https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=1-uWrLlcQ5M
So welcome everyone. I’m joined with Mark Vernon today. He’s the author of many books. He’s had some podcast series. He’s done some a couple of videos interesting commentary on my work on awakening from the meaning crisis. And so I’ll let Mark introduce himself more. So welcome, Mark. Thanks very much, John. It’s nice to speak to you having you know, watched a lot of we’re doing from afar. I particularly sat up there when you started talking about Owen Barfield in a couple of talks, because he’s a chap that has been very inspirational for me. I mean, he’s what he’s done is he brought a lot of things together for me or at least I guess found he helped me find a way to bring together a lot of things, which, you know, it’s not unrelated to the whole issue of the meaning crisis. I used to be a Church person for one thing and then sort of fell out of love with that and left. I did a philosophy PhD on Plato, spend the whole time thinking that I wasn’t quite getting to grips what Plato was saying, even though I got the PhD, apparently fine. I’ve even got a past in physics, my undergraduate degree was in physics and, and quite, you know, how that fits into things again. So he helped me sort of bring together a lot of things, primarily actually by this notion he had of kind of unthinking what you think you know, and seeing what pops up and when you can do that. And so, you know, that starts to make more sense of Socrates, it starts to make more sense of the crisis which we face now, particularly within Christianity, that I think is really presented as too rational really, you know, as if X follows Y follows Z, even in relatively liberal traditions like my own. So he began to create kind of imaginative space. And of course, imagination is a big, big thing for Barfield. So I know that’s a sort of starter, what he helped me do. Yeah, so there’s two things I’d like to pick up on that. Well, actually three. But the first two that came to mind was you, you referenced the particular relationship you think this bears to Christianity. And this brings up your recent book, Mark has a book out. It’s very well written, by the way. In fact, I find I’m in a lot of convergent agreement with the book in a lot of powerful ways, but it’s also very beautifully written. It’s called The Secret History of Christianity, is that correct? Yeah, thanks. And I do recommend it. I think it’s a very good read. As you know, many, many of you know, I’m in dialogue with many people like Paul Van de Klay and Jonathan Pageau, Mary Cohen, JP Marceau, who are Christians and who are very attracted and interested in a very good faith way in my work. And I am interested in what they’re doing. I’m having this interesting dialogue with Christianity. So I’ll mention both points, Mark, and then you can play with them as you wish. And the first is, yeah, what like, you know, there’s sort of, you’re critical of Christianity. In fact, at the very beginning of the book, I think the first sentence is something like, there’s something wrong with Christianity today. You start very critically. So there is something wrong. And then there’s maybe a difference of opinion or maybe view ultimately about whether or not that’s a sickness unto death or whether or not it’s, you know, portends a potential reformulation or revival. So what’s the relationship to Christianity that you see barfield? And then how does that relate to, you know, the Nietzschean death of God, but also the more broadly the meaning crisis? So I’m giving you this very loosely formulated question because I want to give you a lot of room to play in. And then the other notion that came to mind is these two terms, because I think, and when you when you’re talking about logos in your book, and I believe you call it Socrates, the Athenian Moses or the Moses of Athens, and Barfield’s critical of the notion of rationality, I’m very critical of what I call the enlightenment notion of rationality. And I’ve tried to give a notion that’s much more Socratic is the adjective. And then, because that the modern notion of rationality, and here’s where I’m going to get to the term you brought up, but I want these two talked about together, if possible, please, is imagination, because you’re also using imagination in a way that’s different how it’s commonly used or commonly understood. So the person that’s been most helpful for me on that, apart from Barfield, and Lachman, Lachman’s book was a very good book, Lost Knowledge of the Imagination, I believe is what it’s called, is especially the work of Corban and the commentary and excellent work. And I had a discussion with Thomas Chieffin about this, the notion of the distinction between the imaginal and the merely imaginary. So can you talk a little, I know I’m giving you a lot here, but I want to give you a lot of space to play with. So Christianity, the meaning crisis, Barfield, right, and then, you know, playing off against each other, I think, I think they require sort of a reciprocal reformulation, imagination, and rationality or reason. I had a really excellent conversation about with Ian de Gaulle, Chris, about this, to the Master and his Emissary. So there’s a lot there. I’ve tried to feed you a lot. So now, yeah, pick up a couple of threads and see where they go. I mean, maybe start where you ended up there and think, because Coleridge is another big name for Barfield. Yes, yes, yes. And Coleridge’s idea was that you can tell the difference between the imagination and say mere fantasy, which is I think a bit like Corban’s difference between the imaginal and regular kind of imagination. Because the imaginal or imagination with the capital I in Coleridge, it takes you somewhere. It’s not just sort of fun, or that might be fun. It’s not just playing on what you already know, although it would do that, but actually extends and develops and carries you into new perceptions of reality, new knowledge, new awareness. And I think that the reason, reason’s task is essentially discerning what the imagination throws up. And again, it’s not, it’s reason meant in the sense of incorporating beauty and pattern. And again, the sort of the reach of experience and reality that reason enables you to kind of relate to more precisely, rather than just is it coherent or logical? Right. It’s probably got very little to do with that, actually. Yeah. So and then there’s then the sort of theistic element, which I have found a persuasive having kind of gone through a kind of Nietzschean death of God and tried to find a way back, which is that this must be a sharing, I think, with a broader sense of the inside, well, Tewes Barfield’s expression, the inside of the whole world. It’s not something just going on inside our own heads, because otherwise it wouldn’t really go anywhere. It would just turn around in epicycles and sort of consume itself and sometimes feel a bit exhausted, sometimes a bit exciting, but not really with a sense of life that inspires you as much as kind of enables you to co-create with it. So the Coleridgean idea that our imagination with the capital I, and I think this is in Corban too, the imaginal as actually taking us towards spirit and not just amplifying our own inner life. That took me back in the direction of a theistic conception of things. So that’s to say something about that sort of side. I mean, the Christian bit, particularly, my criticism, and this is very much my own story, is when I first started getting involved in the church as an adult, there was a big move around demythologizing in one way to turn Christianity into sort of symbols for a moral life. And I feel very passionately against that now, because I think morality sets up laws and rules, and so doesn’t enable you to be free, really. It’s all about what you’re managing to sort of achieve in your life, rather than is your life really expanding and growing. It judges, but judges not so as to release you to something bigger, but just purely to sort of keep you in place. So that was one side of Christianity, the liberal Christianity I knew. The other side was the non-realism of figures like Don Cupid, who’s still just about writing, I think. But he sort of felt that