https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=bIJuIN6kUcU
How does your mind, how does your body mind, because Socrates was a soldier and Plato was a wrestler, how do they actually work? And how does your self work? What kind of thing is it? How could your mind, body and self malfunction go off the path to wisdom? Push your feelings to the relation between which you feel most comfortable and which is most desirable. How could you think off of a deep increase Welcome to After Socrates, a wisdom spirituality for our time. I’m so excited about doing this series. I’ve been looking forward to doing it for quite some time. COVID intervened, but maybe that was fortuitous. It allowed me to dive even deeper into this project and savor its richness. And hopefully I’ll be able to share that with you. Before we get into that, I’d like to take the time to acknowledge and thank some of the people that made this series possible, the people that I’ve been working with and in discussion with. The first is my dear friend and colleague, Christopher Mastapietro. Christopher, and I’ll explain this a little bit later, will show up in this series in an important way. But the work we do together on Socrates, on dialectic, and to dialogos has been just pivotal in helping this series be what I think it needs to be and should be. Chris and I did work with Guy Sendstock. And the work especially we do on the workshops we’ve created, we’ve done three so far, we’re doing another one this October, around circling into dialectic, into dialogos, also pivotal, central to what’s going to be happening here. So I need to thank Guy Sendstock as well. I want to also thank Rafe Kelly. I’ll mention his particular retreat. I don’t think retreat’s the right word. Called Return to the Source a little bit later in this lecture. But Rafe, in a really important way, reminded me that Socrates was a soldier and Plato was a wrestler. Bringing an embodied aspect into following Socrates is central and crucial. Lastly, I want to thank Dan Schiappi. Dan and I are publishing papers together. We are reading books together. We’re trying to marry the best cognitive science, phenomenological philosophy, and work on Platonic and Socratic philosophy. I can’t tell anymore where my insights are and Dan’s insights. They’re so woven together. And so I want to thank Dan Schiappi for everything that he has done. Again, integral to making this series possible. So this series has a kind of odd title, right? It’s after Socrates. Why this title? What am I trying to convey about this series? How am I using the title to guide you? Obviously, many people have been after Socrates in just a temporal sense. I’m after Socrates in that sense. That’s rather trivial. That’s not helpful. I want to talk about the sense of being after Socrates, like when you’re after someone. You know, like when a hunter is trying to catch its prey. And in that sense, we’re trying to track Socrates. We’re trying to find the signs. That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to find the signs. That which is the most, listen to the word, significant, sign, significance, significance. We’re trying to find the signs and track him and determine his significance. Weibenberg has done work on how tracking within our human evolution was probably fundamental to our cognition. Think about what’s happening in tracking. You’re not directly aware of something. You’re picking up these signs and these traces, and you’re trying to put it together and see how it leads to something and takes you beyond where you currently are and that of which you are currently aware. In that sense, we’re going to be trying to track Socrates. We’re going to be trying to leave our comfortable place we’re in and see if we can move into something a little less familiar and more interesting for us. So I’ve seen the video. I’ve mentioned it before in Awakening from the Meeting Crisis of Saan. These are hunter-gatherers in Africa, the Kalahari. They do persistence hunting where they constantly are tracking and running after. Think of this, a particular prey. Of course, they’re doing all of the stuff that Lieberman talks about. Sorry, Lieberman talks about. They’re picking up the signs. They’re looking at the spore of the animal. They’re looking at the depth of the track. They’re doing all this important inferential stuff. We have to do a lot of important inferential stuff if we’re going to track Socrates. But they also do something else. As they’re running along, they’re often making a gesture that’s a sacred symbol for the particular animal they’re tracking. They’re constantly reminding themselves that I’m tracking this kind of animal, not that kind of animal. Why that constant reminding? Because it’s constantly moving between general tracking and this more specific following. That gesture, though, is connected to something else. It’s a way of triggering more sophisticated behavior at certain junctures in the tracking. They’ll come along and they lose the trail. And the person who’s running and doing the gesturing will drop into enacting the animal, trying to take on the perspective of the animal, what the animal cares about, what the animal finds significant, trying to take on the identity of the animal and then create this sense of, from that, oh, that is the way the animal went. This is the imaginal part of tracking. What’s the distinction I’m invoking here? It’s a distinction from Corban between the imaginary and the imaginal. Both use the imagination. The imaginary uses images and takes you away from perception. So, for example, if I ask you, imagine a sailboat and I can ask you, are its sails up? How many sails does it have? And you can answer me. That’s the imaginary. What’s the imaginal? The imaginal is when a child picks up a stick, ties a blanket around them, their neck, and says, I’m Zorro. They’re not picturing anything. They’re trying to take on the perspective and the identity of Zorro so that they can taste what it’s like to be Zorro. What would Zorro do? How would I do this? And that’s, of course, how children primarily develop, how they go through this self-transcendence. They do that serious play. When I’m teaching people Tai Chi Chuan, I tell them to stand and imagine from their knees down is sinking in the mud of a river. This area is flowing like water. You want this area of you to feel like water flowing. And this, this is like the air. You want this to feel as airy as possible. And when people do this, what’s happening is they’re using this imagination in the imaginal sense to enhance their perception of the world. They’re doing imaginary augmented perception, just like we have sort of virtually augmented perception when you play things like virtually augmented reality game, Pokemon Go, things like that. But for way before there was that technology, people were using their imagination in an imaginal fashion in order to track something better and also in order to augment their perception of reality. And, of course, those two feed into each other and depend on each other. So in this imaginal sense, I’m going to be asking you to imagine Socrates, not as a model of Socrates, not as a picture. I want you to become as much as you can like Socrates. Carl Friston, really important thinker, has created one of the most