https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ewvV3Qlu7Tg
All right. I’m so glad. I’m so glad we’re doing this again. But we are, if you’re watching this video, what you’re listening to and what you’re watching is the official announcement for our fourth DIAlogos, Circling Into DIAlogos two-day course. It’s our fourth time doing it. It’s taught by Christopher, John Verbecky, and myself. And this fourth one, this next one is going to be August 1st and 2nd, the first weekend of October. I’m sorry, not August. October. Yeah. The first weekend of October. There will be a, I think it’s 250. So it’s to your advantage if you know you’re going to do it, you know, register before then. And please, if you’re watching this, please share the video to your social media and Facebook and whatever ways that you share things to your friends. Because last time, I got all kinds of feedback that people hadn’t actually heard the announcement. So I think we have to, I’m trying to do a better job of getting the word out. So if you can help us with that by just sharing it on Twitter and letting everyone know on Discord servers and all the places that the others converge so they can see this. And Chris, do you want to just say a few words about like, just, I want to cover a little bit about what the course is and what we go through and the layers of practices. And then what I want to do is to cover what we’re going to be doing, but then really go into why do it, right, which is what we were talking about before. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you bet. Okay, so the weekend is kind of composed of a series of practices that kind of build on one another. And it’s mainly, what would you say, guys, maybe about four or five, all told, but, you know, depending on how we, depending on how we merge and separate them, they blend together into a bit of a continuum, which is exactly the point, right. So it begins with circling. And I’m just going to stop right there because circling needs an explanation and you’re going to give it, not me, but. But and then to circling, it adds philosophical contemplation and philosophical fellowship, which like circling our relational practices, both socially, but also more existentially, right. You’re not only coming to do something with other people, but also doing something with yourself. They’re both happening at the same time. And that’s true of all of these different practices. It’s a different way of keeping company, which is one way to begin to talk about it. It’s a different way of keeping company with other people and with yourself so that your the finesse of keeping company, which means sort of holding court with an idea or holding court with a particular sensation or experience, becomes something that can be done with a little bit more space, space of mind, but also a kind of acoustic space. So this is about what we do with our attention. And because of that, how we are thinking and feeling and reckoning with problems, how we’re using intuition, all of those things are all enfolded into this and they all spill back out from it. So all of these practices are basically using a relational form of being in company with other people, a way of speaking, a way of conversing, a way of conveying information and signals to bring about a change in how we’re bringing our attention to bear on those dimensions of experience that are the most ineffable, that are most difficult to make present, that are most difficult to get our hands around. So it’s about that relationship on every possible scale. And so circling and philosophical contemplation and philosophical fellowship all culminate in a practice called dialectic into dialogos, which is based on the Socratic, Platonic dialogs. And it’s based not in the exact same dialectical method, but it’s certainly the same spirit. It’s the same kind of it’s a demonic exercise to try and make present what you just mentioned before we started recording, Guy, which is a third factor perspective that prevails over my perspective and your perspective and all perspectives that are in the room. And that becomes something that can guide our attention and have us look at something in ways that we couldn’t have done otherwise. Not just look at it, but feel its presence to take on a certain kind of competence or a certain kind of identity in relation to a fundamental idea or a fundamental perspective the way that wouldn’t have been possible without a kind of collective effort. Before we started recording, you and I, while we were talking about it and all kinds of there are so many different metaphors or analogies that can be used to describe this. The one that we describe most often is building a fire and how you can basically assemble all of the right pieces and components. But you do all of that just so that you open these conditions to the possibility of an intervention, something that comes from outside of it, like the way that we conduct electricity or the way that you can lay the fire as meticulously as you can just in the hopes that it will spontaneously become sustainable, become dynamical and, as John would say, self-organizing. Jazz is another metaphor we use a lot, right? This idea that you’re using a kind of spontaneous poetic process of being