https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=AALyoLXE0AQ
There is no part of you that is a panacea that will always give you the truth, never lead you astray, never be a source of self-deception. It does not exist. If you hear one piece of advice from me from this whole series is, stop looking for that part. It does not exist. Welcome back to After Socrates. This is episode 8. Last time we looked at the problem of the Socratic daemonian and Socrates inner dialogos. And we came to this sort of pivotal point where we were asking a question. Does this behavior around Socrates with his daemonium, his divine sign, his divine voice, and all of these inner dialogos he engages in and the related practices, his dream work, etc. Does it point to him being fundamentally irrational? Or, as I proposed to you, a provocative challenge to make the Socratic shift. We talked about the sort of four dimensions in which we can make the Socratic shift. We began to challenge the monological model of thought, but that almost immediately enmeshed us in challenging the monadic model of the self. I now want to pick up that argument. We didn’t really finish that argument, as I said last time and this time, we’re part one and part two. Let’s pick up that argument. Now we had this notion of sort of eye positions, where the eye is sort of located. Of course, it’s located, imagineally, it’s not located literally in physical space, but I’m using physical space to indicate this. So I have this eye position in which I’m present within this perspective, shining on that perspective, and then I do this reversal where I’m present from this perspective, shining on that perspective. We can call those two points eye positions. That’s a term that has become sort of prevalent in the dialogical self literature. Now Norbert Wiley has recently written a book called Inner Speech and the Dialogical Self, picking up on the work we did on earlier speech and how we were bridging it into the dialogical self. He makes use of the distinction that James made use of, but he actually goes further into that pragmatic tradition. Remember, James made a distinction between the eye and the me. Wiley picks that up and he makes use of Meade, George Herbert Meade’s idea of the eye and the me, which of course is also from James, but Meade did something really interesting. He said that the eye is related to a me, which is actually a past self. So Meade puts tense, temporal tense into it in the way in which James didn’t. So we’ve got the eye-me relationship, which we talked about already, but the me is already past. And then he goes to Pierce, George Sanders Pierce, who was actually sort of the founder of pragmatism, and Pierce also started talking about the dialogical self, but he talked about an eye-you relationship, where the eye is not related to the past self that is me, but the you of the future self. And this puts us, of course, directly into the wheelhouse of the notion of aspiration and that the Socratic self was an aspirational self and of the importance of the second person perspective and how it’s wrapped up in aspiration and how that’s wrapped up with dialogus. I point you again to the seminal and important recent work on this fantastic book by Agnes Callard called Aspiration. I remind you again about how aspiration is also inherently imaginal, where it’s not imagination that takes us away from perception, but imagination that augments our ability to conceive and perceive. For example, we have to take an imaginal relationship to our future self if we want to aspire, if we want to aspire in sort of very basic ways, like saving for retirement and being comfortable in our old age, or if we want to aspire in a much more profound, transformative way, like the aspiration to become more rational and to become more wise. Please remember that connection that I just mentioned about the deep interpenetration between aspiration and rationality. We’ll come back to that in episode nine when we talk about the Stoics. Now Wiley does something very interesting and I think is really, really helpful. He proposes a synthesis, and then I’m going to build on his synthesis. So what he proposes is that the IU relationship that was pointed out by Pierce, so here’s the IU relationship of aspiration, that relationship itself generates a relationship to the me. So what’s Wiley doing? So I’m always doing this, I’m aspiring towards my future self IU, but as I do that, as I progress along that aspiration, I’m of course generating past selves, mes, memories of my past I positions. Now I want to add in that reversal that we talked about last time, that the IU generating the me is not just an IU because if you remember, we had a situation where it’s this way, and I’ve just enacted it, I directed towards you, and that of course is generating particular mes, but then I also do this. I take this I position, and it’s IU that way, and that’s generating other mes. So the mes are also doing something really interesting, they’re trading between a process called data compression memory consolidation, and let me give you a way of understanding that, which comes directly from George Herbert Mead, who I just mentioned a few minutes ago. So let’s think about the generalized other, and this goes towards that mutual modeling that I was talking about last time, but instead of it being a couple, now let’s think of somebody playing on a baseball team. So when you’re trying to form a mutual model of all of the people, that’s going to get very, very, very complex. So what you can do is you can do a data compression, you can find basically what’s common among all of those different particular models, generative models, and generate a generalized other. So what would any other baseball player on your team do, and then you only have to do the mutual modeling with them. In the same way, what your memory is often doing is taking a bunch of different mes and compressing them down into a generalized me. Now it’s constantly toggling between creating a generalized me, which is your general sense of me, and specific mes, specific episodes or stages in your life, and it’s constantly trying to toggle between them because it’s always trying to help you do opponent processing between getting a general and a specific fit to the world, because it’s trying to do relevance realization. Precursive relevance realization. Now say you have the generalized me, and what you can have is you can just sort of sometimes when I say you’re relating to your me, you can just have the I relating to that generalized me, or you can have the I relating to more specific mes, the father, the lover, the brother, the son, the friend, etc. Now why we keep the specializations, again I propose because we’re toggling between a general fit to the world and a specific fit to the world, and we’re always trying to find the optimal grip between those according to the situation. But another thing that we get when we have these plethora of specialized mes is we actually have an enriched