https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=btMhGUzvBhU
Welcome everyone to our monthly Patreon Q&A. I want to thank you all for accommodating the switching of the date for this month. I’ve been traveling a lot this month on work, two different conferences, two different presentations, a lot that you’ll see the fruits of. I hope you’ve all taken a look at the new Patreon tiers. We’ll be retiring the benefits of the old tiers this week, so please sign up for the new tiers to remain actively a part of this community. I am incredibly grateful for your support. I can tell you that my work is being taken up and appreciated within several important networks of communities and of academics. Thank you so much for affording that. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to Madeline over direct message on Patreon or email John at JohnVervaikey.com. We’re going to begin and our first question is from Matt Wilkinson. Thank you so much, Matt. Hi, John. I am loving After Socrates. Great. Glad to hear it. It’s so profound and engaging. That’s encouraging. I tried a lot of new things with After Socrates and I’ve been getting a lot of positive response about it, and so I appreciate that. So thank you so much for that. One question though. I struggled to understand the practice at the end of episode five, the walking practice, the melody of reality, etc. makes no sense to me. Can you point me towards something that would help unpack this? Thanks again, Matt. So let’s just quickly review the practice and then, Matt, I’ll point you to a resource that I think will be very helpful. So while you’re walking, you’re trying and your walking helps because the walking has a rhythm to it and you’re trying to pick up the rhythm of process. That’s fuses. Just notice how moment by moment the world keeps pulsating into existence, right? That sense of presencing, presencing, presencing, and you have the shadow of that, right? You have things slipping into the past and coming out of the future. So presencing, presencing, and that’s like a rhythm. It’s the backbone. Now Matt is having a challenge with the next, which is fuses, which is the melody of patterning. And this is the idea that look around you, see all the patterns. Maybe there’s patterns in the needles of the pine tree or patterns in the sidewalk or patterns in how the flowers are around. Just noting all the patterns and note that the patterns are within you and without you, like music. And those patterns are right. That’s what it means. They’re like a melody. They’re unfolding. They’re not just simply raw repetition. You can see like things are differentiating while they’re unfolding. It’s more like a song, like a melody. And that is the fuses of patterning, really paying attention, noting the patterning all around you and within you and how they’re bound up together. They interpenetrate each other. And then you move to noesis, which is you’re noticing that behind it all, there’s a sense of it being one, of it being principled, of it being law-like, of it being regulated. And this is the noesis. This is the harmony of principle. Somehow all of these things are in concert together. They are all separate beings, but they are all within being together. And so this practice is a way of developing contemplative skills in the world. And you’re cultivating the imaginal. You’re using your imagination, not so much visual imagery, but like musical imagery in order to enhance your perception of the world. And this is drawn from an important book by John Rusen, S sorry, R-U-S-S-O-N called Bearing Witness to Epiphany, in which he lays this out. He lays out the musicality of intelligibility. It’s a thin book, a beautiful book. I’ve got to talk to John Rusen. Some of you may have seen the discussion on my channel with John Rusen. I hope to talk to him again. My guy, Senstock, has had quite a few conversations with John on his channel as well. So that’s the idea. The practice goes on a little bit further from that. But those are the three parts that have that musicality of intelligibility. And then you’re building it in to a neoplatonic contemplative practice and you’re using the imaginal. But music, rather than a visual image, although you’ll see patterns, right, it’s more that musical imagery. And of course, music is so inherently imaginal to begin with. Like you’re not really seeing things. And when you’re hearing music, it’s simultaneously inside and outside. It’s drawing stuff from you, but it’s also disclosing from the world. And that drawing and the disclosing are interpenetrating each other and creating a religio and playing the serious play with your salient landscape. So that’s what you want to be doing with the practice. And then the book, as I said, is Bearing Witness to Epiphany by John Rusen. Thank you so very much, Matt, for that question. So the next question, the questions are very large today, very long, and I appreciate that, is from Philip Olek. I’m going to read the whole question and then try and make my way through the answer piece by piece. So, Philip begins, am I correct in connecting the practice of Awe-Awe from Actors Socrates to the way self-organizing criticality works in oscillating between chaos and order? Are there ways to do similar exercises in a ritual setting? I’m currently starting to work on a LARP project, that’s live action role playing, with friends that will include a serious play with ritual. Oh, every character will have their own personal reflection, a small item generating random sounds and of lights representing chosen sets of archetypes that they will negotiate their actions with. The group will be gathered around a giant technological mirror, a source of reflections, acting as an oracle for the tribe. This sounds exciting. I’m just at the beginning of my research regarding ritual studies and specific historical examples. I will deeply appreciate any directions. The whole project is aimed at, other than having fun, of course, to be an imaginal exercise in tribe building and communicating with hyper-agents and also an artistic metaphor for technological society. LARP is a fertile ground for that, it assumes suspension of disbelief and is in itself a kind of serious play. First of all, I agree with what you just said. And secondly, the way you’re