https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=OH4JFXyCM20
Welcome to Cultivating Wisdom with John Verbecky. It’s a great pleasure to be here again. Apologies for last week, but things just didn’t fit into the schedule, which is happening more and more frequently right now because of my other work. And so I appreciate all of your forbearance on this. I’m happy to be able to meet and I want to keep doing this until we finish the Wisdom of Pipeacia together. But we only have a couple more classes, probably this one and one more, and we’ll be done. It’s been a wonderful journey with you all. For similar scheduling problems, we weren’t able to do the live stream monthly Q&A yesterday. We will do it next Friday. We will of course keep doing that on a regular basis, on an ongoing basis. But right now, all three of us have really packed schedules and trying to find the intersection point is getting increasingly challenging. We all appreciate your patience and as I said, your understanding and your forbearance. We are very grateful for it. We usually, if you’re joining us for the first time, there’s been a lot. And so go to the links, go back to the first lesson of meditating with John Ravichie, work your way through the lessons all the way through, trying doing a couple lessons every week, and you’ll be able to catch up if you wish. Even if we stop the regular sitting, there is a place where you can meet. We put a link to the Discord server community in this video. You’ll be able to go to the Discord server, meet the people that have gone through this course, many other people that are wrestling with the issue of how to cultivate wisdom and virtue in these very chaotic times. You’ll be people there that are not just talking about it, that are engaging in many of the practices in a virtuous and admirable form, and it’s a vibrant and vital community. And so eventually, if you want to have a community through which you can continue to commune in these practices, then I strongly recommend the Discord server. So if you could all help me to reach as many people as possible by liking this video to raise its presence in the YouTube algorithm, because the algorithms on social media are the gods of our age, and they’re often capricious and have their own interests. So please help me as much as you can, and that is also much appreciated. There will be questions at the end. We’ll try to get some questions in today, and in order to do that, I expect we will end up going a little bit long, probably to 11.15, to try and get through some of the backlog of questions. So as always, what we’re going to do is we’re going to begin with chanting, and then a silent sit, and then we’ll go to the whiteboard for the Logos talk, and then I want to come back and quickly take you through an exercise as we move from theoria into theurgia. We’re going to learn some theurgic practices, talk a little bit about theologia and theosis but the main things we need to be practicing are the theoria, which we did last time together, and the theurgia. And then I’ll give you the context, I’ll give you an example of, and McClellan does it so well about what theologia looks like, and then how all of those, of course, apex to theosis. All right, so please get yourself in a comfortable position, set your phones on do not disturb. We will begin together when I say the word begin. fait en One. Om. One. Om. Om. One. Om. One. Om. Om. One. Om. One. Om. Begin your silent sit. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. Slowly begin to come out of your practice. Trying as best you can to integrate what you cultivated in your practice with your everyday consciousness, cognition, character, and communitas. Perhaps by reciting the five promises to yourself. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. All right. Let’s move to the whiteboard. Jason will switch the cameras. Great. All right. So we’re trying to realize the pyramid of neoplatonic practices. And if you remember the neoplatonic practice, we’re trying to realize the pyramid of neoplatonic practices. So we’re trying to realize the pyramid of neoplatonic practices. And if you remember the pyramid, it’s a triangular pyramid. And with McClellan, you see all the threes and all the pyramid, all the threes and the triangles running through the whole system. And that’s because we seem to be particularly oriented for threes. Three dimensions, three tenses of time, et cetera. So we have threoria, theologia, and theurgia. Let me make that very clear so you know how to spell it. I’ve recommended books about this. And they’re all interdependent. And then they rise to the apex that is theosis. Okay. So we’ve done a lot about that. We did a practice for doing this, the contemplative practice that we went through last time. We did a practice for doing this, the contemplative practice that we went through last time. Recollecting the inner site and then ascending analogically up through the scala natura. So you know what this is. At least we have, and there’s more. What I found the core and most invigorating and vital practice version of it, McClellan gives you others. But this gives you a taste that we can have learned together, which will help for practicing in community. I’ll talk a little bit about and sort of exemplify. McClellan does a lot. He does all the stuff on the macrocosm and the microcosm. That’s theologia. Okay. All that stuff. And his discussion about how can we take the ancient language of gods and turn it into language that’s more relevant and useful and internalizable as today. So I’ll talk a little bit about that. And then theurgia. Next time we’ll talk about how this all culminates in theosis. Which as I said is still within Eastern Orthodox Christianity, their word for salvation. It doesn’t really mean the word salvation. It means becoming godlike. All right. So let’s just quickly the theologia, which is finding the logos of the gods. The gods mean what is