https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=rWwmJ912NJU
Welcome to Cultivating Wisdom with John Breveke. If you’re joining us for the first time, I’m chuckling because this is actually the last session we’re going to have together. This course that began I think in March or April. You’re most welcome. What I recommend you do is go to the description, the links to the very first lesson. You can work your way through the lessons, you can work your way through the sits, you can do the meditation and contemplation course drawing on the Buddhist and Taoist traditions and then you can move into the wisdom of Hypatia course drawing on the Epicurean, Stoic and Neoplatonic traditions. And then if you wish to continue practicing with the community, there’s link to the Discord server in the video and you can go there to meet people who have gone through this course, formed a Senya together, integrated with the more expansive community on the Discord server. So there’s lots of resources for you. You’re not alone. There’s a community there. I regularly go on the Discord server at least once a month answering general Q&A. So you’re most most welcome. So as I said this is our last session. I want to take this time now to thank Jason and Amar who have done so so much for us all the way through. It has been… When the people that you love give you great gifts it matters and so they have done that for me continuously. And I want to thank all of you who have joined and attended and you know been involved and supported each other. I strongly encourage you to keep doing this. You have something really important that you’ve all built together and keep it going and keep it growing. And I will… I’m not disappearing but this course is ending. I will still be available for the general Q&A’s on my channel, the general Q&A’s on the Discord server. And there’s more series, more video series coming down the pipe. So thank you one and all. So today we’re going to as always we’re going to begin with a chant and then a silent sit and then we’ll go to the whiteboard and we’ll have our logos talk. We’re going to do a sort of a culminating talk and then I’ll point to a few more things. I’m hoping to actually create one more video with the members of my philosophical fellowship community enacting dialectic into dialogos. I think it’s trying to teach it in this context just I don’t think will work. And then so there’s one sort of more lesson after this one. It’ll be uploaded on to YouTube and I’ll announce when that’s available. Okay so get yourself ready, get yourself comfortable, put your phones on do not disturb and we will begin together when I say begin. Begin. One. Om. One. Om. One. Om. One. Om. One. Begin your silent sit. You You You You You You You You You You You You You You You You 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. You You Okay now we’re going to move to the whiteboard. So we’re going through the core elements of neoplatonic practice and we took a look at Theologia last time which of course we hear theology which isn’t completely right but it’s not completely wrong either. What we’re basically doing here is this is rational reflection. Rational reflection on the orders of intelligibility. On the orders of intelligibility. All those levels and patterns by which we make sense of things and the fundamental insight is The deepest patterns of intelligibility signify being. They’re the lens through which we can come into a conformity awareness of being. And and the idea here is I think I’m going to move my lectern a little tiny bit because I’m getting too blocked here. All right, so the idea was This basic idea of the forms the idos and these are these we don’t have quite a right word for it. Remember these are these paradigmatic patterns, powers. So they’re patterns of intelligibility but they’re powers of possibility and then they’re paradigms of understanding. So if you take our three notions of a pattern Power. Power is an actual possibility for change and paradigm which is a structure for understanding. Then what you’ve got is what the forms are and Theologia has us reflect on these bring them into our theoretical awareness and understanding the conceptual structure. And then of course we we contemplate the world in terms of the forms in Theoria and we’ve done some of those exercises. And then in Theoria what we’re trying to do is this. We’ve got the idea of the logos. And what it does is it’s unfolding the forms. In any intelligible behavior prototypically speech but also imagery narrative etc. And so this is realization in the sense of making real actualizing. This is the sense of realization in the sense of coming into awareness coming into understanding. And what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to make it a reality. And this is the sense of realization in the sense of coming into awareness coming into understanding. And what we’re trying to do in Theoria is we are trying to enact symbolically enact this at one minute. The realization of realization. Nishatani one of the greatest figures of the Kyoto school defined religion as the self realization of reality. And in that in that sense this is like a religious thing we’re trying to do in Theoria. OK so Theoria is the right to enact this in one minute. It’s symbolic enactment. And then I gave