https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=_wUom7AfPdw
Welcome everybody to another Voices with Reveke. Many of you are no doubt familiar with the person who’s with me, my good friend Guy Sandstock. First of all, we’re going to talk about an upcoming workshop we’re going to be offering. Then we’re going to start into a discussion, which will be the beginning of a series of discussions I’m going to have with Guy Sandstock, Thomas O. Stoner, perhaps Jordan Peterson, Jordan Hall, and perhaps also James Filler himself. That’s James’s amazing book, Heidegger Neoplatonism and the History of Being, Relation as Ontological Ground. There’s two sort of important things here. One is this workshop, the Circling into Diologos workshop, which is important. Then we’re going to set that into the context of this larger series in which we’re going to be discussing this really powerful proposal by Filler that has had a huge impact on me. First of all, welcome Guy. Great to have you here. Thank you. Welcome fully received. I’m really glad to be here with you again. It’s been a while since you and I have just been able to converse, and I’ve been looking forward to this for quite a while. I have, you could say the culmination or a symbol of what opened up for us in our interactions, and with many other people as well, really turned into what we call, what we’re going to be teaching. The course is basically called Circling into Diologos. We have one coming up. It’s going to be February 10th and 11th. It’s on Zoom, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., both days, Saturday and Sunday, and that’s Pacific Standard Time. February 10th and 11th, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Saturday and Sunday. I think there’s a $100 discount two weeks before the start date, if it’s an early bird discount. So if you’re interested in any of that, just click, all the links and stuff will be in the show notes below, and we look forward to seeing you there. One of the things I was excited to talk with you about, because I’ve been grappling with the book that you had mentioned, is I thought that there’s something so profound about this sense of something like being as pure relation. It’s interesting because as I’ve been going through and editing one of our first conversations, one of the first dialectic into dialogos that happened with Jordan Hall and Christopher, yourself and me, I’ve been kind of slicing little parts of it out. So I’ve been going through it as a fine, like a fine, you know, with a fine listening. And in some sense, I realized, like, as I’ve been reading that book, that this is what we were kind of reaching for throughout that whole conversation. This is what we were trying to put words on, right? And throughout, you can kind of feel it really, really gather. So it makes sense to me that when you came across this book, which was just published, I think, just last year. Yeah, the essays were published, I think, the year before. This is all very new work. Yeah, really new work. I would imagine it just, I could get how it just, it would hit you like right between the eyes in the best way. So I thought it’d be really interesting, right, to really go into the essence of her proposal, what she’s proposing, and really, really sink into it, really look at what’s important about it. Why is this significant? What does this say about our traditions and where we’re coming from, right? Like, what’s important about this and really get the sense of it and let it sink, because it’s a, and to go slowly with it. And my sense is like, once it’s like really getting it to sing, and then start to look at some of the practices that we do in dialectic and in dialogos, and just hold them up to the note and see what we see from there. Because I think in some sense, all of the practices that have intuited this and seek in some way to home ourselves in this insight. I think that’s a wonderful proposal. So yeah, the book by James Filler, Heidegger Neoplatonism and the History of Being, Relation as Ontological Ground. And there’s some, there’s a very good essay also by him on Platinus’s Notion of the One, also an essay on Annexamandor and Heraclitus and another one on Heidegger. And excellent, just excellent work. I’ve got a couple more essays by him that I haven’t been able to read yet. James and I have been in conversation, he’s going to be coming later this year in person or conference. And I hope that we, he and I are going to definitely get together, talk at length and I hope we will actually record something as well together. This book has had a profound impact on me. So I’m working on this next big project, Walking the Philosophical Silk Road. And one linchpin book, book end of book is Nishatani’s Religion and Nothingness, representing sort of the Zen integration. And this book is the other end, representing, I think, one of the profoundest takes on Neoplatonism that I’ve seen. So for those of you who may not be familiar with this book, what Filler is doing it in the book and in the essays, the book is not cheap. So if you are concerned about that, I recommend getting the essays, which are pretty much, I think, all available free online. So what he basically argues is that what Neoplatonism is proposing is a very fundamental inversion in how we primarily make sense of the world. And it’s a way we make sense of the world that is very much bound to the logic of language. And the idea here is that we see the world in terms of things that have properties. The Aristotelian term for this is a substance. Now the problem for most modern ears is they think stuff when they hear substance. That’s not what is meant. It is meant that to which properties belong, but it isn’t itself a property. So for Aristotle, guy-send-stock is a substance because properties belong to guy, but guy isn’t a property belonging to anything else. And so that parallels. And that parallels, or maybe is even isomorphic to the logical structure of language. There is a subject and a predicate. Guy is a man, right? Kind of thing. And so we fundamentally understand that the world that way in terms of these Aristotelian substances. And then what we think, and Aristotle seems to argue this, at least in one place significantly, that relations emerge out of these substantial things. And then what Filler does is he makes a very sort of, it’s even a standalone argument. You don’t have to know anything about neoplatonism to initially get the argument because the argument is just a purely logical argument that that model of how relations exists can’t possibly work. It is actually very problematic, often self-contradictory. And kind of like what Copernicus does with inverting the solar system, Filler says we can make all these problems go away if we just invert it and see relations as primary and that things, the relata, the things related, emerge out of relationality. And then he makes the historical argument that this is in fact what neoplatonism was fundamentally