https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=HgVN6dyCWtk
Welcome to Metedic with John Verbeke. We do this live stream every weekday morning at 9.30 a.m. Eastern time with Mondays alternating between a new lesson, Dharma Day. Previous Monday was Dharma Day and a review of the whole ecology of practices, Upaya Day. At some point we will start alternating in the Upaya between reviewing all of the Eastern practices and reviewing all of the Western practices. If you’re joining us for the first time, you’re most welcome. What I suggest you do is to look for links to previous lessons and sits in the description of this video. Go immediately do lesson one. Keep meeting with us and continue to do a lesson or two every week in order to catch up with us. It might be a good idea also if you want to partake in a new course that we’ve just started together as a Sangha for the wisdom of Vipatia if you review the lesson that was given on Monday, although I’m going to review it as well today. Please like this, everyone please like this stream to increase visibility in the algorithm so I can help as many people as possible with this practice. There’s a lot of value that I would still like to share with people. Thank you all for helping me so much sharing all of the wisdom that we’ve been able to draw from the Buddhist and the Taoist traditions. But there’s a lot of wisdom that I want to share with people from the Epicurean, Stoic, and the Platonic traditions. I think this is also very much needed at this time. So please help me to help as many people as possible. At the end of every session, there’s a Q&A period. Please limit the questions at that time to questions from the ecology of practice that I’m teaching you. For more general questions, please come to the live stream Q&A on YouTube every third of the month at 3 p.m. Eastern time. And that will be the 21st of this month. Okay, so I’d like to do a bit of review with you. And then we will chant and we’ll sit. We’ll open up the time for some questions. So last time we talked about that the central figure from the Western tradition, the touchstone figure. So I would say the Buddha was a touchstone figure for us, right? Wasn’t trying to make anybody into Buddhists, but nevertheless the Buddha served as a touchstone figure, an exemplar that we could use in order to paradigmatically guide our way on the path. Socrates is the paradigmatic exemplar of the Western wisdom tradition. And Socrates famously said, the unexamined life is not worth living. And then I mentioned that we should be following McClellan, that we should be making use of a couple of general practices right from the beginning. That gives me also an opportunity to remind you of the books. So this is the mandatory book, The Wisdom of Hypatia by McClellan. Please get that and read up to the end of the first Degree of Wisdom, which is parts one and two and page 70 in the printed version of the book. I strongly recommend for supplementary reading that you get Pierre Hedeau’s What is Ancient Philosophy? And then as soon as you can, but we won’t be using it for a while, Arthur versus Lewis’s The Perennial Philosophy, which is a very good introductory text on Neoplatonism and its spiritual significance for the Western wisdom tradition. So McClellan mentions that there should be a couple of practices you should be doing. One is regular self-examination. And so I strongly advise you to take up the practice of journaling that he mentions. Some of you have already been doing that in anticipation of some of the stuff that’s been in common with stoicism. You’ve been journaling about your cognitive biases. I recommend that you expand on that. So what I typically do is at the end of every day as the formal recommend, I look for things that I admitted to that. So I look for vices of omission, the things that I could have done that would have been more in line with the cultivation of wisdom and that I failed to do. And then you also look for vices of commission, things that you did that perhaps not only failed to cultivate wisdom, but might have actively enhanced patterns of self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior. And again, remember the standard we’re using here. The standard is not a punitive perfectionism. It is a virtuous friendship. Then that brings me to the third thing that you note without engaging in self-aggrandizement. You note any instances of virtue. Remember, we’ve already been talking about this. There’s an Eastern version of this where you celebrate the Buddha. In this way, you’re celebrating how you are inculcating the various virtues that you are finding are central to wisdom. And the ancient tradition that we’re studying here recommends, of course, four what are called the four kalnabhushas, wisdom, sathrasan, which is moderation. And I will teach you all of these as we go on. And he’s starting to teach you courage and justice. We’ll talk about all that. I will recommend as we get deeper into neoplatonism that we add in the virtues that were given to us from the neoplatonic Christian tradition, versions of agape, versions of faith and a version of hope. Again, all of these will be tailored, though, so that they are comported well with both stoicism and neoplatonism. So please undertake those practices. And then the other one, he calls it commonplace. That’s fine. I’ve always used and I mentioned this on Monday. I think of it as maximization. This is the collection of maxims. A good source from that is, of course, the book itself with the mahyapetia he gives them. But a good source for you guys is also Lectio Divina. When things stand out to you and you resonate, you might want to note them down. And the point of these maxims is to memorize them as guiding principles. And then we engage in maximization. And I’m doing the play on word here because what I mean is, and we’ll come back