https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=_0FjAt9Oiu4
Welcome everyone. It’s great to be back. It’s been a while and I want to apologize for that. Part of it has been, the most significant part has been my good friend and has been my partner in a lot of this work, Amar, has been suffering from an unavoidable illness. He apologizes for his absence, but we’ve added in some redundancy. We have a new person. Madeline, who’s going to be helping out a lot. Jason’s here again as well and Amar’s here helping in the background. So here’s all of us hoping that he is restored to his full and deserved health. I want nothing more than just to have him healthy and happy again in the world. So we’re going to take your questions and we’re going to do the usual Q&A format. For those of you who are new, we’ve got questions already texted in from patrons. I’ll address them first and then towards the last 15 minutes we’ll take some questions from the chat. And so we’re going to move to the first question and the first question is from Alec Barnes and he asked this question, how can we make a wisdom conference in Toronto aka Burbecky Palooza happen? Who and what do you need? So a couple things about that. One thing is I’ve already been in discussion with Daniel Thorson and Sation. Some of you may have seen my video with them. Sation has opened up and has been running the Willow Monastery. It’s a secular monastery just outside of Toronto. I encourage you all to check out that monastery and it’s a monastic academy. In fact, that’s a better name, Monastic Academy. I encourage you all to check that out and consider going there for their three-month program. But we have already been in discussion about having a conference for all of these emerging communities of practice. So there are three communities, emergent communities that I’m in discussion with. Rafe Kelly’s got an emerging community that’s doing a call of your practices. Of course, Seville King has one, etc. etc. So we have been talking about doing that and we’re just at the beginning stages. Doing something more centered on wisdom and perhaps some of my work. I would love to get that started. We need to put together some sort of organizing committee and it would probably be good if those people got involved with the Discord server community. They’re sort of my ongoing community of support. By the way, check out the Discord server community. That’s where you have people. It’s called the Awakening from the Meeting Crisis Discord server community. I do a regular Q&A there as well and that’s where you can see lots of people doing a lot of the practices I talk about. But I think contacting Madeline at the ad for Vakey email would be fantastic. We could get some people organized and let’s start getting them in discussion with, like I said, the Discord community and then also with myself. Let’s just start planning it and start making it happen. We should think about who we want to come, how we want to run it. But I think this is an excellent idea and I’d very much like to do it. So thank you, Alex, for proposing that. That’s really wonderful. I also hope that all of you will keep your eyes open for the Communities of Practice Conference. We’ve begun the initial planning of that and I’m hoping that we get that going soon. The Communities of Practice Conference is basically a way to start stealing the culture, building up the community of communities, going, starting to move it from the talking stage to the It’s already happening. So I don’t want to make it sound too initial or something like that. It’s already happening, but the point about the Communities of Practice Conference is to start getting these communities to talk to each other, supporting each other, etc. So my next question is from Rachel Hayden. Rachel’s a fantastic patron. I always appreciate talking with her. If you get a chance, the rest of you, please see the video I did with Rachel. I’m very proud of that video and I really hope that Rachel and I will get to do another video again in the future. Her question is, my question relates to emotions and transjectivity. I’ve noticed that some of what I would call emotional states of myself seem to be reflected in my experience of the world. For instance, if I’m in a deep state of peace and the world itself seems peaceful, if I’m truly anxious, the world itself seems like an anxious place. This does not occur with all emotional feelings, however. If I’m angry or scared, the world itself does not seem angry or scared. So it seems like paying a special attention to these emotional states which cross into the outer world might help one develop their attunement to meaning as a transjective process. These seem complementary to how states like wonder and awe work going from an inner to outer direction rather than outer to inner. Yes, please, I hope all of you are noting how insightful this question is. So the secondary question, do you think so? I think that’s very much the case. Now, it’s generally the case, well, first of all, let’s make some distinctions