https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Y4lWJQUg1WM
Welcome everyone. We’re about to do our second version or maybe our second instance, is a better way of putting it, Philosophical Fellowship. It also involves philosophical friendship. And I’m joined here again by Tracy, Robert, and Kira. I could ask you guys quickly introduce yourselves. Hello, my name is Tracy. I’m Robert. And I’m Kira. Thank you guys for coming. They were here for the last Philosophical Fellowship. I want to once again thank the work of Ran Lahav, who has inspired Philosophical Fellowship with his work on philosophical contemplative companionships. Ran has emailed me and we’ve had a discussion. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to attend one of his sessions because of timing, but I hope to do so in the future. So what I’m going to do for everyone is I’m going to mention the philosopher we’re going to use, give a bit of background for him. Then I will review the practices that make up the Philosophical Fellowship practice. I’ll take any questions that Tracy or Kira or Robert might have. And then we will go into the practice. And then we’ll, after the practice is done, remember that the practice includes the takeaway. There will be some final free-form discussion and then I’ll end the recording. So the philosopher we’re going to do today is Meister Eckhart. And that might be startling to some people because he’s traditionally not thought of as a philosopher. He’s almost prototypically called a mystic and thereby consigned to relative unimportance for many, many people within the academic community, no doubt. But I’m reading a highly recommended book. I highly recommend it by Flash, Meister Eckhart, Philosopher of Christianity. It’s making the very persuasive and good case based on very good scholarship. He’s an excellent philosopher and historian that we should be reading Eckhart as a philosopher, a mystical philosopher, no doubt, but as a philosopher. So in the same vein as Plato or Plotinus. Part of his argument is we have given an overemphasis to the works that Eckhart wrote in German, his sermons, and not enough emphasis to the work that he wrote in Latin, which is quite voluminous and a lot more academically and philosophically oriented. It’s written in academic Latin, for example, it’s intended for an academic audience. So the traditional interpretation of Eckhart is guilty of what has been called selection bias. We have been very biased in the works we have been looking at, and that has led to a biased interpretation of Eckhart. So Eckhart is, of course, somebody who is undergoing presumably altered states of consciousness and cognition that inform transformations of his character. We have good report in the sermons and elsewhere that he undergoes these transformations. But like Plotinus, he understands these altered states of consciousness to be consonant with and in sync with proper philosophical argumentation. So unlike in the German sermons, in his Latin works, Eckhart continuously invokes the notion of reason. But his notion of reason is a very neoplatonic one. So let’s bring that out. And let’s talk about where he is. So he’s, I think he’s born around 1260 and dies around 1328. So he’s after Thomas Aquinas. He’s after Albert Magnus. He’s influenced deeply by Thomas Aquinas. But he also is critical of Thomas Aquinas, explicitly so. He’s deeply influenced by St. Augustine and by Dionysius the Aragapagite, who was a great neoplatonic Christian in, I believe, the sixth century, probably in Syria. Had a deep influence on Eastern Orthodox Christianity. So those are the influence. What Eckhart is doing is he’s responding to a lot of things that are happening in Germany at the time. Germany is going through some major transitions. The Empire, the German Empire, the Holy Roman Empire is entering into significant, this is where the beginning of its decline. There’s been a lot of controversy in the Papacy. It’s been moved to Avignon. It’s during the Babylonian captivity. So there’s a lot of tumult going on. And it’s just before the Black Plague is going to hit, the Black Death is going to hit Europe. So he’s at a very, very pivotal point in history. So how is he, what is his notion of reason? Well, it’s not argumented. Although he makes arguments in his work, he’s not talking about reason in that sense. He’s talking, what he really is concerned about is a faculty that in neoplatonic philosophy is called NUS, N-O-U-S, which comes from the Greek word, the verb noesis, which means to notice. And I agree with Maitzen that one of the best translation of this word is insight. So when you notice and you have an insight, when you realize, to use a term that I’m somewhat in love with, I guess, is when you realize, and in both senses of the word for Eckhart, Eckhart famously said, the eye by which I see God is the same eye by which he sees me. So realization is simultaneously you having an insight and an awareness and also reality realizing itself, disclosing itself, actualizing itself, revealing itself to you in depth. And so NUS is the faculty of you that allows you to have that kind of comprehensive insight in which you see how everything is connected, how everything fits and belongs together, so that you see through that manifold, to the ground that’s behind it, that’s underneath it, that makes it possible. So this, of course, you guys remember from the neoplatonism lectures, this is the idea of the one, that which makes both being and being known, being and intelligibility, and their relationship between them possible. And so for Eckhart, what