https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=SSPAmvL7ydk
Well, man, I really appreciate you taking the time to meet with me and This is I think as I mentioned my email Your work has been just a It’s been medicine. It’s been really healing and So lately I’ve been Lately I’ve been you know this last month kind of really in preparation for our chat You know, I read your book I’ve been trying following as many videos as I can and Man, you put out so much stuff recently. It’s just really been Hard to keep up with well, there’s a lot happening and there and there’s a lot of urgency and so, you know Doing as much as I can really trying good It’s amazing so Also the meditation Man, that’s been amazing to you. I feel like you know, I’ve been Meditating or at least thinking I’m meditating for the last I don’t know 10 or 20 years but this has Something about the way you’re describing it has I actually feel like I’m meditating Yeah so anyway, I Don’t know where you want to start I I have You know, this could be an interview it could be just a conversation What I don’t agree. What would you like? I think Man, I have a ton of stuff. I’d love to ask you but I think to keep it with a theme You know our school we have a training center. That’s Focuses on whatever refer to as the primal arts, right? Basically looking at you know, all the essential skill sets that we as humans have Practiced and preserved and continued using at some level either, you know from the the Perspective that we focus on is like a very kind of fundamental You know base like, you know awareness and tracking, you know, these are the skills of perception that people have been doing since the beginning of time, you know and Survival skills, which is the you know, the essence of existing and being here skills of healing preserving life and then skill of combat and so those four kind of elements create like this This training curriculum that Is is the skill sets we focused on and then we have behind that a layer Just to give you a little orientation to Conversation um the The next layer of skills is a focuses on the art or the experience of training and growth and so there’s kind of this a Multi dimensional and multi layered Training progression so It’s it’s kind of modeled behind after the the science art and philosophy concept of or I’m sorry the Yes, that’d be the true the beautiful and the good, you know Give me kind of a frame of reference so so that’s been You know the way I set it up is we have one class every month and it goes around for a year-long curriculum and Mostly it’s for local folks that live around here, but I do have some people come in and I’m starting to get stuff online Anyway the the where we’re focusing right now is a Class I call know thyself and of course following your work. I knew that was important to you and but man, it would be the ultimate to talk to you on that so That happens to be in what we refer to as the tracking direction so If you can, you know, I think of our tracking courses have essentially three layers of depth it’s the hard skills of tracking and then the Class we call the path which is basically So then we get into know thyself with which is like the philosophy so That’s where we are right now just give you a little context and and this is yeah How big a community is that we’re talking about You know It’s it’s been a dissipative structure. So we have People come and go and we have a We have kind of a base community, but it’s also been You know something it it seems what happens is it inspires people They have if they go through our programs They kind of get inspired and they kind of go through this cycle and then end up getting released into the world and doing that thing So we end up having a community An extended community, but it’s not necessarily all here all the time So I have I have a few students that practice, you know, like martial arts we do that consistently but So I size-wise I mean, it’s I would say it’s quality over quantity. So We’ve probably had You know that have been here through time like deeply probably 50 to 100 people and then a lot of ripples from there About 20 years Yeah, the school itself about 15 years and then kind of preparation for that so Yeah, you say we who else is working there with you Well, actually me and my wife and then Primarily I’ve been in the school for about a year I’ve been in the school for about a year I’ve been in the school for about a year I’ve been in the school for about a year Primarily I’ve been I’ve been kind of the the head instructor pretty much this whole time. I’ve had a few assistant instructors along the way and But it’s been kind of a small small thing where I kind of act as a guide in this experience and then Basically it there’s a lot of I guess one of the main vehicles for it has been mentorship I would say right right right You that’s really it’s that kind of patient so right Wow, that’s really cool. That’s very yeah So I like I like I like getting into contact with these Emergent communities of practice and the emergent color practices. I find it. It’s I find it really really Stimulating and thought-provoking so I’m glad to meet you. You found some amazing ones. Yeah, likewise so Well one more thing I’d like to share with you is is from your impact is Something I found very powerful and when I say healing you know, I have a lot of training in a Number of areas that I feel like the It’s been extremely powerful and one one of them has been with Man named Tom Brown jr. Who’s a tracker and he was trained in the old way by a Apache elder, you know Learn this very grounded and very at the same time transformative and even spiritual Experience right so and I’ve been trying to learn I’ve been trying I’ve been learning from him for the last few years and In that process, you know the the the Teaching style and the the culture that it comes from is very I would say Their focus is on awareness, you know, and their focus is on Earth connection and It’s it’s a it’s a departure from our normal from our Western perspective They’re a very I mean one way to explain is they’re very organized around space. So it’s very We’re often overrides around time. It seems they’re kind of a spatial World and so a lot of the language and a lot of the teaching kind of has to do with has to do with that but there’s a there’s a reference to what’s called coyote teaching, which is a a way of Conveying what’s not even conveying is drawing people through experiences, you know instead of trying to give them information and kind of We tend to it’s a experiential pulling someone through Through mystery basically in ways that they don’t even know what’s happening to them and they end up putting together their own experience and so very What I’ve learned kind of through you very so kravik in nature as well. They use the yeah They use the what’s called the sacred question Or the art of questioning and that’s one of the main vehicles. So Because they’re so generative, yeah, they don’t collapse on the answer, you know, they expand into It’s a amazing way to learn and to teach but what I found from your work is is your precision with language and Defining terms and somehow building the bridge from a very grounded Scientific, you know place to to bridging all the way to this metaphorical realm that I’ve been Custom learning from so the language is often get to learn through is basically metaphor, you know And it works surprisingly well actually but To have this have it grounded in the physical in this way or or in How do you explain it