https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=s22FBKKmpwQ
Hello and thank you for tuning in to my discussion with John Vervecki and myself where we discuss something that John really developed and we’ve been fine tuning it through the course that I’ll tell you about in a moment that we’re going to be doing in February. But the practice is, I think we’re calling it the Neoplatonic contemplative exercise or meditation if you will. And it’s a progressive, you could think about it and we’ll go into depth describing what it is and how to practice it and what each of the stages are, the progressive stages are. But essentially you can think about them as the Neoplatonic sense of the way being itself is intelligible. And in the classical sense of the way of knowing and learning was with if we just take the world as having intelligibility, then learning about reality we will become more fitted to reality. We can become more conformed with reality which is an experiential full body mind, neurological, spiritual process. So you could say that this contemplative exercise that we’re going to be describing in our conversation goes deep into the specific levels of understanding of how one becomes more fitted with, at one with reality as such in a Platonic sense of the word. And this also, as I mentioned, is one of the exercises that we go deep into at the Dialogo Circling Weekend. This is our second time putting this on and it’s taught by John Brevecky, my friend Chris and myself, and it’s our second time putting it on and the first one exceeded our expectations. It was so awesome. And so we are fine tuning it and we’re going to put another one on, February 19th and 20th. It’s February 19th and 20th, 10am to 3.30pm Pacific Standard Time on both days. That’s a Saturday and a Sunday. There’s a discount if you sign up before February 6th. I think it’s like a $50 discount. The link to register is in the show notes below. Or you can just go to the Circling Institute slash Circling slash Dialogos and sign up there. All right. I hope you enjoy the conversation and this will be the first of many. All right. Welcome, John. It’s good to see you again. Hey, Guy. Great to see you again. Great to see you again. Excellent. I’m excited about this. It may take a couple of videos to get complete on this so we can take our time. However, there’s something that I first heard you speak about explicitly and I think you call it something called Platonic Levels of Contemplation. Yeah, Neoplatonic. Yes. Yeah, the Neoplatonic Levels of Contemplation. So I wanted to talk about, and you presented it in our course that we did together, the Dialog into Dialogos course and Circling course. As a, you could say, something distinct from Eastern, what most people consider mindfulness in Eastern meditation. Very much. Very much. There are similarities to it, right, in places that they touch together. However, it’s a very unique place that you come from around it. It really goes deep in our own Western history. And so I thought it’d be really great to go over each of the distinctions of the levels, right, and talk about what is contemplation, right, and then talk about your own personal experience because I know this is something that you have been researching and developing both theoretically and practically. You’ve been practically working on that, right? And you said that you’ve had some updates since the last time we talked about it, so I want to hear about all that too, as well. That’s great. Yeah, I’m trying to sort of reverse engineer or do archaeological engineering of what these practices may have looked like within the Neoplatonic community, making use of some stuff that we have published material on, like the View from Above and some of the things about some other eschesis, spiritual exercises that were preserved in the Stoic tradition and some of the Neoplatonic traditions, some of the things that are said about dialectic. And then just some of the things I’ve concluded from the study I’ve done in cognitive science. Maybe I should start by just distinguishing meditation from contemplation for people very briefly. I do entire videos on this. But in meditation, you’re learning to step back and look at your framing, and I use the example to become something of a meme. Like normally you’re not paying attention to how you’re framing the world, you’re paying attention through it, by means of it and beyond it. In meditation, you learn to step back and look at it to see if there might be stuff that is actually distorting your vision. But you only really know if you’ve done the correct thing in meditation, if you actually put your glasses back on and see if you can see more properly into the world now. And that’s what I’ve argued with Leo Ferrara. We argue together, best understood by the word contemplation. Contemplation is a Latin word for the Greek word, theoria, which means to look deeply into things, originally even travel to a new place to see something new that you haven’t seen before. The word temple is in contemplation because you’re looking up and into the sky. So there’s that aspect of it. And what you’re doing is you want to, and this is influenced by Plato’s notion of anagogy, these two practices complement each other. Meditation helps to break up inappropriate framing. That’s what you’re doing when you’re becoming aware of the framing and cleaning the distortions. Contemplation allows you to create new framing, see differently. And notice, I can only tell if I’ve cleared, cleaned my glasses, if I can see anew. But I can only see anew if I take my glasses off and clean them. And so you meditate to break frame, you contemplate to make new frame, and you get the possibility of profound insight into yourself and reality. That’s contemplation. Totally. You know, it’s interesting, as you say that, having been meditating since my early 20s, my first experience of that was doing like a 10-day Vipassana retreat. I just did myself right in the deep end. And I’ve pretty much been doing it ever since. And I just hearing you just now talk about that, I was just realizing that I think for myself and a lot of people that I’ve worked with in meditation, they end up actually having very implicitly these contemplative realizations about the world, right? Simultaneous, right? But this puts a distinction in there that I don’t think is people are generally prone to recognize, right, as such. This is a really cool distinction. The distinction is an intent to explicate what is largely implicit, and by explicating it and engaging in more deliberate practice, you can enhance that capacity. And so what we’re doing in the neoplatonic version of contemplation is