https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=NpaN59gxE28
Welcome to Voices with Verveki. I’m joined by a good friend of mine, Taylor Barrett. And Taylor actually facilitates the circling group that I attend. He’s one of the two facilitators. He and his wife Joanna. And so Taylor’s also doing some really interesting work around circling, authentic belating. And also he’s in an interesting way, he’s taken up the call of trying to bring a little bit more of, if you’ll allow me, a term, philosophia into circling. And what does that look like? And so I’m just going to turn it over to Taylor to introduce himself and talk a little bit about where he’s coming from and what he’s seeking for. Thanks, John. Yeah, so I think I’ve been working in authentic belating for the last seven years. It was not something I was looking for. My wife had found it. And we weren’t married at the time. We had only been dating for like two weeks. And so she sort of said like, hey, you want to try this thing? And I was just in a position where I was really open to new things. So I did this thing. And I had no idea, like the end result of this, I had no idea that I needed this. I had no concept of what was possible. I had never done any therapy. I had never done any sort of group process work. It was just very much an automatic move with my life. And it was amazing after our first event, we spent hours sort of debriefing it and immediately changed our language, changed the way we were relating to each other. And we just started burning through our stuff, like our material. Just getting more intimate and more close and getting down to the heart of the real truth of what was underneath all our behaviors, all our surface behaviors. So I mean, the magic of that experience, and sort of being on this rocket ship together, had us do all the events. And then there were trainings being offered. So we took the trainings, just really so believing in what this could do for us. So yeah, we took over the Toronto community about four and a half, five years ago. Started building it out, adding more events and more facilitators and training them. So that’s sort of how that’s been going. But I mean, all this work, this authentic relating work, is really falls under sort of an umbrella of relational leadership, or maybe more actually relational self leadership. How do we bring ourselves and how do we take responsibility for ourselves in relationship with other people? And the frame for this is around authenticity. And the way we hold authenticity is, it’s more where our outward expression more accurately reflects our inner experience. And this is a little bit different than say like a radical honesty practice, where you just share everything that comes in your mind. Here, this is sort of in service of something. For example, if I was upset with you, and I decided you were some expletive name, in radical honesty, I might just say that thing. In authentic relating, I also might say that thing, but probably more accurately, it’s just like, I notice I’m feeling really angry with you. And then when we get really good at it, we might notice something that’s underneath it. And that’s because I’m feeling a bit hurt that about that thing that you said, you know, so we start to sort of own our experience, not make you responsible for make other people responsible for we sort of like, take it back and sort of own it. It’s almost like a subtle shadow integration, that motion of sort of taking it back and re identifying. Right, right. Yeah. So that’s on that sort of the, you know, the basis for me or the way I hold authentic relating, and it can be sort of looked at as a way of being like a way to be in the world, you know, through this relational self leadership. But then there’s things that are known as authentic relating practice, which you’ve experienced in a sort of the warm ups that we do. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And we sort of liken those to like going to the emotional workout gym, you know, so when you go to the normal gym, you know, you go do squats over here, and you go do a leg press over there, and you do biceps here. And an authentic relating practice, we might work on our empathy, we might work on our listening skills, we might work on noticing, like bringing language to our emotions. And so that’s sort of authentic relating practice. And then circling, which I know you’re familiar with, but you know, it’s this, we call it an intersubjective meditation practice. It’s like a group practice, and there’s different formats of it and slight variations to it. But this also fall, I consider this falling under-authentic relating practice. To me, it’s like the marathon, you know, we go to the gym, so that we can run the marathon and to me circling is sort of the is the main event. Yeah. So, so that’s, you know, what what I’ve been up to for the last seven years and then I noticed about six months ago or so, after watching a number of your episodes of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, and some of the stuff that Peter was doing, like, you know, he was really like shaking, you know, containers. Yeah, Peter Lindberg, yeah, yeah, like sort of shaking up containers and sort of like clashing, you know, like different groups and sects. And I just noticed, like through that, I think you had started talking with maybe Jordan Hall at that time and Guy Sangstock, and I noticed Rebel Wisdom was starting to talk with, you know, and I’m watching these videos and I’m like, I’m starting to get this sense like, oh yeah, there’s something here. Like, we were sort of, like six months ago, it seemed like we were sort of teasing around the emergence of some idea, something that to me was a bit transcendent of circling. Right, right. I still love circling. I’m still going to do circling. I’m still going to train circling. I think it’s critical. And the intention that we bring in circling to really, like, be with you in your world, as beautiful as it is, as transformative of a practice as it can be, it also has some limitations. And, you know, by trade, I’m a problem solver. You know, before I got into this, I wrote software. I’m a software engineer. Right, right. So my brain actually works really well for, you know, solving problems. And then you’re bringing in this frame of sense making while I’m, like, feeling really integrated with the circle. I’m like, oh, what can we do with this? Right, right. At the same time I’m thinking about this, I’m like sitting in one of your Q&As and you say, oh, what if we take circling and drop a problem into it? Okay, we’re talking about very similar things here. So that’s when I had contacted you and said, like, hey, I’m starting to think about, you know, running a project to try to blend the first, second, and third person perspectives into a more whole discussion. Right, right, right. Because in my sense with circling, we focus primarily on the I and the we. Yeah. So the very first and second person. We don’t talk about a lot of content there. I’ve known people in this community for five years. I have no idea what they do for a job. You know, like, that’s not the way that we actually interact. But when it comes to, like, the world’s problems, I’m like, I just see problems everywhere. That’s just my orientation. It’s a bit of a pain, but it’s a bit of a torment, too. So, you know, pre-COVID, pre-pandemic, the biggest pain that I was experiencing in my circles was sort of like ideological possession and polarities, you know, right? Like they’re happening in society and just this clashing, and it’s just like, wow, why can’t, you know, this, this sucks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is so uncomfortable and terrible. And I can, from one side, see it as like a necessarily developmental stage for people to go through, for society to go through. And it’s like, surely we can do this better. So that was sort of the fire that has sort of lit me up in sort of experimenting