https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=1Qnrdh2mgg0
Welcome everyone to another voices with Reveki the video or about to see was originally shot on Seth Dillinger’s channel It’s a discussion between myself Seth Dillinger and Ken Mannheimer about contact improv and it’s very powerful kind of embodiment practice that would Go well in an ecology of practices in which we’re trying to comprehensively Cultivate wisdom. I hope you enjoy the video. All right. Welcome everyone. My name is Seth Dellinger This is the embodied dialogue podcast and I’m very excited about What we have today Not only because of the two guests who are here, which I’m very excited for both of them But because this is in fact the first time I’ve had two different guests and I get to take two people who are really interesting And introduce them to each other and see what happens. So we have John for Reveki here and He is a professor at the University of Toronto teaching in the departments of psychology cognitive science and Buddhist psychology he’s also the director of the cognitive science program and many people know him from his work on YouTube especially the Lecture series called awakening from the meaning crisis, which is how I first found out about John Something like three years ago now, I believe it is And also have my good friend Ken manheimer who’s with me here in Washington DC and Ken is a longtime practitioner of the practice of contact improvisation and Ken will tell us more what that is, but he’s been coordinating here in DC along with with others a group that does Contact improvisation is known as the contact jam for nearly 20 years he’s also a computer programmer and Just to sort of make a personal connection. I mentioned that around three years ago. I found John’s work And this was during the pandemic and it was sometime in that time frame too when Ken and I started basically just going for a walk in the woods every couple of weeks, but You know, I I’m a practitioner of the Feldenkrais method I meditate and I’ve been involved in circling and a number of different practices and something I’ll be asking John about Is something that John calls the ecology of practices, but one of my practices is going on walks with Ken so To the degree that there’s a connection between the two of you often I’ve been walking in the woods with Ken and I’ve been saying gosh, you know is Listening to John for vacay the other day and we’ve been sort of sharing and and trading ideas and Ken’s been Someone who’s just really helped me a lot in thinking through The teaching and the offerings that I do so that’s a my version of the introduction, but I’d like to give you both a chance to say a little bit more about yourselves and maybe we could start with you John and In addition to anything else you have to say I would love for you to spell out a little bit About this concept of the ecology of practices and why it’s so important today and then we’ll turn it over to Ken Thanks Seth and great pleasure to meet you Ken First a correction. I no longer teach for the Buddhism psychology and mental health program That program has actually been shut down by the University of Toronto So I’m just psychology and cog Psy now so just a correction So the basic idea behind ecology of practice is an way of trying to deal with two basic facts about us Our cognition which isn’t just our knowing it’s our entire sense making Apparatus if I can put it that way sweet is maybe better is Very dynamic. It’s very self-organizing. It’s multiple layers Recursive very complex a dynamical complexity. It gives us tremendous adaptivity and at the same time it makes us very prone to self-deception and that self-deception can inhabit and feed off of that complex self-organization and become almost a living being within us and Intervening in that requires a counteractive done a dynamical system a bunch of practices that intervene in a coordinated fashion Simultaneously or at least in parallel and then this lines up with an independent argument that there is no panacea of practice This can be formally proved by certain things like the no free lunch theorem and the bias variance trade-off So I won’t burden anybody with those formal proofs I’m just gonna ask people to do what I have done, which is accept them as formal proofs and Take that as an indication that there is no such thing as a panacea of practice. There is no flawless faculty And there is no perfect institution And then we may go we may despair if we still hunger for platonic perfection or we may Take up the task of trying to make Our lives have as many self correcting systems in them as possible this of course was the attempt of democracy and What that means is I’m talking about an ecology of practices We need a dynamical systems of practices that has been put together in a fashion that gives us one of the most powerful ways of dealing with the fact that our cognition is complex dynamical and That it’s self deceptive which is we can make it self corrective by looking for complementarity relationships between practices they have fine practices that have complementary strikes and weaknesses and then they can do what’s called opponent processing they can Compensate and correct for each other a couple of easy examples is a meditative practice where you look inward and a contemplative practice We look outward getting practicing both of those Is self corrective another one is Seated stillness practices moving mindfulness practices. They need to be right Attentional noetic practices and discursive Dianatic practices And the list goes on and on and so you want that you want that complementarity that opponent processing self-corrective And you also want a layering to your ecology because your cognition is dynamically layered and recursive And you see examples of this I mean the one that’s I use just because not because it’s the exhaustive or sole account But just because the Buddhists have a habit of numbering things and laying things out in very sort of clear fashion You have the eightfold path which is represented as an eight-spoked wheel all of these different Practices are supposed to complement and contrast each other You know that that is actually what it’s off sought after because it’s not concentration and mindfulness or meditation. It’s right concentration Right mindfulness right understanding and this is how each is being corrected by all the others