https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=l_N5WhH_W-o
Talk until then. Yeah, okay, great. Well, thanks for joining me for this discussion or dialogue. Well, thank you for reaching out. You know, and I enjoyed when we did the empathy circling, Peter, Jason, and I and you. And so when you reached out and said, I think we need to bring you sort of empathy into the discussion, especially on the project that I’m engaged on now, the After Socrates series, I thought, yeah, Edwin just made a good point. So I thought doing it together in dialogue also seemed appropriate. So thank you for inviting me and proposing this. Yeah, and I appreciate your openness to dialogue and watching a lot of your dialogues and you’re willing to talk with everyone. So I appreciate that mindset and that attitude because I think that’s really what we need going forward is kind of that openness just to- Yeah, yeah. I think that, I mean, I’m willing to talk to anybody that will come, they can disagree with me, Paul, Vanderclay, Jonathan Pajot often disagree with me, but I have a tremendous amount of affection and respect for them because I trust them because they come into difficult dialogue in good faith. We’ve lost what that meant, right? But they come in in good faith. They come in with, no, no, I’m gonna be open to self-correction and to insight. We’re gonna disagree, but I’m also going to come in with sort of a reverence for the real possibility that I will learn something from you and you will transform me in ways that I can’t foresee or anticipate or do on my own. And when people come in with that sort of orientation, then I wanna talk to them. I wanna talk to them. When they come in, when they have an ax to grind, then they wanna prove their point. Then it’s like, I have a place where I do that and that’s, let’s go into the scientific academy and we can argue particular theories there. There’s a way of doing that. And I try to, other than that, I kind of don’t wanna talk to people. But thankfully, thankfully, I find a lot of people in both domains that I can talk to effectively and I think productively. Well, I actually like to talk with the people from, they have very, who you say are bad faith, but to do it in an empathy circle. Right, right. With the empathic listening structure. And we bring together people on the political left, political right. Exactly. Talk about topics like abortion, whatever. But they have to follow a structure where they have to do that empathic listening, which you took part in. So as long as there’s that rule, it’s like anybody, I’m glad to talk with anybody. You said, it kind of makes sure people actually listen to each other instead of just start throwing stuff at each other. Yeah. But that’s one of the, we could slow down here because I wanna zero in on this because there’s one of the things I’m interested right now to talk to you about. Because I think the difference you pointed to, because I see Socrates as doing both what I said at the beginning about that, but Socrates also doing something analogous to what you did. That’s the midwifery that he talks about. He says that he’s like a midwife. Because one of the things you, I think, if I get this wrong, but it seems like you’re saying, that one of the things that the empathy circling does is transition people into good faith dialogue. Out, out, out, out. Right. And so, and I think that’s a missing, and I think, so I think your critique or criticism, whichever way you wanna put it, that I have not sort of looked more at empathy or empathy circling, and it’s a missing piece I wanna acknowledge that. You should know, just to be explicit, I’m gonna directly talk about empathy circling in the After Socrates series. The first half of the series is about the historical development of dialectic, but I wanna put that, if you’ll allow me to pun, into dialogue with all these new emerging practices around trying to get to authentic dialogue. And I think, I mean, I think what you’ve, I think what you just said is really important. In fact, one of the things that, when Peter, Peter Lindbergh, who was also, and I talked about after, because we said, we’re doing a bunch of these modalities, and it’s all participant observation. And what we talked about, and Peter had this metaphor for it, which I think is really good, he said, it felt like the empathy circling was sort of training a different muscle than some of the other. And they sort of be seeming to train different things. And I said to him, I said, I wonder if they could be put into sort of a programmatic relationship. And I hope you don’t take this as being diminutive, trying to diminish the importance of empathy circling. I’m trying to do the opposite in my mind, which is that empathy circling is this great thing for transitioning people into good faith dialogue. So you would perhaps need to get good training in empathy circling before you could go into sort of the kind of circling that Guy Sendstock talks about, which is much more when people are capable, not just willing or wanting, but also capable of entering into deep good faith dialogue, then you can sort of do this extra stuff with it. So that’s why- Yeah, that’s exactly how I see it, is that the empathy circle is sort of a gateway practice. But it is this foundational gateway practice is like anybody can do it with sort of a minimal- Right, exactly, exactly. And then which means it can spread very widely, which is sort of the thing I’ve been focusing on, is how do we sort of spread this practice throughout the culture? Is it something anyone in the culture can do? And just by observing it, if we can have like politicians, if we could have, you know, like when Trump, Pelosi, Schumer and Pence were in this oval office and they’re having this banter between each other, remember that? If they would have done an empathy circle with each other, it’s like the whole country would have seen it and they could have picked it up. And it would be like that. So if you can model it, people can pick it up. And it’s this gateway to all