repertoire of I positions. We can go to any me, reactivate it, and then take that presence perspective from that imaginal location and interact with the world. Now this notion of a repertoire of I positions comes from somebody who has become very pivotal around the whole model of the dialogical self. This is Hubert Hermans, and I recommend a couple, actually three papers. This is probably one of his most seminal papers from 2001, The Dialogical Self Towards a Theory of Personal and Cultural Positioning, and that positioning is exactly that I positioning that we’re talking about. I want to recommend two other papers to help you to get into this literature if you wish. One is Pragmatism and the Dialogical Self, and this is by Robert, sorry, by Norbert Wiley, the very Norbert Wiley that we were talking about a few minutes ago when we talked about the work on inner speech and the dialogical self. This is really good at clarifying the connections between pragmatism and the current models of the dialogical self. And then the last one is The Dialogical Self from the Viewpoint of Hermeneutic Phenomenology, and this is by Dimitri Janiv. This is very good for giving you a sense of the connections, also convergent connections coming out of phenomenology that have led to the dialogical self. So what do you get is a sense here. There’s a lot of work coming out of different areas, and I’m going to draw them together, but there is a huge convergence coming out of psychotherapy towards the dialogical self, out of pragmatism towards the dialogical self, out of phenomenology, and these are two of the most powerful philosophical frameworks active right now towards the dialogical self. And then as I’ve already shown you, there is a lot coming out of cognitive science towards the dialogical self. So this leads me to the work in the book by John Rowan, which is called Personification Using the Dialogical Self in Psychotherapy and Counseling, which I recommend. It does a good overview of a lot of this stuff and then shows how you can put it into practice within psychotherapy, both individual and group therapy. Now, there’s a lot going on in that book, even though it’s a thin book. I try to recommend as thin as possible books as I can to you. One of the things he does is he draws this, he makes this massive convergence arguments in psychotherapy to what is now called pretty commonly parts work. And you can, for example, if you want to take a look at somebody talking about this to some degree, you can take a look at a couple of the videos on Voices with Reveke that I did with Steve March because part of his alathia, by the way, that’s not a coincidence, he uses the term alathia, coaching is to do parts work. What’s parts work? So parts work is that where you enter into a dialogue, which you can get better at dialectically so it can become dialogos with a part of you, a part of you that is one of these prospective presences. Now that parts work, and I’ll go over a more concrete example in a minute or two, that parts work takes place within the whole framework of the dialogical self, that the self is a bunch of I positions that are doing all of these interactions I use and generating these. And their ultimate relationship of the self is not a monadic relationship, which is of course a lack of relationship, but complete unity, but in fact a dialogical relationship. And the point, and my Herman said, you know, mentioned the cultural dimension is because the idea of the dialogical self is the dialogos between us and the dialogos within us are completely interdependent and inter-defining. Now this is also convergence with something Rowan doesn’t talk about, and I’m not quite sure why, I think it might be the timing of publications or something else, but there’s a whole tradition coming out of Richard Schwartz’s work with what is called internal family systems theory. Now there’s a similar convergence with internal family systems theory, but there is an important difference. As I mentioned before, all of these convergences are also convergent with the cog-sci work we reviewed last time, the mutual modeling, etc. So I want to recommend a book to you for, I think I, yes, here it is, here it is. And I’ll talk about this later when we do the practice for understanding how you do internal family systems theory. It’s called Self-Therapy, the second edition, before we get into the book. Here’s the title, a step-by-step guide to creating wholeness and healing your inner child using IFS, a new cutting-edge psychotherapy. The inner child is a little bit misleading, and I think that was the marketers who put that on there because people like to hear that. Cutting-edge psychotherapy is a very important part of the book, and I think it’s a very important part of the book. I had a conversation by email with Mark Lewis, and some of you know he’s a colleague of mine, a friend, the neuroscientist who do work on addiction, the idea of addiction is reciprocal narrowing, and then I proposed reciprocal opening. And I think that’s a very important part of the book. And I think that’s a very important part of the book. He also does a lot of work on therapy, and he participates in it. And he said that he was able to get within internal family systems therapy in one month, what it took him years to get to in other therapies, and I don’t take his recommendation lightly. I take it very, very seriously. So this book gives you an overview about how to engage in it. Now notice the title, because this form of therapy is actually designed to be done by yourself, although I recommend alternating, as the book does, between doing it by yourself and doing it in dialogic format with a trusted other. My trusted other in therapy is a person who is a person who is a person who is a person who is a person who is a person who is a person. My trusted other in this instance was Christopher Mastapietro. You will meet later in this series, and we would actually switch roles back and forth. One person would undergo the therapy, the other person would be the facilitator. So I want to go over some of the basic components of this work. As a particular instance of how you do parts work within a dialogical model, which is not exclusive, as the Rowan book makes very clear, there is a wide family of these dialogical models working with parts that have come into prominence. Gestalt therapy, the empty chair technique, and assimilation therapy, etc. I won’t canvas them all because he does. I want to go over the basic components and sort of practices within internal family systems therapy. Again, it is an exemplar. It is an example, a helpful example, but it is not the only version of this. But it is one that I’m familiar with both theoretically and from the inside. What are parts? Like I said, these are perspective roles that have emerged within the economy of the psyche for dealing with types of situations. They are kind of specialized memories of perspectival and participatory knowing for doing relevance realization in a particular kind