in response to other players to kind of conjure and unfold something between you that takes on a life and direction of its own but takes you far beyond the boundaries of what could have been achieved without that combined concerted effort. And then the final analogy we were talking about is that of a story, right? Being able to effectively assemble a group of people and imagine a group of people around a campfire. Why don’t we just combine the analogies? Telling a story on the basis of having heard the possibility and the story that was proposed before you. And this kind of thing happens all the time in improv. There are entire art forms, performing art forms, that are dedicated to cultivating this kind of capacity, this poetic capacity, this kind of spontaneous creation. The difference is what separates this out is that it’s not just an artistic practice. There’s artistry to the practice and it’s very creative. But it’s not aesthetic fundamentally. It’s not just creating something for the sake of creating something. It’s using that kind of poetic capacity embedded in a very social and intimate context as a way of directing our attention to what we like to call the logos in this tradition. And maybe I’ll hand it over to you now, Guy. Yeah, you know, as you’re talking, I was just getting the sense of, you know, John’s notion of his point, but I believe he terms, right, the ecology of practices. And the way that the course is structured, right, is, and it’s all pretty much all experiential. So it’s all structured exercises, right? So what we’ll do is we’ll give instructions for what the exercise is. We’ll give enough context to orient you in the exercise. Then you go into groups with other people and then you just practice for a period of time. Then you come back out, you debrief and talk about the experience, go where that takes us, deepen it, and then go back into that practice. And they’re layered logically, right? There’s a logos to the actual layering of the practices. And I was imagining, I was thinking that that layering, you can almost look at it as a layered progressive, a progressive layered experience of the process of falling in love with reality. How beautiful. Right. It’s like, it’s, it’s, it’s Socrates, you know, emphatically in so many different ways, represented, symbolized, enacted, said that there’s this fun that the way philosophy or the good first makes contact with us is erotically, right? It calls us into, it looks out at us, right? And it captures us and draws us in. And there’s different levels and layers, right? Of distinctions to that being drawn in. But very much the course is about letting ourselves be in some sense, erotically fall erotically in love with reality, right? In the deepest sense of the word. Beautiful. Beautiful. And if you think about the word philosophy, it’s funny, it didn’t, this didn’t hit me until after, after the first deal logos that we did, what the word philosophy by Leah, Sophia. So filea, Leah means the law, it’s like the love and intimacy of friendship and fellowship. And Sophia means wisdom. And so like, literally, we’re talking about this kind of wedding or coming together and this fittedness that comes together between, right? Between love and wisdom. Intimacy, right? And wisdom. And we all know this because, you know, there’s people, I’ve had people, and I’m sure you just look in your life, like, different relationships draw out different aspects of your character, right? And some of them you really like draw out aspects that you really, really like and other ones that you don’t quite like. But then there’s also relationships that you’ve had and you and I have had that not only did they draw out aspects of my character that were already there, but the process of relating, the process of it being drawn out also transforms my character as a whole, right? And this is the really important thing to get about this work, this practice of filosofia, if you will, is that what we’re talking about is coming to know through being transformed through the process of coming to know it, right? It’s not just abstractly learning information or being informed, it’s being deeply engaged and it through the process of learning is the same process of you being transformed by what you learn. And at the end of the, especially this last one was really, really, really this, at least it shined to me more, I don’t know if it was literally more, how people would come back from the exercise, especially as the weekend went on, they would come back and there was just kind of this like their eyes would be dilated and they’d be talking about these insights that they had. But there you could tell that there’s something had changed in them, right? Something had altered in them in probably in some ways really fundamentally. And so this is philosophy in the ancient sense of the word, not philosophy in the academic modern sense of the word, right? So you don’t need any philosophical background, you don’t need to have read anything, you don’t need any of that kind of stuff to engage in circling into the logos. That was beautifully said. Yeah, and that’s a really important point at the end that there’s no particular literacy required, philosophical literacy. And in fact, we’ve talked about the