https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=AeNkugf2zZM
All right, so welcome guys. Thank you. Good to be here. And I’m always, always thrilled to be present somewhere with, with my dear friend Chris. Yeah, yeah. Thanks, John. Likewise, always. And it’s very nice to meet you, Matreya. Thanks very much for having us here. It’s a very kind invitation. Very nice to meet you too, Chris. Thank you so much for saying so. So I wanted to just talk a bit today about Anagoga and like the development of the self. And one thing that I, that I really enjoyed you mentioning, Chris, in the elusive eye was Kierkegaard’s concept of becoming a self. And that is a difficult process in and of itself. Like that’s not an easy achievement. So I wanted to sort of get, delve a little bit more into that. So from, from Kierkegaard’s perspective or from your perspective, Chris, what is it to become a self? What is that journey like? What does it involve? And, and, and how, how would one know if one has become themself? Well if it ever happens, I’ll be sure to let you know what it feels like. Um, boy, that’s a good question. It’s a big question. Maybe I’ll just, maybe we’ll start in bits and pieces that might be in these ways. I think it has, so I think from, from the Kierkegaardian perspective, but not only from the Kierkegaardian perspective, I think it has something to do with the reconciliation of the natural endowment of the individual, that which is a priority, that which we come with as a consequence of our nature and the realization thereof and the disposition of the will as it turns to face that endowment, to know that endowment and to dispose it into a form of action. I think it has something to do with that, that it is the direction of the will. In response to the recognition of what has come before us and which we are by necessity. Right. Because, you know, the paradoxes for Kierkegaard is that the self is both a natural condition, is the condition that is, that is, that is prior to existence and is a condition thereof. But also it is the object of a normative ascent and a very much an anagogic ascent. I think that comes with, that comes as a consequence of how we treat ourselves by the tutoring of our will. And I think in that sense, it’s, I think, especially in that way, it picks up on the Platonic legacy and the legacy of Socratic self-knowledge quite a bit. One, I mean, what’s really interesting, maybe we can talk about this a little bit. One of the things, one of the, one of the points of intersection, one of the, one, one, it’s interesting because it’s not clear always whether it’s an outright contention or whether it’s an agreement or some combination thereof. But that old sort of Greek adage that, you know, to know the good is to do the good, is something that Kierkegaard, for instance, challenges. And he’s challenging it very much from a Christian standpoint. He’s challenging it from the basis of Christian sin, right? For Kierkegaard, to know the good does not entail doing the good because we live in a state of defiance in respect of that good. And he, his ongoing dialogue with Socrates has a lot to do with that, right? Because, of course, we can define the state of Socratic ignorance in so many different ways, right? You could, you could understand, to understand ignorance from a purely propositional standpoint would be to say that not being acquainted or initiated into the truth simply is, or rather, that the question of, the question of, of, of failing to do the good is simply a matter of not being initiated propositionally into the set of axioms that would orient you properly and would equip you with the knowledge to be able to act on it once realized. But for Kierkegaard, that idea of ignorance is either an insufficient definition for ignorance or if it’s not, if that is the definition of ignorance, then that’s not, in fact, sufficient for right conduct or, or certainly for becoming oneself, right? And so he has this, he has this tension with the Socratic tradition because he recognizes in Socrates that the Socratic definition of ignorance exceeds the mere propositional, that it is characterological in nature, that ignorance is not simply a state of factual awareness, but that it’s a state of constitution, it’s a state of fundamental orientation and integration or lack thereof, as the case may be. And he recognizes in the figure of Socrates a deeper definition and understanding of ignorance. And so he accords a little bit more with the Socratic avatar, I would say, than he does with the Greek tradition writ large, that this emphasis on knowing and, and let’s say, I want to say right conduct, but that’s really not a Kierkegaardian way of putting it. In any case, you get what I’m saying, that somehow it’s the interaction with knowledge, between knowledge and the will that constitutes the anagogic journey to consolidating oneself. And that, and it’s not simply a matter of knowing. And so I think it has, so to begin to answer your question, it has something to do with the recollection and proper recognition of that natural endowment and a will that is tutored in such a way as to know what to do with it, to know what to do with it, right. So I would maybe just begin there. And I’m sure John has a lot to say about that. I do, but that that was, as always, that was brilliant. And what a brilliant framing for the conversation. That was fantastic. Thank you, Chris. Yeah, I’m interested in that point that you made about, so I’ll try to get it right, and correct me if I don’t, but Socrates was saying to know the good is to do good. And Kierkegaard took exception to that. And you use the word defiant. Can you just extrapolate on that a little bit? Yeah, I mean, so defiance is one way of understanding the nature of the state of sin for Kierkegaard and for the Christian tradition, perhaps writ large, although, of course, as we know, there are so many permutations of the definition, I don’t want to venture into like a theological landmine or something like that. But I think that the idea there being that the state of being in sin for Kierkegaard, which he identifies as despair in some of his work, is the condition of refusing the endowment of oneself as the natural quality of spirit, refusing to become the spiritual dimension that corresponds to the eternal aspect of oneself, the self under whose aspect we are realized as in the full, let’s say, in the full potential of our nature. For Kierkegaard, that means the full potential of our nature only when set against the knower that is absolutely transcended, only before God are we known. Only before God are we known in sin for Kierkegaard, because only before God can we be defiant and refuse the ordainments of that natural endowment, to refuse the ordainments of spirit. So for Kierkegaard, it’s that defiance, but he has sort of a dialectical understanding of it because he says, you know, defiance can manifest itself in a variety of different humours, and one of those humours is simply a kind of frailty, a kind of weakness, a lassitude of spirit, right, that can’t seem to muster its will, that can’t seem to pull itself together. But for him, they actually share an identity, the defiance that manifests in a kind of intransigence, a spitefulness of one’s being toward the potential of that spirit that takes offense to the potential of that spirit is actually continuous with the attitude that simply can’t bring itself to become spirit, right? So for him, weakness, despair is defined by weakness or an incapacity is continuous with the definition of outright defiance, and for him, they are simply dialectical alternatives, or different dialectical aspects of that same fundamental condition, which is the refusal of that capacity. Yeah, that’s the refusal to acknowledge the natural endowment. That’s, yeah, wow, that’s quite, I mean, it speaks to my personal experience, and particularly the frailty, like I, you know, I remember times in my life where, you know, going through depression and periods of prolonged anxiety and things like that, where to gather my will and become a self was the furthest thing from my mind. It’s about getting through my day and surviving and having food to eat at the end of the day, you know, things like that. And yeah, yeah, that’s, that’s an interesting, yeah, sorry, go ahead. You’ve, well, you’ve tapped something kind of important about it, I think, right? Because it’s interesting, you immediately, you brought up the experience of suffering as a corollary to that, to that phenomenon. And I think that’s insightful, because I think that it speaks to the idea that there is something necessary about the experience of suffering. It’s not simply a matter of a set like self-flagellation, there’s something essential about the experience of suffering for him. And I think for, for Christianity, writ large, but let me just talk about him, there’s something very essential about the gauntlet of that experience, because it’s about the humiliation