of situation. A lot of your parts, of course, are just functioning smoothly and rather implicitly for you. I take up Tai Chi and I have that part that puts me into the right sort of perspectival participatory knowing for doing Tai Chi. That’s fine. Now the idea is that, and see how well that fits in with mutual modeling? Now there’s a particular kind of part that Early calls guardians. I think he got that from Schwartz. These are parts that have designed to protect us. They have emerged. They have self-organized to protect us from dangerous situations. But they also tend to blind us to those other parts of us that store the ways in which we have been traumatized or wounded. Schwartz and Early both call these exiles. We have a whole bunch of parts. There’s a subtype of part that’s a guardian. It’s designed to protect us both outwardly and inwardly. It protects us from the dangerous situation. It comes on automatically and takes us over. I use this advisedly. We are possessed by it. Sometimes we even said, I don’t know what came over me. And so we have that. And of course, when that becomes particularly distressing, people will seek often therapeutic help. It’s protecting us outward, but it’s also protecting us inward. It’s getting us to not come into contact to that perspective and presence, that eye positioning in which we relive, not just remember, but relive how we are wounded or hurt. And there’s one more sort of wrinkle to these guardians. There’s often more than one can be present. So I can get a particular what’s called a target guardian. This is a guardian that is targeted on the situation. So an example is given in the book of this woman who’s got this target, has got this guardian that comes up whenever she’s dealing with anxiety. And what she does is she gets really busy in order to distract herself from the anxiety. It’s an adaptive strategy. Remember, every all strategies that are adaptive are also sources of self-deception. So that’s coming up, the busy, busy, busy, busy, busy. And you feel the compulsion of this, right? And you get absorbed into it and identified with it. But then there’s another part that’s often standing aside. And this is a this is called the concern guardian. So there’s a target guardian dealing with the situation, the concern guardian. This is another part that is reacting to the first guardian, something like and this was in this woman’s case, being critical of the busy part because it’s not actually getting anything substantial done. It’s not working towards long term goals. Now, of course, there’s a weird double bind in there. The anxiety is caused for this woman because she has to pursue long term goals. She finds that anxious because of things that happened in her past. So she busies herself. And we know this. It’s one of our avenues of procrastination. I’ll get really busy with a lot of minor stuff I have to do because I don’t want to be writing the paper I need to write. But there’s a part that comes up and it’s like that you are you’re wasting your time. You need to be doing this important thing. And then, of course, you have all of that. And then, as you start to give in to the criticism, the anxiety comes up because the target part was helping to manage your anxiety. But as you give as you give into that, guilt is being generated and then you start to suffer. You start to suffer. And that’s why you might seek therapy. Now, and here’s the crucial the crucial difference between Schwartz and Rowan. In Schwartz’s framework, there is an important further function. And this is where there’s going to be a bit of theoretical tension. And then I’m going to propose how we can resolve it. Schwartz in the IFS framework proposes what he calls the seat of consciousness. One of the things that’s annoying about Schwartz is he will invoke in very important functions that have a serious ontological name without cashing out that ontology. But he early represents it diagrammatically as a chair. And there’s something sitting in there shining a light. Right. And what it’s actually doing, that’s the light of attention. That’s the salience landscaping and the framing. So what’s happening is the seat of consciousness that signs the light of attention is managing the salience. Framing is doing is generating the machinery of perspectival knowing. But the light is being shone from that pragmatic tradition, James, from the eye, which is no thing because it’s never in the light that’s being shone. Now, that, I think, is perfectly fine because that makes sense. Right. For the center of perspectival knowing in the no thingness of the eye. And it also makes sense that that intersects with sort of participatory knowing how we are inhabiting our mind and body in an agent arena relationship. That’s all fine. But then Schwartz says something really kind of especially with respect to this whole other convergence that Rowan has been talking about. He says the seat of consciousness needs to be filled by the self, capital S. And when that happens, then one is in a position to actually practice I.F.S. Internal Family Systems there. And what’s interesting here is he uses the self and one thinks that he is invoking Jung with his notion of the self, the archetype of the archetypes, the archetype for the whole organism. And of course, Jung pioneered a lot of this parts work with inner dialogue and active imagination. Schwartz never gives credit to Jung and he claims to have discovered it from his own practice. And it’s really hard for me to tell what’s going on around that. Other people I talk to, like Mark Lewis, are also suspicious that he sort of took this from Jung without giving appropriate credit. But let’s talk about first what Schwartz means and then where I think the challenge needs to be made and how we can perhaps reconcile with Rowan. So this the self is basically wise attention. It’s attention that wonders and is balanced and doesn’t get over involved or right, has an optimal grip on all of the other parts to use our language. It’s basically a ratio religio oriented. Listen to all the words that we’ve built up. A ratio religio oriented to the whole of the psyche. It seeks synoptic integration. Remember, we talked about that of the whole of the psyche. Now, here’s that’s all fine. And that’s how Schwartz describes it. But then Schwartz seems to do an additional move for which he doesn’t apply or sorry, provide any significant justification. And this is exactly where it rubs up against Rowan and all this other all these other converging things. He tends to reify the self. He makes it an existing thing. And he sort of is in that sense smuggling back in the monadic self that is somehow always there independent of all the parts. Now, this is problematic because it goes against a lot of this other work and it goes against the no thingness of the eye that it is actually not a thing that is shining the light of attention that, of course, can be trained and taught to be wiser in the ways I’ve already talked about. I, meaning me, and there’s