https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=t2RuJByBu9M
Beacon. Welcome everybody. Thanks for having us. Thank you very much. We’ll be with you guys again. I think this is the first time, I think just the three of us have done this. Could be. I think. Yeah. At least the first time we’ve done it and recorded it, yeah. Yeah, yeah, probably. Oh, that’s right, we’ve had a little side things and stuff. Yeah, but not recording it. That’s right. So, there’s some stuff that, well, actually there’s nothing that brings us together. Ha ha ha ha. Oh man, the punning is gonna just, it’s gonna get out of control. I think actually. I can already tell. I think I’ve noticed how I have to just keep a, I normally have to keep a lid on it, but when it comes to nothing, jokes, it’s like, it’s all right there. And it has me think about, there’s something about nothing and humor. It’s very linked. So, nothing is better than long life and happiness. A peanut butter and jelly sandwich is better than nothing. So peanut butter and jelly sandwich is better than long life and happiness. Ha ha ha. I’ve always heard that aphorism told with a ham sandwich instead of a peanut butter sandwich. I think that changes it. Yeah, but I can’t eat ham. So that’s why I changed. Ha ha ha ha. That’s why I changed. You just live it. Right? Yeah, so I mean, the point about the equivocation and why it’s famous, and this goes back to the middle ages, is thinking about no thing and nothingness is quintessentially very, very hard. We are liable to fall into conceptual confusion about it very readily. I was actually in my daily practice, I wanted to share with you guys because it was just so apropos for this conversation. So I read after I do the Lectio Divina, I usually read from some neoplatonic sources. I was reading from this book, Introduction to Platonic Philosophy. And I was reading from Porphyry. It’s often translated this treatise, I think, yeah, is often just given that rather prosaic name, the sententia or the sentences, but the Greek is actually launching points to the intelligible, which I think is a much better title. I’m reading through this. And then there was a passage at the end and I thought this might be a good place for us to start because I think it brings, because what I’m interested in, and Chris and I are working on this, and I know Guy, you’ve been reading Nishitani, is I’m very interested in the relationship between dialogus and some of the central concerns of the Kyoto School. But just this thing from Porphyry was just so amazing. So he talks about a kind of bogus, that’s the translation, I don’t know whether it was in the Greek, a kind of bogus experience. And so he talks about, to be elevated towards the nonbeing that is beyond being may also be set astray towards that nonbeing that constitutes the collapse of being. So the one of the most- One more time, one more time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the bogus experience can occur as you’re in the process of being elevated towards the nonbeing that is beyond being, that’s the one, right? May also be set astray towards that nonbeing that constitutes the collapse of being. So one of the most significant ways in which we can bullshit ourselves and get into a bogus experience is to mistake, right? To mistake the movement towards the nonbeing that is beyond being with the nonbeing that results from the collapse of being. That which is, if we wanna continue the metaphor, that which is below being. And so he takes it that one of the most important forms of discernment that we need is the discernment that articulates the disclosing difference between those two. What is it that we need? The disclosing difference so that we do not confuse and bullshit ourselves by mistaking the sense of no-thingness as the collapse of being, the merely privative notion, with the no-thingness that is beyond being, the superlative sense of no-thingness. And that strikes me as central. I thought that insight in Porphyry captures perfectly the central insight in Nishantani’s religion and nothingness. Because the whole point, right, exact, the whole point is that nihilism can only see the no-thing that is the collapse of being, and it can’t see, and it confuses that with the no-thing that is beyond being, the one, this what Dionysus often calls the super-essential that is beyond being. So I thought that was an interesting connection because that brings up the question, what are those practices that would bring, would afford and empower that kind of discernment of the disclosure of the difference between the privative sense of non-being and the superlative sense of non-being so that we do not fall prey to the biggest bullshit, and that’s what Porphyry is saying, he calls it bogus, and we can get out or get beyond or dissolve nihilism as Nishantani proposes. So I thought that was just this amazing convergence between the student of Plotinus, Porphyry, and one of the pivotal figures within the code of school. So for me, that’s exactly, sorry, I’ll shut up in a sec, that’s exactly the thing I want to explore in this work that Chris and I are doing on whether or not dialectic into dialogos is one, I’m not saying it’s the exclusive, but is it the kind of practice that is particularly well-designed to affording that discernment of the disclosing difference between the privative and the superlative sense of what is beyond being or other than being, as Levinas might put it, and that’s the question I really wanna focus in on right now. So that was a bit of a speech, but I thought it was, if I was a union, and there are days of the week when sometimes I am, I would regard that as a synchronicity that, because you have to understand, when I’m reading that passage, I’ve done all my Tai Chi and my meditative practices, my contemplative practices, I’ve gone through my Lectio Divina, so I’m in this super receptive state, and then I hit that thing from porphyry, and it was like, boom. Yeah, I really get that. Yeah. Well, a few things that are there is I’ve just been enjoying thinking about, right, what is it, parsing out a conversation, right, or a dialogue, right, that is housed in narrative, right, and one in which is its place, I don’t know if it makes sense to be housed, but its place or its ground is emptiness. Yeah. Just thinking about that, right? You’re working that through, right? There’s something about what I would say is that the classic conversations that, you know, as Heider