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Welcome to Meditating with John Verbeke. We live every weekday morning at 9.30 a.m. Eastern time. We alternate typically on Mondays between a Dharma Day in which I teach a new lesson and then the Epiode and then the Epiode alternate between review of the whole ecology practices from the Eastern tradition or reviewing the ecology of practice from the Western tradition, the Wisdom of Asia course that we’re on right now. Right now we’re in a bit of an acceleration on the Dharma. Today is also a Dharma Day. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday has been a Dharma Day. Just to announce it, next Monday is also going to be a Dharma Day. Next Monday is also going to be a Dharma Day. So if you’re joining us for the first time, don’t be put off by all of this. There’s been lots of instruction and seated practice, meditating, contemplating. There’s been standing practices, moving mindfulness practices, etc. You’re welcome to keep meeting with us and I encourage you to do so. But I strongly recommend you go to the description of this video. You’ll find links to previous lessons. Do Lesson 1 right away. Try and do one or two lessons a week. Keep meeting with us and eventually it’ll all integrate and you’ll be integrated into the course and hopefully into the Sangha community. You could all help me to help as many people as possible by liking this video stream to increase its visibility on the YouTube search algorithm. At the end of every session, there are Q&As. There’s a Q&A period. Please limit the questions to the ecology of practice. We give priority on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to questions from the Western tradition and Tuesday and Thursday to the Eastern tradition. I hope you all met on the Discord yesterday. I couldn’t be here yesterday. If you are interested in more general questions, every third Friday of the month at 3 p.m. Eastern time, we live stream a general Q&A. So it’s important to also, in addition to questions, to share observations, comments at a vacation because it’s not just the Buddha. It’s not just the Dharma. It’s also the Sangha. All right. So let’s pick up on what we’re doing here. We’re on what’s called the first degree of wisdom, the primary school. It’s not sufficient, but it’s needed, of Epicureanism with the course of wisdom of Ipatia. And we’ve learned some principles and some practices. What’s the first practice we learned? We learned the practice of prioritizing pleasure and how to do that. And then we learned the practice of savoring. And we learned the pterotelic and the perotelic sense of ataraxia. And now we have been moving into the discerning and disciplining of imagination. So whenever moments of imagination occur to us, especially those that terrorize us and that can lead us into despair, we have what’s called the fourfold cure. And we’ve gone through the fourfold cure on how to address that. And where that ended on Wednesday was that we need a practice by which we can encourage each other. And of course, I’m separating that to the sense of it’s enacted, it’s embodied, we’re training courage in each other, and we’re also inspiring each other. So the full gamut, both the more ancient sense and then all the modern meanings that attaches to this word. And at the core of this, and the thing that was most valued by the Epicureans, was friendship. Now I think friendship is an important word, but we have tended to lose the sense of friendship as a virtue. And so I’m gonna bring back a slightly archaic word that isn’t used as much to try and emphasize, I don’t mean friendship in just the sense we mean today. I’m not saying you treat your friends lightly. I’m not saying that. I am not saying that. What I’m saying is we need a deeper sense of what the Epicureans were talking about when they talk about friendship. So the word that’s very helpful here, I think, is fellowship. This is a word for use. So in fellowship, there is friendship, but there’s a friendship in the sense of a community and a community that is centered upon something. Centered upon something that transcends the individuals that make it. So Christians often use this word that there should be fellowship in a congregation. And I think that’s a little bit closer to the Epicurean meaning of friendship. All right, so we want to learn how to cultivate a fellowship of encouragement. Now this takes us into some very important work. And today we’re gonna be, this is why I need to have another Dharma Day on Monday. Today we’re gonna be talking sort of more about the theory. Once we get a proper framing of it, I’m doing it right now. And then Monday is going to be the actual specific exercises and practices. So the person whose work I’m making use of here is the really important and recent work. Let’s hold this up for you. So this is a book by Ran Lahab called The Handbook of Philosophical Companionships, Principles, Procedures, and Exercises. That’s the sort of main book for the practice. It has some of the theory in here. Here’s the book that has a bit more of the theory behind it. It’s called Philosophical Contemplation Theory and Techniques for the Contemplator. And that’s Ran Lahab. Again, and then the most important book. Well, not the most important, sorry. The most comprehensive. I used