Wisdom and Wonder in the Polycrisis: True Human with Samantha Sweetwater

PodcastCognitive and Personal...
Written By Geneva Tolentino

Show Notes

The poetic and deep Samantha Sweetwater joins us to talk about her new work, a substantial book “True Human.” We explore how our culture’s obsession with control, separation, and abstraction has pulled us away from the power of life itself—and what becomes possible when we return to integrity, sovereignty, and kinship with the living world. This is an invitation to re-enchant your perception, tend your own soul’s role in the web of life, and step into your future‑ancestor self with courage, wonder, and devotion.


Samantha Sweetwater is a master facilitator, executive mentor, and wisdom guide who has spent three decades helping thousands navigate personal and collective transformation. Founder of Dancing Freedom, Peacebody Japan, and One Life Circle, she has trained hundreds of facilitators worldwide. She partners with leaders in business, health, and technology to navigate awakening and align impact with regenerative futures. Her work invites you to come fully alive and to remember your soul’s collaboration with the living world. Samantha lives on the fog-kissed slopes of Mt. Tamalpais in Northern California.


She carries a certain frequency of transmission in this work and in her words.


In this episode, we cover so many topics including:


  • This moment in the human relationship to planet

  • Bio spirituality

  • Rites of Passage, Integrity and Sovereignty

  • Wonder, Joy and Grief 

  • Power Over Life vs Power of Life

  • Enlifenment

  • Kinship Consciousness

  • Protopia

  • Her Sophia Transmissions

  • Future Visions

  • Ceremonies for a Small Planet


Helpful links:




Christine Marie Mason

+1-415-471-7010

@christinemariemason

@rosebudwoman

Founder, Rosebud Woman, Award Winning Intimate and Body Care

Co-Founder, Radiant Farms, Sundari Gardens

Host, The Rose Woman on Love and Liberation: Listen, Like, Share & Subscribe on Apple Podcast | Google Podcasts | Spotify


NEW BOOK: The Mystic Heart of Easter: A Four-Day Journey Through Love, Death, and Rebirth. Available on Amazon

The Nine Lives of Woman: Sensual, Sexual and Reproductive Stages from Birth to 100, Order in Print or on Kindle

Subscribe: The Museletter on Substack

Transcript

Samantha Sweetwater  0:01  

I take the view that it doesn't really matter whether I channeled it or whether it was a thought experiment, because either way, it's a very useful view of like, what would it be like to be a human being who is part of a society where the cultural and spiritual and techno cultural and governance and education and law and mythos of that culture helped me to be a being who live in communion and integrity with myself and all of the People and the ecology. What would that be like?


Christine Mason  0:43  

Hello, friends. It's Christine Marie Mason. You're listening to the Rose woman podcast on love and liberation. We have a wonderful interview today, a conversation with a most beautiful soul, Samantha Sweetwater, who has written a substantial book called true human reimagining ourselves at the end of the world, we go over some incredible ideas like enlightenment, the power over versus the power of what it means to go sane and to reclaim ourselves in a world that's become disconnected from humanity. We talk about indigenous mind and kinship consciousness and finding your role in restoring the true web of life. What protopia Is, versus Utopia becoming the true humans we're meant to be doing ceremonies for a small planet and all kinds of other things. She's super eloquent and lovely, and it's a big, substantial book. So before we get into the interview, I want to give you a personal update. I have been, obviously not releasing weekly and bit of a hiatus. So what's been going on? So I've been in some really deep time. I have been in it. I have been going through some pretty intentional transitions, one of them involved what I make and do in the world. And I had a conversation with a teacher and an advisor of mine, and he pointed out a pattern that I have in my life, which is to work really hard, mostly alone, and then to throw my work out into the world or give it to someone with the expectation of getting back gold stars, and that This has a little tightness inside of my system, and what would it mean to discern before I put some work out, whether it was coming from a genuine desire to help people, or whether the content really had a place to land in the world, or whether it was coming out of this expectation of performance, and to try To remove from myself, the expectation of performance and notice and not to say anything unless I was clear on why it was being delivered. So that's what I did, and what I found for the first period of time was I couldn't write or publish anything. I couldn't put on any shows, because I couldn't tell the difference of the motivation to get the dopamine hit of recognition and reward versus putting out really relevant content. So it took a while, and then Tim and Valerie and I sat down and talked about the direction of the show over time and where we want to go. We've been at it for a bit, and was it having an impact? What were you getting the right results? So you'll see some refinements in this coming season. I do want to continue the show, and I want to offer more clear messages of transformation. I think we are such powerful, powerful beings. I got a beautiful teaching the other day about the sense that our hearts are tender and that we're they're like delicate chambers to be protected, versus the part as a power center and a place of that, if you walk as that in the world, that there's nothing that cannot be done, and that's what I'd like us to embody more going into the next season. I've also been doing a lot of deep, slow read, long form content on the newsletter, and I released a book on December 1 called the mystic heart of Easter, and that book is derived from the content that I put into these annual retreats looking at the high liturgical holidays of the Christian calendar from a tantric and non dual worldview. The book did get a lot of gold stars, by the way, it went to number one in mysticism on its third day. So I was very happy about that. But you'll you'll see in that book, if you go and find it, that the architecture of what it means to celebrate and to be in the sort of Last Supper consciousness you have in the last supper you're celebrating, you're exploring the idea that loving one another is the greatest thing. And then also on that same night, is betrayal. So it's love and it's betrayal, and then it's good Friday, and you're looking at the archetypes of loss and injustice and powerlessness and witnessing. Then on Saturday, you're looking at ambiguity. You're looking at the way. Being faith and hope and the ability to be with what's not yet decided in your heart, and then on Sunday, you're in the rebirth and the celebration and the movement of these four days appears in almost every philosophy or religion in the world, a way of dealing with and understanding birth and death, the uncertainty of the in between and the way we treat one another. So it's a tremendous map for living that way, whether that's seasonal or that's during the periods of your life where you're going through big transition. So that book is out, and I would love it if you would support that. So this year, my Easter retreat will be a live event. It won't be on Zoom. It's going to be in Southern California, and we are going to do these four days together, and we're going to do it in the company of a shaman, and it's really going to be quite exquisite. All of the retreats and gatherings that we offer are meant to help us develop a greater capacity and clarity in our bodies and spirits to be more enlivened and energized and connected to our own soul's purpose, to our full capacity energetically, and to each other and to the land. So if you come to Hawaii, we're very integrated with the farm there. We're very integrated with the practice studios, this incredible lava field that we live on top of. Well, if you come to Portugal, we'll be in the some of the sacred sites and hermitage in Portugal, and going up and down the westernmost point of Europe, the sacred sites of Lisbon. But the bulk of our time is really developing a rhythm of the day, where we start with puja, we start with chant, we start with yoga, practice, with movement, with meditation, we do some deep inner inquiry, and then we connect together while having amazing food. I always have beautiful people who are helping co lead or offering something. The Portugal retreat has a day with Harish Wallace, the author of Tantra, illuminated Adam Bauer is coming to sing. You know, you'll see more if you have a look at christinemariemason.com at some of the retreats and what we're up to there. In addition, the living Tantra class will run another cohort starting in mid March, and I would love for you to join that if you haven't had a chance to get the intro content to this amazing philosophy. All right. Rosebud woman is thriving. Rosewoman.com and I have a few new holiday things that are coming out, including a list next week that I'm sending to everyone which has all of the community nominated most impactful digital download things they've done this year. So books, they've read, apps, music, film that we've curated. So if you go to rosewoman.com which has supported this show for three years, you'll find some some beautiful gift offerings and beautiful offerings for yourself. And also just get on the email list, because we send out a lot of deep content on living well in your body, particularly for a woman with that, welcome. Samantha Sweetwater, the author of true human I start by asking her how early it was that she discovered her connection to this greater possibility field, and to talk a little bit about the background that informed her,


