https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=KSObTcQ6_Bg
Welcome everyone to another episode in Voices with Verveki. This is episode two with Vivian Dittmar. We’re discussing a lot of issues around her work and how her work interacts with mine. We’re moving into this topic of the transrational, but we’ve also been discussing things around affect and agency. It’s just wonderful to be doing this again. Vivian’s video got so many good comments. Many of you were pleased, as was I, with a strong female voice entering into this little corner of the internet and adding her wisdom and her particular perspective. It’s a great pleasure to have you back Vivian. Maybe just quickly again, just in case some people are jumping in on this one and they haven’t seen the first episode, quickly reintroduce yourself. Then what points do you want to get people to remember because they might not have seen episode one? Then we carry it in and we can just go into this one. Welcome. Sure. Thank you so much, John. I’m really excited to be back in this dialogue and to continue comparing notes in a way. My name is Vivian Dittmar. I’ve been researching in my own way matters of consciousness and also particularly feelings, emotions and affect. For most of my life, initially involuntarily and then increasingly, I got really fascinated by the subject. Like I shared in the last episode, I had a very unusual upbringing. I’m not going to go into it if you’re interested. Go into the first episode. What it really gave me was a very different perspective on the human condition and on our situation right now and the crisis that we’re in, the polycrisis. I believe our inability to feel and also the great many misunderstandings we have around the phenomenon of feelings, emotions and affect is one reason why we’re so lost. One of the things I’ve done is I’ve created a map to distinguish different types of sensations. We talked about that, five different types of sensations, physical, instinctive, biological programs, then the relational forces, which I call feelings, the emotions and finally, what you would associate with the higher states of consciousness, which I call the states of consciousness or abilities, such as the ability to truly love or to truly trust etc. That’s something we talked about. Now we talked about a practice that I developed, which is the practice of conscious release. I feel it’s really crucial because it allows people to bridge something that in many people is separate, which is their higher developed consciousness, the higher states and abilities, the compassion also that many people have been developing through metameditation etc. To bring that together with our shadow aspects, with our immature parts, with the things that we usually suppress and deny and by bringing the two together in a powerful practice, I found that really profound healing is possible on the emotional level. People mature, people develop wisdom and we get out of this pattern of just repeating life experiences over and over and that’s actually a key. This kind of emotional cleanup, clear up is a key to accessing trans-rational thought, which is why I’m super excited we’re going to talk about that today. Wow, what a fantastic review of your work. That was very succinct but very elucidating. Thank you. So let’s pick it up there because it strikes me that it’s kind of a dialogical model here and I just want to make clear if that’s right that I’ll just use a couple of quick. There’s sort of this sage state and the shadow state or if that’s good enough and what your practice is doing is putting them into some kind of dialogical process and is it mutually transformative? Is it integrative? Is it reciprocally opening? Is it the sage shining light into the shadow and the shadow giving some power to the sage? I’m bringing these up because I’ve heard multiple versions of this in different modalities and which one or all of them land for your practice? Well what we do is we really stress the importance of switching roles so when we do a practice both practitioners go into both roles and that actually completes a cycle and one of the things that we found there’s some people now in Germany who are using this with like complex traumatized patients in like a clinic setting and they found that actually when people come in super unstable they go into the sage mode first. They go into the supportive role first and that stabilizes them and then they go into the shadow mode just to use your terminology. So it’s really important to understand that both are practitioners and you benefit from both roles and they complement each other and it’s the contact between the two states of consciousness that’s transformative and being in a sage mode and confronting yourself with someone’s suffering and immaturity in shadow actually deepens your practice of being in the sage mode and vice versa. Like by being in the shadow and then being confronted with a being who’s in a higher state of consciousness in that very moment even if it’s just for five minutes does something and it allows you to shift in process. That’s really beautiful and I take it from what you just said that this eventually can also this eventually gets internalized in the practitioner so that they can start to get those they can start to do this on their own to some degree. Is that what happens? Yeah well what happens you know I like to use the metaphor of the emotional backpack and I with time I’ve come to discern between the weight and the size of the backpack. I like that. Yeah I’ve actually developed a formula to calculate the size of the backpack and I don’t know if we talked about that last time. It sounds vaguely familiar but yeah well I can just recap it. It’s like the the size of the backpack can be calculated by the intensity of the life experiences you’ve had multiplied by your sensitivity divided by the support you’ve had to process whatever you went through. Oh that’s interesting that’s very interesting. Yeah so what happens though is that with time like as we process a lot our backpack to stay with the metaphor might stay really big but it might become lighter and I equate that to increased emotional capacity and what that means is an increased ability to be with what is to feel what’s happening and to process it in the moment so that we don’t carry it with us for later processing which is the purpose of backpack. So oh yeah do you want me to I don’t know I don’t want to interrupt your flow but I also want you provoking a lot of questions so that how does that relate to a lot of the ongoing discourse around emotional resilience? Are you building up or emotional equanimity? Is that is it aligning with that what you’re talking about? Is that what’s happening to these people? Yeah yeah definitely and what I feel is super important to discern here is the distinction between like developing resilience and also equanimity versus training to dissociate which is what happens a lot when people just go into meditation and they feel like the aim is to just not be identified with all that stuff but it actually leads them to not engaging not feeling and actually losing agency. Yeah right right right so this process is it’s it’s only building up emotional resiliency. Does this land for you? It’s also building up emotional discernment like you’re getting better at right is that right that’s what I’m hearing you say yeah right definitely and one of the things that’s so important that we talked about last time is the discernment between feelings as positive relational forces that actually increase my agency yeah yeah and emotions which put me to stay suffering and cause me to lose agency. Right