religious rituals are good for their own sake. They kind of take you out of sight of yourself a bit. They enable you to connect with place and history and that side of things. They probably have some psychological benefit. And I mean, I can see that, but again, it felt like at the end of the day, you’ve got to kind of keep your own will at it. You’ve got to kind of stir up the energy from within, rather than being open to the possibility there’s an energy coming from without. It felt like a closed system rather than an open system. And Barfield helped me with that, because what he tells is also a story of Christianity and why we’ve come to this particular moment with Christianity. Whether or not Christianity will revive, I don’t know. It remains to be seen, I think. It could be that the big Christian cycle that reached its culmination in the medieval period is the Christian cycle and something else emerges now. I’m kind of open to that possibility. But nonetheless, he felt that what it did was it released a new way that we experience ourselves as human beings, and particularly as individuals. And by that he meant that we have a rich kind of inner life that we can claim, to some substantial extent, is our own. That we have real choices over it, and that we can therefore find a path of development through life. And know that that inner life mirrors the inner life ultimately of the divine. You know, the divine I am-ness in the monotheistic conception can be seen by the individual that has a gathered sense of themselves enough, can say I am themselves. And that was tremendously energizing for the Christian period around the Mediterranean, particularly. And it led to the great flourishing of medieval Christianity, but went through a phase of alienation in the early modern period. And for Barfield alienation isn’t just bad, it’s both good and bad. It’s got the bad side, which is the common, the understood side, that it creates the meaning crisis. But he also thought that it throws you on yourself. And if you can use the opportunity, if you can sort of survive the struggle, it actually deepens your own inner life with the potential then that opens back onto the inner life of all things with a renewed consciousness and a renewed deliberation to do it, but also renewed perceptions. And so that’s the question mark in a way that hangs over our own time, I think. He thought that it happened with the birth of Greek philosophy and also the Hebrew prophets. And the actual revolution. That unfolding was going on back then. It sort of found its culmination around the figure of Jesus, particularly for those who turned to Christianity, became hugely productive, fruitful and so on. But again, there’s a kind of cycle now where all this is kind of thrown into question with the good and the bad that that produces. That was really good. That was very good. I enjoyed that very much. So there was a couple of interesting things. So you used a very important term for me when you described reasons. First of all, the imagination as the education in the deep sense of to draw forth of perception, which by the way is finding a lot of consonants within current cognitive science. The relationship between imagination and perception is much more like that than what we used to think. So I think that’s an important point we might want to come back to. But you said that reason has this role of discernment, which is something that I like because discernment, of course, is also a term about understanding and wisdom. It has the idea of seeing through what’s illusory into what’s real. And you’re bringing in that we should, well, this is what I argue. I think that we should move rationality off its fixation on sort of logical coherence to produce certain conclusions. And I’m doing certain like this. Instead, we should take it back to what we see in Socrates and Plato, which is, as you say, the training of discernment, the ability to see through self-deception, to see through illusory aspects, the way in which things present themselves is not always the way they are, the way we understand ourselves can be fundamentally misleading. We’re biased in all kinds of ways. And so I think that’s very consonant. I think that’s very consonant. But when you were talking about Christ and Christianity, and the gathering together, the kairos around him, one of the things that I then wanted to ask you is, given, let’s sort of, we’ll put together, you know, imagination and reason as discernment as sort of a unified faculty, right? And we’ll just, we won’t name it, but we’ll say that there is this faculty. Is that okay? Are you okay with that? And then what I want to know is, you’ll see why, what this has to do with, you know, participation and especially post-axial, reciprocal, what you call reciprocal participation following Barfield. As you know, I think, I quite independently came to the notion of participatory knowing through foree, carx, and there’s deep, and that’s how I came to Barfield. I came to Barfield through, I was searching about anybody who had been talking about this. And of course I was thrown into Plato and people, but then I get Barfield came up. That’s how I came to Barfield, actually, through that. And so I want to talk about the relationship between this reason, imagination, imagination, reason, faculty, and participation, participatory knowing, and reciprocal participation in particular, because I think reciprocal participation is seeing an important revival in these two notions of reciprocal narrowing in things like addiction, which should be thought of as existential and not merely psychological. They’re psychological, of course, but they’re not merely psychological. They’re existential as well, right? And the opposite, reciprocal opening, which has a lot to do with meaning in life. And I like your point also, and then I’ll stop talking so you can talk some more, that trying to reduce religion to morality, which is still a strong impulse today, I think is deeply mistaken, because I think that sense of connectedness, religio, which I think has an important role within reciprocal participation, has a lot more to do with meaning in life. And meaning in life is about this fundamental sense of connectedness. And it’s neither the passive reception of empiricism nor the active projection of at least Rousseauian romanticism. You and I differ a little bit about how to, but I think you agree with me that Rousseau at least has this notion of romanticism that’s very much about expressing and painting on the empty canvas of the world. And so the notion of connectedness that people are seeking in meaning in life is neither that purely passive or that purely aggressive one. And in his book, I know in Barfield, E. Fasutia actually brings this out as a really important point about Barfield’s notion of participation. So there again, I’ve tried to give you a bunch, because the last time I gave you a bunch, you did a lot with it. So go again, Mark. That was a lot. Yeah, thank you. Yeah. I mean, I think there’s a huge amount of what you say and those distinctions are right. And I’ve never liked the Rousseau kind of romanticism. I mean, Barfield actually, he felt that romanticism needs to come of age, as he puts it. And I think part of that is his criticism of Rousseau, but also the tendency in, say, Wordsworth just to kind of fall back on wonder or mystery and to kind of enjoy the sentiment, but not really be able to make much more of it. Yeah. For all that Wordsworth is a genius. But yeah, so I mean, actually, just to throw in another bit of my own biography, because this, in a way, is a key practice for me. And I know the practice is becoming more important for you as well. Very much. I work as a psychotherapist. My kind of every day, certainly the way I earn a living is through psychotherapy. And a key figure, well, there’s both the kind of biographical elements of that is that it was undergoing my own therapy, and part of the training that made me realize that you can take your own inner life seriously, and it really does tell you something. And what it tells you, at least if you can grapple with what it seems to be saying, that extends your participation in life. So rather than, you know, say being