https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=uyre9Ij2nCg
Welcome everyone to Voices with Raveki. I’m joined again by my friend Nick Winkleman. If you remember last time, Nick and I had an amazing discussion about his work on the language of coaching and the role of enacted analogy in facilitating people coming into a more functional and appropriate relationship to their body and to their environment. And that was just amazing. I invited Nick back. I’m going to assume in fact this is not going to be our terminal conversation. There’s ongoing stuff happening here. But I’ve sensed in some of the things Nick said, there’s been an implication at least or maybe an implicature that what he’s doing with people could be more comprehensively transformative and perhaps that’s even happened with some of the people that he’s been coaching. And then the sense that his work and the kind of transformations that afford might be deeply relevant to what I and others have been calling the meaning crisis. And so I’m really looking forward to this conversation, Nick. So welcome back. It’s great to talk to you again. Thank you, John. As we said, I’m humbled to be able to share some insights from my background. I think in our first chat, you gave me a platform to kind of share with your audience the things that I’ve been thinking about in my context. What I’m really excited about for this, as we discussed before jumping on, is you helping me unpack the utility of these ideas for a much broader audience and a broader impact and what is broader and important as making meaning in one’s life. And so I’m very excited for this conversation and through your work, it’s encouraged me to look at the application of language, analogy and metaphor in very different contexts. So looking forward to it. That’s great. So I mean, there’s one sense in which, speaking as a cognitive scientist, that people have been talking about this for a long time, in that we’ve been talking about enacted analogies and enacted metaphors within anthropology for a long time. And I know you’re aware of this. And then, of course, you know, where we talk about, people talk about ritual behavior. And one thing that seems to be sort of a consent, I mean, there’s lots of controversy, of course, but one of the things is there’s something like enacted metaphor, enacted analogy going on. And there’s all kinds of stuff with playing with perspective and playing with gesture. And I think we should talk about gesture more today. And that trying to afford transformation. I mean, you know, if you’ve ever gone to church, it’s this big, huge, you know, arena where you’re playing with all of this stuff. And it seems to be a universal that human beings seek out. Well-homed, you know, ritual practices in order to afford perhaps restoring a lost sense of meaning or enhancing an existing sense or transforming themselves. And it seems to me, and I use the word arena because it plays between those, that, you know, your work is, it has the potential to bridge between a world where, you know, there’s a lots of ritual behavior, the world of sports and athletics, and then what the anthropologists by and large have been investigating when they’ve been investigating things that have fallen under the Western term, religion. Many cultures don’t even have a word for that. They don’t, right? Because the ritual behavior and the everyday metaphorical behavior and the sensory motor behavior and the gesture, the narrative, all of those are woven together in most cultures. We’ve tended to analyze them apart. So I think that sets up very much. I don’t like this word and I know you probably find a little bit challenging too, but we don’t have a better word right now. So that’s why I gave that bit of a preamble. But the word I want to use is spiritual. There seems to be a spiritual potential in your work. And I’d like to try and, you know, provoke you in the friendly, Socratic sense of what is that potential and like, what’s your thinking on it and how’s your thinking emerging and growing in reflection on that? 100%. Yeah, this is, I’m not personally, nor would I suggest most are. I don’t take any triggering from the word spiritual, nor do I think it’s purely the province of religion in a Western sense. And I really like that you’re, and others are trying to bring that word in and look at it, maybe in the same way we look at a word like love, right? It’s a state of being and one that we all pursue and seek. And so let me start there in terms of my view. And this is personally very important for me. And this conversation may shape up to be one of the most intimate I’ve ever had in a public forum, because as I told you, you know, I, so to speak, fell away from traditional religion, traditional Christianity many years ago, but I found myself every day that I was falling away from it in its absolute sense. I also felt myself grasping back for something, right? I didn’t know how to grasp back to it because the form factor that it was being presented to me, in again, a traditional Judeo-Christian sense, betrayed some of my own beliefs. And so like, I’m trying to now come back. And I feel this discussion of spirituality in a lot of my work is bridging back to this. And so I just want to put that as my own preamble to my thinking here. And so when we talk about analogy, let’s at least let me try to define it from my perspective, by all means, John, jump in and provide your own definitions. But when I think of it, and I talk about it kind of in a sporting context, I talk about it very simply between a comparison between things, and notably a comparison between something that is familiar and something that is less familiar, or something that is familiar and something that we would like to become familiar to us, something that we’d like to bring into our own ecosystem, so to speak. You know, conventionally, when we look at analogy and metaphor, they talk about that as the source and the target, right? The source is the thing you know, and the target is what you’re trying to apply it to. And somehow we’re trying to take some element of the familiar thing, and we’re trying to show how it’s related to the unfamiliar thing so that you can come to know the unfamiliar thing in some way similar to how you know the familiar thing. So let me give a very simple example. When my daughter, you know, was young, there was a time where she came across different kind of sport balls for the first time. And so one day I presented to her a soccer ball. I say, say, honey, this is a soccer ball. And she says, oh, kind of like a basketball. And so what she did there, she was able to see, okay, there’s this roundness, there’s this lightness similarity, there’s this sport similarity. And so we’ve used the word right, metaphors almost, and tell me if I’m wrong, you’re like, acceptation, I accept some of the similar things about this, this new thing so I can start to understand it. And in that way, in that way, we use analogy all the time in conversation, as well as physically, and I’ll get to that in a moment. And it’s almost like this collaboration with former selves. And I’ve said this before with you, and I really like that as an idea. And that when we