https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=IQWLfOFe0lo
John Ravecki and Sean Coyne have together authored a new book, Mentoring the Machines. It’s a book about artificial intelligence and the path forward that further develops the arguments of how to align artificial intelligence to human flourishing, and it sets those arguments into beautiful and accessible writing. Welcome everybody to another episode of Voices with Ravecki. I’m very excited to be here today with Vivian Dittmar. I had the great pleasure of meeting Vivian when I was in Bergerac in the summer, meeting with many people who are leaders of communities that would engage in what I call an ecology of practices in which mindfulness and dialogical practices, also imaginal practices, are playing a significant role. Vivian is such a leader and we’ll get to know about her and her ecology and her community, but one of the things that was powerful is there was a spirit that took root among all of us and we all acknowledge that, but Vivian and I felt that we also were deeply connecting on some key issues and some of the issues that are bound up with any proper reflection on spirituality issues, about emotions, issues about rationality and the trans-rational. We both hungered for more extended conversation about that and then I suggested to her, well, let’s have that conversation and let’s share it with other people, especially my audience because I think they would find it valuable. So welcome Vivian, it’s a great pleasure to have you here. Why don’t you introduce yourself and say a little bit more about your background and your connection to all of this. Yes, thank you John. Thank you so much for this invitation. I’m so thrilled to take this time to dive deeper with you into the subjects you mentioned and others maybe. So what I found really striking as I got to know your work a little bit more was that we walked very, very different paths and yet we have arrived at similar observations, conclusions, experiences and questions and that I found really fascinating. So I want to start off with talking a little bit about my background as you invited me to because it’s really unusual. I was born in Germany and then moved with my parents to Indonesia when I was four years old and found myself suddenly immersed in a traditional culture, a culture that was full of meaning to stay in that framework where I experienced people to be materially poor yet very happy. And that baffled me even as a little girl. And that kind of became a mystery, like a guiding mystery for my life, for the rest of my path. I returned to Germany to attend primary school and I also had the privilege of traveling back and forth a lot between this traditional village, a culture that was really immersed in spirituality and also had a very lived sense of ritual but also of the intimate connection between the worlds. It was very natural for people. And I kept going back and forth and I was really puzzled by how cold this world felt. It was so privileged and so clean and so, yeah, even at the time, technologically advanced. In many ways, it seemed so superior. Yet the people, even as a little girl, I noticed the people seemed really poor in a way that I couldn’t really put a finger on and that really confused me profoundly. That confusion only deepened when at the age of 13, I moved to the United States with my mother who got a job there. And due to a series of circumstances I don’t really need to go into, I suddenly ended up at a super privileged college prep school. So I went from my best friends having to work to make a living, really being happy for a decent meal, to sort of middle class Germany, to like suddenly upper class elite US boarding school. And what really amazed me was that the inner poverty that I had sensed in Germany seemed to be even more profound in the US amongst the super privileged. So my confusion only deepened. And these factors really led to me confronting the meaning crisis full force at a very early age and basically very early on at age 15, I said, you know what, I’m done, I’m out of here. I don’t want to be part of this mass destruction project that our culture is embarking on and is clothing as like a superiority something, something that, yeah. So that led me to also turn my back on Western education. I realized very early that what I can learn there, as much as I loved it and appreciated it and loved science also, I realized that what I really want to know, I will not learn there. Something in me knew that. And I knew that because of my childhood experiences in Bali, where I had experienced so much ritual, so much inexplicable. I don’t know, I can’t even put it into words to this day. And whenever I was in Europe or the US, people would just say, you know, that doesn’t exist. That was just your imagination. And that just didn’t fly. So what I did was that I went through a kind of like, yeah, leaving the palace, I guess. I sold all my belongings, like really let go of everything and booked a one way ticket to India because I knew that the Balinese Hinduism had its origins there. So I finished my school as quickly as I could and then went to India and immersed myself in Far Eastern philosophy. I don’t say thought because what was so important for me in Far Eastern philosophy was to discover that there are these traditions which actually consider non thought the source of truth and not thought. And that for me was just such a relief because it cuts through like a lot of what I perceive to be bullshit in all these thought