important frameworks within cognitive science called predictive processing. Recently with Mark Miller and Brad Anderson, I published a paper integrating my work on relevance realization with this work on predictive processing. I think this is powerful stuff. But Friston says something really interesting about the self, that entity that we constantly are sort of trying to understand. That entity that we constantly are sort of organized around and oriented from. He said the self doesn’t have models of the environment ultimately. Of course, you have models in the environment. This is my bathroom. This is what it looks like when I go to the university. We have these maps. But the self is much more fundamental. The self is a model of the environment. It is a way of orienting to the environment so you can find your way in it in a way that develops who and what you are. So what we’re doing here is we’re going to try and use these inferential strategies, looking at texts, making arguments, reflecting conceptually on things. Of course, we have to. This is Socrates, a master of argumentation. But that’s not all Socrates is. We’re also going to do this imaginal. And these two are going to come together as we’re tracking Socrates. We’re going to try and capture what it’s like to be Socrates. And this, of course, would be to take on his really provocative kind of self-knowledge. As we’ll see, Socrates took for himself the slogan, know thyself, from the Delphic Oracle. I have it tattooed on my back. This kind of self-knowledge was central. And we’re going to find it’s a radically different kind of self-knowledge. It’s a kind of self-knowledge that, in some sense, problematizes the self. It’s not your autobiography. It’s not your autobiography. It’s much more like your owner’s manual. How do you function? How do you really function? How do you function well? How do you break down and malfunction? That’s what we’re going to be doing. We’re going to be internalizing Socrates. When we’re done, I hope that yourself and Socrates will be deeply interwoven together in a way that helps you aspire to a life that is carried along by the love of wisdom. So this internalization of Socrates is also how it connected to how we catch Socrates in the second sense. What do you mean? We’re catching, we’re trying to catch the prey? Well, there’s another sense here. And it’s also what I want to invoke with after Socrates. We’re going to catch Socrates the way you catch something like the way you catch a virus. You’re going to catch a virtual virus that’s going to change the genetic code of yourself and therefore how that world is disclosed to that self. You’re going to see and be differently. Now, this leads to a third sense of how we’re after Socrates. And it follows from this previous one, the previous two in fact. This is we’re going to catch up with Socrates. There’s a sense in which he’s ahead of us, even though he’s behind us in the past. What do I mean by that? This is a developmental sense. Socrates has in many ways gone further than us. There’s an ancient adage and was often used in reference to Socrates. As the child is to the adult, the adult is the sage. You have developed more than a child. You have a kind of maturity. And I think John Roussin is right. Maturity has these two poles of it, improved self-knowledge and an improved capacity to face up to the world. We’re going to try and develop the way Socrates did by following his way. We want to see how Socrates inspired people to follow his way. We want to see how Socrates inspired people to follow his way. We want to see how Socrates inspired people, afforded them to aspire to being better than they currently found themselves in a way that has rumbled and continuously through literally millennia. Now, what about this way of Socrates, this developmental pathway? Does Socrates have a method? Am I going to teach you a method? Oh, we live in the aeon, the era of the method. So Descartes, Discourse on Method, the prototypical document. This is how you do it. This is the method. This is the algorithm. This is the sequence of instructions. This is how you do it. This is the recipe. And method is powerful. And being methodical is important when it’s appropriate. I’m going to argue, and many people will be arguing with me in the sense of along with me. There will be a convergence of many people proposing. Socrates does not have a method. In fact, there’s a sense in which he will constantly draw people in to assuming that there’s a method for becoming wise, for having self-knowledge, for aspiring to the good, only to undermine it, only to sort of break it up from within. In this way, he’s kind of like his questions are kind of like Zen Coens designed to break up what we normally take for granted. We can grasp in our questioning. They’re like the parables of Jesus of Nazareth. Where there’s what looks like a narrative and we, oh, I know how narrative works and how a story works. And we take that on. And then the parable breaks the narrative up and realize and makes you realize, oh, wait, that narrative framing is not appropriate here. There’s something more fundamental going on here. There’s something more startling and surprising and demanding and challenging, but also for those very reasons, more satisfying and more profound in meaning. Instead, I want to propose to you the following. And I thought a long time about this and I was like, oh, oh. Socrates doesn’t have a method. He has a spirituality centered on the love of wisdom. That’s his way. And I’m trying to use that word and I’m going to use two non-socratic traditions, hopefully respectfully, to zero in. I’m using way in this way. It’s the way in no way. It’s used in Taoism, the Tao. The way that can be spoken of is not the way where it means this path, but also an orientation and a cultivation and an identification and a movement of self-transcendence. But it isn’t a method. If you think there’s a method to Taoism, you have fundamentally misunderstood its spirituality. I’m also using this sense of Socrates having a way that’s similar to how the early Christians were not called Christians, even in the Bible. This is no insult to Christianity, because in the Bible, the earliest Christians are not called Christians. They’re called followers of the way. It’s often capitalized in translation to try and give you some sense that there’s a special meaning here. They are followers of the way of Jesus of Nazareth. And he’s somehow identified with that way. But it’s a way they can follow. They can be disciples. Disciple means to follow. Discipline means to follow in this sense. They are somehow going to become more and more like him. And this is integral to following his way. Now, I fear I may have offended some people here. And that’s not my intent. Am I putting Socrates into competition with Taoism or Christianity or Buddhism? No. That is not my intent at all. I am putting Socrates into conversation, deep conversation. And this exemplifies the Socratic spirit. I’m putting Socrates into conversation, deep dialogue with Taoism. Christianity, Buddhism, and along the way, cynicism, stoicism, neoplatonism. Notice what I just said, by the way. By the way, along the way. This word is so pregnant with so many dimensions beyond what we capture with the word method. The