https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=onv2Xlcv5tQ
Welcome everyone to another Voices with Raveki. I am so happy and charged to be here with the amazing Rick Rapetti. Rick and I are becoming friends. We resonate deeply. He brings an authenticity and an insight into topics that I’m passionately involved with and concerned about. And so Rick, just welcome again. For those of you who haven’t seen the previous two dialogues, I’ll put the links in here. But maybe, Rick, you could again briefly introduce yourself and then we’ll just start right into it. Thank you, John. The feeling is totally mutual and probably stronger on my end, as far as the accolades about you go. But thank you for that introduction. And like last time, I hope I can live up to it. You have so far. So yeah, so I’m a full professor of philosophy at the City University of New York. And for the last several years since I got my dissertation, which was on free will and metacognition and stuff like that, I’ve been focusing on mostly on meditation in my work. And that’s been a kind of my real curriculum vita in the broadest sense of my life. It’s just kind of really trying to understand the philosophy of meditation. And as John knows, because he’s a contributor to one of the chapters, we have a book coming out in a month in May, I believe. May 17th, I think, is the publication date. It’s the Rutledge Handbook on the Philosophy of Meditation. And there are 26 chapters, one by John, one by me. And that’s really the love of my life, philosophy and meditation, and then the unity of the two of them. That’s basically the short story about me. That’s great, Rick. So before we turned on the camera and the recording, Rick said he had some questions he’d like to ask me. And he said, like, I’ve been asking him a lot of questions he’d like to ask me a couple. So we’re going to start with that. I suspect when we get to sort of the third kind of question, or let’s the one we plan to be third, it will open up and be much more dialogical. But please, Rick, begin. Yeah, John, I’ve heard you talk about dialogos a lot. I certainly have a sense of what it means. But last time I said this in the pre-discussion, you knew something and did some reading and knew, heard about and were interested, very curious about philosophical counseling. So you asked me because I’m a philosophical counselor. So you do this dialogos thing a lot. I would like, and I’ve garnered, you know, when you see a new word and you don’t have time to look it up, you get a sense of what it means when you hear it being used a lot. And that’s where I am with this dialogos thing. It’s very much like Socratic dialogue. It’s very much like a whole bunch of different things. And I’ve heard you make all sorts of descriptions about it. But I would like for you to just say a little bit more about what that actually is and how it’s done, like a kind of functional description of what happens when you engage in it. And what’s the methodology? Is there a methodology? Yes. Or a generic loose genus kind of thing for a variety of practices or speak to me. Thank you, Rick. That’s excellent. So, yeah, first of all, I want to note that a lot of this work is done in concert with Christopher Mastapietro and Guy Sendstock and other people like Edwin Roche and Peter Lindbergh, etc. So, dialogos, I make a distinction between dialectic, which is a practice, and dialogos, which is a process. And it’s of the nature of the logos that you cannot make it or merely receive it, you have to participate in it. So in that sense, there isn’t a method that makes dialogos. There is a practice that affords the possibility of it emerging. So I take great care to make that distinction. People say they’re doing dialogos. That’s sort of okay, because we can speak loosely about doing. So an example of that is I can’t make a good conversation. I can’t like if I do A, B, C, then good conversation, right? Now, that doesn’t mean that it’s arbitrary and I just can passively, I just have to passively wait and a good conversation will accrue. No, there’s things, there’s ways I can participate that will afford the and increase the possibility, the probability of the emergence of a good conversation. So dialectic is the name I give to a particular practice that I’ve crafted with Chris and Guy based on a bunch of other practices. And therefore, it belongs to dialectic belongs to a family of practices that seek the emergence of the logos. So first of all, talk about what the phenomenon of dialogos is, the process, and then I’ll talk about specific dialectic. And then I’ll talk about generic dialectic, if I can do that. Is that okay so far, Rick? As I said, I interject one little thing. This is like the distinction between meditative practices and being in meditative states. Exactly. That is a perfect analogy. That’s a perfect analogy. In fact, there’s something about that analogy I’m trying to get clear on. For example, I say that what distractions are to the practice of meditation, projections are to the practice of dialectic, right? And things like that, try to work out how that analogy can actually be helpful. So what do I mean by dialogos? So what do I mean by dialogos? So there’s psychological criteria, and I suppose even ontological criteria. The psychological criteria are the following. That in dialogue, you and I get into a flow state, a shared flow state. You’re in the flow state, I’m in the flow state, we’re doing the insight cascade, our intuition machinery is ramping up, the insight and the intuitions. I won’t go into all of the machinery of flow. I’ve published on it. I’ve talked about it. So there is a collective and reciprocal affordance of the flow state. And I’m just using it diatically here because there’s the two of us, but it can be with multiple people in a circle. So you get a flow state, and the flow state is both empowering, functioning to activate and access distributed cognition. But it’s also giving us awareness because of the way the flow state is a particular phenomenological experience that is disclosing how we are connected to the world in a particularly salient and memorable way. So you get the flow state, it’s activating distributed cognition, it’s accessing the collective intelligence that’s available there. What that means is that, like a criterion of success for DIA Logos, is that you and I both get to places collectively that we could not have got to individually. And we both feel that that has been a movement of not only between us this way, but also that each one of us has self transcended in a significant fashion. So there’s a horizontal and vertical kind of intimacy. So this intimacy, people in fact report discovering a kind of intimacy that they were always longing for but