buildings. And what happened was that I began to practice very diligently and within a very short period of time had like very profound mystical awakening experiences that completely shifted my entire perception of reality. And took me, I would say it took me about 25 years to integrate. Still working on it and ground. And I resonated deeply with what you also mentioned or talk about how having these experiences and not being like rooted in a community or in the tradition can be deeply unsettling and even dangerous. So basically what followed was a long, long period of integration and learning, which eventually also led me to after several years in India and deepening that it led me to study with a shamanic tradition actually where I found certain pieces of the puzzle that I hadn’t found in the mystical experiences and Far Eastern philosophies in India and that somehow connected me back to the childhood experiences that I’d had in Bali. So that was kind of my education. And after years of basically being nomadic, I had a very, very strong call to return to Europe because I felt that whatever is happening to us, Europe was kind of an important place for birthing this destructive culture, as you would call it, the meaning crisis. I didn’t have that vocabulary, but I felt if I could return there and bring some of what I had found, I could somehow contribute to the healing. And I had no idea how I could do it. I mean, like, you know, I was absolutely nobody. I was a single mom. Like, yeah, didn’t have any education that was recognized in any of the institutions here. In fact, it took me a long time to even recognize it myself as an education. And for a long time, I thought I was just self-taught, but that’s actually not true at all. Yeah. And then basically, the whole time I was deeply involved, I left the Shamanic lineage that I trained with and taught in for several years because like many Shamanic lineages, there were issues with abuse of power and integrity and other stuff. So I left that. And because I had this love for reason, actually, and for the scientific, not just the method, but also the way of thinking. I kept probing deeper and deeper. So trying to probe like the the insights that were just since that shift in my perception, there were insights that would open up and I would spend a lot of time listening to them, trying to formulate them, sharing them with people to see if they were valuable for people. And at the same time, also spent to this day, spent a lot of time and energy working on myself. What that means is that while I had this profound mystical shift and I had this profound shift in my perception of reality, there were still a lot of issues in my psychology. And I realized that a lot of it had to do with the field of emotions, which we’re going to talk about. And I realized that I was not satisfied with any of the answers that I found, not in the Far Eastern philosophies, not in the psychology of the West, and not in the self-help literature, not in the philosophies of the West. I was frustrated. What started to come out of neuroscience was interesting, and yet it was not practical. So I was very much interested in practices and in just what would work also as a mother. You’re confronted with these things in a very existential way. Once I noticed I developed maps and practices that actually helped people, I started to write about them and publish them. And to be honest, I was quite amazed how many people resonated with them. And by now I’ve written eight books. And the reason why I say we walked very different paths, John, is because you’re such a scholar. You’ve read all these amazing thinkers and you’ve studied all these amazing traditions. And I actually consciously didn’t do that, because I noticed when I would read about a subject that I was researching, it would distort my perception and my insight. So what happens a lot is that I just write about stuff and then people come to me and sometimes they were even angry. They’re like, why don’t you credit this and that person with whatever you wrote? And I was like, because I didn’t know that they also wrote this. And I know this approach is pretty radical, like not a lot of people in our culture do it. I know for Asia it’s not so radical. It’s quite normal, I would say, that this is the way to arrive at insight. So there’s a certain excitement for me also to talk to you. And going into your work actually, and the perspective you opened, gave me a new access also to the world of science. And the perspective you opened gave me a new access also to reading about a lot of the great thinkers in a new way. And not simply dismissing, because you also speak about this era of how we relate to Buddhism and to philosophy purely in propositional terms. And this is what frustrated me so deeply, because very early on I realized that the propositional is, yeah, it’s useful. But it’s actually, I would say, it’s a form of fiction, which can be useful, but it’s not truth. And I was interested in truth. Yeah, so in hearing you talk about this, I realized how this is part of our dysfunction, that we understand everything to be propositional. This is how we read it. But this doesn’t mean that all of these thinkers actually come from the same world. They cultivated only this way of knowing. Yeah, so that was actually healing for me. So that’s my story in a nutshell. Well, maybe there’s one more thing. I set up a nonprofit foundation 14 years ago as part of my attempt. It’s called the Be the Change Foundation for Cultural Change. And it’s very