https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=lvEQdiH1HLQ
Welcome everyone to another voices with Reveki. This is a really wonderful episode for me. We’ve got another episode with Terry Dentry, who an ongoing project around the book. And it’s wonderful to be here again with you, Terry. And then somebody I haven’t talked to for a bit, but he was there. I think this is the right way to put it with me at the beginning. And we did some early conversations at the very beginning of my arc, and Tim Adelan. And it’s great to have him here again. His voice and his channel, VoiceCraft, highly recommend his channel, by the way, highly recommend it. But having his voice here is very welcome. So just welcome to both you. I’m going to turn things immediately over to Terry, and she’s going to sort of frame things for us. And then we’ll get into a conversation. Thanks, John. And welcome to you. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation for quite a while as well. Obviously, knowing you both for quite some time now and knowing your history and the fact that the two of you have actually really helped me form a lot of the processes that I’ve been going through these last 12 months, and especially in the way that this book is coming together. You’ve both been very, very influential in the way that that’s happened. So I want to start there. I want to just take us back to a little bit of that history and what the book is about, the bookie we are calling Seeing More at this time. John’s convinced me that’s the right title, so we go on with that. And it started really with my own research work. So I was working with refugee asylum seekers who had chronic pain and symptoms of PTSD and bringing them together with practitioners from two modalities. So from physical modality of physiotherapists and counsellors. So working from the physical and emotional health side with those patients at the same time, in the same room at the same time. And that is a form of interprofessional practice and it is joint therapeutic care. And during that process, and it was a long process, it wasn’t an overnight process, it was an 18 month, two year process for many of those patients, as it is for many people with that kind of symptomology. Many of them, about half of them actually, came to the other side of that process extremely well. They actually came through, they took from the joint sessions with the practitioners, they took on a new way of seeing what we were terming at the time the mind body connection. And they were understanding a change in the way that they felt about how that was for them. And they definitely, they were telling me, and didn’t use afterwards, how they related differently now towards their body and their mind and how that they interacted with the chronic pain that they were feeling. And at the time, that was actually my PhD and I wrote that up and I got to the end of that process and I didn’t really know why it was happening for them. The other thing that was happening for them was that not only were they making breakthroughs in their chronic pain management, they were also making breakthroughs in their own health literacy and in their sense of self. So they quite, many of them were saying to me that they were feeling the ability to make decisions for themselves for the first time, or the ability to take control of their lives for the first time. So it’s more than just a chronic pain component that was changing for them, it was a whole sense of self that was changing for them. And it was when I found your work, John, that it really helped me to think about what might be happening for these people and how this journey might be happening for them. It was definitely transformational and it was definitely a different type of way of them taking in information. So we’ve come to turn that the synoptic integration that they were being able to have perception of the different types of information coming to them from the physical and emotional sides of the practitioners helping in therapy. But they were also, they were able to take that in themselves and it was something that they were able to do. It was definitely insight. They definitely had a turning point and a change which we can point to and say this is when they had a moment of insight. And we can definitely see that that was a nexus of insights. And John, you and I have written two papers on this together, which has been wonderful. And we have looked at it as being a nurturing of wisdom for those people because of that nexus of insight going forward. So Tim and I have had several conversations around this and I’ve been talking to many people in Voicecraft around how this happens for people and what happens when this process does happen because it’s not isolated and it doesn’t just happen in therapy, but it does happen a lot in these kind of therapeutical arrangements. So I was just wondering, Tim, I’m going to throw it to you to say what really comes alive for you when we do talk about these types of transformations for people, especially around chronic pain. Yeah, thanks, Terry. Nice to be here with you both. What’s here for me most presciently now is the challenge of sharing pain with each other at all. It’s how difficult it is to actually show up in that regard, to be seen as struggling, perhaps to be seen as vulnerable. And not so much being seen as vulnerable, yes, but also the reality of what it means to be vulnerable in terms of how implicitly one might be worried that one would be viewed, that one would be seen. Is there in fact a strong enough commitment to see more together, to use that title, that’s present for us to enter that process and have it be worthwhile? We can imagine many contexts in which I present something vulnerably that signals to someone quite rightly, I don’t know if I’ve got that energetic exchange in me to be with that. That feels like it’s three years of intense interpersonal work and I’m already married or something like this, right? And I’ve certainly recognized that the tremendous, the need for relationality in that regard, the profound importance of to extend that to a broader level community to be embedded then in social process. There’s just so much to that. And so I think in a number of the conversations we’ve had, I’ve tended to push slightly into the direction of the great challenges that at least I’ve experienced and I’m perceiving in the context of the kind of relational I could say network community. Ultimately, we’re talking about a culture and part of this book really is wanting presumably to address things at the level of cultural transformation. In that sense, we’re seeing more together. We’re not just seeing through one person’s eyes. We’re helping each other to see more. And so yeah, the various ways that interpersonal process, social dynamics, subtly influence our welcomeness and our fittedness to actually enter that process and be well met in it. Somewhere in that direction is where I would orient. There’s so many things here. Well, I’ll do an initial chiming in. So I wanted to pick up on one theme that Terry said, which I think then does lead into some of the concerns that Tim is expressing. First of all, there’s this idea of recovery of agency, not just a restoration to normalcy. And I’m using recovery here in the way that Tolkien talks about fantasy literature, affording a recovery where we go to the fantastic world. We put on a different pair of glasses, almost like an anthropologist in a different country, a different culture, and we come back and with those new glasses, we’re able to see our culture differently. We recover it. Or the way Zen talks about, before I did Zen, mountains were mountains and rivers were rivers. While I was doing Zen, mountains weren’t mountains and rivers weren’t rivers. And then after Zen, mountains were mountains and rivers were rivers. That’s the sense of recovery. There’s this ontological sense of fundamental disclosure and being differently with things. And so I picked that theme up, Terry, and what you were saying that these people, like the way they’re talking about, they were making decisions for themselves. Obviously, they’ve made decisions or they couldn’t