you the four ends of Theoria. And I want to remind you that you’re already doing Theoria. You’re doing it in Alexio Divina. You’re doing it in philosophical fellowship. So I’m just adding some new components to it so that you have a rich reservoir of things you are doing with respect to Theoria. And so what we’re trying to do is co activate mutually afford insight intuition which is not a magical romantic faculty. This is your ability to pick up out pick up on complex patterns in the world outside of deliberate focal awareness. Internalization which is in many ways the pivot point of this internalization and inspiration. The sense of empowerment of arousal and encouragement. So that brings you into aspiration seeking self transcendence and self transformation. So these are the four ends. This is how you get into Theoria. You’re trying to activate in a coordinated fashion this gestalt of processes cognitive processes. Then I made an argument last time drawn from Corban and I’m suggesting that we put Corban and Young together. Young is sort of the Plato of the psyche and Corban is sort of the Plato of the symbolic. And you when you put them together I think you’re getting some powerful tools for reinventio of neoplatonic practice. I made the argument that the symbolic is the imaginal. The imaginal is not the same thing as to have an image. It’s or to have a conception of something. It is it has to be enacted in participation and participatory knowing. Let’s remember that the word symbol on originally meant to join together. It’s the same meaning as you know conjugal conjoining yoga. Think of yoga as the imaginal in yoga. You are enacting things that get you to participate in a different sense of self a different sense of world. And in that sense you’re doing serious play so that you’re supposed to come into union with what is ultimate the divine. That’s the original purpose of yoga. That’s how you have to hear this imaginal. That’s how you have to hear symbol on. I’m going to use the Greek word as much as possible because it means to join together like the sacred acts that you’re doing in things like yoga or Tai Chi Chuan. And Tai Chi Chuan I am enacting the imaginal so that I can come into a participatory awareness of the Tao etc. OK. The problem we have of course in our culture is that this word is equivocal and often trivialized like everything else we do with important thoughts in our culture because that by equivocating on it and trivializing it. It makes it vague and easy to manipulate commodify sell use etc. And all the things that are problematic for in our culture right now with respect to the philosophical and the spiritual. OK. One meaning of imagine of course is mental image. So when I say imagine a sailboat you form a mental image although mental images sometimes play a role in the urge. They are not the dominant thing. So when you hear imagine don’t primarily hear this. They’re not excluded but they are not focal. They’re not focal. When John Lennon says imagine there’s no heaven he’s not asking you to form an image. He’s not. In fact I’ve never I don’t think I’ve ever tried to form an image. He’s asking you to try and adopt a perspective of possibility perspective of possibility. What’s it like. Imagine means to imagine it means to adopt a perspective you’re enacting a perspective you’re considering you’re more than considering you’re trying to write. I said like you’re trying to. Well maybe you want to say maybe you’re really deeply considering. You’re trying to see if it’s viable for you. Could you actually start to attempt to realize this vision in your everyday life. So this this idea of adopting a perspective of possibility or of the possible and that’s much. Notice how this is getting us into realization. This is you’ve got to give a lot more emphasis to this sense of imagine. And then next which is really important which is play and play in the sense of pretend. But notice here’s this is like right. And I don’t mean in the sense of pretentious. So this is a point made a long time. Very good point by Gilbert Ryle. When children are imagining they’re not really making mental pictures. Right. I mean they might be. But for example when a child is pretending that it’s a dinosaur. Right. The child isn’t forming a mental image. What the child is doing is actually adopting a perspective of the possible and then conforming to it shaping themselves to it. You see how these two go really closely together. Or imagine somebody acting out a play. Somebody is being Sherlock Holmes. They and we call it a play for a reason. They’re not they don’t have a mental image of Sherlock Holmes. They’re adopting a perspective and then conforming to it identifying with it taking up an identity within the perspective of the possible. Pretend. Right. Attention. Right. Here the pretension and attention prehend. They’re all related together. So this is to adopt an identity within it. You can form yourself to it. An identity within it. So this is to engage in perspectival and participatory knowing in a pretty powerful way. OK. So these two are focal. You might use this as help as a help but it’s not central. And we have tended to focus on this because we like to focus on the objects of our cognition rather than the processes of our cognition. That’s a besetting sin of our culture. But