with trying to find a different way to have a conversation around polarities. What’s since happened, since the pandemic has come, is somehow that didn’t feel so salient anymore. I was like, okay, I mean, that’s still out there, but I want to have a different kind of conversation. Now I want to have much more of a collective intelligence style of conversation. And that’s been the last few rounds of the experiment have really been not so much about the way in which we are saying, but trying to bring our relationship to the pandemic into coherence in the hopes that it might start to reveal some really strong insight or even internal motivation to turn around and start moving into action. That’s sort of been the trajectory of it for me. So there’s a lot there. Wow, that was great. No, no, no, no, don’t apologize. That’s why I didn’t interrupt. It was, it was unfolding really, really with very smooth intelligibility. So that obviously means that there’s some ways in which you put your finger on a couple points, but I want you to go back and just unpack if you would please a little bit more about, you know, why is circling inadequate for the things you’re pursuing here? And I will, of course, the caveat, the acknowledgement, you love circling, it’s part of your way of life. I get that. That’s not what I’m asking. I’m not, I’m not asking you for, I’m asking you for critique, not just criticism. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, so I think my perception of circling, although I might practice circling a little bit different than I’ve always had a bit of an allowance, but there’s a tendency within circling of this sort of intention to, to go really inward into the subjective and to explore the subjective. And while I think our subjective relationship to whatever the third person problem is, for say, is extremely important, we don’t tend to actually look at the problem. The problem tends to be something like, oh, I’m really hard on myself, or I feel a lot of fear about being alone during the pandemic, right? And that, you know, might be, you know, an exploration of, you know, well, you know, what does that fear work? Where does it live in your body? What does that feel like? All very helpful and important explorations. Right. But I think you sort of said something about this before, too. It’s sort of like, okay, but now, now what do you do with that? You know, like, where do you go from there? So I think it affords great, great, great, great, great, from there. So I think it affords great personal insight. And, and I see it as a fantastic personal growth tool. But as I consider this, this sort of the shift out, or I’ve been seeing it as a bit more of a, I think you would call it an anagogic, you know, sort of rise, right, is that that’s, that’s still there. We still have some, some degree of insight into into our subjective, but it also like, seems to like bring something forward into the space that men, others can sort of play with. Yes. And then form their relationships to it, you know, and we can sometimes do that in circling. But again, it comes right back to the individual and the eye and the subjective, like, it’s a little bit different for me. And again, very important distinctions, but we just tend to devalue the it, the thing we don’t come in with a problem, we might talk about how we relate to the problem, but we don’t, it doesn’t afford much wisdom, self wisdom, sure. But like, collective wisdom, right, less certain. Yeah, so there’s a way in which if you’ll see if this resonates, you know, that circling sort of really activates, actualizes, you know, collective intelligence, and even puts it into this, you know, dynamic flow. And people do note that they note that, you know, you, we often get into, you know, two people will resonate, and they’ll do that subjective exploration, facilitating each other. But we, we’ve noted in circling that, but there’s, there’s ways in which the circle sort of weaves these things together and does, can sometimes disclose something beyond the individual, right. So, and when I remember, there was one thing we were did where it was actually an interaction that you and I had at the end of a circling, where the shift in the locus of intimacy was off you and I being intimate with each other. That wasn’t, that wasn’t abandoned, but that was backgrounded. And that platformed an intimacy with the process of intelligibility itself, with the sense making process itself. And so, and that to me was a bit of a felt shift. And so there’s a possibility that once we activate it and actualize it, we could, we could couple to it, we could, we could, we could like sail on the wave of intimacy, if you’ll allow me some metaphors here, Jordan Hall’s metaphor, right, with a kind of direction and orientation, like so that, you know, like you said, we could, we could drop a problem in, or we can drop a mystery in, like we, and again, not to foreclose that we’re getting, looking for an answer. I think of it more as could we activate collective intelligence and shape it into collective wisdom so that we get into right relationship with reality and the problem. Just like circling brings us into right relationship with each other, people are invoking that language a lot. I feel so connected and it’s so good and it’s so right, right? It hasn’t finished our relationship. We don’t go, well, you know, Taylor, that was it. Now we’re done, right? Right. So instead we’re coming into right relationship, but we can, what we, there are things, there are things, and I’m using this term as neutrally as possible. There are things we have to come into right relationship other than with ourselves and just each other. We have to come into right relationship with ways of being, with patterns in our culture, with the unfolding of reality itself, and the COVID crisis makes that deeply apparent to us. Is that, does that land with you? Oh yeah, totally, totally. I almost see it as like the circling part of the process that you and I are exploring, like sets us up not so much to achieve this end goal, but it sets us up in such a way in which it’s possible that something could actually manifest. It’s almost like without that intimacy, you know, there isn’t a trust. I might not be willing to try out a new idea or, you know, bounce that off because, you know, maybe normally I don’t know who you are and maybe you’re going to judge me, but here it’s like, oh, we’re in a relationship and we’re getting each other and we’re reciprocally sort of building this thing, then it affords, yeah, it affords a lot more trust and therefore I think freedom of exploration is probably the way I would look at it. So that then, so two quite, sort of a two-part question, and let me give some contextualization for it. You know, I’ve been doing stuff with, and you mentioned it with Guy and Chris, you know, Guy Sendstock, Chris Mastrofietro, Jordan Hall, and other people about, you know, trying to bring philosophy into circling. Guy calls it circling 2.0, but people are now sort of adopting the term that Chris and I have, the dialogos, because we’re also harkening back to sort of the Socratic Platonic template of these kinds of open-ended discussions, right, and that, in which people are getting, they’re accessing collective intelligence, but they’re trying to participate in it such that it is turned towards getting into deeper and more comprehensive right relationships, to being, to others, to important social ideals like justice, and so the two-part question is, what is it specifically you’re trying to do in your experiments, or talk like lay it out, and the progression, what are you finding, what have you learned, I mean, a good experiment should always challenge you, it should be, well, some of the predictions came, it’s a good experiment if you say some of the predictions came true, and some of them didn’t, and the ones that didn’t give me a better way of interpreting the ones that did, so that, and then, so you’re