https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Q9bYrvb4eYE
Welcome everyone to Voices with Pervaiki. I’m very excited about this. I’m joined by Guy Senstock and Zevi Slavin and we’re going to do another one of these things like Zevi and I did where we’re going to have a series of discussions and they’re going to move between the various channels. We’ll start on my channel and we’ll move to Guy and then we’ll move to Zevi and we don’t know how many times we’re going to end up circling because we’re we’ve got this very, we can see outside of them, we’ve got this very large topic where we want to wrestle with in a good way and so the topic we are going to do is the title of the series indicates is we’re going to explore the relationship between dialogos and as an event in which people participate and mystical experience or mystical realization is a better way of putting it as again an event in which people participate and what we’re going to do is we’re going to use a pivotal figure here. Now I want to be clear for everybody this is not, we’re not doing an ecogentical exercise. We’ll do exegesis but we’re going to use Martin Buber as a foil. We’re ultimately interested in what’s the relationship between these two phenomena. What’s the relationship between two phenomena? What’s the relationship between dialogos, participation in dialogos and participation in mystical realization? Now Buber is a useful figure to use as a philosophical foil for two important reasons. He is a pivotal figure. He’s had a huge influence on me. I know he’s influenced Guy on this. He’s a huge influence, a pivotal figure on what I call dialogos and we’ll talk a bit about what that is as this unfolds and and how Buber’s work has influenced my work and Guy’s work on dialogos. But Buber is very interesting because he initially starts his life and he’s very enamored with what he called mystical experience and we’re going to talk a little what that means and then he has what he calls basically like a conversion event and for him it’s as deep and profound as a religious conversion in which he turned away from mysticism and turned into his dialogical practice. And so he seems to see dialogos and mystical realization as opposite to each other and there being you know conflict or a need to choose one exhaustively and exclusively over the other. And for me I find although I like I said I deeply appreciate Buber, I find that a perplexing claim and let’s make clear it’s not a theoretical claim on his part. It’s an autobiographical existential claim. It was such a pivotal event for him. He transformed his life around it. There’s two primary reasons why I find it difficult and we’re going to unpack these. The one is I am aware of another tradition the platonic and neoplatonic traditions in which dialogos and mystical realization are completely interdependent and interdefining in a profound way. And so it’s like how how can one tradition see them as so profound and another at least another particular individual? I’m not claiming that Buber speaks for all of Jewish spirituality or anything ridiculous like that but how can like can we get these two into dialogue pun intended such that we can understand well what’s being said here and what’s going on? The other reason why I find it perplexing that Buber sees such a radical opposition between dialogos and mystical realization is because when you when I’m reading Buber and you have to read Buber in a particular way we’ll talk about this later it’s very much like Alexio Gavina for those of you who’ve seen some of my other work it’s clear that there are aspects in his work that are to my mind properly described as mystical. There’s we get into a relationship that is in some sense beyond speech, God, and God isn’t a thing. That’s clearly the case. God is by this will make a little bit more sense in a few minutes. God is a vow that can never become an it and that seems to defy all categorization and yet so we’re in this deep relationship with something that transcends speech and conceptualization and why isn’t that a mystical realization? And it calls the person to their true self. So many people read Buber and I think if they especially if they’re not aware of his biography they get a very mystical reading off of Buber and I don’t think that is an inappropriate irresponsible response to Buber’s text. So there’s a lot of tension here. Now again this is not exegetical. The point we’re after here ultimately is what’s the relationship between the Deologos and mystical realization? Now we’re each going to take a different dimension and I’ll let I’ll introduce them that my two my two friends that’s the best way to describe them especially in what we’re going to do right. But we’re each going to take a role. Don’t reduce us to this role. This is for the drama of the Deologos. I’m going to represent the rational dimension because I’m very interested in what I call the voice of reason and I don’t think of reason as just logic right. How is it that and this is what the Neoplatonic tradition sees. Somehow in Deologos we attune to the voice of reason until we pass beyond argumentation to that unity that real that realization what is really real that reason is ultimately in love with and ultimately seeking. So that’s the rational. I’m interested in the voice of reason. So I’ll represent the rational dimension. Guy who is one of the founding figures and ongoing supporters and promoters of circling has devoted decades then right to cultivating a practice that properly homes the dialogical as a way of trying to understand the Heideggerian call to this way of thinking and being with each other and some of you and you’ve seen me and Guy being deep dialog. Zevi and I you’ve also seen have had this amazing joint series on mysticism and so that is going to represent the mystical dimension and between us we’re going to try and realize what’s the relationship between the rational dialogical and the mystical. So now I’m going to start talking for a bit we’ll come back in a bit and I’ll sort of set up some introduced introductory ideas around Buber but I’d like the guy to take some time to introduce himself what’s his take on this. How is he going to embody his role and enter into this and then after him Zevi. So take it away Guy. Yeah my name is Guy Sengstock to be truly Buberian that is spoken as one word no I’m just kidding. Yeah I’ve been deeply into both Heidegger and Buber and in kind of preparing for this dialogue I really had no idea what a strange relationship Buber had with many of the philosophers right and theologians right. There was really some tensions going on there and so I’ve been noticing I’ve been walking around kind of all week with these kind of arguments in my head going back and forth and thinking about them more than I’d ever really understood because I’ve never really looked at Buber from a comparative aspect but I think he brings up some real deep points about a particular mode of nihilism that he was responding to and I think that we gotta I think we’ve got to kind of like look at you know we’ll talk we’ll get into this more but we need to look at like this sense of the immediacy of the real and the encounter that particular numbness of abstraction right and homelessness that comes with part of nihilism and I think that he was specifically in some sense in response to that dimension of it right so I think there’s been some confusion around interpretations and stuff around that and I’m also excited about this too because John and I are going to be doing a and we’ll put all the links for this in the show notes but John and I are going to be doing a an experiential course on dialogos and the dialogical right and and circling the combination of the two we’re going to bring them together it’s going to be a real experiential thing so we’ll links for that if you want to join joining that course that’s going to be the 20th 24th and 25th I believe that’s right yeah 10 10 a.m. till 4 p.m. pacific standard time so I’m just excited to be in the flow and I’ve enjoyed I’ve enjoyed I’ve totally enjoyed getting to to know you a little bit so far Zeve and in all of your work and and I’m appreciating the rigor and the openness that you come to this conversation with yeah it’s a pleasure to join this conversation amongst as appropriately John said friends I thought the the word which may have been coming was was panelists or coke but friends is really the right word and also the right spirit to approach boober and as I’ve also been you know looking back into some boober and looking back a man who I fell in love with in my early 20s it’s he’s really kind of rekindled me to to to look at the world and John will explain what these terms mean but to look at the world through the eye that our lenses and that’s been a really beautiful experience and to come to this conversation to see both john and guy as as thou’s as as you use in their full being is a gift from booger in many senses so it’s that that I held the debt of gratitude to him I grew up in the chassidic tradition for those that don’t know a bit about my story and I began to explore a bit more broadly mysticism as a universal topic beyond just chassidic mysticism or jewish mysticism which can be done quite parochially and boober modern boober along with avram shuaheshel a contemporary of his were the first really authors that I read outside of the immediate canon of my own sect’s literature and the boat the poetry the the depth of feeling the pathos the prophetic spirit which they both embodied the philosophy so boober for me this this character who introduced me to to a new way of thinking about my own tradition to think about it in existential terms in in in realizable in real terms is something which which I’m still very much deeply influenced by I hold my own personal grudges perhaps that he transitioned from the mystical to the dialogical and no that’s a joke I and I hope to get that attention between them it’s um yeah I’m I’m very excited to be here and I’m very excited to to both learn about this character together with you guy and john and guy and also to to be able to to to experience to exemplify what boober was trying to get at with his work which he constantly reiterated that it was not about abstractions and not about ideas but it was about real people and real experiences and being open to the shiftingness of reality and being over the real presence that each moment brings so I’m going to try and be present and try to embody that call from boober and thank you so much for having me on john and guy yeah you’re welcome and I’m concerned that I’ve been mispronouncing your name have I been mispronouncing your name um no so zevi is uh is pretty easy okay so some basic ideas about boober and um and this is not going to be complete or exhaustive it’s introductory it’s to get us into discussion so the primary idea about boober is and what makes him properly an existentialist I would say is that he prioritizes in a profound way more than other existentialists the existential uh existential modes so what’s an existential mode an existential mode is one in which the relationship between you and the world and I’m trying to leave these very vague right now is primary um and one of the main ideas from martin boober uh sorry from martin heidegger that boober was influenced by is this this fundamental being in the world um that what heidegger called does like so does isn’t a property of you it isn’t a property of the world and this is what why heidegger was so interested in it it’s a it’s it’s about a fundamental grounding connection between you and the world being there um that’s why he he puts the two together so one way I’ve tried to talk about this uh that helps sort of link it to some cog side is the idea of the co-identification relationship between the agent and the arena I’m always assuming an identity as I’m assigning identities to things I’m becoming right now I’m becoming you know the professional cognitive scientist or whatever I’m role I’m assuming right now and then I’m assigning identities and you know and they can be good I did these are my friends um and my interlocutors right that’s very different existential mode than when I’m with my beloved and I assume the role of a lover and assign the identity of beloved and the and so we have to understand that these modes are primary and this is the thing that buber elevates in a way beyond even what heidegger does to my mind buber actually says no no that that relatedness that connectedness of co-identification is primary and he talks about two modes and two primary modes that are understood and he describes them relationally so the first is the I thou relationship and I think it’s helpful they’re not identical but it’s helpful to compare this to eric from being mode so in the I thou mode you can I can I our language is going to be difficult here because our language tends to orient us towards the agent and then predicate it out in an Aristotelian fashion and it’s exactly that Aristotelian logic that buber is trying to break us free from okay so try to please I ask everybody to be charitable I’m my language is going to bedevil me to a degree perhaps all of us but I can only apologize for myself um so right so when I find myself participating and I’m going to try and use this word participating as breaking out of the two ways we understand the agent the agent either acts or passively receives and participation is neither action nor reception it it it encompasses but isn’t deeper than both of them so I participate in an I thou relationship in an I thou relationship what happens is what’s key is I’m I want to use the notion here from Don Wright is what I’ll call what he calls sensibility transcendence sensibility transcendence is this bidirectional move in which I am trying to be open there’s a reciprocal opening I’m trying to open up to you in your unique suchness that about you which is non-categorical cannot be put into categories and I’m trying to and this is why I’m participating in at the same time I’m reciprocally open I’m allowing my suchness to come what is it you know John Gravicki and even the name is in some sense categorical but this right this here now with this history back there is can can be here in this world in a way nothing else can and that suchness is trying to reciprocally open to the suchness of another and he calls that I thou because if you when you say thou to somebody and we’re going to I suggest we use the archaic word I think Kaufman’s translation into you loses something thou carries with it that you’re you’re direct you’re you’re directing reverence to another right another person it doesn’t have to be a person we’ll come back to that but it’s a personal reverence that you are directing you and so Wright talks about this on an idea derived from Iris Murdoch right Murdoch gives the example there’s a daughter or here’s a mother-in-law she doesn’t like her daughter-in-law because she thinks her daughter-in-law is very coarse and crude and then she realizes that she has not properly understood certain phenomena her categories are inadequate and she gives up right you know crudeness and coarseness and sees the daughter as spontaneous and grounded so you notice what’s happening she is letting go of her categories just and allowing her consciousness and her cognition to be tailored well fitted to what that daughter-in-law is it’s a way of reverence and giving doing due justice and due respect to the suchness of another person that’s an I thou relationship and you’re completely in the being mode to use a form in sense you’re not trying to manipulate or control you are trying to develop your personhood now Boomer