https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=trX90czlPMM
Welcome everyone to another voices with Reveki. I’m here with a dear friend of mine, Teter Barrett, and he is the person who really introduced me to the practice of circling. He was one of the two facilitators, he and his partner Joe. And since then, we’ve had ongoing communication and regular discourse. And I’m excited because Teter is putting together a new course, which picks up on a lot of themes that I’ve been recently working on, and I and Chris have been working on, and Guy and I have been working on. And so I’m just really excited to talk about this and to try and bring out not only what the course might offer, let’s say practically, I don’t like that adjective because it sounds too diminutive, but also sort of some of its philosophical cultural pertinence and significance right now. So welcome, Taylor, why don’t you tell us again, a little bit about yourself, and how you and I, our work sort of jives. And then we can get into the more particulars of the course, maybe start with some very basic stuff about it, when, where, how, and then we can unpack what it’s doing, its relationship to the whole DIA logos, I don’t know if they call it movement. And so again, it’s just great that you’re here, welcome. Thanks, John, I really, really appreciate you offering to bring me on so that we can sort of talk about this. Yeah, so I’m, I’ve been sort of leading, co leading the Authentic Relating Toronto community for the past, well, leading for six years, but I’m involved in it. This is actually, I think, my ninth year now that I’ve been doing it. And it’s been a community that’s been working with a lot of authentic discourse, authentic relating practices, including circling. So I sort of picked it up from somebody else who created it a number of years back, they were sort of ready to move on, they got interested in a, you know, in a woman and wanted to focus on that. So they sort of left it to Joe and I to see what we wanted to do with it. And we picked it up and started developing some training courses and sort of expanding into sort of our perspective and our take on authentic relating and what we needed to do to further grow it in Toronto. So that had been primarily our focus for quite a while, obviously, COVID has put a bit of a wrench in that. However, interestingly enough, a couple years ago, sort of before I met you, but very much in line with what was happening sort of in the sphere and the field, as I call it. You know, and I think we talked about this a bit before in our previous call, that there was a lot happening sort of in the sense making sphere, a lot of discussion happening. And I’m listening to these discussions. And I’m, I’m just sort of like thinking about where the next logical space of this conversation is going to go. And then like a moment later, it’s there. And it’s just like, Whoa, this is like getting really trippy. So I was starting to really experience this collective intelligence sort of experience. And then of course, being introduced to you, and then starting to, you know, start to watch your videos. And, and then it’s like the same things happening here. So that’s kind of when I reached out and said, like, hey, like, there’s this thing going on. And I’m looking at sort of experimenting with some stuff, it seems really convergent with the work that you’re doing. And that’s sort of, I mean, we had already been doing the circling thing together. But this was sort of hearing what your interests were with circling where it was working, and what you wanted to see where things were headed. And also for me, sort of having this experience of being so immersed in circling for so many years, and then seeing myself in in environments where I had to reach outside that, and where that started to feel foreign to me. You know, like, by trade, I’m a software developer. So I’m so stuck in logicality and problem solving. It was so interesting after years of like, deep into subjective group work, that I’ll find myself in these environments where we’re starting to talk about things, and I start to actually feel a bit awkward, you know, like what used to be the water I was so used to started to feel really peculiar to me. And I started to sort of notice what I felt was missing in my authentic relating and circling my ecology of practices, although I didn’t know that use that term at the time. And so it really led me to start creating some experiments about trying to blend in all three perspectives that are available to us as all times that being the I, the we and the it or the it’s using an integral quadrant terminology. So you know, with circling and authentic relating being very strong in the I, the introspection and the we like the energy and what’s happening between us, not spending a lot of time in the it or the it’s the systemic sort of objectives, external realm. And that seemed to be really in line with what you were kind of wanting, or what I perceive you were wanting from some of these circling experiences, here’s this really powerful method of discourse. And now what? What do we do with it? How can we use what’s happening here to turn around and affect the things that were really important to you, and obviously work to me, but I wasn’t working in that sphere of really trying to look at and solve a meaning crisis or try to address a meaning crisis. So I think, you know, I sort of meeting and, you know, colliding in that way. And the bunch of work that you’ve put out is just it’s really plugged in so well to the thing that was running in the background while I’ve been doing all this intersubjective work. Right, right. Yeah, I mean, I’ll evoke a union term, but put some scare quotes around it, without necessarily getting bound to particular metaphysics yet. I want to read Bernardo’s Bernardo Kastrup’s book on Jung’s metaphysics before. But there’s definitely this ongoing series of synchronicities between us that I really sort of cherish and really bespeaks to me that there’s something more going on here. And so I mean, Chris and Guy and I, with help from a lot of people, have been, you know, engaged in this dialectic into the logos. And then you have been working on something that’s deeply convergent with it. I’ll say again, just that I think of the logos as a term for a family, right? It isn’t just a specific like, right. And dialectic into the logos is one particular practice. And there’s many. And how and getting them to all form a community together is one of my extra propositional projects, if I can put it that way. So one of the things I’m very excited about, and I’m going to have some participation in, I’m hoping, and it looks like, in is this new course that in which you’re trying to get this idea about, you know, getting people instead of having their perspectival awareness, their perspective, first, second or third, be transparent, transparent framing, getting them to not step outside of it, but to do that, that transparency, opacity shifting that Polanyi, right, talks about in attention and move into it and move out of it and move it and get aware, get an awareness of what it is to move between them. And then what does that do to our seeing and thinking, our seeing and conceiving? I’m in fact, I more and more like the term conceiving rather than just thinking, because it gives it brings with it the sense of giving birth to something, if we could get that old Socratic sense back, the midwifery sense. So I’m very excited about this. Can you lay out a little bit more, you know, what’s the basic structure of the course? And when will it be? And how can people get involved, etc? Yeah, yeah. So we’ll be starting January 18. It runs for 13 weeks. It was 12 weeks, but we’ve added a week, thanks to you participating with it. And we’ve really