https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=xTzWIwWA-7k
significant responsibility. So welcome everybody. We wanted to put together a video and have a discussion on the Circling Dialogos course, our third one. And it’s gonna, all the details and stuff will be in the show notes below, of course, but the course is happening on July, I think it’s July 9th and 10th. We’ll leave the hours, as it’s 11 to four Pacific Standard Time. And this is our third one. So I wanted us just to get together and say, and announce it, talk about what Dialogos is, talk about the ecology of practices that lead up to it, why we’re doing it, what its significance is in history, and also something that you were just, you were talking about before together about how the way that this work is actually kind of impacting the world in ways that we’re hearing about and starting to understand as it’s going on, which is absolutely stunning, right? Yeah. Well, thank you, Guy. What would you prefer we do first, maybe review what the program is sort of like in an overview, and then go into a deeper discussion of Dialogos? Is that the idea? Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, let’s talk about what Dialogos is and what we mean by it. And then we can talk about, we can just talk about the course and how we lay it out, what our experience has been so far with it, and why bother, why do it? Okay. Because I know that when we first started to talk about this through particularly our conversations that we were having at the time, where we would go into the conversation and we’d have a dialogue, right? And we’d come out of it and we’d be like, what was that? There was something about what was generated at these conversations that had a life of its own. And I think that’s the thing, and essentially that’s when I remember at some point, I think I texted you, John, and I said, that was an amazing dialogue. And you texted back and you said, I think that was a Dialogos. That was the first time I heard that word, right? And my understanding is that what we’ve been talking about is specifically what we mean by Dialogos is that Dialogos isn’t something we can do, right? It’s not a result of an action that we take. It’s what we do in Dialogos is actually what we can do is dialectic, right? Where we come into conversation and the dialectic and mastering, having some mastery over the dialectic and some practice in that is something like tending the garden, right? You can set up the garden, you can water the garden, you can love and nurture the garden, but essentially you can’t make the garden grow. And so, Pia Logos is that moment where the dialectic or dialogue that we’re having ignites. And what dialogue through Logos, right? When what goes through the words, through the conversation, right? Through all of it that fold everything together, it itself starts to show up. And specifically it starts to show up in the way that the Logos, in some sense, the people in the dialogue start to give voice to the Logos and we start to say things that we didn’t know and we don’t know where it came from. It’s that kind of sense of where the, something greater than the sum of the people together. And it ignites. And so, Pia Logos is specifically that like points to that moment, that thing that goes beyond, beyond what the three of us or the interlocutors themselves greater than the sum total. Anything you’d add to that? I think, sorry, Chris, you go ahead. No, please, John, go. Yeah, I mean, I typically say that dialectic is a practice and the Logos is a process that we participate in. An analogy I sometimes use is you can cultivate a bunch of skills of communication, of paying attention, of character traits that would make you more capable of being a good friend, but you can’t come up to somebody and just activate those skills and traits and that person become your friend. Friendship doesn’t work that way. It has to emerge out of something that is co-created by two people beyond, right? Beyond any sort of transactional relationship they have to each other. So they come into a relationship and they come to value the relationship for its own sake. Now, you can do a lot so that you could be a better friend such that friendship is more likely to emerge and to deepen. And so we can do a lot so that this living conversation, it’s not just a conversation, it’s also an exploration and explication of how we’re making sense, right? We’re making sense as we’re speaking, which affords us speaking, which affords us to make sense and right. So in the same way, there’s a lot we can do to afford the emergence of that logos, that living system of speaking and sense-making and insight and reflection that takes on a life of its own between all of us. And there’s a lot we could do to prepare so that when it takes shape, it also progresses in depth, just like in friendship. But the heart of the logos is something you participate in, the way you participate in friendship. It is not something you make. And that is precisely why it is so incredibly important and valuable. One of the central things, and I get this from, I’ve been reading a lot of D.C. Schindler and other things and working with Chris on the Socrates and Kierkegaard series about the leap of faith and the leap of reason. And one of the things that has become really central, and it picks up on something, Spinoza, the most logical of the rationalists, the most logical of the rationalists, right? Says reason can’t bring you to blessedness because reason operates within a particular orientation, within a particular framing. And that framing can be egocentric, where the reasoning