you’re basically enacting, so neoplatonism is an integration of Platonism and Aristotelianism. You’re basically trying to contemplate in a way that is also affording the anagogic ascent. The anagogic ascent is the idea that what I’m doing is I’m conforming to patterns of reality out there, and that reveals and discloses certain aspects of how I’m making sense of the world. And when I get those conforming, then I get my inner psyche more ordered, and then that scaffolds me to a more comprehensive form of cognition that launches me more deeply into a more comprehensive level, if you want to put it, of reality. And so what you’re doing is you’re basically conforming different aspects of the psyche to different aspects of the world, and then those conforming, right, each one is developmentally makes the next level of conforming possible and so on. And so that leveling up, and the reference to video gaming is intended, the leveling up of conforming is how you get the fundamental transformation that you’re after within the neoplatonic practice. And what’s presupposed in what you’re saying, too, brings to mind, which seems important to probably kind of distinguish as a ground level, I think is the classical Western idea of what knowledge is, right? Pre-Décartes, which is knowledge is seen as something, or the world is seen as something that is taken for granted, is intelligible. And then contemplation or philosophy asks the question, how must the world be such that it’s intelligible? Right? Yes. That’s to do with this conformity, knowledge is conformity with deeper dimensions of reality. And that means the answer to that question is also not a statement of propositions or not reducible to a statement of propositions. Right? That conformity, realizing that kind of knowledge is a process that is, as I said, much more transformative in nature. And you’re transforming like these various, like I call them the four ways of knowing, you’re trying to transform all of them in a way that is also properly aligning them. So they’re mutually supporting and constraining each other. So I would, I think there’s a lot going on. But the best thing to do is to sort of go through what like sort of what each level is and what it looks like in the practice and what part of the psyche is being activated, if I can use that term. This is deeply influenced by Perl, P-E-R-L, reading of Plotinus. And that what you do, the level, because the fundamental presupposition is intelligibility. And intelligibility is the conformity of cognition and being together. Right? Each one of these levels is simultaneously a level of being and a level of being known and a kind of processing in the psyche. Yeah. So maybe we should do that. Maybe sort of talking through it be a good way of trying to explicate it further. Yeah. And practice, I mean, I think you’ve talked about doing this. You walked everyone through it in an imaginative contemplative exercise sitting still. But I’ve also heard you talk about it doing it. And I’ve been doing it when I walk. When you walk, you can walk around and do it. It’s very good walking contemplating practice, contemplation practice. And we have to remember how physical ancient philosophy was. The Stoas are walking up and down the Stoa, right? The dialogues are often people moving around in a place or walking somewhere. Or… So the basic idea here is this notion of intelligibility. That’s a very abstract notion for most people. And what you want to do is you want to translate it into something that’s experiential, something that has a phenomenological structure and content to it. And so the way I do that is try to get people to just concentrate on the sense of things being real. And most people know two things about this. They know that this is very important. They have an intuitive sense that this… Because if they start to lose their grip on this, they know that that means insanity. So they know they have… It’s powerfully present to them in an intuitive fashion, but they also simultaneously can’t articulate very much what that is. And so what you’re doing in the practice is you first get people to get into a basic mindfulness state. And what you’re trying to do is take them through some of the things that… Get them to realize… And I’m going to play with this because I’m doing conformity here. We’ll get them to realize realization. They’ll come to awareness of how reality is realizing. So first of all, don’t think of reality as a noun. Think of it as a verb. Think of it as being in a profound way. And so there’s exercises you can do. I won’t go into the preliminary exercises. But what you do first is you’re directing your attention to the level of what’s called fusis. And fusis means things springing forth from themselves. And what you’re trying to get there is the fundamental sense of emergence, of appearance. Now we normally set appearance in opposition to reality, but I would put it to you that there’s a bit of a mistake there because all appearances are appearances of and from reality. And I can’t make the argument right now, but I would say to you, and this is based on some of Schindler’s work, that beauty is when appearance is disclosing realness. That when we have a sense that the appearance is not taking us away from what’s behind the appearance, but welcoming us into the depth behind the appearance. And so you’re trying to get that sense of… So the way to think about it is remember when you had a moment of beauty and the world just sort of strikes you. And then what you want to realize is you try to realize that that’s happening every moment. Every moment is a moment of the world emerging for you. And this is your basic level. This is where your psyche is just… Your psyche isn’t representing being or thinking. This is just your psyche is emerging into existence. And the way you can get that is you can just get the sense of every moment. And when you’re walking, this is very powerful. You can just like, okay, now, and the world just keeps emerging. And that is a primordial, phenomenological dimension of realness because it’s not coming from you. You and the world are co-emerging together. This is a deep kind of conformity. Right. It’s that kind of thing when you talk about emergence. So experientially, that would be if I’m walking around and I’m starting to get presence of foosus, right? Yeah. What you’re saying by emergence is that when I experience it, it’s not… I realize it was something that was already happening, implicit in reality. And then my seeing or my comprehending has this experience of, in some sense, discovering it has already happening. Right? So the next phase is what’s already happening. Yes. Yeah. And there’s