https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=IXFawbTAcqI
Welcome John back to Sense Space. It’s great to be here again Jacob. I really enjoyed our last conversation. It’s a real pleasure John. Yeah, it’s great to have a scholar and friend of wisdom seekers such as yourself back. And I really appreciate it. Yeah, it’s great to have a scholar and friend of wisdom seekers such as yourself back. And I really enjoyed that conversation. A lot of people reached out to me afterwards. Seemed to resonate with it. I ended up having a conversation with your Discord community. And a friend who I just had on Sense Space, Joseph Pickens, who you might not know yet, but he reached out to me after the conversation as well. And we really clicked on our backgrounds in a synchronist way. Well, that’s good news. I’m glad that our conversation afforded you so many good connections. That’s great to hear. So, a little different from our last conversation, which was totally on no sort of agenda. Right, right, right. There’s a couple of things I talked about when I reached out to you. One of which was to kind of build on our last conversation where we explored dialectic. And sort of building on your work, I’ve been exploring a lot about the dialectical nature of being a real. Right. That’s become a sort of a way of understanding a lot of different lenses and levels of experience. And sort of one of the fruits of that has been this idea of the meta practitioner. Right, yeah, yeah. And I think that’s a good point to start off with. And yeah, seeing how we can, I feel that the ideas about trauma and logos are somehow going to interact in here as well. So we’re going to thread all the pieces together and I’m going to try and remember that I don’t know where it’s going. That I haven’t had yet. Sure. Wow. I suppose maybe a good place to start is some work that I’ve recently done with Christopher Mastepietro. Two pieces of work. One is we edited and contributed to an anthology called Internet of Dialogues, which is at the publishers right now. And so there was a lot there, a lot of reflection on dialectic into the logos and what’s going on there. And then more recently, we’ve submitted an article seeking publication about the relationship between dialectic as a practice and the ability to overcome nihilism. And we were using that framework to integrate some of the fundamental insights about the dialectical nature of being drawn from the neoplatonic tradition. And the work of the Kyoto school, especially Nishitani, about overcoming nihilism. And as you can imagine, this could get very, very airy and abstract very quickly. So I’ll try and keep it as basic as possible. And the idea is dialectic is a practice that at many levels and sort of increasing disclosure helps you to overcome sort of the subject-object divide, the way in which consciousness normally is egocentrically oriented. And we have sort of an Aristotelian logic where identities are just A equals A kind of identity. And that’s our sort of normal everyday cognition. And what Nishitani argued is that as long as we’re within that framework, two things are bound to happen together. We’re bound to eventually hit nihilism because we’re going to find ourselves thrown towards a kind of absolute skepticism or solipsism. But it won’t throw us hard enough. It won’t throw us clear from it because we’ll still stay entrenched within that sort of cultural cognitive grammar. And what Nishitani proposed is we need to know how to doubt so deeply that we can actually doubt the cognitive cultural grammar that throws us into nihilism, that egocentric subject-object Aristotelian logic state of mind, sort of a monoculture monologue of cognition. And what Chris and I were arguing is that the practice of genuine dialectic in the Socratic form, because it gets you to confront aporia, to put it sort of a little bit of a slogan, the way you get into the great doubt is by really opening up Socratic wonder. And Socratic wonder in the practice of dialectic and when it becomes dialogos, when it takes on a life of its own and both people get drawn beyond themselves, they get drawn into a process that’s outside their own individual egocentric perspectives. They’re open to identifying with someone and a view other than themselves and then internalizing it and then going through a process of self-transcendence in which they other from themselves and then re-identify. So they’re breaking standard Aristotelian logic. I mean, even Hegel saw that with respect to the dialectic, but not as a conceptual thing, as a thing that’s going on at the level of their lived, you know, perspectival participatory engagement and identity formation, et cetera. And so we argued that the dialectic can, if it taps deeply into its Socratic roots and its neoplatonic culmination can actually give us this higher order practice by which we can challenge the fundamental cultural cognitive grammar of nihilism. And we can turn the nothingness of nihilism into the no-thingness of non-duality and shunyata, which opens us back up to the deepest kind of connections we can have at the procedural and the perspectival and the participatory level. So the argument is that we have the potential by doing something which, right, because the Kyoto school was already trying to bridge East and West, right? We have the potential for creating a through this very cross-cultural, this cross-cultural theoretical integration, an understanding of the process, the practice of dialectic