https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=W-KvEGqrdl8
Thank you. Welcome everybody to another episode of voices with for Vicky I’m very excited to have with me here today. Chloe Valdory. I noticed on Twitter that she was making use of some of what looked like some of my concepts and my ideas. And so I reached out to her, and I’ve seen that she’d been having some amazing conversations with a lot of people that I’ve talked with. And she was very excited. So the two of us we we met and we had an informal conversation and then I invited her on to voices with for Vicky because I thought her work is really important, and it bears a lot on issues that I’m concerned with an awakening from the meeting crisis. So Chloe, welcome very much. Thank you, john, thank you so much for inviting me. It’s a great pleasure to have you here. So, for some of the people who might not know who you are yet can you give us a little bit about your background, and what your main project is right now and maybe how you got interested in my work and if how or if it bears on your work, etc. So, about me, I’m 28 years old. I’m from New Orleans originally, and I live in New York now. And my main project is a project called theory of enchantment. And very specifically we do anti racism training so we go to companies and other organizations, and we provide a set of tools to help people combat supremacist ways of thinking by essentially teaching them how to deal with themselves holistically, including their insecurities their shortcomings their positive attributes so that there will be less likely to overcompensate for those in a supremacist way, affecting them on to other people. So, that’s the essence of what the river chairman is, as you can imagine it applies beyond race and racism. It applies to culture building and companies in general, but our sort of our window in is through the diversity and inclusion piece. Great. So, I mean that’s very important work. So, a few things come to mind right away. How is this different than a lot of other. I mean I’m at a university and we get these interventions on a regular basis. Right, etc. And how is it different from that. And secondly, what’s in the name theories of enchantment. So, as for the first question, there’s a very popular contemporary version of diversity and inclusion. That’s your standard practice. It usually consists at least in America I don’t know if it’s different in Canada might be different But in America. It consists of diversity consultants coming in and telling people about quote unquote whiteness. They usually define whiteness as a whole set of aspects that essentially conflate race with culture. So they might talk about either or forms of thinking, or they say worship of the written word and here I’m here I’m quoting. They might talk about the nuclear family, all these things they label as whiteness, and then they talk about how the people in an organization should stop promoting these things. And they encourage people to self segregate based upon race, which ends up many times alienating people of all different backgrounds, and actually also causing rifts between people of all different backgrounds. So it’s very, how would I describe this, it’s a very racially essentialist way of thinking it’s basically arguing that if you have a specific skin color, then you must practice a way of being. If you have a different skin color it must be different, and we’re going to sort of arrange the room based upon that assumption, whereas our, our organization’s approach is deeply, I would say, spiritual, in a way, and deeply philosophical also in the And so it starts with this idea that anyone, regardless of skin color can be supremacists and supremacists ways of thinking are not even necessarily just about race, they can be about like, if someone cuts me off in traffic. And so it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very, it’s a very If people were to enroll in our online course, they would engage with music and books and films to actually start to unpack the complexity of themselves. And to try to approach the complexity of themselves with love and compassion, so that they will begin to perceive complexity in the other, because stereotyping, when a person stereotypes another person, another human being, they’re also stereotyping themselves, right? And this is related to something that you teach in your meditation series about co-identification and the the inexhaustibility, asking yourself, who are you? And constantly coming up with new questions, or new answers, rather, to that question, knowing that you can never fully grasp, right? Who a person is, because it’s inexhaustible. So those are some of the main differences between our program and some of the other programs that are out there. So there’s a significant, like the goal is, there’s a shared goal about addressing issues of racism and conflict, but the method is, sounds considerably different. So is the theory of enchantment idea because you’re making use of a more philosophical, spiritual framework? Is that what you’re trying to capture with the notion of enchantment? Or is there something more to it? So that is what it ended up being. The reason why I landed on the word enchantment was because I started this, this whole project started out as a thesis that I was working on a few years ago. And I was actually trying to create a framework that would teach people how to love, especially people in communities that were in conflict with each other. Right, right. And so I started to ask myself, well, maybe I can learn how to teach people how to love by figuring out what people are already in love with, and then reverse engineering the process. So the source, the thing that showed me what people were already in love with was pop culture. And so I started to study these brands like Nike and Apple and Disney and Beyonce, all these brands that have religious like devotion from their fans. Right. And so I asked the question, well, why? Why do these, why do these brands have such power and attraction for so many people? And I noticed that all these brands created content where their audience started to see their imperfect selves and their potential reflected in the content, which is why they gravitated toward it. So there’s something sort of aspirational in it. There’s a very like second self aspirational idea in a lot of these brands. And, and I found that phenomenon, fundamentally enchanting. And, because it’s, it’s like the process by which you start to open up to the world and the world starts to open up to you, right, it’s, it’s related to a lot of the things that you’ve spoken about and also a lot of the things I think that Eric from writes about having versus being. So it’s that that’s what I mean by enchantment like the, the mutual opening up towards, not just the world but also yourself, and vice versa. This is so interesting. So I’m trying to figure out, I’ve got about 1000 things I want to ask you so I’m trying to figure out which one to go for. So, what would you who, who or what would you say are your main sort of philosophical spiritual sources for the work you do. That’s a great question because it seems as if I’m adding new sources on a daily if not weekly basis so I think when I started out, I can tell you what the online course contains because that will give you some examples some of those original sources. So, we have a lot of the sages of the civil rights movement, and their writings, so Dr. King Maya Angelou James Baldwin. These are some of the historical figures from that movement that we that is included in the, in the course we have micro surrealist and stoicism we explore. But the thing about the theory of enchantment is that it’s intergenerational. So, we introduce stoicism in conversation with snippets from the Lion King. Oh, yeah, and that have that juxtaposition shows how like there are stoic teachings and principles that are actually And we think, you know, I think this is very important because if wisdom, in a sense, is timeless, then we should expect to see sort of the reiteration of certain ideas in the present right. So there’s a lot of we actually explore a lot of