have even shown up to the clinic. So they’re trying to articulate, I think, something different. They’re trying to talk about something like this recovery in that sense of agency. And I think that’s the way that we’re trying to do it. And I think that goes again to some of the larger concerns that the book is trying to express, which is we’re trying to get away from some of the fundamental ways in which agency is being implicitly understood or misunderstood in regular medical practice. And that part of what we’re trying to do is restore a proper appreciation of agency. And then that leads into, I think, Tim’s point, which is, I think, a point that is becoming very salient for me right now, as I do a very deep dive into Hegel, which is the connections, profound connections between agency and relationality. The we that becomes I that becomes we, which is a quote from Hegel, which is something that we’re actually trying to really explore and use some of the cog side language, the way in which the distributed cognition takes shape, it goes into restore the agency of that person in this way of recovery, and then they are able to enter in and then they’re able to enter in and show up relationally. But then Tim is right, that requires a receptivity to that enhanced relationality from everyone involved. And that, of course, is a cultural change. And that points towards something very deep. And of course, we’re touching upon that in the culture to we’re trying to push up against some very powerful notions of, you know, of what a person is and things like that, that we’re talking about in the book, and this idea about trying to understand how much how much the distributed cognition is woven into the individual person, and how much our current medical practice with its hard and complicated medical practice with its hard and complete, so called complete divide between the subjective and objective domains, actually makes that relationality. It alienates it as a possibility for actually being acknowledged and appreciated. It of course has to be there because of the way human beings are actually working, but it can’t be drawn into awareness, it can’t be brought into effective acknowledgement, and therefore it can’t help afford the health process, if we mean by that the recovery of agency. And so this is, I’m just responding to what I got from you, Terry, and what I got from you, Tim, and how those are sort of landing for me, and how this book is, you know, this book is, and I mean this in a good way, this book is, you know, it’s a profound cultural critique going on in a very important way. And so that’s my initial chiming in, just to maybe get some music going so we can jazz with it a bit. Yeah, would you like to respond to that, Terry? Yeah, I think it requires, it is a very deep thought process, and I think that, John, I can hear the journey that you and I are on as this deepens the way that we’re thinking about this. I came to you with one thing that I was looking for an answer for, and I think that we’ve touched on a much bigger component, and I think that that’s something that, and we have talked about this before, that it’s not only the patient who is needing or going through this transformational process, but it’s also the practitioners when we’re talking about health. And it’s, that’s where you’re talking about it, it’s a wider cultural issue that we are touching on because it’s all, it’s the fact that they, that patients have chronic pain in the first place is already a systemic issue that is something that they’re carrying with them, and their lack of agency is something they’re already coming to from their entire history. There’s something in there that’s been there right from the very start, which of course culture starts from the day that you’re born. So this is a long, this is not something about this immediate moment of chronic pain requiring a healing process. This is a worldview issue that is happening to all of us from the very start all the way through where it is, and we, some of us are responding to this worldview with things like chronic pain and emotional pain, just depression, anxiety, are very much part of this process. This is a response to this culture that we are moving in and working in, and we are trying to find a relation with each other within that, that we’re already part of. And when we have this, so when I just take it back again, because I’m trying to contain it down, because I know we can go so many directions, we contain it down to the moment that the patients are working with two practitioners from physical and emotional modalities that they wouldn’t normally talk to together. Even the practitioners wouldn’t normally speak to each other in this way. And then the patient is there as well and hearing this from two different people. I know there’s very, we had a wonderful conversation with Cam some time ago, who is a very holistic practitioner who brings these sensibilities with him about both physical and emotional pain when he does talk to his patients. But in this situation, it wasn’t people, it wasn’t practitioners who are used to speaking about in holistic ways with their patients. It was ones who, as we do, we train our practitioners to be very isolated and contained in the way that they do work with patients. They work with them in a way that they maintain within their scope of practice, and that we very much compartmentalise this in health, as we do compartmentalise many things that we work with in our everyday. And we think that it’s a great thing to compartmentalise these things, that we keep this separate from that thing. We don’t talk about our personal life to our professional life. We don’t take things from here to there. And we do build these barriers up everywhere we go to make sure that we stay within these compartments. But I think that, in this sense, the pain, chronic pain or emotional pain, is a reaction to this compartmentalisation that’s coming from the worldview way that we are reacting and building our culture. And I guess that this problem is getting wider, and we’re also trying to narrow it down to what’s actually happening. Tim, if I might ask just a quick amplification question from Terry. So Terry, we’ve talked about this before, and I just want to give you the opportunity to reflect upon it. And one of the ways your work sort of did this to me when we were together, is I had that moment where you made this argument about how this pain is literally embodying the meaning crisis in people. And I was like, I’d like this, that, you know. And I mean, you’d already sold me on working with you, but that was like, for me, that was like, oh, OK, we’re going to do this. And I think that goes to what we’re speaking to here. I just wanted to give you, obviously, we’re not going to drain this topic dry, but I just wanted to bring that in, in connection with what you just said. Yeah, so I think that, and we are together, we’re talking to individuals about this process that they are going through. And Tim knows Nate as well. So we had a conversation with Nate the other day, too, about this individual process and my own individual journey. And I think that we’ve all got a part of this journey with us. But there is a thing that I brought to your attention called the symptom imperative, which is a component of pain that goes with us through our life and cycles through and expresses itself in different ways at different times in our lives. But many people tell me this experience that they might at some point have severe IBS and at another point in time, they’ve got severe chronic pain in the shoulder pain. And then another point in their life, they’ve got severe migraine headaches. And another point in their life, they might be diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome. They’re reacting, their body is reacting to the things around them. Each one appears to them as a symptom that needs to be healed in itself. And they often go through a process of addressing that one particular thing that they have. And then I need to find that it’s only healing the surface and then something else is resurfacing for them, not very far down the track. And I think Tim actually