built sort of progressive scaffolding, such that, well, you don’t need to have to enter the course with a particular set of experiences, it will be helpful. But we’re also setting it up such that people don’t have to feel lost. So we’re starting off with some really basic exercises and practices. And we’re adding complexity onto those as we go throughout the course. So in each session, we’ll do a little bit on theory, we’ll talk a little bit about the, and then we’ll make that shift into practice. And then we’ll come back in and debrief and move, you know, and we’ll keep checking in with the group, we’re entering basically a fellowship together, right? Sort of engage in this enacted play for some of us, it’ll be integrated for others, but it will be new some aspects of this will be new to some people. And that’s, there’s going to be different areas where people are really strong in when they’re, you know, participating in working with these practices, and there’s going to be some areas in which they’re probably not as capable of. And those will be the areas where you know, it’s going to be novel for them. And we’ll sort of work on ways to sort of integrate that by using the theory and by using the experiential as well as trying to sort of, I’ll say sense make our experience together as a group. So I think that’s that’s the general, the general structure for for how we’re building it. It’s a couple hours each week, although the first the first week will be a little bit longer, because there’s a lot of context to set up. And we’ll have that space in between to sort of help integrate as well as a little bit of partner work to sort of help people engage, you know, without the facilitators always there. So to have them sort of wrestle with it and struggle with it a little bit and then come back in and debrief and see how that went. So yeah, this is the general structure. It’s pretty experiential. And in many ways, it’s also a bit of an experiment because this is taking all of my years of sort of doing trainings on circling and doing immersions with circling authentic relating practice, but also adding in this extra layer of complexity and starting to blend theory. Because when we do circling, when we do authentic relating, we don’t talk about theory, we don’t talk about structures. And I think this is an important piece to help us sort of grok it or help some of us grok it in a way which we might not be used to. You know, some of us are highly participatory, but we’re lacking some of the procedural. And then some of us are very procedural. And we’re sort of, we’re not really engaging with one another. So we’re really sure about what we’re sure of, but we’ve never actually put it into practice to sort of see like, well, hang on a sec, what’s my blind spot? What’s my shadow here? So yeah, I think those are hopefully that does it decent justice. So there will obviously be some circling practices. What other practices might there be? Like some mindfulness practices, some shadow work practices. What are some of the kinds of practices people will expect to see? Exactly. That’s it. We’ll start with some very basic sort of connection based exercises that tend to fall under the theme of authentic relating. Authentic relating and traditionally the way it’s executed is in the form of what are called games. Some communities call them experiments. But I’ve also seen that these, you know, five to 30 minute exercises can be extrapolated out of the context of an authentic relating games night and put into a leadership development tool because some of them are so amazingly potent. And you can continue to extract more and more nuance through your experience by just focusing, you know, like there’s, there’s this one really basic exercise that we do, or we sort of invite people to look at their hand and just focus on their hand. And as they’re focusing on their hand, they’ll start to notice lines and colors and, you know, things will shift with their shapes. So it’s just like by putting our attention on even something basic like that, but guiding it, like, oh my God, there’s so much more that we can notice this experience. So even though we say that they’re basic, some of the starting ones are basic exercises, they’re foundational to, to self-awareness to working on that muscle of staying present with, with the here and now. So we’ll do a number of those that will be interspersed to help bolster a more complex practice, say like circling or something known as T group, which comes from the 50s and 60s as a training group. And then we’ll move into a practice that I developed after we last talked, which I call a collective intelligence campfire, which is sort of that attempt to start to merge those three perspectives into a dial into a facilitated dialogue. We’ll, of course, have you come on and work with the dialect into the dialogous practice. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that’s, that’s the current broad ecology that we’ll be working with over this course. So exciting. So exciting. So we’ll put a link to like a website in this video so people can reach it and find out the time, the logistics and, you know, payment structure and stuff like that. So that’s very exciting. So I mean, this is becoming so much the core of my work, the new way of seeing and right that a bar talk talks about when he’s talking, he’s sort of taking good time, phenomenology and moral, Ponte and, and, right. And then I’m also reading Leakes book on Polanyi contact with reality. And again, this relearning, I mean, the word is not quite right, relearning how to see and be again, in really profound ways. And for me, this is the level at which we’ve got to work if we’re going to get out of, well, the meaning crisis, and then we’re going to get to a place where we can seriously deeply work together to address the better crisis. So I want to really and I don’t think this is inflationary at all. I think it’s completely authentic. I want to really now try and unpack sort of the three levels of significance this might have for people like the practical, the practical personal level, and then the philosophical sort of cultural spiritual level, and then and then potentially beyond that, you know, or related to it, like the cultural level, if we could. So let’s do the first level. And I don’t want I don’t want this to sound like some dry or sinister, advertisement, advertisement pitch. But you know, what at that level? Why? You got like two minutes. Why would somebody find this relevant at the personal level? In what way will it change? Which practices in their life and in what way will it change those practices in some way? Does that make sense as a question, first of all? Yeah, I’m trying to form the bridges in my mind to that. But I think I get what you’re getting at. Like, what’s the tangible impact? Like, yeah, what’s the tangible impact? Like, what’s the transformation that is, people can reasonably come to expect? And why would they find it’s hard before transformation? And I get that’s why this is not just advertising. That’s why I caveat a bit. But there’s, you know, in a way, then, instead of advertising, there’s a promise being made, let’s take it that way. There’s a transformation being offered. And there’s a promise that you’ll find that transformation valuable in some way. That’s what I’m asking. What like, what’s the promise of the transformation? And what’s the promise of how you might not right now, because you have to go through the transformation, but how you might find that transformation valuable? Yeah. Well, I think the best way for me to articulate it is I sort of see this as a culmination of everything that I’ve been working on, even for myself over the past number of years, so I can speak from my experience of sort of what I’ve gotten out of immersing