of the international indigenous movement, September of 77, first time ever in the United Nations. The play stopped when the delegation came in. It was an amazing thing to witness.

01:38:46 Speaker_01
And the first admonition to the Western world, to the white man, as they said, was about the fate of Mother Earth. They said, we have huge problems, human rights issues, assassinations, everything that was going on among the humans.

01:39:05 Speaker_01
So we came to talk about that. But our first concern is what we're doing to the Mother Earth. And that fell to Oren Lyons, a well-known Onondaga chief. I see no seat for the four-legged. I see no seat for the eagle. I see no seat. Beautiful rhetoric.

01:39:26 Speaker_01
Oratory, I should say. Great speakers, all of them.

01:39:29 Speaker_05
Yes, when Orrin Lyons stood up before the United Nations in 1977, he said this, I do not see a delegation for the four-footed. I see no seat for the eagles. We forget and we consider ourselves superior. But we are, after all, a mere part of creation.

01:39:50 Speaker_05
and we must consider to understand where we are. And we stand somewhere between the mountain and the ant, somewhere and only there as part and parcel of creation.

01:40:03 Speaker_05
And fifteen years later, he said this, It seems to me that we are living in a time of prophecy, a time of definitions and decisions.

01:40:13 Speaker_05
We are the generation with the responsibilities and the option to choose the path of life for the future of our children, or the life and path that defies the laws of regeneration. Natural law, he says, will prevail.

01:40:30 Speaker_05
The law of the seed and regeneration. We need the courage to change our values to the regeneration of our families, the life that surrounds us.

01:40:40 Speaker_05
We must join hands with the rest of creation and speak of common sense, responsibility, brotherhood, and peace. We must understand that the law is the seed, and only as true partners can we survive. The law is the seed, the law of regeneration.

01:41:03 Speaker_05
Feel into that. Growth, death, regeneration within the balance of all things, so that all things we plan must be in alignment to this great law, or it will eventually be balanced so that it is.

01:41:20 Speaker_05
So let us take the empty laws and shake them and see if they ring. Does any vision of governance, any vision of success that does not account for the whole living web, ring with law?

01:41:33 Speaker_05
When Steven Pinker says things have never been better, you know, the worldview that because life expectancy is up, even though it's not, And your chance of being murdered is less than it was in England in 1640?

01:41:46 Speaker_05
That things are better than they've ever been? Does the land ring in response? For me, I feel a lot of ancestors silently shaking their heads. You can't talk of the success of any given part of the system without talking about the whole system.

01:42:04 Speaker_05
You can't talk about success without looking at the interconnected web of ceremony and art and community. Without looking at if debts are being paid and offerings made. If the sweat of the ritual is rising up to form rain.

01:42:19 Speaker_05
If the people are being replenished and not falling victim to cynicism. Not plagued by anxious isolation. Is there levity in the hearts of the people? Are the people becoming cynical? Are they morose and downtrodden? This is serious stuff.

01:42:38 Speaker_05
It's not, oh, I can write a hypothetical book about how if we just use reason and trust the market everything's going to work out great. It's serious stuff.

01:42:46 Speaker_05
If we want the whole system to function, we're going to have to shift the discussion from what we get to do to how to manage relationships and curb excess and offer back in order to preserve an overall balance.

01:43:06 Speaker_05
Because that great balance will curb excess one way or another, with or without our cooperation. And so we're going to have to talk about spirit, about ritual, about ceremony, about how law is embodied and enacted. Law is serious.

01:43:25 Speaker_05
There's no escaping law. Law is the thing that chains Prometheus to the rock. All of us Prometheus's to our own rocks. The eagles eat our livers, they feed, they fly away, they gather again. The feast is timeless here upon this rock of cause and effect.

01:43:46 Speaker_05
And law is serious. How do you talk about the most serious thing there is and convey that it is lighter than air? That it is the clouds, it is the freedom within the song. That it offers a great unburdening.

01:44:07 Speaker_05
But that unburdening is not exactly what we're used to calling freedom. That unburdening happens through an even deeper connectivity.

01:44:17 Speaker_05
How do you convey that the lightest, the most cloud-like you will ever feel, is in a highly structured ritual designed to remind you of your responsibility, even as it dissolves you into the sparkling, luminous web of life?

01:44:35 Speaker_05
How do you convey that law is eternal, and binding, as inescapable as birth and death, And yet, translucent as moonbeams, as light as when you take that backpack off at last.

01:44:57 Speaker_05
May we be unburdened as clouds bear no burden, but to form, to gather, to coalesce, to deepen, to split open, and to reign.

01:45:07 Speaker_05
For when the heart at last is weighed, as the Egyptians say it will be, against a feather, when the heart is weighed against a feather, how will my heart be? When your heart at last is weighed against a feather, how will your heart be?