a sense of recovering the depths to which the appearances can point. So you’re looking at the flower and it can just be… Right? If you get that sense of emergence, you get the sense of, right, that’s coming from some depth to you. That’s why I try to use the word emergence rather than appearing. Everything is emerging out of nothingness, if you want to put it that way. Everything is emerging into… And so this is the way you are emerging and I am emerging. There’s a part at the basement of our being, there is the fact that we are constantly emerging. Think about this like when you wake up in the morning and you come back to reality, as we say, and as the world emerges to you and you’re basically practicing the fact that you are you, like everything around you, everything is co-emerging together. You can see that in all of these levels, we are playing with the fundamental tension of the one and the many. There are many things, but we are all co-emerging together. Like so, the desk in front of me is now. It’s here now and I’m here now and it’s striking me as here now. And this is boom, right? This is the fundamental difference from nothingness, the somethingness of the world. Yeah, totally. And so, and this is also this first level also has a historical correlation too, because these are thes and also logos. It lies at the very beginnings of philosophical thinking in the pre-Socratic era. Very, very much. Right. So the Greeks were the first to, as far as we can tell, to pose the question of emergence, which is often stated statically, which is a little bit of misrepresentation, but why is there something rather than nothing? And instead of giving a narrative causal origin, well, it goes back to the gods. No, no, they were more interested in, right, because the Greeks discovered the distinction between immortality and eternity. Yeah. Right. And they realized that the gods themselves were contingent and could pass away. So the gods were not the source of being. And so the Greeks were the first to raise that question. And what you’re doing is to try to take that. Like we ultimately, right, this is the bullet to the center of the skull, the diamond bullet to the center skull I got from Spinoza. When I read that line in Spinoza said, but God does not have abstract ideas. We have these abstract ideas about being, but we conform more to God, ultimate reality, when we make them intimate to the fabric of our being. And that’s what this practice is trying to do. You’re trying to take that abstract notion of why is there something rather than you’re trying to realize it. And what you’re doing is you’re not just representing it, you’re instantiating it moment by moment. You are emerging into being. The world is emerging into being. Yes. So to make the correlation in practice, it’d be something similar to like where Pyramides is walking around and he’s getting this sense of he’s noticing that, oh, there’s something more primal than even the gods. And then he starts to look at reality. And then it starts to emerge for him, this primorality that isn’t that he realizes, oh, this is what we make stories all about. But they’re just the stories themselves. Is that analogous to something like in our normal lives? It’s like we walk around thinking that we’re looking at reality. But instead, I look at my mom and instead I have all the whole the narratives that I pick up about my mother and all the narratives I have about the world. Yeah. And you’re trying to read, if you’ll allow me, electronic metaphor, you’re trying to plug the appearances because that’s what those are. You’re trying to see them as aspects of reality rather than the full face of reality. So it’s like it’s like it’s like carrying around the sense of why doesn’t what like why doesn’t it just wink out of existence right now? Like to get that sense, right, of that there’s something that keeps affording the emergence. And that’s Fuses. And there’s something ultimately mysterious about it. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t something we can, as I said, come into greater, greater conformity. And so generally, it’s initially a better thing for people to do this part of the practice. In fact, all of the levels initially walking around, because the movement as you’re walking around gives you the sense of the fluency of being, how it’s constantly emerging into your awareness. Maybe I should go on then, because I could talk for each one of these levels a lot. Yeah. And then you and then you move to Souqé. And Souqé means breath, but it also means life. And it points to all the ways in which reality is self-organizing. And so a one. So think about you. Notice we use the metaphor of being in touch with reality. And so the first thing, the first is the moment of emergence, the moment of contact. Now something has emerged. The next is continuity of contact. And that’s what Souqé is, that the universe isn’t just blip, blip, blip. One moment is continuous, feeds into, gives birth to the next. And so what you’re starting to do, and this is what I’m trying to also in another area do with idetic induction. And you and Daniel have been having some great talks about that. You’re trying to you’re seeing that there’s a through line, right? That the past doesn’t the past is right into the present and reaching to the future. There’s there’s a through line of existence. And so what Fouzouz is picking up on is it’s picking up on that level of your psyche that is finding patterns. Patterns are your ways of disclosing continuity, because what a pattern is, is repetition with change. And it’s a way of finding, realizing, right? So I open my eyes and there’s that initial emergence into consciousness, which is analogous and can conform to the emergence of being. And then I immediately start forming patterns. Yes. OK, so it’s Fouzouz, the recognition of emergence and Fouzouz, right, which is the initial glimpse where it looks out at you. Right. Yeah. And so Fouzouz is there’s just there’s there’s something it’s just the thereness of the world. It’s there. Right. The thereness, your nowness. And then and the suitcase starts to get it starts to give you patterns, which is, you know, you start to get this and that, this sidewalk, this tree, right, the leaves. And you’re noticing that patterns are forming. And notice that it’s interesting about patterns and Roussin’s notion of the musicality of intelligibility picks up on this. Like, where’s the where is the pattern? Is it inside you or outside you? Well, if you’re if you if you open, you see that it’s both right, that your mind can only pattern itself because reality is patterned. But the patterning of reality is being realized, right, and brought into your awareness by the patterning of your psyche. So this is your basic intelligence. This is that part of us that unlike plants, well, plants do it a little bit, but unlike stones, for example, we are picking up on a continuity that the world is patterned for us. I got it. So it’d be something like so there’s the emergence, right. You just start to get this sense of everything is coming into being. Right. Yeah. Including the awareness that’s recognized as this emergent. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And then psyche is where you start to notice the the path that it actually emerges in and through and as patterns. Right. You start to see the relationship between things up down. There’s myself as distinct from what it’s it’s seeing. But they’re both emerging and you see that connection. You start. Yeah. And so you also get a heightening of the one in the mini because the patterns are going down to the smallest determinacy of this thing. And they’re there and they’re also weaving together to the the overall pattern of everything. Right. And so you’re getting this overall patterning that’s happening. And this is this is again, this is like the level of of life intelligence. The ability to track patterns is the fundamental feature of life and then also of mind. Totally. And when you’re really tracking the patterns and this is how you know maybe to is it can be a diagnostic. I’ll check it out with you. Is it you know that you’re starting to track the pattern as Suki right from a place of Suki when when the realization of Suki affords a deeper realization of Fuses. Right. So it’s very much. Yeah, very much. So you get things as distinct from something like, oh, an associative response to, you know, that is John over there and John’s like this. And it doesn’t help you disclose John more. Right. But when you see, oh, John is a human being. Oh, and John’s is a man. I’m a man and I’m seeing John. And then you start to see John as an emergence, a pattern that simultaneously emerges in that pattern affords you to get closer with John in that emergence. Yeah, that’s exactly right. So the lower levels always empower the level above and the level above structures and discloses more. It actualizes the power of the lower level. And this is the Aristotelian sort of motif within the practice. So once you get the sense of Suki, then you move to Noesis. And so, again, so think, you know, first of all, there’s contact. Right. And then there’s patterns. My fingers start to find patterns. Right. And then there’s noesis, there’s coherence. The patterns are not like random threads. They cohere, they interpenetrate, they mutually afford to constrain each other. Everything individually and collectively is realizing the one. And so what you’re what you’re getting here is what happens at the level of your consciousness, your consciousness, your intelligence can get. Here’s a pattern. Here’s a pattern. Here’s a pattern. Here’s your consciousness is. Yes. But how do all the patterns fit together in a world? And so you you have an inner world that gives you the ability to track the worlding of the exterior world. But you’re just both part of the process of worlding, of everything cohering and making sense. And notice how this is how you you know, how you distinguish the dream from the from the real world, because the dream is incoherent. It doesn’t fit in. And you have these patterns of coherence that are are are disclosing themselves to you very, very powerfully. And so what you’re getting here and this like eventually I want to integrate these two together. This takes you into a deeper level of idetic adduction, because now you’re the idetic adduction is just everything is right, expanding out and interpenetrating everything else. And so the idea here is you’re moving towards kind of a holographic holism where everything is. Every pattern is not just coherent, like in a static sense, but this pattern here is all the other patterns converging into it. And yet it is part of all the patterns that converge into everything. So you can even do this conceptually, like, OK, so there’s a tree and there’s a leaves, but I need to know about green and there’s wood and the wood, the soil and the light and the sun and the earth and things revolving and gravity. Right. And it’s all there in the tree implicitly. Right. Now, it’s all there also in the sidewalk, but differently implicit. And you’re seeing this holographic holism. So things are coherent, but they’re coherent in depth. And this is right. So it goes to fuses, psyche, noesis. That’s right. Right. So now you’re at the sort of. Like I said, this sort of kind of holographic holism, you’re picking up on. The sort of the depth of the dimensionality of your intelligibility, right. And you’re getting a sense of how all these patterns weave together and the weaving of the world and the weaving of your consciousness are interpenetrating and co-identifying and co-conforming in a powerful way. Now, what you do, what you then do is right. You’re moving to realize that this these the principles of this patterning are not. How do I how do I put it? They’re not locatable in space and time, because what you’re doing here is right. You’re weaving everything into this world of intelligibility. But but the the principles of self-organization and coherence are not themselves further patterns. They are the way they are the pattern. Yeah. And so you start to move to a sense of. And this is really this is the tricky part in noesis. You try to realize how all of these different patterns of intelligibility are not just here and now. There’s an eternal aspect to them. And they are also there that they’re also being made one in an in an eternal way. And you think, what do you mean, John? Well, because I know that the same patterns that have made this tree possible have made trees going back to the beginning of trees possible and will make trees possible. And those constraints, right, and those patterns that are available in reality and also conceivable in my mind, right, they’re still there. So I get the sense of this world or better, as sometimes put it, the oneness of this right is not in bound to any particular place or time. It’s in all places in time, but it’s not bound to any place or time. So is it fair to say noesis is that that that intuition and experience of the intuition of the through line that connects its tree to all the other trees that connects the tree to the idea that I’m currently having about this tree to all other trees, that through line that connects. Yes, that realization of that through line is noesis. Yes, yes, all of them, because of course, the tree is also the