different Disney films because Disney tends to be very rich with a lot of these wisdom traditions. Yeah. So, the Lion King inside out Moana is a huge, huge one. And there’s a film that came out very recently. We also study this film called freedom writers which is a true story about how this teacher transforms the lives of her students who came who come from different ethnic backgrounds, who initially were basically warring with each other. And she sort of, she sort of introduces them to themselves, essentially, and transforms their relationships in the process. We have, you know, we have Barack Obama in conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates. There’s a lot there. I’m just trying to try to remember what’s in the original. I can also send you a link to it so you can check it out. But there’s a lot of rich stuff there. I’m just, I mean it sounds, your project sounds, you know, very Socratic, where the, there’s a deep interconnection between, you know, self knowledge, wisdom and right, knowing other people. Right. And those are all bound up together. So, so what do you do, like, do you go into a business, and they go through the course. Is that the basic thing you do. Is that the basic method that you use for trying to implement this. So, there are two offerings that we bring to businesses, there’s the online course, which anyone can enroll in at any time it’s online and it’s self paced. But then we also have our workshop that I facilitate personally, it’s a day long workshop. And I like to say that it’s an introduction to the theory of enchantment deeper dive. It’s really immersive, it’s highly participatory. We usually cap the amount of people who can be in one workshop at 20. So, it’s an introduction to the main elements of the theory of enchantment and the other thing that I forgot to mention is that the theory of enchantment has three main principles. And so, the workshop is basically an introduction to those principles so the first principle is treat people like human beings not political abstractions. The second principle is criticized to uplift and empower, never to tear down or destroy. And then the third principle is, try to do everything you do and love and compassion, and we are specifically pulling from the agape meaning of love when we talk about that. So, two questions. How long you’ve been doing this and you have any sense from the companies you work with the groups you work with a comparative sense of how your method compares to the more standard method that we talked about early on, do you have any sense about the, like, you’re getting any feedback about difference between the two approaches. So, I’ve been doing this for almost three years. It’ll be three years in December. And in terms of the difference. So we do give surveys out after we do workshops. So we can get feedback. And there have been many people who have taken our trainings who have sat in the other kinds of trainings. And the feedback that they give is that this, our program is much more inviting and welcoming and and deeper. In a way. And as compared to the other program that they sat through which tends to be more alienating more divisive, more full of like animosity, in a sense, so that those are some of the words that have been reported in in that feedback that we’ve seen. Do you do any longitudinal follow up, like, like, do you ever go back to companies after months, or, and see what’s been happening after you’ve done the intervention. So not yet. We’d like to be able to move into in that direction. Right, so we are we are a startup, and where we want to go with the company is we actually want to be able to get our training like the online training, combined with coaching. We want to get those into learning, learning management systems that companies have to onboard new employees. And so we want them to go through our training but also have a coach be able to check in, whether it’s monthly or quarterly, to make sure everything’s going well and then even after the training is complete to help accompany, let’s say align their culture or align their policies with the principles of the training itself, and that coaching would be long term. So that’s, that’s where we want to go and you know that would create a space where we would just have never ending feedback, because the coaches would be would basically be an extension of us sort of embedded in said company. So, how, how’s the general. So, obviously you’re getting very good feedback from companies. What’s what’s, what’s the general feedback from sort of the, the cybersphere about what you’re doing. I, yeah, I don’t. I think it’s good. I mean, I’m not sure if I know how to answer that question, but it’s kind of an unfair question I’ll grant you but so I’ll be happy with a very intuitive response. That’s fine. Okay, yeah, I think it’s definitely been good I will say that like theory of enchantment. I started through enchantment because as a way to work on myself. So, to the extent, to the extent that I have been better at embodying the principles, the nature of my relationship with social media has changed. So if you were to meet me, even three years ago, my way of being on Twitter, or Facebook was very combative and dogmatic, at least, you know, relative to where I am now. And it’s far less now. And so that just changes the way social media appears to me. So in that sense it’s been really good. That’s amazing. Did you, I mean, I’m very very impressed by this. I’m impressed by people who are addressing deep, both pertinent and perennial problems in new ways that are taking seriously the issues of meaning and wisdom. I want to congratulate you on on this it’s just such good work. So, give us, will you welcome give us some, give us it like I don’t want you to, you know, give away the the secret sauce or anything. But like what are some of the things that people do in the workshop but do they do any mindfulness training or do they do any dialogical work or do they do any artistic, like, what are the what’s the best, what are the basic modalities that you bring to play. So there’s a few things that are all about sort of that introspective work unpacking the self, becoming aware of the self so we do a vulnerability practice where folks will watch for a browns TED talk on vulnerability, and then they will actually do work that they were they actually outline their positive attributes and what she calls opportunities for growth, and they will actually start to see how those things are related to each other. Good. Yeah. Yeah, it’s actually it can be very trippy to see that they will also do shadow work, which is actually one of my favorite. One of my favorite things to work on. So it’s a combination of the union sensibility, the Indian tradition but also bringing in the, the historical context of the civil rights movement because during the civil rights movement when a lot of people would protest segregation before protesting, they would They would actually ask themselves, am I harboring any vengeance am I harboring any sense of hatred in my heart for the person that I’m protesting, and if I am that I’m not going to go out and protest today. And so like that self awareness again was like, very instrumental in the success of the civil rights movement. And so I also bring up the fact that before protesting many of these individuals would actually simulate what it would be like in the dinos so they would So they would have their friends spit on them and tear their hair out or attempt to or whatever and call them racial slurs. So they think of practice this very zen like meditative way of being before they got there. So I give them that context they give the participants that context and I say so we’re not going to do that, obviously, today. So I come into a very little piece of shadow work and I talk about how young define the shadows everything that we don’t like about ourselves that we like suppress or repress or project. And so I said okay, here’s your assignment. You have to come up with someone whose behavior triggers your ego. So, again, back to that whole. I’m not just saying your behaviors problematic I’m calling you trash right so someone whose