defensive about life and trying to hold on to your own conception of things, which, you know, can come about for all sorts of quite good reasons. Nonetheless, it restricts and limits life. And whereas understanding your defenses, and more positively understanding that your your fantasies can connect with reality. And the juxtaposition of figures that I quite like here I find helpful is between Freud, on the one hand and Donald Winnicott on the other, who’s a very significant British psychotherapist, very important in psychotherapy over here. And he is a romantic figure, but in the romanticism come of age sense. And because what Winnicott said, unlike Freud, is that our inner life can’t just be the sublimation of our inner fears kind of onto the sky, say in the case of religion, to try and contain the anxiety we have about paternal figures or maternal figures or whatever it might be, you know, try to reach some accommodation with these things that we fear. Because Winnicott said we’d all be mad if that was so. And whilst we can be mad some of the time, we’re not mad all of the time. And he thought that must mean that our fantasies actually connect with wider reality, so that we have a sense of feeling grounded, feeling at home, feeling that we’ve really learned something, and haven’t just conjured another fantasy out of thin air. And I think that, so that sense of how the projections out actually can inspire back is really important for understanding how we can be creative, how the imagination can really, you know, create works of art that last, that seem to give us more life, that give us energy, all this kind of side of it as well. And I think you’ve got that in Plato too, because just to pick up a little bit on how that connects back with ancient Greek philosophy. I mean, I think one of the things which Barfield showed me actually, which is really important in Plato, actually to realize that he didn’t even have words like analysis. You know, that was, that’s an Aristotelian neologism. And words like theory for Plato mean a kind of journey that you go on, that completely changes your perception of things. It is a participative understanding. It’s not like a vague idea you have in your head that you somehow put to the empirical test. And so, you know, analogy is really important in Plato. And what he tries to do is use reason to sort of test, you know, your kind of immediate ideas to the breaking point, to the aporia, and then hold that moment. And maybe you do another one, and you sort of test that to break. So in one dialogue, you might have, you know, a whole bunch of ideas that are put to the test. And it’s the gaps. It’s the crack that lets the light in. And this felt very similar to me, you know, in modern psychotherapy. In fact, really the reason, one of the reasons why I became a psychotherapist, rather than say an academic philosopher, was I realized that the work on yourself was as important to ancient philosophy. You got to be able to resonate, you got to be able to participate with the world around you. And it seemed to me that certainly Anglo-American analytic philosophy really had no conception of that at all. It had what you might call physics envy. Yes. And just to throw in one nice little biographical element there as well. I did this physics degree and my physics tutor, he worked on dark energy. And when I was doing my physics almost 30 years ago, he had a poster outside his wall, outside his office saying dark energy doesn’t exist. And I go and see him every so often now, because every so often I write something journalistically about physics or cosmology, and he still has that poster there. So he too knows that physics envy doesn’t really even exist. And that was another lesson I learned from him. So this sense of, with analogy, openness, reason, sort of testing, you need to have, I mean, I like another metaphor that Wittgenstein used, that to move into the unknown, you have to have the firm walls of the well to lower yourself down in. And so you need something to go on. And reason does provide that and other things too. But it’s got to constantly, I think, have this openness within it. And that is where the participation happens, because that’s when you feel the connection. And it works both psychotherapeutically and I think works culturally. Well, so that’s great. So a couple things then I want to pick up on that. There’s so much of what you just said, but hopefully we’ll get it. I like this, you sort of did this way, you brought in Plato and you were also talking about resonance. And one of the things that’s, one of the shifts that I didn’t talk enough about in this series, I’m going to talk a lot more about in After Socrates, is the shift in Plato from dialogue to monologue in Aristotle. Because part of what you were doing there, and I think the psychotherapeutic analogy, and I’m going to use the word as seriously as you do, if you’ll allow me, the psychotherapeutic analogy is very pertinent. The idea about, you know, things, and this is where I think how one of the ways in which the imaginal differs from for Corbin, not always, but one of the ways from just the imaginary, the images that come up and catch, they catch because they afford this dialogic relationship between us and the world. Not only, as you said, are they projections outward from us, they afford the universe, you know, speaking to us in both ways, the active sense of giving us an insight, disclosing something, but also calling to us, giving a sense of, you know, portending a sense of amorness and a demand on us to be other than what we are. You know, Wilke’s famous line, you know, after looking at the work of art, I think it was the torso of Apollo, you must change your life, right? That sense of you much change your life. And so that’s, for me, that’s sort of a touchstone of how the imaginal differs from the imaginary. The imaginal, you know, it catches us in that suddenly the world suddenly speaks through, and in both senses, we get, oh, I didn’t see that, and also, oh, I’m being called beyond myself in ways I hadn’t, and that, for example, comes up, I’m doing a lot of work with Chris Master Pietro and Guy Sandstock and Jordan Hall on dialectic and dia logos, where you get into a conversation with somebody and it starts to have those features. The conversation takes on a logo, so a life of its own, and you start getting those insights, that sense of insight and calling, not only from each other, but the conversation as a whole feels like it starts to enter into dialogue with sort of the depths of intelligibility, the depths of being. And so I think why I’m talking about that and to bring it back to Barfield and bring it back to what you’re saying about sort of art and imagination and discernment, and maybe this will also get us back into religion, is part of what I see, right, is also a different attitude towards language that’s coming. When you get into that mode, that mode that I’m trying to talk about, where, you know, to use one of Plato’s metaphors, it goes back to Heraclitus, when it catches fire, right, and you’ve got that. And what I see is a lot of the prophets are talking about images, and that’s important, Tillich does, and obviously Jung does, Corban. What I see, what’s more specific about Barfield, and also this puts him into an important dialogue with Heidegger and De Fuscia brings that out, is this turn towards language, but a turn that, in that we’re trying to get a fundamental reorientation about how we participate in language and how we understand language. And part of De Fuscia’s argument is, in fact, that he thinks that Barfield does a better job at that return to language than Heidegger does. And I noticed you’ve got sort of similar aspects running through your work, and I wonder if you could speak to that. You know, this general theme of, if you’ll allow me this, a way of putting it, because you use the term as well in your book, and it also has Christian resonance, recovering the logos. Remember, Heraclitus famously said, don’t listen to me, but listen to the logos, right, in my words. And what does that list, what is the logos in language, and what is it to listen to the logos? Is that a fair enough question, do you think? Yeah, yeah, well, let