these two and how interwoven they are. That’s the sense of imagine that we want not primarily this but this and this. And then what you want to do is you want to activate this. You want to engage it and then you want to try and see through it and you want to try and write in two directions. Transjective. That’s what the imaginal is. I’m trying to see in the world what I haven’t seen. I do this. I may be using this as a bit of help but this is the primary. Like a child is seeing the world. So this becomes the child’s sword and parts of the child are drawn up and developed. Right. And so you’re looking through it. The imaginal is inherently transjective. Once you use imagination in a transjective fashion for the imaginal, you’re doing symbolic enactment like the child pretending that they are Tyrannosaurus Rex. Now we know that of course they’re not literally a Tyrannosaurus Rex but you know the child isn’t just being metaphorical. The child is realizing they’re developing. They’re doing this in order to actualize aspects of the world and aspects of themselves in a coordinated fashion. That’s what I mean when I said that the imaginal is not the literal. The literal is A equals B. The child is a dinosaur. That’s ridiculous. We’d all run in fear and we tried to kill it. Okay. It’s just a metaphor. Is it? It’s not just a metaphor because the child isn’t just considered. I could think of myself as a dinosaur. I could think of human beings as a Tyrannosaurus Rex. The child isn’t doing that. What’s happening, right, and this is what’s central, is the mystical. Right. Maybe this is what Karima wanted me to talk about yesterday. Hmm. That’s possibly what it is. Right. Where the child and the imagined, right, in the sense of considering adopting a perspective and adopting an identity, right, the T-Rex, they’re both, whoa, whoa, whoa, that’s way too much. I just cracked you. I’m not good today again. What you’re doing is you’re seeing, like, what’s being actualized in me, what’s being actual, it’s actual, it’s not just metaphorical, it’s being co-realized between the child and, right, the Tyrannosaurus, right, that that imaginal relation actually causes the co-realization of what is seen through beyond them, their common ground. The pattern of connection that forms between the internal and the external world. That’s the imaginal. The imaginal is always between, not within. And that takes you into the mystical. What we see is the shards of Neoplatonism in Jung and Corban and others and within Neoplatonic Christianity, Eastern Orthodoxy. And what people are doing, myself included, is trying to gather those shards together and reassemble the lens through which the world can be seen and through which we can also see ourselves. Okay, so last time we did the focusing practice as a practice to participate in the imaginal, right, it wasn’t, when you’re getting your handle for that in-co-hate thing that’s coming up out of your unconscious, it’s often not literal, it’s not just metaphorical, it’s imaginal. You’re enacting the imaginal in a powerful way. You’re trying to coordinate the conscious and the unconscious minds so that they co-realize together. Now, in conjunction with that, I want to talk about a practice from Jung and a practice that I have deeply and continue to deeply practice. I went into Jung-Yin therapy for about a year and a half, obviously for personal reasons that I won’t go into, but also, and this is the case, explicitly because I wanted to truly understand Jung as a way of practice. So part of the problem with Jung today is many people talk about Jung and talk about things, but they don’t know, they haven’t actually, if you haven’t actually done Jung, if you haven’t actually done the therapy with somebody and you haven’t done the extensive dream work, I don’t mean to sound harsh, but you really don’t understand Jung. It’s like saying you’ve understood how to make love. What all you’ve done is looked at pictures and read books and talk about it a lot, right? There’s, you have to, and you have to do it with somebody else. It’s an inherently dialogical thing. That being said, I’m going to try the best I can to make use of the book written by my therapist, which I think is an excellent book on how you can individually or perhaps even collectively do dream work together. And that’s the book by George Slater, Bringing Dreams to Life. I recommended it last time that you get it, George Slater, S-L-A-T-E-R, Bringing Dreams to Life. I want to read you a couple quotes right from the beginning of our session here on this from George, and because they bespeak of the attitude you must take in this practice. Okay, so first of all, there’s an attitude of diligence. As I mentioned last time, you’ve got to get a dream journal. And every night you go to bed, you can say to yourself, may I remember my dreams, may I remember my dreams, may I remember my dreams. When you wake up in the morning before you open your eyes, what did I dream, what did I dream, what did I dream? Even if you can’t remember, open up your dream journal and write down the date, and I didn’t, you know, no dreams to report. But if you keep doing this on a regular basis, it gathers momentum like a snowball going down a hill, and what happens is you will start remembering more and more of your dreams, and then you have