arguing for. And of course, neoplatonism wasn’t just arguing for it. Neoplatonism was trying to get us into a state where we could participate in it. We could actually enact it in the very fundaments of our experience and our sense of identity, what I would call perspectival and participatory knowing. And so he makes a very strong case for that historically. He then argues how there was tension in the tradition between the Aristotelian and the Neoplatonic. And he argues that the Neoplatonic interpretation was preserved within Eastern Orthodox Christianity through the Cappadocian Fathers, through Dionysus, through Maximus. I can’t remember who else it was. But anyways, he goes through that and he makes an astonishingly good argument that when properly understood, the Trinity is a sacred symbol that is trying to convey to us the idea that the fundamental ground of reality, ultimate reality, is inherently relational in nature. And his argument, of course, is that all of the terms of the Trinity are inherently relational terms, Father, Son, and Spirit. And then if you look very carefully at how the Cappadocian Fathers think about this and how people like Maximus think about it, they make it very clear that they are prioritizing relationality over substantiality. And then he argues, and then I’ll shut up soon, Guy. I just want to give people a brief overview of what the book is trying to do. He then argues, again, I think very convincingly in terms of historical exegesis, that Heidegger’s project was trying to recover that sense and his notion of the ontological difference, which is to not think of being as any kind of being, is an attempt to recover being, the ground of being, if we want to put it that way, as pure relationality. And why this is so important is it would help to ground the central Platonic insight. In fact, it goes back to Parmenides, that there’s some long logical oneness between intelligibility and being. While being is an inherent relationality and intelligibility is inherently relational. For example, information, even that technical sense of information, is an inherently relational. I don’t know what to call it. It is inherently relational. I don’t even want to say thing. Information is inherently relational. Intelligibility is inherently relational. Well, they can be at one with being because being is a relationality that makes information, that makes intelligibility, that makes everything else possible. And so we have been talking about right relation over as opposed to being right, having, making a subject predicate statement in which the right properties are attributed to the right substance. That that’s not the goal of our practices in the workshop. Our goal is to get people into right relationship, first with themselves. And the self is Kierkegaard. The self is a relation that relates to itself. Relationship to themselves, relationship to each other, to the logos, which is inherently relational, and then through that to the ground of being, that’s inherently relational. So we have been talking throughout about realizing right relationship, entering into a full participation in this kind of relationality. And that what it does is give you this progressive symbol, symbolic disclosure, ultimately to the ground of being because of how deeply one participates in relationality. So that’s my attempt to guide, to give a quick, as quick as possible overview about what filler is doing and how it relates to our project. Yeah, that’s great, John. That’s great, John. There’s so much we can unpack in there. I think one of the things I want to ask, right, is just even that there is someone named Fuller that wrote a book like this and that there was Aristotle who wrote those things and that this inclination that human beings have to to reach into the ground of everything or reach into the heights of something and to try to understand what is being as such, right? Like I can imagine some people going like, why bother with that? Why not just like watch Netflix and go to work? Like, what is everybody doing? What are we doing when we’re doing that? Why is that important to actually get a sense of being, right, in Heidegger’s sense like being is in distinction from just beings? Why do human beings do that? Why is that important? So I think Fuller’s book is actually helpful to me in answering that question because it allows me to bring together two pieces of two bodies of research that I’m well aware of and I had an intuitive sense that they belong together but it strengthens it. Matt Rossano in his really excellent book Supernatural Selection where he’s talking about sort of the prehistory of religion or at least religio makes the point that it’s ultimately about relationships and when you take a look at the meaning in life literature it’s ultimately about relationships and the way to think about this is you’re on your deathbed. What matters to you? Does it do your possessions matter to you? Do your properties even matter to you? Know what matters to you are your relationships and of course that’s ultimately what meaning in life is. You want to be in connection with something that has an existence and a value independent of you and so like I say what do you want to exist even if you don’t and how much do you matter to it? How much are you in a relationship to it? Now what Fillers book says is well that doesn’t make it that shouldn’t be at all surprising. Relationships are the ground of intelligibility and they’re the ground of reality and human beings have a profound drive to be in contact with which is what is most real. You know my constant example you ask people who are in romantic relationships do you want to know if your partner’s cheating on you and they say yes because they don’t want to be engaged in something they don’t want to be in a relationship that isn’t ultimately real and so I think Fillers notion which sounds very I get your point guy it sounds so abstract but it actually helps to explain this very very concrete thing that is at the core of a lot of what we’re doing is we’re trying to make our lives meaningful. We want to be in relationship and we want to participate profoundly in relationship and we want to be in relationship with what is most real and the Neoplatonic account through Fillers exegesis explains that. It explains why we want and why the kind of understanding we want to have of being is not properly or finally a conceptual understanding. We want to love. We want to be in a loving relationship with being with what is most real. Yeah yeah it’s you know in some sense I’m especially the thing that you said at the end the sense I’m getting is in one level even to the person who’s never even thought about being right or like has no interest in it never had a philosophical thought in their life and didn’t even wonder about it. The fact that they already are right that they dwell in and participate in an understanding of being itself it’s like it’d be it’s almost there’s a way in which even if this