right right right yeah yeah so that’s very very helpful okay so there’s this theme of you know getting this dialogue enhancing emotional resiliency and emotional discernment and that also is giving people the ability to identify more with like feelings that are agency enhancing as opposed to emotions that are agency debilitating in some fashion. Yes yes and also learn to shift from one to the other. Right and then this if I understand what you said a few minutes ago in your preamble this is kind of like an affordance or platform for the development or cultivation of trans rationality. Do I understand you correctly? It’s a prerequisite because as long as we don’t do that and I know that we’re both super aware of this the internal space is completely cluttered with unfelt emotions and that actually feeds a lot of unnecessary and unhealthy even pathological mental activity. Right right right and that creates so much noise inside of us that we don’t have access to the much more subtle signals that actually are the hallmark of trans rational thought. Oh so there’s also something like a sensitization process that’s going on where we’re getting an ability to quiet the noise so we can become aware of sense have these more subtle patterns and processes and presencing of this of the sage mode or however we want to call it. Did I get you right? Yes exactly. So say more about that because that’s really juicy. Let’s really slow down and open that up. So expand that out a little bit more and then maybe I mean we talked about it before but maybe a little bit bring in because I think these two points are connected. One is this like the unpacking that process but one is the distinction that you’re making use of between the trans rational and the merely rational if I can put it that way and so if you could maybe address those two together that would I think be very helpful. Is that okay? Yes yes I’d love to do that and actually I want to bring in a third distinction. Sure. That was first brought up by Joan Bernstein which is the pre rational versus the trans rational and I’m sure you’re familiar with that. Yeah yeah. It’s crucial especially in these times. It sounds very similar to Wilbur’s distinction between the pre egoic and the trans egoic that he made he criticized. I think he borrowed it from Joan Bernstein but anyway. Okay okay. So same thing yes we’re talking about the same thing and I feel especially today it’s so important because we’re witnessing a lot of people falling back into pre-rationality. Yeah yeah. And yeah so one of the reasons why I wrote a whole book about the subject of trans rational thought I called it the energy ps and one of the reasons I wrote it was because I was so frustrated with this phenomenon and I wanted to create a map to make sure people understand that trans rational thought needs to be married with rationality and these faculties need to learn to cooperate unless we’re going to fall back into the pre-rational and get really confused. 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. So it’s the fall back into the pre-rational in some ways driven by the ignorance of an experience or knowledge of the trans rational like it’d be because people may be trying to escape like I talk about propositional tyranny in certain aspects and the only alternative given to them to the culture maybe a decadent romanticism is to retreat into the pre-rational because they have no sense of the possibility of the trans rational. Is that is that? I wish that were true like I used to think that. What do you think? In recent years I’ve come to see that a lot of people who’ve had very genuine and powerful trans rational experiences have turned away from rationality because of those experiences and were then really really vulnerable to pre-rational bullshit to use the term and have not really learned like because of I do think it comes out of a rebellion against the propositional tyranny as you call it. Yeah. And this rebellion like then they have an experience of the trans rational the trans person or they have a mystical experience altered state of consciousness and suddenly everything is magical and everything is amazing. Right, right, right. And then they become really vulnerable to narratives that offer really really simple explanations and I think the the reason is that we don’t have a good education on discerning the pre-rational the trans rational. This is why I’ve really zoomed into that and I really want to talk about that because there’s so many distinctions to be made. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, let’s focus on that. I just want to get that point because that seems very convergent with a larger argument. Sorry, that’s not the right word. An argument I’ve been making so sort of a larger phenomena where people one of the things driving the meaning crisis is people have anomalous experiences and they don’t have a cultural framework for properly processing them. Yes, exactly, exactly. And what happens that’s also what happened to me because you know my early childhood was spent in Bali witnessing a lot of things that according to our worldview don’t exist and I kept going back and forth and all I was told by the very arrogant Western worldview was just like that doesn’t exist. Your experience is completely devaluated my experience and just said no that that didn’t happen and I just went back and I witnessed it again and and what happens to people when when they get that kind of feedback is and they have an experience that is so true and so sacred for them it actually discredits the scientific world view. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that’s that’s a problem. Well you know that I totally agree with you and I’ve been doing a lot about trying to make from the scientific worldview properly respectful and responsible to these phenomena which I’ve been doing a lot about. And that’s why you have so many fans including me. Well I’m a fan of you too. So I like this and so let’s like I’m really happy let’s hone in right now on the trans-rational versus the pre-rational and the distinctions you want to make and then along the way where it seems to make the most sense to you how does the stuff we’ve talked about before the dialogues between the sage mode and the shadow mode just as a quick pointer right you said that’s a prerequisite so bring out the distinction and then how does the prerequisite help to enable a proper discernment of the difference between the trans-rational and the pre-rational. I know maybe that’s good I’m loading a lot onto your plate but I think you can handle it. Exactly what I want to talk about it’s fantastic. Okay great. So let’s start with the distinction between pre-rational, rational and trans-rational. Please. One of the things that became really clear to me is that the trans-rational by nature has a very difficult stance in today’s world because it speaks to us in a way that is non-verbal, non-linear, abstract. Yeah the ancient world had a whole faculty and term for the noose and noesis and that was all lost with the loss of sort of our neoplatonic heritage. Yes. Exactly. So what happens is that there’s these sensations that come up and they’re abstract and they’re non-verbal and they’re super subtle and even first of all very often like I said the inner space is completely cluttered and noisy so we don’t even notice them but if they’re strong enough or if we’re quiet enough we might notice them but then the rational mind comes in and just jumps on it and say you know you can’t even articulate why like do I have a gut feeling that says no and you can’t even get an explanation and you know and it just jumps out