https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Mqp1b6NI9lU
John, it’s really great to have you back. Thanks for joining us. It’s a pleasure to be here again, Rafe. I’ve been really excited to follow your work and deeply appreciative of seeing you make use of some of my work, so I wanted to thank you for that in person. I’m so really happy to be here. Yeah, so for those of you watching, this is gonna be more of a conversation, less of a strict interview, where I’m gonna be sharing some of my ideas with John and giving his feedback on them. So what we’ve been working on is a kind of a map of what Evolving with Play is all about. Right. Yeah. You know, we’ve talked about this idea of the ecology of practices before. Very much. Yeah. We’ve been trying to break down, like, what is it that we’re doing? What are all these pieces? And, you know, we’ve come up with, essentially, there’s a set of body practices, like there’s practices within the body and how the body relates to things. Right. Practice that’s kind of like a meditation that’s internal, that’s about the body. Right. You know, a body integrity practice, like, how do I make sure this thing that I’m in or this thing that is me is sustained and functions and has as good a relationship between all its component pieces as possible? Right. Yeah. Then how do I, then there’s the body to environment practice. How do I make more sophisticated, more differentiated, more competent my relationship to the environment around me, the static environment around me? And then there’s a body to object practice. Right. Where does, you know, the environment is the things that we move ourselves on and the objects are the things that we can move. Right. That’s the basic. Right. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Move things that becomes a really interesting place where there’s lots of stuff to practice. And then there’s ourselves and other bodies, body to bodies. Right. Right. That’s the center of our physical practices. And what we do is really at that point, right? Like we’re the body people, like, you know, I’ve been enjoying listening to your podcast series or your lecture series. I’ve been enjoying your talks with Guy Sangstock and Jordan Hall and all these guys. But the one thing that I’m always asking is where is the body in this story? Sure. Sure. Well, I do. I do. I do constantly say that body practices have to be in the ecology of practices. And I often point to your work, in fact, as exemplifying a community of practice that’s grading and ecology of practices. So, yeah, very much. I agree with that. And I, you know, at some point we might talk about some of the phenomena that earmark that earmark that when you, for example, a body environment relationship, if you’re coupled very well to the environment, you’re probably going to get into the flow stage. And what does that look like? And things like that. So, but yes, I very much agree with what you’ve said. And then there’s another way in which my work converges with it, because as you know, I advocate for 4E cognitive science and for understanding cognition as embodied, embedded, extended, et cetera. And so while I don’t often talk about it as concretely as you do, I think what you’re doing is very convergent. The work I’m doing with Guy and Jordan is, we do talk about the embodied aspects for the reasons I’ve just articulated. But right now, we’re really focused on trying to get a psychotechnology for dialogue that’s analogous to what the ink shop practice of dialectic was so that we can learn how to activate collective intelligence within this property within distributed cognition. And in a way that’s analogous to individual cognition, the way individual intelligence can be bootstrapped into rationality and into wisdom. I’m trying to figure out, can we create a psychotechnology dialectic that activates dialogue within collective intelligence so it can be bootstrapped into collective rationality and collective wisdom? So that’s why that’s foregrounded right now, because I think that is, to use Jordan’s term, that’s a metapsychotechnology that all the groups, your group will need that too. Because part of what I see you doing is you’re also getting into dialogue, and we’re doing it right now. And so how can we optimize that dialogue so the dissemination and the cultivation for you of the embodied ecology of practices can happen much more fluently, much more effectively in a much more flowing manner? Yeah, so actually, so movement is at the center of what we do, and we want to be really clear about that. But what we’ve recognized is that our orientation around movement is how it transforms people. Right? Right. Excellent. If we notice that movement does this thing to people, then we can look at these other streams, these other ecologies, these other practices, and how they can assist in them. We want to be focused on where our expertise is, and kind of like, know what our center is. It’s not everyone’s center, it’s not the center that necessarily is the center, but it’s our center. But with the movement, then there’s a mindfulness piece, and a community piece, and this is what I believe that you were challenging me on this the last time we were calling you. Yes. So I’ve written that in now. And then there’s the nature piece, right? A relationship to nature. So, you know, I’ve taken the distinction that I learned from you of meditation, contemplation, and I’ve actually been using, so what we’ve been doing is a combination of a focus practice that I learned from my friend Simon Thacker, or Thacker, sorry. You know, I do, there’s obviously just the breath, but I like to focus on a single point and try to collapse on that point. Right, right. To learn to control attention, I find that practice is somewhat disembodying though. Yes. So I like to couple that with a body scan meditation, and then I will transition from that. Once I have, I feel like I’ve attuned and improved my ability to control attention, then I do a meta meditation. Excellent. Actually taught to me by our mutual friend, Mark Walsh. Excellent. That’s actually a really profound effect. It’s quite interesting. That’s the core of prajna, like learning how to go deep in and then deep out, and then learning how to flow between them. That’s why the movement practices also tie in, right? Because the movement practices give your brain that interactive schema of how to move in and out. So I see, like when I’m doing Tai Chi Chuan, you’re literally doing the in and out movement, but that is overlapping with the in and out of attention that you’re doing in the prajna practices. So the movement mindfulness and the sit-in mindfulness can talk deeply to each other. Yeah. And I think it’s really interesting because the, you know, I always like to at least return to like my base frame, right? It’s like, if I’m going to teach martial arts, I need to at least know that the things that I’m teaching are helping people fight, right? Yes. Yeah. Like everything else that I claim has to sort of not ignore this most basic principle, right? So when I think about meditation, I also recognize that it actually, the meditation trains my ability to focus on the thing that I need to focus in the moment when I’m actually moving. And then without that, that’s one of the biggest dangers that we face is our attention being on the wrong thing. Like most of the things that fall in the course of our core movements, it’s because your attention has shifted too early, right? Right. So you’re looking ahead in the sequence or it’s just shifted completely out of the frame, right? Yeah. You’re moving and suddenly you have a thought about your girlfriend and fall down. Right. And so that ability to attune and train the attention is actually incredibly critical to successfully completing the movements. And of course that all connects in flow state. And then I guess it goes the other way too, right? As I learned in the parkour