https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=7-d69SP7EvU
We think love is an emotion, which is wrong. What? Of course it’s an emotion. No, it’s not. If I love someone, that can make me very happy when I’m with them. It can make me very sad when we are apart or they suffer harm. It can make me very angry if somebody threatens them. Love is not an emotion. It is a thing that is expressed through multiple different emotions. Love is an existential stance. It is a mode. It is a way of binding yourself in deliberately mutually participated co-identification and reciprocal opening. I develop through you, you develop through me, and we both stay faithful to that. Welcome back to After Socrates. This is episode 11. Last time we went over the pedagogy, the pedagogical program and the ecology of practices. The time before that, the most previous lecture, episode 9, we were starting to move after Socrates in time. People that came after him lived after his death. But how that reflected back and helped us to see more deeply into Socrates. And we did this by looking at one of his greatest disciples, Antisthenes. We learned a lot about how to enhance the horizontal dimension of dialectic into dialogos. We concentrated on practices of redirecting attention and reorientation and harmonious, eductive type of thinking, speaking, and conversation. We talked about a metanoia, a fundamental turning away and altering what you notice and how you’re seeing your orientation and your salience landscaping, a metanoia away from purity codes. Now let’s continue that after Socrates. Antisthenes, as I mentioned in episode 9, diogenes, and we talked about that. If you’re interested again in the Stoics and the cynics in the Stoics, please check out episodes 14 and 15 of Awakening from the Meeting Crisis. Diogenes taught Cretes, another cynic, and then Cretes taught Zeno. Obviously not the Zeno who was the student of Parmenides, he was much earlier. Not the Zeno of the famous paradoxes, but this is Zeno of Sidium and he is considered the founder of Stoicism. Now what’s interesting about him is unlike Antisthenes, he actually loves Plato. He reads Plato, he really loves Plato a lot. And what he’s going to do is reintegrate Platonism to some significant degrees back into cynicism and produce what’s called Stoicism. There’s going to be more of an emphasis, and I think it’s due to that Platonic influence, on the vertical dimension of dialectic and dialogus. And that, whenever I say that, that reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Seneca. When cornered, you can still jump into the sky. So the shift from the horizontal to the vertical is pronounced in Seneca. Now a couple of sort of semantic terminological issues. The Stoics are greatly influenced by Aristotle and Aristotelian logic and by Aristotle’s logical, and for reasons that I won’t repeat, I think, mistaken, interpretation of the dialectic as a purely logical practice. So because of that, the Stoics tend to use the word dialectic just to mean, just to refer to logic. And Plotinus is going to do a great service when he actually writes his Aeneid on dialectic. He’s going to challenge that and remind us of how that is going astray in a certain important way. However, putting that terminological issue aside, the Stoa, the place that Stoaism gets its name from, is a covered porch where the philosophers would walk and talk with each other. So very much this kind of flowing conversation, oriented towards reorienting us and redirecting our attention and cultivating wisdom. So I think it’s safe to assume that something like Dialogos is happening at the Stoa. Now I’m not going to review all of Stoaism. Like I said, you can take a look at Awakening from the Meeting Crisis if you want to do that. But I want to zero in on a couple things that do overlap with what I said in that series, but are going to be slanted a little bit more towards helping us understand dialectic and Dialogos. So Zeno made an important discovery and also a distinction, which is usually often translated as the distinction between meaning and event, the distinction between the event and the meaning of the event to us. And that often slides sort of imperceptibly, imperceptibly but inappropriately into our modern disjunction between value and fact. Facts are there and how we value them. And then we have one is totally objective, the other is totally subjective. And it’s very inappropriate and problematic to impose that on Stoaism. So let’s go back to meaning and event. The idea here is what disturbs us usually is not the event but the meaning we give to it. And discernment of the difference is crucial to wisdom. And the Serenity Prayer has that in it. The ability to discern, the wisdom to be able to discern the things that you can change and the things that you can’t change. Many people argue that ultimately goes back to Stoaism. Now not only is that part of the Serenity Prayer and AA, it’s also at the heart of all the cognitive therapies such as CBT, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, that are directly influenced. Beck was directly influenced by Epictetus, etc. and inspired by Stoaism. And there’s a lot of, not a lot but there’s quite a few books showing the deep mutuality between our modern best evidenced, evidence-based cognitive therapies and Stoaism. And what that immediately tells us is CBT and the psychotherapeutic dimension is extending the vertical dimension of dialectic, because therapy is a dialectical, dialogical process, into transformative self-knowing. So we’re really increasing the depth of the vertical dimension within us. And what’s interesting of course in therapy is the horizontal and the vertical are the same. The vertical are, you’re trying to get the proper logos between them to bring about the important transformation. Now that therapeutic framework can help us with the sort of ambiguous term meaning here. I would argue what the Stoics are actually talking about is religio, how we are bound to an event, how we are identified with it. And they are seeking ratio religio, they’re seeking about what’s the proper proportioned way of being bound to an event. CBT uses really helpful language that lines up with language we’ve been crafting together. They talk about framing and reframing practices. And of course that ties in very closely with fundamental framing, recursive relevance realization, etc. So perhaps instead of meaning we should talk about framing, perhaps even fundamental framing, that level of meta-optimal grip and meta-orientation. Why am I going on about this? Because it’s tempting to think that the Stoics are nominalists. What are nominalists? Nominalism is the idea that there’s no meaning in the world. It is all projected onto the world by language and mind. And this is very much in our fact-value distinction. A fact-value distinction is a nominalist position because it says facts don’t have values. The only values that things have are the values we project onto them. It’s definitely within a nominalistic framework. We have to put all that as a side as inappropriate. Because the Stoics weren’t nominalists in that fashion. Instead they wanted to align and conform one’s personal logos. That should mean something to you now, especially after talking about the inner dimension of dialectic and didiologos, to transform one’s personal logos. Remember we talked about that as the soul. They’re trying to align and conform one’s personal logos to the logos of being, the logos of nature. This was thought of in religious terms. This was how the Stoics understood explicitly, how they understood God. There’s an interesting and I think undecidable debate about whether or not Stoicism is a philosophy or a religion. I think it properly sits between the two of them and holds them together very much like Buddhism and Taoism. So this, logos to