in affect. We should talk about emotional states like anger. We should talk about mood states like anxiety or peace. And then we can talk about particular feeling tones, like when you’re feeling hot and bothered. And then finally, there’s existential modes, which we often confuse with emotions like love. And so it’s, I think what we could say is the mood like states, like peace and anxiety. One of the things that distinguishes anxiety from peace is that anxiety can be and often is experienced as a mood. So the thing about moods is they’re atmospheric. So when you’re bored, for example, you’re not bored at something, you’re just bored in general. Or when you’re at peace, right, you’ll say things like I’m at peace with the world, but you’re not at peace directly with the world. So you’re not at peace directed towards an object. The way you’re angry, you have a focal target. I’m angry at this. Right. Now there’s ones that are weird because they can, because that’s partially because we have slippery word usage, like happiness, right? There’s a sense in which it can be like a mood, like just sort of you have a sense of wellbeing, or you can be happy about your friend has just arrived back from their trip. Right. And so when we pay attention to the mood, affective states, and to the existential mode affective states like love, we will generally pick up on this attunement, reciprocal relationship. In fact, I would propose, and this is, I think, inspired by Heidegger, that mood states are actually states in which we’re moving towards attunement and they’re more being mode rather than focusing on a particular task at hand. And D’Costa in his wonderful work on meaning within the Joy of Secularism anthology talks about how our, the transjectivity, our meaningfulness, he calls it like an atmospheric bubble, it’s most revealed in our mood states, like peace, and then negative ones like anxiety. There I’m using anxiety again in the mood sense in the existential sense. And also awe and wonder that open you up. Horror, when it’s horror, again, existentially and as a mood, rather than terror, most horror movies are not terror, not horror movies. They’re movies where you’re afraid about a particular thing, the monster in the basement, the person with the knife, the guy wearing the hockey mask, etc. Horror is a mood and therefore discloses our existential modes. Notice there’s a connection, at least I don’t say there’s necessarily an etymological connection, but there’s a mnemonic connection that helps you remember the connection between moods and modes. Although there may be an etymological, I should check that. So in genuine horror, there’s a sense of losing one’s sanity, of losing one’s grip on the world as a whole. So generally, the two things, the moods and the modes, when we pay more attention to them, they bring with them a revelation of transjectivity, of our deep coupling and connectedness to the world. The thing about the moods, as opposed to mode, for example, I’m always deeply in love with my partner, that doesn’t mean I’m always experiencing it in some way. That’s why love is not just an affective state. It’s much more deep and ongoing and dispositional than an affective state. Love is an existential relationship. But the thing about the moods, like awe and anxiety and peace, did you get this bridge? The moods are atmospheric and therefore they have this feeling tone to them so you can tap into them, but they also are close to and it can help you remember the existential modes. So one of the things you can do when you’re in these moods is try to get a sense of the moods, use the moods almost as a guiding lens of what it’s like to be in the being mode, in which the world, what you’re wrestling with, if you’re wrestling with a task, isn’t a particular problem. What you’re dealing with is, as Rachel put it so wonderfully, attunement, which is the basic relationship of the agent arena relationship, the relationship of attunement or misattunement, as in horror or as in existential anxiety. And again, anxiety, we misuse the word anxiety. Look at how we use it. We use it to mean the same thing as fear. I’m really anxious about my test tomorrow. Really? I think you’re afraid. I’m really anxious to meet my friend. Really? I think you mean you’re eager. And then we say, I have so much angst. Well, when the Heidegger, sorry not when Heidegger, when Kierkegaard’s talking about anxiety, he definitely doesn’t mean it as an affect state solely. He means it primarily as an existential mode in which you are discovering your lack of fundamental attunement with reality. Now that has an affective component, but reducing it to that affect is a deep mistake. So I think Rachel’s question is excellent. It opens us up to a fine tuning effectively, both senses of the word, to our state of attunement and developing a repertoire of skills and sensibilities around that I think is excellent. An excellent proposal and I hope I helped to clarify it and explicate it a bit. Here’s a question from Aden C. And in the issue of scale and the