material to work with. Now, here’s something that George doesn’t talk about, I don’t think very much in the book, but often it’s good to, you’ll find that dream, there’s, well, I’ll show you how to like interpret your dream, but often there’s relation between dreams. There’s dream sequences that you’ll eventually pick up on if you keep a journal. If you don’t keep a journal, first of all, you won’t remember your dreams as well. It’ll be hard to do the interpretation, and you won’t pick up on the dream sequences. Okay, so now here’s the quote. There is a danger, however, in treating dreams like puzzles to be solved. So if we bring the attitude towards this, that there is a puzzle to be solved rather than a dialogue to enter into, just stop doing it, okay? Just stop doing what you’re doing, because you’ve radically mis-trained this process totally. Look, what I’m trying to do in this work is I’m trying to go trans-egoic. I’m trying to get to the aspects of the psyche that are deeper and developmentally beyond the ego. Trans-egoic. And then what I want to do in theurgia is I want to put that into resonance realization with what is trans-egocentric. Can I see the world from a… Can I see and be in the world from something beyond the egocentric perspective? In order to do that, I have to realize the trans-egoic elements of the psyche. If you enter into this from an egoic framework, I’m going to interpret this and figure it out. Ego, ego, ego, ego, ego, ego, ego. Forget it. Then you’re not going to get this, and you’re not going to get this. And then I don’t know what you’re doing, maybe some form of very sophisticated narcissism, but don’t engage in that. That is a radical mis-framing. So George goes on. I want to read you more. This is a quote at length, but I think there is a lot of wisdom, a lot of wisdom in George, and I really benefit in it and appreciate it. So he emphasizes two words that he wants to challenge. He starts to quote by, these two words are emphasized, thinking about a dream objectifies it. Notice, right, tries to literalize it, right, tries to turn it into a puzzle that can be manipulated and solved, right, into a problem of which I am curious, not a mystery into which I wonder. That wasn’t all of him. That was me. So thinking about a dream objectifies it, much like hanging a picture on a wall. I love this imagery. Or as something we can talk about or admire. There it is. And that’s what I mean about the narcissism. Look at my wonderful dream. Oh, there it is. Okay. I’m so special. Okay. We can talk about or admire, now to pick up his quote again. Rather, the meaning of dreams is something we grasp best by experiencing it, like entering into a picture and feeling it as a part of ourselves. Participatory knowing, internalization, right, interpretation that is only analysis turns images into concepts. The kind of meaning that is given by the symbols and images of dreams is experienced by entering into or, and he now emphasizes these two words, participating in symbols. Symbols are something that is fundamentally known through participatory knowing. We activate a perspective and then we adopt an identity within it when we go through a process of identity transformation. It is participatory knowing because that is the fundamental knowing by which we realize transjectivity. Okay. So his other main slogan is energy follows the image. Now energy here is, right, he means, he means psychological energy. What’s not what in his day used to be, in Jung’s day used to be called psychic energy, but we can’t use the word psychic anymore because it means you have weird ectoplasmic non-scientifically accessible psychic energy. That’s scientifically accessible energies that allow you to talk to your dead grandmother about how dolphins are really sort of going to take over the world or something ridiculous like that. So I don’t use that word anymore. Instead we have what is met by psychological energy. You know what that is. That’s relevance and salience and arousal, et cetera. Okay. So symbols are not just images. And here’s how Jung is the inner Plato. They are patterns with that are powerful and paradigmatic. They are paradigmatic power patterns. And what they are is they are the power for transformation paradigmatic that allows us to understand and know ourselves in ways we can’t do. Nor unless we undertake this practice. And of course they are patterns. They unfold in, you know, in a musicality of intelligibility. And so we have to we have to we have to learn to like the way you listen to music and participate in it and resonate in it and internalize it and into it into it and get insight from it. That that’s the attitude you have to take towards your your your dream content. Okay. So George gives a 24 step program, which I don’t think I think is a little bit burdensome. I’ve tried to I’ve generally collapsed it down into sort of 12 steps that I want to share with you. Okay. So you’ve written down your dream. You just write down your dream. And then later you turn to I don’t even like want to say interpret it anymore because that sounds like a puzzle. You enter you’re setting yourself up to dialogue to dialogue through your dream. Because what we’re doing here, right. And this is a book that Chris and I and anthology we’ve edited and contributed to. We’re trying to get