approach the precipice of something that is unknown, right, that challenges us, we really are limited, at least I believe we’re limited to understand it in terms of things that we already have locked in things that we’re already familiar with. And so in that regard, analogy is kind of this ever crescendoing of insight where we use the past to help us understand the present. And so that’s one way I think we look at analogy just principally being important for making meaning we try to extract the substance of a past experience to help us understand and integrate a new experience. Now, the last thing I want to share here as again, kind of maybe an overarching intro is how do we do that from day one, it’s not like we come into this world with all this memory and language and concepts on board. And that’s where perception and kind of our sensory motor apparatus is pretty important for building up these reference points, these real reference points that so to speak, give us meaning in how we can interact and evolve ourselves in a world. And so let’s take for example, within one hour, right, within one hour, and this comes out of, you know, how the body shapes the mind, Sean Gallagher’s work within one hour, a baby can imitate a parent, right, they can stick their tongue out, they smile. Right. So imitation, imitation at first, is this ability to sample the world around us. We don’t yet I would imagine we don’t understand its consequences, its importance, but we can imitate to understand it first. And almost if we imagine that starts to scaffold up to inevitably we put words and concepts and language on those things that we can imitate from a sensory motor perspective and take that as play. What is play? Play is my ability to imitate, to act as if. Right. What is analogy? It’s acting as if the young child on Halloween wears the doctor’s costume only to grow up to become the doctor. And so we use the word analogy and we talk about how analogy and metaphor allows us to create this bridge to making meaning. I think early on, physical analogy, enacted analogy to use your phrase, it allows us to sense, to perceive something in the world that we for whatever reason, you know, unbeknownst to us, we want. And we can act as if we can play, we can imitate that early on allows us to sample, allows us to empathize. And when we come into contact with an enacted experience that I would say gives us a positive emotional response, then we continue to pursue that path. Early on, I would say it is imitation, but inevitably that imitation, I think with each step down that path transforms into a becoming. You become the thing that early on you were just acting as if. And so I can pause there, but I do see analogy at that level of importance in imitation. It’s not just in language, it is everything we do. I think that’s very, very good. I like that. So let me make sure I’m understanding you. You’re saying that, you know, we have this very high level, often in propositional language, discourse around metaphor, right? And, you know, but you think you’re proposing that it is grounded in ability, probably at least initially to some degree innate. That’s Gallagher’s point, right? You don’t have to teach the baby to imitate. In fact, how would you teach a baby to imitate? If the baby wasn’t capable of some comprehensive capacity for imitation given to it by evolution, then you couldn’t possibly teach it to imitate, right? So, you know, and then the idea that that ability to imitate the world, so, all right, potentially start to, and then internalize it in pretense. So Ryle makes a very good argument, which Gallagher picks up on, right? That way before we have mental imagery, we have imagination in the sense of pretense. The child isn’t forming, and children can’t initially, right? Forming a mental image of being a dinosaur, but when they romp around the room and they’re, right, they’re nevertheless pretending to be a dinosaur. And that’s a kind of imagination by imitation rather than imagination by imagery. And so that sets, if I understand you, that sets sort of deep into our fundamental cognitive grammar, a way in which we’re enacting as if so that we can aspire to become. Did I get you correctly? That was very articulate and exactly what I am observing in my own lived experience and what I have read, yes. Yeah, so I think the idea that below metaphor is a capacity for mimesis is really important. So I’m wondering if there’s also, because you’re also doing this, you’re gesturing, right? The whole time through and even like you circled back and you were doing all of this. And I’m wondering if there’s also, and for me, I don’t think these two things are necessarily completely distinct mechanism, but there’s a capacity also for something like internal mimesis, much more like exaptation, that I can take, the brain can take sensory motor behavior for manipulating the world and then use that for communicating to the others. And we imitate each other’s gestures almost immediately, sticking out of the tongue, the baby, all that sort of eyes widen, my eyes widen, the baby’s, like all this stuff. And we’re doing it all the time. It’s where most of the nonverbal stuff is happening. And you’re even doing it to yourself because we know that not only is gesturing communicative, it’s also cognitive. A lot of my thinking, this is not just ornamentation, the work of Golden Meadow and others is showing, it’s actually doing a lot of the work of my cognition that my, so that these two are cooperating. And there’s an interesting, something like a metaphor or like mimesis between the speech and the gesture. They’re kind of imitating and mirroring each other, but they’re also different from each other, the way you and I are mirroring each other, but different from each other. Right. So I personally, I personally believe these are all operating on the same neural hardware and just some of the features are older than others. We have to probably think that gesturing nonverbal right communication well preceded our ability to verbalize ourselves in an articulate fashion. And so again, I think Gallagher’s work here is relevant where, where he makes the strong distinction between our, our body schema and our body image. One seems to be more innate. Yes. And body image is exactly for the listeners, what you think of there. It’s our image. It’s how we, in almost a third person way, think and feel through and know about and are aware of our body. But, but ultimately the body schema is the operating system. It’s what you move around, grab the cup. And so it’s, it’s based again on your sensory motor machinery. It’s based on your proprioceptive ability, your ability to know about where the body is in space. Now, yes, our sense of our body depends on that hardware, but again, you think through your body when you grab a cup of water, your body, and that is built on the body schema. So even, you know, and you know, you’re doing this, but when you talk about, Hey, you know, this, this thing grew well, literally I take my hands and I physically allow the space within them to grow. You know, I went from here to here. I should hike as a change, knowing that in our Western culture, a vertical change is considered