would talk about idle talk, right, is idling, is really kind of seems to be predicated on the non, if anything, an avoidance of nihilism, or an avoidance of feeling the null and keeping something going, right, keeping a narrative going, right, making sure that we’re all in our roles, that we don’t even know we’re in, right, gossip, all those kinds of things that lots of conversation is kind of filled with, a certain kind of normativity. It also has a function, right? A social function. A social function. But then kind of feeling the difference, what happens in dialectic, right? You know, how much more attention is there and how much more mindfulness is there, and especially when it goes, when it transcends and goes into dialogos. Yeah, yeah. It is, it’s on a different ground, right? Yeah, very much. This goes towards an argument in the phylia sense of argument that I’ve been having with Jonathan, Pageot, and Paul VanderKlay, and some of the discussions I’ve had with Jordan Hall, where I’ve been basically trying to argue that dialogos is deeper than narrative. It’s more primordial. That narrative is born out of dialogos. Children have to learn narrative, and they learn narrative out of an already preexisting capacity for dialogos. And it’s dialogos that allows them to internalize other perspectives and afford self-transcendence. Narrative is barren if dialogue is taken out of it, because dialogue actually bridges between story and action in drama. And then you get a sense of, of course, in both the neoplatonic tradition, especially the neoplatonic tradition, but in other similar traditions, of a post-narrative form of a dialogue and dialectic that takes us above the way in which narrative is centered upon an exchange between egocentric perspectives, but that it is possible to move to something that is a non-egocentric perspective. These are, of course, the mystical experiences, and therefore narrative is not the appropriate way of talking about them. And that leads me to this weird kind of narrative, and I mentioned this to you, Guy, right? Parable in the work of Sally McFag and others about how parables look like narratives, but they’re narratives that destroy narrative. And the point about them is that they don’t stabilize, and they’re supposed to jet in use beyond narrative into the kingdom of God, to use one of Jesus’ famous phrase, or to use the Buddhist sense, the other side of the river, right, in which you throw the raft of narrative away. So I think all of that- Is there like a function, it’s like a koan? Yeah, koan, yeah. Parables have a koanic function to them. Now, the interesting thing about koans is they don’t run off of narrative. They, and this is really interesting if you think about it, you can have a parable that takes you out of narrative into this other place, and you can also have a dialogue, what looks like a dialogue, that explodes as a dialogue, because the master asks you a question. It looks like you’re supposed to be entering into a conversation, but it actually explodes the dialogue from within, and you’re blown into, right, into this other space. I mean, so what’s it in, when the koan is like swallowing the red-hot ball of iron, it’s supposed to burn all the way through you until the bottom drops out, kind of thing. So I think there, what I’m saying is I think there’s deep connections between what I proposed and what you have brought up, and I’d like to explore those. I think there’s something about moving communication, communion, cognition, outside of narrative into dialogos that will help us face the no-thingness, but also, right, also aspect-shift it, right? Because if we can fundamentally change how we are present to it, we will fundamentally change how it is present to us. He who stares long enough into the abyss, the abyss will stare long enough back into him. That’s Nietzsche, but Eckhart also said, “‘The same eye by which I see God is the eye by which God sees me.‘” So can dialogos transform us so that we can, as you said, face the logos, but to face it is to change how we present ourselves to it, so it changes how it presents itself to us. And this has got to, we’ve got to think about it, even talking about it that way puts it into a narrative frame, and that’s wrong. That’s wrong, there’s something else going on there. But I really want to know how is it that I can move into that space without feeling like everything is collapsing away? I acknowledge that this experience happens, it happens for me regularly and reliably. I go post-narrative, I go post, right, even dialogue, I have mystical experience, right? But how is that, I want to put it in, how is that ecstasis, or at one minute different from despair, different from despair? Because the point of the idle conversation is to keep us away from despair. But the very machinery that keeps us away from despair, but by its confusion of the two kinds of no thingness also prevents us from genuine self-transcendence. I mean, and this is Kierkegaard’s profound insight, until you face, right, the negative, the negative infinite, as he would put it, you’re incapable of the positive infinite. So now that I’ve mentioned Kierkegaard, I should turn things over to Chris. Well, no, so it’s interesting. One of the things, that’s a really good question, right? How do we obviate the despair that eventuates when we displace ourselves from the center of narrative? That’s a good question. And I think part of that, part of that has to do with the fellowship of dialogos. Because to me, the circular fellowship of dialogos is a stabilizer for the process, right? I think of it analogously to being put into a harness and then lowered into some peril, right? You’re put in the harness for a reason, and you have people ready to coil you back to safety if need be, right? It’s like an exposure training. And I think that the fellowship of dialogos is almost like, it’s almost like a necessary constraint for the process of accepting narrative into something that’s not fundamentally narrative. And so starting, so in a way, because it’s fundamentally a dialectical process, the integrity of the narrative that is to be repurposed, I think is very important. It’s important to start with a narrative that has some integrity and some integrality. I mean, just like the process of individuation does not require the annihilation of the ego, so too, I think, does this confrontation with no thingness, I don’t think it requires the annihilation of narrative