much about exploring how we can develop a culture of sustainability and how we can develop a way of life that is more in alignment with our true needs. And very much about offering a new definition of prosperity. So in your language or in Eric Fromm’s language, shifting from the having mode to the being mode, which is what my latest book is about. And two years ago, I founded a community because you spoke of the community of practice that developed around my work. It developed over the years, but two years ago, we formally set it up. A community and an academy, which are called the last thing I want to share about this is they’re called Lebensweise Academy. And Lebensweise, I don’t know if you understand it, but for the people listening who don’t, is a German term that has several meanings. Leben means life. Weise means wise. So it means becoming wise in and through life. But Lebensweise together also means lifestyle or our way of life. So it really sums up what I’m trying to do with my work to develop practices and maps that help people become wise in and through life and thereby help us develop a new way of life, which it’s quite evident that we need to develop if we want to stay around for longer and have some quality of life. Yeah. Thank you for that, Vivian. That was wonderful. That was so rich and flowing. I really could just listen to you for quite a bit longer. That was really great. I just I don’t know where to start. There’s so many things. Well, maybe you start with, you know, that that provocative point that you said we’d return to that is very much in need of discussion right now. I think we agree on that about which is the place, the role, the function of emotions in the cultivation of wisdom or let’s use the word spirituality to mean that. I mean, part of what we might be doing is renegotiate what we mean by spirituality. But right now, just as you know, what do you think? Well, how do you think about it? Do you think that by and large, the West is getting it right? Even the spiritual, even the sort of reemerging spiritual, but not religious cohort? Is the West getting it wrong in some way? Are we misunderstanding emotion, emotionality? There is a lot of confusion. That’s what I noticed. And it has to do with the fact, I think that emotion and feelings, and I don’t use the term synonymously, were basically ignored by spirituality, by science, by philosophy, by everything. Even psychology, like there was a lot of like, you know, we don’t really want to deal with this. And there was a great disregard. And as I know you’re well aware, the advances of neuroscience have really shown that that was a big mistake, because thought actually depends a lot on feeling on that part of our brain. If we just want to stay with that. So my work has really been, and this was born out of really my personal suffering, just to be really clear. My work was a lot about creating distinctions, and really like open this box, this, that’s just labeled feeling or emotion or effect or whatever you want to call it, and unpack it and say, well, what is it actually that we’re talking about here? And the first thing I did is that I distinguished five different kinds of sensations, starting with physical sensations, which, you know, I feel hot or cold, or I feel touch. And the second, I call biological programs, which are your instinctual reactions. So fight and flight mode and that kind of stuff, hunger, sexual drive, etc. And then the third category is actually what I call feeling. That’s where I use the term feeling. And I use that for something that actually has a very important social function, because it determines how I relate to whatever I’m confronted with. And feeling the way I use the term actually is created through thought. So how I interpret a situation determines how I feel about it. And it’s much more deliberate, and it’s also slower. So ideally, if the situation and how I interpret the situation and what my needs are, if they match, then the feeling that I create will be appropriate to the situation, both in terms of the flavor of it. So whether it’s anger or sadness or fear, because they have different functions, but also in terms of intensity. So that is already a very, like there is reason in that kind of feeling. Yes. And they are important in order to actually counteract the biological programs, which can be amazing, but they can also be really off the mark and difficult to handle. The fourth category is what I call emotion. And I use the term very specifically for feelings that we didn’t feel in the past, because we couldn’t feel them because we were overwhelmed, or we didn’t want to feel them because they were uncomfortable. And they are kind of stored with unprocessed experiences. I use a very simple metaphor, which is the emotional backpack. Obviously, they’re stored in the brain and in the nervous system. But the emotional backpack is kind of like my metaphor for that stuff. And this is where, well, actually, let me go to the fifth and final category of sensations, because they’re very interesting to your field of study is, I call them abilities and states of consciousness. So this is where you would have agape, and where you would have the ability to trust in life, the ability, maybe also faith, gratitude, like these different states that states and traits that I can develop. And I call them abilities and states because we need to cultivate them. We’re born with potential for them, but they need to be cultivated. So they’re actually abilities. And even if we have cultivated