most real and therefore sacred because of its intense and ultimate reality. And the main insight that drives the neoplatonic understanding of the- they actually- the neoplaton- well the middle platonist like Philo, but it actually starts to get more seriously used by people like Proclus. They basically invented this term theologia, which we get a word theology from. But what was the central insight? And it’s one we’ve seen before, so I’ll just bring it out again just to remind you. The idea of patterns of intelligibility. Patterns of intelligibility signified. And here’s the word sign. And I want you to almost hear that word. You know when people talk about seeing a sign. They signify being. They signify being. And perhaps a better way of conveying what I’m talking about here is to capitalize it. And then we’ve talked about this. This is the whole idea about the theory of the forms, the Eidos, right? And just to remind you also of the notion, but to reinvoke it, to reactivate it in your thinking right now. We’ve got the logos and we can think of it going one way of expressing itself. To press out. Expressing itself. To press out. Another way of thinking about this is it’s unfolding in speech. Unfolding in speech. And that means both inner and outer speech like when you’re thinking and also when you’re talking to others. Unfolding in speech. The idea, the pattern that is actually existing all at once. It may exist all at once in your mind as a concept. It may exist all at once in the world as a pattern of how reality unfolds. The idea here is that what you’re doing, this is the microcosm aspect. Microcosm. So this is how you are expressing, unfolding the forms in your thinking and in your speaking. The things that of course are central to you being a rational human agent. But what’s the macrocosmic? So I’m assuming you guys are reading the wisdom of vacatia. This is the inner cosmos. Where cosmos means an intelligible order that we find beautiful. Macrocosm, the intelligible order we find beautiful. Remember what we mean by the word logos. We mean a gathering order and an ordered gathering. Top down, bottom up. We’ve talked about all of this. So what’s the macrocosm dimension? So the logos is bidirectional. It’s a lens that focuses both ways, refracts both ways. And what we’re talking about here is we’re talking about the central idea that we get from the integration of Plato and Aristotle is the conformity to the Eidos, to the forms. And so what we’re trying to do is we’ve already been practicing invoking the logos and contemplating conformity, realizing conformity. And of course we have practices where we’re already trying to do this in speech. We have the Lectio Divina. We have the Philosophical Fellowship. Because what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to invoke the logos. We’re trying to engage in invocation. So all of this we’ve practiced, we’ve talked about, we’ve reflected on. You have McClellan in there also giving you more different voice, slightly different angles on this, unpacking it. I’m trying to give you a schema by which you can understand. And what is it I’m doing right now? This is theologia. This is theologia. This is the act of doing this philosophical reflection in order to articulate these patterns of intelligibility into patterns of behavior that we can enact. Think about what articulate means. Articulate means it means simultaneously to speech, to speak, but articulate also means to find all the connecting points, find the patterns and how things are connected, how things are articulate. So we talk about the arm as an articulated thing. So what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to articulate these patterns of intelligibility in speech so that we can articulate them in behavior. Articulation. So how, using this as this bidirectional lens, how did the Neoplatonists see being? And what they needed to see is not just a picture of, not just a psychological picture of the inner world and not just a scientific picture of the outer world or a physical in the sense of physical science picture of the outer world. They wanted to see the patterns that underlie the possible conformity between the inner and the outer. What fits them together? Because if the world makes sense, and we’ve talked about this before, we’re ultimately engaging in participatory knowing. The form in my mind and my body is the same form that is in the world. And they wanted ultimately to understand this through the lens of conformity, not just scientific explanation, not just psychological therapy. So how do they see the world? And McClennan does a good job on this and I want to sort of expand on one of the metaphors he uses. And he talks about, so microcosmically we have a body and we’ve learned how much the body contributes to how we make sense in the practice. And then he talks about we have a mind and we have a soul and then we see the corresponding conformity in the external world. He talks about basically the world body. And then a metaphor he has to help us for understanding this. And it’s one that I like because of the domain I’m in. This is like the hardware in a computer. This is the actual physical machinery. All the causal processes that are going on when you’re using your computer or using your phone. There’s the hardware. And then he talks about the cosmic mind and he repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly tells you don’t anthropomorphize this. Don’t anthropomorphize this. The idea is our minds, we’ll talk about this later, they participate in the same thing as the cosmic mind. I don’t even quite like using that term but I understand what he’s trying to get at. And he repeatedly says don’t anthropomorphize this. Don’t think about this as something that has consciousness or is engaging in something like inner speech to itself. That’s a fundamental mistake. And he repeatedly warns you with good reason because when you fall prey to anthropomorphism