what you’re doing, and then how, because, you know, I’ve talked about it, how is it convergent with, and how can it be put into conversation, sorry for the pun, with the sort of the dialectic, dialogic, dialogos project that I’ve been involved in? Yeah. Is that okay, is the question, or was that too much? I think I get it. Okay. Correct me if I’m, if I go off into the weeds or something. Yeah, so yeah, the first couple of rounds around it, I had like this focus on people taking a side and putting four people into a conversation, a facilitated conversation, and then I had people on the outside observing that conversation, and there were a few reasons for doing that, but I wanted some people just in an observational third-person role to create a bit of an arm’s length distance to when we started actually talking about the content, and what I found in that was rather, I mean, there could be a few reasons of why it sort of worked and sort of didn’t work, so we picked a topic, and this topic was about the change of lyrics around the baby it’s cold outside around Christmas time, because it was about right for the time, and there were people who said like, that was ridiculous, it shouldn’t have changed the lyrics, and people, we tried to pick something a little on the safe end just to try out the structure first, and what happened was, for me as a facilitator, I started off in it. I started off in the third person and just sort of like checking in with everybody to see what their position was, and get shared reality about that position. Fortunately, what happened is the people in the conversation actually found their own points of meeting and started to come a little bit more into an I or we around this idea, so we could sense the potential, but something about it didn’t feel as intimate or say as potent as say, if we circled around it, like if really one of the circling intention, and then the next time I did it, we really struggled again, like it was something about maybe it was the sample group, taking people who are familiar with owning their experiences, and really not projecting, and being able to see complexity, and not actually really take a full on hard stance on a particular position. That seemed to be really difficult just to tease out the polarity to even do the experiment, so in some ways with that a bit fizzled, it made it really sort of this wonky discussion of like, well how are we gonna like come to some meeting point of understanding somewhere in the middle of shared reality around these issues, just it just wasn’t really happening. So then I tried a couple more rounds, but you know this was now into the pandemic, and I was noticing the way people were relating to this particular issue. I was trying to have other discussions about the pandemic, and I noticed every time I would try to talk about the it of the pandemic, it was so hard to come into any kind of coherence, because everybody had their unique personal impact of how they were being impacted by the pandemic. It was only until we could actually address and have them bring their voices forward, and feel heard and seen and how they’re impacted, did they seem open or even capable of starting to take in some of the objective aspects of it. So that was like, okay I definitely need to come with you know with the first person perspective first. So that was very important to sort of learn, but even in that particular one there were a number of gaps in capacity in terms of relational capacity. So there was actually some pretty big gaps in how people were relating to each other, and then to have like six people in about an hour and like to try to get everybody to sort of meet, and it just wasn’t working. So it further revealed to me how important capacity is, or at least some sort of pedagogical lead up to it, like context setting, in terms of actually being able to do this really well. So you know you had mentioned that one situation with you and I at the end of circling where we said like oh let’s experiment with this, and when you feel like we’re at the point let’s zoom out, and then zoom in and zoom out you know. And I think that worked so easily because of one you and I already had whatever the relationship was, there was already that intimacy, we already started in circling, but then there’s a certain capacity of me to like, like I don’t have any belonging needs with you or with the group, I’m not afraid that you’re going to judge me, I don’t have this other thread that I have to, so it allows me to open up and surrender to the symbolism that was happening in that particular exploration. So I’m noticing these sort of these bits and pieces of what are the ingredients for success, and how does even I hold a large developmental lens when I’m working with people, and it’s like where, like what can we reasonably expect or how can we configure this such that it’s more accessible. I think I watched you and Guy and Jordan do a dialogous conversation and it’s like yeah, like that makes sense. I would not be able to have had that conversation with the mix group that I had and there’s you know various reasons for that. So it’s starting to sort of notice like how can we bring this relational leadership style of conversation in which we can actually work on a problem in a way that’s accessible to people that provides like a leg up towards I think you know more of a dialogous conversation. Right. Yeah, so that’s kind of what I’ve been noticing in a real general sense in trying to move towards that. So I’m imagining future ones might be you know I might start to pick out a specific invite group and set a specific type of context for people who I think could really open their perspectives in a very philosophical sort of theoretical perspective, and then see what happens from that using the same tools I would say or the same intention of you know let’s connect, let’s you know solve whatever interpersonal thing to get the flow going, and then let’s notice where are the moments where we have, it’s the word salience or sort of a cohesion around something and then it’s like okay now we can pop out and now we can start to sense make on it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so yeah I’m trying to reverse engineer that too. I’ve sent you some documents around that. So there’s that and that’s you know and it’s very much a work in progress. So a couple things come to mind. One is you know Peter and I are talking about this you know sort of a progressive program of pedagogy like you may be like you know maybe you start with just you know social noting and then perhaps move into something like empathy circling because Edwin argues it’s a great gateway practice right for moving people from adversarial winner take all into weight. We can actually make stuff together. We can get into right relationship with each other and that’s much more important than having the right view, right relationship, right and then maybe taking it into circling and then I’ve been trying you know I said what would you do to like you said to notice the moments where people are sensing the hand of the logos and get that zoom in zoom out thing happening. Yeah. So I think part of what I’m saying is and I you did you did bring up pedagogy it sounds like ways in which we can try and do the bridging and the capacity affordance is if we have that pedagogical program and you know it’s like when I’m teaching the meditation course I don’t teach people prajna at the beginning you have this progressive build up of skills and practices that scaffold people in so that would be sort of the bottom up but I also think and you know and Chris and I are talking about this and I want to I want to get your feedback on it that that should be complemented with a lot of sorry this is I know I’m struggling for an adjective here I want to say it’s sort of high level and that’s sounds elitist so I’m trying not to so high level the logos that we’re you know and and also ask people to they don’t get it