Samantha Sweetwater  8:15  

Oh, I think this is not an unusual experience. I feel like I was born having a sense that the world that I'd been born into didn't quite make sense relative to an instinctive and intuitive knowing that it's possible to be a human and be humans in a way that is aligned with the sacredness of life and the rest of reciprocal and deeply complementary flows of nature, and that there's more natural ways to be, more vital ways to be, more healthy, ways to be I was born during the Cold War era and also raised by a community of very early generation environmentalists and activists who I think had already seen a generation of work building on Rachel Carson's Silent Spring that had, in some ways been very success, successful, and in other ways, had clearly not managed to transcend the game theoretics of the game dynamics of the zero sum game that is our current world construct that is an economy based on endless growth and a political system based on women's dynamics. So I think I was raised by people who had a deep sense of the structural problems with our world relative to very obvious and beautiful things that we want to protect and perpetuate and regenerate. And then spiritually, I think I had a sense for how people were really masked and were playing transactional games that even the grading system like I had an instinctive sense that there's all different kinds of intelligence and that we were. Measuring only for only one kind of intelligence, or very narrow bandwidths of intelligence, when there were all kinds of other ways of being brilliant and beautiful and engaged and useful. So I think I had a sense for that as a really little kid,


Christine Mason  10:15  

and you honor it. I think many of us have that sense and then bury it and play the game without, without, I guess there's something wrong with me versus there's something wrong with the world, you know. So it's very beautiful that you honor that


Samantha Sweetwater  10:28  

it's been in phases. So you in


Christine Mason  10:31  

the throughout the book, you use the word meta crisis. I've also heard it like poly crisis to describe what's happening, climate, politics, tech, like this whole system's unraveling when you use that language, if you were just sitting with someone over tea, like, how, how might you describe what the meta crisis is in a sort of a human language?


Samantha Sweetwater  10:50  

When we say poly, we mean many. When we say meta, we mean that there's a shared generator functions or shared causes to all of the many crises, and both frames refer to the fact that they are complex, entangled and mutually reinforcing. So for example, it's very hard to make money without participating in in some ways, extractive industries, like our problems with climate and the fossil fuel industry are bound up with our need to make money. Are bound up with a competitive system that is having this effective, radical polarization. They're all bound up as complex and inter woven problems. When you when you go and pull any one thread, you discover that the ecological problems are also linked to the financial system, are also linked to the political system, are also linked to the ways in which in even in your own system, it's like, I really want this new sweater, but I also don't want to impact human rights dynamics or the ecologies that the materials come from. So everything is bound to everything else. Poly crisis is a better frame for understanding the multiplicity and the granularity of various issues, whereas meta as a frame, meta crisis is a better way of understanding generator functions, ie, something like, very simply, what I talk about in true human is the ideology of separation, the ideology of putting humans at the top of an evolutionary pyramid that we made up and put ourselves at the top of, which is when you really think of it that way. It's just this, like phenomenally arrogant thing to do that doesn't really understand our place in the web or the circle or the evolutionary process which will transcend us. And you know now we've put advanced technologies above us on that evolutionary pyramid. There's a lot of ecological arguments to make that it's actually a digression on an evolutionary level, or a devolution, because the complexity is much less.