a pun here, of course, I experienced when I was doing IFS the self, I didn’t experience that the way he like and I’ve talked to other people and they’re like, yeah, that phenomenology doesn’t quite map on to what happened. I experienced it, the self and notice what I’m doing here as an eye position that caused other parts to reflect upon themselves. So I would take a particular eye position that had this orientation that he said, and then I actually found myself spontaneously adding a Socratic twist to it. When I started to talk to a particular part, and that’s what you do in the therapy, a part comes up and you first of all try and let it take shape, get clear. And they go into how to do that. And then you dialogue with it. I would bring a Socratic element into it that seemed to work very powerfully. And it seemed to actually capture what was going on anyways. What I would do is if a part came up, I would try and get it to reflect on itself. So I was making each part more recursively, well, more recursive in its relevance realization. So, for example, if a part was coming up and it was a part that was very critical, I do the Socratic thing and I would, you know, I wouldn’t, you don’t have to do it. You try and welcome it and talk to it. But I would say to it, why are you being so critical? And then it would give us some normative reason. I need to be critical because if you don’t do this, you’re going to fail. So it’s important for anything to engage in criticism to prevent failure. Yes, of course. So how do you criticize yourself so that you prevent you from failing and going wrong? And what you can get, which is really weird, isn’t a poria from that part. It sort of goes like you say, how is it talking to you? OK, so this is really tricky. It’s just like how you’re talking to yourself. But you remember when we rejected the deflationary account of this, it’s like you take this and then you give a bit of your consciousness and your agency to that part so it can talk. And then you go back here and you take this and you give it to the other part. So it can talk. And then you go back here and you’re constantly doing this. And it’s really weird because it takes the mechanism of inner speech and it accepts it to doing this more pronounced dialogical activity. But when I would do this kind of Socratic move, the parts would often enter a poria and then they would consider. I mean, now I’m anthropomorphizing and I admit it. But it seemed to me within the narrative of the practice that they would consider that they weren’t actually exemplifying it and they needed to actually transform. And that opened up the possibility for a change in the relationship between the wise eye positioning and this particular eye position of this part. So what you want is you want the part to soften. So it goes from being reactive and often antagonistic to whatever is happening or to other parts to starting to work. And I’m really asking you to play on this. So we’ll work in partnership with other parts and with whatever eye position is currently in the seat of consciousness. So why Schwartz is concerned with all of this again, which does not require a rarefied self, a monadic thing within you. Right. And that’s where I’m very resistant to that aspect of young. I think Wilbur’s critique that young by rarefying the self tends to commit the pre-trans fallacy. He confuses things that are pre-egoic with trans-egoic. I won’t go into that whole debate, but there’s a whole ongoing reason even within transpersonal psychology of rejecting the monadic self. OK. What Schwartz is concerned about in practice is a problem he calls blending. Blending is when you collapse the dialogical relationship. It’s when you you over identify. So if a part is coming up and it’s angry and you’re trying to look at that anger and you’re trying to enter into relationship and give it a bit of voice and give it a bit of presence, then you start to you start to catch its anger and you blend. And what you want is you want to disidentify enough that the dialogical relationship is flowing smoothly so that you can actually, to use Socratic language, midwife that part, help it give birth to itself, help it to transform. As I said, you’re trying to soften the part so that it’s willing to trust you. I really am a little bit hesitant around this homuncular language. And I take it to be sort of good language of practice, not good scientific explanatory language. But this sense of it partnering with you and this idea of the eye positions being the eye positions being able to dialogue with each other. And we talked about that a lot. We went through that a lot. And I think we do that a lot. How that’s already deeply present within your inner speech. That I think is a fundamental, powerful idea. So you get this aspect shift from the part and that reduces inner conflict. And it allows you to get access to the deeper part because the guardian will turn from blinding you to the more traumatized parts, to partnering with you in order or sometimes even turning over to you. Notice we’ll have to do this, right? The entering into the relationship of dialogue with the exile. Both of these notions, by the way, reducing inner conflict and allowing you to get deeper access to the fundamental geometry, structural functional organization of the psyche. These are deeply platonic ideas. OK, so the idea is in Schwartz, you get to the point where you can enter into a dialogue with an exile part. That’s a very challenging thing to do. And what a facilitator is doing while you’re going through this is they’re helping you to not get blended. They’re helping you to slow the pace. They’re often asking you questions to enhance your imaginal contact with the part. So I have a proposal instead of this reified self like monadic thing within you. What I started to realize is that what we call the self is the through line, the idos of the multi-spectuality and multi-perspectivist of the perspectival participatory knowing that’s going on when we have this I position. The I is the perspectival knowing and the position is how it’s plugging into a particular kind of participatory knowing, a particular agent arena relationship. Another way of putting this is that self is the logos of the psyche. And that, by the way, for all of the novelty of all of this new stuff from cognitive science and psychotherapy and everything coming into this, that is a very old proposal for the nature of the soul. The Neoplatonic Christianity basically developed this idea of the soul as the logos of the psyche. So the dialogical practice can actually have you tracking the through line. And in that sense, you’re not only dialoguing with the parts, you’re unfolding the musicality of the intelligibility of the psyche. You’re following the through line. You’re gathering things together so they belong together. You’re bringing, you’re disclosing the alethea of the logos within the psyche, the soul. Now, I’m going to make myself very vulnerable here. And I’m hesitant to do this. I