https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=0GjdjccFJVg
Whether you’re watching on YouTube or listening as a podcast, remember to subscribe and hit the bell to track upcoming releases. So I’m so glad you’re both joining me here for this. And I have a sense of how to proceed here. And the first thing I ask we do is that we take 30 seconds of silence together. After that silence, I’m going to open the space, as it were. I have a sense, perhaps, of what a link, one of many between us is. And I would presence that and not put that link or that frame before being here now together, more as a departure point. And we’ll see where we land. And then we are off. So if that sounds good, then perhaps we can take 30 seconds of silence here. I’m going to shut my eyes. Please feel free to do whatever is most natural. Yeah, I will do the same. Okay. So it is a real pleasure in an uncertain time to be here with you both. Over the last four to five months, I’ve had the privilege of speaking with both of you separately on a few occasions each now. And both of those conversations have been deeply meaningful to me and meaningful to many I know who have listened and perhaps even transformative for me. And my sense is the wisdom inherent in the embodiment I’ve been present to in each of you, as well as in the theory that each of you have been developing on and express, is one that is in an important sense, deeply resonant and well worth presencing together. Although of course, I don’t just mean theory. So my hope is that in this conversation, we can all get to know each other and generate insight, informative of new understanding that is beneficial and helpful, really up and down the stack for ourselves, each other, others, and not in any way disconnected from mind and heart and soul and what have you. And the sense I have of, and here I’ll present something that is as well, core to the core insight that is moving me and driving me to express and realize things in the world in conformity with or being informed by is the following. And perhaps we can take that as a departure point. And that is this dynamic of the relationship between authentic expression and how it is met in relationship in its context. And here I’m going to use words that I know are resonant with each of you in perhaps slightly different ways, but to that end, hopefully bring our vocabulary and sense together. The expression of authenticity when it is met in an environment of care, and perhaps a few other things, although I don’t want to belabor us with too many words, when authentic expression is met with care, we have here a core dynamic of the dynamic of growth. And when authentic expression is truncated, perhaps traumatized, we have here the opposite. We have here the retraction of the opportunity for growth in the extreme. And there’s links here with notions of voluntary confrontation, of fear, of uncertainty. And we have here also notions of the value of stepping into vulnerability. We’re also presencing the importance of relationship and this dynamic between individual and context and self and other. So from here, as a framing, I see this as being something important to all of us and deeply informative of the ideas and ultimately embodied way we might realize in our lives and together. And I’m interested in how that lands for both of you. So that’s all I have to say. It’s powerful framing. I guess I would say I’d want to pull out two of the central things that were sort of anchor points in what you said, this idea of authentic dialogue, authentic discourse. And part of what I would like to explore is the possibility of opening both of those back up, putting them into question in a Heideggerian sense. What do we mean by authenticity? Heidegger is perhaps the person who made that way of speaking, but I imagine it has drifted quite away from what it could be for us. What I’m saying is I want to open these both up in a reciprocal questioning. What do we mean? What are we trying to get at when we’re trying to get our authenticity? What are we trying to get at when we’re trying to get into dialogue or what I like to call dialogos? And how do those two opening up, how do they relate to each other? Because I think you’re right. People are, at least the people I’m coming into communication with, people are hungry for a kind of connectedness that simultaneously grounds them and affords them also growth and transformation. There’s a hunger for this, but they feel that a lot of the ways, the terms and the concepts they bring to bear to try and express it are not translating into transformative practice. And so there seems to me to be a gap between the conceptual framework we’re using to try and express this and the ability to achieve the goals that we’re pursuing in the expression. So that’s kind of what I’m interested in in this framing right now. I guess what comes up for me right away around that is this, the paradoxes of where actually is the self. So I’m assuming that there’s, if we’re going to be starting with this notion of authenticity, that we would be tapping into something that was something sincerely within me that I could share with you. And the paradox there is that there’s a sense of self-awareness. And the paradox there is that, of course, I would offer you everything. I would gladly unzip myself and be there. But I have this kind of interesting tension of recognizing that if I did, what you would see is all the ways in which the context that I have lived within, the experiences that I have had, the traumas from school and being wrong, and the way in which maybe right now our speech patterns are getting judged, that those would be indications and they would be an illustration of all the ways in which that thing that I would wish to unzip and show you that would be truly mine is actually of the context that I have been in. And I honestly have no idea how to tell the difference. I would like to be able to say, and here I am in my most authentic self. But what the heck is that? And how could I possibly extract that or find this nugget or essence even? Because I think there is a kind of yearning to get at that essence that is somehow untouched by my culture, my experience, my life, my ancestors’ lives, my children’s lives. And I think especially right now in this moment where there is so much melting in the structures around us, that this is a question that bears a lot of consideration around if I am shaped and formed and forged in the various structures that I have lived within, who am I when those structures are gone? I think that’s really important. What I’m understanding you saying, and of course, please interject if I misframe you, but there is, I think you’re doing part of what I wanted to do, which is the automaticity by which authenticity is understood in terms of a reconnection with one’s inner true self is very much the thing I want to bring into question. And that assumed idea that we have this stable sort of Cartesian subjectivity within us, that is the ultimate normative guide for