teacherly authority. So this I think Aden is making reference to some recent discussions in the new series I’ve been having with Leymann Paschel and Brendan Dempsey Graham. We’ve been talking about the artful scaling up of the religion that’s not a religion. In the issue of scale, and I want to take this opportunity one more time, as I have done in other episodes, I am not trying to found anything. I’m not founding a religion or anything ridiculous. That is my attitude properly understood towards that proposal. I am trying to articulate and explicate and help afford something that’s already happening that is needed. I do not see myself in anything like the role, anything near the role of Siddhartha or Jesus. I aspire to perhaps be what Plotinus or Aquinas were. So I want that really understood. Because people keep misattributing intent to me that is not fair to me. And I want that clearly understood. In the issue of scale and teacherly authority, do systems like the basics of stoicism or the way of Dante’s Commedia allow for an engendering core that can be complexified and continually reach out to gain new knowledge of it in the classic encyclopedic manner with the core area to return to for implementation? So I think what Aidan is pointing to is exactly the right thing. What we want, I mean, if this is going to work, is it has to be oriented towards sacredness. And the argument that I’ve made with Christopher Massa, Pietro, Philip Misovic, and others, is that one of the core functions of sacredness is to help us assimilate the world, home us, so we avoid domicide, but also force us to confront the numinous and open us up in accommodation. And what it’s doing is constantly balancing between those. And so systems that have a home that we can return to, but that also encourage us to confront the horizon of intelligibility in wonder and even more so in awe and the numinous, is exactly what we want. Now, stoicism is a great example of that. So stoicism was a practice that dealt with the domicide, the loss of home, during the Hellenistic period. And unlike the cynics, the stoics sort of moved the idea of homing into a more cognitive framing. And the basic idea was to become cosmopolitan, to find the entire cosmos, one’s home, one’s polis. And this was done by, I won’t go into the depth, but because I talk about it in the series, about learning to become aware of and bring and cultivate wisdom within how we are attributing meaning to the world. CBT is developed from stoicism. Most of the cognitive processes are. However, I think they, in the research, is showing that they’re starting to win in effectiveness precisely because they have been reduced to technique and they have been taken out of the entire ecology of practices of something like stoicism. Stoicism has rightly been called something that sits on the boundary between philosophy and religion. And for me, it is a very good exemplar. We cannot adopt it without problematic revisions that need to be met. But stoicism is a good exemplar of something like what the religion that’s not a religion should be. And what stoicism had was these practices that homed you. But stoicism was always also something that in which you were internalizing Socrates and you were calling things into question and you were moving to the horizon of intelligibility. This ethos, this ethos and its deep coupling to the disclosure and realization of sacredness, it’s got to be at the core of any attempt to create a scalable religion that’s not a religion. So I think what Aidan’s been saying in that question, with the finger, he’s putting his finger on exactly the key thing. Getting, right, so along with the commitment of religio having priority over credo, the commitment to a opponent processing of a system of practices, an ecology of practices, not a system, I don’t want to use that word, an ecology of practices like stoicism that is constantly and effectively trading between meta-assimilation, meta-accommodation, giving us this meta-optimal grip on reality. I think that’s central and figuring and learning from the historical examples like stoicism and Dante’s the Commedia, how to craft that. I think it is a vital education that needs to be practiced by any and all of us who want to try and afford the ongoing emergence and autopoetic coordination of the religion that’s not a religion. Excellent question. I’m really impressed by these questions. There’s a kind of gratitude. It’s a gratitude mixed with optimism, that’s what I’m feeling right now, and it’s humbling to see my work and the work of people working with me drawing people out, adducing, that’s the original core of education, drawing people out, and then bringing them into the world of the world of the world of the world of the world of the world of education, that’s the original core of education, drawing people out and the questions that are coming and the tasks that they’re taking and the reflections that they’re undertaking and the transformations are undergoing. There’s not much better in life than that. I mean, So just