https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=nBYeyHuJ7Cg
Welcome everyone to another Voices with Raveki. I’m here with Jonas Suvik. I’m butchering his name completely, but Jonas reached out to me a while back by email and he said, you know, part of what you’re talking about when you’re talking about building a community and ecology of practices, I’ve experienced it, at least something that overlaps with it a lot in terms of a particular kind of high school that he’s gone through. And then I was talking to I talked to him privately. We met and I was just impressed by his eloquence and his authenticity. And then I was thinking a lot about what I’ve had conversations with Zach Stein, others about a different model of education. And so I asked Jonas to come on to the show and and present this because this to what he has to say, I think is very good evidence that the kind of stuff that I’ve been talking about is actually not just possible, it’s actual, at least to some degree. So it’s really great to have you here. Welcome. Thank you, John. I’m very grateful for the opportunity. And as much as you butcher my last name, you flatter me. So it started out when I was listening to you and Rick Pappetti talking and specifically it was when you jokingly said the one stop enlightenment shop. Yes. And what the conversation right around that, it just clicked for me. I thought, I know what this is. I know what John is talking about, because what you mentioned is that you want something that is more than simply just teaching. You want something that is more involved where you can do your ecology of practices and actually share the whole package with people. And we have a model for this in Denmark, where I come from, and it is called the Folk High School. And now it’s confusing for North Americans because you hear high school and then you have one connotation. And that’s not what it is at all. And so I have a term I prefer to use that everyone inside the sphere and area, they’re going to butcher me for this. But I prefer to call it a people’s school. Right, right. And but you’re not going to find anything if you look for it online, if you call it a people’s school, you’re going to find it when you call it a folk high school. And the reason I prefer to call it a people’s school is because we have this idea that the school is for the people and a people. And this is when I’m going to have to try and teach you some Danish, John. OK, there’s a there are a few words that are quite necessary for me to like really explain what it is we’re getting at. OK, now. Some people might already know the one like stereotypical Danish word. We we call it Hygge and everyone’s like, oh, yeah, Hygge, great, awesome. And basically, it it’s a bad translation of having a cozy time. And it very much means an atmosphere. And the reason it’s important here is because that atmosphere of Hygge is sort of what’s on the school. Now, the next word, which is the biggest and most important one, is Danielse. And Danielse is. It’s sort of meta education or transformative education. It is a process that happens in a person and sort of like the process of eudaimonia. Right. For context. Education in Danish is Ul-Danielse and then Danielse without like a little specific thing in the beginning, then that is this meta thing happening. I see. And it is it’s a deep part of our culture. It’s normally spoken about when you go. Like usually after high school, you would go and travel for months and you will have that big transformative journey where you go out into the world and it changes your perspective and all this. And we call that Danielse’s Reise, the Danielse journey. It’s a concept that we have embedded in our culture. And I’ve heard I’ve looked around for it and turns out that apparently some German philosophers talk about this. They talk about Bildung. Yes. You know that one. You know that. OK, perfect. OK, because that’s actually it’s just the Danish word for Bildung. Right. Right. That might click some more things for you. It does. It helps. OK, perfect. And then the last thing I’m going to mention is enlightenment, because enlightenment is used in a very different way than you would normally think in terms of the Buddhist idea. Enlightenment is information. It is becoming smarter, gaining more knowledge. It is that process happening through gaining information. And the reason I want to have these with us, especially Danielse, is because it’s really hard to describe what’s going on if we’re not cognizant of this. Right. I appreciate that. So that’s the pre-work. Now I’m going to explain what school actually is. Yes. So this folk high school or people’s school is a boarding school, for one. And you go there for a semester or two and you live there with people that are like you. And but there are no exams. There’s no set curriculum. There is no math. There’s no science. There’s no like hardcore topics. That’s not the point of this. The point of this is I don’t remember the expression that Aristotle uses, but for the thing in itself, you’re there out of interest. You’re there out of curiosity. You don’t get any grades. You don’t you’re not supposed to do anything specific. You’re simply there and you have classes. And if you have clay making pottery, ceramic, something like that, for example, you’re going to get taught some basics and then they teach you to just ask you what you want to do. And you just you go and do your own projects and they are there to help you to facilitate, to help you explore and discover. Now, there’s quite a lot of different branches because there’s the more intellectual of having politics, like political things and topics are quite big in in like what is focused on. And that actually comes from the originator of the idea of this school, which is a Danish guy called the country. And he was so prolific he could put Stephen came to shame. Yeah, it’s insane how much he wrote. It was like 35000 pages. And I think it’s a third of the Danish hymns are him. Like he wrote that. Wow. It’s incredible. And and he had this idea of a school for life that then got changed. Like it got incorporated into what folk high school is today. And like the three tenants and by law, these are the most important things. I’ll find the specific quote here. Life enlightenment, enlightenment of the people and democratic density. That means you’re becoming a citizen that understands and participates in democracy. You at the same time, you’re this personal experience of growing and understanding or gaining perspective and not just for yourself and not just out in the world, but also how you can participate in that world. You know, it’s all we’re knowing. It’s happening right here and getting integrated. Usually the school is. 80 to 90 people, so it does not exceed the numbers number. Right. Right. Like that. I don’t think that’s on purpose at all, but it just sort of happened. That’s right. But as far as I know, not if ever, if even any