me say, try and say some things about it. I mean, I think one of the reasons why I think Barfield may do a better job than Heidegger, and I say that nervously, because, you know, Heidegger is a big figure, but is I think that he doesn’t have Heidegger’s hatred of Plato. Yes. And I mean, I think that he’s not, he’s not, he’s not, I mean that, I think Plato understood reciprocal participation, in a way that comes out of the pre-Socratics and comes out of Heraclitus, that Heidegger felt the need to reject for one reason and another. I think it’s actually much, just the state of academic philosophy at the time, actually. But anyway, that’s perhaps a bit of a… Could I interrupt for just one point? Because there’s, I’ve just, I’m in the midst of reading a really good book by Rakowski called Heidegger’s Platonism, where he makes the argument that the Heidegger, who’s lecturing on the cave analogy in the 30s, has a really positive attitude towards Plato, and seems to get what we’re talking about here, the reciprocal opening and things like that. And it’s only, but then there’s a shift that comes out later, and when he writes the, you know, the thing on Plato in the essence of truth, where as you say, he makes Plato the villain. And so there seems to be, you know, there seems to be an original deep appreciation in Heidegger of Plato, and then there’s a rejection. And Rakowski actually argues that if Heidegger had stayed true to what that original, he might not have made his serious, his most serious mistake, which was getting involved with the Nazis. So I just wanted to put that out there as a potential resource for people to consider. But I think your overall point is right, that Heidegger, right, turns on Plato in an important way. Please, Mark. Well, I must pick that up. I’m glad about that, because it’s, you know, I feel the spirit of Plato alive, and I get quite upset, actually, when people just go for him. But anyway, yeah, but the words, so the words point picking up that, and what Barfield says about that, is, well, actually, I mean, I think another reason why it goes so deep for Barfield is that words were his material. You know, he was a philologist. He realized that if words enlighten our consciousness now, as they do particularly in poetry, and by that he meant that the poet’s task in a way is to put words together, but defamiliarizes them, but so as that it releases the energy or the meaning, the felt sense, the felt consciousness of the word in a fresh way, and it revivifies words. So prose can be quite poetic, but the poet just goes for that completely. So he thought that words have a kind of soul, or by which he just means a vitality and inner life, and that words come from somewhere, you know, they speak us as much as we speak them, we co-create with words. So again, this takes him to the kind of inner life of the world, the cosmos. But with this balance that we’re supposed to do something with them, you know, so that sense of reciprocal participation. And, you know, this then takes him, this is where he gets his story from about the rise and fall of the ways of human consciousness, that if words now carry something of our inner vitality, then if we can track back the way words have changed meaning, then they can become what he called fossils of consciousness, and we can understand how things have changed. And so can also use them to tell a story of now, as well as just try and experience now. Yeah, so I forget where we started on that. But that’s something about Barthold and words and why they were so central. They were both his evidence, if you like, you know, he didn’t just sort of imagine this, he didn’t just receive it as if he was sort of mystic. And this was actually quite common in the 19th century to realize that there is a story you can tell about the development of words. So I was very struck that figures as diverse as Jeremy Bentham and Ralph Waldo Emerson, both realize that words change meaning in ways that you can actually track that tell you something about the shift of consciousness and particularly about the sense of how, you know, human inner life and inner life in the world around once felt quite connected. And that’s perhaps where language comes from. And then it goes through these periods of feeling disconnected, which is expressed in the changing change meanings of words as well. So that was very good, Mark. I like that. Just to bring it back to the original thread, the original thread was a comparison of Barthold and Heidegger on this return to language. And that, you know, Heidegger has this notion that language is the house over the shepherd of being kind of thing. And yet, Defecia seems to argue that Heidegger’s attitude towards it, maybe it’s kind of like the criticism you’re making of Woodsworth. It’s very much the glassenheit. It’s the letting be and it’s letting go. But he thinks that that is what I don’t want to get too technical here. But the idea is, you know, and you talk about this in the book, your book too, the subject has become sort of determinant of objectivity. It’s a very Cartesian model. It’s very much about the will to power and imposition. And then Heidegger is trying to break out of that. But what he does is he just sort of, he tries to get the individual as will-less as possible, glassenheit. And that to me strikes, that’s kind of ironic because it sounds like Heidegger is still bound to the very grammar. He’s just negating it. And that’s ironic because that’s the criticism he made of Nietzsche, that Nietzsche doesn’t really escape onto theology. He merely inverts it. And Defecia argues that Barfield goes beyond Heidegger and that he doesn’t just do the passive glassenheit. So if we’re going to use Eckhart, there’s not only glassenheit, there’s Dirkbrück, there’s breakthrough, right? And it’s like you said, there isn’t just this. There’s also the calling forth and the drawing forth. And so Defecia argues that Barfield sort of brings back the participatory creativity within logos that’s missing from Heidegger. And so Barfield has this notion, if you’ll allow me one of my neologisms, that’s much more transjective about this. That when we’re using language, and I think you said it earlier, it’s being co-determined, it’s co-creative, and it’s not just us letting go and letting be, but it’s also Dirkbrück breaking through. That’s kind of the core of the difference, at least as Defecia argues. What do you think about that? Do you think it’s a fair reading of Barfield? Yeah, no, I mean the thing reminds me two things that Barfield discusses. One is what it takes to make a new word, a new word that really lasts, isn’t just a sort of technical term that captures something for a small group of people. And of course, people like Plato and Aristotle are great coiners of new words. That now we just assume our consciousness. But he says that’s a struggle, that’s an effort. And that is, you know, as it were, bringing down into language something that enables you to see it and to focus on it, but then provides the life of the words. So that’s one way to account it. That’s excellent, Mark. Sorry? That’s excellent. That’s excellent. Thank you for that. That’s a very good exemplification. Thank you. Sorry, please continue. Yeah, yeah. And then the other thing, another take on it, which I really like, and it’s really come alive for me actually, is Barfield doesn’t talk a lot about Dante, but Dante has been an important part of my psychotherapy story, actually. I think psychotherapy can very good at taking you into the inferno, but it’s not quite sure how to get you up through purgatory. And Dante’s helped me do that. And I think one of the things that Dante realised is that what really takes you into paradise, however you understand that, is when your will, your sight, your desire, your knowledge, your awareness chimes more and more and more with, you know, he would call it the divine and sight, desire, knowledge, awareness, and so on. But you can call it the Logos as well. But it’s done freely. It’s done because you’ve worked on yourself and you can sense that there’s no greater enjoyment of the will, desire, sight, knowledge, and so on than when it chimes with the cosmos as a whole. Right, very