trying to bring a serious play on ritual and the imaginal into LARPing, I think is very appropriate. As you’ll see when we move on later, especially some of the episodes specifically on ritual and the imaginal, right, but you’ll get, especially when we demonstrate them, episodes 10A and 10B, you’ll see that a lot of it is exactly as you insightfully noted, is this attempt to co-opt, exapt, access and activate self-organizing criticality in order to afford more present insight and more profound kinds of insight. So there’s a lot, I mean, there are a lot of practices and rituals that have that dynamic in them in which there is an ordering process and then a destroying process, an ordering process and destroying, for example, the ritual of Tai Chi Chuan, right, you’re doing a yang, you make this move, you’re exploiting the heart, for example, and then it breaks down and opens up into another move. And so you go from yang, break down, and then a yin emerges, which is already an opponent processing with the yang, and then back out again. And so you can see in many of the practices, you’ve got this moving in and out, the contemplation practice, which is expansive, and then the meditative practice, which is condensing, this is breaking frame and making frame, zooming out, zooming in. There’s so many rituals in which this is a organizing grammar for the ritual. Try to remember to also layer. So opponent processing, right, you can have multi-dimensional opponent processing like you’re doing here, but you also want to layer. So you want to start with, you want to have an aspect of the ritual that is primarily, right, very participatory right at the basis of the sensory motor loop, and then that should layer onto, it can be exacted into a perspectival ritual that picks up on it. So right, this is the vertical jazz, the horizontal jazz is when you’re jazzing with other people. The vertical jazz is the jazz between the kinds of knowing. So you do something that’s primarily participatory sensory motor, and then that gets taken up into the perspectival, another ritual, but it’s layered on, and then that gets taken up into the more procedural, and then that can be taken up into a propositional or even dialogical practice. So you want to do the opponent processing, like you’re saying, you also want to pay attention to the layering. I think, I want to hear from you, Philip, how this goes. There has to be a proper empirical aspect to this, like try this out, I want to see what happens and hear back from you. But I think what you’re proposing is excellent. I think, I think LARPing, and I mean, when you get to Jeep form, it’s already passed over into ritual, to my mind. The thing that will turn it into a ritual other than serious play is the degree to which you are trying to affect bleed, the degree to which you’re trying to blur the boundaries between what’s happening in the practice and real life in a healthy way. That’s what serious play should do, not in a logical identification way, which means you’re going crazy, but you’re after bleed. The degree to which the ritual transfers to non-ritual contexts, transfers to other domains of people’s life, other levels of their psyche outside of the serious play and affording the finding, the formulation of problems, the creating of new connections and structural functional organizations in whatever domain you are significantly engaging in some kind of long-term endeavor. So keep an eye open for that to fill up. Thank you very much for your excellent question. And I’m really, how do you say things without sounding self-centered? I want to express my appreciation for the way people are taking up after Socrates. What I really requested and advised was don’t just watch the lectures, get into discussion groups. A lot of them are emerging. Robert Gray is running one. I seriously get involved with that. It’s at the Stoa. And Alexander Zachary, I think, is working with him. I think they’re also doing one on Robert’s channel. There’s that. And then people are taking this up and they’re seeing how they can experiment with this and transfer it to other domains of their life in an insightful and enriching fashion. That is how after Socrates was intended to be received. It doesn’t mean, of course, that people won’t have criticisms, and I’m getting criticisms. And of course, I appreciate constructive criticisms set within an acknowledged proper appreciation, meaning understanding and valuing what’s good in the thing, good in the series. I ignore just insults and ad homonyms and accusations and cursing and all that. That’s completely irrelevant. People taking it up and engaging with it. I’m just so happy about that because that is how I intended it to be taken up. So thank you very much. Next question is from Gabriel Garcia. Gabriel begins. What is your thank you so much, Gabriel. What is your vision for the ecology of practices as presented in after Socrates? Do you expect from each viewer to practice all of the listed practices as a single routine, or are you giving an abundant amount of practices so that each viewer follows the ones that draw their attention the most? When considering this, I noticed that all of the given practices can help to promote changes in participatory and perspectival knowing. So this being the case, are all of them different roads that lead to the same path? That’s an excellent question, Gabriel. My intent initially is for people to do all of the practices in the pedagogical order I gave them, not so that they’re eventually limited to them, but to do exactly two things. And you alluded to one. One is to pick up what are the domains, get a sense, not a thought, but a sense of what are the domains the practices are applying to. What are the design principles? We’ve got multidimensional opponent processing, you have layering, and I’m also showing you a pedagogical program. Which practices come first because they afford later practices? What’s the relationship between individual practices and group practices? These are all the design principles I want people also to get a good sense and taste for. And then they can choose, but they shouldn’t just choose according to comfort. So this is the thing. You have to choose those comfort is the worst thing to pick. There should be intuitive resonance. They