Commentary: Alnoor Ladha
political spirituality

MYSTICAL ANARCHISM
A Journey to the Borderlands of Freedom

On Beginnings

I started my career under the same veils and presumptions as most youth growing up in a Western, capitalist state—seduced by rationalism, consumption, growth, and competition. I wanted to be a lawyer or some such technocratic, middling career that would satisfy my immigrant parents’ desire for white acceptance and simultaneously uphold the logic of the system that put the whole house of cards together. I grew up in a poor part of the relatively affluent city of Vancouver, Canada. I maintained mediocrity with the occasional hints of rebelliousness that would be produced in any sentient being living in the Canadian suburbs.

They say it takes a certain type of personality to be a radical. Questioning of the status quo, anti-authoritarian, angry perhaps, undoubtedly rebellious, critical rather than accepting of what is. Complex analyses and algorithms are deployed to compare shared psychological traits, relationships to authority figures, levels of socio-economic privilege, and even birth order. If any of this attributive long-form speculation is correct, I may be more of an anomaly than my grade school report cards alluded.

It was not my love for Trotsky or Proudhon or Sankara that radicalized me. Even if I had read fragments, I couldn’t fully understand them in my state of pre-consciousness. It was, in fact, the influence of my mother’s spiritual values that seeded my initial morality. The influence of her brand of Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam, self-cultivated within me, even though I explicitly rejected Islam from a young age. I started to adopt some of its principles as the basis for my own spiritual journey, both rejecting and accepting its tenets at my discretion, while incorporating other modalities including Buddhism, Taoism, Ayurveda, and Shamanism.

I found that my central quest — to help create an emancipatory political and economic system, to create the better world we know is possible—was suffering from a central schism in my life. I knew that simply changing the rules of the economic and political system would not be enough.

On Anarchism

The highest values in anarchism are the simultaneous upholding of freedom and equality. True freedom is equality of choice and equality of opportunity for everyone to thrive in his or her own way. It has nothing to do with private property or ownership per se. If we can decide on our own arrangements for how to live, the majority of us will not be subjected to the greed and wealth extraction of a tiny elite and, therefore, will not need to reduce our freedom or equality to compensate for this. 

Anarchists believe in the conscious individual as the unit of free societies. This requires sovereign women and men who understand the structure of power, consent to rules they themselves have legitimized, and consciously choose to live within their own communities according to their shared principles and values. This fundamental belief in the dignity of the human soul, the desire for collective liberation, the intuitive understanding of a shared consciousness, and the faith in a human creativity greater than any one individual are in many ways all recognitions of a greater ‘source’ in each of us.

On First Principles

When someone asks, what should be done in such and such a situation? the primary question is, in fact, how should we live? The answer requires both a material and spiritual answer. We must honor the dimensions of both mind and soul. 

If we are to uphold a worldview that reflects our values, we must answer for ourselves the key questions, the first principles of philosophy, that we are never incentivized to ask: Why are we here? (existentialism); What is the ultimate end purpose? (ontology); What can we truly know? (epistemology); What is beauty? (aesthetics); How should power be distributed? (political philosophy); and What is reality? (metaphysics).

None of the false gods, including religious institutions, academia, the political machine, mainstream media, and other organs of the status quo ever address these first principles—although they offer us illusory answers that we are asked to obey. They serve as both our siren and our lullaby. They present us with critical concerns and then pacify us with their agenda-ridden propaganda. We become willing carriers of their pre-programmed memes.

ON MYSTICISM

At its simplest level, mysticism is the belief that our material reality goes beyond the ‘observable’ phenomena around us. It recognizes that the world of three dimensions and five senses is limited to exactly those confines. We can therefore never truly understand all of the complexities of the universe with our rational minds.

This does not mean that mysticism denies science. In fact, the opposite is true. As a mystic, I view all of the world’s scientific knowledge as the minimal level of our understanding. It is the floor of our collective knowledge as opposed to the ceiling. Every day, brilliant scientists from around the world add new observations to our constantly growing nest of accumulated wisdom. But as recent findings in string theory, quantum mechanics, and chaos theory have proven to us, the more we discover, the more we realize how little we truly understand.

Everything we learn from the scientific realm further enhances and deepens the magical aspects of the universe. The universe expanded at the perfect rate from its inception. If it grew 0.01% faster, matter would never have been able to take form. If it grew 0.01% slower, the universe would have collapsed in on itself.