person doesn’t like think about this or consciously consider it or have any curiosity about it at all every part of us is constantly demonstrating and embodying an understanding of being right in some sense wouldn’t you say that? Yeah and I think that’s one of Heidegger’s great insights that and that’s what I was trying to articulate I’m glad you picked up on it. Yes that person may never seek a conceptual theoretical understanding of being but Heidegger’s notion and I take it that’s what Fuller’s arguing is that no our understanding of being is not conceptual it’s how we enter into relationships that we participate in right that and that’s why you know that the names for God in you know are all relational like love love is a relational thing light right and think about that and you know life etc and it permeates our world I mean the quantum realm in science is it grounds out in pure relationality the cosmological is the pure relationality of relativity I mean it’s just like people they yes they may not yeah like you said it may never have occurred to them to think about this or to pass certain propositions through their minds or do any conceptuality but they are enacting it they are understanding it insofar as they are entering into relations and those relations are to a reality that is inherently relational bottom to top top to bottom yeah and it’s so it’s so interesting because it’s like in some in some sense I was doing this in this last training course that I was in where you know basically teaching people how to facilitate circlings and we in a particular exercise that we had that that where you know each person would circle the person for 15 minutes and then move to somebody else would circle that same person circle that same person it’s so interesting I was I was struck by like how everybody has a has a basic fundamental disposition a place in which they’re already always stepping in beholding the other or not beholding the other and the way that they’re beholding it that there’s some some deep deep thing going on that you can immediately feel but it’s very difficult to reduce it down to anything that that first step into stepping into relation is already embodies this deep sense of an ontology right and and uh it’s it’s like and I think I’m saying this because it just it’s so close in it’s so close to us right it’s it’s not something way out there and abstract as we’re talking about we’re talking about it’s before us it’s it’s the thing that’s so close it it’s it’s in some sense concealed in its obviousness somehow thank you for watching this youtube and podcast series is by the verveki foundation which in addition to supporting my work also offers courses practices workshops and other projects dedicated to responding to the meaning crisis if you would like to support this work please consider joining our patreon you can find the link in the show notes I think that’s well said I attended a talk on the weekend by a person who’s becoming a friend of mine and she’s a zen abbot as she moves between two uh monasteries one in the black forest in germany and one in colorado she was giving a talk on emptiness and she said something that uh it went something along these lines is not quite verbatim but very close to it emptiness is that in me that comes and goes as you come and go that comes and goes as you come and go yes and so zen and of course buddhism as a whole is about trying and this is how it’s profoundly convergent with neo-platinism trying to get us to realize not that we’re nothing in the absolute privation sense but they were we ultimately we are not substances we are not things no thingness we are right we are these dynamic fields of relationality we are not things we are of relationality and so uh there’s a part of me that comes and goes as this bottle comes and goes there’s a part of me that comes but so instead of thinking what I do is I take all of my properties that I think belong to me as a substance and I re-realize them in both senses of the word as no this property is how I’m related to that and it comes and goes so that comes and go and what I start to see is this coming and going and this flowing of pure relationality and that’s emptiness but notice the way she described it it isn’t an abstract thing it’s that moment you were just describing that moment when gai sensed dot comes on the screen and there’s the affection and love I have for him and there’s a part there is a part which is not even the right word but there is that which in me that comes in right comes you know into awareness right or just just comes I don’t even want to say comes into awareness it just comes as you come and then when you go it will go right and and and so it’s like you said it’s it’s it’s it’s right in the very most intimate encounters we have and you can even think about emptiness is that in you which comes and goes when you think about aspects of you that come and go and this of course is what we’re constantly doing when we’re identifying and this is what I so for me there is a profound convergence not an identity by any means there’s a profound convergence between zen and neoplatonism and of course this is also something I’m been exploring in great length as I’ve been preparing for the next big video series because that relationship but I’m trying to get that zen is trying to say this is both the most ultimate reality and the most intimate right the most intimate it is the at the very guts of whatever intimacy you have you are actually realizing pure relationality it is not just the out there out there abstract ultimate it’s in the very threading of whatever intimacy gives you whatever genuine meaning in life you are realizing yeah yeah yeah yeah and it’s got this um that when you’re saying like the springing right the coming right like I don’t even want to say coming something but just the coming and then the leaving and the um but guy don’t you see how that maps onto all the talks we’ve been having about the shining and the withdrawal the shining in and the withdrawal just interwoven in you know yeah yeah yeah so it’s that sense of that um like I can feel I can feel my uh I heard someone call it the apophatic walking stick right yes yes this the sense of feeling into and this is really a bit important to me and in a deep way is is that that sense of whatever it is that’s like primordial or ultimate right um that this this relate that it be a relation in which it’s an apophatic relation that there is as you’re talking about there is something that withdraws into the mystery right but yet it also something comes forward and glows of it yet the thing but but it resists any any like well filler’s argument right is that the and this aligns with the platinus’s argument right is the and this this aligns with uh the argument made by martin in uh indeterminacy and intelligibility little little thin gem of a book i’m reading right now just astonishing that pure relationality is indeterminate because to make any determination