the wrong word. I apologize. The most comprehensive book in terms of its sort of the philosophical foundation is Stepping Out of Plato’s Cave, Philosophical Counseling, Philosophical Practice, and Self-Conformation by Ran Lahab. Okay. So obviously, and I’m not expecting all of you guys to read all of these books and making it available to you so you can use it as needed, right? But my job is to learn this material, test it out, put it into conversation with the best sort of cognitive science that I have learned, and then transmit to you, hopefully, as helpfully as I can. All right, so Lahab has this model of what he calls philosophical contemplative. And, lay to companionship. He sometimes shortens it to philosophical companionships, but he wants us to always remember it has these three components in it. So let’s talk briefly about this notion of philosophical. Let’s draw it out. Okay, so courage, because we’re talking about a fellowship for encouragement, because this is the most powerful way in which we can respond to fear. All right, so courage is a virtue. And you have to think about what a virtue is. We use this word when we talk about virtual, like virtual reality, and what we mean is a shaping of possibilities so that we have practice for what is actual. A shaping of possibilities, like when you’re in virtual space, it’s not real space, but it’s shaping a possible space, a possible world, hopefully to help train you for the real world. Now, of course, like everything else, we can use it in an escapist fashion, but that’s the original meaning of virtue. Virtue is a power. It is a shaped potentiality to act rightly in the world. Okay, so what? Well, the person who really unpacked this is, of course, Aristotle. And the notion of a virtue is a wise habit. You inhabit something. So you practice until it is second nature. If you think a virtue is about, and this is one of my problems with a lot of our political discourse, left and right, I’m not taking a side here, is that we have relegated the ideas of virtue to the possession of beliefs, right? That’s not where Aristotle, for example, classically located virtue. Virtue is located in a wise habit. So you have to practice something. And habit can be a skill, it can be a sensitivity, it can be a transformation of your sensibility. But you practice something until it becomes second nature. So that you inhabit it, you wear it, like the habit that the monk wears to change their identity, okay? Okay, so we’re directed towards a training when we’re talking about a virtue. So we’ll come back to that. But what about the other side, the wisdom? So for Aristotle, there’s two aspects to wisdom, importantly. Sophia and Phenicis, both of these words are translated, both of these Greek words are translated as wisdom. The fact that we have one word for it, really hamstrings our understanding. Just like we have one word for love, and the Greeks have agape and eros and phylia. That’s phylia there, right? Phylia, Sophia, we’ll come back to that. Okay, so what is this? This is basically your ability to grasp, to see, to have insight into the principles that are regulating the patterns of things. So what’s the principle that’s at work? So you’re in a situation, and what’s the principle? What’s the most relevant principle at work here? That’s Sophia, is having an insight into what’s the relevant principle here. Pronesis is your sense of what’s unfolding in the process, and how can I intervene, how can I fit myself to it and intervene in it effectively? And so what you wanna do is you wanna bring these two together. And for those of you who’ve watched some of my other work, I think I’ve talked about it a bit in the sangha too. This is the notion of getting an optimal grip on things, getting an optimal grip on the situation. So optimal grip comes from perception, right? So perception isn’t some static thing you do. We’ve talked about this in savoring. This is too close, I’m getting details, but I can’t see the gestalt. This is, I can see the gestalt, but I’m not getting all of the features. And what I wanna do is get some, I wanna find a spot and I wanna move the thing. So I get the best overall trade off between the whole, right? The most encompassing gestalt and the specific unfolding of the features. So I’m trying to get these two to come together. And you’re probably saying, and you would be correct, this reminds me of what you talked about in the eight-fold path, like the right handedness of things, like right understanding. Yeah, it’s exactly that idea. So my hand, it makes use of various principles in process in order to come to an optimal grip on it. So one way you can think about this then is that what you’re trying to do in wisdom is your trying, and this is one of the overall, so when we’ve done a lot of work on this and there’s a consensus around this, right? Is that wisdom at least involves seeing through illusion, right? In order to get an optimal grip on a situation. So your sense of, if you can grasp the relevant principles, right? The more general, the more powerful patterns, and then see how they apply here. And then, that’s the Sophia, and then seeing how they apply is the Phronesis. Then I can see through illusion so I can come into optimal grip, a right relationship in the sense of right handedness with the situation. Okay, so