myself into this world. So, I mean, the anecdote that I tend to tell is that before I got into sort of this interpersonal personal development group work, I could see myself as a bit of a misanthrope. I didn’t like people. In fact, I basically externally blamed everybody else around me for all the pain and suffering that I was experiencing. And what I’ve come to realize, or what’s happened through that, is all the projections that I was making onto other people, I could start to see what’s mine and what’s theirs. I can start to create more ease in what was, I wasn’t even aware of it, but what was a fairly anxious system. So, the interesting thing for me is that I don’t experience very much anxiety anymore. There’s a relaxation in my being of having explored these group practices with people. There’s a way in which I have more space, and it takes time, but there’s a way in which I have more space to consider internally, introspect, also see what’s important to me, how am I being impacted before I’m sort of articulating what it is that I really want to say that creates the connection that I’m hoping for. So, it can look a lot of different ways. Ways we’ve talked about it before is some people cannot really put a finger on it. And I think you said something about this before, people were happy about something about their kids being with Socrates. I’m trying to remember what it was, but they couldn’t put their finger on it, but it was just like there was an example of something that was attractive in that, I don’t know what it is, but I feel comfortable around you, or I feel safe around you. And this is, even though that’s never an active thing that I was ever doing, in fact, I wasn’t even being reflected that, you know, oh, you’re scary and, you know, stay away from me. But there’s a way in which to sort of getting more in touch with who I am and sort of the deeper truths of reality, my own, as well as our shared one, just creates a certain degree of ease in engagement with other people. So, I mean, that’s probably one of the biggest ones for me. I want to zero in on that, because I think that’s really astute. Because the opposite, of course, of ease is disease. And so many people have commented, who are entered into a space of sort of critiquing where we are at, have talked about this weird, almost paradox, that all the space is disappearing, right? Everything is in your face. Think about how much that is. Everything’s in your face. And things are becoming breathless and fast, and there’s no time and no space and everything, everyone’s in your face, and that. And at the same time, we feel radically disconnected. So there’s a loss of ease and intimacy, if I can put it that way, where ease doesn’t mean easy. Ease means the sense of not diseased, the sense of things flowing together, rather than smashing into each other and things being in your face. And so one of the things that I think people get, at least that’s what I found, in circling, is how you can get those two together. Like when you’re in circling, you feel intimately connected, deeply connected to people, yet you also feel a spaciousness and an openness. So things are happening at ease, rather than being forced or colliding or smashing into each other. And it almost sounds like a paradox from our usual frame of mind. But, the proposal, the promise is, realizing that I don’t think I’ve met anybody, and you have much more experience than I have, but I’ve never met anybody that’s experienced going to that place and saying, no, no, I prefer the way it was before. You see you laugh, and that’s your, that like, it’s like, wow, it’s almost on the border of absurd. It’s like, you know, and that’s what I mean, it’s like a transformation, you know, don’t tell me that you don’t want to go to Spain if you’ve never been to Spain. I’ve been to Spain and I’ve been to Canada, and I’ll tell you, you should go to Spain, you’ll like it, right? Right? That kind of thing. That’s the kind of metaphor. Right? And so, what you’re, I guess we’re proposing is that there’s a real transformation here, where you get this, you get the, you get spacious intimacy, and I want to state it like that, because it sounds like a paradox. But you get that spacious intimacy that seems so unavailable to us, and you realize it, and almost universally, I’ll put the almost in there, because I’ll be a scientist, but almost universally, it is preferred over the diseased state that we’re currently in. That’s the promise at the personal level. Does that ring fair and true to you? Yeah, yeah, you know, I think so. You know, I think earlier we were talking about this sort of, my experience of the language I would put to it is there’s a rightness of the moment. Yeah, yeah. Again, it’s sometimes hard to articulate, but there’s just something that like, maybe you notice it depending on how somatically aware you are, but there can often just be an ease of being present and in truth with everybody that’s sort of there. And sometimes, and as you said, you name all this thing, there can be all the spaciousness, but there can also be like a void over here that’s a little uneasy. Maybe that’s like a person, or that’s a withhold, or something that’s happening. And being in that spaciousness gives you an opportunity to sort of reflect and notice that you can sort of enter into the witness awareness of what’s happening in the space. So you can also observe yourself doing the thing that you’re doing in this particular space. Like it can get to some, I mean, I’m not promising this for early practitioners, but you can get to this space that almost borders on or verges on a psychedelic experience of a hyper presence and hyper awareness and openness, like a real openness where nothing’s really a threat, even the thing that maybe seems a little fuzzy over here. And then you can put your attention on that, like, well, what is it that’s over here? And you can engage in that, at least in terms of the interpersonal or the intersubjective meditative practices like circling. So there’s something about the container, the way we set it up, the context, you know, that everybody’s there, like we have shared reality of what it is we’re here for. We have our agreements to sort of help frame how we’re going to play the game, although we don’t tend to use that term, but how we’re going to engage into this particular practice. And that affords a lot of permission for a lot of people who in an implicit interaction, they don’t necessarily, like, you know, the social norms come in and start to tell them you should be doing this right now. And well, but I don’t want to do that. And you get, you know, and that can happen in this space, but it’s a beautiful space for you to like wrestle with that with other people, because we’re all acknowledging we’re going to, you know, excuse my term, fumble beep, we’re going to fumble, fuck our way around. Sort of doing that, like, it’s going to be a particularly awkward, but here’s a space in which we’ve all sort of agreed to do it. And we’re going to feel probably the a myriad of emotions, conflict, you know, conflict is great. It’s great for energy, but you don’t want too much such that starts to become threatening. So it’s like, how do we play with that in the space? You know, coherence is great, but if you have too much of it, things start to get a little bit flat. So there’s all sorts of experiences that are sort of available when we allow ourselves to be ourselves with one another. Yeah. So there’s a developmental loop between cultivating virtues and virtuosity. You get that virtuosity you were describing, but it feeds back into people acquiring particular virtues of discernment, and an orientation towards, you know, the true disclosure, right. And so virtues and virtuosity are training each other, which I think is one