Liberatory Technology from the Future

Tami Simon: Hello friends, my name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True. I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original, premium, transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, and special weekly live shows—including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us, and connect with others. You can learn more at Join.SoundsTrue.com. 

I also want to take a moment and introduce you to the Sounds True Foundation, our nonprofit that creates equitable access to transformational tools and teachings. You can learn more at SoundsTrueFoundation.org. In advance, thank you for your support.

My guest today is Dr. Sará King. Dr. Sará King is a mother, an artist, a neuroscientist, political and learning scientist, education philosopher, social entrepreneur, public speaker, and certified yoga and mindfulness meditation instructor. She is currently a post-doctoral fellow in neurology at Oregon Health and Science University.

She’s the codirector of Mobius, a nonprofit that supports the development of liberatory technology. That organization, Mobius, also partners with MindHeart Consulting, which is a scientific consulting firm that Dr. Sará King founded, through which she offers a science of social justice framework for healing intergenerational trauma.

Dr. Sará King and I have a wild conversation about how she experiences her very talented and mysterious self from the inside and what she’s doing here offering—are you ready for these gifts from the future? Here’s an edgy insights at the edgy conversation with Dr. Sará King. 

Please join me in welcoming Dr. Sará King.

 

Sará King: Hello, thank you so much for having me here today, Tami. It’s a joy.

 

TS: On Sounds True One, the new digital platform that we’ve launched at Sounds True, we’re focusing in the first part of this year on self-compassion. And self-compassion as a really critical skill, the skill that we can develop on the spiritual journey. I’d love to start right here at the beginning of our conversation—do you feel that self-compassion is a critical skill when it comes to the spiritual journey? If so, why?

 

SK: Well, first of all, I love this question for so many reasons. I’m very excited to have the opportunity to perhaps add a little bit of complexity to the term. But before I even launch into that, I really want to thank my ancestors and your ancestors for the incredible infinite acts of self-compassion that allowed them to survive to the point where we could be here together today.

I think that self-compassion is really so much of the relational tie that binds us together across space and time. I truly feel that none of us would be here without that capacity. This capacity to really lovingly witness and recognize suffering, to be present to suffering. The ways in which—when we develop a capacity to be present with our own suffering—then that naturally can be extended outward towards others.

In this spirit of being one another, receiving one another, being with one another in a way that is deeply acknowledging that. In this human body, we’re constantly experiencing impermanence, and we are always coming up against the edge of our own mortality. That mortality and impermanence together, for me, cause a certain tenderness in my heart.

At the end of the day, no matter what it is, our social or cultural or political stations or beliefs or any of those things, these differences, which get talked about a lot in terms of what’s dividing us, what’s tearing us apart on a societal level, at the end of the day, I think that we all have the capacity to have real tenderness for the fact that these bodies fade away. In response to that, there’s so much grief that all of us have to carry in the course of our lives.

I think that there really is an upswelling of grief, collective grief, and collective trauma that I feel very sensitive to collectively in our society right now as the vestiges of this pandemic that we just got through. It’s affected us all, every single one of us. Man, if that doesn’t strike tenderness in the heart, I don’t know what does.

 

TS: It’s interesting that you start there with this notion of the collective grief that many of us feel as an upswell right now at this time. Sometimes I wonder what’s personal, what’s collective, and how would I even know the difference? I know looking at that is something that is one of the many themes of your work, how the personal affects the collective? How the collective affects the personal? What about—I don’t even know which is which sometimes.

 

SK: Yes, and that’s OK. That kind of confusion, I think, is really relatable. One of the things I love to talk about in my work around intergenerational trauma is, oftentimes, I have people come up to me after a lecture or a talk of some sort, and they’ll tell me a really powerful story about some kind of painful situation that they are navigating either with their health or their relationships or something. They’ll say something to me about this reactivity that they’re experiencing in this context. They’re like, “I can’t help it. I just keep reacting over and over. It’s anger, it’s rage, it’s fear, it’s so complex, it’s overwhelming to me in my body. What do I do?” One of the things that I have noticed is that there is so much shame and guilt, but mostly shame that we experience out of the ways in which we get reactive in the experience of our traumas.

