https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=X-f5BgSLb3U
Thank you for tuning in. I’m excited to host and announce this video where we discuss and announce the next Circling and Dialogos Weekend Training. That’s February 19th and 20th, that’s a Saturday and Sunday, 10am to 3.30pm on both Saturday and Sunday and that specific standard time. There is a discount if you sign up two weeks before the course starts, which is February 6th. The link to register is in the show notes below. So if you have been listening in on the conversations that I’ve been having with John and Chris and all the other people and you feel inspired by the ideas that we discuss and connect with the distinctions, this course is going to be about experiencing those things and diving the very practices of mindfulness, contemplation, philosophical meditation and inquiry, inner subjective meditation or circling, and dial like the actual practice doing philosophical dialectic. The first one that we did was just really exceeded all of our expectations and we had so much fun doing it, it was so inspiring and the people that showed up for it were just good, they were awesome. And so we were inspired to keep going and keep refining it, so this one Chris, John and I are going to refine it, deepen it and we hope to see you February 19th and 20th. 10am to 3.30pm Pacific Standard Time. Links to register are below and I hope to see you there. Enjoy this video. So I’m super super super super excited to announce the next Dialogos and Circling course. It’ll be our second one and the first one I think really exceeded our expectations. And so I just wanted to take some time and we’ll be doing a number of different videos and stuff talking in more detail and probably do it like a question and answer video, those kinds of things. But mostly I just wanted for us to get together and essentially announce the next course, let people know where it is and then say a few words of like why we’re doing it, what the course is for, where we see this is going and what it’s addressing. So I would just say that as I’m saying this sentence right now, I’m just present to the how much this has been emergent out of a community of people, right? That has we’ve been circling around something and having conversations and the conversations on some level have been revealing what we’re circling around. And one of the things that we started noticing was that there was this intimate relationship between how we circled around it and how it showed itself to us. Yes. And that precisely we’re like realized and recognized that actually on one level we stumbled on to something new from a certain perspective, but really something really, really ancient that goes back to the very, very beginnings of philosophy and Plato and Socrates. So I’m really, really excited to what we’re doing together here. I am too. So I’ve been I tried to take time off and I’ve managed to a little bit over the December break, but the flurry of discussions have just picked up again. And what seems to be shared among a lot of these discussions, people talking about there’s a sense of imminence that things are where there’s like something’s in the air, something’s changing. And so for me, it’s like you said, Guy, it goes back to Socrates, but it comes right to this pivot point that I think we’re on. And one way I’ve been talking about it recently is to challenge a sort of set way of seeing and speaking. And the problem when you have a set way of saying and speaking is you don’t it so filters the world that you can’t get any evidence of alternative ways of seeing and speaking. And it becomes almost self-evident that there is only this way. And the problem for many people today is that the only way that seems to be available is the one that seems to commit them to choosing between despair and avarice or something noxious like that. And many people are like we’re seeing major moves that people are rejecting that the fact that people are not going back to work after covid, well, after covid. But anyways, right. And one of the ways I’d like to put it, just to bring up and I’ll try not to use too many large words, multisyllabic words, but Paul Recour talked about the fact that we were launched into what he called a hermeneutics of suspicion. This was given to us by Freud and Marx and Nietzsche, and we could we could amend that and add Derrida, who was contemporary with Recour. And the hermeneutics of suspicion takes as its exemplary moment of truth the way that we uncover the conspiracy when we reveal the secret motive, when we uncover the malicious agenda. Right. And this is the this is the moment of truth. And this is taken as the measure and the measure of how we are supposed to ultimately frame reality. Now, that’s the problem with the hermeneutics of suspicion is twofold. One is it breeds distrust of the world, of other people, of oneself. And it breeds cynicism and ultimately nihilism. Now, people might say, but it might be true. But the problem is, it can’t ultimately be ultimate. The point that many philosophers, Marlo Ponti, Heidegger, Hegel, right, is you can only realize one thing’s an illusion in contrast to another experience that you take to be real. Yeah. You can only realize that you’ve been self-deceived in a moment of self-correction. You can only realize that you’ve been self-deceived in a moment of self-correction. You can only realize that you’ve been limited when you transcend that limit. There’s multiple ways philosophers keep converging on this point. We can’t take illusion as the ultimate taste of realness. Yeah. And what I want and now to get to the point, what I’m proposing, right, is to see Diologos as challenging the hermeneutics of suspicion in a profound way. Right. Now, notice the hermeneutics of suspicion has fallen prey to the very thing it was designed to attack. The whole point of the hermeneutics of suspicion was to get us to call into question default assumptions about reality. But now the hermeneutics of suspicion has become the default assumption and it has become precisely noxious in that way. Now, with Diologos, you have the alternative. You say, no, no, any disclosure of deception of illusion is ultimately based on a more primordial and profound disclosure of a contact with realness. And then then the exemplary moment of truth isn’t the discovery of the secret cabal. Yeah. It’s the moment of the co-emergence of shareable and shared insight. It’s the hermeneutics of beauty. But in the hermeneutics of suspicion, appearances deceive us and distract us and distort us from reality. Yeah. But in the hermeneutics of beauty, appearances disclose the depths of reality and beauty invites us towards truth and towards goodness. And the point is that we’re the hermeneutics of suspicion, while it’s pretending to be foundational, is actually deeply parasitic upon this, the hermeneutics of beauty. And Diologos gets us to re-remember, re-experience, relive this, re-appropriate it so that we can challenge fundamentally the hermeneutics of suspicion. What if you could taste a way of seeing and being with yourself and other people that gave you a sense of the capacity to trust yourself and other people? And reality in