didn’t know that they wanted, because it’s neither sexual intimacy nor familial intimacy. It’s this new kind of intimacy. So this is where I’ll come back to this where it connects to guys work because guys have this of circling creates that kind of intimacy. When that intimacy gets sort of directed toward, when this gets more directed to this, then we’re moving into full DIA Logos. When we feel that we’re not only indwelling each other, but we’re starting to indwell ontologically more encompassing orders or levels of being. So, right. Logos. Yes. More into the Logos. Yes. Yeah, exactly. And so when you, there’s a lot more to it but when you get this resonance and this resonance, and people feel not only an intimacy with each other, they feel that there’s an intimacy with the Logos itself, how these two dimensions are dynamically resonating with each other. And then they pick up on an intimacy between their Logos, the Logos of the group, the we Logos, and the Logos of being. That’s DIA Logos as a process. So it’s very much trying to integrate aspects of what’s happening in the Platonic dialogues with Socrates, but also what you see in the later Neo-Platonic tradition, like when Plotinus is talking about the dialectic and the cultivation of virtue. Is that okay, as what DIA Logos is? Yeah, that’s great. But you mentioned dialectic as a practice that you bring that about. Did you say a little more about that? Yeah. So this is very much a work in progress. And it’s very much a case of participant observation, participant experimentation, and participant engineering. And there’s, I don’t know of any other way of doing it. So I practice a lot of these things. You saw the empathy circling with Edmund Royce, I’ve done insight dialogue, I’ve done circling, I do work with Guy and Chris. So I’m not going to, right, I’m not going to give sort of the machinery. So what practice looks like is this. Practice is, what makes it, one of the things that make it specific is what it’s focused on. So it’s not focused on just how we’re present in a situation like in circling, like in Guy Sandstock circling. It’s focused Socratically on a question and a Socratic type question which is about a virtue. So the whole point about a virtue is it’s supposed to do this and this at the same time, right? So what happens is you usually form a group of four. And the first person will be the proposer. This removes it out of the impersonal proposition that back to, I propose that. So this is the Socratic taking up the project of proposing, rather than pointing to something that Sophie said or something that somebody, so you actually take up that role. So I propose, I think honesty, I propose that honesty is X. Now you propose it to a specific person. And then they are, what they’re doing is something like empathy circling with you. They are constantly trying to adduce from you. They can ask for clarification questions. They can ask you to say more. They can also reflect back to you. They can say, I noticed you were silent there for a minute, what was going on? I noticed you clenched your right fist. And you also do the mindful mirroring thing that I learned from two-person Vipassana. So you’re reducing and mirroring and reflecting. You’re basically helping this person draw out their thinking as much as possible. And periodically, you will say, I understand you to be saying this. And they have to sort of say back, yes, you’re getting it. Once they’re done, you will, first of all, you’ll make sure that you understand them again. This is what I hear you concluding on. Is that right? Yes, you do that until you get their agreement. And then you say what you learned from it first. This is what I learned. This is what I hadn’t thought of before. This is a new way. This is a new angle. And then you say what you think was missing or mistaken about it, but not to them. You turn to the next person. They hear it, but you’re not directed at them. You propose you say to the next person what you thought was missing or mysterious or mistaken. And then you say that and then you say, on the basis of that, I now propose to you that honesty is who you pick up the other person. And then you just repeat this process. You go all the way around in the circle until the third person speaks to the first person. And you complete this all the way around and you do it several times. And then what happens is you go into after that free flow, dia logos, because hopefully by then it has it has engendered that. Oh, that sounds awesome. I want to do that, John. Well, Rick, if you have time, and I mean, I can offer an empty seat, invite me. Well, we’re doing a workshop in February on the 18th and the 19th, Guy and Chris and I. And I can get you a free seat if you want. You would be very welcome. Oh, I’ll get back to you. I have to look at my calendar and I don’t want to force you into anything while we’re on camera. Oh no, I would love to do that. In fact, I think I saw you and your friends advertising dates. Yes. Yes. Oh, awesome. That would be great. You know what this reminds me of, if you don’t mind. Socratic dialogue with a capital D. Are you familiar with this? No, no, no, no. Yeah, it’s kind of like it’s one of the modalities of philosophical counseling. It’s a group thing. And so you’ll get a group. It could be, you know, 12 people, six people, not too many, though. No, no, no. Yeah, yeah. Money or something like that. Yes. Because sometimes it’ll be a weekend retreat, but that’ll take up the whole weekend. But I’ve done it in a three hour class of mine at the college. When I had one of those classes that meets once a week for three hours that made that possible because I had a three hour container. But you come in with a topic, typically a virtue. It doesn’t have to be. It could be a concept, any kind of concept that Socrates might have tackled. Almost all of those were virtues. But in my class, I think we did justice or injustice. I forget exactly which one it was. But you tell the participants in advance this is the topic and then they think about it. They come prepared with a very short story of their own personal, immediate and direct interaction with this thing. Right. Right. Right. Maybe a paragraph long. You don’t want to spend too much time. And you ask them nothing too emotional, nothing that you’re not going to be able to maintain your composure talking about, nothing too private, you know. But, you know, something that when you think of this concept, what experience did you have of it? Right. Right. Yeah. Got to be you. It’s not like I saw it happen to my sister or no, you. When did you experience injustice or something like whatever the topic is. So then there’s a moderator like in my class, it was me and you go around and each student, but