necessarily, but a change in the way we stand in relation to narrative. And so then the question I think becomes, what are then the constraints and the enablers that allow us to refigure our relationship with narrative that has to fundamentally start on steady ground? And I think that the fellowship of dialogos has something to do with that, with equilibrating the process so that it doesn’t cast itself out of coherence altogether, and that it remains in tension with the place where we start when we enter into the practice. So two things are coming up for me when you say that. One is Guy talks about this pivot point, right? And we’ve talked about it multiple times before, and it’s one of these aspect shifts. And maybe it’s related to the aspect shift between the negative version of no thingness and the positive version, because Guy talks about the shift between exposure and vulnerability, right? Where vulnerability is, it’s a sensitivity, it’s a receptivity, it’s a lack, it’s an opening, right? But it’s different from, if I understand Guy correctly, it’s different from exposure, which is that same thing, but very negatively experienced. And it sounds to me like you’re saying, if people create the communitas, it’s almost like we’ve talked about how the sacred is this pole of home and horror, and it balances them together so you get the numinous, right? Exactly, the bivalence. The bivalence. Talking about the same thing. Right, right. And so we keep hitting these bivalences. There’s the bivalence between the exposure, which is, right, ah, right, and the vulnerability, which is ah, right. And then there’s the bivalence between, yeah, between the tension within the numinous, and you have to keep the two sides to get the numinous. So my suspicion is that, and that’s, my God, that’s all the way through Nishantani’s religion and nothingness. The stereoscopic grokking of the bivalence, right? And the bidirectionality, like going as deep in, as deep out, right? That’s, ugh, right? That stereoscopic move is central to him. So again, what I’m sensing is a possibility that there’s something about the way the practice of dialectic is also itself inherently bivalent, that it’s stereoscopic, that, right, and like you say, it’s properly structured stereoscopic, I don’t know what to call it, stereoscopic practice. Do you see what I’m trying to feel towards? There’s something in the way dialectic is managing, right? It’s managing the non-logical at one minute between things that is central to managing this aspect shift, this bivalence, this double aspect nature that converts exposure into vulnerability and makes, and turns us towards the fear of the negative, towards the appreciation of the positive version of nothingness. Does that make sense as a suggestion? I think it does. Well, just, so what is it that allows for this, right? What is it, what is that, this bivalence, right? I’m also imagining there’s the foreground background shift, which is a huge part of it, right? Where, like the very thing that we were talking about, we realize, whoa, we’re doing the very thing that we’re inside of, and there’s that moment where something opens up. This thing that starts to thin out to itself and becomes more present, right? Like in your meditations that you’ve been doing, John, like your instructions, the way that you put that thing where it’s like you’re like, okay, now go out-breath, go totally to pointless point, and then the whole universe, and then go back and forth. I was like, just the instruction was like, boom. That inner penetration and co-mingling, right? I’m wondering if senyatta makes itself known in what allows for the dynamic of all that mutual penetration. That’s what I’m proposing, in fact, Guy. I think you put it better than I did. I think there’s, that’s what I was trying to get across, like the stereoscopic experience that happens in prajna or in Spinoza, Schiancia, and Tuativa. There’s something about how dialect, so I’m thinking of narrative as inherently sequential, although it has feedback, foreshadowing, and what are they called, backflash, or what are flashbacks, right? But what happens in dialectic is although you’re still speaking in sequence with other people, right? You’re going in and out. I mean, that’s the main argument that Chris and I are making, like that there’s the communitess between people, and you’re also, there’s not just the in and out is becoming all at once. There’s the up and down between, right, this context, right, and the deepest or highest levels of reality. And what happens is the oscillation, the reciprocal opening in both directions, it integrates, but this is the thing. The integration is not the integration we are familiar with. It’s not the integration of logical integration. That’s why we use all these visual metaphors or musical metaphors. It’s like Chris’s metaphor of all the instruments tuning up together and suddenly they gel, right? And although they’re playing different pieces, they’re somehow playing all one piece of music, right, or playing different instruments. Or like the vision, I have my left visual field and my right visual field, and they fuse together so that I get third dimensional depth perception. It’s that kind of thing. And it’s not the kind of thing that is available to, we can point to it in language, but it is not the kind of processing that is actually directly exemplified in language itself. So dialectic is paradoxically using language to push us into a state that transcends language. And I think what seems possible, right, is it’s because it gets really tricky, at least as a Yankee, as a Westerner. I start talking about nothing, man. It’s so easy to turn it into something, right? But I was thinking about, well, okay, well, what would it be for, you could say, an awareness of the non-presence presence of this, right? That penetrates through all of this, allows all of it, negates all of it, negates itself from all of it, and it presents itself as all of it, and allow it to be present in the way that it is. I started thinking about, well, I think that’s where you, what would that look like? That would look like Japan, right? That would look like Japanese art, right? There is this way in which, I’ve been watching these movies, like little movies of Japan, from like when they first had movies, they re-digitized, they’re on, just going down the street in Japan. And it’s a real, like you really do get the sense of, well, what happens if you have a