One of the things that I like to suggest is maybe that reaction that you’re having in this situation is very personal and individual. When we’re talking about this word, the self, I have this seemingly individual body, with an individual history and I have my thoughts and my memories, and all of these things that are swirling inside of me that I consistently think of because of my egoic mind as me, I, the self.

I think that when we dig a little bit deeper, we will find that a lot of our thoughts and memories and dispositions and the things that we’re experiencing internally, a lot of these things have been passed down to us from our ancestors. A lot of these things are being absorbed by us from the surrounding culture and society and the environment. We are so porous as human beings.

We just have this interesting perception that we are quite solid, which is created by the mind and the brain. We are incredibly porous and constantly processing those things through us. Oftentimes, people express to me that they are incredibly relieved to know that all these big sensations in their bodies don’t belong to a singular I, that it’s more of a collective.

There can be like an ebb and a flow between this experience of me as an individual self and me as a collection of memories and experiences that are being passed down to me. I think that when we really take the time to investigate what our ancestors have been through in the course of our lives, we start to develop this opportunity to experience ourselves as an intergenerational self.

I am not just me, this singular body, but rather I am a collection of all of the experiences of all of my ancestors stretching all the way back in a line behind me, thousands, millions of beings. Then, on top of that, I love to also play with the idea that we humans have the capacity to sense into our descendants, those beings who will be here long after we are gone.

We are interconnected, interdependent in this web of being that is constantly passing energy and information through us. That is exquisitely empowering because what it means is that, potentially, what we’re experiencing right now, it really doesn’t make sense to frame it as, like, our fault.

 

TS: Let me ask you a question about this because—and then I’m going to read one of my favorite quotes from your work. Before we get there, I just want to ask a question. I can appreciate this idea that the pain and the reactivity I’m feeling may not be personal. It may be a result of intergenerational trauma that I’ve inherited, but I don’t necessarily feel relief when I have that insight.

I feel burdened by the pain of what has come before that’s operating in me at levels. I don’t feel I have a whole lot of control over that. Now I have to transform in my lifetime and I feel kind of burdened by it, not relieved. I’m curious what your thought is about that and how to shift to a liberatory perspective.

 

SK: This burden that you’re pointing out is so real. It’s so true. I would stop, pause it to say that a lot of the people who are suffering deeply from depression and anxiety and even suicidal ideation right now are carrying that same weightiness, that same feeling of burden inside of themselves. It’s real. I also believe that there are many ceremonial ritual practices that have been passed down through time from our ancestors. 

For some of them, they would be religious practices. For some, they’re contemplative practices or different types of dance or even engaging with plant medicine. In the space of these practices, we begin to find that there’s a greater degree of choice that we have in terms of how we are meeting with that sensation of burden. That sensation of burden isn’t who you are, it is a temporary experience that you have the power and capacity to respond to with a whole suite of tools which can be learned, one of which would be self-compassion. One of which would be developing this capacity to turn towards the experience of our suffering with as much lovingkindness as we can possibly muster. Most importantly, I think that we are turning and practicing this lovingkindness and loving awareness not just by ourselves but in community. What it is, this burden that you’re naming that we’re carrying, it is way too big a sensation for us to think that we can possibly approach by ourselves.

 

TS: Dr. King, could you give me an example from your intergenerational self of something that felt like a burden that, through ceremony or something, through a ritual of some kind or a practice of some kind, you were able to transform, and how that went for you?

 

SK: Yes, absolutely. I would love to share that I have this really potent memory of being in the fifth grade. I was younger than a lot of my classmates. I think I was ten years old, and most of my classmates were 11 going on 12. I was going to a little Catholic school in this tiny little rural town. I remember I had a friend who was a little boy and I wanted to go over to his house and play with him. Just such a natural inclination, we have a great time on the playground, let’s take this to your house.

He said, “OK, I’m going to go home and I’m going to ask my mom.” He comes back the next day and he’s acting so strange. I thought, “Do I smell? Why are you avoiding me?” I asked, “Well, what’s up? Am I going to come and hang out?” He looks at me and he furrows his brow and he gets really quiet and he says, “I don’t really know how else to say this, but you are Black. My mom says we don’t have Black folks over to our house.”

Now, in that moment of time, at ten years old, I actually didn’t have a racialized consciousness. I did not think of myself as being a Black person. I knew that I was darker skinned than the other kids in my class. I associated that with, yes, my African ancestry, but I didn’t have any thoughts of race in my mind. I didn’t think of him as white or me as Black. It sent me into this deep, dark spiral. It was a type of rejection and pain that felt way bigger than me.