into dialogos that would help us give people a genuine reason and to have hope that they have a response to nihilism that actually takes in practice. That takes in the product that is going to be found within the process of them meeting other people, going through development, internalizing other perspectives, exacting our fundamental cognitive and developmental machinery. So we think that it’s plausible that dialectic into dialogos is going to be not in our particular version, but the family of the dialectic. So I think that it’s plausible that dialectic into dialogos is going to be not in our particular version, but the family of these practices that are emerging so prevalent right now in the West. I think they can be put into, sorry for the pun, into dialog with both our own Socratic, Neoplatonic roots and with the cross-cultural work done by the Kyoto school to give us a deep response to the ongoing trauma that we experience and label as nihilism. So it takes nihilism, I mean, this is going to piss the nihilists off. It takes nihilism. It’s going to piss off the nihilists because what we do is, and what Nishatani argues, and this is how he argues against Nietzsche and others, is the nihilists don’t take the nothingness far enough. They don’t take the nothingness far enough. They don’t have the machinery that literally encourages us, enwraps us in wonder. So that we can re-realize, do like a fundamental aspect shift. We can re-realize the nothingness as the no-thingness that, you know, was at the center. You can see sort of at the center of Zen and therefore at the center in many ways of Taoism and Buddhism. So that’s the argument. That’s what we’ve been currently working on. Awesome. That was a lot there. Sorry. No, absolutely. Part of what I’m realizing and exploring this idea of a meta practitioner and kind of drawing on some of the conversations you’ve had around, you know, what might be a kind of shamanic sort of polymath type role to respond to the contemporary meaning crisis, which is kind of for people who don’t know, you have been the sort of main articulator and sort of expanding on the topic. Expanding on the depth and history of why the crisis of meaning today is quite deep and unique. So part of that is sort of coming into, coming to try and sort of translate and put what you’re telling me into dialogue with all the other conversations that I’m having. And part of that move that I sort of realized over the last few months was that I was sort of speaking to teachers, sages, people that I was really drawn to speak to, but I wasn’t really engaging horizontally as much. So the move that I’ve recently been exploring is just sort of putting myself out there into certain communities just for practicing this. Excellent. This sort of dialectic with people. And what you come up against very quickly when you’re doing that is nobody knows what the fuck dialectic means. They don’t have a relationship with Socrates, and I don’t have a huge relationship with Socrates except through your work. That’s something we’ve lost in the West, right? We used to. We used to have a very extensive relationship. Yeah, it’s a funny thing though. You’re right. Totally, Jacob. You meet and you try to, you know, that’s why we’re doing all this work. If what you described wasn’t the case, there would be no need for the work. But the thing is once the thing like we and Chris and I wrote about this, there’s this weird other thing that this phenomenological thing is once people get into it, like it with it and they learn how to start doing it and they write and they start they’ll say things like, oh, they act like I always like those. Is this weird and amnesis? Right. Oh, you know that. Yes. I always knew that this is what I was always looking for. They act like and I don’t mean they act as if they’re seeming. There’s no pretense involved. They’re authentically saying, right, right, right. This has always been here in some sense, but I didn’t really know. And so we tried what we tried to do is try to articulate people, you know, where does dialectic come from in relationship to everyday conversation? Like what is the relationship between just everyday discourse, everyday, everyday discussion and full blown dialectic? And so that’s also what we tried to articulate in the paper, because we think that there is a deep continuity. I think the deep continuity is the best way to explain these two what seem like opposite results. People, like you said, don’t know what the heck they’re supposed to be doing. And then once they start doing it, it’s like they just they turn on and they oh and they oh right. And they do all this. I feel like I’m coming home and get all this religious language, often from very secular, otherwise skeptical people about this process and what’s going on. And so I think that there’s I mean. The best way to account for that is that there’s a deep continuity between what’s going on in dialectic and what’s going on in just everyday discussion. And you just have to we worked out sort of a hierarchical model about the relationship between discussion, debate and dialectic in order to try and articulate that relationship. So I mean, maybe I’ll just say what it is briefly. So the idea is, you know, it makes what makes use of a lot of the work of of a philosopher at the foundation of a branch of linguistics called pragmatics, which is Grice. And so the central insight of Grice is. And there’s an episode of where I do this in the in the series is we