should speak to you, but they should be practices that you find yourself in a zone of proximal development. You’re kind of getting it, but you have a sense that there’s more that you do not know. You should have that Socratic sense. I don’t know. So it should be calling you out, but calling you from something beyond what you can easily or readily grasp. If the practice is just easily assimilated, right, it’s not for you. If the practice is just jarring and you can’t accommodate to it at all, it’s not for you. This is the Piagetian advice. You want to get in the place in which you can have the conditions that give you flow where you’re getting it, but not completely. And you realize you can sense and taste that you need to grow in order to really get what is being intimated in this. You’re getting this. There’s something. And you should have a sense of reaching, of stretching your skills, of opening the possibilities of perspectives, of how can I put it, empowering the possibility of new roles, new identity. I recommend and you’ll get this recommendation later in the series. Of course, there’s there’s lots of good ecologies and practices, especially the neoplatonic tradition, the wisdom of a patea, which I believe I’ve already recommended. I can’t remember what episode I recommended in. You can take some of those up. I am trying to give you a skeleton. And if you want to just stick with that skeleton, that’s fine. But I’m trying to give you a sense of these important design principles, introduce you to the Socratic neoplatonic tradition, and then recommend how you should be taking up practices as you seed and develop your own individual or small group ecologies of practices. But you see, if you have the design principles and you have some of the overlapping theoretical grammar and conceptual vocabulary from the Socratic neoplatonic tradition, then while your practices, your ecology may be quite unique or individual to you and your group, you can nevertheless enter into deep dialogue and discussion, perhaps even dialoguos with other groups so that you can act as mutual supports and mutual challenges to each other. So, Gabriel, thank you for your question. That’s the overall intent of how I expect people to take up the practices. Thank you very much for your question. So Martin has a question also about after Socrates. I’m really happy with all the enthusiasm for after Socrates. Now, there are three questions. So it’s going to take I’m going to read all three questions from Mark from Martin. And then I’m going to answer them one at a time. So I’m going to read all three first. If Plato was presumably not being specific how to do dialectic on purpose, probably due to at least one of the three plausible explanation John walked us through on the episode or something else entirely, as John said, what do you think the reverse engineering project will leave us without? Is the reverse engineering project one that is needed because of the times we live in and our culture of cognitive grammar forcing us to understand it only in a reverse engineering fashion? I’ve changed my mind. I’m going to answer each question in turn. This is so first of all, as you indicated, the reverse engineering is just due to the insufficiency of the evidence. This is called the under determination problem. There is insufficient evidence to determine a specific historical proposal. This is what they were doing. So for that reason, because I want to be very honest, what I’m doing is a reverse engineering. And thankfully, Martin has acknowledged that. What is being what will the project leave out? Some of the projects, some of the things I’m aware of, I’ll say, of course, there’s things that’s leaving out that I can’t possibly know because of the argument I just made. I can’t know what’s missing because I’m ignorant of it because the data is too poor. But some of the things that are missing is. So Socrates is like a gadfly for the state. He’s very constantly challenging the state. And. That can’t work for us. Socrates was in a direct participation democracy. He would literally go to the assembly and vote on all legislation. He literally participated in the government. He literally fought in the army. We are not in that situation. We are in a long ranged, highly symbolic, technologically bureaucratized representative democracy in which our access, Like the chances that anything I say in all of my work joined together will reach the ear of the prime minister are vanishingly small. So I can’t be a gadfly in that way. You can’t be a gadfly in that way. We can’t. But this is why I’ve talked about stealing the culture. I thought of a different model, the model of Christians within the early early Christianity within the Roman Empire setting up. We can do what they do. They set up small communities and then the communities came into a community of communities and they worked out sort of this meta curriculum called their catechism. And they worked out ways of managing the relationship between individual practice and group practices by developing the three institutions, the church, the monastery, the university. All of that. That is how I’m recommending it. So that direct participation in challenging government is not available to me. It’s into most of us. So that aspect has to be left out. Socrates was a lot more. Combative, I suppose is the right term. He was a lot more about drawing people out into contradictions. That’s because he’s in a culture that is built on this kind of very powerful, verging on aggressive competition. And it’s very, very male centric, very male centric. There are no participants in the dialogue in other than a couple of really important exceptions like diatema, which says that Plato understood something about women and access to the contemplative dimension. And he hints at it in various places. But the dialogues themselves are nevertheless very, very male centric. And I believe that that’s not what we need right now. We need women, not just men and women, open to all the genders. We need everybody to be able to participate in this. And so that is why the reverse engineering has tended. I tend to try and transform the attempt to draw people into reductio ad absurdum into this more trying to see what was mistaken, what was missing, what was