culture that it’s grounded in nothing, versus grounded in the sense of being? And you really do get this sense of where they hold open the awareness of emptiness, right? Without ever making it an object, right? In some sense, right? In the way that they’re walking around, they exemplify it, they exemplify what can’t be exemplified, right? And I think there’s that sense that, as I’m talking about it, it does feel like Dia Logos kind of hits that space, right? It hits that space where, very similar to what Chris and I, as we’re reading the conversation with Heidegger and the Japanese philosopher, it’s like six pages of them talking about the thought they’re not speaking, right? This way of not saying it, right? But it impregnates itself, right? There is. I mean, I’m thinking of like, what did I read this was this in the Nishida? So, in the Tate-Chen, it says, we shape the cup, but it’s the emptiness inside the cup that’s actually useful, or it’s the space at the hub of the wheel, right? And this was a criticism, I think that’s Masao Abe. He said, the problem is we got locked into Aristotle, and this is why I think porphyry was so important. We got locked into thinking of, and this is actually paradoxical for Aristotle in one sense, but we got locked into thinking of like, the non-thingness, the emptiness, or possibility as not real. It’s funny, I was just lecturing on this today, and our own science just tells us that that’s wrong. I mean, we depend on real constraints. E equals MC squared, where’s that? Where is that? Yeah. Right? It’s not here, it’s not an event, it’s not an object, it’s not a process, it’s a shaping of possibility. Possibility has a definite real shape that’s presencing to us, because relativity is everywhere and nowhere, but it’s not presencing itself to us as an actuality, as something acting, as an event, but it is the ground from which all of these events are constrained into the determinacy that makes them events and intelligible as events, right? But that’s what I’m trying to get at. That’s why porphyry is so cool, because he’s getting, like the Neoplatonists are getting, there’s an alternative way of talking about no-thingness that takes us towards what I would call real possibility, as opposed to thinking of possibility as a deficiency of actuality, which is real. And it’s interesting, because the Neoplatonists have a practice where you practice progressive no-thingness. You first realize the no-thingness in the sense of not a particular object, then not a particular event, then not a particular space or time, and then not a particular principle, and then that’s how you move towards the one, right? You keep going to what’s the real possibility that made the lower level possible, and you keep doing that. Talking about no-thingness makes me really high. But you can… It’s got this quality of just, it’s really something I just noticed in talking about lately, is you’re talking about that there’s something really opening. Yeah, sure, come on in. I gotta, hang on a sec. Yeah. There we go. Sorry, just had to give somebody something. That was funny. So yeah, I mean, I think it is… I mean, this is the individual part of dialectic. Emmerich, you and I were talking about how, there is the group practice of dialectic, and then there’s the individual practice. And the individual practice has to do with that ascent through ascending, or for some reason, in our metaphor, we turn it the other way around, right? But ascending orders of real possibility. Real possibility, not just abstract nominal possibilities in thought, but the real possibilities. And what’s interesting is, as you are realizing them, you are in the sense of becoming aware of them, you realize that they are realizing you in the sense of making it possible for you to be there having that thought. Like, there’s a realization of being aware of them. There’s a realization of being realized, right? And that, that to me is a profound experience of meaning. That’s a profound sense of being connected to the simultaneous fount of being and intelligibility. That’s why I think you’re getting high, Guy. You’re getting high because you’re taking the machinery of religio, of connectedness to that which matters beyond your egocentric concern, and you’re running it like on max. Of course it’s gonna be, and of course it is and should be deeply meaningful to you. But if you’re locked into a thinking that is bound to actuality and determinate spatial temporal objects as the defining touchstone of reality, then this kind of connectedness is impossible for you, and you won’t have the reservoir of meaning in life in order to deal with the threat of despair. You won’t have the home that Chris talks about. You have to deepen those connections so that you can face the no thingness. And if those connections are deep enough, you will see it as the fount of the inexhaustible fount of being an intelligibility rather than the loss of yourself and your story. Well put, John. Yes. Very well put. I think one of the ways in which dialogue structures, precisely what you’ve just said, take everything you’ve just described. One of the ways in which dialogue processually structures its phenomenology in order to afford that. What does that mean? Processually, like as a matter of process. Okay, both. Okay, yes. The way it structures itself as to afford that anagogic, that sort of anagogic opening that you’ve just described is I think it allows the individual to source his necessity, let’s say call it the necessity of his speech from the possibility of silence. Oh, right. So this, I think, comes back to what you often talk about, Guy, in the distinction between thinking and listening. One of the things that happens in dialogue and dialogos is that there is a dialectical opponent process between thinking and listening. Brilliant, brilliant. And as the process goes on, at the beginning, everyone struggles with the fact that we’re constantly vacillating between one and the other because we can’t do them simultaneously. But what begins to happen, what begins to happen, and we all know this because we’ve all experienced it together, what begins to happen is that you begin to think with your speech and speak with your silence. Oh, yes. They shift, they shift. And that becomes a way of reconfiguring the relationship between the possibility that sources the intelligibility that fundamentally shapes the dialogue and the necessity and actuality of actually having to pitch