schools are exceeding 150, it’s not many. They have this small local community. Size. As I said, the teachers are very, very free. Actually, by law, they decide the curriculum themselves. And this is from like each and every school can choose what they want to do. And it’s a very normal thing for the teachers that they have one plan. And then as the semester goes along, they change, they differ, they get new ideas and they change around depending on the students that are there because. Well, for them, it’s not just about going through specific curriculum, it is about discovering with the students and thinking this is something you would appreciate a lot, that it’s not just you conveying information, you’re not just the expert. Right. You’re there with a certain set of skills that you then show to the students and they then play around with them with you. So you participate in their like in their discovery. So you learn a lot from that as well. And they can often throw you insane curveballs that you never imagined. And then that becomes part of your next teaching. So it is a participatory process. Very dialogical, too. Yeah, exactly. A lot of dialog. Yeah, that was actually one of these like main things about the School for Life. It is built on the living word. Right. It’s about conversation. It’s about this dialogical process of speaking with each other. And it’s not just the written word, like he thought that that was fine. But the most important thing was the conversation between people, between the teachers, but also between the students. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. And now one of the most important things I think, and other people are going to agree with me, is the fact that you live there because that starts building this certain community because you can’t just go to class and then put on a face and a specific persona and then go home and relax. You are there with people all the time. And most places you will have a dorm mate. You always social. That means at some point all that bullshit, you can’t maintain that. Usually it’s like around a month. It’s very specific. Around a month, things will just shift. And I was at high school, folk high school for two semesters. And I talked with one of the guys there. There’s like a 50 year old guy or something, because you can join a folk high school as long as you’re 18. There’s no age limit. The average age is around 22 and mostly it’s between 20 and 30. But you can have 50 year old people joining as well. And usually there will be a few. And I talked with one of them and he said that one of the things he noticed was that around this month, the girls that did not use makeup would start using makeup. But the girls who already did would stop. There’s like a shift there. Oh. And I don’t know much about makeup, but I think it’s very telling of a shift in the values and the perspectives that happens within these people. Right. And secure pattern that happens again and again. Now, what I really experienced as the most magical thing is that you get to be close with these people like you’ve not been close with other people before. For one, because everyone has the same intention. You’re coming here and the entire idea is that you’re not just there to learn a specific skill. You’re not there to have classes. You’re also there to gain friends. You’re there to interact and have fun social times. You will sit in the living room and you will discuss the late in the night, or you will get caught up in something at the workshop and keep doing that because you get this engrossment of this immersion that keeps you going. And more and more research shows that this is the proper way to motivate people by interest and by curiosity. And well, what happens if you’re just free to discover whatever you want, this immersion happens and then you reach flow. And that sort of continues to happen because you’re free to do this every day. Mm. Mm. So it’s like this. You get a lot of the currencies of the flow state. Yeah. It’s, it, I like to say that it’s like a low state of flow throughout the entire semester, right? Wow. Wow. Because there are these, like the school just sets the ramifications. It’s like a facilitator, but they don’t decide what you should do and they don’t decide what needs to happen. They don’t have any answers. They just help you start asking questions. Mm. Um, as you probably talk a bit about the structure of the day, just to give some more concept, that’ll be helpful. Usually. Yeah. Yeah. So usually you will get up and then you will have breakfast and then you have a morning assembly where it’s like an hour or something where you will begin with singing a song. So everyone sat, sits and things together. And the folk high school has a specific folk high school songbook. Right. Um, most of them are Danish, but there are also some fantastic community classics. Um, help with some of my friends from, yeah, you know, and it was, and Gorky Park and some bit like more, uh, not Gorky Park, what’s it called? Winds of Change. Change. That’s it. Mm. But songs like that, that might remind you of some of the either communal or maybe a bit political songs you would have, but setting the tone for singing together as the first thing you do that day, it just, it sets the tone for the rest of the day. Yes. And after you, you’ve been singing, usually there will be a presentation. It can be by a teacher, by a steward or principal or by a student. I had four or five presentations throughout the semester because I just said, Hey, I’m curious and interested in this sort of thing. Can I make a presentation? And I said, sure, go ahead. You can get Tuesday. So everyone is welcome and everyone is invited to come and just share whatever they’re interested in. Like I had a friend who talked about a game he likes, and we had a teacher who talked about Backstreet Boys and the producer for them because that was his thing. Um, and after that you will go and have practice and you will normally have like a full day of just one class. So it can be ceramics. You just do ceramics for an entire day or you have some sort of debate political thing generally, it can change depending on each group because they’re free to set their own curriculum. I think normally you will have like two to three subjects as your main throughout the week. So you have lots and lots and lots of time to delve into it. Then you have lunch, you go back and then at some point, um, the day ends. Officially, very often people will stick around and some, some people, if they’re particularly engrossed in something or they’re part of the project, they might like keep going to like three in the night. Because it was fascinating and they got caught up. This happens again and again and again and again, for people. Sometimes you, you go to the common, uh, like dining room and there’s like five people missing because they’re off somewhere doing something they got caught up in and that just, it happens all the