And of course the Buddha is making use of the notion of you know Codependent arising or Ketiknath Han’s notion of interbeing we create this Dharmic dynamical system that can counteract powerfully the parasitical Processing that can take us over in comprehensive self-deception And so the ecology of practices that’s the core argument in a nutshell It’s built off all of those ideas and then like so there’s three arguments One about is the nature of our cognition one is there is no panacea practice and the third is if we look across historically and cross-culturally we see religious philosophical frameworks in actually creating these rich ecologies of practices to deal with the first truth to the first two truths that I Mentioned and so you have a converging of three arguments to the idea of an ecology of practices And I use the word ecology because ecologies are these dynamic right things that are multi-level and they’re self-organizing They’re autopoetic and they have checks and balances throughout them so that they get into a stable Optimal grip on their environment and can persist for long periods of time and even evolve Well within that environment and that is the best that life can hope for because the perfect final form of life doesn’t exist The perfect final form of being doesn’t exist the perfect final form of practice doesn’t exist But we can get one that optimally evolves its optimal grip on the world there. That’s as best I could do Pretty good Thank You John and What I’m hoping We can do is is explore the practice of contact improvisation and also look at it within the framework of The ecology of practices and I know you’ll have more to say about this John but also, you know, why do we need in particular today an ecology of practices and You know, what are some of again some of the dynamics of contact improvisation that could contribute to this? So Ken, please Introduce yourself and and share a little bit more about contact improvisation Well, I want to bookmark a couple of things remind myself from what what John said I am I Have the sense I want to tell my story in a way to Relate it to what John was saying because I think I have done Some of that counterbalancing that you were talking about John in in pursuing I come from a family that is highly verbal and and Interested in technical kind of thoroughness stuff and so I When programming which was not so prevalent when I was young Was around I really I really Got was drawn to it and took it up. I like programming a lot and I still do I also Feel like I have a sort of love-hate relationship with words the There’s a lot that you can do with words and that I want to do with words and Sometimes that works out as I hope and sometimes it doesn’t and I struggle with that and so All this is to say that I also Really liked moving and being in my body being physical and I am very happy that in college I found my I was I was taking a biology of movement of exercise section in a biology course and I spoke with a teacher about a project and she said that she was teaching a class in contact improv in town you know and I might be interested in it and so that’s how I was introduced and as soon as I saw it and and Got a feel for it. I I knew it was something I would like to do and have done since this is college in 1979 so For the most part I’ve been doing it fairly regularly as a folk practice is something that we gather to do this This thing that I’ll talk more about but to get back to this counterbalancing I I feel that Particularly because of the way contact improv approaches it. It’s it’s very much not an explanatory thing it’s a experiential thing And it’s it’s an experiential thing that you do in a a kind of deep way with someone else Where neither person is leading neither person is in control ideally You’re both following and and of course, there’s all sorts of layers and layers of where we fool ourselves And go to habits and go to ways that that take us off the the present moment But it’s a practice of being in the present moment with someone else and I’ll say more about that when we when we get to it But my my experience over the years as I’ve gotten familiar and comfortable with it is that There’s a kind of language in it that I get to I get to carry on with other people That is not That is not Burdened with a lot of the complications of spoken language with other people And so I’m very thankful I have spoken language and I’m very thankful that I have this way to Connect and communicate with other people and in some ways it feels more like a native a Native language for me my first tongue And That may have created a mystery of what kind of tech improv is we can get to that in a moment But another thing I wanted to say Something that I was taught early on By my father who who kind of disabused me of the notion that we know anything absolutely as a kind of playful exercise But it it’s spurred in me this curiosity about what it means to have a sense of what’s real And I think as you were as you were speaking about Ecology of practices and how we fool ourselves Also as a programmer this comes up a lot You know It’s it’s very tempting to blame blame the compiler for the errors and you discover again and again and again how How how you can mislead yourself and didn’t debugging and so finding out noticing what’s real and what is Really going on with myself with the world with others I think in programming and in contact improv and in conversation and in meditation and in all these things is what I see is the the thing you were talking about and a little bit differently and and another the last note I want to make is that particularly learned from contact improv is that in order to notice what what’s real I think the most Fundamental thing is learning to participate Yes part of yeah Wow That’s really rich. I mean that notion of participation being that boat that To you’re knowing not by representing or applying even a skill you’re knowing by you and something else Sharing the same principles right being bound within the same process mutually shaping each other. They’re being shaped Mutually shaped by the process you’re both within that participatory knowing I think is is the deepest Rounding kind of knowing that makes all the other kinds of knowing possible I think the coordination I think each knowing has a sense of realness to it that participatory knowing is that sense of Like belongingness rightness