behavior actually triggers your ego in that sense. So identify that person, identify what it is about that behavior that triggers your ego. And then you have to identify that impulse or that behavior within yourself. And that’s the hardest part. Drawing the projection is really hard. Yes, exactly. So that’s one of my favorite practices that. And people say this was so hard and I was like, yes, it’s supposed to be hard. You know, So, do you do any, anything for sort of like non violent verbal communication, you know, things like that, or are those any of the skills that you teach people as well or. Um, well, perhaps, can you be more specific by what you, by what you mean by non violent. There’s a, there’s, there’s a bunch of books, it’s almost a genre now in which talk about sort of applying martial art principles like verbally keto or verbal judo. So what you’re trying to do is deal with confrontation potentially even aggressive force, but you’re learning, as you do in a keto or judo or patchy Chuan, like to meet force with force but redirect it so that you can practice self defense without necessarily trying to, or maybe a more, more honestly putting it while exercising the minimal amount of, you know, counteractive force against the person. So there’s, there’s, there’s sort of a burgeoning literature around that right now. We have more of that in our course, so we have. There’s this Nike ad, where Michael Jordan is actually doing the voiceover, where he talks about. It’s a, it’s an ad called look me in the eyes. And the voiceover text is essentially the script is essentially him saying look me in the eyes. It’s okay if you’re scared. I’m scared to. You’re scared of what I could become. I’m scared of what I won’t become. And so there’s this interesting, like, external internal dialogue happening there. And then we apply that. So we actually use that to talk about applying, applying this insight to the other, when you confront someone who, even in your mind you don’t have to literally confront them but when you’re thinking about someone else, who again triggers your ego to think about how you can actually be a mirror image of that person where you’re, you’re worried about what that person might become in the sense what that person might do to you, right, whereas that person is worried about what he could or could not become or what he won’t become. Right. And that’s in the same issue simultaneously. Now I will say that like our current course is foundational, and our aspiration is to build more and more courses. Right, right. So, for future courses we might have, you know, far more. A far more acute focus on that non non violent communication. We definitely want to eventually bring in the meditative piece, which is something I want to talk to you about which we can do offline, if you want, but, but we have our plan is to keep building more and more courses so that we can offer a whole suite of different options to people. Well, yeah, I want to be involved with that if I can help you in any way. This is fantastic work. Yeah, you. And I mean you already have such a rich framework so this is no, no, no hidden criticism or anything. Yeah. Any of any philosophers that emphasize, you know relationship like Boomer and I am thou kind of idea, or, or. Go ahead. We have we do have. Oh my goodness, what’s his name. His name is escaping me. So there’s this book called memoirs of the Jewish extremists. And it’s quite good and I, I’m very embarrassed to say that I am not remembering the author’s name because he’s written a number of. That’s what our brains do. Yeah, hours after you’re going to go, Oh, by the way. Oh yeah. So, he’s someone very similar to Martin Boomer, who, well the difference I think, and maybe this is unfair to Boomer but the difference is like you see the ironed out playing out and his, and his actual lived experience. You know his father was a survivor of the Holocaust, and he talks about how that led to a having this very strong sense of defensiveness born out of a deep seated insecurity, which caused a great deal of hostility towards Arabs, in particular, and And he talks about how he was able to work through that he shows the reader, who was able to work through that. So, that would be a similar, that would be similar or along the same vein as a kind of I am now sort of framework and we have a whole section in theory of enchantment course that’s basically titled understanding the self understanding the other, and that’s that’s like sort of in that same thing. Right. And I know you’ve, you’ve, you made mention of from already. I’ve seen from already. And so from around the having and the being modes and the sort of I though I relationship within from square. Go ahead, go ahead. I’ll just say from as a very recent discovery. He’s not in the original, but I do bring him up now when I do some of the workshops, and I hope to include him in later courses. Well, I mean, it’s great that it’s a growing living thing right now, as it should be. So what do you when people are done the course do they ever want, do they ever express that they want more. Yes. Right. I thought that would be the case. Right. Yeah, we’re interviewing a lot of our past students who have gone through the course, and they’ve expressed that so we’re, you know, sort of one of those hurry up and slow down kind of things but we’re working as fast as we can to try and meet the demand. That’s great. That’s great. Let’s be very excited and encouraged by, by the feedback you’re getting. For sure. Yeah, it’s, um, I’m very curious to see where, where it’ll go and how it’ll grow. I think it can really be. It can be at scale which is, which is one of the challenges, I think we’re doing this work especially because there’s a sense of urgency. And you know I don’t have to tell you this but there’s a sense of urgency with everything that’s going on in the world to get this kind of practice out there. Yeah. That’s very powerful. So, I’m interested, because you mentioned that there’s a spiritual dimension. Do people pick up on that, do they do, does it become like does it what does it sort of wet their spiritual appetite in any way. Yeah, it’s interesting because I’ve had different people come back to me and say, Oh, you know, this is very Christian. And I’ve also had people say to me, Oh, you know, this is very Buddhist. Yeah, I’m not sure there’s something very interesting going on because when I first created it I didn’t set out to create a Christian thing or a Buddhist thing. But, but the feedback some of the feedback that I’ve received is that oh you know this is very, this is very spiritual in an X sort of way. And the other thing is, there are also people who, who wouldn’t necessarily consider themselves or use that use that, you know, word to describe themselves, but they’re very deeply interested in philosophy. And that’s what they love about the training. There’s different aspects of it that speak to different personality types. I don’t think I’ve come across anyone who has sort of been unspiritual and then it awakened their spiritual sensibilities but then again I haven’t actually surveyed for that. So maybe that’s, maybe that’s happened but I don’t know. Yeah, that’s interesting. I get them. I get similar responses to my work. Your work is very Christian your work is very Buddhist, your work is very Taoist your work is very. Yeah, and so I think I can empathize with you. I think we need to collect some of that data to see what’s happening because some of the work that I’m doing with guys send stock and Christopher master Pietro, you know, of the pedagogical program, we use you, you take people you know through mindfulness practices into circling practices into philosophical fellowship, and, and then into dialectic and the deal logos and you get a lot of people do start using spiritual and religious terms and metaphors, try and express what’s happening in their And they also use turn and they, they also discover new meanings or at least new aspects or dimensions of old terms. One of the things that we frequently hear is, I discovered a kind of intimacy that I didn’t know existed there’s this non sexual intimacy it’s not it’s not