and discredits it completely. Yeah ineffable means non-intelligible means useless garbage. First of all before you go on because I want you to go on that I just want to express a moment of appreciation. Like I’ve been looking for more people to have the discussion with. I’m really interested in the phenomenology and the functionality of this as opposed to sort of abstract just philosophical theorizing. There’s a place for that I’m not dismissing that but I’m hungry for this. I’m hungry for the phenomenology of the trans-rational and you’re unpacking it so go. Yes I’ve gone into it for years so yes let’s talk about it. I’m also very excited to talk to you about it because I know from a certain direction you know a lot more about it than I do so I’m really happy to put it together. So compare that with the rational and the pre-rational. The rational obviously is logical, is linear, is verbal so it can articulate itself very well. It can argue. Not only does it have this linear cause and effect thing but it can even like do research on it and prove it or disprove it. Like it’s amazing. In the pre-rational we also have a linear pseudologic. So let me give an example like in the Balinese village where I spent part of my childhood when a person would get sick very often the explanation would be that another person cursed them. Right right right. And that’s a very simple linear pseudological explanation. Right right right right. And in contrast to the true rationality of course it will not stand up to like empirical research. It’s just going to fall apart right? Yeah it won’t stand up to good argument, good empirical evidence. Right exactly and that’s how we can discern the pre-rational and the rational. Okay so let me this is good I’m sorry I’m going to interrupt you because you’re saying precious things. So you’re giving us sort of a working thing. You can say look if it can be basically not dismissed but sort of disproved or disconfirmed by rationality that’s a good marker of the pre-rational. Did I hear you correctly? Yes exactly. Yeah okay. And of course the challenge with that is that the scientific exploration of the world is never complete. So we’re always going to learn new things and we’re going to always have new hypotheses and then you know I don’t have to tell you that but this is part of the challenge that it’s not that clear cut obviously. Obviously obviously yes. Yeah I mean a good philosophy of science which many people who talk about science on social media haven’t received an education in. Yeah it’s very much you know and it’s there are there are there isn’t a scientific method. There’s a family of scientific methods and they’re all mutually interacting and each one is self-correcting and they’re correcting each other. It’s a very complex process and it goes through changes that are not totally linear or logical Thomas Kuhn and paradigm shift and I won’t repeat all of this so that the people you can look into that. So I just say total agreement with what you just said just unpacked it briefly for people but go back in. So we’ve got this way of distinguishing the rational and the pre-rational. Now I foresee a problem and I guess you’re going to tackle it. The problem might be the rational thinks it can treat like it mislabels the trans rational as pre-rational. Of course. Yeah right. And sometimes for good reasons. So let’s go on. So obviously like once we go into the rational we can see okay a person might be sick because they caught a virus. They were infected and that’s why they got sick clear enough or they were exposed to some chemical or they’ve been smoking for 20 years they got cancer etc. Now when we go into the trans-rational and people will often experience this of course as a result of spiritual practice but also as a result of certain crises. So someone might have a diagnosis and they might have a life-threatening disease and they go into a really really profound crisis and suddenly they are catapulted maybe also facing death they’re catapulted into a deeper sense of what life is what reality is. Sure. And they have an experience that suddenly feels much more true to them than anything that they have ever thought. Right it’s a sharpening of that I’ve talked about onto normativity. It’s a sharpening of the sense of the guiding presence of the really real something like that going on. Yes yes yes yes. Okay. And then what happens is suddenly people have a profound sense maybe of yeah that’s what your work is all about right of meaning-making. Like suddenly they experience their disease as meaningful. Right. The crisis is meaningful. Yes. And that’s a blessing but now something very interesting happens John and I really want to focus on this. So what happens is that they have a felt sense of meaning and it’s trans-rational so it’s non-verbal it’s non-linear. Yes. It’s abstract. It’s kind of like a super insight because insight has a lot of. It’s non-verbal non-linear. Yeah. Absolutely. You’re super excited about it and you want to go tell your loved one and then you try to put it into words and then very often what comes out sounds pre-rational because someone might say something like I had to get cancer in order to quit my job. So what they’re saying is again it sounds linear causal. Yes but it’s not. I get it. I get it. I get it. I get it. I get it. I get it. Well actually the moment they say it it actually becomes linear causal because our language is like that but what they’re trying to express is something that is multi-causal and if we are really on that level of reality everything is multi-causal. Nothing has a singular cause. I mean our conversation the way the reason that we’re sitting here right now thousands of causes have come together and restraining factors etc to make this happen. I totally agree. I totally agree. And so let’s use these are a bit tired metaphors but they’re coming back into vogue and I’m sort of part of that but you know Wolfgang Smith and others you know here’s the horizontal right the linear and but you can get this vertical. Yes. It’s about all these. I use that a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the problem is when we try to express the and the Greeks had this is noesis and this is dianoya right and right and right and when we try to express this in this we’re into linear language we’re into things that have properties we’re into substance like we get into all of this and there’s a it would it be fair to say this there’s a kind of a profound mistranslation that goes on. Yes. Okay. Profound mistranslation. Yeah. And this is kind of the problem like if you’re really aware you feel at the moment it happens like you try you have this epiphany you try to tell your spouse about it or your best friend and the moment you say it you’re like it becomes untrue it becomes a lie it has a bad taste in your mouth but if you if your loved one is really attuned they can feel the space you’re speaking from and they understand that what you’re actually trying to convey is is more. Yes. Yes. Yes. Okay. Keep going. Keep going. So a very dear friend of mine and we dialogue a lot very deeply from from these places and one of the techniques that we use is that we’re trying to express something in that space we preface it with let’s assume that nothing I’m about to say is true. This is so neoplatonic right it’s like it’s like this is the cataphatic apophatic interaction you’re speaking right but you’re always saying but the speech is in some fundamental way not true because it fundamentally fails to translate or to convey. Yes. Yes. Yeah. So what I found profoundly helpful in my practice is to really understand not here but in a felt sense