our entire life is precisely the thing, not paradoxically, ironically, which was Heidegger introduced the term authenticity to try and call all of that into question. And now it has somehow circled around that authenticity is, that shows you how pervasive, almost parasitic, that formulation of thinking we want to call it, the question is, how do we take something that was so carefully crafted to call it into question and absorb it back into itself and say, no, no, this is what it means and this is what we’ve always been talking about? I find that something that we should also just step back and pause on right away and say, notice how the very thing that was supposed to challenge all of this got reabsorbed into the very machinery it was trying to challenge. I think that should give us some pause for how carefully we need to work together on this right now because there’s a lot happening in our cultural cognitive realm and our background that’s going to keep driving us back towards that the very thing, it’s going to drive us towards a closure, the very thing we’re trying to bring into question. But I hope I understood you, Nora, because that’s the connection I’m getting from what you said. That’s exactly where I want to go. And I mean, even language and certainly communication patterns become a kind of reflection of repetition, of extension of these various contextual threads that say, this is who I am, this is, and when I want to say, yeah, but this is the real me, where’s the real me? And I think that there have been moments, and I think those moments of confusion might be something really to look into. Those moments where I, prior to the past couple of weeks, my most frequent experience of moments of confusion that maybe had something of that, what do I even want to call it? It’s something raw. I’ll just say it’s something raw. Okay. So it is when I live in Sweden and I live in, I do a lot of my life in multiple cultures. And so- I’m in Brana, which is inherently a multicultural place. Yeah. I’m in Trano, Canada, it’s a very multicultural place. So please go ahead. Yeah. So one of the things that can happen is that I have found that I could think that I have expressed something and then realize that that is not what was received and get very kind of disoriented in the reception, in the way the reception is reflected back to me. And there’s something that happens there that is like a crack in the matrix of my various contextual formations and language. And those cracks, those cracks might be the closest I know to getting at this thing. And right now I think there’s an awful lot of cracks of looking around and thinking, really, who are we? What do I say? Like what can we possibly say in this moment that is authentic? And the second I try to make it authentic, it becomes inauthentic, for sure. Yeah. I understand. But that was a good point you made about how that pattern that I was pointing to sort of historically with Heidegger is also something we find prevalent in our own attempts. I was, what called to mind was a Leonard Cohen song and he talks about the crack that lets the light in. And so this leads me to, well somebody who practiced introducing those cracks as a way of trying to provoke wonder. And I’d like to at some point talk about the difference between wonder which calls the self and the world into question and curiosity which tries to feed and plug up the gaps in the self and the worldview. And so, but I’m sort of, and had a lot to say about a dialogical notion of the self. And I’m thinking here of the figure of Socrates that I’m, and somebody I’m working to try and understand very deeply precisely because he had a form of communicative practice that centered upon introducing those cracks, getting people to a place of aporia where it was possible. It was not inevitable, not inevitable, but it was possible for them to come to a state of wonder. That opening where they could call the self and the world into question and that could induce them to see the self as something that is aspired to as opposed to something that is already possessed. And so I’m very interested in all of that. And the question, the work I’ve been doing with Peter Lindberg and Guy Sandstock and Chris Master-Pietro is, is it possible for us, I’m changing the question slightly, Norah, I hope you’ll be patient with me, is it possible for us to learn from that such that we could be better able to pursue what we’re trying to pursue right now, which is getting some sense of how to move towards deeper communication, deeper communing in a way that people are craving. And so that’s for me how I’m trying to think about this right now. I’m trying to think about it in terms of people have managed in past to give us examples and to be exemplars of how to do the thing we’re doing. And what does it mean for us to learn from them? Well, first of all, can we learn from them? And then what does it mean for us to learn from them? And how do we bring that about? Tim, are you there still? Yeah, I hope so. We’ll have to see how we do. This is a bit of an unlikely occurrence. The internet hasn’t had any problems since I’ve moved into this apartment. I’m going to open the door to the bedroom. I don’t know what. Oh, so we’re getting our own aporia here. A lot of the cracks are shining, coming right now for us. So technology is the God that limps. I like that you’re opening the door to let the internet in. I know. We are last resort here. That’s next level, my friend. I love it. I know. Put the cat out, let the internet in. The sacrifice is my girlfriend’s extra couple hours of sleeping here. So there has been a cost to this door opening. Does it actually work to open the door to let the internet in? Look, I mean, I don’t understand how signals work, but there seems to be a physical world where there are some interactions. And that’s the level of bluntness by which I’m approaching this environment. But as far as I’m concerned, it may be possible. At least, you know, I care. I love it. It’s my favorite thing all day. It’s how I solve all my problems, actually. But please. Open the door. All right. Let’s get serious here and let’s get to work. All right. So I was proposing a model that we could consider for somebody who regularly, like I said, he crafted the virtue of inducing the cracks in people. The aporia, which let the light shine through of a new possibility of self and also a new possibility of world. And that’s and you know, that’s wonder. And I follow Fuller and other people and seeing wonder is very different from mere curiosity. And that ability to induce wonder and to bring people to a place, it wasn’t inevitable, but it was possible, where they could aspire to a different self and a different world is, I think, a valuable example for us to consider, precisely because the Socratic model of authenticity is an aspirational model. Your true self is not something you possess. And it’s not something you possess in distinction from others or your world. It’s something that you aspire to continually and