logos, little logos to big logos, if that helps you. This was typified in what they promised the practice of Stoicism would give you. It would give you the ability to flow with nature. Your logos would conform to the logos of being, the logos of your being to the logos of being. That ability to flow with nature would bring with it joy. So we tend to think of Stoicism, and the British gave us this and they messed it up really significantly. Stoicism, being Stoic is to be very dour, almost sour, and it’s a joyless existence of duty and doing what you need to do for king and country and all that sort of thing. Stoicism was about joy. It’s about joy. Not pleasure. And of course this is another way in which our culture is messed up. Antisthenes famously said he would rather go mad than experience pleasure. Another one of his Zen-like coans. He’s like, what? Why don’t you want pleasure? Well, what a plausible interpretation is, pleasure is so attractive to us, it can distract us inappropriately from joy. We even use the word enjoyment as a synonym for pleasure. We’ve so lost the distinction. We typically, and this is a Platonic principle, and I think this is actually a quote from Hume, who is of course not a Platonist, but nevertheless it’s an important idea. We don’t sort of directly do evil. We fail to love wisely. And the idea that we pursue a lesser good at the expense of a greater good. And that’s why I think Antisthenes is talking about madness. It’s a kind of losing a grip on reality if you over-prioritize pleasure and let it thereby distract you from joy. Joy is the sense of a deep connectedness to fundamental goodness, maybe even to the good. So what are the Stoics doing? They’re redirecting our attention to a process within fundamental framing that I will call co-identification. So within our fundamental framing, we are always, moment by moment, doing this. Almost always doing this. So within our fundamental framing, we are always, moment by moment, doing this. Almost always unconsciously, automatically, and reactively. Unconsciously, automatically, and reactively. We are assuming identities and assigning identities. I am the lecturer, you are my students. This is the studio, etc. And I am just here doing a job. Now, that process of co-identification, it’s basically how the agent arena relationship within participatory knowing is doing that co-shaping. We’re doing something like the cognitive equivalent of niche construction. Niche construction is an idea in biology and evolutionary theory that, of course, animals are shaped through evolution by the environment, but animals are shaping the environment through their behavior. So they’re shaping the environment, which then shapes them, and then they shape the environment, and you get that agent arena co-shaping that we talked about at the core of participatory knowing. But it’s almost always happening automatically, unconsciously, and reactively. So the Stoics are going to try and redirect our attention and reorient us by making us aware of our perspectival knowing and our participatory knowing. And specifically, they’re going to want to bring this process of co-identification into our awareness. So Stoicism involved practices to awaken us to the process of co-identification, cognitive niche construction, that agent arena participatory knowing co-shaping, bring that up insofar as it concerns our identity and the identities we’re assigning. So the Stoics talked about prosaash, which is paying attention to attention. It’s a kind of mindfulness in which you’re trying to pay attention to how you’re paying attention, which is becoming aware of your perspectival knowing and then becoming aware of your fundamental framing and that process of co-identification. They also talked about prochiron. So prochiron is very similar to sati. It’s learning things and remembering so that you can remind yourself, you can bring them into your current cognition and help break up inappropriate framing and afford more appropriate framing, ratio religio. These are central to Stoicism. Now that process of co-identification, that agent arena binding, that niche construction, that corresponds to an existential mode. That’s what an existential mode is. An existential mode is a particular way in which the agent arena relationship is unfolding with its attendant fundamental framing, orientation, the optimal gripping, etc. And what Eric Fromm did, an important psychologist, is he took these ideas from Stoicism. He saw similar ideas in Buddhism. If you want an independent argument for that, take a look at Stephen Batchelor’s book, along with others where he draws these connections between Buddhism and these kinds of existential mode. Why existentialism? Because existentialism is within the sort of history trajectory coming out of Stoicism. Because existentialism emphasizes the degree to which our existence precedes our essence. And unlike other creatures, we are inherently self interpreting, self defining beings. So they’re putting a lot of emphasis on this co-identification process. So Fromm is bringing all of this together as a way to bring together the idea of what is the process of co-identification. As a way of highlighting what he thinks, something actually common in Stoicism and Buddhism. So Fromm talked about two kinds of existential modes. He talked about the having mode and the being mode. Each are organized, their existential modes organized around types of needs. Having needs that are needs that are met by having something, by controlling it, consuming it, being able to master it. So I need to have food, I need to have water, I need to have oxygen, I need to have shelter, I need to have medicine at certain times, etc. So these are, this mode is typified by me exercising my problem solving abilities to manipulate the environment to achieve my goals. And I have a particular relationship, agent arena relationship, and we can use Buber’s language, an existential philosopher, theologian. This is an I-it relationship to the world. This is a bottle. It has a categorical identity. I am a drinker, I’m a bottle user. It is an it and I am an I. And I’m a particular kind of I because it’s an I positioning. And it’s very different from other I’s within other existential modes. But this is an I-it relationship and what it is is a bottle. It reminds me of all the other bottles I’ve used. It helps me predict future bottles. I know how to control and manipulate it and use it as I need to. And I know how to replace it if it gets damaged or lost. Now before we go on, there’s nothing, nothing, nothing wrong or moral, immoral in any fashion with the having mode, with that categorical relationship, with that I-it relationship. If I try to have a deeply personal relationship with every object in my environment, like so, I got to really understand Susan. I got to spend a lot of time getting like, I’m not going to survive. There’s nothing wrong with that mode. Now there’s another existential mode built around other kinds of needs. Now from called them being needs, perhaps they’re better called becoming needs. These are our developmental needs. These are not me needs that are met by having something. There are needs that are met by becoming a particular kind of person. So I need to become mature. And notice how these needs are open-ended in a way that the having needs aren’t. Like, I can only drink so much water. And it’s, it’s, in fact, it’s, it’s very rational and reasonable to say I’ve had enough water. I don’t need anymore. Now sometimes, of course, people spin out about this, but we think they’re sick. We think they’re either right, there’s a mental disorder or illness or there’s vice happening because, you know, right, they’re hoarding water or something. But notice we don’t find the developmental needs to be self terminating in that way. We’d be very disturbed by