you’re falling into magic. You’re falling into magical thinking, at least in the pejorative sense of magic. Not the way my colleague Junsun Kim uses it but what in the ancient world was called sorcery. Okay, so the idea here is that this is the level of the software. Now if you think about it, like if you were to take out, look at the code, you’d actually have all these strings of propositions that are related to each other logically. And they’re all there all at once and the logical relations are all there all at once. So the software is in a sense timeless. It’s not unfolding in time. It’s not unfolding in time. It’s articulated in logical space, not physical space. So that’s why you can take the same, let’s use an example, the same program and multiply, this is the word we actually use in cognitive science, you can multiply realize it in many different machines. Now the program can’t exist independently from this but it’s not the same as any one instance of it because the same program can be moved, the same files can be moved from one computer to another. That’s why we have this distinction. So this is taking place in physical space. This is taking place in what people, well in our modern computers, in logical space. But I wanted you to think about it a little bit more broadly, more in logistical space, both logical ordering and all the gathered orderings and the ordered gatherings of the logos. So that’s the software. So you can think about this as your operating system, the operating system and all the programs. And McClellan goes into two aspects of this, sort of the differentiated and the undifferentiated. I won’t get into that right now. Why I find this model helpful is it also helps me understand Spinoza because Spinoza’s God is just all three of these seen through a naturalistic lens. That’s why he calls it God or nature. Now this, right, is a set of principles. This is a set of processes. And then what you have here is you’re actually running a program. This is the principles coming into the process and the process being regulated by the principles. Here’s the emergence, here’s the emanation. Here’s the emergence, here’s the emanation. And so this is basically process, all the processes that we find in reality. These are all the principles. And McClellan is right. He says science is all about this. The fact that we’ve seen science and spirituality as opposite to each other is really a mistake because all the laws of nature and all the principles, like the principle of evolution, evolution is a principle. It is a principle that explains how, so here’s the principle of evolution. When you have variation and selection, what’s going to happen is particular organisms in their reproductive process are going to change, they’re going to evolve because of variation and selection. So you have the principles, the principles of evolution, you have the process of evolution, and then you have, of course, the patterns. You can see, oh wait, these are, look, watch the whales. They were like these wolf-like creatures and you can see them through time unfolding and becoming whales. We talk this way, we think this way, and that’s the Neoplatonic point. What is the fundamental cultural cognitive grammar of how we make sense of things. And then that is our biggest indication, our biggest sign. This is what signifies to us the best way we can look at the world. Okay, so this is what you’re doing in Theologia. Like I said, McClellan spends a lot of time unpacking that. I’m not going to go into that in much more detail, but I just wanted to give you a way of at least schematically understanding what this, and how what Theologia is doing is it’s doing this articulation. We are articulating conceptually the patterns of intelligibility. Well, actually, ultimately, the principles, processes, and patterns of intelligibility and of being, of being and being known, and we’re articulating it conceptually so that we can articulate our behavior, our practice. So Theologia is that kind of, that bidirectional or double aspect articulation of intelligibility so that we can more properly engage in our practice. And some people would call this metaphysics. I don’t have any problem with that, but many people, the kind of metaphysics that is prevalent today doesn’t really capture this, so that’s why I tend not to use that word. Okay, so Theologia, Theologia, this literally means the work of the gods, the work of the gods. Okay, so I want to give you a basic definition here. This is the enacted, imaginal affordance of Anagagia. Remember, Anagagia is that process of resonating between the ground of the internal world and the external world, so you get reciprocal opening. So, again, Theologia is the enacted imaginal, not imaginary, and I’m going to give you that distinction in a sec. This is crucial in both Jung and Corbin. The enacted imaginal affordance of Anagagia. And so what we’re trying to get is like that transjective reciprocal opening. So how can we use the imaginal, how can we enact the imaginal in order to afford Anagagia? And so when you’re, a word I want to use to capture all that, and you’ve heard me use it before, is the idea of invocation. We’re trying to invocate, we’re trying to invoke something, provoke it, evoke it, induce it into being. We’re trying to actually generate the affordances of Anagagia using our imaginal capacities. And the idea of the imaginal capacities is that they bridge between the conceptual and the perceptual and between the inner and the outer. So, I talked about this in the awakening from the meaning crisis a little bit more, but the imaginal is the nexus at a cross between how perception is picking up on emergence and how prehension, top down, is picking up prehension, is picking up on emanation, right? And the imaginal is that nexus point between them and then it’s also the nexus point between the internal and the external. This is in fact Corbin’s point. The imaginary is