the quality of the trans-rational. This is what I want to get. This the phenomenology. Yes. So what’s that like unpack that. So it’s like I said it’s subtle abstract non-linear multi-causal multi-causal multi-dimensional. So far that sounds all right that sounds perfect. Yes. Keep going. So what I went into is two things. First of all understanding what are the preconditions in a system to even be sensitive enough and quiet enough to perceive these signals. That’s one thing. So for that all the mindfulness practices the development of trans-personal space the cultivation of that is very very important. The practice of conscious release we spoke about is very very important. The practice of conscious release we spoke about is very very important. Clears out the emotional baggage. Homes the mind. Creates a space where these subtle signals can surface. But it’s not enough and that’s why I created this map of the energy PS where I discern five ways of thinking. So I complement the rational thought with four trans-rational ways of thinking. And I speak very precisely about these different ways of thinking and where they show up in the body because they actually show up in different places in the body. I also refer to it as full body thinking because I perceive it as like it’s not just your brain thinking but your whole nervous system thinking. And these five ways of knowing or five disciplines of thought as I also call them they actually need to balance each other interact each other and also and this is an important point with regards to your work also they need to check on each other. Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so there’s a self-correction that’s going into this right. Because each of these has a particular functional purpose and each of these is susceptible to error. Bullshit and all kinds of stuff. Yes including the rational mind as we know. So are there and so does the energy PS book it’s talking about all of and what are you finding sort of relations of complementarity between these five like so how they can relate to act as checking on each other and keeping each other in check if I can double the language a little bit there. Totally totally so just to be clear the book is not out yet we’re working on it right now we’re about to release the emotional backpack the one we talked about last time. Yeah we’re excited about that also thank you for your support John. Yes totally. Yes in the work it’s coming but I’m happy to talk about it. So yes let’s just talk about the different disciplines of thought. So one that I well actually before I go into it I need to make one thing clear again I have the same problem like with the realm of affect which is that the language becomes very fuzzy and that when you talk about this they’re not precise in the terminology so what I do is I use terminology which I define so just to be clear. You get stipulative definitions I get that. Did you do any and this isn’t a criticism it isn’t it might sound like it but it’s not it’s just a question I get that you’re doing this out of your own like your tremendous phenomenological capacities reflection did you do any cross-cultural analysis does this match up with what like wisdom traditions across culture and history? I have. Yes excellent excellent excellent okay. Yes good because as you know I spent several years in India studying Far Eastern philosophy and then I spent some time studying with the Mexican Germanic tradition so I cross-referenced that and actually what I what I try to do is I try to bring that into a language that we can apply here today and then try to cross-reference that with the latest findings in neuroscience which I’m sure you know so much more about than I do but I think it’s such an exciting time that by now we have enough evidence to be able to know that intuition is a real thing right? Oh yeah yeah yeah I mean that a couple of decades ago that wasn’t the case like people could just completely discredit it so it’s very very exciting what’s happening there. Okay so back to the five ways of thinking one is intuition actually quite obviously and intuition is super interesting I know there’s been a lot of research on it I believe you’ve done some research on it. Yeah implicit learning intuition flow states yeah I’ve done work around that. Yeah so intuition I mean it’s quite amazing because in many ways like it it works better than rational thought and in some ways obviously it works worse. Yeah yeah yeah it’s yeah so there’s a distinction in the literature rationality literature between large worlds and small worlds. Small worlds are worlds in which you have done all this translation very carefully and you can apply formal algorithmic thought and that’s where standard models of rationality work very well when you’re out here in large worlds you need a lot more of the implicit learning the intuitive processing. Yeah yeah more data also yeah yeah yeah yeah so that’s I find that’s really important to educate people on intuition on how to recognize it and this is where we link back to the practice of conscious release to discern it from emotion. Right say a little bit more about that that’s helpful. Yeah so what happens is that remember the qualities of trans-rational thought subtle non-linear also polite actually now very often an emotion will pretend to be an intuition and then it will not be subtle and it will not be polite I see and it will come with a lot of like a lot of heat so I might have a very strong sense like I have to do this and if I don’t do this now there’s going to be a lot of fear and a lot of worry dialogue that’s not your intuition that’s emotional baggage coming up. So this is why the useless advice of follow your gut is useless advice. Yes exactly. Because your gut can just as much be you know whatever prejudice bias or emotional baggage or defensive projection you’ve built in or a biological program exactly biological program exactly yes okay so and at the same time I’m sure we both agree it’s not completely useless advice because without our gut I don’t think we’re capable of navigating this life very well for sure for sure yeah so it’s about learning to discern what’s coming up in your gut and to clarify the space and to really see okay that’s an emotion and that’s maybe a suppressed need that’s biological program and that is actually a true impulse to act on right now or true informed sense also I mean that’s the second thing that intuition obviously is very susceptible to manipulation yeah yeah as we know so that’s intuition and it’s very very important to educate the rational mind about the nature of it and how to discern it from emotion what are the symptoms of emotion pretending to be intuition when to listen to intuition and when not etc and also teach it to actually become a voice for intuition when the intuition is appropriate there’s a pretty good anthology out there I’ll just get it for one sec is for the listeners and viewers called rational into rational intuition philosophical roots scientific investigations okay I can’t see it right now oh well it’s rational intuition philosophical roots scientific investigations edited by Lisa M. Osbeck and Barbara S. Held I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the two scientists are women by the way okay so okay so so that’s that’s the gut feeling which I feel is very important to like I said develop educate people about you build a relationship with a rational mind and then we have another faculty that very often people also just call intuition which I actually call inspiration oh yes I distinguish between these two so please you do fantastic okay so this is where you know like it’s