each person tells their story and the moderator takes a little note. Like it could just be one word like cashier story or, you know, some some word that will help you remember it. Each person tells their story. And when they’re all done, then you go back and you say, okay, you know, John had the cashier story. Remember, you know, short, short change that the register or whatever. How many of you think that that would most representative of the concept, you know, three or four hands go up and you go around and you get votes for each one. And whoever got the most votes, they become the primary person to cross examine. Oh, when you deeper. So now once once you say, okay, we picked John now, John, please say anything more that you think is relevant about that story to help broaden the context and deepen our understanding of it. And then you might go into it. I, you know, I want to embellish on this or that. And then you’re done. And then everybody can freely interrogate you about it. What about this part of the story? But really, the moderator is supposed to say after after he’s spelled out. What’s the depth of his story? The moderator then asks the group and John, what element of the story specifically did you see the criterion in your mind? What you think was the aspect of injustice? Where did that show up exactly in the story? Right. And what do you think? How can you articulate that as a criterion? Right. And so and then everybody questions the person also about that. And we just kind of it’s a free form thing to try to isolate the criterion. Maybe, you know, people can modify it in a kind of loose discussion. Okay. Once we have a tentative initial definition, then we go back to the first person, the second, and we compare the criterion with their story. Right. I tear and capture the injustice in Sam’s story. Right. And story. And if it doesn’t, we work on modifying the criterion so that it captures that. Right. We go through the entire set and then when we’re done, now we have a more group modified. Yeah. Definition of the target. And then the whole group does a Socratic cross examination of the new definition in a free form way. That’s very cool. It’s awesome. Sometimes it doesn’t lead to a consensus, but sometimes it does. And when it does, it’s just awesome because you know, most Socratic dialogues don’t end in a consensus. No. So that’s really interesting. I could see these two practices complementing each other. I’d like to learn more how to do this Socratic dialogue with a capital D. So what typically I’ll send you whatever information I can get on it. That would be deeply appreciated. So the what I tell people in dialectic into dialogos is. So it’s more apophatic rather than cataphatic. And that’s why these two methods would of course go very well together. Because what typically happens is when people are doing this, the virtue becomes more mysterious to them. So it’s more memorial and explosive. Yes, yes, exactly. Right. And I could see. So I just want to play with this for a sec. And so what typically happens is I tell them, because this is one of the lessons that Gonzalez and other Highland and others argues from the Socratic dialogues, the Platonic dialogues, is not to come to a final proposition about it, but to get into right relationship to it. And I do reverence and appreciation for it such that it inspires. And so, but what you’re doing is also part of the Platonic uber. And I think having forgive me a dialogue or a dialectic between the two of these methods, it would come closer to what I’m actually looking for. So I would really like to do to learn more about this and put it put it into put because that way we have a cataphatic and an apophatic sort of version. And then the two would resident. Oh, I’m excited about this. I’m very excited about this. I was right then to think that there was a. Yeah, very much. I very much. But that points me to the other point, I do not think there is a single practice. An ecology and a pedagogy of practices is needed for getting into the logos. So, for example, on the weekend we do not start with the dialectic into the logos practice. We start with basic meditative practice and a basic contemplative practice so and remind people to always bring those two into whatever they’re doing. Then we go into circling and circling is the circling in this workshop is designed to create phyla fellowship. Right. And then you turn the fellowship the phyla towards Sophia. And that’s the philosophical fellowship practice we do. And then after the philosophical fellowship practice we do the dialectic into the logos. Two sentences on philosophical fellowship, please. So it’s inspired by the work of Rand Le Havre. It’s not exactly his, but but he but he likes what I’m doing with it. Because he sent me an email said this is really cool. And we’ve tried to connect a couple times and then our schedules did not intersect. I’m going to try again at some point. So, you know, you give people a text ahead of time, the leader will give some background of the author let’s say it’s Kierkegaard or Augustine, or something like that. And then you tell. So what you do first is you do the slow reading of the text. And then the reader gets to pick out something that is salient and the gist in some way of the thing. And they chant it and you chant it, you chant it in circles, and you chant it slowly and really let it resonate. What is it evoking in you what it is what is it provoking in you. Right. So the evocation and the provocation and you’re doing this with each other. And then each one. Each person does precious speaking this is like what, Rand, right. As briefly as possible two or three sentences. What is being evoked and provoked in you. And then throughout, while you’re evoking. And well, and being provoked. You’re trying to invoke the perspectival presence of the author. So between in the we space the we spaces inhabited by Augustine or Kierkegaard and you’re, it says much about invoking him and entering into connection with him, as it is with your connection to the text. So you’re doing this sort of three way connection, you in the text you and other people and you and your presencing the person. And so again, it what happens is people start to say I felt like Spinoza was there, or Augustine was there and then they, I was not just in being informed by the text even understanding it, I was entering into a transformative reading of the text. Wow, that sounds awesome. I got to try that with my students. Yeah. So that. Related to Lectio Divina. I was just about to say that. That. So that’s sort of like a group version of Lectio Divina so it really works well with people that have already been practicing Lectio Divina, and then the two resonates so those two are