to this when I’m trying to widen my frame so that I’m considering the long term nature of a particular pleasure, a particular desire I’m trying to fulfill in pleasure. What I do is I apply the maxim, I’ve memorized the maxim and I apply it in order to widen my frame so that I have not just localized attention on what’s intense. Remember when we talked about hyperbolic discounting, temporal discounting, and we tend to confuse what is intense with what’s important. And we want to invert that. We want to become aware of what’s important and teach ourselves and train ourselves to intensify that. This is a way, of course, of befriending ourselves. So Epicurus, whereas you see that each one of these traditions and a fourth that I don’t talk about here, but I’ll talk about in after Socrates, the skeptic tradition, each one of these traditions sort of they sort of glum on to one sort of an important feature of Socrates and then some, you know, an important facet and then some adjacent facets. It’s interesting to try and think about trying to take all of these different facets and then work backwards, triangulate backwards to what Socrates might have been. What Epicurus was deeply impressed with Socrates was Socrates’ capacity for ataraxia. And he thought this was also the basis for Socrates’ wisdom and courage and sophism. And we’ll see that each one of these schools plays around with the cardinal virtues in a very, very helpful manner. So ataraxia is often translated as tranquility. And that’s good. But we need to take sort of a bunch of English terms and put them together, as I suggested last time. There’s tranquility, which is sort of a lack of tumult. And then these two terms are somewhat synonymous, but I’ll stipulate a bit of a difference here. There’s serenity in the sense of a sort of right embeddedness in your world that is conducive to inner tranquility. And then there’s equanimity, that you’re not being upset. So ataraxia, as I mentioned, is a negation of inner tumult, inner turmoil, inner conflict. And so Epicurus was of the like he proposed that what we are most in need of is ataraxia. And so he proposed that what sets us most in turmoil is because we are uneducated about our desires and our fears, our desires for certain pleasures. I think that’s philosophically a little bit inaccurate. I think we desire things that give us pleasure and we fear things that give us pain. So all but for simplicity’s sake, I’ll just allow Epicurus to speak the way he does. OK, so we are desiring certain pleasurable states, we’re fearing certain painful states, and we do that in an uneducated manner. A similar proposal has been made recently by Harry Frankfurt, the person who did the work on bullshit. And Frankfurt talks about the fact that we can’t be wantons. That, you know, this is an old word, you know, wanton behavior. It’s just impulsive. And we all know this. We know we can’t act impulsive. But let’s let’s bring out a very important maxim. That’s also an analogy. As the child is to the adult, the adult is to the sage. You as an adult know you should not be as impulsive as a child, that you shouldn’t be wanton because if you are, you’re in turmoil and self-contradiction and self-conflict. But what Epicurus is asking you to consider is the possibility that there is a state that is comparatively much more mature, less impulsive and tranquil with respect to your adulthood. That is analogous to how your adulthood is more mature and less impulsive to childhood. And that is a very promising proposal. It’s a very promising proposal indeed. So what does Epicurus recommend? Well, he recommends that we need to engage in a process of education. And we and Frank goes even farther. I think what Frank does is helpful. He talks about a process, not of just education, but of identification. What which desires do we identify with? Which pleasures do we identify with? Where are we? Where are we setting apart? Interestingly enough, that’s what the word believe originally meant. It didn’t mean to utter a proposition. It meant to believe in, to set your heart upon something. And this goes back to Socrates’ notion that one of the things he did know is he knew what to care about and how to care very well, how to care in a rationally profound, but spiritually efficacious manner. Okay, so what’s the main maxim governing the education process, the identification process? We’re trying to use rational reflection, rational discernment. Here’s where the training and mindfulness is so beneficial for the Eastern and the Western, can befriend and help each other. We’re trying to use rational discernment, rational reflection to give prioritization to the ease of sustainability. We want to try and get to pleasures that are the most sustainable for us, because those that are most sustainable are the ones that are least likely to put us into conflict. They’re the most sustainable so that we can use them as a basis, as a grounding for our most sustained identity, the aspirational identity of who and what we are most aspiring to be. So I think this is a very, very powerful idea. So what is the basic program? Well, the basic program is when we get a desire, we step back and look at it. And there’s the mindfulness moment, right? And then, of course, there’s also going to be a looking through it. But we step back and look at it, and then we catalog it, we categorize it, and we use a set of increasing, we use a set of criteria. And they should be pursued in this order in order to try and hone our prioritization. Now, this is not an algorithm. You are going to have to bring your judgment to play. And that’s partially as I’ll say, that’s why the savoring is so important. I’ll come back to this. OK, so first of all, you ask, first of all, you ask, is the pleasure physical or mental? And Epicurus argues that the mental pleasures are more important than the physical