Embodiment and the Metacrisis with Rafe Kelley (PVJztMRSeek)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=PVJztMRSeek

Welcome everyone to another Voices with Ferveki. I’m very excited about this. I’m here with my beloved friend and frequent collaborator, Rafe Kelly. And, well, we’re going to do what we usually do, which get into some very interesting discussion. But I’m going to first, in case it’s possible that you have not encountered Rafe Kelly on my channel in some way, shape or form, at least his name, I’m going to let Rafe introduce himself a bit. And then we’ll just take it away as Rafe sees fit. Yeah, so people ask me what I do. It’s always an interesting thing. Suppose the most recent elevator pitch is I teach a ecology of practices, which should be a term familiar to people on your channel, that really originates in parkour, but then kind of parkour in its connection to our relationship to the natural world and then a relationship to the martial arts, which is something that I’ve studied deeply through most of my life. And then this idea of a broader movement culture incorporating elements of dance, gymnastic strength and various other things that then kind of evolved through the events we teach and then through my interaction with your work and with Jordan Pearson’s work into really an attempt to kind of build a bottom-up wisdom practice rooted in the relationships of the body to itself, to the psyche, to the natural world, both as a landscape we move through and as a set of objects we can manipulate and to other embodied agents. And lastly, and only just tapping into it, we’re aware of the element of the divine or the sacred. And so it’s been evolving over, I’ve been teaching movement now for 21 years and have dabbled in many, many things and played with them. Yeah, so that’s what I do. And we teach, this year we have two big retreats in May and July, and we have a series of workshops coming up all over the world, top of my students, and we have online courses that people can find. So that’s the basics about me. Well, we’ll put all the notes about links and connections, the online courses for the retreats. I’m just going to say something that I’ve said before. I went to return to the Source, which is that going to be in July this year? Is that when that’s? Yep, July 14th, March 21st. Foundly transformative experience. Yeah, just, yeah, all of those dimensions that Rafe mentioned were drawn out and put to the test. Excellent, excellent calibration. Everything was challenging, very transformatively challenging, but the level of instruction and the structuring was there too, so that everybody’s sort of really reaching, really challenging their fears and some of their self-image in really healthy ways that is, that’s, you know, really, really well done. I mean, it’s you, you’re doing stuff that is genuinely at times scary, but you’re always safe and you’re always guided and accompanied. You don’t feel alone. There’s other people there. The instructors are there with you in a deep way. And then you form deep relationships when you’re there. I don’t know if I could do it again. I’m getting old and I’ve got arthritis in my hip and other stuff like that. I’m glad I did it. And I’ve recommended it many times. I’ve recommended it on many channels. I will do so again. I’ve been recommending it to my own Reveki Foundation. And there’s some talk of them, some of them, the younger ones, participating in Return to the Source this year. I’m going to continue to encourage them to do that. If you get a chance. This is really an astonishing opportunity to partake in a well crafted and well run Ecology of Practices retreat that is pretty much guaranteed to open you up to transformation along many of the dimensions that are so central for people getting a much more embodied and participatory sense of meaning in life. And as Ray said, even carried into deeper existential and even sacred aspects. So I cannot recommend this enough. And I just want to emphasize that. Take a look also at the May retreat and the online courses. And Ray is sort of doing a tour of sorts, as he mentioned, will be coming to various locations and they’ll be in in person. Wonderful opportunity for you to meet and be taught by this wonderful man. So please take advantage of all of this. We’ll put the contact information in one more pitch. Go to Return to the Source because it’ll do that for you. You’ll return to the source. And that’s a powerful thing that is needed for many of us today. Thank you so much, John. Yeah. As I said on our last private call, we’d love to have you in a, you know, a role there that is appropriate to your age and health. I think we can craft that for you. I do have to make one correction, which is it’s actually my students, Kyle and Aaron, who will be traveling and teaching the traveling ones. But Kyle has been on on Voices with the Brake as well. Aaron’s coming up. They’re incredible teachers with really deep experience. Aaron is a real innovator in the space of the interaction between authentic relating, like relational practices and interactive movement. So we just put out a new rough and tumble course, which really starts to open up the idea that we have this capacity to communicate and to learn to develop rapport and connection and attunement with another person through games that are physical and that proceed in many ways. The development of linguistic capacity, then actually connect that into fundamentally a community of frame and how we start developing better communication, as is a major focus in your space. It’s teased in there and we show how it’s used to make the rough housing practice better. But as we continue to develop these things, we’re going to go further and further into that. And that’s really what Aaron specializes in. And then Kyle has been doing the natural parkour stuff with me for 10 years. And he’s a really remarkable wilderness connection coach. So he’ll be bringing a really deep level of knowledge around the connection to nature, which is a big topic we’re going to talk about today as well. So that’s what people can get from that stuff. And thank you so much. Well, let me just say, as Rafe said, Kyle’s been on twice on Voices with Reveke for good reason. Both Kyle and Aaron were there and were instructors for me. I think extremely highly of both of them. They’re excellent. And so you couldn’t be in better hands. They’re fantastic. Wonderful. Thank you, John. You’re welcome. So what would you I know there was a couple of topics you want to bring up and you reached out to me. And of course, I always want to hear from you. So why don’t you lead us into what you would like to reflect upon, discuss? Yeah. So, you know, we you and I have had a lot of recorded conversations. And then I think of the last since you came to return to the source, we’ve sort of moved a lot of our dialogue to to behind, you know, to private dialogues. But I wanted to reach out and have a public conversation with you because I really enjoyed the conversation you had with Ian McGillchrist and Daniel Schmachtenberger. I don’t know if you remember, recall, but like when you were first starting to make all the podcast rounds, I was really, really keen to see you talk with with Daniel in particular. And so it’s really great to see that dialogue happen. And I think there’s just an immense amount of value that came out of that conversation. But as I kind of always feel with the conversations that happen in this little corner of the Internet or the Reveki space or sense of making space or, you know, Peterson space. There’s always this hunger in me to hear the voice of the body spoken more clearly. And and as I listened to that, I thought, you know. I feel like there’s a there’s a there’s a key to unlocking the riddle that was discussed in that, which has to do with the kinds of practices that I’ve been advocating for that that that I didn’t hear fully grasped. And it felt like you’re it felt like you’re kind of all three of your sort of like, you know, the blind men touching the elephant and unable to say, OK, but but how do we do that? Right. Ian said. That there are three relationships that give meaning. Right. The relationship to society, the relationship to nature and the relationship to the divine. And in the course of that conversation, you settled on the idea. That ultimately to solve the kind of the psychological drivers of the meeting crisis, what we need is to fall in love with the world. To return to a loving relationship to the world. But what I didn’t hear is. How you do that? The closest thing that I heard was. Something like a reclamation of Christianity a little bit, which was really interesting to see McGilchrist say that because I’ve seen him sort of push the other way when pushed on that before. And, you know, and I think you started to. I didn’t get to to rewatch the end of it, but I believe that you started to to lay out some of the ideas that you’re working with in the philosophical Silk Road about how we have to recover these wisdom practices, not only from a specific sacred tradition, but, you know, a kind of who are you talking to? Who are you talking to? Are you talking about? The the. The philosophical Silk Road as the hallway like. He pointed out to me that C.S. Lewis and mere Christianity talked about hallway Christianity. Where nobody lives in the hallway, but it’s the space that the various Christians could move from room to room and visit each other and maybe move to a different room or return back to their room. And then what Paul proposed, which I was completely happy to accept, is that I’m trying to do that with the Silk Road, but not just between denominations of Christianity, but between all of the axial legacy wisdom traditions and religions and this proposal of trying to create a deal logos that. What? Locus, a space, a courtyard of Zen neoplatonism in which that can take place. I think too great. The two great grand unified field theories of spirituality, Asiatic and and you’re you’re Asian. And so, yeah, that’s very much. And I following the advice of my good friend Bishop Maximus, I don’t talk now about the religion. That’s not a religion. I don’t use that phrase. I’m much more I like I’ve moved towards and I feel much more at home with and aligned to this idea of the philosophical Silk Road. I picked up a book on neoplatonism Judaism and I was started an article by the renowned. Scholar of mysticism Bernard McGinn and he said philosophy is the first ecumenism and I went. Yep, that’s right. Right. It really is ecumenism. Can you can you unpack that? That the ecumenical movement is the movement to try and get the various religions to talk to each other. I’ll move into. But initially sort of mutual respect and tolerance and then into what people like Cobb and others are doing. From sort of the West and what the Giosco was doing from the East into mutually transformative dialogos. And and just to be very clear about this and I’m going to really sort of I don’t want to say hammer, but I’m going to make this argument sort of very forcefully. This is something that’s already happening and Christians are actually already doing this very significantly. This attempt to get mutually transformative dialog going between Christianity, for example, and Buddhism or Christianity and Vedanta, etc. Yeah, so yeah, I started to talk about the philosophical Silk Road. There’s two aspects to it. One, the Silk Road. Nobody lives on the road, but some people need some seekers. These are still the nuns. They need a way to travel. And some people also need to travel so that they can return home in token sense of the recovery theory. Like you go out and you live somewhere else so that when you return to your home, you can see it anew or you