has another term another right remember the relationship is I.N and this this maps really well I think under Palms having in the I.N relationship my attitude towards things is their categorical identity this is a book this is a poem right and what’s the point of the category the category the point of the category is to help me see how that thing is like a bunch of other things so that I can take a skill that and apply it equally and powerfully to any of those members in an interchangeable manner so the point of that is right to get control because I do need to control the world if I don’t control the world then there then I can’t I can’t have certain things I need to have food I need to have water I need to have sleep right I need to have a safe environment so don’t think of this as bad but the point is I manipulate the world because I’m trying to solve problems that are needed to be solved by controlling things in the I.N relationship I’m not trying to solve problems so I’m not curious about how to manipulate things I’m trying to open up the identity of things I’m trying to wonder I’m trying to wonder and for me that’s the connection to the platonic tradition because Socrates says that wisdom begins in wonder now for Boomer again it’s don’t think he don’t think of this as evil the I.N the I.Thou is good because we have to do it we have to spend a lot of time in I.N the thing he’s worried about again this is similar in some ways to Poms modal confusion is that we’ve lost we tend to lose the difference because what happens is once we lose I don’t know what to call it right now once we lose the muse the magic of theologos and enter back into our everyday lives he says the I.Thou relationships always degenerate into I.N so you’re with your beloved I.Thou relationship right but you’re away and you’re not in that moment anymore and then there’s a tendency to just think of for me think of her as my girlfriend you know and that’s not false and it’s not wrong but notice what I’ve done I’ve just I’ve categorized her and and noticed the mistake if I were to bring this into the moment with her the presence of her and treat her categorically well you know I say to her you know you remind me of all the other women I’ve been with you’re in that category very well I can manipulate you and I can have you as much as I need that’s the end of that relationship so notice the point is of course I will fall into I.Thou that’s inevitable Boomer isn’t condemning people for that what he’s criticizing is that people we do this happens inevitably we go from I.Thou to I.It but we forget to do the return we forget to cultivate a practice where we return from the I.It to the I.Thou and so his philosophy I don’t know what to call it but that’s what I’m going to call it at least in the sense of the love of wisdom his philosophy is largely about how do we how do we return how do we how do we practice presencing and reciprocally opening with each other so they when we return okay I’m going to say a few more things and then that will be the introduction but both of my friends are nodding so it seems like I’m I’m doing an okay job so Boomer talks about um so we have this he remember he makes the relation primary I would even ultimately argue ontologically primary but we can come back to that and he sees that there are four relational realms now what’s interesting there’s four realms in which we can be an I.Thou or I.It relation and these are sort of the four dimensions of our humanity he originally had three and in the if you get the book I.Thou you can get translations which are only three but later on I think was in the 50s he added a postscript in which he added the fourth and then he talked about that another essay now I think a really good presentation for those of you who are interested is this book by Kramer he’s also got a more a more recent book that’s sort of a more of a practice book this is sort of a theory into practice and then the other book is focused on practice and I’ll hold that up at some point in a series and he talks and he he lays out a really nice schema for those of you who get the book it’s on page 65 he lays out a really nice schema for understanding this these relational realms and I want to go through this schema very carefully and so these are the four relational realms these are the realms in which dialogos is realizable for us so the first is in nature now that might strike people as odd because surely dialog the ologos depends on dialogue if what we mean by dialogue is speech uber’s saying no no dialogos is possible without speech and it’s and we’re going to talk about this he how how do you relate to a tree as a vow and what does that mean what does that mean so we’ll come back there now it’s interesting and I think Kramer is right about this uber defines these realms right not only in terms of their possibility from the for these two types of relational ways of being but also in relation to speech and notice how that already came up so he says that the the the the realm the relate the the realm of nature the relational realm of nature is is is beneath speech so it’s tapping into something about us and I want to eventually talk about that as the procedural and the perspectival and things like that it’s it’s this right it’s beneath speech and then he used gluber uses this really tricky german two-word phrase and if you look at the translations it’s maddening because it’s translated as intellectual form spiritual shape but I like Kramer’s proposal for the translation uh because uh but but I still want to qualify he he translates it as spirit becoming form now let’s stop there because he’s using the german he’s using the word german word geist and the problem with the german word geist is it it doesn’t really translate well as spirit it’s it’s it translates as spirit right but it’s not just spirit because it also translates as mind it can even translate as intellect in certain situations that’s why some people translate it as intellectual form right and also form is meant very platonically which I’m not might work uber I’m not sure but what he means is he means that which makes things intelligible and also that which makes them be what they are like right and so this spirit coming into form an example he gives uh buber get relates this experience where he’s looking at a particular wall and there’s like in it’s there’s architecture it’s been designed a particular way and he’s suddenly struck by the artistry of the wall he’s struck by how that form has now been spirited the wall and I don’t mean anything goopy or california by that what I mean is you get a sense of right there’s it’s like what scarry talks about when she talks about the beat when you get that moment of beauty you get a sense I didn’t realize walls could be like this and wow how did that that that that intelligible meaning that was in that person’s mind has informed the wall and I’m relating to it so that’s why I think it’s thinking about it as you know spirit becoming form in both in the sense of forming and right and informing some material thing is what so for me that’s a very platonic notion and like so that can enter into that whenever we’re in relationship to things like art and later on maybe philosophy but whenever we’re coming into what plater would talk about is the contemplation of the forms we can experience uh we can do either but we can also do i.s the next so oh what’s the relationship of speech interestingly well the nature is beneath speech the realm of spirit becoming form is what bequeaths speech it’s what makes speech possible that’s why the connection to intelligibility is so important right so because of what’s happening in the in the wall with me and me with the wall right the wall had the wall the wall and i are shaping each other in such a way that speech is possible for me about the wall but it doesn’t mean the wall is speaking to me so he’s not being sort of crypto animus or anything like that okay the next one which is properly in speech is the person to person relation okay and that is primary in some ways in some ways for blue blood but in other ways it’s not primary right because you can make an argument that the fourth realm is ultimately the primary one and this is again for me strikes very neoplatonic and kramer lays lays it out in that order i think which is rather nice so this is the relationship to what buber calls the eternal vow god and the point about this is right it is a separate realm it’s not the same relational being as we that we can get into dialogos in all of these but right there’s something different right and and that difference is captured in the difference of our relationship to speech nature is below speech right spirit becoming form the intelligible forms bequeath or make speech possible we actually engage in speech with other persons but with the internal now although we can speak uh what he says is it actually transcends and penetrates speech right so it’s if you’ll allow me to use a bit of the spatial metaphor if nature is below speech god is in in some way above speech but penetrating speech from above god’s not not in the same way god’s not not separated in that aboveness if you’ll allow me now what’s unique about this is this is the one realm in which you can’t enter into an eye get relation now we have to be really careful about what he means because you can say well surely i can think of god as a thing and i want to manipulate god in prayer and he doesn’t deny any of that what he means though is you can’t get you you’re not in any kind of proper relationship to it um you you are you are you are fundamentally mistaken about it if you take the iate relationship with it in a way you’re not fundamentally relate mistaken if i use this just in an iate relationship seeing it always and only as iate is a mistake but taking it as an it is not a mistake but for god it is it is always a mistake to try and get into an iate relationship now for me notice the relate notice how three of these realms are outside speech and one of them is outside categorical thought the dialogical relationship with god and god somehow transcends spirit coming into form which i mean that sounds incredibly neoplatonic to me and it it sounds incredibly mystical to me beyond speech beyond thought but that’s just to set up the problem we’re going to discuss so i hope that’s i mean that was fast and i didn’t want to do too much but i try i wanted to give us at least some basic theoretical machinery for talking about hoover so i’ll stop talking and i’ll uh i’ll let uh i’ll let my my gentleman friends uh begin so who wants to riff and respond on that see i’m still i’m still i’m still working with this this last thing that you said right about this what is that relation right what is that relation because in some sense with boober i mean in some sense god is god is underneath and within all of it isn’t it like it’s it’s all the way down right yeah it’s the ultimate god and in the thing i’m i i found interesting is that is i’ve been rereading boober again is that in some sense it’s almost like the i-thou relation right is this way where you have this in the way he describes i kept getting the sense that it’s and this is where we can start to look at the logos right and this lifting right where we got where where you’re not just with the product of the logos right conversing it but you actually you read so deeply into it that you become identified with the logos in some sense right yes yes um and that precisely you really get this sense of he’s talking about that that the the the that fundamental relation the i-thou is being spoken as one word right especially that that sense of it you know it where and also this quality where everything it’s almost as if the whole universe both comes to a single point it’s like the one in the medi right it’s get experienced in this in this dialogue but in this strange way that’s not a it’s not it’s not objective so there’s like all kinds of interesting things here the other thing i kind of noticed about boober is like and i’m curious about this because as i was reading more of the people that critiqued him and his response to to them yeah i kept getting a sense i kept wondering about like some of his responses were kind of non-responses right and i kept getting the sense that he was exemplifying something through all of it right that he was in similar to socrates right um where socrates would be you know would be talking about how he doesn’t know what love is and or whatever but he’s actually um aporically embodying the good that can’t be spoken he’s being it right in some sense i kept noticing that boober seemed to respond right to some of these criticisms right uh in a way that seemed to exemplify the thou and and not hitting something right so even his vagueness seemed to i’m not sure about this but they seem to be he seemed to be kind of like in response to the philosophy which he really saw is and i think he’s mostly responding to modernism right um as as that it is that overly abstract right and not in leaving it out right the way the way that character are talked about hegel right where it’s like yeah they build these cat you know these castles and then they live in the shaft next to it right like they they don’t include them they live near it but they don’t live they they’re not within their system right and i think in that same vein that character guard first started talking about right um with the is that he’s he’s kind of in that same vein all the way all the way through so yeah so that’s that’s just some of my initial responses to what i was what i was left with but this kind of sense where there’s this one that like the the one in the many in this dial this dialogical relation which is just actually really compelling it’s very platonic yeah i want to pick up on that at some point i really do because i think that there’s two transcendences that work here there’s the sensibility transcendence that right talks about and then there’s the intellective transcendence that you get in the neoplatonic tradition and i think there there there’s a proper relationship between them as well i remember uh i i i’ve been going through alexio divina with spinoza and i was just floored by this part where he says god god does not have any abstract ideas and it was like i’ve read it before and then it just sort of hit me like right so we we have to do this sort of abstraction perhaps like with spinoza to get up there but once we’re there we have to we have to get we have to re-dow it because it’s not it’s not in any way an abstraction and it was that i remember that sort of you know i almost felt physically pushed back when i read that it was oh and yeah so i want to talk about the the one in the mini or sensibility transcendence and intellective transcendence um and and and again what does that have to do with abstraction and and reason but i want to hear what zemi has to say yeah i’m really excited with the direction that this is taking i’m really i’m really curious uh to see what to see where it goes and where the life of it takes itself but just before before just to reflect on two things that john you had said um one is the the this issue of the thou you that the translator has a problem yeah yeah misfals iron thou and thou ultimately wins out and you mentioned cuffman’s struggling with which is the correct translation and cuffman makes the interesting point which i think is worth bringing up here which is that thou because it’s archaic in contemporary english it has a lot of respect as you said and i think you correctly emphasize that respect but i want to i want to maybe just nuance it a little for the audience and and and