a positive. Whereas conversely, I would have said, you know, I dropped, you know, or low today. And I gesture that low knowing that when we are closer to the ground, we are almost more infantile, we are less developed, we have regressed, it’s considered a negative. And so in the same way that we have a metaphorical grammar, verbally, we have a metaphorical grammar physically in our gestures. And oftentimes, and you’re probably the same way, John, I, if I have an idea that I can’t quite grasp, what will I do? I will, I will move my hands almost tacitly, you know, it’s like that thing. And I’m doing this until it’s almost like I’m trying to get the body schema, the motor engine going so that boom, my cognition can grasp on grasp again, what I’m trying to say verbally in that regard, or even sometimes you’ll give some pieces verbally, but through your gestures alone, the person that I know exactly what you’re talking about either yet they’re still smiling and nodding. And so this is why people throw out 95% of communication is nonverbal. Let’s not get stuck on the percentage. The reality is there is a tremendous amount of meaning that is imparted in physical gesture. And by the very nature, it is metaphorical, right? My gesture is not the literal meaning, right? It is movement that suggests something. And that’s what metaphor is, you know, and so, so far as we have gesture and verbalization of metaphor, I believe they operate on the same hardware to convey insight. I think that’s right. I think, yeah. So, like, I like these ideas. You’ve got gesture, the body schema, you’ve got mimesis, the ability to mirror, but also the ability, the ability to identify, because your example of the child wearing, right? The lab coat on Halloween and eventually becoming the doctor, they’re constructing an identity. So there’s an identification process going on there. So this is, I mean, this is fundamental machinery by which we’re making ourselves in a very powerful way. So is that where you see the connection to spirituality? So like, why are you, it is itself a metaphor, like the breath, right? The wind, right? Why use this term spirituality for this? I agree with you that it’s right, it’s resonant, but let’s try and articulate and explicate it together. So, John, what I’d love to do, because I am, I’m the neophyte in this conversation, for my own calibration, I’d love it if you would put some language to spirituality for you. How would you define it? Bring it into light so I can understand the way you look at it. I think that would be very helpful then in the way that I’m trying to pursue it. Yes. So how I use the word spirituality is I use it to refer to those processes by which we acquire and develop, often aspirationally, our capacity for non-propositional meaning, such that we can overcome self-deception and cultivate wisdom. And that often involves us coming into deeper relationships with ourselves, with other people in the world, and those, and aspects of those relationships often can’t even be properly expressed in the propositional. They have an affable quality, but they nevertheless feel deeply right and real to us. That’s what I mean by spirituality. And so this is where I’m just going to start to touch on where I believe analogy, what we’re talking about in my own journey, can start to get us to this concept of spirituality as you’ve defined it. I think it’d be interesting for a moment to discuss this idea of a disembodiment and how we oftentimes can think of ourselves as separate from this world that we are trying to become fully engaged in, in such a way that we gain meaning and insight that we can’t even put into words. And I read something quite interesting today, and it goes back to, again, the body schema, that so often when we’re interacting with the world, I’m interacting with the cup, I’m interacting with the car, I’m interacting with my computer to interact with John, I’m interacting with the pen to write on the paper, that my experience is in this outcome of this world. It’s not of myself in generating that outcome with the world. And so what it starts to do is it creates this separation that you believe yourself is this experience of the outcome of this interaction. And it’s somehow right, traditionally, we would have called that and some people still do the soul, right, that the soul is somehow separate from this machinery that houses the soul. But this is where again, we attend, we think, we perceive through our body, our body is a vessel for interacting with the world around us. And so it is not separate, it is the means by which it is not separate, it is the means by which. And I just think that as a starting point is really important that we glue experience, that we bring experience back to mind, body are one, they work together, they are constrained by each other. And as you say, rightly so they are embedded in the physical environment around us. And so that is a starting point, I think is, is really important. I can’t completely articulate why I think it is so important. But if we’re going to start to understand meaning that I think we have to glue ourselves back together, we can’t have one thing floating separate from the other, that they have to work together in this meaning making process. And so when we now start to talk about spirituality and how analogy can help us, well, I think you used words around spirituality is this process of, of becoming it almost suggests to me that it is a path. It is a pursuit, I am going towards something. Oftentimes, I’m going towards something that doesn’t have a distinct ending. Maybe it doesn’t have an ending. Maybe it shouldn’t have an ending. And I’m not even quite sure what it is. It lasts, it lacks the grasp ability oftentimes, yet there’s something magnetizing me towards it. You know, for me in my life, a lot of the spirituality has evolved around the big existential questions. Why am I here? What is my purpose for which there might not actually be a concrete answer. Hence the reason many of these things that we come to are are ineffable, right? They’re a feeling, they’re experience, their clarity is in the experience of them, not your knowledge of them. Very different. And so how does analogy get us there? Well, let’s go back. Let’s go back to the kid that put on the Halloween costume. When he put on that Halloween costume, he would have had no idea that one day he would become a doctor. All he saw was this costume and the things associated with it spoke to him or her. And I’m not like, I would like to be that. I would like to act like that. I would like to experience that. And so it starts by putting the costume on. And I think that’s what ultimately play an imitation as we’ve been saying. That’s what it does. It allows us to sample a future. And in sampling that future, I think it does, it does come with some propositional knowledge. You know, doctors tend to wear these coats. Tend to have these degrees. But then there’s this experience you get on top of it, you know, which might be an experience of power, an experience of love, an experience of respect, an experience of humility. And these things we give words to, I think oftentimes are much bigger than what the squiggles