mysterious, and therefore put it more on positive construction. Also, because none of us are Socrates. You see, the negativity of the Socratic process that draws people out and reveals their contradictions was counterbalanced by the charismatic, sapiential, having to do with wisdom, presence of Socrates. You’re in the company, the presence of a bona fide sage. We don’t have that. So we can’t rely on that to counterbalance that more sort of critical, incisive elements of the Socratic practice. So some of the things were left out precisely because we’re not in a direct democracy. We are trying to open this up to something other than sort of a hyper masculine approach to dialogue. While still trying to keep all of that ability to challenge, open up, get people to wonder, get them to come into a poria. And we are not we can’t wait for Socrates to show up. We don’t have that time. And genuine sages, well, they’re really rare. And so the proposal was, can we play more on the logos and the intelligence, the collective intelligence within distributed cognition so that we can all act as sages to each other within the dynamic flow within the collective intelligence of distributed cognition? So those are some of the things more explicitly brought in to try and. Exapt, I think, is within the reverse engineering. What was going on in the Socratic practice into something that can work for us and also, you know. The dialogues have a small number of people in them. Right. Two, three, four, maybe. I think there’s more at the fatal because they gathered around Socrates. We’re trying to do a practice that has small groups that are operating within large groups. And so, you know, there’s been, you know, I’ve paid a lot of attention to how some of the Buddhist communities practice this. Some of the Christian communities have practiced this. So all of that is going into that reverse engineering. Second question, what’s the name of the other type of memory that contrasted against episodic memory? In the video, there’s an example of when the person learned how much two plus two equals saying something like I learned that back in school, but can’t remember exactly what that’s called semantic memory. Semantic memory. It’s your know it’s your memory for facts like cats or mammals. Number three, what’s the definition of non propositional second person perspective and its advantage in true dialogos? Really? Is it seeing the world as if I had your participatory and perspectival knowing, but without your propositional knowing or the other way around? Having your propositional knowing, but my participatory and perspectival knowing. Note that I use the word advantage instead of goal, as I don’t believe there’s a goal or something tangible to be achieved in two dialogos. But by the same or similar token, advantage may also be incorrect. I had a pre clarification around this tool. What you said first is exactly it. So you’re you’re you are trying to pick up on the perspective and the co identification process that’s going on in the person you’re having the the logos with and allow that to transform and inform your propositions as you try to come into more of a conformity, meaning a a resonant reciprocal opening with that perspective and. And participatory knowing I know what you mean by advantage. Perhaps you mean more like advance. It helps the it helps the process advance and move forward. It draws people into more reciprocal opening. It gives them that it’s more conducive to the shared flow state. So Martin, thank you very much for your very sophisticated and excellent questions. Thank you for the answer. I hope you found it helpful. Felix also has a long question, so thank you very much, Felix. I’ll go over your question. I appreciate all of this tremendous interest, as I say, and it is my responsibility to answer these questions. I want to encourage people, though, to get into discussion groups and bring up these kinds of questions with each other as well. This shouldn’t be totally bound to me or even to the people that are in the series. So. Felix begins. I have a question regarding the cultivation of an ecology of practices from the incredible amount of practices that are being taught. For instance, I have an ongoing practice that worked very well for me. At this point, it’s mostly letting go into a flow state, which leads to a mosaic of resting and awareness of awareness, savoring pleasant energy, and I think that’s a very good question. I think that’s a very good question, as well, as an energy phenomena inquiry into emptiness and inquiry into difficult emotions as they come up. That sounds like an excellent practice, Felix. Additionally, after some practices for lucid dreaming and dream yoga, now the practices you are introducing and after Socrates really resonate with me. Good. Uh, they should. That would be my hope. See, I just want to break here and make something really, really clear. I’m not trying to be imperial. I’m not trying to say the Socratic, Neoplatonic path is the way. I’m trying to reverse engineer it, exact it so that it can stand among the other wisdom traditions on its full footing, and it can enter into deep dialogue, reciprocal reconstruction with the other wisdom traditions. I would hope that people coming out of Buddhist, or Hindu, or Taoist, or Jewish, or Islamic framework will find, and I mean this in a good way, will find a beautiful, elegant, sparring partner in the Neoplatonic, the Socratic way. And so it’s very good, Felix, that you’re finding this resonance. So let’s go back to it. Now the practices you’re introducing in After Socrates really resonate with me, and I’d love to engage with them to understand this path, and also to further develop my own practice. Perfect, perfect, exactly, exactly. To do so, one option would be to stay with my practices as the base and integrate these new practices into my existing practices over time. Another option would be to fully focus on the new practices for a certain amount of time to really learn them and integrate after that period. What would be your general advice for working situations? Excellent question. So what I recommend is can you do a reduced or attenuated, very baseline, backgrounded continuity? Continue your existing practices, but attenuate them, do them more as background, and