pleasures. And that’s why we say that mental pleasures are more important because they extend into the past and the future. Or to use Frankfurt’s terms, they are they have a broader temporal scope with which we can identify. You see, one of the things that makes us adults as opposed to children. And so notice I’m inverting something that is normally talked about very positively, as it should be, by the way. But now we’re looking at the other side of it, as we always should as well, which is, yes, we are unwanted and irresponsible at times, which is precisely why we engage in the project of turning them into adults. Now, that’s because and this is really interesting from psychology, right. They lack a temporally extended self. Part of why people develop narrative, this is from cognitive science, is narrative allows us to develop an autobiographical sense of self, that extends into the past, through the present and into the future. And that that gives us a larger scope of identification and a larger scope of responsibility. So this is what adults, for example, can feel guilty about things they did five or six years ago. Or they can aspire to be something that they want to be four or five years from now, like going to university and aspiring to get a liberal arts education, for example, or something like that. OK, so we get priority to the mental pleasures. Remember, this is not exclusive or punitive. This is prioritization. If you’re in a situation and right, there’s just a physical pleasure. Fine. But. Very often, and this is another maxim, we we we suffer not because we do evil, but because we prefer a lesser good to a greater good. So. When there’s a clear choice, choose the mental pleasure. But for both the physical and the mental pleasure, you then ask, is it natural? Meaning, is it necessary for your physical life, your mental life or your social life? So your physical life, I’m not going to talk too much about. I think he was very impressed by the science of his day, and we had a lot of good science about that. And that tells us what what do we really need? Right. In order to sustain our physical life, not to make to give it vitality. What do we need for mental vitality? Well, it looks like we need two things with two things, which is right. What’s called sort of subjective well-being. I think we get that by doing this practice. So what I suggest we zero in on, which is what Epicurus zeroed in on, is those things that we do. What I suggest we zero in on is those things that are needed to enhance meaning in life, the sense of connectedness to oneself, to others, to the world in a way in which we feel we are connected to something greater than ourselves that has a value independent of our own egocentric interests. And so that’s meaning in life. And so those things that are needed for meaning in life should be given priority. Does that mean I exclude any mental activity that does not directly give me meaning in life? No, it’s not exclusive. It is not punitive. It’s about prioritization. But what it does say is if I’m doing something that isn’t directly needed for meaning in life, I ask myself, what’s the cost? What’s the cost? How much turmoil is it? How much turmoil is it creating in me? And so and then and again, I can’t tell you what it is. I have to evaluate because it’s going to be different for different people. It’s like, well, this isn’t, you know, this isn’t natural. But when I pursue it, it doesn’t seem to be causing over the long term. It doesn’t seem to be causing lots of turmoil. OK, so it’s relatively safe. Next, we ask, is it right? So is it natural? And that, as I just said, like, is it something that’s needed directly? Then when you’re doing that, as I just said, you ask, is it necessary or unnecessary? Necessary means it’s needed for meaning in life or it’s needed for physical health or it’s needed for social health, many social life, I should say. Many of you are asking about that. Please hold off on that, because that’s going to come in when we talk about friendship. I know you’re concerned about that, but I can’t teach everything at once. I’m going to address that when we come into friendship. So is it natural? Right. Is it directly within, you know, constitutive of physical life, mental life, social life? Is it necessary? Then is it short term or long term? It’s short term. You always prefer the long term or the short term. How do you do that? You do what’s called frame widening. You have to open up and identify with your future self in the future world, because this is how you test to see if the pleasure that you’re seeking has sustainability. That’s where the maximization comes in. That’s where you bring in the maxims. You have them ready to hand. You memorize them. You call them up, and they tell you this. So I gave you an example, one from Socrates himself that I used. The unexamined life is not worth living. Am I undertaking a pleasure that long term will increase my capacity to examine my life or decrease my capacity to examine my life? That gives me a guide. That gives me a guide. Okay. Now, once you’ve done all that, and you have to do those three first before you do the fourth. You must do the three before you do the fourth. Is it natural? Is it necessary? Is it long term? And then how easy is it to obtain? How much, and this is just a question of how complicated of a problem solving path you have to go through to obtain it. How easy is it to obtain? The general idea is Ceteris Paribus, because remember the other three are important, Ceteris Paribus. You should go for those that are easy to obtain because they are much more likely to be sustainable. And so then I gave you an example of a practice that gets you into exactly that, which is the practice of savoring, where what we’re trying to enjoy is the purest pleasure of all, which I think is what ataraxia is. One of my criticisms