our inner dialogue. I can’t spell today. Just cannot spell. And our inner dialogue. And right with the trains egoic and our outer dialogue with the trains egocentric. Got to wait. Okay. Now that’s what we’re trying to do. So I’m going to talk about this now. And like I said, I’m going to release a video doing dialectic into the logos, which is the other form. And so what we’re doing is I’m emphasizing this half of this equation right now. Okay. So one of the first things you want to note is the setting. What’s the setting of the dream? Paying attention to what you’re doing at first is you’re just making a lot of stuff explicitly right. Focally salient to you. What was the setting of the dream? Just take a time. What’s the setting? Because the setting is often deeply informative. Settings matter. Everything in that right often in a dream matters for the purposes of the dialogue. Obviously you want to look at the central images. You know, I saw my father or, you know, there was an elephant. What are the central images? Especially the ones that struck you as filled with power. And sometimes that power can be almost numinous. I remember a dream where I went through an underground tunnel and then I was flung into empty space. And then there was the sun right beyond. And it was so big. It was beyond my comprehension. Of course, Jung would say that’s, you know, that’s I’m encountering the self. Proclus would say I’m encountering the one within, et cetera. You want to look at what are the main themes? What are the main themes? Of course, we have a lot of narrow practice with because we practice narratives all day long. We have a lot of in we’ve got a lot of implicit, sometimes explicit skills of picking up on thematic arcs. Within a story, the fourth, you want to look at the action, the transformation. How is the energy flowing in the dream? How is it being transferred? How is it being transformed? Is it being gathered? Is it dissipating? And in some sense, you’re also looking for the logos of the dream. How does it gather together? Right. How does it order? How does it fall apart? You’re looking for the energy that’s being transferred. How does it fall apart? You’re looking for this. How is the energy transferred? How is the energy transformed? So that’s the first set of four. Okay. What you want to do is what’s the feeling tone? And you’ve got a lot of practice for doing this from the mindfulness work. What’s the feeling tone? What are the emotions and the values that you’re sensing in the dream? What’s the feeling tone of the dream? And make that sort of textured and layered. Individual things have their feeling tone. There’s an overall feeling tone. For me, the musical metaphor really works here. It’s like there’s these individual chords or individual instruments, and they have their own individual sort of emotionality and value. There’s a valence to them, and they fit into an overarching valence. Next thing. And what you… Oh, so I should have said tone. I should have mentioned this, but this is where you come to it in the practice. But when you record your dreams in the morning, when you wake up presumably, try to note your feeling on waking. Were you happy? Were you afraid? Were you relieved? Were you perplexed? And now, so write that down when you write down your dream, and then when you come to this stage, you reactivate that feeling on waking. Because what you want to do is you want to know… There’s a symbol on that’s trying to form here. What’s the symbol on? The symbol on between your perspective in your dream and your perspective in your waking life. Try to co-feel them together. How do they want to join together? Notice the symbol on between your unconscious… I mean, when you’re in the dream, and your conscious perspective and sense of self. What was your sense of self? What was your perspective in the dream? And then what’s your sense of self and your perspective on awakening? Okay. Seven. Okay. Try to remember the previous day’s events. What was going on? What was going on in that day before you had that dream? Is there any symbol on that wants to, you know, logos gather together and take shape between those? Notice how all of these are increasingly having this dialogical feel, because that’s the correct attitude. Maybe nothing comes up, but maybe you go, oh yeah, there was this… Ah, oh right, right. Remember the insight part of the theurgia? Eight. You want to take a look at the emotional and salience landscape surrounding the dream. What’s going on, right, around, you know, in your life in general before the dream, and perhaps as you look forward to the days ahead, what’s the overall emotional and salience landscape of the dream? Of the dream context. Sorry, I misspoke. What’s the overall emotional and salience landscape of the context within which the dream takes place? So what’s the shape of your life in the days before? And you’ve already done a bit of that here. And how is that arcing into what you’re anticipating going forward? Okay, that’s the second four. Third four. Associations. And this is a big chunk. I recommend doing the mind map where you draw things and then you draw associations and you draw it out, like you’re doing when you’re brainstorming, right? And you can use the size of the circle to indicate its, right, its salience or relevance. Put