can see it again for the first time, as T.S. Eliot said. And so those two things, those are the two groups I want to simultaneously address. And I think the philosophical Silk Road framework addresses that much better than the proposal of the religion that’s not a religion. I still have a lot of my critiques about two worlds and mythologies, etc, etc. But I think Bishop Maximus advice is very good advice, and I have chosen to follow it. That feels like a major, major revolution. It’s kind of interesting because, you know, I think it’s a very interesting thing. I think the revolution is kind of interesting because, you know, there’s a lot to unpack there, but I just want to recognize that was, you know, that’s kind of a major, a major shift. And I like it. I appreciate it. It lands for me. That sense that. Yeah, I suppose in my own search, there has been this sense that there are aspects of the traditional religions that are really, you know, they’re non-compatible, right? You know, the Jewish and Islamic and Christian understanding of the role of Christ are incompatible. Literally cannot both be true. And I think in some sense, like the Buddhist idea that the ultimate is to awaken from being and to escape it. And the Christian idea that that the Kingdom of Heaven is here and it’s through incarnation that we find redemption are also, you know, they’re at opposite ends of a scale and, you know, Gnosticism and Christianity in a similar way. But to me, like the truths that you find in Taoism are very deeply congruent with the truth that you find in Christianity, or at least there’s a way in which they can be, they can play really well together. And I think that that move that you’re talking about, that you see Christians doing right now, it’s not a new move. It’s something that’s been happening, you know, for a long time. Right. If you look at I’m quite interested. Recently, I haven’t done a deep dive into it, but I’ve had this call towards interest in the Christian, or sorry, the Celtic saints in particular, because in the stories of Celtic saints, there’s a deep, deep relationship to nature in particular. And that was something that, you know, I don’t know what’s happening inside the Orthodox tradition, you know, in Eastern Europe around that relationship to nature. But it feels like there was something of the Celtic spirit, the Celtic spiritual traditions relationship to nature that was retained and grown in the Christianity that grew in that area that was really beautiful. And that was that could be congruent with with Christianity in a deep way. Yeah, it’s similar, though, to the way towards, you know, that Buddhism goes into China and integrates with Tao and Taoism becomes Chan, or it goes into Tibet and it integrates with the Bon shamanism. And I think I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but the Celtic saints also represent that kind of integration with the with the pre existing pagan religion of the Celts. And I’m very interested in that. I got the here just once. So this is a replica of the lion man. The lion man was from like 40,000 BCE. And yeah, it’s a certified replica. So it’s it’s replica. It’s a replica down to every little mark on it. And I got this for the philosophical. So I’m very interested because of this phenomena. Of course, there’s the animal world of the lion and the human world are being syncretized together in order to try and articulate something. And I’ve got Amon Ra over there again. And I and I and I’m really interested in this phenomena that you just described about how it is that we. How does that happen authentically? Because Christianity is born out of a syncretism and it continues to do that. How do you do that authentically? And then how do you distinguish it from, you know, from the dilettante or somebody who’s just dabbling or somebody who’s being indecisive or and and and and this really intrigues me. And I’m hoping the philosophical Silk Road will be a path for me. I mean, it’s not just this is not a series. This is a pilgrimage for me. I’m putting myself open. That’s another difference between the religion. That’s not a religion that sounds very arrogant, whereas the philosophical Silk Road is trying to clearly indicate that what I’m doing is in service of something else that I and I’m very happy about that. But yeah, I hope the Silk Road will help to articulate how we can do this well. This kind of mutually transformative. And there’s a lot of people I’m reading. And the Silk Road is an example from history of how it seemed to have been done well at one point. And so I’m hoping to some degree rationally reconstruct, recover, re-engineer that possibility for us today. Sorry, that was a bit of a speech, but I think it was relevant to what you said. Yeah, I think it’s absolutely relative. I’m quite interested in that conversation and also my preparation is more towards some other things in the conversation. And I think there’s a way that they link back. But I’m curious to sort of step back a moment because, you know, I did the Respond Project with you. And that was a project about essentially creating a wisdom guild. And there were, I guess, nine of us who are acting as scholars. And then we had all these people who were recording it for us. And one of the dimensions that came out there, and I’m pretty sure that I had thought about this for a long time before that. But yeah, I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, but I think it’s a really useful frame is it was inspired by something Jordan Peterson said. He said the answer to the corruption of society is the virtue of the individual. I was like, oh, that’s a really beautiful idea. And it’s also incomplete, I think. Yeah, I agree. The way that I look at it is actually the way that I’ve come to look at it is that there is no system of institutions that is proof against the corruption of individuals. Yes. It’s got no panacea of practice, no divine faculty. And there and reciprocally short of us all becoming Christ, there is no level of virtue that we can attain that is perfectly resistant to the corruption of our institutions. So in order to solve the meta crisis to use, you know, Schmackenberger’s term, we actually have to have a mutual scaling up process of understanding the problem of institutions and addressing it and understanding the problem of how we cultivate virtuous individuals and addressing it. So I think of someone like Schmackenberger as really a profit of why all of the institutional structures have become perverted. Right. And and thinking on a really systems based level about the incentive structures and the risks and and all of that stuff. And where I see that conversation missing is you need individuals who are willing to make the type of sacrifices who can see clearly enough, who can step outside of the frames of the zero sum games in order to to shift these institutions. You can create those people. And if they don’t have a theory for how to address it, it won’t work either. So the theory around, you know, like having a clear understanding of existential risk, having a clear understanding of incentive structures, of game theory problems, all of those things are really, really profound. But you you you can’t get people to take care of the natural world if they don’t love the natural world. Yes. And no amount of of jiggering with, you know, DeFi currency or, you know, intentional communities is going to is going to actually provoke love. And there there’s it’s actually within practice that we have the potential to bring people into that. And that that’s the fundamental idea I wanted to really address in this, because I I do think that what we’ve done with evolve, move, play is actually a really key part of the answer. And I think that it aligns deeply with theoretical positions that you’ve laid out around how love works and how what love even is such that we could address these problems. Because when I listen to that conversation and you’re talking about, OK, we have to love. But how what would you like? Even even the word love, I like I was talking to. I was talking to one of my students. I have an apprentice in town right now, and I’m playing with how I work with the apprentices, where I’m trying to kind of take on a Socratic approach. So this is actually something that Aaron Cantor introduced to me. So rather than say, give a lecture on what what makes a great coach. What I’ve done is gone on a walk with my student and say, I’m going to give you a sentence stem and you answer it. A great coach is and he’ll respond. A great coach is trusting. OK, and so then I could say a great coach is trusting because and then he answers that. And then I could problematize on this. I could could a great coach be too trusting? Is there a point where trust is not actually optimal? And so we go went through cycles of this for a week. So then finally. We get down to it and I point out. Ultimately, I think actually the number one thing that makes someone a great coach is that they love the student appropriately. Appropriately, yes. Love in the sense of care deeply for the. This is a quote I think I get from you, and I may have butchered it slightly, but I think it’s good even in the butchered form. But but it’s something like I pointed out to two two quotes. One, I think it’s Iris Murdoch quote, which is love is. The recognition that someone else is truly real, painful recognition, painful recognition. And then the other one is love is to sincerely wish the good for someone else. Of course, that that gets into the problem of how we define the good, but it’s such a powerful thing, right? When someone shows up as it to work with you in any transformative thing. Fundamentally, they’re seeking a good that is relevant to them. And it’s your role to help them facilitate a journey that they’re already set set out on on their own. Right. You don’t have control of that. You don’t know, right? I don’t I think we make a mistake as coaches and thinking it’s like an engineering process. Yeah, that’s a mistake. I agree. Right. I think of it is like a gardening process. Right. It’s like the rose comes to you and it’s going to grow. And what you can do is you can provide a good soil, good water. You know, you can give it a scaffold to grow upon, but you can’t make it grow. It has to grow from its own impetus. Thank you for watching this. You’ve been watching the show. And if you’d like to support this work, please consider joining our Patreon. You can find the link in the show notes. I think the cultivation metaphor and I just did a video with Robert Gray for Valentine’s Day about love. And I think that’s the most important thing about the show. And I think that’s the most important thing about the show. And I think that’s the most important thing about the show. And I think that’s the most important thing about the show. And I think that’s the most important thing about the show. And I think that’s the most important thing about the show. And I think that’s the most important thing about the show. And I think that’s the most important thing about the show. And I think that’s the most important thing about the show. And I think that’s the most important thing about the show. And I think that’s the most important thing about the show. And I think that’s the most important thing about the show. And I think that’s the most important thing about the show. And I think that’s the most important thing about the show. And I think that’s the most important thing about the show. And I think that’s the most important thing about the show. And I think that’s the most important thing about the show. And I think that’s the most important thing about the show. And I think that’s the most important thing about the show. And I think that’s the most important