https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=HmNkQ3P7vXg
Welcome everyone to our monthly Q&A. I’m very excited to get into the questions. And so let’s just start. We’ll do our normal format with 45 minutes of the submitted question and then the last 15 minutes any of those coming from the live chat. So the first question is from Rachel Hayden. Always, always happy to get a question from Rachel. So I’ll read it out. A warm hello. Hello, Rachel. I’m inspired by this idea of relevance realization, realizing its own irrelevance as for me it bridges your work to Zen Buddhist practice. Thank you, Rachel. That is what I see it doing as well. Practice is not even really the right word here as it seems more like faith realization as the Zen master, Yoshu said, quote, once you have seen eye to eye with me, it is no different. End quote. I wonder about what happens to the capacity of caring within this realization. To me, phenomenologically, the caring of relevance realization is revealed to be boundlessly opened up, but in a way that becomes paradoxically and impartial caring. Not exactly universal, but prior to the universe. Hard to describe. It feels like potential energy. Wow, Rachel, you are really hitting this on the head like you’re hitting the nail right on the head with this. Exactly. Can you speak to this form of cognitive science perspective? Oh, sorry. Can you speak to this from a cognitive science perspective? Thank you as always. First of all, the way you’re describing this and the connections you’re making to Zen are like deeply astute and deeply appreciated. I am more and more, always only half jokingly referring to my position as Zen neoplatonism, integrating Zen and neoplatonism. And by the way, lest you think that Zen has to be integrated with Buddhism, take a look at this book, Zen Catholicism, a book published in the 90s as an ongoing tradition. People that are, you know, bona fide, admitted into the tradition by masters in both traditions, Zen and Catholicism. This is a book I’m about to read, and there’s a bunch of others, because I think the possibilities of Zen, which was the integration of Taoism and Buddhism in a way in which there was a series of profound practices for continually privileging and prioritizing religio over credo. And then of course, neoplatonism as a whole series of practices for bringing ratio and religio into proper and deep relationship. And of course, neoplatonism was itself the grand unifying field theory of the whole entire Western philosophical, ancient philosophical heritage. And as I mentioned many times, it has an enormous capacity to enter into reciprocal reconstruction with Christianity, Judaism, Islam, obviously, I think potentially Buddhism, etc. So just putting your finger on that, Rachel, with the notion of Zen, and then bringing that into relationship to the project that’s being built here within this community of communities, this corner of the internet, I think is right. I think you’re right, it’s also not that practice, it’s more like faith realization. If we understand faith is exactly that, those two dimensions, the prioritization of religio over credo because the sense of connectedness is being prioritized, and then also the sense of ratio religio, the proper proportioning of that. And so faith realization in that sense, I think is really good. And what does this do with the caring? I think that’s something that I need to put more thought into, and I think that’s something that I need to put more thought into. But there is something about the transformation. So I’m trying to put two things together. So we get to a place where relevance realization realizes that it’s fundamentally irrelevant because we are entering into relationship not with any beings or set of beings, and their combinatorially explosive potential, both individually and collectively, but we’re entering into, we’re trying to get ratio religio and profound religio with being itself, with the ground of being. We’re trying to get the reciprocal opening with the depths of being, the inexhaustible source of intelligibility. And that, of course, does not, in that state, relevance realization is no longer proper. The caring that is always integral to relevance realization, because it’s not cold calculation, it’s caring because you are paying attention, you are taking a chance, you’re spending time, listen to the language, right? We’re taking a risk, we’re risking bias, all of this arouses us, requires our affect, salience grabbing our attention. Relevance realization is not cold calculation, it’s profound caring. So the question is, if relevance realization realizes its own irrelevance, what happens to the caring that is enmeshed in relevance realization? I think that’s a very important question. So I’m going to go ahead and answer this question. This is a really important question, and so this is this is this answer is no, I will not be satisfied this answer when I utter it, but because it’s still very much a work in process. I think what’s happening is obviously there is a caring for the ground of being, but it’s not the normal arrow of relevance, which is how is it relevant to me, it’s ultimately how am I relevant, in fact, that the arrow of relevance has been so completely turned around that the caring becomes indistinguishable from the movement of conformity to what is most real. And that’s why I think it would come out as something like impartial caring, agapic caring, not universal, but prior to the universe, because you’re trying to get to the prior, you’re trying to put the primordial ground of your cognitive agency into an ever