and the proper original sense of the term humiliation, the humiliation of the soul, and a certain, you know, there’s a, you know, ultimately, the becoming of oneself for him is also an act of submission. And, and, and it’s very difficult to come to that without the crucible of suffering to dissociate or detach the individual’s identity from all of those, all of those, those correlates, all of those objects in the world that would become, that serve as temptations to, to embolden that defiance. Right. And so resigning from those attachments is a way of disentangling oneself from all of those things, all of those, all of those objects in the world that could serve to amplify that defiance and, and, and, and lead the, the, the individual, you know, further away from the ground of their being, as it were, or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that word humiliation really strikes a chord with me, like, because part of what I wanted to talk about as well was transcending the self. Now, that, that concept of humiliation speaks to that, to some degree to me, because what, what comes up for me when you say that is, is, you know, there’s this concept of ego, and as ego diminishes, we become more of ourselves. And in humiliation to me, seems like a similar process. And so, yeah, I wonder, I wonder if Kierkegaard has anything to say about transcending oneself and if it is in fact the same process, if humiliation speaks to that. Yeah, I mean, in some sense, transcending, it’s perhaps paradoxical in its formulation, but that usually means that Kierkegaard likes it. It, it, that transcending the self and becoming oneself are somehow, again, two, two aspectual renderings of the same fundamental and phenomenological process, which is also an ontological process, as we know, right, that, that transcending the form of self that lives in the condition of despair and that identifies with that condition as the, as the formal state of its being is also the self that must be transcended. And the transcendence of that self is about resolving those dialectical opponents that ultimately comprise the alternation of our existence in the world, right. And that alternation, I think, can be tracked along so many different dichotomies, whether it be the difference between the inner and the outer worlds, whether it be the difference between the constraints of our finitude and the, and the open-endedness of our infinitude, the part of the individual that is somehow acquainted with eternity, despite all of his limitations, right. And for him, it is precisely as it, I mean, not to say that Kierkegaard somehow came up with this idea that is the, it is the unity of dialectical opponents that comprise the anagogy, obviously, that goes back to Plato and perhaps even beyond. But he formulates it in a way that is embedded within the intrinsic suffering of existence and the existence of a self that has, is fundamentally claustrated and bound to himself irrevocably and irreversibly in a state that he can’t rid himself of, right. I mean, all of his language, all of his experience as he, as he writes about it, a lot of it has to do with being in a state almost of incarceration, a state of being bound to himself in some sense, right. And he has to somehow, and for him, being bound to oneself is, cannot be separated from the experience of suffering intrinsically, that that is what defines being bound to oneself, which is not to say that the only, that the only, it’s the only thing that characterizes existence is suffering, but that it features, it is part of that spiritual endowment through which we must venture in order to realize the meaning that lies behind it and that it otherwise inculcates. Mm-hmm. Yeah. The, the incarceration of the self within the, the finite self that, that resonates with a lot of Eastern mystical traditions where they will refer to the prison of the mind and, and being in one’s small mind and, and the limitations of that being a prison in comparison to the infinity that you can experience through meditation and self-transcendental practices and the, the openness and the, yeah, the vastness of that experience compared to being an individual in a world within the confounds of your own mind. Yeah. That’s, that’s, incarceration is a good word. Um, John, recently you had, you had a series with Zevi on mysticism and, um, you were speaking in that series about selecting a sage and internalizing a sage and I found that a really interesting, um, point and, and I think, I think these two things go together because, um, if, if we take as, you know, if we take anagoga as the fundamental, um, thing which human beings should strive for or toward, um, and becoming oneself as, as something that we should all try and do even though I don’t like the word should, um, selecting a sage then seems to be pretty, pretty important to that process because that’s going to inform and guide how you decide to then go about that. Um, and it was, it was interesting to me because Zevi actually disagreed with you on that point. He said, well, a sage isn’t necessary. You can do it yourself. Um, and so, yeah, I wanted to, I wanted to, like, hear a bit about what, what you meant by selecting a sage. Well, uh, I wanted to answer that. I want to respond to, uh, the, uh, uh, the, I think the framing that Chris gave because I think I really want to explore it, um, uh, which is, I think he is right to put the point on, of contention, if that’s the right word, but it’s also, also interaction between Kierkegaard and Socrates is on what has been called the, this, you know, the Socratic paradox that, uh, right. Nobody ever knowingly does anything evil because people only seek the good and therefore they, they only, they only seek what is, um, what, what they, so the only reason why they do evil is because they are mistaken about what is good. Um, and then, uh, Kierkegaard is picking up on the, I think the most original challenge to that with his, with his, with his, uh, with his work and it’s coming from Augustine, uh, because Augustine, uh, famously, um, has a mystical experience, a neoplatonic mystical experience. He’s reading the Platonets, he’s reading Platinus. He has a mystical experience, but he can’t sustain it. And in his mind, um, his fall and the relationship to the biblical fall is keenly present in Augustine’s, Augustine’s mind. The fall from that is somehow connected to this act he, he, he engaged in as a, as an adolescent where he seemed to, uh, which, which he also found a pattern throughout his life where he seemed to be doing things that he knew were bad. Uh, and he, and he wasn’t doing them, uh, for some mistaken understanding. He thought he was doing them simply because he had a certain delight in the fact that they were wrong. Um, and they, and, and, and so, um, Chris, do you think that’s a fair, uh, a fair connection I’ve made there? Cause I wanna, I wanna make sure that’s fair before I, I do. I do. And if you don’t mind, John, I’ll just add one thing to it, which is that this, this idea of doing something, knowing that it’s wrong or in fact doing it because it’s wrong is something that Kierkegaard also picks up and talks about it as, as that form of that, that form of, of spitefulness is in part born from, born from the outrage of being, of being, of being mistaken as a creation. Kierkegaard has a metaphor when he, he, he likens the defiant individual in sin to a grammatical error that lives in spite of the author that erred in making it. Right. Right. Right. So this idea of I’m, I’m being mistaken in creation and I’m going to appropriate my mistakenness to spite the creator. So there’s, there’s some of that going on there too. Anyway, so go on, John, I just wanted to No, no, no, that’s great. So, and then here I, so, and I think Kierkegaard would want this. You taught me the idea that Kierkegaard is, he follows Jesus, but his teacher was Socrates. So the Socratic response to that is, well, I can see Socrates sort of pausing with Augustine and saying, I don’t think you quite understood what I meant, because I meant that the knowledge of the good and the knowledge, knowing thyself are deeply bound up together. And I’m wondering about your implicit presupposition of your self-knowledge, which doesn’t seem to be falling prey to the very self-criticism that you’re subjecting everything else to. You seem to completely know yourself when you’re making this declaration. And I, as Socrates, am deeply intrigued by this, you know, this unchallenged assumption that you know yourself. And so that’s how, that’s how I’d shift it at first. I’d want to say, you know, I understand what Kierkegaard’s saying with the idea of the will, but the problem, and I think Kierkegaard’s aware of this, you know, the Greeks don’t have that concept. So trying to, you know, project that back onto them is not fair. So I’m trying to keep it in the Socratic ballpark, if you’ll allow me. And so Socrates is going to say, look, when I said knowing the good, I didn’t