is always, how are things relevant to me? Or it can be transactional, which is just a, right, a looped version of egocentrism. But what Spinoza says is, no, no, no, you have to get something, the only thing that turns you away from egocentrism is a profound kind of love, where love is understood not as a feeling or not even as an attitude, but an intimate affinity and conformity to something. And so in, when we part, so, and this, he talks about participating in God, right? Or what he means by ultimate reality. And so when we’re in, when we participate in the logos, we are drawn beyond our egocentrism and we’re drawn into conformity. We find a love for the logos that I think is at the core of us having the proper orientation that makes us truly capable of the proper exercise of reason. Iris Murdoch said, love is when you realize that something other than you is real. And so the logos brings people to this profound kind of realization where they, or where their orientation is redirected, right, it’s transformed. And people express this by, they discover kinds of intimacy that they always wanted but didn’t realize they wanted. And intimacy with them, and a simultaneity. And this is so, an intimacy with themself, with other people, and then usually to the logos itself, and sometimes through the logos to being itself. And all of those are interwoven in that way that is proper to love. Because the thing about love is you do get a sense of the fullness of your being, but if it’s proper love, it’s not an egocentric consumption. So I think that this ability of the logos to properly reorient us is something that is so fundamental. I’m reading a really excellent book right now by Werner Stegmeier. It’s gotta be good, his name is German, right? But this is, what is orientation? And he’s making, pardon me? Been wondering about what orientation was. Yeah, and it’s a profound thing. And he makes the point, and it lines up with a lot of the work I do with relevance realization and other things, that orientation is primordial. That everything else depends on it. And until you’re oriented, you can’t actually do anything. You can’t reason, you can’t problem solve. And so given all of I said, and try to bring that into this, I think the logos is about proper orientation. And here’s a point he makes. You only seek orientation when you are disoriented. So one of the tasks of dialectic is to disorient people from their familiar orientations. So that fundamental reorientation onto reality that helps us overcome the way our reason is usually blindsided by a pervasive kind of egocentric orientation, that can actually occur. That’s what dialectic does as a practice. It helps put you into a place of disorientation so that the possibility of the logos reorienting you can come into full emergence. That’s something I wanted to add. That’s great. Chris, so people who are unfamiliar, what would you say are in this context, how would you distinguish logos? So the way, sort of the perennial analogy that we use, we use it in the sessions themselves, and we’ve used it in a lot of these conversations. Very helpful for a reason, and that is the fire. Speaking of the primordiality of the relationship, there’s a reason that the fire, the campfire is a particularly excellent symbol. And not just because it brings us back to Heraclitus, and that is helpful in itself, because it brings us back to the logos and its originary formulation. And there’s value to that independently. But even if there wasn’t, even if there wasn’t, when we think it through, it provides a particular model of excellence for how this dynamic works, when it’s working fluently, and when it’s flourishing. And it integrates all of the component parts that both of you have just described. Dialogos is a process in which we create something, no, that’s not right. We create space for the presence of something which in turn recreates us by recreating our attention to it. Just as a fire does, right? Dialogos is not something to know, it is something by which to know, dia logos, through the logos, by means of the logos. But first, the logos actually has to be brought to the fore. It has to be summoned, conjured. It has to be actually made known. And you’re right. So as John says, we can set the conditions to prepare for such a thing, but we can’t actually guarantee it because there remains a new monocity to that logos. There remains something always uncanny and unpredictable about it. There always remains a part of it that exceeds our capacity to bring it about by sheer will. And that’s why we need one another. That’s why it’s not something that we can do at least without a great deal of practice alone. It’s when two or more people gather to create between them a dynamic that will in turn become a creative force that will recreate that same dynamic and recreate the participants within it. So think of how a campfire is put together. You find your kindling, you find your logs, you put together all of those preconditions which make it most likely that the fire will catch and spread and deepen when struck. And that means building relationships of trust, of forbearance and of good faith, not because they are in and of themselves the objective of the exercise, because they’re not, but they are the necessary preconditions for establishing the requisite good faith so that when it strikes, it has room to grow, it has room to build, it has room to spread and it has the attention of its participants to pay it its due. And just like a fire, so the fire is so interesting because when we build the fire, when we’re out in the country at night and we build a fire, the