a deservedly rational fashion. I think that this is for me more and more what I think the key of Diologos is, that what it’s doing is challenging this fundamental orientation we have in our culture that is destroying us and showing it, like disclosing it, but in a beautiful way, right, that it isn’t the only way we have to be. And so for me, Diologos, like this sounds like, oh, abstract, but the point is it goes right down into, like, we take you through a series of practices in which this becomes viable, present, practicable by you. That’s why I think Diologos is so important. Yeah, absolutely. Very nice. Absolutely. It’s funny because part of what Diologos is able to do that is because it changes. It kind of it takes our attention and basically multiplies the way in which our current frame of attention becomes consequential to how we think in the first place. Right. And it sort of reverse engineers a different way of paying attention by, I think essentially almost dilating the scope of consequence that comes with thinking in a certain manner. Right. It’s sort of like we are tested in a way. And the point of Diologos isn’t sort of to test your metal or to test your intellect or anything like that. But it is, I think, a test of how your attention is sharpened or not sharpened and where it seeks to go automatically and instinctively. Right. That’s one of the things that you find out in dialogue is you find out where you where you tend. Right. That that that quote, I can’t remember whose it is, John, but you like to repeat it often of Socrates taught me how to talk to myself. Oh, Antisthenes. What did you learn? Antisthenes. What did you learn from Socrates? I learned how to dialogue with myself. Right. Right. Right. And so that’s a huge part of it, that the relatedness of dialogue and the relatedness of Diologos reverses itself back into the interior, just as it does between persons. Right. And so it’s it’s an exercise in how to better keep our own company by knowing by knowing how to direct our attention within our own company. Right. And marshal our attention. Right. I think of like that persistent platonic metaphor of the chariots and the pilot of the chariots and the cohering of the different forces, the different loves. And and and Diologos, I think, is it’s among other things, it’s a kind of way of arranging those loves so that the attention is paid to the highest possible order within the scope or within the context that’s given by the moment. Right. Yeah. But it’s it’s really just it’s it’s even in the word philosophy, phylia, Sophia, phylia, being the love, the love and intimacy of fellowship. Right. Of of community, of of of friendship in the deepest sense of the word. And Sophia wisdom. And I think they from the very beginning, the last so phylia, Sophia, they go together. And yes. And this is the thing that I I want to emphasize. And I don’t think we can we can emphasize this enough because a lot of times people think about something like philosophy and they think academics, they think kind of abstractions, those kinds of things. But actually, you know, back to the point, well, the point both of you were getting at, actually what we’re talking about to. That it’s possible to be in relationships with people and to commune together in such a way where we don’t just. Sustain or idle together, but we actually can disclose more of reality, right, in the very way that we relate. And this this this in the deepest sense, this deep intimacy between relationship and being oriented in relationship and to really kind of understanding to to such a profound degree, what we are as human beings is so deeply relational through and through that, of course, the way that we relate with one another. Right. Can be right ones in which we’re not just apes. Like, like kind of being able to get like you’ll pick, you know, you’ll pick leaves off my back. But but actually to relate with one another such that more of reality. Comes to bear upon us and in deep transforming ways. And and I think it’s it seems to be innate to to the possibility of what relationship is right. And that’s the that’s the thing that a lot of of this of this. What what had us come together and do this course is seeing this interconnection between friendship and basically deep, profound conversations. Right. This this way where they mutually disclose one another and deepen one another. And so me having having started circling back in 1998, which is essentially a relational practice. We were like, well, that’s really getting at this filea part of it. But there’s also deep, there’s also naturally it discloses in these kind of trends, these these transcendent kinds of experiences, right, that seem to go together. And so we did our first one a number of months ago. And it’s so like when we did the circling and the personal intimacy and all of that right at the beginning, it’s so beautifully turned into the philosophical conversation, the conversation for wisdom. I just thought it was I mean, it was really it was really stunning. Yeah, I think. I mean, what theologos does is it retutors you not in thought, but in attention and perception about that, that, you know, persons are. They they’re especially disclosing of being of reality because they’re the kind of the apex of being and then an aperture into its depth, an apex aperture, because, right, we human persons represent sort of actualizations of reality that that give us access to how we see everything else. Right. It’s I mean, and and that can go from something very, I don’t know what adjective, primitive to a kind of animism or an anthropomorphism to a profound realization like that. No, no, no. If we really plumb the depths of how we make sense together, we are always conjoined to plumbing the depths of how reality discloses itself to us. And and I put it to you that one of the things we’re all hungering for above and beyond the particular hungers and angers that we have right now is we’re hungering for a contact. And it’s it’s this it’s this stereoscopic contact. We want more contact with other people. And we more and we want more contact with what’s real. And we want those two together. And what the a little ghost does is it brings those two together. The file, Leah, is we start to get people off. They all they almost universally say they just rediscover a kind of intimacy that’s neither sexual intimacy nor nor just companionship, nor economic interdependence. It’s this more primordial kind of intimacy, the fellowship, the file, Leah, that contact with others. And then they start to, especially when when we do the course, is they start to recover through that intimacy with others and then through the others and intimacy with themselves. They start to recover a capacity for an intimacy with reality, a sense of being really connected. And I don’t mean some abstract philosophical construct in the academic sense. I mean, that lived sense of being almost like in vibrational resonance with reality so that you feel like you fundamentally belong in existence again. And for me, the logos really helps people. Articulate in both senses of the word, this longing they have and allows them not only to come to an awareness of the longing, but