on the paper can ever fully suggest. And so when I now start to look at where I’m at right now in my life, I think it’s a matter of spirituality is allowing yourself to continue to sample, to continue to pursue, to act as if, you know, I, I would not say that I am someone who, who, who, who I would not call myself a meditator, but I’ve started to meditate more. I’ve sampled it. And what I’m finding is the density of periods where I do more and more of it in a period of time are increasing. And so in sampling it more often, I’m gaining more experience, more understanding from it. And so I’m acting as if I was committed to it like John Verveke in the moment that I am doing it. Right. Right. And only in time, only in time will I fully, as, as you said, become it. And so what, what is spirituality for me, it’s constantly pursuing a path that, that gives you an emotional experience that you would put as, as, as positive, as right in your mind. And it’s continuing to pursue it until you become it. So analogy provides us as humans, utility to the degree that if we are unhappy, we have a mechanism, a bridge to go try different things that might actually be the greener pasture. We know not yet that we want. And so let me, let me pause there, but that’s, that’s me. Some of it out. No, that was good. That was good. I mean, even at a, even etymologically, there’s deep connections between spirituality and aspiration. They both have the breath metaphor in them and the in and out. Right. And so that connection, I mean, you made some, to my mind, some very deep connections between spirituality and, and aspiration, right. The spirituality is ultimately aspirationality, which I, which I kind of like, I think that’s a really cool way of, of even phrasing it. And then, and then your point about embodiment, and I think why you were hammering at why it was an important point. Well, I’ll propose to you that why you’re doing that is because you’re trying to counterbalance a tradition that has grown up of seeing spirituality and you invoke the notion of the soul as something separable from the body or even the re the rejection of the body. As you probably know, I’m a big, big fan of neoplatonism, but one of the parts of neoplatonism that I’m deeply, deeply critical of is that how it started that tradition and it gets exacerbated in the Gnostics that the material world is evil and spirituality is about getting the soul back up into a completely incorporeal existence. And so I think why you’re, I’m proposing to you that perhaps why you’ve, that you wanted to really make that point so clear is because you’re trying to, you’re trying to portray a vision of spirituality that rejects the rejection of the body, if you’ll allow me to use that double negative, and says, you know, we’ve got to get, we’ve got to, we’ve got to put aside the rejection of the body as the primary metaphor for what you were then talking about later, which was the meta, right, self-transcendence, which is itself a metaphor. I’m going above myself. That’s a metaphor, right? Right. And so we have, and so aspirational is about self-transcendence, right? You basically, we used, you know, you pretend until you make it, right? Until you’re there. And so part of the challenge, I think, in terms of our historical context is to really articulate and also beautify the notion of self-transcendence that is now completely separate from the idea of disembodiment or rejection of the body or rejection of the world. I mean, that was, I mean, for all of my criticisms of him, that’s Nietzsche’s project. He’s trying to get, the notion of the Ubermensch was a notion of self-transcendence that still made you a lover of the earth. You were still going to stay true to your embodiment and embeddiment because he, so I think, I think that goes deep. Here’s, I’ll propose it to you and then I’ll let go back to you. That attempt, and I’m with you in it, we’re partners in it, that attempt to reinvent yourself self-transcendence so that it’s aspirational through enacted embodied analogy, I think that is consonant with and participates in what I argue is the larger project of re-understanding, right, the legacy that we were given from the Axial Age without having the two worlds mythology anymore because we did the same thing to my mind. We thought of wisdom and meaning and realness and see what my hands are doing, right, as that which was, could detach from, leave behind, right, the messy material embodied world and I understand why that metaphor erodes, it makes sense, but I think the metaphor, you know, I think the metaphor is now moral bond and it’s also malicious to some degree. I don’t mean any evil intent but it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s deleterious. So you see what I’m trying to suggest? I think this cultural project of overcoming the metaphor of the two worlds from the Axial Revolution and the way you articulated spirituality as somehow like making attractive again self-transcendence while like keeping us embodied beings. I think those two projects are deeply interwoven. I think, I think, and I’m going to bring the movement back in for a moment. Please, please. Because we are going to bring up Rafe Kelly and this might be a bridge. I won’t call it a footnote. It might be a footnote or it might be a critical piece to this. You know, why now do we find this, you know, this pursuit of spirituality, of aspiration, of a journey of betterment? And Natalie, I feel like, I feel like that’s a part of who we are but why? And so if we, and I have no data for this, you, you might, but if we go, let’s go back before, you know, the, the Industrial Revolution, before agriculture, what were we? We were hunter-gatherers. We were movers. We were nomads. Our life was a literal, like in a literal, perceiving, acting way. It was a literal journey. And every day, our survival, our survival depended, depended on our ability to attend to the right things at the right time to make the best decision, right? To keep our family safe, fed, clothed, so on and so forth. And so it wasn’t metaphorical. The journey that we used to go on was quite literal. But over time, I believe that journey had to become metaphorical because we, agriculture required us to stay in one place for long periods of time, then cities. And so now look at us. We’re not even at a workplace right now, John. Now we’re just at our home. It’s become even more locked in. Yet I do believe there’s this grounded need for a journey. And I believe that grounded need for a journey means there are two core ingredients, two core ingredients that we now as humans, we absolutely need as much as, as, as air, water, food and love. And that is, we need to move. Movement has, has, has gone away from being part of what we do as a natural course of day to day as something we have to think about doing. It’s almost by analogy, similar to, you know, at one point I would just think about this cup of water and grab it. But now I actually have to think about my arm as it grabs the water. I have to think about moving. I have to think about using my body. But if we don’t use this sensory motor machinery, it’s almost like it starts to erode. And we know quite literally physically