thing about the show. And I think that’s the most important thing about the show. And I think that’s the most important thing about the show. And I think that’s the most important thing about the show. And I think that’s the most important thing about the show. And I think that’s the most important thing about the show. And I think that’s the most important thing about the show. And I think that’s the most important thing about the show. And I think that’s the most important thing about the show. And I think that’s the most important thing about the show. And I think that’s the most important thing about the show. And I think that’s the most important thing about the show. Because you know, you get this as a parent and a teacher. Because you know, you get this as a parent and a teacher. That at times what you’re doing is not just helping somebody cultivate the good. That at times what you’re doing is not just helping somebody cultivate the good. You’re helping them to realize the good behind the good. You’re helping them to realize the good behind the good. They were seeking X, but that’s not really what they’re seeking. They’re seeking Ys. And of course this is a big theme throughout Socrates and Plato, right? And of course this is a big theme throughout Socrates and Plato, right? That people often think that they’re pursuing good X. That people often think that they’re pursuing good X. But what they really need, not even want, or desire, But what they really need, not even want, or desire, what they really need is good Y, or something like that. what they really need is good Y, or something like that. So how does that land for you? And then what would you say in response to that? Yeah, I agree completely. I would say that, you know, most people who come into parkour, or come into a fitness practice, or come into any of these things, their target is a kind of tertiary good. their target is a kind of tertiary good. their target is a kind of tertiary good. And their need is a higher order good. And part of the education system is that they’re not really seeking X. And part of the education process is simply interrogating them is simply interrogating them in a way until they can recognize that the thing they think they’re seeking isn’t actually going to meet the need isn’t actually going to meet the need that drives the search. Yeah, so I brought that up because for me that’s an argument for your point that this is coaching that this is coaching, teaching, is not engineering. Because in engineering the goal is sort of established and all you do is work towards it. Whereas, and this is one of the things whereas, and this is one of the things the way Plato said philosophy was not a techne, because very often what you’re doing is doing this process of looking through a good you used to look at to the good beyond it, the good that actually is the source of it, the deeper, higher good, the good that will actually bring you the fulfillment that you’re seeking, etc. And so that’s why I wanted to bring that point out, because I think, I think we have gotten into an engineering mode for all kinds of teaching, you know, and we think we know what the goal is. I was just talking to a bunch of high school students who are working their way through after Socrates, and they wanted to talk to me and Chris. Mr. Mastropietro. And I was saying about the advent of AI and things like that. It’s now, I mean, if we peg in education towards getting a job, I said, you folks are in the worst situation of all. You are, many of you might be starting an education towards a career that won’t be there five years from now when you’re done. And I said, and I said, and then following on something Chris said, I said, I mean, obviously you have to take a gamble and you’ve got to try and cultivate sort of minimal economic skills. But I said, maybe go back to the ancient model of the job of education is to make you the best possible person you could be. Why I’m saying all of this is we thought we knew what the goal was. The goal of education is to get people a good job, a good career, and then we would just engineer education accordingly. And that is now collapsing. And I think we’re being returned to the kind of model whether or not we want it. We have to, and I think politicians won’t wake up to this for a while, but we have to return to the model you’re proposing that what we’re doing is an act of logos and love cultivation so people can come into right relationship with the deepest possible good that is appropriate to them. Does that land for you as a proposal? Absolutely. It’s interesting. For some reason, a quote from Warren Buffett came up as you were speaking, which he said, you know, if a young person came to me and asked what they should invest in, they didn’t have very much money, what I would actually tell them to invest in is themselves. That their education and their capacity as a human being is the thing that’s going to ultimately put them in the best position for success beyond any specific strategy with stocks or bonds or anything else. And I think that that’s essentially what you’re proposing as well is that in a landscape that’s changing very quickly, ultimately the purpose of education cannot be to attain a very specific skill set that’s going to be a very specific skill set that’s not generalizable. It has to be about general adaptivity and capacity and, you know, problem formulation. That was another thing that came out in your conversation is that the kind of scientific worldview or technological worldview, it’s very good at solving problems, it’s very bad at deciding what types of problems we need to solve. Yes, yes, yes. And confronting mysteries. It’s not very good. When mysteries don’t mean things we don’t currently know, mystery means those things that we can’t get a final completion, cognitive closure on. Yeah. Which is most of the things that matter. Yeah, exactly. I guess the idea that’s really present for me is going deeper into the idea that to solve the meta-crisis, what we need is to help people fall more deeply in love with being. Yeah, I agree. That was my argument that I was trying to make. Yeah. But I think your point was right. I don’t want to forestall what you’re going to say, but yes, I think the fact that there was a lot of talk about but not much facilitation of like embodiment and the important role that plays in a proper understanding of falling in love with meaning. Yeah. So, one of the things that I’ve got from you as well that I think is incredibly powerful is the idea that love is a process of reciprocal realization. Yep. I still stand by that. Virtuous process. Okay. So, if we think about what’s driving the meaning crisis, we think about what’s driving the alienation, we think about all these things, I think we can actually see these things as processes of derealization. Right? Yeah. That’s beautiful, Rafe. Yeah, I think that’s right. You mean analogous to the psychological state of derealization or depersonalization. It can land on either pole, the agent or the arena. Right? And I think the fact that we’re getting increasing psychological distressors around derealization, agent losing its reality or depersonalization, sorry, arena losing its reality or depersonalization, the agent losing their sense of realness. I think that’s right on your point. Bang on. Yeah. Yes. So, if you spend most of your time in a text-based universe, you are losing touch, literally, like physically losing touch with the world. The world is becoming more a set of abstract symbols or signs and less an emergent whole. Right? The technology itself is driving us towards a world that is more left-brain and less right-brain. You know, in the McGillchrist, right? We can’t see the dynamic flowing holes because we’re not literally interacting with them. Well, you have to be transformatively immersed in them if you’re going to know them. Because that is how they demand to be known. It is not our choice, which is part of the problem. We think all of our knowledge projects should be totally under the control of our choice. Try and love your romantic partner that way. It doesn’t work. Right? Yeah. Yes. We have to treat our romantic partners as flowing holes and mysteries that we go to with humility, you know, and awe, as one of the most profound vehicles towards the sacred that we experience in life. And if we treat them as technology, with the spirit of technology, with the spirit of geometry, it’s going to be destructive. You’re invoking Pascal’s spirit of geometry versus spirit of finesse. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, there’s this vision of a future that is rational and clean and comfortable and safe that preserves the animals and the nature. We just don’t get to do anything with them. Right? So, we’ll all live in 15-minute cities, you know, in our urban cores, in high-rise buildings, and there’ll be plenty of space for wilderness, but human beings won’t be able to interact with it. And we will make ourselves happy by getting on our VR headsets and meeting, you know, other people to have hollow sex. This is Clifford D. Simac’s city, that great novel, very great novel. Yeah. My family and I watched WALL-E last night. So, but if you look at, like, you know, the writings of a Klaus Schwab, it’s like, this is actually the world that a lot of our technological elite are oriented towards. You know, I saw a quote from Sergey Brin recently where he said that the very worry that AI would be destructive to human beings is speciest. Right? There’s a, there’s a kind of seductive power to technology, to the idea of ramping up power, ramping up liberty. And then these things could exist that have more power and liberty than I have, and then they’re things could exist that have more power and liberty than us. And then why, why even bother with us? Because we suffer. Let them, let them take over. And then maybe it’s going to be better because human beings won’t be around to suffer. And maybe, maybe the animals won’t, won’t be suffering because of us. And I think that this is, is a deep mistake, you know, on, on lots of levels, but just on the level of how do we become the type of people who could actually solve the meaning, meaning crisis. It turns out that the people who are the best at preserving nature are hunters. You’ve said this to me before, and I always find this very thought provoking, so please unpack that a little bit. If you look at a lot of the efforts and a lot of the money that goes into preservation of natural spaces, it turns out that a lot of it is generated by people who hunt. Okay, so there’s one of two possibilities here, and I want you to give me an argument as to which one you think is the more probable. One is, well, that’s because they have an instrumental attitude towards this. They want to keep doing this thing they enjoy, and so they want to basically, you know, preserve their playground. And so they’re willing to put money and time and effort in, and it’s a purely utilitarian, and therefore it exemplifies the very attitude we’re criticizing, that nature is just a resource to be properly controlled from whatever it is I want to be doing. Or you could be saying, well, hunters actually have in some way cultivated an ability to fall in love with the natural world, and that is what is motivating their conservation and care efforts. So which one of those, and why? I think it’s both, actually. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Right. Because I think that some hunters are, you know, simply motivated by a sort of hedonic pleasure in the act of killing, or, you know, in the ego boost of being a super masculine person who, you know, successfully kills an animal. There’s a lot of that out there, for sure. But then there’s a lot of hunters who basically hunt because they love being in nature. And it’s a way of deeply interacting with the natural world. It’s a way of coming into relationship with the natural world. Like through sort of Darwinian, Darwinian machinery being activated to take us into that immersive experience. Is that what you’re saying? Yeah. I mean, I know a lot of hunters who have very sacred relationships with the act of hunting. Right. And they will, you know, they will go out and hunt and they will, they’re very careful about what they harvest and when they harvest. But they’re not disappointed when they don’t harvest an animal because they’re still excited just to see a beautiful animal. Right? They’re still excited just to have spent the time in nature. They still feel healed and repaired just through that connection to the natural world. So, the argument here is, you know, we’ve taken on this ethic of leave no trace, you know, of hands off, don’t touch of nature, you know, and this is another point that came up with McGillchrist, was the idea that we have now externalized nature as the environment, which is something we’re within, rather than the source of ourselves. Yes, yes, yes, yes. And so when we, when we take this, like, there’s a certain way of conceptualizing environmentalism, which treats a human being as separate from the process, which reifies that very idea. And then it actually denies the connection and the capacity for reciprocal realization that actually invites people into a true falling in love with the natural world. I agree with you. I think at times it gets even more vicious. I mean, in the sense of the opposite of virtue in which the framing is that human beings are some kind of earth pest or earth disease. And that is so Cartesian. It’s Cartesian disconnection on steroids. And so I’m just amplifying your argument. I totally agree with it. Yeah, so what I think when you’re So Daniel is really good at laying out a kind of series of problems that seem insurmountable. Yes. And then he kind of puts it, gives it to you and says, OK, well, what’s the solution? How do we step out of this? Here’s a set of frames. And I think a lot of those problems, those are real problems. But I also sense that there are problems that are in some sense stuck within this frame of the emissary, the frame of the rationalist mind. Because there’s that projection of exponentials, right? It’s just there isn’t that sense of the limitedness that the natural world actually imposes on us. Where that limitedness can also be a very positive affordance. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. We are I don’t think we have as much potential to run away on the exponential spirals as it might seem. I think that, you know, that’s one of the things that I really enjoyed about the essay you did, the video essay about when chat GBT came out. It’s like, hey, actually there’s thresholds and actually the way that intelligence operates means that it’s not so easy for it to just get into an inflationary cycle. Yeah, that’s right. And I still stand by that argument. And I stand by the fact that I said that a lot of the predictions how things would be the way they would be in eight months and ten months have not come true. Because there are univariate graphs which univariate graphs dealing with potentially exponential things. We have just reliable evidence that human beings these are really profound vehicles for self deception for human beings. They really are. Go ahead, though, right? Yeah. So I agree. And so when Daniel lays out the problems, I said, those are serious problems. But in some sense, we have to have a faith that they’re solvable. And part of that is actually accepting that we are maybe less powerful than we think we are. We don’t have this. You know, we have finite transcendence. And so that’s one thing that I notice and pick up in that conversation. But then I think there’s a potential connection here that I want to hear you say something. I think our inability to properly inhabit our finitude when we confront these problems is actually a form of the disembodiment that you’re critiquing. What do you think of that? I agree. I agree. I think that I think I think when you go into nature and you humble yourself before nature and you you reciprocally realize with the natural world, you get a sense of its power. Yeah, there’s this. I don’t have related this to you before, but and it’s getting old enough now that I shouldn’t presume. But there is a movie called Titanic, James Cameron’s thing. And not a particularly good movie in a lot of ways, but very good for giving you an immersive experience of what it was like to be. And there’s two scenes in the movie that I did think reflected some directorial change in the way reflected some directorial genius. There’s a scene at the beginning of the movie where they do this cutaway and you’re seeing that all the decks of the Titanic and it is this this machine that it is literally it’s Titanic and you go holy crap. That’s a big machine on the engines and all these people. And there’s this oh my gosh. You’re feeling it. And then just the sunset before the Titanic is going to sink. He pulls away into what was at that time a helicopter shot. And here’s the Titanic on the ocean and you go, oh right. Titanic is this big overwhelming machine but against the ocean it is miniscule. And I thought that was a brilliant juxtaposition. I thought those two scenes are just fantastic for the point you’re making. Like we shouldn’t deny the Titanic power, the technology, but we have to remember that it’s you know. Yeah, I mean we’re like you can see human impacts on Earth from space, right? Like that’s we’re the only species that is like that and that’s real too, right? But you know people talk a lot about population and now we’re worried about under population, over population. It’s a big problem either way. But you know an inflationary cycle of human population forever is a real problem, right? And then but like currently, yeah there’s a lot of human beings but we could easily fit all of them in Texas. Right? The world is actually really big and I think this idea that technology saves us and that we’re somehow just trashing the Earth it, it, it, it to me it leads to bizarre places. The idea that we’re going to colonize Mars I think is the silliest idea. Right? It’s the silliest idea. It’s like why are we spending billions of dollars to try to spend this energy and this technological affordance to get us to Mars when there’s the Sahara, right? Which was green and rich and a place where millions of animals and human beings could live, you know, 15,000 years ago. Right? There’s the Amazon which is getting destroyed right now which is one of the richest biodiverse places in the world. It’s like why aren’t we terraforming the Amazon? Yes, yeah. Right? And the Amazon is fascinating too because it used to be a place that was, that was filled with human beings. Right? This is something we don’t realize. We think that it’s this primordial wilderness but the truth is that the Amazon had millions of human beings prior to the Colombian Exchange and it was European diseases that shattered those populations. I did not know that. That is very good to know. Oh yeah. They’re actually, they’re just actually someone who is coming to return to the source the year that you came, bowed out because they were in the middle of a dig for a giant city that had just been discovered in the Amazon which was just published recently. I can’t remember the exact details but I’ll try to send them to you. There was a civilization there. This sounds like Edgar Rice Burroughs novel. There was a civilization in the Amazon? Massive, massive cities throughout the Amazon. But this is an interesting thing is the Amazon cities were built on agroforestry. So when we go into the Amazon, Charles C. Mann has a beautiful book called 1493 where he talks about the early research that is starting to indicate that there’s actually a huge human population in the Amazon that then collapsed. One of the reasons that they started to suspect this is that there’s basically an ecological model of how much sort of human friendly fruits would grow in a given area and they found that it would be about 7% of the, I think it was, don’t quote me on these numbers, I haven’t read this book for a long time but if I remember correctly the projection was that about 7% of the plants would be expected to grow like human friendly fruits and what they actually found was about 21%. So when we’re in the Amazon, we think we’re in a primordial wilderness but we’re actually in the remnants of a garden that was cultivated for thousands of years. What’s particularly interesting about the Amazon is that those that they practiced a type of agroforestry so they were not mostly cutting down trees and planting it with grains, they didn’t really have grains, what they had was all these incredibly productive fruit and nut trees and so they were shifting the environment to produce extremely high productivity environments that were also really highly productive for other animals. So they were arborist as opposed to agriculturalists. Oh wow. Yeah, so there’s a tradition of agroforestry and so this is where I think like the technological world view and the way that we are kind of treating nature as something that we have to have our hands off of is actually deeply misled, right? We can actually act as stewards of the garden. It’s a biblical image. It is. My dad was also really deeply inspired by Tolkien and he created these beautiful houses which you’ve been in. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I never quite understood him in a lot of ways. We were both very similar and also extremely dissimilar. But there was a certain point in which I had this realization that fundamentally my dad’s architecture was a kind of artistic representation of the idea of recovery that Tolkien represented in his work. That’s what the practices that I’ve cultivated are. And so there’s a continuity between that. And my dad treated his land as a food forest. Now, my dad was idealistic and not very pragmatic so we never really harvested nearly the calories that we could have. We never were effective in the use of it and we were still relying on the technological world to make all this happen in a way that was, you know, way more than was actually necessary because the land was already happening. But he planted it with fruit trees and nut trees. So, one of the books I’ve been reading recently is Charles C. Mann’s book, The Wizard and the Prophet. And turns out apples are more than just apples are more productive per acre than wheat. I’ve heard something like this before, yes. Right. But we have an apple orchard on that land and we have grass underneath it and we have accounted I think 14 pairs of robins in the part of the apple orchard that we teach under at Return of the Source. And there were jays raiding into the nests the entire time we’re there. And there’s innumerable songbirds. Right. So there’s a way in which we can, you know, something like an apple orchard actually creates a potential for human beings. The other thing that my dad did was he did a lot of hydro hydro engineering. So we have an access to a water right that comes down off the mountain. And so he ran a series of ponds and fountains through the land. Well, what that does is it slows down the trickling of water through the land. Which means that the soil has more water in it more consistently which increases the productivity of the land. It also means cleaner water at the bottom of those watersheds. And we don’t realize how much we are actually capable of interacting with land such that we are actually working positively with this. So this is not, it’s