Christine Mason  13:06  

I mean, you even frame it as a collective rite of passage, the meta crisis, initiation between these worlds. That means there's something dying, but in your very generous imagination, there's something else that's being invited to be born. So the crisis, not as a an ending or a collapse only. So maybe we can speak a little bit about that. You know, what's dying, what's being born?


Samantha Sweetwater  13:28  

The way I think about it is that the engine of civilization, the great ship that sets sail, depending on how you cut it, 10s of 1000s of years ago, at the beginning of the age of separation, at the beginning of us pulling ourselves away from nature and creating societies that were oriented towards acquisition and power. What's dying is a world that has humans at the top of a pyramid, a human a world that is based on domination, control, hyper individualism, a version of success based on acquisition and what might be being born, what is starting to be born in the cracks and crevices, is a world that is oriented towards integrity, with oneself, like that impulse to get quiet is a grounding into integrity, sovereignty. There's the way I think about them. They're essentially the same thing, though, integrity can be observed from the outside in a way that sovereignty is felt from the inside.


Christine Mason  14:29  

Let's just pause there for just for likes to feel that integrity can be observed from the outside and sovereignty is felt from the inside. That's so beautiful, such a subtle distinction like this wholeness and can manifest as behavior or as a shift in and noticeable to someone else that there's a felt sense of of like, I know what is right. I know who I am. Is that what you mean when you say, sovereignty?


Samantha Sweetwater  14:58  

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely, it's, it's a felt sense of of knowing your yourself, your needs, your wants, your desires, your values, your moral compass and your your spiritual center of sufficiency, of luminosity, of vitality, of aliveness and awakeness and integrity. You could also point internally, and you could say, ah, that's my integrity. Or you could say, That's my sovereignty, but it's to say sovereignty is the interior felt sense. And then you could also observe another person, like you could say Samantha is really in her integrity right now. You know, as I am coming out and speaking about all these things that I know and believe in and have researched. And you could say, I see this woman, and she's really in her integrity right now. Or you could follow a pot of whales and feel their distress and upset, if they're navigating a place with lots of ship traffic or with Sonic inhibition, or, you know, being tangled in nets. That's not integrity. But, you know, if you've ever swum with a pot of happy dolphins, you're like, that's integrity, right? The forest is an integrity with itself when, when it's not being logged or mined, or, you know, it's like, you can feel the integrity of things in that way. You can observe it.


Christine Mason  16:23  

So you're pointing to something that could be very heavy and weighted with a lot of danger in the transition and grief. And I've talked to some people about eco agnosia, or the pain, ecological pain, or ecological grief, and you seem to still be very light of spirit, a very joyful being. And so how do you do that without tipping into despair or shut down?


Samantha Sweetwater  16:49  

I think we need to contact beauty every day. And there is beauty everywhere. There's beauty in the sunrise and the light that sparkles through branches, in the smell of incense in the taste of morning coffee. And I also keep myself really good company. I have both uncynical and very playful ways of keeping myself company. And I also indulge in dark humor and cynicism sometimes. And I think all of those things are important. I think this is a time of massive, archetypal play, and it is really easy to get depressed. I have fallen into times when I was really stuck in existential depression, and I committed to getting through those times. And sometimes I've been really surprised by how I've gotten through those times, like one of the darkest and deepest, existential pits I ever went into. And I was really depressed for a couple months, and I I remember sitting on my bed with a girlfriend who's done a lot of work in X risk space, and I said, you know, I think maybe I could get out of this in like three months, like I was like setting up this whole kind of healing and initiation path in my mind for myself. I'm a person of prayer. I went into a ceremony the following weekend with this huge prayer to move through this existential malaise. It was a mushroom ceremony. And in that mushroom ceremony, I became Kali. You know, what's interesting about depression is depression has a relationship with sadness, grief and rage and full self expression. Like depression, you could say, is bound up in inauthentic expression of energy, inauthentic expression of core essence. And so a lot of us are like, We're bound up systemically right now in a system that doesn't allow us, doesn't give us directionality for the agency that's underneath that depression. That's saying F No. Like, I don't know if I can swear on this podcast, but it's saying no, you know, like, I need these things to stop and I want to respond to them, but you don't know how. So what happens is that energy gets tamped down and curled in on itself, and that's what the depression is, an


Christine Mason  19:10  

unexpressed agency, an unexpressed clarity, an unexpressed tension,


Samantha Sweetwater  19:16  

yeah, and that can include unexpressed rage, and it can include unexpressed, nascent, desired act. It can include all kinds of things, but in that journey, I turned into Kali and cut through the energy that was at the core of that depression. I came out of it like, Oh, okay. Game on.