put me onto the work of Gabriel Mate, who talks about this quite a lot in the sense of small T trauma and large T trauma. So the small T traumas that we carry with us from childhood and mixing those with the culture that we’re working in, this is of course alluding to the buildup of the symptoms being part of the meaning process that your work points to, John. And that this is something that is, yeah, each of us has in a different degree. We are all part of this particular work. We all have many of these narratives that we carry with us. We adopt the narratives of those around us and the people that you are around and the people you are vulnerable with are the ones that you adopt the narratives that are around those people. And I think that that is part of this process of also finding a new way to open up when we talk about the… Going back again then to my patients and the way that they had a particular turning point, a particular moment that we could almost point to in therapy that said this is a moment of turning when they had an insight and things changed for them and they built a new narrative from that point onwards, not just about how their pain was reacting but about how they were relating to others in their local, in their family, in how they’re relating to friends and how they were relating to themselves and their sense of self change from that turning point onwards. And it was that moment of them opening up to this thought process that maybe their current beliefs were not working well for them. Maybe there was something else that they needed to consider. And I think that that’s what we’re trying to touch on, that turning point cultivating and nurturing the ability for people to have the opportunity for those turning points. I don’t think we can tell people what they need to do or say because everyone is very different and their lives are very different and the narratives they carry are different. But it’s more a case of helping people and nurturing and cultivating the ability to see those turning points and have the opportunity to have those insights at times when they need them. And I can see that Tim’s got, I think that it’s opened up a few things for Tim and I absolutely really would love to know the sorts of things that you reflect on, where your mind goes when we talk about this. Well, I think I want to zoom out slightly again and trust you guys to bring it back to the particular point of focus you have. There’s a few themes and notions that seem important here. Let me try and touch on a few of the figures mentioned of Gabor Mate, also one Mr. John Vivekhi in terms of the meaning crisis and some of the core argument that’s present in that, that I feel is relevant here. There’s also elements of what some people refer to as the meta crisis and I know John has had dialogues in relation there. And then perhaps as well to presence the figure of Jordan Peterson in relation with Gabor Mate, which I think is very interesting. These are perhaps in terms of most popularly known, these might be the most two quantitatively known, you know, psychologists, physicians in Canada. We might be with number three at the moment, but Gabor and Jordan have in many respects, in my opinion, when people hear of Jordan Peterson, if they were to do a bit of an over reduction, they think of responsibility, right? Take responsibility in relation to, and by taking responsibility, you’ll realize more meaning in life. Now there’s much more that we perhaps ought to say about this, but nevertheless. And in the case of Gabor Mate, you have rather than responsibility, one word, he likes to emphasize the response ability, the ability to respond. And we could also talk about that in terms of the way you outlined recovery before John, we’re talking about what are the kind of constitutive requirements for agency, but we really want to think about agency in the context of culture and nature. We want to think, you know, and if we, obviously John and I have had some conversations with Forrest Landry, he’ll think about choice in relationship to change and causation. So we’re not talking about some free dangling, just agent out there. Obviously it’s a ridiculous notion, but we speak about agency in the context of embedding, in the context of participation. And so a frame that I have, that I, when people ask me questions about, well, what is, not necessarily what you’re doing, but if they’re wanting to understand the meta crisis, or if they’re wanting to understand the meaning crisis, I could stand there and sort of recall elements of John, your lectures. I can also put things into words that seem to be helpful for me for drawing together a lot of these things. So I think in terms of education, contribution and belonging. If we think about the belonging piece, and look, and if we think about agency, you can’t really have agency if there’s not also the learning enabling of effective choices, but you might also identify that with the contribution aspect, right? And making choices that are influencing to some degree, and captaining the ship. But in the context of belonging, one way to, I mean, there’s many, obviously many ways, everybody’s, can understand that and feel into it in their own, in their own way. But if we recall the meaning crisis, and we think about arguments you’ve made, John, to do with domicide, and to do with upheaval of, you talk about one world into two worlds, there’s many different ways you can tell a historical story of the changes and permutations and fracturings in our sense of what the norms are, you know, speak about the normative and the narrative and the nomological. And so, but to tie all that together, even if we think about what it is to cultivate moments of possibility for seeing more, in that sense of spark, right? How can that spark realistically, well, we could, many ways it can realistically, but if we were to zoom in on how that spark actually kindles into the contribution to the fire of belonging, right, in which metaphorically multiple people are sitting around in the context of culture, now people have got to be gathering the sticks and all of that to bring it says many aspects and you can just zoom out again and again, it turns out to have this fire is actually, you know, a complex achievement for us to be sitting around that and not just burning everything down. And so it’s zooming in on that piece, it’s, it’s, it’s also the movement towards integration in that regard. There’s the ability to respond and then what is it we’re taking responsibility for? I think this speaks down, I think this must incorporate worldview, common value, what it is to trust and cultivate the sense of trust that actually we can open into, but it’s even before we open into it, what is beneath the eyes, what is beneath the eyes in that sense of, is it, am I, are we, are we kind of protecting each other enough to stay in communication? What is, what’s underlying our sense of who we are actually to bring it back to the, to the we piece. So that’s what I would point back towards again. And it speaks to criticisms I have of therapy in general as a cultural phenomenon, not as a beautiful possibility for humans to treat each other well. And it’s, it’s that how can we think about therapy without also taking into great consideration what therapy and healing are in service of, what are we in service of together? That’s where I would move it. That’s really rich. And I want to leave to sort of reply a little bit in depth to that because I think that’s very powerful. So first of all, I’m going to initially talk about what might seem a little bit associationally and then I’ll draw it all together. So one point you, you talked about, you know, the campfire and the spark and you talked about not only being responsible, but making it able to respond. And, and then, and then of course, Terry’s talking about this metanoia, this turning in that people where it’s a fundamental reorientation and it almost has a religious feel to it because they’re taking up a new identity within a new worldview. And this reminds me of Plato and what I call Plato’s pivot problem is what actually ultimately turns people towards the good. And then that, that