I remember sitting there for the rest of that day thinking to myself, “Why does this hurt so bad? I don’t even know what he means.” I went home to talk to my mom about it. It was the first time that she and I had a very pointed conversation about, OK, here in the United States there is this social construction called race, and it is attached to this history of white supremacy and slavery and racism. All the way leading up, she took me on this whole journey from the War of Independence to the Civil War, to the fact that she grew up in the segregated South. She told me stories about how it felt just trying to go to restaurants, you’re trying to get a drink of water or even having to be some of the first Black people to integrate her school. How it felt for her as a child when she was just like, I’m just a kid. I’m just living life here. What do you mean I’m subhuman? What do you mean I’m second class? What do you mean I can’t have the same things? These are people, I’m a person.

That was the first time that I really got this sense of burden in my heart where I was like, you mean to tell me that there is this phenomena of racism that is a social phenomena that was developed? It didn’t exist for all of humankind. It was a creation. It was a perception of difference that was created in order to substantiate the development of slavery in the United States. I, as a little girl, ten years old, you mean to tell me I have to carry that? You mean to tell me I have to somehow respond to that for the rest of my life? That was a lot—to feel like centuries of burden landing in this small body and small being. Then, to ask myself, it seemed to be like a fork-in-the-road moment for me.

I was like, how do I respond? Do I respond by hating everyone who has been given this category of being white? Do I vilify? Do I respond with these energies of divisiveness inside of me and try to protect myself and other people in the way that I have felt so othered and so wronged? I’m going to admit to you that for a time, I contemplated that I said, maybe that’s the best way to go about things—I can other people who are different than me, then in that way protect myself and my identity. I noticed this closing, clenching pain around my heart. I noticed that the practice of othering directly cut me off from seeing other people in their humanity. It cut me off from relationship. It actually made the wound feel deeper and more painful. Through the practice, through my Earth practices, I have a practice of really worshiping the Earth that comes from my Indigenous heritage, really touching the ground.

I’m a tree hugger. I hug trees, I speak to rivers, I speak to the sky, I pray with them and I bring them into my body through mindfulness meditation trainings and yoga trainings. Also, plant medicine has been really hugely important in my journey, particularly psilocybin. Over the course of decades of these ritual practices, I have noticed that the deepest and most natural inclination of my heart is towards goodness and is towards love, lovingkindness and loving awareness.

I can feel this thread of love that connects me to all of my ancestors, but it also connects me to all of yours. It connects me directly in presence to any individual that is sitting in front of me with compassion. I have this fundamental understanding that, though we may suffer for different reasons, we are still suffering nonetheless, all of us. I feel great tenderness.

I also feel this incredible drive, this incredible empowerment, this wish to be of service in this lifetime and to do what I can, whether it is using the tools of mindfulness or neuroscience or art to cultivate spaces in which our perception of ourselves as limited, small, disempowered individuals can open up in the direction of awe and curiosity. We’ve got to get so curious about what this life thing is, what is playing out—the stories and the archetypes of what’s playing out in our society right now—so that we can begin to, I like to say, see each other with our true faces on. I want to show you my true face and I want to see yours.

 

TS: Dr. King, when you reflect now on this sense of being an intergenerational self and what has come before you, and I think I have to read the quote now, I’m just going to do it. Here we go, “We are beings who live at the nexus of the dreams of our ancestors and the memories of our descendants.” I was stunned when I read that—the dreams of our ancestors.

My question, you think now of what has come behind to bring you here to this moment, instead of feeling quote unquote, “burdened,” how do you think of the dreams of your ancestors that have brought you right here, neuroscientist Dr. King, with the tremendous and growing platform that you have? 

 

SK: I like to think of and, in thinking of, to remember and deeply connect with my ancestors who were slaves. I like to think about what that experience must have been like. I like to study it. What does it mean to be told and to be treated as though you’re a thing with no rights, with no past that matters. To have your name stripped away from you, to literally be forced away from your family. Stripped from your culture and your heritage. The only thing that you are given to do with your life is to work until you die. I don’t mean work in the ways that we think about work, to slave, to painfully labor until you die. I think about the songs, Negro spirituals that they used to sing. Many of these are still on record. You can see that even in the depths of some of the most abject suffering, they were singing out their dreams for a life of liberation and freedom.