living thing is also the place right that has a particular niche within an ecology. It’s all kind like and this is this is part of the idetic deduction, realizing right that you’re mostly ignorant of anything you’re seeing. And what you’re doing is trying to get this kind of learned ignorance. You’re trying to open yourself up to the realization that there’s so much more, but not in a random chaotic so much more. There’s so much more in a way that continually surprises you by its capacity for intelligibility. Right. OK, got it. Got it. So that’s noesis. Yes. And so and then what you want to do is you start to want to move towards hypnosis. This is it. This involves kinosis and emptying process. What you want to do and this is like how it’s like the view from above is you want to go from realizing that all of this is not dependent on your thinking and living and being, but the other way around. Your thinking and living and being is dependent on it or better thou. Right. And so you go from being egocentric to ontocentric, centered on realness. You’re really trying to get the sense of how every moment physical realization, biological realization, perceptual cognitive realization that you’re having are dependent on these more primordial principles of being right of who’s this and of Suke and of noesis. And now you’re starting to move into HENOSIS. OK, got it. And so HENOSIS, right, is so kinosis where you start to recognize the through line through everything that’s affording everything else. Right. And then that’s noesis. Noesis or noasis. So as I start to see noesis and that develops and that gets going. Then HENOSIS starts to happen and that’s right. But there’s a transition thing, like I said, of kinosis, the emptying, because the temptation when you’re doing this is to get you can get into sort of an egocentric inflation. Right. And right. Oh, right. Look at how wonderful I am. And it’s the other way around. You want to write. You want to empty. This is the right. This is sort of drawn from Christian Platonism, the self emptying of Jesus. Right. And the idea here is that what you’re trying to do is to. Make clear to yourself, not as a thought, but as something that even may shiver you in your being of how you participate in processes that precede you and exceed you in incomprehensible ways. And that is not a narrative about a past event. That is an ongoing principle of your present existence. Yeah. OK, so and then you’re going to move to HENOSIS. First of all, what you’re going to do is you’re going to try and just focus on that non spatial, non temporal oneness. How? Because the holographic, right? Right. The holographic sense you got. Right. The holographic wholeness. Right. There’s a oneness to that, and it’s not the oneness of a being. It’s the oneness that makes possible everything else that’s come. Right. Come with that. It’s the oneness that you first got a taste of in FUSIS, and then you got more of a taste of in SUKE and then more of a taste of in NOESIS. And then you’re opening up. It’s OK. It’s beyond all the things. It’s emergence and continuity and coherence. And then even more, it’s not bound to any particular place or time. All the places and times, all the thoughts I have are bound to it the other way around. And then you realize and then you do this move. Just as all of my thinking, living and moving and being is dependent on the FUSIS and the SUKE and the NOESIS and the oneness, all of this, right, it’s just a symbol. Right. For the following. Everything and all the oneness I’ve experienced so far is oneness by participation. It’s participating in this principle of oneness. But there’s a oneness that is not a oneness of participation, but it’s just a oneness, not by participation. It does things aren’t right. It’s not expressing it. It’s just a pure principle. And it’s like and of course, it’s incomprehensible. Right. And the idea is it’s what you’re trying to do then is realize that there’s even behind that sort of sense of the oneness of you and the world and everything. All of that is just a symbol, a participatory symbol. Of what is one in itself, not right. That is the source of realization, both cognitively and ontologically itself. And you can’t realize this. And so you say, what do I do, John? Well, you do you do this trajectory you get every time you try and push it a little bit farther. You realize. And this is like the meditative questioning at you like, oh, right. This is the principle of oneness behind all things. But that now you have a thing in your mind. Thank you. But that is just a symbol of what’s beyond that. And then you get you get you get some other inkling and you go. And then what you start to realize and you do it both outwardly and inwardly. Right. But wherever your mind tries to land and say, aha, now I have it. You go, thank you. That’s an even better symbol that I can look through. And I get the sense of the opening that I can. And then what I get is that I get the learned ignorance. I get the moment of unending wonder. Right. Right. Totally. And this is and this recognition that can’t ever be fully recognized, but only recognized in that it’s not that which is from participation. That level is what do we call that? Well, that’s a gnosis. And if you get that sense. Yeah. Of the sacredness of that. That’s the osis. OK, right. Theos is yes. And that’s in theos is something like the impulse that’s happening in negative theology. Right. Very much. It’s that recognition. Yes. Yes, very much. And it’s the notion. So the West Catholic and Protestant have a notion of salvation. Eastern Orthodox Christianity, which is very deeply indebted to negative theology, has a notion of theos is, which is a notion of. Well, it’s becoming godlike. And it goes back to Plato. Plato talks a lot about this in the Republic and other dialogues. It’s this idea of in Spinoza talks about it, too, when he talks about there’s some way there’s in the deepest kind of schiancia intuitive at the third kind of knowing. And we’re doing something like that, by the way, in this practice. Right. You get into a place where you’re recognizing the eternity of your mind and body, both for Spinoza, by the way, never just one that is indistinguishable from the eternity of God. And it’s so it’s it’s an identification now before people’s eyebrows go up. Remember that you have to pass through kenosis thoroughly and deeply before the identification of theosis is possible. This is not anything. This is not you consuming anything into your ego and thereby identifying it. This is you. This is you being carried beyond. You have a continually a continual trajectory of transformation that is like an arrow pointing beyond like