into it in any kind of concrete way. That’s brilliant. That interweaving of speech and listening that’s inherent to the dialectic. Yes, that’s brilliant, Chris. That is brilliant. That is analogous to the interweaving. Guy’s insight. Yeah, the interweaving of the in and out in the meditative practice. That’s what you’re pointing to is the analogy, Guy. That’s exactly where the analogous movement is happening. Yes, I totally agree with that, Chris. That was scintillatingly brilliant. Oh, thank you. And so now we can’t do that, of course. We can’t do that without the apparatus of the fellowship, within dialogus. And so that’s one of the reasons why I think that we have to socialize. It’s almost as though when we speak, we subtract from the no thingness. And the subtraction from the no thingness has to become an act of communing with it. It has to become an act of confrontation rather than an act of avoidance. Because typically when we speak in, especially when we speak in any kind of propositional manner, we speak in subtraction from the pure open possibility of no thingness, right? I think it’s an avoidant act in many cases. And I think that the reorientation that happens in dialogus is that the act of gathering, the collegenda, right? The act of gathering intelligibility in the form of speech becomes a confrontation with the no thingness rather than a subtraction from it. So Chris, do you think the otherness of the interlocutor is also contributory of us being able to confront the alterity of no thingness, especially if we’re in a Western frame of mind in which the non-being has this sort of pejorative otherness to it. Do you think that’s- Yes. I think that’s exactly right, John. I think that’s exactly right. And think of it this way. Think of it this way. When I speak, me. When I listen, not me. When I speak, me. When I listen, not me, right? So that dialectic between those two states of speaking and listening also becomes a dialectic between my ego as Christopher and being foist with perspective. Now, if I’m genuinely listening, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have to qualify that. If I’m genuinely listening and not just sort of formulating as I’m, you know. If I’m genuinely listening, there is a certain, that’s a, I mean, in the way that you described it, Guy, having to listen in the way you know I mean necessitates. Yeah. It necessitates a, it will, it subordinates. It subordinates your egocentrism by necessity. And so there’s a console. And so between listening and thinking, listening and thinking, there is a dialectic between your fundamental egocentrism and its subtraction in the process. And so you’re, so you’re, so again, it’s not as though your ego dissipates. It’s simply that your ego is constantly having to be qualified by the other perspective that it has to then draw from to reconstitute itself. Yeah. That’s where you start to overhear yourself in a different identity as you say. Yes. For people, yeah. Because that’s where, that’s where the stereoscopic fusion happens, right? Because I start to internalize the other and I, look, when I self-transcend, there has to be an other than my ego as it is now. That’s what self-transcendence is. It’s a self-othering. And when I internalize the other, I get a, like there’s a non-logical identity. Like Chris’s perspective and my perspective have fused in an act of my own self-transcendence. I’ve othered to myself and transcended. It’s a non-logical identity between as I am before and as I am after, because I’ve, internalization is a stereoscopic fusion between my perspective and Chris’s perspective. And that otherness is taken into, and it’s an affordance of, self-transcendence requires the space of otherness. It requires the non-being who you are. That’s what Chris is exactly saying. And so when, you know how you talk about this guy, and you and I’ve noted this, when you’re in the middle of like circling, you get this sense of the other person’s perspective, not they’re looking at you, but suddenly it goes like this. And the two of you are looking out stereoscopically together. You and I have talked about that experience. That’s the moment, right? When the non-logical identification occurs. Right, absolutely. And under those conditions, under those conditions, we become able, when that stereoscopic fusion happens of perspective, we become, we are suddenly born into the capacity to address ourselves as thou. That is what allows for the second person perspective. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that’s right. And that’s why it’s an ingress. That’s why it’s an ingress into the process of Socratic self-knowledge. Yeah. Because it actually manifests, it’s almost like a process of conjuration, a reconjuration of identity, such that you suddenly, you suddenly are endowed with the capacity to witness yourself as thou and treat yourself in that commensurately. And then that means, of course, that deepens the real possibility of addressing others, including the world as thou. Yes, that’s right. Your thou ability. Because then you can address yourself as thou. Yeah, the thou ability, great. Yeah, great. Yeah. I’m saying, it’s like, I’m hearing, I’m hearing Hermes in here somewhere. And specifically just thinking about like the specifics of that we’re using language and speech, right? And Hermes being the god, the messenger god. And particularly that Hermes is a strange one, right? Because he’s neither, he’s not, he has a knot, there’s a knot, a lot of knot in Hermes, right? There’s like, he’s not quite a god, he’s not quite human. He’s this world of in-between. There’s something about the herm, the hermuneetic, everything hermuneetic has this quality of negation, but presencing through negation, right? Especially with, you know, just like when you, when you read, right? You don’t read by measuring the shapes of the letters, right? You read by actually in some sense, not seeing the shape of the letters, right? But you end up experiencing the word, right? Yet it’s the negation of the shapes of the letters that allow for, you know, so I’m also feeling just this sense of, you know, cause I was thinking about this, cause like one of the things I think that, to get at the sense of emptiness, right? I think it’d be very difficult to un, I often just automatically go to space, right? I think emptiness, I think space. But what does it mean to say that like, that time is ultimately empty all the way down, right? What does it mean for