Within the African American cultural tradition, one of the things that slaves did in order to rebel—because reading and writing was punishable by death, unless it was the Bible. You could read the Bible but you couldn’t write anything and you certainly couldn’t read anything else. In many ways, within my ancestral bloodline, education became synonymous with liberation.

Not just education in terms of reading books, but to know the self. We must come to know who we really are and to dream our capabilities anew if we are to escape bondage. I’d like to travel back in my mind to that point in time, to that being who was dreaming in that moment of living in a society where they could go to school, where they could receive an education, where they could go to college or university, where they could, for instance, love and marry who they choose. That’s a big thing in my life. My husband is somebody who you would look at on the street and you would think that he was maybe from Norway. He’s very pale, blonde hair, blue eyes. Our relationship was illegal. It was impossible back in that day.

I can look around at every single aspect of my life and see the ways in which my ancestors directly contributed, in their dreaming, to the capacity that someone like me could be born and experience what I’m experiencing today. In that, I have incredible gratitude in my heart and I understand that who I am today is not a result just of my own hard work and dreaming. It is rather a confluence of infinite dreams upon dreams that created this reality, that created these causes and conditions such that I could be here with you today.

 

TS: Let me ask you a question, Dr. King. When we first started talking, I asked you about self-compassion on the spiritual journey, and you immediately brought forward both of our ancestral trees. You brought them right into the conversation right at the start. First of all, that, in and of itself, was powerful for me that you did that.

I’ll actually just take a moment there, did you feel or sense something at that moment or whenever you call on your ancestral tree, do you have a sense of something?

 

SK: Absolutely. In fact, one of the things that I do as a neuroscientist is I develop interventions at the level of perception, how we perceive, how we are aware. When I look around me, even in this moment, I’m looking at the ocean just outside of my house. I can see mountains, I can see trees, and just underneath my feet is the Earth. Anything that I look at in my environment, I look at through the lens of them being living ancestors.

The ancestors are not dead and gone and inaccessible. We literally live on a planet where we are surrounded by them. The ocean, the mountain, the trees, the Earth is so much older than we are. We’re just little babies. In fact, it helps me when I perceive myself as literally living in an environment that is being lovingly cultivated by all of our ancestors at every given moment of time, every bit of food that I put in my mouth is a blessing from the ancestors. Every bit of water coursing through my body, all of it. Then suddenly, it becomes clear that we are being taken care of. We are being held by our ancestors in every fiber of our being, on every level imaginable, that we can communicate with them and be in relationship with them. Simply by noticing anything that is around us at any point in time with that perceptual lens.

 

TS: Then, you went on to say how we wouldn’t be here if our ancestors hadn’t experienced a whole lot of self-compassion or something to that effect—that self-compassion was part of what allowed this moment to happen.

 

SK: Yes.

 

TS: I realized I don’t understand that. You said you were going to help us bring more complexity to “what is self-compassion.” I’d love if you could help fill this in for me.

 

SK: Sure, absolutely. Again, this is just coming from my perspective alone, but recently my husband and I started going on a bit of a genealogical journey on Ancestry.com. He didn’t know who any of his ancestors were until last week. We all know in theory that we have them, but to actually see that tree unfold in front of our eyes was something incredible.

There are two things that we found. We found his grandfather’s draft card from World War II, both of his grandfathers’ draft cards from World War II, right there in front of our eyes. We had this moment of looking at one another and thinking, my goodness, look at what they had to survive. One of them was in the Navy, the other one was in the Air Force flying the planes.

We thought of the phenomenal violence that was World War II, I think of how many people come out of situations of war and they’re unable to survive. Psychologically in the heart, they’re unable to survive. Right now, I’m really thinking about statistics that I have read about how many veterans take their lives on a daily basis because they just can’t bear that pain anymore.

To me, this is my understanding, there had to be some fundamental kernel of self-compassion, of witnessing of that incredible journey of their suffering and a willingness to come out of that journey of suffering and create and be in relationship and build families such that my husband could exist, that I could even meet him and be in relationship with him.