you’ll you’ll correct me if i’m if i’m misrepresenting what you’re saying no i think what buber what buber is getting at with his with his with his do is not respect in the sense that we think of respect like respect your elders or respect on authority yeah um because in german you have a word for that you have z is what you talk about in a sense of respect do is is deeply personal it’s intimate and that’s what he’s getting at and respect in the sense of the awe that you have in the in the immense um suge narrows personality which breaks all categorization so well i just want to be i want to if i can make that point that when we say respect excellent yes yes so that’s so that’s one thing um and and i think it’s fascinating to to think about for buber it’s it’s it’s that which it’s which definitionally is not quantifiable and measurable but he says you know it when you do it and i think i think that we all can know that what we’re struggling here is we’re struggling to use language to define that which is the i that which that which is does not fit into language which is by group which is part of the critique against buber as guy was mentioning a lot of people criticizing for being just you know for obvious skating terms for being too poetic for not being exact and we were saying no like you need the poetry to describe that experience because nothing else quite gets to it it’s poetry points beyond language to point that experience which is more than experience which is which is the full to town of the other as a real entity and not just as a projection of our own mind which is part of you know escape from from his um his earlier there’s this early moment where he’s very much redeemed from his own sense that everything is just you know the construct of his imaginations by he’s reading of Kant and for buber it’s that real real experience so i think that part of the struggle that the audience will think which is us trying to talk about this this place which is full of awe and full of presence and full of intimacy and therefore it almost must be done poetically or metaphorically so that’s that’s that’s one point the other point which i wanted to mention was that the iu and john you you got to mention in this in in sort of the second half of your presentation the iu is as you said it’s not just with people and buber makes this very clear buber has iu moments in his book with with a cat with a tree and his early work with a piece of rock a piece of mica and and i think and i think that point is a very interesting for our contemporary world and maybe this will come up in the conversation where we treat the world around us as something for our own exploitation as a means to an end instead of seeing nature as its own person its own persona which we can encounter the divinity within the thou within that and therefore we cannot simply exploit it we cannot simply use it to our own ends so i think there’s there’s sort of this anthropomorphization or this divinization of reality and and really the way i see the i thou which is what both guy and john were saying was to see the divine in everything because the because in every relationship between an i and a thou the reference is made to the eternal that took god god has always implicated in that relationship and maybe just one final point before passing it back there was a beautiful letter that modern luther king jr the who i don’t think needs not much introduction and he’s let us from jail he wrote that that what’s needed is that once we can once once all of white america can see the divinity inherent within the african american then that is the end to racism i think that in all of our john very much your focus on on the meaning crisis and on the alienation and on the instrumentization of of things when we see the divinity which means we put that this thing has inalienable inherent infinite value it’s the it’s the it’s the meaning of the infinity and the actuality in the in the thou in the divinity of that all that we encounter and and for for for buber that’s both with people and nature and animals and in the and specifically in the other and i think i think that what might be an interesting point which is inevitably going to come up here is is that it’s specifically in the other it’s it’s actually the space between the two yes we find the real magic so that’s that’s my um that’s my reflection on how you guys opened so i i mean there i wow that’s great uh so i there’s i have two sort of things uh one is i’m there’s a cognitive scientist that’s interested in me and then it connects up to uh some stuff i’ve read uh by robert carter who’s one of the uh great uh uh interpreters of the kyoto school uh to english audiences uh especially michiganian michita but he wrote a book of becoming bamboo and there’s a zen thing if you know if you want to learn from the pine you have to go to the pine right and so that has a properly poetic thing and but i’ve also done i’m publishing papers right now with dan chiapi where you can actually see this and you can see it in cognitive science you can see this really really so let me describe it very briefly to some of these are not familiar with it because i want to i want to bring up the loop a little bit so the work was on scientists on the ground nasa scientists moving the rovers around on mars now it’s interesting that one of the rovers is actually called spirit by the way um and the issue is uh they don’t you don’t have joystick control and all you’re getting is black black and white photos all right and stuff like this and how do you like and what’s really interesting and this goes a lot towards boober because boober emphasizes present again and again and again is this phenomena of presence realization it’s like in video games where they they feel that they are on mars and they feel that they’re on mars because they are being the rover it’s just rarely and you and what happens is there’s this link process this loop so first of all they anthropomorphize the rover right and they’ll do things like and they not only have to promote pies they identify an anthropomorphizing like i need to move my arm right that’s the rover and right and we although saving we’ve got to keep the rover alive right and so they anthropomorphize it terrifically but they also do the reverse they techno-morphize themselves so what they’ll do is like one of the scientists will say like oh here’s a rock and she’s sitting on a chair a swivel chair and she’ll start moving around and she’ll go like this and i i need to turn like this right and these are the these are the rovers cameras and the wheels are right right and what happens is there’s this loop right as much as they’re anthropomorphizing the rover right and turning the rover into a human being they’re allowing themselves to become the rover so i’ll use some terms from polanyi right and from from milaponte they they indwell the rover so when you’re indwelling something you’re not just seeing you know like like when i pick up an object and tap like i’m indwelling this i’m not seeing it i’m seeing through it so they indwell the rover they’re trying to be the rover and see like the rover sees but they also internalize the rover what would it be like to be the rover what would it be like to be the rover so there’s this loop of internalization and indwelling and what that gives them is a sense of presence which is really really fascinating to me right and so what what i think that has to do with what is that loop i’m going to put out a proposal that loop is part of what we’re trying to talk about and be a logo in dialogos and we can enhance that loop with language but we can participate in that loop without language and we can participate and like i said we can participate in that loop in a really interesting way and this is where i have to pass from the scientist to the rover a scientist back to carter but i want to say one thing about the scientists the scientists say some these are hard literal rocket scientists by the way hard-node scientists and they’ll do things like they’ll still say i was working in the garden my right wrist kept getting stuck and i came to the lab and spirits right wheel was getting stuck and then they sort of laughed nervously i know right but you know there’s no magic but there’s some kind of sympathetic connection right and that’s that’s really germane now carter picks up that sympathetic connection and he does something very interesting with it right and you can see this in in nishatani and i think this is in the neoplatonic tradition when i’m doing this loop it’s a profound kind of deep co-identification and it’s a transformative ongoing i’m i’m shaping myself i’m making a space so that within me so that so i’ll be shaped to the thou right and i’m allowing myself to be shaped into the thou and those are two different directions different directions but what can happen is you can come sorry the spatial language is misleading but it’s all i have you can i’ll try this you can come to experience you and you and the thou i and the thou as two species of the same genus or something like that it’s like right what’s in me and what’s there they’re not the same but they ultimately are the same in something higher and you get lifted up so the participation is not just this way the participation is also that way to pick up on guy’s point false stop guy wants to say something i’ve just i’ve just i’m struck by i said this thought like it’s almost like the thou when you when the realization of the thou it’s almost like the it that we take ourselves with is like the phantom limb and this thing up here is the real lip right um and i uh so that i just loved the way that the way that you just said that was instructive to my mind if i’m myself kind of experiencing it a little bit but this sense of i’ve always wondered about this and i i think people instinctively just know what i’m talking about here is like phenomenologically when you have that moment with somebody that moment of intimacy right it may be the first time that you’ve ever met them but there’s that moment where there’s a recognition and for me it’s always this experience of oh there you are like as if as if we just forgot each other for a while but like we meet again it’s like there’s a quality of remembrance about about the experience that encounter of intimacy when it’s recognized there’s a feeling that’s more like oh yeah like it was as if it was already there was just a little bit to the left and you just hadn’t looked there ever but it was just right there there we are that that sense of the genius is that what you called it at the top yeah i was trying to use i was trying to get out of a spatial metaphor by using a taxonomic metaphor so so that moment so again for me that moment of recognition like recognition recognizing is also a a memorable moment and i’m going to try and push on memory and reminding and sati and mindfulness because when i encountered somebody as a vow and i’ve recognized them i catch their guys i i sorry what i mean is they they they start to live in me right they start to live in me in a way like i don’t i don’t i don’t want to use her name because i don’t want to trust but the person my beloved partner she’s with me all day like she’s not in my head as an idea or a set of facts like the set of facts and ideas i have about bolivia she’s in my head as a voice a presence i don’t like either one of those but beyond that’s so in the german word geist is really good for that because it it’s nicely touching for a voice presence spirit shaping intelligible form when that that’s what i mean about i’ve internalized i’ve not consumed her see the difference i think one of the fundamental confusions is to confuse i consumption with i thou internalization precisely because she speaks to me all day i have i’ve been i have a better sensitivity to hearing her when we actually come back together and letting myself be tailored to her in that situation so for me and and play to try to get this i think with his notion of anamnesis it’s signus and simultaneously a recognition there you are i didn’t know trees could be like that or there you are but it’s also like this deep it’s memorable it goes like it becomes i’m struggling but do you have is this tracking or landing with what yeah yeah i think i think i think this is very interesting i want to also to go back on what you what you started saying earlier john was that and buber i think makes this point quite nicely that the i it in the i relationship in the i in the i thou relationship aren’t the same eyes yes yes itself is a different self when it’s relating to the other as in it that we that we are fundamentally changed which is why he says that there are these complete world pairs and buber really says that we only really become a real eye when we encounter a thou and buber writes that when he encounters this piece of mic and has his first mystical experience he writes to his friend he says he says for the first time i was i for the first time i i knew who i was you didn’t count the fullness of the other and that’s that sense of participation where we are drawn out into the encounter of the other and i think i think this point is really a real point i think it’s something phenomenological as guy was saying that we can walk around in the world we can get stuck in this sort of solipsism you know in this uh the zombie thought experiment that maybe it’s all just my projections maybe there’s no real other entities out there and buber was i think boobas lifelong philosophical mission was attired against that position to say that no you have to encounter the things outside of you as really real as really demanding your presence and attention is really outside of you part of boobar young’s debates about the existence of god was that boober felt that that god was too much psychologized even he has this he has this critique of mystical experiences the abyss in german is too much within individual that can negate the real particulars of the other and boobas said i don’t want to i cannot negate any particular existence i need a real vow outside of me i want a real god outside of me the relationship and we can we can also get some why that’s so important to him but this sense that in that relationship is where we do become the self in that participation and it’s it’s it’s particularly that move not allowing us to collapse just into ourself as beautiful as that is what he demands and that i think that’s also what what guys talking about is the remembering of the existence of the intelligibility of the world out there as something which we can interact with and and even if that somehow is connected back at top even if it somehow becomes sort of the one true above in some in a platonic sense maybe it’s a very real sense that there really is something out there that and and only when i’m open to that can i can i actually encounter you because if i just believe that you’re just a projection of my own imagination then i i’m never thinking for myself because i’m never thinking i’m never encountering your thought i can never be challenged or made to think or made to or moved by something else it’s only when i do it for myself to have my my perception altered or changed or challenged do i even be able am i even able to begin to discover myself and i think i think this is a very strong new platonic point which is that when we can begin to discover that which is intelligible in the out there in the real out there we begin to discover the real with you that’s the that’s the main move of anagoga so i just connect back beautifully again for me to write an iris murdoch because murdoch said love is when you genuinely recognize the realness of