way. There is a way here. That is what I have found. And that is what many people have found, both existentially as they try to live a Socratic life, and scholastically as they have been reflecting on what was Socrates doing. So Stephen Fowler has written the book The Art of Spiritual Midwifery. And I like the way he spells diologos. He actually capitalizes logos. Dialogos. Dialogos and dialectic in the classical tradition. Now, first of all, note the terms, diologos and dialectic. Here’s another book that uses both of these terms. By Gero Hansen Helskog. I hope I pronounced that correctly. Called Philosophizing the Dialogos Way Towards Wisdom in Education. Dialogos is here. And then within the book, he talks about dialectic. So we’ve got dialectic, diologos, and we also have this notion of being a midwife. What’s going on here? Well, first of all, I want to make it clear. Fowler’s a Christian. In fact, he’s an official chaplain, and he is a pastoral education supervisor. So this is not somebody who’s just theorizing or doing philosophy. He’s putting his Christianity into direct dialogical practice and dialectical practice with people. Okay. So what’s he doing in that book? And how is that relevant to what I was just talking about? Well, what he does is he is repeatedly comparing the way of Socrates and the way of the other people. He’s comparing the way of Socrates and the way of Jesus of Nazareth. And he’s explicitly not putting them into competition. He’s putting them into deep dialog with each other. He’s really interested in comparing Socrates’ self-description of being a midwife. So he’s comparing Socrates’ self-description of being a midwife and that he helped people to give birth to themselves. He uses that metaphor. We’ll have to be really careful about these precious gems where Socrates uses these metaphors to give us some understanding of how he understood and experienced himself and his practice, his way. So Fowler takes that, where Socrates says, I’m a midwife and I help people to give birth to themselves. And he compares it very fruitfully to in the Gospel of John, when Jesus says to Nicodemus, I tell you, you must be born again. And then Nicodemus is all confused. And then Jesus is trying to say, no, no, no, no, I’m talking about being born again in the spirit. This is a spiritual rebirth. Now, can we remember? It’s like it’s hard, right? It’s hard. But can we remember? Can we somehow go back and maybe we can use Socrates to help us here? Maybe we can use Jesus to help us understand Socrates better. But can we go back to the radicalness of that? What does it mean? I mean, I hesitate to say this. What does it mean to be born again? But notice, step off what we usually focus on. We focus on the person being born again. But Fowler does this really cool thing. He says, no, no, no, Jesus is a midwife. He’s offering to help people to become born again. There’s something deep. Are they the same? Are they saying the same thing? No. But we can understand more of what I’m trying to get at with this notion of a Socratic way, a spirituality, by comparing it to these other ways. We’re going to spend some significant time in this deep dialogue between Socrates and Christianity. I’ll talk about this more in detail towards the end of this episode. But what’s going to happen is, at one point, it’s not going to be a monologue. Christopher Mastapietro and I are going to be here together, and we’re going to dialogue. We’re going to exemplify Socrates. We’re not just going to talk about dialogue. We’re going to actually exemplify it for you. But not just randomly. We’re going to do this. We’re going to talk about the profound relationship between Socrates and one of the founders of existentialism and profound thinkers within Christianity, Soren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard is a follower of Jesus. He’s a Christian. But Socrates was his teacher. And how does that work? And what can we gain? How can we use each to look more deeply into the other? That’s going to be a defining feature of dialogue. We’re not going to try and get Socrates and Jesus or Socrates and Kierkegaard to agree. No, no. In dialogue, what happens is both people move. They emerge. They give birth to themselves. They have insight and transformation. They both get to a place they couldn’t get to on their own. How did I get here except by this dialogue? Let’s go back to the title because I’m still not done with it. After Socrates. What has come after Socrates? What has been inspired, in spiritus, spirituality? What has been inspired by him? What has afforded people to aspire because of him? How does this path of people inspired to aspire because of Socrates, how does that reflect back on him? How does it help us to understand him? Again, not just inferentially, but also imaginally. How does it help? We’re going to enter into reciprocal reinterpretation. Reciprocal reinterpretation. What does that mean? On the one hand, we have historical interpretation. But on the other, we have existential inspiration. And those aren’t the same. Those aren’t the same. One is trying to get at what’s the historical fact about Socrates? The other is how is Socrates living within me such that I am becoming a better self? So we have these two. And why do I call it reciprocal reinterpretation? Because they influence and change each other. And as we know more about Socrates historically, that changes how he existentially inspires people. But also as people are existentially inspired by Socrates. And we’ll see whole traditions around this, like Stoicism, that reflects back on the historical interpretation. And you might say, oh, this is going to be messy. And in one sense, you’re right. But in another sense, you need to step back. Right from the very beginning. And what do I mean by that? I mean with Plato, Socrates’ greatest disciple, the person who wrote the dialogues and given us the most information about Socrates. Right from the beginning with Plato, it’s impossible to pull apart the historical facts and the existential interpretation. Because in Plato, they are reciprocally opening to each other, reciprocally constraining and affording each other. You can’t really separate these two poles. We can emphasize, we’ll talk more about this, the historical, we can talk more about the existential. But in the end, you can’t really pull them apart. Ultimately, I am not going to try to do so. I’m not going to try to do so. I think it’s a quixotic project. I’m not saying people should not do historical analysis. I’m not saying that. But insofar as we’re after Socrates, we should take seriously what Plato ends up saying. In his seventh letter, which is by most people now regarded as authentic, Plato says he has made Socrates more beautiful in his work, in his writings. What? Because he goes on about how beautiful Socrates is. Not physically. Socrates was physically ugly. But this other kind of beauty. And we’ll come to that. But what does Plato mean? What is he saying? What Plato is saying is he’s not being totally faithful to the historical facts. But for good reason. Because he wants to be even more faithful to the spirit of Socrates. This is the same for me. I will enter into this reciprocal reinterpretation. Another word that’s good here is the Latin word