those different practices that you’re, I think that you’re talking about, that whole constellation of practices, and it’s like making it deeper. But that’s why I really find it so important making it deeper, but that’s why I really focused on this. And actually our topic actually is like, what is the role of empathy in your work? So I haven’t heard it, you know, mentioned, I don’t know, you haven’t talked about empathy. I think it’s really a foundational practice. And you had sent, you know, just said, well, maybe we should start off by like, what are we talking about when we’re mentioning empathy? Right? It’s like, what is the definitions that we’re talking about? It is a bit of a mess out there in the academic world in terms of what people are calling empathy. And I sent you that article, that paper by Dan Batson. He lays it out pretty well, you know, just a basic framework for it. So it’s a good starting point. I think it is. So two points on that. The first, the mini, I mean, this is a, this is a prevalent problem in psychology where the same term is used in multiple different ways. And so that really, that really makes the problem of equivocation a deep problem in psychology. And so I have avoided the term empathy. Perhaps I was mistaken, but maybe not. It looks to me from the outside, in the article you sent me sort of Simon’s to support this, that there are many different meanings and they don’t, they are of this term. And so that’s why I hesitated in using it. And you know, and some particular meanings have come onto very strong criticism, like the criticism that Bloom has made. I know you have responses to that. I’m just trying to explain why I sort of held off in using the term because it struck me like, what people, like, what am I saying when I invoke this term? Either I spend a lot of time like trying to stipulate it, or I just, I just put it aside. Now, here’s an opportunity to actually give it the foregrounding that it needs. But the second thing I’d like to bring into that defining is I want a definition that makes focal and central the very thing you just put your finger on a few minutes ago. I want a definition of empathy that helps me explain the transition from bad faith to good faith dialogue. So I want to reverse engineer empathy from that important, and I think you agree that central function that we as deeply needed today. Or I’m sorry, I’m gonna be a little bit bold here, Edwin. If there’s a definition of Ed, there’s a definition coming from Edwin that doesn’t tell me, you know, explain how empathy gets people from bad faith to good faith dialogue. I’m not that interested in it because I think we have the shared idea that, no, this is really, really needed right now. And I think it’s really central to, as you also seem to agree, with a lot of important projects. So let’s open up what it means, but I want to keep this function the central thing. I want to understand what is empathy? And the explanation is such that it explains to me this function of taking people from bad faith to good faith dialogue. Is that fair? Yeah, yeah, I think that’s great. Yeah, there’s a practicality to that too. Yes, yeah, yeah. It’s like, if this is a practical definition, it’s not just, you know, whatever. It’s like, this is something we can use. And that’s what I really appreciate about the value of empathy is the practicality of it. And I see it all the time. Like, you know, I do empathic listening with people. I do mediation. And it’s the empathy that’s sort of the key ingredient for bridging that meaning crisis, I would say. Yeah, yeah. And so the work I do is pretty much based on work of Carl Rogers. So he had definitions. I had sent you that definition. Yes, I saw that. Of empathy. You know, he has, I think, really a paper, and he presented the paper. You know, he gave his definitions. He laid it out. He spent like 40 years doing, you know, developing empathic listening in a therapeutic context and, you know, promoted it. So it’s his work. And at the core, it’s kind of the most simple definition or is a metaphor of going on someone else’s journey with them. Yeah. So I am going, I’m sitting here. I’m looking, you’re kind of going, I’m speaking. You’re following my journey, right? It’s like you’re present with me. I can feel you being present, you know, sensing into what I’m saying. And, you know, and you’re going on my journey. You’re not saying, no, you’re wrong. You’re this, you might be thinking some things, but you still have that presence. And so you’re going on my journey. And then also the other part I would say is the empathy, I like to define empathy within the context of an empathy circle too. Of course. So that we have something tangible that we’re defining it with. Yeah, I like that. So here it is. You’ve been following me. And then it’s like, okay, now I’m going to follow you. Right, we’re going to switch. I’m going to empathize with you and follow you on your journey and hear you. Yeah, so that’s just the sort of a starting, that’s just the starting point. No, but that’s great. Okay, so that, thank you. That brings up a couple of points I want to, first of all, I like this idea of sort of, you know, participating in somebody’s other sort of, just sort of what I would call respectable knowing. And that leads to a point that I think I want to explicate and draw out from your work, that you aren’t thinking of empathy as just an affective state. You’re thinking of, if I’m following your journey, the way you’re talking about, I’m not just having sort of the same affective state. I’m also trying to see how you’re making sense of things. If I’m following your journey, there’s a deeply cognitive aspect to this project. It’s not just an affective response. And I think that’s important because many of the definitions, you know this, many of the definitions of empathy reduce it to a kind of affective response or an affective resonance between two people. And then it’s like, okay, so what? For me, that carries no moral implications. If I just share your pain, I might just run away from