is itself a relation and therefore it presupposes relationality and whenever we are trying to determine things we are trying to say how they are without relationality and that isn’t ultimate and so the ultimate relationality is indeterminate not in again not in like not in like you know the amorphous sense but in the sense that we can’t close our minds on it because that would destroy the very possibility of the relationality that is at the heart of information that’s at the heart of eligibility that that’s the heart and like the heart of meaning etc. yeah yeah so that so it’s this this at the heart of things right the yeah this was talking about i was talking through this with with um last my last few conversations og rose um i don’t think you’ve met yet but he’s i think you guys would would have you guys have a great time talking um there’s this uh this sense where he the way he kind of talks about he’s like yeah like if if we look down to the deepest most ground of of what’s most real and if there’s if there’s nothing there that we can couple with that we can we can we can home in if there’s nothing intrinsic there then basically all we got is like hitler or stallen right then it’s kind of like there’s this set there’s this this implication that if there’s nothing if there’s nothing at the heart of reality that’s intelligible right that that has a has some kind of i don’t know essence and not the traditional sense of the word but that that has an intrinsic meaningfulness to it like that it’s something that that we can in some sense tune into and draw out and embody out right then it’s kind of like then all we got is kind of like power dynamics and stuff like that right at some level but if there is something intelligible right if there is a through line through things right that that like and this is one of the in in that conversation i really got the sense of like this is why it’s so important to mind this especially now in our time right because in some sense like you know as you talk about you know you have 50 50 episodes basically breaking down right the the the millennial and the historical movements of the meaning crisis right but in some real way it’s like i sense a real urgency in attempting to actually look into ultimate reality for lack of a better word and to see to see its nature to to discover it to be close with it to to see this such that like that like almost everything’s kind of banking on that in some way and now that religion and is no longer viable in the same way that it once was right that this this has a new level of importance to it that i think is super super important okay i think this this is amazing um let me try and do uh so i was talking with uh there’s an argument i made to jordan hall and when there was a recent video i think with jordan and chris and i uh but i was making the argument um that if you move to a substantialist metaphysics in which what is most real are individual uh independently self-standing things which is what we mean by the word substance it doesn’t mean stuff um until you get basically to sort of maybe day cart then you are driven towards a nominalist epistemology uh because you have raw individuals and you really can’t ontologically derive the relationship from raw individuals and so the mind has to project has to project patterns onto them and i think this is what exactly happens when the substantial uh metaphysics at the heart of Aquinas come to the fore and people like occam and scottis and and then you get the rise of nominalism which makes a lot of sense the problem then with nominalism is it says that all of this stuff exists in the mind and not in the world and you get a profound dualism that’s implicit and of course day cart will draw that out so now you’ve got nominalism and dualism and then if you have nominalism and dualism and you understand reality ultimately in terms of self-standing substances then you’re into adversarial processing by necessity because there are no shared patterns there is radical disconnection through dualism and it’s your subjectivity against my subjectivity in a very sort of hegelian fashion and you’re into adversarial processing and i think that’s exactly what you mean by the power dynamics and i think that line just goes tick tick tick tick tick tick like that yeah and of course we are trying to unthread that and i think i think i get what you’re saying like we were trying to say no we need to get out of adversarial processing and get back to opponent processing and then we need to get out of monological thinking and into dialogic and we were and we are and we’re doing that and we’re trying but you know where that winds all the way back it winds all the way back to oh we’re saying that reality is ultimately relational and when you realize things it’s ultimately a relationality and and and and i think that i i i agree i think we have been doing this we have been trying to we have been trying to reverse out of right the adversarial processing and that and then reverse out of the monological understanding of the mind and then reverse and we’ve been doing this whole thing and this is what we’re doing on the workshops getting and we’re not just talk we’re not primarily talking about it we’re getting people to enact it within and between each other so that they realize it and they come into proper relationship uh to it in a profound way i i i totally agree and then and and and also what you just said you know and i i started the quote with it matt rosano’s excellent proposal that religion is ultimately about relationship and that as we’ve lost religion and you know even as we’ve lost the trinity as a sacred symbol and i’m not advocating for christianity here i’m stating a fact but what we have lost is we have lost a prioritization of relationship and we have lost the claim a sacred claim that reality is ultimately relational and so we have lost a cultural framework that helps us to properly ritualize our interactions so that we can get out of this adversarial like dualistic nominalistic isolating lonely cut off meaning crisis that we’re in yeah yeah totally totally can i can i can i can i just want to make two other points about this this is also convergent to my mind and i’m going to be making this argument with a move within the philosophy of science which is called structural realism which is that it’s real patterns all the way down that’s how they put it and they argue that this because if you look across paradigm shifts in science it’s not the content that stays the same it’s the patterns that stay the same the patterns that make the intelligibility possible and so they propose as lady men and others that it’s patterns all the way down and of course there’s similar arguments by whitehead but i want to i want to say something this is not to aggrandize myself at all but i remember having this realization like as a young adult i started to think but wait everything is a relationship and any of the things that i think are in