Find our Sentientist Conversation on the Sentientism YouTube here or on the Sentientism podcast here.

Jonina (@JoninaTurzi) is cofounder of Lancaster Farm Sanctuary, a volunteer district leader for HSUS, a doctor of physical therapy & a yoga educator.

In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “what matters?”

Sentientism is “evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” As well as the video above, the audio is on our Podcast here on Apple and here on the other platforms.

We discuss:
0:00 Welcome

1:24 Jonina’s Intro

• Lancaster Farm Sanctuary, physical therapy, yoga teaching, sobriety, queerness

2:33 What’s Real?

• Hippie parents, social justice, civil rights
• Catholic father & schooling, more cultural than doctrinal
• Brethren Church family history
• Parents with a spiritual appreciation without buying into religious doctrine
• Feeling the freedom to explore “I just want you to be happy”
• “It felt like a human construct”
• Identifying as an atheist as a teenager
• Finding a beauty in the human body (& a sense of spiritual meaning) through an anatomy class
• Being bullied, as a “young queer kid”, by members of “Youth for Christ”
• “I have no idea what’s real”
• The lower & upper case “Self” in some Yoga practice
• Some things might always be unknowable
• Reverence, wonder & awe… openness

17:10 What (& who) Matters?

• Oneness & interconnectedness
• Unnecessary harm to sentient others
• Might plants have a kind of sentience? “I’m OK with saying we shouldn’t harm plants unnecessarily”
• Seeing the similiarities between human and non-human animals through physiology
• “The idea that non-human animals aren’t sentient is so bizarre to me”
• Movement & intent as indicators of sentience
• Are Roomba’s sentient?
• Evolution, behaviour/comms, information processing as inferential evidence for sentience
• Intrinsic & instrumental value
• The ethical dangers of holistic/ecocentric thinking
• “Spirtual Bypassing”… rushing to find a purpose/meaning/spiritual goal while bypassing compassion & understanding
• Knowing very spiritual people who also own factory farms
• A local factory farm with a Bible verse written on it
• “The foundation of a spiritual practice is caring for others”
• Stages of moral development: Ego, ethno, anthropocentric…
  37:30 Vegetarian to vegan
• Rebelling against Jonina’s mother’s vegetarianism as a teenager
• Being vegetarian. Not understanding dairy
• Seeing slaughterhouse footage & going vegan together with Jonina’s partner
• Social indoctrination re: animal ethics & the supernatural
• Climate change
• The relationship between scarcity & morality. Is it harder to be moral under scarcity?

44:09 The Future

• “Treating every sentient being I can with dignity, including myself”
• “We should all adopt Sentientism”
• Embedding a sentientist culture & ethics of care into education & religion & law
• A post-scarcity future? Freeing creative impulses from the bottom half of Maslow’s hierarchy
• Re-wilding, permaculture, agro-forestry
• “A whole new relationship with non-human animals that will blow people’s minds” as at Lancaster Farm Sanctuary
• Existential hope?
• Being clear about problems but radically open-minded about potential utopias
• Extending human concepts (e.g. Universal Declaration of Sentient Rights, Sentientist Development Goals) or something different?
• You can’t just legislate morality. People need to feel it too – by meeting other sentients! Gaps in our compassion are like holes in our brains
• Our most basic, important interests are those we most have in common with non-human sentients
• “Sentientism will look different depending on where it’s practised”
• Indigenous perspectives on sentience & connecteness
• Humanity to Sentientity?

1:00:08 Conspirituality

• MLMs, Wellness, “Alternative” medicine, QAnon, Flat Earth…
• The Conspirituality Podcast (https://conspirituality.net/)
• Assessing yoga/spiritual teachers & groups. “Is there a clear call for compassionate ethics towards other sentients?”
• The danger of putting anything as more important than sentient beings

1:05:40 Following Jonina and Lancaster Farm Sanctuary

• lancasterfarmsanctuary@gmail.com
• https://lancasterfarmsanctuary.org/
• Instagram, FaceBook, maybe TikTok soon…

Sentientism is “Evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” More at Sentientism.info.

Join Jonina on our “I’m a Sentientist” wall using this simple form.

Everyone, Sentientist or not, is welcome in our groups. The biggest so far is here on Facebook.

Thanks Graham for the post-production.