what does that mean? Well, what would that mean for courage? Courage would mean that you have practiced until it is habit, your, right, not your belief about principles, but your ability to see them, to realize them. That’s what all that maximization is doing when, right, in the Epicurean practices. We create these mnemonic packages that help us keep practicing seeing the principles in action, and these widen our frame. Sophia. So I’ve done that, and I come into a situation, and fear is starting to distort, like in my imagination. But then the maxims remind me of important principles. They maximize my frame. I open up to Sophia. But, now we’re gonna talk more about, yeah, but how do I then bring this into process? How do I bring this into the specific situation? How do I contextualize it? That’s exactly what the virtue is. You can think about every virtue as the way of how you’re wise in this particular situation. So to be kind is the way to be wise in this situation. To be honest is the way to be wise in this situation. To be courageous is the way to be wise in this situation. That’s the tight interconnection. Virtue is very much the beauty of wisdom. Where beauty is how you are able to realize principle in process, such that it fits you well to the situation. That’s what beautiful music does. You get the big pattern, how it’s impregnating the unfolding process, and it fits you to the unfolding of the music. You’re gripped by the music, and you’re optimally gripping it. You’re in that right relationship. Okay, so virtue is the beauty of wisdom. So, notice what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about this enacted sense making. Notice the musical metaphors, because they’re gonna be very, very pertinent. So here’s the idea. When we’re doing this making sense of things, Take seriously this, and take seriously the metaphor here. This is both our understanding, right? Like the sense of a sentence, but it’s also sight and hearing. It’s that connectedness to the world. Making sense of things. Making sense of others. And making sense with others. Now I have arguments for all of these, and I can’t do them cuz I don’t have time. But the point is, these are all mutually interdependent. When we’re trying to make sense of things, we’re almost always having to make sense of others. So you say sometimes I’m alone. Yes, but you’re carrying other people’s perspectives around with you when you’re trying to make sense, even when you’re alone. And making sense is ultimately something we do together. Let me just give you a non-controversial example. I didn’t make any of these words. I didn’t come up with them. Neither did you. We make English together, and we keep making it together. That’s not the only way we make sense. It’s just a pertinent example here. This is where we’re starting to get the idea of why we need philosophical, contemplative companionship. Contemplation is the making sense of things, right? The companionship is both making sense of others, while making sense with others. Philosophical companionship is about trying to grasp the principles of this triangle and then enact it in a regular practice process. Okay. So let’s unpack this term, philosophical contemplative companionship. I already mentioned, right, phylia, sophia, that’s in the word philosophy. So I’m not talking here about academic philosophy. Academic philosophy is not something you should despise. I’m always suspicious of people who do so. But that’s what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about this. This is the fellowship love of wisdom. Now this word is often used to mean actually both sophia and phronesis together. Okay? So it’s the fellowship love of wisdom. And of course, as I tried to show you, wisdom and virtue are inherently bound up together. Virtue is the beauty of wisdom. It’s what makes us love wisdom. Okay, so look, what about this word companionship? Well, it comes from two Latin words, companions, this means with, and this means bread. And you’re going, what? Yeah, this means sharing bread with people, having a meal with people. So the basic idea here is communing together. Think about when you eat with other, and so how much we want to eat with other human beings, and how much rituals involve eating with other human beings. Sharing bread together. Now what’s going on there? Because the point here is this is not just about communication. This is about communing. So one of the things we have to get right from the beginning about philosophical contemplative companionships, right, is that this is not just about communication, this is about communing. It’s about communion, not just communication. It’s about feeding each other, not just giving each other feedback. And there’s a big difference between those. There’s a very big difference between them. So when we eat together, right, notice what we’re doing, and we’re sort of enacting this. We’re literally mattering. We’re taking in matter that makes us, and we’re doing it with the people that matter to us. And so we’re trying to get all of that in sync, resonating together. We’re eating a meal together, and notice we use consumption, like we have to digest an idea. All right. So this is telling us, okay, so yeah, I get that. That’s that triangle, making sense of things, making sense of others, making sense