relationship are themselves relationships and i got this i got this sort of i had like a mystical experience of it’s all just relationships all the way up and all the way down and all the way in and all the way out yeah and so again i i’m trying to do what you’re talking about i’m trying to constantly to and fro between very abstract thought and then say no but this is how it shows up in our very concrete practices or here’s a very abstract proposal from the philosophy of science but as a kid i had this i had this sort of mystical realization a direct experiential thing and and because holding those two in tonos in creative tension in relationship is ultimately what you need to do to grok what we’re talking about yeah yeah yeah yeah so it’s like this um sorry i’m getting too excited about this this stuff is really really motivating me very well the this that you’re getting excited about like is is um i think is is worthy of excitement for for sure it’s so there’s that you know when you said when you said that that insight and i’ve had like similar kinds of you know kind of mind-popping you know heart opening experiences of that of kind of recognized wait a minute like whatever i say is in a relationship those things within the relationship are made of relationships and then there’s this sense where you go to the very very micro and then you kind of realize it’s all relationship but in some sense it’s paradoxically you just basically named a unity that is relational like it is relational it’s this one this kind of um well it’s beyond i mean this is filler’s point right and uh botanist’s point it’s like it’s transnumeric it’s neither one it’s neither singular nor plural right because what it is is it’s what makes uh it would it’s what makes any numeric intelligibility possible for us and and it’s transcentric it’s it’s it centers everywhere and it circumfers is nowhere um i’ve been having experiences um i do practice it’s very sort of similar to a zen practice um and came to this state uh where nothing is in nothing is excluded and nothing is enclosed and it’s the closest words i have for trying to articulate that sort of being or being realized in being realized by and realizing of pure relationality um and what’s interesting about that and i’m not and i really am not intending to say anything inflationary of course this is how nicholas of kusa describes god god is within everything but not enclosed and beyond everything but not excluded and you sort of get a sense of i think i think kusa had this experience too had this realization and he got a sense of that this is this is somehow ultimate but not yet but not just ultimate it’s transformative it’s liberating it’s releasing us from a lot of imprisoning ways of thinking and being assuming our identities and assigning identities and all and of course that this is like zen and the kind of liberation it brings to to my understanding yeah yeah that that so so you’re so that sense that that experience that you just described if you can call it an experience that of where what was it you said that everything is nothing is no the way it’s i i’m being very careful about this nothing is excluded uh but nothing is enclosed so there’s no there’s no things but it’s not but but but but everything is included right nothing’s excluded right and so it’s it’s that yeah it’s it’s this this state um and it was in that moment like and maybe even your access again a bit now as you’re as you’re trying to describe it in that moment if we say that that that everything like nothing nothing is excluded right and everything’s included no nothing’s enclosed nothing enclosed like right before you you started to articulate that what called that articulation in your mind like what what was calling to you in that moment were you experiencing something yeah i i mean i was starting to relive the experience and and uh and i’m trying to get at something that i keep coming back to which is this is a this is an experience that well in one sense sounds completely abstract is also just profoundly intimate um it it it it um it it follows on what i i had a really powerful insight i was reading spinoza and spinoza said god doesn’t have any abstract ideas and i went oh right we we think that because we we we have to use abstract thought that we’re moving into an entity that is somehow abstract in its being and that’s not and it’s the same kind of inversion we may be doing this sort of abstract language but what happens is you get this and what called me is i get this experience of an inversion and i’m some i’m suddenly into the most intimate experience the most here now connectedness that i could know i don’t know what or and could be known by yeah yeah yeah in some sense i just kind of i think i’m getting a sense of as you’re talking about this this it’s in some way you know it’s funny because i just i’m having a that the human relation in some sense right coming into relationship with each other and there’s always these moments where it’s like there’s you find yourself in an intimate moment with somebody right yes and you’re sharing something right it’s very hard to put into words what exactly you’re sharing but you’re sharing something but there’s always this element to it that is always struck me is this this very pervasive element of of feeling like maybe you and i have never had this interaction before maybe we just met right but the felt sense is that when that connection happens it feels like oh i remember you in the platonic sense of it yeah yeah yeah that sense of things has a new ring to it as we’re talking about yeah it’s reality that’s good yeah i like that it’s that kind of connection of otherness and intimacy that’s in anamnesis or the sufi the dikhar or the kurdajev are truly remembering the self sati right these yeah i i agree i think that’s it that’s exactly right i think it is very much that and i mean when when you were saying that and i was thinking of course of boober that there’s never an eye it’s either an eye it’s a it’s at bottom it’s a relation it’s i it or i thou that is that’s the actual logos that’s the actual word and i yeah that that that well yeah it would be the it would go back to what the you know the zen abbot said when she said there’s that in me that comes and goes as you come and go this is kind of i can only remember who i am and what i am as i as you come and go and as chris comes and goes and as sara comes and goes and even uh when john when i whatever that is reflects on the memories of john that come and go yeah uh i i what’s happening for me is a kind of a rhythmic resonant at one mint of interconnectedness and impermanence that i hadn’t understood before i mean i would permit at oneness yeah because that that everything is interconnected but it’s impermanent because everything is coming and going as everything else is coming and going and um and even the see this is the problem this is feller’s point this is such a profound inversion because it’s taking us out of how