deepening conformity to the primal ground of being itself. And so I think the caring, the arrow conformity turns, and it goes from being in any way a relevance realization to this unbounded trajectory of trans framing that is not trying to come to a conclusion, but is instead tracking and tracing out both of those together, I need a term for both of those together, but tracking and tracing out the depths of reality for its own sake. And in that we come into conformity with the depths of reality realizing themselves for their own sake, the real self realization of reality for its own sake, which is the ultimate grounding of any possibility of contact with what is real. So that was the first thing I wanted to talk about. I think it’s a very important thing to talk about. So that was a great question, Rachel. I really appreciate it. I hope you like the answer. This next question is from Hano or Hano. I remember as a child, I was not able to appreciate a long piece of classical music or jazz for that matter. I see it say, appreciate what I really mean is I couldn’t even sit through them. It made me feel too anxious. Yes. I think this might be a common experience because children generally like consonant music. I’m currently reading Tillich’s Courage to Be. Thanks for recommending it, by the way. You’re welcome. I think everybody should read that book. He says, in it, confrontation with God produces absolute anxiety because of our finitude. Yes. But he doesn’t stop there. So maybe you’re still reading Tillich. Do you think the deepening of our understanding for music is symbolic for the deepening appreciation for reality? Yes. Is this one way of how beauty inverts the arrow of the ego to reveal the truth which allows faith in goodness? Yes. You are saying this so well. You are saying this so well. Do you think this is why we are drawn to music, which makes us sad? Yes. You, if you’ll allow me, and I’m not being hyperbolic here, you are, these questions are demonstrating wise insight. Like you, I just want to shout yes, what you’re saying. Because we have faith in music and can so stand the anxiety without fear and is therefore symbolic for touching God. Yes. Your ability to extend through the symbolic conformity to the flow of intelligibility and the evolution of your salience landscape. Your ability to extend that, extend your cognitive flexibility, extend your ability to track it and trace it and be able to get the proper virtue of reverence, which is the virtue for awe such that the diminishment of the self and its connection to finitude is no longer experienced negatively but experienced positively like in awe because the finitude and the transcendence are being properly bound together, religio, a tonos, a creative tension. Like, and this is what Tillich talks about and that creative tension is our most profound humanity. This is Plato’s deepest point, our Drew Highland’s book. We are finite transcendence. We lose either one of these poles and we lose our finitude and that’s, this is, I think for me, one of the great pieces of literature for that is the heart of darkness and right, because Marlowe resolutely holds on to simultaneously his finitude yet he pursues the quest and is engaged in transcendence as well but he were, he, unlike Kurtz, he doesn’t lose hold of his finitude and unlike the people, like the Europeans, he’s not just bound into his finitude in a completely servile and despairing manner. So we need these practices that do exactly what you’re talking about here and enact what Tillich is talking about. We need these practices that put us into this tonos, this creative tension, which is a significant way of preserving our humanity in then that is the meta-meaning field, the fundamental agent arena relationship. The fundamental agent arena relationship is the relationship between finitude and transcendence, right, and so that is where we most deeply realize, preserve, and inhabit our humanity in the face of what is ultimate or as you’re putting it in this, God. And what Tillich does say, by the way, later on in The Courage to Be, is God takes that tonos up, God valorizes it, God neither wants to overwhelm us demonically nor just serve us, serve our autonomy, God wants to afford our self-transcendence that nevertheless is always grounded in our mortality, which is the proper way to understand our finitude, and finitude is the proper way to understand our mortality. And so practices that can deeply sati remind us of that, and so we feel the stretch, but we also experience the reduction of the self in the face of the transcendent as awe rather than as aweful or as horror. So that was a brilliant series of questions, Hanu, thank you for that very much. This is from Alexander Prokopis, do you have any advice how to best navigate a philosophy course? I’m in my first year university that is deeply materialistic, should I continue to pursue it for the reasoning skills it might give me even though it is basically devoid of the real knowledge and past the wisdom at the level you have been offering it? That is the decision I made, Alexander. I didn’t make it first year, I made it second year. If you can, try and take an ancient philosophy course which might open you up to a bit more philosophy as a way of life. Philosophy as a way of life is becoming more, and the topics of wisdom and transcendence are coming back into academic departments, but it’s a slow process and it varies quite idiosyncratically between different places and institutions. But I decided when I faced the decision you are facing to go on with academic philosophy, and I only later discovered philosophy