you are trying to do is you’re trying to use NUS to become as one as possible, so that you can become as one as possible with the one, which is for him God. In fact, he thinks of this as beyond God. He thinks, he famously said, that he prayed to God to rid him of God, because he thought of God as a particular representation of a thing, a very great and powerful thing, but as a thing. Even as a creator, God is entering into a particular conceptual distinctness and category. So he often talks about the Godhood or the abyss beyond God, right? And so for Eckhart, that is actually what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to get to the place where the one in us is completely at one with the one of everything. And in that sense, we are trying to realize the God beyond God, to use a phrase you might have heard before. And for Eckhart, that’s going to lead us into the central idea of the passage I’m going to read from you. I’m going to read a section where he is basically giving a sermon on one of the Beatitudes, where Christ says, blessed are the poor in spirit. And that’s always been a really odd phrase for many people. The Beatitudes are just really odd things anyways. What is it to have poverty of spirit? And the reading is about this poverty of spirit, because what Eckhart wants us to understand poverty of spirit to be is that we first detach from the things of sense. We move towards the senses themselves, the faculties, the powers of our mind. And then we move towards the awareness that all senses have in common. And then of all the things we make sense, of all the ways we make sense of things, not just physically, but conceptually, we’re going to move back towards that ground. So it’s a progressive withdrawal and detachment as we try to move backwards towards a state of pure awareness that is below, as he’ll say in the passage, love and understanding. But that’s the common ground behind them. So think about how love reaches into all the motivational and sensual aspects of your existence, and how understanding reaches out to all the ways in which you make sense, conceptual, abstract, the way you make sense of the world. And what he’s saying is he wants the poverty is to move to a place below that, the common source of love and understanding. It’s not an activity of the, it’s not something the soul does, as he puts it. It’s the ground of the soul. Now we’re not going to be trying to do that practice, but we did some similar practices in the meditation and contemplation course, and also in the wisdom of Hypatia. We’re going to be doing the philosophical fellowship around it, but I wanted you to at least be familiar with what he has in mind behind the reading. So first of all, any questions about that? Anything that was like, what? So for Eckhart, it’s really interesting that he sees this movement as simultaneously the culmination of reason and as our greatest, and he’s got this interesting phrase for it, it’s both our highest spiritual activity and our highest spiritual receptivity, because we’re moving to a place where we’re not acting or receiving, we’re in something that is full participation. Any questions or concerns? Okay, so that’s the background, and I’ll remind you what we’re trying to do here. There’s three things we’re trying to do in philosophical fellowship that are interwoven together. We’re trying to make sense of the text. Remember, we put a very strong emphasis on both those words. We’re making, right, it’s a creative act on our part. We’re not just passively receiving. We’re making sense of the text. We’re making sense of each other. We’re making sense of the text of each other, and we’re making sense of our, we’re making sense with each other. So we’re making sense of each other and ourselves. We’re making sense of the text, and we’re making sense with each other. And what we’re trying to do is remember we’re not going to be speaking about the text. We’re trying to speak through the text. We’re trying to resonate it. We’re trying to presence Eckhart’s thought and presence Eckhart’s perspective for us, and that’s why I gave you some of his, a bit of his background and what’s going on in the text. So remember, we were trying to invoke. We’re trying to invoke the depths of the text from the depths of ourselves and the depths of each other and the depths of Eckhart, and we’re trying to invoke it and make it present, as we did with Spinoza last time. When we’re responding to what other people have said, we’re trying, we’re first of all, we’re listening in like Alexio Divina fashion. We’re trying to resonate and internalize. When we respond, we try to incorporate like in jazz what the other people have said. We’re trying to make something together. We’re trying to create something that is beyond each of us, that is a place in which Eckhart’s voice can be heard and made present to us as a wise perspective, as a potential sage that we are at least within the practice internalizing. Okay, remember we’re not arguing with each other. That’s not what we’re doing here. There’s a proper place for that. What we’re trying to do is work together to co-presence each other as much as possible and to co-presence the text and Eckhart. All right, so if you remember I’ll just go over the procedures and then I’ll go in the order. I’m going to start with slow reading, which is Alexio Divina type reading. I’m going to pause periodically so you can soak up what’s happening. I’m going to read slowly, let you soak it up, let you really resonate with it. We’re all trying to internalize the text as much as possible during the slow reading. When