you because I don’t want to be in pain. But your notion of following somebody else’s journey is no, no, no, I’m not just sort of in, you know, sharing an affective state with you. That affective state is bound up with, it’s facilitating and affording, trying to get, deeply get, this is what I mean by perspectival knowing, how you’re making sense of things. That’s why in the empathy circling, I like the part where you have to sort of say back to the person, I’ve understood you, right? It’s about- Have you understood me? You know, you’re getting a check. You’re getting a sort of a message sent, message received accurately sort of, yeah. So I think this one point we should emphasize right away. And I’m trying to make connections to some of my constructs. I hope you find that useful. Yeah, great, that’s what I’m looking forward to. So I think this idea of thinking of it more as a whole person thing, it’s got serious cognitive aspects to it. And that we can think of it in terms of participatory knowing, and knowing by, in some sense, identifying with people so that I can get, right? I can enact for myself to some degree their perspectival knowing. I’m seeing how they’re making sense of a situation, how they’re salience landscaping, how they’re framing, how they’re sizing up. Also how they’re identifying with that particular perspective in a participatory manner. I see that I’m trying to unpack, I hope you finding this fair, that following somebody else’s journey in those kinds of terms. That’s what I’m trying to do. It’s their whole landscape, there’s a landscape of their beingness, right? It is all these things that are happening in their being, and you’re just sort of moving into their world, into their landscape of all the different relationships, their felt relationships, how they’re putting the world together, and just sort of exploring that, and not bringing in, you’re just bringing in your presence to follow them to get a sense of that landscape. And it’s a felt, the one thing I would say is, I know there’s, you talk about the emotions and the cognitive, but it’s so intertwined. I don’t know how you can even, this whole thing of affective and cognitive, it’s all so intertwined. I don’t think you can even really clearly tease it apart. I wasn’t wanting to tease it apart. In fact, I argue in my series for the deep interpenetration of cognition, and emotion, and motivation, and affect in general. I think that, I think what I was trying to do was, I was trying to resist the reduction, I think the overly simplistic reduction of empathy to a purely affective state. Right. Okay, that’s what- Yeah, there’s a whole mapping. There’s a map. When you have map, you’re seeing things in relationship to each other. So there is that, it’s not just a felt experience, but those felt experiences have relationships to each other. Yeah. Maybe that’s what you’re- That’s what I’m pointing to. Right. You’re kind of trying to get the other person, not with just the machinery of the mind, or the machinery of the heart, but if you’ll allow me, sort of with the machinery of yourself. I’m trying to figure out how, if you’ll allow me to turn this into a verb, I’m trying to figure out how you’re sort of selfing right now. How you’re sort of configuring yourself, and co-configuring the world, and trying to fit yourself and the world together. That’s what I’m trying to get. And here’s why I think that’s important, Edwin, and I hope you think this might be a way, I mean, I know Paul, and so I don’t- Okay, well let’s have an empathy circle with him. At some point. At some point. I’ve been trying for five years to have an empathy circle. You won’t talk to me. Well, I don’t know him well. I’ve only, I’ve met him, and I’ve had a couple of conversations with him. I might be able to get into a conversation with him. I know he likes my work a lot. But, so I agree with him if, please remember the if, if empathy was just that shared affect, then I think it’s morally neutral. But if what we mean by empathy is this sort of enacting for myself, getting by enacting, yourselfing, that has huge moral implications. In fact, I can’t enter into a proper moral relationship with you if I can’t inactively get yourselfing. So I think that’s a deep way, if we understand empathy, of being able to respond to that kind of critique, and say, no, no, this is what we mean by empathy. We don’t just mean the shared affect. Yeah. Well, there is a, sorry. Go ahead. There is a feeling into, I’m feeling your excitement. There is, right. But it’s like your excitement is not overwhelmingly, and I’m just overly lost in your excitement, right? And that’s what Bloom is criticizing. He’s saying, oh, you’re getting all excited. I’m gonna get all excited. Yes, yes, exactly. So I have a sense, I’m still feeling into your being. Oh, I’m feeling you’re excited. What’s beyond that excitement? What’s the bigger picture? So I’m not being, so in fact, if I get totally, you can do that. I can get totally excited, and I lose my connection to you. Exactly. I actually, what Paul is criticizing, I actually agree with. That state that he is criticizing is actually, it’s a block to empathy as I’m sort of explaining it. So in a sense, I agree in that sense, but I don’t call that empathy. That’s just like state matching, or there could be any number of reasons you get into that matching state. So yeah, I just wanna throw that in. No, no, I think that’s good. I think that’s why I like this idea of making sense, because sense has both sort of a cognitive meaning, like making sense, but it also has a sensorial meaning, like actually sensing and feeling, like you said. I’m trying to pick up on that with that term. And the reason why I was circling, I’m not quite intended on this, is one of the definitions in the paper was the idea of empathy as emotional contagion, which is exactly what you were describing a few minutes ago. An emotional contagion, as you yourself say, can actually be deeply disruptive. It can disconnect people, and it can motivate them to immoral behavior, I think very