them, we’re not always in a state of love, or a state of trust that can fall in and out. And this is where we begin to touch the transpersonal, the transrational, the spiritual. And basically, this is like the beginning of my map that I drew. It’s beautiful. Good. I’m glad you like it. And we need, so what I notice is we need to develop the transpersonal faculties in order to heal the emotional baggage, which is where our ego and our distortion of in perception also and in processing information comes in big time. So the fifth is needed to help heal the fourth in your taxonomy, right? What about does the third, the feeling states that you were talking about, that sort of fit you to situations, if I understood you correctly? Do they also help when we’re trying to heal the emotional baggage? Or like, go ahead. Basically, that’s where we end up. So very often, let’s do a simple example. Your partner does something that triggers you, as we commonly say. And you find yourself reacting emotionally in a way that is not appropriate. So either you’re flooded with emotion or you go completely numb. And both of those are signs of some kind of emotional baggage being activated. And you’re no longer able to respond appropriately. You’re no longer able to steer or direct what is happening in your system. And this is the kind of loss of control that we all know. And if you try to change your response, you will fail. You cannot just think about it differently. And you will still feel. You can try to pretend. You can study nonviolent communication. You can breathe. You can meditate. But it’s kind of sitting there. And what I have found, and I’ve developed a practice that helps people do this, is that if we can bring together the kind of transpersonal wisdom also, and love that is in the states and the abilities, we can bring that together with the suffering that’s in our emotions. Healing happens. And then we can end up in the third category, as you named it now, in the feelings as appropriate social powers. So what I suggest people do when they find their partner triggers them, they’re no longer able to respond appropriately, I suggest that they go practice with another person. And we’ll talk about this practice later. And then they can return to their partner and actually address the situation appropriately with one of the feeling powers. And that could mean that I’m still angry at my partner because he behaved inappropriately. And then a healthy anger, a healthy positioning of, hey, this is not okay for me, is a good response. But I can’t do that as long as I’m in the grips of my emotional baggage and the old stuff that I didn’t process, which makes me behave like a child. It’s interesting because that sounds very similar to the kind of connection that Aristotle drew between virtuosity and virtue. He said the point is not being angry or not being angry, it’s being angry at the right time for the right reason to the right degree. Yes, exactly. And it sounds to me that’s exactly what you’re doing there. And you’re also making use of some sort of platonic divisions in the psyche. Which I think are really impressive. So two things come out of that that I want to talk about. You tell me which one you want to talk about first. One was I noticed there was a kind of, there’s three places where there’s a kind of implicit rationality. There’s this sense of at the feeling level, the fittedness, what I would call relevance realization going on there. And then upper here, these are, there’s something transpersonal there. And it sounds to me like that as a source of guidance and wisdom in the healing. So there’s something implicit there. And then there’s the unpacking at the emotional level, which also feels like there’s an, you’re trying to get over, or you’re not trying to be in the grip of self-deception or distorting reactivity. You’re trying to reduce, draw things out, educate yourself. And so there’s that. So there’s an implicit kind of, as you said, there’s an implicit kind of rationality, not logical inferential argumentation, but there’s this other thing going on that’s really important. That’s one thing I’d like to talk to you about. The other one is this notion of sort of transfer that you mentioned. You have a situation, you go and do the practice. But the point of the practice isn’t just in the practice. You do the practice so that it will transfer back to the situation, which I take to be a defining feature of good ritual. If you’re just doing it for in the thing, it’s right that that’s not ultimately how rituals have been practiced sort of cross-culturally, cross-historically. They’re supposed to lead into your life in a life-changing way. So there’s the sense of the proper, sorry, this sounds a little too academic, but the proper ritualization of practice, that’s one topic. And then the other one is the implicit rationality within, three, four and five, if I can just refer to them by their numbers right now, and possibly connections between those. But I’m just laying that out is there’s stuff I’d like to talk to you about. Where would you like to start and how would you like to proceed? Let’s start with the ritualization. It’s actually something that I became aware of after having practiced for a number of years. I realized, well, actually, this is a ritual. And it took me a while to realize that. And it was really good to frame it as that. That’s one thing. The second thing is what happened, I told you that I had this really, really intense and also disruptive shift in my perception of reality. And