https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=C3vvlyit4GU
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cultivating Wisdom with John Gravicki. We’re still working with one camera today. Jason and Amar put in a lot of time this morning trying to get the two-camera system to work. Still not successful, so we’re still working on it. We hope to have it fixed by next weekend. So as always, we will begin with the sit together. We will begin with a chant, then we’ll move into the silent sit, and we’ll come out of it. Perhaps you’ll recite the five promises to yourself. Then Jason will move the camera, we’ll move to the whiteboard, we’ll continue with the wisdom on Fibatia, more on Stoicism, and then we’ll come back to this position and answer questions you might have. So it’s wonderful to be here, and you guys have the view from above, which is excellent. So please get yourself into position. Set your phones and do not disturb. We will begin together. We’ll begin with chanting when I say begin. Begin. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Begin your silent sit. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Om. Okay, Jason’s gonna help me move the camera and let’s move to the Dharma. So we’re on the second degree of wisdom in the Western tradition, the wisdom of Hypatia. We’re basically in the high school and we’re talking about Stoicism. I hope you’re also seeing retrospectively the continuities with Epicureanism. So we’ve been talking about some basic principles. One of the first principles is the internalization of Socrates or the internalization of the sage. Of course, Stoicism, it’s Socrates. Socrates plays to the Western tradition, but to figure like the Buddha or Lao Tse play within the Eastern traditions. We’re internalizing the sage in order to transform our inner dialogue. Remember Antisthenes, I’ve learned to converse with myself. I learned dialogos. I replaced inner babble, inner monkey mind with inner Socratic dialogue. And imagine what that would be like if that became our normal way of being. And then that’s a, and we talked about the process of internalization as a perspectival process. We talked about Bogotsky and we did last time the view from above as a way of trying to enact that third person sage like perspective. And then practice internalizing it into our own perspective to give us the highest order metacognitive meta perspectival ability to reconfigure. What we find salient and relevant in a way so that we are constantly tempted by our salient landscaping to what is good. What is the good life? And that leads us, of course, to the idea of aspiration that we are aspiring to become wise. And this is a participatory knowing. This is where we’re actually knowing by living it, by loving it, by being bound to it, coupled to it so that our identity is being transformed as our way of knowing it. This, of course, is the only way you know virtue. You only know honesty by becoming more and more honest. You can only know honesty if you already have some honesty to some degree. And so the idea here is what we’re trying to do in becoming wise is we’re trying to seek, we’re aspiring to that which is always good. The Stoics ask the question, what is always good and what is always good is wisdom. And then it’s talked about an idea of wisdom as deeply connected to the virtue. Virtue is basically the beauty of wisdom. Virtue is how you appropriately discern what is most relevant and important in this situation in a way that most reliably affords you moving towards the good life. And so there’s deep connections, and this is very intrinsic to Stoicism, between wisdom and rationality. Where rationality doesn’t just mean what we now think of it as sort of formal logic, being more logical, avoiding inconsistency. Logic, that’s why I often use the term for this, the Stoic, psychologic. It has much more to do with comprehensively overcoming self-deception. So what we’re actually after is a kind of self-transcending rationality, a rationality that affords us to become more rational, that affords us to become more rational. And this is the, of course, you’ll see where this will end up, this will end up in the Platonic ascent out of the cave. The idea that as I become less self-deceived, I come to realize the real patterns that thereby help me to become less self-deceived, and so on and so forth. So when we’re talking about wisdom, we’re talking about that we get better at judging what is real. So for the Stoics, the core of rationality is not argumentation, it’s judgment. It has to do with our ability to judge what is real, our ability to desire what is good, and our ability to move towards, to orient, to identify with that which is most in our control. And what’s most in our control, of course, is the capacity by which we make meaning. So the training of rationality. So before I get into this, and we’re going to learn for today the Dharma, I want to address a question, a series of questions that came up last time in connection with the term I used. I made a distinction, it’s a distinction that the Stoics make between emotion, which is to be in motion, by the way, to move out, emote, and