informed by the mindfulness to more appropriately distribute my attention, that should then ramify out into my life in general, right? That’s the idea. So like why do parkour in addition to meditation might be the opposite question, right? Yeah. One question is why would a parkour athlete want to do meditation? But the second question would be like, why would a meditator want to do parkour? Those are both good questions. Yeah. And the reason that I might recommend parkour to a meditator is kind of what you just mentioned, which is this idea that essentially we’re making physical the processes that people are trying to apply in their mind. Yeah. This is where like, I really love the embodied and embodied and embedded, right? Yeah, very much. Yeah. Because it’s like, you can train the mind, but if it isn’t in relationship to the body, it’s missing this tremendous aspect because, you know, this is one of the things I love about your work. You make so clear that how we think is extraordinarily conditioned on the fact that we have bodies, right? Or we are bodies. We are bodies. Yeah. How much of our thinking is framed in analogies of the body to understand, to have a group on something? Yes, very much. And so I think it’s very easy in our culture to lose sight of this, but when we make a more erudite body. Oh, I like that. That’s a nice sort of phrase. Yeah. I was actually, I was reading up, I was trying to find this quote that I thought I had heard from like Epic Tennis about wrestling being the foundation of physical culture. And I couldn’t find it. Maybe it’s a misattribution. But I started reading about how Plato was a wrestler. Yes. From wrestling. Yeah, I know very much. And so, yeah, gymnastic and athletic metaphors are pervasive through Plato. Wrestling with philosophy. Yeah. Which I think is quite interesting. It’s interesting because you don’t have that association now. One does not expect a philosopher to be a physical practitioner. No, and that’s unfortunate. I mean, I think that’s more the case, if you’ll allow me these adjectives in Western philosophy than what you might find in Asiatic philosophy. Yeah. So, and then the contemplation is also really interesting because I think that when you start having that orientation towards wanting to bring good into the world, right, right. It helps regulate emotion and regulation of emotion is actually super key to athletic performance as well. It’s something I think is massively under understood is how much people’s frustration, fear, sadness, anger, etc. is actually the thing that has to be addressed in order for them to make progress. Yeah, I think that’s very well said. I think it’s very well said. I think that, I mean, from what I know within like, Tai Chi Chuan, but also what I’ve read about in gymnastics in ancient Greece. I mean, one of the functions of the athletic endeavors was to afford people exactly that kind of training. Learning, you know, very, very much in the power of an exigent moment to exercise self-regulation of emotion, I think is one of the key things. Yeah, and I think that, so yeah, so we have that interaction again where the mindfulness gives us something as an athletic tool, but then the athletic practice gives us a window into and a place to put characteristics. This is exactly what is one of the features, because I’m trying to do this meta thing right now where I’m trying to get at, you know, what are we looking for in ecology of practice? And one of the things I’ve talked about is the checks and balances, but also this other thing you’re talking about, the way they mutually interpenetrate and mutually afford each other, right? That’s also a really important thing that you want to be looking for, I would argue, in an ecology of practices, because if they don’t do this, if they don’t sort of impregnate each other with transformation, then you’re not going to have a very dynamic self-organizing system. Yeah, so what comes up in my head then is this general question that I have about the power of emergence of dynamical systems as a reframing from an excessive reductionism. So I want to get into that with you. I think that’d be a really deep line of inquiry, but I want to just go through this little model. Please, am I giving the kind of feedback that you’d like to know? I’m not jumping in too much. I’m just trying to comment along the way. Please do. This is a little new because I’m used to, when I interview people, having my interviewer persona on, and trying to balance that between like how would I talk to John if it was just me and John talking? Well, see, Rafe, this is also helping me because this is exemplifying this process of dialogue and trying to get an emergence of the logos in the dialogue so that it starts to take a shape of its own and leads us into places that are insightful and transformative for us. Sweet. So what I’m going to actually do is I just managed to, I didn’t know if I had done this, but I saved this thing that I’m looking at and I can share it with you. Okay. So I’m going to share this and now you can see it, right? Yes, yes I can. So this is what we do, right? Mindfulness, community, nature, and then there’s some, this will get really interesting here. So yeah, so we talked about meditation contemplation, then obviously dialogue. We’re just in this conversation about dialogue, but so what we’ve noticed that what people comment on about our workshops more than anything else is the sense of community. Yeah. And then you asked me this question the last time we talked, like, what is the community practice? Right, right. I hadn’t done that explicitly, but it is implicitly or was becoming more explicitly part of what we were doing. So one of the things is actually a dialoguing practice, and this has been quite interesting as a development. So traditionally at my workshops, I would tell a lot of sort of, I would do a lot of kind of lecture about the theory and the practice, right? So people could put it in context and gain the insight out of the physical practice. Now I went to train with Mark Walsh in June and he had this practice of just having people after a drill have one minute to share their insights and then he’d ask a few leading questions to help people do that. Right, right, right. So we adopted this when we taught this summer and it was really interesting how the insights that I used to feel like I had to share with people were self-generated by the group and we got everyone talking. So we drove a real interest in dialogue. The other aspect of these community things is we found that storytelling has this enormous power. As a teacher, as I’ve shared stories of myself and then once I encountered Jordan Peterson’s work, actually telling old mythological stories and connected work. And then I’ve got retreat down here itself because like I don’t know how to describe the whole container of these things, but when you go away with people and you make food and you and you do the dishes together and you go have saunas, whatever it is, all of that. You’re synchronizing up in powerful ways. Yeah, I get that. That’s very good. And then the body-to-body practices of course fit as a community development tool as well. And then this one is something that new and kind of breaking things down, but I wrote down your four ways of knowing, right? Propositional, perspectival, and participatory. And I was just looking through how I’ve helped people understand nature in the workshops that we did and then also how my colleague, Kyle Cox. So Kyle is one of our teachers. So he’s been one of my students for many years now, but he is also a trained teacher under the Wilderness Awareness School method from the Inake Wilderness Awareness School. So he teaches. So I noticed that what I do a lot is what I would call nature knowledge. So it’s propositional knowledge about here’s what to look for so that a tree branch doesn’t break. Here’s what the local ecology is like. Here’s