fact that sometimes that can be as much a disadvantage as an advantage because this is really not just an intellectual exercise. It isn’t exclusively, it isn’t even mostly, I find, and that sounds maybe a bit strange when you think about talking about, you’re not talking about philosophy, you’re doing philosophy. That’s the difference, incidentally, right? You’re not reviewing works of philosophy, you’re engaged in the process of disclosure. I love how you put it, that it’s not the conclusion, any particular conclusion or definition or proposal that’s drawn. It’s something that is occurring in the process of reaching past the point of your foreknowledge, right? Where your drawing out, my drawing out, happens in part as a consequence of your drawing out. And the fact that we’re drawing out is precisely what draws whatever kind of insight descends on the process, right? It’s because of you’re taking a certain kind of posture. And that if we look at the why, right? Why do dialogos, circling into dialogos, and why engage in this practice? And again, this is something, you know, that this is a work in progress, right? We are refining, we’re refining the course and adjusting it, and we’re talking about it in between the courses. And continually, it’s an emergent practice, right? So in some sense, we’re teaching the course, but we’re in it with you. And there’s an experimental element of this, right? So you’re going to be, when you take the course, you’re going to be part of a process of discovering what this is. And, you know, Chris was Chris was was referencing this experience that’s that I think is very telling about why it exists, and why I do dialogos, and why I get involved in this, right? Has to do with when, when we go to describe what dialogos is, it’s as if you have to wonder newly about it in order to just describe it, it does not lend itself to rote, rote descriptions, right? They go well on a marketing page or something like that. It’s, there’s something about the question, what is dialectic in the dialogos? In some sense, in some sense, it, it you have to almost ask the question newly, again, and then in some sense, we’re as much finding out what we’re saying about the logos as we’re saying it right now. So there’s this quality of that there’s a generative aspect to it that you have to come back to, right? And that that generativity, right, has a quality of inexhaustibility. That that inexhaustible source, I think is precisely what the practice and what like if you say, well, why do it? It’s so that we can continually get deeper and deeper in an intimate relationship with that inexhaustibility that seems to be underneath and primordially at the very heart of everything, in some sense, and the interconnectedness of everything and the sense of affinity and infinity, right, two things in that way. And so, in some way, in the dialogical practice in the back and forth and the dialectic, right, as that goes back and forth, something emerges. If the deal goes catches, right? What what you catch sight of is this thing that’s beyond what any of the participants can do on their own, or just the sum, it’s greater than the sum of the parts, right? There’s something beyond that, that when you catch sight of it, it kind of glistens out and it gleams out and you can kind of feel that sense of moreness in yourself drawn towards it, and then unable to describe it a certain sense of aphoria. And that orientation to that something more, it does it kind of like, in my experience is every time I touch in on that, and it’s like I remember it, and I remember it’s oh, it’s defying words, but everything in me wants to describe it, to get close to it, but there’s something that actually withdraws and has me step back and come near to it. And that mystery that bucks language, but draws language towards it, seems to be the same mystery that kind of, whatever it is, it has the flower bloom, whatever has the tree grow, whatever has the atoms twirl around each other in a particular way, that interconnected generative moreness that animates everything is really what the practice, why the practice is in existence, is to get into relationship the more profound way with that. Exactly, exactly, exactly. Beautiful. It’s like trying to catch the wind in a sail, you know, and all of the work, all of the method, all of the nuts and bolts of the practice, and all of those practices that come before it, that establishes the capacity to be naked before yourself. Not in any kind of perverse way, just in a sense that you can kind of try and we’re trying to get to the bottom of what kind of view, what kind of perspective we’re actually living out, maybe without being aware of it. And by making proposals in the direction of these deep, deep structures, these deep forms of value that we call virtues, by trying to reach in the direction of something that can’t be grasped adequately, we’re issuing a kind of fundamental challenge, a fundamental sense of doubt, a fundamental ignorance that can have us wonder and question again at the very, we talk about it, I really like to talk about this in terms of the kind of the dream, whatever dream that we’re living out, right? This becomes a way of waking up. And it might just be for a moment, might just sidle right