then give more full attention, focal attention, more time and effort to engaging with these practices for a particular period, right? They’re foregrounded. These aren’t completely shut off. You do them, like I say, in an attenuated background fashion, sort of a maintenance in the background, and then you have the foreground where you really develop, really practice these practices for a period, and then integrate the two together. Given the availability of so many practices and paths, I recognize how easy it is to become distracted and dabble in too many approaches without developing depth. Everybody, everybody that is doing an ecology of practices, take note of what Felix said. Given the availability of so many practices and paths, I recognize how easy it is to become distracted and dabble in too many approaches without developing depth. This is the dilettante fallacy. A little bit of this, a little bit of that, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, right? Depth means you are realizing the design principles, not in thought, but in how they are transforming you. You can’t get that if you’re a dilettante. All you’re doing in a dilettante is collecting wonderful experiences, and we all fall prey to this, so I’m including myself in this danger, but all you do is collect wonderful experiences that you put on the ego shelf so you can demonstrate to others and yourself how spiritual you are, right? You can’t get into the zone of proximal development if you’re being a dilettante, okay? So please, everybody, hear what Felix is saying. On the other hand, the idea of an ecology of practice really resonates with me, and developing one seems to necessitate at least some exploration. Yes, do it the way relevance realization works, right? You have a set of practices. You open up the options, and in how they resonate, zone of proximal development with your existing practices, some of them remain, most of them get killed off, and now your ecology has varied, and then you expand out, select only those that catch, not comfortable, catch in drawing you into the zone of proximal development so that you’re realizing the design principles of an ecology of practice, multi-dimensional opponent processing, multi-layered layering, proper pedagogical program, proper top-down bottom-up relationship between an ecology of practices and dialogical practices within a community. So, Philip continues, Felix, I should say, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Also, if this is an appropriate place, what would be your advice given the two specific sets of practices? I think I’ve answered all your questions along the way, Philip, Felix, and you say thank you a lot and all the best, Felix. Thank you so much, Felix, and I’ve tried to give you some very clear answers to your very excellent questions. Varun Godbollah, thank you, Varun. Thank you so much for your support. Varun begins, number one, the very machinery that makes us adaptive is what makes us prone to self-deception. I’ve tried constantly, consciously training the recommendation systems on social networks to give me more pro-social and wiser content, for example, by changing my behavior and click through on those services, but I’m wondering if I can somehow twist this recommendation systems even more consciously to somehow provoke me into obtaining more insight. Do you have any thoughts? First of all, my first thought is that is really cool. This is also something we should all consider. We need, oh, this is brilliant. We need to incorporate into our ecology of practices the wise interfacing, and this is part of our community house, the wise interfacing with social media. Trying to alter the recommendation patterns, the way you’re doing, Varun. This is brilliant. I’m gonna ask Madeline to note your name down because I wanna take this up and start recommending it explicitly. It’s been something implicit, and I’ve been doing this implicitly here and there, but what you’re doing is really interesting. One way to enhance it would be to become more aware of cognitive biases and how advertising and social media pathways are triggering and exacerbating the cognitive biases, like the confirmation bias and the my side bias. So become aware of those. What you’re practicing, Varun, is you’re practicing active open-mindedness, but in social media, you’re becoming aware of the biases and how you’ve been manipulated, and then you’re trying to actively counteract them. Right here, right now, I wanna recommend that. That’s brilliant. I think becoming more explicitly aware of the biases, more explicitly cultivating active open-mindedness and bringing that in. Trying to get a bit of a small world network that you have mostly local connections that are following. I mean, it’s almost like a ninth part of the eight-fold path, right? You’re right watching, but you wanna keep a couple of long, more long-distance connections that can challenge you out of the blue and introduce some self-organizing criticality. You have to manage that very carefully. I would recommend setting up a buddy system. This is what we do when we really have maybe two or three people and you all watch each other. You might wanna journal about your patterns and see it, because often when we write stuff down, we become aware of patterns that we aren’t explicitly aware of when we’re just holding them in working memory. So these are things you could do to enhance your brilliant proposal. Excellent. Two, I’ve published a bunch of research in deep learning. Of course, okay. And I’m increasingly interested in making academic contributions to alleviating the meeting crisis. I’ve started reading some of your papers, but I was curious if there’s anything you recommend reading to ramp up faster. For example, if a grad student told you that they wanted to get started, what three pieces of work, either books or papers, would you absolutely recommend that they read? So I think in order to deeply get into 4E cog Psi and the perspectival and the participatory, I think you should take a look at Evan Thompson’s work, the earlier work, The Embodied Mind and the more recent work, Mind in Life. Those are two books I would highly recommend. I think Varela’s book, Ethical Know-How, is great about wisdom as a good book. The Sovereignty of the