the light bulb that goes off the eureka moment etc and again this is super important I feel for us to know more about it to understand that it’s connected with very particular processes in the brain I do a ton of work on this all right maybe you talk about it no no no no no inspiration and insight I make a subtle distinction between them I don’t think it’s relevant here the distinction is insight is like like we use it generally when we’re talking about like a one like one problem or I had an insight but I have Piaget there is systematicity of error so there’s also the possibility of a systematic insight a more comprehensive insight that affords you aspiring to be something more than you are that’s what I call inspiration that kind of okay yes I like it yeah good so I sum up both insight and inspiration as one faculty that’s fine and yeah I like the distinction so what I found really fascinating is that most people will know this just like most people will know having a gut feeling about something and by now as I’m sure you you know more than me but I’ll just share what I know what I researched on it there is a lot of research about it to know that there is things we can do to increase the probability of having this kind of insight or inspiration yeah I do this in one of my lecture courses on thinking and reasoning and I talk about this idea of making yourself more insight prone okay how do you do it well I mean there’s lots of different practices some of the practices for experimental work is so you have to do you have to work a lot with attention and mindfulness practices help that because you have to learn to break frame and make new frame and so you have to practice doing that so you want meditative and contemplative practices you want to take it deeper into insight not only into like I said problems but insight into things like roles what role are you assuming in this situation what roles are you assigning and so what you do is how can you just make insight more likely and then how can you make systemic and systematic insight more likely and there’s so we talk about things like that in fact a lot of the course is about all of the scientific work trying to understand what kind of process it is what affords it and what undermines it fascinating I would love to read up on that is there a book on it that you have no part of my sabbatical is I’m going to try and create an integrated up-to-date document about the psychology and cognitive science and neuroscience of insight and also bringing these ideas about inspiration as systematic and systemic insight that affords aspiration fantastic okay I’m really excited about that so one of the things that that I found in myself and in the research and also the people I work with is that it takes the sequence of like really wanting to know something and really grappling with the problem and then and this is crucial for the mind for the rational mind to know and to understand to let it rest so to actually stop thinking about it like stop like chewing on it and and go do something else what can I do that sorry yeah this is this goes back to Wallace 1926 who talked about you know your work and then there’s there’s incubation and what’s been interesting coming out about incubation is it seems to it’s not the it looks like mild distraction is actually what most affords it yes exactly yeah like so if you think of it just as rest that that’s yeah yeah so what you want and it might be that the interaction between the default mode network and the task network is a biological thing that allows us to be always slightly distracted so we’re making ourselves generally more insight prone yes and that’s why people report having the greatest insights when they’re using the bathroom or they’re taking a shower or they’re making coffee yeah yeah and that’s when it happens right yeah yes yeah and it’s interesting about yeah and people are trying to zero in on like what makes it because you don’t want the thing you’re distracted by to be too sticky or you’ll lose the connection exactly you don’t you don’t want it to be too loose or it won’t actually pull you away enough that you can come back and see it differently they’re trying to figure out what that is is is really tricky okay wow I love that people have gone into that so deep I talk about it deeply in the course I teach on insight yeah good good good good good so so the the third faculty that I talk about in the inner dps is the heart intelligence and that’s something that really bothered me that people didn’t discern that that they would say like follow your heart follow your gut like it was really fuzzy the language around that and what is that for you heart intelligence yeah the heart intelligence it took me a while and and can I tell you a concern I have first yes just because I don’t think you’d be saying this because there’s a lot of talk right now about emotional intelligence as a psychological construct and I have some very significant questions about that scientifically because if you can a lot of the research I’ve seen shows that if you control for measures of general intelligence and and personality factors and or attachment styles three other independently well validated constructs there’s nothing left to emotional intelligence right and so I’m very hesitant about it as a construct and I take it you’re saying something different than that yes yeah like I use the term heart intelligence mostly to prime the rational mind that there’s something going on there to pay attention to ah okay so good good good okay so we can we can use a different term for it but my point is that there is some kind of information processing happening in the heart so there’s an information processing that’s happening up here that we talked about there’s an information processing happening in the gut and there’s something that happens in the heart like physically that area the body yeah so some like 40 cog side talks about embodiment which is not just that you have a body that’s a vessel but that part of your cognition is actually being processed by your body in some important way is that closer to what you’re talking about yes that’s part of part of what I’m talking about this is why I call it full body thinking yeah yeah right right right okay yeah because there’s something that happens when people actually tune into their belly for example yeah all the somatic stuff all the somatic yeah somatic stuff or they tune into their heart area center of the chest and and they tune into that and then they connect to maybe a certain decision that yeah you get this feedback loop going yeah yeah yeah I get yeah yeah yeah different a different understanding that happens and for me this understanding the far as far as I have penetrated it there’s a lot to be said about it but it has it’s linked to the sense of ethics meaning and the good true and beautiful that’s what I connected to oh cool so for you that is it’s sort of a locus of for how normativity lands in us that’s what the true the good and the beautiful are there they’re about normativity is what you ought or should like you should pursue the truth you should pursue what’s good you should pursue what’s beautiful you should not just you want right that’s the important distinction is that is that yes and I’m a bit hesitant because the again it’s a language thing right you’re trying to please please yeah yeah yeah that is is trans rational so the heart let me try again so people talk not about not not about that as rule I mean a lot of people talk about that as rules that’s Kant and other people but there’s like Yaden and others talk about like there’s a sense of calling there’s a sense