but imitate it play with it pretend right because that’s what kids do that’s what kids do until they pretend until they can comprehend right and so the idea of getting a practice where we say look we’re going to show you this and obviously not at the beginning but let’s say people are starting to move into this pedagogical programming and say now let’s watch some of these and you’re not going to be able to do that that’s fine and don’t worry let’s get into serious play try to imitate it try to imitate it as much as you get and I’m not holding myself out as something I’m just saying imitate imitate the deal logos or wherever we can find it I mean because that’s what that’s why soccer that’s why Plato wrote the dialogues right initially we sort of and I’m saying maybe we can have a simultaneous strategy where we’re doing this you know pedagogical program where we have sequences of practices that scaffold people in bridge them in build their capacity but also give them a lot of role modeling and right and say okay just just imitate this play pretend what you know play and pretend and imitate play and pretend and imitate because this is how kids also you know this is how they go through developmental stages and I’m wondering if you know if we got a pedagogical program of practices and then we had sort of ritualized imitation serious play you go into a church that’s how they scaffold people into Christianity and I don’t mean I don’t mean any insult you take them through a catagism you build them up but you also do a lot of imitating of Christ you do a lot of imitating of Christ and imitating of Paul right and imitating of mose you do all that you do both of those together so what do you think about that as a proposal yeah yeah I mean what I noticed in the last round when I ran it is there was a moment where I felt like I was in contact with the logos I’m like oh this is the thing right so I brought it forward as an invitation nobody took it up so I waited and I’m like you know they said whatever they wanted to say and I brought it back in as an invitation you know sort of like oh what is it about this thing that has like you want to do this and you want to do this and I want to do this what is it and they just didn’t seem to quite know what to do with the invitation right which you know is more on me than on them but I know at the end of that I felt like we really got somewhere like at the end of it like everybody was like no I really enjoyed that I want to do this again let’s do a series of these and so in you know for me the thing that I trust the most is like what was my intention and then what’s the felt experience I have at the end of it do I feel like you know I’m moving towards that intention or I’m moving away from it and I think to a certain degree you know just having that discussion even though we didn’t you know go into some sort of you know huge relevance realization around you know why we have a tendency to give the perfect advice to other people but not and not take it on ourselves right good you know which was the piece I’m like oh I want to go into that like let’s do that out but I think just the idea that we can have that conversation start bringing in that third person was a very different type of conversation that I’ve ever had with that group of people and it and I canvassed them I asked them and it was very different than any other conversation that they had too so it’s almost like we’re hinting at the potential the more and more in which we sort of exercise this so I think even just sort of the role-playing idea or sort of the imitation idea I think would also serve that in very much the same way it creates a comfort with the intention in the container of what we’re here to do and maybe I’m not going to quite you know I’ll need the training wheels and then I’ll take the train I might fall over but you know I get an idea of what it is that we’re doing because I’ve seen somebody ride a bike before I’ve never seen somebody ride a bike before I might look at the bike and not know what in the heck I’m supposed to do with that exactly that’s a beautiful analogy yeah so that’s all I think that’s I think that’s a great idea and I appreciate you bringing it forward because it gives me some ideas it’s like oh okay I know what I’m gonna do well I mean and this is also something I guess I’m trying to argue for and exemplify you know I keep going back to this template of dialectic and you know Socrates and Plato and it keeps it keeps being a fount of intelligibility it keeps giving me because and there’s and you actually see you actually see it in the dialogues that people like even the aporetic dialogues the dialogues where you know they bring up some problem and they don’t get a solution and it’s it looked at argumentatively it was like well that was useless no we didn’t figure out what you know what courage is but it like but if you pay attention to the dialogue what happens is people get educated right in a particular way they they they stop they they let’s see they stop following the authority of obviousness well you know just wow it’s facts right or you know the authority of you know sort of formal definitions well I read that this is it right and and then what happens right is as people get into that and they instead get into the right relationship with the logos what you see is the people who like the people that Socrates were was dialoguing with they’ll say things like well I want my sons to hang around you I want I want my children to hang around you so although you could so so although we didn’t come up with the definition of courage you exemplified it you exemplified it you know in a powerful way you made it sort of beautifully accessible to me and I want my sons to stay around you because I think if they could imitate you long enough then they would get right so they at least get that inkling you’re talking about and then that inkling gets linked to them to imitation now of course they’re adults and so they have their egos and they’re not going to imitate but they want their kids their sons and this is this is very important in ancient they want their sons to start to imitate Socrates and I so I think there’s developmentally that modeling the relationship between inkling and imitation is actually a very natural one for us yeah and I think what I’m sort of hoping um like I don’t know ultimately what we’ll end up doing with this conversation if we just have the conversation or if we find out like oh actually people might actually want to watch this conversation too and I think that’s why I had the observant role too I’m still trying to figure out how to bring that back in I’ve taken it out but something about it I know feels right to me there is um there’s something I think really valuable in having people in that third person role yeah but um my sense is is that through what was I going to say through um I’m starting to lose the thread now what was I going to say like I the last thing I said was sort of inkling into imitation yeah yeah it was um I know it’s I know it’s still on the thread of imitation well the one thing that I would say is when we when we train people in circling before they know how to recircle before we have given them all the tools and I mean it’s a highly experiential practice so really your training is not done after we give you you know the pedagogy anyways like you have to they do circling but at first we won’t call it circling we call it something else so that you know the pressure of I don’t know how to do that isn’t there you know so we bring in an element of circling and then we start to say okay now we’re going to do it this way you’re just going to circle me like you know as opposed to you know so we start to sort of pad this out and grow it so that they’re technically always have been circling um but you know before they have all the knowledge one may need to hold that structure so I think that you know is already a thing that’s in place for at least