passion. And they compare this to walking down a hill, and this is running down a hill where you lose control. And then some of you, for example, I think Mark made a very well-written comment about it, because aren’t most things done with passion, that people don’t know? Achieve great things, unless there’s passion. So what we’re, what the problem we’re facing with that is we’re facing anachronistic equivocation, where equivocation is two different meanings of the same term, and anachronism is to not pay attention to historical context. So let’s pay attention to the, let’s pay attention first of all to the, go back in the history of this word, and it’s deeply related to this word, passive. Passion is the opposite of action. When you’re passive, you’re not engaging, you’re not acting. The Stoic term that’s being used here is, is pathé. It’s where we get our term pathetic from. So what the Stoics mean by passion is when we become pathetic, because we are completely passive in the face of our arousal and our affective state. It has run away with us, and that’s the metaphor of running down the hill. Now what’s really interesting is we have taken this term, and we’ve made that to be sort of a metaphor for the fact that we’re not in the state of the state. That to be strongly motivated, and in terms of strongly committed. So motivated not just I have the impulse, but I’m actually committing myself, which of course is the opposite of being passive, strongly committed. It’s the opposite of being passive, it’s the opposite of being pathetic. We hear this term and we hear it as sort of, you know, heroism, heroism. Now what the Stoics would say to that idea of how that term has come so far away from its original meaning, like the meaning of the word stoic, like the meaning of the word cynic, is that it reflects a kind of confusion that, and this is what modern Stoics say, that’s prevalent in our culture where we tend to confuse, and we’ve talked about this before, we talked about the Epicureans, we tend to confuse intensity with commitment. That the only thing that makes us committed to things is the experience of intense feeling. And what the Stoics would say to that is, what you actually need for commitment is because feelings are actually not long standing, and feelings vacillate, and feelings contradict themselves. One moment you’re feeling, and the next moment you’re feeling this, and the feelings don’t last. What they say is, they would ask you, what actually keeps people in long term commitment? That’s a very good question. I mean, this is a question. So let’s compare the intensity of infatuation with the commitment of love. If you were to try and keep committed to your partner through always trying to rely on the intensity of infatuation, and of course people do this, we call them infatuation junkies, and that picks up on something that Mark was saying. He was trying to think about this more in terms of addiction. But, you know, if the infatuation junkie is somebody who wants the infatuation fades, as it inevitably does, because that is the nature of feeling, the relationship ends. What actually keeps the relationship going, the relationship of love? Well, it’s commitment. It’s commitment. And what is it in a person that keeps them committed? Well, things are the things you say, you know. They listen. They communicate. They’re sincere. They’re willing to adapt and adjust. They find their sense of who they are to the other person. Notice what we’re not talking about feelings now. What are we talking about? We’re talking about what the Stoics talked about. We’re talking about virtue. What’s the original meaning of virtue? Well, think about virtual reality, shaping a possibility. Virtue actually means power. That’s why we have phrases like in virtue of. Right? So virtue actually means a power. It means a power to commit to the other person. It means a power to connect with the other person. So virtue actually means a power. It means a power to commit reliably to what is good, a power to commit reliably to what is good. And so for Aristotle, what you do is you build up things that empower us at long term habits and skills. And then you have them directed towards what is considered by you in your most rational states, the good, the true, the good and the beautiful. So perhaps a better way of thinking about it is right is to say the Stoics are engaged in the psychology of trying to examine what actually keeps us committed long term to the good. And that is not typically feeling that is typically. Virtue. So hence wisdom, because virtue is just the way in which we are wise in a particular situation. We bring Sophia principle to bear from neesis on a particular context. So we talked about this cultivation of rationality in terms of the psycho logic. And this is me trying to remind you that I’m not using logic just in the modern sense. This has to do, as I said, not so much with argumentation, but much more with judgment. And that judgment has a lot to do with this stoic practice. Pro-Sach and pro-Sach, the best translation of pro-Sach is mindfulness. So all the mindfulness training we did plugs in right here, right here. And