never in any kind of completion to an ongoing process of mutual transformation. And although I’m not claiming we can get back, that would be anachronistic and therefore fallacious to Socrates or the Socratic world, although there are some very important similarities. Socrates was carrying out his practice while Athens is literally under siege. The whole city is quarantined and there had been a plague. So his context is not that different from ours in some important ways. I’m recommending that we take a look at Socratic dialogue as a way of perhaps speeding up the process by which we can learn about how to recover a relational sense of self and an aspirational sense of authenticity, perhaps, that are urgently needed right now. And then I proposed that to Nora and then she had something to say about it. Yeah, I really love that you’re taking it to this place, John, because this is kind of where I’m working with all my hours and moments and days and heart and soul right now. And I have been generating these, okay, let’s call them dialogues, but they’re sort of, I called them warm data labs. Okay, so the idea is that there’s an exploration of a complex question with a number of people. And that exploration includes them starting in small groups around various contexts, and then they move when they want to. I don’t ring a bell and make a move, they go where they want, when they want, and things get mixed up. This is back in the days when people could be in the same room together. So what I started to witness happening with that was really interesting, because as people explored a question, whether that question is something like, you know, what is health or what is identity or what is authenticity could even be one. That becomes something that is very swiftly revealed in the stories and the inputs between the people as being something that exists between the context and between the people. So it started a liminal revealer and an interdependency revealer. And so I guess where I’m going with that is that the more of those processes that I have done, and I’ve been doing hundreds of them around the world, the more I’m seeing how important it is that that process of opening those cracks, of coming into that wonder is actually, it’s not to be done alone. We actually need each other to provide multiple description. And by that, I don’t just mean lots of perspectives, I also mean lots of textures of ways of talking. So it’s not just my professional knowledge or just my personal stories. You have to have both of those and questions and jokes and things that come up between people that are unexpected. And that in a strange way, in the most intimate kind of shiftings happen in this possibility of having multiple patternings kind of overlay like a moiré phenomenon. Mm-hmm. So that in that moiré phenomenon, there becomes, I guess one of the signatures of the moiré is that you have one pattern and then you have another pattern. And when you cross them, you have a third pattern. And that third pattern can actually tell you something about either of the other patterns, but it is different, right? And so what I’m getting at is that a kind of insight can come out of that overlay. And so this is where those insights are not actually accessible very often in life. And in this moment, I’m with you, there’s an urgency. And so this process that I’ve been playing with is actually kind of an accelerated interdependency insight maker. That’s great. That’s amazing. That’s really cool. It’s really cool. Yeah. I’m very excited about this. So if we could unpack this just a little, the practice. I don’t know how much you know of my work, but I’ve been engaging in a lot of participant observation and a lot of these emerging, I call them psychotechnologies, right? These practices of trying to afford insight and flow within dialogue, within distributed cognition. And so it’s really, and also people trying to put things together. What I’m saying is there’s interesting convergence. So for example, I’ve been participating in circling and then they’re trying to get circling to integrate with bringing in important topical questions. So how do we go from just circling where we’re maintaining the circle to making it topical in a fashion? And then what are the bridging processes you do? Because if you just sort of slam people from circling to a topic, they can get sort of, they coherence can break. And so it’s really interesting about how a lot of things seem to be coming towards each other. So can I ask you some more, I don’t know, this isn’t the right adjective, so be forgiving on it. Can I ask you some more technical questions, more specific questions about it? So, sorry, I’m just going to be a little bit of a cognitive scientist here for a moment because I’m really, really intrigued in this. One thing, and this is something, that pattern, I’m not trying to take anything away from you. I’ve thought about doing that because that’s very similar about this sort of small world network formation you get within a brain to provoke insight within. And I was wondering if we could get that sort of fluid small world network restructuring between people that would also bring about an insight. And it seems like you’ve actually already cottoned onto this and made it work. So that is really fascinating. And then what I’m really interested in, well, there’s multiple things, what you said is just lighting me up right now. I’m interested in what’s the relationship between the group insight, if you’ll allow it, and the individual insights. How are they resonating with each other? How is that working? And then the thing you talked about with the patterns, Chris and I talked about that in the article, the chapter we’ve written about, this sort of third factor that emerges. I see it in circling all the time in which you get, so you’ll get people will get into this, like between two people and these people, and then that gets layered and you get that emergent, this what we call the third factor to give it sort of an ostensive reference without a very just clear denotation. And what’s interesting is people’s, I want to ask you if this is also the, like do people sense that? Like do they get a sense of something telling them or calling them to move from one of the groups to another? And do they get a sense of that something is taking shape, like a light that has a sort of a systemic life of its own above and beyond, not only the individuals, but the subgroup? Because I’m definitely finding that reported continuously when I’m doing the participant observation of these other kinds of practices. Is that also going on in the warm data lab? Absolutely. And so one of the things that happens is that it, I mean, I did a lot of systems teaching and complexity teaching, and it was frankly irritating because, you know, people would come and we’d have these great workshops and people who understood it before felt very clever and the people who didn’t understand it maybe had a little sense of it for a little while, but then it would kind of