fire becomes the means by which all things are then known and experienced and made eligible. It casts its light on our faces. And there is a, I mean, anyone who’s been out of, and most of us have been outside, whether out in the country or even in a city, you can get this effect. When you’re sitting by a fire with someone at night and you’re looking at someone through firelight, there was a kind of revelatory aspect to that experience. There’s an intimacy, there’s a kind of disclosed secrecy about that kind of presence that is not felt if you’re in another scenario in another setting. And Dio Logos has that effect when it’s working properly, which is to say that the particular light that’s cast by Dio Logos is disclosing not simply in an autobiographical way. It’s not like we’re simply telling each other about ourselves, but that we’re finding a reflection of ourselves in one another that bears the reflection of something that is beyond ourselves entirely in which we find ourselves present. That’s why it both reflects back on us as individuals and helps us to know ourselves, but it uses the knowing of oneself as a way of knowing one another and knowing in general. And the other thing that it does, which is particularly important, is it makes the presence of darkness itself more knowable and more appreciable, right? It gives us an awareness of darkness and an appreciation of darkness by calibrating that light just so it doesn’t overwhelm the surroundings, but allows us to see everything that is impossible to see. And that is what we mean by the learned ignorance that begins with Socrates onto Augustine, Nicholas of Cusa, et cetera. The learned ignorance is an appreciation of darkness cast by the kind of light that knows better than to overwhelm that darkness because knows itself to be less than it. That is the point of Dio Logos. So that’s a beautiful, the flickering of the fire, right? Discloses the dance of sense-making much better than the constant fluorescent light, which pretends that there is no darkness. I think that’s a beautiful metaphor. And I was thinking about the way that orientation and right relationship are different sides of the same. When we are oriented, we are in the right relationship to something. And so what typically happens in Dio Logos is not the resolution, that’s like the fluorescent light of some answer, that’s not, right? And it’s not about being right in a debate. It’s about coming into right relationship with oneself, other people, intelligibility, sense-making itself, and being. You’re coming into right, your ratio, rationality means ratio. You’re properly proportioning these things and your attention so that you enter into an ongoing right relationship to them. So I sometimes replace the word faith with faithfulness. Like the way you are faithful to your friend or to your lover doesn’t mean that you have all the answers about them. That’s the end of your relationship, by the way, if you think that. Neither is it that you can just very effectively exercise your skills upon them. That’s also a disaster. It’s more that you are oriented towards them in a living manner so that there is a constant flow of shared sense-making and commitment to the relationship beyond, right? Just the commitment to the other person or to oneself such that you are in constant right relationship for the reality of a person. We intuitively know that we have to be proper and our culture’s struggling about this in a very confused way. There is a sense of people are important. We have to be oriented towards them in the right way. Yes, and so that’s what’s powering it, but it’s also driven by a misapprehension of what that meaning is and what that right relationship and what that connectedness is. And so, Deo Logos can give you the only kind of knowledge of that that you can have, which is a participatory knowledge. You have to participate in it. Just like you can’t know what it’s like to be Timothy’s friend unless you’re in friendship and right relationship with Timothy that affords the ongoing life of the friendship. You can’t know it from the outside. It doesn’t mean that it’s subjective or arbitrary or any of the other Kantian default words, right? But it means that it is properly something that you only know by participating in it. And if you can’t get that, then your ability to enter into right relationship is going to be, well, it’s gonna be truncated. I mean, and that sounds harsh, and I’m not trying to be harsh, I’m trying to be helpful. We have very little education about how to enter into deep disclosing right relationship to ourselves, to other people, to the logos and to being. This is what we’re trying to offer. Yes, I, you know, it’s interesting with the fire and I’m just, I’m still lingering on that, what you said, Chris, about the face and the flickering, especially when you think about the way that the fire in some sense actually kind of draws in the darkness. It doesn’t just light up the dark, but it actually draws in the darkness and transform it, right, through the conformity of like the way of flame, right, conforms exactly to the law that it’s burning, right? There’s a certain shape, but it transforms it and draws out this light, right, and lights up what’s happening. And I would say that there’s a sense of, it’s with most people habitually in relationships, there’s kind of an automaticity of that when we get together, people don’t realize to what degree we’re constantly trying to fix and solve people and solve people’s problems and give advice and all of this kind of stuff, where with DLogos, what we’re not doing is we’re not solving