mean stating a belief. And you yourself, that’s one of the things that attracts Kierkegaard to Socrates, is Socrates’ awareness and his hunger, or a better word, his eros for, right, that kind of knowledge that can’t be captured in propositional assertions. He’s always engaged in his Socratic task of deflecting from people who are going, who are very, they claim to know, and they just make pronouncements about themselves. And that’s exactly where he comes in, you know, and he has the opposite view, the unexamined life is not living. So what I hear Socrates saying is, no, no, when I say know the good, I’m talking about that in a way that is bound up with knowing thyself. And in a proto existentialist fashion, for Socrates, he would say that’s, that is very much, you know, what’s at the key of existentialism, knowing yourself is an aspirational process, right, it’s something I’m aspiring to, it is not, so he’s not a romantic, he doesn’t think he has a, you know, a true self. Why is all that a preamble, I’m getting to this, because I want to connect it to Anagagai, is that for Socrates, right, to know the good and to know the self is to properly love the self and to love the good. And so one of the things I could see Socrates saying to Augustine is, I’m not sure you love yourself, I see a lot of self-loathing in you, a deep kind of profound self-loathing that bespeaks a sense in which you’re not, I mean, I’m hesitant to do this because I hold Augustine in such a very high regard, so, but I’m trying to play the game here, I’m trying to play the game of theologos. Because Socrates would say, do you, can you really, could you really turn away from the good if you loved it, and could you really not love the good if you properly loved yourself, and then, and this is what Socrates is saying, and have you learned to distinguish that from egocentrism and narcissism, because that’s not what knowing the self is, that’s not what loving the self is. Loving the self is understanding the self as a spark of the divine. It’s understanding that the nature and the function of the self gives us our best purview from which we can come into a transformative conformity with the ground of being. And so that would be the Socratic response in saying, I think, you know, well, I’m willing to die for the, again, I’m in this pretentious place of speaking on behalf of Socrates, but I’m willing to die for the idea that there, that when people, when they get past the ways in which they mistake that they are loving themselves, but they are actually, and Kierkegaard, I think, would really like this point, they’re actually loathing themselves and despairing of themselves and the sickness unto death. When they get past that, they get a sense of a possibility that the good is that which is loved for its own sake. And that’s what ties it to reality. It exists in and of and for itself, not for me. Right? And then there’s something in me that is for its own sake, but that is so easily bound up with egocentrism and narcissism and to pull that apart so that I come to a piece of soul, so that that goodness within me, the force for its own sakeness of me, can grasp the for its own sakeness of reality, and that the goodness to the goodness, and that’s anagogony. That’s anagogony. And that’s what Socrates is offering, I think. And I don’t, so again, I don’t want to be presumptuous, but I kind of suspect that Kierkegaard would like that, what I just said, because I think I’ve tried to incorporate a lot of his ideas into it while still answering Matreya’s question about what anagogy is. The thing about that, then, that was why I insisted, I insisted, because Zevi and I were in genuine D. and Logus, I proposed, that’s the original meaning of a proposition, I proposed why internalizing the sage. I have a lot of psychological argumentation and theorizing why that’s needed, that’s how development occurs, that’s how we overcome the paradox of self-transcendence, and I want to talk about that paradox at some point with us, but if I really want to, and this is something I’m struggling with, and Chris and I are in our, I mean, we have a profound friendship, and we are wrestling with this together, the how, the reason why I think we need to internalize the sage is that relationship of love, it has to have a voice, it can’t be directed towards something just an impersonal abstract, right, so I mean, the Stoics took Socrates as their choice, that’s the sage, that’s clear, the sage whom they’re internalizing, and we’re discovering in a lot of sort of therapeutic investigations that there’s similar kinds of moves going on, and Socrates himself had a daemon, he had a voice that spoke to him of the good, and it never compelled him to do anything, it just spoke to him basically, no, don’t do that, that’s not good, right, and it’s not his conscience, by the way, that the sort of late British Empire trivialization of Socrates’ daemon into his good conscience, because that’s all we’re ever talking about, the good conscience, you know, that sort of thing, that’s ridiculous, that’s not what’s going on in Socratic daemon, not at all, and taming it and removing the numinous aspect of it, I think, is to do a disservice, so I think, anagogy, if it is this binding of self, of the appropriate self-love that comes in self-knowledge, that is loving the goodness of the soul, that is then allowing you to see and love and transform into the goodness of being, that can’t be done in an impersonal propositional fashion, it needs modeling, it needs a perspective through which, and this is a theme that Chris brings out a lot, through which you are knowing, by which you are knowing, you can only know yourself in a way by which you are knowing, and you need to internalize the sage to do that, so that was my attempt to try and, you guys said so much that was like, whoa, and I was just like, ah, so I just wanted to give it my best, my best reply, of course, it’s not in any way intended to be any kind of exhaustive or complete, I just wanted to be, you know, appropriately and affectionately responsive. Yeah, yeah, cool, all right, wow, that was amazing, thank you John, so there’s two points that I want to pick up on there, the first is that you mentioned, how could you not do the good if you loved yourself completely, right? And appropriately, right, yeah, it’s appropriately, there, this is why it’s not, in fact, I would like to bring out the Greek here and stop saying knowledge and say wisdom, if you loved yourself wisely, how could you not pursue the good, that’s the Socratic question, because what that brings up for me is Jung and his concept of the shadow, and the work to love yourself appropriately is the existential work, and it’s confronting those parts of yourself that you don’t want to acknowledge, you don’t want to admit exist, you don’t want to bring out, so you’re trying to deny and suppress and bury all of these parts of yourself that you’re afraid if you bring out, you’ll be rejected by your friends or peer group, and it’s threatening to have those parts of you exist, it’s threatening to the existence of yourself, and so, yeah. That’s the key point, I mean, it’s, you know, I’m fighting myself quoting David Hume here, which is odd for me, right, but like the idea that we don’t pursue evil, we pursue a lesser good, rather than a greater good, because we haven’t appropriate, like, appropriate ratio, rationality, proportioning, we haven’t put the goods into proper proportion, and that takes wisdom, and you have to transform yourself in order to be able to do that within yourself, and Plato’s all about, like, you’ve got a monster inside you, Plato has that, right, and you have to, if you cannot put things into their proper ratio, you know, proportion, you will not see the world correctly, because you will pursue lesser goods over greater goods. Yes, agreed, and also for me, the distinction between egocentrism and ontocentrism, if we just after ourselves, that is a lesser good, if we’re looking after ourselves, our family, our community, the world, the environment, every single person we come across, and we’re in service to them, that is the greater good, as far as I’m concerned, and so that is an anagogic process to go from a lesser good to the greater good as well. But that’s a transformative thing, it’s like if you’ve never been to Spain, don’t tell me you prefer Canada over Spain, right, if you’ve gone to Spain, you come back and you say I prefer Canada over Spain, that’s fine, right, so what am I, what do I mean by that, like, tortuous personality, what I mean by that is those moments in my life when I’ve been in what I think, what I have good reason to believe is anagogic, where I have been genuinely ontocentric, where Eros is moving into Phylaea and Agape, I unquestionably regard them as where I, those are the best, those are the best lived moments of my life, and when I’ve been on the other side where I have been entrenched, and believe me, it happens frequently for