https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=eaBrbjAueF8
Welcome everyone to another Voices with the series I’m doing with Rick Rappetti on the philosophy of meditation and very excited. Someone whose work I’ve read and has been a very influential figure, especially in Rick’s career is Lou Marinoff. And I’ll turn things over to Rick to let Rick introduce Lou and then we’ll start as we do entering into a dialogue with Lou about his work, especially at least initially its relevance to meditation, mindfulness, et cetera. Thank you, John. I’m really happy to have Lou here. He’s also a friend. For many of us, Lou needs no introduction, but I’ll mention a few highlights about him here for those who are new to his work. And we will put a more thorough bio in the show notes later on. Lou’s not only widely recognized as a popularizer of practical philosophy, something John and I both have a great interest in, but more importantly, as one of the elders and founders of the contemporary philosophical counseling movement, particularly in the U.S., just as was our previous guest, Pierre Grimes, another friend of Lou’s and mine. Lou initiated the first international conference on philosophical practice, the ICPP, in 1994 at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, along with Rand LaHavre, whose deep philosophy work has influenced both John and I. The philosophical practice movement and particularly philosophical counseling began to get great traction with the publication of Lou’s influential and valuable 1999 book, Plato, Not Prozac, love that title, which has been translated into 27 languages, along with Lou’s many other books on the topic. I should add that Lou co-founded and directs the APPA, the American Philosophical Practitioners Association, where Pierre Grimes, our guest at the previous episode, and I are both on the board, along with other key figures in the movement, and that his work in this area has influenced my own approach as a philosophical counselor. Lastly, like John and I, Lou contributed a chapter to the Rutledge Handbook on the philosophy of meditation, on how meditative practices function as key philosophical components on the Buddhist sapiential path, which puts him in connection with both previous episodes here with Pierre and John, and also with the next episode, in which Massimo Piliucci, a colleague of Lou’s at the City College of CUNY, and also an APPA certified philosophical counselor, will discuss the ways in which similar but distinct meditative and contemplative exercises constitute a key part of the Stoic sapiential path. All right, so Lou, tell us about yourself, what you’ve been doing lately, and what else the audience should know about you for us to get started. Well, thank you, John and Rick. It’s a great pleasure and an honor to join you today. I’m very happy to be with you. And I think we’ve told them enough for now. They can always find out more on my website. You know, we’re all ceaselessly active, publishing, writing, organizing, podcasting, doing all kinds of things. So we can get into the nuts and bolts during our dialogue. How did you come into meditation? This is a big question. How did you come into philosophy and the philosophy of meditation? I came of age in the 1960s, which was a pretty good time to do it outside of the Vietnam War, that is, but you know, I was in a I’m a recovering hippie and part of the counterculture and all of that. The 1960s featured the Beatles and they brought TM to North America very famously from India. So everyone got turned on to that, along with other things. Alan Watts was in his heyday publishing books on Asian philosophy and practices for a Western audience. So there was a mixture of pop culture, hippie counterculture, the Beatles. So that was my sort of very, very informal and mass produced, if you like, kind of intro to meditation. I had a different route to philosophy and probably a slightly more serious route around the same time. In the 60s, I was actually recruited out of out of Hebrew Sunday School. You know, I mean, I’m Jewish and I had a proper bar mitzvah and everything. But but there was a there was a kind of a double agent who was teaching in the Hebrew school. He was a humanist and he ended up he was very influential and a nice guy and recruited me to the Montreal Humanist Fellowship. So, John, I’m a Montrealer. You know, it’s my hometown. Oh, wow. Yeah. Are you well, I have to talk about that later. Are you from Toronto yourself? Yes. Canadian? Well, like everybody else, I wasn’t born in Toronto. I was born in a city nearby called Hamilton. Yeah, I’m a Canadian through and through. I’ve been to Montreal multiple times. I’ve been to Quebec, etc. So, yeah, I mean, I’ve been to Toronto multiple times and I have a lot of friends there, most of whom are ex Montrealers. You know, Toronto. Anyway, that’s another conversation. Hamilton, Mississauga and Oakville. You know it all. Excellent. It’s a megacity now. Yeah. Toronto. There used to be distinct municipalities all the way down to Niagara. OK, so I got recruited to the Montreal Humanist Fellowship out of Hebrew Sunday School and I developed a very strong or probably had already a strong affinity for humanism. And I ended up as a teenager leading their youth group and I found the whole thing to be very interesting and enticing. At the same time, I became attracted to Ayn Rand’s objectivism and hung out with some objectivists. There was a club, but of course, we loved clubs back in the day and we were all, without hopefully too much contradiction, members of the Young Hedonist Club. So, you know, that’s the philosophy back then, Rick, was nothing too esoteric. Although humanism is very beautiful and serious and objectivism, I think, has a lot of traction today again. But Hedonism, not so much. It’s good for teenagers, but hopefully most people will grow out of it. So as far as philosophy of meditation is concerned, you’re asking a really interesting question here and I think it’s a bit of a double-edged sword, if you don’t mind. In the late 60s and early 70s, I encountered the Bhagavad Gita and the Daote Ching and also in person met, as it turns out, many sannyasins of Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh, who was later rebranded as Osho, but he was very popular in our neck of the woods. And I kept encountering his sannyasins, also premmies of Guru Maharaji and the, you know, the carriage trade from India, gurus, which started to burgeon around that time. So they were preaching satsang. And as far as I’m concerned, if you’re teaching satsang or preaching satsang, that is a philosophy of meditation. So not a formal philosophy as you’ve construed it in your excellent anthology, but nonetheless, I think we can talk about that more in depth. If one is trying to introduce people to meditation with words, then ultimately it’s various philosophical views of meditation that will get people to start meditating. So that was my own trade. So, Lu, one area, at least the prima facie, where they might intersect is they both use language around wisdom and dependent virtues. Did that start to come to the fore for you at that time as something you thought about trying to cultivate? Because, you know, wisdom is, you know, it’s ultimately existential. You can’t pursue unless you transform, etc. Did that start to emerge as something that you thought of yourself pursuing? Not directly, John. I hope I don’t disappoint you. But I mean, I sort of virtue ethics followed much later. I think in my case, some of the practices that were entered into for other reasons gave rise to an appreciation of virtues, both the cardinal virtues of Hellenic times and the associated virtue ethics of Asia, which are, of course, very deep and also backed up by all these practices. But please don’t think that I was lambent on becoming virtuous as a teenager. I was more interested in sex, drugs, rock and roll, motorcycles and hanging out with cool people. And I think there may be some virtues in that, but not of the kind that we’re discussing here. How did that start to intersect with more academic pursuits? Well, that came way later. Ultimately, I did a lot of things in my 20s with mostly with music. I was a classical guitar student and teacher and also playing in all kinds of bands. Oh, I know that. Oh, yeah. Well, we could talk about music. I think music is supremely important. But eventually I went back to school. I dropped out of McGill twice. You should know this. OK, I was in McGill. I was the last class for whom Latin was required. In 1969, fall of 69, I graduated from Lower Canada College in 68, took a year off, went to McGill. And after that, they dropped the Latin requirement. But I dropped out of McGill as an undergraduate and spent a decade doing music and martial arts and other things. And then went back to McGill in the 80s as a graduate student in a physics program, actually, theoretical physics. And I dropped out of that, too. And fortunately, because I’d won a Commonwealth scholarship to do postgraduate studies in London University College. So I’ve always aspired to go back to McGill as a faculty member and resign to kind of complete the cycle. You know, I mean, in and out of all these ascending levels, I thought it would be appropriate to. But that hasn’t happened yet. And maybe as a result of this will never happen. But anyway, the answer to your question is embedded in that narrative, because in London and I was hanging out with some very serious philosophy of science people at the University of London and also Oxford and Cambridge. There still is a strong circle there for philosophy of physics, particularly. But at the same time, I encountered Sogyal Rinpoche, who had just been sent by the Dalai Lama to open a school, RIPA, the Clear Light Meditation. He’s from the Dzogchen tradition. It’s about very beautiful and studious and very beautiful