problems, right? We’re dwelling in a mystery, right? We’re dwelling in and evoking and finding ourselves in a mystery that whatever it is, particularly we’re talking about, has this eye towards this perennial sense of the thing that has always been the case, the inexhaustible, right, horizon of intelligibility. And just the experience of being in a conversation, being in a dialogue and not fixing anything or solving a problem, but actually deepening a sense of wonder and mystery, right, to where that starts to, you start to salivate for more and more and more of that, that deep sense of that inexhaustible, mystery that’s happening. So in many ways, it’s, you know, when we’re together and we’re in dialogue, what we’re doing is in some sense supporting each other to tolerate that mystery. How deeply can we sit in it and tolerate it and experience it and describe it and open up to it? It’s one of the more phenomenal experiences I’ve ever had is in some of these dialogues together. It truly is. And I’m glad you said that also because it brings up something else I think that’s very important for people to know, you know, who are considering entering into the process and entering into the course as you’re about to describe it, which is that, you know, just like being kind of enveloped by the darkness at a campfire, it can be remarkably meaningful. And there’s a certain, there’s a charge to that experience when it catches, when it catches and there is traction and there is faithfulness to it, as you’ve said, John, there was a remarkable charge to it. And it can be an ecstatic experience in the proper meaning of the term. The other thing though that’s very important to know is that, you know, when you invite darkness upon yourself and you invite darkness onto a conversation and darkness, it presents itself in part as the presence of ignorance, right? And the presence of ignorance when it makes itself known can be a remarkably unnerving experience just as it can be a remarkably profound experience. And you really can’t have one in the longer term, I think, without the other. Being unnerved, right, just as the interlocutors of Socrates discovered, often in spite of themselves, is an experience that doesn’t always leave you feeling golden. Sometimes it leaves you feeling quite sour and sometimes it leaves you feeling less than. And it’s important to understand that because that kind of humility, that kind of learned ignorance is part of that process, just like any great adventure. I mean, this is an adventure of the spirit, right? And like any great adventure, there is a darkness to that adventure just as there is a great deal of light cast by it. And learning to understand the way that those two interact as a dialectic is part of this process and part of the practice that conduces it. And so, you know, it contains both aspects within itself. And undertaking a Socratic process like this is also a kind of training in acquiring comfort with and facility with that experience of ignorance that is so necessary for reopening the question and directing it back toward oneself and toward others and toward the world. And it’s not, it comes with, like the Socratic midwifery, it comes with labor pains, but that is to its meaningfulness. It’s important to know that too. No, that’s great. If I could pick up on the metaphor and so into it, I think what you’re saying, you know, in pure light and… Sorry, I had some technical difficulties. John, you wanted to pick up on the point? Yeah, I wanted to pick up on the metaphor of the firelight and what Chris was saying. And there was a famous book by Roger Zelazny called Jack of Shadows, and he was a magician and his power worked with shadows. So when there was either pure darkness or pure light, he couldn’t work his magic. And it’s a similar thing. When you’re in the firelight, the shadows come and the shadows have the capacity to turn two dimensions into three dimensions. Shadow gives us what’s called chiaroscuro. And that’s when you shadow in a picture, that’s how you turn a two dimensional picture into a three dimensional picture. It takes you into the depth. And of course, part of what’s going on in this is, and this is a bit of a youngie and play on words, is shadow work. You’re playing with your shadow and the way you project it onto situations. And I think it’s important to realize that, as Chris said, this practice doesn’t promise contentment. It doesn’t promise sort of pleasure or satisfaction. Often you’ll get the optimal experience of flow, but sometimes you’ll get a poria, that sense of disorientation that is also what Chris is talking about. That’s the shadow within the light, your shadow or the shadow of others, or the shadow of being itself, because we’re dealing with appearances, not always with realities. And learning to properly use the shadows to see the depths is actually what we’re offering. We’re not offering that you feel good. We’re offering that you become good. And there’s a fundamental difference between those. Well said. Really getting a sense of what you’re both bringing up here is this sense, and I think people can get this, is like going through these practices and dialectic and ideologos, as you could say, is the culmination of a whole series of things that we’re gonna be doing. Yes. But you get this process, you really get this sense that it’s something you, if you take the course, it’s something you go through. And so there’s that sense of a through is, on one level kind of takes, I’m in something, but I’m in something that in some sense is beyond me, is beyond me, but it’s beyond, is right here. So we’re going through something. So