this actually happened twice. It happened again in another way a few years ago. And I became a mother shortly afterwards. And I think this is significant because it really changed my spirituality. I was not able to just, you know, become a monk somewhere and immerse myself in practice, disconnected from everyday life. But I had to develop practices that had an immediate effect on everyday life. And I think this was a very important thing. And I think this is why the practice that I cultivated for myself and then developed is different, because it really has the direct application to everyday life. If it didn’t help me on the ground with my children, it was useless for me. And I couldn’t afford to waste time with it. The ritualization is important. I encourage people actually to practice very regularly and not only when they’re triggered. The metaphor I like to use is that if the firefighters only practice when the house is on fire, we’re in trouble. So we need to practice when the house is not burning. And then we can reliably go into ritual in those moments when we really lose it. And those are the moments that are going to be life changing. Yeah, that’s about the ritualization. So let’s keep a pin a sec in the rationality of feelings and emotional baggage and those, the states, the abilities. So one of the things that connects back to emotionality, though, about this is I think there’s a danger. I want to know what you think about this, that people have lost that lesson that you just mentioned. Edherstad in her book, How the West Really Lost God, said, when we stop living in extended families, that’s when we actually sort of fell into secularization, because we don’t have to confront the exigence of living with people often who are suffering or getting old or being born or dying. And what’s their perspective? And how is it different from mine? And we like, we can just avoid all that. We can be very self-involved in a profound way. And to me, that has led to a kind of, I don’t know what to call it, but like a having a consumptive attitude towards spiritual practice. The point is to sort of generate wonderful experiences in the practice and sort of savor them and consume them or make them trophies that indicate how unique or special one is. And of course, psychologists are now even studying this as a phenomenon called spiritual bypassing, which is becoming very problematic. And I wonder if you also have come to a similar conclusion that this is something that, I’m not saying it’s unique to the West, but I see it as a pervasively increasing problem with a lot of what’s called Western spirituality right now. I like tourism around ayahuasca ceremonies is particularly problematic for me because it engenders this whole kind of framework, which I think misses the fact that if your practices aren’t helping you raise your kids, then there’s something going wrong. Yes, I’m completely with you. And this is one of the reasons also why I’ve had such a hard time kind of finding a home for myself and my body of work in the culture where I live, because I don’t find myself in the kind of like new agey spirituality movement, because it’s just so full of irrationality in a not good way. And I hope we’ll talk about irrationality at some point. And yes, I was also acutely aware of how, yeah, there’s this whole narcissism that happens when people go into spiritual practice and they seek enlightenment and it becomes about, yeah, like another, like the having mode, like you said. And from like the practice, the practice of conscious release, as I call it, is very different in the sense that people don’t go into it in order to have mystical experiences. In fact, until very recently, I never talked about it as a spiritual practice. I kind of kept that a secret. I talked about it purely in terms of psychological practice. So people would enter it and still enter it to alleviate suffering, which is kind of the obvious entry point for spiritual practice. But we’ve kind of lost that because it’s become very shaky. And yeah, I think to be had, so when you really go into it to alleviate suffering, it’s a different entry point. And what you’re working towards is to be free of suffering. And an experienced practitioner will reliably have that result within five or ten minutes with the practice. And then what they arrive at is a profound sense of inner peace. And that’s fantastic. If you’re coming from suffering, you have kids trying to get you to go to the hospital. And that’s fantastic. If you’re coming from suffering, you have kids to raise. Inner peace is fantastic. You don’t need to see the golden lights and all of that. It’s not part of what people who come into the community of practice that I started, what they’re after. We’re not into that. It’s more that when people end up having mystical experiences as a result of the practice, they’re a little shocked because I didn’t prepare them for that. This is one of the reasons why I’m starting to talk about it more in terms of spiritual practice also, because otherwise that can be disturbing if you suddenly find your sense of self, your perception of reality shifting. And that was never mentioned. So two things come to mind to me when I heard what you said. One is that I’ve come to the conclusion, I wonder what you think, that even when people reflect on their suffering, they tend to do it in a very shallow, superficial way. I don’t mean that there’s not an intensity, but they confuse that intensity with a grasping of the depth. What I mean by that is people will often