somebody who said, I have enough maturity. I don’t want any more. It’ll be too much. It’s like, what? What do you mean? I have enough wisdom. I don’t need anymore. I don’t need anymore. Too much. It’s like, oh. OK, so these are needs that are met by becoming. And here we are not trying to manipulate the world. We are trying to enter into ratio religio with it so that we can become. We can realize ourselves in a way that is oriented towards reality. Think about maturity. John Roussin makes a very excellent argument about this. What is the hallmark of maturity? The mature person is somebody who can take more of reality into account and who is more responsible to as much of reality as they can be. They face up to reality as we often do. They grow up and see things as they really are. Think about the language we use. So our relationship is not one of problem solving. It’s one where we’re often being exposed to mystery in the sense of something that is inducing wonder in us. Wonder, again, is when we call ourselves and our world into question so that a developmental progression can begin. That means my relationship with the world in this mode is not I it. It’s I thou. And we’ll do an episode about that. It’s I thou. And we’ll do an episode on Buber and his dialogical notion of the self later in this series. Now I made fun of treating this bottle as a thou. Of course, there is a situation in which it is appropriate to take an I thou relationship to this. And that is an artistic or poetic or even mystical relationship to it. But let’s think of the reverse case. What if I went to the woman that I’m profoundly in love with that I’m trying to constantly be in ratio religio with? Reciprocally open. I’m affording her development. She’s affording mine. What if I went to her with an I had attitude? I’m with you because you remind me of all the other women I’ve ever been with. And you help me predict the next woman I’m going to be with. I can easily control and manipulate you to serve my needs. And I can replace you easily if need be. Is my relationship going well? I’ve killed it. I’ve killed it. Now the being mode is not inherently good. There’s ways in which we can pursue the being mode that’s inappropriate. I gave you the example of taking the inappropriate relationship to a bottle. If your friend came to you and said I finally met the being that I want to spend the rest of my life with. I want to devote myself with. You say well please I want to meet them and they take you home and they introduce you to a cactus. You don’t go I’m so happy for you. You go oh no. Oh no. The problem is not either mode. The problem is modal confusion. Modal confusion is when you use the wrong mode for the needs you’re pursuing. So for Fromm the most prevalent form of modal confusion in our culture. This has to do again with the relationship between the horizontal and the vertical. Is that we pursue being needs from within the having mode. So I need to become mature. So I have a car. I need to be in love. So I have lots of sex. And why is this mode prevalent in our culture because the more I can convince you and it’s a kind of bullshit right. Because I’m making the wrong thing salient and directing you to the wrong thing. I’m making the wrong thing salient and directing you away. Orienting you away from reality. That’s why it’s bullshit. Because when I’m doing that I can I will get you to try and satisfy your being needs through having stuff. So I can sell you things and ideas. And because you’re not actually oriented to the reality you’re not tracking reality. Your being needs are not met. So it must mean I need more cars. I need more sex. I need to self transcend so I need more alcohol more drugs. I can sell you more. I can manipulate you more. I can get you to attach and identify to sets of ideas. Of course the opposite is the case in our culture because our culture is the culture of extremes. Where we have people who engage in spiritual bypassing. They’re all spiritual and about self transcending and being detached. And they’re not living up to the responsibilities of an embodied being in a real world in which having needs must be met. It’s called spiritual bypassing. When I grew up we called it too heavenly minded to be any earthly good. So both are present but the modal confusion of pursuing the being needs from the having mode is more prevalent. Because the powers that be political economic etc. can exploit us more by keeping us modally confused. And that of course was also the case in the time of the Stoics. So stoicism is not only trying to awaken us to existential I’m going to turn it into a verb existential moding. It’s not only trying to awaken us to that existential moding. It’s trying to awaken us from modal confusion. Now notice how the two are dependent. If you have no awareness of that co-identification process. Then my chances of getting you to realize modal confusion are miniscule. You need to first right prosaash and prochiron you have to be awakened to that co-identification process that existential moding. And then you have to be able to awaken from modal confusion. Modal confusion and notice how that requires an understanding of the dialogical self. There’s an I it a kind of positioning. There’s an I thou and they’re not the same and they can’t be confused or merely identified with each other. Now I’m going to say something that the Stoics didn’t say. But I’m trying to strengthen their position by bringing in some more current. Cogs I because existential modes are probably grounded in our embodied cognition like all of our cognition. And here I want to turn to actors reversal theory. So after has a theory of what he calls meta motivational modes. Notice all the language here. What does he mean by that? So we have a arousal and arousal we talked about this before when we talked about the autonomic nervous system arousal. It’s just how much metabolic expenditure you’re engaged in. Of course we have the opponent processing between parasympathetic and sympathetic calibrating our arousal. But after brings in an extra dimension that’s really insightful. He talks about and this is his language not mine. He talks about the framing we put around our arousal. He talks about two different kinds of frames we have. These are the meta motivational modes. We have to first frame our arousal before we enter into a particular before we’re oriented into a particular kind of arousal. We have to first frame our arousal before we enter into a particular before we’re oriented into a particular motivational trajectory. So one mode of arousal is the more aroused I get the more uncomfortable it is for me. And then when the arousal drops off I experience it that positively. So arousal increases frustration and anxiety and when it’s decreased it’s satisfaction and relaxation. There’s another mode in which low arousal is boring and increased arousal is excitement and involvement. And the relationship between these is and he uses this by the way is an aspect shift. A reversal. This is another way in which the self is multi aspectual multi perspectival. Now let’s think about it. Why would one framing be increasing metabolic expenditures frustrating? And when the energy goes down that’s positive and it’s positive that’s good relaxation. Well it would be because you had this particular framing. The activity you are doing is for the sake of the goal you’re getting to. So your motivation to use some psychological language is extrinsic. It’s extrinsic outside of the task. I am doing this in order to get there. A good test if you’re in that mode if that activity is typically in that mode is ask yourself do you want a shortcut. So for me I get brushing my teeth is like and if I had to do it longer I would find it frustrating. And if somebody could say to me hey we’ve got this thing where you don’t have to do that anymore you can