me, when I’m entrenched in the egocentrism and I’m drawn into the narcissism, and I have suffered, and even though I’m being impelled in some way, there’s a part of me that in comparison can say this, this, this is, right, whatever is in here that’s adaptive, it is, it is, it is far from this other place, so I’ve been to both, and therefore, that’s why I am confident in how the anagogic Spain, or whatever, is better, right, right, it’s, I’ve had a participatory and perspectival knowing of the two, I’ve been there, that’s why those spatial metaphors are used by Plotinus, I’ve been there, and so I know, and is it, but it doesn’t bring about like Satori, it doesn’t bring about for me like, well, that’s it, right, because like you said, there’s the shadow, but, and I want to stop, because I want to hear what Chris has to say, I just, so the point I’m trying to make is, the thing that gives me the greatest confidence in the Socratic vision is precisely the moments of vision where I see as Socrates saw, and when I see as Socrates saw, and I hope that’s not pretentious, I mean it in a genuinely, like deeply honorific, respectful way I’m saying that, right, it’s like, you know, as a child, when you start to see as an adult, you start to realize, oh wow, nah, that’s what I’m talking about, like that, right, and I want to be there more, and there is nothing else in me that has that certitude for me, and I don’t use that word very frequently, but I want to be there more, and for me, that’s what I’m trying to convey with the Socratic, the Socratic Platonic vision, but I’m going to shut up now, because I want to hear, because Chris is going to say brilliant and beautiful things, because he always does. Not more than you just did, my friend, not more than you just did. Wow, okay, wow, I’m glad, so this is definitely something where, you know, the Platonic and the existential and even the psychodynamic, like I’m glad you brought Jung and Matreya, because those things all coalesce in the matter of the pedagogy of love, because pedagogy for love, I mean, right, because the eros, the eros, when left untutored, can vitiate our capacity to, in fact, to love ourselves, when the loving ourselves is loving the self with the capital S and not with the lower case, right, loving everything about ourselves that is yet uninitiated into the ego consciousness, and I think that’s where the Jungian perspective can augment and complement all of this, right, that this idea of loving oneself, that loving the self with that capital self is precisely the move to the ontocentric, because it is precisely the attention to everything of one’s, it’s like using the ego consciousness, using the ego as an instrument to play the ambient melodies of nature, right, and when those ambient melodies are yet undifferentiated from the totality of all that is inanevitable, the totality of all that is not yet alluded to us or distinguished in the realm of our actual concrete experience, and when, and of course, obviously, the entire individuation quest is to turn, is to sharpen the instrument of that consciousness so that when it turns in the direction of its own ineffability, in the direction of its own font, its own sort of ineffable source, that it has the capacity to begin pulling and shaping and working dialogically and dialectically with the prima materia, right, of all that emerges from it, and that to me is in deeply deep confluence with the Socratic quest. I mean, to me, like, I don’t know, I mean, in my sort of indistinct mind, they are just all aspectualizations of that sensual quest. I don’t even differentiate them anymore. I mean, people, we have to differentiate them for scholarly purposes, but in my mind, I don’t even differentiate them anymore. But this problem, though, this problem of the eros is that it has to, and this is where the philia Sophia, this is where the examination of life that comes with the fellowship of the spirit, and I mean that in both its platonic and its Christian inflections, the fellowship of the spirit being known, so known by the spirit, and, you know, is the way of revivifying the eros from those. So I’m tempted to bring in Grimes here. So Pierre Grimes has this idea who incidentally danced on both sides of that border, right, the psychotherapeutic and the philosophical, and not for nothing, right, because he has this idea of the pathologos, which is that the false beliefs that Socratic inquiry is meant to disabuse us of are not simply, as John, right, as you’ve said, John, they’re not, they don’t simply dwell at the level of propositional thinking, because what they’re actually, and this is why they bear much more affinity to the Jungian complex, because they have actually been inculcated by an erotic, a set of erotic conditions that actually give them rise, right, it’s like challenging a false belief is not simply challenging a falsely known fact or a fact falsely assumed, it’s challenging a complex of attachments that have to do with our affiliations to the inmost relations that constitute our lives, right, challenging a belief isn’t just challenging an incorrectly assumed fact, challenging a belief is challenging the sum of influences that have gone into generating that belief, and those influences might persist in great strength and great potency, it’s why people find it very hard to secede from their families, especially if their families were a source of genuine erotic nurturing, because you don’t want to cut off, you don’t want to, you don’t want to, it’s very difficult, and it’s part of, I mean, part of, I think, the art of the individuation quest is, is in fact succeeding from those influences without alienating them, right, that’s why there’s that dialectical paradox of finding unity in the differentiation, unity in the distinction, because you ultimately have to part company with those influences that have with the internalized model, at least of those influences that have actually germinated and nurtured those false beliefs, right, because Grimes talks about the fact that the false belief is, is, is, it’s invisible, it’s the thing that you look through, right, it’s good, it’s like being haunted by a ghost, right, you can’t see it, all you can see is, is everything that it, that it, that it, that it produces, right, it is the progenitor of the way, but you, as you would say, the salience landscape, John, right, it helps, it basically is the thing that determines how the world presents to you, and it’s sort of like when you wake up in the morning, and you’re really exhausted in your fatigue, and you go about your day, and everything in the world is aggravating, everything in the world makes you angry, everything is wrong all the time, and you think, why is everything wrong, and then you get a good night’s sleep, and you go, oh right, I was just tired, because it becomes the medium through which the world emerges, and, and, and the false belief is very much like that, and, and if the false belief has been produced in an erotic process of nurturing, or, you know, even outside of the family context, right, I don’t just mean that in that sort of prototypical way, but even other kinds of relationships, it ends up, it ends up presenting a challenge to the very relations that constitute the basis of the form of life upon which the belief is based, and so to challenge the belief is to have to challenge the form of life, and that’s why it’s a characterological maneuver rather than a factual maneuver, and that’s why the depth of the Socratic inquiry, as you’ve just explained it, John, has to be understood exactly as that, a total, something that is done with the whole of being, rather than something that is done, you know, as a, as a, as a, you know, as a sophistry or something like that. Before you say something, Latre, I just want to clarify, just for people who are listening, because what Chris said there was beautiful. When Chris and I in this context are using eros, we don’t use that word how it’s, how it’s become predominantly used right now. The way it’s predominantly used right now is part to truncate it to mean sexual desire, okay, that’s not what we’re talking about, that’s not what we’re talking about with eros. We’re talking about what Chris was talking about, the fundamental way, think about the original meaning of belief, the German belieben, that’s what you give your love to, that what you give your heart to, that’s what eros is, right, what you give to heart, your heart to. So you can give your heart to your country, and that’s eros, you give your heart to your mother, and I don’t mean this in any crypto-Freudian fashion, that’s eros, right, that’s what we’re talking about here. So I just wanted that clear before we went on, just because I didn’t want people to, what, why is Chris, what’s he talking about there? That’s not what he’s talking about, he’s not talking about the erotic as, it does not exclude the sexual, but it is not restricted to the sexual, that’s, and so I just want to be clear