properly paired together as well. Well, unfortunately we don’t we don’t have a chance to do the Lectio Divina in the workshop I would like to extend the workshop and make it a week and bring in some more practices. We need, I like, like I said I think the Socratic Dialogue is something I’d really like to learn how to incorporate. And that’s the other one that we need to do some shadow work in the, in the pedagogy so that people become aware of when they’re projecting and learn how to take that back. The most difficult thing in dialectic is to is for the listener to not talk about themselves. Right, when you’re listening to the other person be completely in service to them. Do not talk about yourself, do not try and, and I have to you have to go into the room and you have to say to people no no no, you’re talking about yourself. You’re, you’re you’re you’re unfolding your autobiography. People get a chance. Right now it’s that person’s time. And so people, right and and so that that’s it that’s a big part of it get people to pick up on a other centric and allocentric orientation of dialogue, rather than an egocentric. So that that empathy circle thing helps people. Yes, yes. Listen, you have to listen. And then you have to repeat it back. Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. Other other focused. Yep. Yeah. So those that that’s that’s what the logos with dial dialectic into the logos is there’s like I said there’s other ways of getting into our deal logos, I want to incorporate also create a pedagogical program that scaffolds people into dialectic into the logos. So we’re workshopping all of this right now. This is really awesome. Great work, John. Thank you. Thank you. And I education that we both should have had. Well that that’s the thing. And what’s interesting is people’s. I mean, people’s attitude towards philosophy or towards philosophy changes when they do this, they go, Oh, is this what philosophy is fighting, I never thought it was this. And I sort of say, Well, this wasn’t what it was. At one point, right, I don’t know of academic philosophies like this now academic philosophy gives us a lot of powerful tools that we’re using here but this is the this prac you won’t. If you go into an academic philosophy department you typically will not find people training this. I think that’s a credit dialogue with a capital D that I did with my students that normally doesn’t happen in a classroom. Yeah, yeah. And I’ve had classes where I start the class with meditation. I did a study on my own students for a few years where I would had a control group where they didn’t do any meditation and one class right we did it twice another class we did it five times another class we did it 12 times our semesters 12 weeks long. And I had one class where I did it every single day. Right. And then, and I had them do I don’t know if I mentioned this to you before but I had them do like I made 25 philosophical statements, and they use the Likert scale that they agreed or disagreed on day one and then on the last day of the semester. The more and then we analyze the data the more that they meditated, the more variance there was from the beginning of the semester to the end their attitudes towards philosophical things like, I feel confident that I know what reality is right. So it really had a tremendous impact but the class that meditated every day. The dynamic field that developed in that class was like the logos. Yeah, I don’t doubt it because that’s the experience I’ve been having. Did you publish that study, Rick, I did, I did. I’ll send you. Yes, I would love to have that that’s sorry for asking you for so many things but you’re saying so many interesting things that are really valuable to my work. I’m so glad we met. This is very, very valuable. Likewise, yeah was a bunch of us out there and we’re all starting to connect. Yeah, yeah, very much. That’s so that’s, and then the idea is, you know, the, the idea. This goes back to something that came up a long time ago in a conversation with Jordan Hall. And he said, Well, you know, you’ve got your ecology as a practice but you need sort of a meta practice, a meta practice that helps you curate and create and coordinate into individual and small group, the colleges of practices. And I thought that’s exactly right. And I thought, you know what the model is the model is platonic dialogue. And that’s what it is in the neoplatonic tradition, you, it was always the school, right, and the deal logos within the school that act acted as the meta space that gave you the collective wisdom from the collective intelligence that helped to guide people in their individual and small group of colleges of practice. So I deal logos should never be practiced on its own. First of all, it should be realized through a pedagogical scaffold, and it should always be practiced in right relationship to people practicing an ecology of practices. You know, this might segue into the next subject because as you were describing that this larger thing sounds like a container. Yes, pause. Yeah, yeah. And the Plato’s Academy, sounds like a church. And maybe what we need to do is open up a new Plato’s Academy john. I joke, and the name is intended to be a joke. I want to create the one stop enlightenment shop. Right. I exactly something like that. Yeah, yeah, very much. I mean, I both physically brick and mortar and virtually, and one, you know, you know, physical places nested within the virtual virtual space. And, you know, and I’m working with Nathan and other people to try and actually create at least a virtual network first of the already existing communities that are doing this and putting them into communication with the embodied movement people because I think both of them are needed as well. And trying to get something like this going. Yeah, very much, very much. Great. Well, I think I said this last time that the topic came up, count me in and you said, oh, I will. Yeah, I definitely will. I think I’ve mentioned you to Nathan I, I’m going to actually do that I’m talking to Nathan tomorrow. I think that it would be great if we set up a session so what what’s Nathan doing right now is he’s pulled the community and he gets questions, and then he’ll have me and him and somebody else. And we get into a deep discussion which also often leads to deal logos about, like last time, like, what is wisdom. What is an ecology of practices, but things like that. I would definitely like you to be involved with this. So, I’m definitely, I’m just, excuse me for one sec I just want to actually physically note this. Yeah, well I wrote down Socratic dialogue. My study. Yeah, that’s excellent. That’s excellent. I wrote some other third word that I was supposed to do for you but I don’t