a word to be empty? What does it mean for a self to be empty? Absolute emptiness all the way down. This is the thing I’m getting about, like reading the Shatani is he’s, he’s, yeah, I’ll just, I’ll just like leave it at that. So like this, I just noticed that I’m hearing Hermes. Well, Hermes is the psycho pump that guides the souls into the underworld. And that’s what you just wanted to do there. You wanted to take emptiness all the way down. Take emptiness all the way down, right? The deepest death all the way down. So I think that rather than the messenger of the God, I think Hermes as the psycho pump is what’s going on here. Well, but that’s what I was trying to do when I was invoking real possibility, especially because it’s almost a contradiction for the Western mind, because possibility is neither temporal nor spatial, right? Possibility is ontologically more primitive, more primordial. Like that’s what I said, there’s no top, there’s no, there’s like, there isn’t an event equals MC squared, just like there isn’t a spatial location for it too, right? And it’s no coincidence that it’s the mathematical aspects of science, especially the relational mathematics, the parts of modern science directly and explicitly influenced by neoplatonism, that that example comes so readily to mind. So I think that to say that time is empty is to say that the attempt to locate it, and this is Bergson’s great critique, the attempt to, I mean, this is, it’s paradoxical, but the attempt to locate it in space is of course a big mistake. This is Bergson’s great critique of what he called the spatialization of time, right? And then, but I used, I went when I was living with my stepson, I would go into his room sometimes and write weird things on his whiteboard. And so, and one time I went in just to try to provoke him into thinking, and I wrote, does time take time to happen? Time can’t be inside of time, but everything that we think of is inside of time. Time can’t take time to happen because then the bottom of time drops out. You can’t think of time that way. Is that, okay, so that’s, okay. So here’s this other thing that Nishida talks about a lot, right? Which is, okay, consider that, so the West gets into this thing where it says the ground of everything is rationality and therefore it, all this gravity is for the subject, right? So everything’s in terms of the subject. So then you end up in all these paradoxes where you’re like, well, then how do they connect if there’s subject, object and, and he says that in Japan, right, in Senyatta, the home ground of everything is on nothing, right? And that it’s, this notion, I love this notion, like seeing something from its home ground and from emptiness is, is in some sense, it’s dethroning the self and its subjectivity, right? It’s to realize, well, this is what I’ve been trying, I wanna return back to what you said, I wanna return back to that point in a sec because I have a counter criticism. This is one of my criticisms of the Kyoto school. But anyways, that’s what I’ve been trying to get out with the non-temporal spatial sense of the moreness of the thing. And that’s the way, that’s the interpenetrability, the interbeing that Nishitani talks about. But it’s also like, things are perpetually withdrawing into the mysterious moreness and they’re perpetually shining forth into the non-categorizable suchness. These are the two mysteries that thought can’t grasp. We can’t grasp the combinatorial explosive nature of things and we can’t ultimately grasp the specific unique suchness of this because it’s precisely non-categorical. And those two are non-logically identical for us because they are both ways in which we are put into touch with the field from which intelligibility springs. That’s what I take to be the home ground. My critique of the Kyoto school is the one area, and I think I mentioned this to you. I’ve said this before, religion and nothingness is one of the top five books I think written. I put it in my top five books. I read it a couple of times, I wanna read it again. The Kyoto school is deeply important. But the one area that I think Nishitani, now this is where he’s different from D.T. Suzuki, by the way. Nishitani doesn’t get, he doesn’t really get neoplatonism. The way he understands, for example, platonic rationality is not subjectively oriented. It is definitely, definitively not subjectively oriented. And neoplatonism, I just read it to you, is not oriented that way at all. That’s a mistake. Now D.T. Suzuki gets neoplatonism in his book on Buddhist and Christian mysticism where he compares prajna to Eckhart, who’s a Christian neoplatonist. And he says that we’re basically saying the same thing. He gets it. But this is my one sort of like, ah, Nishitani doesn’t get. I think he’s too influenced by the later Heidegger reading of Plato, like that Rakowski talks about, rather than the earlier reading of Plato. The way Heidegger sort of castigates Plato as basically a proto-decar, which I think is a fundamental misreading. And I think Rakowski and other people are right that the earlier Heidegger gets Plato better. And I think Nishitani is getting the late Heidegger’s mis-framing of Plato. And that’s making him misread, misread the neoplatonic tradition, I think, in a fundamental way. Yeah, totally. Totally. This has been quite ecstatic. Well, it has to be. Anything less, anything that has to be. I love that have to. Anything less would be just to speak about it. And we’re not trying to speak about it. We are trying to use speech as the ritual of invocation. We are trying to invoke it, not just speak about it. What is the use of just speaking about it? What is the use of speaking about anything that really matters if you’re not invoking it? Yeah, so you know, something about, so there’s also another, there’s another, like, I think a more, kind of the machinery of dialectic, and especially being in speech and conversation, right? And I’ve been noted, been experimenting with this and when I’ve been meditating, right? Where I’ll, there’s the meditation where I’m, you know, I’m focusing on my breath or I’m focusing on nothing, you know, that kind of, more the Eastern stuff. And then I’ll see, like, okay, then I’ll listen to a book, right? And see if I can do, if I can meditate while reading the book, right? Can I meditate while I’m actually engaged in listening to conceptual things? And it is, first of all, I haven’t been able to get to the point where it seems