how I train people in circling and I’m pretty sure others would too I don’t think I’m sure everybody’s doing training circles um so I think that’s very much a part of it you know and you get the feedback which is kind of why I’m just hoping to use the observational group actually use this container also as a training tool in of itself as a teaching tool so there’s the there’s the insight that it can afford and there’s also the practice of doing it and not being successful as a teaching tool as well right right right right right um yeah so I see what you’re saying though there’s a sense in which the people in the third person perspective maybe this was the connection you were you were you were feeling towards they’re going from like you know participating in the insight and the flow to seeing it as something and when it works they are getting something that they may want to imitate they may want to participate in it was that part of the intent of that of having the group out there well I certainly have gotten that when we would go to take feedback from the third everybody would start bringing in their first person subjective sort of opinion about the topic so you could really see people you know who were in the third person role really wanted to be part of that conversation so that sort of validates the idea right I think this was the thing I was going to say that maybe we can present this as something that you know so you have these fantastic conversations with Jordan Hall maybe your your conversations with him aren’t an accurate analogy here or a frame maybe take like a rebel wisdom one where David Fuller is interviewing Jordan Hall or yourself about something it’s this sort of discussion that’s sort of in one direction to the expert yeah you guys do it beautifully but not everybody’s an expert so how do we bring people into having a conversation like like you’re saying like it’s not going to be this but maybe we’re imitating maybe we’re building starting to build the capacity through actually enacting the the practice such that maybe it doesn’t feel like a bridge too far oh well maybe I’ll actually share my opinion this time oh actually now I’m going to stand for my opinion this time well actually I’m going to go do some research on life you know like we’re giving them an opportunity that maybe they feel like a sort of a me too I can do that as well rather than watching you know beautiful and really inspiring for me two-hour conversations but it’s just like they don’t have a bridge like how do I get to a place of philosophia right how do I do that well hey maybe there’s a practice here that starts to crank that engine a little bit that’s good that’s good yeah so that’s what I’m hoping for no no that’s good I like that so the the thing that came to mind was a pedagogical model of apprenticeship right and that um and then yeah and you don’t you don’t expose the apprentice to to the masterwork at the beginning if you’ll that’s where masterpiece comes from that’s that’s right right uh yeah um you you don’t expose them to so it’s perhaps masterpiece on uh conversations well you don’t forbid them of course but maybe like you said maybe what you need is you you need sort of you need role models uh that are also sort of timed at quit at you know critical transition periods within the pedagogical program so when you’re like when you’re in this one here’s a role model that you can imitate for what to do here and then when people move you go oh here’s a role model for what you do here and then yeah here’s a role model for what you do there and then you can go to the bottom up you could do the enacting you could also be doing the imitating and then you could scaffold people up and then when they’re getting and then you say okay now here and you present something like that yeah totally yeah yeah and that totally fits with my intention and why i was holding this particular frame for it rather than you know this you know philosophia or like still the logos is available in our conversations but we’re not having a philosophical or a very broad sort of conceptual sort of discussion but i believe that the the thing that we’re doing the the motions that we’re doing the zooming in the zooming out the integrating of these three perspectives those are happening in both of our explorations yeah yeah that’s good that’s really good yeah well i’m glad i’m recording this because this is going to be very valuable for the work that i’m doing so are you like i guess are you going to continue the experimentation or is the is the is covid really putting a dent in uh in in trying to keep things going no no i’m actually um we’ve done more um fortunately because of online it’s a little bit and plus people aren’t as busy i guess yeah yeah so there are people are a little bit more available um but also because i’ve shifted some of the experiment down to smaller groups i you know i had over complexified it i think i was trying to like track way too many things in the first couple rounds i’m like okay i need to like distill this down into the basics and then bring something in that’s always how experimental design goes that’s always how experimental design i feel so much federally i thought it was like why am i over complicating this um so no actually um i’m actually thinking about doing a series that is massively influenced by the experiment and not actually connecting this series to the experiment but sort of having maybe one of these entry-level style of discussions um that starts to bring in that first or second layer of complexity and then if we can sort of if that’s working really well then bring in you know bring in the added complexity and then maybe we’ll do one more we’re actually like zooming like way out and moving maybe into some idea of sort of a philosophy or like really conceptual thinking once we’ve sort of built up this relationship to the practice so that’s my loose um plan for the next couple of weeks is to uh to sort of start a series of these conversations that i think will will fit more into um the intention of the experiment that’s cool that’s cool um so yeah there was a couple things that came up when you were you were mentioning that um so what um what what do you think about this practice like like um you knew i was gonna ask this so this practice and and i don’t mean just circling i mean the whole pedagogical apprenticeship from you know from maybe you know social noting up to full-blown dialogos right and and and the way it’s you know it’s it’s exemplifying a way of being not just a way of thinking and that’s part of what’s behind the whole notion of authentic relating how is that what’s the word i want to use i want to say something like what relationship does it have in affording a response to the meaning crisis and what relationship does it have with with responding affording a response to the way the coveted crisis is really exacerbating the meaning crisis yeah um so oh you know i feel you know he’s gonna do this at some point i feel like really excited and i’m like oh my god there’s so many like entry points into this discussion um what i would say because i’m holding that developmental lens um and i just can’t seem to let it go it just seems to work so well for me um and and sort of how i perceive and make sense of the world and uh and relationships with other people and what i really see is is that you know if we look at the crisis of meaning is you know i’ve sort of held this frame that you know we don’t we don’t have this institution or this um to turn around and give our power away to um or to enter into community with like that used to be the church right or or a particular faith or religion and as that sort of starts to die off in a sort of a post-truth world it’s like what what is the thing that is greater than our egos greater than ourselves that we want to give ourselves to like that seems to be like a biological mattering mattering you matter exactly yeah you belong to something bigger than