but it’s been very powerful and very it’s filled in a lot of gaps for me. So What was this the name of the teaching what you say coyote teaching or what was it? Yeah That’s cool I’d like to know I’d like to learn more about that and especially the the art of sacred questions Well, you could see why I’d be very interested in that Is there a return written down or the videos about this but there’s From this lineage say there and this is a pretty broad broad Broad group so when I said, you know 50 to 100 people that’s That’s the people that work seriously with me There’s a whole community. There’s a whole underground movement going on. That’s that’s worldwide and So there is a lot of material I only know of Tom’s books Tom Brown. He’s written a lot of books as well as but they’re more story, you know, there’s there is a There’s tons of teaching in them, but you can see how I don’t know that might be a good place to start actually Yes, please send me some links or yeah, that’d be great Yeah, and then another reference is John Young. He’s another teacher of mine. He’s he’s taught Courses in the art of mentoring and all this and it’s it’s been really powerful. So I’ll send you both those Please thank you Ben. I would appreciate that Yeah so So, yeah, I just wanted to Say the the value of somehow however, you’re using language has been at least from my mind. It’s been really powerful really effective With that where I’d like to start is actually maybe just asking you to define a Few things even though you’ve defined them before in your material But I think for our audience it would be really powerful and I’m also trying to get people Exposed to the work. So thank you. No, I’m happy to do it again, but so So with that well actually, you know what Could you tell us a little bit about your your background in relationship to This idea of know thyself and maybe it’ll kind of reveal why I invited you to oh Okay, well, that’s that’s a long little long story Where to start I Came out of a fundamentalist Christian background that It’s interesting No matter what how people end up their religious upbringing goes like it gets almost into you like you’re into your DNA, right into your your the rudiments of your thinking and being but I left that form of Christianity because it was ultimately very It was very traumatizing on me in a lot of ways And it became very antagonistic towards Christianity religion in general And then well in university I encountered the figure of Socrates in a philosophy course And It had a huge and profound impact on me because I saw a way of Cultivating Wisdom and virtue and what I would later come to call, you know a kind of spirituality I don’t like that term, but that we don’t have a better one right now And that that had a huge impact on me And so Socrates is very much for me a sacred figure in that I As you know, because there’s all these socks like there isn’t one Socrates I mean it was a historical figure presumably But you know, there’s stock Socrates as seen through the eyes of Plato And then as seen through the eyes of the cynics and the stoics seen through the eyes of you know Paro and the skeptics or Epicurus and the Epicurean so right there’s right. There’s this huge It’s like a pebble dropping it upon there’s this huge ripple effect that comes out And what what what I saw is that I can return to that rippling again and again and again and Again and again and again And when I do I see things that I hadn’t seen before And I challenged in ways I hadn’t been challenged before And then I go out into the world and that interaction slowly percolates through my life and permeates from my consciousness and cognition And who I am and the way I am in the world sort of changes Right, and then after those changes I go back again Into that whole tradition and I see things I hadn’t seen before um And then they afford transformation And transcendent and so this this has just been happening Through the whole of my life. Um, the figure of Socrates is it it’s it’s inspired. He is inspirational aspirational He right and He’s constantly Encouraging and I I don’t I mean that I want to really put on that word not just in the sense of motivational But in the sense of exemplifying in helping me to become more courageous What tillick would call the courage to be so socrates is doing all of that uh, but of course, he’s also constantly challenging any Temptation and of course I’m very prey to it, you know to self-righteousness or self-importance Uh, um And so He has been a constant companion for me, um in a profound way and that has carried into The project that he fundamentally sees to be The project that he sort of took Although it’s many faceted the project he took as his central project and it goes by different names It’s you know, he wants the examined life because the unexamined life is not worth living He wants to know erotica He wants to know meets me if he wants to know how to care and love deeply and profoundly what should be loved And cared about deeply and profoundly he wants to know himself know thyself and all of these things are are constantly, um many different ways of Gesturing towards this core thing That’s right his love of wisdom and the fact that He doesn’t give an answer to that but does exactly what I said he right he gives you these Partial answers that are always meant to take you to the other answers And while while your whole life is doing this, right? um That’s that that’s that’s how uh He is has been and is to me in an ongoing In an ongoing way. I hope that answered your question Yeah, no, that’s great. Um That sounds really familiar that that experience sounds like Uh much of what i’m trying to describe with coyote teaching right Yeah, so I think it’s you know, the power of questions. You know, it’s like, um So and then also I just want people to understand that you’re also a cognitive scientist you are a philosopher you know sure those those um Tell us a little bit about work and how that might relate to know this. So So, yeah, so i’m a cognitive psychologist and a cognitive scientist Um at the university of toronto i’ve been teaching and researching And writing and publishing and you know all that since 1994 um And so I do a lot of work around This notion That’s ultimately inspired by socrates of What is a meaningful life what is the cultivation of wisdom and surprisingly Those questions we cognitive science and psychology Have gotten to a point where things that people might not have originally associated with socrates or can now be put into Uh deep discussion deep dialogue with the saccadic corpus. So as a cognitive scientist i’m doing work on You know, you know the nature of brain functioning or artificial intelligence and yet it’s surprising how Getting a deeper understanding of that actually affords me a deeper understanding of the socratic project And so what’s happened? Is i’ve become very interested around What kind of psycho technologies can people internalize? Such that they can better uh Cultivate what socrates was trying to draw draw from them try to induce from them and So and those are you know, those are you can see you can see Instances of all of these in socrates in the dialogue. Obviously there’s mindfulness practices socrates could stand in place Like in a meditative state for 48 hours straight like just profound abilities, right? Um, so that’s obviously there Um stuff we don’t know about but it’s only alluded to because it was so presupposed of greek culture Socrates, of course, uh showed great courage on the battlefield. We