inventio, which means both to discover and to create. I will both be discovering Socrates and in a sense creating myself in the image of Socrates. I’m going to do this for three reasons. First, this entering into the reciprocal reconstruction. The reciprocal reinterpretation. Really captures the three previous senses that we’ve gone through here about being after Socrates. You can’t really be after Socrates in the way we’ve been talking about if you don’t enter into the reciprocal reinterpretation. Secondly, much more than the facts, Socratic spirituality is needed in our times. In fact, the need is so pronounced in both senses of the word, like pronouncing a word, how something is pronounced, projecting outward. And the emergence of all of these communities that are so Socratic, not in that they’re trying to capture the historical facts about Socrates. But they are definitely following the way of Socratic spirituality. The whole movement around authentic dialogue, circling, authentic relating, empathy circling, even things outside of the Socratic tradition like Buddhist insight dialogue, on and on. And we’ll talk about these. These are all attempts to get at what Socrates was doing with his practice and the way that he was affording for people. Third, as I’ve already said, this entering into the reciprocal reinterpretation. This is how I aspire to live my life. I’m not offering an argument by authority. John Brevecki does this, and therefore you should. That’s ridiculous. That’s crap. What am I offering? What I’m offering is because I actually aspire to live this way, I can also explore this way from the inside. That’s the way I need to most present it to you. If it’s going to become relevant to you, such that you will consider internalizing Socrates and taking up his way. So what will you be doing? We will be asking how people in the past participated in the constant renewal and revisioning of the Socratic way. And how people are doing this right now. Deep connection between the participation in the past and the creation in the present. This means that in addition to a lecture, like I’ve just given, every episode will do a series of lectures. Every episode will do recommended points. Points for you to reflect on. Not because I’m making an argument, because they can help scaffold you into a lecture. Even more so, I will, each episode, take you on a pedagogical program. I am going to teach you in a course that will help you understand what the Socratic path is. I am going to teach you in a course that will help you understand what the Socratic path is. I am going to teach you a pedagogical program. I am going to teach you an ecology of practices built step by step, episode by episode. So just as I’m building an argument, lecture by lecture, I’m going to be giving you a tutorial, episode by episode, so you can build an ecology of practices to enter into the stream, if you wish, of those who are following Socrates. Before we do that, before we move to points and practices, I want to make a few final points within the lecture. The question that’s probably coming to mind for most people is, how does this series relate to Awakening from the Meaning Crisis? You’ve talked about Socrates and Plato already. What are you doing now? You’ve talked a lot about wisdom. What are you doing now? Awakening from the Meaning Crisis was extensive, very broad scope, and very expository. It was trying to teach to you. After Socrates, it will be much more intensive. We’ll be covering quite a bit of time, but I’m not trying to do the big picture. I’m not trying to give you the world view, although we’ll get to people who do do that. I’m trying to help you follow a pathway. It’ll be intensive. Instead of being expository, a lot of time it will be exploratory, trying to figure out together with you. I’m not Socrates. That sounds like such a trivial thing to say, but trying to hear that deeply. I’m trying to learn as much as you are. I’m hoping that I can be helpful to you. I got into a bind as I was working on this series because I kept reading more and more books. Look at all the books I brought here. Socrates and Dialectic and Dialogos. I’ve been doing all these practices, and I’m going to share them with you. I’ve been doing all this participant observation, and circling, and I’ve done some authentic relating, empathy dialogue, and Buddhist insight. I really have to thank Peter Lindbergh for all the help he’s provided in connecting me to these practices. And more and more, doing participant experimentation with Guy and Chris, trying to build a workshop for people so they can really taste this and sense its transformative momentum. Doing all that, and then this is what happened to me. There’s still so much more. There’s so many more books. There’s so many more practices. There’s so many more ways we can try and put this together. I got into a bind. How could I possibly? Because you can’t just speak about Socrates. You have to exemplify Socrates. We somehow have to try and make Socrates be here. We have to figure out how to be Socrates to each other. If this is going to mean anything, if it’s going to make any difference. Then I remembered my supervisor, Jack Stevenson, when I was working on my PhD, and I got into a bind. And he came to me. He said stuff like this. He would say, you’re already way more of an expert in what you’re writing about than I am. That’s not my job. I’m wondering, OK, well then. And then he grabs me by the shoulder and he almost shakes me and he says, John, your thesis is not your masterpiece. Stop trying to make it your masterpiece. You will only maybe do that at the end of your career. And that was immensely liberating. And I went on to write the Naturalistic Imperative in Cognitive Science and start the beginning of the development of the theory of relevance realization. And I’m still working that out now. He was so wise. He was so prescient. That’s what I’m doing here. This is not going to be my final work on the Socratic Way. It is not going to be a masterpiece. Instead, together, we are going to try to construct a portal and a platform into and onto the Socratic Way. That’s what this is about. That’s what I’m going to try my best to do with you and for you. I had to make a choice. And I thought about this a long time and talked to people about it. Should I assume that people have not seen Awakening from the Meaning Crisis or should I assume they have? Each one is problematic. I chose the second. I chose to assume that they did. Hopefully not out of egocentric arrogance, but for the good reasons that I can’t possibly review the whole argument from Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. I can’t do it. And the more I do that review, the more the people who have watched it will just be suffering under repetition. Instead, I will refer to specific episodes in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis that might be necessary or at least helpful to people. Okay. Let’s move into some points. These are not intended to be summary points. These are intended to be things that you reflect upon in order to begin the ecology of practices. The Way is deeply enmeshed with self-knowledge, but a kind of self-knowledge, Socratic self-knowledge. And again, this is not your autobiography. This is more like your