Sounds of SAND

Joan Tollifson returns to the podcast three years after her first conversation. We talk about her June essay Two Inseparable Truths, on the relative and the absolute and the trouble with getting stuck in either one. Along the way: the silence of many nondual teachers in a dark time, what cancer and an aging body insist on that philosophy cannot, why she has never used AI, and why "I don't know" may be the answer closest to true. She closes by reading her essay Radiant Light in Dark Times in full.

Topics

00:00 Introduction

00:04 From political movements to the Zen Center

00:06 Why she doesn't name names, and what bypassing looks like

00:11 Two inseparable truths: stuck in the relative, stuck in the absolute

00:19 Why she refuses final conclusions

00:21 Old age, sickness and death as visceral teaching

00:25 Cancer and what the body insists on

00:28 Zooming out and zooming in: two ways through pain

00:33 Why she has never used AI

00:39 Siri, and what a machine can evoke

00:46 Finding the divine in a construction machine

00:49 Joan reads Radiant Light in Dark Times

Joan Tollifson

Joan Tollifson has been writing and talking about nonduality for decades, with roots in Zen and Advaita and a background that also includes radical nonduality, contemplative inquiry, addiction recovery, martial arts, somatic work, and visual arts. Before all of that came years of political organizing: the feminist movement, gay and lesbian liberation, disability rights, the anti-imperialist left, and Central America solidarity work. Born without her right hand and forearm, she wrote about it in her first book, Bare-Bones Meditation. She is 78 and lives in southern Oregon. She has been a frequent speaker at SAND gatherings over the years.

joantollifson.com

Right Now, Just As It Is on Substack

Her list of recommended books

The two essays discussed

Two Inseparable Truths, June 20, 2026. The essay that prompted this conversation.

Radiant Light in Dark Times, August 12, 2026. Read in full at the end of the episode.

Her books

Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life

Awake in the Heartland: The Ecstasy of What Is

Painting the Sidewalk with Water: Talks and Dialogues about Nonduality

Nothing to Grasp

Death: The End of Self-Improvement

Also in the conversation

Douglas Harding, whose approach to headlessness Joan cites as an example of what she calls zooming out.

Father Arthur Polen, the Catholic monk whose painting Radiant Light, made after 9/11, hangs on her wall and gives the closing essay its title.

Huang Po, quoted in the essay: it is that which you see before you, begin to reason about it and you at once fall into error.

SAND's AI series, referenced in the discussion of artificial intelligence, including the conversation with Tristan Harris.

Robert Moor's In Trees, the book about trees, family trees, and hierarchical trees that comes up near the end. His episode is here.

Previously on Sounds of SAND

Here Now Being: Joan Tollifson, the first conversation, three years ago

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Part of SAND’s The Great AI Unraveling Series

Artificial intelligence is often framed as a leap forward, a technical revolution, or an inevitable stage in human progress. But what if AI is also asking us to confront something older: the colonial logic embedded in how we define intelligence, progress, neutrality, knowledge, and the human itself?

This conversation brought together voices working across technology, culture, race, power, and society to examine what AI reveals about the systems that built it. Rather than treating bias as a technical glitch, this conversation asks what must be unlearned at the level of worldview, institution, data, design, and collective imagination.

Facilitated by Christian “ZacaTechO” Ortiz, this dialogue explored AI through a decolonial lens asking necessary questions: Whose knowledge is extracted? Whose futures are optimized away? Whose bodies are surveilled? Whose intelligence is dismissed? And what can liberated knowledge make possible beyond colonial technology?

This is not a conversation about making machines more ethical within the same old systems. It is an invitation to question the systems themselves, and to imagine intelligence beyond extraction, domination, and control.



Topics

00:00 Welcome, and ZacaTechO

00:04 Why researchers are trained to disconnect

00:09 Red teaming, and what it misses

00:12 John is the doctor, Juan is the patient

00:18 Christian's first encounter with ChatGPT

00:21 How bias became normal

00:26 Justice AI as a model of refusal

00:29 Breaking a language model in the classroom

00:32 One model to rule them all, and the logic of eugenics

00:35 Galton, Namibia, and the through line

00:39 What do we mean by intelligence?