get it articulated so they can start addressing it. Like people start to they both they both the the hunger goes from being in co-hate to more co-hate, and then they through that, they start to get a better sense of how that hunger can be satisfied. And then they practice the this, you know, the beginning of the that the the the transformation of skills and virtues that will allow them to do that. And so I like again, I mean, this is this is I’m not trying to blow smoke here. I think the logos is pivotal right now. And it’s pivotal at multiple levels. It’s pivotal in your in our individual lives that are beset. It’s pivotal in how we are connecting in our interpersonal, you know, communities. But it’s also pivotal on how the culture as a whole is relating to the world and to reality and other cultures. And so at multiple levels, right, you can use this just in a very personal process and you’ll get a lot out of it. But you can also it promises it’s pregnant with the power to address these deeper levels that many of us are concerned with and that and we’re finding it harder and harder to separate off the way we were taught the private life from the public life because they’re interfering with each other in a more and more pronounced fashion. And the logos gives you the capacity to address the personal to write to to to the biggest picture. Yeah. Yeah. And in that that way, and I think the practice, right. So part of the part of what we’re talking about, so most of the course is going to be it’s it’s not it’s not going to be very much like lecture, no, almost none. Most of it is a setting context, right. To go into to to engage into practices. Right. Yeah. And in the practices, you could say in using some of John’s language, you could say it puts constraints around a certain set of like meaning machinery. Right. Communication like embodiment experiences, ways to perspectives to sit in. And what any kind of skill building or capacity deepening practice always involves putting a constraint around the thing that you want to work on so that you so that you don’t default into what you would normally do, but you’re forced to stay and work a particular muscle. Right. So so this is so this whole course is really basically we’re only do as much talking as it takes to understand what you’re going to to be able to participate fully in the exercise and then come out and talk about the insights that came through that. But these are this. And I think maybe we want to talk a little bit about this because I first heard the words, John, you first use these in your meaning crisis series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series, this idea of an ecology of practices. Yes. Right. And this is, I think, in this course, this really is one of the places where that sense of an ecology practice literally comes to fruition here, because it really is creating an ecology and specific layers of practices that build and mutually feed on each other. Right. And in a big way. Yeah, exactly. It’s a it’s a pedagogical program in which you’ll be sort of introduced to some meditative skills and some contemplative skills and then some circling skills. And then what’s called philosophical fellowship skills. And then we move into a practice called dialectic. And all of these practices layer on and they afford each other and they constrain each other and they feedback into each other. Chris, what did you want to say? Yeah, I think I kind of think of it as like the different practices that that lead into dialectic and to dialoguist are sort of like sketching out dimensions of a geometric figure. And right. You can think of it as a kind of collider for attention or a collider for for your loves. Right. That into which you place them and the different practices beginning with with circling and the the meditative and contemplative practices that you lead, John, basically are unfolding the dimensions of that figure so that by the time we’re ready to actually step into that figure and fill it with our attention, there’s actually a shape. There’s a figure there to actually help to vector things in a certain direction so that they’re not simply chaotic or scattershot in the way that they often are. Right. So there’s a form to guide the content that we bring to it and that the form is designed to to be transformative, just as it were, you know, just as it were a physical collider or something or something used in in the sciences. That’s important. And it’s important to also note that this is still very much a work in progress. Yes. So this is simultaneously a workshop, but it is also a lived experiment. We are probably going to put some modifications on what we did in the first workshop, given a lot of the conversations and reflections we’ve had from the first workshop into this second workshop. And and and so you will actually not only participate in something that’s transformative, you will also help to participate in something that could be transforming the very pedagogical program itself and helping us to improve it for other people. And so there’s there’s there’s that richer purpose to it as well. And we very much I, you know, the three of us and Chris and I are talking a lot about some things and about bringing some other aspects in to the pedagogy. And there’s a few things I think we’ll tweak in when just do some initial tries this time around it. And so I so not only are we offering this course in a very deep sense, we’re requesting your participation because you are helping us to experiment and engineer and improve and make something better that is still very much understood to be a work in progress. Absolutely. Yeah, that’s key. Thanks. Yeah, I’m glad you. I’m glad you brought that up, John. I think that’s key. Absolutely. The the. You know, the sense is, you know, it’s also to with the ecology of practices. So part of, you know, part of my understanding of what that points to is. You know, that there are there are spiritual traditions, right, that have out of them have created like things like meditation and all kind yoga, all kinds of different ways of working that the machine, the machinery of self-transcendence. Right. And. One of the things about that machinery is that that same machinery, we talk about this a lot, where that same machinery that kind of that can can open you to enlightenment, right, is also the very same machinery that can can turn in on you. Right. And go south. Right. And my my sense about it is that because that human beings, we are comported in the world the way that we are. Right. It’s not like it’s not like all of your meaning making capacities and your meaning experiences capacities. It’s not like if you don’t use them, they just kind of sit there. Right. I think actually, if we don’t exercise all of our abilities and capacities for self-transcendence, if we don’t consciously. Address those and take those up and develop them in our lives. They actually go sour, right. They actually turn into things like additions. Right. It’s it’s meaning, meaning and profundity in self-transcendence. Are that’s not those aren’t options for us when those are. Yeah. Yeah. If I define they find their if they’re not directed properly, they find their