back into it afterwards. That’s okay, that happens too. But this is, I think this is a way of using the kind of, using the powerful social technology and psychotechnology, as certainly as John would say, that we have at our disposal, that is dialogue itself and the different structures that it can actually take when it’s refined a little bit. We’re using that as a way of unfolding that sail, that if we’re so lucky, catches a logos or catches the spirit, however we want to put it, right? There’s so many different ways of talking about this philosophically, even religiously, but that’s fundamentally, I think, the idea. And that all of those practices that come before prepare our capacity to sink knowingly into the ignorance we have and appreciate it such that we become aware of, you know, we’re able to wake up in whatever kind of life we’re living in, we can wake up inside of it for a moment, enough to look around, enough to maybe put a foot outside of it. And that when that happens, that’s the aporia. And that’s where it begins. Yeah, that deep sense of making sense. And there’s something about, you know, another way of one of the things I’ve noticed in both myself and watching people engage in the practice over time is, I can especially see this in witnessing and listening to other people, is people start to, I’ve noticed that the people start to become much more coherent in a very deep way, right? This, because a lot of the skills have to do with finding the relevance, as John would say, or the through line that goes through things, right, that isn’t reducible to the particular thing that you’re talking about, right, or the particular object, but the thing that runs through all of it, right, that isn’t a thing itself, it’s that no thing. And that is, whatever that is, right, we like to call that the logos, but whatever that is, the practice of becoming at one with it, of becoming near to it, letting it breathe you in a sense, and coming into that relationship, is something that’s just, on one level, it sounds kind of extraordinary, which it is, but it’s also the very ordinariness of the way things make sense in a very concrete way, right? So like, your ability for pattern recognition, and the sense of being able to see the whole in the particular, all those aspects that are instrumental in functioning, right, and living well in a very practical way, is very much embodied in this as well. So there’s a real grounded sense to this. And the other part of it too, which comes with all wisdom practices, has to do with, in some sense, to help one become more adept at not self-deception, not having self-deception, not being able to deceive themselves, right? That deep level of attunement and discernment, right, in our lives, right, to open up to the realm of wisdom, right, and the mind sword, as John would, it can cut to the things, to the heart of things. Right, right, right, and to establish also a kind of a font, you know, a font outside of yourself that you can actually draw upon to be able to dislodge yourself from a perspective that’s just not actually availing anything for you, that’s foreclosing things, you know, immediately, just because it’s framed a problem, right, didn’t mean to use that classic example, right, that’s just sort of framed a problem in a way that you can’t actually get through it or around it. And this practice, it becomes very difficult. That becomes very difficult, especially when you get stuck, whether it’s stuck on one problem or stuck in general. We know that feeling, right, when you’re just stuck, existentially stuck, and there’s you just, there is no way forward. It’s like you’re like a chess piece with a limited number of moves, because the moves that you see are a consequence of the life view, right, that kind of the perspective that you’re living in and saturated in and so can’t see, right, and the dream, as it were, and dialogus, one thing, I think at its best, when it’s working at its best, and it’s a matter of practice, and it’s a matter of a certain kind of openness and a certain kind of rigor, like this isn’t, this is something to get better at over time, like anything else worth doing. But the good thing is that because it is a, you know, it is a coordinated sport, in some sense, and a cooperative sport, there’s some form of athloid at work, you know, even if it’s just a kind of a matter of spirit or a matter of a matter of sociability. So, yes, the good thing is you’re not doing it alone. And because of that, if it’s operating under the right ethos, properly in service to the logos, right, then it becomes a way out, and then a way back in, right, it becomes a way out of a particular kind of stuckness that’s really thwarting you, like that chess piece that can’t move forward because it hasn’t realized that there are more moves available to it. I’m really starting to butcher this metaphor here, but you get my point, is that it becomes a way of momentarily extract, being pulled, being extracted from that closed circuit, and suddenly, in given possibility back in the way that you can understand yourself and everything else by extension. Yeah, totally. And the thing about, you know, the circling part of this, right, so we do, it’s the mindfulness, right, then we go into philosophical