of being called to what’s right or how you should orient or where you should be coming from like it’s more about orientation is that getting closer because I do want to do with I want to play with the words with you until we almost well it’s almost like we’re doing dialogical version of Gendlin’s focusing right we’re going back and forth and trying to get what what what ends in so did that move away or like I get the sense that there’s a sense of guiding that you’re talking about it guides you in some way and I’m trying to get so throw away everything I just said I want you I’m trying to provoke you to articulate what’s that guiding like what does that feel like what does it mean well one of the things that I’ve discovered in myself and then the people I work with is that we can spend a lot of time thinking about like what’s right in a particular situation like ethically or morally right and we can like argue back and forth about it and go crazy and then the moment we really tune into somatically into the heart area there is a shift that happens and there is just this knowing of what’s what’s in alignment with the good the true and the beautiful or an ethics that is independent of our cultural norms yeah I think we’re talking about the same thing actually but yeah I also think we’re talking about the same thing and this is why like and I mean I love your definition of of sin and virtue yeah and it’s kind of the same thing you know if we put it into how we are to behave like we’re so close to morality and it almost has nothing to do with it I think that’s where morality originally came from but then it became like this weird thing and it actually took us away often from what I call hard intelligence well I think that the what you just said uh what it’s not about because we have all kinds of research by the way and and we all know this anecdotally about the person who can engage in powerful moral reasoning and that’s not predictive of them being good people right and so it’s this other thing it’s about sort of like like I you may not like the term and that’s fine but that’s what I’m trying to convey with this sense of it orients us and I’m trying to pick up on the old language the metanoia the conversion the turning like it sounds like what you’re talking about is it turns and tunes us in the way we should go does that landing for you okay that’s what I’m trying to get at that turning and tuning function yes and what it does is it very much yeah I’m just pausing for a minute because there’s so much there there’s so much take your time aporia is part of dialogos yes so one thing to be said about the heart is that it’s important to understand it can be it can be immature and sentimental and romantic and that’s not what I’m talking about so is it fair to say that all of these and is this part of the relation to the rational all of these need education yes of course but the rational also needs education of course of course but but but part of what we’re doing is right it’s is there’s there’s the okay I make a distinction between rational which is because I’ve given up on trying to get people to change the meaning of that term that’s the logical linear thing but we have this other word that still survives which is being reasonable which isn’t about that it’s about seeing things in proper proportion and taking up the right role and responsibility with the most perspacacious perspective on a situation that’s the reasonable and so we’re trying to get all these faculties to be reasonable and they need to be educated to some degree is that is that you you’re nodding and smiling so that’s landing well for you good okay yes so that’s exactly what I feel a lot of this is about like your work and my work to see that in many ways reason has been equated with rationality and we both know that that’s been a big mistake yeah big mistake and to reinstate reason as something holistic it’s some as something that comes out of the interaction of more faculties yeah yeah that’s good okay so I’m getting the sense now of all of these are immature they’re all developmental they’re not just sort of given right I mean the faculties are there but they need to be educated and matured and I there’s a subtle distinction there we might want to return I mean you can educate something that’s not necessarily the same as maturing it the two overlap to some degree in significant ways because people can be educated without committing to what they’ve been educated in and that’s they can still be immature with their education is what I’m saying so so far we’ve got we’ve got we’ve got three so far we’ve got intuition we’ve got inspiration we’ve got what you’re calling hard intelligence all of these are lining up with I mean I you know and this is one of the things that struck us at Bergerac I mean we didn’t know each other until then and yet there’s just this I think really profound and I mean that and it’s not hyperbole I think there’s this really profound convergence between your work and mine and I think it’s extremely powerful and like you I am I I feel that people aren’t doing enough on what we’re doing right here right now this deep phenomenology of the trans rational and is so so important so so keep going I’m I’m all I’m all I’m anticipating that the next two because these first three have been so rich and juicy good so the fourth obviously is rationality which we need to kind of revisit like one of the things that I’ve observed is that rationality in in our culture and this is particularly true in Germany has been completely burdened by tasks that it’s not actually equipped for yeah oh so the misaligning of this Cartesian model with so poor fit between this Cartesian model and tasks that it’s given yes yes it’s in the gochris makes this argument also as well yes yes so what happens obviously is that for example I mean I’ve given one example that the mind can argue endlessly what’s good in particular situation and what’s the right thing to do but also when it comes to when is a good moment to act or what what is what is a right decision we will have to also listen to the intuition the true intuition that will have to be incorporated and if the mind tries to decide without I mean there’s been like Antonio de Masio’s work I feel has been really revealing and that there’s no there’s no thinking without feeling there’s no decision making without feeling so totally totally I think it ties into that and you use feeling in de Masio’s sense right if I remember correctly it’s sorry you used feeling more in de Masio’s sense than the way a lot of people might be some people associate feeling just with sort of tactile or appropriate yeah no yeah yeah yeah I used feeling in more in a yeah feeling emotional sense but I use emotions different so no no but wait I think we understand each other yeah so so I want to ask you a question because now we’re on rationality and part of my criticism of rationality of course is and you’ve I’ve alluded it to already is we’ve reduced we we’ve put it in service of propositional tyranny that the only way we know is propositionally and of course that leads out the procedural that leaves out the perspectival that leaves out the participatory and and I think rationality should have been about because if you go back to logos and ratio it was more about this reasonableness which was well for all of these ways of knowing how do I best overcome self-deception and how do I best enhance religio being deeply and reciprocally connected to the world right it’s this connectedness that’s so central meaning in life is central to that notion of rationality and and it’s completely orthogonal to our modern notion of rationality