as a way of life, like I said you should be able to take some courses, some courses on ancient philosophy, existentialism courses that will give you more of a taste of philosophy as a way of life. I think the skills, the meta-science, the meta-culture skills you get from, let’s call it academic philosophy, I think are deeply valuable. They give you a kind of scientific and cultural literacy that is deeply empowering and inoculates you against a significant amount of bullshit in our society. The fact that it’s not philosophy as a way of life means that you have to look for those gems in academic philosophy that point to it, and you also have to take up a serious study and practice of philosophy as a way of life. But if you’re asking me do I think the value of academic philosophy is worth it, even though it’s not giving you the love of wisdom, yes. I think the meta-science and the meta-cultural, the meta-ethical skills and tools that you’re given, you know the psychotechnology of symbolic logic and informal logic is very helpful. They really are powerful, they liberate you and they inoculate you against bullshit in a powerful way. What I do strongly encourage you to do is to not give up phyllo-sophia, that instead you in addition to the academic philosophy you look for the gems you can find within the academic curriculum and you also take up practices, ecology of practices and the study of that literature independently of academic philosophy. I hope that answered your question, Alexander. Dominic Molinero, do you have any advice for those who are interested in setting up a regular dialectic into DIA Logos sessions for their local community? Thank you. Dominic, I recommend that you take the circling into DIA Logos workshop twice. I recommend if you can both times to take it with somebody else so that the two of you, and you can do it with three people even better, but at least the two of you know the sequence of practices that you can engage in and you can also demonstrate them to other people and see their understanding and awareness and build it out. The other piece of advice I want to give is, yeah, so let’s be clear what I just recommended, at least two of you, if more that’s great, but at least two of you do the workshop twice. It’s good to do it twice because taking it in different with different people in different contexts and it’s always evolving. It gives you kind of a stereoscopic vision into the practice. There will also be in after Socrates demonstrations of all of this, so look for that. Chris and I are writing the book about all of this, so look for that, but in addition to doing what I recommended, taking the workshop twice, taking it with some other people so that you can you need to be able to demonstrate it. Of course, we also have some videos that you can make use of. There’s one that’s been put online with Guy and Chris and I about hope, which I think is particularly good. There’s also several videos around philosophical contemplation that are also helpful. In addition to that, I strongly recommend against doing just dialectic into dialogos. Dialectic into dialogos is a meta practice. It’s designed to be in a symbiotic relationship with an ecology of practices, mindfulness practices, movement practices, reflection, and rationality cultivation practices. The practices feed up into dialectic into dialogos, and then dialogos acts as a normative guide. That’s its intended design. It’s not intended to be a standalone practice, but to be a meta practice that’s in that symbiotic top-down bottom-up relationship with an existing ecology of practices. Those are the two pieces of advice I would give to you, Dominic. I hope that’s helpful. Thank you for your question. The next question is from Emil Sorger. Emil sounds French, so maybe sorger. Can you speak to ways in which sapiential practices which originate in deific traditions can or cannot be reimagined in a modern context such that practices are palatable to those possessing a scientific worldview yet do not sacrifice their transformative power? Let me read the whole question, perhaps also covering some of the potential pitfalls of this process and ways to avoid them. Lastly, can we undergo this process in a way that honors the deific tradition? So deific is covering both deism and theism, I take it. This is what the whole of my project is about, Emil, to quote Camus, one of the characters in the plague, my whole project is how to be a saint without God. That’s the whole problem I’m up against these days. I do believe, and because of good reason and good evidence and good transformation, because those are the ways in which we get truth, reason, evidence, and transformation, I do believe, I think, in a highly justified way that the sapiential traditions that originate within deific traditions, it could be polytheistic too because many of these, like Lexio Divina, pre-exist monotheism, that they emerge within the Neoplatonic pagan tradition, for example. So let’s say in a deistic, theistic, or even polytheistic context, these practices can be transposed lovingly and accepted into our current context. That has very much been the case for me for many of the practices I practice and teach and the way they are being reconfigured into new and emergent and vibrant living ecologies and practices. The work that Rafe Kelly is doing, for example, in Return to the Source and the other retreats he does, the work that Vanita Roy is doing, many of these really excellent teachers. The work that Thomas Steadinger is doing in Germany with Elizabeth, I woke all of these communities. Why do I say that first? Some people in