something other than yourself right yeah right yeah and so and that’s the platonic idea too that there is the the the the loving that takes us outside of the solipsistic attractor right and thereby allows us to come back and know ourselves more deeply that love right it it’s it’s it’s it’s the deepest kind of knowing and that’s something a hallmark card but we’re trying to get at something here that’s beyond the hallmark card in fact the hallmark card tends to turn love into an it and we’re trying to get outside of the cliches we’re trying to get back to i think when you really i mean this is a point that you know a guy and i are reading this book right now by schindler on playdo playdo’s critique of impure reason and he actually at one point cites the murdoch but the idea that brilliant you really realize that the the non-me reality of something right that you love it there’s the right that like like you were saying maybe like when like when you’re saying about the environment like understanding how everything that there’s a reality that everything has a for itselfness right that’s like spinoza canada’s right that’s like spinoza’s canada’s and like that this is that allows for intimate relation because i can only relate to its for itselfness from my for itselfness and then realize their inherent affinity but but i can only do that with that what you and i like the way you put those two together an intimate reverence right like i can only but when i do that it see this is what i like the platonic plane and this is the response to nihilism and solipsism and all that is that that that strikes the eye that strikes me that’s just inherently good which is not my moral goodness or aesthetic goodness it’s just there’s something about it like the degree to which i can reflect back and my own for myselfness which just it just you know intrinsically seems good to me right when i do this i realize but but but that’s the case for everything right and so any i’m thinking i’m thinking you know you know you loving your neighbors yourself a deep version of that with like if that’s value if that’s inherently invaluable in me it’s inherently valuable in the thou of everything so i like i really like this idea of yeah and i didn’t want i didn’t want to i didn’t want to get i didn’t want to do hegelian thing i’ve gathered up to two poles and the one above i was not trying to do that i was i was trying to get um i was trying to get a sense of let me put it this way let’s try it this way so we’re doing the intimate reverence we’re getting the reciprocal opening we get the note we’re getting the knowing that’s the loving right we’re getting we’re getting eye to thou and as zevi said i’m only truly starting to realize myself as i i give myself over to the thou and so what’s happening is my suchness the suchness of the thou are in resonance but i also feel another dimension to it there’s also the moreness right so and here’s where i’m thinking of blake right to see the world in a grain of sand yes so at first i i have to do that i have to enter into that with the sand right and it’s it’s absolutely unique it’s the grain of sand but i also see the world in it all how all of it is present in it and so for me that’s what i’m trying to get with the vertical dimension i’m trying to get when i’m in the eye thou i i this is what i’m trying to get with also with boobers metaphor of the penetration which right not only am i getting the suchness suchness the suchness there’s also like and this is part of beauty there’s more there’s like there’s an inexhaust there’s a way in which the inexhaustibility of all of reality is present and that’s what i was trying to put my finger on i wasn’t you know i you know i wasn’t sure i i i i don’t want to set these off against i don’t like i off against each other um so yeah i mean if i can just ask you just like do you think like so boobers concern is just like we can i said you know we can we can confuse internalization with consumption right is is the worry about mysticism perhaps that that self-knowing of our own suchness can be confused with egocentrism or or a kind of self-centeredness i’m trying to get at the nature because i see like i’ll shut up what what do you think yeah no it’s a it’s a very it’s a it’s a very interesting question um i just want to i don’t know if this is a good habit or a bad habit but i want to i want to respond to two things that came up while he was speaking and then and then yeah please that’s a good habit it’s a very good habit yeah you know you can’t get the logos which is good so boober besides for being this um existentialist philosopher labels that he rejected categorically as as the most philosophers reject their own labels that are put on them but besides for being the existentialist philosopher that we know him to be he’s also he has he also has like these two other full identities intellectual identities one is that he’s a interpreter translator and popularizer of chassidic mysticism yeah the tradition that i was born into and grew up in and he’s also a bible translator that he does along with russians by translating the bible in a very bizarre way into german in a way that the that the the shockingness of the hebrew would somehow be still in the german he creates all these um all these neologisms in german that that shocked the reader to contain something of the original shocking verse and and this two there’s two points that that come from from from those two sides of him which which i think impinge upon this because obviously he’s a complete person and these are all happening simultaneously yeah one is one is a very beautiful line um from menachem and of kotzk who was a chassidic rebbe who boober was very infatuated by among many others the kotzker was known for having this uh absolute unwavering pursuit of truth um the stories told that that he he was so he was so allergic to to to falsehood and all all kinds of both in terms of personal false people would come and pretend or effectuate they were thrown out right away but even in his writing he only ended up ever writing in his lifetime and custody grabbers wrote some of them wrote volumes and volumes of volumes he only wrote one piece of paper that was the only truth he could that was like what he was able to boil down and even that truth he was buried with because it was it was like he still felt unsure about it that it was maybe not and he took it with him to the grave literally the one the one piece of paper that he wrote so the kotzker has this great line i’m going to say in yiddish because it’s like really great in yiddish and then i’ll translate into english he says and and you’ll hear a lot of the german yiddish and all of the phrases that broober uses as well maybe he’s borrowing them from from the kotzker from this he says and which means that if i am i because you are you and you are you because i am i then i’m not really i and you’re not really you but if i am i because i am i and you are you because you are you then i am i and you are you and then this is how the this is how it ends and yes and then we can talk then we can enter into dialogue but if my existence is simply predicated on it on not being you it’s simply negation of you that i i my category i’m i’m this because you’re not that i but but if my and then i’m not really me and you’re not really you there’s no there’s no real meeting that we’re all just each other’s projections we’re not we don’t have the existence that full totality but if i’m really me in my own full existence and you’re really you and your full existence and we’re able to recognize that of each other then we can come and we can be in real dialogue and we can really talk yeah um which is which which is part of you mentioned this thing of that to love your neighbors yourself when buba translates the biblical um commandment you love your neighbor as yourself as it’s usually translated he doesn’t translate it as yourself he says you should love your neighbor because he is a self like you are a self not that he’s like yourself he is his own he or she is their own self good good like like you are your own self and that’s that’s a very beautiful thing that he does in the gem and so a bit of a bit of his side and a bit of his bible translator side coming here into this into this this need to recognize the other as really others so that dialogue can happen so that love can happen right both dialogue and love in in terms of in terms of the question of mysticism um it’s a very interesting because he he finds i mean his early works he he writes a work called the static confessions with a tremendous uh which is tremendous compilation of mystical testimonies from from mainly christian mystics but it becomes a real staple in german literature um he writes daniel which is a work of tremendous mystical poetry he does his phd dissertation on nicholas of kusa and jake burma you’re fantastic um you know middle-aged christian germanistics so he’s he’s he’s fully fully i mean he’s fully in that but i think what you see in his mystical writings and i’m i’m being a student of mysticism i’m a student of boober i’ve taken an interest in them and and his his his poetry inspired sort of by these aphoristic prophetic version of of of niches is really something to knock one off one’s feet you see you see that there’s constantly one thing which nags him about about the mystic which is that the mystic and and he’s writing about himself right because he is the mystic in that phase he never knows whether this is really really real or it’s really just outside of me never knows if the sound of he writes this if the sound of the ocean is just the internal waters that are that are bouncing around inside and not really something outside and he he really wants that real thing which is beyond him which is outside of me once he wants a god which is not just a product of our psychology wants an experience which is not just internal and narcissistic so i think i think there’s two there’s one worry which is a simple word which is that mysticism can lead to narcissism it can lead to megalomania it can it can lead to to solipsism it can it can lead to sort of me just being on my own ego trip it becomes hedonistic um like spiritual spirituality as its own pleasure trip which which is a real concern yeah but i think i think i think i think that the the philosophical concern which for him is is is also real concern is that there needs to be something real outside which grounds his own relationality and his own love his own experience of that real as not simply him just being alone with himself in the universe however beautiful that is he really wants something outside of him and not to not to psychologize boober because i don’t i don’t think that’s fair to do but but um paul mendes floor who’s a very famous um intellectual biographer who wrote who writes the intellectual biography of boober he writes about a very very tragic moment when boob is three years old where his mother uh leaves the family to work yeah russian soldier and and mendes floor makes the case throughout the book that that it’s boob is real desire for the for for his mother for that real thing which is outside of him to turn back to love him and he and he writes that that as boober standing by these big french windows he grew up quite wealthily he’s calling out to his mother saying mama mama and she doesn’t turn around she doesn’t never only once later in his life when he’s when he’s already um a grandfather brings his brings his children to to meet his mother he can’t make eye contact with her there’s like there’s like this this rupture of relation and and and for for mendes floor it’s this desire to to really relate to the mother to relate to the other he writes a love letter to his wife when he when he ends up you know when they finally come into that relationship and he says i’ve now found and i’ve now found my mother it’s like a very it’s very weird range yeah wow he’s looking for and all of his so many of his theological metaphors is the is the child in the womb returning to the womb returning to the maternal returning to the mother and and the mother in jewish mysticism is is the material is the earthly is the real so i i get the sense that that boober he i mean he’s a very young intellectual at the age of 14 and 16 he’s ready reading Nietzsche and Kant and he’s being lost in these abstractions he wants the real and he feels like the mystic is too quick to dismiss the real or or to or to fool into just themselves and that’s all that exists the boober needs it to be done with other with the real other with that which is really outside them and to come into that space of love and and knowledge of the other and and that’s i mean i i don’t i don’t want to play up the psychologization to reduce it to that um because i think that the point stands even without that experience but i think this is real driving force through his thought so this would also explain the you know the antipathy and cryptique he has of young so he’s worried about because young is so deeply concave and young often in fact explicitly refuses to make any metaphysical or ontological claims um and so boober is going to be very very um antagonistic towards that so to what degree then and i’m asking both of you yes what degree then is i mean so i i i have sort of an argument i’ll make elsewhere but i’ll just allude to it here i think people become great if they not only speak of things but they exemplify things in their own life that have have general relevance in an important way um so boober’s hunger for and i want to use this word because i’ve done a lot of work on boober’s hunger for religio the hunger for connection to what is real um as as real which you know is on playdoh argues that’s one of our greatest meta drives in addition to whatever we want we want it we want which satisfies our want to be real and that that trumps everything else um to what degree is that hunger or the an intimate relevance and reverence of reality is that like i’m seeing that as symptomatic pervasive for modernity in an important way that his time big time but we see but but the but the see as soon as we say that again the horizontal and the vertical dimensions come in because part of what i mean when something’s real is not only that it’s outside of me it’s also deeper than me it’s so people don’t just want connection they want connection to what’s deep right which is significant right um and so here here let’s let’s now that we’re we’ll step out of the the psychologically for a second you weren’t but you were worried about it thanks to the postmodern critique because the postmodern critique is basically sorry that was going to be way too hubristic one important dimension of the postmodern fatigue is you can’t actually get presence and the longing for presence is a fundamental mistake and insofar as you’re trying to do that you’re trying your quest for the real is ultimately you know hegemonic and loco centric and all the insult words but the idea is no no no and you can see like and this is the direct heritage from you know con and back back to conton nominalism no no no right all there is is the play of signs and your attempt to get out of this is actually what’s causing your suffering and causing you to oppress and hurt other people and then notice the little sneak sneaky thing that just happened at the end there which is i sneak in the presence of the other that i have some sort of direct moral access to and you see you can see how levin has has a huge impact on derrida around that so so i’m trying out out let’s like so i you know we’ve done some good exegesis i’m not trying to let’s zoom out a bit we can zoom back into boober