just mental pictures in our head. The imaginal, what it does is it invokes, it activates and coordinates, it invokes the bottom up perception, the top down prehension, and it invokes the external and the internal. So these are images that we are enacting as opposed to images that we are merely representing. I’ll get you into this more specifically. So invocation has sort of, there’s the three ins, sorry, not the three, why did I say three? Because of all the threes in Neoplatonism, I guess. I want to talk about the four ins of invocation. What are we trying to activate? And so we’re trying to activate our insight machinery, our intuition machinery, and I mentioned the book before about that we should think of intuition as your capacity for implicit learning, your capacity for picking up on complex patterns in the environment. So insight, intuition, internalization, which we’ve talked about before, and then inspiration. Inspiration is your motivation to aspiration when you’re trying to go through a process of self-transcendence, that motivation to self-transcendence to engage in aspirational development. So this is what we’re trying to invoke and we’re trying to activate it in such a way that we start to reciprocally open with the world. And we’re using imagery to do this. So visualization techniques. So I mentioned that I’m using the word in the way Korban means. I recommend the work of Thomas Chetham on Korban, A World Turned Inside Out, Imaginal Love, All the World as an Icon. I have one video where I talk to Thomas Chetham. So, excellent. And then there’s even, he does a lot, especially in the Imaginal Love, coordinating Jung and Korban together. Jung and Korban were of course good friends and collaborators, although I think Korban more reliably cites the influence of Jung than Jung cites the influence of Korban. So let’s talk about this Imaginal. How am I using an image? Well, I want to set you up with a contrast class where I’m relating two things together. So when I’m speaking literally, I’m basically saying A is B. Right? Lightning is electricity. I mean that literally. There’s an equivalence relation. Metaphorical, and we’ve talked about this before, is when I use A in order to see something different about B. So when I say, you know, Sam is a pig, I sort of think about what I find salient or relevant of pigs, which are very highly salient in a pig, and then that makes me see things that are often very low in salient in Sam, or I might not have noticed, and then I have the insight. It brings it into awareness. I get the salience inversion, as Ortoni says. But how we’re using imagery, in theurgia, is mystical. Where mystical doesn’t mean magical, it doesn’t mean that the world is made out of dead elves, or that everything is composed of ectoplasm. What the mystical means is that you are being taken beyond the limits of speech, literal and metaphorical. You are transcending. We think of this as exhaustive. There’s the literal and the metaphorical. And what theurgia says, no, is there’s a third. There’s the imaginal, the mystical. What happens in there? So here’s A, and here’s B, and I realize that they actually come, I’m trying to signify that by, and think about this almost as folding into the third dimension. What I’m trying to indicate here is they both are siblings of a common ancestor, of a more encompassing, deeper grounding pattern that makes you realize there is like a sibling affinity between these. So what you have here is you have correlated participation. Now you think, oh what the heck is he talking about? That is so abstract, and you have been doing it. The thing that has been getting you to realize this are these, the theoria. When you co-realize that the self-sustaining stability within and the self-sustaining stability without, and how they’re actually at one with each other. Here’s the self-sustaining stability within, here’s the self-sustaining ability without, and they’re affine. They’re like siblings of a common principle, the principle of how things are self-sustaining, self-perpetuating, both internally and externally. You have a co-related participation. So this is the mystical, this is the imaginal, and it is neither. If you understand it literally, you’re doing sorcery, and you’re being stupid. If you understand it just metaphorically, you are not going through transformation, and therefore you are mistaking the whole process. The tricky thing, tricky sounds deceptive, the crucial thing, the crucial knack you have to get, it has to click for you, is I’m not seeing it literally, and I’m not seeing it just metaphorically. I’m seeing it mystically. I’m seeing it in an imaginal fashion, not in either an imaginary fashion. This is imaginary, this is literal. I’m seeing it neither literally nor imaginary. I’m seeing it mystically. I’m realizing it as imaginal. Okay, so how do we practice getting to the imaginal as opposed to the literal or the imaginary? Because that’s at the core of theurgia. Getting to the imaginal, having a mystical realization, again, I wish, I kind of like, I want to at times replace mystical with imaginal, because it’s in many ways less contentious, but both terms have problems. When people hear imaginal, they think imaginary, and when people hear mystical, they think magical. And the point is, both of those are going the wrong way. The magical is to take it literally, the imaginary is to take it just metaphorically, and we’re trying to get beyond that because we’re trying to invoke the transjective relationship of anagogy, of reciprocal opening, which is neither inner nor outer. It’s neither just subjective nor objective. So how do we get to the imaginal so that we can evoke it? Well, we’re going to, of course, use visualization of imagery. You just said, but we’re not supposed to do that. Just be patient, please, and I’m going to get there. Now what we want to do though is we want to not just play with images or fantasize, and that’s a word