time. And it, it, it brings a certain magic to it because you know, then it’s not because they were caught up in runs responsibilities. It’s because they wanted to. So give a few more examples of the kind of classes you do. There’s ceramics, there might be a debate class. Is there like class on literature or do people do philosophy? What? Yes. Philosophy, psychology, and some are starting to do meditation and yoga, but those are more like short break classes. And there will also be activism or events. Like there’s a festival here in Denmark where one of, one of the folk high schools, their entire class, or one of the classes is that they participate in making this festival happen and holding some of the camps there. So they actually use all the time of the semester just prepared to prepare for that one thing. I see. You also have writing classes. You have all kinds of art, like digital art. You will have actual painting. You’ll have drawing different techniques, skills. You will have all kinds of music. Music is like a really, really big part of it. Most people, I don’t think there’s even one school that does not have anything about music. Right. They all do. And it is such a big part of the school because well, then one night they will just hold a small concert and whatever they’ve been practicing and there’s both the playing songs that people already know, and there’s like songwriting in itself. There will also be an e-music where you can sit and play around with that. So it is mostly focused on all the creative artsy stuff that you don’t really have space for in normal education. And then you have some of these deeper, more philosophical, intellectual things like literature, like philosophy, like different types of psychology. Do you, are there ever, like maybe at these festivals or whatnot, are there ever events that bring multiple schools together and enjoy activities? Yes. Yeah. So the folk high school movement and institution is one big network that also once a year organizes a gathering for they come and all the schools meet for some purpose. It can be political and usually there will also be people playing music. And it’s also very common that if some big thing is happening in Denmark, then folk high schools will show up. It differs in how much they participate, but normally they’re like in the forefront. Not that it happens that much or that often, especially now after COVID, but that’s the life. So I imagine you felt that the time you were there changed you. Could you tell me how it changed you and why you think these changes were important? Yeah. I come from a very rural place and I did not find many people that wanted to debate John Verbeke or Jordan Peterson and different intellectual types of stuff. Like I’ve been doing this on the internet most of my life, just consuming, just like sitting passively and receiving. And then I came to this school and I met a guy from Brazil who started laying out the law in terms of Machiavelli and his rules for power and explaining to me the political situation going on in China. And we started talking back and forth and then we started touching upon all these curves of philosophical ideas. And it just, when you meet someone that actually thinks like you and is interested in the same topics, but have a different base of knowledge, you just smash together and you grow so much and you learn so much and they can start pointing out all the shortcomings you have and all the ways in which your logic and your thinking doesn’t make sense. Now that can happen naturally as it did with me because I was not in many classes with this guy. It can also happen if you’re in writing class, for example, where I had to sit down and actually try and write something that came from me, then have the courage to actually share with someone and they, like seven, eight people, they just take your piece and just read it through and then pick it apart. Mm hmm. Like that’s incredibly scary, but you learn a lot from it. I imagine, I imagine. Yeah. I think one of the classes that did most for me and that I know did a lot for a lot of the other people that had it was this one teacher who is academically trained in African dance and drumming who, she called the class Hibe rhythms, but it’s in the lack of a better term where you would have to, for example, stand in a circle and everyone had their own small dance movement and then everyone else should copy it. And then it would switch around to have the one copy. You would do, um, haka is like the call outs. You would do these warrior dances together and it is so intimidating to do if you’re not used to that sort of stuff. I can imagine. But you, first of all, you get challenged. Second, you find out that it’s completely okay. And you’re caught and you’re carried by these people because everyone is open and everyone who’s just playing around because there’s no expectation. There’s no performance. You’re just simply there to play and having that freedom. Like I took a year and I could just do whatever I wanted. I read so much. I built my meditation techniques, not techniques, my meditation habit. I built that there because I had the freedom because there’s no pressure. And I know it’s becoming a, like an increasing thing in, in the U S as well, possibly also Canada, but having like this gap year movement in Denmark, it’s very common. It’s almost more normal. It’s more weird not to have a gap year. I think the idea of having it, especially before you go into like university. Um, I think it’s, I think it’s brilliant. Brilliant. I would not have been able to join university if I had not had this year. And I had to all this as well, because I grew so much. You naturally do at the end of your teenage years. It’s so much happens. And it just facilitates it even more. You’re doing symbolic dance. You’re doing meditation. Uh, you’re doing, uh, you’re talking about literature, talking about, uh, democracy, politics, uh, you’re talking about philosophy and you’re getting into deep conversations, often in flow state. Um, are there, I mean, I’ve already noticed one, there’s also seems to be some collective rituals. There’s the singing of the song, um, at the beginning of every day. That’s a very communal thing. Were there other communal sort of rituals that were done throughout the day or at various times? Like, was there a way in which the day ended with everybody together? Not necessarily. Um, some nights it did. And on our school, it would, every second Wednesday, there would be some, there would be a common dining where they invited everyone from the local town to come and have dinner. And usually there would be some, um, some person come and have some sort of talk. Or there would be some people from Greenland that would show off some work or a small theater play that they had or someone from the folk high school would just play music in the spring times. You will very often go out and make campfires and sit around the campfire, hang out, play