01:45:25 Speaker_05
How do you convey, without having felt it in ritual, that when we talk about law, we're talking about the most binding thing there is, and the most spacious thing there is? About the thing that is most binding and most freeing at once?

01:45:44 Speaker_05
Do we talk of the breath? How you can feel in your next breath all the layers and gradations of freedom? and then feel how you have no choice but to breathe?

01:45:58 Speaker_05
How do you convey that you and I are precisely as free as one note of music in the midst of an intricately structured symphony?

01:46:07 Speaker_05
So the sky says to the clouds you will have all the space you could ever want to express, but you will also be eternally bound to me. What do we do in this vast ephemeral world, this shining web of interconnectivity? Sing again. Dance again.

01:46:26 Speaker_05
Do the ritual again. Water evaporates again. It rains down again. This is how we reverberate within the law of the living land around us. This is how we renew, replenish. And we do it over and over again. Because that's how the alchemy happens.

01:46:48 Speaker_05
That's how it rains.

01:46:56 Speaker_07
It's a great Zen teaching that says, he who is most disciplined is most free. The deepest liberation, the deepest freedom is precisely within the discipline, because it's the discipline that is the freedom. Again, one of these wonderful paradoxes.

01:47:11 Speaker_07
Until we're disciplined, we can be kind of held captive to various forces, sort of external to ourselves or internal to ourselves, that will push us and pull us and draw us away from an inner integrity.

01:47:29 Speaker_05
The foundational discipline of the jazz musicians is what liberated their musical vision.

01:47:35 Speaker_05
The embodied repetition of scales and patterns is what liberates John Coltrane to ride a path of melodic progressions, to ride tensions right to the place of resolution, right to the source.

01:47:48 Speaker_05
Feel how the artist needs to wander, like cloud, yet wander rhythmically. Feel how the artfulness needs order and the order needs artfulness. And then our songs can sing with law. With a law that says I am eternally bound and yet eternally free.

01:48:09 Speaker_05
Eternally bound and yet eternally free. You feel what I mean? I'm free. And the last thing I am is free. And I'm free. And the last thing I am is free. You feel how those words start to hum a little? Stay with me on this journey. It's simple. Feel it echo.

01:48:32 Speaker_05
I was free as cloud. And no, I was not free. I was free as cloud. And I was anything but free. I was free as cloud, and I was anything but free. I was free as cloud, and I was anything but free. Do you feel the simple hum of law there?

01:48:56 Speaker_05
For the law, perhaps, is simple. Everything in the universe, José says, likes to be appreciated. If we want to reverberate with the law of the land, step outside in the morning and say thank you to the world.

01:49:11 Speaker_05
And after a while, the wind will start talking to you.

01:49:15 Speaker_01
You go out every morning and you stick your face out to the real air, not the house air, the outside air, and greet the earth with your nose. Greet the atmosphere of the outside air, the air that the earth made, you know, around you.

01:49:31 Speaker_01
And breathe it with the idea of you're getting communication. And be thankful for being able to do that. And you do that every day, And you knock one day, and you knock the next day, and sooner or later that elder is going to go, who's here?

01:49:47 Speaker_01
Who's knocking on my door? Must be serious. You know, it's going to take its time. It's the first time they're not even going to open the window, you know?

01:49:56 Speaker_01
But after you go to it, and you repeat your Thanksgiving day by day, first thing, you know, go out. Don't ignore, don't even make coffee first. Breathe the deep, face the air, you know, face the air, face the wind. That wind's gonna speak to you.

01:50:15 Speaker_01
It's gonna speak to you. There are ways because it's all around us. It's just we forget, huh? We forget it's all about our day. So that's a lot of expressions of mind and sticking with a habit, you know, forming the habit. Forming the habit.

01:50:39 Speaker_05
All this talk of freedom and law, it arises, it disperses. It feels tangible for a moment, present and clear. And then we try to grasp for it and it's ephemeral. Where did it go? So that after, maybe you think back and you can't quite place it.

01:51:00 Speaker_05
What was he saying again? Something about the clouds. Something about the ongoing dance of all this. Oh, what was it, this life? It was something about the most serious of things. Our responsibility before creation.

01:51:21 Speaker_05
About the only path there ultimately is. Something about who we are and how we treat the world. That's right. It was something about dissolving this. Something about being good to each other, do you remember? Something about giving back.

01:51:39 Speaker_05
It was something about gathering clouds. Do you feel? It was something about holding space for each other. Even if we disagree. It was something about the law of creation. It was something about rain. Something about kindness. It was something about rain.

01:51:59 Speaker_05
Something about loving each other. Something about rain. Something about loving each other. Something about rain. It was something about loving each other. Something about a drenching rain. It was something about loving each other.