we do, and then when we do precious speaking, remember you try to convey as much as you can with as few words as possible. So there we’re trying to hold ourselves to one sentence, maybe two. But remember we’re trying to convey much more than we’re saying when we’re doing the precious speaking. Remember try to speak through the text and not at it or about it. You’re trying to invoke, you’re trying to invoke, you’re trying to presence, depth to depth resonance. In the intentional conversing, you’re listening. Now we’re going to not just respond to the text, but what we’re going to do is we’re also listening to what other people say and we’re getting a fluid, flowing, ever-growing conversation. It’s like jazz in that sense. And what we’re doing is we’re savoring the text, we’re savoring what the other person says. When we speak, we can speak maybe four or five sentences in intentional conversing, but we’re always trying to speak through the text and internalize and incorporate what other people have said. We’re trying to get that flow going. And then there’s ruminatio. Ruminatio is the philosophical chanting. I will choose a phrase or a sentence, make sure you all understand it, at least in the sense of an inkling, at least in the sense of I’m on the tip of an insight. And we’ll do the chant and then we’ll chant it and then I’ll pass it to Tracy and then to Robert and then she passes it to Robert and to Karen. We go around. Remember when other people are chanting to chant in your head silently with them. We’re trying to make this collective and flowing. And then there’s a pause after each and we usually do four rounds of those. So first of all, any questions about the review of the procedures that we’re going to be engaging in? Okay, so the order will be the following. I hope you remember it from last time. I’ll be the facilitator again. I’ll do the slow reading of the text with lots of pauses, including at the end of the reading. Then I will suggest a phrase or sentence for ruminatio. I’ll repeat it a couple times. If anybody doesn’t quite understand it, that is your opportunity to say could you give me a little bit of explanation if you need it. Okay. And then after that we will and I’ll guide you through this. We move to precious speaking. In precious speaking, remember what you’re doing is basically responding to this. What is the text provoking and evoking in you? What is the text provoking and evoking in you? What is the text provoking and evoking in you? We do the precious speaking. Then I’ll say and now it’s time we’ll move into the intentional conversing. And then finally when that ends we then will each will go around and a little bit more free form. Your takeaway. What are you getting from this? What’s coming out of this? And then I’ll tell I’ll say when we’re formally ended the philosophical fellowship and then we can have some free form discussion. Any questions, concerns, or comments that need to be addressed before we get? Are we sitting as the to do the call for initially? That’s a good idea. Yeah that’s a good idea. So that’s a very good idea. I forgot about that. Let’s do that again. Let’s get into the proper. Thank you for that Tracy. I’ve forgotten about doing that. So let’s take a few minutes and we will do a mindfulness practice. For those of you who are unfamiliar you can check this out on the lesson section for meditating with John Vervecki. But the four of us are going to be finding our center, our route, our flow, and our focus. We’ll do that for about three or four minutes and then we will. Sorry I’ll have to interrupt and then we will begin the practice. Any other questions about any other aspects of it? All right so let’s take a moment to get into a state of mindfulness by cultivating the core four. So I’m slowly coming out of your practice. I turn my notifications off. I’m just going to put my phone on airplane mode because I don’t think that’s it’s working. There we go. All right. So the passage is I said is from Eckhart. So man’s proper activity is to love and to understand. Now the question is what does blessedness most of all consist in? Certain masters have said that it consists in understanding. Others say that it consists in loving. Others say that it consists in understanding and in loving. And these speak better. But we say that it consists neither in understanding nor in loving. More, there is something in the soul from which both understanding and love flow. It itself doesn’t understand or love as the powers of the soul do. Whoever understands this something understands what blessedness consists of. This has neither before nor after and it is not the same as the soul. Nor after and it isn’t waiting for anything to come for it can neither gain nor lose. This is why it is deprived of the knowledge that God is acting in it. More, it is simply itself rejoicing in itself as God does in himself. Therefore we say that a man should be so free and empty that he neither knows nor understands that God is acting in him. This is how a man can possess poverty. So the phrase for the ruminatio that I’ve chosen is there is something in the soul from which both understanding and love flow. There is something in the soul from which both understanding and love flow. There is something in the soul from which both understanding and love flow. Are we ready to begin the ruminatio? I’ll begin. There is something in the soul from which both understanding and love flow. There is something in the soul from which both understanding and love flow There is something in the soul from which both understanding and love flow There