some of the core images and spin off the images and just associate here. And the idea here is that associative patterns specifically engage the right hemisphere. They open us up to making connections we normally do not make. And of course, this is prototypical for the psychodynamic approach Freud and Jung, right? One of the things to think about here are similarities. Okay, you want to look at some similarities. Similarities to elements in your life. And they may not be conceptual similarities. They’re just, this comes up for me. I don’t know why, but it comes up, right? Similarities to elements in your life. Memories get recalled. That’s an association. Wow, that’s similar in some way. Because a lot of the similarity is not conceptual propositional. It’s procedural, perspectival, and participatory. The ego loves to talk, right? It loves propositions. And often to get to the trans-egoic, we have to make connections outside of the propositional. Now here’s something that’s important to mythological stories. Fairy tales, religious stories, popular culture. It’s making me think of Captain America. Or it’s making me think of Dracula, right? Note that down. Note it down. Mind map it. Note all the similarities. Nine and ten are like the pivotal parts of this practice. Next is amplification. What you want to do, and I’ll put, I meant to bring it out to show you guys. I’ll put a description in, I’ll put a description, sorry, the name, in the description of this video. You want to get a very good dictionary of symbols. A very good dictionary of symbols. And what you want to do in amplification is you start looking, okay, you’ve done everything you can. What have other people reported in general about these images? This is you amplify it. You open it up. So you want to use, right, not what do your dreams mean. In fact, I didn’t mean to put that up. Don’t get a dream dictionary. Those are largely useless. Get a symbol dictionary. And like I said, I meant to bring it, I’ll show you guys, I’m sorry. I have one beside my bed. I forgot to bring it up. You want to get a good one, and don’t do this first. That’s really crucially important. Get a good one. That’s really crucially important. Do not do this first. Do not do this first. Do not do this first, because then you will go into the egoic, I’ll interpret and I’ll solve this puzzle, and here’s the manual, and there we go. That was all very nice and tidy. Do this only after you’ve done everything else. Okay? You want to get your symbol dictionary out. Okay? And then what you want to do is, wow, I didn’t know that people have generally considered bears to be symbols of this. And see if that resonates with you. It might not. That’s fine. Let it go. Don’t force it. But you might go, oh, oh. That’s how you use the symbol dictionary. Next thing you want to do is you want to look for compensation. Young’s meet compensation. Whether or not you take a full Jungian approach or more about insight, dreams are giving you the opportunity to move to a perspective and an identity that is compensatory for how your perspective is too narrow or how your identity is too stuck. Look for how the dream is trying to move you to a compensatory perspective and a compensatory participation. You have to look for that. And that’s why you don’t do this until after you’ve done everything else. Okay? You might want to do active imagination. Some people use this as a separate technique on its own. I won’t talk too much about it, but what you can do is you can reimagine the dream, but don’t just image it. Right? Go, like George says, go into it. Relive it. Let it unfold. What’s going to happen in that dream? Maybe dialogue with some of the characters in the dream. See what comes out from it. You want to gestalt it. You want to take a look at all the perspectives in the dream, not just your perspective, but the perspective of other people, other beings, in the dream, and try and say, okay, what’s common? How do all of these perspectives fit together? What’s the one of them? What’s the common ground of all these perspectives? Gestalt the perspectives that are found in the dream. You might want to draw or sculpt. I don’t do that very much, but other people find that… Sculpt. I think that’s right. Other people find this very helpful. You might. I don’t particularly find that helpful, but I know other people do, so I’m putting it down there. Then after you’ve done all this, do something like focusing. Okay, all of this. But now, like, again, get into the state. What am I feeling? What is the question that’s being answered here? And then you do the focusing practice. What’s the question? What’s the issue? And here’s where you can apply focusing. Of course, as I mentioned last time, you should be doing focusing just on its own, but here’s where you can apply the focusing practice to draw it out in amplification. Completion. This is the last thing of amplification. If the dream seemed complete, if it was incomplete, how would you like the dream to be completed? But also ask yourself, how would the dream like to be completed? And that’s where the act of imagination can be helpful. You go in and say, how would you, speaking to the dream weaver, how would you like this to be completed to unfold? Okay, then the four ins. How did this inspire you? What insights did you get? What