know he he was he had some Martial art training. He’s clearly spending a lot of time in the gymnasium doing a lot of mind body work again Plato just Plato needs broad shoulders because he was a wrestler, right? All of this is just so presupposed that they don’t even but you know If you read the republic plato goes a lot about how the body has to be trained properly So there there’s that there’s socrates’s capacity for uh, uh, you know questioning people leading them to aporia, you know, there’s a realization of How much they’re deceiving themselves such that they’re they might be open to fundamentally Restructuring their thinking so a lot of these practices are now Practices and processes that are being studied quite deeply within cognitive psychology and cognitive science. So it’s possible And this is what cognitive science does Because because in cognitive science you’re often trying to connect up to artificial intelligence How would you give these abilities into machine you have to take this weird question Which is this reverse engineering question? So you know given this process How can I reverse engineer it so I can get it down to its basic processes, right? And so I mean and I mean this with the deepest respect even reverence, uh We are getting some of the signs that will allow us to reverse engineer socrates and what does that look like? And in connection with that I’ve been working on these two ideas, which is like an ecology of practices and I alluded to them already You know socrates is there’s some mindfulness stuff going on. There’s mind, you know, there’s mind-body interaction Integration going on. There’s these questioning insight practices and then What socrates also exemplifies for me is That above and beyond the ecology of practices and this was an idea provoked by jordan hall I’ll always be grateful for in provoking right, is there a sort of a meta psychotechnology that You know collates and curates and right the ecology of practices And there was in the ancient world there was such a meta Psychotechnology that came right out as a socratic tradition and it has the name dialectic Um the problem is If people have heard that word before they probably heard it in hagel’s voice and hagel is much much later And it’s he has his own particular post-confuence land planet, which I think in some ways is misleading So what i’m trying to understand and what and see dialectic is is very complex process And you have to sort of walk you have to go through the socratic tradition Right the platonic tradition the spillard tradition the neoclatonic tradition to try and get a sense of What this is because it’s both an individual practice Right and also a collective practice and so a lot of my most recent work has been Trying to reverse engineer that with the help of christopher masapietro and guys senstock and jordan hall and peter linberg reverse engineer that um And do a lot of participatory observation observation of Uh, very like these spontaneously emerged discourse practices Like circling and empathy circling and insight dialogue It goes on and on and on right there, right? There’s a reason why there’s a reason why Like this is a plausibility argument. There’s a reason why independent. It’s like and it’s like convergent evolution There’s a reason why independently all and now you’ve introduced me to a new one, right? All these all these discourse authentic relation Right practices and communities are emerging. That’s a real phenomena that bespeaks that something there’s a lack Right. There’s something missing Right, and and so i’m trying to Get in that’s why i’m so pleased to talk to you. Although right now i’m doing all the talking. I’m sorry. I’m just trying to answer So right trying to understand why are all right, what’s the lack? What’s what’s happening in all of these uh communities right reverse engineer socrates And also do the participant observation and try to get all of those together to try and come up with What dialectic might might look like? Wow. Yeah That’s powerful, you know, um something you were recently I I watched the uh Your lecture in the meditation series on uh Uh, is it lectio divina? Yeah Yeah, um just as a as a practice. Um Something you were talking about just remind remind me of this. I wanted to uh, make sure I I communicated that There’s something about That practice as you described it. I was like, oh my gosh, that is that’s how we do tracking, you know Yeah, that’s that’s actually we use you know rather than the poetry we have All of nature, you know, so you have you’re actually making contact. I was doing it last night you’re actually making contact with some aspect of nature and allowing it to you know You’re going through a similar process. I don’t remember exactly, you know I have to kind of research how you laid it out, but it is this kind of uh, Ends up being this kind of revealing conversation. Yeah with that entity and and uh Becoming it and all of these, you know Yeah, there’s all these layers in that there’s just like Which really kind of makes me curious about how old that Type of thinking is because tracking is obviously Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean so you I mean the tracking I mean There’s arguments right that that’s the one of the big drivers of the expansion Uh, right lobes and probably also the cerebellum frontal That loop that the cerebral frontal cortex loop So yeah, I think I would imagine that the the practice you do is Is hearkening back to something that’s primordial lexio probably lexodermina Probably goes back to antiquity within something like the neoplatonic Uh period um, so later Towards late antiquity Um, and then it it’s hard to know and then it seems to overlap and get taken up into christianity in a powerful way I I I see lexio Uh as performing a very I when I talk about ecologies and practices and you you look for sort of design principles Um, so you want you want you want practices that have a complementary relationship They they have complementary sets of strengths and weaknesses and therefore they can give you uh a process of self-correction within the ecology And then you want you also want layering Which sounds like you’ve mentioned a couple times where like I have this practice and then I can Layer this another practice on it because this practice exaps and makes use of the preview. It takes it up into itself, right? And then there’s linking practices and the linking practices sort of help you progress between sort of the major nodes of your ecology, so if you have like sort of mindfulness practices here and Then you have something that is like has has much more propositional content in it uh, but it’s not just propositional which is dialectic Then lexio actually serves to bridge the bridge between it bridges between dialogos and mindfulness practices. Um, so in that sense it’s it’s it’s it would be interesting to talk to you to see how Because you gave me sort of the you gave me sort of fourth. What’s it four or three? I know that they they they correspond to true the good and the beautiful like oh, yeah Yeah, so four directions. I actually use the medicine wheel, uh psycho technology as a guide Cool Yeah, that’s been really powerful and just and not only there’s that’s the whole nother thing I’d love to talk to you about but the way that that thing with practice any of those types of tools and i’ve kind Of found a very i’d say core principle based version of it it seems to uh Get your mind kind of you’re you’re kind of mapping to it, you know And so actually