It’s not the person’s not my family and they’re not my friend I just met them but this is so I’ve been toying with this idea, drawn from the Christian tradition of talking about fellowship, where people are discovering this kind of intimacy that comes from this these kind of joint communal projects of wisdom cultivation. It’s interesting if you, I mean, do what you’re going to do but like collecting some some information about that spiritual dimension of the practice I think would be really really interesting. I hope to have eventually a kind of saying like, you know, yeah, coming together different groups who are practicing it in their own communities you know we don’t have to facilitate it but to be able to spearhead something whereby people can just join each other come together of their own accord. I’m also doing circling with guy by the way so excellent. Yeah, it’s interesting it’s been it’s been it’s been something. But it’s definitely like a challenge. But it’s but it’s good it’s like a it’s a stretch it’s like a yoga. So, well that’s how he describes it he describes it as a Yeah, I was, I was thinking about that I’m also supposed to start the official first certification with guy. Very soon I think in October. So, yeah, I, but I was thinking about the possibility of the work you’re doing and the work that I’m doing, you know, for people who want it they could be sort of coordinated together. That’d be really cool. Yeah, because I’m. Yeah, well, great. That was a really wonderful reaction. Yeah, because I see you taking people who are close to positions of polarity and making really making real communion, not just communication real communion between them possible. And I think the work that I’m doing with guy and Chris is that okay once you take that, you know, and then you get people and you can build them towards, you know, I guess a way to say there’s a more profound aspiration to wisdom and meaning and self transcendence. Yeah, we should, we should talk about that because because one of the things that’s always concerned me about the work that I’m doing with the dialectic into the logos is like when we’re doing the workshops we’re getting people that are self selected. Right, or when I do stuff on rebel wisdom. And that’s not that doesn’t make it meaningless but you’re getting people that are coming in and they’re self selected and they’re oriented in a particular way. And one of the things I’m interested as well. What can we do that would be the same, you know, to get people that would be analogous to that self selection process, what we do to take people who, like I said, are in proximity to polarity, right and polarization and and sort of a cognitive rigidity and move them into. I think that would be, would be a powerful synergy between the two. Also, nice, if there was the kind of the way you are getting people I like because this is guys were to vulnerability as opposed to exposure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re, you’re, you’re training people in a vulnerability and an orientation towards virtue that I think would really also give would deepen the context that I’m also trying to build in the work that I’m doing with Christian guy, we should talk about this I think it sounds possibilities of integrating the two together, would be really powerful. How do you think you can select for people who are cognitively rigid. Well, I’m trying to find right there’s there’s there’s a sense in which the whole program, you know, that I’m talking about is supposed to take people from the street. But the problem there is it needs something else, where people are more oppositional adversarial to get them into a place where they would be where they would consider the program. And so, you know, some things that are helpful is Edwin Royce his work on empathy circling that’s designed for people who are an adversarial position. Peter Lindbergh’s anti debate. Those are some, those are some, I call them sort of bridging their onboarding kind of strategies, but, but I think, right, and maybe they could be integrated, because they’re very good for people are like almost yelling at each other. The problem is I still, I still sense a huge gap from getting people sort of calm down and willing to relate. Right. And I see the work you’re doing is like it’s, it’s fitting right in there. I’m not trying to subsume your work into mine I’m trying to propose a partner know but this is interesting though. Yeah, the calming down. I think that’s a, it’s definitely a key, because they’re, because you can’t do it verbally right you can’t just walk up to a person and say calm down. Doesn’t work. Even angrier. Yeah. But I think that there is a way. I had this experience where I was speaking to someone like last year who I met this person for the first time I think they’re like investment banking, this is New York so just to paint the picture for you. So we’re, somewhere in Manhattan, and they were clearly frantic. I think that they were frantic about politics and I could tell their energy was just like erratic. Right. And I don’t know I just showed up in a way that was informed by theory of enchantment, where it’s, I wasn’t, I wasn’t matching their energy but I also wasn’t, I wasn’t countering their energy. Right. Right. Yeah, but I wasn’t matching it either. Right. And slowly but surely the person actually started to calm down. And that’s what I’m seeing. That’s what I’m. Yeah. It is to, you know, it is a way of moving people into not a propositional but you know, a perspectival and participatory realization that there’s an alternative way to address their, the issues that they have their burning issue. The problem, the problem is, and I don’t think this is specific to either the right or the left is that politics itself is, is becoming a surrogate for religion in a way that’s often not properly recognized. So that’s one of the reasons why I think just either combating the propositions is useless because you don’t understand that the people are not in this just because they want these propositions to be true. Right. There, there, there is there, there is a devotion right to them and an identification with them. That is more important than the particular content of the propositions although they’re often confused together. And you can’t just sort of take that away from people. Yeah. Right. And so what I do because if you do they will fall into like, yeah, yeah, hell. Yes, exactly. Exactly. And so what I, what I hear you doing and if I’m, if I’m getting it wrong please just interject and correct me. But I hear you, like, really trying to get people awakened to that level. And right, trans and transformed at that level you’re not trying to take that away from them. You’re trying to say no no, this can be transmuted into something that right is oriented towards wisdom and and aspires towards you and to, to enhance connection. So I am understanding you correctly that I think is that is that yeah. Transmutation is actually one of my favorite words. Okay. And I was actually speaking about this so I was circled yesterday, and a whole circling thing. Yeah. You had the birthday. Was it was that what it was. No, no, it was like it was like advanced explorer. Okay, kind of thing. And I talked about my experience with how, like, if I’m angry at someone. If I can drop my anger down to sorrow. If I can actually, because underneath the anger is sorrow. Then my sorrow can actually be transmitted into joy. But I can’t do that until it dropped my anger down to sorrow. Oh wow this is so similar to some of the key moves that go into emotion focused therapy. I don’t know about I don’t know about this. Yeah, so emotion focused therapy as I did some training with less Greenberg, one of the originators of emotion focused therapy. Motion focused therapy is very important because Susan Johnson’s work emotion focused therapy is a powerful way of working with attachment machinery, like in Bowlby sense of attachment. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this but the idea that, you know, the child’s relationship to the parent. And so and that, you know, you can be avoidant or anxious or securely attached. And, and that has, like, next to sort of next to maybe measures of G or something it’s one of the most powerfully predictive and validated theories in psychology it’s one of the big theories. And it’s not suffering the replication crisis and it has huge therapeutic interventions because very often when people are in distress and they come into therapy, there’s huge attachment machinery at work, because the attachment machinery plays out in our romantic relationships, which are places where we suffer a lot in powerful ways. Anyways, back to the point, but I don’t want to digress too far in emotion focused there, emotion focused therapy is a therapeutic technique that gets you to try to get to the that gets you to try and become mindfully aware of exactly the phenomena you’re describing what one of the things it’s doing is that emotions are are often layered and the loop and and they’re in a particular relationships to each other. And so, very often, what prevents people from healing is that they get stuck at a superficial level to use your example which is by the way, is a very, very common pattern that anger masks sorrow. And it’s also a pattern. Sometimes you can like that sorrow masks fear, people are bad, because they’re afraid, right and that sadness is a way of sort of reducing their effort and motivation because they’re afraid to undertake the task. And so what you learn in emotion focused therapy is you learn to understand, and not again here, but right here, you learn to understand these relationships between emotions, and then you can actually transmute your emotional state by prop through this And that can alleviate suffering and distress and it can also ameliorate your, your sort of predictively screwed up patterns. Yeah, I love transmutation, I think it’s such a powerful tool, and I suspect, and I’ve experienced this anecdotally. I suspect that if you can learn self transmutation, then you can actually be with another person. While they’re feeling what they’re feeling. And just by you being in a certain way with that person, you can actually help afford them a sense of the transportation, like, I’ve been in a situation where someone was super not super aggressive but like slightly aggressive, and almost just being a container for the aggression, aggressiveness, and not, not, not matching it but also not countering it like it I don’t know it’s something there’s something weird happening there. Well, I think what’s impressing me more and more about you is the fact that you’re bumping into these, like, these things that I consider powerful and vessels of wisdom and you’re bumping into them and uncovering them on your own as you are doing this work. And for me that that that that that’s raising my sense of the plausibility and the power of your work. And to respond to the point you just made I think there are times in fact when we have nothing but that that presencing that can help somebody in transmutation. And one of the one of the situations in which all we have is when we’re all we have is that is when we’re, when we’re encountering somebody who’s in grief, significant grief. And anything you say, it’s, it’s going to learn. It’s one of the clear instances where you can sense the, the powerful inadequacy of purely propositional thought, because anything you say is going to either be, you know, truistic and useless, or it’s going to be trite, or it’s going to be hacknade. And if you’re willing to just sit with the person in the way you’re talking about and you know extend yourself all these metaphors, extend yourself as a vessel for what’s happening and take that sort of transmutational stance, that’s the best you can do I think for somebody who’s experiencing grief I think there’s situations where that’s all we have, and all we should properly aspire to, aspire to, reigning to those situations because anything else, especially if somebody’s lost a loved one, anything you say is going to be so full of hubris. Like, you’re standing in front of a profound mystery, death, and you’re going to throw human speech on it, like that’s, that’s just, it’s inadequate, it’s just inadequate. Yeah, that’s a very good point. I do have to say, sort of going back to our earlier point about taking away propositions and then people falling into hell as a result. I think part of how I was able to come to these conclusions is, so I grew up in a religious home. And in senior year in college, I had an experience where I realized that the frameworks, the religious frameworks that I was using to understand the world and that actually created incredible depression. Right. And, and a hellish like state of mind, right. And so it’s interesting because I think that Jung would say, a person has to go down into the depths, in order to sort of emerge. So I’m wondering what you think is the distinction or whether it’s the subtle difference between, you know, having someone fall into hell, which we don’t want, but knowing that a person has to go through something on some level. Yeah, in order to seek out change. So, I think an important way of distinguishing those and we can make use of some post unions, like Hillman and Raff and people like that. Reading Raff right now. Yeah, chemical. Excellent book, excellent book. And if you want to get an advanced practice that goes with it, I’m going to talk about this in the next series after Socrates, especially when I talk about Socrates Daemon. And a book that has had a huge impact on me is a book by Raff called Ally Work. Yes, I’ve heard of it. I saw it like I saw it on my recommended books after I bought the Alchemical Imagination. Reading, read the Alchemical Imagination first you need to. The order in which you’re doing it is perfect, but following that up with Ally Work, I think is really important. And also, along the way you might want to do, I forget the name of the author, some internal family systems theory work. There’s a book called Self Therapy, because it get like those two sort of help each other afford each other as a way of turning a lot of what’s going on in the Alchemical Imagination into a practice, like in the eskimo sense as a spiritual exercise. But to use some of that then to answer your question. I mean, there’s a difference and you see you and you and this and the reason I’m stumbling on this is because this question is like really like pressing in on me very powerfully because it’s around sort of trying to understand that Socratic point where he induces a poria in people. Many people don’t react well. Right. Yeah. And that and you know you see the same thing with Jesus of Nazareth he’ll do this, and it would like and it’s like, yeah, I understand that there are stages and they’re doing this sort of thing, but I’m not a sage, and I want to try and understand a little bit better. And so for me, making use of some of the people we’ve been talking about is, I tried to see the degree to which, you know, I’m helping. I’ll use one of Socrates is other metaphors, and it’s strangely picked up by Jesus. Right. You know, being a midwife, am I helping somebody to give birth to themselves. Right. So, am I am I. So what that means is you do so it should be drawing up. So, are is something from the depths calling them now, or have I just pushed them into stuff that right that that their, their, their internal system is not prepared for. I know that’s very abstract. And so the trick. Now that’s the wrong word that’s totally wrong with the knack. Right. The knack is like, well, what does that feel like what does that feel like, and to me, it’s, again, are when we’re on this continuum between insight and wonder and awe and horror. We are like I’m trying to shoot for getting them to wonder. And if, and if it happens and they go into all that’s great. But if I push for too much chances are I’m going to push them into horror. And so if you think about it again in terms of, we’re familiar what it’s like for people to be in the effect, the cognitive affective state of wonder, and can it’s almost like Tai Chi, can you develop the finesse, so that that’s more likely to happen, rather than. You can see that you’re, you’re inducing some kind of horror. I don’t know is that a helpful answer