resting place, they find their home and lesser objects. Yeah. Right. Absolutely. And lesser and lesser realities. This is a Socratic and Platonic insight. This is right there. I mean, and there’s books of the republic just dedicated to the fact if you’re not pursuing like wisdom is not optional. And in that sense, philosophy is not optional. Yeah. Right. You’re either doing it explicitly or you’re doing it implicitly. And if you’re doing it implicitly, implicitly, the chances are it’s being beset by your bias and you’re being manipulated by the machination of other people. The degree to which you’re ignorant of something is the degree to which you’re imprisoned into it. Right. Right. And it and guys point and Chris’s point is it doesn’t just sit there sort of latent. It is a dynamic self-organizing capacity within you. And it will evolve. And you have to you like this is the Socratic, even Kyrgyzstan guardian point. Right. You have to bear the responsibility for that. You cannot avoid that responsibility. You can pretend that you’re not responsible. You can distract yourself, but it’s not optional. And we’re sort of realizing that. I mean, one of the things that COVID has done is thrown us back onto the fact that things don’t stay still in meaning making. Like they they they either are cultured by like wisdom oriented practices or or or they the capacity for self transformation produces monsters. And there’s an increasing monstrosity in the meaning making domains of our society. And to think that your mind, our minds, I include ourselves, are not infected and affected by this, I think it is just unjustifiable. Yeah, that’s right. But did you want to say, Chris? That’s right. No, no, no. That’s yeah, that’s exactly it. And when it’s working properly, deal with what you intended to do with part is to lend consciousness to the implicit despair in the Kyrgyzstan guardian language or the implicit lack that that we we find ourselves in, whether we’re conscious of or not. And and I like that. I like that you that’s boy. That point goes undersung very, very often. This idea that it is not an option. We can’t opt out of it if we’re not just because we’re not conscious of it doesn’t mean that it’s not happening to us. And so this is a mechanism to gain, to gain consciousness and to lend it to others, right, to basically use social context. Yes. You create and borrow and share reciprocally a consciousness that can be then reintroduced to one’s own. That’s beautiful. That’s ability. That’s the logos in a sentence, what he just said, that that sharing out of consciousness and that sharing in where consciousness isn’t some Cartesian thing, but this active process of trying to engage and connect to yourself and connect to the world. That was beautiful, Chris. That’s exactly. And the logos is right. This whole program of dialectic into the logos, this pedagogical program, it’s designed to give you right this, this, this, this living, right? Ecology of practices, a scaffolding, one skill prepares you for the next. They layer on each other so that you don’t have to just listen. Don’t listen to our words. Ultimately, come and do the practice and taste what it can give you. Yeah. Yes. Yes. And one of the things about what’s I mean, the more I look at it, the more the the more astonished I am at the time that we’re in, the unprecedented time that we’re in in terms of technology, in terms of like the time scales that we’re looking at, how much change is happening. There’s it’s it’s it’s extraordinary to the degree that we are in a time that has never been before quite in the way that it is now. And and what we’re facing with that. And. And part of. You could say. The self-transcendence and the relational practices have usually been historically has been been in the domain of religion. Yes. And it’s in and now that’s not that’s not viable for many people, right? In our in our time, right? So in some sense, part of the one of the things I really like about the idea of an ecology of practices is that in some sense, it’s taking up a lot of the wisdom of these religions, but in such a way that you don’t you don’t have to buy into a whole set of beliefs, right? You don’t have to. It’s not it’s there’s there’s not a dogma. There’s not like something that you have to believe. It’s more about how to more profoundly relate to reality. Right. And and that goes beyond way beyond propositional knowing, way beyond beliefs. So that’s one of the things I really like about this, in some senses, like these practices are a lot of them are very, very ancient. Right. Dialectic is that goes all the way back, you know, in 2500 years ago. Right. We in the Platonic Academy, Socrates asking the Socratic questions and people having catharsis is and going into a poria and in this this this kind of this kind of grappling to disclose more and more of of in in in in to be struck by how much we don’t know. Right. And the wisdom that’s afforded through that. So there’s a sense where I what I like about what it is that we’re doing with this is it’s in some sense, I’ve noticed this with with the years of circling is. You know, it’s the practices on one level, like we’re going to be doing explicit things about right about actually having genuine philosophical dialogues in a structured way. Right. And and there’s a and there’s a certain formality that we will go through with that in order to really highlight that and exercise those particular skills. And in some sense, those capacities. And what I’ve noticed is the same thing with circling is that, you know, when you’re if you’re if you’re at, for example, if you’re if if you go to yoga class and you’re doing a downward dog. Right. And you start to get really, really good at downward dog and you struggle with it. Why you do yoga probably isn’t to do downward dog. Right. You’re doing downward dog and yoga so that when you’re walking out in your life and you’re not thinking about yoga, your relationship with gravity, with movement, with the whole is more tuned. And it’s pre reflective. It gets that’s the practice is that your response, right, is more open. Those kinds of things. And one of the things that I think is really I think because it’s so close to us, it’s it’s it’s also the most hidden to us that that really we become as human beings through conversation. Like we all become through these. Like I become who I am through my dwelling in the attention and the conversations of my parents and my family and my culture. And that there’s actually there’s a structure to those conversations, right, that actually have a deep effect about who we are. And I think that goes on for our whole lives. But there’s very little attention, in my view, given how given how deeply influential it is for us and how deeply impactful conversations are, very little attention is paid to the form of engagement, the form of communication, the form of dialogue with an understanding, especially with the understanding that there is there is a way that we can dialogue that can actually emphasize and be open to the kind of changes and growth that we want to have. And that’s one of the things that really, really, really excites me about about the logos and what we’re doing here. I