of course is behind what Tim is asking. Like we’re turning people and there’s two questions I’m hearing. And if I’m projecting Tim, you can of course intervene. I’m hearing what actually turns them. And that’s bound up with the question, are we turning them to the good? Because if you’re turning someone, there’s an implicit normativity in there. And then what is that that we’re turning them towards? And of course, Plato has the metaphor of the sun. And for me, and then this goes to your putting together of Jordan and I’ll tell you, this is also for me the pivot on which Plato is turning or the point on which the pivot point is to be found. Drew Highland’s proposal that what we are called to do is to hold together, Plato is getting us to hold together our profound finitude and our capacity for transcendence. And in so far as we are finite, we are all subject, and I use that word strongly, we are all subject to fate together. We are biological animals contingently flung onto a planet in space and time, and we are all subject to that fate together. And we have to exercise that which makes us capable of responding, as Tim put it very beautifully. But we are also not just that we are, and this is Jordan Peterson, we are called to responsibility, we have a capacity for transcendence, we are called to virtue. We are not just animals subject to fate, we are persons caught up in the making of history. And that is also something we have to recognize. And I think the right and the left, when they’re at their best, represent these two. The left represents that we need to always be open to compassion because we’re always subject to fate. And the right is, but we are always also called to virtue and to responsibility. And Plato is saying you have to hold the two together, because if you have the finite without the transcendence, people fall into despair. And I think a lot of the people in the chronic pain situation are in that despair, they are overwhelmed by their finitude. But we can’t just simply address that. We have to give them the opposite, right, which is people also have to hold on to their transcendence. They have to hold on to the fact that we’re calling them to, and this is what Tim I think was alluding to with, what is this for? Like, what’s the normativity of this? We’re turning them, but what are we turning them to? And I think that is, right, that’s also missing. This is part of what’s called the pathological framework of medicine that we’re restoring. Freud’s famous statement that we’re returning people to their normal state of unhappiness, rather than we’re not affording people the possibility of genuine self-transcendence. Now, of course, transcendence, and this is part of my criticism of my friend Jordan, transcendence without finitude gives you hubris. And of course, that’s also implicit in the medical formation because we have often a medical profession that comes in with an air of transcendence, that they are from a higher perspective, a higher order than the patients. And there’s hubris in that, tremendous hubris. And we know that many of the horror stories that we hear about the medical profession, well-documented ones, I’m not talking about any conspiracy theories, I’m talking about well-documented horrors, are very often driven by exactly this hubris. So the failure to properly hold finitude and transcendence together is, I think, part of what we’re wrestling with. And then I would say to you, Tim, that that is where we can find an answer to that, what calls us in the metanoia, we’re calling people to a profound recovery of their humanity, where that humanity means that tonas, that creative holding together of finitude or transcendence. And we need an orientation to health that addresses that tonas properly and proportionally. That’s how I would reply to what you’re proposing. Yeah, I get that. And I think that’s right. I think that’s well said. I still think that there’s a, you know, in my experience of meeting many people in that spirit, over many years, in the context of, you know, I mean, I’m 32 now, it’s fair to say, such as it is, my career has been based on this. My career has been based on how to actually, like, to the degree of talking about career, and I’ve only actually started using that word in the last like couple weeks. But maybe like, I don’t know, don’t really know what one is, but maybe like a career in this case is some sort of occupation or vocation that, you know, is involved in your functional contribution in society that also gives you an opportunity to eat and drink at the end of the day, right? I don’t know. But to the degree that I’ve been doing much of anything, one angle on it, I just say one angle is something like this. And what I notice is that, like, I’m kind of interested in the what happens then, I’m very interested in in the structural dynamics of how this very process, for instance, formulates and unfolds in the context of what someone like Alexander Bard would call attentionalism, just to name which at a broad level, I’m just going to reference as naming what it’s like for civilization to integrate the digital. There’s perhaps a little bit more to it. It’s not necessarily a notion that I am clear enough on or necessarily in agreement enough about in this formulation to offer it here is, you know, is exactly how I see this. But certainly, if we think about the pressures and patterns that people feel subjected to in order to continue to subsist, we can just say economically as well, part of what Bard’s pointing to is in attentionalism is something which is a meaningful paradigmatic shift post capitalism, that there’s something about capitalism which enables attentionalism in a particular way. I’m a bit blurry about it, to be honest, because I see the critical role that capital is playing in the possibility to garner attention in a number of ways because of how bound up the vast majority of us are in the economic patterns of our own sustainability. And so, and look, and from another perspective, this becomes a religious question. It becomes a question of formation in that regard. And, you know, it’s, you know, it’s, it’s, and this is where this is exactly at that point, at which now all of a sudden, there’s an interesting challenge, like the prospect for creating the right shared expression as artifact, like, if we just share this across multiple membranes, this is now that part that begins to where private and public and our shared views of those, there’s a dialogue to be had around that and a feeling through. If we take the example of fires, you know, it’s something like, well, maybe we need that kind of fuel for that sort of fire, but definitely not here. That’s not an appropriate place for that fire. And so religiously, and so religion and politics and personas, basically, partly what we’re speaking about here is a little bit of an opening into the relationship with the transpersonal. Now, obviously, people can bake in different metaphysics around here. I happen to really appreciate the, that way of, that way of talking, but this relationship between finitude and transcendence, absolutely important. But then there we are back into the world of masks, back into the world of allegiances to particular contexts that are doing functional things in the world that really matter for keeping the lights on and certainly matter to the worldviews people have in terms of how they need to generate the resources to look after their kids. Even if the very product of, for instance, those companies might be to the detriment of the long term vitality of their children. And so it’s, yeah, it’s what I could stop there. There’s a piece where I could probably make a little bit more clear that the challenge of, like I’m very, it’s, there’s on the one hand, this like utterly being for like an in like mutual dedication to that, that we can say the spark or that which sort of animates the cultivating soul or in that sense to before the unique insolvent to use a zack stein term of everyone on the way. And then there’s the reality of the hills people choose to die on the particular religions, you know, momentums they attached to in the world, which, and you know, the most effective