when we need to but like what is this telling us and what is it telling us again about two things the relationship between dialogus and mysticism and then the relationship between that relationship and our hunger and love because playdo says they’re always mixed together right uh for the real so that’s does that yeah that question feels like it lands now yeah yeah and i just i want i want to say and i have no idea if this if this fits or not but it’s been coming up a bunch and and what everybody’s been been saying um i just want a presence to be a liveness of this conversation is just intense right it’s really great i’m having a great time with you guys so thank you thank you for that with me very much so yeah yeah my my eye is given by you thank you um the uh i’ve been thinking about this sense of this is what i was encountering too with boober like there is this sense of like this deep deep hunger for the real right and what does he really mean by that right what does he really mean by that um and i and it is why i’m glad that you’re bringing up this sense of the way that post-modernity kind of unhooked presence right that you can’t get presence anywhere right it’s it becomes deeply it becomes deeply suspicious of the of presence and it right it so one sloganistic and please remember that adjective way of understanding post-modernism is to challenge the equation of realness with presence yeah yeah yeah well this is this is also where i think nishitani’s critique right about nicha right is that he didn’t take he didn’t take he didn’t take nihilism deep enough right he didn’t take the nothing deep enough because he didn’t negate the negation and i keep hearing this right of this this sense of of the way that nishitani talks about this and you can almost hear it in the i thou it’s like where there’s we negate there’s the the two it’s myself is in it you as an it right you negate that right that’s the first negation in coming together right and then and then when you go to somehow you go to i thou it’s almost like um you negate you negate the i it and then return back into some kind there’s a there’s a there’s a different kind of realness that goes on right there is something about this negating the negation of this full loop where you’re kind of somehow on the field of senyatta and it is very much like this sense where where you know you have conversations in the space and it’s like people turn into almost like talking phantoms right they’re like space themselves like kind of open up and they speak things that are they don’t even they don’t even know they have not qualified to say right this is this is a lot of about this thing with dialogos and i have this sense that there’s it’s there’s this dichotomy that that somehow is being pulled on here about this this sense of presence that i what i understand that to mean is that like if we say presence has this constant thingness right right like this um this constant identity right that as if it’s completely solid as a ground but i would have to say that like i would have to say these experiences are like precisely um release you from that from the grip of that of the i it right like i would say that that kind of presence that they’re talking about is probably like more of the i it the i thou is something like the negating the like the negating of that negating the negation so you come back and you the the reification you can you can you can work in domains that are more real but you’re less reified right and you return in some sense walk away with that sense of things glowing right in that way and this may be the link back into like the mystical yeah can i jump in on that guy yeah i i think i think i think that really um like is really getting at something really rich here which is which is some sort of rapprochement between these two sides between this negation and the real where where the where this negation and negation and maybe maybe to flash that a little because a lot of this work is done in a lot of us know about sort of the apophatic theology of the west this this this way of unsaid this this via negativa and and i think there’s actually a place here where post-modulism doesn’t have to be the boogie monster that it is but there’s actually a deep mystical side to it and i think you see that a lot through derrida i think i think particularly when we talk about big time specifically you know bodhis and bodhis mystical mindset which john is is you know as teachers there’s a lot of that and but even in the west and sort of to maybe sort of begin from here there’s this notion of of this hunger for the real as we’ve been saying which i think is a good phrase for this part of the conversation which john calls the onsenomativity the sense that they’re really real out there which commands our presence and that the sense that when returning to ordinary life to ordinary state of consciousness it feels like an illusion in comparison to what we experienced in in the mystical state and and i think and i think this is a really powerful point here this this sense that in in in in kabbalistic jargon for example we speak about as many names for god one of them is is iron god has nothingness of the capital and the point here specifically is what john was what guy was saying that it’s nothing in that it’s no thing it’s not an object it’s that cannot be made an object it is that which is the eternal vow is the nothing it’s the no thing it’s the non-object and i think a lot of the scholarship around mysticism assumes that the mystics are talking about god theistically and therefore trying to get to this object object and reading them it’s so it’s so absurd it’s like no they’re not trying to get to some sort of transcendental rossels teapot alien with a beard out there and i think a lot of a lot of the very good critiques of that way of thinking about mysticism point out that the mystic is precisely getting to that which is which is not a thing it’s not an object it’s not something which can be languished it’s it’s precisely that which is the negation but but simultaneously and this is a thought which is paradoxical but maybe we can try bring it into the human relationship to make sense of it it’s it’s precisely that full negation of any categorization will be encountered the realest real in behind the new thingness behind and even in the post-mon critique i think in or a element of the post-mon critique as you said when when we when we get rid of the sense that there is some sort of uh presence or some sort of substance or some sort of essence this thing we get to the full base of reality whether there’s there’s a full destruction of any essentialism it’s the full sunyata of the buddhist there’s in that no thingness is the full realness and i think i think you see this very clearly when when when lacan and derry danfico talk about the the the the the immanentism i mean they they latch onto boob sorry they latch onto onto spinosa for this reason they seem as the philosopher of of immanentism that this full imminence once we’ve deconstructed the sort of this middle ground of is this thing real how real is it how does it fit into our axiology of realness it’s like no there’s an obliteration of any of this hierarchy where everything is absolutely the eternal vow and i think that when traditional ways of thinking about religion or mysticism or politics or theology or anything tries to hang onto a hierarchical structure of reality that’s where the critique comes in because because we think that oh on that level of reality like for the neoplatonic it might be announced for the for the for the for the for the for the for what it’s like at some point it’s like oh that’s more real and it’s like no no the the end game is that that’s all it’s all nothing it’s all to use the language of the kabbalists all it’s all zero and when we when we find the full zero that’s when we find the full real maybe just to make a bit of sense of this in the relational to take away from the metaphysical what when you encounter the other right a lover a spouse a partner a student a parent a stranger in that full presence you you have that i thou what was it that was communicated what what was it that was experienced what was it that was present and dober says there’s nothing there’s no proposition there’s no content there’s no there’s nothing which there’s nothing which you can even use to describe what that person is in their essence for you there’s it’s nothing with a capital n which is so real and i think we think about these terms oppositionally we think about realness nothingness as oppositions and i think the point which which buber the mystics perhaps and and postmodern thought are saying is that is that that the full no thingness is the real and it’s that which cannot be made into a thing and i think that’s a it’s very it’s very apparent that that’s what moob is getting at to to come back to that figure yeah so that that’s interesting then because there’s a sense in well one thing that i’m hearing you and i i agree with everything you said i think that was beautiful um yeah but it strikes me then that there’s sorry i’m going to be sort of more of an analytic philosopher here for a second there’s two i think there’s two meanings to this word presence and i think they have there there’s equivocation and complation going on and we haven’t properly pulled them apart because the kind of presence you’re talking about uh right is is not the presentation if i’ll use a slightly different words it’s not the presentation of a thing right right so we and think about how the word exists means to stand out and so standing out i present the thing to you here i present the thing to you right and is and so we can think of presence as presentation of you all that and then we can think of existence as when something has been fully presented to us and i think that sense of presence is subject to the postmodern critique because this is an act of signification and it only works by contrasting this foreground with the background and then what the but the background isn’t inherently the background and blah blah blah blah blah and all that and then all of that just unfolds and i’ve got you know relevance realization running around it but i’m hearing and in having you and i talked about this you and i talked about this too i’m hearing another and this is what’s going to be really tricky else yeah right right so we’re in new territory now yeah it’s going to be tricky because i’m trying to be i’m trying to be i’m trying to exemplify what we’re talking about but there’s a sense of presence that is not you’ll allow me not presentation yeah right and and so it have first of all zeb you said yeah so that that’s packing with what you said yeah in the sense that i think presentation also has the connotation that it’s it’s a it’s a it’s appearance of some sorts it’s uh what how am i trying to um present myself what what am i what am i choosing to put forward of myself right who who am i for this conversation as soon as you’re doing that you’re you’re you’re you’re eating yourself you’re no longer making room for thou right yeah is that what you’re getting at reification is the key yeah yeah so okay yeah that’s what i’m getting and i’m getting at the idea of presentation uh as you know i’m i’m presenting it which means um right i’m i’m doing i’m doing a bunch of things i’m i’m presenting it so it’s now ready for reason it can be categorized it could be used and i’m also um i’m centering your attention on it in a way that diminishes its relationship with other things and i’m trying to get almost like before we even get to a conceptual abstraction there’s a phenomenological abstraction happening that’s what i’m trying to get at that we’re we’re like this right that we’re doing this we’re doing we’re thingifying it as we present it and we’re and we’re and i think you’re right we’re always and we’re and i think you’re right we’re always presenting it to someone even if it’s to myself um and so i’m trying to get i’m trying to get i’m trying to get one more one more sentence guy and then i’ll shut up i’m trying to get at what i’m trying to get at with presentation in contrast to present is i’m trying to get out a phenomenological abstraction that precedes and can and can also afford conceptual obstruction yeah yeah right well i i’m just wondering about i keep thinking about one of the things that we do in in um i’ve done this in my advanced courses right well even even for beginners work trying to get at something like this experientially which is to get at what are you actually seeing when you see another right what is that perception right and and so what i’ll do is i’ll be i’ll be i’ll be um you know you’ll go face to face with somebody and i’ll have you look right at the person’s eyeball right um and i’ll say okay now go ahead and just zero in on their eyeball and describe it in detail right and really get the sense of the physicality of the eyeball right and then i’ll be like okay now keep your eye right there now see zev or see john move from seeing the eyeballs to seeing john and there’s as you can see people go there’s this experience of like and you really kind of get this sense that and i i think that there’s something there’s a starting point there around this i still to to this day i still don’t quite know exactly what the hell i’m seeing when i see you right but there’s a there’s a perception right but it’s not it’s not a thing in in normal sense of the word yes so i’ve been trying to get at this phenomenologically with the what happens in that moment unlike unlike presentation what happens is like right because one way and i know this is not what’s happening one way of trivializing oh the person just went from a feature to the visual so what what no no i think when it when it impacts people what happens is right is like instead of foreground background i’m trying to say that their that presence is i’m just going to use the time it’s it’s the moreness into the suchness and the suchness into the moreness and that is different that is different from this act of presenting something yeah yeah that’s sorry i’m i’m struggling here but i’m trying to get at something can i it’s the hyphen can i try can i try maybe add a bit of language here yep um there’s a biblical term which might be relevant to this and if it is this will help me understand what what what you guys are getting at there’s that so there are people that are asked like who are you in the bible or and uh and and they and there’s responses you know i’m the slave of such and such i’m the local from such and such i’m and we do this in our daily life all the time right where else so so who are you oh yeah i’m a i’m a this i’m a that i’m a professor i’m a student from here then there’s another expression in the bible where where we ask where we ask someone existentially who are they uh where are they sometimes ayeko is is the first time it’s used in the bible in genesis and there’s a very beautiful word in hebrew which which is which is hinene which is which is made up of two hebrew words it’s here am i here i am is the response when when you call out and say and say where are you or who are you the response is it is the i who is here it is the i am who is here where there’s no categorization i can’t say i’m i’m a guy i’m this is all this my nationality this is my ideas it’s just so so presentation would be all of that right i’m presenting my cv and presenting all the labels yeah but but but presence is simply to say himene himene here is i here i am um which which is yeah which is that immediacy yeah which is also saying nothing i’m saying nothing in that sentence but i’m but i’m saying everything but you’re