of how ataraxia is generally presented in sort of academic world is it’s presented as a privation, it’s prevented as a lack of pain. And this, I think, misrepresents what’s going on. For Epicurus, I would argue that the ataraxia has a positive content to it, which is the pure pleasure of being. And so I recommended to you the practice of savoring, the practice in which you turn the world into a garden. And you’re walking, you’re walking around and you try to have no sentences or scenes in your mind. You try to have your mind completely in the world. And what you’re doing is you’re opening up perception, you’re allowing more and more sensations and details and features to flood in. But at the same time, almost like Sherlock Holmes, you’re increasing what’s called the down. So that’s bottom up, the top down pre-henship. You’re trying to notice more patterns, as many patterns, you know, symptomatic patterns, different, you know, almost like themes that are emerging in your awareness and synchronicities in the Jungian sense between the inner and outer felt sense of the meaning of things or almost synesthetic, almost like you’re touching what you’re seeing and you’re hearing colors. And we know that mindfulness enhances the capacity for synesthesia. What you’re doing there is what we talked about from Rusin. You’re really appreciating in the sense of musical appreciation, you’re appreciating the musicality of intelligibility. You’re appreciating the musicality of how, right, of how everything is presencing, how the moreness of everything is coming into its suchness. And all these patterns are like flowing, the flowing music of being. And you’re noticing texture gradients, you’re noticing the difference, you know, tempo changing, emotional tone. And here’s where all of the stuff you did in rooting and learning to flow, soft vigilance. You can bring it to bear and you will get into a kind of flow state that is just an enacted celebration of what it is to joyfully be. That savoring is designed to act as a phenomenological, a felt sense touchstone for you. Because you can go, oh, this is a, right, this is a sustainable long-term pleasure that takes me into the heart, the ground of my being, the very ground of what I can identify with. And so you use that in a bottom-up fashion when you’re evaluating your desires. You ask yourself, well, this is tranquility. Is my desire moving me towards that or away from that? So you use the savoring as a bottom-up, you know, touchstone, felt sense. And then you use the maximization as a top-down conceptualization to help you hone in on whether or not you should pursue this desire. And on Friday, we’ll start expanding on this when we turn to how we deal with fear. Okay, everyone. So that was a very long review, but I promise to do it. I hope you find it helpful. We’re going to sit. I’m going to change what I already told Amari. I’m going to change the way I talk. I’m going to change the way I talk. I’m going to change the way I talk. I’m going to change the way I talk. I’m going to change the way I talk. I’m going to change what I already told Amari and Jason. So I’m going to speak it aloud so they know. We’re going to have a short sit now so we can get to at least a couple of questions. Remember, we go longer on Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays. We’re going to have a 10-minute sit. We’re going to have a 10-minute sit. So everybody, let’s please get ready. Get into position. Set your phones on do not disturb. And we will begin when I say begin. We’ll chant first and then go into a silent sit. Let’s begin. Om Om Vam Om Vam Begin your silent sit. Om Om Om Om Om Om Om Om Om Om Om Om Om Om Om Om Om Om Bell Bell Bell Bell Bell So we’re going to have some time for questions. We’re going to try and set up a bit of a schedule for questions. We’re going to give priority, not exclusion, but priority on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, to questions from the Western wisdom tradition, the wisdom of Hypatia. And then Tuesdays and Thursdays, we will give priority to questions from the Eastern tradition that I’ve already taught you. Please share observations and comments as well as questions. And remember that we will therefore be going a little bit longer as well on Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays. Oh, here’s some questions. So, Rahat, I appreciate the value of prior oritizing being at ease because we want to get out of dis-ease. I’m just adding that in as a comment. However, I can’t resist being a bit worried about losing a certain level of arousal in the long run. So, I understand what you need. And that’s why I’m trying to bring in an aspect of flow in the savory because what you’re trying to do with flow, and I’ll talk a bit more about this on Friday when I talk about the telek and the parateleic states, you’re in a state that in one sense is fairly high arousal metabolically. But nevertheless, there’s also that sense of grace and ease in it. It sounds paradoxical, I know, but that is one of the defining features of the flow state. And the savory is, of course, a kind of flow state. And so I think it actually addresses your concern while still maintaining. And we know that we get an optimal performance in the flow state. So I think it addresses your concern while still maintaining our allegiance to the Epicurean maxim that we should be seeking ataraxia. We should be seeking that state of ease, which doesn’t necessarily mean slowness. It means that sense of it can mean it doesn’t exclusively mean this, but because it can mean contented, contentment, because when we talk about it, the ataraxia for the telek is contentment, but the ataraxia for the parateleic is something like flow and engagement. And so I’m going to talk about that on Friday. I’m going to keep refining this for you guys. And so there is a form of ataraxia that’s