of our religions, perhaps the most vital of our religion, so that you could look at that in a couple ways, date back many hundreds and thousands of years, they’ve got quite a lot in the way of resources, they’ve got arrangements with governments, right, they have tax breaks, people are used to gathering there, there’s all this social architecture that is extremely valid to consider in the context of how one might want to go about understanding how to democratise and support the democratisation of people helping each other see. And we can think about it in terms of practitioners in the medical system, this is one place in which people can help each other see, ideally, we would want to have such relationships with our families, with our friends, as a self making, a mutually self making is what dialogue is, right? That’s like that for me, that’s always been the promise of dialogue, as I’ve understood it, if in some way I could meet you in that sharing that sharing that dedication, because in that there is something, there is a mode of participation that it’s kind of like of the essence of tending to common value, something like this. So, but where that comes into, where that comes into the kind of conditions enabling of more entrenched formations, more entrenched personas, which might be justified, in a sense, we’ve got to see how this plays out over 400 years, because maybe the educational programme, you know, we at least need to, you know, like, we’re talking about things that play out over centuries. And I do believe it’s important people in that sense, dedicate themselves to the beautiful possibility that they won’t necessarily get to see the full incarnation of, right? Or as if such a thing were possible in that sense. And yet, I don’t think in general as a culture, and as I would put this to the broader context, I remember mentioning this to you once, John, in the context with Forest over Message, an effort like that, I wasn’t able to formulate it very well, but I think in and amongst all of this, these different religious affiliations, different orientations for action among collectives, there has to be as much care for how to support a more shamanic, trans-membranic context for participation, for interaction, where more of the ism that I’ve committed to, and maybe my ism is more right than your ism, right? This is what you will have people ultimately believe in the context of Christianity. I can’t see it another way. It’s like, well, I am Christian rather than Muslim. And at some point, there’s a line. And it’s a line I’m choosing to step over, and that’s the tree I’m going to sleep underneath and shut my eyes for the last time. Now, maybe one’s more right than the other, and that’s not the most nuanced frame we could take in relation to that. But I do think there has to be cultural support from both market and state to support what would be the more shamanic, trans-membranic possibility for meeting for the purpose of kindling and cultivating that commons resource of the possibility for communication that is critically trans lineage. I don’t see how any of this makes sense otherwise, because it just comes down to, well, that’s a very nice opening you’ve had, but are we still on the same team? You’re sleeping under my church. You’re going to allow to be advanced in the hierarchy of this. How does sexual process work in relation to that? There’s just so many other social dynamics that are relevant to consider here. And I think we need a space. Anyway, I’ll stop there. But yeah. Well, I want to respond to, and then I think I’ll pause. And after that, I’ll let Terry join in. So I’m in very, I think, very significant agreement with you. I want to say, I mean, my next big project, the one that is profoundly calling to me and reaching into my guts and drawing me into a long personal project of transformation and some kind of preparation for the pilgrimage of the philosophical Silk Road project is trying to afford exactly what you’re talking about. They’re trying to set up, you know, what the Silk Road as a whole at least in part was the right, which is a place that people could travel on and maybe bring about a recovery of when they were returned home. I would like it that if people would travel on it, they were could return home and recover in the way we’ve been talking about Christianity and or their Islam. But it also could be that on that road, if there are none, they might discover a home. You were talking about domicide earlier that they did not have before. And then everybody contributes to the road and nobody owns the road. And Christianity has this metaphor in it. My friend, Paul Van der Kley pointed out C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity talked about hallway Christianity. Nobody lives in the hallway, but the hallway has to be there so people can move between the rooms and talk to each other. And people are going to return to their rooms, but they need to be able to visit and they need to be able to move in between the rooms in order for it to actually be a viable thing. And this is an extension of my idea about trying to replace the courtroom of debate with the courtyard of the Deologos. The Silk Road is the Deologos at this trans lineage point you were talking about. And that’s very much the case. And for me, I think the project that I’m doing with Terry that is focal here is I think this is the possibility of what has sometimes been called the telling example. What we can do is at a very small scale break across levels of discourse, separate ontologies, separate ways of measuring reality. That’s what we’re doing. And also separate state power statuses between the patient and the practitioners. We can be doing all of this in a way to which we can point to concrete alleviation of suffering and affordance of agency and go look there. That’s the kind of thing we’re talking about. Now, do you admit that exists? That formation exists. Now take that telling example and consider the possibility that we could heal distributed cognition. We could heal across the religions. We could pursue synoptic integration writ large in this very powerful way I’ve been trying to articulate. And so for me, I find there’s deep resonance between what I’m doing with Terry and this and I can’t call it anything but a vocational call. I’m being called to the Silk Road project, the Philosophical Silk Road. It is a profound thing for me. And I don’t want to get into it in detail unless it’s in service of this conversation. But I see these two projects. We could properly relate them together so that we could say, look, here’s a telling example. And I’m using it. It tells you and it stands out. It gives account and demands that you make yourself accountable to it. It’s a telling example. Look, this works here. This formation process works. And here’s a way in which there’s historical precedent in the Bildung movement and in what happened with a kind of neo-Platonism along certain parts of the Silk Road in which Christians and Sufis and Kabbalistic Jews and all of this were and even the the Dantists and Buddhists were all talking to each other in this really mutually formative fashion. And I think the possibility of that is what I would offer in response to what you’ve said. That we could very much, you know, this is again the concern. It’s a right concern, right? Is you don’t want to, again, it’s the finite and the transcendence. You don’t just want the concrete specific example. It has to portend. It has to be symbol on symbolic joining together to something more overarching. But the overarching also needs the concrete to make it, you know, make it palpable to people in their lives in a way that they can appreciate. So I see the joining of these, this is why I’m working with Terry. I see the joining of these two projects as a way of responding to your concern. Now, of course, that’s at a very visionary level. I’m not neglecting that there’s a lot of hard work to be done around specific, more specific nuts and bolts issues you are bringing up. But that would be my initial response to what you put forth. But like I’d say, I’m interested to hear what you have to say, but I’d like to make a space for Terry