I’m so grateful for all of you and to be part of this process. Next question from Dominic Molinaro. How do you avoid falling into modal confusion in this fear of dating and love, given such seemingly hardwired instinct to pursue others, treat partners with intention and retain them as mates? So this is this is. So I am someone who is with Dominic seeking a good answer to this question, and I’ve sought it for my life. I will try to speak from the ways in which I failed to answer this question adequately, much more than having a settled and wise answer to it. And any answer I give is going to be like chess. It’s easy to learn, but it’s hard to practice well. So we have these tremendous imperatives, and I want to be clear, I’m not approved. I understand that people want to pursue sex, often just for its own sake, just for enjoyment. And I don’t want to foreclose on that possibility. I would warn people also, however, not to engage in self-deception. When you’re messing around with sexuality, as indicated in the question, you’re messing around with Darwinian machinery that’s deep in the brain, and it doesn’t care about your higher order existential projects. It will kick into place regardless if you’ve right. When you have you felt some of the intense longing or some of the deep, painful jealousy or profound grief. That gives you a sense of how deeply this machinery operates and how autonomously it operates. So you have to take great care. One of the things I wish I had learned earlier in my 20s is the… See, I don’t want to sound prudish, but I want to say something like the danger, the opportunity and danger of human sexuality to go deep into the psyche. And that this is very precious coin, and it should be spent as wisely as you can. The one thing I wish I had done better and the one thing I wish I would continue to do better in terms of how I prioritize my wishes is if I could love more wisely. Loving wisely is like nine tenths of a good life. And again, easily said, hard to do. So the challenge is to come up with practices. These may be therapeutic practices like internal family systems theory. It may be more cognitive practices like from stoicism. It may be dialogical practices like a philosophical fellowship or it could be in dialectic and didiologos. But what you need to do is you need to develop a dialogical relationship between the Darwinian machinery. Plato represents it as a monster and those other parts, the two other parts of the psyche. So as often when I’m thrown back on the hardest questions to answer, I find somebody already sitting there with a half smile. And that person is Plato. So Plato talks about the three centers. There is that part of us that’s Darwinian and will drive us into the having mode. And we want and we want to consume people and control them. And we’re pursuing a kind of gratification with them. If you try to eradicate that or much worse, which is sort of happening now, pretend it doesn’t exist. I’m sorry. I find that pretense dehumanizing and disgusting. And the fact that it’s becoming popular right now is something I wish to sort of actively resist as much as I possibly can. So that part of us, and this was Plato’s great insight, it can’t be the attempt to eradicate it or avoid it is is doomed to failure. However, the attempt to simply reason with it and Plato represents this as a man. I’m sorry, that sexist for his time. Plato was one of the least sexist individuals possible. But he let’s say it represented as a human being that can write, can reason broadly construed that part of you that can reason cannot usually directly deal with that part of you that wants to consume the other in love. Or in last perhaps. Let’s use the word last for that consummated part of us. There’s nothing wrong with last properly appropriated. And we’ll talk about love as having deep connections to our rationality as it should again, the romantic opposition between those between love and reason and rationality should be put aside. Plato’s great insight is there’s a third part of us. And it’s often translated as emotion. And this is a simple mistake. I don’t translate it. There is no good translation for the Greek word thymus. It’s those those those socially oriented affect that we experience in the chest, like pride and shame and honor and respect and communitas and working together with others or being ostracized by others. This the thymus and Plato’s great insight is that it sits between. It has a mediating status. It’s intermediate in terms of its goals, how abstract it could work. But it’s also very, very powerful. Precisely because we are cultural in the chest as well as, you know, biological. He represented that in the stomach in the genitalia. Right. We have these two centers and we are as much cultural because, you know, four million years or more of evolution has gone into us being cultural. And it has become increasingly our core adaptation because we are cultural and not just biological. The rational part of us can it can enter into a relationship with the social part of us, the