think that’s well said. And that goes back to Antisthenes. You’re you’re you’re having conversations all day long, even when you’re alone. Yes. And think about think about what would happen if I took away from any of us conversations, the ability to have conversations with others or even with yourself. Think about how radically your agency would would be reduced and how impoverished your experience would be and your sense of identity. And yet, as Guy pointed out, this fundamental machinery of cognition and agency is largely left to just run of its own accord. Like we think we should be educated on other things, but we think that this is just something we can just do. And the problem with that, in one sense, that’s true. We can just do it. But in another sense, that blinds us to the fact that we could do it so much better. Evil doesn’t come into the world by people choosing evil. They choose a lesser good in place of a greater good. And if we constantly just default to, well, we’ll just sort of chat along. Right. And that’s and then that that that actually shapes our identities and the fabric of our of our mind. Like think about how how how much how much we’re wasting and what opportunity we’re wasting. I would say that that primordiality, I want I want to I want to respond to something that Guy said. I do agree that Deo Logos is very much. For people who find the traditional religions non viable for many different reasons, right? On the other hand, I would say, and this is also true, Deo Logos often helps return people to a religion and find a home within it that they were in question about or that was not properly making them feel home. And so Deo Logos is not something that is like it’s not designed to convert you in or out of a religion. It’s designed to reinforce your capacity for religio, for connectedness. And insofar as you might not find any traditional religion, a viable home for religio, Deo Logos will help you. But insofar as you have a religion that homes religio, Deo Logos will also help you. And third thing, it will allow the non believers and the believers to commune and fellowship with each other, which is sorely needed today as well. Big time. Good, good. Yeah, that’s critical. That’s critical because it’s not Deo Logos isn’t out to change what you know or what you believe. It’s the how you know and how you believe that it’s out to change. Right. The fundamental attitude of participation, the dispositional formal way of relating writ large relating period. And I mean, I think of one way of thinking about it when we talk about the voices, the conversations that carry on unnoticed inside of us, we like they’re not just conversations. They are the forces that direct our will and attention to the agent. Right. They’re working on us. They’re directing our movements. They’re steering us whether we’re conscious of being steered by them or not. And so one thing that again, when it’s working properly, one thing that Deo Logos says is that we use the logos within Deo Logos as the voice to tame our multitudes and to hear them. Yes. Right. So that there’s a consciousness that that those that the multivocal nature of ourselves and our personalities can be given something like an orchestral conductor to to help to to bring it into. Yeah. Right. The interpersonal and the interpersonal, they reflect and reinforce and disclose and articulate each other when dialectic and the logos is is is happening. Right. Exactly. So it always wants to give you back to yourself. Right. It wants to orient you back to yourself. And and that’s why it can be, I think, I think I think we’ve seen enough to know that it I mean, just within our experience. Not least the tradition that it’s emerging from that in the way that Platonism was so essential to the emergence and the ontology of Christianity and the relatedness of its fundamental hypostatic. Right. The the the the Trinitarian relatedness that came out of it obviously rests on that tradition. And in the same way that one emerged from the other, I think so, too, can a renewal of religious participation emerge from the profound experience of being in dialogic practice. It’s not a certainty. And, you know, that’s a that’s a big statement. Like, it’s let’s say that cautiously. But I think there’s enough there’s enough evidence for the fact that, you know, that that’s possible. Well, look at how the dialectical tradition, the Platonic, Neoplatonic tradition, Neoplatonism, Platonism, Neoplatonism enter into reciprocal reconstruction with Christianity, like you just said. But they also do this with Islam and produce Sufism. They do it with Judaism and produce Kabbalah. They do it with Cartesian. The Cartesian framework in Spinoza and produce Spinoza’s. Right. And they they Neoplatonism can enter it enter into a reciprocal reconstruction with a scientific revolution. That’s what happened at the beginning of the 20th century. Like so it like that again. We’re we’re what we’re trying to. Help what we’re trying to help do is to recover this lingua franca arena in which reciprocal reconstruction. Like I’m reading Thomas Plant’s book right now, where he’s comparing pseudo Dionysus to to to to pure land Buddhism and how this kind of platonic framework bound this Silk Road together. And it didn’t make everybody say the same thing, but it provided a space in which everybody could talk in a way that was mutually transformative and they could commune even when they could disagree and that allowed them to trade and build civilizations together. This is this is again right. That I’m just I think I’m trying to broaden the historical argument that Chris is making right. What we’re trying to get at is and I mean this with respect. We’re trying to get at the space from which religions are born so that the so people can go back if they need to, or they can give birth to something that is, you know, trans religious or post religious that will do that same thing for them. But also, as I said, afford people to talk to each other again. It’s amazing how we’re we’re losing like, given what guys said, think about how fundamental conversation is and what we are losing right now is the ability to properly converse with each other. Like we’re talking about we talk about the environment being degraded. And we should, by the way. But the very environment that makes persons possible, metacognitive, self reflective, self aware, moral agents possible at environment is being degraded, not by any one position, but by the lack of the denuding of the forest of conversation. We can’t have an ecology of practices. We can’t even have an ecology of ways of being without that. We are losing. We are losing conversation at a rapid rate. And this should be our primary concern. If you all you’re concerned about is a particular position, winning or losing, you are ultimately losing. We’re all we are all losing together. Totally. I was thinking about what I was thinking about. What what are some things that are like kryptonite for nihilism? And like like what is I what what is it? Just kind of like I was listening to something about how they’re like some breakthroughs in curing cancer or something about like some of it has to do with what are the environments