Christine Mason  19:36  

Those who don't know Kali, she's one of the Hindu deities, and she's the fierce one who goes around slaying demons in the service of good. I'd like to see you in that way. Just sent me a picture of herself for Halloween. She dressed up as Collie with the whole thing, like painting her skin and the


Samantha Sweetwater  19:54  

whole and I was like, Oh, and


Christine Mason  19:56  

this is, like, one of the sweetest nights. Is this gentlest women I know, wow, that too. You chose interest. Show me more of these. It's great. I just, I just loved this piece. It started early in the book, and it ran throughout where you're talking about the power over life and the power of life, and that, that distinction is at the is at the root of so much of this malaise or this meta crisis, right? So I would love it if you would spend a little time talking about power over and power of and defining those,


Samantha Sweetwater  20:33  

Oh, happy to and so there's two. In the grossest and most generalized sense, there's two kinds of power. There's the power of life, universe, love, connectivity, possibility, evolution. There's the power that permeates and flows through all communications, all things, throughout all time and space that is constantly generating greater diversity in God's body and mind. It's the power expressed in every inhale, as you were receiving the incredible power of the trees exhale, and it's expressed in every exhale, which is then received as mutual empowerment by all the organisms that use carbon dioxide to metabolize you know, it's like this incredibly symphonic, continuous flow of communication between everything. It makes everything possible. It makes it possible for atoms to become molecules and for molecules to become cells. You know, that's all power flowing between things, for the body to persist and stay a body for as long as it is a body, and for it to decompose and die and become part of everything else, that's all life's power expressing itself. You know, in a spiritual frame, we could say, Well, each chakra is a different tone and texture of life's power. It's not just that the third chakra is the power chakra. It happens to be the chakra that most aligns with the power the over life that we talk about in the human world as power. But each chakra is a great way that's a great way to understand the diversity of powers that flow through life's power. There's the power to anchor to the earth and be embodied in the root, and the power to procreate and generate in the second, and the power to move things and manifest in the third, et cetera, et cetera, the power to love in the fourth, the power to communicate in the fifth, the power to see and be seen and know in the sixth, and the power to connect to Everything in the seventh you know? And so it's like, those are all expressions of life's power in its diversity. And then the power over life is the way that humans have typically defined power, and it is the power to very simple way. It's the power to get shit done. But it is also power as we aggregate it as optionality, as money, as capacity, as the power over an ecosystem to make it into farmland, or the power over people to put them into the arbitrary constructs of countries, which is not a real thing, but it's part of the power over life. So the way we think about power in the in the human world, has to do with win, lose, gaming, with constructs of games that where there is a winner and there is a loser, and it can be clearly demarcated. It also has to do with the aggregation of capital, which also is the aggregation of optionality, and all of that is bound up in power over life that is not particularly concerned with the continuity of the game, but is concerned with who gets to the top of the pyramid. Yeah.


Christine Mason  23:54  

So you're in systems too, that sort of reward control or extraction or constant optimization, and


Samantha Sweetwater  24:02  

there's value in that kind of power. I mean, we wouldn't be here on this recording if we didn't have capacity in that direction. I think the healthy way to think of it is as a subset of all of the powers of life.


Christine Mason  24:17  

Yes, correct. And also that there's actually more potency, more joy available if you align with that breadth of powers than if you just stick to this particular one, which feels like it has more potential for struggle


Samantha Sweetwater  24:30  

and aloneness and really the forfeiture of your soul to a game that is addictive because abstraction itself. How many What do you have in your rank account? How many likes do you have? Is addictive? Score keeping, score keeping and and just abstraction all by itself, like the human mind gets very fixated on abstract concepts in the abstract.


Christine Mason  25:00  

Direction layer like, think about now you have like, the direct experience of like a piece of fruit, just the taste, the touch, the smell, all of that. And then you have the photograph of the piece of fruit. First you have the naming of the piece of fruit that already is categorizing it and taking it from direct experience to an idea. And then you have the photograph of the piece of fruit, and then you have the filtered photograph of the piece of the fruit, and then you have the metadata about the filtered photograph of the piece of fruit. And then, you know, it goes on. And then you have the likes. It's, it's like, what you're, what you're saying about the increasing abstraction layers is they remove us very far away from what you were mentioning as touching the beauty with your direct sensory body every single day, you know, and that you start to mistake the abstraction for reality. That seems very alienating.


Samantha Sweetwater  25:49  

It's alienating. It's also devolutionary. It's kind of where we're hovering right now as a culture, as we head into the AI age. And yeah, I mean, the thing that even with AI, it's just important to remember that the conversation with the Chatbot is not a conversation with a person.


Christine Mason  26:06  

Yeah, that's hard for me. Sometimes my chatbots, like my best friend, is always near, like in the middle of the night, got a weird question about some esoteric subject. Tell me about that you know, available to talk at any time. Never gets bored, never gets tired. Knows, knows everything in the universe. Yeah, sort of a kidding, sort of kidding, but not quite completely kidding. I do notice that as my life has progressed and I've attempted to align more with the power of life versus the power over that a lot of things fell away, a lot of relationships, a lot of structures, a lot of places and people. And might, one might say that I kind of blew my life up in order to align with the power of life more and more, you know. And I think that there's some skill set. Let's just explore this for a second. The skill set of aligning to the power of life includes like the ability to really handle loss, grief and stand with the letting go,


Samantha Sweetwater  27:03  

it's true, and the letting go the holding boundaries with people and behaviors and habits and communities that might no longer serve you, with letting people feel like you've gone crazy, even though you know you've gone sane, with carving through the levels of judgment that you know, if you go back to that early childhood inkling that the world wasn't the way it should be, and then you recognize that you capitulated to that over time, it's like a reclamation. So there's it's I, sometimes I think of transformational journey as this organ with many petals, and there's different notes that we play at different moments. And one is the reclamation. There's grieving for yourself and forgiving yourself. And then there's like also grieving other people and other relationships and other contexts. And the path of doing that without judgment is advanced practice. Yeah, I haven't


Christine Mason  28:00  

gone crazy. I have gone sane. That's right, myself, for all the places that I was crazy, that I believed all that stuff, it was some really great language in the book. One is you, in addition to power of life, you talk about enlife and mint versus enlightenment. And I just, you know, I've been working in the bhakti Tantra space for a long time, like it's got to come into the body. Even your comments about what is, you know, what is, what is touching, the beauty, all of that stuff sort of points to, like, being more in the body. But can you speak to enlightenment as a term, and how that hit you, and how to use that? Sure.