right now. Thanks, John. I am going to jump in this space. Thank you for giving me a moment because I do want to have the two of you continue this. But I wanted to remind you of what something that I have learned deeply from the conversations I’ve had with the two of you over the last 12, 18 months. And to me, chronic pain is a lens. It’s just a lens to view things through and it’s a very, it’s a common lens. So it’s one of those ones that, as you say, it’s a telling moment, but it’s something that we can all relate to. And I think one of the first thing is that we need to understand how deep chronic pain is, what it actually is. So that’s one of the things that I think I first convinced you of. It’s not something that comes from an external source. It’s something that comes from an internal source. And I think that a lot of it does. And that is something that we need to address. But the other part that has become very real for me in these conversations is our lack of dialogical reasoning in our day-to-day lives. And this is something that’s become quite fundamental to the way that I’ve seen this whole project. And you and I have sort of put together the fact that with dialogical reasoning can come these other components, can come the seeing through narrative bias, can come the ability to have synoptic integration. They only come from the ability to have dialogical reasoning. And we don’t seem to have that in our communications and our daily actions with other people. And if it’s lacking there, then where is it? And it’s definitely lacking in our medical system. This is what’s lacking in our interactions, in our general interactions, not in the wonderful people that we have talked to. But when we go to a GP, we’re not invoking a conversation that involves dialogical reasoning. We are invoking a paternal kind of a conversation that is very hierarchical. And the way that we’ve compartmentalized our health system is something that we expect is the way it’s supposed to happen now. It’s become very much part of our culture. There’s a term that was grated on me for the last 10 years. And the term is teamwork. And I think that particular term, the way it’s used in our current way of working with others has flattened out this way that we think about how we actually interact with others. We’ve termed everything teamwork. We’ve said that we team with our family, we team with our colleagues at work, we do this teamwork interaction with our practitioners. But we don’t understand that it’s not our being. It’s a whole way of being. It’s not just coordinating things and cooperating with others and collaborating with others. When you actually are working with someone, when you actually are entering into a phase of true dialogue with someone, it’s not teamwork. It’s something else. It’s this thing that we have, we’re missing now because we’ve flattened it into, I’m doing teamwork. I’m doing this thing with these people. I’m interacting with people without realizing that you’re interacting in a way that’s missing the actual interaction itself. And I think that’s something in there that I know that is missing. And to me, it was the finding of the dialogical reasoning in the conversation. And this, I think, is where Timma’s point is, is what the promise of dialogus for us is to bring it back. And I think it’s something that can afford turning points and can afford us to see with different lenses when we do actually have true dialogical reasoning with each other and with the world around us. So that’s where I’m at in my thinking at the moment. So first of all, that’s great. I really appreciated that. I think that was very well said. Thank you for watching. This YouTube and podcast series is by the Vervecki Foundation, which in addition to supporting my work, also offers courses, practices, workshops, and other projects dedicated to responding to the meaning crisis. If you would like to support this work, please consider joining our Patreon. You can find the link in the show notes. Let’s turn it back over to you, Tim. I said quite a bit and then Terry said something very quite eloquent and to the point. And what’s coming up for you hearing both of those? Well, to Terry’s point, yeah, I think dialogs good for sure. Do you know what I mean? Like, I’m here for that. It’s critical. I mean, what that brings up for me is the various walls I’ve hit on sort of knowing the importance of that and seeking to further that possibility in the world and showing up all the time, essentially always in a manner that helps to cultivate that possibility in relationship. What I believe I’ve learned actually is that for many people in positions of power, that’s not how they actually want to be addressed to begin with. And that the various membranes of uncertainty that likely have to be crossed in order for there to feel enough protection to be vulnerable and into that process, those start to become of interest. Now, it’s one thing to serendipitously meet someone along the Silk Road. And I think it’s very important that what you’re pointing to is this was something like an emergent structure that developed. In what ways can we recapture it, reimagine it, all of that. And so, big yes for me in terms of how that connected as a possibility for genuine serious response at a concrete level to some of what I was articulating. Certainly, I think notions of pilgrimage are very interesting there. I think other ways that I’ve explored and come to similar fruitions of interest have been in the importance of, well, certainly a fascination with the meaning of song lines in indigenous culture here. Not that I can articulate what those are. I did come across an interesting perspective and what I’m about to say, I’m not even asking it be carried forward exactly. But I’m quite interested in the relationship between song lines and memory palaces in that context of Greek oratory and that kind of thing, John, which I’m sure you would have lectured on at some point. That’s particularly interesting. So if we point towards the more speculative end of where I think a lot of interesting, some interesting conversations to be had is the relation between field effects, memory, and then also concrete instantiations, and then the stewarding of those structures. But there’s so much that has to be said in relation to that to have it seem like even remotely a pragmatic thing to contend. But certainly in how to contend. But certainly in how I’m looking at what makes sense to build is very much in the way of various types of gathering structures along a journey. Let’s just say that. But what are those gathering structures? What are the elements? I’ve heard Bard speak quite a lot about the various types of affordance, let’s say that were present on the Silk Road. There’s a lot there, and I’m no expert on that. Some of where this might link for me a little bit closer to where we’re at in this conversation. Yeah, I do think, you know, I’m very much for the revolution in the interdisciplinary practice among practitioners in the health industry. That seems like a no-brainer. I think part of what’s being leveraged there is a pre-existing social structure for something like a sacred space of care. Hey, I’m off to see people and they’re going to care about me, hopefully. We’ve got this shared thing in common, which in this case is being for the health of whatever’s in issue here. That’s super valuable and I think clearly a worthwhile thing to put resource into reforming. Remember, I’ve walked around at times in the city earlier on in the journey, John, back when we were just beginning to speak, going back to 2018 or so, and walking along and going, my God, there’s 30 bars on this street. These are places people come for social interaction, in principle to talk to each other, at least in part, lots of other activity going on there, of course. But I imagine that for the most meaningful of those occasions, people actually find a way to connect with each other in a manner that isn’t just the same old that they were doing during the day. We know a lot of what fuels that context is. Alcohol, which has a value up to a point in some contexts, even to do it irresponsibly in some context, ideally in a