after 20 years of training that kind of see the world that way, you know, it’s this multi thing but uh But yeah, so we have four directions which would be our four Dimensions of training and they have three layers of depth each so there’s 12 right right right so Pardon me trying to be a holistic system Right. Well, that’s what i’m trying to get out within ecology practices and i’m trying to I like i’d be interested in understanding a bit more This isn’t like people mistake this word because they take it to mean the same as sort of making But when jordan hall and I talk for example about design principles We’re not talking about like that you like we’re talking about the structural functional organization that makes it work right So i’d like to talk to you about that at some point that’d be very interesting yeah, but so And this is the thing like This has also been an interest. I just want to note this and then i’ll let me i’ll turn things back to you It’s been a very interesting thing for me as i’ve gotten into this and really try to Study and enact and embody this project um philosophy and You know dia logos I found well, that’s what’s happening with us right now that although the history and the content may be different I i’m capable of entering into you know, pretty Deep discussions with people from you know very You know separate traditions and that also is something that’s really Having an impact on me. It’s like okay. Why is this what’s going on here something? Deepest going on here something right? To me, it kind of suggests some sort of there’s there’s some sort of core Uh, either realness or trueness about that, you know when you do that When things started aligning like that, oh these yeah, yeah Yeah, very cool. Well um i’m gonna go back to my questions just to keep to give this a pathway but uh, I love where this is going. Um So what how would you define? So i’ll just make this very simple Uh, what does it mean to know something? And what does it mean? And well, we’ll start with that. What does it mean to know something? So i’m talking about know thyself. I’m kind of breaking it down into So So I tend to I like that you you you pose it to me as a verb rather than as a noun You didn’t ask me what is knowledge. You asked me. What is it to know which I think is a better way of putting it Uh, because if we think of it as an action Then we can talk more about Doing it well as opposed to trying to get final features, uh, because I don’t I don’t think they’re I don’t think there’s sort of a final epistemological answer. Um My my my supervisor for my phd described himself as a metaskeptic Metaskeptic is convinced there’s knowledge, but he’s not clear there can be a unified Uh final epistemological account of knowledge and so that has sort of stayed with me, but let let so let’s say it’s Let’s think of it more as something we do And then if you think about the doings you can think about Virtues within there and what the virtues are designed to do is to get us into Right relationship with the normativity that is appropriate to the action So I mean and this is a riskotillion point you judge how good something is by getting at well What is the normativity that actually? Regulates its functioning. So what well, what’s a good knife? Well, what’s it do what’s it for cutting right? Okay, well then what what are the what’s the structural functional organization you need and what would make it a good knife in virtue of which? Notice the language in virtue of which it cuts well so I I Start with the idea that there’s four kinds of knowing um And then I try to get at what’s the normativity within within each one and then what’s the virtue appropriate? To following that normativity well if you’ll allow me and I mean this respectfully What’s the virtue that allows me to track the normativity within that particular kind of knowing? okay so So I take one kind of knowing which is predominant in our society and I think it’s oppressively Dominant in our society and for historical reasons I can’t go into it’s in the series right Is propositional knowing and this is knowing That something is the case knowing that cats or mammals for example, right notice. I have a proposition all cats or mammals, right? and So I assert this and then We want to ask well, what’s the normativity here and it’s this very tortured notion of truth um And what is it for something to be true? and that’s Probably not quite uh where like so if I start going down that pathway i’m going to slip into the kind of Talk that i’m trying to get away from so another way of putting it is is well What’s the problem with the truth, you know, like in propositional knowing? Well, the idea is well we fall into some kind of self-deception About knowing our biases and our prejudice make us Draw the wrong inferences draw the wrong conclusions, etc. And so what we need are we need practices that um Give us the the virtue of good conviction that we are convinced appropriately. We are convinced well um, and so I take it that uh, so let me finish this whole thing, right, please. I take it that the What we’re talking about here is a kind of rationality a kind of inferential rationality that What people have to learn is what’s called active open-mindedness which is a way of looking for how particular biases can affect and and how form Your inferential practices your inferential activities your inferential actions And so what does that mean well it means learning about um how Adapted machinery otherwise adaptive machinery can interfere with my Inferential practices. So let me give a concrete example. It’s one. It’s an easy one. It’s one I like to use Confirmation bias, right? So when we’re making inferences we tend to only look for Inferences that will confirm our already existing beliefs and we only give Attention to the evidence which already confirms our belief So part of what active open-mindedness is and it’s both this is where i’m a little bit different from stanovich All right. It’s both an individual practice and a joint practice The individual practices I try to sensitize myself to Those biases I try I try to look throughout the day I make a commitment at the beginning of the day to look for a bias Right or try to look for a set of biases and constantly reading about these biases like you’d read a bible Just read about them and read about them and read about them And then when I notice a notice of confirmation bias and I do now I actively try to counteract it I actively try to counteract it and I encourage other people to do that with me, right? Give me feedback on it so I think Good propositional knowing Is to train Your sense of conviction which is your ability to track the normativity of truth within Inferential knowing to train it with active open-mindedness. And so now There’s procedural knowing there’s knowing how to do something and the normativity there isn’t truth. It’s power It’s a sense of being empowered and so similarly we need We need to be properly trained so that we get that that Interactional fluency with things and this is why i’m so interested in the flow state What are the conditions that are conducive of flow? Why is it so optimal? How can it be right? How can it be misdirected? How can it actually and this is the right word because the normativity here isn’t truth. It’s power How can it empower us so that we have a more skillful interaction with the world Then there’s Perspectival knowing this is the kind of knowing what it’s like. This is knowing what it’s like to be here now With this particular salience