social emotional right participatory social participatory part of us. Like I said, I’m just going to say the thymus. Right. It can enter into relationship with the thymus and together that can help us model the way that we think about ourselves. It can help us moderate. The Darwinian monster. And so what you would ask is, well, what is the what is the practice that brings the reasoning and the thymus into relation so that they enter into fellowship and friendship with and they can coordinate to moderating the Darwinian monster. That is the that is the practice of the logos. The logo simultaneously integrates and even synergizes the thymus and the reflective rationality of us and brings them into an emergent kind of integration complexification so that something new beyond just being in your head or just being in your chest occurs. And that when that is practiced, that state of mind and body and being and being in relation to others can train us so that we can get the virtue virtuosity for appropriately moderating those parts of us that simply want Darwinian satisfaction. Again, we’re not trying to eradicate them. We are what we’re trying to do is it’s almost like we’re trying to create a song words and music of intelligibility and sensibility so that the right the the the the the the the beast. I’m going to I’m struggling for a term here right can be drawn into training can be can be tempered by that song. We’re trying in that way if you’ll allow me to be poetic. We’re trying to create an enacted in way of enchanting that part of us so that it will be tutored and tempered. It can’t be argued with it. It can’t really be trained, but it can be tempered by this song of the soul so that love has a greater possibility of in mutual affordance of the support of the soul. And that’s the importance of reciprocal opening that again is one of those things that went when it’s when you when you’re in that existential mood with another person there. It’s completely for. And I don’t think there’s much more I can say right now, but that would be my my best attempt to answer that very, very profound question. But again, fairly easy to say. It’s easy to learn to play chess. It’s very hard to play it well. Same thing with with the wisdom of love. I mean, that’s why I do Lexio divina regularly on on on Plato I read regularly on the Christian platonic tradition that did the best on this in some ways. And even current work. I’m reading DC Schindler’s book. I’ve mentioned to many of you in various formats DC Schindler’s book Plato’s Critique and Pure Reason, the best book I’ve ever read on Plato. I’m reading a more recent book by his love in the postmodern predicament, which I think is astonishing and perhaps the best book other than Plato that I’ve read on love. And so never stop learning about it. Give up. Give up. Give up the romantic bullshit that we all just know how to love well just by having intense feelings. If I can ask you to consider giving anything up in your life that would have the chance of opening you towards a happier future. Give up that romantic bullshit. You must aspire to love. You must aspire to be wiser and wiser in love. So thank you very much for that question. So this is Lizelle Van Wick. It’s always a pleasure to have a question from you, Lizelle. Lizelle is often commenting on my videos as she shows up at the Rebel Wisdom forums. And she says beautiful and wonderful things. Lizelle, at some point if you would like it, I would like to set up a Zoom call and just talk to you one on one, maybe just for 15, 20 minutes. If you don’t want, that’s fine. But you’ve been an ardent supporter and participant for a long time. And I’d like to just meet you in person, so to speak, a little bit more directly, if possible, at some point, if that appeals to you. If it doesn’t, no hurt feelings. I’m fine. I just want to extend the sincere invitation. So in episode 20 of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, you say always a new psychotechnology. Look out for it. Yeah. Better believe it. Better believe it. But I’ve heard you mention the revival of old psychotechnologies many times. I cannot really recall you pointing out new ones unless merging with the Mars rover counts. Anything interesting you think we should keep an eye on? Yes. So the new psychotechnologies are psycho cyber technologies generally, although I’m trying to inventio. Remember inventio means to discover or recover and to invent. There’s a there’s a psychotechnology I’m trying to inventio right now with the help of Christopher Massa Pietro and Guy Semstock and other people like Peter Lindbergh and Jordan Hall, which is this dialectic into Dio Logos. Oh, by the way, the book on this, the anthology has many people in it, myself and Chris and Guy Semstock and just Savella and just so many great people. It’s going to be called Dio Logos and it should be coming out next year. So there’s a text going with this. So I’m trying to in that book point out this new these new new and old new in the sense of being exacted old in the sense of