like it’s it’s this active arrow pointing you towards something that you are continually conforming to. And so it’s it’s not anything being taken into you in egocentric identification. It’s always you being taken beyond every time you try to circle the ego around it. And you don’t treat this with hostility because this is itself the very process of intelligibility and realization. You think it and say, ah, but what was behind you? What made you possible? Yes, yes. And that in this and when it’s really going that recognition of I keep getting this image of and it’s like a body memory of all the experiences that I’ve had like this. And I’ve heard a lot of people talk about where. Yeah, you’re you start to have this realization is things shine through and you’re like, oh, this is this is it. I’m seeing it. And then all of a sudden you realize, wait a minute, there’s an it. Yeah. And then in that realization is it simultaneously that there what I was seeing is actually what’s doing the seeing. And then you start to see that. Right. And then become an it. And then you’re like, wait a minute, that’s an it. And it gets closer and closer and closer. This kind of subject object. Realize it on itself. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I find that the more I do this part of the practice, the more those there’s a reverberation back. It’s like, oh, you know, there was this there was the eye that was that was not seeing sorry, that was not seen, but was affording the seeing of whatever me was confronting the reality. But there’s also something that corresponds to the mystery of the eye. Right. Whatever, whatever, also whatever intelligibility intelligibility was shaped from the world side. There’s something behind that, too. Right. And so the agent and the arena are both going like asymptotic towards the horizon in this sort of resonant manner. And that’s the anagoga. That’s where you’re in the deepest, deepest possible conformity. This is not anything you can have as a thought. This is the deepest kind of conformity. It’s the it’s the kind of knowing that is indistinguishable from being. Right. Right. This is the you’re at the place where you’re not representing. You’re enacting your being. Being. I mean, that sounds like a redundant statement, but that’s the point. And so this this is supposed to give you a sense of right. That part of you. So in the Christian tradition, that is the image of God, that part of you, which is not an idol, but that part of you that is capable of this this profound conformity towards God. I’m not going to say conformity with because that gives you a sense of completion, but this ongoing conformity towards and that that discloses something about God or ultimate reality, if you don’t like God as a term, but that discloses something about ultimate reality that you can only be that you can never have as a thought or an idea or representation. And then you may say, well, what’s the use of that? My ideas are what empower me? No, ultimately, this to get to this place, to get what Tillich would call the ground of being the God beyond the God of theism is the place in which the most. This is this is the space from which the greatest alithea of the spiky and the world is possible. The greatest opening, the greatest disclosures, the greatest insight that this this conformity is, is to give you the touchstone taste of what realness is like. So you try to you’re like when you’re into when you’re in this final state, you’re trying to be as still as you can inward and as open as you can outward. So what you’re doing is you’re indwelling as much outward and you’re internalizing as much inward. This is this the state of still openness, but it’s not a static still openness. It’s a stilling opening. It’s stilling opening. Yes. Right. Right. And so and that place, right, that for that is where you are trying to remember Sati in the deep sense of remembering, you’re trying to remember the touchstone taste of realness. You’re trying to make it second nature that this is part of scanty intuitive. And so it’s it’s like it’s pro chiron. It’s ready to hand this touchstone taste of realness. So when you’re in the middle of your bullshit, you’ve got to you don’t just have to rely on an idea or you’ve got this taste like woven. Wait, this just doesn’t taste real. Yeah, that’s right. That that. So it’s like where you start to have a visceral taste for what before you would need a bunch of propositions. Yes. To know about this isn’t to know about this is in some sense. In knowing those propositions and seeing with those propositions and then realizing what even gives those propositions that that back and forth relationship, right, that goes is both an identification and beyond itself and disidentification in realizing itself. This back and forth is back and forth creates something like the ability to down at the level of a foosie to taste. You could say taste that idea as it emerges in the instant that emerges and rather than needing a proposition, let’s say, right. You could just exactly into it. The highest level at the most primordial level of emergence. Exactly. It’s like it’s like so here’s an analogy analogy when you’re drunk and you’re sober and you know what the taste of that is procedurally prospectively even participatory your sense of agency. It’s the sense of the intelligibility of the world, the agent of really real relationship. Right. And when you move from when you when you wake up, this is why we have these metaphors of waking up or sobering up and notice it’s up like in Plato’s cave. Right. It’s but it’s like that. It’s like that. And you know, if I were to ask you, yeah, but what’s the difference? And you can give me something. And what you’ll do is you’ll start to talk about emergence from outside of you. You’ll start to talk about their continuity. It’s causal past. You’ll talk about coherence. Then you start talking about how it all hangs together. And then, right. And then you start talking about the depth to it. And you basically redo the exercise, but this is to explicate it and practice it and deepen it and extend it. Right. So that that that ability to wake up goes from being an idea that you think about to something that you can actually live in and enact. And sense through and with and about as one one instant. Right. You could say, yes. Yeah. And both both senses of the word sense. Yeah. Both senses, the perceptual and the cognitive sense of sense. Right. When you say I’m making sense of something, it’s it’s it’s it’s that which is below the perceptual and the cognitive and what makes them bindable together. You’re getting down to that place or up to that place. These metaphors all