tradition. So I was fortunate to encounter him and join that sangha and spent three years there in tandem with studies in London. So in my mind, the metaphysics of new physics, including quantum mechanics, were really bound up with Buddhist ontology. I saw a lot of commonalities and wanted to pursue that. So it was an excellent opportunity to actually to do both. I was also able to to have dialogues with David Bohm, who was, as you may know, but he was a professor down the road at Birkbeck College, just adjacent to UC. So we had he was very friendly and always willing to talk to people. And he had a lab set up to search for the quantum potential. Very interesting stuff was going on back then. So I think that’s really how I became a more serious practitioner of this brand of Buddhism, namely Dzogchen. And so that was but I had done meditation earlier on prior to London. And this was not in my bio, but I spent 11 years in the 70s through early 80s as a student of Grandmaster Shing Ming Lee, who came from Hong Kong and opened a Kung Fu school in Montreal. And we were the first generation of Montrealers to learn martial arts. He was a grandmaster and taught five styles as well as Chinese medicine. But everything began with sitting meditation. Everything we ever did in that school began with meditation. And, Ricky, you know, this from martial arts, you can’t I mean, you can’t do anything with your body unless your mind is calm and and and in some sense synced to Soma. So it’s all about meditation. Of course, that was in a different context. But later, Joe and I learned to see the common denominators in all of these traditions going back to ancient India and going forward. Thank you for watching this YouTube and podcast series is by the Verveki Foundation, which in addition to supporting my work, also offers courses, practices, workshops and other projects dedicated to responding to the meaning crisis. If you would like to support this work, please consider joining our Patreon. You can find the link in the show notes. I’m interested. What what what what are some of those common denominators to your mind? Mind the idea that that control of one’s mind and associated virtues, discipline, diligence, practice, determination, will. These are underutilized capacities in generally in the West. And I think that these days, people tend to depend on technology, on quick fixes, on magic bullets and on big pharma for solutions to a lot of their problems. But I think that the development of the of our internal, innate capacities is really uncultivated and undeveloped. And that’s unfortunate. Of course, people who who do practice various things, including music, I mean, one can take any practice and use it as a basis of meditation. I play classical guitar. And when I practice, it’s a meditation with music. As far as I’m concerned, that’s what it is. I play tennis. I’ll be on the court this afternoon. That’s a meditation with with tennis balls. You know, I’ve begun to to believe that almost anything that one does as a sentient being is fundamentally an employment of the mind. And so a well-trained mind is going to help anybody become better at whatever they elect to do. That’s really, really interesting. So when I mean, when did the, you know, the Hellenic and Hellenistic, when did Plato? I mean, you focused entitled Plato, not Prozac, although there’s a picture of the Buddha on the cover, I believe. When when when when did that come in and when did that? Because I know I mean, I have I had some experience, minimal training in some philosophical counseling. I know there’s a dialogical there are dialogical practices, you know, the Platonic Socratic. When did how did that come in and how did that get integrated with this training of the untapped potential of the mind? Well, that wasn’t necessarily because of Plato, although Plato certainly has a lot to say about it. And and on the cover of Plato, not Prozac, which I did not design, but fortunately, a professional did that. It was commissioned by Harper Collins and they did a very beautiful job. Nietzsche is on the cover, too. Yeah. And and so is I think. Well, there are several philosophers on the cover and including, of course, the Buddhists. Well, it’s this story. The narrative here is a little convoluted. You know, I went back to let’s see, I went back to do a first degree in 1981, and that was in Concordia in theoretical physics. But I was interested in philosophy of science. So I took philosophy courses in tandem with the science courses. And I was in an accelerated program there called Science College, which exposed us to a lot of interesting stuff. And then when I got to London, of course, I furthered studies in philosophy of science at the postgraduate level and developed a tremendous interest in catching up on my generic philosophical reading. As a Commonwealth scholar, you know, I had three years of of supported living in London. Well, barely supported. I mean, I just remember one was always cold and hungry. But the British Library took care of at least it was heated in there so we could read to our hearts content and then eat cheap Indian foods, you know, outside or sandwiches and things. It was a wonderful opportunity. And for three years, I made camp in the British Library. I mean, the old one under the blue vault of dome on Montague Street that was in the British Museum at the time. And I just read to my heart’s content. So it was there really at that time that I developed a more burning interest, let’s say, in virtue ethics and what the Hellenics were doing, but also began tentatively to draw common denominators between and among what I call the ABCs. This is a later book eventually called The Middle Way. Rick knows about this book, and it shows that there are indeed linkages between and among Aristotle, particularly Aristotle, Buddha and Confucius fortuitously in Indo-European tongues. They are the ABCs of virtue ethics. OK, that’s the common denominator. And the purpose of the book is to illustrate to people a middle way whereby they can navigate the horrible extremes that are polarizing the globe in so many along so many axes now. And people feel the effects of this daily, of course. So I think it’s very important for us to return to a middle path of not a compromise, but a virtue ethics path. And so in the process of that and that long incubation and gestation of that book, of course, I was much more steeped in Plato, in Aristotle, but also in the literature of Confucianism and Taoism and Buddhism. Let’s get a little technical, Lou. This is the kind of question that came out of the Rutledge Handbook, you know, in terms of taxonomy. Part of the philosophy of meditation would be taxonomizing things. Do you distinguish between meditation and contemplation? John makes a big deal out of that difference. I, prior to meeting John, never really did. So I’m just curious where you fall on that question. I fall very far and quickly on that question. I think I think I’ll let John I will see to John the distinction drawing that he may be fond of in that in that context. I would also respond in a complementary way and suggest that if you want to construe them broadly, I see no opposition. OK, so it’s not versus to me. One can certainly make distinctions. But, you know, looking at it from this point of view, they could be synonymous, too, depending wholly on usage. You remember that the slightly disparaging reference that was made to people who meditated in the West before it became a thing was contemplating your navel. You remember people used to use to be accusatory, almost. Oh, look, this guy’s contemplating his navel. Well, excuse me, but probably doing a form of meditation. So, OK, that’s a popular confusion or vernacular confusion. But nonetheless, there’s something in it. And I think that every major religious tradition utilizes both for that matter. Yes, I agree. OK. And if we if we want to harken back to the distinction between the Vita Activa and the Vita Contemplativa, then of course, the Vita Contemplativa entails all kinds of meditations. Yeah, yes. Yeah, I argue that they have, you know, they’re not oppositional. They have a complementary relationship to each other in terms of the ways you’re training attention. And yeah, I think and I think most most I agree with you. The ones that I’m familiar with, at least many then religious and philosophical traditions have both meditative contemplative practice. They have seating practices. They have moving practices. They have ethical practices in which you have to see if any of this mindfulness training is transferring to behavior, et cetera. The reason why part of the reason why I make the distinction is because it opens people a couple of things. It has a couple of functions. One is it helps people to see that things that are happening in the Western tradition can be understood as mindfulness practices, even though they don’t seem like, you know, following your breath or something like that. And then the other one is trying to resist the sort of reduction of all of these different dimension of mindfulness practice to just a seated, mindful meditation practice that’s been happening in the West and that rich ecology has been lost in some ways. So that’s the that’s the function of that. That is the distinction is performing also scientifically. It maps onto two different processes that seem to be at work in a completely different literature within insight, within insight experiences and within self-regulation experiences. So it creates a more coherent scientific theoretical framework. Well, yeah, I’ve read your chapter and I think it’s very useful how you’ve drawn this out. I mean, Rick, in turn, has done a great service by allowing different voices, of course, philosophers to to to treat the same theme each in their own way. So I understand that. And I really appreciate what you’re saying. I mean, but if