ourselves and we need to make we need to feel like we’re connected to it in a way that matters to it yeah yeah exactly and and i think you know through authentic relating the thing that matters is the quote unquote other which is in very very uh many ways also ourselves right so i sort of hold a particular frame that you know yes god exists but it is exists within here within my perception within my relevance realization within my salience landscape you know that’s what’s there and can i open transcend my ego and allow that information in to guide me so that’s sort of my spiritual orientation if we were to call it right right and i think my experience like i didn’t have that before authentic relating so it was through my experience in authentic relating of you know i went into authentic relating as a misanthrope i didn’t like people i really didn’t like people like i blamed everybody else for everything that was wrong everywhere um and now i feel like i’ve got the capacity i could love anybody and it’s and and that came through these practices of sort of being with people in their world and noticing how i’m impacted and then how they’re impacted by my sharing of that like it created something richer in my experience than i experienced anywhere else so it felt like it was something much greater than me like oh there is something here that i can’t create on my own i could sit here and meditate i’m not going to get this same experience that i’m having in relationship with you or a relationship with a group so that you know just you know the enormity of that and then how it brought value back into my own uh perception of who i am and my identity and what i was able to learn about myself just through the reflections that would come back through this like to me and it created a shared context for me and my wife like it’s in so many ways it’s become my world and it i had never thought about mission and purpose until about a year into doing this i you know there was a weekend immersion so it’s like really intense like two three days of like just you know inner inner work and you know looking in and relating and i just i got i got so scared i got so scared because i thought oh wow for me to do this thing that i now feel called to do it’s going to like blow up my entire life like my life is going to change in this moment so i just wanted to note and this is not you know me this is not in any way an insult i want to know how religious your language is becoming you’re feeling called you’re connected you’re speaking of the logos that you know this you know like it’s sacred to you it’s transformative um right it puts you into right relationship with yourself with other people i mean you’re you so i sense it and we we haven’t talked too much about your past uh together personally but i sense that not only did you go from being a misanthrope to being philanthropic um it sounds like you also went from kind of a a secular or non-religious stance to a more spiritual more religious in the sense of enacting religio in the way we’re talking about here is that also something that happened yeah totally yeah that’s exactly so that’s the way in which it is a deep response to the meaning crisis i mean you’ll allow me and i if you feel this is an imposition challenge me right away but it seems to me this is kind of like what i’m trying to talk about the religion that’s not a religion we are activating and enacting the logos we’re feeling called by it we’re in faith to it we’re trying to stay dynamically coupled it’s putting us in the right relationship with ourselves with being with each other it’s leading us to aspire it’s giving us mission all this kind of stuff yet you’re not being bound to a particular you know uh dogma dogma set of propositions the dogma that emerges is purely reflective practical it’s pragmatic dogma it’s well what are the things that are most are reliably invariant that afford us getting into this flow that seems to me and i’ve noticed that that’s that’s i mean in the circling and reading about it that this spontaneous emergence of you know of spiritual and religious language that seems to be like a common feature in the in these in the in in circling events and things like i’ve seen well i’ve seen it in person and i’ve read about it and it just happened here between you and i when you were relating yeah and so go ahead go ahead i think it’s fair to say that my language in general around any of these newer experiences is very limited because i really didn’t have you know a religious background i really didn’t have like this is a whole new world you know like we make a joke it’s like seeing the matrix right right right take the pill and now you can’t unsee everything that you can now see yeah yeah through that it’s like i don’t have you i don’t have your education and your mass vocabulary too so for me it’s like i’m picking up you know this is the way in which i’m imitating you know the people who taught me or who are mentoring me in it it’s like this is this is the language that they’re using and i make meaning using those words right so when i read like your papers i have to like i have to translate them because i know what you’re saying like oh this is you know this is this thing in my world or you know in my language it’s exactly we’re talking about the same thing but it’s just the language is different so i don’t i think that’s more i’m not quite sure where that comes from i don’t i don’t know that i can identify that it’s some part of me that wants to identify with that idea of spirituality or religion but there is this perspective that i’m experiencing things that are bigger than myself greater than my ego and in that space it seems to me most of the you know set of academic circles most of that language is religious language yeah yeah yeah very much you well you explicitly did invoke god in your description and it’s the subtlety of being connected to something larger than yourself that calls you you also talk that you feel called by it like it’s it’s inducing you it’s drawing you forth it’s ecstatic it’s you know it’s drawing you beyond yourself right and so there’s something deeply aspirational and transformative about it too and so i think that’s right i think i think that the way in which the practice practices exemplify a way of being is the way in which this responds to the meeting crisis i don’t think it’s going to produce a set of propositions wherever it goes oh yes of course right yeah i agree i don’t think it will either right but my sense is what it is or what it’s in service of is a transition through to the next stage of development yeah for me i see it’s it’s helping you know hopefully helping society like i’m bringing in complexity the work that i’m doing brings in complexity to most people’s lives and awareness of themselves in relationship you know like most people don’t consider construct like they’re not even remotely construct aware most people can’t even take their own perspective right they can’t even are they don’t even know what that is so i’m trying you know again through the developmental theory lens i’m trying to bring in this complexity in something that really matters to people and that tends to be their relationships right you know the studies all say you know what was the most important thing before it was your relationships like it just seems to be the closest thing to objective reality we can put our finger on and therefore to to bring sort of this this mode of development or moving through to grease the wheels to add the complexity to create the you know is that one of the one of my teachers says you know a change happens either through by accident or through discourse and it’s like these practices make us more accident prone setting up these containers like give us an opportunity to clash i think you have a you have a map that you brought i remember and and that’s sort of that thing like it you know and then you can zoom out from it and you can look at it