much. What’s also interesting in Dante is that when he gets into paradise, one of the things that rather shocks him at first is that he still sees lots of individual souls in paradise. He doesn’t just sort of see a kind of divine mush. And it takes him quite a long time through the paradise to really appreciate that it’s a diversity in unity. And it’s kind of harmony, I mean, which resonates a lot with what people say about non-dual perception and so on and so on. And I think that’s another really important notion that I remember when you were talking about the will in Heidegger, that it’s actually an intensification of will in Dante, but with this alignment as well with the greater will. And what greater flourishing of the will could there be as a world than to be aligned with the divine will? So there’s something about that going on as well, which I found very, the way that Dante actually sees these things, it feels very fruitful for me. Okay, so that brings up something, that’s excellent. Before I forget, guys, everyone, Mark has a video series where he’s taking people through Dante, so please check it out. Just a little plug for you there, Mark, because you’re doing something. Thank you very much. Yeah, no, but I really hope, I do believe that Dante’s many things, but if it’s not read as a kind of a spirited, transformative text, the key thing even, I would say, is being missed. So I’ve been trying to do that. So that brings up something that I think will deepen the critical comparison, because when we’re talking about this way, we’re talking about Dante, and of course, we’re invoking a Christian idea here. We’re getting this sense of a will, a willing, and a willingness. It’s both a willing and a willingness that is sensing, as you’re setting, this affinity, this affinity and conformity with the divine and the sacred. And so, right, the way in which we normally understand that voluntarily binding ourselves to something that we sense an affinity to is love, right? And love is how we, in the work of Annan and others, that’s how we experience reciprocal opening. And what I see in what you’re saying, and one way of understanding Christianity, especially in the figure of Christ, is the deep integration of logos and love together. And I think that’s a theme in Dante too, but we can explore that another time. What I’m saying is that sense of logos and love together, which makes me think of, we need a conversation about how that integration goes together with the reason-imagination integration. They bespeak to each other in some way, but that is also missing in Heidegger. Love, which is a deep, because you see that deep integration between logos and love, of course, exemplified in Plato. The two are inseparably bound together. And of course, our culture and both enlightenment and forms of romanticism are responsible for this divorce too. Right? Yeah. Well, I think, I mean, just to leap in there a bit, when you say logos and eros, I think that if you, when they add it together, they make philia, they make friendship. Yeah. And the point about friendship as a kind of love is that you want your friends to be both fully themselves while you’re fully yourself. Exactly. Excellent. Yeah. And that’s when you have your conversations with people and see the third thing, I think. Right. Yes. And then there’s a sense also, you get a sense of calling at times. And then you see this more, you don’t see this at least clearly in Plato, you catch it in Augustine very much, that the philia can, I don’t know what the word, it can induce you, it can draw you towards agape. It can, that you wanting to matter to something beyond yourself to, you know, it’s, right, it’s completely re-centering. So, you know, there’s egocentric and then there’s sort of, you know, polar-centric in philia, and then there’s ontocentric in agape. And what’s interesting also is that turn. Turn. Because what I hear, Barfield’s notion of creativity as distinct from just our notions of making or sort of decadent romantic notions of pure self-expression, right, the notion of creativity can, I don’t know, can conduce us into agape by making us aware of the creativity of God. Is that a fair thing to say? Is that fair? Yeah, no, I think that the notion of the incarnation, the Christian notion there is precisely that. That the deepest meaning of the incarnation is not something that happened 2,000 years ago. That was just what made us aware of something that’s happening in every creative moment, which is that the divine is coming into, say, human form into the material world, and it’s creative. That’s how you know that it’s happened. You know, so, for example, I don’t know, I think music is a very good example of this. That music is a strange thing that it’s kind of in between worlds. That it is both a physical thing, it’s acoustic, but if you just assess the music by its acoustic properties, you get absolutely nowhere. But the question is then, where does what you assess music by kind of come from? Yeah. And there would be a sort of more, a narrower romantic view that would say, for example, it’s the power of expression and so on. But that doesn’t really feel to take you very far. And it doesn’t, again, have this sense that, you know, when you’ve listened to Mozart, or so Bach, say particularly, you know, that your experience of life has greatly grown. It’s not just your expression, but something’s been given to you. And, you know, Barfield thought that that’s because the music both does something on the horizontal, but also transposes, as he puts it, something from the vertical as well. And that’s why it exists in this, it’s in the imaginal zone, in an intermediate zone. Very much. Very much. Yeah. So, I’m not quite sure if I fully answered what you were saying there. No, no. Let me try and feed it back to you through what you said. What I’m trying to suggest is, when, and you can think of Winnicott here, also the transitional object and serious play, when I’m involved in serious playing of and with music, right? And especially like if I’m doing something like jazz, where I’m actually not just listening, but feeding back in creatively, I write that when I, there’s a notion of creativity there that transcends the making or transcends the expressive notions of creativity and gives us a sense of, right, it’s, and we can only participate, here, I’ll try a bold hypothesis, and then you can criticize it if you want. We only can participate in the creativity that is God, God’s agapic love, when we can get to that kind of creativity to some degree in ourselves, or actually between us and the world. And music is something like that. I think that’s why music is so prevalent when people are trying to get their most pertinent representations or symbols of the experience of sacredness. They often resort to music and musical analogies. It’s pervasive through Daoism, as you probably know. I’m a Tai Chi Chuan player. And notice the word, by the way, I’m a Tai Chi Chuan player, right? That’s the Chinese, right? And so, like, let me give you an analogy from that tradition, then I’ll give it back to you and see if we are getting in sync. You don’t really understand the Dao until you play Tai Chi, and then you get that musical sense of your participating in a kind of creativity. As you say, it’s not a creativity even of a work of art, it’s a creativity of a way of being. And that discloses to you in a participatory fashion, the creativity of ways of being that is the Dao. That’s what I’m trying to say. Is that resonating with you? Is that landing for you? Yeah, I mean, for sure. The music analogy works for me because I play the piano. There you go. And I remember when I first started having jazz improvisation lessons, for example, and I thought that I was going to be given this somehow this kind of magic that I’d suddenly just be able to start playing jazz. And then I spent the next five years basically doing scales. And the point of that is that all that work is required. Your participation in this whole musical cosmos is required. Before, maybe, you know, something else can start to kind of flow through your fingers. Now, I’ve never actually, I’m not very good at jazz at all. Really, I’m not. But what it did help me