just go to clean teeth. I’d say give it to me. I can just relax. So the activity is in service of the goal. What would be the opposite? The opposite would be the goal is in the service. This is the reversal the figure ground reversal. The goal is in the service of the activity. What do you mean? Well let’s take something relatively simple. You’re playing tennis right and let’s say you’re not doing a professional where there’s an extrinsic reward of status and money. You’re just playing tennis for enjoyment. You set up all these goals winning and scoring. But they’re in service of giving you a structure so that you can play the game. You don’t want a shortcut. You don’t want to take away the playing and replace it with some simple activity. We flip a coin you won the game we go home. Because getting to the winning is not the point. At least if you’re playing well. You’re listening to the game. At least if you’re playing well. You’re listening to music. Someone is playing music. You don’t say jump to the end. Give me the final two couple notes or even the final note. I just want to get to the end. Yes the music has a goal. It’s moving somewhere. But the goal is to structure the activity that is pursued for its own sake. And of course prototypically making love with someone. Which is maybe different than having sex with them. Think about this. The point isn’t to get to the end. You don’t want to cut out in between. You don’t want a shortcut. This is of course one of the great dangers of pornography. Because it offers us a shortcut that puts us cleanly in this particular mode. What does he call these two? He calls the first one where the activity is in service of the goal. He calls that the telek mode. It’s working like a telos. The purpose is the good. The end is the good. He calls the other one the paratelek mode. Because it’s not really telek. It’s using goals. But the point of the goal is to get to the end. And that’s the point. Because it’s not really telek. It’s using goals. But the point of the goals is to give us a structure by which we can participate in the activity. It’s to be intrinsically motivated. You’re doing something for its own sake. You’re not doing it for something else. He gives short terms that I think are really helpful. The telik mode is when we’re working. That’s what work is. The paratelek mode is when we’re playing. Now of course some people, and I am one of them, have a combination of luck, constitution, effort, the help of others, so that a lot of my work is actually play. And I’m still astonished. That people will give me money to do what I do. Because I can pretty honestly say, as long as I could survive, have my having needs met, I would still be doing all of this. The fact that other people find it important and valuable enough that they will give me money for it, I count as a great blessing. But nevertheless, work and action are two different things. Nevertheless, work and play. Think about how we play music, and how that activity before the climax is called foreplay. And how we play tennis. Play is how intelligent organisms develop. Do you see what I’m doing? Play, the paratelek metamotivational mode, how we frame our arousal, is the mode that supports the being mode. We need to get into the play mode, so that we can get into the being mode. Play is how intelligent organisms develop. I’m going to come back to that. But let’s talk about what does play depend on? Yes, the framing is inverted, there’s a reversal from work. But Aptor talks about what he calls safety framing. Think about the conditions you as an adult have to create in order for children to play that they may properly develop. You have to put them in a situation in which it is safe for them to do the reversal, to do things that are intrinsically motivating to them, to play. Now it doesn’t mean the situation can’t have challenge in it. Tennis can be very challenging. Doing Tai Chi Chuan can be very challenging. Why Tai Chi Chuan? You don’t do Tai Chi. The verb in Chinese is you play Tai Chi, the way you play music. You’re basically making music with your body, because music is for its own sake. Nietzsche famously said, life would be a mistake without music. But what does music do? So I want to make a proposal to you, a way of understanding all of the Stoic practices. And Stoicism is going through a huge revival right now. And that is not happenstance. That is not coincidence. I think Stoicism is the ultimate safety framing. Stoicism is to give you this practice of discerning the framing from the event, so that you can engage in a reframing that puts you into safety framing as much as you possibly can be. Because when you realize that a lot of the time you’re not suffering because of the event, but because of your framing, and that you have the power, the virtuosity to reframe, such that you are no longer overwhelmed by fear or desire about the event. You are no longer inappropriately religio to it, identified to it. You’re not modally confused about it. You can open up and engage in serious play. That’s why the Stoics talked about flowing with nature and experiencing enjoyment. Let’s explore this relationship between serious play and development. So again, this is an awakening from the meaning crisis, but I need to bring it in here because perhaps people aren’t aware of this. And this is like a pivotal point. So this goes to what’s called transformative experience. L.A. Paul literally wrote the book on transformative experience called Transformative Experience. I’ve got the meaning of the book here. I recommend her work highly. She invited me down to Yale to give a guest lecture to one of her classes on the work I was doing, so she sees a lot of consonants between her work and my work. Okay, so she brings up a particular problem around transformative experience. So in order to do it, she’s going to seriously play with you the way philosophers sometimes do. She’s going to give you a little bit of a lesson on how to play with your life. She’s going to seriously play with you the way philosophers sometimes do. She’s going to give you a thought experiment. She says, imagine your friends, your good friends come to you, and they give you just undeniable evidence that they can do the following. They can turn you into a vampire. Should you do it? You have all kinds of propositional knowledge about vampires, and you might have some procedural knowledge. You might know how to stalk and skulk and something like that, but you’re actually missing two kinds of knowledge. She uses slightly different terms, but she was happy with the mapping that I’m going to make now. You don’t know what it’s like to be a vampire. You don’t know what it’s like to have that salience landscaping. You don’t have the perspectival knowing of a vampire. And you don’t know who you’re going to be, because when you’re a vampire, your agent arena relationship, your sense of self, your character traits, your preferences are all going to flip. So you lack participatory knowing of being a vampire. And the only way you can gain those is by becoming a vampire. And the problem is once you become a vampire, you can’t reverse it. So here’s the problem you face. Should you do it? Well, if you do it, you don’t know. You can’t know what you’re going to lose. Well, then I shouldn’t do it, but then I don’t know. I can’t know what I’m going to miss. And I can’t infer by manipulating propositions what I should do, because that won’t give me the missing perspectival and participatory knowing. I can’t infer my way through a transformative experience. Listen to that again. I can’t infer my way through it. And you go, oh, who cares? I’m a vampire. And then this is where Lori does the move. She says, most of your major decisions are decisions where you’re facing transformative experience. What do you mean, having a child? Being a child is you know