always have to be conveying much more than we can say. Because if we try to put in everything we’re conveying into our words, we get like this explosion, a common explosion of everything we’re trying to say. We just get into this infinite regret of trying to. So what we rely on is we rely on a lot of non-propositions. Especially as an academic. Yeah, yeah, yeah, especially as an academic. But so what happened, Grice talked about, like, we have a basic maxim that we’re cooperating. And so what happens is if you were to say, you know, excuse me, I’m out of milk. Right. I don’t think that you want to lactate, for example. And I don’t think that you are expecting me to have milk right on my person. Right. And I make all these assumptions that you mean the milk of a cow and that you want to consume it. Right. And you want it in a container. You don’t want me to throw it on your face. Right. And we know all those expectations are there because if I violate any one of them, you’re surprised and angry. Right. And we got a sense of how much milk you’re asking of me. You’re probably maybe asking for a cup or a container. If I give you a drop or I give you a truckload, it’s like, well, wait, that’s not what I was asking for. So there’s all of this machine that we’re always conveying more than we’re saying. Now, in everyday discussion, that’s against the background, right. A shared background of cooperation. Now, what happens is we can come to a place where we realize that we’re not in agreement about something, that we may have beliefs that are contrasting to each other. So we move to the level of debate. And then what we do there is we carry on the debate until we hopefully get to some resolution where we can get back to cooperation. And then we go back to just being able to discuss and live our social lives. And we have thought for a very long time, like our society has paid attention to those two levels a lot. Problem we’re facing now is what do you do when, right, the higher order, even when we’re debating, there’s a higher order assumption of cooperation. There’s a shared model of rational normativity. What happens when that’s undermined? You can’t debate your way through that. So if you’re up against a nihilist, right, you’re going to try and debate with them. They’re not going to want, they’re not going to, you’re going to try and invoke, you need to play by these rules, the rules of debate, and they’re going to go. They’re going to throw some very trenchant skepticism or they’re going to withdraw into a kind of solipsism. And then you’re going to, and if you stay in debate, right, you’re not going to get any resolution. And then what you have to do is you have to move to the level of dialectic. And dialectic is how do we get back? What do we do to reconform ourselves to each other and to the world so that we once again get a shared sense of cultural cognitive normativity? We get a shared culture of how we’re going to interact with each other so that we can then drop back down to the level of debate so we can resolve our theoretical disputes and drop back down to the level of living our lives. And so the thing about dialectic is you only get there after these other levels have come into question. But you’re still using the same machinery. You’re still ultimately relying on the pragmatics, even in everyday discussion. Remember what I said. Most of what I’m giving meaning to you is in terms of what I’m conveying, not what I’m saying. And as you go up the level, it goes more and more into that. When you get to the level of dialectic, it’s purely pragmatic. You’re just trying to convey to each other so that you get back into communing with each other so that the communication needed for debate is possible so that debate can be resolved and put us back into everyday discussion. And so when you’re engaging in dialectic, although you’re using propositions, the pragmatics is way more important than the propositions. The propositions are basically vehicles by which we try to become aware of how we are trying to convey and co-create a new kind of shared intelligibility so that we can come together and we can actually effectively debate each other instead of in an adversarial way. It’s very much like many people have said what’s going wrong or the difficulties facing the United States right now is debate has died because both parties have lost a shared overarching commitment to America and to democracy. They don’t have the shared normativity anymore. They’re not moving in the same cultural space at all. And the debate mechanism doesn’t work for resolving that. It just gridlocks. And what people are looking for in co-hately mostly is how do we get back to the place where we share something, we share the space in which we are willing to debate again in a fruitful and functional fashion rather than gridlocking so that we can solve those problems. So that we can get back down to just talking to each other and living our lives again. So that’s the basic argument in a nutshell. I really want to draw out this aspect of embodying the thing that you’re communicating rather than existing on the propositional level. Yeah, so I apologize. I mean, I don’t like to do this. I’m getting in a bit of a performative contradiction here. I mean, I’m talking all about conveyance and embodiment and the co-creation through communing rather than just speaking and listening as much as speaking and opening up to the other as much as and all I did was present a treatise to you. So