clearly. Mob, kinda. Mob and lots of things. So I think trying to get this, I’m glad we have this forum, we’re trying to get very clear on conceptual reformulation of empathy that can distinguish it from these other things, I think would be tremendously helpful. I like this idea of following somebody on a journey in the way we’ve been talking about it, this sort of a participatory knowing of other people’s perspectival knowing of getting into, feeling into, getting into, to maybe speak both sides, feeling into and getting into how somebody is selfing and whirling, I see that as really important. And that, I think it’s also important for another reason, because this idea of getting into how somebody is selfing and whirling might help to explain why empathy can move people from bad faith to good faith dialogue. Do you see what I’m? Yeah, I do. Go ahead, go ahead. I mean, you talk about bullshit, so somebody’s talking bullshit and they’re trying to manipulate you and you just listen to the bullshit, you listen to the, all the different things that they’re trying to throw out there, and then you just hear it. It’s like, oh, I hear you’re really, this is going on for you. And it’s almost like it disarms them. It’s like, oh, you’re actually listening to me. They might have anger, oh, I hear you’re feeling angry, is there more? Yeah, and then you go into it and it’s almost like it disarms, and it’s like, ooh, and then they’re like, oh, this feels pretty good, I’m actually being heard. And then they kind of open up and there’s a deeper truth, I find that kind of comes up over time if you. Okay, that’s helpful, because now I can ask another question that might help give even more distinctive clarity. So what’s the difference, because I think there’s a difference in what you just said, between listening to someone so they’re heard and listening to someone and being convinced by them. Because I don’t wanna be convinced by the bullshit artist, right? I don’t wanna be convinced because then the bullshit artist is, Zach, we’re not gonna connect. Bullshit artist is then gonna manipulate me, he’s gonna trigger my self-deceptive machinery, my defensive machinery. So what are you doing? What is empathy doing that is allowing you to listen so the person feels heard without you thereby being convinced or manipulated by them, if they’re doing something in bad faith. Because that’s what we’re zeroing in now. And how do we get from the bad faith to the good faith? So what’s the difference? Yeah, there’s a guy named Sam Vaknin, he’s in Europe and he wrote a book called, Malignant Self-Love. And he’s kind of the go-to guy that you go to for a narcissistic psychopath, right? Right, wow. He’s created a media persona of being, and there was a documentary about him that they traveled to these different research centers for studying psychopathy and they tested him. They actually tested positive for this. And so I’ve done a couple interviews with him and we did a couple empathy circles and it’s sort of amazing that it’s like he kind of started opening up. Instead of trying to manipulate me to get what he sort of wanted, it’s like he was able to share who he was and be heard by me. And then likewise, I was able to be heard, he was reflecting me, he was following me on my journey. And there’s sort of a deeper truth that comes through over time with that in that I can share my truth. Plus it’s more than just having two people, the more people you get, that’s why I like four people in the circle, you have multiple points of reference too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I see that. So that creates a bit of a safety as well that if you just get with two people and they’re just going back and forth, you can kind of get kind of bogged down. The more points of reference of reality you have, it creates a sense of safety. I don’t know if that’s sort of touching. That’s part of it. Okay, the last point you said makes good sense to me, using sort of distributed cognition in the chat. Okay, so I think that’s, and of course that I think overlaps with sort of Socratic dialectic in important ways. I like this idea of a deeper truth. So this is what it’s sounding like to me. It’s like, well, sometimes what people, often what people think they want in a conversation, especially if they’re coming in with bad faith, is they want belief transmission. I want to give you my beliefs. So that way, I’ll be able to predict and control your behavior. But it sounds to me like the deeper truth is almost like the Heideggerian al-Athaya. What people often want and what they perhaps, if you’ll allow me, what they really want is connectedness and a mutual opening, right, rather than, right, rather than belief transmission. And so is that the key, that you listen in a way in which you’re not getting of belief transmission, you’re trying to listen in a way in which you’re trying to shift the person on to paying attention to that sense of connectedness which they crave. Is that a good way? Yeah, I think that you’re talking about the meaning crisis which is feeling disconnected, right? You have a sense of disconnected from your own real felt experience, and you have disconnection from other people’s felt experience. So the empathic process of just fully hearing somebody is sort of a connection building process, and that connection, when you start feeling connected, it’s like your fear goes down, right? And the fear itself is a disconnecting process. So the more we can get away past fear, the more we can sort of feel connected, and the more we feel connected, it creates a positive spiral towards deeper, deeper connection over time. Yeah, a reciprocal opening as opposed to a reciprocal narrowing. So that seems to be implying, and I would agree with this implication, that sort of one of the core underlying motives of bad faith dialogue is a kind of fear motivation, whereas when people, if you can sort of get them to connect, you shift them from avoiding fear to pursuing connection, and that’s how you can shift people from a bad faith dialogue which is fear driven to a good faith dialogue which is connection seeking or connection cultivating. Is that? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, you do start over time. I mean, you know, we have, like I said, we’ve done left-right dialogues, so on, you know, gun control, gun violence, on abortion, you know, people have really strong feelings, and it’s easy, they share something, and if they don’t feel heard, a wall goes up, right? It’s like they get tense, you can just feel the tension, and then, but it’s like, okay, what I’m hearing is this, this, this, you know, you’re starting to hear them, and then they get more relaxed, right? And then, but then, then there’s also the mutuality of it, at least in the empathy circle, where it’s just not the other person doing all the talking. It’s a mutual, so that feels pretty good, there’s a sense of fairness within it, so that fairness within the empathy circle helps. So, right, but you’re looking at, so the real dynamics of what’s really going on here. Well, that’s what I want, yeah, I mean, I want to, and I’m grateful to you for being such a willing participant in this, I want to bridge between the cognitive science and the practicality. I want to try and understand, you know, in terms of the cognitive science, what are the cognitive processes, what are the dynamics going on, because, well, I think it would serve your practice, one of the things that’s happening here, is a way of getting, you know, good responses to misunderstandings and mis-framing of empathy circling. I think that’s a clear potential benefit, but also, I think, if I could understand, if you’ll allow me this metaphor, the machinery of the dynamics, then I could relate it to other developmental processes. I could see how empathy circling as a practice could more properly coordinate with other developmental processes and projects. So that’s what I’m trying to do here right now, that’s why I’m trying to do it. Yeah, well, there’s another piece that’s coming to me now, is that, there’s, I mean, there’s multiple, so many dimensions to this. One is the empathic listening was really articulated, developed within the therapeutic context, right? There’s the listener, like Carl Rogers, he would listen to his clients, and they would bring all kinds of, I mean, the amount of struggles people have, the meaning crisis that they’re bringing, their meaning crisis is to him. He’s just like sitting and listening. The other part that I’m looking at is the relational part. Within the therapeutic part, you do have a bit of a distance because you’ve got a professional relationship, the therapist is not equal in a sense, they’re not sharing their story, so it’s not a mutually empathic relationship. So that’s another part of it, is that, that’s why I call it a culture of empathy, because we want that mutual relationship part. And how do we create, and so the relationship part is you can speak empathically too, right? It’s not just like listening empathically, you can contribute to the empathic relationship by speaking more, and this was the work of Gene Jendlin, I think you’re familiar with the focusing, is he like, they go, okay, who is this, who are the clients who came, who is moving forward in their growth? They’re stuck, they got a meaning crisis, who’s actually through this empathic listening, having some kind of forward motion. And from his studies, it was like the people who spoke from a present felt experience, like, oh, right now I’m feeling excited, I’m feeling concentration, and the concentration is right here, I feel a kind of a spaciousness here, and doing it moment to moment too, it’s like, oh, it’s actually changing just by my sharing the felt experience, kind of starts shifting, and then you get a reflection on it, and that kind of contributes to the shifting. And so his insight was, it was the felt experience and identifying it, you know, sharing it, getting the reflection on it, versus kind of spinning in sort of an intellectual, sort of an attached way that you’re in sort of a monotone, continuous sort of monotone space, you just don’t move anywhere. So that was sort of his, and he kind of developed that whole kind of a structure. That’s helpful. So now I’m getting a sense of the appropriate, let’s call it the empathy conducive kind of listening. And now you said, but it has to be properly conjoined with an empathy conducive kind of speaking, and getting them to resonate properly together is part of the challenge, I take it. Yeah, and you can deepen, that’s what it takes to sort of deepen the experience, even at a super, you know, at that sort of just more bad faith or whatever level, you know, right, right, it already it does a lot, you know, it over time, you know, we do like family empathy circles, four hours of empathic listening. And you know, it kind of people are kind of disjointed. And after, you know, about two hours, a little bit more, something clicks, and people are sort of you just kind of feel this kind of connection that happens. Yeah, I take it that what happens is, you get to sort of this self organizing system that takes shape. I’ve noticed that in other other circling practices, you get sort of this, people, people feel sort of static, or just, you know, this kinds of one off connections. And like you say, it’s sort of all propositional, and then it shifts into no, no, no, now we’re all sort of belonging to this self organizing system that’s starting to take on a life of its own. And people start to I noticed that the metaphors shift from sort of pushing effort to being drawn, people start to say, I was, you know, they do I saying this, and they sort of push their hand out, they do all these pushing metaphors. And then when the shift turns, they go into I’ve been I’ve been drawn in, I carried along and they start to and so they they use a Buddhist metaphor, they they feel that they’ve entered the stream, right, that they found a way to orient themselves into the process so that then they know to get carried along. So I’m very, I’m very interested in that. I’m