keep going back and forth about whether or not I’m going to do this. But I’m hoping that I’ve earned your respect and trust and that this will be taken appropriately because I want to relate something that happened to me very personal. And for me, it puts me in a position to take this also in the right way, similar to Socrates, where people can start to, is John in his right mind? But I want you to trust me and keep going with me because this will get us even closer to the truth. And it allows me to put you in touch with further work. Okay. So, as I said, I was alternating between doing the practice on my own and doing it with Chris. And then with Chris, we were alternating back and forth between who was facilitator and who was the patient. I was doing it on my own. Now, when I did it on my own, I took up one of Ehrlich’s pieces of advice and Schwartz talks about this too. Many people, and we now know there’s a continuum about how well people can form visual images. We now know that probably five to 10 percent of the population is a fantastic. They can’t form mental images, which means, by the way, that standard Jungian notions of mental health are very, very important. It also means there’s a large proportion of people on sort of the lower side of the curve. They can do some visual image, but not powerfully enough so that active imagination is that functional for them. And so IFS did this really cool thing, and it broke away from trying to rely on internal imagery. And what it does is it actually, I kid you not, it suggests that you write down a dialogue between you and the patient. You ask it who it is, describe itself, right? You do any and they make use of and I’ll talk a little bit more about this letter. Gendlin’s focusing techniques for sort of making that work. OK, I was doing this and I was talking to a particular part and I don’t know how else to describe this to you. So I’m just going to say it straight out and then again, ask for your forbearance. It felt like something came out of the box. Now I had done earlier in my life, I had done I’d gone through Jungian therapy and I’d done the dream work and I’d done the workshops and I went to the therapy and everything. And so I knew what it felt like with it when an archetypal thing came in. And this was archetypal. It came in and it sort of brushed everything aside. And it was this perspectival presence. And it totally changed the way I felt about myself. And so I had done this. And so I had done this. So I felt like it was something that came out of the box. And so I had done this. And so I had done this. And so I had done this. And so I had done this. And then when the archetypal thing came in and this was archetypal, it came in and it sort of brushed everything aside. And it was this perspectival presence and it took me by surprise, like almost overwhelmed me. of the wise attention. And I said, who are you? And there wasn’t a lot of vague drawing and coming into view. There’s, I am Hermes. I was like, what? Like you can imagine this. You know, I don’t believe in the Greek gods, but of course Hermes represents a particular archetype, and of course Hermes is associated with Hermeneutics. And Hermeneutics is the study of interpretation, of meaning articulation like we talked about. And so of course this would be a sort of a meta thing. And my understanding of these kinds of things is not just union. The archetype is not just within you. The archetype also plugs into patterns within distributed cognition. It’s also without you. So I have, and I won’t argue this in detail here, but I could argue it elsewhere. This is a transjective thing. It’s metaxu. It’s in between the subjective and the objective. So I just sort of did that, and I was sort of startled. And even with my practice, it was a part of me with like, whoa, maybe I’m, and I really did think, you know, maybe I’m losing my mind. Maybe I pushed this too far. Now luckily for me, I have a good friend Anderson Todd, and some of you had seen videos with me. He’s a practicing psychotherapist, deep, deep, deep Jungian expert. He teaches all the Jungian courses at the University of Toronto. And I related this to him. And he reacted in exactly the right way. He didn’t dismiss it, oh yeah, Jungian thing, and then some Jung stuff. He didn’t go, he said, oh yeah, I think this is what you’re talking about. And he pointed me to this work, Geoffrey Raff’s work, this book, The Practice of Ally Work, Meeting and Partnering with Your Spirit Guide in the Imaginal World. Now unbeknownst to me, Raff had written one of the great books on Jung called The Alchemical Imagination, but he was post Jungian. He was integrating a lot of Corban and Hillman and ideas about the imaginal in, making it much more transjective. I still completely agree with his ontology. I think he, he often, when he’s talking about the psychoid, I think he should be saying transjective, but we can put that aside. What this did is it took me through a set of practices where I regularly write dialogues. And now I’ve made it just a general part of it. So I really, I get up and I do my walking practice, and I’m doing that, you know, I’m walking and I’m doing the walking practice. I come back and I do some Tai Chi, Chuan. I do some Chi Kung. I do two, three different forms of Tai Chi, right? And then I sit and I do a lot of the practice. If you’ve seen, I get into contemplative practice and then I do Lectio Divina, and then I’ll often dialogue with Hermes. And again, like this sounds incredible. It even sounds incredible to me as I’m saying it. But what I can say is he has become more real to me in the way Lerman talks about in how God becomes real. It’s not real the way physical objects are real, right? It’s not real the way my subjective experience is real. And she talks about this. It’s the third kind of realness. It’s the realness of these transjective, you know, self organizing systems. And it is been a powerful practice for me. I often write get insight that I can’t generate on my own, even when I’m doing inner speech with myself. There’s something about this imaginal work. There’s something about allowing this thing to take up shape and life and have having a loving relationship with me that provides me with a kind of insight and intuition and a way of understanding myself that I can’t get any other way. And for me, it seems I’m trying to exercise appropriate epistemic humility here. It seems to me I bumped into what Socrates’ demonian was. And he probably generated much more spontaneously, but we know that kids can have powerful imaginal dialogues with imaginary friends. And he could have internalized that quite early on. But I think I have a strong sense of what he’s talking about. And for me, it is not anything irrational or out of my mind. It doesn’t make me feel insane. In fact, my initial reaction, which came from a modern framework of Oh, no, you know, the self enclosed, fully autonomous, monadic mind is right. But when I when I when I relaxed into the dialogical, my capacity