Good by Iris Murdoch would be my third book, just to get you started. That’s all on the wisdom, deep continuity hypothesis, the relevance realization, deep learning, Mark Miller’s work, just find papers by Mark Miller and read them. Some of the work that Brett Anderson is publishing online on Medium, read that stuff. That would be a good start. So thank you very much, Faroon. I really was really impressed by your practice. And I think this should be a proper domain within any good ecology of practices. I’m gonna give this a lot more thought. Okay, now to Nancy. Do you have an opinion on McGillchrist’s wagers, similar to Pascal’s wager? I’m not aware of it. If you present it here, I’ll take a look at it, but otherwise I’m ignorant and I won’t comment. After the original two options, he proposes a third. If God is an eternal becoming, fulfilled as God through the response of his creation, and we for our part constantly more fulfilled through our response to God, then we are literally partners in the creation of the universe, perhaps even in the becoming of God, who is himself becoming as much as being. This is a very whiteheadian approach to God, in which case it is imperative that we try to reach and know and love that God, not just for our own sakes, but because we bear some responsibility, however small, for the part we play in creation and indeed how big or small we cannot know. The terms are derived from our limited experiences in a finite world. This is from the Matter With Things, page 1259. I have the book, and like many people, I have not yet read it because I’ll need a month to read the two volumes. Just those books, just those two. As in many things, I find myself in convergence with Ian. So for me, this is how I would rephrase it, wisdom and a relationship to sacredness are not optional for us. But I find that runs largely independent of Pascal’s Wager. And so my way of putting it is, you either are doing this implicitly, oh, I’m completely secular, really, and do you watch sports? Sports is a religion. Almost every anthropologist would readily, easily acknowledge the way we participate in sports is a religious ritual, and we are trying to find our teams sacred. Whether or not it’s a good ritual that transfers outside of your life, it used to be, we used to try to train good sportsmanship and other things, mutual respect to an opponent, but of course, sports is starting to lose all of that. But that’s just an example. So you’re either doing this unconsciously, implicitly, or you’re doing it consciously, explicitly, reflectively. I think you’re much better off, all things, all else being equal, setters paribus, doing it explicitly, reflectively, and dialogically than doing it autodidactically, unconsciously, and implicitly, so I’m in agreement in that way. I think those are the only two options, and Pascal’s Wager. Why make the wager about the afterlife? Make the wager about this life, and I think it properly can. So I wanna thank you for your excellent question. Rob, what will you be talking about at the Young Society next month, or potential topics? You haven’t picked one yet. I gave that talk yesterday. Also, do you have any favorite Jungians or people who speak right on topics related to depth psychology and alchemy, or people doing some group practices based on the imaginal, such as systemic constellations, a group practice at the Stowa this month? I know I have some excellent facilitators that Peter L. introduced to me, and we both highly recommend. So I wasn’t speaking. It was a question with David D’Andrea. He was asking a bunch of questions about the meeting crisis and about ritual and non-propositional knowing, trying to see if bridges could be built, and I think they were to Jung. I mean, one of my closest friends and collaborators is to me one of the best current leaders of Jung, who is Anderson Todd. Just follow the work he’s doing. Bernardo Castrop has written a beautiful book, I’ve been told. I have it, I haven’t read it yet, but Anderson, whose opinion, no, not his opinion, whose judgment I deeply respect has said it’s excellent. It’s called Jung’s Metaphysics by Bernardo Castrop. Raph has a book on chemical imagination and ally work. These are both excellent books containing excellent practice. So I’d like to know more about this systemic constellation, so perhaps I’ll ask Peter about it. So thank you very much, Raph, for your excellent question. We’re now shifting to live questions from the chat. Thank you to Patreon subscribers and everyone watching right now. The first is from Eric Hendries. What are your thoughts on Plato’s unwritten teaching? Do you have a sense for what they might contain? How important do you think it is to understand them if we are to understand Plato? This is, right, this is a deep controversy. In the third way that I follow, Gonzalez and Highland and Ruchnik and just a whole bunch of people, many of whom I mentioned in the series, think the third way is to, the first way is that everything in Plato is just sort of in the literal propositions and the arguments, and that’s all we have to pay attention to, sort of mainstream university presentation. The second was, no, no, the esoteric, the dialogues are largely at most suggestive or covering for the unspoken dialogues that had something to do with the monad, the dyad, the indeterminate dyad, various sort of Pythagorean mathematical propositions and practices. The third way says, no, the non-propositional is showing up in the dialogues in a powerful way, but you have to read the dialogues other than just extracting their arguments and the so-called theories. We should stop saying, we should stop saying Plato had a theory of the forms. There is nothing like a theory of the forms presented in Plato. There is something like a theory of the tripartite psyche, a psychological theory argued for, for example, in the Republic. There’s nothing like a theory of the forms, right? And so the looks, this is how the three options, this will be helpful. The first option says, there is a theory and we can extract it by just extracting sort of definitions and propositional arguments from Plato. The second one says, there is a theory, but it can’t be found in the dialogue. So it’s esoteric and it was unspoken. The third says, there is no such theory