these communities have rediscovered these practices independent of an awareness of their religious framework. They have come out of independent and non-theistic secular traditions, obviously informed by some religious background. So can it be done? Yes. I think there’s very good reason, because I have many examples, in both a top-down and a bottom-up fashion, people recreating these practices independently of the religious traditions, people learning from the religious traditions and taking them into a more scientific worldview. I do think that the scientific worldview has to bend to accommodate them, but I think that bending is already occurring independent of this process of transposition. I won’t repeat the arguments about how 4E Cognitive Science is doing exactly that, and also how philosophically naturalism is being extended, not to just what is derivable from science, but what is presupposed by science. That’s something that Greg Enriquez and I are working on. We’re going to be doing a new series together, Greg and I, about exactly that. So the reason I keep stumbling, Emily, sorry, not Emily, Emile is, sorry for that, Emile is because I think the answer is a profound yes, but you basically have to take all of the argument from Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, all of the arguments since then, all the work that’s been doing, all the participant observation, participant experimentation, participant psychotechnological engineering that I’ve been doing, all of that together to give you a yes. What’s the pitfalls? The pitfall, and one that I’m trying to, the primary pitfall, is the primary pitfall that comes to mind right away that I’m trying to avoid is trivialization and commodification. So one of the things that’s happened with the mindfulness tradition is when it was de-religionized, when it was removed, secularized from a religious context by people like John Kabat-Zinn and others, you got a tremendous reduction of the ecology of practices and a tremendous reduction of the depth of meaning of mindfulness within those, and this of course is the basis of all the current critiques of mcmindfulness. So reduction of dynamic complexity, a refusal to enter into a deep exploration of one’s ontology, a commodification and illegitimate repurposing of a practice. Mindfulness has been repurposed away from primarily the cultivation of wisdom towards primarily getting people to be willing to accept their dronage within the corporate machinery, which I think borders on evil. And so those are primary pitfalls that need to be guarded against. What we need to maintain from the religious framework is the profound orientation, which is your fundamental framing, your meta-optimal grip, and how you can navigate through the world, your fundamental orientation towards what is ultimate, what is most real within the religious traditions. I think that can be taken out of a specific religious context, and I point to the whole neoplatonic tradition and also ultimately Zen in a lot of important ways as indicating that that is possible. We can have that profound orientation towards what is ultimate without having to take up a position, I would argue, that transgresses against the most cutting edge possibilities to us within our scientific worldview. So thank you for that excellent question, Emil. I hope you found the answer helpful. So Galad has a question. Great name, by the way. Wow. I’ve been meditating for about a year now following your meditation course on YouTube. I still find it difficult to meditate when I have a cough running nose as they constantly distract me, require me to clear my throat or blow my nose. Do you have any tips on how to meditate through these distractions? So one of the things that can help is if you shift your breathing from being through your nose and through your mouth, the way to do this is to make sure you, like, take a really long drink, make sure your mouth and your throat are wet, moist. Put your tongue just above your teeth, like where you’d put it for doing the letter D, and then breathe that way. I’m going to do it right now. I won’t be able to talk properly. So this allows you to bypass your nose and then take over the primary function of your nose, which is to moisten the air. Now you will have to swallow more with that, but generally you can avoid having to blow your nose. Now if you have a cough, just clear your throat. There’s nothing really that can be done about that. I’m sorry. You can meditate for as long as you can and then clear your throat. You should not teach yourself to suppress your gag reflex. That’s not a good thing to do. That can actually be deadly. Try to hold off clearing your throat as much as possible, meditating on it like you do meditating on a distraction, like you would on a pain, but at some point you will need to cough because, like I say, you don’t want to learn how to shut that off. That’s a dangerous thing to do. So you then say thanks again for all your work and looking forward to After Socrates. Thank you for saying that. So we’ve made arrangements and we’re doing the final preparations for the final filming, which should be done, I can say, by the end of October. We’ll start releasing it very soon. I’m getting a lot of positive feedback from people, uh, sort of beta viewers watching even the raw edits. It’s been extremely encouraging. I know from the inside, but of course there is the self-deception, but I know from the inside, doing this has felt very much like I’ve stepped, I’ve taken a step beyond what was going on in awakening from the meeting crisis. So I look forward to interacting with people