all this stuff. And then what Kyle brings is things like sit spotting, which is awareness training, like meditation in orientation toward nature. How do I recognize what is the furthest sound of a bird that I can hear? What are the birds saying? And what type of water sounds are happening? All those things, learning to zoom that awareness in and out. Oh, excellent. What’s it called again, Rafe? I can’t quite read it. What’s it called? It’s sit something? Sit spotting. Sit spotting. Oh, cool. Oh, and there’s a play on the word spotting. I get that. Oh, that’s very good. I like that. That’s very clever. Sorry, I made that in a complimentary fashion. It’s not mine. I think it may come from a teacher named John Younger. It may proceed here. I learned this from my friend Simon Tapper, who I mentioned before, and Kyle. You can do the same type of walking meditation practice where you’re working. Yeah, I taught people walking meditation. Hunting, gathering, right? Also connecting to these things and indeed fire making and primitive stuff. So that’s where we bring the nature in specifically. Wow, that’s very good. I like that. That’s very interesting. I wanted to tell you this interesting story about the power of the, what’s called the participatory perspectival, which is also something I’m just starting to understand. So I asked Kyle to teach bird languages, and I expect him to walk through the woods with the students and describe to them what type of songs birds sing and help them recognize this. He sets up this game where everyone pretends to be a bird in the forest. Oh, very shamanic. That’s very cool. That’s very cool. Yeah, and I’m very tired because it’s kind of like I teach for three days and then it’s Kyle’s day to lead the wilderness awareness. And so I’ll just go take a nap sometimes. So I’m not really into running around pretending to be a bird, but there’s birds and there’s weasels and there’s hawks and stuff and there’s this whole structure of the game. So then I go and I sleep and I come back and I ask people, like, okay, how was it? They’re like, oh, it was one of the most amazing things now. And people are just talking about in their awareness of the birds and what’s happening is so massively expanded. Oh, that’s fantastic. So the generate to recognize process, which is really cool, become the thing, generate it, and then you are much more capable of recognizing. That’s very, that’s very cool. That’s perspectival and participatory knowing. It’s so shamanic too, right? Yeah, that’s really, that’s really cool. You’re doing really interesting stuff. Thank you. Yeah. And not just me. I mean, Kyle, that’s Kyle’s stuff. You all, I meant you collectively, your group. And by the way, I want to acknowledge the way you share credit. I think that’s excellent. Awesome. Thank you. That’s one thing I really admire about you as well. Thank you. So yeah, so yeah, so then this is what we do. And we’re trying to get people these ways of knowing. And then essentially all of this is oriented towards creating meaning in people’s life. And I looked at it and this is an interesting thing that I’ve been wanting to discuss with you. I just came across this actually in a conversation with another of our friends, Aaron, who’s one of my apprentices with Evolve and Play, but he made the distinction between being and becoming. You’ve talked about the having mode and the being mode. It feels like there’s some distinction here between being and becoming as well. Well, I actually say that I think the being mode should be better understood as the becoming mode. It’s the mode in which you’re trying, these are the needs that are met by developing, by going through a process of self-transformation. And it’s where aspiration and appreciation are playing much more important roles than control and manipulation. So yeah, I think why Fromm and others wanted to use the being mode is because of the way in which, and this overlaps with Heidegger who had an influence on Fromm, of course, the idea that we recover our sense of being. And if we can bring back the being as the gerund, the active, not being as a static thing, but being, I don’t want to say processes because it’s deeper than a process, but you understand what I’m trying to convey as something much more dynamic. And so when we’re in these developmental modes, we have to learn how to disclose aspects of our being so that the world can more deeply disclose aspects of its being. So the being and the becoming are very deeply intertwined in that way. I hope that made some sense. Yeah. Yeah. So I wanted to rephrase it in, like, I think I can use your language in a, tell me if this makes sense. So it’s as if the way that we think about being, like ontology, has become purely a propositional problem. And what you’re saying is that to truly engage in philosophia, we have to hover the participatory and perspectival being so that we are engaged in it, not just observing it. Exactly. That was very well put. I completely agree with what you just said. And I think that’s exactly right. Yes. So this being and becoming distinction that we make, there’s an observation in why there’s a distinction. So the first thing is when you’re training, there’s the experience of the training and how it is. Right. So I am in a state, right. And then there’s how it transforms me over time. Yes. Now, if I become hyper focused on being in the state that I am in now, then I don’t afford myself transformation effectively in the future. I hyper focus on the transformation, then I never get to enjoy what I’m trying to become. Right. And so that’s where I talk about the symbolic aspect of this, the relationship between your current self and the divine double to use more traditional language. Yeah. You have to have that symbolic relationship between the two selves, if you’ll allow me that language. I haven’t quite finished the latest one. I’m like 40 minutes into it, I think. But you were talking about this, about literally like basically being becoming the idea of the divine double. Exactly. Most recently listening to. So what it feels like to me is people, I think people need an archetypal aim. Right. This is sort of what you’re Yeah, I think. Well, I think, yeah, I would just hesitate because I think it’s a genus species thing. I think the Jungian notion of the archetypes is one species of ways in which people have crafted symbolism around the divine double. Yeah. So I mean, the thing is, your current self causes the future self, but your future self has normative authority over your current self. And sort of getting those, getting the sort of the appropriate respect for each side of that is the virtue that we’re trying to cultivate in people when we’re trying to teach them proper aspiration. Yeah. So I’ll share a little story. This will be familiar to a lot of the viewers, but it’ll help ground the conversation. So I came into parkour and I found something in parkour that was very meaningful to me. And there was this idea of a philosophy of parkour that I seized on, but I couldn’t quite fully grasp. It didn’t quite cohere completely. And so I think that what I did was I ended up essentially reframing parkour in the sport frame, right? In this frame that we were talking about, maybe descends from the nationalist and romantic period of the 19th century. And that frame, it’s very, well, perhaps not so romantic. It’s very much like goals, right? We’re going here. And so it became all about smart goals, specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, time-sensitive, right? And so I set up all these goals. And then there was this conflict because the thing that I was truly motivated to be wasn’t the thing that I had set out to do. Right. Right. Right. All of my goals were best served by like training in the gym so I could go compete in other people’s gyms. But what I was deeply motivated by was going to play in the woods. Right. And so I followed my motivation