with the world kind of sense that the prospect of unknowing the know it the knowing that comes through noticing and What we’re foregrounding and backgrounding and noticing how we might be messing it up and therefore needing insight That prospect of unknowing I think it gives it something else I think this running through what you said the sense of real there is that sense of presence That sense of something somebody being sort of fully actualized in contact with the situation And then for skills, it’s our power and then finally for our beliefs It’s truth and I think we have fixated too much on propositional truth And we’ve lost the other kind of truths how it what it is to be true to someone and for your aim to be true and to be troathed And all that and so what you just said I heard all of that echoing through everything you said So deep resonance for me. I have one question Just to draw you out a little bit more. You said something really provocative About that counterbalancing, which I really appreciated you talked about spoken language and then you talk about a Realization of and this was your metaphor a language a language of sort of improv and contact And I found and of course, there’s an interesting thing there You’re obviously trying to use that metaphorically because you’re making a contrast between spoken language and this other and I mean and this puts me to the the idea of the The Greek the ancient Greek idea of the logos as something that is not just found in language or logic But in any way in which things gather together to make sense We do a practice called dialectic into dialogous Well, we try to get that being present in addition to the spoken language and a question has emerged for me in there and It’s I’ve been exploring it in some of the online courses I’ve been teaching and I wanted to ask you and I wanted to hear your thoughts Because I already have a sense you’re wise and I want to know and I’m not going to do the Socratic thing with you I’m trying to draw you out or anything like that. I’m trying to do What what like? Do those two and I’m gonna play with the metaphor do those two the spoken language and let’s call it the language of contact movement Do they talk to each other for you? There are several layers first of all, thank you for I Was very excited about this opportunity to talk with you and Seth Because I can see the relationships the Salient things that that overlap. I believe there’s a lot to share here The I Think of a couple of responses to your question One has to do with With With a question people often ask When they’re learning to do improv of any sort but contact improv is the one I’m most familiar with for movement improv which is How do I stop my mind from working or get my mind out of the way? and my response is Not to get your mind out of the way but to find a way for me for me to find a way to To let my mind the kind of spoken or executive mind do what it does well Which is planning and recognizing opportunities and doing things that Reflex doesn’t do as well or the more immediate responses And and then to also give reflex and More intuitive sense of where things are going and being present in the moment To have a cooperation a collaboration between these different skills, right? Right, right And the thing I hear in your In the crisis you’re talking about is where we are Yeah, and I think more than skills. I think that’s right I think where we try to let modes of being roles identities try to do the jobs for others Right, right. I so much agree and yeah So the right go ahead. Yeah, can I want to zero in on that because I I think that’s right. I think that’s right. I think that’s right. I think that’s right Because I This is like so for me this getting the noetic The nonverbal and the dia noetic the discursive to as you said to collaborate and cooperate I think this is actually the key to avoiding nihilism I think if you just do one or the if you just do this you get empty chatter If you do this you get this sort of silence that can be terrorizing to people right and doesn’t connect with Our endeavors to make sense of the world and so I you’ve been doing this a long time and What like what’s the phenomenology of when they’re collaborating? So I imagine you have a sense of when they’re not Collaborating and a sense of when they are and what’s that shift like I’m sorry. We have this Useful useless word in English. What does it feel like? You know, I’m trying to get more than what does it feel like? Like what like what’s the phenomenology when when it when it shifts from not collaborating to collaborating? How does that? How does that how are you realizing that? How does that come to you? so I think I need to back up a little bit because yeah, I Said there were there were two things That occur to me and one is one is a little different, but I think it relates I think it’s an important piece of this the One of the big lessons one of the most fundamental skills I’ve I’ve found in Improvising that is a little different than the kind of virtuosity that people often Recognize and aim for is When when Collaborating it’s easy to get Collaborating it’s easy to get Diverted by paying attention to the person you’re collaborating with at the exclusion of paying attention to yourself or paying attention to yourself and not giving opportunity to receive them and the greatest skill and the greatest Difficulty, but the the challenge is also the most exciting when I’m actually doing it is to be able to have room for both To listen to myself and listen to the person or people or the situation I’m communicating with mmm, and So in response to your last question about where that where that shift is or or how it works when I’m It’s the same thing with the verbal and nonverbal I think when I’m able to leave space for the verbal to I when the funny thing is the The Psychology 101 or the the The excuse of I don’t have words to talk about this thing that sometimes that that talking about art can be useful but useful to a limit you want to use it in the ways that it’s helpful where it shines light and And recognize some places where it doesn’t So so finding those that balance I guess which is sounds a little trivial But it’s no it doesn’t it sounds exactly the opposite to me It sounds like the thing that we’re talking about at the core of dia logos when you’re getting exactly That almost stereoscopic awareness, but it’s resonating