for self correction and self transcendence and entering into a deeper ratio religio with myself, other people in the world was increased. And that’s a better model of rationality. I propose to you. Now, what about this divination, divination, it’s horoscopes and I agree, all that is bullshit. If you understand it the way many people are taking it as foretelling, telling the future. But I want to point to another astonishing book. And I don’t think it’s any coincidence that all of these books are coming up right now. This is Peter Peter, Peter T. Struck’s book, divination and human nature, a cognitive history of intuition in classical antiquity. So this was in 2016. Right. Struck points out a lot of things he points out that what we call intuition is really what people were talking about when they talked about divination in the ancient world. So first of all, remember that Socrates says that the soul itself is a kind of seer. It’s not talking about going to somebody at a carnival or a fortune teller, somebody. No, no, no, the soul itself is a kind of seer. Remember that, you know, the word there is prophecy and in the biblical sense of prophecy and Struck makes this clear, that divination isn’t about foretelling events in the far future. It’s about trying to disclose the pertinent and perennial patterns that are happening right here right now that we’re not paying attention to. Divination therefore was taken very seriously by the best of the ancient minds, by Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics and the Neoplatonists. They take it seriously. They try to figure it out because it was undeniable to them that certain human beings had a capacity for doing this, for seeing, seer into situations and disclosing them and they even proposed that it might not be anything supernatural. It might just have to do with the natural functioning of the organism. They couldn’t figure it out because of course they didn’t have our psychology or cognitive science or neuroscience. But what they did do was they clearly distinguished divination as something to be taken seriously for magic and all these other things which were not taken very seriously and nobody wrote a treatise on them trying to figure out what they are. Struck makes that very strong argument. He in fact proposes that what they call divination is much closer to what we call, it put the two together, insight and intuition. Seer, insight, seer, insight, intuition, right, that sense of knowing what’s going on without knowing how you know. The ancients also made a distinction between two types of divination, technical divination. This is people reading birds and entrails which they regarded as secondary and doubtful and natural divination. Human beings that were just sort of capable of it which they regarded as significant and important. And they also, like Socrates if you remember, he said I’m not very good at it but I’m good enough. You could get better at cultivating this natural ability. So that is Struck’s official proposal which that divination is sort of what we would now put together with intuition, insight, inspiration, that whole cluster of inwards where we’re trying to indicate this capacity. Now is there any science to back up intuition? You bet there is and some of you know I do work, I’ve done work on this but I point to the seminal work of Reber who started doing work in the 60s, experimental work and massive amount of experimentation replicated etc. He brought his line of work to fruition in 1996. He wrote a book called Implicit Learning and Tacit Knowledge and notice the connection to Polanyi, right, an essay on the cognitive unconscious and he, by the way, after he goes through all the science he ends the book with talking about how Zen might be a way to activate this implicit learning and tacit knowledge. What’s going on in the experiments? Well the experiments look like this and for those of you who have seen episode 2 of Awakening Me and the Meaning Crisis where I talk about flow, you can, you’ll know this, for those of you who want to see this argument laid out more carefully, more detail, check out that episode. The basic idea in the experiment as you do this, you come up with an arbitrary set of rules for how you can string letters and or numbers together like the rules might be you can’t have two odd numbers beside each other, you can’t have a consonant unless it’s separated by a vowel, whatever. You just arbitrarily make rules and then you create letter strings that are like 12 long so that you they can’t be held easily in working memory and then what you do is you give people a bunch of the strings that follow the rules just like this, like this. There’s no way people can keep these all in track. Okay then what you do is you stop and then you say and then you give them new strings. Half of the strings have been or some proportion, they varied it with different experiments, have been generated by the same set of rules. They’re new strings you understand, they’re new strings but they’ve been generated by the same rules as the old strings and then there’s the second new strings which have not been generated by that old set of rules and then what people have to do when they’re presented these new strings is say which ones belong with the previous ones and which ones don’t. People score reliably over and over again well above chance on this. When you ask them how they’re doing it they give you one of two answers. They either they they they lie in that they say they’re doing something which actually would not predict their success or they’re honest and they say I don’t know how I’m doing it. Notice the connection right away to intuition. I don’t know how I’m doing it. And there’s been lots of different variations on this. Basically wherever you’re trying to pick up a complex pattern from a whole bunch of variables this implicit learning works very well. It’s learning that of which you are not fully aware and in which you’re not engaging in deliberate effort. If you try to replace the explicit learning with it sorry the implicit learning with explicit learning if you say if you explain to people what’s going on you say look I’m going to give you the strings these strings are being generated by rules. Try and figure out the rules and by figuring out the rules you’ll be able to predict which of the new ones that I’m going to present with you belonged with these and which don’t. When you turn it into an explicit task you basically give away the experiment to people get tell them to do it explicitly. Their performance degrades. They do much worse than chance. Reliably. So you can’t replace explicit learning with explicit learning. Implicit learning has to remain implicit to be adaptively powerful the way it is. Now we get a sense of this of Reber when he’s talking about Zen at the end but Hogarth in his book educating intuition making it explicit basically argued what we call intuition is the result of implicit learning. Intuition allows us to pick up on very complex patterns