trying to see what are the conditions that make make that gel and take shape. Actually, starting to do work with a student about trying to maybe come up with, you know, a way of operationalizing this and measuring this so we can see where you get that transition, where it goes from sort of chaotic to the coherence of self organization. Yeah, there’s a real felt experience in that you’re like you’re saying there’s a feeling of pushing versus a feeling of being drawn into it. And exactly. And yeah, it’s like being in sort of a flow and there’s more of a harmony of the whole that kind of happens. And how do you kind of create that environment? Yeah. So part of the theorizing that I’m doing is, is that I think that what seems to be happening is that within distributed cognitive, you’re getting you’re getting a shared flow state in the chick set my son of the word, you’re actually getting people in sort of distributed, mutually reinforcing flow. And so I’m wondering if the conditions that create individual flow, how did that map on to creating this collective flow? It’s interesting that because I’ve been in some circling events and I’ve been reading about it, that people often they get this like this third factor that in addition to all the people, there’s the conversation or the process or even even the spirit that they start to feel sort of a relationship to the process and the spirit of the process above and beyond, but not excluding of the other participants in the process. And I get a sense from what you’re just saying that that’s also happening when you get into the deeper levels of empathy circling. Do people start to talk that way as if they’re being sort of carried along and the conversation itself is starting to direct them or lead them? Yeah, I found there’s a there’s a state where you don’t even do empathic listening and you don’t do the reflection anymore. It’s like it’s already embodied sort of that. Yeah, we already know that we’re listening to each other, right? We already know there was taking each other in. So we don’t even do the reflective listening anymore. And I kind of like that at state because there’s a kind of a shift that happens and I kind of feel I feel comfortable and at ease because I’m not having to be on guard. On guard about what’s being said, is there going to be space for me? And then I’ve heard that there is sort of like this I have some people have mentioned sort of a third space, you know, there’s you and this third sort of a space. The third space. Exactly. It happens. And how do we create that? And how do we deepen it? Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s those are good questions. And those are questions I’m trying to get a handle on. And I’m also interested in that because when people I’ve seen and I’ve read about and I’ve experienced it, that when people start to get a sense of that third space, they’re some of their they start to shift. And I want to be really careful here. And I don’t want it be I don’t want this to be over read. But people they start to use spiritual and religious language to talk about this this space. And it makes sense because you’re sort of involving the whole self. And then the whole self is in relation to other people’s whole selves. And then all these whole selves are sort of in relation to this third space. And it’s I’m interested in, I guess, for lack of a better word, the spiritual aspects of these practices, too, because I think that’s also the way in which they address the meaning crisis. They give people a way of not believing in propositions about spirituality, but actually enacting the self transcendence and the deep connectedness that’s at the core of I think a lot of meaning making and the cultivation of wisdom, spirituality, to put an umbrella term on it. I wonder what what do you think about that? Do you think it starts to because that’s another aspect of addressing the meaning crisis, right? Giving people a place like a temple or a church, if you’ll allow me the analogy, where they can go so that they can they can enact self transcendence, they can enact deep connectedness, they can enact transformation, they can enact an awareness of something more comprehensively connective than just their own ego itself. Yeah, I think I heard one of your your dialogues that you had of a evangelical fundamentalist background. Yeah. There you go. There you go. That explains so much. Yeah. So, yeah. So I so for me, you know, I grew up, I thought I knew, understood everything, you know, I was going to go to heaven. I had the kind of the answers. Then I spent 10 years traveling around the world. Right. Muslim countries, Hindu, you know, animist and just wide variety. And all that kind of just, you know, kind of passed away to where I kind of I just saw that what people are kind of people. If I was born here, I’d kind of be a Muslim. If I was born here, I’d be a Hindu or whatever, just because I would have taken on the culture. And then I just saw that there was sort of this common humanity, you know, people just they’re kind, they’re generous, they’re caring, they’re they’re not so caring, you know. So I just see it more spirituality is more just felt experience. So if you’re saying spirituality, that there is a felt experience of, you know, if you say transcendent, something, you know, moving. Yeah, being unstuck, getting unstuck, getting unstuck. Yeah. That’s what I mean. That’s what I mean by self-transcendence. And I mean, again, again, if we if like, I think what’s going on is people a felt experience of getting unstuck, but also a felt experience of making connections and making meaning. And again, not propositional meaning. I mean, the meaning in life kind of meaning. The kind of where we sense that we’re connected very deeply to ourselves, to other people, to reality in important ways. The things, you know, that the research is showing is, you know, are really conducive to people feeling they have a lot of meaning in life. And that’s what I mean by spirituality. Yeah. So for me, I just use the word felt experience