out in the woods. I went deep into play as my kind of primary thing. And it was really transformational. I made massive progress. But at a certain point, it became stagnant. And I also started getting injured. And I started feeling like I needed this sense of where I was going again. And that’s actually basically when I encountered Jordan Peterson’s work. I actually had started to articulate very similar ideas. I remember I wrote this essay called The Self Worth Esteeming. You can check out the video on my YouTube page, which was all about the idea that self-esteem is kind of the wrong thing to aim at. We have to aim at creating a self that we would. Yeah. Yeah. That’s the aspirational self of Socrates rather than the true self that you’re born with from in standard models of romanticism. Exactly. Very much. So we started saying, OK, we need to be aimed at something. And then it was like, well, winning at sport or having a specific skill is actually too narrow of an aim. It doesn’t really encompass what the person can become. It has to be about how those things transform you. What are they transforming you into? Well, that’s what this thing is about. So yeah. So I became very interested in the idea of the hero’s journey and that confrontation with chaos and how that aim gives us meaning. So I don’t want them to have to look at this forever. So I need to go through this a little bit quicker. OK. Sorry. No, no, no. It’s great. And it’s been wonderful. So OK. So we have the being mode. Right. Or what’s more being oriented here is immediately when you engage in these practices, it affords something, affords a deep connection to things that are meaningful to us. Yeah. Play is intrinsically meaningful and motivating. Right. Movement has a meaning. Being in nature is meaningful. Being with a tribe of like minded people engaging in something. All of that is powerful in the moment. But then it changes you because it gives you awareness of self. Right. And we learn our own personality. Right. We come to recognize what deeply motivates us. We improve our embodiment. Right. And we develop a positive relationship with the body, which is something so many people are missing in our culture. Right. We view our bodies through the lens of something else. Right. It’s It’s extremely. That’s I think very deeply can be very deeply alienated. If your body matters mostly to you because of how other people see it, you’re essentially alienated from the most from the most fundamental aspect of yourself. Yes. Yes. So this is where being is becoming, becoming. And then over time, we have this idea that we’re transforming our character. Right. So we can say that our character is transforming. We can call it self transcendence. So we can call this the development of the heroic self. Right. Right. Through these practices, we are trying to afford ourselves these connections and this transformation. That’s great. I agree with that. So we talk about something also analogous to that, the work I did with Leo about internalizing the sage and how there was a lot of these wisdom traditions like stoicism where you’re trying to internalize Socrates. So the Socrates serves as a internalized symbol of the future self of the sacred second self or the divine double. But because Socrates also has a semi independent existence, Socrates can challenge you and motivate you. It’s not just an egocentric mirror sort of narcissistically reflecting back to yourself kind of thing. Socrates had his daemon, right? So he also, yes, very much. So I’m going to put this back up then because that was a perfect segue into what we’re talking about next, which is so the reason that I actually reached out to you to specifically talk right now was that I was, I was working with folks on our online course and they were asking me questions like, why can’t I do X skill? And I didn’t have any video of them doing the skill. So I started saying, well, you know, it’s like a lack of skill. It’s a lack of physical ability or it’s a emotional psycho emotional issue. Right. And then I noticed that that had mapped this idea of what are the archetypal attributes or the archetypal representations of the heroic character that we’re trying to develop. So I had, you know, I’ve returned the source the last few years. We have told these heroic narratives, right? We’ve told these stories and we’ve mapped the idea of the movement practice towards like, it’s like the confrontation with the dragon and the heroic literature. And that was cool. But then people were like, well, what, what, what is it in more depth? What is it that that gives you that capacity to confront the heroic figure? And so we started looking at what are the different archetypes of the hero? So I started seeing that there was this combination here because we talked about four heroic archetypes at the autumn retreat that I, that I had come to study them that gave me inspiration for where we were going. And then I saw that this was kind of aligned. And the reason I, I, I reached out to you though, was because it didn’t align perfectly. And I was trying to figure out how it aligned. Right. So I, but, but what we ended up doing is so we started saying, if we think of Horace as a, as an archetype of vision, where does vision sit in our struggle? Like, well, before, if we think of, we think of movement practice as a, as a way of, of embodying and cultivating the capacity of the self in general, to address a problem, right? The first problem that you have with a problem is, can you see that it’s there? Yeah. I mean, that’s, that’s sort of more like at the level of like relevance realization and Horace is often represented as a capacity for attention. Many other things as well, of course. And Horace is of course capable of flight, which in the overview, but also zooming in. So yeah. Yeah, there’s, there’s many figures that have that role. But I, yeah, the, the, the capacity with the, the, to, to, as you said, to develop that honing relevance realization. So you have insight. So you see into the situation well and powerfully. Yeah. I think that’s crucial. Yeah. So in the park, we have this problem of vision, right? And I think it’s a thing that, that, that is a, is a, is a problem many people are facing, but we’ve, we’ve recognized it right in a certain way, which is when you decide that you want to practice parkour, you start looking around you and you can’t find necessarily things that look like what you saw in the video. Right. So, so over time, you cultivate this ability to see how the spaces around you afford you movement potentials. Oh, I see. That’s very interesting. So you’re doing this sort of perspectival transformation where you’re, ah, that’s really interesting. So you’re trying to train yourself to pick up on affordances that you originally can’t pick up on. That’s what you’re basically saying. And, and what’s interesting about this too, is that like, I found urban parkour vision developed very quickly, even though I grew up in the woods, the, the environment is relatively not complex, right? You can see. Yeah. It’s a highly predictable. It’s highly predictable. Moving into nature is actually to this day, even after, you know, 10 years of being focused on nature, eight years, whatever it is, it’s harder for me to see what is afforded by a new tree or a new set of rocks than it is concrete obstacles. I have to go and physically embed myself in that environment in order to create the vision to reimagine the space. Right. That’s really cool. And so, so yeah, so we, in, there’s this, are you familiar with the Udall loop? No, you, you mentioned it to me before. Yeah. Okay. So I’ll go over that again. I think it’s interesting to me because I just see these, these common patterns showing up and all these are places. I’m really interested in how they all come together. But the loop is the insight of a military strategist, John Boyd, he was in the air force and he basically