we’re always, like any kind of practice, the reason why we practice is, a practice is a kind of constraint that forces you to use muscles that you wouldn’t use normally. In fact, you kind of, in some sense, you put constraints around the muscles that are like your ace in the hole, right? It’s like we put those things away and start to exercise. Essentially, I would say the muscles of wisdom, which have a lot to do with, of course, wisdom has so much to do with alleviating self-deception. So all of what we’re talking about is, in some sense, the practice when it’s working well, draws out those things, draws them into light, if you will, such that we can start to exercise more and more wisdom. That’s brought out. It is educed, which is the etymological origin of education. The original meaning of education was to draw out, draw you into something. And that’s very much what you’re talking about, Guy. To reintroduce people to a more fundamental kind of education, which is not how you take information in, but how you are drawn out, you’re drawn into something beyond yourself. And it reorients you, puts you in right relationship, challenges your self-deception, challenges your egocentrism. It does all of that. And in that sense, it’s absolutely useless for what we usually think of. It’s not giving you new techniques or skill. If you walk away from this course, now I’ve got some new tricks I can play on people, then you fundamentally have not participated in the course. It’s a different thing. It’s a different thing entirely. I mean, you’ll find if you practice, start doing these practices, that it takes on a life of its own, not only within the conversation, but beyond the conversation. It’s having profound effects on me, on how I see the world and how I relate to other people. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And it becomes a way of encountering problems. Yes. It’s not the content of a particular problem or a particular line of inquiry. It is the capacity to encounter inquiry and shape with it a certain kind of relationship, a position relative to it. And in that way, it is a matter of character. And in that way, it is particularly useless and generally infinitely useful. Yeah. As are all the great things. Yes. Like great music, great art, great poetry, great love. Draws on courage and invites volunteer voluptuous vulnerability. Voluptuous vulnerability. So this is probably a good time to go into just a little bit of the way the course is laid out. And I love the term that I first heard it from John, which is it’s really an ecology of practices. And I don’t think we can emphasize this enough about dialectic and the dialogos is the culmination. It’s like a high level practice that presupposes the capacities that all the other practices that are layered. So big part of this course and what we’ve been doing is this is the third time we’re gonna be doing it. And it’s a work in progress and we’re tuning it and focusing it and put a lot of thought into the way that we layer the different practices as it moves up into dialectic and the dialogos. And so maybe we wanna talk a little bit about what the layers are and what each exercise and part of the course kind of zeros in on. So, I mean, I can go through the overview. So we’ll come in and so the first thing we’re going to be doing is getting you to train your attention. And the proper practice for that is our mindfulness practices. And already we’re doing an ecology because you’ll do a meditative practice, which gets you to stand back and look at your mental framing, look at how you’re oriented, look at how you’re paying attention. And then we’ll do a contemplative practice, which trains you to try and see more deeply into the world in an important way. Because something we haven’t spoken too explicitly about, but I’ve already alluded to it, is dialectic is not just between you and the other person. What happens is people also move between levels of interpretation, levels of understanding that correspond to levels of being. And so that movement along that vertical axis, and so you can pay attention, oh wait, all of these are part of this, and all of these are part of this. That ability to do that is a contemplative practice. So we teach you a meditative practice, a contemplative practice, and that starts to train your attention both ways, the in and out of meditation and the up and down of contemplation. Then Guy and some of his excellent highly trained facilitators will take you through some basic circling practice. And the idea of the circling practice is to learn how to use conversation not to convince, not to correct, but to enter into a right relationship with yourself and other people and in a deep way and get into a shared flow state where you are provoking insight and other people they’re provoking insight in you. Then we move into a practice called philosophical fellowship in which we take those skills and we orient them towards a philosophical text so that we are learning how to come into right relationship with a text that is trying to make us wise rather than just trying to consume its propositions. We enter into, and I think this is a good way of saying it, how do I properly love this text? How am I oriented towards it so it can draw the best from me and we can draw the best from it together? And then we take that into dialectic, into dialogos, which is a practice that brings all of these together and we teach you a special way of questioning and answering each other like Socrates. We all learn to be Socrates for each other because we don’t have one available right now. And so the best thing we can do