also from this tradition, phantasm, which means an illusion, right? We want to basically do this so that we get to the archetypal depths of the psyche. We want to get to the place where consciousness and unconsciousness, right, where our conscious awareness is coming into contact with the participatory machinery that makes consciousness possible. And of course, that’s where the psychodynamic tradition, especially Freud and Jung, have done so much work. We want to get to a place that’s trans-egoic. We want to get outside the ego in the depths of the psyche using imagery that way. Now what we have are the pre-hended perceptual patterns, and what helps us realize these? Well, you know, you have theologia and theoria that helps you to realize these. So obviously you can’t be doing theurgia unless you’ve been doing lots of reflection in theologia and lots of practice, contemplative practice in theoria. And then what you’re doing is finding how they resonate with each other, how they reciprocally open. You’re trying to sense the, and I’m using this word in both senses, I just did it, you’re trying to sense perceptually and you’re trying to sense mentally, like when you make sense, you’re trying to sense the affinity between these two, how they’re siblings, how they’re at one with each other in a way that isn’t just conceptual, in a way that’s actually making you experience the resonance between them. You’re trying to sense their underlying common ground. That’s the imaginal, because it stereoscopically points inward and outward at the same time. And what I’m doing is I’m doing this stereoscopic triangulation. I’m doing this so that I realize the common ground between them. Okay, so what we’re going to start with are some practices that, so we have, I’ve indicated to you how you do this side. I’ve given you an example of this and we’ve done an exercise with this. So we want to start practicing this in this direction so we can get the transagoic to put us into relationship with what’s transmundane outside of the everyday world of our experience. Not separate, not supernatural. The software can’t run independently of the hardware. None of that, again, magical thinking. So what I, like I said, I’ve taught you this. I want to explain and take you through a practice of how to do this. Like I said, we’ll run a little bit over today because I want to also answer some questions. So we’re trying to show how we get, remember we’re always trying to do this. We’re trying to activate our insight machinery, our intuitive machinery, our internalization machinery, and our inspirational machinery. We’re trying to invoke. We’re trying to realize it, again, in both senses of the word. Okay, so I want to talk about three kinds of these practices, or at least two. I’ll take you through to, maybe point to a third. The one I want to talk about today is focusing. But next week what I want to talk about is doing dream work. I’ve gone through Jungian therapy. I’ve done tons of training, all the workshops. I practice it. So what I need you all to do is if you’re already journaling where you’re noting at the end of the day the stoic practices, what vice did I commit? What virtue did I omit? What biases were present? What virtues did I realize? What I need you to do is to start the first thing, so get your journal, put it beside you. The first thing you wake up in the morning, the very first thing, even before you open your eyes, orient yourself towards your journal and write down what your dreams are and try to capture the imagery as much as you can. And this will take practice. You have to get into a regular practice of remembering your dreams so that you can start to get to the archetypal depths. Okay, we’ll talk about that dream work, which I think is a modern version of theurgia next week. But in order to get our place to the place where we can properly learn how to do it, I want to teach you Genland’s technique of focusing. I want to teach you Genland’s technique of focusing. It has basic steps to it. So what you’re going to do is you’re going to sit and you’re going to clear a space. You guys know how to do this already. You’re going to see all the overlaps with what I’ve already taught you. You’re going to find your center, find your route, find your flow, find your focus, come to that settled, spacious awareness by realizing the core form. Now, here’s where it shifts from meditation. What you’re going to do is let problems, because your brain has always got those ready to go and here we’re not going to treat them like distractions or even meditate on them as a child. We’re going to let the problems come up. We’re going to let problems emerge. We don’t go looking for them. We’re going to let problems emerge and we’re going to stay detached from them. We’re going to do the view from above. We’re going to remain mindful of them. We’re not going to go into them. We’re just going to let them arise. And what we’re doing is letting them inhabit and this is the term that Genland comes on again and again and again and he’s playing also on the word sense. The felt sense. What does the problem feel like in your mind and body? You don’t have to solve the problem or even formulate at this stage a question about it. Just how is it being invoked in you? Now, the thing about problems is the world, a problem is between you and the world. It’s a breakdown. It’s the opposite of anagogy. The world doesn’t contain problems. The world just has stuff and the problem isn’t in you. The problem is a breakdown in the fittedness, the transjective fittedness between you and the world. This is how we’re getting into that frame by something that is really familiar and pertinent to us, which is our problems. We’re turning our problems into affordances. Okay, so what we do is, the first thing to do is we clear a space. Okay, and then what you want to do is you want to get a felt sense of the problem. So you want to, again, don’t try to unfold the