of the most powerful things. So there’s so much I mean, there’s a couple things I’d want to say, but I guess we talked about it in the first talk, you know, this, it’s something new, it’s not therapy, and it’s not debate, right. And those are the two things it’s not, right, it’s not therapy, and it’s not debate, because therapy and debate are directed towards different ends. And they also presuppose things much more fundamental, the the dialogos that we’re actually trying to recognize and become real aware of in these in these practices. And for me, that points to what I was talking about when I was talking about the sort of philosophical, spiritual import of the course. So I’ve been talking recently, I tweeted about this, I tweeted that New Year’s, I don’t generally tweet, but I tweeted that New Year’s. And I was also talking to David Fuller about this, and some of it will come out in some work he’s going to be doing, about trying to step back and look at these two different fundamental ways in which we could be oriented to the world. And I don’t know how they map on to being and having and some of the other fundamentals, so that’s the work to come. But it’s pertinent for what we’re talking about right now, because I talk about there, and this is based on a phrase from Paul Ricoeur, the hermeneutics of suspicion, this is what we got from, we inherited from Freud, there’s the therapeutic, by the way, and, and Marx, which is the economic, and from Nietzsche, and there’s the postmodern, so, so that what we go in is we were funded, our orientation is fundamentally one of suspicion and distrust. And the moment of truth, the exemplary moment of truth is the discovery of the conspiracy, of the secret agenda, of the cabal, of the hidden motive, right? And, and of course, the reason why that was those were taken up in is originally because they were very, very much needed, right? There was, there was, there was, there were, there were undermining a certain orientation we were getting from the Enlightenment and Descartes about certainty and self-presence and all that. There was a critique of modernity, profound one, developing. So I’m not saying, I’m not saying, I’m not trying to be dismissive of it, but what I’m trying to point out, and this comes from recent people I’m reading, like D.C. Schindler especially, and Clark, and a bunch of other people, Tyson, right? Marleau-Ponty and Lowe’s book on Marleau-Ponty, it’s this excellent book on Marleau-Ponty’s Last Vision. And here’s the basic idea. The basic idea is that’s an attitude towards the relationship between how things are appearing or showing up and reality. And the hermeneutics of suspicion says, appearances distort us, distract us, and deceive us from reality. And they, of course, can do that. They can, of course, do that. But what Marleau-Ponty and Schindler and, you know, this is that ultimately I think goes back to Plato, but you only realize some things in illusion if you, in terms of another experience, you take to be real. You only realize you’ve been self-deceived or you have been deceived if there’s a moment of self-correction or realization. Listen to the word. So the hermeneutics of suspicion is not self-sustaining. It actually depends on deeper moments, a different hermeneutics, where appearances aren’t distorting or distracting or deceiving, but where appearances are disclosing and revealing and connecting to reality. And this is the hermeneutics of beauty, beauty properly understood, not what we’ve reduced it to. Hans book on saving beauty, we’ve reduced beauty to what sort of gratifies us, right, rather than that which can strike us and open us up in ways, right? I recommend Scarry’s book, Beauty on Beauty and How It Prepares You for Truth and Justice, because where you come to see appearance as, and this is what Borthalt is doing in his book called, what is it, Saving Appearances? I think you’re taking appearance seriously. I can’t remember the title. It’s a great book. I’m reading it right now. And so the hermeneutics of beauty is one where the exemplary moment, the moment of truth is not aha, there’s the cabal and this is why we should hate it. The exemplary moment of truth is when you and I together, there’s a co-emergence of an insight into reality where the appearances are beautiful, where you, and this happens in these practices. And I want to see that even when I say this, people can hear it, right? Like you would become beautiful to me. And notice how like there’s the hackles of cynicism coming up. But try to put that aside and say, no, no, what if, what people are reporting is they reconnect instead of appearances being mere appearances that bedazzle us, what about appearance as the showing up, the disclosure of deeper reality and people affording that in each other in a profound way? That’s what I mean by the hermeneutics of beauty. And for me, what we do is we disclose a depth of reality that we love rather than the secret conspiracy that we uncover so that we can hate it and kill it. And what I would put to you is happening in increasing speed is, and this is an irony considering the nature of the hermeneutics of suspicion. The hermeneutics of suspicion has become the default mode of interpretation. It has become the very kind of thing it wanted to challenge, which is an unquestioned default mode of interpretation. That’s what the hermeneutics of suspicion was supposed to be always undermining, but it’s become the very thing. The very thing it was designed to explicate and call into question. And so I think the hermeneutics of suspicion inculturates us to distrust, to be cynical and ultimately nihilistic. And then we react to the starvation and the deprivation that causes to us by an attitude of conquest and dominance, because that’s the only form of connection that remains possible. So we get the zero sum game, the winner take all, the love of victory rather than the love of wisdom, all the things. So I think, and I don’t think this is inflationary, I think people truly tasting the hermeneutics of beauty. And that’s a way I think of describing a lot of how people report what’s happening to them in these practices, right? Is what is deeply needed in order for people to wake up to an alternative to the hermeneutics of suspicion, which is getting rapidly just insane and out of control. The speed, the rapidity at which conspiracy theories are being flung and people are being demonized and whole entire groups are being disclosed at, sorry, that’s not the right word, being portrayed, that’s what I want to say, being portrayed as this secret narrative. Like that is, I don’t know if this has happened to you, but it’s gone from being something I just see out there in social media to personal relationships. I see it in people I know now, perhaps even in myself, and I’m just blind to it, but I’m trying to get awake to it, right? To the way this insane mindset. And here’s where I think there’s a cultural point, then I’ll shut up because I want you to go back to talking. What it’s done is it’s led, see, the hermeneutics of beauty allows you to pay attention to the beauty of the dance, the beauty of the process. It makes you aware of the fundamental importance of procedural justice, right? That, right? How we do it is as important, if not more important than what it is we’re trying to do. Substantive or substantial justice is, this is what I want the world to be, right? It’s that kind of view. And I’m not saying we should stop talking about that, but what happens in a hermeneutics of suspicion is we undermine procedural justice for the sake of substantial justice. Let me give you a prototypical example. I was talking to David about this. So in the hermeneutics of beauty, you have a presumption of, listen to the word carefully, you have a presumption of innocence, right? And