focus on the distressing qualia of it without paying attention to that suffering more properly actually means the loss of agency, your ability to act appropriately with respect to reality. And I also get the sense that the inner peace you’re talking about, given what you said earlier, isn’t just sort of this withdrawal into it’s an inner peace that refits you for the difficult situation that you were in and affords your agency and restores your agency in that way. And so you’re nodding. So I take it we’re in agreement about that because again, I think there’s this again, this very superficial understanding. And I think it’s part of the general bullshitting nature of our culture that we tend to confuse the intensity or salience of something with its reality or its meaning in a deep way. Yeah, and this is because you were talking, you asked me before, are we on the right track with regards to feelings and emotions? And I said there’s a lot of confusion. And one of the confusions is that people, quite a few people have a sense that feelings are important. Yet very often, these are the people who are full of emotion and due to their emotional baggage tend to go into drama a lot. And this is where we can produce really, really high intensity of suffering and the illusion of relevance. Right. Complete illusion. And this is one of the pillars of my work to make people aware of drama and to guide people to really go into feeling what wants to be felt and allowing it to move, which really means it moves out of your nervous system. And that’s a process that happens very quickly if you know how to allow it versus staying stuck in the story and the drama and the analysis and the kind of ego bolstering illusion of relevance that it creates. So they’re very different processes. That’s beautifully well said. I mean, this reminds me about how the part of what’s called third way platonic scholarship that I follow emphasizes that the platonic dialogues are not to be understood solely in terms of the arguments that are being made. You have to pay very careful attention to the drama that is unfolding because that is as important reflection on the character and the virtues under examination as any argument that is being made. And this is precisely why Plato wrote dialogues as opposed to writing treatises or just pure argumentation. And so are there any practices you do that get people to sort of step back and disidentify from the drama and reflect upon it? Is that part of what’s happening as well? Definitely. So two things. One is the practice of conscious release is I like to compare it to meditation because it’s very quickly explained and very easily misunderstood and then very difficult to implement. So, you know, like meditation, you know that you teach meditation, sit quietly, close your eyes, breathe, watch your breath and stand, you know, and then you try it and you fail. So with conscious release, what’s special about it and it was amazing, like going into your work, I understood many aspects of it that I hadn’t understood before, which was amazing. What’s different about it is that we always practice minimum two people together. We never practice alone. So there is a relational aspect. And this has to do with the fact that emotions, our system protects us from emotions that are overwhelming and doesn’t allow us to feel them unless there is a safe space. And what we do in the practice is that we try to reliably create a space that is safe enough and big enough for emotions to be felt that we couldn’t feel alone. And we all know this phenomenon, what happens when a dear friend comes and they really have a lot of love for us and they just look at us, you know, in a caring way. And maybe we’ve been through something rough and we just start crying. So we try to replicate that in a ritualized way because we live such fast paced lives that this doesn’t happen often enough. And you also mentioned the loss of extended family where, you know, we used to always be in each other’s kitchens. Yeah. And so now in this isolated time and fast paced time, we lack these spaces where we can feel the stuff that we couldn’t feel ourselves alone and thereby we can’t process the really, really challenging moments in our lives. And if we don’t process them, we don’t harvest the wisdom and the growth that comes with them. This is the big problem. This is one of the main reasons that I see why we grow old without growing wise. So in the practice, what we do is we have clear roles. So always one person, minimum one person goes into a supportive role and they really go into a state of, I think you would call it scaling out. So they really go into like a space and they provide a space. So their perception really opens up and they really go into it’s similar to like the meta meditation and Buddhism. And they really cultivate agape. They really see the person in their best light and really open their hearts to them in a transpersonal way. So it’s not a personal thing. And this gives a space that very often the first time people experience this, they’re like, oh my God, I’ve been waiting for this my whole life. And you can just do that. You can take the time to do that for someone. And the person who then gets the support or is offered the space, they do the opposite. They do the scaling down and they go in and they consciously go to the places in their systems that they have avoided the most. And then they give them space. So they go scaling down and they’re like, oh my God, I’m going to do this. And then they go scaling down