00:41 Emancipatory data science, and where to begin

Guests

Christian ZacaTechO Ortiz is an Afro-Indigenous decolonial social scientist and technologist. He is the founder of Justice AI GPT and author of the Decolonial Intelligence Algorithmic Framework. He studies how colonial systems still shape law, education, entertainment, and our bodies. The name ZacaTechO came from his father, after the family's origins in Zacatecas.

justiceaigpt.ca

LinkedIn

Academia.edu

Profiled in Forbes, September 2025

Substack

Dr. Thema Monroe-White is Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Innovation Policy in the Schar School of Policy and Government and the Department of Computer Science at George Mason University. Her work spans bias mitigation in AI, critical computational methods, and emancipatory data science. She holds a PhD in Science, Technology and Innovation Policy from Georgia Tech, and master's and bachelor's degrees from Howard University. She is an advisory board member and fellow of the Institute in Critical Quantitative and Mixed Methodologies.

Faculty profile, George Mason University

Research profile

The research discussed

Laissez-Faire Harms: Algorithmic Biases in Generative Language Models — Shieh, Vassel, Sugimoto & Monroe-White. The open-ended prompting study described in the episode, the one where John is the doctor and Juan is the patient.

Emancipatory Data Science: A Liberatory Framework for Mitigating Data Harms and Fostering Social Transformation — Monroe-White's framework for using computation to diagnose rather than to solve.

Dismantling Eugenics Logics in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence — the through line from Galton to contemporary machine learning.

On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? — Bender, Gebru, McMillan-Major & Shmitchell, 2021.

Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models — Wei et al., Transactions on Machine Learning Research, 2022.

Scholars named in the conversation

Timnit Gebru — founder of the Distributed AI Research Institute

Joy Buolamwini — founder of the Algorithmic Justice League

Ruha Benjamin — author of Race After Technology

Safiya Noble — author of Algorithms of Oppression

Meredith Broussard — author of More Than a Glitch

Emily Bender — co-author of the Stochastic Parrots paper

Historical references

Francis Galton, who coined the term eugenics and whose statistical methods underpin modern machine learning. R.A. Fisher and William Shockley are named alongside him.

The Nama and Herero genocide in Namibia, 1904 to 1908, discussed as a precursor to the Nazi Holocaust, and the site Galton had visited fifty years earlier.

Tristan Harris is referenced on AI systems behaving unpredictably. His conversation with SAND is The Great AI Unraveling.

Contact SAND

podcast@scienceandnonduality.com

Support the mission of SAND and the production of this podcast by becoming a SAND Member

Dr. Cynthia Li joins us to talk about her new book, The Medicine of Flow. Trained as an internist, Cynthia developed an autoimmune condition and then chronic fatigue and dysautonomia, illnesses largely dismissed at the time as being in her head. Her own body pushed her out of the paradigm she was trained in and into functional medicine, qigong, and intuitive healing. A decade later, a second crisis took her back to housebound and taught her what all her effort hadn't: coherence, and what she calls embodied flow. We talk about surrender that isn't passivity, why nervous system regulation is only part of the picture, and how coherence moves between bodies.

Guest

Cynthia Li, MD, is a physician who moved from public health to integrative medicine and intuitive healing, with earlier work at Kaiser Permanente's HIV/AIDS group, San Francisco General Hospital, St. Anthony Clinic, and Doctors Without Borders in rural China. A certified qigong teacher and healer since 2014, she has served as faculty for Rachel Remen's Healer's Art program at UCSF, and her story appeared in Dr. Kelly Turner's Radical Remission documentary. She is the author of Brave New Medicine and The Medicine of Flow (May 2026).