going back to a lost tradition. These new psychotechnologies of Dio Logos. That’s that’s very big. And so they to my mind are the most important psychotechnologies are emerging right now. The other ones are the psycho cyber technologies. Social media is the exam as the example very much like alphabetic literacy. We have launched this for purely prosaic reason without understanding how it is percolating through our psyche permeating through our cognition by mentally changing our patterns of tension metaphors by which we understand and think of ourselves. The images we use to cost late our sense of identity. All of this is going on right now. Some people are paying attention to it. And we’ve got the beginning of some serious philosophical reflection. But where this experiment is going to lead is not clear. And of course, both it just accelerated everything and it revealed a lot of the danger of this new psycho cyber technology. A lot of the danger, which of course reveals the unknown power of this psycho cyber technology. So those are two I would point you to. I would point I would point you to to the whole family of Dio Logos psychotech that’s emerging and being cultivated and socially engineered. Really really powerfully and a quite increasing rate. And then of course the cyber the psycho cyber technologies that have emerged as prominent. And the thing that deeply interests me. Is the possibility of the coordination of those two together. And I’m doing various things with experimenting with it. Like I’m doing series that are dialogical in nature rather than monological. I’m doing series in which we move from channel to channel community to community as we unfold the series doing right one right now with layman. So the first step and with Brendan. The first episode was on voices with the vacay. The second was on Brendan’s channel. The third one will be on the integral stage with layman. So I encourage more and more people to do this to try and experiment with the psycho cyber technology of social media YouTube etc. Especially with towards integrating it with the a lot Dio Logos and dialogical practices. I think that’s a possible way in which we could steer or perhaps even better steal the culture. So thank you for that excellent question. Oscar Boethius. Wow. What a great middle name. Wow Oscar Boethius. So Oscar’s asking a question. What major difference between mental states have you experienced in your deepest meditative absorption compared to your deepest psychedelic experiences. Do you believe or know even that they will converge at the bottom provoked are you skillfully to reach the same actual mental state. This is a great question. It’s a great question because it’s a question for which there should be ongoing theoretical argument in the positive philosophical sense of the word argument and ongoing empirical experimental competition. So what are the differences I’ve noted. So first of all I would note that there’s there’s some independent for me. There’s some empirical research that shows there’s a difference. So for example when people have a mystical experience within psychedelics within within a psychedelic state. Remember the psychedelic states do not necessarily require require substance. Aidan Lyons book on the psychedelic experience which I which is coming out soon. Perhaps take a look at the video I did with him. We’re doing another one soon. You don’t have to take a substance to get into the psychedelic state. Psychedelic means mind revealing mind disclosing. So active imagination deep there deep therapy can also be psychedelic. But people who have had a mystical experience within the psychedelic experience tend to describe ultimate reality in impersonal metaphors like the one as a prototypical example or the really real. Whereas when they get these mystical experiences within the meditative state they are much more likely to use terms that at least historically have a personal image attached to them like God. And so that to my mind that is not convincing evidence. It’s suggestive evidence that while the mystical states in these two conditions obviously overlap a lot in terms of their functionality. This difference in the phenomenology perhaps points towards a at least an initial difference in the underlying brain function functionality that’s being activated. So what I’ve noticed is in the psychedelic state. Right from the beginning it’s much more the world is calling me and drawing me out and the world is more and more enlivened. In a way that is beckoning almost like the way music calls you into and situate you within a situation. Whereas in the meditative state deep meditative state when I move into the more mystical experiences it’s. This probably won’t be too surprising. It’s much more like the interior noise drops into a silence and then the silence resonates. But you know the word silence is so misleading because we only hear absence. It’s silence that is a silence that is a. A profound presencing and the silence within and the silence without begin to resonate and then that is