fade away. It would eat you away from them. And here’s what I’m finding is that the structure of the process has to do with creating the opportunities for about, so that people can have a conversation about the question of what is health through the context of economy, and then they can move over to family, and in those little circles they tell all sorts of stories and all kinds of stuff. There’s absolutely no conscious purpose control over what gets talked about. There’s no documentation, very important. No documentation. What do you mean specifically by that? It’s not recorded or people aren’t allowed to cite stuff? What does that mean? I usually don’t do either. Okay. Okay, there’s no post-its. There’s no paper tablecloths. There’s nobody writing anything down because those contextual interactions, the story that you tell me about your grandmother’s recipe reminds me of something, and that is a link like compost, finding links, finding relational process. And so that is, and then I go to another context and someone says something, and it connects then to your grandmother’s story and the memory that that brought me to. And so this understanding of, if you want to call it systemics or complexity or interdependency, whatever you want to call that, it turns out to be very intimate. So is the idea that they’re exemplifying it now, right? They’re instantiating it. They’re participating in it. They’re not just sort of talking about it. Is that part of what’s going on? Yeah. Well, what’s happening is there’s an about and there’s a within. Ah, right. Right. So the conditions of the lab are structured to offer the space for people to talk about. Right. But in the negative space of it, there’s the liminal of what’s actually connecting in the within. So you would never have a warm data lab on relationships or communication because that would be ridiculous. Those are all things that are forming in the within. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. So that’s been really interesting. And then after the lab, there’s this moment that I would call the mutual learning moment. So then there’s a sort of a moment when we have the room in plenary and say, so, you know, what did you notice? What have you observed? And that’s when you get that group lift. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Most of the people in the room don’t actually have words for what they’ve experienced because it’s been such a combination of intellectual and physical and emotional and memory. And all these things have been kind of mushing and reconnecting and they’re in a territory they’ve never actually had to make words for before. But a couple of people in the room will find the words. And when they start to find the words, the other people also find words. And the words are usually something along the lines of I started to notice that I, you know, there was repeated things in multiple contexts, that there was overlap, that when I left one context, the conversation that I had there didn’t go out of my body. I took it with me. Right. Right. Right. And it’s seasoned to the next conversation. And so you get this lift that happens in that moment where the whole room realizes that they’ve had very different experiences, but they’ve had a mutual learning at the same time. So this idea that mutual learning doesn’t mean we’re learning the same thing. It means we’re learning together. And that that is as unique for you or me or, you know, anybody of any age. And really, I’ve been working with this in very vulnerable communities and also in parliaments. So in inner city Pittsburgh, with groups of Islamic women in Asia, in really broken towns in the UK, and then with the Finnish politicians, or with so it’s really, it kind of anyone can do it. Kids can do it. Sure. Yeah. It’s pretty interesting. Oh, so have you has this been written down anywhere? Or have you like, because I’d like to learn more about it. And we have limited time here. Maybe you and I can do I mean, how does one learn to practice it? And because that one to go or now. So it’s, it’s a it’s, there’s a lot of theory there. And so to bring this kind of back to where we are with this conversation, I think probably one of the most important pieces is the piece around abductive process. And, and that that is the piece where it starts to become clear in this question of authenticity, that there is a kind of cross contextual description that we live within. Everyone lives within it. In fact, I would say probably every living thing lives within a cross contextual description. So if you look at an earthworm, that earthworm is a description in a way of the soil. It’s also a description of the tree, or of the bird, or of the grandpa and grandson that are going to go fishing, or right, so that earthworm is, is just like you and I are a description of our education system, we’re a description of our culture. And these different contexts are difficult to grab hold of and fix in isolation or in reductionism, because they’re actually not where they, you grab them and they’re not there. You want to fix the education system, but it’s actually, it’s actually created in the abductive process of our economy and culture and intergenerational expectations and identity and, you know, all these things that then, you know, the education system is a consequence. Right, right. Can I see here, John, if I can just to, are we off track? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, not at all. Just to draw some things together and make sure that I’m up and with this and also perhaps just to add a little bit. So if I can synthesize sort of some of the themes we’ve touched on so far, it’s importantly, authenticity is not the expression or the capturing of something that is the inherent and importantly fixed to you, but something that is realized in a, some form of cooperative, but ultimately interdependent dynamic on an ongoing basis with each other. So we are, we are presencing from a phenomenological perspective, though we are talking more than that. A question might be, what is it to show up to transformation, to learning, to the drawing forth and, and, um, remembering of engaging in a remembering of what it is to be with each other and also an aspiration of our becoming and deepening together, um, to, so, so what we can perhaps add in, although not to jump the gun is what are some of these modes of orientation? And this is something I’ve thought a lot about what are ways we show up actually to these moments of, um, when the moment is upon us, John, you like to use this term Kairos, that there is a significant imminence to the now where we may be particularly challenged or call up called upon to presence ourselves in an appropriate or right relationship with each other, given the given a kind of particular energetic context thrust upon us. And it seems to me we, if we really were to, um, not be reductive, but, but attempt to synthesize some core modes, we might take in response to this, we can, we can, um, allow ourselves to be, uh, um, moved by