like I’m either in one or the other. I lose one or the other, one or the other, one or the other. But one of the things I find is somehow doing that, right? Is I notice that there’s a different quality of, there’s, when I listen to it, right? When I get caught up, if you will, in the book, it seems to evoke its own kind of presence, right? It’s not that I’m not present. It’s like I’m present in a different way and it seems to evoke a different quality of presence, right? And so I’ve been thinking about like, just some of these things, because Japanese philosophy is relatively new to me. I’m a lot more familiar with Tibetan stuff, but I think Tibetans are great. But like this kind of sense of the way that Zen and Japan really, really do have this sense of nothingness, it’s just so much more a part of the fabric of it. So it’s pretty new to me to explore this. So I’ve just been thinking a lot about this. And so the other part I started to think about, well, what is a way that they actually practice this in some kind of social interaction? It’s tea ceremonies, right? And there’s something about, as I’ve been reading tea ceremonies, it’s very similar to that sense in which, on some level, they’re engaged, on one level, they’re drinking tea. On another level, they’re not drinking tea, right? They’re not drinking tea and they’re drinking tea absolutely at the same time, right? And there’s a way that they’re, what they’re actually doing is they’re dwelling in emptiness. The whole thing is about emptiness, but yet it’s all about being precisely in the engagement of what they’re inside of. So there’s another quality that I’ve been thinking about as we’ve been gearing up for these conversations with it, is like, okay, well, in what way, right, the actual speaking and listening as a way of dwelling in being present with thinking and listening in itself, a part of this, right? So I just wanted to bring that center. The tea ceremony is exactly what I was, what I said we were doing. It’s a ritual invocation, right? It’s a ritual invocation. And the precision is to point you towards the non-categorizable suchness of what’s happening, right? But the openness is to always get that reverberating with the mysterious moreness into which everything withdraws. That’s the whole point. At least that’s my reading of D.T. Suzuki’s reading of the tea ceremony. And I wanted to go back to, and I wanna link that to the thing you just said right before that. When I’m reading Plotinus, the genius of Plotinus is that I’m simultaneously meditating and doing this deep conceptual work at the same time. That is what struck me in the face when I was reading Plotinus. It was like, oh my gosh, I am simultaneously doing this tremendous conceptual work. And at the same time, I am going through a meditative movement at the same time. And I have tried very, very hard to emulate that. And I found that also in Spinoza. Spinoza is even more like you’re doing this, but then you get the scanty intuitiva. That, that has changed my life. That kind of the way you just taught like that, I don’t think I’d be the same person if I didn’t have those experiences with authors like that in those experiences. Like those, that’s the holy grail for me. One of the other things too is that good, it’s not just works. It’s not just straightforward works of philosophy that do that too. I also find that really good fiction does that as well. And it just uses a different apparatus. It uses a different edifice, a different kind of edifice to scaffold the structure. But fundamentally the process is the same, which is to say that you move in train with a particular sequence, particular narrative sequence, right? Just as the tea ceremony marks itself with particular movements in a particular order. It’s the same for narrative, but really, really good novelists, what we might call philosophical novelists, what they do quite deliberately is they constrain, they constrain with narrative and then suddenly they open. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then of course they recourse, they return at some point to the narrative, right? So the dissolution and the resolution, that contraction, that expansion and contraction is simply part of the geometry of the entire experience that is laid out in the form, in the artistic form. So I just read the plague with Dan Shapion, so that is amazing. And that’s where I got my sort of slogan from the character Taru, I wanna know how to be a saint without God, that’s the whole problem I’m up against these days. But I was thinking about that and something came to mind and then it clicked with what Guy was saying a few minutes ago, right? Because I think there’s a way in which non-being and vulnerability come together. Because like when I look through my glasses, they’re no longer there as my glasses, but they’re actually the real possibility of me seeing. It’s the vulnerability in them such that I can see through them that actually affords me seeing by means of them and beyond them. And so it’s their non-being as glasses that actually, because I stopped seeing them as, like they disappear from view, right? And it’s because in the way in which they become completely transparent, right? There’s a kind of, there’s a vulnerability to transparency that affords them being real possibilities of me seeing other than them by seeing through and beyond them. And what I’m getting is like the works of literature, I mean, cause that’s what happens in a great work of literature, right? You do that, you do that, you’re not, you do that, there’s that moment, right? Like in analogous as you’re saying, Chris, like when you’re reading platonic, there’s that moment that you said when it explodes and you’re outside of the narrative, right? You’re looking through the narrative to what is trans narrative. And the narrative has a vulnerability to it, right? And it allows itself to be a no thing to us so that we can see beyond it. It’s vulnerable to us. It becomes a question, becomes a question of its being. Yes, exactly. Its form becomes a question. That’s essentially what happens. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, great connection. There’s this way that there’s almost a, like for me, the affective state that’s now coming up when I’m talking about this is like a tenderness towards the, because everything is now striking me as having this capacity for this vulnerability that transports me through that thing to everything else. Yeah. I share your statement. That’s beautifully put, John. You’re ecstatic. Well, even ecstasis, this sense of dwelling in by standing over and out of my dwelling in being the dwelling in, right? Yes. That is primordial ecstasis, right? I think so. Feeling that a lot. I’ve noticed, so in one of the things I’ve noticed, and I don’t know quite what to make of it in this conversation, I just, I could feel it. When we’re talking about like the back and forth, right? So I see through the glasses and the glasses withdrawal, right? And they afford everything that I see. And then like, and then in a moment I pop back and I realize, oh my God, there was the glasses that afforded that. And now I’m pressing the glasses, right? And then I look back out and they withdraw again. There’s something in me, and I was thinking about, there’s something about this is agonist, right? Getting this stuff, there’s like, it’s ecstasy, but there’s also this like, oh, quality to it, right? And I think what it is, is there’s some part of me that wants, I don’t know if this is my implicit attachment to actuality, but I think I feel a little bit like Kant or something. Like I want the presuppositions. I want to hold the presuppositions while having them act as presuppositions. I don’t want them, I want to see everything and be aware of everything at the same time. I just, I noticed that tension in me. I think that’s a tension. You want to dwell in both worlds simultaneously. It isn’t that, isn’t that the Kantian sense, right? How he kind of ended up with the thing in itself is because I think Johannes was talking about this, where he wanted to, he didn’t want the presuppositions to go in the background that afforded the foreground. So he just ended up having to split everything logically, right? And so there’s that sense of, and this is okay. And then when you said tenderness, right? And vulnerability, I think that’s where I feel it. Like in a certain sense, there is a sense of letting something go to the background, right? And you’re surrendering to something here. Yeah, I guess for me, I mean, Kant is the opposite, right? So for Kant, intelligibility is that which walls us off. Reality, but for the Neil Platonists, well, intelligibility are the glass or is the glasses of the world. Intelligibility is that which is the most vulnerable through which we see beyond all possible intelligibility. That’s the one, right? Why do I wanna see it as I’m seeing with it? What is that in me? I just noticed it’s in me. Is that in you too? Like I wanna see the glasses as I’m seeing. I don’t know if your motivation is the same as Kant’s. I doubt it. I haven’t really read Kant. I’ve read about Kant. Well, Kant is, you moke me from my dogmatic slumber. Kant is really worried about skepticism, right? And so he can’t, skepticism, if you just decide, and I think you ultimately have to make a choice. There is no way within the framework of skepticism to argue somebody out of skepticism. Boy, an undergraduate education in philosophy, if that’s the one thing you learn from it, that’s what you learn from it, right? And so what you have to come to, and I think this is again, the neoplatonic insight, is if there isn’t an aspect of knowing that isn’t also being, if there isn’t participatory knowing, then that’s what you have. You have absolute skepticism. If the mind and reality don’t share, right? But the opposite is true, and this is my counter move to Kant. Insofar as I reject skepticism as ultimately self-defeating and non-viable, and therefore absolutely no guide to rationality and to life, I am committed to there being some ultimate relationship of participation between intelligibility and that which transcends, and will always transcend, intelligibility. And there’s that kind of, that disclosure and discernment. Exactly, exactly. Disclosure and discernment, right? Exactly, exactly. And they don’t do together. And the whole point of the project of Gnosis is to realize. It’s just an interesting feeling that just a sense, like a stretch of that, of like, I just want, but it is cool, it feels a little bit more religious. It feels a little bit more. Well, Argue said it is. Yeah. Right? In thinking being, he, you know, which is a beautiful explication of, you know, the whole tradition from Parmenides to Aquinas, right? He says the proper attitude is religious. But. Tragic too, in some level. But. Yeah. But imagine, imagine if the beauty of this, this goes back to Chris, imagine if the beauty of this communitas became strong enough that the sense of exposure to skepticism that has been ingrained in us by our culture and is pervasive as an undercurrent in our culture, what if it became a strong enough countercurrent that that concern for exposure to skepticism drops away? Yeah. Right. Right. It becomes a way of making play. Yes. Something dogmatic. As you’re talking, I’m noticing, right? That kind of almost what felt like a mental desire has like sunk down into this kind of place where I was like, it’s actually just in my heart. And then I was feeling this quality of tragedy, right? This sense of tragedy, but in this ecstatic sense of like the two fingers, right? Like if those touched that, I mean, no one would even pay attention to that. It’s like, it’s that they don’t touch, right? And that there is that space is. Yeah. Because if they touched, then Adam would not have a space in which he could self-transcend towards God. Yeah. Yeah. There would be no despair and no recovery there from. It just felt like 3000 miles wide. Gents, I’m sorry to say it, but I’m going to have to duck out. It feels like we just got started. I think, but no, I think this is a good place to go. And I need to go too. I need to go too. You guys just dropped me into infinity. You were always there. We’re all there together. Yeah. I love being with you guys. This was tremendously helpful. Yeah. I think this has already opened up a lot for. So encouraging. What Chris and I are going to start doing. So thank you so much. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, guy. John, this was great. It always is. Yeah. It always is. I’ll put out the email for the fourth time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For the four of us to meet. Right. And it’d be great if, if you had a chance, you can share this file with me, guy. I’ll put it up on my channel. And the other, I forgot to present you the other one too. Yeah, please do. Bye. Take care. Hey gents. Have a good evening, Chris.