I can’t read my own handwriting. I’ll email about it and we’ll see if I forgot what I forgot or whatever. But let’s segue now into the, the, the container I prefer a different word for reasons that I think would be clear but we can discuss them. I prefer home, not just as a now but as a verb. We need those senses. We need a home that homes us. And I think that’s important. And I think that’s part of my good friend, Paul Vanderkley’s response to some of. I think this is a very important question. So first of all, what’s your take on what Paul is saying. He’s not here to defend himself or explain himself so we’ll be very gentle and respectful. I had no criticisms anyway, I just had some curiosities and some some of my own perspective which differs from his because he is a minister I believe. Yes, Protestant Protestant. I’m sure that that informs a lot of his, his worldview and, you know, each person goes into the market with a different interest and sees what he sees what fair enough that’s, that’s well said. Nevertheless, what’s your take on it what do you think he’s saying, and then let’s get into a discussion about it because I think this does segue birth perfectly from what we were already talking about. So, he, in three different conversations he had with groups of his friends, I don’t know what the different channels are but I just searched the name when I when you told me that, oh, he did something based on one of our. Found it and there were three of these conversations that he had and then he put together a mix from all three of them that seemed to be mostly about our conversation, but primarily I think what interested him about that was my many mystical experiences. Yes, and be particularly the latter ones which were sort of negative after my three spiritual teachers who were almost like wedded had what’s analogous to a divorce. Yeah, traumatizing. I lost faith in my community and I wound up leaving the community and all the community split up into three communities and. And then when I had no larger container or home to use your phrase. All of my psychic and mystical and spiritual experiences seem to go from having a positive valence to a negative one. Yes. Yes. And it was a dark night of the soul and eventually it became so overwhelming for me. I was in my late teens that I just had to shut the valves on that. So, so that’s the content of what his interest in me was. Yes. And then from his point of view I got the impression that as a Christian minister, you know, he thought that if I had a larger container like hit the analogy that he made in one of the talks was, okay, what if it was my local minister in my local church who had some kind of scandal, you know, with a nun or something and then you know I lost faith in that church. I still have the church with a capital C. Yes. Like I could go to another church. I can go to any number of churches. I think there’s the whole history of the church in the more metaphorical sense. There’s the Bible. Even if I don’t trust the human beings, I can trust the Bible and the Bible is the kind of gateway to God and all that kind of stuff. And in the absence of that, he thought in the absence of that kind of container. That’s why my, I took a kind of nosedive out of my spirituality or something like that. And this almost got the sense that he viewed it as something like maybe spiritually pathological as opposed to healthy. Right. You know, like it was a loss and that I might not have had that loss. If I had a larger container. Can I interject here, please. Rick, I think, I think there is a double response. I think he’s definitely responding to that. I think Paul is also responding because I was the person in conversation with you to my, my proposal of the religion that’s not a religion. Right. Right. And that where, where, where, and the problem with that, one of Paul’s things is, will it scale? Will it actually home people? Right. Whereas Christianity has a proven track record on being scalable. I respect that point, but I also have some criticisms of it. But the idea is, you know, Christianity is there and it has a proven track record of homing, whereas the religion that’s not religion. It’s not clear that that’s even viable. So I think there was also the response is also directed to that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He was like, oh, you know, John found a guy who represents what he loves and, you know, and then he gave his criticisms of it, which, you know, I forget I might be misrepresenting them. I hope that I’m not mischaracterizing any of any of what. Yeah, I mean, yeah, Paul, Paul always speaks very thoughtfully and very carefully and very respectfully. And so, yeah, let’s just let’s just do what let’s yeah, just keep going. One of the other things that he grabbed a hold of and that I thought might not really ring true to me was he showed the clip where I said, you know, after I had that tower dream where I was going up, it was symbolic for me. Yeah. I feel like I was going up a tower. It was getting rickety. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I remember. And went back down that in a variety of omens. Yeah. So me were messages from my higher self or from the universe or whatever from the logos that I needed to make an about face. Yes. But the way that I verbalized it in conversation with you was that I realized I just didn’t have the skills and he fastened upon that word skills. Yes. And this is a kind of Protestant idea I would imagine that it’s about grace. It’s not about effort, you know, and so and so it was as if I was a poster boy for this erroneous view that see, I thought I could do it all on my own. I could do it from my own generation of spiritual effort. And, you know, that’s not what it’s about or something like that between that and then the larger container. So it was a variety of these perceptions that I thought, well, I could understand them. They seem reasonable. If I didn’t know a little bit more about myself, but they didn’t ring 100% true to me. But but I’m still open. Like, like, I think I admitted to you that only in recent recently have I come to accept the fact that the absence of a home or a container is a The absence of a home or a container in my practical affairs might have had something to do with my the way my life turned out. Yes. One more thing I’ll say and then you know you can speak to whatever you were about to speak to. I did have a kind of home or container. I just didn’t trust it. I mean, Buddhism, there’s, you know, this place is all over the place. Hinduism, ashrams, temples, this, there’s all those Buddhist scriptures and I could have gone to India like all my friends did. And I knew about all these other great, you know, teachers and all that. I just