that what we’ll do is, right, we will presume that people are innocent and we will have to prove that they are guilty. And we can, right, and because we understand how fallible and finite and self-deceptive we are, but we also understand that people can ultimately be reached in their commitment to what is true, what is good and beautiful, right? Now there’ll be violations on that and those people will be criminal, etc., etc. Okay? But now what’s happening is we’re moving into a hermeneutics, the dominance of the hermeneutics of suspicion, where suspicion is equal to being. So the accusation of something is now gets people fired, they lose their job, they lose their reputation. There’s no, the presumption of innocence is gone. Like there’s been some cases in Canada where people have merely been accused of something, in the States too, and it’s like, and whether or not they’ve done it or not, that’s not the point I’m making. The point I’m making is we should claim that we don’t know until we do all this hard work and that we should basically trust people until we have very good reason and evidence to distrust them. But now we’re in the opposite position. You’ve been accused, that’s it, you’re done. And for me, that’s where the hermeneutics of suspicion completely subjugates procedural justice as substantial justice and substantive justice. And that just, that to me is, right, that’s the cultural significance that aligns with the philosophical significance. And what we’re doing, if you really think about it, I mean, this is kind of a, I don’t mean this to sound childish, but we’re really allowing people to return to the presumption of innocence in discourse. And that sounds like, well, no, but we don’t. And people have to, like that space, what I’m proposing to you is the space of spacious intimacy is exactly innocence in that sense, where people are coming into a space where there’s a presumption of innocence, not a perfection, not of infallibility, not of certainty, but of innocence, and allowing people to return to that without some romantic childish notion of innocence, but a profound one that restores our capacity to see and be so that we can fall in love with each other in the world again. So now I’ll shut up. That was a long thing. But for me, you know, there’s a philosophical and a cultural significance of what you’re proposing in this course that really needs to be put center stage. Yeah. Wow. So thank you. That’s beautiful to go on this journey with you as you sort of explicate this. I’m with simultaneously a lot of anxiety as you sort of talk about the default mode that we’re both perceiving that’s out there of suspicion. I feel like I allowed myself to touch a little bit into maybe what might be our collective trauma around that. So a part of me is a bit upset. And then another part of me, you know, and it’s just, it’s a way in which you sort of explicate and exemplify as you’re talking. So there’s this other way, as you talk about the beauty, I can sort of dip into that with you. And I can also feel the beauty that I’m imagining that you’re invoking as you talk about it. So it was quite a ride to sort of go with you. So it was, it was lovely. And I think it’s a beautiful frame that you have. And I think it’s very apt. I think one way that I would map some of that onto the way in which I’ve tended to do this work or these practices is that I would call them sort of good faith. We enter into practices and faith. So that is probably the part, you know, that maps onto the presumption of innocence. And yet one of the things about our practice is that we are not so rigid such that there is a particular direction in which we go. At least in circling, we tend to work with emergence a lot. So in circling, we’ll tend to give space and allowance for suspicion, allowance for judgment, but to work with it together, to be in relationship together about how we’re impacted as that’s being arrived. So we really work with the pieces that you’re talking about that maybe allow us to free ourselves from them such that collectively this is happening. And like you said, you think maybe you’re doing it too, and you’re not aware. And I’m aware of the ways in which I move into reactivity and see something. And it’s a lot easier to turn around and demonize that because they don’t have the time and space and the inclination to actually know everybody. And there’s that part of me that wants to just always say, you know, project love, but I also am working on trying to trust my actual experience and not override it. So it’s very much a dance. Sometimes we’re clumsy in that dance, but like anything, the more you practice, the better dancer you’re going to become. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, discernment takes a lot of practice. And I did say I wasn’t trying to give like a romantic notion of just loving everybody. Although, you know, Jesus of Nazareth said, ultimately, you can get to that place. But we used to think about the beautiful that way. We used to think of the beautiful as it can call me out of myself without it can call to me deeply personally without triggering all my personal projects. You can get this place where I can step outside the prison of my own ego for a bit. Right. And the thing is, I guess another way of putting it is the we space is an innocent space in that people can step outside of their own ego, and they might have to do that by first confronting, you know, suspicion and, you know, and self aggrandizement and all the stuff we want to do. And but that they can step into a space and find that that space is in some appropriate sense, welcoming, right? It’s a space that will in which their caring will be met by caring. Yes, totally. I mean, you know, we have for the facilitators, we have sort of principles and our first principle is to welcome everything. That’s our very first principle to sort of indicate whether or not we are doing the practices circling. Different organizations have different orders and structures of their principles. But for us, and that doesn’t mean to embrace it wholeheartedly and hug it and love the hell out of it and project it onto it. It’s to welcome that, you know, this person’s truth, the perspective is real and valid for them, you know, and that is the sort of the, you know, that is the extending of regard to somebody that like what you’re experiencing is real and valid for you. And whether it’s objectively valid or not, that’s, that’s even not the thing that we’re doing in circling. We’re not really interested in that. We’re really trying to step into your world to be with you in your world, to see what it’s like, you know, we use sort of this metaphor, if you try somebody on as a suit and sort of look through their eyes, how do you see and perceive the world? And this process that I’ve been doing for a number of years, you know, I think I don’t know the exact quote from Guy, but it’s this idea that, you know, you go through this experience and you come out of it and the world occurs to you as a little bit different. It’s the recovery theory of Tolkien. Yes, exactly. It’s the recovery theory, right? So the idea is, and this is the, the multi-perspectival virtuosity and the set of virtues that under undergird it, right? That’s the key in the wisdom consensus paper, this multi-perspectival ability. So when I go to another perspective, this was Tolkien’s idea of fantasy, it’s like the anthropologist that goes to another culture. You put on another glasses, another you inhabit and think of the monk’s habit, right? You put on a different habit, you go over there and then when you come back and you see your own world renewed, you recover it, it discloses itself. Yes, and that’s what I mean about, and that’s what I mean about this, a beauty that is tied to disclosure, right? It’s