problem in thought. You’re trying to get a felt sense of the problem over whole. A felt sense of its complexity without trying to unpack it, without trying to resolve it. You’re trying to get this felt sense and what you’re going to do is you’re doing this deep listening. You’re trying to sense the form, the idos of the problem, rather than immediately unpack it and unfold it in inner speech. Three. So now you’re going to find your handle. So what you’re going to do, and this is a very experimental thing, you’re going to try and come up with a word or a picture that captures the gestalt and that has a sense of how the problem is actually emerging into this image. This word or image. So, and you can see what’s happening here. This is imaginal, not just imaginary. What you’re trying to do is basically create an icon. You’re trying to, if I had to, what’s the word, the picture, or the word picture that just captures this? So when I get it right, you can feel that shift, that felt shift in mind and body. Yeah, yeah, that’s the insight, right? Alright. Now notice it’s not an insight into the solution. It’s an insight into the idos of the problem. So you’re trying to get this handle, this felt sense. So what you’re trying to do is what word or word picture, what icon, would invoke the problem? Would cause it to be active in you again, cause it to inhabit your mind and body again. Okay. Now you resonate. And here you know this, because we’ve practiced resonance a lot. You resonate. Basically you’re enchanting your icon. You keep speaking the word image, keep imagining the image, speaking the word, and it keeps invoking that felt sense. And so you’re trying to, I mean, this sounds paradoxical, but maybe, I hope not, but you’re basically doing a reciprocal opening on it, until it is coming more and more present to you. Instead of getting into how you represent it in concepts, you’re trying to invoke how it, you’re trying to really enhance through this enchantment of the icon, you’re trying to enhance how it is presencing in you. Rather than how you’re representing it in thought, how is it presencing in you? Then, fifth, asking. Ask your icon, your word image, what do you need? What do you need? What do you need? And this is like the invocation you do in Lectio Divina, where you let the text speak to you, or in Philosophical Fellowship, where you’re presencing the perspective of the sage. What do you need? What do you need? You open yourself up for the answer. Remember I said, don’t use meditative questioning to get answers, because I was going to teach you something in which you will do that. This is it. What do you need? You’ll say, that kind of sounds like prayer. It’s like prayer, and it’s not prayer. You’re imagining something, but it’s not just imagining something. You’re doing the imaginal. You’re doing imaginal invocation. What do you need? You have to ask this question like we do in Lectio Divina. This open listening. You’re not trying to resolve, you’re not trying to represent, you’re not trying to automatically categorize, you’re trying to afford a space in which the icon can speak to you. It’s not literally speaking to you, but it’s not just metaphorically speaking to you either. Something else is going on that is trans-egoic. The answer you’ll get will be accompanied by a second felt shift. This felt shift of the body and the mind going, they’ll be like, oh. It might not be any fully propositional thing, because it might be that what you needed to do was a procedural change, but you’ll get a sense of it being answered. You’ll get a sense of, right, that if I were not to turn to this problem in the world, I would be tapping deeper trans-egoic resources within myself, which would put me into conformity with deeper patterns in the world that I’m not currently realizing. I would start to afford reciprocal opening in this problematic situation, rather than reciprocal nearing. I would be affording anagagay. That then takes us to the last thing, which is receiving. You have to receive this into you. You have to receive it like an internalization. You have to let it become a part of you. Okay, so let’s review one more time what we’re doing, and then we’re going to do a version of this, and then we’ll take some questions. I apologize. Like I said, we’re going to be going over quite a bit normally than we normally do. I understand if you have to leave, but we’re doing theergy. We’re going to clear a space. We’re going to do a felt sense of the problem. We’re going to get a handle on it. We’re going to resonate. We’re going to ask, and we’re going to receive. Alright, so we’re going to switch back to the cushion. And I’ll sort of talk you through this process. Okay. So let’s take a moment. This will be relatively brief. I just want to give you a taste for how to do this. Let’s take a moment and just find your car for it. You’ve been practicing this a long time. This should be happening more rapidly than it used to. Just drop into that space. You’re clearing the space. Centering, rooting, flowing, focusing. Now I’m going to talk aloud, but you wouldn’t normally talk aloud, because you can’t see my mind, and I’m going to try and articulate what’s happening. So it’s a little bit intrusive. It’s hard to do this. So try and do something corresponding within yourself. Okay, so I clear this space. I’m going to take a moment and now I let a problem emerge. A problem has emerged. And I’m going to, you know, I’m just going to open up. I’m not going to go into any problem. I’m going to stand back from them and just let them sort of emerge like the way distracting thoughts emerge within mindfulness practice. I don’t go into them. I’m going to give you from above. But which of them is most inhabiting my mind and body right now? Sorry, this will be somewhat personal, but it’s the only way to provide you guys with some guidance. So I’m having a problem with trusting right now. Somebody is deserving of my trust, but