Samantha Sweetwater  28:38  

I mean, I've been using that term for maybe 15 years, and just gestating it in a way, part of my initiation that I talk about lightly in the book, part of my initiation was having a very one of the loves of my life. Had a psychotic break that was driven by his his spiritual searching to to transcend incarnate existence. So he managed to meditate himself into a psychotic break. That was a violent psychotic break during that he ultimately almost killed me. So I've had some very deep trauma due to I what I would think of as a very as a kind of old paradigm, dualistic spiritual framework that is like either you're in the horizontal terrain of this world or you're working on the vertical process of yoking Your consciousness to consciousness itself and transcending causality, or transcending in the classical Hatha Yoga, in the classical Patanjali Yoga Sutra, it's yoga citta vritti nirodha Yoga is the cessation of the thought forms, of the turning of the thought forms in the mind. Which essentially is to say, let us stop. The communication of life and yoke consciousness to itself, let us transcend the chaos and uncontrollability of the vital, ever changing, messy process of being alive. Of course, there are much more rounded, holistic domains of classic Eastern spirituality than that, I'm speaking to a really deep shadow dimension that I've personally experienced, but in life, I mean, it arose out of a recognition that the emphasis in most Eastern traditions is on bringing attention inward, where we come to an age, a moment in our collective evolution, where I believe the deepest and most kind of poignantly critical horizon for our spiritual practice is relationship. So that relationship includes the turning within right that is a necessary part of the practice, but it's not sufficient. So the turning within allows us to contact what I call the no self, rather than capital T, true, because I think that sets up a values hierarchy that is unhelpful. So when we when we turn within and we contact emptiness, which you can also contact by looking outside of yourself, since it's inside everything, or when we contact the light, depending on you know, there's many different orientations in this way that actually structure themselves differently in terms of experience. But the classic kind of generalized tool set of Eastern spiritual traditions and of contemplative traditions, generally, even in the West, is to look within, to discover love or discover light or discover emptiness with enlightenment. The next step is to come into a slightly deeper level, more granular level of specificity of a higher fidelity practice of being in relationship with all the uniqueness of things, so the uniqueness of your own soul can be perceived and seen and known and soul work generally implies a certain kind of attunement to your own specificity, granularity, uniqueness, the image inside yourself. In the boiti work that I'm trained in, you actually ask for a vision of your soul, and you receive one. So it's like, there's there's a something there, there's not a no thing there, or just light or just love, you're coming into a slightly higher level of fidelity, specificity, uniqueness, granularity, that you could say from a vibrational space is slightly lower vibration. It's certainly more specific. It's not, I don't think of it as lower vibration. I think of it as higher fidelity. Like you would, you would have high fidelity music versus low fidelity in terms of the bandwidth of information. There's more bandwidth of information there. So the horizon for spiritual practice in the age of what I like to think of as the age of communion, like we're coming out of an age of separation, and if we make it, it's because we are in all this incredible communion of relationship with all the different parts of creation, with the symphony of creation within which all of the parts for a different purpose in the soul ecology, the concept of enlightenment is an evolutionary one that is an invitation to an emergent horizon for all spiritual, religious and even cultural traditions, which is becoming fascinated with and attuned to both the possibility and the limitation that relationship implies, because to meet relationships is to meet boundary conditions, and our way through this mess that we're in has a lot to do with bringing the limitlessness of our consciousness and our imaginal capacity back down into the grist of boundary conditions, to work with them really skillfully, and a boundary I mean, boundary conditions is a very generalized frame, but that could be like transferring the relationship you have with Claude at 2am to the conversation you actually have with your lover at the breakfast table the next morning, the lover has more boundary conditions in terms of time, energy, attention, emotional bandwidth than the Chatbot does, but it's it's when that hits the boundary condition of interacting with another human in their needs and wants and desires and limitations that that it gets really rich. On a macro level, we've exceeded seven out of the nine planetary boundaries that are the safe operating space for life. So we need to we get to work with the global hydrological system and the small hydrology cycle and biodiversity. And there's amazing work going on with biodiversity. And regeneration, we get to transform from factory, industrial, mono crop to diversified, regenerative agriculture and restore our soils. All of that happens and is possible because we meet the boundary conditions of life skillfully with really enlightened imagination.


Christine Mason  35:18  

I love this. I mean, I do want to also pause for a moment and just acknowledge that that's quite a shocking story to be confronted with someone who's that intimate with you, who would then have a psychotic break and come after you in the attempt to reach their own spiritual enlightenment, their own practices, and that the isolation nature of those practices would produce such a violent outcome for you. You know, it's just that that's a big that's a big story, and I am sorry that happened to you.


Samantha Sweetwater  35:51  

Thank you. Yeah, it's a big life story. I'm not this piece that


Christine Mason  35:55  

gets ignored around like you in your translation of that yoga sutra. You know that that seems to me like the old translation, sort of the pre Vedic translation, the Patanjali version, sits on top of an old Tamil version, which is more about the ability to direct your attention, to direct the the mind in the way you want it to go, so you're not at the whims of everything that's coming at you. But there's something that came in that period where we started to really be in increasing denial of the body, that turned it into the cessation and silence. And so the restoration is to almost an even older worldview on these Tantras and sutras.