about that right now, because it, and one of the things that Plato is struggling to do, you can see in the republic, and especially in the phaedras, and especially in the symposium, is he’s trying to get people to realize the deeper, the spiritual aspects of eros as independent from just the sexual aspects. I just wanted to make that point of clarification, so there wasn’t confusion in people listening. No, no, perfect, and it’s on that, that’s great, John, thank you for that qualification, and incidentally, right, the infamous, famous or infamous enmity that emerged between Jung and Freud was precisely on that point, among others, but it rested fundamentally on that focal point, is that the eros, the libidinal energy of the psyche, what, how do we characterize it, and it was on that precise point of disagreement that they party company. Excellent, excellent, exactly, yeah, yeah, and although I think Freud is the better writer, for, that’s one of sort of the three reasons why I prefer Jung over Freud, is because Jung has a much more platonic understanding of eros, and Jung also sees the psyche as a self-organizing organism rather than as a hydraulic machine, there’s other, and Jung has, Jung has a properly ambivalent attitude towards religion, which I think, so I think those are all bound up with what you just said, that’s why I just wanted to amplify it, and now I’ll be quiet so Matreya can say something. Sorry, Matreya, we’re kind of, yeah, no, I’m enjoying this, this is fantastic, this is great, so you said, Chris, about false beliefs and challenging those false beliefs is really difficult, it’s a difficult process, because there is so much that’s bound up in those false beliefs, that is our lives, and they come from our family of origin, so they have value to us, they’re kind of like precious things that, to let go of a false belief is a mini death of some sort in the experience of it, and it’s very difficult to challenge our false beliefs, find them in the first place, let go of them, and then reconstitute and refine who we actually are without all of those false beliefs that we were carrying. Can I make one Socratic point here? The fundamental mistake from a Socratic point of view is to mistake the belief as the bearer of that, right, the belief is the criterion of this whole complex machinery that Chris is talking about, the attachment, the commitment, the self-definition, the self-constitution, the belief is that linguistic aspect, at least the part that we can bring into linguistic purchase, but the fundamental thing we can get locked into, and the reason why I’m saying this is because this is part of the ideological warfare of our time, is we think, oh, that’s the vehicle that is bearing all of this, and all I have to do is somehow change the belief, and I think I’m being fair to Chris because he’s nodding, that’s not what Chris is saying, he’s in fact, he’s trying to say, no, no, we’ve got it exactly, we’ve grabbed the knife by the wrong end of the handle, right, we’ve got it the wrong way around, right, and we’re fixing on this, and that’s why I wanted to almost, like that’s why I was introducing the German word, right, beleben, right, which is, you know, Liebenstein, my loved one, my beloved, right, and in fact, you see so much eros discharged onto these ideological formations without being acknowledged and examined in a Socratic fashion is exactly the thing I want to say, no, no, let’s be very, very, very, two more times, very, very careful on how we’re talking about belief here, because I think what I heard Chris saying, and this is something I deeply agree, is no, no, no, he, like, he, that what we typically think of as the belief is the tip, it’s an important, it’s a point of access, it’s a criteria, it’s a criterion by which we can market, but it is not the entity that we want to wrestle with here, sorry, I just, I felt really, that was really important to bring out. Yeah, totally, yeah, and actually, that’s why, that’s why if you actually probe often beliefs, like if you’re in dialogue with someone, and you’re disagreeing with something, and particularly if someone has an ideological commitment that’s very, very ardent, and that’s a little bit intractable, when you actually probe it, what you’ll often find is that the belief actually converts itself, the way that the person opines about the subject matter will often convert itself into some form of ad hominem, if it’s an acrimonious interaction, or if it’s somewhat more sympathetic, it will back on to something like compassion and affiliation with a certain group identity, precisely because the fealty of that identity is so powerful that the belief is like this tiny little, as you said, John, it’s this little point of access that’s resting on this structure, and the structure is very strong, but it’s mistaken for that access point into it. Yeah, I like the way you characterized it, John, that was really good. Thank you Chris, I was inspired by you. Yeah, I interrupted you, but I thought that was important, right, like the framing of this is really, like I’m trying to, you know, that’s what Socrates would want us to be doing here, he, you know, he’d be really, no, likes really carefully, that’s really as self-reflectively as possible, let’s keep stepping back and look at how we’re trying to frame it, how we’re trying to take off the glasses, like, you know, Chris said the way Krogergaard said, like the mood, it was like a mood in the way it configures, it invisibly configures our entire sailance landscape. Yeah, absolutely, no, it is an important distinction, and the belief being the tip, and there’s machinery under the tip that sits, that kind of hangs off it, and to challenge a belief and let go of a belief means that the machinery that hangs off it also needs to, also needs to be dealt with, because there will be implications from challenging a belief and letting a belief go. It needs to be listened to, to see the thing about the self, and this is, I think, again, I see this in Socrates, and I believe I see it in Krogergaard, but Chris knows Krogergaard better than I do, right, is the self refuses to be reduced to the beliefs about the self. It refuses that, right, and part of what people are trying to do to my mind right now is to carry out exactly that kind of thing that Krogergaard would, I think he would, like, what are you doing? The self, it cannot, right, you can, your beliefs about yourself are not in any way equivalent, and what Socrates would say is, and yes, and take that lesson to heart, and then understand that’s the case for everything. Just like you know in the guts, right, that you are not summed by your beliefs. Realize that’s the case about reality. Yep, and to me the experience of letting beliefs go is an experience of greater freedom, so my beliefs, I’m not my beliefs. My beliefs will inform my reality if they’re challenged, and if something goes against my beliefs, then I will have a bodily somatic reaction to that. If I have less beliefs and I’m carrying around less baggage with me, I won’t experience that somatic contraction as often because I will be freer. I will be degrees of freedom, freer inside myself to experience reality as it is in this moment without the resistance to life and the world and human being as they are right now. I think what you’re doing there is beautiful, and I think this is something, this is why I like the Kyoto school because it reaches into Kierkegaard and Heidegger and Socrates and the bridges it into, you know, especially Zen, and in Zen you get both Buddhism and Daoism, but what you’re doing there, right, and I realize you’re doing a lot, so I’m not, one of the things that you’re doing there that I appreciate in all those senses of appreciation is you’re bringing in just the terrifically important role the body plays in this, and the body is not the clay, it’s not the vehicle, the body is also as much your identity as your beliefs, right, and again I don’t mean that in the fashion sense of the body and the way capitalism has made the body a commodity. I mean the way in which 4e cognitive science talks about the body as the locus, as the living locus of cognition and sense making and meaning making, and bringing that in like you just did there, you said, you know, the way in which I embody, this is by the way also why you need to internalize the sage, because internalizing the sage is to embody the sage, not just to have beliefs about the sage, right, so you’re helping make that point for me, but you know, like the way we embody the world and the way we embody ourselves and the way we embody, like that has to, like I think for me, and this is what it was for me, that wisdom of the body as the living locus of sense making and meaning making, I got that from Tai Chi Chuan within Taoism and Vipassana and Metta within Buddhism, and that is something that I found sorely lacking even in my most cherished of the Western philosophical traditions. The body is, it’s been very much, I