or. Well actually midwifery that did land for me as a, as a metaphor. And I did really listen to your episode about horror and and terror which was very interesting. That brings up another question for me but, but, um, yes, I do understand, it has to be, it has to be a kind of attunement, you sort of have to sense for it. I have a composition that you could tell me that would, you know, I also try to enact it and exemplify it. So, yeah, like, like I wonder if properly and sincerely engaged is contagious. Right. Yeah, right. That’s right. Yeah, I could definitely see that so my follow up question is sort of laterally related to. Um, so I’ve been noticing that I sometimes fall into this trap, I don’t know if it’s trap is the right word, where there’s too much wonder, like, like, and so my question is how do you chill out basically like when you’re seeing I spoke to Jordan Peterson about this when you’re seeing everything as combinatorially explosive, right, like, that can be overwhelming, and not not in a sense of terror, it’s just too much, you know, yes. So how do you deal with that. So, for me, the part of it is to try and make sure that the wonder gets transmitted into flow. So instead of it just being wonder flow is yeah but I always start doing things in the world, I start to get you sensory motor engaged and because these are all on the continuum. It’s, you can see I’m trying to do something analogous to emotion focused therapy, where I’m trying to find what are the natural relations between these states, and thereby that would be the easiest path by which to transmute. So when you’re saying wonder, right, you can try to transmute it into will flow. And so, like, so when, and I try to model that to my students, I’ll do things to get them to wonder, but then I’ll unfold an argument within the flow state, so that the wonder flows into the flow, and then the flow goes into the argumentation and the critical reflection. That’s the okay. And I try to do this. Go ahead. It sounds like you home the wonder for specific tasks. Yes, you hone it to the specific task. And so for example when we’re doing the dialectic into the logos we don’t just provoke wonder, we get people to wonder about a particular virtue. And then what happens is they. And so what you do is you you get them into where they’re willing to wonder and open up and you do that with the philosophical fellowship and the circling circling really opens you up right, and then you do that with philosophical fellowship that opens up people are wondering and doing all this and then you bring it in and they start wondering, but the wondering is gets linked to pondering the wondering gets linked to pondering okay what is honesty and of course the thing about the virtues and that’s why they’re at the core of the dialogues is that they concern you right they’re not just, they’re not just over there they’re not positions or ideas, right, you have to, like if you are not in some significant degree, honest, or at least valuing of honesty, talking, you won’t get why honesty is important you won’t even be able to understand it as phenomena. So, right, you’re trying to, you’re trying to get people to exemplify and induce as much as they’re explaining and explicating. That’s a task that’s a demanding task, and that’s what flow requires. It requires that people take the wonder, right, and then you put it into a demanding task. Now, it’s got to tune it right so that they can meet the challenge of the task, but if you can put it make it a demanding task in which they’re getting feedback they’re trying to clarify the signal, all the things that induce flow. That’s a way of turning the wonder into flow and then the thing about flow is people can learn to then go from sort of, you know, in the moment to much more long term cool flow of aspiration of doing that loop with their with their sacred second self and aspiring more Socratic or more like Marcus Aurelius etc. I was gonna ask you about that because like if I’m in a state of wonder and I want to hone it into flow, but I’m by myself right and I can’t have a conversation about a virtue with someone else but you’re saying I can do that sort of with my second self. Exactly and that’s where all this post Jungian work on internal or imaginal dialogue, like learning to dialogue with, you know, your divine double learning to, you know, get into real imaginal dialogue with your inner sage. And that’s the kind of thing that you can do get engaged in. You can also of course take up the practices that help to cultivate. So you know for me, I can take wonder, and I can do Tai Chi Chuan, which turns it into a flow state in which I’m training the kind of complex, you know, sensory motor and mental emotional That’s needed in order to be honest or courageous or just. Yeah, I did just start your the part in your meditation series where it’s not Tai Chi it’s Kai Gua? Am I pronouncing it right? Chi Kong. Chi Kong. Chi Kong. Yeah. I’m mispronouncing it too. Unless you speak a total language you’ll mispronounce it. So yeah. But yeah. Yeah, it’s a I started that this morning so I’m excited to see where it goes. My, my other question for you, and it’s related to what we’ve talked about. And it’s something I struggle with. But, and I can, I can only imagine that, you know, we’re talking about people with propositions. And like shifting deeper into participatory ways of knowing and things like that, I can only imagine that people who grew up with traditional religions or traditional versions of religions, probably suffer from this more than I do because I grew up as a Christian but, but observing a lot of Jewish festivals and Jewish holidays. Wow. So, there’s a lot of like framing and reframing that I grew up with. And so I think that that gives me a, that makes a lot of what you’re saying easier to digest. Yes, yes. But something that’s still a challenge is going from finite game mentality to infinite game mentality. Karst, Karst’s work. Yeah. Yeah. And I’m wondering if you have any thoughts on that. I do. It was a great pleasure I got to talk, I met Jim at a conference. And then I did a voices with for Vicky with him just before he died. So that was, I mean it was it was very powerful at the time and then it became even more retrospectively moving for me, because I got to really connect with him. Yeah. So, part of it for me is to try and move people below below belief. What I try to do is I try to first of all see if there’s common ground in terms of practice and transformative experience that I can reach people on. So, you know, I’m not, oh, you know, you believe in the Abrahamic God and I can say, well tell me, tell me, like what you practice. That’s why I often say don’t tell me what you believe tell me what you practice. And now I’ve sort of added and tell me how that practice is transforming. And then people will start to say well what I do is I pray, I pray this and I do, I read the Bible, then I say okay well I’m doing like so divina, and it’s like this and this is helping them go, oh wow that’s very interesting that’s very powerful I think this could be helpful to me. And then I say, oh, and so what does that mean for you like, and then, you know, trying to get them into the common ground that is below the propositional doesn’t mean they’re going to agree with every me because they’re not going to suddenly say oh yes, right, but what I find is that there’s more common And it’s exactly the place where you find people’s. I’m going to use a distinction that they were used, not their manifest commitment but their latent commitment, the deeper commitment that is really going to often the, the unarticulated aspects of their identity, rather than I’m, you know, here’s my creedal identity for example. And so I find if you do that, you can find a place where you can connect with people where they have more of that flexibility and more reframing as possible and once people start to do some reframing there, then they’re not always not an algorithm by any means but they’re often willing to consider being more flexible about the way that they’re committed to the propositions. I’m trying to be very careful what I’m saying here what