funny that I find myself talking a lot about this on this podcast because I’m not a farmer. I don’t do this kind of thing. But it’s a big part of where I see that the sense making space is not it’s missing the body and it’s missing a relationship to nature. Right. So yeah, I want to have this because I know you’re working towards some other points but I want to just unpack that point. Let me make sure I’m getting you. I hear a proposal that there is this different way of relating to let’s even say food production that could simultaneously afford even encourage falling in love with the natural world again. Is that what I’m hearing you say? So those things don’t have to be made dichotomous adversaries the way some environmentalism is pitching it. Instead they could be seen as well reciprocally realizing activities. Did I get your argument correctly? Precisely. My dad was a kind of new age spiritualist in a lot of ways but he’d been raised as a Catholic you know altar boy and he retained a deep appreciation of Christ and particularly he was really inspired by St. Francis of Assisi. And so he believed and he said that our purpose here on Earth is to become gardeners of Eden. Different models and sort of Promethean and Utopias. Exactly. So if we think about you know Tolkien’s recovery and the Shire and all these things right. There’s this idea that human beings can actually become virtuous and virtuosic in our relationship to the natural world. I like this. This is really good. This is really good. Now what do you think of Jordan Hall’s proposal that we could be living that way in sort of Dunbar Dunbar communities. Dunbar is the idea of a certain. Yeah. Go ahead and unpack it for the audience. Dunbar is that we sort of evolved to live with about 150 other people. And that’s sort of optimal for our psychological and mental health. And what we’ve done is we’ve instead lived in cities that are noxious for our physical health, our mental health, our social health, our moral health, noxious for the environment, noxious for other species, noxious for our children. And we do it because all of that is offset by the force multiplier of collective intelligence being not just some additive sum. And what Jordan Hall was proposing with Sivyam is that we could have, we could be living in at sort of Dunbar levels. And I think we could amplify by what you just said. We could think of a different way. I worked on an apple orchard that I’ve done that. But then his proposal was this new technology gives us the capacity to get the force multiplier in a lot of ways. For a lot. And then I was saying to him there’s the, so the at Amazon civilization, I got, I’m going to ask you when this is over to recommend a book that I can read about this. That’s, wow, that’s so fascinating. But you also have the whole Bildung movement in the Nordic countries showing that society can commit to sort of a network of, for lack of a better word, secular monasteries that are about the cultivation of wisdom and meaning while teaching people practical skills of improved, at that time, agriculture and other things like that. So all of this stuff could be coordinated together in a very reliable way. We saw in COVID that a lot of what we do can be done ethically. But that, it also revealed that while a lot of our work and productivity can be done that way, our health was seriously undermined because we couldn’t be with other people or with nature. Sorry, this is a bit rambling, but do you see what I’m trying to do? I do, I do see where you’re trying to get up. And I have thought a lot along similar lines, right? When COVID happened and when, you know, everyone moved into remote work, I thought, hey, is there a world in which the economically productive work that people sort of earn their money from could be contained in such a way that a much larger segment of people could proactively cultivate a relationship with the land and that we can return to smaller communities that have tighter value and connection and connectedness where we can actually operate in connectedness with a small community and with a natural environment. So I agree basically in a lot of ways with the civilian proposal. I am skeptical too because I think that if we go back to this idea that fundamentally these simulacrums of connection that we have online, as good as they are, they’re still not the same, you know? I think, you know, if you and I spent a week together talking via Zoom, right, well, we couldn’t even do it, right? We couldn’t spend eight hours a day together on Zoom. We would get exhausted, right? And… We did that readily at Return to the Source. Yeah. Exactly. And there’s a pressure when we’re in this situation to… We have to have dialogue in some sense. There’s no spaciousness. But if you were to come here and speak with me, or I was to come there and spend a week with you, we can create a very different kind of dialogue, which I think is richer ultimately. One thing that is much richer is the sense of intimacy and connection and friendship is much deeper, which I think creates the grounds for different types of dialogue. I’ve joked about this lots of times. I don’t know if I… But I’ve said, like, I would love, you know, every time that you and Jordan have a discussion, I think I want to get Jordan and John to wrestle together. Yeah. Have a meal. Like, do the stuff that we do at Return to the Source and then see the dialogue that was coming. Because I think that… I’m open to that. And if Jordan will do it, I’ll do it too. I’m open to that. Okay. Yeah. And I just want to be clear. I wasn’t trying to convey that we could replace that. I’m just wondering how much… But is there a way… Like, how much… How much do we still need to live? Because to put it bluntly, Rafe, that kind of relationship you just described, I’m not having it with 99.9% of the people in Toronto. Right? I don’t… Yeah. Nine-nine. Yeah. Exactly. Right? So, it’s worse than that because not only are you not having a real relationship with most of Toronto, by living in Toronto, in a lot of ways, you’re actually sort of perversely incentivized away from the depth of connection that happens in small communities. Yeah. I know. There’s something Jordan Hall’s been talking about as well. But one thing that I’ve… You know, through teaching our retreats and seeing the depth of craving for true intimacy that people have over many years, what I’ve realized is that, like… There’s actually many ways in which we experience this in the sort of technological world. We suffer a problem of deficiency and excess in the same… Yeah, yeah. …in a deeply related… It’s a profoundly Aristotelian vice. We’re suffering both the vice of defect and the vice of excess. I think that’s very well said, Rafe. I just want to… Just for the audience, just to make sure that the wrong bell isn’t being rung, and just note that this might be the wrong bell, intimacy doesn’t mean sexual intimacy. And it doesn’t have to mean that. The fact… In fact, in many of the practices I do with people, they often say paradoxical things like, I’ve discovered a kind of intimacy I didn’t know existed, but I’ve always been searching for. They see… And this is why I’ve been trying to bring back this notion of fellowship as this kind of intimacy that’s not sexual intimacy, and it’s not friendship. Right? But it’s this other thing that you can have with people. I just wanted to put the pin in there, because I… Yeah, it’s really important. You know, that’s one of our sort of agreements that’s from all of our students, is actually that they’re not going to pursue sexual intimacy in our events. But it is, nonetheless, an experience of incredible connection and intimacy for people. And that type of intimacy is something that people are deeply missing. So we know that friendships are disappearing. Regularly, decade by decade. So I wanted to finish this thought of the excess and the defect, and how it’s… I think it’s really interesting to connect it to how it’s a persistent problem we face across the sort of technological world that we live in. So the excess is that we experience actually far too much social engagement that’s of low relational value. So when you are on Twitter, when you are getting… When you go to your email and you have 40 newsletters that are crafted by AIs, when you’re getting texts all the time, like all of this is a kind of social stimulation that lacks the vast majority of the nutrition that’s in a real thing. So you can be in a world in which you are socially engaged almost all the time, and you are never experiencing real intimacy. So for me, this is a profound proliferation and amplification of modal confusion, where we are confusing an extensive having of social interaction with the being with others that is necessary for the development of our humanity and personhood. So when we do something like Return to the Source, and you do… You wrestle on the beach and you get a little bit hurt, and then people are there and they support you, and they’re holding your space for you and loving you, and you’re jumping into scary waterfalls and these things, and then you get to sit around by a campfire and nobody has their smartphone out, nobody’s looked at their computer all day, nobody’s taking calls and distracted by work, and you just talk about your life. You experience a level of fellowship that’s deeply meaningful and that many people today probably never experience. And what I found at Return to the Source, and maybe I was a confounding variable, but I don’t think it’s totally that, because I won’t give away any secret sauce or anything. But I saw… You can tell people whatever. You can’t give away the secret sauce because it’s in body. You can tell people what happens, but they can’t. The only secret when they get… But what I meant is that this intimacy with each other turns into an intimacy with the environment, like the sit, sitting, and things like that. And then some of the practices turn into an intimacy with the depths of reality resounding with the depths of oneself. The sacred. The stuff towards the end, I mean, you don’t object when I’ve said, this is clearly a ritual that you’re performing at the area. Yeah, we use ritual. We’re very careful about it. Yes, of course you should be. It’s like electricity. It’s powerful. You have to use it carefully and wisely. But what I mean is that there’s a way in which the retreat not only engages the intimacy, it scales it along a dimensionality. You go from, oh, I get more intimate with myself and then with other people and then with the natural world and then with the sacred. And that’s what I found, a natural progression happening when I was at Return to the Source. This is essentially the proposal that made me want to jump on this call is that it was really striking to me when Ian said there’s three primary sources of meaning. Society, nature and the divine. I was like, well, that’s the five relationships that we’ve cultivated at with the Evolving the Play ecology of practices. But there was a substantial missing piece, which is the idea of the relationships internal to the self. So we have the internal relationships of the self, the relationship of the self to the environment, which to us, we divide into two pieces. It’s both nature. But there’s an interesting way in which it reflects Ian’s dichotomy as well, because there’s the environment as a landscape, right, which is expressed through parkour. And there’s the environment as a set of objects that we can manipulate, which obviously expresses this fundamental capacity of a human being, which is more left brain. But we have those two relationships that we need to cultivate. And then we have other embodied agents, which is society, which is other people. And then last, we have the