landscape No, uh, so one way of thinking about it is Perspectival knowing it’s you know, you’re knowing through a state of mind into a perspective And so it’s how you it’s your situational awareness it’s your pattern of noticing It’s what you take to be obvious, right? It’s all of those things and it’s just happening for you right now So what what’s what what’s the virtue there? Well, the virtue there is presence It’s about so, you know, like and it’s it’s the virtue that they’re trying to get into uh into uh into video games Because what you want is the right pattern of interaction. So people right Are there but that has to be in order to get the right pattern of interaction If you give people a sense that they’re present in the world that you give them the right sort of salience landscaping and so You know what? Well, what what how is the self-deception there, you know if You know if you’ve got something like bias For inferential learning and you can have sort of clumsiness or ineptness for procedural. What’s the same thing for? Perspectival learning well, you know you can you can either lack presence or you can project like you can be egocentric For example, many people know what I what what what I mean when I say that’s a kind of error within Perspectival knowing because you’re incapable of taking the perspective of another person So what we need is well What and when you can’t think about what i’m saying here when you can’t take the perspective of another person They’re not really present to you and you’re not really present to them, right and you can be doing all kinds of this Language can be flowing but you know what it’s like. You know what it’s like when you realize you’ve been talking to me They’re like wait that we’re just not in the same world. We’re just not together, right? You lack that co-presence So what’s what’s the virtue there? Well, it’s very there’s a lot of mindfulness practices That are designed to give us a you know a kind of insight at the perspectival level and so that so what I want are Like mindfulness practices that train a kind of virtue within Perspectival knowing so that i’m more reliably overcome the tendencies of self-deception and afford presence But my ability to do all that my ability to generate a perspective Is actually based on my it depends on my participatory knowing This is the way in which my biology my culture and my online Cognition shape me into an agent and shape the environment into an arena and it’s happening below my consciousness Below my ego and it’s making all of that possible because what it does is it opens up affordances for me like here Like this is graspable to me Right and you notice how the culture has shaped this piece of the world And it has taught me to shape myself to it so that it’s obvious to me that how I should use this right and of course my My biology has done the same thing. Oh, there’s food Right and right and so all that participatory knowing is where all this dynamical coupling and I want to be really coupled well to the world So and what’s what’s the normativity there? It’s being in right relationship It’s being coupled in the right way to the world so that affordance is reliably and systematically Open up for me What’s the self-deception there? Well, it’s reciprocal narrowing where the way i’m inhabiting my agency and the way i’m inhabiting in the world They’re getting rigid and narrow and they’re locking each other down and that’s what mark lewis says is going on in addiction What’s the virtue the virtue is anagoga where i’m open. I i’ve learned Right i’ve learned how to in a reciprocal fashion open up My agency and my arena so that I get a deeper and deeper right relationship to things that reciprocal opening and so knowing there is to cultivate the virtues that reliably afford reciprocal opening so my sense of right relationship and belonging is more and more afforded and when I have a set of virtues that Link all of these four kinds together That’s the deepest and afforded deep transformation Deep understanding which is to really grasp the significance to get like to be able to really track and be called by all those normativities truth power presence right relationship That’s knowledge, but that’s where knowledge has finally become what I would call wisdom Wow That was a beautiful, uh Yeah, I I you know, I actually uh Mapped some of those four and uh ways of knowing and the virtues and um Onto the medicine wheel it’s already becoming i’m already embedding it into our curriculum. It’s that’s good so so So thank you if if like that I mean that’s what I learned from cognitive science if I can build A conceptual vocabulary and a theoretical grammar That allows people to take this as tools into their own Theorizing and their own right practices and their own aspirations to transformation and they find it reliably helpful That that that’s that’s the most important goal for me Well, that that is happening sir. So that’s working. That’s really amazing um Cool So, okay, so that’s what it means to know something Or a definition how about we tackle what is a self? Ah So that that’s that’s the know thyself that uh, he keeps circling back to Yeah, so The thing for me has been And this is very socratic right? It’s been not it’s been trying to Draw people out from you know Get them to get them to move free from um A way of thinking of the self that I think is actually detrimental To their flourishing and this is a notion of self as well, it’s It’s a notion of self as a self-composed as a self-composed thing Uh, I sometimes call it the the monolithic mind right that um that To have myself is to uh to is to possess a point of self-enclosure and What what makes the self is it’s sort of its ability to talk its talk to itself and possess itself and grasp itself Um And I think that is fundamentally mistaken that sort of cartesian view um that You have a self and it is sort of Completely self-enclosed i’m going to keep emphasizing that sort of within your mind or brain um, and so The the true nature of the self is ultimately is something that is is very subjective um Subject to you right thrown underneath the subject um and that the self is In it is is The normativity of that is to try and remain very true to that sort of fundamental possession And this is very opposite all of that which has become you know Has become very common language for us. We think of ourself as inner We think we have a true self And we have to be true to that true self And I think this is very problematic we can what we can a way of problematizing it is to put it in contrast With the socratic notion and I would recommend christopher moore’s book on socratic self-knowledge The socratic self is It’s not self-enclosed and it is not something you possess And it is not sort of already complete and you must remain true to it instead the socratic self is Something that you’re aspiring to The self is a way of talking I I sometimes say Uh that there’s ultimately no self behind self-organization What I mean by that the self isn’t a thing the self is a way of talking about the way our cognition and lives Are appropriately or or right or inappropriately Self-organizing how is your how is the life of your life going right? How is the self-organizing? Aspect of your cognition right and your cognition is dynamically developmental Your you you develop as You’re functioning and you function as you develop because your cognition is inherently self-organizing so What you’re doing in self-knowledge is you’re not I mean you can your biography may