recognized that like every combative situation and every combative situation, you face the problem of incomplete information. And this is true everywhere and in life. And he even broke this down to basically Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Godel’s incompleteness theorem. And, oh, and what was the other one? Oh, the, the thing is the second law of entropy, right? But basically on these, we, we, we will always have included information, right? As soon as the information gets to you, it’s already degraded or it’s model already degraded. You know, and you can’t see everything from within whatever frame you adopt. So, so, but the big thing was that in order to continuously solve problems, first, you have to be able to observe accurately what the problem is vision. Second, you have to be able to orient effectively to it problem formulation, and you have to make clear decisions and act. So, okay, they’re brand decide act. Interestingly, within the parkour community, we evolved essentially a similar sequence, which we call feeling the call of the jump. He observed that a jump is possible. You then assess the jump and then either before or after assessment, depending on the job, you begin to feel fear. And then you have a process that allows you to overcome fear, which is generally visualization, breathing, shaking, some sort of ritualized behavior that allows you to shift out of that fear state. And then you act. And so essentially you could say, well, the first thing is, is observation, right? And then essentially all the rest is like how you overcome the problem and get to the city. Right. I find that really interesting. And then like there’s almost a problem before that, which is how to see the recall of the jumps that can call to you. Yeah, exactly. I was going to say. Yeah. And so this is where the archetype of vision is. Right. And then the next would be like understanding the problem. Right. Like I can see this jump. This calls to me, but how would it be done? Right. Right. Then there’s the skillfulness to actually do it. And then it’s like, it doesn’t matter how perfect a jump you have. If the jump is just way too large, your legs can’t make it. You just don’t have it. And the last thing is you can see it. You understand what needs to be done. You have the skill to do it. You have the physical capacity to do it. Can you psycho-emotionally regulate yourself to be able to do it? Right. Right. Right. Right. And so interestingly, we had talked about four heroic archetypes at at the retreat as Horace of his vision. Socrates was Logos and then Luke, Celtic hero, Celtic God, was the embodiment of skillfulness. Right. Right. Right. In Irish mythology and in the book of the invasions, Luke is sort of the young hero up and coming. He goes to Tara, which is the capital of the tour. And he asks for entrance. And they ask him, well, in order to come in here, you have to be really good at something. And so he starts listing off his skills and he lists off all of the skills that were like pertinent in early medieval Ireland. And they keep telling him, well, we’ve got a carpenter. We’ve got a Smith. We’ve got a soldier. We’ve got a soothsayer. We’ve got a poet. We’ve got a harp player. We’ve got a chess player, whatever. And at the end of it, he says, do you have anyone who can do all of these? Oh, no, you can come in. And then he wants him to lead the battle. And then he confronts what turns out to be his own grandfather and destroys him. And that’s Luke. So Luke is our idea of skillfulness. And then we talked about Christ as a figure of agape. And so initially I was like, does Christ map to this emotional regulation piece? Right. And it didn’t feel quite right. Well, I have something to say about that if you want to hear it now. Can I finish what I’m saying? I really want to hear it. But what occurred to me is actually, if you take this set of heroic capacities, you can have all of them and you can be evil. If you’re oriented to do the wrong things, then being able to see a problem, understand the problem, effectively solve the problem, have the strength to do it and have the emotional regulation to do it can be applied to the most horrific things. So then the idea was that, essentially what we came up with was Socrates is actually kind of a combination figure for us. He’s the emotional regulation and the understanding. Horus is vision. Luke is coordination skill. You could use Hercules or Thor as representations of strength. And obviously, heroes contain different elements. It’s just a story that we can tell to contain this insight for people. And then at the highest end, it’s like, if this isn’t in service of agape, then it’s not ultimately leading us towards heroic character. For the audience, this isn’t me telling them that they need to go join a church and become about Christians. I’m not. I’m an atheist as you are, but I do think this is true. And I also think that like meta meditation, which we learned early, which we talked about earlier, is actually one of the powerful pathways to cultivating this specifically. So that’s this map that I created. This is what I wanted to share with you and get you. Oh, I like that. I like that. I like that. You basically anticipated what I was going to say. So that’s good. I was going to say that agape sort of bleeds between, you know, it’s a kind of sophist, and first of all, what you want, what you set for yourself regulation. You don’t want it to be in traffic. You want it to be sophist on it. And the way I describe that is you want to come to a place where you’re tempted by the good, right? That your salient landscape is constantly tempting you towards the good. And then Paul presents agape as exactly the best form of St. Paul, as the best form of sophist, because we’re constantly being tempted towards the good of trying to create as much meaning and as many meaning makers as we possibly can. And so that’s how exactly I think you you articulated what I was going to say quite well, actually. Beautiful. Yeah, I love that idea of sophist and the idea of being tempted to the good. And I was thinking about actually, I thought it was interestingly in line with like flow. The idea. Yes, it is. I mean, you’re talking a lot about this sensibility transcendence and sensibility transformation, but you’re right. You have to have something that organizes it all together in that aspiration. Yeah, but what are we aspiring to? Well, we’re ultimately aspiring to meaning making and the cultivation of meaning makers. That’s what we’re ultimate. This is how this whole thing, right, right, grounds itself, because there’s nothing else beyond that that’s grounding it. Yeah. So that’s like that’s logos, the thing that yeah, the way that we can articulate and give rise to order and agape, which guides us towards order that is actually to the good. We have that faith that everyone we interact with has the capacity to come into an order that is better. Yes, I think that’s well said. And if we didn’t have if if if if we were not already grounded in logos and agape, we couldn’t do any of this anyways. Part of, you know, part of the the ancient notion of pride or hubris as a sin is a refusal to acknowledge that we are already beholding to logos and agape. And we should acknowledge that and then put ourselves right into a participatory relationship with it rather than pretending that we don’t need logos and agape. Yeah, I think that’s fundamentally important. So one one thing that occurs to me, I have have Jordan, for this reason, maps and meetings here, but he talks about the aspect of the heroic, the heroic person. And he talks about the logos, right. And that’s represented by the mouth and the tongue, right. Vision represented by the eyes. And he talks about those as, you know, if you look at a homunculus of the body, this is what’s most represented. The other thing is the hand, right. Understanding the hand grasping. Yeah. But