about this. And I, you know, I request for people to keep spreading the word about this, because as I’ve said for awakening from the meeting crisis, and even more so, even more so for After Socrates, this should be taken up by groups of people who enter into discussion about every episode, but also take up the points for, I put in points specifically to ponder, to reflect upon for discussion, and people who also will take up the practices that are going to be taught at the same time and integrate those in. So thank you very much, Galaad, for that excellent question. Mark, thank you for all you’re doing to address the meeting crisis and providing the opportunity to support your efforts through Patreon. Thank you, Mark, for supporting me. It’s fantastic. I have a question about the prajna practice from your meditation series that I hope is not inappropriate for this Q&A. Definitely not. Just let’s be very clear. If you’re a patron, you can ask me questions about anything. Awakening from the meeting crisis, Voices with Hraveki, the cognitive science shows, the meditation. And once they happen, you know, the books. They’re all fair game. In my practice, I alternate between meta and the process with my breast, as you taught, and I have experimented with trying to maintain both states of mind simultaneously. Good for you, Mark. It has been interesting, and I’ve had what feels like some success, but I wondered if you could elaborate on what you meant when you talked about the potential for that in your prajna lesson. Yes. I have a note from the previous lesson where you referred to prajna as dynamic wisdom, active self-liberating intelligence. Is what feels to me like a mindset or state of mind missing something fundamental? I think there might be a word missing from the question. Is what feels to me like a mindset or state of mind missing something fundamental about the prajna practice? I think I understand what your question is, Mark. I may just be misreading it in a clumsy fashion. Yes. So the prajna practice, when it moves to simultaneity, I’ve been thinking more about trying to articulate the phenomenology of that, and maybe that’s what you’re pointing to, about the particular state of mind and this dynamic state. So one way to think about it is it’s like a kind of clearing, and it has these two dimensions to it. One is you’re stilling to the core. So you’re stilling to the very core, that very place where the mind is most touching itself, like in the deepest vipassana, and this is a stilling to the very, very core, and it feels like everything is falling still. And at the same time, you’re as open as you can possibly be. So there’s a state of very, very still, falling still, having fallen very still and having been drawn very open. And so you’re still open. It’s a bit of a mnemonic. You’re still open and you’re open still. You’re still open and you’re open still. You’re very still very open. And within that field, you are simultaneously very anchored. You’re deeply in sync with the flow of the realization, of the awareness of awareness and the realization of realization. The awareness of awareness is more in the realization of the realization of the world is more out, but they’re completely interpenetrating. And so you’re very anchored. You’re very anchored in this, how you’re in sync with this field, but you’re also absorbed in it. The way you let yourself to be, you let yourself, like when you let yourself be absorbed into a great piece of music or a profound poem, Platinus talks about when you’re reading and you completely forget that you’re reading. It’s that state of anchored. So the feeling tone, if I can put it that way, is a state of anchored absorption and absorbed anchoring. And it’s still open, deep, profound falling still within and deeply opened out at the same time. And that is more what it feels like when it becomes simultaneous. But that isn’t the final state. But I’m trying to give you a phenomenological touchstone, Mark, so you can move towards it. When you’re in that, then what happens is a final, and this goes towards the answer I gave to Rachel, there’s a final sort of letting go into this. It’s just one-on-one-ing. And there’s a sense in which you’re not doing anything at all. You are completely caught up in it. So that’s a state in which it becomes a self-liberating, reciprocal opening. But you’re even moving past the, it’s opening, but in the sense of like the all-at-once-ness of a bell ringing, it’s already happening while it continues to happen. And that state is where you, precisely because it takes on a profound life of its own, it is this active, self-liberating intelligence. It’s disclosing to you the depths of how you can come into contact with the depths of the psyche and the depths of the world in contact with each other. Yeah, I think that’s all I can say, Mark. I hope you find that helpful. Thank you for that excellent question. It gave me a chance to relate some of what I’m trying to work on right now. I’m in a, I’m sorry, I’m deeply appreciative and grateful of the position I’m in. But I’m in a challenge in position because I have to try and articulate something that is very much resistant to articulation and trying to find the right way to articulate it so that ultimately you will leave behind what I have said and realize it for yourself is what I’m struggling with. But anyways, thank you for that excellent question. And now a question from Rob Gray. I keep, and I’ll keep doing it. Go to Rob Gray’s channel, The Meditating Philosopher. He is doing great work. Rob’s channel needs to be lifted into more of the limelight in this little