want to use a term that Chris often uses, it’s been displaced in an important way from this conversation, and I think what you just did right there, and that’s why I like the Kyoto School, is like, no, no, can we take this, all this we’ve been talking about over here, and can we bring it with that, and that’s what I see a lot of the pivotal figures in 4-E cognitive science like Evan Thompson and Francisco Varela, the people who have had profound impact on me, that’s what they’re doing, so I think what you just, again, you were doing a lot there, I’m not trying to reduce it to that, but that point there, that point there is something we need to learn to, and like even saying this sounds like some sort of fitness slogan for good life, fitness gym or something, but I don’t mean it like that, and try to hear it as I’m trying to say, we need to be able to listen to the body, and that means listen to the way in which, right, in which we are embodying the self, embodying the world, embodying our aspirations, etc. Yes, yes, and you mentioned internalizing the sage there, and not just imbibing the beliefs of the sage, but embodying the sage in a fundamental way, and for me, I’ve been with my sage for six years now, Prem Vishwan, and attempting to do exactly that, and one of the things that you suggested was that it’s useful to have a sage in order to help us challenge our beliefs and see ourselves from a different perspective through the eyes of the other, through the eyes of the sage, and one of the things, so my teacher, Prem Vishwan, had a teacher before him, Bhagwan Osho Rajneesh, who died in 1990, but he would say that when I die, as your enlightened teacher, you must go and find another living teacher. There’s no point in reading my books and watching my videos and analyzing my discourses because I’m dead, that’s it, my body of work is finished. I can’t then challenge you in a live way and show you something new about yourself because I won’t be in existence anymore, so go and find another live teacher and be with them because that’s your only chance, right, and I really like that because to be with a sage is a very different experience from reading a book about the sage and their work and their beliefs and their life. I imagine so. Part of what Chris and I are trying to do with the project of theologos is to make alive again, and I’m trying not to use any sort of supernaturalistic language here, but make alive again, you know, the Socratic voice and the Socratic presence, and other attendant voices, but I’m using that just as a paradigm right now, and so, right, you know, and the work I’m also doing with Guy Sandstack is like, you know, the practices of circling and then philosophical fellowship and dialectic and theologos, philosophical counseling, and how they intersect, as Chris is noting, with the psychodynamic stuff that’s, there’s this growing convergence around the imaginal dialogical central, like, that’s the, the imaginal dialogical being central to transformation, genuine liberating transformation, but so, I think there is, I haven’t said this before, so I’m proposing it, but I’m proposing it with, I think there’s, I have a lot of conviction about its plausibility. I think there is an inseparable relationship between anagogai and theologos, that you’re not going to be able to internalize the sage without dialogical practices. Obviously, you’re engaging in those with your, with your teacher, Metreia, I mean, in our previous discussion, that was very clear to me, that that’s how, it’s a living, a dialogical relationship, and so, what, for, for me, the way in which Socrates and the whole Socratic Platonic tradition becomes like that for me, and so, in which I can find a home for anagogai is through dialectic inter-dialogos. I do not see another way of doing it, for exactly the reason you said, and I love Platonic scholarship. What’s going on right now in Platonic scholarship is brilliant and beautiful, and these people, I can’t, it’s, I’m trying to nourish you, but you, and Derrida’s going to jump all over me for saying this, but you can’t ultimately get it in the book, right? You have, the books, the books are like the beliefs, they’re points of access, they’re necessary doorways, right? But the, if you’re not, if you’re not, if you’re not in the community where people are taking up the text, which is what they did in church, right, and getting into dialogos around it, then, yeah, then you’re not going to get it, you’re not going to get anagogai. That’s what I’m going to assert now as something I’m proposing as possible. Yeah, well, that resonates as true for me, Chris, you were going to say something. Oh yeah, I mean, it, it’s, yeah, that’s, that’s the challenge, certainly, and, and, and I mean, you often say, John, we often, you often say, we often say that, that the reason for that is because dialogos is not a feature of sociability, it is a feature of ontology. Yes, that, yes, exactly, exactly. It is a, it is a place within which that turn to ontocentrism is afforded. And precisely because of that deal, I’m trying to get people to sort of adopt this, because people are adopting the term dialogos, and I’m deeply appreciative of that, but I like this distinction between dialectic and dialogos. Dialectic is something we can do. Dialectic is, I often put it like, it is the kindling that we put together, but, but for, for dialogos to be dialogos and to afford ontocentrism, it can’t be something we do, it can be something that we can make a place for, but it has to take place of its own. Now we can make a better place, and you’re trying to make a fire, you can make a really good place, but it is not sufficient. You’re trying to make a fire, you can make a really, really crappy, right, kindling, or you can make a really good one. And that matters, literally, it matters. But it’s, while necessary, it’s not sufficient, and it’s not a fire. The fire has to take, the fire has to take, and Plato uses exactly that metaphor in the seventh letter to try and say, that’s what I’ve been trying to get you all to see, right? What we’re doing in dialectic is, right, we, but you said, you have to live with somebody, he says in the seventh letter, until that spark jumps, and the kindling takes flame. Can I ask, John, who your sages have been through your lifetime, and who your sages currently are? Yeah, so my sages, I have my three S’s, and then Jesus. So Jesus of Nazareth, because of my upbringing, will always be a sage to me. I regard, I have, I hold, I keep returning to Jesus of Nazareth, and I hold him in very high regard, which gets me into a very interesting relationship with Christians, a very interesting relationship with the, they can see, I hope, I, one hesitates to speak of Jesus, because, right, there, every, you’ll either say something that’s a stupid hallmark card trivialization, or something utterly pretentious. I hope and aspire that what people are sometimes seeing is my genuine love, and I think that’s the right word, Jesus of Nazareth. That’s hard for me to say, by the way, given the way the particular version of Christianity I was supposed to traumatized me, but Jesus, and I’ve taken up the task again, I’ve just purchased David Bentley Hart’s, because I respect the man a lot, he’s recently translated the New Testament, and I’ve taken up the task of reading the New Testament again to try and to feed that sage. And then my three S’s are Socrates, Siddhartha Gautama, and Spinoza. Those are my three, so those are my four sages. Platinus is close, but he’s not quite, I tend to, I tend to project everything that came out of Socrates, Platinus and Proclus and even John Skeras, Ergina, back into Socrates. So Socrates sort of assumes he’s the fount of that whole. So when I mean Socrates, I mean, I don’t even just, whoever the historical figure is, I don’t just mean the historical Platonic Socrates, I mean, and I would include Kierkegaard within that field that emanates from Socrates. Same thing with Spinoza, I see Whitehead as emanating. The thing about Spinoza that’s different from Whitehead and other people is, you know, the Whiteheadians, and I love that, they’re doing amazing stuff about understanding, reinterpreting our metaphysics, but Spinoza is ultimately about blessedness. Spinoza is still about wisdom, about self-transformation and about practice, and about the practices you can do. So yeah, Jesus, Siddhartha, Socrates, and Spinoza. Those are my four, my core four. Yeah, beautiful. A treasured gift that I have is from this gentleman here. He, for one of my birthdays, he gave me the collected works of Spinoza. And you read them probably in three days, my friend. No, no, no, no. He don’t read Spinoza in three days. Chris, can I ask you the same question? Sure, yeah. I mean, I share some of those in common with John, of course. I share, I acquainted first with Socrates when I was sort of like right at the end of adolescence, and that in many ways is what lured me into philosophy. So I share