experience on occasion is sheet music. Every so often, you realize that the music is kind of playing you rather than you trying to play the music. And so that’s what I’m talking about. That happens every so often, which reminds it, you know, so the Dao, playing with the Dao, I wonder whether there’s a similar kind of experience. So what I’m trying to get is that flip you just did. That, to me, is conducive or affording of the flip to agape, the flip from being egocentric to being entre-centric. You belong to the music rather than the music belongs to you. But it’s not a passive belonging. It’s not like you’re just, right, right? That’s what I’m trying to get at. And that’s what I see if, I don’t know Barfield as deeply as you do, but I see when he’s trying to talk about poesis. That’s what I’m hearing. He’s trying to, if you’ll allow me now to really pack into this word, he’s trying to see poesis as playing with language in a way that affords that flip. That’s how I’m seeing what Barfield’s doing. Yeah. So I mean, a prior thought, and I’ll see if I can get a bit more Barfield to sort of to resonate with that. I mean, one thought, which is a key thing, is that it’s actually the particular that is universal, not the general. Yes. So it’s when something becomes more and more and more itself that it becomes universal, not because it kind of becomes general. And certainly one of Barfield’s criticisms of say, Locke would be that they tried to separate subject from object, try to say that what was most abstract was most true. Whereas Barfield would say, no, actually it’s the least alive. It has its kind of uses, particularly if you want to do things like make machines that you don’t really need to be alive. Although the risk is that you forget about your own vitality if life gets taken up with machines. But yeah, so there’s something about that how it’s very much the particular that makes for the access is the universal and not the general, which he would criticize. And so making is artistic rather than machine like. That’s what I was trying to get to. So poesis, it can mean making like the pot has a poe, the potter has a poesis in ancient Greek, but there’s a meaning why it’s kind of got become poetry now is that this was seen as a sharing in the kind of materiality, you might say, of what you might make a pot out of to make something human out of the material. And again, I mean, I got this from, I think this is another figure that’s becoming more and more important for me actually is William Blake. I think Blake understood a lot of this, you know, he has kind of different levels of engagement with the world, which he uses, he has names for it, which are idiosyncratic to him. But essentially, what he’s doing is saying, you can move from the sort of abstract dead, you know, reason in the more logical coherent kind of way through what he called generation, which is a bit more like the kind of the processes of nature are very fecunds, but aren’t very conscious through to a level which is much more about love. So you kind of seek the beloved and nature becomes more of an eye, our relationship with others as well. And then, you know, the highest level for him is what he called Eden, which is actually the creative level where you’ve, you know, joined in the whole dance of creation, if you like, you’ll make you’re as much a maker as a as a as a as an enjoyer as a delight. That’s good. So I resonate with that quite deeply. So the first thing you said was really important. And there’s I mean, you get that for me, I get this much more clearly presented in some Buddhist philosophy, the idea of, you know, the inexhaustible ness, the more ness that I talk about the inexhaustible ness that schlegel talks about and schlegel had a huge influence on Cool Ridge, who had a huge influence on barfield. So, and D’Fugia actually talks about that a lot, but that that more ness comes into what the Buddhists call the such ness. The such ness of this is exactly what you’re talking about, right, the that part of it that I can only, I can only come to know through having an I thou relationship with it, but that I thou relationship with it doesn’t make it sort of doesn’t enclose it in affinity. It actually makes it, you know, open to the more ness. And you know, this is Blake’s to see the world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wildflower kind of idea, which I think is very resonant. But the thing that then I get when I’m hearing that, and this is, this has to do again with dialectic is all the stuff, you know, from the neo-platonic tradition, because you have that sense, you know, Pearl talks about in a lot of his work about this deep correspondence between levels of consciousness and levels of being, and how they mutually afford and disclose each other, and that there are, there’s eschesis, there’s spiritual disciplines that can afford us both realizing the ascension to the one, but also realizing, you know, the emanation to all of reality. And what’s interesting to me about that is the notion of dialectic gets really deepened in the neo-plateness to be not only something, as you said, horizontally between us, but also vertically, you know, between the levels, the ontological levels. And you see that very clearly in the work of Platonus, that those two senses are bound together. And one of the things I’ve been trying to articulate with the help of a lot of people, both in text and in person, is trying to get back that sense of dialectic and this attitude, this existential mode of dia logos relating to the logos, precisely, Mark, because I think it’s really needed right now. Well, for two reasons. Let me just briefly say, and then I’ll let you respond. One, of course, is just the general point about the meaning crisis, and that’s sort of a critical, in the ancient sense of the word crisis, you know, moment of judgment thing. But also increasingly, because in response to the meaning crisis, there are all these movements of authentic dialect discourse, circling practices, and I’m doing a lot of participant observation in them, and there’s a lot. And one of the things, and I mean, I’m in discourse as one of the originators of this guy, Senstock, and he’s very open to this point. What I see missing from a lot of these authentic things is philosophia, that cultivation of wisdom. And I use that term as a way of distinguishing from just academic philosophy, philosophia, which I think is inseparably bound up with this deep appreciation, in the multiple senses of the word appreciation, of logos. There’s an implicit sense of it in these practices, but it hasn’t been explicated, and that explication has not wedded to philosophia enough. And that’s why I think getting this kind of stuff out is really crucially important, especially right now, especially right now, when people are more and more turning to dialogue and discourse to try and find out what really matters to them. Yeah, no, I think, I feel that very powerfully too. I mean, what came out for me when you were talking there was how there’s a kind of therapeutic approach to lots of these practices, you know, obviously meditation and others, that can be very useful. It can help people feel a lot calmer in life, and even has the insight capacity where people can understand their inner lives more subtly. But I think also you do need some metaphysics in there, because otherwise you get very good at understanding your own inner life, but it doesn’t really take you anywhere else, and that ultimately is dissatisfying. And what the reason the metaphysics can help you do is discern both the richness of a particular tradition, and that that is as much about learning and so on as it is about the practice. But it helps you discern and grow your practice too as a result. But at the end of the day, it also helps you see how the tradition itself is just a channel, is just a kind of symbols that itself transmits something more than just the tradition. So I think that that’s what learning and the metaphysical side can give you. I actually got this, I was just trying to remember it, a book on Iamblichus, who I found actually really helpful in this. The theology and the soul. Yes, yeah, it’s a great book. It’s a really wonderful book, and