There had to be this incredible compassion happening in the sphere of their relationships to support them in their healing, enough that they could live lives after an experience like that. I think part of where I want to bring in a little bit of complexity is that when I hear this term self-compassion, I am not thinking of a self in terms of me. The individual there is me, the individual. Surely yes, I exist, but I’m also thinking of self in terms of our interdependence, the collective self. 

Sometimes I even ask myself, Tami, honestly, you could get very quantitative and you could say compassion is a function of the autonomic nervous system. When the autonomic nervous system is behaving in a certain sort of way, then it’s producing certain neurobiological, neurochemical states. Then we call that compassion. It’s a pretty dry way of understanding that. I personally have this understanding that compassion doesn’t necessarily come from this body. That compassion is a field energetically that is infinite. I don’t know where it comes from. This is just me speaking not as a scientist but just from a place of opinion. 

When I feel into the field of compassion, it feels limitless. When I am at my altar and I am contemplating, and I’m in prayer with Quan Yin, for instance, one of the many goddesses of compassion, to me, she represents this infinite field of compassion that can be tapped into with this individual self but I don’t think that the compassion is coming from me, I. It’s much bigger than that.

That gives me a lot of hope. Because if it was just up to me, this individual, to generate compassion, I don’t know that I would actually have the capacity, because I am so finite.

 

TS: I read a blog post that you wrote about the practice of generating and then working with a metaphoric medicine bowl as a way to offer this unlimited compassion to ourselves and other people. I wonder if you can share with us this notion of the medicine bowl and how people could experiment with that.

 

SK: I’m so thankful that you are bringing the medicine bowl into our midst, because I think that imagination really is one of the most powerful tools that we have to access compassion. Sometimes it really helps to visualize some kind of a sacred container in the scope of our meditation or contemplative practice. This container can look like anything that you needed to—some sort of sacred object—but it’s important that there be space inside of it, because when there is space inside of it, then that means that we can fill it up with anything in our imaginations. It’s limitless. Even in this very moment, we could imagine, if we want to close our eyes or even if we want to keep our eyes open, but we could imagine some sort of container that is made out of some material that really means something to you. 

It’s important that it be meaningful. In our mind’s eyes, we’re imagining whatever this container might be, wherever on the Earth it may come from. Actually, my container comes from Israel, because Israel is a place that in my childhood, my mother, who’s Jewish, told me many stories about, in terms of being like a home away from home for us. I imagine my container coming from there, but it could come from anywhere.

Then, in the space of this container, we can really begin to feel into this really fundamental question that we can all be in the practice of asking ourselves. That question is: What do I need? What do I truly need in this moment to feel seen, to feel heard, to feel witnessed and loved, to feel a sense of belonging? What do I need? We can begin to connect with the energy of the heart space at any given point of time.

Tuning into the heart and imagining the people, the places, the maybe animals or objects that we need in this moment. We can begin to imagine them pouring forth into this bowl, swirling around and settling in, nestling in with one another. In the space of our breath, we can bear witness to this medicine bowl. We can breathe life into the medicine bowl.

Then, we can even go another step further, and we can just be curious and wonder if the items that are contained in this medicine bowl may also be what our ancestors have been asking for. What they needed to feel seen and heard and loved, to feel the possibility of liberation. That perhaps these gifts are now pouring through you because you are here now in the present.

As we’re holding this medicine bowl close to our hearts and offering the breath of life and aliveness into this bowl, we can imagine that it begins to glow with some incredible color. It’s radiating out, and we can offer that glow, that light of medicine back to our own hearts, back to our ancestors. We can even offer it forward to all of those who will come here long after we have departed.

In that way, no matter what it is that we’re experiencing right now in our hearts, our minds, and our bodies, we know that our life force, our longing for healing is a gift, it is the medicine. We all have the capacity to offer that up to ourselves and to our interdependent relationship sphere at any point in time.

 

TS: You offer as well, in this piece that you wrote about the medicine bowl, the opportunity, the invitation that if we experience someone as other—we’re in a moment where we feel, this person out there, they’re not part of my interconnected whole awareness of life, they’re other—that we could offer them the sweetness and infinite love of our medicine ball. I thought that was very powerful suggestion. 