but like I said I’ve sort of give I’ve sort of given up people I’ve been making this argument for a very long time very publicly and people just keep still as soon as I hear rational they think Descartes logic linear so I let them have that and I’ve now been talking about reasonable that is yes let’s do that yeah yeah yeah okay so yeah sometimes it’s good to acknowledge that certain words have been stolen and have a certain meaning that we’re not going to change I mean and even though the word ration and ratio are right in the word rational we’ve completely lost yes all of that okay so so we’re on the same page about this please continue so what happens is the mind needs to be the rational mind needs to be educated about the other faculties it needs to develop a new humility by understanding that the other faculties have abilities that the rational mind itself does not have so it has access to information and ways of processing information that the rational mind doesn’t have access to that’s all something that the rational mind can be informed about and it greatly changes how the rational mind interacts with the others well this goes towards work I’m trying to get published right now on rationality and relevance realization all the work that’s coming out of what’s called ecological 4e cogsci around and this goes towards this small and large world like when you’re in a like you can use rationality within small worlds but it’s actually unreasonable to use it in large world situations and I’m hoping to get that paper and there’s a lot of formal argumentation and evidence around that but it what I’m saying is I think there’s good argument and evidence to back the claim you just made good thank you always happy to hear that yeah because of my appreciation for the scientific method that’s the thing like I’ve kind of had to go my own way and do my own research in a completely different way and I’ve always done my best to kind of revisit what’s coming out of the scientific method to kind of check and that’s kind of exactly the process that we need to be doing like we need to match what’s coming out of the trans rational faculties with the rational mind and we need to do that also in our daily life is that one of the function is that one of the proper functions of rationality to help you bring the best findings of the best science into this whole inner ecology that you’re talking about is that one of the things that’s one possibility I mean also what I find really fascinating and this is kind of what I think a lot of your work actually is is to create a new mythology that is science-based and that gives us a way of meaning-making and also gives us access again to these trans rational faculties which are key to meaning-making by making the mind understand them but having a mythology that yeah is science-based so I won’t go into because I got a whole thing around this and you know after Socrates but this is Socratic self-knowledge it’s not your autobiography it’s what I meant when I tried to say this is like your owner’s manual this is about learning all of this and learning about the phenomenology and the functionality of each what’s appropriate how they can correct each other how they can relate to each other which is a platonic model by the way it’s in the republic this is so good when is your book I you make me really we’re working on it right now if you want me to write a blurb for your book the energy ps I will please please John I would love that I well so get it so yeah I know one of the advantages for me is I get an earlier man manuscript yes you will get it as soon as it’s in a readable version which will I will I will definitely write a blurb for this this is beautiful this I will help promote this this is great because this is see what I’m trying to do like I’m trying to make this stuff as simple as possible but not too simple so kind of like an app I know it’s really hard and we can really apply it yeah I talk about the distinction between stepping down the way a transformer steps down electrical current right and dumbing down and trying to find the dare or get the stepping down without dumbing down I’m looking for yeah yeah so okay so rationality the other thing is that the rational mind is really really good with linear time with logistics with budgets with restraints with accounting accounting accounting yeah very good with accounting which I mean this very broadly putting things into a table and being able to give an account of them and where everything came from and where everything’s going yes and also so so we might have this great inspiration you know to to write a book or to those do this or that and then the intuition is like oh yes there’s a lot of energy for that let’s do that and the heart is completely in line you need the planning though exactly and then it’s like okay when am I going to do it and the mind says you’re going to need to take a sabbatical yep exactly yeah to have the time for it to have the resources for it so that’s where the mind like it becomes very it’s very practical and then it will sometimes go back to the other faculties and say look guys this is a really great idea but we can’t do it or how we’re going to pay the rent you know and then the other faculties can also process that and maybe come up with suggestions but it’s it’s like an internal dialogue of course non-verbal but it’s an internal dialogue between the different faculties that we need so I want to come back to that because I think I want and maybe I’m going to suggest we do a third episode because we’re we’re yeah where we talk I want to get into the phenomenology of the internal dialogue because it’s not it’s like you said it’s not verbal so it’s really more dialogos than dialogue I’m hearing and you know that I’m just like yeah I want to get into that profoundly but we still have the fifth there’s the fifth so the fifth the fifth is really interesting and I learned a lot about this in other cultures and other traditions and its intention oh say say more about that because that doesn’t usually come up on some of the lists I’m familiar with but I’m so this is this is really interesting because the others like you talked about the the two lines like the vertical and the linear right so the bathroom is very good at the linear and the other three faculties like they form a vertical line in our system right and they’re all three are very much receptive so they’re listening yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I think about it that way I think about it as this way is the speaking and this is more the listening yes exactly but we have a trans-rational faculty that is also proactive that is not receptive and that’s intention and this is it’s really challenging for people to understand in our cultural framework I find because we very quickly confuse it with goals say that again now don’t say that again Vivian that was a gem say that again we quickly confuse intention with a goal right right right right say more about however intention is like an inner movement where I direct myself towards something so for example we both have an intention to contribute in some way to the evolution of our species and that is an intention that is deeply informed by our trans-rational faculties like it came out of a profound space in both of us we never talked about this but I know this no no for sure yeah so is it sort of the way you’re the way you’re shaping your agency is that what oh yes yes okay and and it’s very powerful and many people are not aware of this so many people when they open to the trans-rational they become very passive it’s kind of like well god knows where I live and if he