for me, that’s the body, too. Right. Yes, very much. Very much. Yes. That’s what I see is missing. So often these conversations about meaning is how it gets grounded in the body. Oh, but you see, that’s right. That’s why I emphasize the contact epistemology so much, because the contact epistemology reminds us about the embodied and embedded as well as opposed to the sort of spectating, the factorial epistemology. I’m not sure if I’ve talked to you about this, but we’re talking about nature. Like how does natural movement, natural parkour, create connection with nature? And Peterson has this analogy of resolution, right. Imagine that you have high pixels or low pixels, right. Like the more pixelated your thing is, and since some, the more meaning you have extracted from it. I’m just thinking, like, imagine the experience of a tree, right. You have me showing you the picture of the tree and you can say, oh, that’s a beautiful tree, right. I would love to see that tree. You walk in through the park and see that tree. And that would be more meaningful. It would be more real having had that experience participated in being near the tree, more real. But when you move in the tree, when you map it with your body, when you map how it affords your body moving from space to space, this creates a layer of meaning that has greater depth. And you can go in another even more. It’s like, if you know what animals lived there, you know how it’s used, you know what kind of timber it makes. Like all of these things are built up into meaning. And it’s like, it feels like we have become divorced from this incredible world of meaning that exists all around us that we’re simply blind to. Yes, I agree. That’s why I’ve been trying to articulate this notion of sacredness as a deep kind of connectedness to the inexhaustible, as opposed to older models of completion and perfection, which tended to be very static and tended to give us the idea that there was sort of a final state that we were trying to get to and achieve. But if we can, I think what you’re doing, if you’ll allow me, is I think you’re trying to rearticulate this notion of sacredness as this found, right. There’s this found of just more and more intelligibility, more and more meaning, more and more connectedness. What you’re saying is, of course, not just intellectual connectedness, it’s the embodied and embedded connectedness. And that’s exactly it. Can we get back to that sense of that our ongoing capacity to evolve our connection to the world can be coupled to the fact that the world can continually generate new connections for us. It’s inexhaustible in that way. And to understand sacredness in that fashion, that’s precisely why I’m trying to articulate that idea. I see what you’re doing is you’re using nature, and I don’t mean in some sort of pantheistic paganism or something like that, but you’re trying to reintroduce nature as something that can be experienced as sacred, as a sacred experience for the people. And I think that’s very important. And the fact that, see, it doesn’t involve people having to sort of commit to a creed. It involves them committing to a code of conduct, because if they don’t commit to a code of conduct, they’re going to hurt themselves. But it involves a different way. It involves a different way of getting people to re-inhabit sacredness, as opposed to just argue about the propositions that have been referring to sacredness. Does that make any sense when I’m trying to articulate? Yeah, absolutely. It’s very interesting. I mean, so my old business partner, Tyson, when we started our parkour gym together, he always joked that we should just turn parkour into a church, right? But now people will be like, well, what are you creating? Are you creating a religion? And I was like, well, no, not a credo. But I’m trying to help people connect to a religio. Well, that’s exactly right. And that’s why making that distinction, I think, is really important. And you’re creating a very complex mythos, right? We’re even talking about using mythological figures in order to afford people coming into a more direct participatory awareness of religio, and how if they enhance that connectedness, they get this experience of it being intrinsically meaningful. But again, in this sense in which it’s, I become sort of, as you know, I’ve become hesitant with the word meaning, because it sounds so subjective. And I really want to, that’s why I like what you’ve been saying, this sense of increasing connectedness. And that’s what I’m trying to get it. It’s the connect, and even the word connectedness sounds static and fixed. But I’m trying to, it’s more this ongoing, mutually accelerating disclosure. That’s why it’s more and much more like love than it is by making a statement. You’re helping people to have that, right, and I don’t mean this romantically, and we’ve trivialized the word with romanticism, but you’re helping people to fall in love with sort of the depths of connect, through the depths of connectedness that they can find in the natural world. They’re falling back in love with being. And I think that’s the ultimate way in which we have to respond to nihilism. We can argue and we can make philosophical propositions, but people have to learn how to deeply fall back in love with reality. That’s what they need. And again, you know, I don’t mean this romantically. I mean it in the sense of a sacred kind of loving. Erotically. Yeah. No, that really that like, you know, that struck home for me, right? Like, especially because going back to the idea that agape is the principle that gets highest access to the good, right? Yes. Yes. It’s kind of like the idea that the proper practice is a practice that continually helps you fall in love with all of the most important things in life. Yes. Yes. Yes. That seems extraordinarily powerful. It’s interesting. One of the, you know, let me just, I want to let that one sink in because so after one of my seminars, one of the students said to me that it was like having gone on for a walk on the beach for years and years and years and then getting to go surfing for the first time. And how the beach now suddenly became so much more meaningful in a literal way. Like, I know these things about the waves. That’s propositional. But not only do I know these things about the waves, I have felt what it is to be in those waves. I know this landscape of what those waves mean, right? Like, I know when a wave behaves this way, towards me this thing. Yes. And I know then also what that experience is. Right? I really have struggled with the distinction between participatory and perspectival. And one of your recent lectures, you were talking about your old model of wisdom, which didn’t include participatory. Right. That that the procedural or sorry, propositional gives you rules, procedural gives you roles. No routines. Routines, routines. Right. And then, and then, and then perspectival gives you roles. And I was like, wait, what’s, what’s, what’s after that? But then it finally came together for me. It was like, mothers should feed their children when they cry is, is a proposition. Right? Right. Knowing how to warm up the milk and put it in the in the in the bottle. That’s a procedure. Right. Right. Right. You could understand the proposition, not know how to actually feed the baby. That’s right. That’s right. And then a baby crying is a salience landscape that becomes especially meaningful to any woman who has had a baby or had a baby. Right. And that that is a that is an experience that is shared. Right. That perspective is true of all the all the class of mothers. But what that meant to that individual woman at that time is the participatory. Right. The way she identifies the way she changes her identity. So she’s identifying with the child. That’s that’s the participatory. Right. Yeah. Well, she her her process of being and the child’s process of being become deeply coupled and