SCRIPT:

Friends, comrades, adversaries, and those that are indifferent. We come here from many different places. Today I’d like to invite you to be present in this space with me, and allow yourself to relax. 

Find yourself in a comfortable seated position, and let yourself settle into your body.

Allow your eyes to gently close. Take a deep breath, and let it out slowly. 

Become aware of the space around you. The space above you. The space below you. The space in front of you. The space behind you. The space below your tongue. The space behind your eyes. 

That’s right. 

And become aware that as you go deeper and deeper, how nice it is to just close your eyes and drift away. 

Just like that. That’s good. 

And I wonder if you can imagine a quiet, peaceful spot. Here, where we are all seated together. 

And in this spot, I’d like to talk to you about the American Dream. 

In continents north and south, brown and black, we received this dream, a transmission of golden arches, shopping malls, four-door-cars, green lawns and crisp dollar bills. 

Into our ears came came the words that “American Dream is the belief that anyone, regardless of where they were born or what class they were born into, can attain their own version of success in a society where upward mobility is possible for everyone. The American Dream is achieved through sacrifice, risk-taking, and hard work, rather than by chance.”

Following the siren call of this dream, we left our homelands, our beloveds, our centuries-old ways of living, to come to this strange land where we believed we would be, all that we can be, where we would find our futures. 

We were told we could manifest our own destinies, start from zero, reinvent ourselves, build a new fortress that was all our own. We were told to work hard, and harder, and harder to climb ladders that kept growing with no end in sight. 

I am here today to tell you that this dream is broken, and it always was. 

I am here today to tell you that we have been misled, and tricked, and enslaved. We were never welcome as our selves. We were asked to erase our histories upon entry. We were harnessed as an animal labor force. We are the collateral damage of migration. 

Now that we know that this dream is a lie, where do we go from here? 

Let’s imagine a room somewhere. And in that room there are stairs going down, and you can go down those steps now. 

10... 9 ... more and more relaxed. 8... 7... safe and secure. 6... 5... deeper and deeper. 4... and 3.

That's good. That's exactly the way it should be.

And while you are in this state your mind is open to many possibilities... you can imagine things vividly... you can access the shimmering intelligence that is just beneath your waking life. You can let go of thinking, and you can enter the realm of sensing and feeling.

I am here to tell you it is time to dream a new dream, and not just one, but several. This dream, comes from within you, from your earliest memories and desires. 

It is these new dreams that will change the landscape around us. Not policies, not laws, but only this fundamental restructuring of our consciousness. 

Just as the visible forms of the earth around us – mountains, valleys, rivers and seas –are the expressions of continual yet invisible movements deep beneath the surface; the shifting of tectonic plates, the mutations of lava and rock embedded at the core, so are our practices, habits, and belief systems formed at a fundamental level by processes that operate beneath our liminal perception.  

When we engage those primary forces inside us, our subconscious, our unconscious, through speaking our dreams, we shift social perspectives and trajectories at a communal level.

A dream that is no longer based on productivity, or success. A dream where you do not have to change the sound of your name, where you can still be Muhammad, not Mo. 

A dream where you can fully embrace the richness of your lived history and of those that came before you, the gifts of rest and slowness, and your emotional intuition as the way you will begin to create the world you wish to live in. 

That's good, that's exactly right.

And now it's time to return to the present. I am now going to count from five up to one, and when I get to one, you will be back in the present, awake and alert and ready for the rest of your day. 

5... 4... 3... 2... 1.