ON CAPITALISM

Having a mystical worldview does not abdicate us from rigor or from politics. How can we even begin to organize the better world if we do not fully understand the current system? Many of the most spiritually enlightened people I know will say things like, “I’m not political” or “Politics creates dualities between good and evil.” Politics is about power. Who has it? Who doesn’t? Who gets to decide? And why? Ignoring it doesn’t remove our responsibility; it contributes to the status quo, working against the interests of the poorest and most vulnerable amongst us. As the writer Howard Zinn says, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.”

We must be conscious and critical of our current economic and political structures—the operating system, if you will. We must recognize that this system is dependent on the misery and exploitation of other human beings. As philosopher Dieter Duhm reminds us, “Behind the material consumption of our society stands the indescribable anguish of billions of our fellow beings.…Capitalism is simply an extension of colonialism, slavery, patriarchy, imperialism, and deep racism. For those of us who have benefited from this system, we must be cognizant of the moral implications.”

Climate change is not man-made in the traditional sense that we think about it—climate change is capital made. Every dollar of wealth created heats up our planet because we have an extractives and fossil fuel-based economy. Capitalism turns natural resources into commodities in order to attract and generate ever more capital. It locks us into path dependency where we can never take a risk of slowing growth.

ON NEOLIBERALISM

Neoliberalism is based on three tenets. First, it defines our relationship to each other through a competitive lens. (Am I better, richer, etc.?) This inevitably leads to ordering society through rigid hierarchies. It equates material wealth with life success, which is equated with virtue. (Rich people are good, poor people are bad.) Thus, re-interpreting poverty as a moral failing.

From an economic point of view, neoliberalism advocates the bankrupt policy of trickle-down economics, the concentration of wealth and subsidies in private hands. This leads to the direct extraction of wealth from the poor to the rich.

Since the very lifeblood of modern capitalism is the energy derived from material consumption, it is inevitable that those who single-mindedly and ‘successfully’ desire, adore, and glorify consumption will fit neatly and effortlessly into the seats of power. Operating successfully or even moderately well in this system makes us transactional beings who reduce each other’s vital humanity to tools by which we value-maximize short-term profit.

If we want to reconnect with spiritual truths, the first essential challenge is to disconnect just enough from the economic machinery and its incessant propaganda to recognize neoliberalism for what it is and what it does to us. How else can our political organizing have the power to assess the importance of our spiritual wisdom?

ON SOLUTIONS

We tend to assume that progress is guaranteed, that human ingenuity will give us the necessary solutions at just the right time. We will find a technological innovation to mitigate climate change. We will create enough economic growth to ‘lift all boats’ from the stagnant harbor of poverty. But if we look at the arc of human history from its beginning, the dominant mode is extinction and collapse of species and civilizations. As evolutionary anthropologists remind us, 99% of every species that has ever existed is now extinct.

So what must be done? The traditional answer of the Left, especially Marxists, has been to change the superstructure—the generative rules that create our material conditions. The second has been suggested by anarchists, communitarians, libertarians, and ironically, by many institutional religions that believe we should focus on the community level. They ask, how do we create the support structures for those around us? The last level has often been suggested by spiritual teachers and mystics who have simply said, ‘go within.’ All you have control over is yourself, and since the entire universe is within you, that is the primary unit of change.

The truth is that we need to create change at all three levels simultaneously, and given the state of climate change and the destruction of the biosphere, we must operate at a rate that creates interdependent, positive feedback loops. If we simply try to change the superstructure, we will spend our precious resources in an inefficient battle with the well-funded.

If we only focus at the community level, we risk contributing to the banality of good and ensuring that the status quo stays in place. We will only create temporary bubbles of moral superiority while our species and our fellow planetary co-inhabitants are forced into extinction all around us.

And if we only focus on ourselves, we forget the most important lesson of human nature. We are who we are, through others. Beyond the quantum truth of this, highlighted by Einstein when he said that the idea of the separate self is just “a kind of optical delusion of consciousness,” there is also the sociological truth of our entanglement. We are inherently social creatures. Spiritual narcissism will not save us. 