preparation for being a parent. That’s one of the things you learn as soon as you become a parent. It becomes apparent to you. Ah ha ha. OK. You have all kinds of propositions about parenthood, but you don’t know what it’s like until you have a child. And you don’t know how you’re going to change until you have a child. So should you have one? Well, no, I don’t know. But then you don’t know what you’re missing. Well, then I should do it. But do you know what you’re going to lose? I’ll infer my way through it. I’ll calculate all the probabilities. And you know, you don’t know them. You’re ignorant. That propositional manipulation won’t get you what you need. Here’s another one. Enter into a committed romantic relationship with someone. You’re going to see things. You’re going to take on perspectives you don’t have right now. Your identity is going to change in ways you cannot foresee. Should you do it? Same problem. I’ll infer my way into it. I’ll let up the pros and cons. That’s all bullshit. You know it is. You know it is. Well, I’ll just be romantic. I’ll let myself be swamped. Just take it along by impulse. Great. That’s really going to inculcate virtue and wisdom in you. So what do you do? Well, Ali Paul’s book sort of doesn’t give an answer to that, but I’ve actually proposed this to Laurie directly. Because I took a look around. I tried to get a sense of how do people do this? When people are considering having a child, they’ll get a dog. And they’ll name the dog. And they’ll take pictures with it. And they’ll treat it like a child. And so what they’re doing is they’re doing this thing. They’re not, they’re putting one foot in the new perspective and the new identity, but keeping this foot there. Because you can give away a dog in a way you’re not allowed to morally give away a child. So you get a taste of it. I mean, this liminal place where I’m finding a place between the two worlds. And I’m in there. And I’m playing. Considering getting into a long-term romantic relationship, travel with that person. Not for a week, but three or four weeks. This is advice that people give. Yeah, it’s in between. Right. Right. People engage in serious play. Why? Because serious play is how we engage the perspectival and the participatory knowing without making the full commitment. We taste it. This is why play is so central to development. Because all of play is transformative experience. When you mature, when you develop, you get perspectival and participatory knowing that you don’t have as a child. That’s why we make the distinction between a child and an adult. But as the child is to the adult, the adult is to the sage. Your serious playing is not done. So, Agnes Callard was deeply influenced by L.A. Paul in her book, Aspiration, because she talks about this relationship we have to our future self. And she even brings out how the fact that self-transcendence is so paradoxical. Because if we’re just extending what we already have, we’re not actually transcending ourself. And if there’s genuine novelty introduced to the self, then that’s not self-creation, but something imposing itself on us. But instead, you have to break out of the monadic self and realize that we’re inherently dialogical. That the self, and this is Socrates in Christopher Moore’s book, the self is inherently aspirational. I am always in this relationship to my future self. And I have to bind myself, ratio religio to it, in the right way and engage in the right serious play that will get me ratio religio to it. So that I will become someone who I am not currently. And she makes the case that all education that’s not just giving us particular skills, but what used to be called a liberal education, is about becoming someone other than who we are. She gives the example of someone taking a music appreciation class. They don’t currently like classical music. But they want to. They might do it for extraneous reasons in order to impress that girl or that guy, right, blah, blah, blah. But if they do it for its own sake, that’s that act of appreciation is an act of aspiration. It’s a way of trying to commit myself, sacrifice myself to some degree as I am now, so I can become the self then. In the ancient world in the third century, and Charles Stang wrote the book on this called The Divine Double, people tended to think of themselves not as individuals, means not divisible, not divisible. They thought of themselves as individuals because there was the current self and there was the divine self. And the journey of life was the aspirational journey of bringing the current self to the divine self. Now, I had the great good fortune this past summer to meet Charles Stang. We really hit it off. And I proposed to him that the divine double was a religious way of talking about something that we are always engaged in when we’re engaged in aspiration. Because the future self is the normative guide on me. In that sense, it’s divine. But the current self is the one that is giving birth. Think of midwifery, giving birth to that future self. And he thought that was incredible. He thought that was great. He said that that conversation was one of the highlights of the conference for him. Now, what do we know from the work of Hirschfeld and others about these aspirational processes? Well, remember, or imagine, remember, you bring the information in, show the academics that they should be saving money right now for their future self. They’re rationally convinced by all your argument and all your evidence. You come back six months later, none of them are saving. Why? Because they don’t want to be religio with that future self because it’s old and ugly and diseased. What you do is you have to reorient them, the perspective of the future self. Reorient them, the perspectival and the participatory knowing. Think of your future self as a older family member that you love and that you feel responsible for. You care about them. They really matter to you. Religio, ratio religio. And the people come, begin to start saving. And it that’s an imaginal practice, imagination for the sake of perception. And the more vivid the imagery, the more they can do it. So serious play and the imaginal. We’re starting to talk about the rudiments of ritual. We’re going to come back to that when we talk about neoplatonism. But that ritual is not that aspirational, imaginal, and therefore proto, at least proto ritual aspect of our behavior is not separable from our rationality. I go into this in greater detail in my Cambridge talk. But here’s one of Agnes Callard’s point. Part of what it means to be rational is to aspire to being much more rational than you are. So central to rationality is the aspiration to grow in rationality, to transcend one’s current irrationality into being rational. Which means aspiration is central to rationality. It also makes sense when you think about how central aspiration is for self-control and pursuing long-term goal, like saving for your retirement. The imaginal, the aspirational, the developmental, and the rational are all deeply interwoven together. Now, notice what this means, by the way, and we keep coming back to this. If we think that the hallmark of rationality is inferential reasoning, and we admit with L.A. Paul and Agnes Callard that transformative experience and aspiration are not inferential processes, then we have to say that aspiration and development are not rational processes. But aspiration is at the core of rationality. We would be engaged in a performative contradiction. Because if I’m saying, if part of me being rational is the aspiration to being even more rational, I’m caught in a contradiction because being rational involves me in the non-rational process of aspiration. The way to get out of all of this is stop the monadic self, stop the monological idea of rationality, bring in the dialogical self, bring in dialogical