so you don’t typically think of mindfulness as a logical act. But in terms of the logic of the Stoics, mindfulness is a deeply logical thing to do. But a better way of putting it is that mindfulness is a deeply rational thing to do. Think about ratio and rationing. Appropriately apportioning and in proper proportion. Look at, listen, how these words all sing together. Appropriate proportioning and proper proportioning of your affect and how you find things salient and relevant. That’s the core. That’s the core. The core of this is paying attention so your salience landscape shapes you towards wisdom. So there’s a triangle here and then there is ethics, which doesn’t mean what we’ve reduced it to, which is a very up-following concept, a very legal notion of what’s our duties and what are the rules that we have a duty towards. For the Stoics, this is again much more psychological. It’s about how we deal with impulse. We’ll talk about that today. And then over here we have physics. And physics isn’t, I mean, it’s not the same as modern physics. What we’re doing here is learning to discipline desire. So this is learning to see things as they are, independent from the projections of our desire. Of course modern physics tries to do that too. It tries to get us to see things objectively, see the thing in terms of just the properties that belong to the object, not things that we project on it in terms of our values or desires or hopes. And so that’s the connection. Here we’re trying to see things independent of our projections. We’re trying to withdraw our projections. Here we’re trying to deal with that aspect of ourself that is not in our control, the impulsive aspect. Okay. So this all falls under, so the two big things I said, one was prosaash, the other is prokyron. So prokyron is to practice so that things become ready to hand. So again, the training of habit and skill and attention so things are ready to hand. They come naturally to mind in the situation in which they are needed. We’re basically trying to train how do we bring principles into process, how do we get process to be governed by principle. And we have to practice. The thing that links, here, okay, principle, process, right? What links them? Practice again and again and again. Again and again. Oh, we love to be talking about our principles. We also like, oh, just do it. Feel it. Go with your gut. Feel it. What you actually have to do, according to the Stoics, is no, you have to practice a lot, getting clear about the principles and bringing them into process. You have to practice seeing what’s actually going on in the process and putting it under the regulation of the relevant principles. Sophia from Nisus. Sophia from Nisus. So, I’m, so two books that we’re most relying on right now, as you know, there’s this book, the one we’re going through, The Wisdom of Arpacia. And then I’m especially making use of this beautiful little gem of a book by Buzari, Stoic Spiritual Exercises. Both books, both books rely very highly on this book by Pierre Hedeau, The Inner Citadel, where Pierre Hedeau talks about the logic as the disciplining of judgment or ascent, the ethics as the disciplining of impulse, and the physics as the disciplining of desire. Okay. So, Buzari talks, gives some advice to further refine the practice of maximization that we got from the Epicureans, the creation of maxims and try and repeating them and sort of making them permeate our lives until they come readily to hand. But she actually proposed, she actually proposes a practice that I would, using a term from cognitive science, involves deep learning. So what she proposes you do is she proposes you read many different, so here’s, read many different instances of the principle, like Marcus Aurelius repeats it, the principle, Epictetus repeats it, Seneca repeats it, right, and read many different, and then you come up with your own, right, maxim. So this is a compression. You try and draw from all of them what you think is most central about them, compressed to what is central. And then she recommends then practice you from this, not from here, but from yours, create variations on it, create variations. Rewrite it, play with it, keep reworking it, get involved in a process of continually rewriting, continually recreating the principle. This actually will help you to remember it very, very deeply. The way we get neural networks, the artificial intelligence is so powerful today, we actually have them cycle through this. They take the data and they compress it and then they do variation on it, they interact with the world and they compress it and they just keep cycling. And that’s how you come to learn something very, very deeply. So what she’s proposing, this is my interpretation, this is my way of bringing some cog science to it, she’s proposing that don’t just write the maximizations, put them through a process of continual deep learning. Keep reading and compressing and then creating variations and then recompress from there and keep refining it and recreating it. By the way, this is the process that makes you learn something, hence the name, learn something very deeply and make it very ready