more parateleic, more flowing. And so the tranquility in there is that sense of grace, even though you might be metabolically in a very high state of arousal. So we’re going to come back to that, I promise, on Friday, but that’s to give you a little bit of foreshadowing. Kelly Meyer says, Observation. I have a meta problem with adding more and more daily practice. I already aspire to do more than I have time for every day. The challenge is to become dismal in us to do only those things. I’m trying to journal every day for years, so practice that relies on that habit probably doomed for me. Okay, so don’t rely then so much on the journaling right now. And Kelly, this is what’s difficult, because this is the pluralistic element of the ecology of practices. Again, it is not expected that you do everything I’m teaching. And I’m going to be doing some work with Mark soon, try to schematize how you design your ecology. A good way of thinking about it initially is you have to find what takes for you. Try things on for a few weeks. See if they take. And try it at different times in your life, because certain practices just don’t take at a certain part of your life. I mentioned that I just tried all the dream yoga stuff, and it just wouldn’t take for me. Maybe when I’m older, it’ll take. I don’t know. So you have to do that. And then you have to also not only do they take that sort of a subjective side, there’s an objective side to which is how well do they actually address a perennial problem? How well do they help you overcome self-deception? How well do they? And which kind of self-deception? Maybe egocentric self-deception, maybe biasing self-deception. That sort of thing. And so you have to go. So think about how things evolve. Think about how things evolve. This is how your relevance realization machinery actually works. This is how children actually learn something. So when things evolve, you get variation in the species, and then there’s selective pressure that chooses the ones that are most appropriate in the world. When children are learning a new strategy or skill, they don’t just stick with what they first get, the first sort of sequence of operations that works for them. They create a variation, and then they put selective pressure on it, and then they choose it. So what I’m giving you, hopefully, is the variation of all the practices. And then I’m increasingly trying to also give you a sense of how you select it for them. And we’ll talk more and more about this. And this is how you’re going to evolve your ecology of practices. I can’t give it to you. I would be suspicious of anybody who did. But I can give you our universal principles by which you can evolve the ecology. But it is ultimately up to you, because you have to be able to evolve your ecology. But it is ultimately up to you because you, right? I’m talking about this applies to me, but I’m directing it to you. You are the author of your self-deception. Nobody else can ultimately solve that. This is why you have to ultimately defend yourself. So I can I can present you with the variation, sort of the set of practices and universal principles of selection. But you have to evolve your ecology. And because it has to it has to fit your patterns of self-deception and also your patterns of aspiration. Only you can relate to your future self and aspire. I can’t do that for you. Only you can do that identification. So I’m not I’m not trying to cop out. I’m going to try and give you everything I can. But what I’m trying to get you to understand is that you should be thinking about cycling. You cycle through a period where you’re varying and introducing new practices and then you compress them down. You select you get those ones that fit you and fit together and fit you to the path. And you keep cycling and you evolve your ecology. OK, everyone, thank you so much for joining. These classes are deeply enriching to me. My techno friend and my techno major friend is also my techno friend. My good friend and techno major was back with us today. So thank you very much. My beloved son Jason was there doing all of his apprentice techno maging in the background. Please subscribe to this channel to be notified of the next video. You’ll also find links to the lecture series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis to the Diologo series Voices with Reveki. To the upcoming series, the one on consciousness, Untangling the World Not and Down the Road, the one on the nature of the self and the God beyond God. Reinventio of the sacred. Please follow me on Twitter. It’s not against any of your principles. For the best updates about all of these streams of everything that’s happening and talks that I’m giving, if you’re interested in that, invite others who might benefit by sharing this series. Please join the Discord servers to chat with others, do the moving practices in the group. I’ll do a group lexio to do an extracit. And most importantly, right now, where we will find a home for the group practices that are so central for the wisdom of Hypatia course. Reminder that we’re doing this every weekday morning at 930 Eastern time. And I think that’s everything. Please remember that continuity of practice is more important than sheer quantity. You are not holding yourself to a standard of harsh perfectionism. You’re holding yourself to the standard of virtuous friendship. And boy, is Epicurus going to be a helpful one as he helps us to get clear about what virtuous friendship is like. When we talk about philosophical companionships, there’s no enemy worse than your own mind and body. But as I was just saying a few minutes earlier, there’s no friend, no ally, no true companion on the path greater than your own mind and body. Relapse unto yourselves and to each other. Thank you, everyone, for your dear time and attention. Take good care, everyone. See you tomorrow.