I welcome this. We need to shift back into, yes, let’s try and do it with each other. So there’s something about something about this quality of dialectic, which perhaps, you know, if you were to encounter a Socrates or a Jesus or Buddha on the road, he’s quite unlikely to announce to you, you know, his scholarly or religious authority. I think the way that or the shaman for that matter or the meta practitioner or whatever it is shows up relationally always and contextually because they’re embodying this spirit of dialectic. So I’m not going to come into a conversation with any given person with a totally prefixed agenda of where I want it to go. And the underlying orientation has to be towards greater, greater ease, friendship, a sense of a shared inquiry towards truth, which of course necessitates a sense that truth is a possibility and something that we can experience in the same way that we can experience beauty in the world. And so in order to to show up in this way, as I am, you know, doing the work of attempting to do now, making myself available to people jumping into these conversations for an hour or 90 minutes with no idea really where it’s going to go. I feel I’m honing somehow this this skill set and especially in a context where we don’t necessarily, you know, the topic of dialogos and what that is this this notion of a sort of emergent truth and and an intimacy in relationship to a kind of felt sense of mystery coming to people. That doesn’t get named until there’s a sense of demonstrating it, I guess. Yeah, yeah. I mean, so this is this is where the distinction between the language of explaining and the language of trading is really important. What I was doing a few minutes ago was explaining it to you. Because, well, what theory is supposed to help us see, but it’s not it’s not the same thing as doing it. Yeah, I mean, when you’re entering into this process. I mean, typically what you do is you do practices just to get a flowing intimacy going and you and you shift people out of there’s it’s a sequence of practices you do you basically try to get people into a collective flow state where they are flowing with each other. There’s the back and forth between them. But you also try to get them. And this is goes back to the earlier point. You have to you have to shift them. I don’t want I don’t want it to sound so manipulative, but that’s the best language I have right now. You’re trying to get them out of that egocentric orientation. It’s locking them in. You’re trying to get them to be open to being coupled to the process. So what’s emerging? As you said, you’re trying to get people. So for me, what you what you’re really trying to do is you’re trying to you’re trying to get people to cooperate to wonder together. There remember I was saying that that’s how we’re that’s how you get people to confront what is beyond you try to get people into a state of insight, but not the kind of insight in which we’re going to get an answer. It’s the kind of insight that opens up the wonder even more so that we start co wandering together. We start wandering together over the landscape of intelligibility and we help each other to see what we couldn’t see before. But we’re also encouraging each other. Your presence helps me deal with the threat because I have a sense that you’re there for me. If you know if this gets a little too whoo, you know, that’s because you know if you push if you call too much into question too quickly, people get like, ah, right. But also if you don’t call enough into question, people get satisfied. They get self satisfied. We have a good term for that. Right. And so you’re trying to get this optimal grip this sweet spot of co wandering where you and I are mutually affording wandering over the landscape of intelligibility seeing what we couldn’t see before. And because of your encouragement of me, I’m more liable to see the emergence as something beautiful. Maybe awe-inspiring rather than horrifying or threatening or defensive. And hopefully I am doing the same for you. I am affording you to wander. Right. And encouraging you so that that emerging sense. And here’s the thing. If we if we if we start to get into that and we’re playing with it rather than trying to bring back things that we’re going to tell our friends later or whatever, you know, and we all do this, whatever egocentric narcissism is at work. We can also get to a place where the presence of that process of beautiful emerging intelligibility. We start to do it for its own sake and we start to love it for its own sake. And what that does and there’s no words that can do it. This shifts you from seeing reality in this sort of hard subject object thing, you know, way. And it opens you up to the presencing, the presencing out of no thingness. Right. Because like you said, that’s that’s another word for mystery. Where does this keep coming from? Where does all this where does all this moreness and the truth? And the truth. Where does all this intelligibility keep coming from? It seems to have this life of its own. It’s beyond you and me. And if we can get to that place where we can sense that and find it awe inspiring and beautiful rather than terrifying and threatening, we can come to internalize it, identify it with it. And then we are outside of the very framework that traps us into that kind of adversarial position. And so now what I want to talk to you, that’s what I mean. I want to shift into this is that this is what you want to do to get into the