to hand and actually internalize it so it starts to become the very process by which you’re seeing the world. It becomes the lens through which you see the world. Okay. So, you can put that of course into some, you can put that into relationship to what a practice we’ve already talked about the self examination. At the end of the day when you’re journaling, you could also in addition to looking for the commission. Right. The advice you might have committed a virtue you might have omitted commission a mission the bias member, active open mindedness, and also the virtue, you might also want to practice the deep learning of maximization, deep learning maximization. The, the, the slowly, the stock date product, the stoic daily reading book that I recommended to you by Ryan holiday. Is that right? So you can read it every day. And he has a quote from one of the story philosophers and then some exegesis on it. And then you can go and look at similar ones and you’ll find that same practice, the same principles are being repeated again and again and again. That’s not because of kind of a just a rope repetition, they’re trying to do that process, you can see it in Marcus really says meditation of deep learning, deep learning of maximization. Okay, let’s turn now to the core of the psychological. What’s the core of the psychological? The core of the psychological is a practice that bizarre recall calls the pocket, which means to bracket or to suspend. Another way of thinking about it is to defuse and pull apart things that are fused together in your experience to reduce confusion that way. So, the things that get fused all together and are treated as one is there’s a thing, something in the world, and then we get what the Stokes call an impression from it. This is this is something over which this is the part of the experience over which we do not exercise like there’s colors and the shapes. And they’re just like, this is what’s happening automatically in the sense of it’s that part of your perceptual system that is that is most causally impacted by the world and not like the part that’s affected most directly by your judgment. So you get your initial impression and then you get and there’s various ways of talking about this. You get you do aspectualization or you do categorization. You do conceptualization. These are all slightly different ways of saying the same thing slightly different conceptual conceptualization. You actually create propositional content. Sometimes this is also called representation. It’s how you present something to it’s been presented to you here in your senses and then you re presented to your mind. Think about the word representation means you re presented to your mind. So what this means is so you go from the impressions to let’s try and do it slowly. So here’s an impression and then I start seeing it as a marker and I categorize it as a marker that I can use and those how I’m not going in. It’s an it. I’m going into the habit mode right away. And now I start to conceptualize it. Things I can do with markers and then I make some kind of propositional assertion about it. This is a good marker or this marker is not so good because it’s running out of it. I start to make a judgment about it. Now like I said when all of this is happening unconsciously automatically and reactively mindlessly then of course we are fettered to the world by all of this con fusion. So what the Stoics want us to do is they want us to introduce judgment here and I want to use the Greek word for judgment. The Greek word for judgment because I think it’s really helpful. Crisis. That’s the Greek word for judgment. You crisis. Crisis is a bad thing. Well think about what we mean by a crisis. We mean things are being called everything that was we thought was stable and secure. That’s just the way it is is actually being called into question. Things are unraveling. The structures are coming apart. They’re unraveling and there is an opportunity for real change. There’s a critical moment. Crisis critical cutting cross cutting across. These are all related ideas. What we’re doing is trying to afford the unraveling that coming apart the calling into question of this structure. This fusion so that we afford the possibility of seeing things differently. We afford the possibility of real insight where we shift the aspect. We come to a new category. We see new possibilities for how we can talk about it. Think about it. Reflect on it. So this is actually ultimately about trying to generate insight. Cognitive flexibility. Now that this whole so they go on this whole sequence here. All of these things at the pick to just cause this epi leg I which this is from logos where we get logic from this. We this is related to our word epilogue. So the idea here is this is all a kind of inner speaking. This is speaking after the impression the epilogue. And what we want to do is we want to replace this automatic epilogue with critical dialogue. We want to replace the automatic epilogue with critical dialogue. We want to keep we want to pull it apart. We want to defuse it. So one way you can think about this is Ellen Langer and his work. Sure. In her