thought, you know, at the time, I was getting a lots of feedback from my relationship with reality that it was time for me to dive back into the world like, you know, Yeah, like, yeah, and, and it was like, I had, it wasn’t like a loss of faith. I mean, I lost faith in that particular approach at that time in my life for me, because it wasn’t working for me. And I, I just decided it was an act of faith to plunge to dive into that mud lake of the world and knowing that I would emerge at the right time and that it was part of my path. You know, I, I had a kind of total trust on another level in a large, the largest container because I really did believe at the time in that totally mystical metaphysics that the universe is one and all the, and it’s all good. And, you know, it’s all part of it. It’s just, this is where my life has to move. Like, that’s not the direction for me. I get it. So it wasn’t a pathological loss of container for me. Although, if I had a home in that kind of sense of home for my spiritual practices or my ecology practices, all along, that might have my life might have turned out differently. But like I said, my curriculum Vita, I think, is this philosophy of meditation. I think it worked out just perfectly that I wound up doing everything I did in the philosophical aspect of it. Doing everything I did in the philosophical aspect of my life while keeping my spirituality on a low burner. And now they’re coming back and now’s the time for them. So that’s my perception of my path and my journey in life. Yeah. That wasn’t captured at all in, you know, me being the poster child for, you know, yoga is a kind of gateway to bad mysticism. And there’s some truth to that because, you know, look at my experiences. But yeah, this was okay. First of all, very authentic, very sincere and very insightful. So let me pick up on a few things that that I’m resonating with. First, there’s two you’ve made two allusions to works of literature, the Dark Knight of the Soul. And one of the things I wanted to say to Paul that I haven’t had a chance to say is, St. John of the Cross has his Dark Knight of the Soul, while he remains within the Catholic Church and the Catholic faith. And so I think that the Dark Knight of the Soul, the container will not sort of be a prophylactic against the Dark Knight of the Soul. In fact, St. John advocates that you need to go through the Dark Knight of the Soul in order to come to a true appreciation of the home that he never left. I think Rick isn’t quite meaning right, quite what, what, like the dark, because you referred to it multiple times as the Dark Knight of the Soul. And I’m thinking, well, you know, maybe that illusion is helpful. Let’s unpack it. And you know, St. John of the Cross, I mean, he, he goes through the Dark Knight of the Soul and it sounds pretty horrible. And yet it’s not, it’s, it’s not provoked by him leaving his home, the bigger container. And so that to me sounds like we’ve, I think we’re, it’s that the phenomena you’re describing has been this frame. Because I’ve always been intrigued by, and you see this also in Eckhart, the, the, the proposal from many of the people of the tradition, that you need to go through something like this in order to get to the higher levels. And from my own work, what this makes me think of is self organizing criticality, the sand mound goes to a certain height, it keeps growing, and then it has to collapse in order to create a wider base, so that it can go higher up. And so this makes great cognitive science sense to me. So that’s the first, then the Hermann Hesse, right, Siddhartha, and the whole point that Hesse is trying to get is that, right, people often can get caught up in going too high up spirituality, that they get too caught up, and I’m using that metaphor deliberately, in the upward movement of spirituality, that they lose touch with the downward movement of spirituality. Yes, there is the flight, right, but there’s also the grounding. And so people often, and that’s what I take Siddhartha to be a novel about, somebody realizing, wait, and then he goes down and then he realizes going down, he can lose it. And he tries to get, you know, I was going to say an optimal grip between these two, that’s what I see the book advocating. So I think it’s very plausible for you to say, no, no, that wasn’t a pathology that was self organizing criticality, making it possible for me to connect the two poles of spirituality in a more healthy manner, and I needed the philosophical tools to ground me so the spirituality wouldn’t keep taking me off. Right. And I, I think, again, I think that’s appropriate. So I resonate with those two points you’re making very well. Now, I do think that one more point that I wanted to make in reply to Paul, and I just want to emphasize to everybody listening everybody knows how much I love and respect Paul, right, and I don’t think I’ve never met him but I love watching an amazing person. But I was also saying, but he’s a Protestant, and he comes from a person who rejected the whole of the church now he may say Christianity, and then that, that’s where his point turns more towards me than you, Rick, because I think what he’s saying is it. And he says that he doesn’t say it like, you know, hand, you know, fist into hand or anything like that. But he says, you know, I just wonder if, you know, you will have the, that the religion that’s not a religion will provide the philosophical pedagogical practical in the sense of ecology of practices framework that people always need. So, I think that his criticism then is that, you know, doing these practices without a religious framework is very dangerous, I agree with him on that proposal. But what you’re saying is that framework didn’t cease for you, you just did not trust that it like that it should be. You had lost. Sorry, I’m struggling but give me a sec. What you’re saying is, look, it’s that I had these larger containers, but I realized I had something like an uncritical relationship to them and unreflective relationship to them, and that I needed to cultivate the philosophical skills of reflection and criticism to get back to a right relationship to, you know, the spiritual or religious dimension, is that fair. Is that a fair way of representing what you’re saying. You know, but to be honest, at that time of my life like I said, it was a variety of different signs and omens things that are resilient for me. Yes, that over a period of time form the gestalt, where I just knew I had to go in the other direction. Yes, yes, yes variety of guidance from all sorts of spiritual figures. You know who did similar things, or, you know, who, who did related thing I got you know clues from here and there, you know, you know, one of them was, I