we’re one of the speakers, academics, if we put on our professorial hats to the exclusion of all else, then I would say philosophers contemplate problems. That’s part of what we do. We’re working on whatever it is we’re working on. And there’s some problem in exology that we need to, you know, define and and and somehow explain away. So that’s contemplation in quality academy. But no one’s necessarily meditating while they do that. But again, I do think there’s a unification here. And you’re pointing to it. I recall as a physics student trying to solve problems and contemplating the problem did be no good at all. But very often it happened that I would sleep on it, literally sleep on it and wake up with a solution next morning. And that surely is not contemplation in the in the sense of conscious mind. So there’s something else going on, which is meditative in a, you know, another sense where the mind can work very effectively and insightfully without necessarily being under conscious control. And that’s phenomenally interesting. Yeah, very much so. Great. Well, this one should come easy to you. How would you? All the questions are easy to Lou. He’s giving great answers. Yeah, yeah, I’m happy to have Lou here. I get to ask Lou questions for a change. So, Lou, how would you differentiate? But you’ve mentioned this already. Academic philosophy that had that you were just talking about versus practical philosophy. You’re one of the founders of the practical philosophy West. So give us give us your, you know, kind of from the hip. What’s what’s the difference in your mind? I’m glad you asked Rick. Really, I am. And this is as you say, this is not not that difficult for me. I could probably do this one in my sleep. So try it that way. But seriously, for a very long time, it’s been clear to me that in the academy, most subjects and most disciplines, the most important subjects in the academy, the most important subjects in the academy. Very naturally divide into theoretical versus practical or in science, pure versus applied. Yes, I mean, one can do theoretical physics or experimental physics. One can do the same with chemistry and biology. There’s a journal of theoretical biology as well, although one tends to think of biology as mostly practical. It’s theoretical as well. And psychology is all over the map. I mean, there are so many aspects of psychology that are theoretical or hypothetical and so many that are practical. We couldn’t even begin to list them. And same in mathematics, Karen applied. Right. I mean, it’s you know, this and the same with with the arts. You can study music composition or you can study music performance. And so you can study English literature or you can do creative writing. So all of these disciplines have two faced aspects, either theoretical or practical, but except for philosophy, which was always this way. But only really in the 20th century, if one looks at the history of the evolution of our discipline, one sees that it it really separated itself from the mainstream owing to various influences. You could you could look at the, you know, I suppose the logical positivists, you could look at the Vienna Circle, you could look at the people who wanted to remove metaphysics altogether and base everything in logic that failed catastrophically. It was scientists themselves who brought metaphysics back into physics when they saw they they desperately needed it and so forth. So philosophy owing to a kind of an historical accident detoured itself. And the analytic school, which I very much respect, I mean, if we’re talking about Hume as an analytic philosopher, the Enlightenment’s Hobbes is an analytic philosopher of the early modern times. I mean, these these guys were tremendous in their achievements and are still relevant to us today. So I’m not bashing analytic philosophy. I’m merely pointing out that there was too much emphasis placed on the theoretical ultimately. And by stages, this removed philosophy to the point where people tell very bad jokes about it. You know, what are the first words a philosophy graduate utters? Would you like fries with that, sir? I mean, you know, that we produce philosophy attracts really brilliant people. You have to be smart to get through a philosophy program. It’s not an easy course of study by any means. But our current state of culture does not offer, let’s say, equivalent opportunities or philosophers have forgotten how perhaps to make themselves more relevant in everyday life. So I simply see practical philosophy or philosophical practice as a way of remedying that deficit and balancing the pure and applied domains in which philosophy, to me, should and could and does have equal traction. So can I ask you a couple of questions around that? One is I I sort of know. Well, I don’t know your answer. I know how I would answer this because I practice in both domains. But I think a lot of people might have some sense of what academic philosophers do. You know, you make arguments, you publish papers and you do conceptual analysis. What might be the practices of practical philosophy? Maybe that might be a little bit less obvious to people. And then what do you think the relation is between that distinction and Aristotle’s distinction between Sophia and Phonesis? They’re often translated as theoretical and practical. Does it map for you? And is that does that does that land? Absolutely. That’s almost 100 percent mapping. I mean, that you’ve nailed it, John. Phonesis is practical wisdom. And and and philosophy is love of wisdom in more of the theoretical sense, love of love, love of cogent argumentation, love of love of of inherent logic and, you know, and and epistemic issues that we grapple with. But basically, to your question, and this is what has produced a movement that’s now globally effective and growing in. And Rick, we were just at a international conference in Romania in June. And Rick, you know, was his first ICP. But he saw just how much traction this has in this case in Eastern Europe and other places. We’ve been training Indian philosophers this summer. There’s a new cohort. I mean, India, the most ancient philosophical culture on Earth is now is now taking up our version of what they used to do. So so they can bring philosophy for everyday life back to their their compatriots, because India is modernizing and secularizing and being challenged by neo Marxist ideologies that are going to deconstruct the whole the whole enchilada if they get half a chance. And they’re undergoing parallel struggles in their universities for academic freedom now or ideology. It’s incredible to witness this happening in the most ancient, arguably the most ancient philosophical culture on Earth. And China did, oh, and for different reasons, they they they, you know, they’re employing their indigenous traditions very brilliantly to bring them back to everyday life, because China has also become industrialized, modernized, secularized and has created tremendous problems among ordinary people. What does it mean to be Chinese today? What does it mean to be Indian today? What does it mean to be human today? So bringing philosophy, I think the Spanish language has the most appropriate phrase for what I do in that arena or what we all do in that arena. And in Spanish, it’s la filosofía para la vida cotidiana, meaning philosophy for everyday life. And if you say that in America, people will will not understand you. Yes, by and large. If you start if you stop people on the street and say, what’s what’s your philosophy for everyday life? They’ll give you a very puzzled look and wonder if it’s a trick question or if you’re giving something away or trying to sell something to them. You know, the usual responses. But it is. And I think that this is the price now people are paying, in a sense, for being unaware that analytic and also continental philosophy. Continentalists are different. Obviously, there’s a schism between the analytic and the continental. But the continentalists have all kinds of theories about everyday life, but most of them are hallucinations in some sense. So they they may not they may not play out as well. You know, the business community and the European Union and all the people who are working on the political and economic problems. I mean, they’re not talking to leading philosophers in Europe about this, because the continentalists don’t have anything practical in general, do not have anything practical to offer to people charged with governing societies and polities in our current circumstances. So what do we do? Your question is is is and Rick knows perfectly well, because he’s doing it himself. But we basically offer modalities that help in at least three different dimensions. One is the individual. And that’s what we become sort of I hesitate to say famous. And we’re not celebrities, but we certainly become well known for doing philosophical counseling because it’s controversial. Yes, it’s something that belongs to psychology for a very long time, but only in modern times. You know, if you go back to ancient times, you know, Confucius is a philosophical counselor. That’s what the analytics are. The Bhagavad Gita is construed this way, it’s philosophical counseling, Indian style. And Aristotle also is giving counsel. And Seneca said it in his letters. I think it’s letter 41, letter 40 something. Seneca was asked, what is the purpose of philosophy? And he said one word purpose of philosophy is counsel. Out of the mouth of, you know, someone who was managing Nero’s estates, Nero’s estates with the Roman Empire, excuse me, at the time. And and it was seen that philosophy was essential to the management of that estate. Well, if it’s essential to that estate, it’s essential to all of them. So we have been able to give people a new identity in a sense by putting them in touch with ideas and schools of philosophy that are relevant and