that cancer can’t survive in? Right. Different ways of eating and stuff. And so I was thinking about like, what is that with nihilism? And and I would imagine as a bunch of things, but the one that seems really poignant to me, at least in my experience, it has to do with wonder. Like the the the primary disposition of wonder. And yes. And it almost feels to me that that. And I mean, I mean that in the sense of the deep sense in which when you’re it’s not like not wonder is like a subjective feeling, right? No, not not wonder in terms of something being wonderful on the outside, but the disposition of wonderment, right? Where? Where in some sense, what is what is most on one level, there’s one sense of wonder where you look at something and it’s so it’s so beautiful, it’s so amazing that you experience all and wonder. However, there’s also another way where wonder is. Is is where you start to when it becomes a disposition is where what is most common becomes the most strange, what is most common becomes the most wondrous. And that that that way or that focal setting, right? That stance, that perspective, that that context that we come from, such that we can look at the world, listen to the world, feel the world, feel ourselves in relationship to the world. That that place where what is what is right before us, what’s closest to us, what’s most immediately what we usually call our reality, that’s that’s normal or ordinary. What we’re talking about is that focal setting that can see its extraordinariness, its uncanniness, its wondrous. And I think that’s one of the things that I I noticed in in when we did the first deal logos a couple of months ago is what I started to see is every time they’d go and do an exercise and we’d all come back, right? And they do another exercise, they come back. The sense of affinity and the sense of wonder kept. Yeah. Yeah. Kept expanding, kept expanding, kept expanding. And I have a feeling that in some sense, that almost is almost like a direct in my view, cultivating that. And this is this is also what what Socrates, I think, I think was the first one to talk about that philosophy arises out of the disposition of wonderment. Very much. Yes. And that in that sense, and I think a lot a lot of the exercises that we’re doing precisely in some sense, you can you can you can see them as practicing, abiding in that focal setting, such that what you’re looking at, you know, because again, speaking to the notion that a lot of times people think of philosophy is something really, really abstract. But actually, our our time and our place and our relationship in this moment, if we really, really can open to it and look at it and see it right and and be and truly listen to it. Is a source of an extraordinary amount of wonderment, right. And meaning. And so it’s it’s that that’s the thing I want to just emphasize. What we’re talking about are really there’s these exercises that are deeply experiential that have to do with right now in this moment, being with you and what we’re addressing is that practice of that particular focal setting. Right. And I would say that that’s almost that’s almost like kryptonite to the meeting crisis there. That’s like almost like kryptonite to nihilism. I think that that’s right. I think the proper response to nihilism is to learn how to fall in love with the world again, which is properly a dialogical relationship. Like you you and the world are reciprocally opening to each other. And you practice that wonderment, that reciprocal opening and be a logos and in a way that will permeate through the levels of your consciousness and cognition and pervade throughout the domains of your life. And this is how it’s different from distractive entertainment and other things. Nihilism proposes a closure on what reality can be. It provokes it proposes a conclusion, a conclusive closure about reality. And reopening the world is the best evidence that that closure is not it is is actually not true in a profound way. And if you’re in a certain framework, nothing I can say to you as an argument will move you from that, because everything will strike you as evidence for the framework of the closure of the world. If but if you practice and write it’s like if you’ve never been to Greece and I try to convince you to go to Greece, you’ll just keep seeing it in Canadian or American terms. And why should I go to Greece? But if you can go to Greece, you’ll come back and go, oh, wow, it’s so different. That’s right. It’s a similar kind of thing. But if you practice this course, you get the opening of yourself and the opening of the world to each other. That is the best way of remembering in a deep sense what it is to fall in love with with the world. That’s for me, that’s the deepest meaning of truth. The meaning of truth is is not some correctness of semantic content. It’s the ability to fall in love with reality in a good way. I’m obviously thinking of the true and the good and the beautiful as being completely inter-defining here. And so, yeah, like again, this is there’s a move Socrates would say, like what you what you worship is where you spend your time and your attention. And he would often ask, why are you paying so little time and attention to the care of your soul? And. And what you’re trying to do in this course is this course is not going to be complete or finished, it’s just to introduce you to the possibility of skills. You can train virtues, you can cultivate character that you can embody that will set you on a course by which you will. Again, fall in love with being being yourself, being with others and being in the world, and I ask you, like again, isn’t it worth it? And really, I mean, it’s it’s it. What other way could we best spend our time other than trying to help each other, reawaken and remember what that is like? That seems to me one of the greatest things human beings can do. And again, that’s why we’re not just offering this to you. We’re requesting your participation because it makes possible a way of education and improving that way. Education for other people, not only in this particular version of the course, but particular future versions and other things. Dialogos is a family of practices. Dialectic into the Logos is one. There’s many. And the more we can get people to take this up and help each other remember. I guess it sounds pretentious, but for me, this is this. This is where where the pivot point that we’re all sensing we’re on. This is how we pivot, how we how we how we escape from a world that seems to be like we’re doing a what is it, a desertification or creating a desert where there used to be a rich ecosystem of conversation and ways of being and seeing. And so this this is really like I said, this has the potential to give you a way of responding to what’s happening at the very concrete guts of your life to the horizons of what’s happening in the culture. But it’s important that the you know, that there’s a sort of a proper paradoxical way of understanding the fact that this has a this has a tail us that is aimed to the transcendent, but it also has a modesty. Yes, modest estimations of its own scope, of its own attention that are properly paired with that