corner of the internet. Everybody look at Rob’s channel, participate in it, you know, make comments, like it. Let’s get Rob’s channel out there. It’s good stuff. Rob is a really good person. I got to see him again in person at Thunder Bay, in Thunder Bay at the Consciousness and Conscience Conference. Really strongly recommend you check out what he’s doing and you support it and help him get more woven into this little corner of the internet because Rob is really a good person doing good work. And before I answer, read and answer Rob’s question, I just want to thank everybody who’s been watching the films that from the Consciousness and Conscience Conference, both on their channel and on Paul Van de Klay’s channel, the feedback has been deeply encouraging. So thank you very much for that. Okay, let’s get to Rob’s, I anticipate, excellent question. Oh, it’s about prajna as well. Prajna is an amazing practice and you mentioned that you did it a lot as it became internalized and accessed in your day-to-day life. To experience prajna going into the depths of mindfulness in a tandem, going to the depths of meta, interpenetrating and co-affording, well said. Mark, make, Mark, you might also pay attention to the answer to Rob’s question, within Rob’s question, there’s some great guidelines here, with some additional steps and practice synergizing rather than adding where they birth and enabling a new dimension of reality to notice and participate with, complexity through integration of the differentiation exactly, then neither one alone could afford. Exactly, there’s an important way in which you are complexifying in the relationship between Vipassana and Metta and what emerges, well, sorry, what complexification always drives is a new emergent oneness beyond, right, beyond the component parts. Well said, well said. Could you talk about some of the theory and also other neoplatonic practices where cultivating two or more different skills for a while then uniting them to afford a synergy of self-transcending each practice? So that’s going to be the core question, I’m going to come back to that. I find mindfulness plus X and moving practice plus Y or imaginal practice plus Z or social practice plus A all seem to have this potential when explored lightly and playfully but also risk self-indulgence and parasitic processing. This, what Rob is doing here is wise and wise. This is like stepping back and seriously playing and then stepping back and considering the design principles, not just what you’re doing in the practice but the design principles of your ecology of practices. This is so important. Oh yes, yes. For example, talking to Simone rather this quality and imaginal practices in nature enacting respect or reverence with familiar or under-noticed places. It feels like getting to know the moreness in a way that it becomes suchness, such that can afford more no moreness. If that makes sense, that makes perfect sense. I’m going to read that again. Getting to know, and he doesn’t mean just propositionally, getting to know the moreness in a way that it becomes suchness, yes. That can afford more moreness, yes. If that makes sense, yes. And often intimate, intimate, connected and very meaningful. I’d love to take this beyond intuitive understanding and have a more technical grounded understanding of how these synergies can be harnessed or differentiated. Integration in such, I can’t read the rest I get of this for some reason. It’s not coming up on the screen. There we go. Integration in such beautiful, profound and pragmatic ways. Thank you, John. I think you, first of all, you put your finger on exactly the developmental engine here. What you’re doing is you are pushing. Think about, think, okay, think about physiological flexibility. What do we want? We want increased range. Is that all we want to be flexible? No, because I could hyper extend. We want increased range, but also the ability to escape polarity. I don’t get locked here and I don’t get locked here. Increased range, but increased ability to escape from polarity. And then an increased ability to not be in the default median place so that you’re also bouncing around a lot more. It’s called meta stability within the range. So think about those three dimensions. Increased range, right? Increased ability to escape polarity and cultivating meta stability rather than single stability within that range. This is exactly what you’re looking for in a martial art. That is what you’re cultivating when you do what you’re talking about here, Rob. This is how I understand it. When you can properly integrate differentiation. I’ll stop because I used the wrong word. When you can properly complexify integration and differentiation, you are increasing the flexibility. And that’s even, I want to add a word to it and I want to hyphenate it. You’re increasing the flexibility dexterity. This is the right handedness in right mindfulness, right meditation, the meta optimal gripping, the right orientation. You’re increasing the flexibility dexterity of relevance realization itself. And insofar as you complexify relevance realization so you get emergent capacities of relevance realization, you are directly cultivating wisdom. And I think when you are directly cultivating wisdom in this manner, you are bringing out the virtues of that actualized potential because every virtue is just a way to be wise in a particular context. So as you enhance your capacity for wisdom by increasing the flexibility dexterity of your relevance realization, then you will also actualize your virtues in a more deeply and vital fashion. Now, do I see that in the