01:52:18 Speaker_05
Something about an all-pervading rain. It was something about loving each other. It was something about rain. It was something about loving each other again.

01:52:33 Speaker_07
In the Vedic world, There is the notion that all of this, even that which seems, that is degrading and the resistance against degradation, all of that is held within an encompassing, boundless, undifferentiated field of pure consciousness.

01:52:55 Speaker_07
That in some way, even that, even the degradation is held within a power that ultimately affirms and ultimately says yes. And that this ultimate yes both is the source of one's yearning and the object of one's yearning at one and the same time.

01:53:18 Speaker_07
It's the source of responsibility and the purpose of responsibility. And it is real. And that's where I find my faith. You know, at times of chaos and the traditions that that means so much to me, as you know.

01:53:37 Speaker_07
That ultimate source and ultimate object of yearning and longing and seeking, all of that is love. Uppercase L. Love. All of it is love.

01:53:53 Speaker_07
So that life, the meaning of our lives, the purpose of our lives, literally the foundations of our lives is to know and express Love, that's what I think the real seers do.

01:54:30 Speaker_05
First of all, special thanks to my guests, Nyungar elder Noel Nanup, Native elder activist and author Jose Barrero.

01:54:39 Speaker_05
He's the author of Indian Roots of American Democracy and the editor of Thinking in Indian, The John Mohawk Reader, among many other books. William Mahoney, the author of The Artful Universe and Exquisite Love. Both books are highly recommended.

01:54:55 Speaker_05
This episode featured the Megh Ragh, the Song of the Clouds, performed by Nivedita Gunturi. Thank you so much, Nivedita. She also sang a version of the mantra Pushpam from the Yajur Veda.

01:55:08 Speaker_05
Special thanks to Maria Stark for some ethereal cloud-like singing on this episode. You can find Maria's music anywhere you find music, and her new album, Weightless, is worth listening to.

01:55:22 Speaker_05
Many thanks to Lorraine Couture also for doing some research on this episode, and to Andy Aquarius for playing Harp. As usual, this episode contains reference to many books, movies, stories, etc.

01:55:35 Speaker_05
These include the long-running TV series Law & Order, The Declaration of Independence, The Magic of the Orphic Hymns by Tamra Lucid, The Silmarillion by J.R.R.

01:55:45 Speaker_05
Tolkien, Hamlet by William Shakespeare, and thanks to Travis Puntarelli for voicing some characters for us. The book Dostoevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears by Laszlo Fuldanyi.

01:55:59 Speaker_05
a highly-recommended critique of The Age of Reason, and I've always just wanted to say that title on the podcast, so there you go.

01:56:06 Speaker_05
The Writings of Lee Maracle A Wish-Fulfilling Jam Guidance on the Meaning of Being at Ease with Illusion by Rabjang Longchenpa, translated by Michael Sheehy. Right Story, Wrong Story by Tyson Yankaporta

01:56:19 Speaker_05
Shobugenzo Butsukojoji, The Matter of Going Beyond Buddha by Ehei Dogen. An article called Are We Destroying the Natural World by Shohaku Okumura Roshi for the Dogen Institute. The Heart of Understanding by Thich Nhat Hanh. The Wayfinders, Wade Davis.

01:56:35 Speaker_05
Camel, Weasel, or Whale, Cloud Symbolism in English Literary Text by Martin Heuser. The Yajur Veda and in particular the mantra Pushpam, the offering of the flowers. Song Spirals by the Gewu group of women.

01:56:49 Speaker_05
Tulku Urgun Rinpoche's commentary on Padmasambhava. The book Ardor by Roberto Colasso.

01:56:55 Speaker_05
Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Environmental Futures by Winona LaDuke, Wisdom Sits in Places by Keith Basso, American Indian Tribal Governance by Stephen Wall, Fargo Season 5 starring Jon Hamm and Jennifer Jason Leigh, Orrin Lyons Addresses to the Non-Governmental Organizations of the United Nations in 1977 and 1992, the song Break in the Clouds,

01:57:17 Speaker_05
by Elephant Revival, the song Saltarello by Dead Can Dance, Tamanwit, Natural Law, a presentation by Barbara Harper and Stuart Harris, Hawaiian Proverbs and Poetical Sayings by M.K.

01:57:29 Speaker_05
Pukui, The Poems of Mirabai, and of course the song Little Fluffy Clouds by The Orb.

01:57:42 Speaker_01
So we're being sought out now, and we'd rather just drink coffee and stare at the clouds. Suddenly people want to listen to us, you know? Kind of strange.

01:57:59 Speaker_02
What did you play when you were a kid? Mostly, I think I played horses now that I think of it. I'd be a horse, and I'd run through the field making horse sounds.