language keeps trying to strangle us back in to thinking about things i mean and niche niche niche bumped up against this he said i you know i fear we’re not getting rid of god because we still believe in grammar and he meant linguistic grammar yeah you know because we we have to say bizarre things like it is raining yeah what like what what what’s the it yeah like we and in those little absurdities we can realize that the language is pushing us into a metaphysics that is actually not true to um how we’re making sense of the world yeah yeah yeah and when you have a metaphysics that isn’t true to how we actually make sense of the world right what like and then just press go with that what do you end up with i think you end up with what we are yeah right now yeah i think you end up with all the alienation all the anxiety all the absurdity yeah all the all the modal confusion all the stuff that you know i’ve been talking about and you and i and chris and jordan hall and all of that and then on the other on the other side you have all the wonderful critiques by wittgenstein and heidegger etc and maybe on the third side of it you have what i’m encountering with so many people and it is profoundly calling me is the sense of the advent of the sacred as something that is trying to come come so that we can come in a way that we have we couldn’t be have not been able to before and i and this is really calling to me reality also comes and goes and we come and go as it comes and goes and i think there’s a sacred dimension to this that is trying to be born right now because we need to be born beyond the meaning crisis and the sacred needs to be born and so i’m interested in the neoplatonic zen proposal or the zen neoplatonic proposal the eckhart proposal the tillich proposal of the god beyond the god of theism because theism is ultimately bound into a substantialist metaphysics at least the one the form of theism that i’m familiar with i’m sensitive to filler’s point that you know the eastern orthodox christians kept kept alive a completely other sense and so i want to be very careful about what i’m saying here but that call that that’s calling to me right now something is trying to come yeah yeah advent the advent of the sacred and so and again that can sound horrifically abstract or it can go into the most intimate way you are with you listen to the language the way you are with yourself and you are with others if you could read if you could hear that very strongly and resonantly and relationally um the the sacred is trying to be born so that we can be other than what we are because we need to be i mean this we’re like we’re in a profound individual and shared kind of grief that’s what the meaning crisis is and the what some of the wisest advice i was given is you you can’t make grief go away you can’t make the whole go away the only the only thing you can do is to grow into someone other than who you are so the whole isn’t so large within you and that was and i think that’s what we’re at right now that’s where we need to go would you say that last part again the thing about the the grief and the whole yeah so like the the problem we like the the mistake people make when they encounter grief which is the kind of emptiness when relationality is actually lost for us that’s what grief is grief is there’s a hole in reality because relationality has been lost and there’s this hole and you and the mistake we try to do is we we try to fill it with something we try to fill it with intense experience or alcohol or the next person or something and you know you know this psychologically therapeutically that is a disaster that is a profound kind of self-deception all you can do right is grow into a different person such that the hole isn’t as large in you as it was when it first occurs you trying to make it go away is impossible and you can grow and then the the and then this was part of what this wise person said to me is that the growth is it’s bound up with it because he also said to me he said don’t get in don’t get seriously involved john with anybody who’s not experienced grief because paradoxically almost when you grow beyond that hole right it allows you to connect to the whole and other people it becomes like an aperture becomes like a an eye by which you can see other people’s depths that are otherwise not seeable like and i know what he means if you’ve met if you meet people who haven’t touched grief and i don’t want grief i don’t wish grief on anybody but you know that there’s a kind of lack of depth to them that is not there there is a depth to somebody who has properly processed grief and you resonate profoundly with it that’s what i was trying to articulate and all of that goes again with we are its reality is inherently relational we’re inherently relational and this is not just an abstract this goes into the most intimate guts of our existence like when we’re in profound grief right right yeah there’s something about that that’s really striking um you know especially to you know i’m thinking about um what uh in the kyoto school right uh nishitani it’s you know his critique you know in some sense his his critique of of of of niches nihilism he says he didn’t go far enough right like like it’s not not just that it’s not but go deep into that go all the way through the knot all the way through and i hear i hear a real embodied sense of that in going into grief right like in this other way it’s like there’s that sense of like i’ve in it through that i grow large enough to be able to be to have the whole in some sense and i also get this sense this innermost way that you somehow it puts you in through that through that nothing into the emptiness in some way this yeah i think that’s right of the nihilism discloses itself as the spaciousness of of being if you will yeah and that’s nishitani’s point he says you know the one thing the eye can’t see is the eye the fire can’t burn itself there’s this there’s this emptiness inside everything that allows it to be what it is but also allows it to be other than what it is and and that’s what you see everything has to have within it emptiness or it can’t properly be in relationship to anything else because if it was if it was actually substantial and completely self-enclosed you get like leibniz and monads with no windows right and how do they possibly connect and relate to each other you just have collisions you don’t have relations yes exactly and you just have adversarial processing and you just have normalism and you just have the kind of right torrent situation we’re in and we’re torn within ourselves and we’re torn between ourselves right right god so there is so that’s so interesting how symbolic grief is like that sense of what it taps into at such a deep level because it’s it’s like yeah grief always involves the loss or the change or the going away of some relation it’s like it’s a tear or a sudden loss or a slow loss of some something some person usually some situation in which you