this process in a way that’s appropriate and we can allow ourselves as well to more confront and move this process to, so there’s a sort of a push and pull dynamic that can be done effectively or less effectively. And a lot of that, I think has to do with how well we are able to sense what is the appropriate ripening vulnerability to step into with a certain kind of care and courage rather than to, um, rather than to, uh, either bury our heads when faced with a moment or in fact to attempt to close, um, that opening before in fact we were able to find and be with each other in order to then come to some kind of, um, harmony or movement together. So, and I, and I think this can help ground us as well back in what some of the experiences are we’re having in our lives at the moment, because fear of course is very much heightened and care and courage are very much called for in this time and it is my hope in a deeper sense that the kind of theory we might be discussing in this conversation is in actual fact a crucial piece, more than a crucial piece, that all of this together is very much involved in the movement towards the realization of we, because that is also what we are discussing here. How can we create these mutual learning environments where we can give and receive to our fullest as best we can informative and enabling of transformation, both individually and collectively in touch with ecology. So grounding this back in our moment today, I think is important because the emotionality people are experiencing and the tension they’re experiencing in their lives. I think we ultimately are making calls here that there are a call for stepping into that moment, holding oneself in such a way that enables us to transform that toward a wholeness, not a final one. Whitehead has this expression, that many become one and are increased by one, which is a process framing of some of what we are discussing here. So to add some of these pieces in, am I sort of on track with some of the core features of our discussion? I think so. I mean, there’s two things I guess I’d want to say first to respond to you and then to thread back to Nora. I think what we’re talking about here in the thing, I mean, I see this as a feature of many of these emerging practices. There’s this oscillation between theory and theory, I mean using theory in the old sense of the word, you know, the contemplative immersive involvement that gives you insight and then the reflective theory, that movement is, and trying to figure out what some of those patterns are, not just for theory’s sake, because I think what Nora is doing and what Guy is doing, the circling, I like what Nora is doing though because it’s got this topical element to it that I think is really important and central, and it’s got this ability, it’s got a grammar built in of explicit restructuring and the way people move around, and I think these are important things to take note of, and that’s why I was taking note of them, but towards your question, Tim, is that these practices give people a deep taste, what I call a participatory and perspectival knowing, of the power and the potential of our, I don’t like this term, but it’s, you know, of our sense making, our meaning making capacities. If people, the thing, people will take significant hits to their standard of living if they get a sense, you know, a felt sense of a course of mattering, a course of enhanced connectedness. That’s why people have children. I mean, having a child is completely irrational from a subjective point of view because your health goes down, your finances go down, you’re tired all the time, your most significant relationship is put into crisis, like every, all of your subjective well-being just crashes when you have a child. You ask people why they do it. They do it because they want it, they feel connected and involved with and involved with, not just theorizing about, they feel participatory in the creation of something that transcends them in an important way. So giving people, if you can give, these practices have a value, I would argue, in helping people remember in, you know, in the sense of sati, right, mindfulness, deeply remember, you know, and I want to use this taste metaphor, like in the Bible, you know, taste the Lord and see that he is good, right, they can remember what this is like, what it’s like to be immersed in this, to flow with this, and I think that gives people a kind of faith and courage that is deeply realizable and relevant right here, right now. That’s, so yes, I’m being the nerdish scientist, I’m really excited and interested about what Nora’s talking about, you know, as a scientist, but I think I can make, I think I just made it. There’s a case for this, the existential import of what we’re discussing, I think, is also apparent and should be noted. That’s how I would respond to your, that sort of reframing. I think that here, I think there is, we have, we can have a kind of stereoscopic vision where the theoretical concern and the existential concern are both actually being fused into a kind of depth in which that is of value to us right here, right now. Well, that seems to be called for in this time, and I wonder if the framing of the concepts of the interior and the exterior is part of what is maybe helpful to presence here as well. So core to how I’ve been, one way I’ve been attempting to communicate the project I’ve been on with this for some years is to, and I’m not like, I’m not happy with this framing necessarily. There’s other things I would prefer to say, but what I have been saying explicitly in places is the process of making sense of what to care about. Of course, it’s more like caring about making sense of what to care about, but there’s, because there’s this, there’s a sense in which these things are so interdependent, yet there is an orientation towards, I think ultimately grounded in something like of love and for love that’s, I think, better made, better related to in a language of perhaps care or towards that metaphorical way rather than sense. But we are here in this moment together where so much is shifting and it’s how can we draw in what is most relevant and also be anchored in what is what is most worth caring about. And so it’s bringing these two together in the process. Absolutely, that seems to be so fundamental. Well, I mean, that’s Socrates taught erotica. Socrates knew how to care and that’s a central idea in Heidegger, right? The wisdom of caring well and that’s where I think, and I want to turn it back to Nora now, that’s where I think the work I do on relevance realization seems to line up. I think, I have a sense, I’m not clear yet, but it seems at least it’s convergent with when she’s talking about when she’s talking about sort of this abductive process that’s at work because that comes up a lot in my work too. And so I want to turn it back to Nora. I want to hear more about this abductive process. Yeah, the abductive process is really interesting because I’m pretty sure that that’s where the change