is use the collective intelligence of that shared flow state to act as Socrates. We try to make the logos our Socrates and we try to participate in allowing that logos to adduce us, to tutor us, to draw us beyond ourselves. And you do that in such a way that it’s designed to transfer back into your life as a whole. Something to add as a sort of in the margins of all of this, especially when we get to the culminative practice of dialectic and the dialogos and the conversation, the interaction becomes less centered on the felt presence or the felt character of a person’s experience and becomes directed onto the discussion of a particular virtue and about ideas, right? When the discussion moves from yourself to the ideas and you become implicated in a discussion about ideas, we risk a lot of things in doing that. One thing that we risk is some misapprehensions. One of them is that this is an exercise in something like philosophical scholarship on the fly and it’s not, okay? It’s not debate in any classical or academic sense of the term. And you need not have any philosophical literacy per se in order to undertake the practice. In fact, philosophical literacy, I mean, it can be an aid to be sure, but it can actually also be a crutch as you can be some, we can become so sort of persnickety and preoccupied and exacting about the philosophical propositions and their origins and their histories and their implicatures and their connotations and whatnot that on all of that can be quite besides the point, right? When these ideas are not being held aloft to be determined as true or false, right? They are spatial. They are meant to open lines of relation through which to be, through which to know, right? In that sense, they are spaces to occupy. This is a container, this process. And it’s very difficult to do that without bringing all of the baggage that’s associated with these ideas and turning it into something scholarly, but it’s not. So I think that that goes in both directions, that caution, to those who would be very hesitant or even insecure about the prospect of entering into dialogos without any kind of philosophical literacy, I would say you don’t need to have it. And the process should be no less meaningful for not having it. And to those who would want to undertake it, to create from it a forum to debate ideas or theories or particular interests that you’re nursing and to find a wrapped audience for those interests, this is also not the place for it. So that caution goes in both directions to the initiated and to the uninitiated. Both of those are misapprehensions. That is not what this process is about. I wanna add to that on the other end. Well, first of all, one thing, you don’t have to be a philosopher, but we hope that this will properly engender in you a love for wisdom, which is the, Pylea, a fellowship love for wisdom. That is the way in which this is philosophical, not do you understand how Aquinas is a Neoplatonist? That’s not what we’re doing. It’s about, can you go from some sort of abstract conception of wisdom to being intimately in right relationship with it? That’s a very different thing. And many of you probably know people who may not have any philosophical training, but are wise in that way. And you admire them for good reason. Other caution, this is not therapy. None of these practices are if you are seeking therapy, that’s not what this is about. If you want therapy, you should get therapy. And I mean that with a moral imperative, you should get therapy. That’s what you need. That’s what you, this is not that. So you do not come to this because you want to work out your therapeutic problems. So it’s not that. So if some of you might be apprehensive, oh, people are gonna start talking about how they never really loved their mother and stuff like that. That’s not what this is either. This is not group therapy. This is not group therapy. That’s the other thing you need. It’s between, notice how difficult it is for us even culturally to say, wait, what’s in between therapy and academic philosophy? Exactly, we have lost that orientation, which is the fellowship love of wisdom. Yeah, totally. It just had a, I just had the last dialectic in the deal logos practice session, which you can find on my channel online. We’ve, I think we’ve done four of them so far. And the last one was so interesting because somewhere in the dialogue, we caught sight of, there’s a certain intensity that’s happening in between us and something’s calling out. And the rest of the dialogue was this exploration about what it was that we were actually dialoguing about. And it got to this place where it was so, we were just, in some sense, I felt as if I was like dripping in wonder and euphoria. But this quality of just, think about this like the ear and the sense and the developing a sense for what is it that’s gathering ourselves and orienting ourselves, right? Is bringing it back to orientation that we are oriented. What is it that gives that? And it’s the answer to that isn’t always obvious. In fact, the answer to that oftentimes leads you into a deep mystery. And so this last one was the whole second half of that dialogue was us really trying to get closer to what it was that we were actually coming close to, right? That presupposed everything that we were talking about was orienting our attention. And then noticing as we dialogued about that, right? How that affected our orientation, right? And now we’ve got closer or further away from the whole thing with this intimate, is like an intimate experience with something in between all of us, right? In such a deep, such a deep profound