work on mindfulness talks about replacing absolute learning with conditional and she has she has experimental evidence that this really improve improves people’s problem solving ability. So if I were to teach you something absolutely would be this is what it is. This is X. This is X. This is X. This is X. This is X. This is X. This is X. This is X. This is X. This is X. When I teach you conditionally I teach it to you. One way of thinking about this as as X. So I keep separate in how I’m teaching it to you. All of this from the thing. I don’t fuse them together and say this is X. What I do is say one way of thinking about this is X. I replace epilogic confusion and monologic reaction with dialogue with critical dialogical reflection. So getting close to how do you do this. What’s a way of doing this. And so all three authors talk about this. And a practice called objective seeing. McClellan in the wisdom of Hypatia calls it neutral description. Buzari calls it physical definition. You can tell that they’re all trying to zero in on something. And this has to go back to this notion of epache which is suspending judgment. By the way. And this this is a valuable and hopefully useful connection. This is a central practice within the philosophical tradition known as phenomenology. Knowledge where you try to write phenomena how things are shining and they’re appearing to us. And you try to get a very rigorous awareness of how things are appearing to you. And you and who invented it actually invented this process called the pocket. And if you want to get good at that, there’s an excellent really highly recommended book called experimental phenomenology by Diane Ivey where he takes you through a whole bunch of exercises. What’s valuable about this is it first of all teaches you how to do this kind of seeing or description that we’re talking about. It’s actually how to do it. And then what’s also valuable is that allows you to make links potentially between stoic philosophy and continental philosophy. People talking about the meaning crisis. People like us are all and how to get it. Et cetera. So highly recommended. So what do we do with physical definition or I like to call it objective seeing because I want to emphasize the perceptual attention to the object. Like I said, it’s our bizarre. Calls it physical description and become calls it neutral description. So how does it work? Well, it’s really interesting because it actually plugs into a lot of the research on how you get children to delay gratification to. And so this is the famous marshmallow test. There’s a compound in the marshmallow test with socioeconomic status having to do this. Long term prediction. You can put that aside. You can look at some of the mechanisms, however, that do help people delay gratification. And one of them is this kind of re description. There was a little girl. So you put the famous marshmallow, you put the marshmallow in front and how long can they do? And you say to them, you know, you can eat the marshmallow whenever you want. The longer you wait, though, the greater the chance will give you a second marshmallow. And you measure how long they can delay. Right. And what you do is what you do is you get people to reframe it. One four year old did the she literally put a mental frame around it and she treated it like a picture of a marshmallow, a representation rather than the marshmallow itself. And she famously said, well, the way I because I’m a marshmallow, I’m a marshmallow. She pulled apart the meaning and the representation for her from the thing itself, the marshmallow. They also taught the kids to zero in and we described marshmallows as, you know, they’re like fluffy white clouds. So you get a strategy of trying to read, describe things, reasspect your kids, and then you can do the same thing. And so she did that. And she did that. And she did that. And she did that. And she did that. So you get a strategy of trying to read, describe things, reasspect, specialize them, recategorize them so that the way they initially present themselves to you falls into crisis in the sense of all of those things that are fused together, get pulled apart. And when you pull them apart, that’s the space of your freedom. That’s how you can see through those cracks that you open up. That’s that is the vehicle of insight. So. What do we do? What do we do? So let me give you an example from Marcus Aurelius. I chose one that’s a little off putting. You go, yeah, and that’s and I chose it deliberately for that reason. Here’s a quote from Marcus Aurelius. Consider sex as the friction of two pieces of skin and the ejaculation of a sticky fluid. And you go, oh, yeah, what’s wrong with him? Well, what’s he trying to do? Well, he’s trying to describe it. And that’s why Bazzari calls it a physical description and the clone calls it a neutral description. He’s trying to describe the act, the event from a purely third person, almost like the view from above, purely third person perspective. And remember the research showing that if you move from a first person perspective to a third person perspective, you will also often get tremendous insight into your problem. This