that, and incidentally, in meeting John, it was John’s affinity with Socrates in part that endeared me to John. I mean, that was one of many, many dimensions of that. But so that affinity is very strong, and it’s strong in character in addition to being strong as a matter of intellectual interest. I mean, I grew up in a Christian family as well, and so to me, Christ, the relationship with Socrates is a learned relationship, and its affect is very much an affective phylia. And that of Christ is far deeper in the unconscious, I would say. And I think to me, it’s very, I’m actually, I’m not even going to try. I’m not even going to try, but that influence is very potent, erotically potent, in the qualified version of Eros that John took pains to explain, incidentally. And incidentally, it’s that, I mean, the Eros, I want to try and avoid spinning off into it. Okay, sorry, I’m going to leave that aside. So the influences of Christ are deeply numinous to me, and I haven’t, to be quite honest, haven’t fully made the personal unconscious dimension of that relationship as conscious as I hope to. That was very much for me a work in progress. I feel deeply ambivalent, not about him, of course, but about Christianity writ large. But he is such a numinous force to me that I have not fully integrated it. So it’s suffice it to say something of deep importance, but something that I would find difficult to explicate in the moment. And Jung for me is another one. I mean, I find that clearly Jung is, I find, I know some people find Jung, I know some people find the indistinctness of Jung to be somewhat thwarting. And I get that, like I really, I know, like you say that sometimes, John, and I get it. I get why you feel that way, right? Because you have an appetite for a certain kind of precision and distinction of ideas that is very, very important to the kind of work that you do. So I get it, you know what I mean? But at the same time, it’s precisely the indistinctness of Jung that’s part of the equivocation of Jungian definitions. I mean, Jung saw his project as very much an open-ended one, and he actually resisted the impulse to codify his thinking so precisely because his own understanding of his own concepts was constantly developing. And so he didn’t want to pin himself down too much because he knew that the objects of his own learning, his understanding of the objects of his own learning was not equal to those objects. And so that did, I think, eventuate in a certain impressionism. There’s an impressionistic quality to Jung. It’s like looking at a Monet painting, right? Everything is a bit out of focus, but it’s quite beautiful at the same time. And it’s the slight out of focus quality of Jung that actually, oddly enough, attracts me to it, maybe because I share some of those, that kind of impressionistic indistinction as part of that artistic temperament. So anyway, Jung for me is a really significant, sagacious influence too, in part because he in many ways reproduces a lot of the Platonic and Socratic Platonic, speaking of the Mazwan, of course, wisdom, but obviously within the arena of the individual psyche. And not only his, it’s not simply the content of his thought and hypotheses and theories and typologies, it’s not so much that as much as it is his deportment and relative intellectual humility. And as you pointed out, John, ambivalence toward the religious enterprise, in its institutional and organizational renderings, that also draws me to him very, very deeply. So yeah, so him too. There are others, but those are the key ones. Those are the significant ones, for sure. Yeah, yeah, beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah, nothing’s really alive for me right now, to be honest. I was interested just in your journeys that both of you and who’s been important to you and yeah, so that’s really helpful. I mean, I’m gonna, so I’m gonna embarrass my dear friend for a second and say, you know, it’s one thing to have a sages that are, you know, sages that already belong to myth, you know, I mean, like the people that, you know, the Christ and Socrates and even to a lesser degree, some of the philosophers in the intervening centuries, pre-men and now, obviously, they take on, they’re able to dwell in a realm beyond the imminent. And that’s one of the things that makes them transcendent dialogic partners, is because they dwell in that space between here and eternity, right? That hermetic space, and that’s one of the things that makes them so powerful. But I mean, I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that, you know, I mean, John has been a sage to me, by some definition of the term, since I first met him. And that’s just, you know, and I hesitate to say that with him here, because, you know, John is humble, and deeply, deeply humble, and I don’t want to to foist him with those kinds, because those kinds of projections can be very difficult to bear, you know what I mean? They’re very heavy, they’re very grave, and you do not levy that at a person lightly. But I say that because he knows the sense in which I mean, that he is a deep, deep friend of mine, and that relationship has graduated into friendship beyond the pedagogical relationship that it first took. But it is possible for many things to be true at once, I believe, so long as they remain known to one another as features of a relationship, and so long as they don’t become unduly possessed by one another. And so in that sense, hopefully, in a well integrated way, and I think it is, you know, after some years, John is both my deep, deep friend and a sage to me. And, you know, and you’re right, Metreya, it is important, it is important to have not only the influences of the disembodied voices of the past, but also the very much embodied character of the present. And I’m going to embarrass him just a little further by saying that one of the ways in which John is sagacious is not simply the prodigious competence of his pedagogy and his learning, which is patent for anyone to see, they watch him for 10 minutes, but it’s also that in his character, he is as good a friend as he is a teacher. And not many people have the luxury of knowing that, and I do. And so that is a more powerful combination that I could begin to express. Okay, awesome. Well, thank you, my beloved friend. I mean, I appreciate that. I won’t trivialize it by disagreeing with it, but I think you see the good in me because you have the gift of bringing the good out in people. And I’m often at my best around you, which is one of the reasons why you are one of my best friends. And so you’re a confounding variable in that equation, if you’ll allow me to speak scientifically. And for that, I’m deeply appreciative. So Chris, Chris is there for me. I have two or three people in my life that are the ports in any storm, and Chris is one of them. My amazing partner is my son. My son is living with me right now. My son is living with me right now. But I just, Chris is in that group for me. Thank you, my friend. Thank you for sharing that. Both of you. That was really beautiful. Yeah, to understand the depth of your relationship in so many different dimensions. That’s really beautiful. So, John, this is part of, you know, just maybe to take that and maybe to use it also, God, it’s true in and of itself, but maybe to use that as an affordance for some further discussion. One thing that, you know, I was talking to Greg Henriquez about this recently, and I think it’s a really, it’s a really, really important thing to state that, that I mean it when I like it, it is a blessedness, having deep friendships, having deep phylia is a blessedness. And it is something that it is, there is a paucity of it, I think, in our culture. And one of the reasons for that is that the basis of relating is seldom the Socratic project for mutual recognition and growth. You know, if a person is lucky, they’ll have one or two friends that share that project. And I think a lot of people are not so fortunate to have any. And it’s not necessarily from their own failure, although maybe in some cases it is. And I think in part it’s because we don’t, like, we’ve lost the compass as a culture. We’ve lost, I’m speaking in some very general, general and broad terms here, you know, you understand that there are exceptions to this too, of course. But I do think, you know, from a very unscientific, unscientific sample of encounters in my own life. Yeah, Chris, there’s recent science backing up what you’re saying. Okay, that’s good. The number of friendships for Americans has been steadily declining since 1990. And the quality of the friendships has been steadily declining. I just read some recent, you know, rigorous kind of research on that. So you don’t have to just make an anecdotal claim. It is backed up by some good research. I think there’s one more symptom of the meaning crisis. Okay, thank you for that, John. I just wanted to back you up. I didn’t mean to- Thanks for fortifying me with some more evidentiary. Thanks