is something in the soul from which both understanding and love flow There is something in the soul from which both understanding and love flow持 staring please. To close. ꗶ They’re sitting here. żen I had just seen a ejection machine rest your face to the screen over and over again. McGee is uh I’d like to see this report when I’m on, and then when I’m done I think before I come in and stamina club talk online. reen say, both love and understanding flow. There is something in the soul from which both love and understanding flow. There is something in the soul from which both understanding and love flow. There is something in the soul from which both understanding and love flow. There is something in the soul from which both understanding and love flow. There is something in the soul from which both understanding and love flow. There is something in the soul from which both understanding and love flow. There is something in the soul from which both understanding and love flow. There is something in the soul from which both understanding and love flow. There’s something in the soul from which both understanding and love flow. There is something in the soul from which both understanding and love flow. There is something in the soul from which both understanding and love flow. There is something in the soul which both understanding and love flow. There is something in the soul from which both understanding and love flow. There is something in the soul from which understanding and love both flow. There is something in the soul from which both understanding and love flow. There is something in the soul from which both love and understanding flow. There is something in the soul from which both understanding and love flow. Now let us pass into precious speaking. I feel myself reaching to the ground of a new understanding and love. I feel at the edge of an ocean of tears. It feels like we were singing. I feel this heaviness behind some force that wants to be heard but doesn’t want to be heard simultaneously. I am aware of feeling in a flow and wondering about the activities in it. I feel like I am trying to connect all of this to the poverty that Eckhart speaks about. I have a sensation of serenity traveling from my head all the way down to my toes in response to the word pure. I wonder what a poverty without money would feel like. Poverty feels like something that has been dropped in the middle of this calmness and created. I don’t have a word for this. I am trying to let go even of God. Poverty of spirit, that expression has now completely changed for me since the reading. I feel like they never talked about justice, but there is something to do with justice in this space that we are looking at. The word God hit me and I am wondering how God shows up in poverty. Beneath this struggle I sense the rejoicing in being that Eckhart spoke of. I am feeling connected to all of you through the ruminati, the repetition of those lines. I can sense you as real human beings now. I am thinking about the future when he was talking about this timeless point. I am thinking about the emphasis on activity and how activity participates in flow, understanding, love, and my conception of God. I am trying to pass into intentional conversation where we can talk about not only the text but what we are all saying to each other. I am sensing a perspective. I think that touches everything we are talking about here. There is the peace, the change in view. I think that Robert is right. Eckhart was tremendously concerned with justice. Justice is somehow pregnant throughout all of this. The thing for me for Eckhart is the breakthrough, the dark brook. Robert said it from the beginning, the force. I am sensing that. We are getting all of the axes for which breakthrough is possible. As we were repeating, when I said tears, I could feel them but not in a bad way. I am wary of this because I don’t want to sound weird and mystical. I really felt it as it was going around. I could feel this pure, innocent spirit with all of us but especially while Kira was speaking. It was so beautiful that it made me want to cry. He is confident that he is not confident. He is trying to speak of things below love and reason. He is trying to make sense on some level. What is this experiment he is trying to partake in? Like Tracy was saying, Kira was presencing. It is lighting us up too. It is reminding us of something we have lost. Or something he wants to show us that matters a lot to him. I have two thoughts going in at the same time. One is the mention of him writing this or doing his work right before the Black Plague. The awareness of where we are and what is happening in our greater world right now. The interesting thing that happened at some point, I switched the words from understanding and love to love and understanding. The interesting difference in how that felt. How that changed. It felt warmer in that different order. It was an interesting thing to experience. I also enjoyed the orders moving back and forth. I thought, and Kira was glowing throughout this practice. I welcomed it because I thought it was conveying much closer to what he wanted to say. Sometimes in a practice, I will walk one way through a ravine doing the savoring. Then I will turn around and walk the other way. They are two totally different perspectives. It is giving me a sense of what I think he is doing with the love and understanding. Love is walking this way and understanding is walking this way. Yet the way up and down and in and back are the same way. He is trying to get us to that. That is what is coming to my mind