is called the construal level effect, the Solomon effect, lots of converging evidence on this. So he’s trying to get you to describe it from a non-human perspective, which is what physics tries to do, describe the world from a non-human perspective. You try to strip it down to its essence. The properties it would have even if there were no human beings there. Now, obviously, there has to be human beings having sex. But you know what I’m trying to what I mean here, as if there were no human beings there. You’re trying to take a non-human perspective on it. You’re trying to look at the whole, break it, analyze it into its whole and parts. What’s it’s what it made of? What are the substances and the forces at work within it? You’re trying to give it its most proper name. The name that would be true in the greatest number of contexts. That description that Marcus Aurelius made will be the case no matter what kind of sex is happening from the most horrible to the most loving. And you go, OK, I get it. Why am I doing that? Because that is the practice by which you train judgment, by which you withdraw projection. Because when you do that, when you’re doing the ook, what you’re doing is you’re realizing that all of the beauty has to do with what you’re projecting into the situation. And what that tells you is that maybe it’s not the sex that is so valuable, the sex per se, but all of that machinery by which meaning is being made. But maybe that, in fact, maybe that machinery could happen more consciously, more mindfully. And this, of course, is central to the whole tradition of tantric sex in which you realize, wait, what’s important isn’t the physical act. Right. What’s important is all of this that’s built around it. And I go from an absolute confused meaning to a conditional, insightful meaning of the event. And in that space, metanoia, the changing of mind, metanoia, the word we use for conversion, shifting direction, metanoia, actually means to beyond how you’re, beyond how you’re noticing a fundamental transcendence of your salience landscaping. In that space of metanoia, that’s the space in which I can turn towards the good. I can aspire to wisdom and virtue. So you can do objective seeing, neutral description, physical description throughout your day. You can actually also do it as, you know, at the end of a seated practice, you can open your eyes and look at an object that you have a strong relationship to. Now, sometimes some stoics recommend start with objects that are actually you’re almost neutral towards because it’s easier to give a neutral perspective to the object. And then go by degrees like progressive desensitization to redescribing things that are less neutral to you. But in an increasingly like you’ll sense it as an increasingly more neutral fashion and by that progressive movement, you will learn to be happy, more critical in your judgment. And you’ll be there by training your psychological. So what we’re going to continue to do is we’re going to take a look at each one of these, like the logic, the physics and the ethics and look about the particular spiritual exercises you can do for each one of these as a way of training your rationality, cultivating virtue and aspiring to wisdom. OK, so I’m going to go back on to the cushion now so I can see the questions and take any questions that you have. And I’ll take any questions that people might have about today’s Dharma or about last time with the view from above or anything from the wisdom of Hypatia or in fact anything from the entire meditation and cultivation of wisdom series. So the first question is from pleasure of doubt or Brett. I haven’t talked to you in a bit. I missed talking to you. I guess I will see you Monday night, though, because I’ll be on the Discord server for the monthly Q&A. The question Brett asked is I think it’s like a crucial question here. Does internalizing Socrates require having deeply studied Socrates to a significant degree? Yes, to a significant degree, yes. So it used to be people, of course, we had a wisdom tradition in which people always had at least one sage that they had internalized. For many people, for example, it might be Jesus or Moses or or Mohammed, right? But we’ve lost that. We all walk around. That’s too strong. I’m sorry. Many of us walk around with a hole in our heart that we don’t even realize that we have. And it’s a place that is ready for the reception of the internalized sage. I actually think given the situation we in, that we should have a community of sages that we’ve internalized. So I try to internalize Socrates, Platinus, Spinoza, Siddhartha, and Jesus of Nazareth. So I think it’s important to learn about Socrates. And one of the great gifts given to us, and we’ll talk about this when we move into the third degree of wisdom, is the Platonic dialogues. They’re not always easy. And I recommend starting with the more popular ones like the Symposium or the Republic or listening to them on audiobook, which is very helpful for many people, because they’re actually dialogues. And the point of a dialogue is not just what people say. The point is also because that’s only propositional. The point