for backing me up there. Yeah, and you know, that’s a profound loss. And again, like the pathologic belief that exists beneath our awareness that determines the course of our life and experience, so too can the lack of an intimate friendship be an invisible impediment to our own growth without us ever knowing that that’s what we’re missing. And I meet people like this that don’t realize, and I don’t say this from a position of superiority, because God knows I’ve been in that position too, right, in, you know, years past, where you don’t have someone by whose- you don’t have someone in whose presence you can be known beyond your knowing. And that is what frees a person, right? That is why, proverbially, friendship can save a person from a tyrannical family, precisely because they can know you beyond the scope of all of those false beliefs that you carry about yourself. They can help to disabuse you of them, right? They, you know, they can see you well beyond the boundaries that you have demarcated yourself within. And the value of that, I think, is just is beyond measure, is beyond measure, because I think in some ways that is like, that becomes the enabling condition on the basis of which the entire project becomes feasible and sustainable, because then having that supportive presence, it’s not just a presence to cheer you on, is it’s a presence to recognize and help you to chart the stages of your own growth as they’re actually happening. And I think that not having that stacks the odds against that project pretty high. And it pains me, like it actually pains me to know that so many people don’t have that. And then the luxury of having it becomes, it is a gift beyond, it’s something to be so devoutly grateful for and to retroactively earn when you have such a thing. And so to the degree that we can project the expectation of that kind of relationships, right, I’m tempted to again think of that in almost an archetypal sense of it’s something to be activated and projected as an expectation into the world in order to know that it is actually an object for striving. And I think a lot of people don’t know that that is, that kind of relationship is in fact an object for striving, and that attaining to that goal is continuous with the goal of self-knowledge. They are not separable. Yeah, beautiful. Yeah, there’s so many things you just said that resonated with for me, and the knowing of yourself beyond your own knowing through the eyes of a friend is so important and so instrumental in that growth process, in that anagogic process. And yeah, the gratitude I have, and even when you mention it now, a lot of people don’t have close friends. And for me, I do have close friends that are supportive of me in this journey I’m on, and that do see me and do support and celebrate my success and all this kind of stuff. And it is, I don’t reflect on it very often, but it is critically important for me. And I don’t mean that in an instrumental sense, in that their feedback is helping me in my particular goals or anything like that. I mean in the sense of just having people to share experiences with and to relate to in a deep and profound way is just so meaningful and so important. And it is sad to me, deeply sad that friendships are declining in modern Western society and social media is becoming more and more prevalent. And we are- The three F’s are declining. The extended family is disappearing. And how the West really lost God, I always remember to forget the name of the author. That’s- Mary Westfall, I think. Or no, not Westfall. Or Stad or something like that. Or Mary or Stad Westfall. Yeah, anyway. So the extended family, and that has a dramatic impact on people’s spirituality, she makes a good case. Friendship is going away, and then fellowship has almost completely disappeared. So when we lost the church, some of the baby we threw out with the bathwater is we lost the art and the way of life of fellowship. We lost the Sangha, to use a Buddhist idea. The Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha. The Sangha is as important as the Dharma and the Buddha. And again, I think one of the things that Diologos builds is- I think Diologos depends on friendship, but it builds fellowship. And I think that’s very- we need that. Because again, Chris and I are in many different ways we’re saying, the kind of knowing we’re talking about, the kind of knowing that’s a loving, that’s a transforming that we’re talking about, right? It’s bound up with all of this way of being yourself while being with other people, while being towards what’s real together. And so the fact that we are losing these, the extended family, friendship, and fellowship, I think is- thank you, extended- capitalism has reduced us to the nomadic semi-semitemporary nuclear family. It’s not really nuclear, other than a sense it’s prone to explosion. And we’ve lost that and fellowship is almost completely gone. The place where people get a taste of fellowship, perhaps, is in university or professional school, they get a sense of what that’s like. And they’ll often look back at that time. And what they’ll note is they had friendships, but there was also this cohort, right? And they use almost military terms, there was a fellowship. And they sort of wistfully know that they’ll never have that fellowship again. And they’re often aware that those friendships have become tenuous. And of course, like most of us, the extended family has largely dissolved around them as they become an adult. And so we are terrifically bereft. We are terrifically bereft. And like I said, one of the things I think that Dialogos does is it acts as a living bridge between friendship and fellowship in a powerful way. Beautiful. Yeah, definitely. And yeah, what you said about the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, to me, those three things have been very important in my life. The Sangha that I live with in this Buddhist community here is so important because, yeah, I can speak to any one of them and talk about what’s happening for me in any moment and get an honest reflection, which is, yeah, very valuable. And I think Jordan Hall is right, by the way. I think the next Buddha is the sign. What he means by that is the next place we’ll find enlightenment, like the model. And I’m not disputing that your teacher is enlightened. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the next model. Your name is the future Buddha, right? That’s what your name signifies. The next Buddha is the Sangha. The next model is going to be a model of distributed cognition rather than of the particular individual. Yeah, there are interesting, actually, there are interesting spiritual communities that live through that tension. Yeah. There’s one called Trillium, Trillium Awakening. And this community actually was a splinter off of another community called Waking Down in Mutuality. And I followed the story closely from what I can gather. So there was a guru in the 80s, Adi Da, who was very disciplined, punitive, like you must do it this way. It’s all about very, very strict meditation and also worship of him as the guru, right, Adi Da? Yeah. Yeah. Very much into that. And so this, a student of his, Sanyal Bonda, for 20 years left, formed this community called Waking Down in Mutuality, which was almost the exact opposite of that guru worship concept. It was trying to integrate mutuality and embodiment into the spiritual practice so that it was all about everyone has an equal place here. Everyone’s voice is valid. Please contribute everything that you have to contribute. But there was still this subtle guru position in that group because Sanyal Bonda was the founder, right? And then there was another group that formed after an argument or a disagreement between leadership in that group, Waking Down in Mutuality into this Trillium Awakening thing. And that then became the teachers that formed that initial circle within this new splinter-off group became the governing mechanism by which that group operated. And it wasn’t anyone individual. It was a group of, say, 40 teachers. And governing the group with all voices being respected. And then, having to form pseudo-democratic processes and all of that to take care of that. But it’s a very interesting study in that exact thing, is the next Buddha, the Sangha, because we have case studies of communities that have tried both and that it still is now doing both. And seeing the various successes and failures. That’s so interesting. I was unaware of that. Thank you for sharing that. That is so interesting. I’d like to know a bit more about that. I have to get going soon. I’d like to know more about that history at some point. But I do need to get going. I don’t want to just close things off. I just want to indicate if we could start moving towards closure. That would be appreciated. Yeah. Well, there’s so much that we’ve spoken about today. And this conversation’s been very rich for me. Thank you both so much for participating. Thank you.