be relevant data, but you’re not primarily Celebrating or looking at your biography to get your sense of yourself. You’re trying to figure out Here’s a self-organizing system what I need to know are what are the principles by which It like the constraint it to be self-organizing and how can My cognition and here’s what you get in the paradox. Well, who’s the who’s the eye? But how how is this how is? right this reflective consciousness A and cognition able to become aware of the constraints on the self-organizing so that the self-organizing Occurs better and better so it gets better Overcoming self-deception better at zeroing in on the relevant information ignoring the irrelevant information better at Cultivating well all the knowledges we need all the knowings that we talked about All the knowings that we talk about Right, so the socratic self is basically What how have you come to learn How like how do you let’s put it this way what socrates is doing is he’s he’s getting you to see Where do I commit? my Resources my precious and limited cognitive resources The my my precious and limited relationships to myself each other where am I actually committing them compared Compared to what I say who I say I am because your introspection is actually shit, right? So people think well, I sort of i’ll be quite a look into myself. No Your introspection isn’t that good. It’s not that effective, right? Well, I state what I most I most believe Well, your beliefs don’t really capture this very readily so the socratic project was actually trying to get people trying to get people to Come to a point try to get them to a state where they realize oh Oh, this is what i’m committing to and this is how i’m committing to it and then say is this actually Constraining the way in which I am a fundamental way in which I am a self-organizing dynamical system In a way that’s going to lead it more and more towards wisdom. So this the self is right the self is the way in which I would argue your your your set of virtue your character uh your Your habits of your deep habits of mind and the virtues of mind there, too cognition and consciousness Your your your your dispositional elements your personality and All of this is not in you. It’s all relational. It’s how right it’s how mind and body are related It’s how mind and body and world are related It’s how mind body and your mind and body in your world and mind by it mind mind and body My world are all of that and how it well Self-organizes such that this particular like mind body like flourishes That’s the self Wow And so knowing that knowing that so If you’ll allow me a metaphor Knowing that self is not knowing your story or a autobiography that information is useful But right you your story has actually helped you to become a story is being a story because that’s what you are In some ways, you know, there’s no a story. You are a story being the story is a way of trying to create What what I call a virtual engine a set of constraints so that your particular self-organization Happens in a particular way. That’s good But i’m asking people socrates is asking people don’t look at your autobiography or maybe maybe to be more more Charitable don’t get fixated On just your autobiography look at your operating manual a lot more look like look at your operating manual a lot more Try to understand the principles and patterns of its self-organization because the way you transform yourself And also the way you know yourself because they’re they’re bound up together Is how that self-transform how that self-organization is transformed when you transform the patterns of self-organization That’s how you’re fundamentally changing the self Um That’s really cool that actually ties into something I I forgot to mention which is kind of the whole focus of this little series i’m making which is the primal perspective and that You you naturally went there, of course Something that drew me to your to your work. But um, yeah, it’s looking at the the principles of the processes as the thing You know, it’s like yeah. Yes. Yes Um, that’s really cool. Would you say then that our I mean, maybe i’m getting into consciousness now and that’s might be too big of a question, but would you say that the Ex what we might experience a self then is Kind of an emergent property of of those processes Yes, totally and what’s interesting is So that that notion that we are sort of like a like a soul In the ancient in sort of the ancient like whatever like the the ghost inside the machine um As I think as rile put it because I think there was an there’s an older or and also a newer sense of soul that we could We could rehabilitate Which is also to be able to live within it again, uh to habit us, right? But yeah, I do think that that that’s correct because When you ask people how much have you changed in the last 10 years, they’ll say oh i’ve changed so much So much you go. Oh, how much do you think you’ll change in the next 10 years? Oh, I won’t change very much at all And then you ask him again in 10 years How much have you changed a lot? Oh, I’ve changed so much. I’ve changed so much Really? How much are you going to change in the next 10 years? Oh, i’m not going to change very much This is the end of history by us, right? So Right. We we we think of ourselves as We we’re always suffering as if we’re that we’re somehow we and this is why I don’t like the ideas of perfection That we have some because perfectio, you know to come into completeness right to be finished um so yeah, I I think that You’re looking for continuity of content in your relationships So a continuity of contact that continues to give you right relationship uh that gives you presence situational awareness that can allow affords you to You know acquire and apply the right skills that then gets translated into sets of you know Sensibility and skills for how you move around your concepts and you get that’s where you get the propositional knowing So yourself you should be Because you are I mean come on you touch The the what what exists between you and how you were as a two-year-old is not any kind of identity It’s a it’s a continuity. So right that there’s been this process of self Organization self-transcending developmental self-organization that got here. So yourself yourself Is in that sense constantly changing It’s constantly in a process of dynamic change But of course it’s happening at multiple time scales, right? Some of the change so some of the change of like momentary and some of it is like it’s at all different levels Some of it’s more, you know, this is oh like have you ever had that experience where you look back over the last five years? And you go. Oh geez, I didn’t realize but I was changing through those five years at this level That I didn’t even know what’s going on at that time Yeah Yeah, I feel like i’m actually going through one of those now and uh I think you You’ve actually helped count Thank you for saying that um Something you said earlier too. I gotta check the time. I think how are you doing? What do we got? Yeah Like 15 more minutes. Yeah Okay, um the uh something you said about everything being In the relational or or I guess that’s the perspective of seeing things as relational. I’ve had a a real powerful shift lately of I mean i’ve been studying a lot of complexity theory and and that as well and that that’ll do a number on your On your deductions very much very much very much but uh really starting to tie that back into my training with uh, You know the lineage of tracking and all of that and