is the drama, the perspectival, right, the perspectives that are there and the participatory knowing, the character that are there. And so reading and learning more of just familiarizing yourself with Socrates in the situation of Socratic dialogue definitely helps. There’s lots of excellent books. And if people want, I can recommend some books to read to get a sense of it. There’s lots of videos on this. I think it’s the fourth episode of my video series, Awakening from the Meeting Crisis, helps. So what you want to do is you’re not so much trying to get some sort of philosophical, scholastic, historically accurate thing. I mean, that’s a goal that you can have. But the goal here is to get something that is reliably going to work to help you do the Stoic practices. And then so Hado calls this the figure of Socrates, the figure of Socrates. So you want to practice configuring Socrates and figuring him out. You’ll allow me to play a little bit with words. And so I’m going to do something to help people address this. And it’s been something that has been put off because of funding circumstances and COVID. But also it’s turned around to be a fantastic opportunity. I’m putting together another series that is going to be at the level of Awakening from the Meeting Crisis, which is called After Socrates and the Cultivation of Wisdom and Virtue. And so that will help people with this, I hope. Deborah Wagstah. So children learn to pay attention to how they pay attention by imitating the adults around them doing the same. That’s exactly right. So this is called natural pedagogy, natural pedagogy, that most of how we learn to see the world, which is also a process by which we are inculturated into a particular community, is through imitation and internalization of how other people see the world. That’s why, you know, this is a really good proverb. Children don’t pay attention to what you say. They pay attention to what you do. You can say the most beautiful things, but it’s actually what you do that really matters. That’s why we even have this phrase. It’s a really good phrase. Indeed. Think about what the word means. When you say that, that is the case. Indeed. We mean in action. Inaction is where it really happens. So Deborah Wagstah. I was slowly coming back. I reached out to touch Saturn as I passed. Suddenly realizing I was massive, expanded to hold Saturn if I wished, focusing on maintaining, expansion and filling my body. So I believe that Deborah is talking about last week and she was talking about the view from above. And yeah, so your your sense of self and your identity will become like wisdom filled water or even wondered filled, wonderful, wonder filled. I was going to say wonderful, but this is better. Wonder filled water. You’ll feel your identity moving around in a state of wonder because wonder is exactly the state in which we are calling ourselves and how we see things into question. And so you get that wonder filled, watery sense of self. It flows, it expands, it shifts, it moves. And what that does is challenge again the automaticity by which we assume and assign identities. So thank you for that. Manual post. Great to see you, Manuel. The lesson is focused on the depersonalization of things. I’m wondering if there is a set of practices that does the opposite. So it’s not so much it’s depersonalizing not for its own sake. It’s crisis. So the point is to introduce enough depersonalization so that you don’t have absolute learning. You still have conditional learning. You’re not going to stop seeing persons as persons because in fact that’s a proper name for this particular kind of individual. So what you might be saying is, well, I will see things a lot less anthropomorphically. And so within schism, Manuel, you’re not going to see something that counterbalances that. But within neoplatonism, you’ll see you’ll see something that counterbalances that, which is after people have gone through rigorous rational training, so they’re not doing anthropomorphic projection, then you can bring back a symbolic way of seeing things as a way of cultivating wisdom. But the point of the neoplatonists is if people do the second without having deeply done the first, the chance that they are going to fall into unrecognized projection and thereby significant self-deception is very, very high. And so that’s why a lot of these wisdom traditions converge even in the Buddha. And remember the famous quote from the Buddha. This is how you’ll know somebody is not my disciple if they offer to perform a miracle. Right. So the idea of, you know, magical projection is always called very deeply into question by all these traditions because of the proclivity for self-deceptive projection within it. So in answer to your question, not so much within stoicism, not so much within high school, but once you’ve done the high school, you move into university neoplatonism and neoplatonism has theurgic practices that do exactly what you’re asking me about. But they do it on the understanding that you have passed through elementary and elementary school and high school. So I hope that answers your question. Robert Gray, follow up to Brett’s