not, because what it’s not, it’s not sort of psychological being a psychological dilettante, oh, I’ll try a bit of Suzy on for a while and I’ll try a bit of Mac on for a while and I’ll try a bit of Peter and a bit of Andrea on for a while and I’ll just sort of consume the one that I find most gratifying. That is a total mis-framing of what we’re talking about here right now. It is not that consumerist dilettante attitude now projected into perspectives, right? It’s a very, very different attitude at all. It’s about, can you undergo a transformation of the other that allows you to recover yourself and them and your shared world in a new and profound way? Yeah, I think that’s very much the heart of it is sort of the coming back to knowing of being in some way, right? And a way that I’ve looked at it recently since watching and listening to a lot of what you’re saying is I enter in these experiences and something often can happen that breaks my frame of reality such that when I come out and sort of process it, it gives me this opportunity to reshape and reframe my perspective on reality. So it’s constantly that modal reciprocal shaping that’s happening of myself to the other, right? I think you talked about it in terms of like the mother to the child, right? And sort of affording the agape and the way in which it comes back into it starts to reshape the framing of reality for the mother. But I mean, it’s happening for everybody when we’re in this kind of real relationship, this real, as you refer to it, I think a covenant of reciprocal opening, where we’re exchanging and we’re here, we’re now, we’re exploring what’s here, we’re welcoming everything, including what’s uncomfortable, including the beautiful. And often what’s uncomfortable is really beautiful, which is really, again, it can be this really, the word’s not coming to me right now, but it’s not what you would expect. You have to be able to sit in discomfort with somebody else and then come out and go, wow, that was really cool. And I don’t understand it. I don’t understand why that was, you know, that because there’s an alive, it can sort of happen. And I think that goes back to you saying like it brings us, you know, the recovery is bringing us back in touch with our true nature and a way in which we’re not really doing that in the discourse that, you know, you were talking about before. I think it’s much more reactionary. And we are just more or less, you know, feeding off of that particular energy because it’s the easier thing to do. And nobody’s really taught us. I mean, nobody taught me how, I mean, I was 30, I was 35 before I came to any of this particular, it completely changed my perspective on other people, on relationships, on what’s possible in relationship and love. I had 35 years of default mode, game A, you know, reacting to life is happening to me. And then this just puts so much more power into my access, like within my grasp of, you know, was sometimes referred to as self-authoring. It gave me this opportunity to sort of break out of the socialized mind and start to actually self-author and notice like, Oh, I really like that. And Oh, I really don’t like that. Not what society’s telling me to like and not like actually deeply in touch with my body. And I can feel how I feel when I’m doing this and I’m trusting that that feeling is good. And I’m trusting that this uncomfortable thing is not good, but I’m not just always succumbing to that, not always surrendered to that. You know, it’s information, it’s information I still have to sense make, I still have to process because there can be ways in which I’m deceiving myself in either end of this. Right? Yes. So that is a big part of why, yes, we’ve got the practice, but we’re also trying to bring in the sense making of really trying to process those experiences together. Like, Hey, is what I felt in that experience the same as what you felt? Excellent. Interesting. They’re different. Why are they different? You know, and then we can sort of talk about, we perceive what might be different, you know, like, Oh, I was really anxious and actually I thought you didn’t like me. Oh, wow. I wonder why that happened. We can actually, we can have our experience, but then we can also have another experience as we look back on that experience that helps us get, I think a little bit closer to objective truth, which is really hard when you’re dealing with, you know, subjective human beings. But it’s possible. That’s the point. It is possible. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the pursuit is fun. I wanted to move a little bit back now towards the practical, just keep booing between them. So I’ve been sort of, I coined a slogan that what distraction is to meditation, projection is to deal logos, that it’s the thing that can just rail the, you rail it, but you’re not trying to, you’re not, but you’re not trying to push distraction out of your mind in meditation. You’re trying to learn to acknowledge it, but not get consumed by it and step aside from it. And then eventually you can also meditate on the distractions because they reveal very powerful habits of mind. Right. And the same thing right here, we like, this is not like, so again, a little bit more because you started this by saying what you got out of this is you weren’t sort of automatically projecting. All right. And projection and suspicion are just two sides of the same coin. Right. So, right. So in what way does this course and this pedagogical program of practices address the issue of projection? Is there some shadow work going on or are there practices that get you to, again, to sort of, again, I’m never going to project that, like, right. Exactly. So that’s why I used it. I think it’s a very strong analogy of distraction in meditation. Like you’re going to constantly get called to projection and you have to constantly call and call each other out of it again and again and again and again. And even note what the attraction to the projection might be saying about you and about the situation. So are there practices in the course for dealing with that? The reason I ask is that, and this is a point that Chris has been making, Chris Master Pietro, to myself, but also to Guy Sandstock, is that the dialectic and the dialogous practice needs to incorporate some shadow work, needs to incorporate this dealing with projection. And I’ve been also talking to Chloe Valdry about that, you know, theory of enchantment because she does shadow boxing and some other work about that. And so this is something that I’m very keen on right now because here’s what I don’t think we can do. Well, you’re going to go through a long program of therapy so that you can deal with your projections and then you can do this practice, because if we do this, no one will do this practice. First of all, they’ll either not do the therapy or they’ll get stuck in therapy. And so again, I don’t like this adjective, but how do you see, and I know this is experimental and it’s something we’re working on too and we’re working on together, how do we bring in, like there’s, you know, following the breath was a developed practice for dealing with distractions and labeling the process rather than getting involved with the content was how you, you know, it was a way of getting the right optimal grip on your distractions that allowed you to return to the mindful state. So what do you see? I know this is a loaded question and it’s very much a work in progress. And so I’m not going to pin you to some Cartesian standard of, I want the algorithm here, right? It’s just, what are your thoughts, right? Really open ended. What are your thoughts about how in a practical manner that avoids, right, just falling into projection within debate or just, I’m going to analyze you forever within therapy. How can