sort of fail us in one way or another. Yeah. And so that’s the point of this practice. The point of this practice is to is to like, like Hegel said, you know, you’re only aware of a limit if you can go beyond it. Right. And so what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to practice not not knowing. I know that I’m ignorant. I know that I’m bound. I know that my thinking is, you know, super no, no. Stop talking about it and start realizing it and realizing it in a profound way so that and I tell you, like, there’s other practices. I do like to learn ignorance practice and I’ll talk to you about that at another time. But the way the the way these. Intrude into my everyday patterns is what gives me aspirational hope, because I’ll be doing this and I’ll just get the taste. It’s like, this is bullshit. What you’re doing, John, is bullshit. You’re just you’re just like, oh, look, it’s all it. It’s also it’s all very glowy and salient. And you’re just, oh, I love that. And look at how nice and it’s part of me just goes, no, that’s bullshit. That’s bullshit. Like, think about how how much you how much ignorance you’re you’re ignoring. Yeah. Right. And so my wife does really well with me. Well, that’s I mean, that’s what that’s what that’s what a partner should do. That’s what a good friend should do. Yeah. Right. You know, that’s that’s the difference between a friend and a buddy. Right. A friend, a buddy helps you fall asleep or, you know, doze away from the world. Or right. But the friend wakes you up, hopefully, in ways that you can’t do on your own. Right. Right. Totally. So this this practice, this practice, the touchstone taste. Like it’s it feeds back. So this practice keeps evolving for me. Like it keeps it. It has a life of its own. And this practice and the learned ignorance practice and the way the lexio divina has also evolved. Like they’re all doing this to each other in ways that. I can’t like I couldn’t have foreseen if I was just trying to, you know, step back and theorize about it or think about it or try to derive it in some conceptual manner. It doesn’t mean that it’s all just romantic or anything like that. I’m not saying that this brings with it a kind of clarity of thinking that’s analogous to the kind of clarity I get when I’m doing math. Because in math, you’re playing with it. You know, John Roussin talks about this. You’re playing about these. You’re playing about how everything that you know, there’s these there’s these right. There’s these dimensions of of of disclosure. That’s what I want to say. Dimensions of disclosure. You know, there’s the rhythms and the melodies and the harmonies that he talks. Math is about playing with a lot of the structures of intelligibility. Like, where are you doing that? Where are the mathematical objects? Well, they’re not there in things, but they’re not in things and they form patterns. And then those patterns form patterns and there’s somehow some unifying thing behind it. But you can’t actually unify it. You’ve got to go delian reasons. There’s a lot of themes here that show up in math that that are reflected. And so you can you often get the same kind of clarity you get when you’re getting that, when you’re doing math and you’re getting when you’re really realizing things. Think about when think about when like when you when you first got the Pythagorean theorem, not when you memorized it, but when you were doing it and when you knew, oh, this will always be the case. Right. When you notice there was emergence and then there was a through line, there’s a continuity and you start doing the eidetic adduction. Oh, this one. And then you suddenly do the noesis everywhere and nowhere. Right. Right. And then. Right. Yes, totally. Yeah. It’s not I’m just also as we’re talking about this, we were texting about this yesterday about Garrett’s understanding of what he was doing in his sciences. Yes. When it of seeing what gives that particular species of plant its species, this right beyond its within, but it’s beyond the particular. So how does it realize itself? And then he realizes like, oh, this is it’s realized in some sense, my cognition. Right. Yes. Towards it and realized through it that allows you to see it deeper. You can see this him literally trying to profile intuition and intelligibility. Right. So I only know a bit about good. I was I supervised the thesis, not to go out and I together. No, that’s the guy when I were not supervising it, sorry, we were external examiners of it. I apologize. Yeah. But I was external manager. I think Matt was one of the supervisors. I can’t remember the bureaucratic roles anyways. And it was I forget the name of the author and I apologize for that. But it was on good his way of seeing how he was trying to get the form. Yeah. And I I I I’m considering very, very carefully the possibility, maybe in the possibility that good it was doing something like sorry, this does I don’t mean this to be sound self aggrandizing, but good. It was doing something like what I’m trying to do with I did a conduction. Yes, a practice. And like I said, what I yeah. Yeah. Good. I’m glad you see that then, because that gives me some hope that I’m there is reasonable plausibility in the sense of the convergence. Yeah. And like I said, and ultimately what I want to do is weave better together the I did a conduction practice with this view from above practice. I think you need to get very good at the levels of being in the view from above practice, but then also do the I did a conduction at each level. So there’s there’s a lot more coming and, you know, and it’s it’s so this is I just got the sense of just even even this very conversation. Is exemplifying. The exercise that we’re discussing. Yes, very much. Coming in, it’s still emerging and I can tell even right now you’re getting more about it and we’re making more connections with Garrett. It’s gathering itself, which shows it’s beyond itself. Right. Exactly. The dimensions of this because this practice, I mean, you started initially outside walking and there will be an imaginal component. And because you’re walking and looking around, you will keep it imaginal and you won’t make it imaginary. You won’t take it inside to your subjective images. You’ll make it the way in which you’re interacting with the world imaginarily. But then what you want to be able to do is do that in a seated practice and nevertheless engage in it imaginarily and not just imaginatively, not with just mental images and that. So I strongly recommend people to do the walking version of this practice for months before you try and do the seated version. Now, of course, when we’re doing the workshop, we sort of hope