helpful to them in given situations. You know, be it a personal crisis, be it a career change, be it a divorce, be it whatever people are going through, obviously the right idea, the right song can help. So that’s one thing that has received a lot of media attention, relatively speaking. And that’s what Plato, not Prozac, is in therapy for the same. There’s just dozens and dozens of case studies from my own practice that illustrate how dozens of philosophers and literary, also literary traditions can be very helpful to people. But we also work with groups. I mean, just as psychology has has learned and developed individual therapies and group therapies. Well, we do that, too. There are Nelsonian Socratic dialogues. There are dilemma trainings. There are all kinds of modalities that we can bring into the lives of groups and organizations. So many of us have learned how to become consultants to corporations and government industries and other entities like that. So, yeah, I mean, we can bring philosophy into individual lives, into group lives and into the lives of organizations as well. Are those the three dimensions then that you mentioned? Those are the main three dimensions. And the fourth one is philosophy for children, which I don’t personally get involved with, but that’s become a sort of a brand on its own. And it’s another global movement. It’s a spin off of philosophical practice. It was created really in the U.S. by Matt Lipman at Montclair, not far from Ricksneck of the woods. And then it was taken over by educationalists. But basically, they they were very successful. It might amuse you, John, to know that that it actually became frowned upon because it succeeded to well, they were turning out a lot of little relentless Socratic inquirers. So this was fantastic. Right. Kids are included. Anyway, if you prepare, if you if you’re a parent, if you’ve ever been a parent, you know, they go through the wise where they need an answer. Like, why is this? Why is that? Why do I need to do this? Why is the world this way? And they demand answers. So they were really good at encouraging this and turning these kids into little Socratic inquirers who then went home and started questioning their parents and questioning their teachers in other classes. And people began to say, well, excuse me, these kids are a nuisance. Let’s let’s stop this. You know, it’s tracks. But basically, philosophy for children is a big pertinence of the movement. And also, I would like to say in general that philosophical education can be retooled or repurposed in order to make it more relevant to the lives of our students. Those who read the texts and do the homework and show up for class already have this kind of question. Almost whoever we’re studying, people will make connections between a given thinker and some situation in their own lives. That’s only natural. So so philosophy serves a great educational purpose, and I think it’s underutilized in that way, too. That was fantastic. Rick, you don’t mind. I want to pick up on a couple of threads on that. And yes, I’m aware of the controversy and I’m not asking you to try and resolve that or even foreground it. But could you, you know, again, just for purposes of clarification, put it that way. How would like what in what ways philosophical counseling different? I, you know, I acknowledge there might be overlaps, but if you were trying the elevator pitch, how is it different from regular psychotherapy? Great question. Now, you’re asking me to resolve anything. I can easily exacerbate the controversy. You know, I want to practice doing that back and back about 20 years ago. We had a lot of press for this, although not lately. I don’t mean to go tend to remember things if it’s in the media, you know. But I remember once the we were on the front page of the L.A. Times and they they actually goaded the media are very good at ginning up controversy. That’s how they sell stuff. So they had goaded the at the time, the president of the American Psychiatric Association into giving him a really intemperate quote, saying that anybody who does ethics counseling is practicing psychiatry without a license and opening himself up. My repost to them, which got printed in the story, was that any psychiatrist who thinks that resolving a moral dilemma is a moral dilemma is a mental illness needs philosophical counseling itself. It’s pretty straightforward. Right. And similarly, they goaded a former president of the American Psychological Association into saying, you know, I can’t imagine how how logic could help anybody. Well, she’s she’s making our phones ring off the hook when she says this. You know, people are not as dumb as the media would like them to be. And there are times when critical thinking is absolutely essential. But to answer you in a sort of a packaged way, a way and I think a way that that would resonate with our listeners today is is to suggest that a lot of psychotherapy, not all of it by any means. I mean, there’s there’s there are existential psychologists and existent. You know, they borrowed. I would like to preface this by saying that, in fact, a lot of successful psychological modalities are successful because the platform on which they built is philosophical, whether we’re talking about existential psychiatry and psychology, CBT, cognitive stuff, or you know, you know them all. Or do you need the positive psychology? That’s virtue ethics. Yes. Yes. You know, R.E.T., R.E.M.B.T. This is this is stoicism, you know, and and and on it goes. Now we’ve talked about mindfulness and we’ll be using that word again. Even Buddhists are a little bit irritated. Even well-practiced Buddhists are a little bit irritated by the, you know, this this they’ve taken mindfulness right out of the eight factors and they bought it and sold it in the US. Mindfulness is the leading journal of all time. And it’s not it’s taken out of context. It’s so powerful and it still works. But I think it works even better in context. I’m in agreement with you on that point. Total. Well, that’s great. So let’s find something to disagree about. That’s more fun. But here’s the thing. But here’s the thing. OK, to answer you, I think that a lot of psychology. So I’ve basically given this, you know, disclaimer that, of course, and the best psychologists, from my point of view, have always been philosophical, too. Yes. But basically, and they were one thing for a very long time, as you as you well know. We had departments of philosophy and psychology well into the 20th century. Yes. William James, who was neither but a medical doctor, you know, officially was chair of philosophy and psychology at Harvard. And Cyril Jode, a great neglected philosopher, was chair of philosophy and psychology at the University of London into the 40s. And City College only had its department of psychology created, I think, in the mid 50s. So they were also one thing for a long time. I think that a lot of psychotherapy tends to want to go back to the past and to it’s it’s really neo Freudian. You know, Freud’s notion that there are no mental accidents. And so everything that we experience is somehow predetermined by prior experience. So it would make sense then to excavate that to the bottom and find out where things went wrong. That’s the neo-Freudian model. But I think that philosophical counseling tends to encourage people to reconceive themselves as architects of their future rather than as victims of their past. And I think that’s a significant difference. So if someone gets like official training and accreditation as a philosophical counselor, do they get training at all of these four dimensions you mentioned or just the first? Not all at once. It’s modular and it takes time to develop. I’ve been practicing for over 30 years, you know, philosophically with others. But Rick knows that he’s been through actually all of them now. The one more we have to do is the training dialogue for the Socratic facilitators. But Rick, you’ve been adhering to our different programs. So we suggest that people start with the training, the certification in philosophical counseling, because that’s foundational. And if you go into a group, there are always going to be individuals in the group you need to direct particular ideas with and at. And so you’re doing a little philosophical counseling and group work. And when you go into a corporation or government, you’re going to end up there because the CEO or somebody wants philosophical counseling anyway, and they bring you in to do some work with their teams. But ultimately, you’ll be doing philosophical counseling at some level there as well. So I think that it’s useful to acquire multiple modalities, but we teach them one at a time and we encourage people to practice them on their own. And then ultimately to develop the kind of practice they want to develop. You know, nothing’s graven in stone. And I’m also happy to say as a clarification for our listeners that philosophical practice is nowhere regulated by government. So we don’t have licenses to do this. We don’t particularly want licenses to do this. We don’t think in general that government should be regulating philosophy. They do need to regulate a lot of things, but philosophy is probably not one of them. Excellent. Well, you said a little bit about this before, but could you say what you think about philosophy of meditation as a topic? Or perhaps, you know what, that’ll come up again anyway. Let me break that down into those three theses that you’re familiar with from the Rutledge Handbook on the philosophy of meditation. What I suggested were three theses that almost every chapter addressed at least one of these. So I’ll rattle them off to you. One, two, three, and then we’ll go to the first one again. One, can meditation contribute to philosophy? I think you’ve already answered that. Is there, can there, or ought there to be a philosophy