way is, I can’t emphasize the kind of intimacy that can be evoked when we’re talking about these ideas. And I think a lot of people have the experience of, when they think of ideas, right? Kind of to hit the point that you guys were talking about in a moment, a few moments ago, of they think about like ideas as being something kind of like inside of our head, right? Kind of a dry abstract kind of sense. But this is not at all what we’re talking about, right? That it is actually possible to become profoundly intimate with very, very, very deep ideas and to have that intimacy shared between each other. It’s such a unique, I’d say unfortunately, kind of unique experience of a profound intimacy. Like with the circling, there’s a sense where, right? We open to each other and there’s, as John mentioned, there’s that reciprocal opening, right? That mutual self-disclosure that starts to get a life of its own, right? You open and you open and you open and zero in on whatever is pertinent. And it’s very personal, like a personal self-disclosure. So in the course, we go deep into that and open that, right? Then what we do is we take that intimacy, right? And that vulnerability and that openness, and we turn it up towards the vertical. So it goes from the horizontal, right? Into the verticality. And it’s an intimacy, it’s an opening and an intimacy with something that is, you could say, with transcendence in a very deep way. Yeah, and I was talking about this yesterday about how DioLogos has the capacity to offer us a fundamental kind of reorientation, metanoia, because it has a capacity to make meaning sacred again while also changing the meaning of sacredness. So the relationship between meaning and sacredness is being reciprocally opened within the practice itself. And many people articulate this, and we’re not proselytizing it. I’m not offering a religion. In fact, people of no religious background, or notice the word I’m gonna use, orientation, tend to talk about this change as something sacred to them, as the experience of something sacred, or as Chris said, numinous, but also as a new kind of way in which meaning, not the meaning of sentences or ideas, but the meaning that people crave when they say they want their life to be meaningful. They do not mean they want more propositions than other people possess. They mean something else. They wanna be properly oriented and to write relationship with something that has a value and reality that transcends their egocentrism. That’s what they mean. And that reciprocal opening between sacredness and meaning, the sacralization of meaning, and the alteration of the meaning of sacredness, is something that Deologos gives us. We do not make it. Because if you try to make the sacred, it’s not sacred, which is part of the problem we’re facing right now. We’ve got a lot of people trying to make sacredness. You can’t do that. But Deologos has the capacity to give us a new way of orienting to the depths of meaningful reality and experience that is properly called sacred, but a new, I wanna say post-religious, but not in any derogatory sense, a post-religious sense of the sacred, in the sense that it doesn’t have to be bound, just like you do not have to come to this with a particular philosophical training, you do not have to come to this with any specific religious background. That’s what I mean. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. We all live inside of this idea. I’m glad you both took pains to elaborate this, this idea that the ideas that are being explored and inquired within are not those ideas we understand to be these sort of, these sterile conclusions that we trade and barter with. They are those structures within which we live, invisibly. Yeah. Right? Discussing a virtue would be very, very useless if the virtue was a proposition that could be concluded, true or false on the basis of that discussion. That is not what the virtue is. The virtue is that idea, idea with a capital I, if I can put it that way, that is an undergirding structure that invisibly impresses a set of beliefs and preconditions for the way in which we experience ourselves and other people. And it operates that way often beneath our notice. And so one of the things that Dio Logos helps us to do is make visible those structures, those ideas we live by and live within, such that we understand what it is that we live. And understanding what it is that we live and through what we live can begin to change our relationship to it, just as it changes our relationship to one another. Because the beauty of it is that they’re ultimately, what Dio Logos does when it’s functioning optimally, when it catches, is it uses the relationship between two people or between three or four, but let’s say two for the moment. It uses the relationship between any two people as a symbolic host for the relationship between each person and the sum total of the mystery before which they stand. And developing the intimating relationship between those two people becomes the same thing in that practice, in that process, as developing an intimate relationship with that mystery that invisibly grounds and scaffolds experience. And that revealing one is to reveal the other. And that’s what makes it so profoundly, that that’s why Dio Logos is productive of intimate relationships. It’s not because that is its goal, but that is something that happens as a consequence of the experience because the relationship is triangulating to that third factor, which cannot be sourced by the individual acting alone. Yeah. That’s how I often describe it. I often describe in Dio Logos, it’s not like debate