but you’re calling to the person right to bring back the autonomic activity right you’re yes you’re calling to the person you’re trying to you’re trying to get them like there’s a demand like it’s not just a statement there’s a demand in there right it’s yeah it’s it’s always a responsible call so i think one of the famous cases where it’s used is where where god calls abraham to sacrifice isaac and he calls out um remember abraham abraham abraham abraham and abraham says hinene here i am it’s it’s a sense of readiness it’s a it’s a response to a call to to initiate it’s it’s it’s here i am i’m here to receive i’m here to hear i’m here to participate in what it is that you need from me as as a me as an eye so it’s an active it’s an active commitment then too yes yeah it’s it’s it’s it’s an active it’s an active commitment it’s saying i’m here and available and ready i’m present for what it is that you’ve called my name for yeah so there’s something in the person that’s also responding to the call in order to and and that’s yeah and and so above all the ways i can present myself there’s a call that reaches deeper and from that i respond am i understanding correctly yes yeah yeah i think i think that’s a perfect description of what’s of what that’s what that’s what i was trying to get at because so let me use a linguistic analogy so you know before i can categorize these are both books right this is this right i have to do demonstrative reference this this and that pre that makes possible any conceptualization because if i can’t i’m going to turn it into verb if i can’t thisness if i can’t this this this and if i can’t this this then i can’t this them together and then get them together so i can start to do a concept and that’s what i’m trying to get out with the suchness i’m trying to get out the the demonstrative yeah reference right the demonstrative indexicality of us yeah so like the way the way i is like the way i points in that purely manner and that’s what i was trying to get at the suchness but what i want to try and get with the suchness into the moreness is what am i looking for i want to be iconic and i’m using it very careful in contrast to the idol that even when i come into the sort of the face the front edge of your presence in your suchness there’s a there’s a depth behind it and beyond it and above it and through it that right that permeates it that’s what i’m trying to get at so that the yeah i was also trying to challenge something you said early not challenge what you said but challenge away uh right something you pointed to is i don’t want to i don’t want suchness to be understood as the appearance of the thing yes right yes because it’s yes yes yeah because i hear what you’re saying it it almost in some sense it for it to be suchness to let’s say goes from appearance to suchness if we look at it like that i would say is precisely when the moreness comes somehow comes in involvement right it’s this do it’s this it’s this double uh presencing right yes i want i want i want to get at it’s not only the non-categorical nature of the suchness right but but it but it that’s a negative way of putting it but there’s a moreness in that there’s it’s more than anything i could think about it yeah that’s what i’m trying to get at i’m trying to get it i’m trying to get that there’s a dynamic in there that’s presencing that is different than presentation that’s what i’m trying to get yeah totally it’s kind of like it’s the thing that you know this is where i think that this is and what i what i’m probably going to do in my my thing next time is going to talk about this about idle talk the difference between idle talk and authenticity and discourse which is vague and is not totally worked out in heidegger that i think boober is in some sense addressing this right but um what was i going to say that that there’s there’s it’s it’s got this element of um the way that heidegger talks about death right and i wanted i’m also wondering about the way the way death what what is the deaths what in what way is death present in the eye that right um in what way is death involved in that in that perception not my our demise necessarily but the the the ontological sense of death that being being in time is essentially about right our mortality there seems like that’s got to be central in there some way and i don’t know exactly how but i have a feeling that you’re starting to get at that with this of this um this way that in a later like heidegger talked about this in terms of gestell or not gestell uh that’s the right the opposite of gestell is um oh what is it uh a rightness right which is this quality it is not a being this is the this is the important part right like it’s not a being right it’s a it’s something other than being but it’s this quality of where where the set the um the self concealing with like come um in some sense unconceals in its withdrawal yes right that’s that’s gestell something like that right the event of yeah the shining into the suchness that it withdraws into the morning kind of thing yeah yeah yeah so there’s this kind of kind of way where and there’s a there’s also this quality of of of with with that work where is there is that sense of remembrance and it and it’s it it’s interesting because it’s um yeah this is we’re right at the edge of like we’re right on something that doesn’t quite have a word right for it but i think boober would be proud of us i’ll just say one more thing and i’ll let you have you talk i that’s what i think that’s i think we’re we’re resonating because the the problem with sort of the the demonstrative indexicality is it can be like it can you can get a metaphor of just touching something right this right or just pointing out but i don’t that’s insufficient that’s what i’m trying to get beyond the suchness it’s i don’t touch it i like i i i i i move i i move i deeply indwell it as i deeply internalize it to go back to something i said that’s what i’m trying to get with that that that space of that movement is part of what i’m trying to point to with them so i i agree with the the no thingness of the suchness but i also want to i also want to get the depth right the depth that i’m trying to convey with the awareness yeah so i’m thinking about the death the sense of that that sense of right the possibility of impact like the horizon that you can’t ever reach but it’s a exactly it both pushes you back right what i was trying to pick up on heidegger’s idea about with the moreness is is like being immortal is not knowing you’re going to die being immortal is knowing that there are things you can never capture no matter how many thoughts you have about that thing right that that’s part of the idea of uh uh uh uh because that well i’ll stop good can i can i complicate this a little please yeah so i i’m trying to i’m trying to make this rapprochement between the mystical and the dialogical yeah to there’s definitely i think both phenomenologically in like contemporary culture and philosophy there’s this aversion and this disdain for the fakeness right it’s it’s the same thing which which kartske hated he hated the fake and we hate that we hate people that are fake we have people that aren’t that are ingenuine people that put on fake faces we hate uh we hate small talk because it’s fake talk these are all the things that we just say then metaphysically we we hate the fake we want the real right this is part of it as well and therefore there’s this desire to go beyond the surface because the face is seen as as a place of fakeness and and i think there is that sense of depth which you’re pointing out in booper when he speaks out the eternal thou that permeates all thou all i down yeah yeah that’s a vertical that’s a vertical dimension right yeah so i want to i want to i want to grant that but but but i i think that’s only one i think that’s only sort of one phase of thinking about reality i think i think that perhaps where the mystic meets the dialogical is to say that and this this is a point which which harkens back to to buddhist flavor postmodern and so the elements of jewish mysticism here where where there’s this precise realization that that the things are as they are and that the that the depth is on the surface that the that the that the sense that that nirvana that nirvana is realizing that samsara is no other than nirvana that realizing that there is this collapse between depth and surface it’s a very interesting word play in hebrew which is that in hebrew face is panim and and and and the inside the depth is pinim which they’re almost indistinguishable right so there’s this that’s there’s a sense that that there is there is like this sort of ontology where we have a distinction between depth and and surface and in that ontology there is place for fakeness and in that ontology there is need to go beyond it and to encounter the thou which then connects us vertically and and there is that hierarchical model but i think there’s a second step which which which can be made and it’s it’s a tension to hold both of these together and this is we in buddhism we speak of the um there’s sort of this dual reality in in kabbalistic metaphor we speak about the the two levels of unity there there is a lot of this dual metaphysical putting out is it’s a common amongst mystical traditions which is that there’s a second level of reality where where we no longer have that concern of getting beyond the fake to the real getting on the face the inside because because it’s in everything is inherently already thou it’s it’s a space where nothing can be eyed and therefore there’s no concern of of seeing someone’s face and seeing the light because everything is on the face because everything is there and when you stare at someone’s face you see their entirety of beings straight into and through them all on the face it’s that it’s that collapsing of of depth and surface it’s that it’s the it’s the uh to use the one of the first verses of genesis it’s the it’s the uh the spirit of god which hovers upon the surface of the water it’s the now which is there which is which is which is on the surface you don’t need to dive into the ocean to see the now it’s it’s ever present because it was all of reality is necessarily permeated by that ontological realness um and and i think i think that that that kind of works for the postmodern thinker who who negates presence but also who negates presentation but also has the full presence and somehow there is a place where where where presence must be uh that which is presented and vice versa so yeah so bit of a wrench maybe that’s good that’s good i mean uh i that’s i was trying i i was trying to allow for the uh the non-logical identity between because that’s why i tried to say the suchness into the moreness and the moreness right right but then you’re also saying yeah that so if you’re allowing that is you’re saying but there is the thing you said at the end but there’s a relationship also a deep relationship you’ll allow me to call that presence because you said there’s a relationship between something like between presence and presentation so that right that so you know when i started before i did did zen rivers were rivers and mountains were mountains while i was doing zen rivers weren’t rivers and mountains were its mountains and then when i was done doing zen rivers are rivers and mountains are mountains and they usually put it in capsules and negation and negation yeah yeah but the point is it’s a non-logical identity and that’s that’s what’s that’s what’s very very difficult because the temptation with non-logical identity is to use what is most familiar for us for non-logical identity which is the narrative and we’re looking so we’re trying to come up with a narrative answer to this and and for me that that is part of that’s that’s another mistake that we often engage in right so so i think that’s exactly right what you just said sevi and i’m trying to get at that right what i’m trying like what’s the mapping so it is is is dialogos is dialogos trying to like use speech to bridge between presence and presentation and then mystical realization is when that that non-logical identity occurs or that’s i’m just asking that as a question the provocative question what’s the what’s the mapping that you were replying that’s what i i want to get clear on yeah i i think you’re right in that in that this schema rejects the linearity that that we’re used to thinking in and it’s not so much once you place these things hierarchically one above the other we’ve destroyed what that that’s what we’re trying to do there’s a sense of simultaneity of it i think i think maybe to use the language that we’re using up until now is that in truth in every act of of presentation there must also be presence right because if all is all if the suchness is in if the if the monus is in suchness then even if i do try to care even if i do try to reduce myself to some sort of category i say hi i’m australian there’s something in the way that i said i’m australian which i can only say that there’s only the way that’s that that my my eyeness can can present in that particular way and and there is the sense of of the of sort of the the the the all the cosmos in a grain of sand where even when we are trying to do and i think part of the work maybe is of the work of dialogue maybe to scoop into dialogue where there is presentation happening and to see how all that presentation is really expression of presence there’s a there’s a chastidic idea which buber is a big fan of which is that even in literal small talk this is this is something which goes back to the first master that register of asham this is that that if one is is present in small talk they can see how everything that’s being spoken is really manifestations of the eternal now is really all presence in what seems to be us um presentation so maybe it’s not so much of a linearity that this sort of that there’s that there’s there’s one phase of reality where the other is not but there’s a sense where they can they can intermingle and the work of dialogue is to is to is to see the the maximal presence in in every in every iteration of being in every moment of of of the expression of being so you said that in every presentation there’s presence is it also the other way like i um so that’s it’s an interesting question because because they’re ever present without presentation uh yeah yeah yeah i mean so from from the perspective of the metaphysics of jewish mysticism there there is uh as as in as in there is presence which which is never presentable there’s there’s what’s called um that is the essence which never which which by definition does not account reveal itself um which i mean to to sort of unpack implications of that would would be interesting there’s i mean i mean i think about that on the individual level there’s there’s i’ll put it there is if you’re dyslexic my dyslexia is having a great time with this conversation go ahead sorry um yes it’s it’s interesting because because we okay so this this is a real paradox it’s funny i asked this because this is this is like again this is where i can hear the post-modernists wanted to come in and wanting to say well yeah right yeah i get that you may be saying that there’s always there’s never presentation without presence but there’s always never presence without presentation right um oh i’ll tell you something interesting so in sort of within the within the um like the habitat of of of jewish mysticism itself and unpacking this may be an interesting exercise which which i haven’t done yet but just to sort of bring the raw material to the table there’s there’s a notion in in jewish mysticism which is i mean