intuitions are brought up? And most importantly for dream work, given your insights and your intuitions and your inspiration, what can you internalize? What can you take into? And this is where the compensation is. How can you transform your perspective and your participation in order to internalize what has emerged in the dialogue with the dream? And then once you do that, and this is the most important of all, because this is how the dialogue goes forward into your life, what’s your conscious response going to be? Once you internalize this and it’s disclosing new things about the world and yourself, this is like Alexio Divina, right? What’s the demand on you? What do you need to do? How can you take responsibility by responding? How can you take responsibility by responding? How can you take responsibility for what has been disclosed to you in the dialogue? That’s the most important of all. This sequence is a very good sequence. Doing things out of sequence really messes things up, and you have to be really careful because the ego will really try to, like, just take this out and this out and just move this here, right? And it is a very, like, this is the one thing I, right? There is a constant temptation to bullshitting ourselves, right? That we’re going to turn this into thinking about it, solving the puzzle, being curious, and then of course this isn’t theurgia anymore. We’re not doing the work of the gods, right? Remember theurgia is the work of the gods. But remember this word, enthusiasm, enthios. We get our word enthusiasm. It literally means we’re in a god. We have, there’s a god within us and we’re within a god. We’ve internalized something. That’s what you’re actually after. You’re not after the satisfaction of your curiosity. You’re after the power of transformation and healing. Okay, so we’ve got a few minutes left. We’ve only got about ten, unfortunately. I’m going to try and answer maybe two or three questions. And any questions that I haven’t been able to get to, we are going to dump them into the general Q&A that we do every month. And we’ll slowly work our way through them. They will not be abandoned. Your questions will not be orphaned in an epistemic desert. They will be addressed at some point, I promise you. Okay, so let’s return back to the mat. Jason’s going to switch the cameras back. Okay, so this is from enemy of elder. Can you speak more to the difference between theoria and theologia? They are fusing together in a confusing way for me in definition and motivation. Right, so theoria is not conceptual. It is not rational reflection. Theoria is a contemplative practice in which you’re trying to realize the logos, move up the scale of natura, for example, or you’re doing the view from above. Those are theoria. They are ways of seeing into the depths. Theologia is a way of trying to rationally reflect and conceptually make sense of the orders of being and how you understand them. It’s basically to try to explicate and perhaps fine tune or improve your worldview as a theoretical structure within which you live. Of course, all of these things do overlap, but theologia is very much more like philosophy as an academic practice, whereas theoria is much more like meditation. Well, it is. It’s a contemplative practice. You’re not running propositions and sentences. You’re not trying to conceive of things. You’re not trying to clarify your conceptual understanding. Instead, you’re putting that aside and you’re trying to undergo what contemplative practices do. So they are needed, both are needed, but they are not the same. And I tried to show you the relationships between theoria, theologia, and theurgia, and how they take us into theosis, which is that at one minute with what is most ultimately and transformatively real for us. Okay, so Matthew McCready, in the way you relate your issue with trust to the tightness you feel, what should I do when I’ve observed a tightness and twisting in my heart area but don’t know the issue that causes it? So that, Matthew, that’s a prototypical example of when you sit down and do the focusing exercise. Open yourself up to it, resonate, go through all the steps of focusing. So remember that the attitude is dialogic. You’re trying to afford it a shape, a space, a basic vocabulary so that it can talk to you, giving it a face and a voice, invoking it so that you can enter into it. You can face it and dialog and talk with it. So the focusing practice is exactly what you do. So if you have something like that, if you are embodying a question or embodying an issue, you don’t have to, like, what’s the issue now? You don’t have to start that way. You start from that as the issue that you’re going to do the focusing practice on. Badar Altamani, hey John, love your work. Thank you. Question, are these teachings able to scale to a mass level or are they an internet niche? And if the answer is yes, how could we proliferate and propagate the set practices to transform people’s being? So that’s a great question and I’m always in discussion with people about it. Paul VanderKlay, Jonathan Paget, Jordan Hall, had a great discussion with Forrest Landry and Tim Adelaine, and Tyler Hallett, I think I’m misremembering Tyler’s name. I apologize, Tyler. Last night, actually, I hope that we all together agreed to release that publicly because