where one side tries to win. It’s not like usual discussion where we’re just trying to come to agreement. In fact, you don’t have to come to agreement, but Dio Logos is when both people feel they have moved and Chris’s metaphor of triangulation is perfect here. They have moved to a place that they couldn’t have got to on their own. Yeah. In that quality, as we’re talking, I’m really kind of present to that quality of, you’re right, Chris. There’s an intimacy involved, but it’s not because it’s its goal of the logos. It’s more like the way of the logos. And there’s that kind of quality of that where the attention, which often habitually is like trying to look out beyond what we can see. And it’s a little bit more like trying to discover what’s right behind our eyes. That’s the domain that we’re coming into relationship with is the thing that’s kind of like the invisible hand that’s holding everything together that because it holds it in the way that it does, it does it through its very invisibility. Yet when you see it, you see it from having found yourself already in it and held by it. And such that when you bring a light to that and get over here and see the contours of the hand for a second, it’s this experience of, you could almost say for me, it’s like a deepening of a dynamical ontological faith and trust of that, oh, things are intelligible. There are things operating right below underneath all things that I find myself, I find myself already underway in participation with it. And so when that starts to become explicit, the experience of that can be life-changing. Yeah. And it is unreasonable to look behind your own eyes without borrowing someone else’s. Yeah. Exactly. Well, may we live unreasonably then. No, maybe we live reasonably so that we don’t face that unreasonableness. Right? Exactly. So are there any practical things that we need to convey before we close off? There’s, let’s see, there’s a discount until two weeks before the course. I think it’s like a 55 discount. It’s the 9th and 10th, and the 9th and 10th of July. I think it’s the course, I believe it’s 11 a.m. till 4 p.m. Pacific Standard Time. And all the details for the course will be in the links below. And it’s through, it’s hosted through the Circling Institute, which is my company. And so it’s gonna be, it’s gonna be the three of us who are the main leads of it, but there’s also gonna be a tremendous amount of support staff. Yeah, that’s a lot of support staff. Oh yeah. Yeah, so it’s really well, it’s gonna be really, really well run and organized and work, we’re fine tuning this to sing. And so the thing I wanna also emphasize is that, if you take this, just realize that you’re definitely not taking a finished product, right? You’re participating with us, right? In a certain sense of what we are discovering together. Yes. Yeah. You can really feel the spirit of that throughout. And I have to say, I have been, well, you guys, but I’ve been like so, so impressed with the people that come to this. Like- Oh yeah. The people that come to this are just, they’re just awesome, right? Everyone shows up completely hungry for this, completely really, really generative and fully participating and really open to one another and very supportive of one another. It’s this beautiful sweet spot, right? Between like love and wisdom and communitas. It’s like, it’s just, I love the people who have been, who are interested in this and who have been showing up for it. And we’ve gotten a lot of really helpful feedback from it too. Yes, yes. And people telling us what, based on what their experience has been, have been very helpful in relaying it to us and helping us to figure out what to pay more attention to, how to distribute the time and how to finesse the exercises. And I’m glad you emphasized that. It’s really important. Cause that you’re coming to participate in something and to help sort of lend yourself to the creation and the refinement of a practice. And everyone who’s participated already has helped to do that. And the- We’ve had people take, like we’ve done two, and we’ve had people that have come back from the first one and come into the second one. And they’ve been also helpful in helping us to understand, cause they would compare the two and give us feedback. So that was also something for which I was very grateful. And so you can get a picture of it. The majority, and kind of get this is that, this isn’t gonna be a lot of didactic teaching or lecturing. No. Right? The majority of it and the point of this is, it’s basically gonna be, we’ll gather as a big group, we’ll set some context, we’ll give some instructions, right, for the practice, make sure you have everything you need to do, need, and then you’re gonna be going for the most part, be in small groups. And you go and do the practice in the group together, and then we come back out and we answer questions and talk about our experience. And we go to the next layer, right? Then you go back into a small group, and then you come back and we regroup as a, as together. So it’s, majority of your time is gonna be exercising, doing the exercises in the practice. That’s what we’re doing. This is a participant with fully, full contact participatory sport. All right. Anything else you wanna say before we bring this to the opening? Yeah, I think it’s a good place to close it. Awesome. I’m so glad to be doing this together with you guys. If nothing else came of this and all that happened was I got to know you guys and become friends with you guys, that’s good enough for me. Yeah. Hear, hear. Yeah, yeah, I agree. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.