container that itself is wanting to be responsible to the broader effects of that. But nevertheless, in the majority of instances, it’s often profoundly counterproductive to what it is to connect more meaningfully. Nevertheless, it’s the fuel unit of all these interactions. And so I’m thinking, well, this is a place that already exists in the context of how people gather. There’s no reinventing the wheel here. What would it be like? Is there a possibility to shift, to open up the possibility for who would be the practitioners of the bar, as well as those who frequent it, that actually there’s ways of succeeding at what you are perhaps in part trying to do here, which might be connect more deeply. So I think there’s something very valuable about working with the pre-existing structures already existent in our society. And I’m with you on envisaging what might be the sort of longer arc of history, maybe deeper contexts that afford our imagining for what it would be like to move in a trans lineage, transdisciplinary way, and to be vitalized and to vitalize context through that process. I am interested in just the final thing is just like, so much of this consistently shows up for what are the practical problems I’m facing as someone in relationship to this. And there’s just a massive list of those things, like just a ridiculously large list. And I’m sort of not in a position to be looking at, you know, reanimating the Silk Road, or at least pursuing that as a research project. Nor am I in a position where it’s for reasons, let’s call them at least of credentials, able to participate in conversations about what’s valuable for therapists to do, even though that is precisely the kind of conversation I’m involved in having. But what is it to actually build structures without in some sense, the support of institution, essentially at all, that’s nevertheless in address with what it’s like to try and build the possibility for belonging. So in there, that’s kind of where a lot of the, that’s where I live, you know, that’s where I live. I live in that, in the tension of that struggle at every level. Well, first of all, I just want to pause and let that land. And I appreciate what you just said. And I want to appreciate the degree to which you were pouring yourself into that last thing you said. I feel called to be responsive and responsible to that, but I’m a little bit at a loss of what to do, because it’s, I’m hit almost with a sense of a combinatorially explosive problem of all the possible variables and all the possible interactions, and the way they are showing up, perhaps idiosyncratically for you and different for Terry and different for me. And this is not to say they’re not real. I’m not saying that. In fact, I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying the opposite. I’m saying they’re real and it’s difficult for me. I feel my mind almost in a porria struggling to try and come up with a framing that could be appropriately responsive to the degree of affect and the degree of presence you made in that last comment that is calling on me particularly strongly. And I’m not quite capable of making those meet. I can’t get my mental capacity to formulate problems, which are frequently one of my strong points. But I can’t bring that to bear on the issue, not because I should, but because I can’t, right? I just, not because I shouldn’t. I’m struggling is what I’m saying, Tim. I appreciate what you’re saying profoundly. I feel this is only meant as an analogy. Please take it only as an analogy. I feel the same way when I am with somebody who’s at a funeral because they’re experiencing profound loss and grief. Trying to say anything seems inappropriate, but you don’t want to remain merely silent because that could connote neglect or dismissal. And so you try to figure out how can I be properly present without saying something that is just by the very act of speaking inappropriate. And that’s how I feel myself right now landing with what you said. It’s sort of the final thing you were saying. I feel like, yeah, yes. And I just want to sort of, I’m just trying to open my heart to you because I don’t know what else to do when you present that dimension of it. And I’m not trying to cop out, you know, I think you know enough from our conversations and following my work. I’m a person who likes to take on responsibilities. I don’t shirk them. And I get what you’re calling us to, but all I can do is relate to you how it’s landing for me. And I don’t have anything more to offer to that specific problem because I think that problem is that might be something that could only be solved with sort of massively dynamic living distributed cognition that has already got like, I’m worried that it’s almost like a cart before the horse kind of problem or a catch-22 we’re getting into that the very thing we’re talking about is what we might need in order to answer the problem you’re posing, which is a challenge to the very thing we’re talking about. And I hope it’s not a pure catch-22 that there’s a way out. But that’s how I need to reply to you right now, Tim. Yeah, I hear that, John. I appreciate that. Certainly, there’s no, the answer isn’t in the response. It’s in the ongoing being with the tension and being with the process. So, and I think, you know, yeah, it’s one of those things about, there’s so many directions to go and I’m conscious of time. I mean, I will just say that as I express that there, the being with the tension of it is also to be understood in a generative way, meaning tension in some sense. I took it that way, Tim. I did take it that way. Absolutely. And while of course, there are sort of many instances in which I feel, one might certainly feel, that tension might be too much. And in such instances, I think, yes, the heart is the only response. I suppose the mind might be like, well, why don’t you lighten the load a bit? And it’s like, well, yeah, definitely, that makes sense, too. So definitely agreeing to that. But that’s not, you know, that’s certainly not the only way, as I know, you understand that I’m expressing that. There’s also in that, the very thing about the very spice of life and what it is to enable the possibility. It’s interesting, like what is grace in some sense, at least grace involves a right relationship with tension. And there’s many other things we could say about that, obviously. And so, in some sense, meaning is right in that spot, you know. Meaning’s right in that place. I mean, tension also suggestions. There is a volatile immediately which I believe might lead to relationship. But it’s basically buried in relationship that Torrance teaches to all the movements and other diseases and maybe, you know, senselessness with tension makes people of this and just to offer something that would seem to make sense to me in the context of the possibility for better therapy and transdisciplinary therapy. It’s what type of structures, what types of funding enabling of an ongoing support for a kind of the opening of dialogic possibility across different membranes of proximity where you might have the therapist being, if we just call that the once a month or once a week, but that’s in the place that’s in the sacred place if we all forgive me here because I don’t often think hospitals, but they maybe can be or wherever it is, that’s the kind of really rare place. And then, okay, well, this is now a group, okay, well, what’s possible? How does that like the continuity of being with the tension of that because all the vitality of what would be possible in the context of conversations about health with therapists, in part, that’s a lot of tension that brought us to that point. And this maybe has to be resolved in some way in order for us to feel some of the positive release of release from pain. Well, I think partly what this conversation is pointing to is that, well, there’s going to be a different kind of tension essentially immediately experienced when entering into a different relational context. So what kind of structures could support just being with the ongoing relation with that tension to find it having some sort of opening for self making and self addressing possibility. It’s really