have profoundly in some sense um put in your future for a kind of infinity right it’s that and it’s also you know yeah you know blade runner the tears in the rain speech at the end which was beautiful and ad-libbed but the point he’s making is you know when you relate to somebody you’re relating to a whole field of relationality you lose a world you lose an access right you lose a portal right and of course the doorway is another metaphor for relationality right you lose a portal to the world and that’s what can awaken in you in grief a sense of horror because you realize that you realize that reality ultimately isn’t substantial it has this relationality to it and when a relation is lost you can lose that whole world and for me when when i’ve experienced grief that is though that’s when that’s when it got particularly challenging to me when i realized that there was a whole world a whole way in which i could be again that in that in me which comes and goes as you come and go and when that person permanently goes there’s me and and of me is not a substance it’s a whole nesting of world that all goes to and that’s that’s that that’s what’s so profoundly on like disclosing about grief there’s a horror aspect not terror there’s a horror aspect into in it and um and i think when you when human beings have both when you’ve had that horror and i’ve had that horror we have a kind of mutual knowing of each other where we and it’s wordless we just like yes yeah yeah yeah yeah i mean it’s it’s that that horror is perhaps perhaps the most profound distaste we have of our mortality which doesn’t just mean we’re going to die at some point it means we are in we are inherently relational and so we are always right vulnerable yeah since we were talking about this i’m really getting this sense in some way like before i’ve had any loss right like before i’ve gone through grief i have relationships right and in some way right i could you know i could in some way be in relationship with you but not i’ll be totally in relationship with you because i’m not in some very visceral way connected to that the very source of this relation is an emptiness right an emptiness to me and an emptiness in you right that’s what even affords the possibility of this relation and in some sense in some sense a kind of like i can even become have a kind of idolatry right of the other right of the relationship right and then the then the loss of it at some level from the perspective of my idolatry or the loss of the sense of emptiness that that that mutually disclose each other right that looks like that looks like everything and there’s the horror like everything’s gone and how the hell do i survive that and who could even begin to feel that and however the grief the the letting oneself grieve right to to letting oneself not cover it over but to go into it in some sense is in in some way it’s really interesting it’s like it’s a you know it’s what’s really striking about this and there is something odd there is something i think this is why this yeah you’re getting at something i can tell but what’s happening on your face and the way you shifted your body you’re you’re into you’re into something right now yeah is in some way it’s that emptiness right is i’m still in relationship with them and this is the process of that emptiness in them right and the emptiness in me that it’s almost like it’s their final kiss to me if you will right yeah this is lennard cohen right it’s the crack in everything that lets the light shine through right and of course he’s he’s very profoundly influenced by zen yeah i i think that’s right i think i think when we realize that that crack that emptiness is what allows our relationality that yeah i like what you just said that we we don’t get the person back but it is it is the final gift that the final kiss we get from the person you know see as lewis tried to i think maybe articulate this when he was talking about grief when he talked about you get this realization that the grief now and the joy then are inseparable from each other and that you couldn’t you you can’t have one without the other one without the other you couldn’t have entered into deep relationship with someone if there wasn’t the emptiness within you and within them in the way we’re talking about emptiness we’re not talking about privation we’re talking about that that that non-substantiality that pure relationality yeah yeah yeah so just the just really kind of getting this this this i think i mean i just feel like i’m appreciating it as we’re talking it’s it the in some way that the the ongoing practice right of in some way continually reaching into and and being reached by this this this relationality that is also an emptiness right this this um this minding this uh seems to be so i don’t know it just seems like it’s like the most important thing i think that’s what we have been sort of fumbling our way along and i mean i i do think the practices are well designed i don’t mean that but we have been we have been we’ve been on a journey as we have been trying to share this with people we have been trying to go deeper and deeper with increased intimacy into the relationality and you know like i said i’m just unroll unfold from the adversarial unfold from the dualistic unfold from the nominalistic unfold from the substantialistic right and what does that mean and again it’s not we’re not talking about abstract theorization we are talking about the most intimate profound experience realization i don’t like any of these words realization comes closest to it as long as you make it a fully visceral embodied enacted thing that’s what we’re trying to give people in these practices what you know you know from the neo-platonic contemplation through you know the circling practices the the philosophical fellowship the dialectic into dialogos it’s all about doing this and getting people right to come into right relationship well even just it’s it’s really interesting even to look at just the the the you know one of you could say that the the circling in the dialogos course is is basically it’s an experiential course of a of a layered of progressive practices right exactly exactly exactly exactly and it strikes me it’s like just even the one like looking at this right now kind of bring this up into the practices like the singing of the peer relation is looking at um for example the philosophical fellowship practice where you basically you take you take a um a you know a a short reading of somebody like from character guard or boobers you know somebody somebody like that and then you read it slowly as a group and then you pick out like one sentence right to then chant as a group and then and then then you begin to articulate as a group you go around and you and you use short speech right to essentially and what’s interesting about this is you’re trying to feel you’re you’re trying to feel through the words into the author itself into their very motivation into their thouness and begin