songs, stuff like that. And normally you will just like spend your time with these people. We sit in the common room or you go out and you play in the art garden and have space for that. Have space for the fun games. The art garden. Is that what you said? No, just the garden. I missed it. Do you? Oh, okay. I see. I see. That’s interesting. That’s interesting. So, what are some of the key things you found out about yourself going through this process? Cause it strikes me that this is very much a Socratic process of simultaneously learning about yourself and learning about the world. And they’re playing off against each other, like dialogically. What are some of the things that became more clear to you about, about how you saw the world and how you understand yourself? Well, I, first of all, because I started actually doing my meditation properly and expanding that I started seeing way more patterns of how I treated myself and how I approached my own consciousness and how I started to understand, oh, this is so much more complicated than I ever imagined. And on top of that, I started finding out just how much capacity I had. That’s interesting. Can you expand on that? Yeah. I, well, I would, I had read a lot of books and I had watched a lot of YouTube and I had actually grown my mind to a point where I could find that I actually had something to offer. Not just to my, to my peers, but to the teachers as well, where I could challenge them and I could, like, I had something to offer and having that feeling as a young person is massive. Yeah. Yeah. Cause I, I, I feel that many in my generation are pressured, but they’re not encouraged. That’s a fair point. I think that’s a very interesting distinction. And having, and having that invitation and the teachers getting excited when you bring something new to the table. That is fantastic. Generally, I think I grew the most from being with my peers. It was just having that opportunity to get close with people and meet a bunch of new people, because one of the things is that you will, you will reach this school with 80 different people and most likely you would never have met them. Otherwise, and from all these different walks of life, and you’re all put into this melting pot, it’s basically like a micro scale U S where like all these different people from different cultures, from different statuses. We, in my school, we had people from many different countries. Most of my, my most interesting conversations was with people from other countries because they have such a different experience, such a different history, their relationships are different. And it’s just, it blows your mind because you haven’t ever thought about this before. And you’re having all this new, all this new perspective thrown in on you. So, well, it’s hard for me to be specific because I just, I got more than else, and yeah, yeah, just by passively being there interacting with these people. So I like, I want to return to this idea of the living word, like the logos. I, like, I get a sense that you had a lot of very profound conversations with your fellow students, perhaps also with the teacher. Yeah. Well, like what, what was it about these conversations that were different to your mind than the conversations you have in everyday life? Like, what was it about these conversations that really, really made a difference for you? There was a general different level of openness. People way more receptive, people way more open about themselves because that is the spirit of the school. The spirit of the school is to come here and not have this pressure and this judgment. So you can decompress and that allows you to open up. And when you open up while you unfold, I think some of my most transformative conversations was not that much intellectual as they were personal. Because I found that suddenly I could, I could really get close to people and they would share all these things that happened to them and that they went through. And well, that’s why I study psychology now is because I got centered in on that. I thought, wow, this is like gossip for me. I get fired up. I feel that energy within me. It’s calling out to me. Right. Right. And that, I think that is one of the most important things that this school gives you. It’s just that ability to maybe find a way if you’re lost. And many people actually go there because they don’t know what they want yet. And some people have started university, started some higher education and then dropped out and then they come here and then they find their way. So did you find that because you were having these quite strong personal communications that you were starting to see yourself through other people’s eyes more readily, because typically when we feel closer to people, we start to internalize them, we start to see their perspective on us as well as our perspective on them. Normally when we’re in the world, we’re sort of, this is what I think about this. This is what I think about this. But when we have good friends or fellowship or a good romantic partner, it’s more like a, it’s more like a loop. I see more deeply into you and then you see more deeply into me, but that allows me to see through you more deeply into me and vice versa. Was that kind of thing happening for you? Yes, definitely. I think I definitely felt it with someone, my closest friend. And I also found my girlfriend there and especially her, like that self transcendence of, of being so deeply in mess with another person and having someone to constantly have conversations with to the point where automatically, like when, when you in the awakening from the main characters, when you started talking about internalizing the sage, that’s what happened. Right. I naturally started doing that with my girlfriend and with my, with some of my other friends, that their voices would just be in my head and I could end up in conversations with them, debating something. And it was usually when they were not there in, in missing them. Yeah. They showed up in my consciousness and then, and that growing perspective where you just, you, you get capacity beyond yourself. Yeah. And that grows for you. Yeah. This capacity. Yeah. Yeah. And that grows to not just be about you. It becomes about the community you’re in as well. Of course. Because you, you start caring less about all the bullshit going out, going on around in the world and you, you hear with your people, with this community, and you get this special bond where even now, if I meet these people out in the world, I like, even though I never talked that much with them there, we will still have a connection because we shared this experience together because we were there and had a piece of life that didn’t really like it. It’s not part of the normal world. I like to say that the high school folk high school experience is sort of like it’s like a delicate experience because it is this hyper reality that has a limited duration and then you go back into