and the attempt to find this theory or propose the theory is outside of the dialogues is to misunderstand the inherently dramatic and dialogical nature of the dialogues. And so that’s my position. Now, were there things going on in the school? Sacred geometry was most likely being practiced, which is an imaginal practice. Should we adopt sacred geometry? I’m not sure about that. It doesn’t have the same binding. Like you have to remember math and geometry were identical in Plato’s time. And they thought of math, therefore very spatially. And the geometry acted as imaginal, as a bridge between abstract conception and perceptual experience. Maybe for some people, sacred geometry would work that way. I doubt for many of us, because the way we have been taught geometry and taught alternative, more fundamental forms of mathematics like algebra and calculus, I don’t know what would do that. Should we try and find imaginal practices that are probably doing something like sacred geometry? Yes, why do I think sacred geometry? Because the geometrical metaphors and even geometrical proof like in the Meno show up in the dialogues. So again, this is where I think the reverse engineering conjoined with the third way of reading Plato is the most important. I’ll finish the rest of Eric’s other questions. Do you have a sense for what they might contain? I gave you an example. How important do you think it is to understand them if we are to understand Plato? Like I said, I think what’s more important is that we reverse engineer practices that have an analogous function for us and then do what Gadamer called the bridging of the horizon. Go as far as we can from where we can understand. So, and we meet at the horizon of what was probably available to Plato. So, Eric, thank you very much for your excellent question. Brian Rivera, thank you, Brian. Oh, thank you so much, Eric, for your support too. Thank you, Brian. Can you direct me to the source of the description of four ways of knowing in the literature? Procedural and conceptual knowledge are everywhere in cog psych, but I don’t know much about how participatory and perspectival knowing are studied, if they are. They’re not studied currently in cog psych. You will find them, that you won’t find them explicitly under those terms. Those are terms that myself and Christopher Mastropietro have coined and published and that Dan Schappi and I make use of in our published papers. The ideas behind participatory and perspectival knowing will be found very deeply and richly within 4E cognitive science. You might wanna get the Oxford Handbook for E cognitive science. You might wanna read Gallagher’s inactivist interventions, or is it embodied interventions? I can’t remember. I think it’s inactivists, Gallagher’s work. You might wanna read some of the work of, as I said, Evan Thompson, the embodied mind. So that is where I recommend you find this. The article that introduces the four kinds of knowing, I can’t, which, oh, I can’t clearly remember. I wish Chris was here. Sorry. A lot of stuff has been published last year, in the last two years. And I can’t remember if it, I don’t think it’s in the Metamodern Reader. I think it was in the Sideview. We explicitly published a table of the four kinds of knowing. That’s where it actually has its published home, I believe. I’m not too confident about my memory. But the ideas, for example, if you read the three papers that Dan and I wrote on the Rovers, you can clearly see the perspectival and the participatory. If you look at LA Paul’s work on transformative experience, the kinds of ignorance, the two kinds of ignorance you talk about map explicitly on to, well, not explicitly for her, but for me, map explicitly on to the perspectival, the participatory. And I’ve actually presented this mapping to Laurie and she was completely happy with it. So that’s the kind of place where you look. Thank you, Brian. So Dave, Dave Natick, love the internal work, but how should we think about relevance realization in relation to social institutions, governments, religions, academia? How do we make them more wise so that we can solve large scale problems? So Dave, I’m gonna do something. I’m gonna point you to a talk I gave at the Czech Republic on a democracy as relevance realization that instantiates the opponent processing, instantiates opponent processing of relevance realization within the collective intelligence of distributed cognition. This is a reframing of democracy that could be paired with significant electoral reform, replacing first past the post, which rewards polarizers, rewards popularists with forms like D21, ranked voting, et cetera. And there’s a lot of them and they have different modeling that punish polarization, that punish popularism, that reward people for learning about more than their most chosen candidate. There’s a lot that’s there. And then there Adam from the Institute for Democracy in the 21st century who ran the symposium also did an interview with me about all of this. And you can find that on the YouTube, both of those available. And that’s where I, that whole talk is an extended argument answering exactly the problem you’re addressing. And then the interview unpacks it in greater detail. So Dave, I hope you find those resources. You just put in John Brevecky democracy, you’ll probably find the links. If not, I’ll try and I’ll find the links and I’ll have Madeline put them in the notes for this video. So thank you very much, Dave. We now move to Andrew. Andrew, thank you for your support. Jordan Hall recommended Sand Talk by Tyson Yoncaporta to you. Have you read it? There’s a similarity between Tyson’s minds and the type of knowing that I would love your perspective on. On his recommendation, I have bought it, Andrew. I have not yet read it. I take what Jordan says very seriously. I fully intend to read it. He has suggested the same thing, that there’s similarity between minds and types of knowing. And I look forward to reading it. I can say no more right now because I’d just be speaking from ignorance or hearsay. So thank you very much for your question, Andrew. Maybe ask it in a few months from now. I hope to read it soon. I do have it. But yeah, I fall prey to the failing of all academics, confusing the owning of a book with being transformed