from the inside and it has both physical and mental consequences. So it seems like we need to now bring in movement as a part, as a part of the solution, as a part of the journey that we now no longer go on in a literal sense, which would have a literal movement requirements. The other piece though, is this pursuit of something, right? This ongoing pursuit. This ongoing pursuit of something. And for me, that’s now where this discussion becomes remarkably important. I don’t know. I don’t know if thousands of years ago, the conversation around self-development and, and growth mindset would have been as powerful. My sense is probably not. No doubt religion and spirituality was still part of it, but it seems so connected, right? To the seasons, the physical journey, they were, they were almost one. And so now the movement is gone. The physical journey is gone. So how do we get back the movement, the sensory motor journey, and then how do we get back the cognitive pursuit of something that depends on that physical journey? That’s where I believe these things start to come together. And this is why the self-help industry is a multi-billion dollar industry. They are all trying to do what we are trying to do on this call. And that is saying, what are the schemas, the heuristics, the mental models we can use to consistently put us on a cognitive path, a physical embodied path towards, towards clarity, towards clearness, towards a connectedness with the world around us, with ourselves. And I’ll pause there, but I believe it’s those two elements. It’s the movement part of the journey and it’s the pursuit itself that are now missing that we are trying to bring back in with, with conversations like this. That’s, that’s really good, Nick. That’s really good. Thank you for that. That’s really okay. So lots of stuff is sparking for me. And then I want to bring in something you had already brought up earlier, the mimesis, because I’m thinking of the shaman and I’m thinking of the shaman, right? Who, right? Gestures and dance so that he can assume the identity of the animal that is being tracked so that he can pick up on the science. But I watched a video of this, right? And it’s, it’s fun to hunter gatherers there in Africa. And they’re tracking, they’re doing persistence hunting, right? Where you just keep tracking the animal until it basically heat strokes, right? And it looks like we evolved for that. That’s why we could sweat off for a whole surface. So we’re doing this for a very long time. And the thing about persistence hunting is tracking is crucial to it, right? In a way that it’s not crucial for ambush hunting and other things. And so, and they come to a place where the, the antelope has gone out of their field of vision, right? And they’re trying to decide where to go. And so what does he do? He stops and he starts enacting the antelope, right? That, you know, and he starts enacting it and he does the mimesis and he does this thing where he basically gets into the perspectival, knowing like the agent arena relationship of the antelope, right? And he’s dancing and moving, right? All right. And I’m going to go somewhere with this. That’s very punny. I’m going to go somewhere with this. And then he, and then he goes, ah, and he picks up the signs and they track. Now, is he 100% right? No. But is that a really reliable skill that he’s honed so that he can track, right? Yeah. And it’s like, and so what I’m saying is you’ve got the movement, right? And you’ve got the pursuit, but what’s often united them together is the mimesis. And right? Because you see how what the mimesis does, it allows you to coordinate the move because you’re not just moving. You’re like you’re saying you’re tracking, you’re tracking. So let’s say that what we’re doing is tracking, then mimesis is going to be really valuable for us if we’re trying to track something. And then what that brings in for me, the final connection is, and I argued this at the movement summit that Rafe put together, that these two movements, I keep punning, the movement movement and the mindfulness movement are coming together because I think we’re trying to stitch back together, you know, the mindfulness where we’re learning how to get into a state of consciousness that puts us in the right mimetic relationship for aspiration, right? That we can then integrate with the movement. Yeah, that’s yeah, I didn’t realize that I just made the same argument you made. But no, we’re saying the exact same thing. And that is that the physical stuff, right? And kind of, you know, excuse me here, the mental stuff, they were connected. Yeah, they are connected in the physical persistent hunting that you’re just outlining there. The reality is though, the vast majority of humans can’t reenact or engage in that, nor do they want to. You understand that to stitch them back together, we still almost have this insatiable inner need for these ingredients. And that’s why if I’m moving in a world, it brings me back to it. And if I’m learning how to pay attention to that world, to mindfulness, I’m giving myself the ingredients, albeit separately, although I think they can still come together in mindful movement, that we got naturally as a matter of course, you know, years ago, right? And obviously, for those who are still hunter gatherers, and let me just put a very small footnote on the shaman, and the enacted dance of the animal for possible naysayers, because we’ve all actually experienced that enacted dance. If you’re wearing a hat, let’s say a large hat, and you walk down a hallway with a doorway, what will you do? You will naturally nod down, that hat’s not coming off your head. When you drive a car, you immediately have an expanded sense of where the edges of that car is. You know, what that tells us is it goes back to Gallagher’s body schema. We have this ability to tap in to the physical structures of our surrounding and extend our sensory motor experience into them. It’s part of the imitation, and it’s part of our ability to connect with the environment around us. This reinforces why movement, imitation, as I think you have argued, a play is so important as part of this ongoing process. That’s great. I think that’s very helpful. I wanted to pick up then on one other thing that comes from this. I really like this point. I’m sorry, it’s very pregnant for me about, you know, the hunter gatherer pursuit, and we were hunter gatherers for 99.9% of our history as a species. Because I’m thinking about the imitation so that we can pick up the signs so that we can track the mind, the non-human mind that is other than ours. And you think about how much this has taken up into religious behavior, right? So that what I’m trying to do is, I’m trying to imitate Christ so that I can come into a proper relationship with this. Well, in some sense, you know, he’s supposed to be divine. So his mind is supposed to be like mine, but not like mine. Like the animal’s mind. You see what I’m doing with the analogy here? It’s like mine, but not mine. And I need the analogy in order to aspire so that I can find the signs that will help me to come into the right relationship, track the mind that is like mine, but other than mine, so I