with others. Okay, Sophia is both getting, right, practicing principle into process, right? I’m gonna be communing with other people to do that, not just communicating with them, feeding them, and being fed by them. Not just giving feedback. Okay. So what about this word contemplation? Well, we’ve talked about it before. Remember, it has to do with, the original meaning has to do with the temple. It means divination, right, in the sense of, right, of course, and that’s degenerated into people believing they can foretell the future and stuff like that, but originally it meant looking for signs of the God’s presence, right, looking for signs of the God’s presence. And if we go back to the Greek word that contemplation is based on theoria, we get a word theory from that, which is fine, but that’s only half of it, right? What’s the original meaning of theoria? Well, the original meaning of theoria is to go on a journey so that I will see something marvelous that will transform me. So what I’m doing is I’m trying to give, I’m leaving the familiar and, right, the ordinary, the normal. Think about meditative questing. Gotta get the right adjective, they’re crucial here, right? I go on a journey. I leave the familiar and the normal to see something marvelous that will transform me. I wanna be present for a revelation. I wanna see something that I haven’t seen before. So this is very much a vision quest. Like how it’s used sometimes to discuss certain practices from indigenous communities. You’re going on an adventure to see the advent of something. You’re trying to pick up on the significance of things. That’s what the word significant means, how it’s a sign for the presencing of something that has not been present to you before. Okay, so we’re trying to get away from our normal and familiar way of thinking. What is the normal and familiar way of thinking? Well, it’s the having of beliefs, it’s the communicating and not communing. Because what I wanna do is defend my beliefs or give you my beliefs or perhaps consume some useful beliefs from you. That’s not communing. That’s not this. So I want you to pick up on all of these metaphors. When we’re doing philosophical contemplative companionship, what we’re basically doing is we’re doing something like a ritual meal in order to see and make present, grasp the significance of something by making it present to it. Not just representing it, look at this word, that means it’s no longer present, but actually sensing its presence. Okay, so what’s the meal in philosophical companionship? What’s the meal we’re sharing? Well, the meal is actually, it’s a short philosophical text. Now, it’s philosophical and on Monday I’ll give you the website link that we’ll have. These are texts for philosophy in the sense of phileas of phyla, not academic technical philosophy. But these are philosophical texts that are designed to be nourishing. And what we can do is we’re trying to partake in them together. We’re trying to participate in them together. We’re trying to take part in them together. Okay, that’s what we’re doing at the meal. So again, think about ritual meals, family meals, Christmas time, Thanksgiving, you’re gathering people together. Why? You want to be present with them. You want to nourish each other. You want to get into right relationship with each other. Really try and make use of that metaphor. Okay, so what are we doing? How are we speaking? Well, we’ll get into the specific how on Monday, but again, what’s the theoretical framework? We’re cooperatively, cooperatively, we’re cooperatively, together we are trying to give voice to the text. We’re trying to make that person, that author, present to us. Like seeing the gods, we’re trying to invoke them and partake in their presence. The idea being that when we can come before, when we can share in the presence of that person together, right, we will, and that’s an amazing thing about text, it can actually do that for us. We will be enriched in the sense of being encouraged, encouraged. So we want to give voice to that. And here’s where you’re probably thinking, but I’m going to say one thing and Bob’s going to say another and Susan’s going to say another. And that’s exactly right. But the metaphor that the have uses is we’re forming a chorus. We’re singing. We’re trying to sing, I’m using that metaphorically, the significance of the text. So the point here is not to agree or disagree with the text. The point is to bear witness to it, to try and give voice to it, to try and present, make present the spirit of Augustine or the spirit of Marcus Aurelius. It’s like seeing the gods. You’re trying to pick up on the significance of a shared presence rather than convince others of your particular belief or opinion. You’re trying to get away from familiar opinion that we all have that. And there’s nothing wrong with it. We need it in the social context. But we have that very familiar normal way of communicating with each other. We’re trying to leave that behind in the theory and come into communing with each other. Okay, so what does that mean? Well, we’re trying to do these three things. Let’s bring that triangle back. We’re trying to, in a coordinated and cooperative fashion, make sense of the text, not agree or disagree or offer your opinions. The point is, what is it saying to us? And