very neo-platonic in this point and many other points and and this therefore a point which is relevant to many traditions and also i think phenomenologically and existentially relevant too um is that there’s a distinction between between that which is revealed that which is presented the light is the word that’s used in these traditions and the source of the light right there is there’s that which signs and there’s that which shines which that comes from the light the sun and the rays that emerge from the sun then and that’s that’s sort of the the paradigm of of the the emanator and emanated this is another way that’s yeah but then there’s then there is the one or there’s the in self whatever it is which which is not even uh which has no relationship and has no relevance to expression it’s it’s that which is like just beyond expression never it never even gets involved in this process of overflowing or emanating right um the the the the full paradox here is is that the messianic vision uh for the jewish mystic is precisely the revelation of that which uh constitutionally and and and definitionally cannot be revealed it’s it’s the ghillie it’s the it’s the revelation of the essence which is unrevealable uh which like you know post-modernism eat your heart out yeah but there it is so wow that’s yeah yeah so i wonder that’s there’s a self-concealing right yes i wonder what we make it that like phenomenologically or in sort of this interpersonal dialogical librarian context that yeah i i that that’s really interesting uh because i which part well what what i’m getting i i mean and this might have been for maybe one of the core um things we’re trying to get out here like there’s this sense of being in in relationship to that which you can’t be in relationship to um but but not only is that sort of uh some mystical state to put a label on it because we got to talk about it right but it’s it strikes me that that’s also what hoover’s trying to put his finger on in the eye though like ultimately i’m trying to get into a relation when i’m relating to someone in love the way we’ve been talking about it here right i’m getting into the state where i’m trying to relate to that about them which is ultimately not does not enter into relation right there they’re for themselvesness there right there’s suchness into moreness and and yet somehow if i understand you what you what you’re pointing to and what boo maybe i’m maybe is this what is this what somehow that happens and for me phenomenologically i’m not trying to reduce it to the phenomenology okay i understand the distinction between ontology and phenomenology in fact that’s what boober wants ultimately right but so but from phenomenologically that strikes me is that we have these two different senses of realness and we move between them fluently and we have a not non-logical identity one is real is that which confirms notice what i’m doing with my hand the graspable the real is the rational the quote hagel and then the other and then the other notion is no the real is that which shocks me and takes me completely by surprise because that reveals my projections and my presuppositions and somehow these are one but they’re not logically identical and it sounds to me like that the phenomenal lot that the phenomenology of realness is being captured in depth by this relation to that which is ultimately unrelatable does that does that land does that sing yeah yeah and is it is it is it kind of what the question is is something like what the question that you’re asking john like i guess that we’re asking at this point or discovering that we’re asking which is interesting in itself right is exemplifying of itself like um is basically like okay the there’s these two that just flow together and we do it all the time right on some level yep that we go back and forth right and flow together all the time must mean that on some level i have some already understanding of it are you asking what do i already understand it yeah what what do you mean by the yeah you mean do you mean the flow i have the flood the flowing of the of these two modes right of these two these two things that don’t come together i think that just exemplifies oh there’s something that we actually that we already just do it right yeah what do we already understand right about those things such that allows us to to participate have participatory knowing yeah i think that’s in relationship with that that’s deeply right there’s an analogy with virtue if if if if you’re in no way honest i can’t teach you honesty because i can’t get you i can’t get you to be interested inter inter essay to be within it i can’t get you interested in it ever if you don’t have some honesty right i have no purchase on you i’m using that i’m using virtue as an analogy right it so if i don’t have any if i don’t have any realization happening not in me but through me uh preposition for failing me here but if i don’t have that then i i can’t ever i can’t ever as you said i can’t ever participate that in in that in in reality uh yeah but that that’s that that’s a deep way again of saying that that that deep that process of self-realization and the process of of reality realizing they’re they’re like they they belong together yeah they belong together and they belong together in our in the way that we respond to them so that so in some level like what is it that we already understand that we enact that we can enact them so deeply i think is another way another way of kind of getting at this or maybe the way we’re getting it what is that what do we already understand right in some sense not even you know i don’t mean i know i know right i know yeah that’s why you said participated so everyone’s yeah yeah a point which always resonates with me on this is sort of this this marriage of the euclidean and parmenian idea of yeah of that which is always changing that which is never changing right yeah and i think we know these to be true like that that sense that that we’re always changing and like we’re we’re there’s no stability of self-aware we’re constantly being recreated um and and and but that’s not that’s always something central and continuous which which always has been us it’s always been that i that’s always been there and it’s it’s that same sort of relationship between the real within which which is which is graspable which the outside is grasped on that real which is beyond grasping in ourselves i think i think there’s that beautiful marriage that happens that there’s a beautiful coincidental visitorum to use the the language of kusa i think i think and i think what you’re saying guy here is is so beautiful that it’s that it’s in it’s in discovering that which is happening within ourselves and then to and then to be in relation to that same thing which is happening out there the real which which can be grasped and can’t be grasped uh the real which is changing which isn’t changing as as the self is but maybe maybe just add a third point here because because one of the things that we mentioned going into this is that buber speaks primarily about dialogue and it’s two ways it’s two and what we’re exemplifying here is tri-love that this three does this and and one thing which buber does allow for this is that he he says that the meat that the realness happens not in the locus of of each of the participants but in the space between them yeah there’s what john refers to as the we space and i think i think what we’re seeing here is as we’re as we’re grappling with these ideas and coming to something there’s something in between the three of us which we are all triangulating around which is kind of this this gospel ungraspable awareness within this the space i’m like looking at the little point between our three screens on the zoom it’s like the real that that shines out yeah yeah yeah yeah totally yeah i mean that and from to use some of uber’s language that that that we space isn’t isn’t a static system of relations it’s very much a spirit becoming form it’s very it’s very geisty if you’ll allow me to to do an english transformation of a of a of a german word right it’s very guys right but but but there is but but then what people do so but we get like we get a sense of the of the of the guys between us but then what typically happens is also what we’re doing here is we’re trying we’re not using that’s not the right word our intimacy with the guys between us we’re trying to right we’re trying to we’re trying to what am i i’m gonna use the word sense but i don’t just mean sensation i mean sense like when we’re making sense we’re trying to send through that intimacy like something about realness if i can put it out we get the intimacy with the spirit affords a deeper intimacy sorry with the deeper language but you know what i’m trying to do a deeper intimacy with realness and yet that realness is not abstract even though it’s deeper it’s it was in the very intimacy of the intimacy we’re having with ourselves and with each other yeah that right because that’s what happens when we do when we do circling into the logos people pick up on the guys the first they’re just like they’re just there’s just interpersonal intimacy but that the eye vowing moves into people can get an intimacy with the guys if you’ll allow me that and then sometimes it moves into it moves into and through the guys without not leaving the guys behind into an intimacy with realness in the way we’re trying to talk about here yeah and i’m really interested in in what’s and it’s funny zebby when when you do this people from all kinds of backgrounds they fall into religious spiritual even mystical language when they try to describe it yeah right and yeah and so sorry this is a long way of answering drawing on what zebby said but answering guy that’s the already present that i’m really interested in like that yeah that that sorry i’m doing narrative the very thing i said i wouldn’t do that movement that movement is what because what i also see very to use language we talked about i see an increasing sense of onto normativity coming in the normativity towards the other and then the normativity towards the the we and the right so the normativity to the valve the normativity to the we and then there’s the normativity to be in yeah yeah yeah i have a challenge for guy actually if i can so guy guy’s a master of dialogue um particularly in the form of certain but generally this idea of dialogue and booper has this interesting expression to build them are saying here which is um existence as dialogue or dialogue as existence or existence as dialogical where where it’s it is the the the the fabric of reality is biological itself yeah yeah i wonder i wonder i mean with the human it’s too easy but i wonder so we mentioned before that when we if you want to learn about the pine go to the pine all right yes that we can interrogate and be in dialogue with nature itself i would love guy to see to do a circling session and put like a pop plant on the chair and be like just he does that he does that he walks around with a camera and he’s not talking to people he he enters into the dialogical relation with his with his surroundings he does that yeah that’s really awesome yeah you fulfilled my challenge even before i put it out i’m gonna have to well there is there there is something so if we just look at it right now so we are we’re i have this experience i’ll just speak for myself i have this experience of us encountering something right something’s being revealed it’s still hidden right like but there’s a there’s a there’s a there’s a presence of like there’s a um i have like a lot of euphoria right there’s a lot of ecstatic there’s like a little bit of like watching i’m noticing i’m tempering my like wanting to grasp i’m i’m being tutored not to grasp in some way right there’s this there’s this thinking there’s this the the thinking up that and the affinity for both of you is just off through the roofs i mean you guys are the best people in the world it never existed right now that’s what’s happening on a personal level yeah but there is um but there’s the forget that with the non-personal like where we’re talking about two minutes yeah you ever get that with this is this is this is what i was this is uh i think i’ve talked about this before but i actually remember a specific time i think it was when i was around five or six where i just started to get a sense of that the that i could start to see the way the adult saw right and the way the adult saw was like everything was kind of dimensional right and subjects and objects and or something like that right and i remember at first it would just come over me and then i i’d notice it go away and i didn’t know how to get it back right and so i would try to like figure i remember used to play this game between myself with myself where i was like okay can i get it back right i remember like trying to twist my body and like i would be able to like will it back and then go away and there’s this whole period of time right around five or six i think when this was going on and there was a sense of like when i looked back well what was the what was the what was the difference like my world and their world the adult world and my world the child’s world and it was really clear my world right at that time was if everything was a vow everything was a who everything spoke it’s like everything had a personality to it like it just instinctively was that way and that there was this kind of difference i started to note when i was a kid that i would try to like hold on to because it was so distinct where it’s like the the hallway um it didn’t stop speaking as a character or something like it’s the darkness of it and a certain character to it now all of a sudden i just see that like as a box or something like that right and i and yeah and i knew at some point i kind of also just had this sense of like at some point i would lose the ability to go back and forth and i just knew it and i yeah i and i think i tried to describe this whole experience to my dad and my grandpa at the time i don’t think i did a very good job i don’t think if i even did a good job just now they’re both like i thought it was perfect yeah i thought it was beautiful yeah yeah yeah i’m interested to hear what john has to send this from from a kagasai perspective but this the sense that we think about children is childish where they everything is personified and we put faces and googly eyes and everything it’s like very childish right to put faces and everything or to think about things as personalities to not understand that oh no there’s no personality there’s no but but but the sense that the sense that there is a boundless to things if we can allow it to if we can allow them to arrest us in our i.it being for them to call out us i have this experience i live near a forest when you’re walking through the forest you can kind of i.it the nature around you and you’re just like yeah tree material this common then something will either because it’s you know tremendously beautiful or or grotesque or whatever it is it’s arresting it it calls out to you there’s dialogue there and there is there is a boundless whether it’s a flower or cockles or a sunset is a boundless i’m wondering i’m wondering john what’s what’s the what’s the scientific what’s going on here well well i don’t want to reduce it to that but what’s a bunch of bucks into into into that no no i’m i’m i’m i’m supposed to take that role to some degree um yeah so what it reminds me of is um jill bolte taylor’s uh book my stroke of insight uh where she like she was a neuroscientist so but she basically had a hemorrhage in the left hemisphere now luckily it didn’t kill anything