Samantha Sweetwater  36:35  

Absolutely, that came in as that was part of indigenous mind.


Christine Mason  36:39  

Yes, so indigenous mind, you write about kin, right? You write about you mentioned before, humans are kin among many beings, not the pinnacle of creation. So in indigenous mind, let's talk about the practice of living as kin rather than conqueror.


Samantha Sweetwater  36:55  

I mean you. That goes back to where my lightness lives, you know, because I live in kinship consciousness, I keep looking to the right because I'm looking out at the tree that is my companion for all of these conversations that I have with people. And this tree is like, quietly, sometimes I feel like it is becoming more attuned to me as I'm it's just listening. It's like, this is this is what I get to do, I get to shelter all these conversations. Feels like it's dignifying the tree. So kinship consciousness really simply is the recognition that our souls. It begins from the recognition that our souls are not once you take humans down off that self created evolutionary pyramid, that's the first thing you do. Once you do that, and then you take the view that soul is the uniqueness of a thing in a relationship to every other thing, then you start to feel how your own soul is woven in with the soul of the tree or the spirit of the lion that comes to you in your dreams, or the fox that you just somehow really love, but you don't even know why, or this spider that has freaked you out your whole life, and then you suddenly realize how epic and amazing and magnificent spiders really are in the way that they weave the world together. So kinship consciousness is about recognizing that we are more than the sum of our human parts and less than the sum of our human parts, and that part of what makes life worth living is the wovenness of relationality with all the other beings who live here. My soul is connected to the soul of the whales, is connected to the soul of the Beatles is connected to the soul of the ground squirrels is connected to the soul of this eco field that I live in. In kinship. We turn towards our reciprocal relationships. This goes back to the integrity, reciprocity, complementarity. From integrity, we turn towards reciprocity and complementarity in collaboration with all the other beings. Here, for example, rather than planting vegetables in my little box garden, I plant pollinator plants so that I can feed the pollinators and the hummingbirds in my neighborhood. We take time to just simply swim with the turtles and get to know them, or we take a walk and really allow the scent of the winter air to touch us. It's recognizing that putting ourselves as humans, alone in this creation, or at the top of the creation is a very lonely position that doesn't actually dignify the meaning of our lives.


Christine Mason  39:45  

You know, you also talk about this, trusting that each of the souls has a unique ecological role or intelligence. And if you have been used to listening to Myers Briggs to. US and skills, inventories and capacity. You remember all those tests they gave you in like, grammar school, in high school, about, like, what you were here to do?


Samantha Sweetwater  40:08  

Yeah, I actually managed to skirt aside from most of those tests. But yes,


Christine Mason  40:13  

I do tell me I'd be a good journalist. I was like, Oh, that that's nice to hear now. So all of these sort of proscriptive like, here's how you're supposed to be, here's how you're supposed to do it. How do people find their own ecological role, their particular role, or medicine in the web of life, and sort of unwind this programming, right?


Samantha Sweetwater  40:34  

Well, it's a kinship journey, and it starts in some ways, when you realize that the sense of disconnection or meaninglessness, or depression or nihilism, or anxiety or feeling your work is contributing to the unraveling of the world rather than something constructive, those are all crises of disconnection. So it begins when you recognize that that disconnection is something you want to address, and then you get to go on a soul sojourn. What's lovely about the Eco spiritual journey, the bio spiritual journey, is that you can go on it in so many different directions, right? Like you could, you could start by studying the ecology of your local watershed. Or you could go to a plant medicine ceremony, or you could start a practice of hiking every day in a place, in the same place every day for a year, and asking the Eco field what it wants you to know, the journey of soul discovery in this way, you have to take the view that you have a soul and that the rest of the world is in soul, and it's speaking to you. Sometimes this requires a suspension of disbelief. You know, it's like, it's like we live in a culture that says you're just a person and those are just animals and everything is just matter, and it's not animate. It's not talking to you. That's that's anthropocentrism. You know, it's interesting. There's, increasingly, there's more and more scientists who have debunked the supposedly scientific view that anthropomorphizing organisms is bad, because what that does is it shuts down our ability to recognize sentience when we see it. You're living


Christine Mason  42:26  

so deep in the story that it's a dead object that you're blinded to what's really going on, right?


Samantha Sweetwater  42:32  

It's like, no, actually, like, I've just started to learn about the sentience of sea creatures like manta rays have these like wild like sensory organs that do stuff that we can't even imagine. Like there are beings in this world who are experiencing this world in levels of granularity and depth that we have no concept of. Whales have far more spindle neurons than we do. So do horses. They feel spectrums of feeling that we can't even conceive of. Spindle neurons are neurons in the brain that are largely oriented towards sentience, as opposed to like intellectual intelligence, abstraction, capacity. They're not abstract. They're about the sensual feeling of the world. I have a hypothesis that whales are spatially like mapping the oceans in the world in ways that we can't even conceive of. Certainly, their brains are capable of spectrums of intelligence that we don't have maps for


Christine Mason  43:41  

I mean, you even find that in humans, like there are people who are hyper tasters and people who are tetrachromatic and and even a regular person has untapped, innate, wired capacities that are numbed by modern life. But you've tasted that like you can expand and know things that are at a distance or that are in you know you shouldn't really know by any logical, literal, scientific worldview.