rationality. Agnes Callard calls it proleptic rationality. It’s part of our rationality is inherently aspirational, inherently imaginal, inherently involving us in serious play for development. This is how this is all profoundly wrapped up with remembering Sati, the being mode. The Stoics have a practice, and after this lecture, I will talk you through this practice. It’s called the view from above. It seems to predate them, and it gets taken up into what is called the view from above. The view from above, I’ll just explain it to you now. I’ll talk you through it later. It’s an imaginal practice. You imagine that you’re sitting in a particular location, and notice how this is going to be perspectival and participatory. Then you imagine being above that and seeing yourself in the room and then seeing the house you’re in, the country you’re in, the continent, the planet, the planet, the planet, the planet, the planet, the planet, the planet. The country you’re in, the continent, the planet, the solar system, the universe, not just at this time, but at all times, in all places. Notice what it’s doing. It’s playing with the way the I and the world are co-creating. The view from above is a non-inferential ritual of serious imaginal play designed to awaken you to existential moding and awaken you from modal confusion. That’s exactly what it does. It makes you realize, oh, my sense of self emerges from this agent arena relationship. As I move in this way, my sense of what’s relevant or important and my desire to have, wow, I drop into the being mode much more comprehensively. That’s exactly what it’s designed to do. I’m going to say this one more time. The view from above is a non-inferential ritual of serious imaginal play designed to awaken you to existential moding and awaken you from a modal confusion. If you’re interested in this in more detail, I have a talk on my channel that I presented at Stoicon, the Stoic community, about exactly this. The view from above frees you from modal confusion, frees you from, and it frees you to flow with nature. It frees you to enjoy. It’s the opposite, therefore, of addiction. So my friend and colleague Mark Lewis talks about addiction, and I go into this in more detail in many talks, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, many talks. It’s about a reciprocal narrowing. I drink the booze because the world is stressful, and what it does is it actually reduces my cognitive flexibility. My problem-solving abilities go down, so the opportunities available to me shrink. The world becomes more threatening. I drink again, and my cognitive flexibility continues to degrade. The world loses more and more options, more and more possibilities. I reciprocally narrow until I can’t be any other than I am, and the world can never change, and that’s the compulsive entrapment of addiction. And, of course, I propose this directly to Mark, but, of course, if there’s reciprocal narrowing, there’s reciprocal opening, and that’s exactly what Platonic Anagogy is. The view from above is a way of enacting an agagé. It’s a way of engaging in reciprocal opening. Now, interestingly enough, of course, reciprocal opening is how you fall in love, accelerating mutual disclosure. If I open up about, and I don’t mean just romantic love, it can be friendship love, etc. I open up about myself in some way, and you reciprocate, reciprocal opening, by opening up about yourself. And then I open up, and you open up, and we start to see more deeply into each other, and we start to see ourselves more deeply through each other. That’s love. See, we’re really messed up about love in our culture. First of all, we don’t make a distinction between agape and phyla and eros and just raw lust. Secondly, we think love is an emotion, which is wrong. What? Of course it’s an emotion. No, it’s not. If I love someone, that can make me very happy when I’m with them. It can make me very sad when we are apart or they suffer harm. It can make me very angry if somebody threatens them. Love is not an emotion. It is a thing that is expressed through multiple different emotions. And then secondly, we have reduced emotions to feelings. When I’m having a certain feeling, that’s not the same thing as an emotion. Remember the metamotivational modes? You can have the same feeling of arousal, and it can be two totally different motivational states. So love isn’t an emotion, and emotions aren’t feelings. And then we do this ridiculous thing of thinking love is a feeling. Love is an existential stance. It is a mode. It is a way of binding yourself in deliberately mutually participated co-identification and reciprocal opening. I develop through you, you develop through me, and we both stay faithful to that. I never claim to know you the way I know the bottle. I’m only faithful to you in that I am constantly being drawn into your mystery as you shine into me. That’s why the people that love us are the ones that can most hurt us. Because we have committed to reciprocal opening and existential stance, Joy is a way of recognizing that you are in love, which isn’t an emotion and isn’t a feeling. It is an existential mode. In particular, it is a way of inhabiting the being mode by being with, through, and for. It is an existential mode. In particular, it is a way of inhabiting the being mode by being with, through, and for someone else or something else, including your future self. So we’ve got to now revise ratio. It not only means the proper proportioning of your attention and your memory, prosaush and prokiron, it actually also means being in the right mode. So ratio means being in the right mode as well as rightly proportioning your attention, rightly proportioning your memory, your character, etc. So it’s that, but it’s also, am I in the right mode for the goal I am trying to pursue here? Am I pursuing a developmental need or a having need? One more time, there is nothing wrong with the having mode. I tend to have a having mode towards my vehicles. It bothers some people because they don’t have a having mode towards their vehicles. They identify with their cars and somehow it’s an exception. For me, it’s not that. All right. Ratio religio and the enjoyment, the realization that you’re in love with yourself, ratio religio, love with yourself, with others and with being itself flowing with nature. So what are some points to ponder? The Stoics add further depth to the vertical dimension of dialectic into dialogos. We got to bring that into our practice. And we also have to ask how can we reintegrate the vertical emphasized by the Stoics with the cynics emphasis on the horizontal. And there’s nothing inappropriate about that because you know was deeply influenced by both the cynics and Plato. How can we bring awakening to existential moding and awakening from modal confusion into our practice? We need to get into safety framing and serious play and ritual organized around developmental needs. We need all of this in our practice. How can we bring reciprocal opening into our practice? Well, one of the things I’m going to do is actually show you a reciprocal opening practice, a contemplative practice. And then I will take you through another practice, the view from above. But first I want to give you some book recommendations. And there’s a lot this time because Stoicism is going through this huge thing and there’s communities that you can join and you can get deeply involved in this. I recommend first of all getting into the work of Pierre Hedot. He’s the one that really brought back the idea of ancient philosophy. Well, as this book so aptly puts it, philosophy is a way of life. Excellent anthology. And then what is ancient philosophy? You’ll specifically get a very good introduction here to Stoicism and also Platonism and Neoplatonism, Epicureanism and Aristotelianism. His book specifically on Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor who was also a great Stoic philosopher called the Inner Citadel, is very good background. If you want to start, if you want to contemplate this way of life, you might not share all of the metaphysical views of the Stoic. I recommend Lawrence Becker’s book, A New Stoicism, that tries to transpose Stoicism out of an ancient cosmology into more modern cosmology. I recommend picking up one of the great Stoics. For me, many people, try Seneca, try Epictetus. I like Marcus Aurelius the best because for me he comes the closest to starting to integrate the Platonic dimension of Socrates. Stoicism is the religion philosophy of internalizing Socrates. I recommend starting with a very accessible version of the meditation that’s organized or sort of helpful reading. You could actually even consider doing Lectio Divina on this. This is called The Spiritual Teachings of Marcus Aurelius by Mark Forstater. Excellent. Then you can move on to more sort of traditional translations of the meditations. We call it the meditations and we think it’s just reflecting or we might think it’s meditation. You know what the actual Roman title, Vitan title is? Thoughts to himself. You are reading him practicing interior inner dialectic and the dialogos. And that is a way of constructing the inner citadel. The inner citadel that allows us to be perpetually safety framing. Here’s a bunch of books on how to practice Stoicism. There are so many now and so these recommendations are just that. There’s a lot of other books to check out by Stoicism and the Art of Happiness. This one I highly recommend though. A Guide to the Good Life, the Ancient Art of Stoic Joy. I thought this book was a joy to read by William B. Irvine. There’s a couple more books. Nice thin one here. Stoic Serenity, a Practical Course on Finding Inner Peace. Why are there so many of these books right now? Ah. Here’s a really good book by Ellen Buzare, Stoic Spiritual Exercises. That’s a good translation for Eschisis. Remember we talked about that with Antisthenes. Now a book I highly, highly, highly recommend. I’ve used it elsewhere. This is The Wisdom of Hypatia. Hypatia is at the end in many ways of the Neoplatonic tradition. But what McLennan does in this book, he’s also a cognitive scientist which is… Anyways, he takes you through and he creates a pedagogical program. He takes you through Epicureanism and I think it’s worthwhile to look at that. I don’t do Epicureanism because it doesn’t have much to do with dialectic and to dialogous. Then he takes you through Stoicism and each one is exercises and practices. And then he takes you into Neoplatonism. Because Neoplatonism is basically you take the Platonic tradition, you take the Stoic tradition, and you integrate it with some Aristotelian psychology and that’s how you get Neoplatonism. And there’s a whole bunch of excellent practices there. Excellent pedagogical program. Alright, we’re going to move into the practices now. I’m going to show you a reciprocal opening practice and take you through the view from above. So we’ve seen the first part of the book. So we’ve seen that we need a practice of reciprocal opening. I’m going to teach you such a practice. So in the practice you first find your center, find your root, and then what you do is you direct reciprocal opening first towards yourself. Remember, you are dialogical. May I reciprocally open to you? And you’re directing that to yourself. So what you’re trying to do is the same thing you do when you’re trying to befriend someone. You’re trying to befriend yourself. You’re trying to see more of them and open yourself more up to them. You reciprocally open. What you do first is first of all bring that existential molding, that process of co-identification because you identify with yourself, the I and the you and the I and the me. Bring that into your awareness. What does that feel like to you? When you take up that relationship to yourself, when you aspire to a radio religio to yourself, what does that provoke in you? Anxiety, coldness, anger, emptiness, numbness, morph. Embody it. Become aware of it. It’s no longer going to happen unconsciously, automatically, reactively. You’re going to bring it into awareness. And as you’re doing that reciprocal opening to yourself, may I reciprocally open to you? May I reciprocally open? You’re bringing the relationship into awareness. And you may want to do what I’m doing. I do this when I practice it. I actually do this reciprocal opening gesture. And first of all, I bring it into awareness. And then I try to see am I having myself? Am I consuming myself? Am I controlling myself? And we say this so easily now without realizing, or am I being myself? This is the deeper meaning of authenticity. Can you move into the being mode and reciprocally open to yourself? Being yourself doesn’t mean acting impulsively. That’s just want and license. It means deeply befriending yourself as you aspire to virtue. Because that’s what friends do. A buddy is just somebody you have fun with. You enjoy a friend because they love you and you love them, and you are helping each other to become more virtuous and wise. May I reciprocally open to you? Next, pick a person that you’re close to. And notice we use these spatial metaphors. For example, I may pick my son, perhaps my older son or my younger son. And may I reciprocally open to you? Well, what identity am I assuming? I’m the father, he’s the son. Well, can I see him other than as my son? Not in place of, but other than. Can I see him other than my son? Can I open myself up to him and be other than just a father? Not in place of, other than. You see how I’m opening up the multi-spectrality here. What’s it like when I bring that co-identification process into awareness? What does it feel like? There’s some anxiety for me, a sense of responsibility. But when I open it up, maybe because I’m trying to hold on to this father role a little too tightly. Oh, the little confusion. I have a son rather than I’m in relationship with him. I’m living vicariously through him. I don’t want him to make my mistakes. But that’s mixed up with, I don’t want to have made those mistakes. So I’m going to really try and open up what’s it feel like, that co-identification process. And I’m going to try and shift out of the having mode into the being mode, into an attitude. I’m safe here. I can seriously play with this, like I play music or I play Tai Chi. All the time I have an image of him in mind. May I reciprocally open to you? Then I pick somebody further out. This is a neutral person. Somebody that I know, but I haven’t really opened up to them. They haven’t opened up to me. I may not know their name. I may know their name. But may I reciprocally open to you? What would it be like? What does it feel like when I bring the identity out? I am just purchasing a newspaper and you’re just selling me a newspaper. That’s all that’s here. Well, of course it’s not. One of the jobs of morality is of course to remember that people are never just ends. They’re never just instruments. They’re always intrinsically valuable, important, real. And I try to remember Sati, Prasash, Prokairam. I try to remember that. May I reciprocally open to you? May I reciprocally open to you? And I shouldn’t just have you and have a categorical relationship. I should open up to the being mode. Next, somebody you’re in conflict with. The tradition says like the enemy. Hopefully you don’t have enemies. People dedicated to your destruction. I’m old enough that I do, but hopefully you don’t. Here’s where we can get really a little confused because we can think the point of this is forgiveness. And then we can we have largely in our culture done with forgiveness. What we’ve done with love. We think of forgiveness as an emotion. It’s a particular feeling. I have to have particular feelings. That’s