the normal world and then you have to figure out all of the things I learned here, how do I integrate that? How do I take it with me and actually maintain that? That’s what I wanted to ask you about next. That’s the two kinds of transfers. Did you find like, you know, you’re doing your meditative practice and then you’re getting these like reciprocally opening conversations going on, you’re internalizing other people, they’re internalizing you and you’re also, you know, doing community. Did you find that they, that you were making sort of spontaneous connections between what might be happening in your meditation practice and what’s happening, for example, when you’re in deep dialogue, did you suddenly have those kind of, oh, I didn’t realize that mindfulness and dialogue fit together and like, were you making those kinds of connections a lot? I think for me, it was more having the matter spent perspective on myself and started to see my own patterns that in conversation are like, oh, I’m getting caught up in this tree or this. I see. Yeah. And I am putting too much of my own ego and my own will and force into this where I need to detach and think, oh, oh, that’s not necessary. That’s the, well, that’s, that’s definitely one of the connections. I was wondering if you ever got it going the other way, that sense of, cause you know, um, Siegel has proposed that when in mindfulness, we’re basically taking the ability we have to do that. Mindsight resonance with other people. And we’re turning it on ourselves. The idea that, that kind of those kinds of deep flowing dialogues, especially when they’re opening up, actually help us to better dialogue with ourselves. Uh, in mindfulness practices, I wondered if, did you ever feel it go the other way that you would, that your mindfulness practice was somehow being deepened because you were able to really see more deeply into other people? Um, good question. No, I don’t think that happened that much for me there. Um, it is something that happened afterwards when I left the place, right? Because there was so much activity and so many things going on and like, I’m a very social person. So even when I wasn’t really able to join being in that environment made me almost constantly be oriented towards the world. And so I was like, I’m not going to be able to do that. Made me almost constantly be oriented towards that. But when I left there and I continued to meditate because of all that energy and noise, it went down that, that downward motion just deepens my practice as well. So that really started to unfold before. Oh, it’s really unfolding after. Right. Right. So that leads me to the second question because it sort of falls naturally. What’s happening with the transfer from the, you know, the full high school into what we, we, we, what we call the real world or the everyday world. Like you mentioned that, well, you just gave it one example and you also talked about the project now is the integration, but how’s that going for you? Like, did you find that a lot of what you, uh, learned in the school is transferring or are you finding that some of it does and some of it doesn’t, or are you finding that there’s a transformation that’s required in order for it to transfer? How is that going for you? Generally, I think this course could be way better at actually facilitating this and being mindful that towards the end, they should focus on saying, okay, so you’re going to go back into the real world. Right. What are you going to take with you? What are you going to do? What are you going to hold onto? Because you have to do that consciously. Now I was lucky enough to actually sort of know this. First of all, there’s the friends and the relationships. And that is incredibly important because you, you touch back to that sense of community, but it’s also an anchor for you to remember how, what you were like back then, because I was a, I was in many ways a better person then, because you go to this completely new environment and then you become a different person because the, all settings are different. Yeah. Yeah. And then remembering what you were like then and not going back into your old habits and back into your old ways of being then you have to remember that and think, no, I didn’t used to be like this. And I think for many people it happens naturally. For me, many times I would, I would realize I was doing something out in the real world, real world where I, I found weights on high school. I would just do this. What’s the problem? Or I would think, huh, I’m so caught up in this thing. That wasn’t important to important to me at all before. So you get these small tidbits and I think it’s almost inevitable because you spend as a master, you spend four or five months being here. So it’s a very long way for a long time for you to get this into your system. It’s not just a short duration trip because I’ve also been at like called a youth exchange. And I was in Belgium with a special project where we were out in the woods and we were challenged with all kinds of exercises and, and. Like you would have a two trees and you have two ropes and then you had to get everyone through without touching the ropes and then it’s like this different sorts of group exercises to build social cohesion and also challenge each other. And it’s all based on this entire thing called experiential learning. And, and that was a week. And when I went home, it was great. It was fantastic, but it was, it was just a high that then tapered off. But because this had so much time to build and maintain, it doesn’t go away that easily. Yeah. Sharp in sharp out. Uh, this is a problem. Very steep in you often come out very steep. Whereas you want the longer arc. You want the longer arc. Totally. I think it also gives you time to have natural epsom flows. Yes. Because then you can have the heightened because that’s again, the first month, everything goes up and everything is so active and then people collapse because they don’t have any more energy. Well, then they’re down in the dumps and then they start more carefully, more slowly coming up. Oh wait, what are we starting to see here? What does this look like? If this looks like optimal grip, right? Right. Because you’re taking that and, and you’re naturally building that. And the part that isn’t really talked that much about as far as I know, but that happens naturally in this is you learn to build a community and participate in a community and you can take that with you because then you’re part of the sports club or scouts club, or you’re part of a specific team in your work. You know what things work and what things don’t. You’ve experienced dramas and different challenging disparities between people that got solved. And generally you’re just more mature. Like we have another thing that directly translate is called after school, which is the same concept, but in 10th grade of primary school, where you go for one year, you have that’s normal school, but