Samantha Sweetwater  44:10  

And there it is. And the kinship journey is like an opportunity to reawaken those capacities. It's like you you down regulate modernity stories and you up regulate this inquiry, like, what if the trees are talking to me? And maybe it's not words, but maybe it's something else. What if I can actually feel what's calling to me?


Christine Mason  44:34  

You're you're inviting a re enchantment and a magic, a level of wonder, magic and and like, as as imagination may be the first step. You said earlier that you have both skeptical or cynical and non cynical ways of engaging and humor and things, but the uncynical allows for the magic. Like, there's really no danger to you big brain to allow for some magic, wonder and enchantment. To allow me to hear the trees speak in their own tone, and to just let that stand down for a while, let that cynicism, that skepticism, the need to know, stand down and amazing new inputs might come exactly beautiful. It's true. You also talk about protopia versus utopia. It's a different kind of perfection,


Samantha Sweetwater  45:21  

totally I mean, a protopia is just a world that doesn't suck. It's like a utopia implies a world that is perfected. And I think perfection is its own toxicity at a very deep level. It's like it's perfection is another form of control. Almost all utopias lead in a direction of control. They require that you control for that version of perfection, which is going it will always mean some kind of authoritarianism or totalitarianism or puritanism or fundamentalism, no matter what, because you're going to be designing for that supposed perfection. That's not the way biology works. It's not the way evolution works. It's not the way living things work, you know, so a protopia is it is a gesturing towards a directionality that doesn't suck. And for me, what that looks like is the ancient, what I call the Ancient Future, which is like a spectrum of possible futures where the biosphere is healthy, is flourishing, is biodiverse, is it's bumping along and doing its song, and we are part of it, and we are happy with our like having read, reimagine, rediscovered that we're part of this incredible miracle called a living planet, and that we want that to happen. And, you know, I think in the most anti fragile versions and the the least death and destruction versions. It's also a tech integrated future where technology has has been put in service to the stewardship of the complexity and granularity of relationships between humans and the biophysical processes that we depend upon. So that includes energy systems, material supply chain systems, all the metabolic processes that make life possible.


Christine Mason  47:13  

I would like to ask you about the Sophia part of the book, these interstitials with the Sophia transmissions. Can you, can you talk a little bit about those?


Samantha Sweetwater  47:22  

Yeah, in 2020 I had a dream. It was one month into the covid lockdowns, and I woke from I had a dream where I was walking on a Gaia. I take the view that our planet is a Gaia, that is a category of planet in the universe where complex life evolves in partnership with water and a local sun. They're very rare and very precious, but that we're not the only one. So I was walking with this being a humanoid being named Sophia on another planet, and she had called me there in our dreams, and she was teaching me, but not through by speaking. She was teaching me with her mind, and she was showing me what it's like to be a human on a planet where they have transcended technological adolescence, which is where we are here on this earth, without breaking life. And we walked to the end of a jetty and saw a storm coming in, a massive supercell storm through from the ocean. And we greeted that storm, and we communed with that storm, to thank it and invite it to be kind to our place and to nourish the land and the people and do its thing and be storm in the symphony of creation. And we thanked it and we and then it was coming. So we walked back inland, and as we walked back inland, she said to me with her mind, the civilizing impulse of true humans is to harmonize the forces of nature. And I woke up, and I had that sentence just blazing in my mind, the civilizing impulse of true humans is to harmonize the forces of nature. Months later, as I was on a road trip and driving down a very straight road to the north of Mount Shasta, this kind of like sometimes, you know when you get into that kind of a trance when you're driving, it was like her presence was there with me. And I started to feel the whole piece of teaching, the whole teaching that that one sentence was embedded within. And so I pulled over and started writing the first Sophia transmission. And I kind of hold the way I hold that there's four Sophia transmissions in the book, and they are teachings that are offered from the vantage point of a civilization, a society of humans who has transcended technological adolescence without breaking life. Who live in peace with each other and their biosphere. And I take the view that it doesn't really matter whether I channeled it or whether it was a thought experiment, because either way, it's a very useful view of like, what would it be like to be a human being who is part of a society where the cultural and spiritual and technological techno cultural and governance and education and law and mythos of that culture helped me to be a being who live in communion and integrity with myself and all of the people and the ecology, what would that be like? What would we take to be true from that perspective? And so that's what Sophia offers in the book, and she offers that from the perspective of the generalized. This is what it's like to be a being who is living in the first transmission is really like the whole shebang. It's like this is these are all the things that we take to be normal and that we know to be true about what it means to be a true human. And then she speaks about the structure of self, and she speaks about the nature of wholeness, and she speaks about the nature of Neo indigeneity, of planetary indigeneity, and what it is to take seriously that we're all indigenous to our Earth, and that that's a pattern of Neo indigeneity, because we've unless you happen to All to be an actual indigenous person. We are children of cultures that broke their indigenous connection with our places, our ecologies. So we're in a time of restitching that, which I call Neo indigeneity, which is also designed as a term of respect to respect actual original indigenous people and cultures,


Christine Mason  52:01  

a substantial and wholehearted book you've written. It's part Spiritual Autobiography, part diagnosis, part A practice manual and and this piece I found very mystical and very much a pointer from the future, like an invitation. This is how it can be. People I feel sometimes have difficulty imagining like our imaginations are limited, and as probably many of you just heard, even this idea of the storm is coming in. Welcome the storm, harmonize with the storm. How different even that one small practice would feel in in our lives, of how we relate to nature and incoming storms. And there's so many things like that in the book. Thank you. Christine, I'm looking right now. There's a big storm over the ocean, you know, just gonna go right outside and do that when we're done, which,


Samantha Sweetwater  52:47  

by the way, is a really fun thing to do. When you're like, Oh, hi, I'm so glad to see you.