and then they go scaling up again. And what happens then is that it moves and people learn to feel again. And then when they feel what happens is that they travel through, I call my image for this is like an emotional package. They travel through different layers. Very often they will have images come up of memories of when they felt like this before, sometimes all the way into collective stuff. And they release it. And as I said, if someone knows how to do this, within five minutes, they can effectively release something and process it and then come to a place of peace and insight. That was something that I looked for decades to find. So it’s powerful. So the point isn’t just like catharsis. It’s also the catharsis. You’re seeing, you’re discerning, you’re unfolding, you’re articulating, you’re getting insight. But you say there’s wisdom that’s coming out of it. There’s a learning that’s going on. It’s an educational experience in a deep sense. And so is it, I mean, so the person, this is very similar to the two-person exercise I learned when I was doing Vipassana. But the person who’s sort of the receiver, they’re kind of, they’re almost like a mirror, right? The person doing the release is sort of seeing that, do they, what I’m trying to get a question, and now it’s taking shape. Do they get to the point where they start to be able to reflect on themselves from that transpersonal perspective that’s being offered by the receiver? So initially, I’m going to be very, pain makes you very self-centered, right? I’m going to be very into myself, like, right? But as let’s say they open up and this education starts to open them, do they then start to be able to see themselves through that transpersonal framing that the receiver is providing? Does that happen? That’s exactly what happens. And the amazing thing is that this happens without words. So the person who’s holding space, as we call it, they’re simply present and they do not speak. And what we do is like, we never mix the two roles. That’s very important. We have a clear time frame. So we agree beforehand. It’s five minutes, 10 minutes. And then we stick to that. So it’s about learning to go in and out. And then there is a special confidentiality, which means that when the practice is complete, we don’t talk about it again. Right. Also not with each other. So it’s not a dialogical process. It’s not communication at all, actually. It’s a space for realization, you could say, and for release. Yet it’s not about, I find many people when they think of catharsis, they try to get rid of stuff. And it’s not about getting rid of it at all. On the contrary, it’s trying to digest it, which means you try to assimilate it. Which is the opposite of getting rid of it. Yeah, I think you’ve properly used the metaphor. I’ve heard of metabolizing is not a bad metaphor. Right. I think that’s good. As long as you keep the sense of it being taken into life, not just sort of a mechanical breaking down process. I think that’s well said. We’re coming close to our time, so I want to start a topic. But before I do, I want to invite you to come back for another one of these soon, so that we can maybe devote our second conversation more fully to that topic. Because I think I’m getting it. I’m very happy with how this is opening up. You have a profound reflection on affect. I’ll use that for all of this, if that’s okay. You have a profound reflection on affect. And that reflection is not just theoretical, as you’ve emphasized, it’s very practicable. It demands to be put into practice and a transformative practice. And so that’s been excellent. And then there’s been hints along the way of this other thing that we noted, we put a pin in, and we’re not going to finish it today. So let’s both take a breath about that. We’re not going to try and rush. I just want to start talking about it. And as we get close to the time, I’ll try and find sort of an easy place to just put a pause. And then I’m hoping you’ll come back, because I’m finding this great. I’m finding this really rich. And I just want more people to know about you and your work. I think it’s really important stuff. I did some similar stuff in my Vipassana training. I did similar stuff when I did the version of emotion-focused therapy with Les Greenberg, things like that. But you’re doing something more than those, which I really appreciate. And it’s a good more. But what keeps coming out is this. There’s a seeing through illusion into what’s more real. There’s a coming into a deeper contact with reality. There’s a kind of wisdom that’s coming out of this. There’s a rationality to it in that there’s a proper putting things into perspective, a proper proportioning of affect, a proper fittedness of it to the situation, which you always keep emphasizing, which I really appreciate. That brings in this older notion of rationality, ratio and rationing and proper proportioning and putting into perspective and inducing and drawing out and self-transcending, and not just logicality and computation. Which it’s so I mean this older sense, the platonic Socratic sense of rationality. And it keeps showing up in when we’re talking about these practices and talking about affect. Again, we’re just going to introduce this topic because you graciously have said you’ll come back, which I’m excited about. Let’s start the topic about the relationship between rationality, not the Cartesian, but this older putting in perspective, proper proportioning, proper fittedness, overcoming self-deception, etc. And spirituality because I think