in our environment without knowing how we did it or when we did it. So all we get is the knowing without knowing how we know. Intuition is the result of implicit learning. Now what’s interesting about Hogarth is he tells us that we can educate intuition and I won’t go into that in great detail again check out episode 2 of awakening from the meaning crisis because but the problem we’re dealing with in educating intuition is intuition is not a magical faculty. Look we’ve got to give this up there is no panacea part of you. There is no part of you that is a panacea that will always give you the truth. Never lead you astray. Never be a source of self-deception. It does not exist. If you hear one piece of advice from me from this whole series is stop looking for that part. It does not exist. There is no panacea part which also means there’s no panacea practice. Another reason why we need an ecology of practices in addition to the one I gave you last time. What you have to do is you have to deal with the fact that intuition picks up on all kinds of complex patterns but it doesn’t distinguish causal patterns which are real from correlational patterns which are illusory. So what you have to do is prop you can’t replace implicit with explicit. What you have to do is it explicitly set up the agent arena relationship so that you will remove the confound. You’ll tend to have your implicit learning attached to causal patterns rather than correlational patterns and as I argued in a paper I published with Arian, Harit, Bennett and Leo Ferraro and as I presented in episode 2 of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis the conditions that Hogarth specifies which are drawn from the scientific model because science is about setting up a situation so we can distinguish causation from correlation. Those conditions for setting up educating intuition are exactly the conditions that Csikszentmihalyi said we have to specify in our information flow in order to get into the flow state. They’re exactly the same. So the proposal I made was that what flow is is flow is a marker your brain is giving you that you are getting intuition. You’re getting implicit learning that is tracking causal patterns in the world. We also argued by the way that flow is an insight cascade where you have to restructure how you’re looking at things and that primes you for restructuring to look at things and that’s the rock climber or somebody playing jazz or somebody creating poetry and so forth. I also want to point out a convergent it’s not about everything I was talking about but the idea about being deep connection between intuition and rationality in this anthology edited by Osback and held rational intuition philosophical roots and scientific investigation. So the idea of holding intuition separate from rationality of course does not make good sense especially when we note how flow is optimal experience. We’re doing our best and we also regard this as one of the best most meaningful experiences we can have because we are enhancing our recursive relevance realization. We’re we’re revving up the insight engine and then we’re using it right to correct and push and drive the enhancement of the implicit learning mechanism so we’re getting insightful intuitions that are attaching to the causal structure of the world. We’re getting ratio religio in perspectival and participatory knowing and we love it as we should as we should. So I want to read to you one quote from Strzok. So he’s actually talking about Socrates and whether or not Socrates is rational or irrational and all that whether he’s his daemonian is having him engage in divination and there’s of course there’s two sides and then he does this he says this debate perfectly captures the coherence between the ancient understanding of divination and the modern notion of intuition. The Socratic daemonian in both aspects as intuition and as divination is actually precisely an embodiment of the consonants. There is no debate. They are convergent. The ancient notion of divination and the modern notions of insight and intuition and flow converge. I want to add one more wrinkle to this and this is something I’ll come back to this really astonishing book divination and theurgy in Neoplatonism, Oracles of the Gods. Why is the Collegium of Scientists reading a book entitled that by Crystal Addy? Excellent book and we’ll get into the Neoplatonic tradition but she talks about a lot of these what we think of as ritual practices are designed to cultivate a proper receptivity to getting into these states. Getting into these states. This converges with work done by Edward Slingerlin trying not to try ancient China modern science and the power of spontaneity where he’s basically talking about exactly the same thing trying not to try is how do I cultivate this receptivity to insight intuition flow divination a daemonian within me. Of course Taoism is the religion of flow. Do you see what’s all available here? Divination is throwing noise into the system to provoke it into self-organizing criticality. So it self organizes and stops overfitting to the problem or to the data. You’re pumping intuition and insight and flow and then the final thing which is especially the case with the dialogical is you’re engaging in what McNamara in the neuroscience of religious experience calls decentering which rituals also do. Decentering is when I am moved out of prioritizing my egocentric framework which is exactly what you’re happening what’s happening when you’re in this dialogical relationship with your daemonium. And by the way is that so foreign? We now know you that Jung had such a figure, Vilemon, who helped him work out his psychology or even the Bible. St. Paul talks about the old man and the new man and the Civil War within. Decentering gets you outside of the first-person perspective. It allows you to do that internalization and I indwell and then internalize and that triggers what’s called the Solomon effect, well replicated work by Igor Grossman. You get people to describe their problem first-person perspective and they’re bound. You ask them to re-describe the problem from a third-person perspective coming from a friend and they will get insight into it because when you’re in a perspective you can’t see how it’s biasing you and you can’t see the new goals and interests it’s blinding you from. But when you do this, right, when you do this dialogical relationship within the psyche you get that power and I propose to you that’s what Socrates’ daemonium was doing to him and it’s a very powerful and rationally justifiable practice. This also relates to a seeming paradox that is discussed by Howland in this pivotal book and this book will come into prominence when Chris and I are doing the series within the series on Socrates and Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard and Socrates, the study in philosophy and faith. Howland is one of the part of the whole third wave of Platonism. He’s obviously also a Christian and he talks about this