how I’m called into the world. I’ve noted with my practice. With what the occultists call the silence. The meditation the contemplation the the the learned ignorance practices the the lexio that right as well as doing the Tai Chi Chuan that ecology of practices. When I get into the deepest states. It’s interesting for me the sort of the. Meditative and contemplative states. Probably because they’re very informed for me by Buddhism Taoism and Neoplatonism. I tend to get the impersonal sense of the really real when I move into lexio divina that’s still there. But it gets a bit of a sense of the real. But it gets a bit of a sense of the real when I move into lexio divina that’s still there. But it gets a bit. For me and I don’t know if this is indicative of anything it could be idiosyncratic to me but I’m answering the question for me in the lexio divina. It has that but it all but it has more of a dialogical feel to it and insofar as it’s insofar. I want to emphasize that insofar as it’s dialogical it feels more personal and perhaps that’s a little bit about what Paul VanderKlay means. Because of that because of the flexibility that I’ve experienced in all of these and I’ve experienced the integration of them. I’ve done Tai Chi Chuan well in a psychedelic state for example. I suspect that there is at least I don’t know if they’re at bottom the same identity. But I suspect that there is deep overlap in the functionality of these of these different mystical states that are arrived at by these slightly different pathways. But I suspect that there is deep overlap in the functionality of these of these different mystical states that are arrived at by these slightly different pathways. Now I think that’s actually best. We should treat that as a gift. The fact that they are so convergent while not being identical means that they can complexify with each other. They can educate and draw each other out and constrain each other. They can educate and draw each other out and constrain each other. That’s how it’s unfold unfolded for me. And so that’s my best attempt to answer that question. Oystein Silverstein. Good to hear from you again. Very good to hear from you. Your distinction between the different types of love in episode 16 Christianity Agape was really helpful. Thank you for saying that. Thank you for saying that. It’s funny, I’ve said this before, your work is like your children. You don’t know which ones are going to be best received by the world or how they’re going to unfold when they gain their own autonomy. And I didn’t know which episodes of the series. I did not expect the episode on Agape to be the one that, that it’s been one of the episodes that many people have found the most helpful, both by Christians and non-Christians. I was actually concerned. I mean, there was a part of me that, I don’t want to be dishonest or disingenuous. There was a part of me that, and I still believe, I was saying something important, insightful. I thought I had, there was an argument to be made, but there was a part of me that was also worried that I would be misrepresenting ignorance or stupidity or my own trauma based, you know, self-deception. That I would be misrepresenting Agape and thereby offending Christians. One of the things that has been, for which I’ve been grateful and has been humbling for me, is the fact that that episode has been so well received, especially by people who self-identify as Christians. So I just want to take that opportunity to say thank you for that feedback and encouragement. Do you have any sources I could read on it? If you could, it would be great if you could elaborate more on Agape and or Eros. There’s an anthology. Jason, do you see it over there on my shelf? It’s a purple book, third shelf from the bottom and about four books from the left. You could go get that. Jason’s going to get that for me. I also recommend Paul Tillich’s book on Agape. I can’t remember the title of it. There’s another book in the Tillich section, a thin little red book by Paul Tillich. Maybe you could find it as well, Jason. I’m making Jason unexpectedly run around and collect books. But the Tillich on Agape, especially this little book, I hopefully Jason can find it. Tillich’s on the second shelf of the second shelf of the main, yes, down. You’ll start to see Tillich more towards the right. So here’s the first book. It’s readings in the philosophy of love, Eros, Agape and Pailea. So this is a book I would definitely recommend. And if Jason happens to find it, if not, I’ll try and find it and and put it in the notes. There’s a terrific book on this until I found Tillich, Paul Tillich, very, very helpful on understanding Agape. And then and I hope again this is taken in good faith. Buddhism, the Buddhist notion of compassion. Corona taught me a lot about how to understand Agape. So those are those are some of the three main sources. Eric Fromm’s The Art of Loving was also helpful, not because he particularly. Jason’s just holding up books and asking me if he could if it’s that book. Yes, that’s the book.