we practically, that horrible sounding neologism, how can we, how can we, how can we dance with projection? Yeah, well, I think there’s a few ways we could sort of tackle that. I think the way that it tends to happen in sort of the ecology of practices that art has always been engaged in historically and now adding on a few others with this particular course, there’s something about doing this work within a group and doing it within that space such that there’s certain types of modalities you can do with other people. And then there’s modalities you’re doing in relationship with other people. And there’s something about the period of being in relationship and where we have our agreements here that we’re basically not going to gaslight one another, that we’re going to speak plainly. The only pitfall, if we just follow that is you could fall into groupthink and the whole group could deceive itself. So that is a potential pitfall to that particular, just relying on the general process to sort itself out, sort of the chaos order flip. However, in my experience, it works quite potently such that invariably somebody in the group or multiple people in the group will not be on board with what is currently happening. And because of the structure that we set up, there’s a strong invitation. In some ways, it’s almost an agreement and expectation that we actually voice where we’re at right now. You know what? I’m feeling really angry with what you just said. This isn’t lining up for me. And that’s one way in which you can, here’s how I’m impacted by something that you’re saying. And we have sort of this saying about these reflections that they’re information. And if one person says you’re a horse, you might think, well, that’s strange. I’m not a horse. If two people say you’re a horse, you might be like, geez, I’ve heard that before, but I’m pretty sure I’m not a horse. If three people say you’re a horse, you might want to look around and see if you’re standing in a barn. There’s just a general way of discourse where we’re inviting everybody into self-awareness and then also inviting that group collaborative sense-making, sort of post-processing of these experiences that I think will tease a lot of those self-deceptions out. And we do do active shadow work. I have run work groups on going through the 321 integral shadow process, which is an amazingly potent process that you, it’s more potent in a group of it. You can also do it yourself. And that is a practice that we will certainly be introducing into the course. You know, for us, for me, at least the one, one of the, I don’t know about changes because it doesn’t, I’m not trying to say anything about the way in which art was run, but we started to make some of more of the implicit explicit. And one thing was bringing in a particular frame that would inform us as what is what. Can I just interrupt for a sec? Yeah. He’s invoking art. That means authentic relating Toronto, just so you know. He’s not invoking artwork, art, authentic relating Toronto. Just sorry, I wanted to get that out before. People, what’s he talking about? Yeah, yeah, years of this. It comes so easily. So one of the frameworks that we’ve been using is Dustin DiPerna and Ken Wilbur wrote a white paper called Towards Deliberately Developmental Civilizations. And it’s, you know, it’s about 16 pages, something like that. And this really calls on to, you know, the previous structure. I don’t know if it was Wilbur or not, but of wake up, grow up, clean up, show up. This is a little bit more simplistic, but I think fits much better and is a huge reason of why I’m plugged into your perspective and what you brought forward with awakening from the meaning crisis is that, you know, to have wholeness, you know, it’s a term that’s wrought with some discomfort. But the idea of a whole thing is that you need to have an integration of structures of consciousness, of states of consciousness, and you have to reintegrate the shadow. And if any one of these things are missing, there are sort of cracks that can sort of allow the self deception to go in. So in the paper, you know, they invoke the idea of the Nazi doctor, you know, here you have a doctor’s taken on an oath and yet they belong to, you know, so it’s like there’s a crack because something is not being integrated into their ecology of practices. So we are working with the structure we’re bringing theory, we’re explaining how this works, we’re bringing in the procedural, we’re working with states, obviously, through the participatory and the perspectival. You know, that’s kind of the spiritual end of things. And then we’re checking ourselves with the shadow work, you know, like, Hey, what’s going on here? Where am I react? What’s that about? You know, we have an opportunity to explore that to hopefully bring it to light. And then if you go through some shadow work process, you might actually be able to reintegrate that which you have dissociated from, from, you know, and you say, that’s not me. And it’s like, Oh, actually, it is me. You know, so there are processes to sort of help us do that along the way. That’s good. Because one of the, they’re related, these two moments that occur, I’m noticing is that really, to me seem to be markers of projection. One is, I’ve always known this, what you’re teaching me, I’ve always known it. It’s like, I’m a little bit worried about that. I mean, they’re like, if there’s this sort of like, like, if you’re seeing, right, I’ve always known, it’s like, that’s usually for me as a marker that I don’t know. Like, if there’s no novelty, there’s no genuine novelty in emergence, that sounds to me like projections going on, you’re just reading it, you’re completely assimilating this to an existing schema. The other is, oh, that I just don’t get that. That’s all just so much, blah, blah, blah. That’s the, so there’s the dismissive move. And that’s also that I noticed that shows up for some people in this. And it’s like, again, okay, that’s also projective. That’s right, it’s an inverse projection. It’s a claiming to know completely that that has no value, right? Do you understand what I’m trying to point to, when we’re talking about projection, you might not think it is where you think it is, right? Like, you might be in, you might think, oh, I’m not projecting because I’m in so much agreement, but that can be dangerous, right? And you might think, oh, I’m not projecting because I just know that’s all bullshit. It’s like, actually those, so one of the sneaky things about projection is it’s often most at work where you least suspected of being at work, if I can put it that way. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, what I would say there, you know, we use, we have a particular agreement when we do circling and that agreement is to own your experience. So it’s, so you’re using, first it becomes more of a serious play of sort of looking at the way in which you frame your assertions. Basically the idea is not to assert anything, is to check everything with the other person to see whether or not it fits their experience. So you can have, you know, this reframing or paraphrasing that comes back. What I heard was this, does that fit? Yes or no. And then we start to see the distinctions in your expression and my understanding. So that helps, you know, if we engage in that process, that helps to eliminate a certain degree of projection. And then there’s the ways in which we can sort of sit in the space and somebody says something and you can say, wow, that’s so brave. And it’s like, well, maybe it’s not, you know, maybe they do that all the time and it doesn’t, you know, to you, it’s brave to them. It’s they feel cowardly by doing it. You know, they feel like they’re avoiding something. So when we sort of make these projections and we assert something, we’re