to be as spirituality somehow has the sense of it being another world. I mean, beyond. Yeah. Yeah. It’s not part of the physical experience. There’s something like God who’s in a different dimension that’s outside of the sphere. No, no, no. I understand your criticism. And as you know, I think we have to I sometimes would use the word sapiential rather than spiritual, meaning having to do with wisdom in this broad sense of really understanding, you know, how to connect with other people, with yourself and other people in the world and really cultivate a depth in that connection. Yeah, something that I had. I just want I just wanted to just wanted to thank you for letting me finish. I appreciate that. I just wanted to say that I guess part of the way I see the project that I’ve been engaging is, is to try and reconstruct the notion of spirituality, make it more oriented to sapiential because I want to take it out of that two worlds grammar that you just pointed to because many people are like you. They don’t find that two worlds grammar of the here and then there’s the other world of heaven or God. They don’t find that two worlds grammar viable anymore. It’s not a live option for them. And if spirituality is bound up with that, that’s why that’s why I would argue that’s why you see a lot of people rejecting the established religions, because that grammar doesn’t work for them anymore for all kinds of historical and I think scientific reasons. But if can we take whatever it was that was going on there that afforded people what I call religion, that deep sense of connectedness, that affordance of getting unstuck, self transcendence, growth in meaning in life. Can we bring it into another way of thinking that doesn’t rely on the two worlds grammar? I think that’s what I’m trying to point to. I think that part of what empathy circling and these other modalities are doing is exactly that. They’re trying to say we don’t need that. We don’t need that. That mythos anymore. There’s another way in which we can enact these these what you call the felt the felt experience of connectedness. How do you create that sense of connectedness without having to think of God and some kind of outside worldly sort of space? Otherworldly. Yeah, exactly. And I think that’s what Carl Rogers, if you like that paper of his, he’s kind of addressing that. It’s like he’s talking about people getting stuck. I mean, that was his whole work was like people are coming. I am stuck in I’m stuck in in disconnection, alienation, depression, anxiety, fear. I mean, you just go down the list of all these feelings that people get sort of stuck in. And he’s like, well, just through the listening to people, for them to start opening up, start sharing their felt experience and for that to be seen. There’s something about having someone there to reflect you to be sort of on the journey with you. Metaphorically, I’m on the journey with you to follow you on your journey. And there’s something about that companionship that creates a sense of connection, even in the darkest. You know, you see people who just collapse like I just they collapse with grief or whatever. And there’s someone there that has their arms around that person sort of being present with them. And it’s a support in that moment. So it’s I think that’s sort of the the empathic presence that how it helps the unstuck. It’s like as you slowly go in. And I’ve had that experience. I don’t know if I mentioned it before, but with I was kind of just noticing my own anxiety. And I was in a dance. I do freestyle dance. Right. I was noticing it. And I thought, well, instead of just avoiding it, going off and away, I’m going to really try to tap in. I’m going to try to take that anxiety that I feel kind of in the core of my body. And I want to zoom in on it like like a picture. Like when you zoom in to a picture, you get to the individual pixels. I said, I want to zoom into this and get into the individual pixels and see what it is. And and I and as I did that, I started getting metaphors. Came to mind like, oh, it’s like thousands of little knives that are cutting away, slicing away at me. And I’m going to get really close to that. And it’s like I really I kept kind of exploring it kind of dissolved that feeling dissolved in a new and it was like, oh, this is kind of there’s there’s no it’s gone. And then it was only a few seconds later that, oh, I have another one. There’s like this heaviness in my mind, kind of a heavy cloud. So it was kind of it turned into and then I started going into that. And for like an hour, I just kind of kept dancing into looking for the fears and anxieties. And I would kind of get as close as I could. And and it’s like going into them. It’s like they would kind of open up and sort of dissolve. And at the end of an hour, I felt like I was I mean, I was like in heaven. It was like I was just so calm. I was just so it’s like, oh, this space of just it’s like talking about transcendence. It was like it just felt so good to have kind of transit, trans, you know, gone through all of these these fears. I think that’s what the empathic presence says. It allows you that’s that you’re not going alone on that journey into these different feelings. So I guess I’m tying that in with the spirituality for me. No, totally, totally. I guess spiritual transformative. Yeah, that’s good, because I think there’s a both an individual, you might call it a therapeutic aspect to meeting crisis. But I think there’s also a cultural aspect. And so that’s what I’m trying to bridge with this notion of spirituality. We need a better term, but we need something. Yes, people need sort of individual ways of getting unstuck. But there’s also people also have a sense of being sort of culture shock, experiencing culture shock within this culture, like not feeling at home in the culture at large, a kind of collective domicile. And I think part of that is they’re looking for I mean, I think there’s evidence to support this. They’re looking for ways not because they’re in what you might call it, you