practice. There’s a big difference between this is what you do to understand what it might mean as a cognitive scientist. Right. And how it might be relevant to nihilism. But how do we do it? Well, that’s what we do. Right. And so I have to I have to sensitize myself to the superlative. Right. Because if I if I if I experience the loss of all of this structure, just as the collapse of being, I will experience this process as privation, as loss, as nihilism. Right. Yeah. Porphyry calls it the collapse of being. Right. But if I can sensitize it, sensitize myself to the very same process as superlative is going beyond being and pointing me to that from which being constantly emerges, then the nothingness, I can experience it. We can experience it together, which makes it even more real. I can experience that as nothingness. I can experience that as the permanent real possibility of a new shared culture and cognition that allows us to re-commune together. So there’s something really important that’s been coming out of your dialogues, which is exploration, not just of dialectic, as we’ve talked about it, but that the embodiment of that understanding of dialectic actually means being in dialectic in conversation. We can say more excessively in conversation between experience and dialectic. Yeah, totally. Both in the sense of I want to now reconnect my experience with the dialectic we’re having, but also in the course of my listening to you, I’m attempting to hold this dialectic between what’s coming up for me in my brain and what I want to say next, and then coming back out to you. Yep. Yep. Yep. To not, within the first few moments, have figured out what I want to say and now be in a state of waiting for you to finish. Yeah. So it’s a listening. There’s almost a total entanglement of listening and dialectic, because in order to be embodying it, we’re listening constantly. Yeah, yeah, keep going. And then, you know, part of my sort of playful expansion on this in the last few weeks has been to consider how we are, how this kind of maps onto all of the most important aspects of our lives. How our most meaningful relationships can be considered a dialectic or a conversation that occurs over a long period of time between you and your partner, the parent and the child. The relationship that you have and that I’ve recently discovered since I actually moved to Berlin since we last spoke. I was in Athens. I followed my intuition to visit a woman in Berlin that I’ve been talking with and now, thankfully, in a lovely relationship with. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. Yes, it’s the it’s a happy, happy occurrence of this year. And somehow, you know, somehow faith affirming in reality, I guess that I should create this. You know, we met a year before but she actually got in touch with me when I produced the first episode of sense base and put it up. Wow. So. And what was really interesting, I’ve been in this men’s group that I connected through rebel wisdom. Talking about men’s experience and trauma, but really in a way that doesn’t sort of focus on trauma and isolation, but actually is a kind of opening up of possibility space. Right, right, right. Awesome. And Andre Andre Pellegrini who runs it, who’s really brilliant. He reflected to me like sense base that kind of sounds like the opposite of trauma. Good. And so I was, you know, I think I spoke to you about this the first time we met but I really got into dialectic I got into engaging out with Lee with the world more with this out of being in the meaning crisis. Yep. At the deepest, most embodied level possible. And so, here we are. Nice good question. Because they’re this right this. Well, there’s several questions I want to ask well let’s ask the first one. This, because I think there’s a part of this is really important. And it was lacking in what I what I previously said and I think, and it really points to the nexus of embodiment, because you talked about sort of if you’ll allow me to use some directional metaphors, you talked about sort of the internal up and down between the perceptual and the perceptual if you’ll right you’re, you’re moving back and forth between right, you know what how you’re thinking, and then how you’re actually coupling to the world so there’s this, but you said that’s sort of a vertical dimension, right. And then you talked about the horizontal between us and then I think you said something really really important, keeping those two right in sync with each other, so they stay in touch with each other so you sort of optimally balanced between them. That to me, that to me, that that’s that’s the crucial, that’s the crucial thing that that’s that’s the point of, you know, of, you know, the most authentic embodiment and engagement and enactment. So, what does it, sorry, I don’t mean to sound therapeutic, but what does it feel like when those are in sync, because you brought it up. And what does it feel like when they’re out of sync. How are you, how are you feeling your way through that. And of course I don’t mean just tingly feelings in your body. I mean, as much your conceptual awareness, your creative awareness, right, your inactive awareness, your perceptual. What does it feel like when they’re in sync? What does it feel like when they’re out of sync? Okay, this is hopefully going to come out nicely. I think we’re connected the Christianity thing that we were riffing on before. That’s fine. That’s fine. So, there’s something important about dropping