neoplatonic tradition? Well, the neoplatonic practices are produced in exactly that way. You are taking elements from platonic anagagai, elements from Aristotelian reflection, elements from stoicism for how to enhance and alter your sense, alter in a positive way, transform is a word I want, how to enhance, transform your sense and power of agency. And you’re actually integrating them together within the neoplatonic practices. But for example, I think integrating, and this is what we do in the workshop, integrating meditative, so first of all, you integrate meditation and contemplation similarly to prajna in the neoplatonic practices. And then you take that training of mindfulness and you bring it into horizontal interactions such as the circling practice. And so you get vertical dialectic and horizontal dialectic, and then you get the third dimensional of the complexification between those two, the way the vertical and the horizontal play off against each other within neoplatonic contemplation and then more properly even, or sorry, no, more fully, not more properly, not more fully, not more properly, more fully, more fully within dialectic into dialogos. And then of course you have the whole symbiotic relationship between dialectic into dialogos and in the ecology of practices. Now trying to get what are all of the design principles, like how do you integrate imaginal practices with moving practices, social, this is very much something that’s a work in progress, very much. But I do think that this toggling, serious play with doing that, with doing the complexification, doing the layering, so you always want to measure, you always want to keep the dimension of layering, like we’re putting these two together and something emerges that’s higher order, that’s why I’m talking about layering, you always want to put that in mind with what’s your pedagogical program, what’s the sequence of practices that properly onboard you into the right appreciation and appropriation of these skills, that’s how you can counterbalance the layering so that it’s not just self-indulgence and parasitic processing, but also like you said, this is, oh, toggling between the serious play in the practice and then stepping out and reflecting on it and asking you and bringing active open-mindedness, bringing rationality properly to bear and saying, is this self-indulgent, am I getting emergent functions, are the emerging, so am I getting emergence, is the emergence percolating through my psyche, is it permeating through my life and then are those two also interacting with each other and especially are other people noticing that the three dimensions of transfer occurring because then your practice has become, and I mean this properly and I mean this respectfully, it has become a genuine ritual. Thank you for that excellent question, Robert. I hope you like the answer. We’re now going to shift the questions from the chat. So Fanny Grande, what is the great neoplatonic insight of Saint Thomas Aquinas? The great neoplatonic insight of Thomas, first of all, I recommend this book if you want to get a really good answer. Here’s somebody who can answer that question better than I can and in this book. JP Marceau and I are going to be talking about this book very shortly and we’ll record it. His great neoplatonic insight is his understanding of being as the most, that being, I’m trying not to pun here, that being, capital B, should be understood as the most primordial act. It is the deepest, it is the origin and deepest point of actuality. What I mean by that is you can think of, and this was a critique made of Thomas by Duns, Goddess and Auk, and the being is just an empty term, just sort of pointing to instances of things, just pointing to instantiation. But Thomas was of the idea that all things are being, and that’s an act they’re doing. And what’s really interesting is he found this tonos. So these two things are both being, but they’re not being in exactly the same way. And so their being, that act, stretches between what is unique about them and what is shared between them. There’s a deep, not just a similarity, he was playing around with sort of notions of analogy, but there’s a co-presencing of being in both of these, but that it doesn’t make them homogeneously the same. It is simultaneously the actualization of their own intrinsic natures, their own through lines to use the neoplatonic language that I’ve been trying to cultivate with Chris and Guy and other people. So this distinction between act, between essay, to be and essence, I think is a profound move because it helps us to remember the ground of being as a verb rather than as a trivialized common noun. So you get a sense of this, the vibrancy of its being and the vibrancy of this, and somehow they’re vibrating together, but they are not vibrating at the same time. So it’s a very, very important distinction. Completely homogeneously, that to me is a brilliant insight. And I strongly recommend reading this book to get deeper into that question. The next question is from Max Gatien. What is your position on the ancient medieval problem of universals, realism, normalism, anti-realism, etc.? So I think my position would best be summed up as post-normalist. I think we have to learn from the normalist that there are categories that don’t have essences. There are similarities that aren’t real, that are merely correlational and illusional, but I think we have to take it that the success of science, and this is Berman’s point, right, and Platonism and the objects of science and other people’s arguments, like Clark is making similar arguments, DC Schindler