right now. The fact that we wove back and forth between them gave me a real sense of that. Yes, I felt when the change happened. It was Kira who said, yeah. I felt it. My mind was going, which one is it? Is it love or understanding? Is it understanding or is it love? Say love first. I felt like a child. It was funny but it was also making me want to cry in a really warm way. I think it was Robert who said earlier what we have forgotten. I don’t know whether I have forgotten how to be human. I certainly, well, we all are because of where we are in history. Very strange things happening. This reading somehow gave me a sense of comfort. It was like, oh, Meister Eckhart went through something similar way back. He wrote this sort of stuff for human beings in the hope that love and understanding and something pure is underneath it all because I know it is there. It is so imprisoned by so many other things. I know it is there. I can’t say how I know it is there. I can feel it. I only get to feel it through discussions such as this, which is very precious and very unusual for me to engage in. Yeah, while Kira and John and Tracy were talking, I was imagining especially when John was talking about these two rooms, there was kind of the cold intellectual room. It was like an armory and it had weapons and it was powerful. There was a warm, warm atmosphere. It was like a warm, warm environment. I wanted to say family first, but then I thought friendship or fellowship because there was so much commonality that wasn’t just lineage. Then I thought, what if there was warmth in the weaponry room and what if there was a sense of purpose and a challenge, a call to action in the family? Tracy was saying something that was so even deeper than both of those things. There was almost like this third room was like a basement that was beneath them. It was like golden and diamond. It was empty and full simultaneously, but you can’t really put words on it, I don’t think. I’m noticing there’s a part of me that wants to, at the very beginning, the emphasis on activity. For some reason, that word, some part of me just grabbed onto it and held onto it. Then the weaving of love and understanding and God through those, I can see almost in my mind this flipping through a Rolodex trying to find what are the activities that correspond to these various things. There’s also this sense of being in this group of love and understanding and how that weaves in of, I know each of you a little bit, but what’s formed in this practice feels like, I don’t know exactly, the activity, one of the activities of love and understanding. That’s what’s happening here, that’s part of it. This is truly wonderful. For me, what this is all, I’m starting to, two things, I’m starting to get a sense of Eckhart’s mind and perspective because all of this is disclosing. It’s starting to make it three dimensional for me, really present, that perspective. Then I’m also hearing the challenge, the activity. What is this activity in which we are even impoverished about God? We’re so poor in spirit that we’re not even trying to have God anymore. We’re trying to let go even more deeply. What is Eckhart calling us to? I can feel him now here. There’s like, you guys are making him present for me. What’s he calling us to? The love and understanding and the purity that he writes about in the paragraph we read seems to me that that’s exactly what we are embodying right now. Even though I don’t, I know you all a little bit now, not that much. There is apparently something quite sacred going on here through the words written, was it 1200 you said? Yeah, probably early 1300s he wrote this. Yes. You just can’t premeditate this kind of stuff. It’s really, really special. I can feel the presence of all of you and you’re just images on a screen. That is incredible. This is, we’re living in this world that is just on a screen right now. And yet I can feel a spirit there. Yeah. I got a sense that his world was so much, like the opposite of his world and our world is technology, I feel like. And he’s blind to God by knowledge and love, which are like eternally troubling human beings. And there’s this obvious irony that keeps bringing up that we don’t know each other that well. And we’re 4,000 or 5,000 miles apart from each other if we had to walk from place to place to place. Yet this notion in this book that was written by this real human being, plus our curiosity and a host of other confluences of things that have motivated us all, have brought us to this point. And it’s just so interesting to me to see four people caring about something and also imagining it just so deeply and so powerfully. Now I wonder if he tried to do that on purpose, if he was going like, okay, well, what if someone looked into my book one day, if I could show them one little pebble and I want it to be the shiniest, beautifulest pebble, maybe I’ll just put it right there and walk away. And yeah, it’s profound. He couldn’t have anticipated this moment. He’s here almost in a sense. So it’s very interesting. It’s really interesting. In this round, John, when you talked about feeling like Mr. Eckhart was here and Tracy talked, I don’t know why this sounds so strange, but I got this very strong image of Quasimodo from the hunchback of Notre Dame. I don’t, and I don’t have any idea. I have no idea where that came from. And so I’m just sort of like mulling that around of what that represents to me. But there’s a like, but, and I got this vision of bells and it’s like Quasimodo, he rang the bells that like everyone that connected everyone in Paris at the same