into, you know, Zach talks about pre tragic post tragic. Yeah, Zach Stein. So, connecting with trauma can actually be the movement from a greater disconnection from self to a move into a process which is affording of a deeper connection to self. So, I’ve been, you know, in this work for about a year and a half or more and so it’s been, it’s been a, it’s been a very important aspect of my life and it’s been actually where most of my insights. And a sense of a kind of There’s a sort of access of movement into embodiment where it feels as if you’re getting closer and closer to the physicality of experience. And we, it’s, it’s very difficult to not start using languages like energy, energetically. When we get into this, because the state of trauma. I’ve ultimately found as a state of fragmentation. Yes. And so that fragmentation tells you, you experience it as a contraction of your reality, sort of shrinking in as you sort of showed with your hands. But there’s also a narrative contraction as well, and a sort of incapacity to see, to perceive that you rest within a process. You are now defined by this state of fragmentation that you’re in. And there’s a kind of a story that you’re telling yourself. And, you know, you are in dialogue with your body, always, I believe, when you are in the process of trauma integration. So there’s something about There is an art, I guess, which for me a lot of it has been to do with The compulsion to connect more, the compulsion to come into a deeper relationship with creativity. And the capacity to have enough trust in relationship that someone else can then communicate to you when you are in the state of fragmentation. And so I began to wonder whether my view of trauma to be fully integrated necessitated that trauma itself be on an axis in relationship to We can talk about what it might be, but something like creativity or greater connection with world. And I’ll throw it back to you. Yeah, so let me see if I’m understanding you. So it sounds like what you’re saying is like part of it is that you’re moving from a sense of being fragmented within yourself to being sort of more connected to yourself. And that that is also expressing itself in right a movement towards sensing an increased connection to other people in the sense, not just of what’s happening in the moment, but also in a sense of A sense of a more permanent possibility that it’s emerging in you like you’re getting a sense of I could be more connected than I am. I could be more in connection to others than I am. And that start and you is that what and I don’t know if I’m right or wrong here, but I thought I heard you saying that sense of that sense that you’re moving towards overcoming inner fragmentation and affording More real connection to others. That’s that sense is the kind of trust in you. But because the process is is like it’s creative. Do you mean that It’s growing, but it’s growing in a way that keeps pace with your ability to make sense of it. Because I could imagine stuff emerging and it would be like, ah, that’s not creativity. Right. Creativity is appropriate novelty. Right. So there’s novelty coming up, but you can appropriate it. I’m not saying it’s painless. I’m not trying to. I’m not. I’m not trying to pin it with rose colored glasses, but it sounds to me like what you’ve got is That you’ve got a sense of, well, I would call it like encouragement trust in the creativity because You’ve got something going on here where this connection and this connection are reliably now starting to support each other talk to each other and it keeps making it keeps introduce it keeps taking you a step further out of the cave. But it keeps helping you adjust your eyes to the new the new things you’re seeing is that am I am I over reading it. Am I under reading it. Am I miss reading what you’re saying. Okay, this might Might go in an unexpected direction, but I have a sense that In the process of coming into confrontation Or awakening to or, you know, we can consider that. I consider that, you know, part of part of what awakened in me when my Dropping into deep experiences and trauma opened me up to the world was a deeper relationship with nature. Right. Right. But I observed the repetition of branching patterns throughout the natural world throughout the human body. And also in manmade structures like, you know, if you look at the Roman roads of Europe. And so there’s something that I found incredibly meaningful and a source of solace in that and as I continue to return to it. As it became As it became an aspect of my being which gave me meaning in the context of the meaning crisis. My thought became more informed by these patterns and I allowed that to take place. And there’s something there’s a deep wisdom. Yeah. In these patterns. And so my first sort of foray into articulating that has been that the landscape of trauma best time I could come up with That we can understand the nature of the self and the nature of trauma by by an understanding and relationship to these branching patterns. Yes, yes. You know, I see john as a single individual, but actually john is constituted by You know, he’s the trunk of the tree. And he’s also the roots going out into oil and that soil, you know, thicker branches is your upbringing, your parents, your grandparents, meaningful interactions and then down to smaller and smaller. And then I played further with it and I said that The circumstance we arrive at in adulthood may well be that we have certain branches