interpenetrating. So her knowing of herself and her knowing of her child are not distinguishable from each other. They mutually interpenetrate and afford each other. Yeah. So then to look at the practice, the movement practice, right, to do a jumper of all or something. I can tell you in this situation, this is the appropriate jumper of all or swing or whatever to do. That would mean propositional. Right. Knowing in your body, having the skill to do it is procedure procedure. Right. Being able to recognize it within a given space is perspective situation, awareness that’s perspectival. Yeah. But then the way that it transforms you is the participatory. And that’s what you see. Right. And that goes back to that underneath and grounding. This is your aspiration to your heroic future self and you knowing and becoming because it’s a Socratic self-knowledge that that future self is bound up with you knowing and getting access to the depths of the world. That’s what I mean about the depths of you and the depths of the world. Your knowing of your depths and your knowing of the depths of the world are like the mother and the child being identified with each other. They are mutually interpenetrating and mutually affording. Yeah, that’s that’s beautiful. So the other thing that’s occurred to me with this, which is interesting is a while ago, I read this essay on Jitsu versus Dow. We talked about this. Not to me. I don’t think so. The idea was simply that traditionally many martial arts started as essentially like trade skills. Right. You know, I, I, you know, or I could you too was was a trade skill for someone who had to use a sword in battle. That’s what it meant. It meant when procedurally when my life is on the line, I can use this thing to try and save myself. However, there was a point at which and this happened in different ways. People recognized that the process of of going through the procedure, the Jitsu afforded a dough and a dough is a way. I know dough in Japanese is Dow in Chinese. Right. Right. And so I can Jitsu becomes a keto. Right. And you see the same thing in the internal martial arts. You know, you’re a Tajik Swan practitioner, right? You practice things because, you know, their martial skills, that’s only one layer of the practice. And if I had one and Bagua and Jiji are our Taoist arts, right? They’re deeply connected with this whole ecology of practices of specific meditations and body care practices. All the Qigong, you know, traditional medicines. All of that was sort of part of this, this, this world. And, and what I recognize when I read that was that parkour in its in its initial development was actually dough oriented and that the dough was not sufficiently articulated. Oh, I see. The world. Yeah. So all we saw was the Jitsu. So something involved in doing these things, but we didn’t see was that the young men who’d started this, they were immigrant, you know, mixed race kids, visible minorities, traumatic backgrounds, you know, they’re having, many of them are having trouble in school. They were, you know, they would, they could have gotten involved in gangs. There were lots of gangs in their neighborhoods and the families of Paris. And they needed some place to go. It was a way, it was an aspirational way, storm them in. And that was the purpose of it. Purpose. Yeah. Yeah. How do I test myself and become this thing that I, that I want to be? The, there was, you know, nine to 12 founders of parkour and at a certain point, David Bell is the most famous split with the rest over a circus performance. But the rest of them then adopted a name for themselves called, which is Yama Kazi, which is a Lingala word, which is a West African language, which means strong man, strong mind, strong spirit, strong spirit, strong body, strong man, something like that. And the idea, you can see the aspiration that this is the transformation of the self. Yes, very much. This is the transformation of the self. Right. Very much. And so it feels like in many ways what I have been creating with Evolving of Play is a return to the Tao. Right? Yes, I agree with that. And, and this came up for me because I was thinking about that idea you had of the sacredness as the inexhaustible. And like, even when it’s interesting, when I started telling people the dragon story and connecting it to the idea of the pursuit of the heroic self, I always like to caveat it by saying, but always remember the Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. Right. Right. Yeah. What I can reveal to you about the orientation of your practice never will, will be sufficient to contain all of what the practice is or can mean to you. So don’t get too attached to it. Yeah. And now I feel like I’m kind of tangentially running in many different directions because you, you know, as you saw the round down and the way that you were describing that, that, that the way in which being is sort of, is both inexhaustible and, and withdrawing from you and also, yeah, or shining in. Yeah. Yeah. At the same time that, that relationship with being and being able to, to come more and more into that relationship with being is maybe the orientation of the practice. And that’s why the idea of, of movement practice as Tao came through for me as something that I needed to share with you. I think that’s excellent. I mean, it might be then that, that there’s a higher order connection going on here because I think what you just articulated was excellent. But it’s, as you know, I brought that language up to try and talk a bit about Heidegger and also the kind of stuff that’s happening in the circling practice, which is this interpersonal dialogue, dialogical practice. And yet there seems to be this higher order point of convergence. I’m not trying to do, I’m not trying to collapse everything. I’m trying to do like a small world network. There’s this higher point of convergence that they can all talk to each other. And then they, right. You get the compression, you get the compression to what is shared and then you get the variation out into the specific practices. John, I’m going to have to take a quick break. My daughter. Okay. I’ll be right. Okay. So we’ll pause this for a second. Okay. Thank you very much. Okay. Well, guys, we have a extra guest today, special guest. This is Katie. So hopefully she will let us have a little chat. Will you let us have a little chat, Katie? Katie, she’s going to sit with me. My other daughter. Okay. Thank you for your patience. I’ve had kids too. I still have kids. I mean, I’ve had young kids, so I know it. I know I really enjoy it. It’s like living with, and I mean, this is a compliment. It’s like living with elves. I mean, it’s just an amazing, they’re amazing. Look, great. Before, we’re running out of time. And so I’m not trying to shut things out. I just need to say something about this. Like, and this is really, I’m being very sincere. I’m really impressed by the work you’ve done. And I’m not trying to in any way take credit for your ideas or your insight, but I see also in a lot of ways, I hope this feels fair to you, in which you’re making use of a lot of my ideas and what you’re doing with it. It’s just impressive. It’s really impressive. It’s like, if you allow me an analogy, I might be doing this science, but you’re doing this amazing engineering that is just like, it’s exemplary. It’s exemplary. I want people to see what you’re doing and understand what you’re doing as a clear example of the kind of stuff I’m talking about, how it’s been concretized and developed and how it’s evolving. I just wanted to say that because it’s very, very, very impressive work. Well, thank you. That means a lot to hear that. Your work has been really deeply influential. It’s been, you know, Jordan Peterson gave me a window into the meaning thing in a way that, you know, is still, had a huge influence in grammar. And then running into your work has given this wonderful set of tools. I