is making similar arguments. The success of science says no, but there are categories that have essences. There are real patterns of real similarity, causal, but not just efficient cause, but formal cause, constraint, vertical causation, as Smith talks about, Wolfgang Smith and I, you can see those videos on the meeting code. All of that is a denial of the claim of normalism. Certainly I think anti-realism is, I don’t see it as a viable position. I think it self-destructs. I think normalism is logically possible, but I think it is largely undermined by the real success of science. I think you only get a strict normalism if you deny the real success of science, and to me that seems to put one into a performative contradiction. So my position is post-nominalist, neo-platonic. I hope that answers your question, Max. I’m trying to get through as many of these as I can. Felix Dorak, hi John, given insight is ultimately non-conceptual, has your conceptual work and clear passion for that work ever negatively interfered with your practice, and how so do you deal with it? Yes, it has, and it’s dealt with it, sorry, how I dealt with it. I encountered it finally in, of course, a non-conceptual way, which was my passion for theorizing and teaching, and they overlap for me, and I’m very grateful that that is the case for me. I find it transferring to areas of my life where I should keep my mouth shut, and areas of my life where I should be paying more attention to the non-propositional and non-conceptual. Please understand that a lot of the advice, if that’s the right way to put it, advice, if that’s the right way to put it, or teaching that I’m giving you, I’m equally trying to apply to myself for two reasons. I need it, and secondly, I want to exemplify, I want to, I take seriously that I am in some ways, because of what I’m teaching and how I’m teaching, I’m a role model, and I don’t want to disappoint people in that role, and I don’t want to disappoint myself. So I’m saying this as much to myself as I’m saying to everybody else. I precisely have catched myself, right, trying to be the theorist teacher in situations where I shouldn’t be the theorist teacher. I should shut up and listen, and I should shift my attention into enacting the non-propositional more, making it more present, respectable, identifying it with it more, the participatory, and that is something I’m constantly doing, and so I have practices that are sort of meta-practices in that they continually remind me to pay attention to inappropriate transfer and to seek out and enhance appropriate transfer. I hope that answered your question, Felix. We’re going to now move to Brian’s question. Brian Rivers, oh sorry, Rivera. Sorry, Brian. Do you think there’s a hierarchy of insight, some insights being more important and depending upon others? How do you think about the progression of insight and self-awareness? Is there one? Yes, I definitely think so. I think that we can have systematic, systemic insights. So a single insight solves a single problem, and I argue for this in Awakening for the Meeting Crisis, but you can also get an insight into a type or a family of problems, a network of problems, and you can especially get this. Here’s a whole bunch of problems that are in co-hate, and then you get an insight where you find the nexus point between them, and then you, from that nexus point, it’s like a two-moment systematic insight. So first of all, you insight into the nexus point, and then you get an insight from that nexus point into the whole constellation that is bound together through the nexus, and all of those problems get co-reformulated, co-addressed, and I think that’s very much what’s happening in childhood development. The child isn’t just having an insight, they’re having that kind of two-step systemic and systematic insight, and I think as the child is to the adult, the adult is to the sage, we can also do the same thing. We can get insight that bridges between things we think are separate problems, constellate them together, and then afford us a powerful point of coordinated simultaneous insight, addressing, reformulating, restructuring all these problems, and I think those kinds of meta-insights, it are, they start to launch us into mystical experience, transformative experience, higher states of consciousness, and we start to see back on what was in co-hate, fragmented and disconnected, in a way that allows us to appreciate the truth, because the truth is really only realized, and the deepest truths are only realized in transcendence. When you do this, this systemic and systematic insight, this two-step moment of finding the nexus point and then doing multiple simultaneous insight, insight-solving resolution in parallel, you’re doing, you’re of course creating profound enhanced flexibility of relevance realization, and through profound complexification of processing that produces emergent functions, emergent abilities, and that’s why you get a developmental step in children, and that’s why you, it’s not just more knowledge, it’s a new way, new capacities for knowing, and we get the same thing when we move as child is to the adult, the adult is to the stage. So I want to thank you all for joining me in this Q&A. I want to thank all the supporters of Patreon, all the, both of your financial support, which is very significant, and your moral support, your encouragement, which is also very significant, and I of course want to thank Madeline for her organization and running all of this. So I look forward to our next one, and I want to thank you all for your time and attention. Take good care, everyone.