again and then you break the frame right yeah you can zoom out and look at the frame and you know so to me that’s what we’re doing through authentic relating through circling and so i see it as like in service of sort of bringing us through to the next developmental level and sort of pragmatically but also in terms of of meaning it’s just it’s been so deeply satisfying like like i don’t need a thing out there it’s not a car car doesn’t make me satisfied a new coat doesn’t make me satisfied in a way in which coming into deep connection with myself and with others like it’s it’s that’s meaning it’s just exactly yeah that’s the meaning yeah and then you know in terms of the covid piece sort of the you know the series of um of conversations that i want to start is i want what i sense is i’ve sort of been holding this question that the pandemic you know is creating a pregnancy of possibility there’s so much potential yeah kairos exactly yeah we’re on that call talking about that and for me it’s like okay what do we want to give birth to you know but i was on a call my fifth round and i remember somebody was sort of like i’ve got like this energy but i don’t know what to do with it they don’t know how to bring it into action yeah so i’m hoping that we can have in a collective intelligence conversation and we’ll find a thread of coherence and that that will build and grow into some sort of you know i don’t know sub meaning or micro meaning or as an alignment with their own individual meaning even if they can’t identify that meaning it’ll light something up in them the logos and then bring that into action and i’m hoping that that is what these conversations you know you were talking about the campfire right yeah yeah it’s like that’s what i want to do i just want to be a little bit more intentional rather than casually talking very much very much yeah yeah so i mean there’s a sense in which you know we’re trying we’re trying to sort of um um what is it nervous raft you know that you’re on a raft and you’re rebuilding it as you’re as you’re as you’re floating on it and i think you know we’re trying to from within the culture we’re trying to rebuild it this is the it’s a slogan i have about stealing the culture right right you know you know if we can make ways of life and ways of being with ourselves and with each other and with the world um like that do that what you just described that sort of that expanding field of coherence i mean i think we could we could do what you know what religions like christianity and buddhism did they didn’t go in and say you know at times they did but mostly what they did is they went in and they gave people these new ways of talking and being and seeing and growing right and and then what happens is it you know and a new culture emerges from and i think that is um there’s a potential for that now with uh the the kairos we’re in one of the things you can see and you can even ask people is what are you reflecting on now right that you weren’t reflecting on before right like what is what is coming to mind or what’s pressing what’s demanding and and and and guy has this wonderful phrase um and i like playing with it riffing on like well you know coming to terms which has both the sense of you know coming to words articulation but also confronting and you know you know not trying to avoid anymore so a way i’ve been thinking about it of asking people is what’s coming to terms for you right now yeah i like that and and and again and and of course this will and so there’s there’s a sense in which the because we are out of normalcy and we’re not going to go back to more the even trudeau said we’re in this is the new normal right um right because we’re out of it we i think we are now willing to reflect upon meaning and intelligibility i get your point we’re not going to many people can’t reflect on it with great expertise and that is not a criticism of them yeah oh right and it shouldn’t be taken like in any way as that but there’s at least a stance of reflection that is now i think becoming more pervasive it wasn’t there a couple months ago yeah yeah totally and not even i think to a certain extent for some people i think it was available maybe a couple you know a few weeks ago but for a lot of people it didn’t seem like it was quite available for them yet because they were still though excuse me the whole situation was so novel to them yeah it just had them you know and now as you you know my my experience is you know as the novel becomes integrated it becomes sort of your background or it becomes you know the water you’re swimming in now you can actually afford to to look at something else yeah you know like other things become salient to you now that you know you’ve the low-grade anxiety of you know what’s going to happen you know totally that’s that’s still there but i mean your your new normal is now more of a normal you’re not referring to it every day as a new normal it’s just you know okay i’m not going to work today and i mean and not not to in any way diminish you know there are people who are suffering biologically they’re suffering economically and that is important that is very important it’s very important but i also think that for the for the people for whom the sort of the the survival urgency is dropping they’re now facing like i said they’re facing meaning disruption normalcy disruption and they’re in a marathon now the sprint of urgency is now giving way to the marathon of endurance and and that causes a different kind of problem formulation a different way of relating and um i think that’s what i mean where people are coming into as a well who am i now what am i supposed to do and we’ve been trying to fill that with sort of entertainment but it’s not it’s not doing a very good job right um and it’s so like well you know the netflix is going to run out and you know all these shows that are now being done from people’s homes rather than in the studios that’s sort of funny and novel for a while but it’s it’s getting kind of stale now um what do i do what do i do in terms yeah exactly exactly exactly yeah yeah no i i completely agree and you know i feel i feel um i do feel privileged to be able to actually like consider this and to have these conversations very much not in survival mode and i get that so many people are in survival mode and i you know i have no expectation that you know anybody can necessarily do that in that place i mean it’s for a reason why we’re not running training courses right now it’s just like it’s this is not the place for that kind of learning this is a different kind of learning that’s going to be happening here yeah so yeah you say is you don’t don’t don’t preach to somebody when they need a coat exactly right that’s that’s not the thing yeah um so there’s one more thing i wanted to bring up and then i’ll turn it back you can answer that and then also turn it back towards um like um giving you a summative response um to our conversation i i had a wonderful conversation with tim adeline and nora bates and and nora bates and and i uh really clicked them like that’s we very much want to talk again and i bring this up because you brought up the issue about introducing complexity and that’s her thing right and the warm data is you know uh most of our problems are complex problems in which we are immersed we can’t have we can’t sort of remove ourselves from them and get the cold hard facts and of course the covet thing right is very much that kind of immersive complexity right and you need the warm data and she talks about that it’s very important but she’s developed um you know a distributed a distributed cognition psychotechnology and she and i talked about it quite at length and i noticed that it was happening even in other meetups like in peter limberg stoa is you get together as a group and then you break up into small groups and then you return and and when guy was taking us through that we do that that’s part of the dictates of the medium