operation manual. How does your mind, how does your embodied mind, because Socrates was a soldier and Plato was a wrestler, how do they actually work? And how does your self work? What kind of thing is it? How could your mind, body, and self malfunction, go off the path to wisdom? We will need many different practices within our ecology of practices for Socratic self-knowledge, but we need to start somewhere. And I want to start somewhere that’s really relevant and provocative. The kind of knowing that I’m talking about is the kind of knowing that is trained in mindfulness practices like meditation and contemplation. And we’ll see, especially when we get into the Neoplatonic, that these are deeply intermeshed. So you’re going to say, oh, but Socrates doesn’t meditate. Well, slow down. Maybe not in the formal way within Buddhism, but Socrates was reported, it’s reported in the dialogues, had this capacity. He would stand for 24, even 48 hours fixed in place, looking deep within his mind, trance, profound absorption. And the anthropologist Lerman, in her work as proposed, and there’s some already empirical work supporting this, that this capacity for absorption is predictive of a capacity for tremendous spiritual, existential, sapiential self-transcendence. So Socrates was capable of entering into profound states of inner awareness. So the first thing I want you to do, if you wish, is practice round, biological reflection. You can do it as a daily practice. You could do it perhaps before or after the meditation practice I’m going to teach you. So here’s a couple of books, and you can alternate between them. One is Socrates Quotes and Facts by Blago Kirov. I’m probably mispronouncing that, since I’ve never seen that name before in my life. Plato Quotes, 365 quotes by Plato, by B. Ashadu. Each one of these, this is good because it gives you some facts about Socrates, and then it has quotes. What you need to do is the following. Read one of the quotes, perhaps from Socrates and Plato, and sometimes they’ll overlap, but they’ll almost always be from slightly different perspectives, and that’s important. That’s why the alternation. Read a quote and then engage in dialogical reflection. Socrates, what are you trying to get me to see that I’m not seeing? Resist the easy first interpretation. If you’ve read anything about Socrates, you know he’s going to come in and challenge the easy first interpretation. And then challenge your second interpretation. Challenge the third. Try to get to at least three. And then ask yourself, after you’ve been dialoguing with Socrates or Plato, what does this mean for me? How could I put it into practice? How can I try it out to see if it changes things? The other practice you do on a regular basis is imaginal, and you know what imaginal means now, imaginal engagement. Here’s a little book called The Allegory of the Cave by Plato. It’s one of the most famous passages. Many of you are familiar with it. What you want to do in this is you want to read a section of it. There’s natural breaks in there. And then try to imagine yourself in the situation. What am I seeing? How am I feeling about myself? What would it mean to be chained? So I’m only seeing shadows and hearing echoes, and I never can turn around and look at the real. I can never orient myself. And that’s important. I can never orient myself in the right way. What would it mean if I got free and realized that everything I thought was real was much less real in that sense illusory? Imagine yourself, imaginal engagement, imaginal enactment. Don’t just read it. Don’t just picture it. Put yourself into it. Put yourself into the perspective. Participate in the identity of the people that are in the cave or coming out of the cave section by section. You’re going to do it again and again. This is a myth in the proper sense of the word. You need to engage with it profoundly. And there’s study. I’m picking books that are easy to get and that are cheap in order to start. This is a Dover Thrift, which doesn’t mean it’s the absolute best translation, but that’s not that important at this stage. This is Six Great Dialogues by Plato. The Apology, the Credo, the Phaedo, the Phaedrus, the Symposium, and the Republic. Start reading this. But read it to study it. So just read it. Try and learn what you can about it. Try to ask yourself not just the historical interpretation, what was Plato talking about, what was Socrates on about, but ask yourself the existential inspiration. And start asking yourself some interesting questions. Why is Plato writing dialogues? Why doesn’t he just give the core arguments? And why is Plato almost absent from these dialogues? And what’s Socrates’ role in the dialogue? Is he just Plato’s mouthpiece? We’ll come back to this. So you want to be doing the dialogical reflection, the imaginal engagement and inaction. You also want to study. Now you don’t have to do all of those if you don’t want to. But the more you’re willing to do all of them, even just a little, the first two practices will maybe take you 10, 15 minutes. The third one, you could do it another time, read. What you need, like I said, if you’re going to study, if somebody was going to ask you about this later and you want to be able to explain, not only explain it to them, but try and attract them to it, that’s how you need to read it. And you’ll probably get it sort of wrong. I’ve read these books multiple times and read multiple books from other people offering interpretations. And every time I go back and see differently what was happening in each one of these, this is how this work could be sacred to me. It’s an inexhaustible fountain ever renewing my ability to make sense of myself and the world and how to best pursue a good life therein. Imagine someone who said they were a Christian, did not go to church, did not study the Bible, did not try and be like Jesus. Are they Christian? If they really understood it, can they really be any kind of guide for you? I challenge you, in love, I challenge you to take this up. You really won’t understand the lectures unless you’re pondering the points and taking up the practices, both the ones I’ll do with you and the ones I recommend you do on your own. If you just attend the lectures, you’re just reading the Kama Sutra and never making love to anyone. Would you want to do that? Or would you really want to understand what it is to make love with somebody? We’ll see that that’s actually a powerful metaphor, a very good metaphor for understanding Socrates because there’s a profound relationship, a reciprocal reinterpretation between Socrates and Eros, between Socrates and the erotic. Okay, now we’re going to move to our first joint practice. I’m going to teach you the basics of getting into a mindfulness meditation. So the first practice I want to walk you through is a core practice for beginning mindfulness meditation. We’ll do a few more along the mindfulness meditation and contemplation pathway, but this is a really good place to start. Meditation is about finding your center. This is how it’s so crucial to the Socratic project of knowing yourself, knowing how you function, how you form. Now this center has three dimensions to it. One is, I’m going to teach you first how to find your center in a way that improves the communication