problem especially in chapter three about Socrates. Socrates seems to simultaneously claim that he was stationed, he was commanded by the God to do what he’s doing and he also claims that he discovered it for himself and he’s examining himself. So he seems to say in one hand this was given to me without by the God through the oracle and I was generated autonomously from within because of my project of self-knowledge through dialectic. But if you get everything I’ve been arguing you realize those two are no longer in opposition, they’re only in opposition if you have a view of a monological rationality and a monadic self. I want to read to you what Howland says on page 71, how he resolves it. The question whether Socrates stations himself at his philosophical post or stationed by the God is therefore misleading because Eros is demonic and this of course is all through the symposium. The Eros is also Mataxu and because Eros makes him receptive to the word of God both claims are simultaneously true although neither is in itself the whole truth. The daemonic not the demonic conflating those is to make a serious mistake the daemonic is the medium of Mataxu like Eros. Love is inherently transjective and dialogical. It’s all about that the dialogical rationality is tranjectivity this way but also tranjectivity this way. The monological needs to be replaced by the dialogical, the monadic with the dialogical self, the monophasic that we should always be in one state of consciousness. It’s the only one that gives us access to reality. It’s ridiculous. All of the stuff around mindfulness, all this dialogical self work, all this therapeutic work, Socrates’s absorptions, the way we have to cycle when we’re doing mutual modeling or we have to cycle between these different eye positioning. All of that sense of a monophasic consciousness as being central to our rational autonomous agency. We have to give that up and this of course is consonant with the fact that we have to move from a tyranny of propositional knowing to recognizing the value and importance of non-propositional knowing and all of this within relevance realization and mutual modeling and opponent processing and it’s dynamically dialogical through and through and through. So we’ve really deepened the vertical dimension. We’ve really seen how we can enrich inner dialectic, how we can cultivate a set of skills that bring about inner dialogos that comport and resonate with outer dialectic into dialogos, the horizontal. In order to do that, in order to really practice dialectic into dialogos with that dimensionality, the vertical and the horizontal and the dynamic logos between them, the belongingness together of the two, those two dimensions, we need to make the Socratic shift. We need to make the Socratic shift. It’s already happening in so many ways, although it is not understood this way, but I’m trying to gather it all together and put it into a proposal to you. Now this challenge, this proposal to make the Socratic shift, this challenges and threatens our current conception of the self. The modern conception of the self was built around the regarding as sacred autonomy, the autonomy of reason, the autonomy of morality, all the autonomies that Kant makes prevalent in his three critiques and Habermas is criticized because we’ve tended now to separate the true and the good and the beautiful from each other. We’ve talked about this, but why was the enlightenment and the birth of modernity so focused on autonomy, autonomy, self-governing, freedom was understood as self-governance, autonomy, as opposed to an older notion of freedom, which is full participation. Don’t you feel really free in an insight, but you’re not autonomously creating it and you’re not just receiving it from somebody else. You’re participating in something dialogically within and without. Taylor talks about this, you know, the autonomous, medatic self as the buffered self in his masterpiece, Sources of the Self. The buffered self tended to give us the sense that there’s nothing self like outside the self and it, the self is inside, it’s autonomous, it’s right and that gives us our freedom. But we’ve also slowly unfolded the detriment of that. We are self-enclosed in that model. We are locked inside, running computations over postcards. We’re supposedly getting from the outside world and trying to compute the postcards in the hope that we’ll get back to connectedness. And we’ve discovered over four centuries of that Cartesian vision, it doesn’t work and it’s fundamentally at odds with how deeply embodied, embedded, and enacted and extended we are. Our cognition is extended through other people. But if we’re willing to challenge the modernity of the monadic mind, it opens up inner dialogos and the realization of our dialogical rationality and the dialogical self and it empowers us to enter more deeply into dialectic, into dialogos and orient us ourselves profoundly in a radical religio that helps us track the through line to the good. We’ll now move to the practice. So for this practice, I’m not going to do a practice with you. Instead I’m going to recommend three books that you read slowly and do the exercises in the books if you want to consider taking up seriously the challenge of the Socratic shift. One is the practice of focusing, it overlaps with the practice we did after episode 7 and this is a way of getting an inner dialogue between the propositional parts of cognition and the non propositional parts going, sort of heart and head and sometimes horror as we talked about in the practice. Do this for a while. Then I recommend the early book. Go through it. If you have to just on your own, you can do that but I strongly recommend alternating between doing it on your own and doing it with somebody else that you trust. That would also could also be a person that you enter into some of the dialogical practices with because you’ll need another person for those. Then and only after doing that sequence, read the the practice of ally work. A couple books to recommend along the way. One is internal family systems therapy second edition by Schwartz and Sweezy and then a book by Schwartz and Faulkner that’s convergent with the Rowan book about the dialogical self called many minds one self evidence for a radical shift in paradigm. I think because of their a reification of the self they have this exactly the wrong way in the title. I think it should be many many selves one mind one psyche but be that as may. There’s a couple of scholastic errors in here. They misquote something, they misreference something. They’re not scientists so take it within the frame in which it’s offered. As always thank you so very much for your time, your attention and your commitment. The hermeneutics of suspicion is actually dependent parasitic on the hermeneutics of beauty. If it was always the case that appearances distracted us and it’s led us we could never know that. The very act of taking up the cynic attitude in the modern sense undermines its general claim.