Many people on the spiritual path believe that they need to achieve a certain level of material wealth or spiritual enlightenment before they can start to contribute to the broader world. But we often forget that the very acts of altruism, empathy, community, and solidarity create our happiness and, therefore, our enlightenment. The actions define who we are and even how we see ourselves. We now know from behavioral psychology that we always act first and then retroactively create our identities from the fabric of those actions. We are tomorrow what we do today.

ON REVOLUTION

All of the collapses we are seeing—the destruction of the planet, mass resource depletion (‘peak everything’as it has been called), the war on women and girls, the increasing financial boom and bust cycles, violence with no end, skyrocketing inequality, and even the spiritual ennui and existential angst that characterize modernity are not separate, discrete issues. They are interdependent and interwoven. Ours is a temporary society built on the quicksand of fossil fuels, human misery, and the destruction of our biosphere.

For true emancipatory social change to happen, a new type of society must be created. New relationships must be forged. A new consciousness must be born. This change will require revolution at all three levels simultaneously.

At one level, it’s as simple as choosing a better story. We have taken one book off one shelf in the library of ideas. The first sentences in the story of capitalism were uttered barely 250 years ago, at a time when we knew so much less about how human nature really works. And like any profound beginning, we had no earthly concept of how the story would unfold. 

We can tell new stories and forge new relationships that make the old story of neoliberal capitalism obsolete. We can choose to be the auto-immune response of the planet, the white blood cells of humanity that cluster together at points of infection and begin the healing. The first decision must be made within. Then we must set our own intentions and look to activate those around us.

This does not have to be by political means only. Accessing non-ordinary states through meditation or yoga or psychedelics can be beneficial avenues to break from the spell of the dominant Matrix ideology. Until we can become free thinkers once more, how will we gain the independence to break the cycle of complicity? 

After embodying this realized self, the second stage is to organize among family, friends, and the community around us. We can refuse to participate in ways small and large, mobilizing on the streets, organizing debt resistance, creating alternative currencies, buying locally, living off the grid, etc. Whatever the avenue for radical change, all that matters is that we do it consciously and with clear intention; that we understand the structure of the power we are facing; that we are aware how it is affecting us spiritually; that we incorporate these lessons into both our collective and self-evolution; and that we build with the communities around us.

Many of us will choose to create alternative communities to live in. These communities are growing all around the world including the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico; El Alto in Bolivia; the Transition Town movement that started in the United Kingdom; and even Burning Man, the temporary utopian community in Black Rock City, Nevada. All of these can create containers or even just sparks for the new consciousness.

As we explore and experiment with these new autonomous, self-sustaining, self-organized communities, we will choose the alternatives that make the most sense for us, our own communities, our own geographies, and our own historical contexts. Creating new stories and the infrastructure to carry the utopian seeds for the New Earth but it will also allow us not only to materially protect our species from a dramatically changing climate, but will allow us to live in spiritual accordance with our values. Dieter Duhm confidently reminds us that this “concrete utopia is a latent reality within the universe, just as the butterfly is a reality latent within the caterpillar. It lies in the structure of our physical and biological world, in our genes, and in our deeper ethical orientation.”

Perhaps this process will be a part of our spiritual ascension. It could be that the collapse of neoliberal capitalism and the healing of our planet and species from the grips of destructive growth, greed, and self-annihilation is a planetary initiatory process that will catalyze the human species to evolve. This will require a new type of politics and a new type of spirituality. We need activists motivated by social justice and empathy but with the sense of wonder and self-confidence of a mystic—the balance that comes from a deep spiritual practice and grounding. Those who can break through the prison walls of Cartesian dualism and find the magic and mystery in our collective struggle. Those who can create what the Russian novelist Chinghiz Aitmatov calls the ‘divine spark,’ a resonance that has both love and power to operate at all three levels—the self, the community, and the super structure—simultaneously.

When I started to intellectually bridge the realms of mysticism and anarchism, I did not think I would end up in this place, that the resulting exploration would have the potential to be so liberating yet so daunting. I immediately went back to my mother’s faith in the magic of the unknown, her confidence that every atom was the embodiment of God, and her totalizing ability to trust in a wisdom greater than our own. I can leave you with no better words than those of Guillaume Apollinaire, which she read to me all those years ago:

“Come to the edge,” he said. They said, “We are afraid.” “Come to the edge,” he said. They came. He pushed them and they flew.

— An earlier expanded version of this article appeared in a Wisdom Hackers Anthology.