of meditation that you’ve also touched on a little bit? But number three, I guess, is the most difficult one. Is meditation itself a form of philosophy? You’ve said a few things that have answered all of those already. So let’s just go through them one at a time, though. Meditation contributes to philosophy. By the way, Rick, I want to congratulate you again for this book because you really cast everything in a kind of a new light and made us think very carefully about these matters. And also your readers will be, therefore, encouraged to think carefully. So I think you’re doing something really interesting and unique with something that actually is quite old in a way. But you put it in new bottles for old wine, and I applaud that. I think it’s wonderful. So, okay, can meditation contribute to philosophy? I would say yes. Meditation could make many philosophers perform whatever they do better, right? As mentioned, byproducts of most meditative practices include patience, discipline, diligence and a clear mind. They all are going to develop those things. These in turn will all be virtues for a professor of anything, I would assert, including philosophy. But if you’re asking whether meditation can vouchsafe fresh or novel philosophical insight, or interpreting the question in that way, I would say on balance, yes. It can also do that. And I would like to offer a couple of examples a bit later on in answer to a different question. We’ll get to it, okay? So Rick Scott is, Rick is all well organized. You’re spontaneous. This is a great combination. It’s like a tag team. I feel like I’m being tag teamed here. But Rick, I did think about this. This is a supportive tag team. This is a supportive, and we are your eager students. Maybe we’re both playing Socrates, so you feel a little self-conscious. But yeah, we’re on your team, Lou. So you want to postpone that answer? Yeah, I want to postpone that part because I think it deserves a separate answer. It’s really important. So let’s take the sequence first. Okay, so is there, can there, or ought there to be a philosophy of meditation? Right, well, I love that. What you’ve done is now you’ve commingled the existential and the modal and the normative all at once. Okay, that’s quite a challenge, Rick. But I’m going to try to reconstitute each one in its own right. Generically, well, I would say there is a philosophy of meditation if and when one philosophizes about meditation. I mean, we’re philosophers. If we’re philosophizing about X, then there’s a philosophy of X, right? Existentially resolved by performing it. Okay, but then again, modally, if something is, evidently it can be. I mean, I don’t know about any, I have no counter example, but after you do something that, you know, that is, but can’t be, I don’t, I can’t think of anything. So in modal logic, it’s P, therefore possibly P. Okay. It’s a very simple answer, Lou. And normatively, I’m trying to keep it simple, trying to keep it simple, at least this part of it. And then finally, the third one is, of course, more interesting in a certain sense. And I’m not going to challenge you whatsoever. Okay. I’m going to assert that one cannot, in this case, derive aught from is. You know, ought there to be. Well, there is, and there can be, but ought there to be. I would like to argue yes, but from not falling into that trap of Hume’s guillotine, I’ll give you a slightly different argument as to why there ought to be. And this is, of course, the normative one, and therefore more subjective and less cementable to formal logic. But I would suggest the following. I think that people ought to meditate, more people ought to meditate more often. I think the world would be a better place. I just, you know, posit that the world would be a better place if more people meditated more often. If that’s the case, I’m also positing that there must be some act of will to meditate, which usually precedes some act of meditation or some practice of meditation. Given that there is some act of will that predisposes someone to start meditating rather than go out for a beer or make a sandwich or whatever else they might do, then there is an act of will. And if there ought to be more people meditating, then there ought to be a manifestation of more act of will to meditate. So I suppose if more people have an act of will to meditate, they must also, that must also entail some philosophy of meditation that they’ve either learned or cobbled together for themselves that impels that act. Yeah. So if you take that chain, you know, more people ought to meditate, that there ought to be a will that impels people to do that. And so there must be a philosophy of meditation that informs that will. Yeah, very good. So what you did, in my view, in a roundabout way and with different language, was appealed to the first two or a few of the folds in the eightfold path. Right view would be a philosophy that encourages and prescribes meditation, which is one of the other folds. And then that will also generate, having that view will give rise to the intention to meditate. You’re talking about the will, et cetera. So yes, very good, though. I like that. Thank you. I didn’t make this up. That’s the wisdom group. I think that is the reason for presenting it first on that list of eight steps. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. Although they say it doesn’t happen in sequence and they can go in any order. And that’s true. It’s more of a holistic thing. You could start anywhere. But yes, I think there’s an importance to right view being the first thing, because your view is the map of reality. And if you have the wrong map, everything else that you do is going to come out wrong. God help you. For the most part. Operating with anything like, you know, I would say skillful view. I like the synonyms, you know, skillful or expedient. Yeah. But you said something in passing that’s really important. And I’ll just mention before we go on, if I may, that I teach this to my students in Indian philosophy and in Buddhism, that we’re looking very often at ladders and rungs. And we, you know, we often accrue credentials that way, you know, stepwise towards some goal. And that’s a fine way to do things. I mean, there are sometimes prerequisites. You need to do something more advanced and so forth. It makes a lot of sense. You’re an undergraduate before you’re a graduate. You know, an undergraduate before a graduate makes a lot of sense. But there’s also a ladder of yogas. And if you take a ladder, if you just imagine a ladder, if you perform a topological transformation on the ladder by joining the sides of the ladder, then the spokes of the ladder become, the rungs of the ladder, excuse me, become spokes. You see, you lose the hierarchy. If you join the sides of the ladder together, then you actually have a wheel. And the rungs, which were, you know, previously hierarchical, are now equal in the sense that they all point to the center. And the center, of course, is empty, which is very interesting. Buddhists like this because the center is empty. So I use that. That’s a topological transformation. You’re not lifting it out of the space and twisting it. You’re transforming it in the same plane. So that is to say, logically, topologically, a ladder and a wheel are equivalent. And so you could also make an argument for what you just said, that it really doesn’t matter which step you take first. It doesn’t matter which one of the factors you focus on, because they all, sooner or later, entail each other anyway. One, six, and seven are always involved in any of the others. So you can’t escape that. It’s a very beautiful, I think it’s a beautiful arrangement. No, I like the, I like the symbology of that. Quick little anecdote. Just this morning, I was guiding a meditation and we were focusing on the breath as the primary technique. And I mentioned that other meditative techniques, when they work, will calm the mind. And when you reach a calm state, one of the last things that’s still moving is your breath. So you wind up with awareness of the breath. But you could start with awareness of the breath and wind up in the same place. So you could begin or end. This is the same thing you’re talking about. It’s just a kind of concrete example of one application of that theory. The ladder turns into the wheel. I love that. Great, great imagery, Lou. All right. Now the tough third question. Is meditation itself a form of philosophy? Yeah. Thank you for making me think about it. I’d have to say prima facie, Rick, that Marcus Aurelius and René Descartes both voted yes on that with their book titles. But then the word meditation might be a homonym in that case. It might have different meanings. It does have different meanings. But in this case, I mean, it also in Descartes case depends on the French. All right, because it’s translated out of French and the word, you know, nothing is perfectly well translated. So Descartes may have had some other verb in mind. And I must confess, I read the first edition in the British Library in English, not French. So I don’t know what word Descartes used to describe meditations. But certainly Marcus Aurelius chose that word deliberately. And he meant us to be literally meditating on some of the practices that one should in the morning indulge in in order to get through the day as effectively as possible with least conflict, with most cooperation and all of that. So I don’t think it’s just a homonym or a synonym. The Stoic practice of ascesis does entail meditation. There’s no question. And so, you know, we have the word aesthetic, which nowadays has perhaps more monastic connotations. But nonetheless, ascesis is a secular set of Stoic practices meditating, you know, cemetery meditations are common to both the Stoics and the Buddhists. And I do them, you know, as well. It’s a very, very useful thing. So let me just say