To bring these multiple capacities to bear That’s fantastic Go ahead Seth. I mean my question has been answered very well Yeah, and and it’s wonderful just to to actually mostly be a bystander here and watch the two of you I just wanted to mention and I’ll let you decide Ken when’s an appropriate moment But I also just have a small amount of video clips so that John could You’re asking what it feels like but also to see what it looks like and we have two different clips one Which is more on the sort of virtuosic end of things and one is much more simple But if this is a good time I could play it now can maybe I would I’d like to first describe in a perfect Yeah, so just let me know way, yeah So There’s so much I want to say but contact improv came out of Postmodern dance both a group of People including a pretty highly trained dancer and martial artist Did I keto and and so forth Steve Paxton? Was part of Merce Cunningham’s company and Studied with various other people worked at a high level in dance, but also formed a group and found a studio space at a place called Judson Church and In Greenwich Village and experimented with all sorts of all sorts of sorts of alternative things including that What is dance? What is it? What’s the difference between pedestrian movement and dance and can they overlap? What’s the what’s the boundaries and in playing with that exploring and experimenting Steve came up with a famous? Winter turn course at Oberlin that he just had men enrolled where they explored colliding and sort of physical kinetic Rebounding energy with each other and also the opposite of that sort of standing still and and finding things in between and was Was excited and found something to play with and what developed out of that which is different than the original There’s a video called magnesium that you can find I think on YouTube Of the performance they did The the framing of the practice that I have it’s fairly Elementary elemental is is People mutually following shared points of contact mmm, and the The trick the challenge is to be following rather than Feeling like you have to make stuff happen you have to do stuff to and in fact Seth it might be better to lead with with the finger dance. Sure video sure to show So this will show the very very simple If you touch fingers together and there’s actually a lead in a way to tune into it that I is helpful for this exercise That it it goes somewhere So This is I Wouldn’t normally talk well about leading this and I’m I’m trying as a leader to not lead when doing this to where we’re both still and Trying to follow each other’s finger movement and of course, there’s a feedback loop It’s like the the Ouija board Where the the challenge of course is that when people play Ouija boards? They want to go to the certain letters to spell things out. But if they can refrain from doing that then And really listen the small movements the Steve Paxton actually pays a lot of attention to a thing He calls this small dance. There’s movements going on and The If you’re willing to be patient and respect the the Refraining from making stuff happen you can tune into that and there’s there’s material to play with a faltering or a shake and That gets amplified by one person following the other following the other following the other And there it’s not it’s not arbitrary but and and in The way you follow you can make choices about whether you follow quick or slow or big or small And those choices start to represent you in the collaboration So I’ll actually just jump in here a moment to say that Whenever it is that I showed up at my first contact improvisation Event and Ken was there and there were others and I had my own background in other movement forms and you know I I have background in musical improvisation. So I thought okay, I just get to move my body every which way and I must have been Flipping out and doing crazy things at a certain point Ken was like, hey, you’re new Let’s and and he showed me the finger dance and Ken often does this to introduce people to the concept of Contact improvisation because of course you can see with the fingertip. It’s very minimal But just to give a little bit of my own experience with it You really you touch fingers and you close your eyes and right away it feels like oh that person’s pushing my finger around But then at a certain moment you go somewhere and you say I want to go over here and then you realize oh I’m pushing them and then you have to sort of so like like the practice It’s it’s it’s yet another kind of a presence practice, but it’s this It’s this interpersonal one and then there can be a moment Where let’s say it’s Ken and I are both doing this and we really do have a sense that neither one of us is leading but of course anyone watching sees our fingers going here and there and it Eventually the practice can involve the whole body And I also just want to mention because the video clip that we played that’s where Ken and I go walking and where the musicality of being workshops happen, which is maybe another Thing that we don’t have to get into a lot But it’s sort of a place where Ken and I are bridging some of what he does and some of the practice Some of the practices you do John because there’s a relational we’re walking down trails and talking and whatnot, but just to sort of Underline that that that that distills something that and It distills something and it also in a way, it’s not sufficient because doing doing that with multiple points on your whole body is It adds another element which is for one thing being in another person’s personal space But also finding ways to engage so that you’re you’re staying engaged You’re going along with each other going through all the pragmatics of moving through space together And so they’re one of one of the sort of the all Complimentary exercise that I often do is this notion of counterbalancing a slight counterbalance Where you are sharing your balance with someone else and that’s that’s a magical thing It’s it’s something that takes a while to get a feel for it. Some people get it quickly some people take a while and one of the big parts of the dynamic of Contact improv jams where people gather to practice is that each person you practice with has a different idea about what we’re doing and so practicing with multiple with different people and over time that you start to get a sense of some kind of common ground some kind of Feel that Enables you to engage with someone who you actually don’t speak the same language. This is done around the world and people often remark on going to Japan or Korea or Britain or wherever and having this opportunity to dance with to Have this conversation this movement conversation with someone with whom they don’t share verbal language So maybe I’ll just play the other clip here if that or did you want to say something first John? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I did. I just wanted to I have done this practice multiple times But I thought it was very valuable to just have you first describe and show the videos I’ve done it sort of three different. I did it at return to the source with Rafe Kelly and especially with some of the instructors there I did it at both of the The respond meetings the one that was in Vermont and the one that was in Bergerac and very Quite a few variations on it and and then there’s similar things also within Tai Chi Chuan Push hands and sticky hands and things like that Now I’m not I’m not claiming proficiency when I’m but what I’m saying is you can you can assume I have a little bit of the phenomenology if you want to talk a little bit more deeply about it. That’s all I’m saying well, I think one of there’s layers and layers and one of the really beguiling things for me is this question of What virtuosity means in any practice but in this practice in particular? right and it can it’s I Think the virtual virtuosity I mentioned of being able to listen to yourself and listen to someone else and not have it Be so much about what you’re doing but about doing together is Is the ultimate for me but what we’ll see in this video is people who have developed a lot of Ability to engage with each other and to take it into moving through three space through spherical space as they call it pretty far and wide and and with a lot of alacrity and and it’s a joy and yet I I Want to put in a caveat? that that in order actually I I feel that in order to get to that depth of and and intensity of collaboration Trying to do the things doesn’t work Yeah, this is the trying to try paradox right that Ed Schlinger Lynn talks about so much right exactly But I’d like to see the next clip, please Yes, I yeah go ahead I’ve done this version of the practice a couple times this where it gets into this very I don’t know what to say almost gymnastic move kind of movement right and and Yeah, the the thing I would point out is that What people see is from a regular frame of reference when people are? Getting rides is lifting and what I see and what I want to suggest is is riding is Yeah, you’re following trajectories and taking the opportunity When someone is moving in a way to to take that what that little ride she got on his hip right then That it’s There’s there’s a big degree of of going where you’re going and yet To alter where you’re going to take an opportunity to get a ride and give a ride and then ultimately You’re getting and giving rides So continuously that it’s not It’s not clear who’s who’s doing what at each at each moment Yeah, there was two things that I noticed and I noticed that that sort of phenomenon of bleed Where I couldn’t tell where things were originating from And then that other one that you sort of made an illusion to with the Ouija board. There was like there’s a third. There’s a spirit And I’m just participating in sort of keeping it alive rather than trying to make the movement And I’m just participating in sort of keeping it alive rather than trying to make the movements happen um and I don’t know if that tracks but um that very much it’s okay, it’s uh, I believe that the when you’re both tuned in um, you you have this there so there’s uh, Uh, one of the original people who worked with Steve Paxton after his performance. It’s a woman named Nancy Stark Smith Who actually died during the quarantine in 2022? Yeah, a lot of us are um She she was sort of the torchbearer for contact improv for a while and she developed this um Out of her teaching and particularly teaching skills she noticed that um She was losing some Some taste some uh Affinity for the teaching of skills, but the her students noticed that there was some preparation she was doing for uh to to get people ready if they were doing Uh what she called low slow flow things that involve moving close to the ground or or then the higher energy Taking a ride up through space on somebody’s shoulder or hip That she would prepare them for these things and those preparations became Uh, she came to realize were as important or more than the specific skills. She was focusing on right, right, right so the the glue between things the way that we connect together and we participate we We organize ourselves to participate is as important as anything else. She developed a practice out of that A thing called an underscore which describe which has a description in it and the description is full of words uh and full of uh These layers of things that happen a kind of progression but the progression is just to prepare Just to make suggestions about how to participate as opposed to what to do when you’re participating The whole of the when you’re playing tai chi the whole of the form is just preparation Uh for letting go of the form which doesn’t mean you stop doing the form Um, right. Yeah, I I and so there’s there’s something There’s something of deep philosophical interest and I mean philosophy is a way of life cultivation of wisdom not academic philosophy here because for me this this I talk a lot about Transjectivity now there’s subjectivity or objectivity But the deeper thing that binds the inner and the outer together lerman talks about the three senses of real and we We have been so fascinated since day cart with the subjective and the objective and we’ve lost the third sense Of real we’ve lost it. We’ve lost the sense The transjective sense even though at some level it has to be there operating unconsciously Or we’d be just trapped within our minds or just you know, uh dissipated into the world Um and do people do do people Do people like report that an awakening of that sense after doing this practice for some time And does that transfer? Oh great. So you’re nodding vigorously. That’s great ken So and does that transfer broadly and deeply into their life and transform at multiple levels of their psyche this for me? These are the criteria I