between mind and body. Socrates was a soldier, Plato was a wrestler. In fact, Plato was his nickname. It means broad shoulders because he was a wrestler. We want to improve the relationship between mind and body so it has that kind of finesse. It has that kind of fluency and fluidity of the soldier or the wrestler, the martial artist. We know that a lot of the time mind and body are undermining each other or antagonistic. I’m all spun out and I’m stressing my body and filling it with cortisol. Or I can be really hungry or really tired and that slows down my attempt to think, to understand. We’ve also had times when they’re in sync, when they’re offending each other. And we know that those are the times when we are most likely to learn, most likely to make progress. Then I’ll teach you how to center your attention. You probably think, well I know how to do that. Give me a chance. And then I’m going to teach you how to center your attitude. Let’s begin first by centering our posture. Now what you might do is you might stiffen yourself and do sort of this, oh I know what that is. Let that go. Don’t try and calculate your center. What I want you to do is feel, find. Because learning to feel and find, I wish we had a word that sort of was the two of them together. Maybe that’s what the tracking is. How to track your center is crucial. So don’t start doing it yet. I’m going to explain it to you and then I will talk you through it. I’m going to ask you to close your eyes. Then you’re going to move off center. And you’re going to feel off center. You have in your middle ear a mechanism that’s been put through 400 million years of evolution that really makes this apparent to you. And then you move off center backwards. Feel off center. Oh this is… And then each time I’ll move a little less back and forth until I get centered. Then side to side. Same thing. Off center, off center, back and forth until I feel centered. And then once my body feels centered, I’ll do the same thing with my head. Front to back, side to side. Why head? Separately, John. When people first begin meditation, they very frequently let their head roll forward like this. First of all, that really cuts off your air supply. So you start doing really shallow chest breathing, which is conducive to anxiety and rumination. You don’t want that. Secondly, you’re starving yourself of oxygen. You’re putting a strain on these muscles. That can lead to headaches, which will make you stop doing the practice. Also, and perhaps most importantly, this is a signal that you’re falling asleep. This is a signal to your brain, I’m going to sleep now. Part of finding your center is to find a place between two places that your brain is very familiar with. Oh, John’s closing his eyes. Ah, daydreaming, mind wandering. Yay, hoo hoo. Nope. Oh, John’s closing his eyes. We’re going to sleep. No. You’re trying to find what at first is a very narrow place between them, centered between them, and grow it and expand it and grow into it. Once you are centered, torso and head, I’ll ask you to relax your chest. That means let it open. See what my shoulders are doing. This is anxiety, stress, tension, anger. This is I’m open to learn and my shoulders are down, not up, open and down. I’m going to place my hands, and you can experiment. You can place your hands on your legs. You can do a classic Vedanta kind of practice or mudra. You can do something more often found in Zen. The point here is to place your hands such that it helps you to keep your chest open, your shoulders down, and add to your sense of stability. Then relax your abdomen. Not so complimentary, I know. Look at John’s stomach. Oh, ha ha ha. So what? Let it go. This is conducive to baby breathing, the way babies naturally breathe. They don’t do shallow breathing in their chest. They do deep abdominal breathing. They expand their abdomen when they’re inhaling and contracting, but they’re not forcing it. They’re not forcing it. They’re following their breath. This simultaneously relaxes you and gets a lot of oxygen in your blood, which is important for practice. Then relax your legs. You’re probably putting all kinds of effort into them. Make sure that your feet aren’t crossed. Your feet are touching the floor. Relax your legs. Then relax your face. Try to sink in. Really sink in. In two senses of the word sink. Sinking, S-I-N-K, and sinking in. S-Y-N-Z, like getting synchronized and dropping into it. Again, like a martial artist about. To fight. Now I’ll ask you, try to notice what it tastes like. I’m using this metaphorically. What does it feel like in your mind and body to be centered like this? What effects does it have on your mind and body? What effects does it have on how you’re oriented towards yourself, oriented towards the world? Why am I doing this? Because you need to create a felt memory of what this is like. What it is like to be you in a centered state so that you can find your way back to this again and again and again and again. Okay, so let’s do that practice together. You can close your eyes completely. Some of you might want to open your eyes slightly. Unfortunately, I have manures in my left ear, which it actually messes up that middle ear. So I probably have to keep my eyes open just a little bit. You don’t have to do that. Do what works for you getting more into this practice. I was able to do it for decades before I contracted manures. But now I’ve got to keep my eyes slightly open. You don’t have to do that. That’s peculiar to me. You probably, and most novices, want to keep your eyes completely closed. Okay, so let’s do it. Let’s close your eyes. Just take a nice deep cleansing breath. Just like you’re sort of washing the insides of your mind and body. And slowly move forward, off center front. Feel that. You know you’re off center. You don’t have to calculate it. Move backwards. Oh, I’m off center. Yeah, there it is. There it is. Now a little less forward, a little less back, back and forth. Slowly zeroing in on where you feel. See how you’re tracking? Where you feel centered front to back. Now side to side. Same thing. Oh, I’m off center. Yeah. Oh, I’m off center. Oh, yeah. Okay, back, back and forth. A little less each time. Off to right. I slowly find my way. Oh, there we are. Now let’s do my head. Frontwards. Oh, yeah, that’s off center. Oh, yeah. Right, right, right there. A little less each time. Then side to side. Now you’re centered in head and torso. Relax your chest. Open your chest, shoulders down. Place your hands that adds to that. Stabilizes it. Relax your abdomen. No forcing your breath. Following your breath. Doing baby breathing. As naturally as you can. Now relax your legs. Now relax your face. Now relax your head. Now relax your face. What does it feel like to be centered this way? How does it taste in your mind and body? Immerse yourself into it. Create a felt memory so you can find your way back again. Okay, slowly open your eyes. So that’s centering the mind-body relationship. Now we want to center our attention. For most people that means just sort of focusing. It’s much more than that. I’m going to use an analogy. Some of you have seen this from Awakening from the Meaning Crisis or from a meditation course. But it’s still helpful. Your mind is always framing reality. It’s always