transcendent. And it was really striking when he said that. And I was like, but there was, but once the proposal is, this is what we need, there’s no how. Right? What I’m proposing is that we actually have developed a how, right? And that how must be much more oriented towards the body. And this is another thing that came out of it. I was thinking about, you know, obviously Ian’s incredibly brilliant, and he’s a brain scientist, right? That’s what he studies. But one of the things you’ve said to me that I thought was most profound was the brain, the mind is not here. The mind is in the relationship between us and the world. And there’s a way in which so many of these conversations, to me, they still feel like they’re treating mind as separable from body and environment. And once we step out of that frame, and I think that’s why it feels like it gets stuck, because you’re stuck inside that frame. When you step outside of that frame, it’s like, that’s how we’re going to create people who have the virtuosity and virtue to be able to address the drivers of the meaning crisis. Fundamentally, to answer Daniel Schmackenberg’s question, we have to learn to play a positive sum game with the world, with our experience of being. So we have to become the type of people who can play that game. So, I mean, that sounds, I mean, you’re taking it farther, so I’m not trying to just reduce it to what I said. But I argued back to Daniel that human beings seem to have a dimension, the relationship to the sacred, which is the human being, the relationship to the sacred, which can show up in all of these things you just talked about, that can put them reliably outside of prisoner dilemmas and zero-sum game. And we could have good experimental evidence for this. If you introduce the Geistlich, the Hegelian domains of normativity and the sacred, human beings will give up a game-theoretic framework. They only seem to go into game-theoretic framework when there’s a sacredness scarcity mentality, if I can sort of create a new phrase. See, for me, that’s the viciousness of the meaning crisis. It starves me of, it starves us of the sacredness. So we then go into a scarcity mentality that puts us into a zero-sum game that seems to convince us that that is what reality has to be like. And then we get caught in that in a very powerful way. Now, so, in what way do you, I mean, it’s so, I think it’s just, I want to finish, it’s completely obvious that I think profoundly about what you’re doing. I’ve put myself in your hands, I do everything I can to further your work because I think it’s I think it’s I think it’s ultimately important. And I mean that in a Tillichian sense. If we don’t, and you know, and the Verrechi Foundation is too trying to do a lot of this. We talk about dying, the dialogical, the imaginal, the mindful and the embodied. But because we’re still a virtual entity, the embodied is very seriously limited. And so I talk about it and then I point people to your work and other people. Bonita Roy’s work with Horses in the Natural World, things like that. And so, and that’s sort of getting to my question is, and I love you, so this you want an insult. I don’t think there’s going to be a rave religion that’s going to spread around the world, right? Or return to the source. And you see where I’m going. This is a question, and this is a question people have given to me. And so I think it’s fair for me to give it to other people. Which is, so I get how this works. But how does it how can we scale it up? So that it can be at the level that needs to be to be able. And no, it doesn’t have to be the whole world. There’s really good evidence it only has to be the right 10% of people and things will tip. But nevertheless, the scale up problem is a real problem. Respond was an attempt to start the ball rolling in that direction. But for various reasons, the way we were trying to do it, the way the Revicki Foundation was trying to create these things, sort of fell apart when we did the second one in Bergerac. A lot of good came out of Bergerac. But the the framework of trying to build the respond network sort of collapsed. Because there was a lot of well, as a frame problem, there was a lot of unintended side effects that quickly became apparent that and I won’t go into the details because it would trespass upon confidentiality. So I’m now sort of I I very much still believe in the networking project and the idea that it’s dealing the culture. But I don’t have a practical thing I’m doing right now to try and realize that. Because the thing I tried to do just to put it really accurately failed and so I wonder what your thoughts are about that question. I’m not asking you to solve a problem that I failed to solve. That’s unfair to you. But I know you’re a thoughtful and deep guy and I want to know what you think about that. First of all, I think you take the problem seriously and then what would you say about that? Because one of the arguments I get and I don’t want to try to trap you into any weird self-exclusions or anything right. One of the things I get from other people is well, you know, the scale up, Paul, Jonathan, you know well, you know, existing religions are the answer to that. That’s the only way you can scale it up. And the thing I say about that is I understand that but and to be fair, I don’t really see the kind of stuff you’re doing that is so ultimate in Evolve, Move, and Play within Christianity as it exists right now in the world. And that is not to besmirch Jonathan or Paul or now Jordan Hall. Right. But so I really want to land this problem on you. Not because you’re going to solve it because then you’ll just be. I have the same questions and I don’t have the answer. That’s for sure. Right. Like I face, you know, I’m trying to scale my business so that it’s successful so that I can just do this. And I think that’s a very doable problem. And I will do everything I can to help you with that one because I think your project is virtuous and gives people virtuosity. It needs to grow and thrive. And if you’re not going to go to Return of the Source people that are listening, take one minute or two minutes out of your life and think of somebody who could benefit from this and potentially recommend it to them. Wow. Thank you, John. So, you know, I’m facing whatever young entrepreneur faces which is like, how do I scale this? And then there’s particular problems for what I’m doing because, you know, I can’t take a hundred people. Exactly. And I have limited personal resources. Right. I’ve been teaching three retreats a year and we’re going to actually take it down to two retreats this year because it’s been too hard on me at the end of the summer. I’m just completely exhausted. I’m facing similar issues with the Reveke Foundation. So please continue. Yeah. So, I ultimately where I think I’m most powerful, you know, part of this is I think, you know, you, you know, Reveke Foundation, your work has been greatly empowered by the encounter with Ryan Barty. Yes. Yeah. Right. And Eric Foster and other people. Oh, just. God sent. Yeah. There’s people who are good at, at organizations and at scaling. And a lot of times the people who are really great at, you know, building a unique ecology of practices or conceptual framework are not necessarily that. That’s my case. And then there’s sometimes people that are both like my dear friend, Christopher Master Pietro, who is the executive director of the foundation. And he can walk in both of these worlds with just this. Yeah. I’ve been trying to walk in both these worlds for a long time. I don’t feel like that’s really where I’m best. I really want to be able to kind of move in towards primarily the work. Now. So not everyone can come to return the source and very small number of people can come to return the source. But I can educate other people who can create similar solutions. And there’s aspects of what we do that can be adopted very widely. We’ve had after my conversation with Jordan Peterson, we had multiple schools that reached out and asked about how they could start incorporating some of these ideas. And that’s something that I think is really deep. One of the people I would really like to have a conversation with soon, I just need to do a little bit more due diligence is Zach Stein and talk about how these things penetrate. You know, my personal point of place where I feel like I have the most power to impact this is getting myself involved in these conversations, right? Like I think that responding to what’s happening with Schmackenberger’s work and McGoekris work and your work and Jordan’s work and Jordan Hall’s work, that’s where I feel like I have the best ability to kind of offer a perspective and a lens that is lacking. And I think that that can over time create seeds for this to grow. Where it grows, I’m trying to be somewhat agnostic to. I think it’s an important aspect. I think I want Evolve Move Play to be like the philosophical Silk Road, where it becomes a set of practices that can donate to many different places. Excellent. As you know, my own sort of spiritual journey is moving towards Christianity. And It’s happening all around me. Jordan Hall is I become a gateway drug for Christianity. That’s what he told me I was. Yeah. And I am, I but I see the same thing, right? Like I think what Jonathan’s doing is quite interesting because like they are getting involved in like food culture and all these other aspects of sovereignty. And the idea of subsidiarity that Jonathan and Jordan are talking about is deeply aligned with what the problems that we’ve laid out. How do we prioritize the most important levels of connection? How do we put people in a position to grow in virtuosity and virtue within those positions? How do we prioritize real relationship at all of those levels that we’ve described? And how do we help people fall in love? All of that has to happen through these kind of bottom up cultural institutions. And in a lot of ways, church, something like a church, and it doesn’t have to be a Christian church, it could be a Buddhist Sangha, I believe is ultimately a fundamental part of the answer. And we’ve talked about the idea of the monastery, the church, and the academia, right? Well, I think, yeah, I was going to say, I think we need to bring back the, because you see this tripartite thing or analogous in many different historical periods. We’ve talked about how you have the academy and the gymnasium and the shrine all near to each other, right? And so, yeah, the monastery, the wisdom place, the university, the knowledge place, and church, the life place, and how they are all interdependent. So, yeah, well, I think it’s important for people to be talking about church, and Jordan Hall’s doing that a lot right now. I think it’s not just church. I think it has to be church, monastery, and university, if we’re going to do the kind of thing. So, you know, and that means probably very different universities than we’ve had, and it means I don’t, and I’m not, I’m not, you know I’m not nostalgic. I don’t mean going back to the monasteries we used to have. We have to do something else. You know, and there’s a lot of really interesting experimentation. Daniel Thorson has done some very interesting experimentation. We had the whole secular, secular monastery thing with the build-dunk movement. So, we have examples of non-traditional monastic relationships that are never less very powerful. But I know you have a point to say, and maybe you can weave it in, because now I want to bring up something from that conversation to ask you about. Because I think it follows right on where we’re sitting in the conversation, and that’s why I want to bring it up. Did you want to make a note of something, or say something before we go? I