look for when i’m i’m and I use this term As a compliment not as a pejorative when i’m looking for a ritual i’m looking does it transfer broadly and deeply into many domains of people’s lives? And does it transform broadly and deeply many levels of the psyche and so does that does that happen? Do they get this sense? Uh this third realness and does it does it do that transfer in that transformation is do people report that? Yes, and and so and I I Take it from what they say that it relates to my experience of it right very much the The sense and so I said that I had I had disappointments with words earlier on and I think those they’re sort of my own quirks my my struggles have to do with um With difficulty finding finding ways to Keep my enthusiasm for what where my thoughts are going from Doing doing that thing of following myself and no longer paying attention to that i’m being followed um, right and so this this whole question of learning to participate uh and learning to participate in a way where I feel like i’m part of what’s going on as opposed to And it happens in this conversation, you know, we’re we’re doing that now in any conversation in any relating And the the trick is, you know, it’s not entirely clear to me how to ensure that i’m going to get to Share the points I want to share with you But I think this point actually this notion of participating in what you’re describing of the third being in that third part The the one where it’s neither you nor someone else but together uh Is is the The juiciest thing it’s just the yeah Because I think that connectedness Described that way and I wanted to do the description first because when people have connection They’re doing the standard two things and the relation between them and that’s not what i’m talking about We’re talking about this not that right this fundamental relationality not a relation between two relata But this more fundamental relationality I think that religio that connectedness is and that sense of it and the sense of it impregnating your life And percolating through your psyche is exactly what has been threatened by the meaning crisis in modernity and uh, and and so in many ways This is what I mean when I say the answer to this problem of the meaning crisis and nihilism is is not an argument It’s learning how to fall in love with being again And so does in does that land for you what I just proposed that this is this is why people are hungry for this Right and and so and I can only sort of relate from my personal experience. Of course my my experience is that That um Contact improv is ridiculously important to me because It gives me uh an avenue to to play with people and and in a way that is so so immediate and thorough both immediate and thorough that that it’s um That it bridges it also there’s a number of things that it isn’t you know, it’s not um It’s not likes it’s not in fact People do it to have performance But it’s really very participatory. Yeah. Yeah, and and the The You don’t have to do fancy stuff to be extremely engaged Yeah, and you don’t have need a lot of equipment. You don’t have to It’s it’s not commerce. It’s not uh, it’s not even sort of um Our lives are not getting entangled or not getting extremely involved in doing this. Thank you for watching This youtube and podcast series is by the verveky 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. Well that that brings me up a question. Uh May I ask it or did you want us to make another point? Yeah, so one of the one of the and we talked earlier about confusions and one of the things that I remember when I did this practice I I was confronting this right? So when we when we when we teach people dialectic and the dialogos or a philosophical contemplation We’ll go off people often say oh, I discovered a form of intimacy. I didn’t know existed But i’m always been looking for Right, right And but one of the problems like and I I even felt it in myself and you know And i’ve been a tai chi player for like three decades and a meditator a contemplator but nevertheless when I was doing these practices, it’s like My my brain was going the standard models of intimacy. Oh, this is familial. Nope, right? Oh, this is sexual Nope. Nope. Nope, right and my brain was trying the usual Scripts of what intimacy is and what intimacy means And I had to it’s almost like the you know with the way you You you you label a distraction and you return to your breath I had to keep sort of labeling those and then trying to return to this sui generous kind of intimacy And i’m wondering if like maybe that’s idiosyncratic or do people have to do they go through a period where they’re wrestling with that? Or does that come back at certain times? Yes, so so I I have a way to describe this that i’ve been working on what what what this difference is and the the A phrase i’ve come up with that I find really useful is shared agency but a more simple a simple thing that that relates to shared agency that we’re doing something together and In a lot of things a lot of games are arranged so we can do something together But what we’re doing together is very constrained It’s some kind of pattern where we’re knocking a ball back and back and forth across the table playing ping-pong or where we’re Going in four four time doing these steps. It’s it’s arranged so that we can be in this very Restricted kind of space but but doing it together. That’s great, but actually steering together actually making choices and Taking it so that we could it’s sort of the difference between driving on a in a city on the streets and Or going out to the wilderness where we’re walking together and we’re getting to pick any direction as we get More comfortable with the choices we each make we can then start making choices about not just staying on the path But making a new path or climbing a tree or whatever So so I believe that a lot of games trade off freedom for structure And that structure organizes us together The contact improv instead of using patterns does this simple task of following the contact points and that Alleviates the structure. There’s a lot of freedom But then the freedom is you have to be willing to deal with the pragmatic Of moving together and learn to do that and then you’re not You’re not it’s not arbitrary. You’re not just caressing each other. You’re actually Moving together. So the the intimacy that people talk about which some there’s a