this. Many practices in monastic orders would say that meditation is definitely a form of philosophy. And I would say those who meditate are once again manifesting active wills to do so, which are motivated by some kind of philosophy, be it the first factor or some other set of beliefs. And so perhaps more properly speaking, we could suggest that meditation is a form of philosophical practice, not necessarily a form of philosophy per se. But if one is meditating in this way or in any of these allied ways, then one is doing a form of philosophical practice. I would certainly want to argue that. That’s good. I think that there’s some semantical issues here. If you take meditation and the word in the inclusive way that you took it, then it falls out of that definition that meditation is a form of philosophy. But here’s a more pressing challenge. If you take it in the narrow way of people sitting and watching their breath, let’s just say that that’s what we mean by that kind of meditation. I think you’re saying even that’s a form of philosophical practice. It’s certainly not a kind of it’s not an analytic argument, but it’s still a form of philosophical practice. Is that what you’re saying? It’s not discursive argumentation. And what people tend to do these days is make the mistake of believing because of the way the culture has oriented philosophy toward them, that philosophy is all and only discursive argumentation. That’s the problem with it. All right. So did you want to get back to the first thing that you said to put on hold or get back to that later? We can get back to it if there’s time. You have asked a lot of questions which are. Well, I have a couple more, but I don’t want to miss out on that. Great. You seem to be really excited about that. So why don’t we get back to that now in case we can’t cover the other questions? I’m really excited about it, too. So I’d like to get back to it. Okay, I’m not going to in that case delay you any longer, but I also hope some can end up disappointing you. All right. So what I like to is this is this the question, Rick? Would I like to share any key meditative experience? Is that the that was maybe what you meant? Because you said can meditation contribute to philosophy? You said the answer would be with another question. So I guess that would be it. Is that okay? So let me preface this. It doesn’t happen overnight. All right. Because as you read in the introductory remarks, I’ve had some wonderful teachers. Thank goodness. I mean, I’ve always been fortunate in that regard of having teachers. And I’m a little bit confusion in the sense that I regard anybody as a potential teacher. And I love to learn. So, you know, that sets one up to have great teachers. And they include the late Grandmaster Lee in Montreal. But as you mentioned, the late Sogyal Rinpoche in the Tibetan Dzogchen tradition and their yogas are very powerful in my experience. They’re extremely powerful. Then I ended up in the Morningstar Zendo in Jersey City. Fast forward with Roshi Robert Kennedy SJ. And you talk about the middle way because Roshi Kennedy, who’s just in his 90s now. And if he’s out there, sensei, how are you? I hope you’re doing well. Roshi Kennedy is a Jesuit, John, who was posted to Japan. You know, there’s been a Jesuit presence there for centuries. And his mission in Japan was to enrich the Japanese experience of Christianity. They flipped him. They turned him into a Zen Buddhist. So he came back to the West and now he enriches Christian experience of Zen Buddhism. He’s also a trained psychoanalyst, a very interesting guy. He was head of theology at St. Peter’s College in Jersey City, which is where I met him. And we were living in the same building. So I ended up for quite a number of years going to his Morningstar Zendo. And he’s a phenomenal Roshi. So there are some things I want to talk about that come out of Zen. But then also I met finally in the 2000s, early 2000s, President Daisaku Ikeda. And he taught me a lot in the Nichiren Buddhism tradition focusing on the Lotus Sutra. John, do you recognize that name? John, do you recognize that name? Which name? Daisaku Ikeda. No, I don’t. He’s the director of the international Nichiren Buddhist organization called Soka Gakkai. Yeah, Soka Gakkai International. It’s an interesting backstory about him. I’m very glad to have the opportunity to introduce him to you. And we published a dialogue book in 2012 called The Inner Philosopher, which has become a new model for philosophical counseling as well. He’s a very important guy. More than that, he’s done dialogues. He’s published voluminously. There’s a whole publishing industry devoted to his works. And I can send you some links to some of his works if you’re interested, John. But the backstory with Soka Gakkai is it grew out of the Second World War in Japan. And the founder of this contemporary organization was a very famous educator at the time in Japan named Tsunasaburo Makiguchi, who had written bestselling books on education in Japan. He was imprisoned during World War II because he was a conscientious objector to Japanese militarism. And I do not think that in the Japanese language there was even a phrase for conscientious objector. Probably did not exist in the language of the time. But he was imprisoned along with his successor Jose Toda. And the two of them, he died in prison and the elder one, Makiguchi died. But he wrote a beautiful book called Human Geography, among other things, which is an illustration of the effects of geography on human character. And that might be of interest to you, the effects of geography broadly construed on the shaping of national and individual character. And I think there’s something in it. The only other reference that I ever encountered was in Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws. He actually touched on this completely independently, of course, in a couple of centuries earlier. So that’s a different topic. Mr. Ikeda is the third president. And when they started rebuilding Japan post-war, Soka Gakkai, which means value creating society, grew out of that post-war development of Japan and became very big. They have about 10 million members in Japan. That’s one-tenth of the population. So it’s huge. And what’s of interest and might be of interest to our listeners is that in 1979, the actual Natcheeran Buddhist priesthood, which is in charge of Natcheeran adherence, Japan’s very Buddhist country, and there are entrenched priesthoods basically running the different factions or different denominations. The Buddhist, Natcheeran Buddhist priests were becoming concerned about Mr. Ikeda’s influence on the lay population. So they excommunicated him from the Sangha. He took 95% of the members with him. So they completely, completely backfired on them. And now when I’m in Japan and I meet older Natcheeran Buddhists, I very quickly figure out which Natcheeran Buddhists are. They are the ones that ones who stayed with the priest or are they the ones who went with Mr. Ikeda. He’s operating in 200 countries now, and he’s had dialogues with amazing dialogues with Gorbachev. His first dialogue was with Toynbee when Toynbee was near death. He went to London and had a dialogue with Mr. Ikeda. And had a dialogue called Hope, about hope for humanity. Choose Hope is the name of it, published by Oxford. Very beautiful. He’s published dialogues with Nobel laureates and with heads of state. I was very privileged to do a dialogue with him, and it changed my life for sure. This man, and believe me, John, I’ve met world leaders. I’ve been with the WEF and with all kinds of world leadership organizations. And this man, Mr. Ikeda, is the closest I’ve seen to a living Buddha. He’s really incredible and has a transformative effect on everybody. So he’s quite exceptional. And I just mentioned this because that’s the third major influence of Buddhism in my life, or the teachings that he basically gave me from the Natcheeran tradition and the Lotus Sutra. Of course, it comes from China as well, which was the crucible, as you know, from Mahayana Buddhism. So to your point, Rick, what is it that happened? Well, let me give you some examples of a serious nature. And also, if we have time, I’d like to tell you a couple of funny anecdotes, because particularly from the Zen tradition, there’s a lot of humor, you know. I think that humor is there. Laughter is therapeutic. There’s laughing yoga. I don’t know if you practice laughing yoga. I’ve seen it in India, and it’s quite amazing to be a spectator of laughing yoga. It’s contagious. But people who can laugh and who can laugh at themselves are generally doing all right. It’s the humorists who need help more than anyone. People who’ve had humor, you know, basically conditioned out of them by ideology or in deep trouble, and they can’t laugh at anything. They’re in deep trouble. You know, they’re waking up angry instead of waking up with a positive attitude. So anyhow, in the sense of, let’s say, recurring one-pointedness of mind, I resolved Bertrand’s random chord paradox. This is a fiendish problem in the philosophy of geometric probability that had perplexed philosophers and mathematicians, and some of the best ones in the business, for more than a century. It took me eight years of gradually deepening insight to actually come up with a resolution. And this was in tandem at the time with Tibetan yogas. I did touch the bottom of it, and my resolution became the lead article in the journal Philosophy of Science, published in 1994. And by pure serendipity, that was exactly the month where I pitched up at City College to give a job talk. So my advice to aspiring philosophy professors is if you pitch up to give a job talk somewhere, if you happen to get a good publication in the works at the same moment and it appears when you’re there, you’ll get a lot of traction. But this was a serious breakthrough. And