paying attention to this, foregrounding it, backgrounding this, and ignoring all of that. You’re always framing. And that’s always sizing up the world. Creating a particular sense of reality. You’re always framing. And that’s always sizing up the world. Creating a particular salience landscape. A flowing landscape of how things are standing out to you. Grabbing your attention. Arousing you metabolically. Generating particular affective states in you. Diamantal framing is like your glasses. If you wear them. I do. Now notice my glasses enable me to see, but they also limit. I’m looking through them in two senses. I’m looking beyond them by means of them. Beyond them and by means of them. They’re both enabling me and limiting me. That’s how they function. That’s how your attention, your arousal, and your affect function. All the time. Moment by moment. There’s a problem with framing. Supporting a lensing. What’s that problem? Well, these lenses could actually be rose-colored, as we say. Rose-colored glasses. He or she is not seeing the world as it is because the glasses are tinted. Or maybe there’s dirt on them or they’re distorting. What do I need to do? What do I need to do? How do I self-correct? I need to step back and look at my glasses. They’re no longer transparent to me. They’re opaque. I’m looking at them. I’m looking and seeing, are they rose-colored? Are they tinted? Is there gunk on them? Are they distorting? That’s what you’re doing when you’re finding your attentional center. You’re stepping back and looking at the normally transparent way you have been looking through to the world. Nice analogy, perhaps, but abstract. What does that mean concretely, John? What that means is, what are you normally looking through in order to make sense? There’s a clue in that phrase, of the world. You’re looking through your sensations. You don’t look at them. You look through them. You’re always looking through at the world. What you want to do in this practice is you want to step back and look at them. Well, which sensations? Good question. So we’re going to pick sensations for a practical purpose. Sensations that line up with that baby breathing that we got in centering our posture. And that, as we’ll see, have deep spiritual significance. This is the breath following the sensations in the abdomen being generated by the breath. So as I inhale, my abdomen expands and I can feel that. I’m going to gently say to myself, in. I’m not paying attention to the in. I’m using the in to track, to track and trace, to follow those sensations as they unfold as I’m inhaling. And then as I exhale, out. And I follow the sensations. Looking at the sensations, tracking them in and out, in and out. And what will happen, pretty fast, is your mind will leap away and you’ll start looking at the world again. I’m listening to something. I’m planning on doing my laundry. I’m wondering if Roger still loves me. What do we do then? We step back and label the distracting process. We don’t get involved with the content because we’re stepping back and looking at. We label the process with an ing word. Imagining, complaining, planning, listening. And then we return our attention to following the sensations of our breath. Now it’s very important to frame this the right way. There’s that framing again. If you think, it’s going to be so noisy in there. I won’t be able to follow one or two. My mind is going to wander all over the place. You’re right. Oh, well that means that I won’t ever meditate because unless my mind goes calm and still and wide open like a Canadian tundra, then I’m not meditating. I’ve failed. You’re exactly wrong. There’s a Buddhist metaphor for this. It’s like you’ve got a glass of dirty water and what you’re doing is you’re using your spoon and you’re trying to push the dirt down and you’re only making it worse. Instead of thinking of that, when you go off and you catch yourself, I want you to take this to heart. Catching yourself in distraction and coming back is the core of the practice. That’s what will transfer to your life. Think of that going out and coming back as like doing reps, building the muscle of mindfulness. That is meditation. That is meditation. You’ll have to do so many reps. Well, if you wanted to build actual physiological muscle, one, two, three reps, I’m done. No, you have to do thousands in a lifelong practice. You’ve spent all of this time building up habits of mind and body. You’re trying to enter into capacity to transform them, Socratic self-knowledge and aspiration. You’re putting this much time of meditation against it. You have to be tremendously patient and frame this the right way. Now that helps me move to the third thing. Centering your attitude. Centering your attitude. Being oriented in the right way. So that part of your mind that jumps around, in the Buddhist tradition it’s called monkey mind. It’s like a monkey jumping from branch to branch. Your mind jumps and chatters as it goes from thought to thought. Suppose you’re trying to get that monkey to stay still. Jack Cornfield has a great analogy for this. He doesn’t use a monkey, he uses a puppy because people are more familiar with dogs. So let’s just use his analogy as is. You’re trying to train a puppy dog to stay. Okay, so you put the puppy dog down, stay, stay, stay. A puppy dog to stay. Okay, so you put the puppy dog down, stay, the puppy dog wanders away. Your mind wanders away. If you, stay, stay, stay. If you’re fighting the puppy, you’re training it to fear you and fight you. Let that rumble around a bit in your mind. If you fight it, if you’re frustrated with it, you will train it to fight and fear you and things will get worse. Oh, so I know, meditation is about just letting things be, letting go, letting it flow. Stay puppy dog, oh, it went over there, oh well. Oh, now it’s over there. Oh, now it’s over there. You train the puppy dog? No. You’re just feeding its misbehavior. You’re just indulging it. You want to be centered in your attitude between fighting your monkey mind and feeding it. You’re trying to befriend yourself and that is so, so resonant with the Socratic project. So, oh, okay, stay, stay, stay, stay. Again and again and again, befriending yourself. Okay, so let’s review. When you start this practice on your own, you’re going to center your posture the way I guided you through it. You’re going to center your attention tracking the sensations of your breath in, out. When you’re mind is focused on your breath, you’re going to focus on your breath. Tracking the sensations of your breath in, out. When your mind wanders, you label the distracting process. You don’t get involved with its content. You label it with an ing word and then you return your attention to the breath. And you frame it the right way. And you frame it the right way. That is meditation. That’s building the muscle of mindfulness. And as you return to your breath, you center your attitude. I’m learning to neither fight nor feed my monkey mind, which is like learning to find the place between ruminating and mind wandering and falling asleep. You’re finding all these centers. That’s why Buddhism called it the middle path. You’re going to see that Socrates is doing something very deeply analogous to this. There’s a couple things to help you when you start to