by the reading of the book. It’s a form of modal confusion that myself and other academics are very prone to. Dali Boferno, thank you for your support. Ask the following question. John, your work has changed my life. Bless you. Thank you. Thank you for saying that, Dali. Thank you so much. Yeah. The sense of exposure and the way it’s triggering my social phobia has been growing. I am not complaining. I’m deeply appreciative of the recognition of the success. But the people sincerely and with some heart encouraging me is always deeply appreciated. It goes on to say, I loved Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, the elusive I, Untangling the World Not. These were all done with Greg Enriquez. The elusive I also had Christopher Mastapietro. All your talks. Will you ever be coming to South Africa? I am not opposed to coming to South Africa. If there is good cause, I would definitely come. There’s nothing planned. Nobody from South Africa has reached out to me and extended an invitation. But if one comes, I have no reason why I wouldn’t go. But nothing’s planned right now. So I do hope that something comes out. All right. Our next question. Barb Carbon. Thank you, Barb, for your support. I’m a philosophy undergrad at Georgia State University. I have three semesters left, but I want to contribute to projects like yours. What can I and others like me do to contribute to this work? I mean, there’s lots you can do. I mean, it depends what kind of support you mean. Cultural support. Read some of the books, especially, Philosophy as a Way of Life, What is Ancient Philosophy? Take up some of the ecologies and practices, form discussion groups, form viewing groups, form some practice groups. If you want financial support, consider joining Patreon on whatever level is comfortable to you or just making a one-time donation if you want. Reaching out to some of the, and participating in some of the existing groups that are supporting After Socrates. The thing that’s on Peter Lindbergh’s The Stoa that Robert and Alexandre are doing. Join that, that discussion group. Bring your expertise and experience to it. Reach out to a reading group or a viewing group that perhaps is near you. There’s lots to do. I mean, like I said, cultural and if it’s, appropriate to you, financial. I know you’re an undergrad, so I don’t wanna make serious financial demands on you, but if that is something that works for you, that’s always helpful. Doing what you’re doing here, right? Well, you’re on the Patreon. What am I saying? Of course you are. Oh, I was, sorry. I got into my mind that this was live from the chat and I forgot everybody here that’s a Patreon. So, Barb, forgive me. Just forgive me for that. So get involved with these online communities. Like I say, the community forming around after Socrates and the Stoa could definitely benefit from you. You might wanna come to some of the workshops. Next weekend, we’re doing a Dialectic into, a Circling into Dialogues workshop, Chris and Guy and I. You might wanna participate in that and bring other people to it. Yeah, I mean, I like it when people even post videos where they reflect almost like virtual essays. They reflect on after Socrates and they post the videos. Sometimes I’m able to catch them and then I’ll try and promote them just so people can get a sense of more directly interacting. There’s lots to do. So there’s lots of cultural support that would really help. So again, forgive me for forgetting that you are already a Patreon. I’m sorry about that. It was just a lapse, because like I said, my mind, we had switched online and I forgot. So, but there’s lots of cultural support you could do, Barb. So please thank you so much for asking that. And again, thank you so much for the encouragement. It means a lot. Last question from Martin. Martin, thank you so much for your support. What’s your opinion on the work of Daniel, on the work Daniel and Jordan are doing in the Neurohacker Collective with Neutropics and in general ways to supercharge our minds to get closer to wisdom? Is that possible? Well, first of all, that’s Jordan Hall and Daniel Schmachtenberger. I have a tremendous amount of respect for the work that Jordan and Daniel are doing. I think that there is a role for Neutropics. I do not think, and I don’t think Daniel or Jordan think this either. So, but I’ll just speak for myself because I’m sure about that. I do not think they should be taken the way we take medicine or vitamins or supplement. They should be taken and within an existing ecology of practices, right? That is honed within a community that is doing dialogical education of collective intelligence. So I think if properly framed and properly incorporated, I think they can help like psychedelics to power transformation. But I do not think you should think you are taking a wisdom pill or a wisdom vitamin. I think that is an incorrect framing and I think it could in fact be deleterious. So I hope you found the answer to your question, Martin, helpful. Thank you for your support. Thank you everyone for joining me for this Q&A. We’re doing these every third Monday of the month at 3 p.m. Eastern. Please though, check. Follow me on Twitter, follow the postings on the community, follow the things that Madeline posts for Patreon. We are scheduled to every third Sunday of the month, but I’m requesting more flexibility around that because there’s so much happening right now and there are so many things and opportunities that are very time sensitive. I’m requesting flexibility around this. There will always be a Q&A, but please, you can plan on it being the third Sunday, 3 p.m., but please check as you get close to the date. This video will be available publicly on the YouTube channel afterwards. Thank you so much for the support. I wanna thank the team, especially the work of Madeline who puts all of this together and runs it and organized and of course, for the work of the executive director, Ryan Barton and the work of our media manager, Eric Foster, there’s just so much going on here. So many people are contributing to making this viable. All of you are doing so much and I wanna thank you. So very, very much. Take good care of everyone and thank you as always. I always mean this. I really do. Thank you for your time and attention.