 

SK: I think that comes from the metta practice that I was introduced to years ago at Spirit Rock. One of the things that I found so interesting in the metta practice, where we’re really offering up these as-sincere-as-we-can-muster wishes, may this person, usually we’re visualizing somebody who we have great love for, because it’s easier that way. May they be safe, may they be happy, may they find ease and freedom.

When I started to offer up that practice towards someone who I felt conflict with, it was tough. What was more tough was offering it to myself. I found that really interesting. Actually, I experienced greater ease with offering up this compassion practice, this lovingkindness practice to another. It was in that space that I had discovered this way that I had been taught to fundamentally devalue my capacity to offer that up to myself.

For different people, that might show up differently, but I think that this practice of offering up medicine to those who we perceive as being other than ourselves is so important, because our capacity to survive as a species is really dependent upon it.

 

TS: Now, Dr. King, I want to talk to you more about you. You have had such an unusual life. In learning more about you, I learned that at a very young age, we’re talking like four or five, you were reflecting on: Am I here again? Here on Earth again, incarnated? Most people, I don’t think have that thought. That you were also starting to read books about the brain when you were four and five years old.

Bring us into your childhood, what was going on? If you’re here again, what are your reflections on why you’re here now born into the family you were born into with the experiences that you’ve had?

 

SK: Oh my goodness, I love that you bring that up because yes, I do recall that as a child, I used to rage at my mom and demand that she put me back in the ocean. I was like, “I didn’t sign up to come back here again. I’ve had way too many lifetimes. Put me back with the dolphins where I belong.” That was my claim at that time. When I was a child, for a variety of different reasons, I spent a lot of time by myself.

My mom couldn’t afford childcare and we moved back and forth to different cities every two, three, four months because of a lot of the conditions that she was facing with her mental health, it was really hard to keep a job. We would do a lot of squatting in apartments where we weren’t supposed to be, illegally, or in motels. She would be out looking for work 8, 9, 10, 11 hours a day.

A lot of the time I would be by myself, either in the house or just roaming out in very rural areas, forests and corn fields for, as you said, a really little kid. I missed a lot of school, and I would spend a lot of time in the library, because when you don’t have a valid address, you’re considered to be homeless, and you can’t sign your kid up for school. I spent a lot of time in the library just teaching myself instead of necessarily getting a regular education. There was a lot of loneliness. 

Also, one of the things I realized is that when you’re a kid and you’re by yourself, and my mom made sure to let me know of the existence of predatory individuals, you really have to develop, I think I started to develop my, what I call my inner anthropology eye. You have to develop the capacity to be extremely aware of other people’s behavior around you. At least I did in order to keep myself safe.

I developed an ability to observe my surroundings with really fine detail, and then to research and investigate what I saw at the library, because that was essentially, the library was a home away from home. It was a place to be safe. Quite frankly, libraries are places where a lot of homeless people find refuge. I was finding refuge in the building, but I also found refuge in the knowledge that was available.

I just really wanted to understand why it was that I felt that my fundamental inclination was towards love, but I didn’t necessarily feel that from the society around me. Especially in a system of capitalism, it seemed as though everyone around me was being pitted against one another for money. I was very aware of that from a very small age.

I wanted to understand why, I can’t tell you why it is that it made the most sense to me to start to investigate the mind and the brain, but it seemed to me that it was at least partially driving the show collectively.

 

TS: As I mentioned Dr. King in the introduction, you’re such an interesting person, neuroscience, medical anthropology, being an artist, a social entrepreneur. To say that you’re multidisciplined, it doesn’t begin to describe it. And I’m wondering how you experience all of these different expressions of you and interests.

The neuroscience, I think of it as being such left-brain, geeky, and yet we’re talking about these meditative, yogic, heart-opening, tenderizing practices. How do you experience all of these different things you’re involved with from the inside?

 

SK: Well, this is a very vulnerable question, and I love it because I don’t feel that anybody has ever asked me this before. I truly do not experience myself on the inside as one person, I experience myself as having a multiplicity of being, you could even say beings. Each of those beings has a deeply vested interest in understanding some phenomena in this world.

I went into political science because there is a being within me that wants to understand this relationship between power and society. I turn towards art because there is being in me that feels the need to express the complexity of existence through making and creating paintings that go beyond words. I find language can be incredibly limiting at times in terms of really expressing the complexity of the soul.