which are illuminated to us and certain branches which are in shadow. Right. This is trauma. It’s disconnection from Aspects of self and experience, which actually constitute. Yeah. So the process of moving from pre tragic to post tragic the process of Attaining deeper levels of wisdom and relationship to reality, I would suggest is of Become coming into awareness and then connecting those roots into world. And so the more parts of self that you integrate The more sort of branches that your tree needs to have. And so if you were living a very sort of constricted narrow and pointed life Where you just did the same thing over and over again, like working a dull office job Actually getting the opportunity, which many people in our society don’t have to step out of that in the way that would allow you to drop into the same place. Disconnections You might need to change the way that you’re being in order to be in relationship With these filler aspects of self. And so for me, it’s been Not doing kinds of, you know, work and a relationship to work that’s traumatizing you and you’re not doing that. And so, Not doing kinds of, you know, work and a relationship to work that’s traumatizing to me because it’s not actually in connection with my body. Discovering drawing discovering music Discovering connection. And I think we have to begin to Find the way in which this becomes our superpower, so to speak. That, you know, initially when you drop into this, you’re going to be Naked and incredibly sensitive energetically in ways that people who haven’t been through this process will not understand, but your sensitivity to The energetics of people and environments Become incredibly heightened. Yes. Part of that is because you Your body is in anticipation or fear of the thing that traumatized you. But in the process of integrating that you don’t lose those sensitivities you integrate them now. And you learn how to have proper boundaries. And so maybe you can see how and how this might connect with our thread of Christianity. Or I feel we have something about a community being created and a narrative that we can all hold fast to. Yeah, something about a deep Embodied reckoning with the historical inheritance of trauma. Christianity is not has not been fit to respond to and then something about something about boundaries as well in there as well. Like you come at you often come out of a religious context with a different relationship to to boundaries. Relationships on the church or something and not Not so well developed in in that respect. What you said was just so beautiful. So when you talked about the walking in nature. So Nishatani defines the essence of religion. He’s not talking about historically or dogmatically. He calls it the self realization of reality. What. So when you went out and you saw the branching pattern simultaneously without and within and that pattern was not objective or subjective but transjective and you realize that you’re not in the same place. You realize as you’re realizing that pattern. It’s realizing itself in you. That’s what Nishatani means. That’s that moment. That’s that moment. And that’s that moment, you know, we talked about in, you know, in dialectic where you’re getting that conformity, you’re the pattern within and the pattern without are resonating and they’re opening you up. And then I noticed that you’re talking about the And that’s that’s the emanation. The sunlight is the illumination, the intelligibility. Well, that’s how I’m feeling. Right. And because you talk about the You know, it’s in the shadow, which means you can’t see it. You can’t make sense of it. And it’s threatening and it’s loop. And so what you so again, you’re doing this, the image, right. It’s like an image of the And it’s not, it’s not a metaphor. That’s the thing, right. It’s not, it’s, you’re not literally saying that everything’s a tree. That’s what you’re saying. You’re saying that everything’s a tree. That’s what you’re saying. You’re not just speaking a metaphor, because you’re saying, No, no, like, it’s neither literal nor metaphorical. It’s beyond them. It’s participatory. Right. And so you’re not just saying that everything’s a tree. That’s ridiculous. You’re not just speaking a metaphor. Right. In a metaphor, we say, think of a as think of B as a, think of B as a, think of B as a, think of B as a, think of B as a, think of B as a, think of B as a, think of B as a, think of B as a, think of B as a, think of B as a, think of B as a, think of B as a, think of B as a, think of B as a, think of B as a, think of B as a, think of B as a, think of B as a, think of B as a, think of B as a, think of B as a, think of B as a, think of B as a, think of B as a, think of B as a, think of B as a, think of B as a, think of B as a, think of B as a, think of B as a, think of B as a, think of B as a, think of B as a, think of B as let’s see. What you’re actually saying is A and B both point upward or downward or whatever metaphor you want, right. To something that they both participate in. The branching in me and the branching out there in the world are both, you know, siblings of the branching of reality the way reality realizes itself. And you use this dropping into metaphor about you like you’re like you’re getting in sync with that lower connectivity. That’s why you use the root, right? Because they sink in, right? And they reach into the ground and they draw nourishment from it. But you’re right. It’s just do you see what you’re doing? You learn