how they perceive the world um, you know, and you hear all these kind of cliche like uh, Everything’s connected everything is one and all this kind of metaphors, but But there’s actually possibly like it feels like it’s getting more and more real to me Like i’m just like I actually see the world right now like I see the relationships as things, you know Right, so you’re moving from that see you’re moving from propositions that you may not even be have been convinced were true Right into well and you’re starting to get some skills But those skills are actually based on like you said I see the world in a particular way And it actually means that you right, you know the way Right, like the way you and the world fit together at that participatory level You’re you’re getting the person you’re getting like your it’s gone from being an idea Like and it’s percolated through all the poor for you, right? And so now Right. Yeah, it’s more real to you because you don’t just have the conviction of its truth You have the power of your skills You have the presence of the perspective and you have the sense of being in right relationship with reality And man, does that ever make things seem real? Yes Yeah, very very Yeah, it’s it’s been pretty awesome This is so fun, thank you, um, i’m enjoying myself. Thank you. Yeah Let’s see. Oh one more before I forget. I had to tell you this. I just had a little epiphany this might be a whole nother thing but uh in Your emphasis on domicile recently or I don’t know how recent that is but in your book I saw, you know I’ve heard you talk about it And how it occurred to me that you know, for example, I teach a survival class is just a one-day Introduction to the survival skills and my kind of tagline for the class is it’s like going home And to me, um What happened to me in my development through these primitive skills? is It’s it is a it’s a homecoming, you know, you actually go you go you you enter this, uh this world where you are directly connected to everything around you in nature, you know in a way that it’s Um, it’s not just something you visit or something you go do or you know, it’s it’s actually home. It’s actually the skills themselves there’s this like reassurance and kind of like this, um This relief that washes over you when you realize that you can with your own hands In your own body mind you can go create what you need to sustain life, you know out of whatever’s around you in any environment You know, I mean it might be uncomfortable depending on your skill level, but you know, it’s like The potential is there and and it’s uh um So the access, uh, I just saw it kind of as a heat one of the healing Potentials maybe of of those kinds of skills in that domicile issue I think that’s deeply right. I mean you might have seen some conversations that I’ve had with my friend rave kelly He’s teaching people you know the parkour in nature and then the martial arts and the mindfulness and then the the the you know the narrative practices and He’s weaving together this beautiful ecology practices. You two would get along very well, actually Yeah, I know a little You do know him a little good. I met him, uh this way. Yeah so yeah, I think that uh You know because he talks the same way he talks about a profound kind of homecoming when people Can be res situated back into the environment in which they evolved in Such that all of four of those things start to click into place all the four kinds of knowing yeah And so i’m really interested in the possibilities That we might have at a more systemic level Is jordan hall’s talking about this possibility? That He talks about the idea that up until recently the only way we could get the synergistic effects of distributed cognition Minds working together was to have them physically close to each other And then the problem with that is what is that we suffer all the deleterious effects of cities We’re cut off from nature. We’re cut off from each other. We get automatized. There’s it really affords pandemics It’s mental really bad on your mental health, etc And you know this better than I do and then he’s saying but we have the potential now where we could actually separate those two because if we could improve this medium And improve the psychotech and the culture around it we could have the distributed minds working together synergistically But people could go back to living in, you know small-scale communities situated in right in the environment in a You know psychologically and socially and ecologically sustainable and healthy way And so that’s a that’s a really exciting idea that I think Like we should be exploring them because again I meet so many people and I mean this is a compliment to you who have Have what I call reinventio and the word inventio means to both discover and invent so you have Reinventio embodiment and embeddedness like with what you’re doing and how deeply deeply healing this is and you can’t tell people From the outside what that healing is going to be like Yeah It’s it’s it’s almost like I can’t tell you what it’s like to live in Spain if you unless you go And live in Spain, right? Yeah, I can tell you There’s a personal experiential I can’t even I couldn’t even predict it actually because yeah, we’re all different. Uh, you’re you know Uh That’s one of the pleasures of being able to train with people and to To facilitate and guide um, I kind of say teach but it’s more of a guidance but I get to set up conditions and and and environments in which people have interactions with the earth and with themselves and with each other that You know these lessons form and they they get things that I never would have gotten so I get to learn the most, you know, so That’s pretty well and now we’ve cycled around the socrates again when you afford people Right that right when you afford people Like in socrates described himself as a midwife when you afford people giving birth to themselves in a way that they cannot foresee Because it requires You know, there are truths and I mean, you know all all the senses of knowing right there are truths that are only realized after Self-transcendence and only through transformation. Yeah, I I think that’s exactly right. I think that’s really really the case that you you giving birth to other people is You It’s it’s it’s weird because when you’re sharing that with other people when you’re sharing your deep learning With other people that’s actually the best teaching but it’s paradoxically You know it rebounds on you and you do some of your own Unexpectedly most deep learning but that’s that’s the that that’s part of the dialectic again, right bringing that into human interaction Yeah, wow, that’s beautiful. Um well, uh Just uh, maybe sneak in one more thought one more question um Would you say back to the self concept? Does uh this idea of a self could it since it is kind of an emergent process couldn’t be the Identity of self-expand to include other I mean, oh it does I mean right I mean I think your sense of self, I mean and so your sense of self moves. I mean we know this from I mean not only from Historical records, but also we’re now doing experimental work when people have mystical experiences and higher states of consciousness Their sense of self moves around Like in in really profound and transformative ways and this isn’t just sort of uh epiphenomenal They’ll they’re again the way they are self organizing changes, you know The virtual engine of their the dynamical system they are is is fundamentally been re-engineered In ways that they don’t