pure serendipity. Some years later, I had other things happen with Yantra yoga. I’m speaking really now about the yoga of forms, about the meditation on forms, which produces insight in the domain of geometry mostly. In the summer of 2005, while writing The Middle Way, I experienced three epiphanies, and two of them are related to Yantra yoga. They’re described in the book. The first two involved meditation with forms specifically. I found a geometric common denominator between the golden rectangle, from which Aristotle derives his virtue ethics. Yes, the golden mean comes from the golden rectangle. And I was looking. I mean, I was wanting to see if there was any common denominator in the iconography of Greek virtue ethics, which is the golden rectangle. That’s constructed of phi, that amazing universal constant, which Kepler called one of the two great treasures of geometry. Johannes Kepler said there are two great treasures in Euclidean geometry. One of them is the Pythagorean theorem, and the other one is phi, the golden rectangle. So it turns out that the yin-yang symbol, which we’re all familiar with, it’s, if people were wearing it, it’s jewelry, it’s everywhere now. It’s also constructed of phi. I found the link between the two of them. It’s made of phi. If you want to know how to make this thing, I deconstructed it and showed you with a straight edge encompassed, you know, traditional Euclidean methods. You can construct phi at home in 30 seconds using Euclidean methods. So that was a, this was an epiphany. This was something that came out of Yantra yoga and also discovered that the fundamental object of chaos theory, which is the Mandelbrot set, is in fact the fractal Buddha. If you want to interpret it that way. I have a slideshow that demonstrates this. My Buddhist friends love this. They’ve never seen it before. And I tried it on them a little gingerly at first, but they seemed quite happy with it. So in the heart of chaos, we have some order and that’s always a cheering thought. Okay. And then the third one is really a kind of a koan. If you’ll permit me, I will just read it to you very briefly. It’s a short thing. It says as follows. Empty of water, full of air. Empty of air, full of emptiness. Empty of emptiness, what remains? And that last part, empty of emptiness, what remains? And if you meditate on that, I guarantee you’re going to get a breakthrough. So, so Lou, I, I, first of all, that was all great. The first two had overlaps with something that I’ve been recently delving into both historically and psychologically as a cognitive scientist. Which is, you know, practices around sacred geometry, which seem to do the two things, especially within the neoplatonic hermetic tradition. And it seemed to be doing something similar to what you’re talking about there. Where you’re bringing a meditative practice and also sort of a multi-dimensional geometrical practice together. And you get sort of profound insights into underlying structures, deep patterns. Does that resonate? I’m amazed and impressed that you’ve done that you’re also looking at sacred geometry. It’s fantastic stuff. So we have more in common than meets the eye. Yeah, it belongs to that same family of yogas as mantra yoga. I mean, mantra yoga is, is doing the same thing with vibrations, but Yantra yoga is doing it with forms. It produces insight. It produces awakening. Yes. Absolutely. John, I want to look more into you. We should share. We’re going to share our work on this. Okay. I want to know what you’re up to. That sounds fascinating. Well, for me, I, you know, I was always intrigued by math for the Greeks is geometry and geometry was very imaginal for the Greeks. It wasn’t like we were post Cartesian and we tend to think of everything as, you know, abstract algebraic equations, but it’s actually, you know, of course, in Pythagoras is doing where the Pythagoreans at least are doing a lot with this. And it struck me as a bridge between, you know, very propositional kinds of knowing and non propositional kinds of knowing, especially perspectival and, and, and also, you know, intersects with Corban’s work on the imaginal in a powerful way. So that’s, that’s what I’m sort of looking at right now. That’s phenomenal. And I, you know, I do this when I get a chance with my students, when we look at day card, even in one on one, you’re reading, you know, we’re going to read a meditation and day card and whatnot, but the, but most of them, a little light comes on when I ask them what, you know, the name of this coordinate system with the X, Y, and they say, Oh, this was day card. Oh, in his spare time, he came up with this and the great size geometry. I mean, what a genius he was, but he also solved some of Euclid’s problems by doing so. I mean, we could do a whole episode on this. I’m not talking about the fifth postulate. I just mean Euclid’s definitions are very, very flawed. You know, a point is that which has position, but no magnitude will excuse me. You can never sharpen your pencil enough to get position and no magnitude. There’s always graphite on the paper and therefore there’s always magnitude. So you’re violating Euclid by trying to view Euclidean geometry, but they can’t resolve that because the point X, Y has position X, Y, but there is no magnet. It’s beautiful. Right. There’s no magnitude. So you can extrapolate this. Or it’s a very powerful way of transposing Euclid from the plane to the geometric space. And of course, I think, I think it’s a powerful psycho technology. Science depends on Cartesian graphing in a profound way. There’s just, you know, there’s problems that can’t be formulated, questions that can’t be asked if you don’t have a graphing ability. This is what I teach my students around this stuff. Yeah, absolutely. And this, and this plays true in the history of science, history of physics as well. You can look at Einstein who always wanted to visualize the world that he was trying to explain. And only when he thought he was operating with the correct picture, did he then search out mathematical formula, which basically described the picture that he deemed to be the correct one. And that’s how he found the Lorentz transforms. So I think what you’re saying is absolutely right and probably neglected in the teaching of science and certainly in the teaching of philosophy. Free. Thank you for that. I may be wrong about this historically, but I might be confusing things. I read, I think I read somewhere that Descartes discovered those Cartesian coordinates in a dream, his analytic geometry. He discovered that. Not the anecdote I’ve heard, but there’s multiple anecdotes. I heard one that he’s laying in bed and he was tracking a fly in a room. And there was tiles on the ceiling. So yeah. And I often, I often say with my students, I say, this is what he did in his free time as he’s laying in bed. What did you do today? Right? There’s no contradiction in any of this. This is absolutely aligned with everything we’re saying. If he did it that way. Yeah. Well, he was lying in bed in a kind of mind wandering, but still contemplating problem solving, whether it was intentionally directly trying to solve a problem or this is the way that the mind works. Like when you have a tip of tongue phenomenon and then you stop thinking about it. And then the answer comes to you. It’s all in a piece. It’s all on a spectrum. Really great. He placed great store on wonder, right? Because it was for him a breakthrough beyond the idea that we’re either, you know, repelled or attracted in wonder. We’re neither repelled or like we’re not moving towards or away and it’s a different States. So it gives us a kind of new epistemic access to the world. Yeah. There’s aspects of Descartes that we, we don’t pick up on very much these days. I mean, I’m critical of other parts of Descartes as most people are, but I also, I, I often, when I do my lectures on Descartes, I often say, I wish I made Descartes mistakes. There are titanic mistakes that shape civilization. Yes. Yes. And, and there’s, and there’s some wonderful logic also that you could buy. I’m not talking about the port Royal stuff that he did formally. I’m talking about the meditations again, when he says it is certain that nothing is certain, that’s a great paradox. And I pointed out to my students and well, if it’s certain that, excuse me, if it’s certain that nothing is certain, then the proposition it’s certain that nothing is certain must also be uncertain. Yes. Yes. Okay. Et cetera. And this, but this gets them thinking, you know, which is an activity they’re not always habituated to do. And they mostly they’re habituated to six hours a day on a mobile device. And that’s whatever the opposite of thinking is their consciousness is being hijacked. I would like to say, and it’s unfortunate. Well, that’s where, that’s where we hope practical philosophy or philosophical practice will help to allow or enable or support people finding their way back into right-mindedness. And before I’ve read a bit about the, you know, your, your, your notion of cognition also. Yeah, this is, we need to get them back into their bodies. Yeah. Right. Where they belong. Exactly. So may I share with you? I mean, I know we’re, we’re doing all kinds of things here and it’s all good, but could I, can I give you a couple of illustrations of humor? Not laughing. I’m not going to laugh for you. I want to give you a couple of illustrations of, of what I think are humorous insights that come out of Buddhist practice. Just personal things that have happened that I find immensely funny and others when they hear about them tend to find them funny also. So maybe it’s contagious. I think, if I may. I think it would be a great, a great way to bring this to a close. Yeah. Be with some, some, some Buddhist humor. All right. Go for it. Well, okay. We’ll start with the source Indian humor. A funny thing. This