we can sort of get people into that a little bit faster. But part of what Guy and I are hoping to do is to get a bunch of videos like this that can serve as background practice that then we’ll have hopefully a library of this that he makes and I make, we make together, Chris and I make Chris and him make, et cetera, and so that we’ll have a bank that people could consult and then they can build up a certain degree of experience and expertise. And then we would take them through the whole dialectic into the Logos pedagogical program. Yes, I could see something where it’s you just spend a month with each one of these levels, right? Very much, very much, very much. It could be just this could be a whole lifetime, actually. Very much so. It is. And you can see what what what Aristotle meant about the life of contemplation and and the point about it is, though. But remember, right. And this is the part that we we do do in the dialectic to deal with us. The point isn’t just to go up because reality doesn’t just go up. It’s to go down. To come. The philosopher comes out of the cave and then goes back down in precisely because only by going up and coming down does he or she complete the realization of being. If you think being is only that which is ultimately behind the appearance and not that which is also in the appearances, you haven’t realized being right. You have to do. And so you have to you do this and then you bring it into right. Like what we do in next in the practice. We do the circling practices in which we’re intimate with other people. And then we do the dialectic practices and the contemplative practice. So it’s not just floating away. Right. You do the view from above so that you can return with fresh eyes to. This seat of your companions. And what’s great about these levels and tell me if this is this sounds right. But this above and below and is going back and forth. Right. In this way. The levels afford it. You could say it’s like as I get realized more intimacy on this level, which is at this level, right, that right, that that that that intimacy is the process of realizing the above and the below. Right. Yes, exactly. And that goes back to your point. Right. You always every level. And this is part of what you do. Like this is part of the practice, too. But this is a little bit more event. Every like you’re always you’re always recalling and being recalled. Right. As you’re moving up, you’re recalling, right. Everything that like you said, you so you see Sucke as the actualization of Fuses, but Fuses is the empowerment. But Sucke is the right is the empowerment of Noesis and Noesis is the act. And you’re you’re you’re seeing the deep up and down interpenetration of the emergence and the emanation all the way through the practice. Yeah. And that’s what I mean. The background background goes foreground. There is this is the it’s like it sounds like the different how you know that you’re kind of seeing the background going foreground is that when the background goes to the foreground, you recognize that the beautiful necessity of its previous concealment in order to be the background for this foreground. Right. That’s exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So what the like when this is flowing, as I said, you like when you’re moving towards the Oasis, the distinction between something being the most abstract and therefore the most profound and being the most intimate and therefore profound is lost. It’s simultaneously both of those at the same time. Yeah. You’re pregnant with the most intimate experience and also the most abstract, but beyond both of those. Yeah. This is where that this is where I can just feel that feel or taste that sense of what’s going on in the word reveal. Yes, yes. So you only veil things that are precious. Right. So so if you if something is revealed, writes the process on one level, it’s like unveiling it. But we say, you know, which is in some sense, in some sense, recognizing and realizing its preciousness in the unveiling of it. Right. Is we we in some sense veil it with a certain kind of. Of realization of its preciousness, which is another veil. Right. Exactly. And that’s why and that think about that, that the meditative questing part, it shouldn’t be called meditative questioning at this point, it’s contemplative questing, right, but when when when when when you get the answer, oh, I’ve got it. Right. You don’t treat it with hostility, you treat it not you neither deify it nor demonize it. Right. Thank you. Yes. Where did you come from? Yes. From within and from within and without. How did you emerge? How did you take shape? How did you all of it? Right. Yeah. So that thank you that recognizes that it’s inherent. And if it’s happening, there’s a goodness to it, even if I don’t see it or I didn’t see it and not seeing it is even good. Right. That the yeah, very much, very much. The goodness. Yeah. We should talk about this. You know, the the proposal about the inherent goodness of being. But just a sense, even at the propositional level, we pursue truth because we sense there’s a goodness in truth. There can be no goodness in truth if there’s no goodness in being. Right. And that goes towards really challenging the thing we’ve got from the enlightenment of the is art distinction, the value fact distinction. But even in the in academic philosophy, these distinctions are breaking down under very powerful argumentation and reflection. And they’re putting us back into a sense of. How it is really possible to fall in love with being because there is something good, true, good and beautiful. The transcendentals that Aquinas talks about, the transcendentals of being are real. Yes. Right. Right. This is great, John. This is really good. Well, let’s let’s talk again soon and let’s maybe do a couple more videos on this. I try to untangle this. I’ll put I’ll put the the levels that we just talked about below in the show notes. Right. And then what we can both do is it’s continue practicing this and write down little notes, right. And then we can get together, right. And distinguish this more and more. Yes. Always theory and theory, though, always the how like always. Let’s articulate in theory, but only so that we could articulate it better in practice. Yes. And so it’s such that that theory, you know, the theory is a good theory or the proposition is a good proposition if it reveals more of what it if it can display more than what it can say. Right. Yes. It’s a new territory that then you can that realization. It’s like the birthing of intelligibility. Yes. Midwife. Yep. And the burning bush. Yes. All right, my friend. Take care, my friend. Talk soon. OK. All right.