I’m not saying is they’ll all they’ll abandon their proposition. No, that typically doesn’t happen. But what they’ll do is they’ll realize that, you know, there’s there. They’ll realize that they’ll even realize that their own tradition has multiple interpretation, historically, of these right and and you can sort of call them to that and open them to that. So what you have to do is you have to you have to, like I found that. And again I don’t mean this in any condescending fashion I mean this, like in fellowship. I try to give gap ground to people like if they’re a theist and I’m a non theist I’ll try and say, Well, this is what this is something I’m seeing and what you’re saying and I like I try to find in this situation this isn’t fraudulent try to find in this situation. How can I, how can I sort of transform my position in a way that’s closer to theirs, that’s still authentic to me. So, I think there is such important and fertile ground between agreement and disagreement. That’s the movement of the dance. Like this came out in my conversation with Bernardo Castro, you know, he and I were doing this but we both caught the dance. And so if people can catch the aesthetic of the dance, they’re again much more willing to be much more like much more dancing with their own propositions than they were before that. Okay. That makes a lot of sense to me. And I can see how that would have impact on me. Part of the specific thing that I’m struggling with is arts. Maybe struggle isn’t the right word just taking time for me to fully transition into this paradigm. But, you know, as cars, cars talks about the difference between having a having a finite, finite game mentality applied to religion so that would look like you know, the second coming of Christ, right, and it’s going to happen at a very fixed time, and that will be utopia and after that all of history will end versus versus an infinite game mentality where there’s just the next horizon and the next horizon and the next horizon and the next horizon and it’s very difficult for me to conceptualize. Let’s try it. Let’s try it though. I mean, so, and part of it is to get people caught up in the aesthetic of the dance. Right and say, Well, before we do the second coming, like, let’s do what the second coming is supposed to be but you know the vision of God, and like, are you aware of the fact that in a lot of the Christian tradition, especially in the Middle Ages, the vision of God wasn’t understood as seeing God, it was understood as seeing the way God does. And what would that mean, what would that mean to you. And it’s even the Bible you can quote versus you know, now I will know as I am knowing. Right. Yeah, all in the great him to a God pays like, like, it’s not that you see things it’s. So it’s not adjectival of what what you’re seeing it’s adverbial in how you’re seeing. And what would it mean for that, and then people will say well, you know, I can’t really like wow, I can’t really see it. I can’t really see it. I can’t really see it. I can’t really see it. I can’t really see it. I can’t really see it. I can’t really see it. I can’t really see it. I can’t really see it. I can’t really see it. I can’t really see it. I can’t really see it. I can’t really see it. I can’t really see it. I can’t really see it. I can’t really see it. I can’t really see it. I can’t really see it. I can’t really see it. I can’t really see it. I can’t really see it. I can’t really see it. I can’t really see it. I can’t really see it. I can’t really see it. I can’t really see it. I can’t really see it. I can’t really see it. I can’t really see it. I can’t really see it. I can’t really see it. I can’t really see it. I can’t really see it. I can’t really see it. I can’t really see it. They’re moments of selftonce descended so people will say, if the vision is to see the way he does, you’re always asymptotically self- transcending within the presence of God. And then people go… and I say, then what would that mean for the second coming? mythological. They won’t do that. But they’ll say, oh, I hadn’t thought about that. And I’ll say, and you remember that the word apocalypse means revelation, things are going to be revealed. What’s going to be revealed? Right? And what does that mean? And so like you try and I try to, I’m just trying to exemplify what I was talking about on this specific, the specific topic that you bring up. That’s the kind of thing I would do. Notice how I’m trying to give a lot and doing it. I’m trying to give a lot of ground. I’m like, give a lot of space. I’m trying to, you know, take, take the vocabulary and not explain it away, but revivify it and see and get them to see living options and possibilities within some of the concepts so that they get a new conceptual vocabulary. That’s the kind of thing I try to do. It’s very beautiful, John. I hope you know that it’s very beautiful. There’s an image of actually, there’s a Buddhist image that’s coming to mind that is in Jordan Peterson’s book, Maps of Meaning, where it’s like a picture of the Buddha constantly self-transcending, self-transcending into infinity. I’m wondering how long have you, like, when did you know that you wanted to be in this way? In the way that you are. Well, I mean, you’re also catching me at my best, right? And what I, what I actually aspire to, so I mean, it’s not fraudulent. I mean, I aspire to this. I eschesis. I try to discipline myself to follow this, but, you know, I’m sure if you were to ask my partner, is John always like this? I’m sure she would just know. And that will be in that. And that’s one of the, and the fact that she would say no so well is one of the reasons why I’m with her. But so without building in the idea that I’ve sort of arrived, I’ll try to answer your question. I guess the moment when, so I came out of a very religious background fundamentalist, and I abandoned it. I became very oppositional, kind of a hate-filled atheist. And then I went into university, I encountered the figure of Socrates in a philosophy class, and that sort of woke me up to another possibility. But unfortunately, at that time within academic philosophy, the pursuit of wisdom and the cultivation of wisdom falls off the table. Now I continued in that education because I found the skills they were teaching me very valuable. But so I took up the Tai Chi Chuan. I found a place that was teaching an ecology of practices, Tai Chi Chuan, Meta, Chi Kong, Tai Chi in an integrated fashion. I’m deeply grateful for that. Not only for what they taught me, but how they taught me that ecology of practices. And as I was doing that, I started to get interested and I started to start teaching other people some Tai Chi, a little bit of meditation, and then that started growing. And at the same time, cognitive science and psychology had come around and the topic of wisdom and mindfulness were being discussed. And that was coming in. And I was starting to, in my own mind, put these together, the scientific project and the spiritual project. And when I started to talk about this in my courses, that was the stuff that the students really went. And I had this realization. And it’s one of those realizations you have to, I hope, it seems that I was lucky enough that I realized it was some humility rather than hubris, that what was happening for me was shared with a lot of people in a good way, not in a narcissistic way or anything like that. And that I could share whatever was working successfully in a scientifically vetted way for me with my students and other people, then I could potentially help. And at the same time, I was sort of cottoning on to this idea of the meaning crisis. And so that’s about when it occurred to me. And what happened is through Siddhartha, I rediscovered Socrates in depth. And so through that whole loop, I came back through that loop to Socrates. And Socrates is now like for me. And so I carry around multiple sages. I carry around Socrates, I carry around Jesus, I carry around Siddhartha. Sorry, that makes it sound like their possessions. It’s not that at all. I understand what you mean. Yeah. So I can’t pin this moment, but I guess the closest moment where it became explicit for