then purpose or the idea, the focus is that you have friends and it is very clear and it’s commonly talked about and people that go to high school can very clearly tell the difference between those that have been on after school and those that went directly from primary school to high school because you’ve had one year that just grows you tremendously much. So way more settled in yourself because you’ve had all these backs and forth with peers that helps you ground yourself and find yourself because they mirror you and push back on you where you don’t, where you stick out too much. And they also help you unfold and poke at you all the places where you’re trying to hide. That’s very interesting. So I mean, we could talk about this for forever, but I want to turn to the reason why you and I are talking because like you said, you, I was joking with Rick, the amazing Rick Repetti about the one stop enlightenment shop. And like you’ve all obviously had something like that. What do you think? What do you, I mean, so what do you think this is? This, I guess we’ll call it an institution, this institution that, right. What, how could this help address the meeting crisis? Do you think this kind of thing? Because you do one thing, John, you talk about it and you explain and you create logical narratives. When you go to a school like this, you experience it. Yeah. Because many people will actually show up because they’re depressed or having anxiety and they’re hugely debilitated. And they come here and they feel that friendships matter. They have the space to be immersed in something that just interests them where they will sit at the ceramic table for nine hours, completely forgetting time, completely grossed and flawed. And that is deeply, deeply meaningful. So this entire idea of the meeting crisis, well, you need something beyond the logical understanding, you need to get that into the real world and build the community and have some sort of way of actually experiencing this in people’s lives. And that is what it does. That is what it does. Number one, it facilitates. So, I mean, it’s interesting because I’m talking to lots of emerging communities around the world and people are putting together things like this in these ecologies of practices. But one of the advantages, it seems to me, that you have is this has been going on, I take it, for a long time in Denmark. I think it’s 177 years. So there’s a lot of track record and a lot of history about what was going on and what doesn’t work. And that seems to me like that would be also a significant reservoir for helping a lot of these other emerging communities of ecologies of practices as to what works and what doesn’t work. Well, yeah, that’s exactly why I reached out to you. Yeah, yeah. Because you, when we had a conversation earlier, where you mentioned that you’re trying to connect all these emerging communities. Yes. So what does that mean? Yes. So what does that mean? Like, can you actually, can you, can you try and explain what you mean by an emerging community? What I mean by an emerging community is that there’s a novelty to it. It’s been created, but it’s not being created sort of top down. Somebody has like a manifesto and they’re going to go and they’re going to make this thing. What it is, is people are often, well, this sort of helps and this sort of helps with meaning and this helps and this helps me get wiser and this helps me connect better. And they start to almost intuitively often, sometimes with some help from relevant science or philosophy, they start to put various ecologies of practices together. And very often they, they realize quite early on they’re better off doing this in concert with other people than trying to do it autodidactically on their own. So you get this emerging community that is sort of coming into existence as the ecology of practices are coming into existence and they’re both sort of shaping each other. And that’s what I mean by an emerging community. Right. Yeah. I’m thinking in political terms, you would normally say like a grassroots movement. Yes. Things sprout up. Yes, yes. Very much. Very much. Go ahead. Yeah. I think the thing that we can do is because we’ve had this for such a long time, we’ve had a lot of time to experiment. And we have some very specific values that we found out are some of the most important things. It is the sense of community. It is the sense of enlightenment as we use this word. So there are some specific things to center on. And I don’t remember who Jordan Peterson talked with, but he at some point lays out this entire trajectory of how the Christian religion maybe have evolved with the ancient Sumerians and all the different tribal gods. And then they fought and then that created this hierarchy and battle for who is most important, who’s value is the strongest. And then that emerged and then built into the Greek religions that then became the Christian religion. They’re trying to always coalesce more and more in what is the value structure that we should be having. And it’s a lot of what you lay out in your academic journey as well. And we’ve had several generations to do this. And the most important thing, I think, is that we have had a chance to do it long enough that it’s become part of our culture. Right. Right. That’s it. It’s actually starting to get embedded. It’s a concept. People know what it is. And many, many people go here and it shapes a lot of how we. Doesn’t shape. It mirrors a lot of what we do in our education system, the way we try and be open and playful. So it’s like a frontier of what you can do loosely that then gets pushed over. So I think that I mean, a point that it’s been going on enough that it’s been sort of woven into the culture. I think that’s an important point. And that really holds up the possibility for what I call stealing the culture. Yes, I was actually going to ask you about that because I’ve heard you mention it several different places. I haven’t had a full account. What do you actually mean by stealing the culture? Well, you’re putting your finger on it. Right. And the building movement. Right. Also, the idea is you’re not creating like a political party or some proposing to how to overhaul the economic system or something like that. You’re basically creating a new culture, a new way of people seeing and being in the world with themselves and with each other. It’s very much what you’re talking to me about. And I’m interested that this is one part where you were critical. And I think that’s important. Making sure that this transfers out very powerfully for people. And so the model I have in mind, although this is now another model I’m learning more about, is the way Christianity stole the culture from the Roman Empire. You have this imperial system. It’s built around power structures. And what you have is you have all these little home churches being seated all over. And they’re just creating fellowship and they’re creating a way of life