transcendent. Well said. Well said. Yes, this is experimental. Yes, this, you know, this isn’t this is very much an open ended exercise. And this is an instance of something that would need to be replicated and reproduced and multiply in both quality and in quantity in order to be efficacious in the longer term. This isn’t like, you know, and and and I also think, you know, I lapse into this refrain often because I think it’s very important, but I know you two agree and understand that a lot of what initially draws people to participate in something like this, people come to these things for different reasons and and that’s OK. You know, in fact, that makes things, if anything, more interesting. Some people I know participate simply to get a dose of community, to get a dose of communal activity and communal participation that perhaps is otherwise lacking. Goodness knows there isn’t a lot of that to go around right now, but properly understood that is not the object of this exercise. The fostering of community, qua community is not the aim here. Right. And that’s why this is the ordering of goods into a certain schema. Right. And the community that is conceived as the as the as the arena for dialogos is in service of the aims of dialogos, not in service of itself fundamentally. Yes, yes. We have to we can’t confuse the ends and the means when we’re talking about the various ingredients that go into the practice. Yes. Well said. That’s very well said. Yeah. And precisely. The whenever you talk about a practice or an exercise, right, and especially with this one, right, with the exercise we’re doing in dialogos. It’s you’re doing it so as so that you can struggle, right, so that you can exercise and and put yourself at the optimal edge of your capacity. And and but we’re and what’s really interesting is like a lot of us can understand that through, you know, if you’ve ever taken sports and you practice for an event or something like that, like all of us probably have experiences with kind of practicing and becoming better at something and putting our attention on something right. But when you think about really what in some sense, just. Just just showing up. And saying on some level that I am I am willing to struggle, right, because there’s something right that these exercises afford me and others to get closer to that’s inevitably inevitably good in itself in a sense. And that’s one of the things I want to just highlight about this is that when I think about everything to do with dialogos, all of our past conversations, all the ones that I’ve had on YouTube, all the different, you know, when we’ve come together, we plan them, all the people that I’ve met, right. The in the qualities that they exhibit, the qualities that I feel are drawn out of me and deepened in relationship with these people, there seems to be like a it’s like quite it feels almost literally true. It’s there’s something so good about it, like a fundamental goodness, right, that it’s coming from such a deep place. And I think that as I’m speaking about this and as we’ve been talking, you know, there is a certain to to to struggle. Right. And as Chris highlighted, and he’s been a spokesperson for this. And I really appreciate in this reminder about this, which is some of these things that we’ll be practicing are some of the more difficult things for human beings to become good at, right. Like, for example, profound listening. Like, it’s surprising to for me to recognize how little I even noticed that I never listened at a certain degree, right, to to to really open up to to how deeply and to really, really hear another person, right, or hear a new horizon open. Right. Those kinds of things are things that one becomes good at through dwelling in it, living in that capacity over and over and over again. And I think one of the things part of what I think has this feeling of the good that shines through all of it is because ultimately what we’re talking about is becoming more intimate with something that is for its own sake. Right. The depth of reality for its own sake. And I would say one of the things that’s really missing and and I mean, on some level, that’s human beings are notoriously struggle with this, but I think in our particular time in our age of technology, we without even knowing it, knowing that kind of see everything as a means to an end that always exceeds us on some level. Right. As as I’m doing what I’m doing in order to get to this other thing in terms of utility, what we’re really talking about, what these practices already kind of presuppose is that what we’re going to come into relationship with is is a is a mystery that is for its own sake and that quality of reverence that shines through it in my view seems to evoke. It evokes qualities in me that and draws out virtues and aspects and develops things in me and has me struggle like with things in myself in such a positive way that really it’s about it has that sense of revealing reality as something that’s worthy to be in the presence of for its own sake. Yeah, meaning. Well, the kind of meaning that goes into meaning in life is, I mean, there’s several dimensions to it, but one of the key dimensions is a sense of being connected to something that has a reality and a value independent of my existence. Yeah, the bigger picture to be. I want to be connected to something larger, bigger myself. People are using space as a metaphor. Susan Wolf makes this apparent in the psychological research is pointing to this. They want to connect to something that is a reality independent of us and a value independent of us. And that’s ultimately why we claim to find truth. Good. Ask yourself, why do you all I don’t believe there’s objective value, but you believe the truth is good and what’s going on there. And it’s because somehow truth is about connecting to reality in a way independent of your existence and your personal set of preferences. And that doesn’t have to be, though, an impersonal cold calculation, that connectedness to something other than yourself. Iris Murdoch famously said, love is when you can really recognize that something other than yourself is real. Yes. Yes. Yes. Right. And so the logos is about in that sense, and Chris has been saying it, it’s about practicing, proportioning and calibrating and coordinating your capacity for love, loving yourself, loving other people and loving reality. And the logos is about that in a proper way. And if you’re hungry for meaning, which what the scientific literature and the philosophical tradition both converge on is you want to be connected to something that has an existence and a value independent of your existence and the value you have for yourself. It doesn’t try to deny them or negate them, but it transcends them in an important way. Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. And there’s something so beautifully paradoxical about the fact that that the very way I mean, it’s sort of a Kierkegaardian formulation, but the very way of gaining yourself and the way that you must gain yourself in order to be reimbued with a sense of vitality and meaning is precisely with the self-sacrifice, precisely by losing yourself and losing the kind of egocentrism that we associate with the uncoordinated, chaotic version of those preoccupations when they’re buffeting us around and directing our attention to places where we know we ought not to put it. And yet we can’t help ourselves but to do it anyway. Right. And so the humiliation of oneself subordinated to the higher good of what is true in the presence of the practice is precisely the avenue by which we seem to regain contact with the part of ourselves that is ever ahead of us. Right. One of the things that’s impressed me from these practice and the workshop and other smaller versions I’ve done in other places is people from all different backgrounds, secular or religious, often come out of this talking in spiritual terms, even religious terms, in a way that seems to be both natural but also strained for them. And I think that’s because what they’re what they’re trying to understand is a kind of meaning that was for a very long time properly re-homed within a religious spiritual framework. And for many people, that’s no longer viable. Again, I’m not criticizing religion. I’m just stating a demographic fact. And so the fact that both non-religious and religious people start sharing this language together spontaneously, we don’t introduce it, just comes up and emerges, is also a very powerful and interesting phenomenon. And I take it as evidence for what we’re talking about here. The people are recovering, remembering and recreating all of those terms, that capacity for that kind of connectedness, that trans-egoic connectedness that we all will crave. And I think it has a lot to do with the fact that we’re cultural beings, that we’re mammals, that we’re moral agents, and that these have created in us a set of real needs that have to be met by a real relationship to reality. And it’s something that we have to practice. It’s like we have to practice morality. We don’t think that anybody is just sort of innately a morally great agent. We think, no, no, morality is important. Kids have some innate proclivities, perhaps. And then we have to culture it. We have to enculturate it. We have to educate it. It’s the same thing. It’s the same thing here. Yeah, same thing. Because we have just as many proclivities for those behaviors that lead us astray. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And it’s something that’s so incredible about on a level that it’s odd because you don’t normally think about it like this or people usually don’t think or associate this. But there’s something really, really when you start to one of the things I’ve noticed, like even in this conversation, certain moments where like something was said and it was really insightful and it struck me, it was like it’s like reality when it lit. There was a deeper understanding, but there is also an experience of it revealing what was already somehow present or what I was inside of and that sense of that sense of it’s almost like a nurturing or this recognition that I’m already held in a world of intelligibility that was maybe concealed to me, but in it being unconcealed, it I don’t just learn something new, I recognize something that was preceded me. Right. And that quality of at home meant and insight and cultivating insight is is so important. It’s been so important for me in terms of developing a deeper and deeper sense of trust and having, I think, a sense about reality, not any particular condition or circumstances like transcendent of those things, but just the sense of reality, having a quality of of a holding of some kind of being held in some deep, deep, rich way. I mean, I have a five month year old and I’m I’m constantly having these experiences with him where we have we have this experience and he like the other day he had his first like you could say, I guess, like existential break. We both had it because I had to go get the bottle. He was screaming. And then all of a sudden I heard while I was in the kitchen, I heard the screaming stop and I heard gunk and I ran out and basically rolled off the couch. Right. And it was fine. But it scared him. And I picked him up and I was kind of like, I was making sure he’s OK. And then he got really scared. He just starts screaming. But what was really interesting about this is that his whole being just looked me right in the eye and just started shaking and just he kept like finding home here. And I had this I noticed this impulse of just locking in with him and letting him cry and then feeding him the bottle and he’d scream and then he’d get quiet and scream and get quiet. And we just kept making eye contact. And then he started to until this point where he was silent. And then he went into this deep sleep for about three hours. And it was mom was mom was like outside. I was babysitting. So I sat in this space at the end of that in silence for like three hours with him. And there was something about that silence that I it it drew forward this sense of. This way in which father, son, family, us coming together, this this new being coming into the world, our holding of him isn’t something that we’re doing, it’s something we’re in. And just that he knew. To look me right in the eye and I knew to look him right in the eye and and the five months of history that we’ve had each other of that just disclosing and then and then finding myself just sitting in that silence of this love. In this, I don’t know, knowledge, this insight was on some level something that we both dwelled in, right. But it’s already there, that’s already deeply intelligent. And I would say that, like in some senses, my I would say my ability to notice that and be present to that and to be with that silence and then kind of notice it and be concerned about it and think about it and bring language to it like I’m right doing right now. Like. That’s all I all of that for me has been a function of Deologos of certainly of these kind of right of of getting together and helping each other attune to and to what is the most meaningful, what is the most profound, right, the living this of of it coming into existence and being able to comport and attune to that and have that be the most important thing, all of that, that moment, I would say for me and the way that we’re being a family and the way that that’s coming to fruition is so deeply, deeply, deeply arises out of these kinds of out of these conversations and out of Deologos. Socrates would love that guy, his his primary metaphor was being a midwife, helping helping us give birth to each other, right, and yeah. And then there’s no room in that space for the hermeneutics of suspicion, which is, yeah. So I think we sort of returned no pun intended full circle back to the point that we started. Unfortunately, I need to get going. Absolutely. So just and I will I will put this at the beginning of the video as well through and in the show notes, but we our course will be February, Saturday and Sunday, February 19th and 20th. It starts at 10 a.m. on both Saturday and Sunday and ends at three thirty p.m. That’s 10 a.m. Pacific. Yes. Yeah. Yep. Civic California time. OK, all right. Well, thank you, gentlemen. This has been wonderful. This has been awesome. Thank you. Thank you both. Bye bye. Take good care of my below. Soon. Bye.