There’s a movement called touch and play with which explores that as a as a this Short of contact improv II but playing with that as a framework to explore Short of contact improv II but playing with that as a framework to explore physical intimacy Uh, but this is not what contact improv is per se contact improv is about exploring moving together uh, and there’s a lot of layers to that a lot of Territory to explore that involves the the um discovering how Immediately and thoroughly you can be making choices together There’s there’s some No, just just quickly john you talked about in dialectic into dialogos that Something we can do that is falling outside of the practice as we begin to project on the other person, right and we have various ideas um There was a visiting uh teacher of contact improvisation who came to washington dc um I think she’s come a couple times but a workshop I attended last year where She was dancing with someone and demonstrating and then she sort of said Here’s me demonstrating an idea and she sort of threw herself on the other person without much, you know Like care and that kind of thing and then she she moved in and out but it was really um Even though she spoke and used her words to demonstrate you could see When she was in this place that is more maybe what you would call a transjective relation And when she was a person doing a thing or trying to get a thing from the other dancer and so so this What you were asking about before there are kind of like Very clear pitfalls in this practice that one runs into um, but then working your way through it um, you know and when it feels like you’ve reached that place like the the phenomenology of it can be that it’s just Effortless like i’ve had the experience of being lifted and I almost don’t know how it happened I’m just suddenly up in the air and these things so it you can get a sense of a kind of a joined Mind or a joined. Um, I love that phrase shared agency Can so I just wanted to bring that in And there’s three things I want to say in response to that. Uh, so dan chappie and I have published a bunch of papers three papers actually and Um high impact cogsci journals about shared agency we agency and what that looks like and and then in dialectic into dialogos, we talk about the particular kind Of agency that you get in the flow state. We talk about the shared flow state Uh, because the interesting thing about flow is it sort of demonstrates to you the lie That the narrative ego is the author of your agency and you could put that aside and have your agency enhanced Even though you’re not being driven from your narrative ego Um, and I think that seems to be showing up. Well, it does for me I you get into something like the flow state. So then what? Just one more point. I can’t have a bookmark what I was going to say. Yep Uh, thank you. And then the other one is um, and this follows from the first two Um, which is like james karst. Unfortunately, we lost Talks about infinite games as opposed to finite games And I think what I heard you saying that there’s a lot of things we do together, but we’re playing finite games Um in which right? Uh, there’s a set of rules I think you called it a pattern and we all commit to those rules and then we move around within that And then and and we try to say to people that dialectic into dialogos is not a finite game It’s an infinite game because in an infinite game you can actually part of the game is changing the rules of the game As you’re playing to continue to play and yes exactly changes you need to change the rules exactly and so Um, I there’s no deeper point. I just those are three things that came to mind As you were speaking again, I just wanted to put them into uh the shared space between us So it reminds me of a thing. I was going to say, uh, i’m first of all I almost want to catch my breath because i’m i’m I said earlier that there were things I would have wanted to Have discussed here and i’m feeling like they’re just happening there. It’s it’s I’m so happy to be Getting to the things that are important about this for me The the thing I was going to say about nancy stark smith in her underscore is that there’s a discussion there’s a little Part of the talk through that talks about these Phenomena these things that occur in in in collaborative improv Particularly in contact improv but in any kind of collaborative improv and one of them is this thing she calls streaming Which is when you’re in Situation when you’re in a state where the way I think of it is you don’t have to add a lot of Effort in order to keep going because you’re part of it. It’s carrying you in a way and you’re carrying it So that’s streaming and part of the reason I mentioned is because there’s another one that I think is I just love the Descriptions she came up with of the score as a whole There’s this thing called the gap which is symbolized by a pair of square brackets with an empty space in the middle the empty space is the Anytime where you feel you lack a frame of reference Which can be disconcerting, but it can also be an opportunity to discover new things, you know it’s that pregnant moment of intuition and and these are both part of the phenomenology that In order to have the richness of being carried by what you’re doing you also If you’re really continuing to be spontaneous and exploring what’s happening You have to be faced with moments where you’re not sure where you belong or what fits And that’s part of the lesson of these practices is to remind ourselves that that actually fundamentally is our true state We fall into this presumptive pretense of certainty and the areas of Reality and cognition where I think certainty is actually possible are very very small Very very small. I wonder did she did she get that phrase? I mean, I’m not i’m not accusing her of plagiarism by any means but you know in buddhism There’s the idea of entering the stream Where you get exactly that phenomena you’re describing you’re describing. I believe so she was a buddhist And so there you go. There you go. Right, right, right. So that makes sense And and it’s also out of out of her practice and Yeah, the the Notion that we know what thinking is I think is Pretty misguided and that the what what we’re able to identify as thinking is a very very small portion of it Yeah part of my work as a cognitive scientist and it’s continually inspired and empowered By these kinds of