missing something about the other person. So baked into our agreements of circling in the way in which we engage in it is really to check with the other person to see if it fits. And in some ways it’s a, it’s like a very light version of steel manning in some way we can go into. I heard this is, does this fit? You know, because, you know, we have our own language, we have our own way of saying things and it lands in us. And we usually formulated in a slightly different language. So that paraphrasing that, you know, that tends to happen in this practice gives us an opportunity to see, is there something, you know, futsy here with my interpretation? Is there something futsy with your expression? But we’re not going to know until you express and I interpret and when we turn around, we meet each other. So I would say that particular piece is already baked into my experience of circling how I’ve been practicing it for the last almost nine years now. No, that’s good. I like this idea about sort of slowing down the process of attribution and looking for agreement in attribution before you move into any kind of wrestling with the content. And that’s very analogous to dealing with the distraction. You don’t get involved with the content. You step back and look at the process itself. Right? Yeah. That’s very, very good. That’s very good. Yeah. I’ve never thought of it that way, but that’s, that’s what’s happening. Yeah, that’s very good. Like, yeah, really get, yeah, that part of doing that. Yeah, that’s in the dialectic and the dialogous, but it’s got to be beefed up a bit. It’s got to be strengthened a bit and bring in some of these other practices of specific shadow work. So that’s been very helpful. Thank you for that. I’m really excited about this. I’m really excited about this whole project. We’re sort of coming to the end of our time together. I want to give you the chance to do the final word. You know, take as much time as you want. Like, I think we’ve done a good job on, you know, how this can be personally, philosophically, and culturally relevant to you and what it, what promises. And I think people are, I mean, get a good sense of the, you know, the combination of authenticity and expertise that you’re bringing to this. And so, but is there anything more that should be said that you’d like to put out as a sort of a final word on this? My inclination is to simply say, you know, if you’ve been following John’s work for a while, you know, I finally finished the 50 episode Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. It took me way longer than it should have. But finally coming to the end of it, there was just that real settling. I was very emotional about it, but there’s a real settling in sort of the things that you were saying about how we can respond and address the Meaning Crisis. And for me, the emotion is, is like, okay, I’m on the right track. Right. Right. And I mean, that might sound, I don’t know how else to say it, but you know, my felt experience is one of like, there’s, you know, there’s an affirmation, obviously there’s a confirmation bias, but I don’t think there’s been any particular shadow there. I’ve done a number of things throughout the years and I get really involved in them and I sort of drop them. This is not that thing. There is something so integrated and so true that continues to allow me to see and witness more truth, good and beauty, more elegance in the world, more beauty in one another. Even when I’m angry with somebody, I still have the perspective. Isn’t that amazing? Yeah. Like when you, like that’s been new for me too recently, over the past couple of years, like, right. I can be angry and yet the beauty can, like the beauty can shine through and it shakes me out of, you know, the project of narrowing that anger can do. Sorry, I didn’t want to interrupt, but that, I just wanted to reinforce how powerful that experience can be. Yeah. Yeah. I just, you know, and for me, you know, when we had our first conversation in your office, you know, for me, it really comes back to like, this is kind of, this is ideally what I would like to be doing. I’d like to be working on creating a pedagogy that sort of helps us move through these things, you know, and I hold a developmental perspective and I see that, you know, socially we’re sort of stuck in this particular area of development and I’m seeing mostly the shadow. I mean, I’m maybe a little too sensitive to it or a little too attuned to it. I see mostly the shadow happening because even where people aren’t engaging with the shadow, they seem almost to me to be regressive a bit more because it’s way too confrontational over here. So for me, I just feel the tension. I feel like I’m constantly in it and living and witnessing the tension. Unfortunately, I don’t feel like I’m alone. Thank you, John and everybody else that’s doing this work. It does help sort of alleviate, you know, some of the tension of like, oh my God, this is all mine. You know, this weird narcissistic tension, like it’s all mine to work with, you know. It’s like, no, no, no, there’s a bunch of us here that want to really, we’re perceiving and sort of seeing the roadblock or the bottleneck and we have a pretty good sense of, you know, especially, you know, as you articulated, like here’s where we were and here’s the cognitive science aspect of it. It’s kind of leading us to here and I didn’t get to that place through your process and lens through, you know, I got to it through this highly subjective, experiential coming into deep contact of what it means to be, I guess, what I think it means to be human. Still ever disclosing. So yeah, I mean, it’s a really long-winded way of saying that, you know, I think what you have articulated as maybe our best way through this contraction in meaning is to engage with these self, what word do I want to use, these introspective self coming into deep contact with ourselves, with virtue, and then for me now I see the next step is to really bring the sense-making part into it so that we’re not deceiving ourselves. Yes. So easy to stay in the good, juicy, feel-good feelings of being with people and seeing everyone and that’s important. Some people need that just to be able to even step outside of anything else because they’re so contracted there. I just see this as the next stage to sort of help us ease out of our self-deception such that when we start to make change in the world, when we want to make systemic changes, these are going to be sustainable changes for the foreseeable future and not the past which seems to have been regressive, more totalitarian, is the winner, sort of power dynamics that tend to have created what we currently have and I just, yeah, I mean, I feel really fumbly with my words right now. It was beautiful though. Like your deep involvement, interest, interest I originally meant to be within. You’re being within it and you’re making it very interesting to people, to me and I assume to people who are watching so I think that was excellent. Thank you very much for that. Thanks, John. Yeah. So I just wanted to thank you. This will not be our final conversation. We’ll first, we’ll do another one of these. This will be ongoing and I just wanted to thank you again. Remind everybody Taylor’s going to give me any information. It’ll be put in the notes for this so I’ll be there for some of this course and I strongly recommend this. Many of you are asking, okay, what do we do beyond talking? Well, this is what you can do beyond talking. This is really what you can do. This is how we can start talking that leads to changing and if that’s the talking that leads to transformation rather than just the talking about transformation is what you’re looking for, this is a good place to start. Yeah, this is the participatory for sure. Yeah.