actually is. Yeah, I agree. And it’s something that is largely missing from most of the diagrams of and explanations of systems change. It’s actually in the abductive process that you’re going to get the real shift. And that’s really, I would say in my sort of verbiage around this, that’s a very trans-contextual thing. It’s happening across and through multiple contexts and it requires that. And we do it all the time anyway. It’s just a matter of allowing for a different abductive process. So if I’m in an abductive process where my identity is formed through and across the various institutions of our world, my education, my job, my family, my wealth, my economy, my health, my sexuality, my gender, all of these things. And all of them are describing each other. That’s the piece that when you get it, it’s like, oh, there it is. But it’s a little tricky to do in a 40-minute podcast. But the thing is, is that in there, there is another kind of integrity. So when I’m seeing abductive shift with groups of people, I don’t guide it. I just make a space for it. And this is actually critical. I don’t ever, ever make any inclination of what I think people should learn or could come out the other end of this thinking, because I feel like that is absolutely not my territory. I can make a space for those connections to happen, but they should be alive. They should be as complex and as unique as every person in that room with infinite possibilities of connecting their ideas and stories and inputs. So it’s very alive. And that living thing is totally unpredictable. At the same time, it’s pretty predictable. Every time I’ve done it, there’s been a shift. And so I just don’t know what the details of that shift are. I don’t get to voice or shape or define or in any way describe that shift. I can only make a space for it. So what people are able to do when they start to move across those contexts is they can see the way in which they are interdependent. And that perception, without any effort, has the second order response of a kind of integrity. It has to do with recognizing not integrity around what’s right or wrong, but integrity to show up and respond in ways that are inclusive of that interdependency, as opposed to just looking at one sort of solution in one context at a time or one trauma in one context at a time. So often trauma gets put into really reductionist terms. And so there’s a kind of a therapeutic and a healing quality to this that is I think what we’re talking about when we say people are longing for this connection, that in that longing what happens is that when you start to see that this thing that is a trauma that you might be carrying is not actually located in any particular context. It’s moving between all of them. And other people are sharing other traumas that are woven between all these different contexts. And suddenly that trauma isn’t as internal. It becomes something that is perceivably contextual and trans-contextual, which is an enormous relief. And when I say it’s warm data, it’s like literally warm. You can literally feel the warmth of that. So it’s interesting to see that, and especially in this moment, which I think is a moment of a need for a completely it’s a need to integrate in another way. Yeah. And so how do we begin to create the conditions for people to integrate together into a way of seeing and responding to this time? I think that’s an excellent question. I’m particularly interested in one aspect of that question that I alluded to or I mentioned earlier, which is I’m interested in what are the conditions that afford insight for people and how those interact with what are the conditions that afford insight between people and how. And then there’s kind of a third thing. What is the optimal relationship between the individual insight and the collective insight? And that’s something I’m trying to get a deeper understanding of. I think that the fact that people are enacting and literally moving and they’re embodying the interdependence, I think that is probably playing a very significant role in the practice because of, you know, you’re triggering the cerebellum, you’re getting people to literally reorient their visual processing, what their foregrounding and backgrounding is literally shifting. We know that those kinds of processes trigger individual insight. And then if they’re and if that’s an insight that also, you know, gets them to realize the interdependence, then I can see how the groups would also restructure collectively so that various things are again being facilitated. It’s interesting about this, maybe I can form a question around that bridge that I just made, because when you look within individual cognition, inducing criticality, you have to introduce some significant amount of disruption. Like if you’re, if somebody’s trying to solve an insight problem on a computer screen, you put some static or some noise in it, you put a bit of entropy in it, or you allow or you moderately distract them, not too distracted, so they leave the problem, but enough that they’ll sort of, you know, they get, you break up the stability and that criticality actually affords the restructuring, like the way a sandpile will self-organize and then it avalanches and that affords a new structure. So I’m wondering if if you see that playing a role within the warm beta, that there’s, you know, there’s, is there a presence of disruptive strategies sort of being played with, you know, in contrast, but interdependently with constructive strategies? You’re seeing the criticality and the construction are sort of mutually interpenetrating. Is that happening? Absolutely, because when people go into, so if you get up from one context and you walk over to another one, noise induction, yeah, yeah, right, you have to actually, you know, come into that. So there’s a lot of what’s happening, who’s here, there’s a whole process of paying attention in ways that are all sorts of non-verbal attention. And then in engaging in that conversation and bringing with you this conversation that just came on board and maybe the one before that, because it’s usually the third context that you start to get the pop. Yeah, that makes sense to me. And it’s also being in a room where there are all those contexts. So you’re in a room where there is this meta. Right. And that really, people can hear it in the background to some degree, right? And so that you don’t get to forget that you’re in this meta, which is really interesting. It actually, it really decreases the possibility for polarization, which is really, really interesting, especially in these times where there’s been so much polarization that usually we go traveling down a rabbit hole because we feel like there’s some context someone’s not seeing. But if it’s in the room and it’s just over there, you can just go over there. It’s not forgotten. So people are less prone to positioning. So there’s that. And that is, I guess you could call that a disruptor, but it’s a gentle one. Yeah. That’s what I mean. You want mild disruption. You