to do in dialectic. One of the things you do is you learn to celebrate these iconic images, right? That are neither literal nor metaphorical but are iconic and participatory. And you try and get people to move into them like the way you did spontaneously. You inhabited it. You relived it. And you were opening it up. And then like what I did with you I would say, but what about the sunlight? Tell me more about the sunlight in your icon. So Jacob, tell me more about the sunlight in your icon. Because it’s there. What’s it doing? It’s absolutely confounding to be honest with you. While it starts out with the relief of being in safety, ultimately in relationship. And then from there, there’s a certain sort of letting go that can then be a fully participating. And what I wanted to sort of riff to throw on that because we talked so much about logos and how with this dialectic we’re eventually reaching a dialogos. I believe that nature or in particular these branching patterns and what they convey to us is kind of the logos of nature but perhaps not just nature reality itself. And so we don’t just take this branching pattern to the self and to the past. We take it out into the world as well. And we say to individuals with these branching patterns, why is it that traumatized people continually find the person that corresponds with their trauma? Whether someone who has a fear of being attacked or something. I’ve seen this many times, particularly with women, continually attract the predator who somehow is energetically detecting this. The dark side of this is that there’s a certain inevitability in our trauma that we’re not conscious of finding its partner. But the beauty of it is to understand that somehow as we move through each relationship and play these things out, the logos of the trauma itself is to come to be resolved through relationship. Is the light then the understanding that’s available from the logos? Just try to feel the light in your metaphor. You looked up, you did this, and you opened your hands like a branching tree, and you opened your eyes. What are you looking up to? I’m looking at the stars, John. I’m going out at night and I’m finding the spots where the streetlights don’t block out the sky and I’m looking up at the stars and then I’m coming from… What does that convey to you when you’re looking at the stars? How do you become different than you normally are when you’re looking at the stars? It’s bliss. It’s a kind of bliss and it’s emanating out of your… You can feel it on your whole exterior. It’s a deep participatory feeling. And you start… Like, as you do this dance between experience and narrative and you play all of these reciprocal games, the fruit of it is more artfulness. Your conversation becomes more artful. And hopefully, if you’re doing what I’m calling a meta practitioner, you’re not just doing dialectic, you’re exploring a whole suite of different practices with an expanded notion such that, you know, inquiry into nature, inquiry into music, trying something you didn’t know how to do before. All of these things come within the remit of deeper participation with world and you’re finding wisdom and you’re listening. Right, right. All different sort of dimensions. Like the tree branching out into the light. That’s really beautiful. That’s really beautiful. How do you feel sort of connecting those two images together, those two icons, looking at the star and being the tree? Like you were enacting both of them together. How does that… How do they resonate with each other inside of you? Feels really good, John. It feels like I’m right where I should be. I know you’ve got to jump off in a minute, but I think I’m going to be feeling pretty blissed out and glowed up for having just these beautiful topics with you afterwards. Well, thank you. That was wonderful. And I thank you. That was courageous. I thank you for indulging me because we moved between theory, the discussion, and then we moved into theoria, the actual contemplative practice of doing dialectic and getting into like really unfolding and unpacking. And notice how we keep trying to say what we can ultimately only convey and we keep doing that. And what it does is it enlivens us, it awakens us, and it gets us right to what you said. Like people, they shift. They do this fundamentally… People, they shift. They do this… They’re capable of this fundamental shift from a sense of privation to a sense of what’s superlative, what is beyond, like the stars. And I think that is ultimately how people can respond to nihilism. I do have to jump, Jacob. I want to do this again with you. I want to follow up. I think this is an excellent second video, right? Because the first one was more background and then this one, we’re getting sort of the two sides of the theory and the theoria together, right? And then we can then maybe next time come together and explore because we have a lot of branches that we didn’t get to climb out on. You know, you want to talk more about the connections to Christianity. I’d love to do that with you. Awesome, John. And maybe we can see about getting a third conversation player in here and really get in the pot. That would be fantastic. I’m very open to that. I love doing three-way dialogue. Awesome. Great to have you on, John. Look forward to the next one. Thank you so much, Jacob. Me too. Let’s make sure we set something up. Great. Okay, I got to jump. Take good care. Thank you. That was really wonderful. So, so vibrant and vital. Thank you.