needs me you can come by yeah yeah yeah yeah and this overlaps with spiritual bypassing all over the place yes yeah and then of course god doesn’t come by and it’s like well I guess he doesn’t need me and what I like to compare it to is like if you if you’re like super receptive and connected and you’ve done you’re doing your work to be to to be in the religio and that but you don’t have an intention then it’s like you’re going sailing but you’re not pulling up the sail and a lot of people end up in that kind of limbo state and they don’t understand that even if you move into the trans-personal which we haven’t really talked about and I think we should talk about that at some point as well but not today which of course correlates with the trans-rational then you still have an agency you don’t just become passive receptive I like this for me that’s the the shaping of your agency is like the cornerstone of what participatory knowing is so can can you say more about that just another sentence so for me participatory knowing is the knowing that comes from how there’s this co-shaping of us as agent and the world as arena so that we fit together and without that fitting together without the ala thea all the other knowings aren’t possible and this isn’t a knowing that you can sort of egoically take charge of you can you can educate it egoically but because it ultimately emerges right because the ego ultimately emerges out of this this is a trans egoic function in a very important way and so I think and and this knowing by being it’s where it’s where the distinction between how you’re knowing the world and how you’re knowing on yourself blurs and blends like how you know your most beloved you know them in the way that you’re different and how you differently know yourself and those two can’t be separated from each other and so and then and the mystical tradition you know love is its own kind of knowing and the the the the latin there is noticia love is its own kind of noticing right and love of course is again it’s right it is this shaping of your agent to another person and then like and allowing them to shape you right and and that sort of thing that’s the participatory knowing and I think it comes to its ultimate fruition in mystical states in which the distinction between seeing and being and knowing and selfing they all just they all just collapse and you’re back down to this very very basic you know connectedness fittedness oneness here-ness now-ness fullness that sort of thing yes did that is that enough to just give you say I mean I have a whole bunch of like no this this I’m clear about and what I was interested in is that you said that into intention intention is a cornerstone for of this kind of knowing well intention in your sense not in the sense that what most people use it most people mean this representation of a goal and intend to right leaning towards it where this is no no you’re talking about you’re shaping your agency so that you’re taking agency yeah yes yes this is this is so important and and because in the transpersonal like you just described it so beautifully because there is a sense of loss even of the typical egoic sense of self that’s right another thing I’d love to talk to you about at some point there can be a sense of a loss of a sense of agency if you identify the ego with the agent but of course things like the flow experience show you that you can go trans egoic and enhance your agency this is what is sought after in the martial arts if you try and spar or fight egoically you’re doomed but if you can drop into the flow state your agency is actually better shaped for the situation you’re in and that’s a beautiful example because in martial arts you work with very clear intentions like you know what you’re doing exactly you’re not just doing anything but you have a very clear intention so so I want to ask you a question and and so for me I see a sort of an Aristotelian thing here where the shaping of agency and the development of character overlap like shaping of agency is in the sort of more online in the moment and then shaping of character is you’ve built these more these larger sets of constraints on how you regularly shape your agency does that land for you does that make sense it does it’s a completely different terminology than I usually use and it completely lands so excellent excellent excellent so let’s just check in because we’re coming to an end this is like so we have at least a third and here’s two things we want to talk about we want to talk about and I think they might go together well first of all we need to follow this up with what’s the phenomenology and the functionality of this internal dialogos between the five if I can put it that way yes let’s talk about that we want to talk about that and then that should put us into the discussion what’s the relationship between the trans rational now fully elucidated and the trans personal which we’ve been touching on here and there and what and then I think that would also overlap because when you talk about the trans personal we start talking about trans egoic stuff as well and I think so let’s we can look at those three trends together the trans rational the trans personal the trans egoic how about that for our next topic to pick it up yes we’d love to talk about that and of course we’ll start by becoming really clear on how we use those terms and what we mean by them and I’m sure we’re going to shut that out yeah but let’s finish like I say is bridging let’s finish because I don’t want to start it now because we’re almost out of time but let’s finish by oh yeah but what’s the dialogos between the five right because that that we you’ve gestured towards that a couple times and you’ve said they they need to have this mutually educating mutually correcting relationship to each other checking in with each other listening to each other dialoguing with each other and I want to unpack that because inner dialogos the relationship between the inner dialogos and outer dialogos is really really central to my work and so we’ll start there and then we’ll go into the trans rational the trans personal and the trans egoic how about that how does that sound for a super excited about it already okay vivian I always give my guests the last word and you can choose how you want it to be can be summative it can be review it can be inspirational whatever you want to say just as the last word first of all I want to say that I feel like I’ve had a really really good meal like I feel like feasted in this dialogue and I’m really really happy thank you so much for having me john really great so I feel it’s been an amazing walk we’ve taken and I really hope that you watching this have followed us not just with the rational mind trying to understand also trying to get the words but really listen to it with your whole body and if you haven’t I want to encourage you to go back and see what happens when you listen to it with your whole body I call it that’s full body thinking but full body listening and it’s quite fascinating when people do it initially they often feel like they’re missing something and they’re not getting it I want to invite you to risk that and see if maybe there is a different level of getting it that’s happening in your system and you can always you know go back and try to understand what we’re saying which might also be interesting but that’s something I want to actually encourage you to do with this dialogue that notion of full body listening that’s a wonderful way to end thank you so very much I like like you I feel deeply nourished by this and I look forward to our next one yes me too thank you so much john