do, because I think that the, I think that one of the areas that comes up in this is actually a critique of, it’s sort of the capitalist technological worldview. And how that, by the way, Rafe Kelly is no crypto Marxist for all of you who are getting out your knives. I know him profoundly well. That is not where he’s coming from. Go ahead. No, it’s funny. I often find myself on podcasts doing this, but I’m very concerned by the excesses of socialism. But there’s a game theory problem of how capitalism ends up solving for the production of capital, which is actually misaligned with… I agree. I agree fundamentally. And we collapse our meaning structure and our sort of significant structure to utility in a way that’s profoundly damaging. And this goes all the way back to Adam Smith. Adam Smith said, like, a free market only works in a place where you have highly moral people. But it doesn’t, but it is itself not a driver of morality. And so the United States used to have this tripartite structure of the church, the government, and the market. And increasingly, the church has sort of disappeared in salience. And the market and the government have become increasingly cross-corrupted. And in a sense, it looks like the religious and spiritual dimension is now actually being taken up by that same government structure. I’m very afraid of Christian nationalism. And just to be fair to me, there are many Christians who are deeply critical of it, too. I’m far less concerned with Christian nationalism than I’m concerned with government enforced wokeness. I think the United States is in the middle of a religious civil war. Okay, but… So my point is that we made the mistake of thinking that the sacred was unimportant and that the market economy itself was a sufficiently virtuous incentive structure that the moral quality of individuals was no longer something that we needed to address as a society. And that’s what we have to recover from. We have to recognize. This is a challenge to the right. Ultimately, I think a lot of… It’s a challenge to both, but I think that people on the right have fallen into the idea that capitalism is good at its highest level. They’ve fallen into a maximization strategy, which is a mistake. There’s also a kind of hand-waving orientation towards the Christian God, but the real God is the market. It’s a profound kind of idolatry, yes. And then, on the flip side, I would say that more and more people on the left treat the real God as the state. I don’t object to any of these. I think that is the reverse of how they are most virtuously called. I think the left reminds us that we’re finite, and we are worthy and need compassion. The right reminds us that we are called to transcendence, and therefore we also have to cultivate virtue and responsibility. And if they were both working properly, instead of the reverse way they have been corrupted, I think we could get democracy running again properly. Yeah. So, you have one more question. I want to touch this and just propose it, and then maybe we could pick it up, because I’m really excited about this conversation. We started to get into what does it mean to love? And in some sense, I think the polls that you just talked about with the right and the left are actually the polls that a parent has to deal with, that we have to deal with as a coach, which is the polls of nurture and discipline. The part of us that recognizes the capacity for transcendence is we have to discipline the individual such that they move towards it. The part that recognizes our fine attitudes as well, but that person needs support. Part of what allows you to do a jump at Return to the Source that you would never do outside of it is that you feel loved and supported. So, love and nurture and support is the foundation from which we can make leaps. But we can also devour people by being too caring in a way that prevents them from doing it. And so, we’re always playing with this. This is something that I think about in my own personal practice deeply. And one of the problems that Schmacksenberger brought up is the problem of defectors. You could even think of that in yourself, if we’re talking about internal family systems. What are the defectors within you and how do you discipline them such that you align yourself towards the highest goal? So, you could say right there, discipline ultimately means to follow, and you don’t discipline punitively. You discipline something by getting it oriented to something that it wants to follow. That’s an important idea. That’s beautiful. That’s a beautiful thing. I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of how do we seduce towards the good? Which I wish I think Sofrasen is. Right? Being continually seduced towards the good. Okay, well that brings up the point, the question I wanted to ask is, because the proposal, in fact, the proposal that engendered the conversation, what problem are we tackling or addressing? As I said, well, what I want, what’s calling me? And I mean this. I mean this in the vocational, even if this isn’t insulting to people, the religious sense, I feel called on the philosophical Silk Road, is this idea and I’m not, this is the best words I have, but it’s not the final word. There’s an advent of the sacred taking place right here in the world and I think it is the place in which the response to the meaning crisis is coming to full, to sort of its full fulcrum where the potential to move the world is most pronounced. And part of why, the reason why I’m doing the pilgrimage on the Silk Road and putting my, because the argument isn’t just going to be made propositionally or even procedurally, the argument is going to be made existentially by how the process transforms me because I’m making myself open to that. And that’s that has gone so deep into my psyche. I’m going through this long, and I don’t think it’s going to stop, process of, I don’t know what to call it, purification, preparation, very much like, and I didn’t intend to do this. It has grown up spontaneously because I think this advent of the sacred is taking place right now. And I wanted to turn towards that because we’ve been talking about two things. We’ve been talking about sort of the problematic and the mis-framing which I think needs to be done. But we moved, and you moved us back towards love, and you know, and then there’s the possibility of, you know, loving this, the advent of the sacred as a way of doing the cultivation of it in your plant gardening metaphor, if I can use it that way. And I wanted to ask you because, you know, I think, and this is no insult to you, I think you wouldn’t be able to get Return to the Source running 30 years ago. Yes, quite possible. And I think Return to the Source, and I hope you take this as a compliment, is an example of the sprouting of the advent of the sacred. It is what it is, and it’s growing the way it’s growing precisely because in some ways, and I don’t want to put mysterious supernaturalistic agencies behind us or anything like that, but I think the sacred is trying to be born in a new way right now because we need to be called to these deep kinds of transformations, both individually and collectively. I wonder if, how that lands with you as a proposal because it’s very powerful for me. You can disagree with me, but the thing is what I don’t disagree with you. When I proposed it to Ian and Daniel, there was absolutely no hesitation on their part. They said, oh yeah, that’s right, and let’s talk about that. Yeah, I mean, I certainly don’t, I’m not, I didn’t engineer Return to the Source to be what it is. It grew, and it grew because there were themes and things that the people who came were hungry for. There was, it was like a kind of, there was a calling in the people who showed up that was not to the local good that I thought it was, and I had the openness to see over time higher goods that were served in the event and then allow it to grow into them. And so I don’t feel like I’m the, you know, it didn’t become what it was because I had this exceptional foresight to carve into what it was. It was only because I had the openness to allow it to become involved into what it was and to seek, you know, seek out collaborators like you and various other people who I’ve learned from. So, I agree, and I think that ultimately, you know, I think that you kind of all landed on that in that conversation, the sense that we can’t actually solve the drivers of the Meta Crisis without a re-attunement to the sacred and that in some sense this, and this is I think, you know, where you were going with the religion that is not a religion and I think it is more refined in the philosophical Silk Road is that there has to be a fundamental shift, right? And, you know, I think it’s very, like I look at, you know, as I’ve been talking about in my book on Christianity, it’s very interesting to look at Tolkien and Lewis and the relationship they had to it and how much that was undergirding my own aspirational structure growing into young adulthood and I didn’t realize that it came from this Christian antecedents and then to compare it to the evangelical New Earth creationist dogmatic, extremely right-wing Christianity that I interacted with in the 90s and the 2000s that I reacted against and ended up, you know, as a new atheist. And it’s like, it’s been quite a revolution in my thinking to be like, oh, that’s actually historically a very weird type of Christianity. Exactly. Exactly. This is what I mean about the difference between the religion that’s not a religion and the philosophical Silk Road, your ability to recover Christianity in that Tolkien-esque way is exactly what I think the idea of the philosophical Silk Road addresses that the religion that is not a religion does not. Yeah. This is a challenge that I gave to you as well, which is that there’s a way in which there’s a lot of Lindy-ness in the traditional religions that we don’t, I’m not sure that we can get out of that we can replace easily. We can’t reason our way towards a better solution necessarily. But I also agree with you that, like for myself, it’s not satisfying to sort of have created the ecology of practices that evolve and play as, and then just sort of like try to go and act out, you know, Orthodox Christianity or Lutheranism or whatever it is. It doesn’t have, there’s some set of practices that can give me an access to parts of the sacred that I don’t actually experience actually in any of the religious traditions that I’ve gone out and interacted with. And so I think that there’s, I think that the body has been lost in so many. The body and nature have both been lost and they were there, right? Like, you know that Taji Shuan and Ba Hua and Jingyi were Daoist practices, right? Of course I do. And I think that Daoist framework is actually essential to them being properly taken up as rituals as opposed to sports or exercise. Yeah. And chivalry, right? Chivalry, of course now chivalry is dead, but chivalry is actually a philosophy, right? It is a, it was a whole system of cultivation of self that included moral, ethical, physical virtuosity rooted in a spiritual commitment to a Christian vision. And actually, that was actually a thing that I want to talk about because I think that one of the, it’s actually a remarkable example of a shift from a negative sum dynamic to a positive sum dynamic. And I can’t unpack it because we’re running low on time here deeply, but I just, I’ll address this really quickly. If you look at the anthropological research on men’s societies worldwide, you’ll find that men’s societies get going and become very powerful in societies when societies are under high pressure of warfare. And that they’re very associated with extreme misogyny, abuse of women, and also sexual