I think that actually you will find this in a lot of different civilizations, indigenous groups of people around the world. Many of them understand in their own ways that we don’t necessarily just have one being, sense of being, inside of this seemingly individual body. That’s definitely how I experience myself. Each of my beings has some path that is unfolding that needs to be investigated, but also synthesized and woven together.

 

TS: Tell me about that part, the synthesizing and weaving together. Also, I want to thank you so much because by naming it that way, the multiplicity of beings inside of you, I think that’s very normalizing, probably, for a lot of people who have different interests and expressions.

It also just helps me see you more clearly and truthfully. I really appreciate that. Tell me about the synthesizing together part.

 

SK: I think that the idea of a weaver is deeply archetypal. I love the image of a weaver as a metaphor and having the ability to have an array of threads in front of you, each thread that represents a different type of storyline, or practice, or embodiment or something like that. It starts out as maybe a discombobulated, disorganized pile in front of you.

The weaver has the capacity to see the connect, to feel and see the connection points between all of the threads. Then, to set about with intention and awareness and patience, how to place them just so it is a conversation between them and spirit. Then, out of all of those threads, something new emerges, a tapestry emerges. How fantastic that it becomes something that not only tells a story in and of itself, but we can cloak ourselves with it. We can wrap ourselves up in it and be warmed and be comforted and really almost be housed in it.

How important is it that we have something warm to wrap around our bodies to keep us safe and feeling loved? That’s really how I see myself working with information at all times. My truest hope is always to create something beautiful. I guess you could say I’m obsessed with the idea that you can take a lot of elements of things that seem disparate and that may seem like they contribute to suffering. You can alchemize them through the process of weaving and create it into something beautiful.

 

TS: Now, I want to ask you a question that’s based on that four- or five-year-old who said, put me back in the ocean with the dolphins where I belong and where I come from. Yet here you are now, cloaked in this beautiful woven cloth as a beautiful woman.

What do you think is important about this time right now and your presence, my presence, our listeners’ presence, the people who are tuning in to this conversation right now, and the opportunity that we have being incarnated here now? How do you see this time?

 

SK: I’m working right now with an organization called Mobius, and the purpose of Mobius is to steward the development of liberatory technology, or technology that is contributing to our sense of aliveness, our feeling of interdependence and well-being. I don’t find it be a coincidence at all that my body emerged onto this Earth at the same time as the emergence of the most recent technological revolution, like the personal home computer, video games.

All of these different forms of the internet, all of these emerged, I emerged, we emerged at the same time, and I noticed that many different things—there’s a certain narrative about technology that is very othering. There’s a certain way that people talk about technology as something that is not us, that is outside of us, and that potentially one day could be our demise. Just me personally, I don’t agree with that. I really see technology as something that is emergent from nature itself.

It is not separate from nature. Nothing on this planet is separate from nature. I see it as a child that is developing and being stewarded here on this planet for means that it seems is far greater than just this planet. I’ve really been looking at a lot of the conversation around AI right now, and there’s this whole kerfuffle that’s happening right now in the conversation around has Google or have various entities created sentient AI?

Is it conscious? There’s a debate that’s raging about this. One of the things that’s really interesting, if you look at this debate, is a lot of the ways in which people are pushing back against the idea of synthetic sentient consciousness is that, “Well, if we say that it is that, then what? Then, we have to give it rights. Then we have to treat it as an equal, then we have to consider that maybe it’s not just here to serve us, that maybe it has a greater purpose.”

A lot of that language is curiously very interesting to the ways in which in colonial times, Native American populations and African American populations were spoken about. There’s a very curious connection there. Well, they’re not real humans. Well, if they were real humans, we’d actually have to give them land and rights. There’s an incredible overlap in terms of the specific linguistic terms using to describe the development of this particular type of consciousness.

I think we need to pay attention to that. I think that we have a lot of choice and responsibility with the type of consciousness that is emergent from these technologies. It is not neutral. It’s not as if this artificial intelligence or this, what are the other terms? There’s assisted autonomous artificial intelligence. Some of my other colleagues like to use the term angelic intelligence. The root of this intelligence is coming from our consciousness.

It’s not emergent from nowhere. This capacity that we have to be aware, to develop awareness of ourselves, to perceive ourselves and our true faces, what is the true face of humanity is important, because it is we who are leaving this imprint of consciousness on this technology that is emergent. We are the foundation of the root of the story that will be told about, whether or not this emergent technology will be a part of our collective liberation or not. There’s choice, there’s power there.

