learning cohorts

building a common grammar for revolutionary reconciliation

10 week cohort

Having good conversations about spirituality, ethics, and social change is more important now than ever. But the crisis of meaning we are experiencing is also a crisis of communication. Too often, we struggle to get anywhere in conversation because we have been robbed of the words and concepts we need to bring clarity.

We need a grammar for revolutionary reconciliation that will let us speak with land-and-life-based ethical clarity about the cascading crises we are facing.

This cohort is about building some of those definitions together, in a conversation which is ever growing and adapting, like Life itself. The goal is to give us something better to talk about than what we are currently being handed by mass media and our information and education institutions. In collaboration with creatives at The New Real, we hope what we discover in this cohort can find its way into zines and other art forms.

In this unit, we will be discussion what an ethical foundation in Life could look like, and work on refining a definition of Life as the interconnected flow of giving and receiving which we are all apart of.
We will also discuss how classical definitions of “God” or Creator differ from the popular ones of today, and how understanding this can help us to see the Reality of Life more fully.
In this section, we will work on defining what it means to be truly Human in our most exalted, sacred state, within the grandeur and interconnections of Life.
This will help us toward continuing in building a deeper understanding of “the sacred” in various traditions, and will be essential to the next section on defining violence as the violation or degradation of True Humanity.
One of the most critical discussions in our series is giving a clear and consistent definition for violence (and all injustice), so that we know it when we see it, and are better equipped to respond to it. We now turn to the darker side of the Way of Death vs. the Way of Life.
We will also lean in more on social scientific observations of violence to answer the questions, What happens when Humanity is degraded through violence, and why do we choose to participate in this?
This word gets thrown around a lot in discussions about reconciliation, but this is also one that we struggle to define clearly. How do we know true solidarity when we see it, vs. performative or shallow “allyship?”
And more importantly, how do we become the kind of people who can enter into true solidarity with others, especially those who suffer the most from the imperial order we live in?
Here is where we reexamine the spiritual traditions to look for lenses that can assist us in the vital work of reconnecting with Life, with one another, and with the Giver of Life. What does it look like to really encounter our True Humanity, and to become more truly Human in such a broken world?

How do we reconnect with the sense of the sacred which can dignify and strengthen our hearts for the days ahead?