was one of my students in an Indian philosophy class who, who during an, in an essay wrote, and I’m quoting now, he wrote the, the devotee seeks union with the oversoul, but he spelled it O-V-E-R-S-O-L-E. The oversoul, union with the oversoul. So I thought, wait a second. This is a great idea. Every ashram should have a shoe repair shop inside where, where you get union with the oversoul while you wait, right? All unions guaranteed for 30 days. So I mean, that was out of the mouth of babes. So we acknowledge the source of Buddhism. Okay. Union with the oversoul, but seriously, you know, you know, funny, serious. No, I’ll give you two anecdotes. And these came out of my time with the Zendo, you know, with, with, I don’t want to now cause the Roshi to, to, to, you know, to be embarrassed by any of this. It wasn’t his doing, but it was my doing. Sitting with him and in his, in his sangha. So I remember being in San Francisco one day in the days when, you know, you could walk around San Francisco and Chinatown, you know, the San Francisco Chinatown was quite substantial and they had any number of Emporium selling all kinds of souvenirs. So I wanted to bring something back to the Zendo in Jersey city. And I went into one of these Emporiums and there were just seemingly miles and miles of shelves with all kinds of, you know, Buddha statues and other things. So this proprietor was a young Chinese lady and she followed me around at a very discreet distance, not because she thought I was going to shoplift, but she wanted to see if I needed help. So she was very discreet and kind of, and then I turned to her at some point and, and just remarked so many Buddhas, you know, and then she, she looked at me with this kind of panic and said, there’s only one Buddha. And she was burning incense behind the cash. They had an altar with the one true Buddha behind it burning. And I looked at her and I said, there is no Buddha. And she was like a deer in the head. She ran back to the cash and began lighting incense and praying to the, you know, so I thought that was really immensely funny and it was a Zen moment, right? Okay. So you like that one. I’ll try the next one. This one is with the Roshi. We used to sit every morning. We had like a Zen and breakfast club. And in, in St. Peter’s, they had hired a radical feminist to preach sedition to the students. You know, St. Peter’s is a Jesuit private Jesuit college and they, and the students loved her. She was a radical feminist, very presentable, very erudite. And she was, she was preaching sedition against white male patriarchal hegemony. I don’t know anybody better at that than the Jesuits. So she was preaching sedition, you know, in the payroll of these guys against whom she’s preaching sedition and everybody loved that the classes were packed to the rafters. And, you know, she cashed the check from these guys and they loved, and they loved her on the faculty. It was a nice arrangement, but she used to carry on. And the, and the Roshi encouraged us because I’m a little bit on a given day, more chauvinistic than her. So he encouraged us to debate these things at breakfast after we had all sat together for a time. And so we had these debates. And one morning she was reminding us of the, and I hear it’s a serious problem, domestic violence is not funny, but she was reminding us about the severity of it. And she, she talked about men flogging their wives. Anyway, later I was in the kitchen washing up with the Roshi. We took turns. We always washed the dishes and sometimes he was there. So the two of us just happened to be at the sink and I’m washing and he’s drawing. And I turned to him and I just mentioned, you know, this is a semantic thing. I mentioned one, one flogs horses, you know, one beats wives. I mean, that’s the terminology. If you’re going to use it, you flog horses, you beat wife. And he looked at me and he said, there are some truths that can only be uttered in the kitchen. Oh, God. You can edit this out if you’re, if you’re a feminist viewer, it’s going to take on great, but this is, it was, it was absolutely coming from, from him. It was a golden, a golden moment. I’ll never forget it. So I think that there is a potentially humor that can fall out of Buddhist practice and there’s certainly no malice in it. There’s certainly no harm in it. There’s a lot of compassion in it and humor is insightful in its own way. One of our friends who’s also one of the VPs of APPA is Lydia Amir, who does a lot on the philosophy of humor. So I just thought I would plug her on this appropriate moment. John, we were about to say something. Well, I want to come into a close here. Yeah, I know. And this will be my last question. And it’s brought up by the third person you mentioned somebody they went, I forget to name. I’m sorry. I apologize. They went to Japan as a Jesuit. They came back as a Zen. Did they remain nevertheless a Christian? So I’ve read some Will Johnson, other people I’ve asked some, an avid of this. I’ve asked some other people of this is something that does then have to be in Buddhism. Can you be a Zen Christian? Could you be a Zen Platonist? What, what would you say to that, to that question? I would say yes to everything that you’re asking. So this is the Roche, this is Roche Kennedy, one of the same. And he, you know, he came back in Roche Kennedy, SJ. Is there an inherent contradiction in this? Well, only superficially, or perhaps, perhaps you could say ontologically, because as a Jesuit, he certainly believes in the soul. He’s an apostolic Catholic and he believes in the salvation of the soul. So, but as a Zen Buddhist, he believes in Anathman. I mean, there is no soul. So how does he juxtapose being so this is the middle way. It’s the razor’s edge. The Katha Upanishad teaches that there’s a way sometimes as sharp as a razor’s edge. He’s been on that razor’s edge for most of his adult life. And my hat’s off to him, because Buddhists don’t thoroughly trust him because he’s a Jesuit. And Jesuits probably don’t thoroughly trust him because he’s a Buddhist. So this man is setting himself up for walking the middle way as the razor’s edge. And I have nothing but praise for him. He’s a wonderful, wonderful human being, regardless of how he manages to juxtapose these beliefs. You know, you should ask him sometime. And you know, I would like to. I would love to. His book, you should, you know, there’s a book that he’s written two books, but one of them is called Zen Spirit, Christian Spirit. And I think he explains it himself. Johnny may well be answering your question in this book. He goes into monastic Christian communities and teaches them Zen meditation techniques in order to rekindle their faith in their particular tradition. Because, you know, in the monastic traditions, faith is waning just as it is in the mainstream church. So basically he goes into Trappist monasteries and Benedictine and Capuchin, all these different monasteries, and does Zazen. Now they trust him because he’s a Jesuit. So he can come in there and, you know, he can recite the catechism so they can learn from him. But he’s teaching them mindfulness. And this ends up being re-experienced by them as a revivified faith in what they’re doing in the monastery. I think it’s very beautiful that he does this. Well, thank you. I mean, in my sort of philosophical youth, when sort of analogous, when you’re reading Watts and others, I read Thomas Merton, Ven and the Birds of Appetite. And that question has always been bouncing around inside of me quite significantly. I have Socrates on one shoulder and Sinhardal on the other. And so what does it mean to have them living together within me and between me and other people? So thank you for answering that question. That was helpful. It seems like you already knew this, but you know, there are embodiments. We’re back to the body. There have to be examples. It’s really important that there be people who can exemplify this in their lives and lead exemplary lives and not be so worried about what other people are going to make of apparent contradictions in their metaphysics. I think that’s less important than virtue in one’s practice. I agree. I have similar entities on both of my shoulders. John and I have talked about this before. And Lou, you’ve heard me talk about it at the Philosophical Counseling Places where we’ve been. The mystic and the analytic philosopher, you know, always in battle in my head. I’m on the racist edge too. I don’t know if I’m getting cut, but we’ll see. And Lydia, you mentioned her. I mean, she’s done wonderful work on this homo risibilis theme, ridiculous man. Lydia wants us to look in the mirror and see how ridiculous we’re capable of being on a given day. And this also has philosophical value and therapeutic value. So yeah, and she’s not afraid, but she’s always the first one to ridicule herself when she’s giving examples of ridiculousness. She’s not pointing a finger except to say, well, look, we’re all ridiculous. Start here. So Lou, we always want to give the guest the last word. Any last thoughts, anything you’d like to plug, how to contact you or what you’re working on, whatever you like. The floor is yours. Well, thank you. I just want to thank you both for this interchange. It’s been really great to see you again, Rick and John. I’m so pleased to have a chance to meet you and dialogue with you. It’s a wonderful opportunity. So thank you once again for having me as your guest. I mean, I’m always publishing something and anybody who’s interested in the latest books and the latest articles or whatever, you can just go to my website and you’ll find all that stuff there. And you know, I’m pretty eclectic on a given day. So, you know, no plug necessary. Just please buy one of my books, anyone you like. Okay. I won’t suggest that. You choose. Okay. Maybe it’ll make your day. Thank you so much. It’s been a great pleasure.