not because I want to consume the content. What I want to do is like at a family meal. We’re trying to invite and invoke Augustine or Plato or Socrates or Epicurus to dinner, to be here with us. And of course, that means we’re also making sense of others. Because I have to appreciate, think of music appreciation. We’re in a chorus together. I have to appreciate, I have to understand and value what you’re saying. I don’t have to agree with it, but that is not relevant in this context. Because we are making sense together. We are sensing together the meaning of the text and we are sensing the presence of the voice of the text. Okay, so what does that mean we’re doing? Well, here’s where your previous practices are a scaffold for this. Here’s the text and it’s like a meal and what are we doing? We are co-savoring it together. We are trying to open it up like when you’re walking and you’re trying to open up. And we’re trying to realize as many patterns in it as we can. Not because we’re trying to finish it or come to a final belief. We’re trying to listen to the musicality of its intelligibility. We’re trying to pick up and listen together and sing together that musicality. We’re co-savoring, that’s why you’ve been practicing savoring. We’re learning how to co-savor the text together. And that’s not independent. It’s meshed up with savoring each other’s presence together. So we’re gonna pick up and partake in the patterning of the ideas of the text. We’re gonna try and pick up on the texture, right? The tempo of the text, the tone, the taste of it. And we talk about having a taste in music. You’re trying to cultivate a taste for the text. The tonas, the tensions that are in the text, like there’s tension in music. Doing all of this because you’re trying to sense the significance. See, understanding is different from belief, see? Significance. Understanding is about grasping the significance. You should learn how to do that very, very deeply before we move to any kind of critical response to the text. So we’re giving voice to the text. We’re bearing witness to the presence. Wow, that’s getting really sloppy. And so what we’re trying, what we’re getting to, finally, is this. And that’s where we’ll all end for today. I know it’s a bit of a cliffhanger, I apologize, but there’s limitations of time that I really have to respect here. Okay, depth, you’re going to be speaking from the deepest parts of yourself. Depth resonating to depth. You are trying to move to a place, you’re traveling far from your normal, everyday belief-making, opinion-giving self. And you’re trying to go into what is emerging from you in the depths. That’s almost like an insight, like an emotional response, something that’s on the edge of your understanding, not something that, I get it. Yes, yes. But more like something, what is emerging from you? So what you’re trying to do, right, is get, you’re speaking from the depth, from what is emerging. And what that is doing is you’re being called by the depth of others, called to the depths of others, and called by and called to the depth of the text. All right? What’s the emerging significance here? The emerging sensing of the emerging significance. It’s a very different way of speaking with others. It’s a very different way. And if we carry our everyday, listen to the word I’m going to use, habits into this practice of how we talk with each other, how we merely communicate state opinions, consume beliefs, give feedback, we will not get any of this. We will not be engaging in the practice of philosophical, contemplative companionship. We will not be generating a fellowship of encouragement. We need all those other forms of communication. And we need scientific discourse, and we need political dispute, etc. I’m not denying that. But we also need this. When you need to learn how to swim, you have to stop trying to walk. Because if you keep trying to walk in the water, you won’t swim. Should walking be thrown away? No, you need it. But you have to stop walking in order to swim, in order to learn how to swim. OK, so that’s a lot. And I hope it wasn’t too overwhelming. And we’re going to have a short sit now. Jason’s going to slightly adjust the camera. And then we’ll have a short sit, and then we will go into a short Q&A. As I keep reminding you, Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays are longer. There’s a lot more to go. So this was the theory. Very abstract. And many of you are saying this is also abstract. I sort of get it, but I don’t know how to do it. I get that too. Monday is all going up on the hub. How do we put all of that into practice? How do we bring the principles into practice? How do we bring the Sophia of today into the phronesis, so that we can actually start practicing it together virtually, hopefully on a regular place on the Discord server? OK, so let’s everybody get into position. Please get comfortable. Please set your phones on do not disturb. Again, this is a little bit strange, but I hope that’s OK. This gives me, again, because of the many errors, I need some back support, and it also gives me access to the TV. So we’ll do a quick chant, and then we’ll silence it together. We will begin together when I say the word begin. Begin. Om. One-ome-one-one. One-o-m-e-m-e. Let your power be whole. Om — On — … … … … … … … … … . .