practice this on your own. How do you know? You may be saying, John, how do I know when I’m distracted or not? Good question. Think of your mind as a stage. This is actually part of a current important theory of consciousness called the global workspace. Your mind is a stage. There’s a mic on it, the spotlight. If the majority of your mind, the spotlight is on your breath and it’s got the mic of your mind, there’s stuff going off on the periphery, mumbling, you’re still following your breath. Don’t turn your attention to distractions. It’s only when they have turned you and the majority of the spotlight and the mic are no longer on your breath, they’re on something else you want, you’re planning on doing or remembering or regretting or whatever. That’s when you step back and label the distracting process with an ing word. How precise do I need to be with that? Don’t worry about getting it absolutely right or wrong. Well, should I have said regretting or maybe I was just remembering? What first comes to mind, try to use different labels, of course. That’s important. It helps you to start to differentiate all of this in-co-hate happening. But don’t pretend a kind of precision that you can’t actually have. Remembering, imagining. That’s good enough. When you’re doing this practice, initially, this will be another demand on you. This will be hard. You have to plan for it. I recommend doing 20 minutes in the morning, 20 minutes at night, not right before you’re going to sleep. In between dinner and sleep, midway. Plan for it. If you say, I’ll fit it in, in my day, no you won’t. I’ve been doing this for three decades and been teaching it for two decades. You won’t. Your head will be hitting the pillow and you won’t have meditated. You have to schedule it in. Like you’re meeting a friend. You’re befriending yourself. Socrates, and we’ll see this, he would say to people, why do you spend so much time on your hair and your clothing? And so little time on your soul. Schedule this. Try and do it at the same time, the same place, at least for the first five or six weeks. It’s really important, that regularity. It helps to build a deep habit. At the core of virtue, and we’ll talk about virtue, is habit. Oh habits, no, no, no. Inhabit. Monks wore habits. We inhabit a place. Think about it that way. Think about habit that way. It’s a good idea to ring a bell. Perhaps light some incense. This helps the conditioning of the habit that you’re trying to acquire. Don’t try to meditate right after having a forceful conversation with somebody. You’ll just play the tapes in your head. You won’t be able to get any sort of significant centering going. Don’t practice right after listening to music or watching a movie. You’ll just play the tapes in your head. Don’t practice right after eating. You’ll just listen to your stomach. Why can’t I practice right before going to sleep? Because one of two things will happen. You’ll fall asleep. And then you’re teaching your brain that the point of meditation is to fall asleep. And that is not the point of meditation. Meditation is not a vacation. It is an education. You are trying to build habits, skills, virtues, states of mind that transfer to your life. Percolate through your psyche. Permeate the domains of your mind. Percolate through your psyche. Permeate the domains in which you are engaging in your most important endeavors. Or you’ll do the practice correctly and you’ll wake up. And then you won’t be able to fall asleep. Don’t practice right before going to sleep. When you’re practicing, weird stuff can happen. You can be sitting there and you can feel like an electric shock just went through your body. You can know that you’re sitting, but you feel like you’re floating towards the ceiling. Or that you’re sinking into the floor. Or you’re twisted, even though you’re not twisted. You may, this has happened to me, it’s happened to many people who meditate. You’re a little bit of a wimp. It’s happened to many people who meditate. You’re alone and you hear, as clear as a bell, your name called out, John! And there’s nobody around. None of these things mean you’re going insane. None of these things mean you’re a Buddha or on the cusp of enlightenment. Let both of those go. Treat any of these like another distraction. Label it with an ing word. Return to following your breath. One important thing, one important caveat. If, there’s two important things. If something comes up that is clearly indicative of trauma that you’ve experienced. Psychological, sexual, violence, etc. Stop this practice. This practice has shown you that you need professional, therapeutic help. Under those conditions, stop this practice. If you’re already in therapy, for whatever reasons, tell your therapist you are undertaking this practice. In fact, tell them all the practices you’re undertaking. Finally, get, well, two things that are related. Get a timer. You have a phone. These are very easy nowadays. Don’t sit with like a watch or, I’ll sit for 10 minutes and I know when 10 minutes will all pass. I’ll sit for 10 minutes and I know when 10 minutes will all pass. I know when 15 minutes will pass. No you won’t. You’ll sit and you’ll be like dead sure. Yeah, that’s been 15 minutes and you’ll open your eyes and 7 minutes will have gone by. Your sense of the flow of time while you’re in meditation is distorted for a very long time. I can do it now, but I’ve been meditating since 1991. Okay. Now listen very, very carefully. How you come out of your sitting is part of your practice. When the timer goes off, don’t just, okay, I’m done. Slowly open your eyes. Try to notice how it is. What’s it feel like to come into yourself? To come into yourself and come into the world. What does it feel like to come into yourself and into the world? And try as best as you can to integrate what you cultivated in your practice with your everyday consciousness and cognition. Meditation is not a vacation. It is an education. You’re building a bridge between your practice and your life. You want what you’re doing in your practice to go in your life and you want what’s happening in your life to come into your practice. Not the content, but the processes, the habits that are triggered, etc. Slowly come out of the practice, tasting what it’s like to come into yourself and into the world again. Your everyday self in the everyday world. Try as best you can to integrate what you cultivated in your practice with that everyday consciousness, cognition, and sense of self. Okay, that is the first practice that we have learned together. I recommend, if you really want to start on the path of Socratic self-knowledge, that you start doing this practice and the other practices that I explained to you. And as always, thank you so very much for your time and attention. Thank you so very much for your time and attention. It’s important to realize that Socrates is being just as surprised by the way the conversation, the dialogue is going. He’s just as much surprised by the Dia, by way of, by means of, logos, the Dia logos, as anyone else participating. And you’ll see how much he comes to deeply value this. He’s not experiencing this just as a rough, you know, back and forth adversarial thing. There’s a deeper thing going on. And you’ll see this in what he says about this practice.