was reading I don’t remember I wish I could remember this book I’ve looked in many places, but it was some kind of a Buddhist retreat that This is just one of the many clues where he gets to talk to this, like the, I think it was the Teravata Burmese, staying in the forest, you know, and he gets to have the interview with the teacher. And he says, you know, my practice has become so dry, I used to have all these blissful experiences and trances and visions and now I’m just fighting with my thoughts and my breath, you know, I can’t focus, whatever it is. And the teacher said to him something like, and where are all of your wonderful experiences now. Yes. And it just that clicked for me. Yes. Yeah. It wasn’t that I was under this assumption that oh I’ve got skills and I can make all those things happen. Yeah, I did have skills and I’m sure they had something to do with it but I cultivated those practices for years, you know, and through sincere. Right, right. Right. And so it wasn’t about that but it was just that that’s not necessarily the way to, you know, like, I had all those things that I thought that those things were like, I get it. Yeah, I thought those were the things that were grounding me up with it but they weren’t. So that was the sand thing like yeah yeah like I just knew I had to go back into the world. One of the other things. It was instinctive it was organismic you know and there were signs of it were coming up. Right, right. Like the library angel brought me to that book you know, and to one thing after another, where finally I just realized you know, I knew I have to go back into the world. Okay, so this is a deeper response and I’m glad we able to draw it out. If you allow me some theological language will bend it if you want, but you’re pointing to there was an aspect of grace in this. This wasn’t something you were doing. This was a logos that was taking on a life of its own and guiding you forward. This was not you right. Yeah, so there was getting signs outside of me. Yes, that it was all over the place the world was telling me. Turn around. Excellent. So I think that’s a very deep and important response. I think the book you might be looking for is a book called living Dharma, where it’s a bunch of people interviewing meditation practitioners, perhaps that’s it. Perhaps that’s it. So, I don’t know I think it was in a larger book that wasn’t a bunch of those interviews but we’ll see. Okay. Okay. But I mean it’s enough that I remember the story but I just wish I’d be able to I know it’s the one it’s like I, there’s a Deichmann quote I know he said it and I, I have not been able to track it down specifically that I wrote it down Deichmann says and I was like, but where I oh. So, I, that’s really important, because that’s the self organizing in self organizing criticality. Right. And this is what you do an insight, you don’t make an insight you participate in it, you break the frame and you throw yourself in trust, you entrust yourself, like really pick you entrust yourself to the self organizing self organizational capacity of your cognition. So what you do is I break the frame and then, okay self organizing machinery take over and it self organized is a new frame for you, and insight comes to you and that’s gracious, that is gifted to you. But again, you don’t you either make it or receive it you participate in it as participatory. So you were participating in grace. I think, and I don’t think it’s, I don’t think I mean you got you were you, it was something given to you. What a ton of a my code to Ricky your other power right that led you right into guided you into the transformation that you needed to undertake. And like I said, that makes both phenomenological and functional sense it’s where the language of grace and the language of self organizing criticality just come together because we have those moments of grace, even when we have a real insight. You don’t make it insight, but you don’t, you don’t just passively receive it. Right, you participate in it being given to. I think that’s the word I was looking for when I said it did but didn’t have to do with skill. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And this is back to the core of skill, the criticism of skill is, I think you’ve talked about it when you think you might be bullshitting yourself with your spirit. Yes, exactly. Can make mental states happen in meditation. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So participation is the is the is the way to powerfully ameliorate bullshit I think that’s true. One of the things about the platonic tradition is, and even the Christian platonic tradition is, it’s, you know, I really appreciate in I really appreciate that tradition of Platonism Christian Platonism with its deep and ongoing reflection it’s happening right now philosophically on participation and a participatory metaphysics. That’s one of my proposals why Neil Platonism might be this is Thomas plants proposal but I’m taking it up, Neil Platonism might act as like a lingua franca. I use this metaphor instead of the courtroom of debate. We could have the courtyard of deal logos where we have, and what Neil Platonism does is it disposes the furniture and the setting, so that we can come in and gives us a common language, so that we not don’t necessarily agree, but so that we can deal logos with each other and his point was, you know, Neil Platonism did that both historically for us and then along the Silk Road, because it gets taken up by Islam it gets taken up by Judaism you know Sufism Kabbalah, there’s, he shows possible connections, you know with Vedanta and even because, so it’s basically the, it’s this, it’s the intellectual Silk Road that was going along with the literal Silk Road. And so that’s something also is that in a book or. Yes, it’s called lost ways to the good. I, by Thomas plant. I think that’s that’s close to the actual title. Yeah. So, I think, I think. What I’m saying is, I think you’ve got a deep response to that. I think that fair enough. Protestant critique, I mean, we do you acknowledge I acknowledge people do bullshit themselves that way they do think they can build Nimrod tower to the heavens, right they do they do think that and and Protestantism and I just and I. Another Paul, Paul Tillich makes that point clear that that that attitude is the fundamental attitude of idolatry, right, into the biblical term that I can build the tower to heaven. And what your dreams and other things showed you was, no, no, you can’t build that, but you weren’t just sort of flung back, you were being guided by what you actually needed and what you needed to do. I think it is right and proper to acknowledge and appreciate that point so thank you for saying that I think I