it just sort of uh silenced it and and she talked about and noticed the language is narrative and spatial but nothing narrative or spatial is happening because she has to tell she felt herself moved to the right hemisphere so she was only experiencing herself in the world in the right hemisphere and then what happens is the right hemisphere right it like she couldn’t she couldn’t pick up the phone to dial it because right because everything is interpenetrating everything else and everything is is is alive and every like everything is everything is resonating um and what what has now you’ll like this because she got because of her trauma i wouldn’t wish the trauma on anybody right but she in her rehabilitation she acquired the very thing you lost because she she rehabilitated and she now has full capacity with her left hemisphere but the uniqueness of that she can always step to the right she can shift back into and taste what that’s like right now yes i want to be really i want to be really really careful here right because you know and i you know and i’ve talked with ian milgold christen and so you know because because of ian’s amazing work there’s a little bit of uh romanticism and glorification of the right hemisphere going on right now i want to and just to get the cog side in here and then be provocative because everyone talked about this but i think it’s really appropriate and i’ll talk about it in a while i think it’s appropriate insight and metaphor do not occur in the right hemisphere they do not occur in the left hemisphere they occur in the dramatic mean go there it is there it is okay now why i bring up insight is because insight is really really interesting because insight is non-propositional in nature but you’ll notice for example in people like both Descartes and Spinoza how they they want to deeply integrate insight in inference if you think about inference as pursuing confirmation and that’s what it for right insight is when right we we are trying to allow reality to realize itself if you’ll allow me in a way that penetrates into our inferential fortress yes yeah yeah right yeah and so yeah i don’t know if that’s totally but i was doing my best to try and bring some science to what guy was saying and so i think if if you’ll allow me one more thing i think there’s a way in which we can come into relationship like like like like this like i’m almost inverting it uh the zen thing so when i was a child you know rivers were rivers right and then i became an adult and rivers were rivers right yeah yeah but now and barfield talks about this can i get to a place that’s beyond both of those yeah can i get to a place right that is appropriately characterized by insight and metaphor and therefore inherently dialogical that that that’s right and that’s where i’m thinking of teler because she can step to the right but she she doesn’t step to the right in trauma and is trapped there because it would be trapped in the right hemisphere really bad right she she knew how to how to dialogue between them in order to bring insight into the inferential one more point and this is just a cognitive science thing we’re getting a little too obsessed also about right and left right we have to remember there’s three dimensions to the brain there’s back to front and that’s where general intelligence is probably found and then there’s there’s neuroaxle but there’s from the cortex down to the brainstem and that’s where a lot of the embodiment is found and all of those dimensions are at work in what we’re talking about here just to just to bring that in yeah so this kind of mutual and it’s even in it’s even in this way i was just thinking about a couple things vulnerability right and this is what and in the role of trust right that that that’s in this open this this openness because it’s like the in some sense you know i think what people come to circling for right is is essentially right to experience what you can only experience through being a kind of openness a radical kind of openness to the other right i think yeah go ahead john go ahead john notion of vulnerability like think about it so if i’m just in the right hemisphere that’s exposure in fact the right hemisphere it was largely evolved to deal with the nation right ah exposure that’s the right hemisphere that’s it’s evolutionary heritage the left hemisphere is everything is boxed in the familiar right vulnerability is exactly neither one of those it’s right your notion of vulnerability is right this it’s the moving between them right and so brain like so here we start to get into like hypothalamus amygdala safety right this that kind of notion of this playfulness of the back and forth what allows you to be the serious to be vulnerable and the in the in this kind of this sense that what you just so people know what we’re talking about with the sense of the distinction between vulnerability and exposure is vulnerability always like insinuate something that you’re volunteering towards right you’re you’re you’re proactively opening yourself up to the other yes um and i was thinking about like in terms of insight i keep thinking about this way that um listening right this this listening is so radically awesome and no one ever really thinks about it and i’m fucked i am fascinated by listening right what is going on with listening because it’s because you usually think about the common sense notion of listening is listening is just the thing that happens if you don’t if you shut up while the other person’s talking right and that there’s a kind of sense where it’s like if you maybe maybe you just empty yourself out be quiet and then you you get filled up with information or something like that right but that’s not at all what listening is think about it listening is in some sense is synonymous with like a um it’s it’s you can’t you can’t listen and think at the same time right notice how deeply coupled they are so if you if you start drifting having a thought right now as i’m talking like you’ll notice that you stop listening so if you think about this in some sense i to truly listen to you right i in some sense i give over my nose right my noose my mind over to you right and and your language in some sense thinks me right i literally have to understand you i have to think the thought that you’re having and and if you think about this like some thoughts in order to think them right require require a different presupposition for me to actually stand on right in order to think that thought which now that becomes a transformative experience right and there’s this thing that chris talks about this kind of at some point in dialogo so this is happening now where they’re like where they start to transfer yes yes where you start to get this inner penetration where it’s like oh you can’t quite tell if i’m if i’m like in some sense i’m i’m speaking your thinking into into your listening right revealing you that’s my speech yeah that’s the indwelling internalization like back to this the scientist with the rovers right yes that’s totally that’s what it is yeah and this is where we just get i’m starting to get to get this sense of dialogue right and i thou and and and dia logos is it’s in some sense it’s like it’s like symbolic right for the whole thing it’s almost like the whole universe is a symbol to taste something though or just want to taste something you drew into for me you drew in you drew into connection logos indwelling internalization and insight in a way that i hadn’t thought them together before sorry that’s why i’m interrupting i just want to pause there please please there’s nothing more i don’t have i’m just listening but sorry it’s an act yeah that i just i’m you you drew things together in my mind that i could not brought together in my mind but again my mind immediately remembered it as right if you’ll allow me to write and the word remember recognized remembered oh yes of course right it was that kind of experience that yeah that i hadn’t had i hadn’t drawn those three together that way before yeah i want to listen now i’m hearing what i just i’m i’m he’s he’s thinking my thought through me listening him right there’s this kind of inner penetration right and that just brought together exemplifies that right so this kind of this this radical openness and this deep trust that that comes together right and this is where i think the thing about trust and boobers talks about this that that there is because to really give give yourself over to a dialogue or a conversation right like if it does seem to be predicated on my ability to let go on some level right and really be be open to be moved by and touched and changed by another right this kind of this yes these inner penetration things yes but i am i’m starting to um i’m needing to go here pretty soon we’ve been going yeah i think this is a good place to go on over two hours reality is intervening in a wonderful way but what i what i what i’d like to do is um maybe we’ll reverse order we’ll start with zebby and give everybody a chance to any sort of final word they want to bring to our dialogue but before we do that um because i don’t want to forget to do this this was wonderful and i mean that in both senses of the word and i wanted to thank both of you for showing up so powerfully um so zebby final uh thoughts or words we’re not done we’re gonna move to guys channel and do the next one but final words of today yeah it feels like we’re really just getting started well first yeah i want to return the thank you to to both guy and john for for creating the space for doubt creating the space where the reality of each of us can hinge upon the other to reveal that within ourselves that we weren’t aware of um which is what this process is i i was i was sort of stuck in in something earlier that had to come up and i and i want to put a pin in that because i’d like to come back to that in the future dialogues which is that buber puts out these two modes of being the i doubt and the and the i and walter and he’s walter coughman in his famous skating introduction to the new translation of my now says like these aren’t the only two modes of being like what is this like reductionistic dualism um and and he does it in like a very i think in a very like deflamatory way it’s like it’s not it’s not interesting the way he does it but i think what what john was pointing to just there now is that there’s a sense that to sort of to to map on these two modes relationship to the right and left the child to the adult to the instrumentalization or the ends in itself sort of all these parallel themes that we’ve been drawing here the sense that one not only do we need both right that we can’t just be totally living in the eye that we also need to be buying groceries and feeding children and um so there is not so not only is there a need for both and not only can we step back into one another as the mode accounts for it and the relevance realization of knowing when am i supposed to be i vowing i’m supposed to be i eating right when i’m walking through traffic i don’t want to i know every car in traffic but but more than that i want to know john you pointed something which is which is the space where um where where where it’s neither either or i had or somehow both of them together it’s not it’s not here one and here the other stuff here here right here adult here but it’s the sense where the adult and child come together as the adult and child and an adult and that’s that’s i think it’s a dialogue between these two modes of existence which i would be interested to explore so in place of recap i’m gonna i’m gonna put that into the future a request is also as good as a recap so let’s take note of that and let’s let’s let’s pick that up in the next dialogue awesome yeah totally okay final yeah this was just this was just ecstatic this is just ecstatic this is this is um i feel blessed um and there was i want to say that this this felt like real genuine dialogos like yes yeah very much and uh i feel kind of a sense of wholeness and a fullness like almost overful my brain’s shut off at some at some point i can’t think anymore thoughts right but that fullness that fullness does seem to have something to do i keep this kind of inner penetration right that’s something that both reveals something right it reveals something that seemed to be implicit but it also gestalts into something new and inner penetrates on so many different directions so i just feel like this whole thing like a piece of my attention is just continually been into the dialogue that we were actually having and watching it unfold and i just love those moments where what we’re what we’re speaking about is the thing that’s speaking right like what that we’re doing the topic that we’re speaking about right this is there’s something about that that just seems to be you can hear the logos um kind of like become itself in some sense right so i really appreciate that and so yeah and so something about um and this actually speaks to what you’re talking about uh so that means that so this i want to look at this i want to look at this kind of thing about the like the uh the uh heidegger’s notion for so heidegger and buber right they profoundly come together a lot of ways and there’s some places where they they disagree but there’s also some place where they actually profoundly agree i think i think buber starts to get at what what what is what is what is what is discourse in in in heidegger’s being in time language what is discourse in authenticity right when you’re in where you’re in the authentic mode right what is it to talk to one another what would that be right and i think that this is this is this is where buber really kind of highlights something as is something other than than than idle talk which is one of the inauthentic modes of of of uh dot sign in being in time where he talks about just idling speech just keeping things going keeping the the interpretations going like on some level like kind of living as if you’re not going to die right a kind of fallenness and then but he doesn’t really go into what is discourse in the authentic mode right so i think this is i think buber criticizes heidegger for that um but i think heidegger i think there’s a deep whettedness going on here that just needs to be ex-explosified and also there is this other sense too and i have to have to think about this but there is this other sense of like what is this we space that people talk about or the collective intelligence right or the distributed cognition like in some sense we’re in we we we are drawing on so many conversations that we’ve never experienced that in somehow we’re drawing on right there’s so many levels of the collective right that are here in what way is that a part of all of this right how do we what does it mean to draw on it for it to be present right like in in and does buber get at that with i’ve hours or as or as the we space something different than than that right so i think those are some open questions that i yeah i think i’m going to come in and want us to touch on a bit right so yeah just reminder um that following up on that where the next installment of this series will be found on guys channel will all three of us will be there we’ll put links in this video for guys channel and uh guy’s going to take the lead in that session and then thereafter we will move to his average channel and so um i i i look forward to this and i encourage all of you to come along to this ride i think this is just really wonderful so thank you very much so one one more thing john also just a reminder if you’re interested in the dialogo circling course link for that will be below in the show notes yes for sure all right bye