around Agape and Logos. These are the two founding things. And they’re building new ways of seeing and being both individually and collectively. And they’re changing how they interact with each other so that they start to take care of they start to challenge infanticide just as a matter of course. So we now all we’ve been they were so successful that we all now regard infanticide with absolute horror. But in the Roman world and the Greek world, infanticide was just a thing. You just did. It wasn’t even a moral concern. You don’t hear any of the greats like Plato even considering it. Right. But what they did was and that’s just one example among many. They get a new way of seeing it. No, no. Children are people, too. Women are people, too. The people who aren’t part of the Roman establishment are people, too. And Agape and Logos are the things that make people into people, not power, not hierarchy. And you get a new way of being that creates a subculture that eventually captures the Roman Empire. That’s what I mean by stealing the culture. It sounds like that’s also what’s going on. Although I was, like I said, my ears did pick up. I shouldn’t say that. Everything you said has been deeply interesting. But I like that moment. You said the one criticism you had was they could do a better job at the transfer. They could do a better job at the transfer. Like specifically what I thought is that the entire psychedelic tradition and what shamans do of integration is integral. It is the most important thing. Yes, the experience doesn’t really matter that much. We don’t find a way of incorporating it into your life. Yes, and we are completely blind to that. But that is just a symptom of Western culture. So that’s where I see, oh, we can start pulling in all these other ways of approaching this. And what I see that I really, really hope that you can bring to the table for this is that I think the schools are a bit too loose. They’re a bit too focused on just asking questions. Yes. What you have spent so much of your career on is to try and find out what is it that works? What is it that is deeply meaningful to people? And having this meta system, it’s not because you’re supposed to indoctrinate people, but just say you need a contemplative practice. You need a mindfulness practice. You need an embodied practice. Doesn’t matter what it is, but you need them. And having that sort of extra framework that is based on the research and based on the science to actually map on to this new emergent wave that is coming. That is, to me, I cannot understand, understand how important that is, because otherwise it’s going to be so disorganized. Yeah, we need something to collect people and not necessarily reign them in, but gain some directives. When you’re talking about stealing the culture, maybe think of the hippie movement and what they started doing, where they just pieced out and went to some farm and lived in a collective. Thanks. Maybe that’s something which we try and recreate, not as early as they did, but just look at also, well, what did they do in more modern times? What can we learn from that? And how can we find out how that got? Yeah. And what mistakes they made. One of the biggest mistakes of the hippie movement is exactly the point we’re talking about, about how to re-integrate. I mean, there were places where they were able to reintegrate into the culture at large, the sexual revolution, for example. And then there was lots of other places in which that like it didn’t. I think that the psychedelic movement, because it is so intimately tied with therapy and with really good cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience right now, that it has the potential to make a difference in the way it did before. As you probably know from my work, I don’t believe that psychedelics should on their own do our relevant thing. They have to be incorporated in something like a shamanic school. Yeah, very much. They’re a tool and they’re a powerful tool. And you don’t tell people that have never used it before to play with a chainsaw. You don’t think, hey, that would be a really good idea for how to learn about how your body works. Here, play with this chainsaw. I mean, that’s a bad idea. So I guess I’m really interested in this idea about, I don’t know, I’m searching for a metaphor, like grafting. You know, when you graft one plant onto another, this is sort of the metaphor. Yeah. You keep what’s going on in the Folke High School and then taking what the work I’m doing with a bunch of people and they’re doing with me. I don’t want to be like we’re all doing it together, right? About trying to get what are the design principles? You know, good cognitive science based design principles for an ecology of practice. And like you say, figure out how to graft those together and also how that will graft onto the community. Well, like I said, I’d like to get involved with talking to some of the people who run these schools and see if they’re interested. I’m definitely interested and also have you and others talk to the network that I’m trying to build here because you have a track record of, as you said, you know, 177 years that should be taken seriously. The fact that it’s how that it’s gone on successfully outside of a particular religious institution. I know the founders had inspired by Christianity, but you don’t have to be a Christian to go to these schools. I take it. Not at all. Right. And one of the criticisms that’s usually laid legitimately against August Compton, he sets up these secular churches and when he dies, they disappear. But that’s not the case with what we’re talking about here. This has been going on for generations. It’s been going on for almost two centuries successfully. And that to me is also something that needs to be taken note of. This has the real potential for longevity in a way that can make the kind of transformations that I think we need the kind of deep and longitudinal transformations we need to need to make in order to address the meeting crisis. So I’m very excited about the possibilities that we might be able to start learning from each other in deep ways. Like you said, I think I agree with you. I don’t think the importance of this can be understated. No, I definitely agree. And I think that one, it is important that we find a way to do this right. Yes. But a problem that I hear again and again and again and again is financing. And yes. I don’t know how we’re going to do that because in Denmark, we are very highly prioritizing this. Like these folk high schools get massive subsidies from the government because otherwise they could not survive. Now there is a folk high school movement in the North Americas actually. And they have about as many schools as we do in Denmark because Denmark is a quite small country. But they have to come up with all these sorts of different ways of trying to make things work because there are very few grants that are available. And the problem