fully understand until it starts to unfold itself Uh through time. So yeah, your sense of self is is is dramatically changed I mean one of the things that I get moments Right now in my own in my own practice I get moments And again, it’s like we were talking about earlier You know You’ll put them into words and they won’t sound deep enough or resonance enough that the person has to be in that world right, but i’ll throw there I get moments where So so you know Most most time, you know egocentric everything is self-referential You know i’m self important import to take in self important all that stuff and then you get moments I have moments where i’m auto centric i’m actually centered right on on on realness i’m centered on that realization Being real the way you talked about it, which is not the same thing as the inflation of the ego And you get like you get moments where you taste the release from that sort of You know that that fever Hunger framing that we’re in all the time and we don’t even realize it but we get released from it in moments of flow or in these kinds of experiences and you get a sense of A way of being a self That’s not and this sounds like a contradiction and that’s probably Very telling a way of being a self that’s not fundamentally egocentric but auto centric and I get us you get that sense of you know nirvana means to blow out, you know the flame you get a sense of Like it’s you get a wave of relief and release that passes through your entire being that right you go Oh I I get a sense of Like what how it could be and that’s very encouraging again, it’s very aspirationally motivated So yeah, I think um now you don’t want to just dump that into people like, you know, just take a novice and drop them into that because Like you’ll you’ll freak them out, right? Um, and you shouldn’t do that. That’s immoral but on the other hand, you know You got to drop you’ve got to drop the breadcrumbs that might lead people there And you got to look for the breadcrumbs that other people have left you so that you can keep moving towards them That’s one of the the beauties of uh working I guess close to the earth are working in nature Nature’s so honest. You can’t really skip steps, you know, yeah, it requires you to say it’s grounded literally, right? So yeah. Yeah The uh, yeah, so it seems like the um The self The self-ideal we’re talking about does this emergent thing it kind of depends on where you want to place this imaginary Boundary or distinction in a sense of what do you want to include or what do you need to include in that moment? And that’s Yeah, I mean I think I think that’s boundaries around Well, I mean we didn’t get to talk about it, but I think about this sort of deep process of relevance realization What’s inside my frame? What’s outside my frame how it moves around? And you know, and there’s mysterious aspects to me I can’t ever bring the the framing process itself fully into like my frame and you know My framing on the world as you said is constantly being challenged by the world and opened up Yeah, and so When we Go through altered states of consciousness that lead to altered traits of character The fundamental ways in which we’re framing the world what we find relevant and salient what we center on are we egocentric or Ontocentric for example that shifts around and I think that if what I said is true If the felt if the self is fundamentally the way we’re in a coupled fashion self-organizing Then that’s that’s what it is for the self to be changed that that that process of relevance realization and framing right has been Fundamentally fundamental framing has been Fundamentally transformed and so that’s what it is for the sense of self to be altered That’s perfect. I think that’s that’s a beautiful place to stop right there. That’s uh, some will chew on. Thank you Well, thank you This has been really wonderful Yeah so again, I just really appreciate your time and taking a risk to see what we’re up to and maybe we can uh continue that but um regardless I just uh, just appreciate your work and I really want to get it out there. So um, is there is there anything you want to uh, include in terms of what you’re up to that I know obviously, there’s the awakening from the meaning crisis series, which has been I think it’s a A huge education and then uh, anything else you want to mention? Well, I mean, i’m hoping you’ll also send me the the files for this conversation so I can upload it to it as well Absolutely. I mean i’ll give you priority you upload it to your channel first. Um, and then oh, okay. I’ll send Okay. Well, um, I mean I also am doing and this what I why I mentioned that is I want to put this on voices with Reveki where i’m trying to exemplify and also cultivate and talk about you know, Dialectic and dialogos of doing this And um, so that that that’s happening I’m working on the next big historical cognitive scientific video series called after socrates about what basically what a lot of what we were talking about today and That series will also Not just the uh, like awakening from the meaning crisis where it’s mostly sort of theory There’ll also be you know Exemplification practice elements in it as well Because what I want to do is like I said, I want to try and you know reverse engineer Socratic dialectic and put it into deep dialogue with all like yourself all these people all these people and all these practices uh, you know of authentic relating and uh, you know, uh Sacred questioning if you put it I think that’s a beautiful phrase by the way, I love that Um, so that and that’s a big project right now Uh that i’m working on a lot uh with greg on leaks i’ll be uh, we are going to be releasing a series of videos that will present sort of my overall argument about consciousness and He will be interacting with me in in a socratic fashion because he has his metapsychology project That’s going to be called Tangling the world nod of consciousness the heart problems of mind and meaning and so that’s going to come out that’s going to come out soon Uh, we’ve already filmed the first episode. We’re going to be doing a sequence of those um And then people should know about and you mentioned it already Every weekday morning um, I do the meditation and contemplation online course And there’s a wonderful sangha there um that practices and Uh, and I and an ongoing course Pardon me. I highly recommend it. Yeah. Oh, thank you And then associated with that if your people are interested there’s a discord server There’s over a thousand people on there now and it’s growing community talking about awakening from the meaning crisis voices with revaki the meditation class Right all of that. So yeah awesome Right on well. Well, thank you, sir. And uh We shall look forward to maybe hearing more from you in the future and I I I’m If you’re asking of my intent, i’m very happy to meet with you and talk again. I would like I would love to do that Sounds great Right. Will you take care and uh, good luck in your work? Thank you so much ben really much really appreciate it a very good time. I I I always say that it’s been good Dialectic if two people can get to a place together that they couldn’t get to on their own and I was hearing in some of my answers To you and how they were provoked by you and I mean provoked in a good way I was hearing things I hadn’t said before I was making connections that I hadn’t made before so that was very helpful to me Thank you very much Likewise. Thank you Take care and keep going Okay, take care And cut All righty Well, there it is