time. And there’s something about like him ringing, like he wrote this and it’s ringing a bell that’s resonating with us across, you know, continents. And like it rings through, you know, it’s a bell that’s being rung through time that connects us to each other and to him in a way, you know, because like those bells, they like, you felt it, you know, that felt it in your bones. And. Well, we’re already gradually moving into it. So let’s just go now into the more free flowing discussion. And so I was, when Kira said that I was thinking of there’s a passage in Augustine and it really hit me where he says, I hear a bell ringing on the hill. And when I was reading this and I was an undergrad at the time, I suddenly felt like I was there with Augustine and then all of this reaching and then what Kira said here about, you know, Eckhart’s sounding something, right, that is reverberating through all of us. And there’s something, there must be something in us that’s resonating, but it keeps drawing me on. It’s because he wants us to get somewhere, right? And he wants us, right? This poverty of spirit keeps coming back to me. What is it? And we’re all getting to this place where you guys are starting to express the rejoicing he talked about, the rejoicing and just being right and being at this depth and being connected. And it’s giving me a taste of, I think of what he’s trying to get us to realize. We no longer have to speak in sequence, by the way, it’s now free flow. That image of the bell ringing through time, Kira, that was just gorgeous. And the one is what kept coming to me as some, I think it was Robert was speaking, I kept thinking this is the one, this is some form of the one. And this is what happens when human beings come together in mutual love and understanding, instead of judgment and opinions. We live in a world of opinions now. Everybody’s got an opinion. We’ve agreed to come together to practice something that is pretty strange, but in the process of so doing, I can feel an element of eternity in us and the love and understanding and purity, as I said earlier. Surely this is one of the definitions of joy when human beings really communicate. Mm hmm. That’s well said. That’s very well said. Yeah, that is a kind of rejoicing, isn’t it? It feels that way. Say a little bit more about, if you would please, I agree with you, I’m resonating with it, there’s a sense of oneness and it’s not a thing, right? Yes, yes. This is what it feels like to really talk with other human beings from the depth of one’s self. And I don’t mean that as a kind of a kind of a one’s self. And I don’t mean that in an intellectual sense. I mean it in a spiritual sense. And I’m not really a very spiritual person, but I feel it. And I also have a great yearning for the spirit. It shows itself in the kind of books I read, but I keep it hidden from the world. And in this little group, I have the opportunity to let it out of its darkness. I have never read Akmai’s to Ekha, but I am reading Saint Augustine at the moment. And I’m just with him all the time. There’s something, John, you said multiple times, that it resonates with you in the image of the bell and the metaphor of the sound. And then Tracy, you brought in the one. And it reminded me of the chanting that we do of, you know, om and then the one. And there’s a so much of an attempt in my life to be able to connect with people. And you end up talking about your life and things like that. But the fact that that image of the Hunchback of Notre Dame came up, and being able to walk through that and see that, that is something that I don’t get the opportunity. There’s something that got accessed that doesn’t get an opportunity to bubble up very often. That is that like, it’s part of the activity of what we’re doing here that touches something that doesn’t get accessed very often. And I’m like, I don’t want to let this go. That’s inspiring. That’s the inspiration. You can have this moment and it can feed you for 20 years. It’s really neat. I think the shift from propositions, from the understanding of what is happening in the moment, to the moment that you’re in the moment, from the shift from propositions, from the understanding to the community, to this act we did, there was no words. It was this action. Yeah, it doesn’t exist a lot in 2020 on earth. It’s very interesting too. And just to hear, here in Tracy especially, share without hesitation what you’re thinking. It’s profound, I think. Kara, I wanted to share with you because you kept really, I felt like you almost being nourished by the pure activity. So I took the course on Spinoza with one of the great Spinoza experts, Savin, and his final thesis was that God for Spinoza was pure activity. Pure activity that makes all the specific activities possible. There’s something that, it’s interesting, there’s something that speaks to a part of me and I could see my mind trying to understand it at the same time. And there is this, John, your voice coming in that says, remember the being mode. As part of my internalized sage, remember the being mode. It’s something that I can’t understand and it’s part of, yeah, it is that pure expression. And you can see, I think, in the way we exemplified it, what Eckhart means, how it’s both pure activity and pure receptivity because we’re not just acting, we’re also receiving each other and connecting, we’re participating in each other. It’s simultaneously like a pure activity and a pure receptivity at the same time. And he’s trying, and he’s trying to, he’s trying to, he’s trying to, he’s trying to understand that. And then, he’s trying