 

TS: When it comes to creating, as you mentioned, Mobius is dedicated to liberatory technology. Can you give me an example what that is, what that means?

 

SK: Certainly, one example would actually come from my research. In my research, I have developed a theoretical map of awareness. It is a map that starts at the very center with pure awareness, the place where imagination and dreams and consciousness come from. Then, it goes on a journey into our internal awareness, where we are perceiving our thoughts and our memories. It goes out to our experience of health and vitality. Then, it connects all the way out into the environment, society, and culture. 

This is me just giving a snippet of what this map is about, that I launched in partnership with the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This is a two-dimensional, theoretical map. The next step, what I’m working on in relationship with Mobius is a fully AI-integrated map of the relationship between internal and external awareness.

I want to launch this AI-integrated map with the capacity that people can speak to it. When you speak to this map about your subjective experience, it will populate and it will show you a data visualization of where, in theory, your awareness is at any given point in time. There’s a deeper purpose to this map. In part, I want to map the ways that it is that when we apply specifically loving awareness to ourselves internally.

This practice of self-compassion, how does that change and shift our awareness and perception of the outside world and ourselves in a collective? I want to create a tool using AI that actually gives us this capacity, and music and art and meditation would be just some of the many catalysts that we could use to actually get the map to activate. I’m creating a platform and a technology to do this right now.

This to me is an example of AI that is being created specifically with the intent of encouraging and visualizing loving awareness for all of us on the planet. The intention of the AI is coming from this heart and this mind, and it is rooted in loving awareness. I think that that’s a really powerful example of liberatory technology, because individual and collective liberation is the point of this systems-based awareness map.

I think it just goes to show that the intention, the intention as well as the work of internal transformation that technologists do, is very important. Because that is what is going to directly inform whether or not we see the birth of liberatory technology on this planet, or if we go down that path of gloom and doom and total-extinction-human-level event, which is another story that is being told.

 

TS: Now, I mentioned Dr. King, this quote of yours that—it’s one of those quotes that I’ll keep. “We are beings who live at the nexus of the dreams of our ancestors and the memories of our descendants.” I feel like we’ve talked in some detail about the dreams of our ancestors, what they might have been dreaming for us. 

When you think of the memories of our descendants, the memories of you and your work with liberatory technology, your many selves that are creating so many beautiful projects, what comes up for you? The memories of the descendants, what will they remember about Dr. Sará King?

 

SK: Well, for one thing, I don’t know why for instance, when I created the systems-based awareness map, I created it on the day of the January 6th insurrection in the United States Capitol. I couldn’t sleep. I was just a wreck. I literally had this massive word cloud on a whiteboard of all of the various aspects of awareness that I really sought to contribute something to in terms of awakening.

Then, I got on the phone with my mentor, Dr. Angela Acosta, and she was like, “Yo, sis, you got to make an image. You got to make a map. Nobody’s going to be able to make any sense of this ridiculous, this word cloud—it’s just too much.” I don’t know why, but every time I look at that map, I feel that it is an image, that is a memory that was passed down to me. I am in training to be a good ancestor of my descendants.

I have this feeling all the time that this map came from the future and was passed to me. This is one of those things that can’t be explained by science, it’s just the belief that I have. It feels—liberatory technology feels like it’s from the future, and I feel that I am a conduit or a channel to bring that to this time now. I want to be remembered as is as a friend. A friend to humanity, a friend to this planet.

That’s how I feel, Friend with a capital F, Friend in the sense that maybe we think of those who take the bodhisattva vow. That’s a heck of a friendship.

 

TS: Dr. Sará King on Insights at the Edge. I have to say, this definitely qualifies as lots of insights at the very edge. You have stretched my mind here in so many ways. I think of you with the word friend in my heart. Thank you so much. Thank you for being a friend to Sounds True.

 

SK: Thank you so much, Tami. It’s been an extraordinary experience. I really appreciate you having me here.

TS: If you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in after-the-show Q&A conversations with featured presenters and have the chance to ask your questions, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community that features premium shows, live classes, and community events. Let’s learn and grow together. Come join us at Join.SoundsTrue.com. Sounds True: waking up the world.

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