right it’s also part of the dictates of human conversation but norah’s had this brilliant insight um um where what she does is and and for me um i don’t know i don’t think she’d dislike this and we really really hit it off so uh i think she’d at least find it thought provoking i think she’s found a way of um getting a virtual socrates into this because what she does right is she people go into the groups and then they stay in groups for a while and then one person moves between the groups and people can move between the conversations and what happens is they come in and they introduce the other groups perspective and that’s disruptive and then things get re and then what you have is this dynamic small world networks in which all the groups are doing this distributed restructuring of each other and then they come back into the group and people have this they’re they’re they have this much more comprehensive perspective that they’re trying to bring in and i think that’s also something that we need to consider as a you know as a as one of these bridging practices that helps to get so rather than waiting for socrates to show up or or hoping that everybody is in an act socrates i thought that’s really neat because what’s happened is you’ve got basically distributed socrates and it’s happening dynamically and bottom up and and so i just wanted to hold that out to you as a really interesting you know and i don’t mean an insult by this uh to you nora but it’s just really interesting you know tweaking and restructuring of this machinery that actually affords again another way in which we could sort of get people in transition we can start to get them to exemplify a much more complex system so i thought that was actually really kind of brilliant yeah yeah i know i like as you were talking about i noticed i got you know pretty pretty lit up and started smiling a lot there’s something and i think part of that’s also you know the motion that you’re bringing to it but it’s also like yes you’re talking about complexity and i really enjoy that and i also noticed so i wasn’t as you were talking about i wasn’t even so much holding the frame of complexity i was holding it as like a like a real practical exercise in in sort of for for the project or you know for this you know this conversation that i’m trying to have like how do you do this in a large group how do you have a large group conversation you know like you know peter and a stow is you know got like anywhere from 30 to 70 people coming on there you know you can’t have a conversation where everybody’s voice comes into the big group with 37 people but with 30 to 70 people you have a lot of cognition available yeah but if only five people are talking a lot of it gets wasted the collective intelligence will get wasted and it might afford some insight for those individuals and that’d be great for them but you know as the group one missing out on it so just even that that idea of like as being like a stage to sort of like yeah determine what is the thing that we’re actually going to discuss like almost canvassing the collective around a broader topic it it seems to me it will come to a more coherent and focused area but then you know almost like instead of us doing the move when we’re in you know sort of in the iwe circling and then waiting for that moment to come in a small group it’s like oh can we bring in like a general topic split everybody out have everybody sort of infect one another yeah with with an idea to see maybe something shifts in that group or maybe they just dismiss it and then we come back in and see like okay so what’s here for us now what like where are we now and maybe that place allows us to turn around and say okay this is the thing and then you know if you’ve got a big group you can either have that conversation because you don’t need all the voices in anymore because you have some coherence or then you can break out and have that specific conversation yeah so i noticed i was getting really excited about that and and also i think that’s a training tool for complexity yeah it is i think it’s also like a part warm-up as well like that can be the warm-up to turn on and invite more complexity of perspective and it’s interesting because the person the people that are moving between the groups and everybody will at some point perhaps or maybe not they might just stay but those people are really embodying right they’re not only they’re not only going to be bringing ideas right they’re going to be bringing timing and pacing and perspective and a way of inhabiting your body right and the salience all kinds of stuff is going to be carried between the subgroups and and they’re going to start resonating with each other in this really interesting that’s what she calls it a warm data lab which i think is a really cool idea so like i said i think what’s emerging is like i said is this very sophisticated pedagogical program practices with some sort of with an apprenticeship model with some you know scaled imitation going on and where we try to get people first to really exemplify something and then get them to reflect on it which so these are things that are coming out so taylor i wanted to give you a chance to whatever you would like to say that’s uh you know summative or on your mind as we sort of bring this to a close yeah just thank you i appreciate it you know it’s like this was the discussion that i think you and i were going to have anyways yeah yeah yeah and i’m hope hopefully it’s valuable for others who are also playing in this field or maybe feel inspired to play in this field too um because you know i think it was when david fuller was visiting toronto he said something about like we need to fail and fail faster so i’m i’m all for um for throwing more irons into the fire and seeing what people are coming up with and hopefully we can you know this can start to come more into the field because it was me hearing you know schmuckton burger and wheel over here and then you and jordan hall over here and it’s just like and then i’m having my you know like there was a distributive cognition happening just through youtube videos yeah yeah it’s like oh if we can add a little bit more into that you know other people trying experimenting with cycle technologies you know um with sort of this intention to move towards you know uh philosophia you know to or to enact the logos through you know through this sort of reciprocal um engagement um within a group or around a problem um i’m pretty excited about it again i hold that frame like um you know in this frame primarily comes from integral theory but it’s this idea that complexity is the lubricant that helps us move through to the next stage so i’m all for uh ways of making things more complex but i want to try to find a way to make them accessible too um and you know and not have a practice that’s only available for people who’ve done your circling training and everything else so i’m very much on board and you know want to stay in dialogue with you about sort of the pedagogy like how do we how do we do this and how do we do it quickly you know quickly and safely yeah yeah yeah yeah it has to be it has to be quick it has to be safe it has to be scalable but it also has to be rigorous so this getting all of these uh is is the challenge we’re facing yeah well it’s just been wonderful to see you i haven’t seen you for a while because the our circles have been disrupted um so i’ve just enjoyed being in your presence but i really i really this really caught fire between us too as we were as we were talking so i’m deeply appreciative and i’m sure we will do this again so i’d like to invite you to come back you know let’s go do some more work and come back and you know let’s let’s keep let’s keep the progression going totally yeah i love that it’s so great to see you so great to talk to you i hope it’s sooner than later um that we get to see each other again me too so thank you very much taylor thanks john take care