know, any kind of psychological distress. It is much more an existential. They’re looking for ways to afford this connection. And I mean, that’s your intent, right? You empathy isn’t just for people who are in therapeutic distress. It’s supposed to be also something that’s more existentially powerful and relevant. Is that is that? Oh, yeah, I’m looking for cultural transformation. My idea is that if we and this is just one tool, the empathy circle is something that can be trans, you know, can go into the full culture. And I really am serious about, you know, what I want to do. I’ve been working with extinction rebelling, you know, the environmental group, because I really like the nonviolent direct action. And I’m wanting to do empathic direct action where we like set up our empathy. I’ve got all these empathy tents. And we’ve got them in different countries, too. We set up on the Capitol Mall, you know, in front of the Congress and we say we demand that the Republicans Democrats do empathy circles with each other. And it’s like that’s great. The way I see it is metaphorically is it’s kind of like World War One, right? You got the social structure, which is, you know, is a kind of authoritarian, colonial, aristocratic, hierarchical structure. You got the soldiers working with each other and then you got the nurses and doctors trying to help like, oh, that’s great. But it’s not those nurses and doctors aren’t transforming the overall social structure. So it’s like, how do we take this sort of mindset and bring it into the core of the social structure, you know, the political social structures? And so we camp out, you know, there on the Capitol Mall and we got these empathy tents. I don’t know if you’ve seen the tents that we’ve got. We have it. Oh, I have to send you the links. Please, please do. So we we know the political right comes to Berkeley and then the political left, Antifa and so forth, you know, come and they kind of battle it out here. And we have this small group. We have an empathy tent. We set it up kind of in the middle of that. We offer listening to both sides and also sort of mediation between the sides. So we’ve got sort of the machinery for setting this up. And so we’ve got the tools. I’m kind of working towards that, you know, Capitol Mall kind of. That’s that’s great. So that that goes towards like my my concern about the sort of sapiential spiritual aspects of this, about that. It’s not just a therapeutic. Right. It’s a much more comprehensive, existential and cultural transformation that you’re seeking. So I think you answered that question very well. I also see in the way you were describing the dancing. And I mean, this is also in Genland’s work, right. That there’s, you know, training and mindfulness could interact with things like empathy circling. They could mutually improve and benefit each other. I think it’s a very powerful ways. So, you know, in other ways, I’m trying to I’m seeing how empathy circling could fit into a larger ecology of practices. So that example was particularly helpful to me. So thank you. Yeah, it is thinking. I think that’s what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to do cultural transformation and the tool set and a map for how can this cultural transformation take part is kind of what I’m getting. Because that’s the culture, the culture itself, the whole dynamics of the of the mutuality is having that crisis of yes. Yeah. Where do we go from here? Things are falling apart. There’s polarization. You know, we’re not solving climate crisis, etc., etc. Yeah, yeah. Right. So we’re not only stuck as individuals, right. We’re stuck as a culture in an important way. And so and I want to understand. Well, you’ve helped to address that. How what’s the connection between the individual level of practice and the more comprehensive level? And I see what you’re trying to do. That’s that’s extremely cool. I think at some point I would like to talk with you again. Yeah, it’d be great. Because maybe a bit longer. Yeah, I’m sorry. I’m today is a day of like four or five interviews for me. So I’m sort of chuckle block. But well, I think it’s I think we’ve made some good progress. I love it. Yeah. Getting things clear. And I would really like to talk to you again. And we let’s do what we did before. We will have this. Let’s try to build on it. Have another discussion. Maybe. Yeah, I’ll set aside an hour and a half for our next discussion, Edwin. And let’s try and also do what we did with like email about how we might go forward and extend. Because I think that really got us very quickly into really good discussion. I would also like I mean, you’ll obviously put this on your channel. I’m wondering if you could send me Google Drive this and I could upload it onto my channel. That would be great. Yeah. I think you’d have get much more distribution. I can put it on Facebook if you want to put it on YouTube. I think your channel. Well, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I’ll put it on my YouTube channel and I can also tweet about it and post on it and LinkedIn. And so I can sort of broadcast it more, more widely. So, like I said, if you’ll send me the link through like Google Drive or Dropbox or something, then I’ll look to upload it on my channel in the next couple of days. OK, great. Yeah, that’s I’m really excited. It’s just the beginning of a. But I found it. I thought it was very I thought it was very productive, though. I thought we sort of unpacked things sort of quite well, at least initially. Yeah. Start to start getting at some of the depths. Like I said, starting to build some connections between the cognitive science and the practice and also the space of how we do it. Yes. Yes. Space that you create. It’s like this warm, inviting, like a bath tub. A warm, inviting bath tub. Well, you reciprocated that space very nicely. So, again, thank you. We will definitely talk again. Please, like I said, send me the file and I’ll upload it to my channel. It’s been great. I’m going to talk again for sure. Thanks again. Thanks again.