abuse of children. Pederastic traditions become very common where warrior societies develop. We see this in Athens, we see it in Papua New Guinea, because basically it’s hard to keep young men motivated to be primarily bonded to other young men in the way that helps them fight next to each other when that bond is being competed with by a sexual connection to a woman. And so that sexual energy then ends up redirected towards younger guild members. The sacred band of thieves, right? Exactly. So this is a much longer argument and people will have to know that I haven’t unpacked it completely, but the reason I bring this up is I think these are bad solutions, right? But they’re game theory stable solutions that have come up repeatedly to be able to create bands of young men who could survive in hyper war-like circumstances. And what’s remarkable about Western Europe that we don’t understand and we don’t appreciate fully, and I think this also happened in the East to some degree, but I don’t understand that as well, is that they created a spiritual tradition that created highly bonded male bands that were oriented towards the sacralization of the face. And that created the grounds through which women could be emancipated from the terrible potential of male coercion, because men do have the capacity to be coercive towards women. And they have strong game theory reasons to be. And it’s a massive problem and it gets running, in particular, when there’s a high level of violence in society. And so to be able to switch that and take your warrior cast and orient them towards the protection of feminine virtue was a remarkable move. And it’s exactly the type of thing where you have this classic game theory problem and you took the sacred and you used the sacred and ended up in a positive sum relationship. I think that’s a great example. We can unpack that. We’re going to talk again soon. We can unpack that. Maybe what we could do is we sort of landed now about because thank you for saying that because you strike me as you are orienting towards Christianity and I’m trying my best as somebody who loves you as a friend to be supportive of that as much as I can. But you’re also honest, as you were a few minutes ago, that you have inventio, both discovered and invented, practices that put people into needed right relationship with the sacred that is not being addressed as far as I can see by Christianity at large in the world today. And therefore, the advent of the sacred needs to be happening as much in Christianity as it does beyond Christianity. This is again why I talk about the philosophical Silk Road. And so you’re somebody to talk to about this. I think there are other things, other aspects. And you know, and Christianity has had a very ambivalent, tortured relationship with the body. So has Neoplatonism. It’s one of the places where and Buddhism and Vedanta. Daoism not so much, which is an interesting thing. That’s very interesting. But that says there’s something to be learned from Daoism, for example. Though they did, you know, take more curious. Yeah, but that’s not a wrong relationship. That’s just a bad theory. That’s a different thing. Right. That’s a different thing. Right. And so I want to talk more about this with you. About what does this look like? And how do we because I mean it’s a little bit selfish. But because at the core of this Silk Road is how do we get the optimal grip between affording people to move? Because some people will need to move. And we, you know, we are rightly noting people who are returning and recovering Christianity. But there are people who are also leaving it. Right. And that and so there’s people that need to move. And how do we get that into an optimal grip relationship upon a processing relationship with those who need to return home and deeply recover something? Recover their home. Their their spiritual home. And I that’s something I want to talk about. Okay. Can I like to finish? I know we’re way over time. But I just I really want to return because again it feels like it’s so easy to get up in the head with these things. But ultimately I think the proposal that I’m making is that if we want to solve the meaning crisis and the meta crisis, we have to fall more in love with being. And that’s not something that we can do just through dialogue. It’s not something we can do through writing and philosophy and reading. It’s actually something that we have to embody. And we got kind of deep into the permaculture aspect of it, which is interesting that that came out because that’s not my expertise. And I’d love to see more people who are expert in that bring that into the conversation. But where my expertise is in how we land in the body and its relationship directly, physically with the world. And the proposal is this. If you, if we’re going to do it, we have to engage with things that bring us into real reciprocal realization with the world. And that is actually what Parkour does. Parkour invites you to fall in love with your experience of being by opening new affordances in how you perceive and experience the world that bring joy and the potential for the flow state. And the same thing is true of a martial arts practice and interacting with another person. The same thing is true with a dance practice and interacting with another person. The same thing is true of a crafting practice or a juggling practice or any object manipulation practice. And the same thing is true of a deep somatic relationship with the self. And that whatever the kind of philosophical and highest level of spiritual transcendence that we look at, I believe we have to address these four levels to truly be the type of people who can virtuously and virtuosically love the world better and more wisely. And, to do that, you have to actually go out and start physically practicing these things. This is what I said to Jordan when I was on his podcast. This is what I said to Jordan when I was on his podcast. Your next book is called We Who Wrestle With God. How can you become the type of person who can wrestle with God if you’ve never wrestled? And I asked this at one of my seminars and several of the women said what if the right relationship with God is not wrestling, it’s actually dancing? And And I think, and I said, well, the answer to that is yes, it’s both. Right? We have to wrestle and we have to dance. And parkour is like wrestling and dancing with the physical world. You can choose which expression you’re moving towards. That’s very good. That’s very good. Right? And so this is the proposal. And I really want to hammer it home at the end of this. If you love this conversation, if you like the ideas, if you want to fall more deeply in love with the world, you don’t need to go listen to another podcast. You need to step outside your door and walk. Just start walking and find yourself some nature. Put your hand on a tree, smell a flower, touch a leaf, walk by a creek, take your shoes off, put your feet in the water. You don’t have to be able to jump 15 feet between buildings to begin building a real relationship with the physical world. But when you invite yourself into play and you invite yourself into connection with the physical world, when you invite that with other people, if you, you know, pitch my stuff here, if you go grab our rough housing course. And you play a game like hug to relaxation with your partner or your child or your best friend. You will feel different about your level of connection. And then if you play a game like this is my spot, that’s not your spot. Right. You’re going to start scaling up your potential to actually experience what it’s like to have real reciprocal realization with another human being, with the world and ultimately with yourself. And then I think all of that is the grounds for having real realization of that with transcendence. So that’s the proposal. Well, I think it’s a good proposal. I have something of a counter proposal, but I’ll because I mean, we, if you want this to transfer broadly and deeply to many different domains of people’s lives, if you want to exact this up into how people navigate the social world and the conceptual world, you also need frameworks around that. Oh, I agree. Absolutely. 100% agree. But you shouldn’t mistake the frameworks for the practice. If you don’t do the practices, frameworks are not sufficient on their own. And that’s where I see that the missing pieces, there’s lots of people with really sophisticated, really sophisticated conceptual models. But there’s not a lot of places where deep practice and clear conceptual models are needed. That’s where we agree. That’s where we agree profoundly. Yeah. The people who are attracted to you, I think are the people who are leaning towards the conceptual side. Oh, that’s dangerous then. I don’t want that. No, I mean, and that’s not a criticism. It’s just it’s a, you know, like we had the people who came with you, right, to return to the source in 2022. And then we had the movement culture before. And it was very interesting to see those two, those two poles. And so this is just the hesitation that I feel every time I listen to conversations in the space is, is this aspect of practice, is this aspect of embodiment fully being seen? And I think that just the technology, the medium itself is it tends us towards that. I agree. I agree with that. Yeah, I believe much more in the colleges of practices than I do in merely conceptual frameworks. That is for definite sure. And I’ve been arguing for that. And the whole awakening to meaning platform is all about practices. We do want more embodiment. And the challenge we face is a very practical one. It’s not because of philosophical principles. It’s that we are drawing people all around the world and getting them all in the same place to do embodiment practices. Very, very challenging. We’ve we’ve we’ve had several meetings around this issue a couple of times. And I know I agree with you. The optimal is to have people in the physical place together. But that’s typically not how we’re going to onboard people into this world. Right. And so there is that very practical problem. And so maybe you and I can talk about that, too. Yeah, absolutely. John, I hope you don’t mind. I got really passionate there at the end and share my message. I obviously have the most respect and love for you. No, no, no. Don’t worry, my friend. Don’t worry. I was addressing your points, not your person. I got I got I’d be as passionate as you need to be. I don’t disagree with you. And that’s the issue. And I think that’s the issue is for me, it’s like. I know how people are coming into this and and well, at least demographically. And how do we how do we meet that? That’s the issue. And we wrestled with it at both of the respond get togethers. And I don’t think there was a really good and this this overlaps with the scaling up problem and other things. And those are mixed up with the advent of the sacred. And so I’m just going to do that. And I’m going to wave my hands and say you and I will talk again about all of this. I’m going to give you the last word, but my last word will be. Takes take race passion the way it should be taken, which is deep lived understanding and conviction of how profound is ecology of practice is in terms of what it can offer you and take seriously. If not for yourself, for other people. The challenge opportunity of going to one of the retreats, taking up his courses. I promise you, I very rarely do this. I promise you, you will benefit from it in a way that is profoundly. Affording of your flourishing physically, mentally, existentially and spiritually. If you can now have the last word. I don’t think I can top that, John. Thank you. Love you, man. And it’s always a pleasure to always pleasure.