I love the way that, the often I forget, which is bad, but anyway, he breaks down these different levels and talks about how, you know, say the Iamblichus understood that the material level of reality has its own way of refracting, reflecting a divine reality. And that at certain times, engaging with material reality is absolutely crucial to open yourself up to that level. And then there’s the intermediate levels, which is more, you know, like say more like reason, but reason in the sense of trying to kind of bring something into mind to engage the loggos, to capture, and so you can feel the resonance with it. And then there’s the kind of noetic level, which moves beyond a reason, and is say more ecstatic or something like that, as you might agree on occasion in Plasinus. Yeah, I love that how it’s the integration of all those three levels that I understand is in Iamblichus. And I’ve tried to work this out in my own therapy practice, actually, in the sense of, you know, being more open to not just what’s going on for the individual in their own inner life, which you have to do all that work, because otherwise people never, you know, realize that their own inner life is not the whole cosmos. But the minute people can begin to kind of step back from a bit a bit to bring in something else that takes people into these wider, and it often happens quite naturally, because people have, I don’t know, they have synchronistic experiences, or their dreams seem to be not just about themselves, or they get interested in Alan Watts videos, or something like that, you know. And then you can kind of help that expansion too. That’s wonderful. Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s Shaw, a theoragist. That’s right, it is. Yeah, that’s a great book. And a lot of what he writes is really interesting. Yeah, so Iamblichus and then later Proclus differ from Plotinus in that they, whereas Plotinus, the material world, is sort of ultimately close to prime matter, which he equated with evil, Iamblichus and Proclus are much more positively disposed towards the natural world. Although, I think Iamblichus understood that evil ultimately, for all that it can be foul, it’s a falling away from being. Yeah, so the material world doesn’t fall away from being, it definitely is, so it must be still reflecting being. That’s well said, Mark. That’s very well said. And then the interesting thing about Iamblichus onward is in addition to theoria, right, which is the contemplative practices, you bring in theurgia, which are these ritual practices. There’s a weaving together of philosophy and religion that until recently was really looked down upon in academic scholarship, but within the last, especially because of the work of people like Shaw, we’ve now come back and appreciate, wait, wait, wait, we’re doing a lot of this. Like we do, you often people, thanks to the work of L.A. Paul and Agnes Callard, I talk about this in my series, going through these transformative experiences, these are not things you can sort of reason your way through, you need these symbolic, you need Winnicott, you need these transitional zones and objects, right, and you have to play with them seriously. And so there is a deeply important role in aspiring to become other than what we are for this kind of serious play, this serious symbolic play. So I just, the notion of ritual, I feel is increasingly important, actually. And again, it’s Plato, you know, one of the things which I never really understood when I was doing my PhD was why, I don’t know, people always disappearing off to perform rites in platonic dialogue, or, you know, Plato then ends the dialogue with a whole myth, as if that’s somehow the kind of grand finale. And I’m thinking what’s this myth got to do with anything? Yeah, yeah. I think this is the whole point, actually, that you need these multiple levels of engagement, yes, to really be able to participate in what’s being sort of discussed and revealed. Yes, and I like rituals, because they do have this open quality that they are situating you to receive something as much as anything else. I mean, they can become magical or robotic, of course, too. But when done with the right intention, you know, a bow is a very expansive kind of gesture. I agree. One of the interesting points that Agnes Callard makes, if you accept all the arguments, and I’m not going to review them here, because I’ve done them extensively, that you can’t sort of infer your way through becoming some, like, she uses, let’s use one of her examples, because it’s pertinent. She says you want to come to like classical music, and you don’t currently like it. You’re not doing this because you want to date women, or you want to actually come to like classical music for its own sake. So you take a music appreciation class, and she gives all kinds of arguments about why you can’t reason your way into that, because you don’t have that value, you don’t have those preferences, you don’t have that perspectival knowing, you don’t have that identity. You don’t know what you’re going to gain, and you don’t know what you’re going to lose. So you can’t use any sort of standard decision matrix inferential processes. What you have to basically do, I argue, is you have to go, you do this, you basically afford appreciation through sort of ritual behavior, where you get into this liminal zone, where you play between worlds until you get a taste, and you can, right? But to bring that back, if we accept that core argument, and I make it more rigorously elsewhere, right, about the role of, let’s call it ritual, in aspiration by which we come to appreciate, again, both senses of the word, or actually all three senses, evaluation, understanding, and liking, right? She says, look, and she doesn’t quite make this explicit, but it’s definitely the core of her argument, we aspire to being rational. We aspire to being rational, and to be, I’m not as rational as I should be or could be, and I aspire to that, but that is also, and she says, and here’s the crucial thing, if that aspirational process to rationality is not itself an inferential process, but if we say it’s not part of rationality, we fall into a performative self-contradiction, because we couldn’t recommend it to anybody, become more rational, because we would be recommending to them a fundamentally irrational process. So we have to disidentify, she calls it prolectic rationality, and the reason why I’m bringing that up is, you know, that again, these things that we’ve tended to push aside, you can see now, there’s sort of modern work is now coming, no, no, no, you know, ritual and rationality are deeply interpenetrating in a way, because, you know, ritual was one of the hobgoblins of the Enlightenment philosophes, right? The ritual behavior was the meaningless, useless, magical behavior, but it turns out that it’s actually integral, in fact, like to your very conception of rationality, you can’t separate the two out in any clean fashion. Yeah, yeah, and again, a couple of thoughts that Barfield was certainly very aware of. One was the way that the medieval world understood the sort of the grammar of ascent, if you like, you know, it begins with the literal, goes through the allegorical, which is sort of the moral level, kind of tells you a bit about how to live. There’s the crucial, topological moments, which is where you’re in that state of not knowing struggle, but you feel something is changing. Yes. Until you get to the anagogic, which is the kind of new level, and ultimately the divine level. And I think Barfield’s own word, they actually, and I’m wondering about this, I’m not sure it’s quite right, but what you were just saying there is actually the word intuition. Yeah. And Barfield actually from Rudolf Steiner, which is a whole other side to him, which I do and don’t understand. But certainly one of the things I think he did bring into his idea of the imagination is that imagination goes through these three kind of stages. Oh, that’s excellent. There’s the imagination, which is mixed up with fantasy and projection and so on. It’s discerned and becomes inspiration, because you get a sense of what you’re receiving. But when that inspiration is fully sort of becomes part