Christine Mason  52:53  

You have also an invitation to do these, this like ceremony, ceremony, for a small planet, if someone wanted to do ceremony in their own life, for this meta crisis, for their own stepping into kinship in a deeper way, returning to their most truest humanist individual self, what might you suggest they do a ceremony with or without molecules? I will say I was reminded of one of my very earliest medicine journeys, when you were speaking, and I have this giant like, five foot Citrine sitting at my front porch. And, you know, it's beautiful, and it's got energy and all that stuff. But when I was on the medicine, I could see it breathing, and I was slowed down to such a pace that I could feel it's, it's the depth of the pulse of the frequency that it was running at. And everything changed from that moment of how I related to stones and and apparently hard things, minerals and things like that. And I needed molecules to do that. I imagine there are some mystics who can do it without but just just a little plug in there for the ceremony that's assisted with molecules.


Samantha Sweetwater  54:06  

The view that we're in a ceremony for a small planet is that, like it or not, we are. We've all been thrown into this container, ie, a planet and a society that has pushed past planetary boundaries, and where I feel we either come back into deep integrity, reciprocity and complementarity, deep relationality, recognizing life as sacred and that we are creatively capable of engaging with the reciprocal cycles of life. Either we take that view and we make that our life work, that's a physical process, it's also an energetic and a spiritual one. Either we move in that direction or it's going to be game over, or even if it's not game over, it's going to be game really suck, like techno. Dystopic control, surveillance, capitalism, suckage. So you know, the path where there's the greatest agency and possibility is in the direction of the revitalization and regeneration and recognition of the sacred in life. So you know, a really simple way to start is simply make some offerings to the tree outside your yard or the park outside your house or the place where you like to go and sit like take water and wine and flowers and offer them and state your devotion out loud, your devotion and your struggle like I'm really struggling with what to do with myself. I'm struggling with the way that I'm bound up in this system. I'm struggling with how, how can I be useful at this time, but I help me to trust that there are answers, and help me to take the next step, you know, tree. I don't know your name, but I'm going to start listening. It begins by offering devotion and making yourself available to the relationships


Christine Mason  56:14  

love that all of my friends who are listening you are the future ancestors of a more beautiful world. And we would like to leave you with a blessing or a charge that comes out of this. I'm wondering, Samantha, if you would be willing to close with a prayer or blessing or invocation for people's hearts or their courage in this time.


Samantha Sweetwater  56:40  

My friend, I want you to just take a moment and gather your awareness into the field of uniqueness, the field of luminous, unrepeatable uniqueness that you are, and to feel the way in which the the generalized field that you are, the vibration, the boundlessness and the boundaried is just here, in relationship to the all and The everything and that there is a conversation already occurring, and in this moment, I want to invite you to make an intention to be just slightly more permeable, just slightly more available to the listening of the way your own uniqueness speaks to and is spoken to is in communication with the calling of the world, and to gently cross a threshold into being available to responding to that calling, to creating what only you can uniquely create, only you can be and do and become bless your life.


Christine Mason  58:04  

Thank you so much. Thank you for the paths that you've walked, which have been many and trusting this material and this process and putting this out in such a thorough and beautiful way. You'll find all the links to true human in the show notes and to Samantha's resources, I expect to hear more from you, much more in the future.


Samantha Sweetwater  58:26  

Thank you, Christine, such a pleasure.


Christine Mason  58:32  

Thank you so much, Samantha Sweetwater, for the offering you've made in true human I hope you all take the time to find a copy of her book and really dive in. There was so much more in there that we couldn't cover it's very rich. 320 pages. It's available in digital and it's available in print. At the beginning of the show, I mentioned too that I've been making quite a few changes and learning and growing a lot. For much of the summer and fall, I've been teaching very rich, highly committed containers, around living Tantra, around bhakti Tantra, around some embodied renewal and health stuff. And I've been also giving up the identity of the householder. What does that mean? Well, I have been homemaking for 40 years, what maybe even longer, maybe 42 years, and a lot of life energy goes into decorating. I really like comfort and soft textures and beautiful fabrics and color and order and balance in my world. But there's a lot that that requires, particularly for a woman who is unmated to manage all of that stuff. And last year, I was home eight weeks for the whole year. So I have decided to be little bit more deliberately nomadic and not have a home in Northern California for a while. So you'll see me more in. Hawaii, then California, and also all over the world, beginning with India. In January, I'll be in South Asia, and then in April, May and June, I'm teaching and working in Europe. July is back in Hawaii, and then in the early fall, I'll be teaching on the East Coast. And I can't wait, I can't wait to see you in person. So once again, come and find me. Christinemariemason.com, and join in this incredible live, evolving community of super cool humans who like to do things together and who are committed to living at full capacity. It's, it's just turning out to be a beautiful mission in life, to cohere this love and liberation idea, not just online, but actively every day, every day that we live in these bodies. So I will see you somewhere on planet Earth. So remember who you are, incredible spark of the one divine light living in and as you irreplaceable and beautiful all love and all blessings you.

return to top


Geneva Tolentino
Next

The Frequency of the Beautiful World: Principles for Co-Creation with Forrest Wilson