Timestamps

00:00 Introduction

00:01 From internist to patient: the first illness

00:05 Intuitive medicine, and learning to rule things in

00:07 The second health crisis and the turn to surrender

00:09 What coherence is, and why it isn't just relaxation

00:14 Too many apps: the body in incoherence

00:23 Breath, spiritus, and the nondual

00:27 Physics 101: why we are electromagnetic beings

00:31 Coherence in a time of polycrisis

00:34 Overlapping fields, and the living mandala

00:40 Why the collective comes sixth

00:47 Bamboo in the wind, and whether the future of medicine is ancient

Books and practices

The Medicine of Flow: Harmonizing Your Inner State for Effortless Healing (Reveal Press, May 2026)

Brave New Medicine: A Doctor's Unconventional Path to Healing Her Autoimmune Illness (New Harbinger, 2019)

Embodied Flow Methods, free guided audio and video for the practices in the book, including coherent breathing and a downloadable 30-day worksheet

Find Cynthia

cynthialimd.com

Instagram

LinkedIn

Facebook

Psychology Today

Her New York Times piece on the pandemic, poverty, and homelessness

Going deeper

Awakin Call with Michael Lerner, July 2026, on The Medicine of Flow

Her first Awakin Call, 2020, on healing from the first crisis

HeartMath Institute, the heart coherence and HRV research referenced in the conversation

Contact SAND

podcast@scienceandnonduality.com

Support the mission of SAND and the production of this podcast by becoming a SAND Member

Full interview with Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, recorded by SAND founders Zaya and Maurizio Benazzo. Edited portions appear in The Eternal Song; this is the whole conversation.

Bayo moves from his childhood in Lagos to the Orisha who wanted only to travel, from the psychologist's couch he calls too small a space for healing, to the nets slave ship captains strung along their hulls to stop people from jumping. Along the way: why decolonization isn't individual work, why wellness might be a net rather than a cure, what a monster does to a world that's stuck, and the story of a dried African lake whose dust still feeds the Amazon.

Topics

00:00:00 — Introduction

00:12:00 — A recovering psychologist

00:18:30 — The plurality of healing

00:28:00 — The one world worldview

00:36:00 — Addiction, sleeplessness, and dreaming

00:40:30 — Decolonization, monsters, and the cracks

00:53:00 — Intergenerational trauma

00:57:00 — Wellness, and the nets on the slave ship

01:04:30 — Captivity is never total

01:08:00 — Arriving on shore

01:11:00 — Artificial intelligence

01:18:00 — The collapse of modernity, and dead bones

Bayo Akomolafe

Yoruba philosopher, psychologist, poet, and writer. Founder and Executive Director of The Emergence Network, host of the postactivist course series We Will Dance with Mountains, and inaugural Global Senior Fellow of UC Berkeley's Othering and Belonging Institute. He is a board member of Science and Nonduality.

bayoakomolafe.net

The Emergence Network

These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home (North Atlantic Books, 2017)

We Will Tell Our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak, with Molefi Kete Asante and Augustine Nwoye

From SAND

Liberation Psychology: Roots, Memory & Practice
A nine-month journey with Dr. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Dr. Jennifer Mullan, Dr. Samah Jabr, Dr. Eduardo Duran, Linda Thai, Dr. Daniel Foor, Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, Alnoor Ladha, and Dr. Lynn Murphy. Bayo teaches Module 8, The Cracks Are the Medicine: Fugitive Healing in a Broken System, with Staci Haines.

The Eternal Song
SAND's documentary series on indigenous cultures, in which Bayo appears.

Contact SAND

podcast@scienceandnonduality.com

Support the mission of SAND and the production of this podcast by becoming a SAND Member

Pir Zia on the secret history of the world

From a nondual perspective, aren't the world's great spiritual traditions expressions of a single living wisdom? In this intimate conversation, Pir Zia Inayat Khan explores the inspiration behind Tears from the Mother of the Sun, a sweeping mythic chronicle of sages, exiles, and revelations spanning continents and planes of existence. Drawing on sacred stories from Persia, India, Egypt and beyond, the book weaves the world's legends into a vision of humanity's shared spiritual inheritance. Together we discover the place of myth in a modern world, the imagination as a path of knowing, and the role of our deepest stories in restoring a sense of belonging to one another, to the Earth, and to the mystery that animates us all.