question. Does internalizing someone alive differ widely from someone you’ve only read about or heard about secondhand, the Christ or Buddha, like a mentor, parent, friend? So I think I’ve met people who who Sage is someone living and they’ve internalized the difficulty there. The difficulty there is when we have a personal relationship, well, think about how elevated the Buddha and Christ are for many people. And if you push, if you project that elevated status onto a human being, the Buddha and Christ have passed into mythos. And I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense. And that again alludes to what Manuel was talking about. They’ve passed into mythos. And so it is not unbearable for them to have that kind of elevated status. But treating a living human being with that elevated expectation can be very crushing and demanding on them. And it can and they can they can suffer the fate of Icarus under our hands. And, you know, there’s a famous song by Ziggy by David Bowie. Ziggy started us about how the fans actually destroyed Ziggy because they elevated him into a leopard Messiah. And so, yes, you can. But you have to remember to counterbalance that with not dehumanizing the person. We forget that there are two ways of dehumanizing somebody. And this was something that Conrad’s literature is so good on. We can dehumanize people by, right, treating them by demonizing them. Right. And that’s something we’re very concerned with, rightly so, by the way, in our culture right now. But what we don’t pay enough attention to critical critical crisis attention to is how you can depersonalize somebody by deifying them. And that’s just as disastrous. That’s the problem of Colonel Kurtz in the Heart of Darkness. So if you can have a stereoscopic vision of the living person, if you can, through one eye, see them mythologically as the sage, but through the other eye, see them in a way that maintains their humanity, that is the golden mean between demonizing them and deifying them, then a living person can be internalized as a sage. Griswold Grimm, how much difference between an internalized Socrates and Socrates Daemon? So that’s a really good question. And the Stoics talk about that inner part of themselves as the ruling faculty. They sometimes talked about it as the internal sage. They often often called it their Daemon. And what Griswold is referring to is that Socrates, Daemon isn’t the same thing as demon. Daemon is another thing in which we’ve degraded a term to give it exactly the opposite meaning. Daemon was the voice from a higher order perspective than your own ego perspective identity. When you get like the equivalent in the Eastern tradition is the Buddha within. That’s your Daemon. Peter Lindbergh talks about how his Daemon leads us. It’s your sacred second self, your divine double. It’s the voice of the third person perspective that is calling you, vocation, calling you to the good, calling you to wisdom. And Socrates had such a voice. When he was about to do something wrong, and it’s not just conscience that’s trivialized. When he was about to do something wrong, it would impact on him. And his whole, he would be turned, metanoia, away from that. And so I think for the Stoics, and especially for modern Stoics like Peter Lindbergh, internalizing Socrates and cultivating a Socratic Daemon, something that emulates and imitates Socrates Daemon, they’re one in the same process. There are two different ways of talking about the same thing. It’s a very powerful. So of course, people often also, Christians experience the voice of Christ, the voice of Jesus, or the moving of the Holy Spirit. And of course, the Buddha, the Buddhists have the Buddha nature. Interesting in Taoism, it’s much more personal, but you feel the Tao and you feel that that often as Qi or Chi, redirecting what you find salient and the identities you’re assuming and assigning. Thinking of Qi as secret magical energy is such a profound and almost racist misreading of that concept. It’s such a bad misappropriation of that concept. Junsun Kim and I are actually writing a paper to really try and recapture the ecologically valid meaning of Chi within Taoism and how that can actually be integrated very, I think, very insightfully. Not trying to be self-congratulatory, but that’s the wrong way then. But very significantly, like it will have, it fits together well. That’s what I’m trying to say. Sorry, it sounds self-congratulatory, but a way of reinterpreting in an ecologically valid way the notion of Chi or Chi that fits in, plugs in really well to current cognitive science so that we don’t need to think of it like, and it shouldn’t be thought of because this is again a Western category, as a supernatural substance or as some kind of ethereal ectoplasmic force or all the gooish silliness that people think of. That’s the kind of ectoplasmicness that people have done in their misunderstanding of that. So in the Taoist tradition, your daemon is much more the experience of Chi or Ki. Okay, so that’s a lot. So thank you so much, everyone, for joining this Saturday Sanghas. I look forward to them so much. Thank you to Amara Jason and the other panelists.