to understand that. And he’s trying to understand that, and he’s trying to understand that as well. So he’s trying to understand that, but he’s trying to understand that there’s a way to do it, and a pure receptivity at the same time. He’s trying, and it’s not only this way between us, it’s this way within Eskira was just doing it, and then somehow that’s supposed to be deeper than any conception we have of God. Oh wow. It did feel like an emptiness, and it felt very medieval. It didn’t feel Greek or like a lot of other places. I expected actually, John, it felt like when you were prefacing things, it felt like it was going to go into something like, like almost like the Kyoto school, like there’s no thingness. You were talking about something under, and I was like, oh, this is going to be interesting. I’ve never seen this take on Master Eckhart, but it didn’t go there at all. It went in, I always wonder about the Middle Ages, because they don’t follow the chains of thought that the rest of the time periods that we teach in school do. They’re a very weird point in history, because they go backward, they don’t progress, they go backwards, which is kind of weird. The Greeks march forward, and we march forward, but they spin in this like this weird point, and he was really, I don’t know, for me a little bit doing that during that 20 minutes we did. So you’ve said emptiness, but you’ve also said at one point in the practice it was emptiness and full. You even described the basement as empty and full. What does that mean for you, the two together? It’s a paradoxical, right? Because like when Kira was singing, I usually think of the no thingness as like a void, like the lack of like a pressure pulling outward, like that space created by pulling out of pressure. But this was somewhere else. I can’t quite take my experiences and put my finger on it, but I certainly will think about it a lot. I don’t know if that answers your question, Joan. Robert, something that came up as you were sharing just now was talking about like the middle ages being this time where things are going backwards. And it’s interesting because like I immediately had this sense of like, there are a lot of things that feel like they’re going backwards in modern culture at the moment. There are certain things that are coming back up that it seemed like they had passed and they’re coming back up again. And so it felt like we’re very, like it’s possible we’re very much in a similar period. Like there’s ways that we’re continuing to march forward, but there’s this word miasma comes up as like this thing. And it’s interesting. I used the word expression earlier and that word somehow like again, rang a bell with me of like how pure activity and pure expression, how activity and expression are. I don’t know, there’s something that my mind wants to explore there that I’m interested in. So everyone, we’re now going to move to the final stage, which is takeaways. What do you want to take away? What are you taking away from this? What I’m taking away from this is there’s a form, well, of something deeper than love and understanding that only comes out when you try to exemplify, when you try to evoke and presence. And it moves to aspects of me and aspects of us that we can’t get to otherwise. And I’m really, I was deeply impressed by how this whole thing takes on a life of its own, right? I mean, I’m reading this amazing book and I’m reading Eckhart and I did Lexio on Eckhart this morning and yet there was stuff here that was like, it’s not like it contradicts what I read, but it’s just like, well, it rings the bell, right? Then all the other stuff was the bell and then what happened here rang the bell for me to use Kira’s metaphor. So that’s my takeaway. My takeaway from this is pure activity, what shall I do next? But also, how can I, having learned, not learned, having experienced this art of listening from my depths to all of you, how can I now take that out into the world and adopt that kind of practice with other people? Because I realized that I don’t listen well enough and I would like to listen better. That’s what I’m going to take away from that. It’s the process itself that is showing itself to me as something really amazing. Yeah, I think it was really the most interesting part to me that I’m going to take with me was the symbolic act of, especially, I thought it was so fascinating how we pulled in popular symbols, our own personal imagery, the imagery of the text. I almost feel like something new was spinning in there. And again, that process, like you can read about that, but I’ll be thinking about that a lot this week and this month I would say. I’m really trying to savor the experience of that I can participate in this because sometimes I question whether or not, I don’t know what I’m going to do, what I’m going to do, and I’m just trying to do my best to be able to be able to do that. Whether or not, I don’t know some of the thinkers and I don’t know all these things and I worry that I don’t have some profound thing to say and yet just the act of participating and being someone who lets things come out naturally, that’s part of the process. So I’ve sort of pulled back on participating in these groups in other places because I wasn’t sure and so just kind of my takeaway is to savor like, I guess that I have a part to play in all of it and that I want to and I want to create, I want to be part of creating opportunities like this. Elsewhere. Well thank you all, this has been truly wonderful. So I’m going to thank everybody who’s watching and I’m going to now end the recording.