me was that realization that, oh, this could be helpful to other people. And therefore, it moved from a sense of self healing, self development, to a sense of responsibility to other people, which has now become more pronounced and urgent for me, as you mentioned, as things seem to reliably be going in the wrong direction in general. I do wonder if there’s, I do have to say you reintroduced me to Socrates because Socrates was a part of the sort of like first set of classes you have to take in college. But I didn’t have the proper professor, I think, because Socrates wasn’t alive for me in the sense that you’ve made him sort of become alive again. So I’m very grateful for that. And I want to say thank you, because I hadn’t even encountered Socrates in that way. Wait for the series. Wait for it. Wait till when I release after Socrates, because that’s going to be the sort of the two goals of that series is to make Socrates alive in that way for as many people as possible in order to give people an exemplar for this whole practice of dialectic and this whole transformative experience of dialogos. That’s the whole point of the series. That’s awesome. I’m really looking forward to that, to seeing that when it comes out. There’s another question that I had, but then it sort of flew away. I probably interrupted you at the wrong moment. Sorry. That’s okay. I’m sure it’ll return at some point three hours later. Yeah, it’s interesting. Funny enough, in my off time, I actually really love to produce music and I love to dance. And so anytime I can understand some sort of practice in the context of dance, it becomes more real for me. It becomes more alive for me. So it’s interesting because I’m writing a thesis and I’m going to argue that part of the reason why we’re alienated comes from a lack of this sensibility that’s related to dance. Yeah, totally. Yeah, and it’s interesting though how this maps on to culture because African American culture in particular is very embodied and very sensual and very much values dance. And so there’s something there and I haven’t fully landed, but there’s something there that I look forward to exploring. Well, then I mean we should talk about that at some point. There’s a lot in 4E cognitive science about embodiment, the gesture, the articulation of the body, affording conceptual articulation, Tversky’s book, Mind in Motion. Yes, I bought it. I haven’t read it yet, but I bought it. There’s a lot going on there. I mean, and similar things about the martial arts when they’re pursued philosophically have a very similar function. We should always be very interested in these cross modal universals. What I mean by that is we find it natural to put words and music together in the song. And you should step back of that and almost take a Martian’s perspective. But why do those two belong together? That’s a bizarre thing. And why does music and movement and gesture belong together in dance? And why are those universals? So Mithran has a proposal that language and music both evolved out of a common ancestor he calls music language. And that what we’re doing is tapping into that more basic machinery when we do things like dance and sing. I think you’ve talked to Rafe Kelly. I have, yes. Rafe, some of his work is like he’s putting together a whole ecology of practices around parkour and roughhousing and martial art motion. And like he’s just doing astonishing work. He’s just doing astonishing work. That’s awesome. Yeah. And I’d love to eventually incorporate some kind of alongside the meditation practice, some kind of dance practice as well. You need a movement practice. You need a mindful movement practice. You definitely do. I think that is not given enough priority in a lot of these pedagogical programs. I think it needs to be given much more priority than it typically is. Yeah. Why do you think it’s not given priority? Do you have a theory behind that? Yeah, I think we’re into sort of a Cartesian headspace in which the confirmation of our propositions is all that really matters. And it’s just I think there’s enough good cognitive science now to end even good philosophy to really undermine that claim and that position. And so when you and I are talking about something like this, there’s an element of I don’t want to use Plato’s metaphor because it’s some but he uses a metaphor and you can see why he uses a metaphor of seduction and that has with it all kinds of bad connotations. But what he’s trying to get but he means in a good way, right? In which in a context in which you were genuinely making love with somebody and etc. I think that’s the way we should properly situate it. What he’s trying to get at is the idea that what we’re doing when we’re talking like this is we’re not just proposing another set of propositions. We’re trying with the proposing of propositions to get people to taste something or to catch sight of its beauty because that’s what will draw them in both to understanding what we’re saying. But the point is and this is why it has that sort of seduction aspect to it. They have to be willing to undergo a transformation in order for these truths to be disclosed to them. And so there’s a lot that so one reason it’s not only that people the culture has enculturated and therefore entrenched people into a kind of Cartesian understanding of understanding. It’s that we often tell people to get out of their head and stuff like that but we don’t actually give them a rigorous ecology of practices by which they can taste the beauty of that and aspire to its possibilities. Yeah that’s very true. I’m imagining I’m reading what am I reading right now? I’m reading a book called The Way of Woman, Unlocking the Perennial Feminine, The Alchemical Imagination also which we talked about and from of course and there’s this like there’s this emphasis on attraction which requires opposites. Yes. You know and a capacity to appreciate difference which is of course related to diversity and inclusion. And so those are some of the metaphors that are coming up for me as you’re describing this seduction process that’s unfolding. It’s like it’s again it’s like the Buddhist notion of like I see the rose but the rose also sees me. Yes reciprocal opening and when people experience the reciprocal opening as mutually accelerating disclosure they fall in love and so in that sense right we’re trying to give people the eschesis the the spiritual exercises the ecology of practices will get them to fall in love with a way of being in both senses of the word as a way of being as like almost like a method or a path and a way of being a way in which being discloses itself to you. Yeah yeah but it’s both and that is and that is for me enchantment. Wow that’s fantastic. That’s a great definition of enchantment. That’s fantastic. So we’ve been going for about an hour and a half so I think we should draw to a close and we circled back nicely there at the end. I hope that you’ll come on again on Voices with Breveki and we could do another conversation. That’d be great and yeah let’s also set up a time where we can talk about you know it doesn’t have to be anything urgent but potential collaboration or at least cross-continuation of our work. I think that’d be very good. For sure I’ve been I’ve been talking to my business partner about you for a long time so I’m excited that this is uh this is going to be a thing so yeah. Well and I would also very much like to get involved. I want a way of addressing these issues because that you’re addressing because I think they need to be addressed they’re important and deep but I want to address them in a way that’s consonant with the deeper broader project of responding to the meaning crisis of getting getting people back into a wisdom orientation a connectedness orientation and so I think I think there’s potential for a very powerful synergy between your work and mine. Absolutely. Chloe thank you so much this has been really wonderful. Please send me in an email as soon as you can any links you want me to put in so that people meet you and get involved with your wonderful work and support it participate in it promote it etc. Will do thank you so much John I’ll talk to you soon.