I’m not capable of trusting them as I should. I mean intellectually I know why that’s the case, the way I’ve been betrayed in the past. So I really feel this. How do I feel this? I feel this. I’m trying to get a sense of it in my mind and body. This is where your mindfulness practice is helpful. I can feel where it’s sort of like a hot line running from my heart into my abdomen. And I can feel my mind twisting around it. So I’m really trying to just get a felt sense of it. How is this problem inhabiting? It’s almost like it’s got a life of its own. How is it inhabiting my mind and my body? I can feel how it tightens my chest, my breath, becomes difficult. I can feel, like I said, how my mind gets scattered but also shrinks. It’s a felt sense of, I can sense the complexity. I’m trying to sense the whole thing, physically and mentally, sense the whole thing, how it’s inhabiting all of my mind and body, even my world. I’m seeing the world through this lens. Because that’s what a problem is, it’s between you and the world. So I’m trying to come up with a word image that invokes it, that would reactivate the problem almost magically. And another, later if I wanted to re-invoke this felt sense, what word, what image would capture it? What’s coming to me is choking. Notice how that catches some of the emotion. I’m feeling choked. I can’t breathe. I stay with it. I stay with it. I stay with it. I’m choking. I enchant the icon. It’s not pleasant. I keep going. Choking. Choking. Choking. What do you need? Asking. What do you need? What do you need? Getting a felt sense of depth. Like a deep river of clear water. I need that sustaining depth. You need that sustaining depth. A sense of release. Shift. Thank you. Thank you. Receiving. Come back into the core four to re-stabilize. Center root, flow and focus. Slowly come out of your practice. Carrying into the world the gratitude and the felt shift. The way you’ve had an insight. Picking up on patterns you hadn’t picked up on before. Intuition. You’re inspired to change and you’ve started to internalize a new way of being. The urge you. Alright. Now I’m going to try and answer some of the questions that have been raised. Karima, how is the one the ultimate good? What everything needs in order to exist and be what it is. How does this get transformed down into duality through the world of mind? That’s a really difficult question. But the idea is that a good is anything that reliably meets a need. And McClellan actually gives an excellent explanation of this. The good we’re talking about when we think the one is good is not moral goodness. It’s not aesthetic goodness. It’s not epistemic goodness. It’s not the true, the good, or beautiful as we live our lives. It is what makes them possible. If you think about what are we trying to do when we get truth? We’re trying to unify and integrate information. All these other goods depend on the fact that things are integrated. That they have an intelligible unity to them. So all things need, insofar as we have truth there has been integration. Insofar as we do what is morally good. What is it to do with good? Well you have met the need of someone else. Which is what? Well you’ve helped to afford them being an integrated unified thing. Instead of you not pulling them apart, you’re helping afford how they are coming more into a fuller wholeness. The word holy and healing and being whole are all interrelated. Same with aesthetic beauty. Beauty is when we suddenly realize how these things fit together and we can enjoy. Think of the Epicureans. We can enjoy this. How does it come into the mind? That trans-epistemic, trans-aesthetic, trans-moral sense of goodness. First breaks off into the three dimensions of the true, the good, the morally good and the beautiful. Each one of those then branches off into specific truths. We’re pursuing specific virtues. We’re pursuing specific theories. We’re pursuing specific virtues. We’re pursuing specific experiences. Insofar as we are reliably meeting the needs that sustain our existence. At all of these levels. At the physical level and at the mental level and at the spiritual level. We are experiencing the one but as refracted through the lens of the true, the good and the beautiful. I’m going to move to a question from Robert Gray. Tom Chisholm seems to have a philosophical love and respect for Corbin based on the way he talks and writes on him? and I got to speak with Tom and I got to read his books. Yeah, he has an example. So I think it’s very fair to say that for him, Corban is the sage that he is internalizing. So Corban is right, Corban is imaginal. Corban is internalized so that Chatham’s inner Buddha, inner sage, can be more properly presenced and analogically realized. Now Rainer Ludwig has a question. How can you justify the mystical aspects of neo-platinism with a scientific worldview which does not allow for the supernatural? Having a science background, I find this difficult to reconcile. Rainer, I take that very seriously and I am a naturalistic neo-platinist. I have tried to show you throughout and McClellan is doing the same thing that neo-platinism can be reinterpreted naturalistically and therefore reconciled with a scientific worldview. And this is no coincidence. Science is deeply neo-platonic. What we have to give up is misunderstanding the mystical as the supernatural, as the magical. For me, one way of like the forms are the laws that science are discovering and the principles that science are discovering. What do I mean by a law? I mean something like force equals mass times acceleration. What do I mean by a principle? I mean the principle of evolution. These are the hyper, what Morton calls the hyper objects. The evolution doesn’t exist. Like it’s not an object. Like because objects I can point to where they are. They have a body. It’s right there, right then. Right? It’s a principle. Where is force equals mass times acceleration? It’s not anywhere but it’s