one of my deep criticisms, and you know from watching this series, is I’ve been critical about how we have truncated the notion of rationality and then made it antagonistic to spirituality and wisdom in a really, I think, unhealthy manner. Yes, let’s talk about that. So I share that criticism and I use a different vocabulary. So just for people who are familiar with my work, I just want to clarify. So I actually use rationality very much in the Cartesian sense. So in the truncated sense that we both criticize. And one of my books, The Inner GPS, is very much about giving rationality, again, its proper place in context with what I call trans-rational faculties of reason, you could say, or intelligence or ways of thought. These only become accessible to us in my experience once we’ve done our homework on an emotional level. Like as long as we are so cluttered with emotions, which then it’s kind of like an engine producing this endless merry-go-round of thoughts in our head that never stops. I find the two are very much connected. It’s the emotions, the charge that’s in our nervous system that keeps the mind running endlessly. And this calms the more we heal our emotional baggage, the more we clear the space, the more we also learn to discern being emotionally triggered versus a healthy anger or a healthy sadness or a healthy fear even. So this is kind of the first step I offer people because I realize if we start to look for what I call trans-rational ways of knowing too early, so we try to access our intuition and inspiration and heart intelligence, and to use a few terms that I map out in the Inner GPS, we get confused. We confuse emotional responses, we confuse affect with trans-rational ways of knowing. And I’ve heard you refer to this as kind of a new decadent romanticism. And I get very frustrated with this because I’ve become known kind of as an expert for emotions. So very often people come with very romantic ideas about emotions, thinking there are some sorts of truth and they’re not, especially the way I use the term, they’re a source of illusion and suffering. And then otherwise they are relational forces, which are important, and still they are created by me. So they’re not a source of truth. They have an important function, but they’re not a source of truth. So what I like to discern is I like to discern feeling and sensing. And sensing is where we enter a very subtle form of, I would say, information that becomes available to us underneath those layers. And that’s how I experience accessing trans-rational ways of knowing. And yeah, I think this is really a topic for another conversation because there is a whole body of work around that, a whole map, and I’d love to go deeper into it. Yeah. And that’s all I wanted to do. I mean, I think you’re right. I think we have different terms, but I think a lot of our work, we’re converging on similar conclusions. I think your word trans-rational might actually be a good word. I’m kind of losing the battle of getting people to remember what rational actually meant. You got me, John, and that was a hard one to get. Well, maybe that’s a little bit encouraging. But yeah, so I want to pick this up. And next time I want to come back and really unpack the relationship between trans-rationality, spirituality, wisdom. What’s the relationship between that? Again, not just in theory, but in deep practice, in transformation. And then what might that say to our relationship to these legacy traditions? Because both of us have gone deeply into them, but not found a home in them. And that’s also something we share. I think we have a properly educated, deep appreciation for these traditions, but we didn’t find home in them. And so I want to explore the trans-rational, wisdom, transformation, spirituality, and our relationship to the legacy traditions. And what does that say about where we’re at in the world right now? Being, of course, preposterously pretentious in claiming that we are, you and I, representative of something. But I think the fact that we both discovered that our work really resonates with so many people gives us some leeway to pursue that possibility. Yes. Good. So Vivian, this is just a pause. You’re coming back and we’re going to do more. I’m looking forward to it. But even so, I always like to give my guests the last word. It can be provocative. It can be cumulative. It can be summative. It can be inspirational. It can be reflective. Just give you the last word before I end the recording. I would like to end with pointing to this phenomenon that keeps baffling me that if we go to the very places that we have so far avoided, the very places that we know are irrational and not who we want to be, and if we give them space and actually expose them to those parts in us that I would say are more conscious, that there is an internal alchemy that happens and that the very places that we avoid actually become a source of wisdom and insight. And this is something I want to leave people with and really encourage them to not use spirituality as a bypass, as a way of getting out of these dark places, but as a way of going into them. Because this is really where the good stuff happens, the deep stuff happens. Right. It’s not so much about shining a light outward as allowing a light to shine inward and reach places that it hasn’t reached before. Yes, exactly. Thank you so very much. And I really look forward with fond and affectionate anticipation for our next time together. Me too, John. It’s been wonderful. Thank you so much for hosting this.