can come to be with it. You see what I’m trying to do? I’m trying to say I do, John. And I oftentimes, I feel I’m oversimplifying it. The, I’m gonna say broadly religious spiritual pursuits, but let me put it in the way that it still kind of resonates in my own mind. And that in my own life, I’m trying to paint a picture of the world I want to live in and the person I want to be in that world. And I recognize that I will never fully achieve it, but that’s not the point. The point is the pursuit of it. Also reserve the right to change that future world I want to live in. Material goods might’ve been important in that future world. When I was 21, they’d become far less important now, you know, at 36. And so I reserve the right to change the world I want to live in as well as the individual I want to be within it. But the beauty is that that is a constant evolving space that I attend to that I, I actually, I seek to empathize with it. So I’m trying to empathize. I’m trying to bring about the emotional state of the person I want to be. I want to think like the person I want to be with the hopes that in doing that I will co-create the world that I want to live in. And in many ways, I haven’t said this yet, in many ways, empathy and like often Johnson argues, empathy is a form of metaphor. And then I try to bring you into me. Yes. Yes. To you. And so in many ways we use empathy to understand and to bring about future states. And so for me, what is spirituality? It’s the constant endeavor to paint the world and the person I want to, to be in that world. The key word there is to be in that world. And then that by its very nature becomes the source analogy. And I am the target. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that’s great. I’m trying to map that onto me and then that map, I’m having these bridges that say, you know what? I’m going to cook that meal on Thanksgiving for our friends who are in the hospital. And maybe the person I wanted to be last year would not have done that. But now the person I want to be now, he’s the kind of person that does those things. You see what I’m saying here? For me, that is enacted spirituality. I am starting to ritualize a behavior that is part of the person I want to become. And so I could be wrong. I don’t think I can be wrong in this case, because I think this has to be an individual journey. But for me, that’s what it is. It’s setting up the world and the person I want to be recognizing that that will continue to evolve. But either way, I’m constantly using that as a reference point to bridge to where I am such that each step I take is in pursuit of a better version of a better world that I define and no others. That’s really good. That insight you had about, right? Although I’m in some sense, like now I’m creating the image, it nevertheless becomes the source that gets mapped onto me as a target. And that’s brilliant. I really like that. And so you sort of said, it’s like evolving, empathetic, symbolic aspiration. Because you’re creating a symbol on, you’re trying to create a connection, you’re trying to join something, you and the not you, but it’s like you, but it’s not you. Right? Like the sage is basically an enacted internalizable metaphor. That’s really, really cool. I like that idea. So yeah, evolving. Can I just brighten that just a second? Because we talk about our ability to time travel mentally, right? Past, present, future. And earlier in this discussion, we talked about an analogy as a collaboration with the past self. Right. Right. I also believe then that spirituality is collaboration with the future self. Right. And the older I get and the more, the more reference points I have and more experiences I have, the clearer I can project into the future, the realm of possibility. And the more the analogy can actually get in front of me versus me always looking back. That’s wonderful. And that’s, that’s what I feel day in day out is happening. I’m able to better project. I know I’m not there. That’s not the point. The point is to give me some kind of direction. And I think conventionally I would have traditionally called that God and I would have called it the doctrine of that God. And that’s okay. And for many people, that is a great path forward. Beautiful. For me, I’ve fallen from that. So I need to replace that with something because I do believe it’s a human need that goes back to the journey that I believe added to the hunter gatherer. And only now am I starting to, to think of it like that. So, you know, there people listening, like there’s no one way to do that, but are you taking the time to look forward and simply ask yourself, what world do I want to live in? But more importantly, how do I want to be in that world? And then simply ask yourself through what steps can I take today to empathize and thus bring on board that future self and be 1% closer. And that, that, that the way in which we enhance the way in which we enhance the evolving empathy is through enacted analogy is that’s a pivot point in the argument, right? Yes. We act as if we are that person. And again, there’s, it’s, it goes right back. One hour after birth, Sean Gallagher imitation. Yeah. We can bring that future into existence by acting as if one step at a time. And you know, this is why I think movies and books like the secret are so attractive, but John, you and I both know there’s nothing secret about the secret. Simply being able to, to project forward and inhabit that future self, right? And having the discipline, the love, the desire to do that. And you know, that’s, that’s all anyone can do. You think that things like the secret, um, represent something that we were criticizing earlier, just to bring it. What I mean is they’re taking something that’s an aspirational enacted, right? Analogy in order to enhance the evolving empathy. I like this way of putting it and they’re turning it into a literal other worldly force. Yes. Right. And thereby they’re getting caught up and in a propositional meaning as opposed to seeing through it, to activate all the perspectival participatory knowing. But that’s why it’s attractive to people and attractive. Yeah. But it’s the wrong, I believe, I agree with you. Yeah. It actually undermines the paths that are available to you to actually do what the secret is suggesting. It’ll help you pursue and achieve. Right. Right. Right. It is, it is blinding you from what is available to you ultimately. But what we’re talking about here takes work, you know, as I’ve heard you articulate many times, you know, wisdom in its, in its core traditions was not what you said or what you knew. It’s what you did. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s why I love that you always talk about enacted analogy, you know, act your way into better behavior. You can’t think your way into better behavior. So act as you want to be and you will become. I think that is if you’re going to put a tagline to what we’re trying to say here around, you know, enacted analogy, that’s what it’s about. Yeah. Stand for the futures that are available to you and act as if the first day I meditate, I cannot say that I am a meditator. I cannot say that I am in any way enlightened, but I am one step closer. And maybe that’s why this is so talking in this way. It’s natural to me because I come from a world of training. We understand that everything we get, we have to earn through remarkably hard incremental work that doesn’t always work out yet. We keep pursuing. And so I see that being on par with the human struggle. You know, people want the easy way and that’s normal. That’s in our hardware. But I think once we recognize that there is no easy way, that’s when the work can really begin and that’s when we’re really, and the access can really begin. Yeah. Yeah. This is a very powerful vision of spirituality that you’re articulating. It’s the only one I know. Well, I mean, it sort of has to be, I think, if it’s going to be spirituality. If it doesn’t grab you, you know, by your guts, then it’s just stuff you’re sort of dabbling in. So what do you think, what do you think are the primary obstacles we’re facing right now to, I mean, you articulated an embodied empathetic spirituality as opposed to a disembodied, I don’t know what to call it, magical spirituality. What are the primary obstacles to getting people to take this on board? Number one for me, I could be wrong here, is is self-acceptance. If it is the self, you as a person that ultimately wants to become, that can’t start to become that, you know, that oneness can’t change, can’t become something else until you’ve accepted it. And so, you know, I think everybody in their own way, maybe not everybody, many, myself definitely, spends the first part of their journey coming into contact with themselves and trying to understand who you are and what you stand for and what you believe in and accepting that fully. Only then, I believe, can we start to begin the journey of, well, to go on the journey, wherever that journey might take you. But you have to be able to become the person that you are versus so often we sit in this third person, we sit separate from ourselves, even in the way we talk about, you know, first person, second person, thinking fast, thinking slow. These are interesting scientific principles, but cognitively as the phenomenological experience of first person, they can be troublesome. They can start to separate the mind and the body. So I think it is about self-acceptance and I think some of the work by, you know, research like Brene Barrao, I think many of her messaging around surrendering to the self, the importance of vulnerability are critical. I think these are our biggest barriers. John, if I’m completely honest. And then from there, it’s the tools of pursuing a better version of yourself. How do you do that? Well, that’s probably for another conversation, but I do believe these mental models, these, what do you call them? The psycho- Technologies? Psychotechnologies. These are critical. Even you giving me that word in one of your first lectures, psychotechnology, immediately allowed me to grab on to the different ways I can think better and the different tools at my disposal. So once you accept yourself and you’re ready to go on that journey with yourself as yourself, rather than third person, first person fighting against one another, then it’s recognizing the psycho-technologies available to you to go on that journey. And it’s supporting then that journey with the ingredients that we need. We need to be able to move. So movement, we need to be able to think. So clarity and quality of attention, mindfulness. So I think we have some physical practices we can engage in that support these psycho-technologies once we have gone through some level of self-acceptance. And I’ll be honest, I think self-acceptance is the first few chapters in everyone’s journey. And again, these tools and psycho-technologies can assist you with, but I would certainly say I am in the mix of people trying to figure this out. That’s very helpful. So if I can ask you some, I mean, so now you’re sounding very Socratic to my ear. And so maybe I should ask some Socratic questions. So you’re proposing self-acceptance and I hear what you’re saying. So can you clarify it by showing, telling me how it’s distinct from these two other things? People are of course enormously fascinated with themselves and their biographies. And we have a culture that just reinforces that all the time. And I assume, because from the tenor of what you’re saying, you don’t mean that when you say self-acceptance. You don’t mean celebrating your biography and all that sort of thing. The other thing is, and this was part of the problem with the self-esteem movement, and we’ve got enough good empirical data now to tell us that that was a mistake. That was a cultural experiment that you got wrong. Where what we want is we want people to have self-esteem and we want them to be satisfied with themselves. Because it sounds very much to me like you’re not proposing self-satisfaction either. So here’s my question. How does self-acceptance differ from self-celebration or self-aggrandizement or self-sufficiency? What do you mean there? Do you understand the question? I think I do. I think I do. For me, the first thing I would say is as I use self-acceptance purely from the standpoint of a non-judgmental perspective. So to the degree that I am, right? I am something at a given moment. It’s my ability to accept that for better or for worse. And in doing so, it allows me as objectively as I can to see where I’m at, accept that wholeheartedly, and then say what elements would I like to pursue? What aspects, what avenues would I like to take? I said to my wife very early in our relationship that the following resonated with me. You know, I’m not what I am. I’m not what I am. And what that means is, for me, it means what I am is constantly evolving. I think that’s the whole idea of the journey. But for that evolution to take place, I believe at any given moment, at any given moment, I have to be willing to accept myself wholeheartedly for better or for worse. And in doing so, only through that lens, will I think my journey net out an experience that I would call positive, worthwhile, fulfilling, satisfactory. So to my ear, then, that the self-acceptance sounds like the Socratic virtues of humility and self-knowledge. Yes. So knowing. Yes. Yes. So it’s, again, it’s not your biographical self-knowledge, although your biography might provide useful material. It’s more like, what did you call the body schema, like the operating manual, the operating system? It’s getting a knowledge, an appropriate, not inflated or deflated, but well-calibrated knowledge of your operating system. Is it something like that? I think so. I mean, for me, to go on a journey, I have to generally, I think, I have to have a general sense of where I am. Yep. I have to have a general sense of where I want to go. And recognizing that the path to get there, there are probably many paths to get there, but I need these two data points. I need to have a general, albeit foggy sense of where I’m going and where I’m at today. So when I say self-acceptance, and I might be using the wrong words. No, no, no. But what I’m trying to get at is how do I get at where I am today? Right, right. And how do I do that without bullshitting myself that this is where I’m at today? Yep. Accepting that, because only in doing that can I then begin my journey forward. Because if here’s where I’m at, but I’m bullshitting myself and saying I’m over here, I can never go there because this is my starting point, yet I think we’ll be in the matrix. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that’s, whatever we call that, that is what I believe is step one. You have to be able to say, this is my starting point, fully accepted, non-judgmental, here’s where I’m at. I have an idea of where I want to go. We’re kind of putting that in the context of spiritual realization and everything that goes along with that. Once I have those two data points, knowing that this one evolves every moment, and spiritually and where I want to be and the world I want to be in, that’s fine. But as long as I have those two data points in check, I can then continue to navigate between them. So it sounds like then, it’s like the hunter-gatherer has to adopt the right identity, even in play, in pretense, in order to afford the journey. Yes. It’s kind of, that’s what you need to, like you need to get your sense of who and what you are so that it affords you adopting in play the future that you’re moving towards. Is that it? That’s it. It’s as you talk about, it’s if anything, it’s the reduction of self-delusion. It is the reduction of self-bullshitting. It is understanding where you are actually at. Yeah. And we know that there are many layers to unpacking that. Right. So that does sound very much like Socratic self-knowledge to me, because it’s that simultaneous process of not bullshitting yourself so you can get into where you are at, to use your language, such that it affords you aspiring to where you want to be. Absolutely. Absolutely. In my mind, and I love your take here, we talk about anxiety in sport, we talk about anxiety in life, and I think that’s part of the, so much of what we refer to as suffering, I believe, is this sense of chronic, non-specific anxiety. And in a way, I love your take on it, I believe anxiety is the space between what you think you’re capable of and what you think is being asked of you. Okay. This is brilliant because this is Tillich. Okay. So Tillich distinguishes between psychological anxiety, and he doesn’t mean that they can’t be found together. Okay. This is an analytic distinction, which he’ll often call something more like fear, because he wants to indicate, like, you know, you’ve got this state and there’s something you’re afraid of. And then what he calls existential anxiety, and this is how he described it, existential anxiety is when there’s a disconnect between your existential self, how you are existing, and your essential self. He uses the word essential, and he says the essential self is always in front of us, right, drawing us forward. Now he, that language might be problematic today, but what he’s trying to get at is he’s trying to get at the Socratic point of your existential knowledge, not your self-aggrandizing autobiography, nor all of your narcissistic ways in which you’re great and wonderful or unique. He said, you know, you want to cut because you only get, what you have to do is you have to be in this, you have to get to, as you put it really well, where you are here now. That’s your existential self. And then anxiety is when there is a disconnect, when it is not being drawn to what he calls your essential self, which he means by that, your aspirational self, the self that would be to your, the self that could say that it is, well, the stoics, right? The self that would be in a place where this sounds morbid, but it’s not meant to be, where you could say, I could die now. Yes. Yes. So that resonates heavily with me. That is the self I pursue on a daily basis. One that is content that I’ve acted and operated in a way where if it was to end and I was alive to tell you how I felt at the end would be okay. Yeah. A hundred percent. And so this is where for me, the reduction of the suffering, the reduction of the anxiety comes in that alignment. I think we spend, you know, and I love that idea of the disconnect. I think you have people that spend a lot of time in the future, which can be very problematic because they’re going nowhere and they’re creating this unbelievable mind map of what they want. Yet every day when they go back to reality, they realize that they’re that, that vision, as it becomes clear, it gets farther away. That gap almost creates more, you know, suffering and anxiety. There’s empirical evidence for this. People who have these rich fantasy lives about themselves actually are much, much more prone to depression. And so this is where it’s those two things. It’s getting a grip on where you’re at. It’s pursuing that future, which should be, I like that idea of the essential self, that the self that you want to die with, I think is, it’s not more of it. I think that’s actually a beautiful idea. And then ultimately it’s recognizing that a lot of the utility and the need for these, these phenomenological qualities, these experiences were, they were invisible to us because they were part and parcel for our hunter-gatherer So now, now we have to make the invisible visible. Why exercise is tough. Diet is tough. Mindfulness meditation is tough. These are things that we now have to take cognitive control over that in the past were tacit. They were literally part and parcel to the environment. But I believe there is liberation in the recognition of that because now we recognize the ingredients, the elements that were once there that fulfilled us that are now gone, but yet are still available to us and bring those in movement, mindfulness, and through those mechanisms, getting a grip on where we’re at, continuing to evolve the essential future self. And we take it one day at a time. And as I say, all the people that I work with, how do you get better? One step at a time. It’s not a cliche. It is true. Do you do something every day to pursue the essential self? And if you’re stacking those together, inevitably you’ll wake up and you’ll be there. That’s wonderful. That’s wonderful. Well, this is actually a good closure point for the So maybe we could come back next time when we’re together. And because we were talking very individualistic here and that’s appropriate. But of course, another part of spirituality and it goes back to the hunter-gatherer is working in a group like and getting that communitas and getting that sense of being at one with others. And I’m sure you also have important things to say about that because that is also no doubt you’ve had that’s an aspect of your coaching I haven’t heard too much about but I imagine that there’s an aspect of that there too where yeah yeah so maybe we could call that you know part two of the discussion about how to what does that look like and how does you know how does your reflection and your experience from the world of coaching give us some understanding again of how we can exact that paleolithic machinery into the scientific age and we can get a even more an even fuller picture of what we’re meaning by human spirituality here. So I invite you to come back and we can have that discussion. I look forward to it John. Okay thank you very much.