don’t want to break the system. Right. You’ve got to perturb it because if you don’t perturb it enough, it’ll get into a local minima. It’ll stabilize prematurely. And then people can often not explore the space of possibilities as deeply as is probably needed. And the other thing is that I think that you talked about topics. Yeah. And one of the things that is really important is to not have topics where people have scripts. So that’s an interesting question. How do you do that? Because a lot of the things you brought up as examples struck me as one which people often have pretty firm opinions that have a lot of cultural baggage attached to them, like health, for example. Like people have lots of opinions about health, of course now even more so. And there’s all this cultural valoration of health. Hahn says that health has become our god in some ways. It’s the thing that justifies everything else we do. So what does that mean? That’s very provocative, what you just said. How would you bring up like that? Let’s do that one because it’s actually relevant to how would you bring up health and keep it off script? Like how does that work? Well, you might bring up family. Okay. If I was working with a bunch of doctors, I might bring use family and have health be one of the contexts. I see. I see. I see. So that you get this, right, you get it off center so that you can actually reorient and read that the abductive processes move in other ways. Oh, that’s very good. That’s very good. Yeah, because decentering strategies also are things found within individual cognition and insight. So it’s interesting that mirroring. That’s really cool. I had one recently and this, I think, Tim, this really is important with your question around authenticity because this is kind of critical is how to get off of these scripts. And the scripts have meaning and have a set of signaling and receiving possibilities within relationships. If you are in a set of different relationships, those signaling don’t go anywhere. You can still signal, but they just kind of dud. So it’s something to get off context to if you have a bunch of doctors talking about media, for example, and family, and suddenly there’s all kinds of health stuff that is implicit in there. And it connects in, but it isn’t what you’re seeing. And so you can’t just go in there and it connects in, but it isn’t what they’re saying. So it’s this thing of not going for the direct corrective, which is going to generate all sorts of reductionists scripted, maybe. I don’t know how that connects to authenticity, but I know that when people don’t know what they’re going to say and they haven’t said that thing before and they weren’t considering the thing that was going to come from the person that just said a thing, that they enter into a discourse in another way. They enter into a mutual learning in a way that surprises even them. But I think that’s an excellent connection to authenticity, Nora. I mean, what you’re saying is there’s a deep connection between getting off script and what we’re trying to do here, I mean, right, is in this discussion about authenticity is we’re trying to get, I mean, there’s kind of a meta level. We’re trying to get off script about authenticity. And it’s now that, well, part of what this attempt to reformulate authenticity is centering on is the very capacity and ability to get off script. But do it, like you said, you have to do it in this, you have to do it in a discerning way. You have to pick, you have to get it, like if it’s health and you go off center because you actually talk about family, you wouldn’t talk about like elephants, for example, right? It’s about, you’ve got to, like, so there’s finesse in this. I get a sense that there’s finesse in this. If, you know, I’m a Tai Chi player and there’s this sense about, you know, can you pick up on the grain of things and follow the grain and get a sense of how, you know, well, you know, so you’re sparring with somebody, as you said, you know, you don’t just hit them because they’ll just block. But can you get them off center and then there’s possibilities that open up? And so I think, I like what you just said. I like this idea about a connection between, a reconceptualization, perhaps, of authenticity by connecting it to getting people off script in, you know, in a way that shows finesse and affords insight. I think that’s a very, I think that’s very powerfully connected to what we’re talking about with authenticity. Yeah, that all of this rings very true. And there’s some things I can present here that I think are vital. And I suppose to go meta on it, the turn is for me to speak personally. Mm. The reason for that is when we drop into the personal and move towards where we are vulnerable, this has an effect on the setting, the context within which other participants may or may not be willing to go. And so here, why John, you, you reference finesse because of course there are the three of us here, but there are also more than the three of us here, at least potentially. And this is very significant. And this is an obstacle, not an obstacle without an opportunity, but an obstacle we all here face. This notion of off script is something that has had much resonance with me for a long time. I, in fact, set up an event last year. I hired out a theater and the event was called off script. And I attempted to have people come along to that event, but I canceled it because I could not get anyone to come. So the question is, how then do you invite a setting where we really can go off script because the price is high. The price of admission is much higher than the ticket because really if we were to open up again to the significance we are here a part of this moment we are in, in the world, the vulnerability there, the confrontation with death and perhaps worse that is there. The various ways in which we may or may not have been seen with each other in this, on this ride towards that which we perceive as perhaps ending and in suffering, I think all magnifies each other. And so, yes, things are about going off script and they always have been and whether or not we were aware of it, part of us always was, we just lost awareness of it, even as we ran out certain programs and we stuck perhaps programs for the totality. But there are, it seems to me, things we can stand on and ground ourselves on even though that is not the case. So, yes, a fixed ground. There are certain imperatives that we can or cannot accept a covenant, if you like, we can enter into. Of course, all things can be broken but there are consequences to those, to that breaking. And so, as we are here attempting to understand what is affordant of authenticity and what is affordant of or the present thing of authenticity in relationship as amenable to a reciprocal opening and this abductive process of understanding. One thing I think can be put forward is that a commitment to be here now together, at least for a certain duration, knowing that cutting the duration itself is already limiting the context