with this is that in Denmark, there are boarding schools. You go and you live there. And in many ways, that is the most important part. Like that is number one in this. The living together and being in the community. Yep. That’s what matters because you allow for all these things to happen spontaneously. The best moments are not in class. The best moments happen when they happen. That’s part of the magic. And usually that’s what gets cut away in the States because that’s what’s most expensive. Yes. But they’re experimenting with all kinds of different ways of trying to do this and producing things and searching grants. Whatever they can find to make this happen. So I think there’s both us in Denmark because we have the deep generational roots. Then there’s already people in the network trying to do this sort of thing in the United States, in Canada, that also better shows what is possible outside of them because we have one way of doing things and we have a very specific value structure that makes it possible for us to do things like we do because it allows so much freedom when you’re not that concerned with funding. And that’s just not possible in most other places. No, but the goal would be to get to seal the culture at least to the extent that the culture would start to regard it as important the way Denmark does. And we start to realize that education shouldn’t just be about market preparation. It should be about intergenerational cultivation of a shared culture. Cultivation, culture, right? And this is, of course, a point that Zach Stein has been making. And of course, people will just say that’s irrelevant until they realize, oh, that’s relevant. There’s no argument you can give them other than giving them lives that are regularly and reliably transformed. Again, that’s how Christianity took over the empire. It didn’t make titanic arguments that, oh, my gosh, that’s a proof. What it did is it gave, here’s regular and reliable profound transformation of lives individually and collectively. And that’s what wins people ultimately over towards making something a cultural priority. I mean, there’s also opportunity with the way social media can afford funding to some degree that could potentially be integrated in with this. There’s also working with these emerging communities and some of the strategies they use for funding. And there’s a lot of experimentation going on right now. But it’s good, it’s really good to talk to a person who has benefited from this. And so proof of concept beyond measure is not just proof of concept. Here’s proof of life about somebody who has been really educated in the Socratic sense. And so, I mean, and the way you come to this, like your manner, right, the maturity, the centeredness, the capacity, the spaciousness of your thought, that’s all coming through. And to me, that’s as important as anything you’re saying. You’re saying lots of important stuff, but also your presence and your manner of conveying your ideas is also very impressive, very impressive. Well, thank you. One thing I got to mention about this, because I think it’s so hard to actually convey why this is so valuable. Yeah. Why it’s so important. And it’s even one of those things where you can’t necessarily just say, well, action speak for themselves and go and do statistics on people that were in folk high schools, did all these great things. Not necessarily. We can do that. There’s a folk high school in the United States. Turns out it’s called Highlander Martin Luther King Rosa Parks. They went there. Right, right, right. You can do that, but that’s not going to be enough rationale for people to actually change the decisions also because it is hugely expensive, labor intensive, and it requires a lot of resources to do what they do, which is deep learning. When I studied university, I was horrified at how quickly you have to cram things. You just sit and you read that there is no room and no time for discussions. Yes. Well, the majority of time on folk high schools is spent on the discussion. It’s spent on unpacking and hearing different perspectives. And it doesn’t just get onto your skin. It seeps into your bones when you do it like that. And then it becomes integrated because you work with it so much. But how do you prove that that happens? Well, one way is to do these conversations and make them public and get people to share about it. This has been really good. I really appreciate this. I’d like to typically give people that are on my program sort of the last word. Before we end, please remember to send me any links you want to put into the description for this video, any connections that might be helpful to people. And we’re certainly going to talk again because I’m very serious about it. I want to talk to people. And if you can help afford that, that’d be great. I want to talk to people who are doing these, the folk high schools, and and see what deep dialogue and exchange is possible. Because I want to learn and hopefully also be of help. I think you can, John. I very much want to. I think this is important. And like I said, this shows that something is really possible. But I’m going to shut up now and I’m going to give you the last word. Well, first of all, I’m all in John because I agree completely. And having experienced it and seeing what you do, I’m like, this, like, it’s very grand word to use, but I have no better one to use right now. What you are doing and what you’re creating is the rational mythos for how to do this. Right. Then the question is just take that framework, that conceptual framework, and then integrate it down into these cultures. And then we will have a direction. We’ll have a set of values that I won’t say they’re infallible, but we’re a good shot better at reaching something that’s not completely catastrophic. So the last thing I will say is not necessarily to you, but mostly to people that view and listen. Which is these things exist and whatever you pay for tuition, it’s not that much more expensive, maybe sometimes not even more expensive to go and do these things. Look up full-time schools here in Denmark. They’re a bunch of North America. If you came out of university, if you dropped out because it didn’t work for you, maybe this is a way to go. It’s not necessarily a diploma, but it affords you so, so much. And university is not necessarily the only way we’re starting to more and more see that. The second thing is viewers and listeners, if this resonates with you or if you recognize, if you know, oh, there’s something in my local community that does something similar to this, then please reach out and tell us about it. Because the more we can see and hear about people and communities doing this, the larger network we can create and the more we can help each other. That was very well said. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for this opportunity, John. I’m happy that you’re so open to discussing with just about anyone. Thank you for saying that.