about how, you know, if we talk about chronic pain, it’s like, well, ideally, you know, we’re not going to just be falling back into that exact same type of pain again, or at least there’s a skillfulness that’s also being cultivated and able to be with that as an event if it occurs again. So those right context for the cultivation of skillfulness, you know, you talk about that in terms of the ecologies of practices and that all links up with the work, obviously, but anyway, I’ll stop there. It’s difficult to say too much more, but certainly if we were talking with, you know, therapists and funding bodies and people putting together plans for how time might be managed and organised, I imagine there’s a few other types of, a few different types of scale and different sorts of affordances that would really be necessary for patients in order to have a better chance at embedding the possibility for ongoing dialogic participation in their lives. I agree. And I think, and I’m going to say something to turn it back over to Terry, which is, I think the person that we need to talk to is Terry, because she has had concrete, no pun intended, experience with this. And, you know, Terry, you related to me the story about getting the funding for the clinic and getting it all built and then, and all, like you were actually addressing the very concern Tim has brought up. You were trying to get all of that machinery and structure in place and you had people that were willing and wanting to do it and everything. And in my understanding, it’s still sitting there empty or largely unused. And so you have a terrific experience around all of this. And so I’m going to turn things over to you and I’m going to sort of give you the last word for our conversation today. All right. Thanks, John. And I really appreciate this discussion both of you. It has given me many, many things to think about. And I think it’s really deepening this work. And I wanted to, John, you just alluded to the program that I was leading for substantially about 10 years with the university here to build a new clinic, to teach students how to work interprofessionally as practitioners so that when they come and work with their patients, they will understand how to have a common language and how to actually work together. And we had a very large amount of money to work with. We had a very, very generous federal grant to work with and we did build the building and we did a lot of work around curriculum development and a lot of work around bringing the right people together. We had a lot of goodwill and we had a lot of wonderful, wonderful people who came to work on that program. And seven or eight years later, it didn’t have the organic hold to make it work and it didn’t continue once the funding ran out. Although there was a model there that would ensure that it had sustainability, it didn’t continue because it was really difficult. It was much more difficult than any of us thought it might be. And my research work started at that same time and my research work started in looking at decision-making. That was what I was focusing on, shared decision-making. And it seemed like a fairly straightforward problem to be addressing. How do we come to make shared decisions, an actual shared decision, a decision where two people come together to actually decide on a path forward? And in healthcare, that happens all the time. We’re talking about a shared decision between a practitioner and a patient deciding on what their care pathway might look like for that patient on having the knowledge of both. The patient brings their own knowledge and the practitioners bring their knowledge to the point. And there is a moment when there is a decision that needs to be made because it’s a long journey before there needs to be a decision. The moment of the decision needs to be a shared decision. And we think, well, of course it needs to be a shared decision. But that is a problem that is almost unsolvable, almost sits in, Tim, you and I have talked very much about Dave Snowden’s model of having simple and complicated and complex and chaotic decisions that need to be made. And it almost sits in the point of being chaotic. It’s more than complex. It is a very, very difficult thing to actually do. And yet we find a way to do it. We navigate it. And some of us are better at it than others. And then trying to cultivate it and trying to nurture it, I think is this time when we, it’s not about the moment. It’s about all the journey up to that moment. It’s about all the preparation work. And Tim, you just touched on this, about the preparation work that needs to go in before we can have that conversation in the first place. If we’re not all prepared and understand and have done the work to be ready to actually be there, then we can’t be in that moment in the right way and be vulnerable in that moment together. And that is a much more complicated problem than any of us have really addressed. And I’ve done many, many systematic research papers on trying to get to this point. And it’s really difficult to address that particular moment is not just a moment where there is any kind of process. It says, this is how you should do it. It is far beyond that. And I think that we have lost the ability to be prepared to come to that moment when it comes and then they go past. And I think there is a very, as we say, it’s a telling moment that quite often individually there is pain that comes from this not being addressed. But it’s a much deeper problem than that. And something that in these conversations I’ve been having with both of you and many others, it’s just showing how deep this problem is sitting. And I think that we say very often, this is a telling moment and a symptom of the meeting crisis, but that is the problem. It is exactly that. It is so deep. That is why it is so difficult to address. And I think talking about it in the way of practitioners talking to patients, it’s just a lens that allows us to talk about a very particular problem that we can all understand. We all have had some experience of that moment. And so it helps us to put it into context and say, here is the shared moment that we can, in our own individual worlds, we’ve all had that moment. And so we can kind of talk about what happened for us in that moment and how we were prepared and what happened to us when we had to make that decision and how it went for us and what the balance of power felt like. And we all have that relationship and that definitely depended on who was on the other side, who was part of that discussion when that thing happened. But there’s a lot of work we can do to strengthen our own abilities to be present when those decisions come for us. I think that is a beautiful place to end. That was very well said. And I felt like you gathered a lot together and you have had direct, repeated experience with confronting this problem. And as you’ve indicated, you were given a lot of the resources that in our culture are supposed to make things work. And there was talent and everything. And yeah, I think I think you carry a special wisdom about that that needs to be heard more, not only in this particular context we’re talking about here, Terry, but the general context of people trying to wrestle with the meta crisis and the meeting crisis. So I wanted to thank you for that last piece. I thought it was beautiful in the right way in which you called us to both, well, how overwhelming the problem is, but that doesn’t mean we get to beg off from it. We have a responsibility to try and do what we can so that we can come up, we can at least be in right relationship with those moments so that we might increase the probabilities of making the right decisions. So I wanted to thank both of you. I think this was fantastic. It genuinely took on a life of its own and went in wonderful and I mean that as full of wonder places. Tim, it was very good to taste the tenor of your mind again. I had forgotten how rich and wonderful that was. So I wanted to thank you too. Yeah, thank you. Gabor Mate once said, I think it was like a vortex, which I did. He didn’t mean as a compliment. Hopefully it’s got a little bit more coherence to it now.