to articulate it in as if you’re as if you’re drawing the author out right be drawn into their author and this even this is this relational sense exactly right yeah some people have described it and you know with a little bit of humor as like a secular seance right we’ve had people that way you’re sort of presencing the perspective you’re presencing the intelligibility and it’s of this right of the way the way this person this person is sage in some way was a portal into reality and you’re trying to go through that portal again we’re trying to import each other through it and get the import from it the importance of it yeah and again and i was thinking as you said that and you know people say that in that practice they say that in circling they say through all of these practices and then they’re saying it deeper and deeper especially when they get the dialectic and the dialogos and the animesis they say i’ve discovered a kind of intimacy i never knew about but i’ve been always looking for again that weird kind of remembering that’s not remembering yes yeah yeah yes totally totally so they because i think they’re realizing the inherent relationality of who they are and who they are with others and who all of we are with the world yeah oh absolutely absolutely and that that sense of just that minding catching a catching a glitch catch you know as sacrilegies would say catching the virtue right yeah yeah yeah being caught by it yes yes getting these glimpses of like whoa that that that this right the the through line through things i think in some sense it’s got this attractiveness to it right that like it’s it’s there’s even a seductiveness about it right this way that it’s it both it both shines forth and withdrawals this yeah it’s beautiful in a very profound way it’s beautiful yeah and so there’s in some way i think also the practices give this way of having a glimpse into something right that that you can’t possess but it was the most real thing in the world and in some sense just having a glimpse of it evokes a kind of eros right in an erotic relationship to it i i think that’s right and uh and i think it it’s also wakes people up from modal confusion that ultimately being is can cannot be reduced to having which is another way of just saying everything we’ve been talking about yeah um and and and that’s another thing filler’s book has made me understand more deeply what from was talking about yeah about the the being mode and the having mode and how we suffer a profound modal confusion where we think we can have being um and and so yeah i think people are they they they realize that they wake up to it i think it’s beautiful um in a profound way it it calls to us it’s erotic in that sense we want to be one with it we want to conform to it because we can’t hold it we can only be in relationship to it we have to we want to participate as profoundly as we can all of this happens and again this all sounds very abstract but it’s happening in concrete specific conversations and practices between people who are right who are not there to do academic philosophy but are there because they want to come into a right relationship to virtue and through that into a right relationship with reality they are called they’re cultivating in that sense wisdom a love of wisdom philosophy of the love of wisdom yeah yeah totally and that you’re having a taste of it and having that awakened yes right because it’s also you know the fact that their practices right is i think saying something right in itself in that way that practices whenever you practice something it always involves kind of like a putting a boundary or constraint around you right that limits your options of things that you do so that it forces you to work a particular muscle that you maybe wouldn’t otherwise so it’s also the kind of quality of like the the machine as you would in your language the machinery right of of getting this right is as you’re working that the sit like the the the reality or the relation kind of peeks forward right and as you’re as you’re training the muscles that work this right it’s not like you know and i think what the thing i’ve noticed is is from just doing practices myself over and over and over again for like years and years it’s not so that they’re they’re like these deep kind of us like asanas or something these stretches right that you go into these extreme positions not so that you can like do that same position out in your life it’s so that when you’re in your life right and you’re not thinking about yoga you’re not thinking about the practice there is a responsiveness that you have that can then continuously see right an opening in a conversation that you couldn’t feel before that and all of a sudden you can see and then you can respond to it and that’s how it works and that’s what turns to my mind part of my the argument i’ve been making that’s what turns a practice into a ritual when it has that capacity to transfer like broadly and deeply systematically into people’s lives yes and that’s and that is what that is also what we’re endeavoring to do in the workshop we are trying and we have been well this will be what our seventh time we’ve done it yeah seventh or eighth yeah yeah and and you know we keep and we it’s always a work in progress and it will probably always be at a work in progress we can listen to people and we and then we go back and we tweak and we redesign and retool and we have been continually working towards how can we get people involved in this such that it will transfer you know to different levels of their cycle and outside of the workshop into their lives in transformative ways yeah absolutely absolutely this is really great john well thank you my friend i think this has been uh wonderful i always give the guests on voices with ravikhi even beloved guests like you um the last word however you want to make it well i just hope that i just hope i hope that in and through this i know i am that if you can always if we could always just always notice that wherever we find ourselves it is a function of relation like we are already in a relation right that’s all that’s ever been there and like to feel into that in in in a way is in some sense in some sense it’s an intimacy that’s closer it’s closer to you than than even yourself and that it’s like it isn’t you’re right it’s like it is not this far out thing to figure out it is it is the it’s like in some sense it’s the very ground in which figures come out right and getting closer and closer to that is uh is i hope i hope i hope that i hope that that i hope i hope that one one hears that and is erotically seduced deeply by that Thank you my dear friend. So again February 10th and 11th there’ll be all the information in the description notes for this video. We will be doing the weekend workshop. I’ll be there. Guy will be there and Christopher Master Pietro will be there and so this is a wonderful opportunity to profoundly remember relationality. Yeah. Take care everyone.