Advaya begins a conversation with Ashanti Kunene with the same question it begins most: How is your heart today? In a very candid conversation, Virginia Vigliar gets a response that most are too afraid to admit, “Ah, you know, she’s around. In truth, I have some conversations I have been putting off with my heart”.
There exists a species of ascidian, polycarpa mytiligera, that can regenerate its entire body within days. Using sensory external mapping, they can identify which pieces of themselves are missing and quickly regain everything from simple tissue to guts from pieces as little as 1/226 of themselves.
Consciousness is a fundamental part of who we are and how we perceive the world. It encompasses everything from introspection, thought, imagination, volition, cognition, experience, feeling, or perception. While consciousness is vaguely defined and often contentious, most scientists agree that the foundational core of consciousness is the internal mapping of the body, an essential process for maintaining our own lives.
Ascidians are considered relatively close to humans among invertebrates from an evolutionary standpoint because they have spines and reproduce sexually. While we long perceived ourselves as far more advanced than these microscopic kin, they far exceed our ability to expand body mapping for self-repair. Indeed, this is because we only sense and map the patterns of matter and energy that are the closest to the functioning parts of our own body.
These creatures remind us that the more we know about the world and ourselves, even parts that are not with us in material reality, the more capable we are of surviving and thriving. I imagine these tiny invertebrates reaching deep into senses that humans have not yet tapped, their minds possessing a direct line with their bodies to foster cellular regeneration.
What if humans could more clearly see the parts of the world that are missing to thrive, and create those conditions for future growth?
Now more than ever, we have forgotten how to turn to ourselves for definitive answers. Our senses and intuitions are powerful evolutionary weapons that have carried us to our bodies from mere cosmic dust. In a conversation with Ashanti Kunene, a teacher in Advaya’s Future of Consciousness course, we discuss the power of listening to our inner voices – our consciousness – and how these voices may guide us towards possible futures.
As a social justice activist, Ashanti Kunene’s work on consciousness has informed timely discussions on identity and systemic inequality. She explains that in these times of great civilizational change, we are increasingly paralyzed by an inability to act because we suffer from leadership that has systematised “not doing the right thing”. And while “doing the right thing” may sound subjective and meaningless to some, Ashanti maintains that conceptions of right and wrong often operate “in the same way as gravity, because whether you know how it works or not, there are basic rules that apply to all of us”.
She goes on to explain that society has normalised “switching off the inner voices that tell us when something is wrong”. The ethos of capitalism emphasises the individual level for rational decision-making, whereby actions are weighed within contexts of hierarchies for personal growth. In Anselm Jappe’s Self-Devouring Society, he posits that such socialisation hurdles humanity towards an inevitable demise, leaving only a residue of narcissists. Likewise, Ashanti explains that “we have gotten used to a society where we are incentivized to do the wrong thing, because the wrong in so many cases helps you climb the ladder”.
Yet Ashanti explains that there are other ways of being in the world. As an activist, she knows the salience of contemporary identity politics, and as a Black woman from South Africa, resonates with many of their intersections. Her work exposes her to conversations worldwide that prove how dissatisfied people are with human history and its trajectories.
To truly listen to our inner voices and reach the part of us that speaks our truth, we must go through a process of unlearning, of stripping the layers that have calcified on our collective consciousness.
“That is the work!” Ashanti exclaims “unlearning the stories, the conditioning, really, and relearning a new way and changing the way in which you walk through the world”.
On this note, Ashanti shares the meaning of a beautiful word “Ubuntu, in my language, means “I am human because of other humans” and my humanity comes from the recognition of others' humanity.” To move towards the world we long for, one in which we collectively thrive – requires an untangling of the stories from our conscious. “That thing that makes us interdependent, interconnected, that life energy, that spirit that animates us and gets us to get up every day – that is what the barometer we should live by”, she says. So much of the work we do at advaya involves tenderly stripping the layers of our conditioning, and imagining new worlds by becoming enchanted with life. The stories we’ve been given are all we know now, but like mutilated ascidian, Kunene invites us to reach into our consciousness and think past the binaries that we’ve been given.