think that’s very excellent. What do you think about the proposal that the logos, maybe helped by, you know, a new platonic framework in the way I’ve described the The courtyard framework. I love that idea I love the metaphor. I love the contrasted metaphor with the courtroom of debate or whatever. Yeah, yes, exactly. Oh, that is wonderful. I love the idea. Good, because that means so that that is my deeper response and I’ve made it to Paul directly in person. I made it to the two Paul’s That for what I think What I’m trying to propose in the religion that’s not a religion. I’m trying to propose this courtyard, whereby, because neoplatonism has twice, both in well three times in the ancient world at in the late Renaissance and in the early 20th century, it has interacted. It’s it’s entered into what I call reciprocal reconstruction also with science and really helped push science forward by giving people a dojo where they can move in ways they haven’t moved before and that was needed. And so it’s not only that neoplatonism can do this with the religions, it has also a proven track record of being able to do it with science. So that the non religious and science, scientifically oriented people could presumably also come in to the courtyard. That’s also my hope. Yeah, well, I think, what was it Augustine, who was a neoplatonist before totally, totally. He has, he has a neoplatonic mystical experience. That’s what primed him for Christianity, really. Yes. So what do you think. And it’s interesting because it parallels you, but his take is different than yours. So he has the. This is really interesting. He has the, the neoplatonic mystical experience but he can’t stay there. He feels himself fall away. And he wants to know what is the force of gravity. That leads me to the grave, right. What is any and that really bothers him and that resonates with him, eating the pear, and he had this idea and his own sexual addiction I was always licking the open sword of lust. And so he sees. Make me not right away. Yes, yes, yes. He sees he is caught up in the reciprocal narrowing of addiction, and it’s enough of a counterpull to the mystical that he thinks he comes to the conclusion that he needs to be able to do it. He needs grace in or he needs a love right that’s stronger than the arrows within neoplatonic mysticism to lift him powerfully away from this gravitational pull of addiction. Now he he he reifies it into original sin and all kinds of things that I think are mistaken, but he that that. Yeah, but interestingly, then then then that in the confessions. The next mystical experience he has is shared. The Christianity allows him, him and his mother Monica have a shared mystical experience, and he takes that as a kind of evidence that he has turned the right way. Yeah, he’s a fascinating character. You know, I’ll say one more thing and I think we have only about a minute left based on what we said we would do. When I wound up in Gestalt therapy, originally, was my divorce but then I became a student of Gestalt. One of my therapists. It came out in therapy that one of my original meditation teachers was kind of like a spiritual prude only the only the, you know, like the fourth chakra and up. Right, right. And that I really, I absorbed a lot of that by osmosis so that’s like Augustine, you know, yes, and sin and God and spirit, you know, this kind of dichotomy. Yeah. And so a lot of that upwardness was ungrounded for me. Yes, yes. And that was part of the reason why I had to. I mean it was at late in my late teens I wasn’t planning on becoming somebody with the stigmata, you know I was a biological human male. Also, so yeah, who knows it’s all multi dimensional. Well, but but that points to something important. And again I’ve explicitly made this challenge to the people like Paul that I’m in the Christians that I’m in dialogue with and I said, you know Christianity has these three different terms, and it’s not clear how they all relate, but they are related incarnation the body of Christ right and I said, all of this is going on, that needs to be you that needs to be ex located and develop, and especially right given what we’re learning about the embodied nature of cognitive of cognition, and, and, you know, take Augustine Augustine has a very negative view of the body. Right. Yes, very much, very much carnality, think about how that is a pejorative term, but notice how carnality is within the word incarnation. And so there, there, there, there is there is a lack of clarity. And from somebody looking there’s a lack of clarity on how these three belong together. And then what is the Christianity’s relationship to the but Christianity has always seen itself as opposed to the Gnostics in valuing the body and valuing that groundedness. But I think you’re making a fair point here, you, and this is this is Herman Hess’s point to it was reincarnation for me. Exactly. Reincarnating. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, there’s a kind of re embodiment that has a transformative spiritual aspect to it that was indispensable for your spiritual transformation. I, that’s what I hear you saying, and I think that needs to be taken seriously. You know, Nietzsche’s quote, you know, the height of my spirituality reaches into the depth of my sexuality. I keep coming back to that again and again and again. This is the work that john russon’s doing and his bearing witness to epiphany, right, you can’t you can’t like. And so I think that’s a very valuable response. And I think I think your responses are fair. And I think they’re good. And I think they’re insightful and authentic. I’ll be happy to hear what Paul might say. But I would also, I’m also going to arrange. I hope for the two of you to speak more directly. But I want, I wanted to thank you. This was great again. Always a pleasure, john. I know we have to stop shortly. Yeah. I would ask if you know send me whatever you’d like it notes you’d like put in, but another request. Because I’ve done it the last two times. But how do you think the third episode should be titled. Think about it. Give it some reflection about it and I’ll send you an email title. Okay. Very good. Thank you. All right. Any last words. But no, just thank you, john. It’s always really great. It’s very kind of this is very affirmative affirmative for me. Yeah, just to talk to people like you. Yes. Well, that’s one of the things that the logos should do. Right. It should really help people. I mean, this is an attempt to reinventio what Plato meant by recollection and amnesis, like people are like that that combination of discovering and remembering. Yeah, that’s very much another criterion of success within the logos. Right. All right, man. Take good care. You to take care. Thanks.