it was about this question exactly. And so at a theoretical level, doing lots of work on it, but at a practical level, things like the Discord server and the community that is growing there are basically trying to work out the mechanics of how this can scale up to larger communities and perhaps communities of communities. So I recommend looking for some of those videos if you want sort of a conceptual take on it, a theoretical take. I recommend joining the Discord server where you see people really engineering an answer to your question. Karima Cynthia Clayton, question, in your non-duality talk with Lehman, I got excited when you said much suffering is caused by unrecognition of oneness. Perhaps you read my paper I mailed you last week, Separation from Oneness, the root cause of psychological suffering. No, I haven’t. I’m sorry. I got that notion from Plotinus. Plotinus explicitly argues that the root cause of our suffering is a separation from oneness. It’s also one of the fundamental claims of Vedanta, the illusory sense of separation between the Atman, the ground of your right, the ground of your internal world and Brahman, the ground of the external world. They are ultimately realizable in a non-logical identity, an at-one-ment. Who would you suggest to read, past and current, whose work is on oneness? The entire Neoplatonic tradition. That’s what it is again and again and again and again and again. So Plotinus, Proclus, Damasius, John Scottus Aragina, Eckhart. There you go. That’s it. That is the tradition that just unpacks this. Vedanta does too, but for me the Neoplatonic tradition just does it in a way that is so well developed and philosophically profound and integratable with a scientific worldview. So for me, those are just important and attractive features. Manual Posts. Can you go into how people can decide for themselves if they’re ready to engage in Neoplatonic practices? Yeah, I think McClellan’s answer to that is the right one. If you have practiced the Epicurean and the Stoic levels such that other people have noticed significant transformations in you on a consistent and reliable basis, chances are that you are then ready to enter into the Neoplatonic practices. I would recommend also, this isn’t McClellan’s argument, but it’s an argument I presented to you guys, that you have already completed work on meditation and contemplation, inducing flow states, the Buddhist and Taoist traditions. It’s very tempting to spin off into mental imagery and fantasy and get all in your head if you don’t have the mindfulness and embodiment practices that Buddhism and Taoism give us. And then of course Epicureanism and Stoicism really train a kind of inner peace and virtue that really has to be in place before you undertake the Neoplatonic practices. So I’ll take one more question. No, two more questions. I’ll take two more questions and then that’s it for today. O. Stein, Silverstone, I have an observation and 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. I’ve answered this question already. I didn’t answer the second part. During Metta I hallucinated, yeah I did, the eye with the root. I did answer your question last time. So sorry, that was just a mistake in the question queuing. One more from Matthew McCready. I took the advice from a question in the last session and it helped me relieve a lot of the tightness in my chest area, so thank you again John for everything. You’re welcome. The example of when you did your questing really helped me not turn away from the strong emotions that arose. It was a strong experience of Sati, a past version of myself. Thanks again. You’re welcome Matthew. I’m glad, I’m always glad to hear that I’ve given people tools that are helpful to them. So we have come to the end. Like I said, there’s going to be one more chunk, but it’s not going to be part of a Sarasana. I’m going to record with the group that I do the philosophical fellowship with. We’re going to do our second philosophical fellowship sometime in December. I think we’ll do a couple more of those and then I want to do a dialectic into the Dei Logos with them. Once we get to that stage, we are going to ask for their permission. I’ll record that and I’ll release it and then you’ll see how the inner dialogue and the inner dialectic and the outer dialectic go together and how they fit together. It’s a long journey together, but just because our journey together is formally ending, I’m not disappearing as I said, doesn’t mean your journey should end. You should keep going as much as you possibly can. I’ve loved this. Not giddy infatuation. This has sometimes been difficult, sometimes strenuous, sometimes personally challenging. It’s put a strain on Jason and Amar. So it’s love. It’s not just infatuation. I’ve loved this. And that’s all I’m going to say. Thank you. Thank you very much. And as always, thanks to my beloved son Jason, my dear friend Amar for making all of this possible. Remember continuity of practice now more than ever is more important than sheer quantity. Don’t hold yourself to a standard of harsh perfection, but virtuous friendship, because all of this, all of this has been about deeply befriending yourself so you can deeply befriend others and deeply befriend the world. Be lamps unto yourselves and to each other. Take good care of everyone. Thank you.