also not nowhere. It’s not just a metaphor and it’s not right. It’s not just a literal object or thing. It’s imaginal actually in a very powerful way. So I think we are engaged in anachronistic fallacy when we read the neo-platonists in a way they would not want to be read which is espousing a literal mythology and metaphysics. And I think that’s what generates the supernatural reading. And I think for reasons I hope I articulated today, that’s fundamentally mistaken. So we want to avoid a literalism that disconnects us from the depths and we want to avoid a mirror subjective imaginary that misdirects us, has us mistake it in a way that is not actually transformative. So for me, and like I said and McLuhan shows as many other people do, you can read John Spencer’s book, The Eternal Law, or another book I forget the author Nature Loves to Hide, like Platonism and the Objects of Science, Aristotle’s Revenge, showing how especially well all four of those would be good, showing you how already deeply neo-platonic science is. It invokes the kinds of entities that the neo-platonists were invoking. They used a different language. Holding ourselves to the literalism of their language, we’re following the letter and not the spirit. And the spirit doesn’t just mean, oh well I’ll interpret it metaphorically. That’s also not what’s going on. If you want somebody who’s really trying to get this imaginal sense of a symbolic way of being, look at the work of Jonathan Pageau. I hope that was helpful. Manual Post, observation, I’ve been getting steady insights over the past two weeks allowing me to relate to the consequences of my practice. I wanted to send my thanks for affording these changes in my life. Well thank you Manuel, and I appreciate you thanking me. I’m glad to hear that the practices are starting to take on a life of their own for you in this vital way. Oisstein Silverston, I have an observation and a question regarding it. I have started to experience meditation induced hallucinations during deep vipassana. I can see scary faces. One time the face of the devil. Yes, this comes up. Are you capable of, right, so what happens, what’s going on there is you’ve got a lot of, so I don’t want to say this in a way that sounds harsh. That’s like a Rorschach, right? You’ve got a lot of ambiguous signal and it’s like an ink block, right, and you’re projecting into it unconscious fears and anxieties. But what’s actually happening is your anxiety is trying to give a face to it, that you can face, that you can do this work. But what you could do is try instead, right, before you engage in the meditation, try to do the practice I’ve just showed you and try and let the problem of the anxiety or the fear come up in you and go through the focusing practice. Because if you open up to it, if you allow, if you try to cooperate with it, it will often shift the icon that it wants to face you with so that you can more appropriately face it and enter into a dialogical relationship with it. So try this exercise and see and try this exercise and then try it when you go into the medit, like in the meditation that comes up, try and the scary face, try instead to feel behind it to that part of you, right, that problem that is trying to get to a way in which it can speak to you and open yourself up to it. So what am I recommending? Do the focusing outside of the practice and in Vipassana, if you get the scary face, do you like the meditative questioning? Thank you, but what’s behind this? And then direct meta towards what’s behind it. It’s not going to be pleasant. This isn’t about pleasant. This is about good and those aren’t the same thing. I hope that helps. Same thing with the meta hallucination. Now if you’re starting to get about seeing the eye with a root, this is not scary but strange. Good. So you’re already, so notice that in the meta the icon is less aggressive towards you, right, and that’s already something to take note of. So try the theurgia, try the focusing practice. Mark, hi Mark, it’s good to hear from you. Observation, savoring is really powerful practice. Was stopping while climbing and appreciating the view, noticing new things, finding details when I hadn’t before. I’m glad you see that. And notice how that epicurean practice in primary school, that that noticing, right, is it’s still at the core of the University of Neoplatonism because ultimately all of this theurgia is an enhanced and exapted form of savoring. Okay, so that’s all the questions we’re going to take for today and I want to thank you all so very much for your time and attention. I understand that some of the material today is abstract. I try to make it as concrete and give you a practice for it. I want to thank you for joining. I want to thank Ammar and Jason. Please subscribe to the channel to be notified of the next video. Please follow me on Twitter if it’s not against any of your principles for updates about these streams. Invite others who might benefit by sharing this series. Please join the Discord server. Vital and vibrant community there for you. We will next Friday be having the monthly Q&A. I explained why we needed to move it and towards the end of the month on the Monday at 6, I can’t remember if it’s 6 or 6 30. I’ll be, Eastern Time, I’ll be on the Discord server doing an hour and a half Q&A there. So that’s it for today and please remember that it’s the continuity of practice and can you see that now? The continuity of the practice, more than the sheer quantity of the practice, that really matters. Don’t hold yourself to the standard of harsh perfection but virtuous friendship because as you can see anew in the practice we learned today, the beginnings of theurgia, right, there is no enemy worse than your own mind and body but there’s no friend, no ally, no true companion on the path better than your own mind and body. Be lamps unto yourselves and to each other. Take good care everyone. I’ll see you next Saturday. Bye.