not forgiveness. You’re giving for. You’re taking a particular existential stance towards someone so that a possibility of reorientation between the two of you is now made possible. You’re moving out of a transactional frame in which people have to earn things from you or you have to control them. You’re trying to take a stance outside of that, which doesn’t mean what we now mean by forgiveness. So just put that word aside because I don’t think it’s helpful for you unless you have this deeper understanding of forgiveness as an existential mode. So what I do now, I call up the image and the name of that person. May I reciprocally open to you? Well, what’s the existential moating? What’s the agent arena? I am the victim and you are the villain. I am the hero. You are the obstacle. I am the chosen one. You are the neglected or rejected one. Bring it up. Become aware of it. It’s no longer running unconsciously, automatically reactively. And how does that taste in your mind and body? Part of you is like you’ll feel part of the pushing away. But part of I love this role that I have. I love hate it and I hate love you and it’s messed up. You know that. Let’s see if you can let go of having those roles and having that script and having that self-righteousness. Again, you’re not trying to generate positive feelings of affection. You’re trying to move into the being mode and reciprocally open. I want to see you other than I see you. And I want to make it possible for you to see me other than how you see me. And not by giving you my prearranged script. I want to discover with you what you have not seen in me yet. I reciprocally open. Now I can do reciprocal opening towards all people. What’s your relationship towards humanity? And can you reciprocally open towards it? First, bring the moding into awareness, awaken to the moding and then awaken from any modal confusion. Can you go from just having a picture or having a background to being with all of these people imaginally? And you’re not going to imagine all of them individually. You can’t. You may only picture seven or eight people, but that’s not what matters. It’s not the picture. You’re not imagining. You’re doing something imaginal. It’s not imaginary. It’s imaginal. Then you may do that for a while, but then can you reciprocally open towards all beings? What’s your attitude towards? Well, let’s do first of all all sentient beings. What’s your attitude? Because we know we have a messed up attitude towards our environment, our ecological partners. And then we can do reciprocal opening towards all beings. We know we have a messed up attitude towards our environment, our ecological partners. We just have them. They’re resources. Can we move? Can we first of all become aware of that mode, the I-it we have? And can we awaken to it and then awaken from it and come back into a being mode, reciprocally open with all sentient beings? You may stop there. You can go even further, reciprocally open towards all beings. A being is anything. But can you remember that you don’t really have things the way you think you do, that they’re multi-spectral and multi-perspectival? Can you open up to the being mode by doing something like idetic adduction towards them and opening yourself up to them by seeing yourself as much more multi-spectral, multi-perspectival, dialogical? You may stop there. Or you may reciprocally open to being itself, the ground of being, the no-thingness and open yourself up to the no-thingness, no-thingness to no-thingness, the deepest conformity, the deepest reciprocal opening, the deepest being mode. And that is how you do reciprocal opening. I recommend that you make this a regular practice. This is a powerful contemplative practice. Meditative practice is you’re stepping back and looking at your mental framing. Contemplative practice, contemplatio, theoria, you’re looking through. You need to do both. You need to do the meditation to see if your framing is distorting things. But you also need to know if the changes you’ve made in your mental framing allow you to see more deeply and clearly. You need to do a contemplative practice. That’s what reciprocal opening does for you. So I say, I find it helpful when I do it to actually do this opening movement, reciprocal opening gesture, as I move through the various stages of reciprocal opening. And of course, gauge the amount of movement in terms of how many stages you want to go through. Always yourself, a close person, a neutral person, a conflict person, and then all people. But you may want to go further. And I recommend eventually you do go further. All sentient beings being itself. Sorry, all sentient beings, all beings being itself. That’s the reciprocal opening practice. I’m now going to talk you through the view from above. So close your eyes. I have to keep my eyes a little bit open because of my minors, but you can close yours. Close your eyes, get centered. I won’t do it in great detail. Just go into that sense. When you’re doing it on your own, you can take a little bit more time, but relive, reconnect, reactivate that sense of being centered and rooted. You should be able to find your way to that quite well now. So you’re going to imagine in the imaginal sense. I want you to imagine that you’re floating above where you’re now sitting and you’re looking down and seeing yourself sitting in that room that you’re in. Let your eye position go from where you are sitting to where you are floating above yourself. Looking down, you’re seeing your body in that chair or maybe you’re sitting on a zafu on the floor, whatever. Now move a little bit further up. No threat, no danger. You’re completely safe. You’re floating up and now you see the whole building that you were in. Make sure your eye position is more there and where you are physically seated. You’re absolutely safe. You start to flow even higher. You see the whole city or perhaps countryside in which that building is found. Move it even higher slowly so you can see the whole North America or Europe or wherever you are. Even higher now, you’re seeing the whole of the earth as if from space. Moving back, you see the whole of the solar system. Now even further back, the whole of the galaxy. And you pull back even further and you see all of the galaxies. And now your framing is not just now, but all of the past, all the way back to the Big Bang and all the way forward into the deep future. Notice what it feels like to be here. Your sense of self. Your sense of what’s important and relevant. Really sink into just purely being here. And slowly start to come back into the galaxy. Moving in, seeing all the different solar systems until you catch sight of our solar system. You move towards it. You see the earth. You see the continent. North America, South America, Europe, whatever. You see the city. You see the building. You see the room. You see yourself. You come back into that place. Your eye position is the eye position that you originally started from. Do not open your eyes yet. Notice the difference. You follow the through line of multi-aspectuality, taking multiple perspectives. Those changes throughout your sense of self, your sense of what’s relevant and important. Note this. Prochiron. Remember it so you can bring it to hand. Pay attention to how you’re paying attention right now. Proshash. Slowly come out of your practice as you slowly open your eyes, integrating what you cultivated in your practice with your everyday consciousness and cognition. Those two practices have a synergistic effect. Doing them together is very, very powerful. You can see how they deeply strengthen the vertical dimension of dialectic into dialogus. As always, thank you so much for your time, attention, and commitment. You can’t keep the theory of evolution isolated. If it’s real, it’s interwoven inextricably with all these other realities.