was telling you before that I sat down and started like writing out some of your key insights. I could organize where I’m using them and how those threads in my experience with parkour, play research, you know, flow. There’s so many in there, but like, you know, you hold a very high place in the set of influences that are giving me the insights to create what we’re creating. And also the example that you’ve given in your friendship has been extraordinarily thank you. Thank you. Well, that’s deeply reciprocated. I just wanted to say that because, like I say, one of the legitimate criticisms, I’m not trying to dodge it, that people make in my work is that it’s often very abstract, right? And it’s a guess, but what do I do? And, you know, I try to address that as best I can, but you’re doing a much better job at addressing that than I have done or potentially ever could do. So I wanted to thank you for that as well. Well, that is quite the high praise. I’m going to put that on my website. Well, that’s fine. Please do. I wanted to, I mean, it might be time to close the conversation here, but I wanted to address, like the last time we spoke, you were asking me to pay attention to your dialogues with Guy Sangstock. Yes, very much. I thought this was interesting and I wanted to share my experience with you and hopefully this will be interesting to the audience as well. It was initially hard for me to listen to Guy because I find that what is attractive to me a lot of the times is that facility with juggling propositions or having a clear set of propositions that you’re offering. And when I was listening to him talk to you, he’s not offering so much of his propositions. That’s right. That’s fair. What comes through is actually the example of participating in what he’s trying to create. Yes, very much. It’s a similar thing. And I actually listened to my, you know, it was nice to listen to my friend Mark Walsh’s interview with Guy because then you got a little bit more of an idea behind that. That’s right. That’s right. I also just happened to have a few friends who’ve also gotten to circling. And so it’s been very interesting to take on some of the ideas and bring that into my relationship with my wife, but also thinking about how we use dialoguing as an inspiration or practice, because I think it’s incredibly valuable. And I think if we’re letting, you know, we had this conversation before we started to call it about kind of the grammar of sport and physical culture and why it might have lost the meaning that it should have or how it might have had meanings embedded in it that we don’t really want to keep embedding in. That’s right. And maybe we can get into that in the future when I study some more research. But if we’re choosing a new orientation towards meaning and it is towards this idea of the cultivation of the self, connecting it to the practice of mindfulness, connecting to the practice of dialog becomes incredibly powerful. So I’m very interested in the work you’re doing with Guy and with Jordan Hall. And I recommend all of the listeners look into that. And it’s something that I want to know more about and how we can facilitate this growth of the dialoguos in relation to, you know, like this is kind of what I want to offer that conversation to. It’s like, I think that if we can get the embodiment, we can get the embedding into the environment and we can connect that to the dialoguing process. So we’re getting that zooming in, getting this broader perspective, we’re having the involvement. It’s like, you know, I was really gutted that you didn’t make it to the autumn retreat because I want the conversation. Yeah, no, I do. And I, well, you know, I’m showing that I’m deeply committed to participant observation. So I very much want to do that. Yeah, I thank you for saying that. I recommend especially the two videos with the four of us, with Guy, Sen Stock, Jordan Hall, myself and Christopher Master Pietro. Because I think those two videos, especially with the four of us, because we all, it’s much more like what we’re talking about. You get many, you get the four kinds of knowing. I’m not saying that each one of us represents one of the kinds of knowing or anything ridiculous like that. But all the kinds of knowing are put into much more dynamic interaction in a powerful way, which I really, like I said, there’s a thing there, the logos comes and it takes everybody into a place where they can’t get to on its own. And knowing how to translate, maybe that’s the right verb, between that interpersonal and then the way we talked about how you get people into that kind of dialogic emergence of the logos with respect to nature and the environment. And getting those two dialogues to dialogue together, I think is something that I’m deeply interested in understanding more deeply. And the communication that comes through the body, right? Yes. You know, we’re very interested in is how like we’ve become divorced from a meaning. Again, like if I say something to you here and you can see me and you can hear my tone of voice, there’s layers of meaning that are divorced that if I said the same thing to you in a text message. Oh, of course. And so one of the things you’re picking up on the circling practices, because you’re always having this stereoscopic vision, you’re doing this deep mindful awareness inward, and then you’re doing a deep mindful awareness outward. But one of the things you’ll often pick up on is you’ll pick up on the mediating role of gesture between the propositional and the perspectival and the way. And so very often people will, you’ll even see it in some of the times when I’m talking with Guy, he’ll say, well, you just, you sort of stood back, you sort of moved back and you sort of tilted your head like he’ll call out gesture. And that for me is something I want to understand too. That reappropriation or reexaptation of gesture as a way of bridging between the propositional aspects of dialogue and the more procedural and the more embodied aspects of the dialogue. And so within what we call rough housing, right, we have the layer of communication that comes where we actually are touching each other and we learn to have sensitivity and contact there. And this, I think, gives a sensitivity and an awareness. You know, the research like, I’m just writing about this right now, but the research shows that rough and tumble play increases capacity for empathy, essentially your ability for theory of mind. Oh yeah, because you’re training the insula to pick up on your own interceptive stuff coupled to your trying to get a sense of where the other person is expressing their intentionality through how they’re moving. Yeah, that makes very good sense to me. And so it’ll be very interesting to think about how can we get that connection from the, from let’s embed ourselves in the environment, let’s create our container, let’s move with each other, let’s move and then let’s create dialogue, right? How does that generate the meaning? Yeah, I’m aware that we’re just about out of time here, but I deeply appreciate the conversation. Well, I thoroughly enjoyed it, Rafe. I mean, it was good for me. I got to spend a lot of time, and I mean this in a good sense, I got to spend a lot of time listening because I got really deeply interested in, like I said, what you’re doing and that’s why I provoked that reaction and that response in me to what you’re doing. So I thank you. I just want to, I don’t know, it seems so trite, but I just want to keep encouraging you to do what you’re doing. It’s meaningful. It really helps to have people who believe in what you’re doing and who can forward it and sing line for fine. I appreciate it every time you do that. So I think my children are going to call an end to this call. Yeah. You need to move on with your day, but we’ll chat again soon. Of course, my friend, we’ll talk again for sure. You can count on it. Okay. Take care of my friend.