contemplation, and then we go into a couple of hours where we do dive into circling. And in circling, you could say is, it’s interesting because Chris, you just did your first pure circling weekend, right, not that long ago, but I think you probably agree. In some sense, circling is something like a dialogos on a human being or with a human being, right, this sense of circling around someone and really, in some sense, drawing out that which whatever it is about that person that makes them them, their suchness, right, drawing that out in this way that where it starts, you start to have this experience, like, the way that you’re relating to that person in such a way that you start to listen to them as if they’re like, you start to have this experience, like you are like the best person I’ve ever met, right, you get this source of affinity, right, you find a center, you find a center in them, like a cosmic center, and that person, right, yes, that animates through them, but it’s also everything else, but in this unique way that comes to be their face, right, and the intimacy, right, the, how does John, he has a great term for it, the progressive increasing mutual self-opening, and ever increasing mutual self-disclosure, right, yes, yes, that experience of intimacy in the horizontal dimension, right, in some sense, we take that intimacy when we start to go into via logos and we’ll have that intimacy at the vertical level, right, so we really go deep into this horizontal level of like this, the real basics of what are those components, what does it take to be really intimate with someone else, to be appropriately vulnerable, right, and responsive to the other, right, what do you, where do you put your attention, what are some of the ways of communication that invite that, what are some of the ways of listening and ways of being that invite that kind of autopoetic self-disclosure, right, that increasingly reveals itself in intimacy, right, we’re going to spend a good couple of hours in that course going really kind of deep into the structure of those capacities and those skills and practicing them, right, and so you can see kind of the logic of how each level of the practice builds on the next one and it tends to the soil so that by the time we’re going to the culminating practice, dialectic and the via logos, the soil is so full, right, it’s so rich with nutrients, right, that in some sense we bring up all of that and then we together turn it towards something like say a virtue or an idea, right, or a piece of wisdom and start to have the same process with that, right, and that intimacy throughout. It goes back to what you said at the very beginning, right, which is that you’re trying to fall in love again with reality and you just in some sense we’re using, we’re somehow being reminded how to relate to the inexhaustibility in each person, that knowing each person and circling seems much more about finding an axis between your knowing of them and the dimension of them to be known that can’t be known. Yes, right. Something like that, right, you try to find the, your knowing has to find its target in precisely what’s unknowable about the person. You find the mystery at the center. I’m no expert, like you said, I just did my first weekend of it recently, but it seems to me that that’s the goal is to somehow find and lock on to, not in a sense that you have a final purchase on it, but in the sense that you’re caught in its current. Catch the wind again, like I said, but you want to catch the wind of that about the person that is so deeply mysterious that bears its affinity to the logos, right, you’re trying to find the logos of each person and then, and the logos isn’t a thing, right, logos isn’t a thing, it’s not a thing, right, it’s that about the person that makes them most real somehow, right, and so we’re doing, we go from doing that of a person to doing that of a virtue, to get to know it relatedly as though we were getting to know a person and if we understand the logos of a person as having a kind of infinite and inexhaustible capacity to be known, then that is at least as true of a virtue, right, and the idea is that by getting into a relationship with that quality about it that can’t be known, our knowing of it is shaken out of its, what John would call its propositional way of knowing, we stop trying to know it as a matter of semantic certitude and we start knowing it in a way that is participatory because we have no other choice because the way in which we’re trying to know it is the kind of way that defies any definition or stable purchase that you could make in the first place, right, and that’s what it means when we say we’re befriending the virtue and being befriended by it, we’re getting caught up in its current, caught up in its nature, socializing with it as we socialize with one another and then this whole process is about sensitizing the capacity to socialize with virtue itself. Beautiful. I think we got there to get a place to have. Yeah, all right. So good. We hope to see you there. Yeah, so again, October 1st and 2nd is when the course is, early bird discount until the 17th, I believe, of October and we look forward to seeing you there and again, please help us spread the word. Much appreciated.