practices is to open up Even the meaning of our accepted terms, what does it mean to be rational? What does it like? I think there’s a deep rationality in what we’re talking about that has nothing to do with the logical manipulation of propositions Um, it has to do with overcoming profound kinds of automatic self-deception In a very comprehensive and powerful way, which I think is ultimately the most important goal Uh, well, there’s two there’s overcoming that self-deception. The other is enhancing the connectedness The religio and I think those are the those are I think that our modern cartesian notion of rationality has lost those as being the central thing Where we’re pointing to when we ratio logos it didn’t mean Uh, uh the exclusion of these things. In fact, it ultimately pointed to them as being crucial And so yeah, i’ve been constantly trying to expand both the vocabulary That we’re using to talk about the mind and its relationship to body and each other in the world and also to reinvigorate enrich expand the referent of even our Established and existing terms precisely because of what we’re talking about. I think Um the presumption that we have a sufficient grasp such that we can Uh just proceed um, I I think that needs to be radically challenged because we have a we For the most part it is changing now But for the most part we have a model of mind that is driving people into the meaning crisis rather than helping them awaken from it and I think that is a deep critique of both the Moral status and the explanatory adequacy of our current models of the mind So something that you’ve mentioned recently that I just want to bring in and I hate to Notice the time but we’re also close to the end of our time. So maybe um just to have an opportunity for each of you to say a final word, but um There’s something you’ve mentioned recently In reference to different kinds of ecology practices, but I believe it’s something you’re developing with dialectic into dia logos and in relation to the meaning crisis and the many crises within it it’s like people are going to have to come together and collaborate and so you talk about The need for people to find a way of being involved with the whole self But not self involved. Yeah, I feel like that’s a little piece So I don’t know if you want to say anything about that and then any other final thoughts before we end Thank you, Seth. That’s Thank you. That’s an excellent reminder. Yeah, this this is I call this Plato’s pivot problem what actually turns people uh because And this this sort of became very pronounced to me when I was at bergerac last summer with a bunch of people who are all leaders of very of emerging and I think very legitimate and healthy ecologies of practices communities around the world and I you know these people I like admire them But in the middle we were doing a group practice and it came to me As something pronounced that I wanted to share with the group and they all picked it up. Um, so that that that That’s not praising me. That’s the there’s some there’s merit to the proposal Right, which is this idea of and play to really wrestle with it How do you involve the whole of the self without becoming self involved? And this is like the opposite these are two sides of the same coin. This is the opposite but Identical with slinger lens trying not to try problem Uh, which and these two are have to do with what ultimately like if if there’s no moving Places play this problem if there’s no movement of the good within something within someone there’s no thing you can do to move them To the good, but how do people then move to the good if they don’t know the good and all of that problem? But this this is exactly it. How do we try not to try? How do we involve the whole of the self without becoming self involved and part of the answer is And I think play to was he finally comes to it in the seventh letter part of the answer is Uh, you know, well it isn’t something that you or I or even we do it’s something We we we use the metaphor from the heraclitus of a fire and what we do is we put the logs together But the spark if we try to make the fire As opposed to set up the conditions by which the fire will take shape then we have not understood what fire is And in the same way you can’t make the logos But right but but you it’s you see it just like it’s not objective or or or subjective It’s neither action nor passion. It’s not where passion means passivity the ancient sense of passion Right. It’s this other it’s participation like you said ken and there’s something about a sacredness in Participation that seems to be what has the capacity to turn people And and that’s very nebulous I know but that’s where my thinking is right now and it seems to me we’re bumping up against this In this practice in a profound way So that’ll be that’ll be the last thing I say well, and and so can I respond just to the thought that’s going through my head is that attachment to knowledge can prevent discovery and that discovery I Einstein was apparently misquoted but had was of the sentiment that That Rationality was the servant of intuition and we have come to mistake the servant for the purpose So so I think that practices opportunities for people to Practice discovery together as opposed to demonstrating their knowledge Is is something that we need and ideally it’s kinds of practices that are That are substantial Thank you, it’s been a pleasure Wow Yeah, and a pleasure just just to just to introduce the two of you because I had a feeling sparks would fly and so It might be uh wonderful to do this again sometime. I’m sure we could have kept going Um, but I just want to thank you both so much. Um, you know for for taking this up today and um Yeah, it felt good to me just to see this connection. Um, because john i’ve been practicing with ken all the time since i’ve Known your work and as I mentioned, uh kind of riffing when we go on walks together about these things Um, so it was good to actually have the two of you to connect today Yeah, this was wonderful this became dia logos and not just discussion and uh for me Um, I i talk already says it what best that is the best way for human beings to live when we can And it doesn’t always have to be spoken dia logos exactly But whenever we’re in dia logos, this is the optimal form of human existence and we got into it and I want to thank you Both. Thank you That’s an honor. Thank you