of your consciousness, becomes rational in that more expansive sense, it becomes an intuition that you’re then able to live your life from. So it becomes part of reality. Yes, I think that there’s something about that seemed to connect with what you were saying there a bit. It does. It does. And it circles back around to this different attitude towards language again, that we were talking about earlier, because one of the places where that comes out for me is I do a practice called Lexio Divina, the divine reading. And you’re trying to do exactly that. You try to, you get sort of your initial associations. So first of all, what you do is you don’t just read the text, you recite it. And what that means is try to pick up on the imaginable, try to pick up on the metaphors and try to at least imagine what it would be like to enact the metaphor. And then you let the associations come up. And then you try to, like you say, you try to discern between what’s just sort of projected fantasy. And then what seems to be, if you’ll allow me, and the pun is intended, what you get an inkling of, what you get an inkling of beyond all of that. And then the degree to which that starts to call you out. And that’s what you’re trying to do as you move through those levels of how you’re reading the text, which sounds very similar to what you’re saying about how you’re sort of educating imagination in a powerful way. And it’s interesting because you get this different feel for language. You get this very different feel for language. And it was poetry that awoke Barfield to that. When he first met C.S. Lewis and became one of the Inklings, he was very depressed in his early 20s. He felt very much demeaning crisis. He said that, you know, my life felt like an ingrowing toenail, that I was wearing my body like it was ill shape and clothes, you know, all these kinds of ways he tried to describe it, which are very vivid. And two things happened. One was he fell in love. So the Eros function inside him woke up. But also he realized that he could read poetry, but follow the energy of the words and resist just immediately kind of collapsing interpreting, trying to pin the poem down. What’s it really saying? That kind of thing. And the point about that, I think, is that if you do that too soon, you just stay in your current worldview, if you like, stay in your current consciousness, you need to hold open that possibility of something. So when you say the lexiconum de vena, I think it’s very much like that. It’s trying to sort of, and it can be very painful. And I think one of the reasons why death and dying is such a central feature of these great wisdom traditions is that it can be really distressing at times. I mean, psychotherapy knows that. And, you know, the aporia in Plato, you know, basically led to Socrates’s death because it irritated too many people. It’s a serious business this play, as Winnicott says. Okay, well, Mark, first of all, I think we came to a place where we could sort of come to an end. I try not to let these get too long or they become people won’t watch them kind of thing. First of all, I thoroughly enjoyed that. And I would like to extend an invitation for you to come back and you and I have another dialogue, you know, sometime within the next month, perhaps, and carry this on because I, for me, I really enjoyed this. And I felt there was a tremendous amount of resonance between us. And it’s very heartening for me too, as well, because it feels integrating for me, actually, with the work that you’re doing that I have, I confess, I slightly have the psychotherapist prejudice about cognitive science. Right. But I think, you know, I very much been listening to what you’re saying about the new expansion of cognitive science. And I, apart from anything else, I’m very hopeful that that’s bringing together of these particular disciplines, which will be the benefit of psychotherapy because psychotherapy has got its own problems, heaven knows as well. So yeah, I think that apart from anything else, you know, that’s really nice to share. Thank you. You might want to take a look at the discussion I have. I’ve got another one coming out with Greg on reeks. He’s a psychotherapist in the United States. And he’s also been in sort of dialogue with my work in this emerging for econ side, picking up on some of the spirituality. So you might find that interesting. Anyway, Mark, I’d like at the end of this to give people sort of, I don’t want to just end, I want to give you like, if there’s anything that, you know, feel you need to find you want to still give voice to any summative or thing you want to say, please take this opportunity now to do so anything also you want to point, you know, my viewers to in your own work, feel free to plug, make a plug right now. So thank you. Yeah. Well, I mean, this is this is definitely an ongoing, you know, life project for me. It’s not something that I’ve sort of come to the end of. And that’s part of its excitement. I think that a real the cutting edge for me more and more, and I hope this might come out for me as I I’m just about to start the purgatory with the Dante YouTube’s and then, you know, we’ll go on to the paradise later this year, I guess. It’s a bit like, you know, your many parts of the meaning crisis. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got to the end of the inferno just before Easter and I felt quite relieved. At least I’d done something, you know, right. But yeah, but it’s it’s I think the vanguard for me is how this connects with, you know, what people like Henri Corban were very directly involved with, which is normally called the esoteric traditions. It’s a difficult word because it means the sort of spooky and mystical, not just kind of implicit and hidden. But I think there’s something really crucial in all, on the one hand, the experiences that people have, which might be called the supernatural, the paranormal, whatever. I’m very influenced by another psychologist of religion called Jeffrey Kreipel on this, who thinks that the reason why people have all these weird experiences is that we’ve lost the capacity to discern them actually. So as it were, these vitalities or this intelligence, these agencies kind of impress upon us, particularly when we’re in fragile moments, when our ego strength tends to fall apart. And how we discern that, I think, is there’s something really important in that for me. It’s much more outre, perhaps, than we’ve been talking about so far. But, you know, I think these things happen and we’ve got to try and understand that. So that’s on the one hand. And then the other hand is what this means for religion, actually. You know, I sort of, Christianity is kind of my tradition and it’s one that, you know, I feel fairly fluent in. I’ve got a lot from Buddhism as well, particularly in terms of practices and what this means for a religious worldview. Because I sort of feel that the way out of the meaning crisis is going to look something like the religious imagination. And the reason why I feel that is that I feel at the end of the day, we can’t bootstrap our own way out of it. We are called, I think, into a relationship with nature, with the cosmos and with the divine, I think, ultimately. And so staying open to how that might be the case. And by open, I don’t just mean, you know, not being too skeptical, but trying to discern the inward flow of divine energy. You know, in the small ways, we’ve got goldfinches nesting in our garden this spring. And during this lockdown phase, they are like little angels. Right, right. They feel like little centers of energy that are calling for something in me as much as doing their own thing. So, you know, trying to be open to that interiority is, yeah, it’s kind of where it feels at the vanguard for me. I’m not completely sure what to make of it. I just feel I’ve got to make something of it. Well, thank you very much, Mark. Eric, thank you very much. And like I said, I hope that you’ll come back again on Voices with Reveke and we can have another discussion, perhaps, on some of these themes that you’ve now just introduced at the end. Well, thank you very much. Appreciate all you’re doing as well. Oh, thank you very much. OK, take good care.