🎧 Listen to this episode on Earth Witness | Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Our current era of interlocking crises – what some call the polycrisis – can be examined through many lenses. Countless commentators diagnose the failings of our politics, economics and social interactions, but these are ultimately just symptoms of a deeper disorder, the belief in an egoistic self that exists separately from everything and everyone else, the essential delusion from which follows every kind of selfish behavior. To effect the deepest kind of change requires the deepest kind of inner transformation; and few go so directly to the heart of the matter as my guest today.

David Loy is a Zen teacher in the Sanbo Kyodan tradition, a professor of Buddhist and comparative philosophy, and the author of many books on those subjects and on their intersection with social and political activism, including his latest book, titled Loving the World as Our Body: The Nondual Path in a Dangerous Time.

In it, David traces the evolutionary origins of our ideas of good and evil, shows how transcendence in Axial Age religions both offered humanity new freedoms and wrought the devaluation of the natural world, and finds hope in the nondual traditions of the world's major religions and in the dialogue between them.