if we take that to be truly what we are doing. So, what does it mean to then truly commit to being here with each other and just how much are we able to integrate through that process even as someone drops into the space with the context shifting and psyche unsettling and chaos inducing fluxes, apparitions of the vulnerability of our existential predicament both now and perhaps also eternally. So, the commitment to really step in is not a flippant one and this, I suppose, is not a bad place for me to stop this and see if this has landed. It strikes me that what you are talking about is a kind of rigor and that it is a rigor that I have so much affection for because it is a rigor for perceiving and looking for maybe with that wonder that you were speaking of earlier, John. Interdependency is a lot of differences, a lot of vitalities, a lot of interactions, a lot of relational messiness and it is not to be underestimated the kind of the kind of multi-sensory perception that it takes to pay attention in that way. And so, it is not as if you can just do complexity as an intellectual game. If you don’t allow that complexity to be perceived through your own complexity, that is not just in words or jargons or maps but also in stories and music and unspoken sensed things and all kinds of other information that is there, you need all of it. If you don’t have that integrity or that authenticity, it is a kind of alertness in the rigor. And so, I guess that is what I am kind of hearing you say right off the bat. What do you think, John? What are you hearing? Well, I am hearing something similar to that and overlaps with it and I am hearing the commitment and I like the notion of rigor. I am hearing the commitment to and I like the notion of rigor. I am hearing that, Nora, that you talk about things, I use language of kinds of knowing that are not propositional. There is procedural knowing and perspectival and participatory and I think what you are saying is the knowing, and I am using knowing not knowledge deliberately, knowing of complexity is something we only know within and through our own complexity. It is a participatory knowing, it is not just a referential knowing and I think that is really important. And so, I am hearing that the commitment therefore is a kind of comprehensive commitment to, I like this notion of rigor about trying to bring, well, let me try it this way. What I heard when I heard that rigor and that you took it to those deep levels in response to Tim is like I said, I am hearing virtue. I am hearing that where virtue does not mean the possession of a rule, we reduced virtue, which originally meant a person whole capacity and power for dealing with the messy ill-defined situations of life and then we reduced it to the possessions of sets of rules and sort of contient procedures. I think that is why the Aristotelian model of the virtue is something that is always found between different kinds of vices, vices of defect and vices of excess. And so, virtue is more like a virtual engine, it is what constantly steers you between the vicissitudes of a self-organizing process so you do not fall out of it. And that is what I hear Tim saying is needed, that people come into these, the intention to commit is necessary but nowhere sufficient for being able to commit. You need particular skills and virtues in order to commit in the way we are talking about here. Now, I do not want to build a catch-22 in here. I think the practice that Nora is talking about is a way in which people can start to cultivate these virtues, but I think to meet the normative demand that Tim is talking about, I think you need to talk about virtue at some point, that these practices should result in people carrying away in their person, not beliefs, but carrying away skills and virtues that transfer into multiple contexts in your life. And I think the meta-virtue of course is wisdom. And so, that is what I think is the normativity that I heard you pointing towards, Tim. And I think when you can, when people can realize, and I mean that in both senses of the word, come to awareness and make real, when people can realize that these practices are affording, deeply affording of the cultivation of connectedness and the virtues that would properly house that and guide it. I think that is deeply motivating to people. I think that is deeply motivating to people. I think that goes back towards giving them a taste, but a taste of the good, if you will allow me a platonic word. And you know what, Nora was talking about sounded so similar to me to what Iris Murdoch talks about, when she talks about the the necessity for paying for a particular kind of complex attention. And it is called the sovereignty of the good for a reason. She allies that capacity with the ability to orient towards the good, to love the good, to be tempted by the good. And I think when people get a taste for this, Tim, that could really afford the kind of commitment that you are talking about. That is what I hear. Yes. Yes. Can I ask how, I just think it appropriate here to just check in and to be conscious of everyone’s time. What are we looking at over the next few minutes here? I had us down to 5.30. So I’m coming up on sort of a hard time soon. I don’t want, I mean, I don’t want to be presumptive and I don’t want to corner Nora in any way or you, Tim, but I’m happy to come back and to have another discussion. I found this one incredibly rich and you could tell at times it was really getting me quite impassioned in the good sense of the word. Me too. It’s been so nice to meet you. So I love this. Yeah. Long overdue. What took us so long? The world intervenes in our lives in ways, right? That’s just, I think that’s how it’s happened. So, I mean, I’m pretty much going to have to leave soon, Tim, but I, again, I’m not making a demand on anybody. I’m just speaking for myself. I am committing, if it is desired, to do one of these again. I enjoyed this thoroughly. I think it’s fruitful and valuable and pertinent given where we’re at right now. And so, you know, and it doesn’t have to be a long time from now. If schedules permit and people are willing and wanting, you know, a few weeks from now, I’m happy to do this again and pick up on these threads and keep going. So I’m just saying that right here, right now as a way of expressing my gratitude by making a commitment. Yes. I second that. So, yeah, I’d be honored. Well, thank you so much. And as usual for me with so much, with so much more to say and in the acceptance that the time is not now. I will thank you so much for joining me. This was for me an opportunity and intention to bring together two people that I find to be, um, to possess no shortage of beauty and wisdom. Well, thank you. Thank you for bringing us together. It’s always a pleasure to see you, Tim. And it’s been a great pleasure meeting and getting into dialogue with you, Nora. And I look forward to doing it again. I do too, John. And thank you so much, Tim. 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