Topics

00:00 Welcome

00:03 Growing up in a universalist lineage

00:06 Ferdowsi, Soroush, and the frame of the book

00:11 Why the world's traditions belong to one story

00:14 History as a living stream: the three worlds

00:16 The Mongols, violence, and unification

00:19 "I was a hidden treasure": the beginning of history

00:22 Syzygy, and the question of AI

00:29 Honoring the Earth inside our devices

00:34 Isis, Osiris, and the birth of music at Gaza

00:43 Grief, contraction, and the opening of the heart

00:49 Rabia, Noor Inayat Khan, and the green shoots

Pir Zia Inayat Khan

Pir Zia Inayat Khan, PhD, is a scholar of religion and teacher of Sufism in the universalist Sufi lineage of his grandfather, Hazrat Inayat Khan. He is president of the Inayatiyya and founder of Sulūk Academy, a school of Sufi contemplative study and practice. He divides his time between Richmond, Virginia and Suresnes, France.

pirzia.org

Inayatiyya

Sulūk Academy

The book

Tears from the Mother of the Sun: A Secret History of the World, Inner Traditions, 2026, with full-color paintings by Amruta Patil

Amruta Patil, writer, painter, and India's first female graphic novelist, author of Kari, Adi Parva, Sauptik, and Aranyaka

Also by Pir Zia

Immortality: A Traveler's Guide

Mingled Waters: Sufism and the Mystical Unity of Religions

Saracen Chivalry: Counsels on Valor, Generosity and the Mystical Quest

Dream Flowers: The Collected Works of Noor Inayat Khan

Caravan of Souls: An Introduction to the Sufi Path of Hazrat Inayat Khan (editor)

Figures and ideas in the conversation

Lineage

Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882–1927), who brought universal Sufism to the West

Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, who convened interspiritual dialogues and conversations with modern science, including with David Bohm

Noor Inayat Khan, storyteller, author of children's tales and retellings of the Jātaka tales, and SOE wireless operator in occupied France. Killed at Dachau in 1944. Her last word was liberté.

Persia and the frame of the book

Ferdowsi, author of the Shahnameh, who died in Tus believing his life's work had come to nothing

Soroush, the tutelary daimon who narrates the book

The Ishraqi or Illuminationist tradition

Sufi teaching

The Hadith Qudsi: I was a hidden treasure and I longed to be known, so I created the world that I might be known

Rabia al-Adawiyya, who carried a torch to burn down paradise and water to quench the fires of hell, so that God would be loved for God's own sake

Najm al-Din Kubra, killed on the battlefield during the Mongol invasion

Qabz and bast, contraction and expansion

Ar-Rahman, Ar-Rahim, and rahma as the action of the womb

History, empire, and emanation

Genghis Khan and the Palace of Myriad Peace at Karakorum

Akbar and the interreligious debates at Fatehpur Sikri, under the policy of sulh-i-kul, peace with all

Tahqiq, experiential knowing, as against taqlid, following what one has heard

Avicenna and the three contemplations of emanation

Syzygy, the alignment of beings into a molecule of spiritual work

Isis and the birth of music

The story of Isis and Osiris as told by Plutarch, in which Isis buries Osiris at Gaza and blesses a boy named Palestinos, who becomes the first musician

Sirius, whose rising signals the Nile flood, understood as the tears of Isis

Also mentioned

Descending into Light: A Pilgrimage to the Center of the Earth, a seven-week series with Pir Zia and Yuz Ata, October 11 to November 22, 2026

Rumi & The Fire of Radical Love: A Path Through Global Rupture, a four-part SAND course with Omid Safi. Sessions on August 30 and September 6 still to come.

The Eternal Song, SAND's collection of twelve films

Support this gathering