https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Egv0ebdNI4g
Welcome to another Voices with Raveki. I’m really pleased to have once again with me Rachel Hayden and some of you saw the previous discussion that Rachel and I recorded. I strongly recommend watching it. It’s one of my favorites. It’s a really important one and it’s very I’m very happy to have Rachel here again today. So Rachel, maybe you could propose what it is you’d like to discuss and reflect upon. Sure, sure. And before I start, I should also just say I’m very excited to be here again and most of all just happy to see you again. And this work has been obviously continuing to be profound for me in various ways and I was thinking of working today maybe toward expanding ideas of ecologies of psychotechnologies and practice including fine arts in particular. How those could be interwoven and maybe grown alongside the other practices that are so predominant in your work and in the work of people who work with you and people who are on the discord. Also martial arts as a particular interest of mine would be really cool to talk about more and discuss maybe how martial arts and fine arts since they’re both called arts, what’s the commonality there? How do they interweave? We know there’s a ton of traditions that do kind of put them all together and say to be a well-rounded person you need calligraphy and flower arranging and swordsmanship and stuff like that. What’s the truth to that? Is that all historical relics or is that kind of like just fancy people doing fancy things and what’s behind all that? How can we use it to our advantage? This is so apropos I mentioned before we started recording that I’ve had an ongoing series with Leymann Pascal and Brendan Graham Dempsey. I always get his inverted names so frequently. I got it correct for that mistake on the artful scaling of the spirituality of the religion. It’s not a religion and the one that’s going to be shortly on Leymann’s channel, the Integral Stage, was about trying to leverage this emergent technology in which we get the ongoing collective and dynamical generation of sacred imagery, sort of like a wiki, a dynamic wiki where you’re constantly and then people can pull out particular stages and make them more static and then reflect it and trying to get visual versions and auditory versions and then getting people to sort of practice mapping between dialogos as it is evolving and then this sacred imagery evolving and getting it layered dynamically. And so we’re all getting very excited about this as a proposal for a way of making the generation of sacred imagery, broadly construed, not just visual, something that is patterned much more like the dynamics of the intelligent brain rather than dominance hierarchies that we’ve inherited from our primate past as a new way of trying to also prevent particular people having a particular sort of sense of ownership or authority over this. So I mean of course there’s downsides to all of these proposals and I want to explore them but I’m just saying that this discussion you’re broaching I think it’s cutting edge for where I’m talking to other people so thank you for doing this. So wonderful. Where would you like to start? Like what I mean one of the things that’s really having a huge impact on me is continues to be David DC Schindler’s work. This book Love and the Postmodern Predictment is an astonishing book mostly about the connections between beauty, love and the cultivation of wisdom. I highly recommend the book and the importance of the deeply, I don’t know what to say, it’s not quite the right word, it’s sort of cognitive existential import of beauty as a way of drawing people into a real capacity to love truth, to love realness, to love goodness in a way that nothing else can do and so the role of various kinds of arts and so I would propose to you as an initial, well initial proposal I guess, is that there’s something, there’s something about beauty in the martial arts, beauty doesn’t have to be separate from functionality, beauty in the martial arts and in the fine arts and the musical arts etc. that is somehow central to getting people into a capacity for love and I think love is where we get a perspectival awareness of fundamental transformations in our participatory knowing. Knowing by loving is in fact a good way of encapsulating participatory knowing and so I think that’s where we’re getting at the foundations and rudiments of our self and our character and so beauty appropriately related to could therefore be central for affording the transformation that I’ve been talking about and other people are talking about. So that’s my initial proposal to you. Wonderful, that sounds great to me you know and I was reflecting on beauty in the arts, I went back and watched your dialogue with Andrew Sweeney and Christopher Mastro Pietro on the role of art and the reinventio of art. I really enjoyed that one both times I watched it and kind of thinking about beauty and horror and how those all fit into an artistic framework and then last week I finally got to go to my first live show since the pandemic began and it was you know it’s a little small place and in a hushed atmosphere with people not talking during the songs, not talking between the songs even, solo, singer, guitar, player you know and what struck me was the pain of the beauty and the songs you know just hurt to listen to in this great way you know. This way that you’re like vulnerable and it kind of you know cuts into you a little bit and it really demands something of you if you’re open to that beauty you know in a way that like you know art or music that you’re like putting on in the background you know which I would call kind of perspectival bullshit art in a way. Yeah right right right that’s good. You know you don’t have to be present with it it’s just kind of sitting there. You know that stuff doesn’t do that but real art we are present with it and evolving with it hopefully you know has this almost like pain and you know I’ve heard it said that like you know art hates you you know which is a really rough way of putting that you know but there’s something to that and that I think it you know wants to draw something out of you and so you know well martial arts hurts in a very different way a lot of the time. Oh that’s good though I like that. You know it’s got its own power. Okay but that’s a really cool point because Guy, Guy Sendstock talks a lot about and I’ve talked with him about it and Chris as well about this this movement from exposure to vulnerability and there’s a connection there to awe which hopefully we can get back to but the like so one of the things I hear you saying is a special power maybe even prerogative of art is to get us to transform transmute reframe exposure as vulnerability because the point is if you if if you just were feeling exposed in the face of the art that hates you you would leave you would defend you would defend yourself but instead what you do is paradoxically you say more of this please more of this please and that’s very much like awe. Awe is paradoxical in that most of the time when our sense of self is being shrunk we’re feeling humiliated embarrassed threatened rendered insignificant but in awe this the sense of the self shrinking is actually experienced as profoundly positive because it’s disclosing a depth and so one of the things I hear you saying is that one of the functions that art can perform and the martial arts fit this very well as you’ve just said is they can help us to transmute exposure into vulnerability just for those who might not be familiar with guy’s way of using this exposure is the sense of that you are open to threat and that you’re on the edge of being overwhelmed potentially destroyed either you know psychologically or perhaps even physically. Vulnerability carries with it a sense of openness there is threat but there’s that but more please because there’s also a sense of being sensitized to a good reality that you have been previously insensate to that’s what he’s trying to get across with this notion of and because one of the things that happens in circling is it’s circling and he calls it the art of circling by the way circling is a practice that in which he says you can see you can help afford people translating exposure into vulnerability the problem we have in a lot of our current discourse public discourse especially but even in our private discourse is we almost always frame every encounter as a defense against exposure yes so anyways what did you think of that proposal of art as being a right help having the special ability to transmute exposure into vulnerability because it picks up what you just said there is something about it that yeah that makes you makes you love it you know and and if we’re talking about love you you kind of just love that you end up loving the art in a way you know and perhaps in a way that can be sort of idolatrous at times but also if you are in relationship with that art you know yeah you know for me as you know i’m a fan of certain types of black metal music they’re very intense and they can provoke like on the state of awe that like literally brings on a stomach ache for me at times you know but i’m just like more more more this is this is wonderful you know um and i think there there is something to that like like you said in public discourse or private discourse or social media discourse especially we can’t you know let ourselves be vulnerable enough to really get to that point but art has a way of like kind of teasing that out of us of like seducing us in a you know positive way to to allowing that to unfold and i i think like we’ve you’ve answered one of my questions on a q a before about this but like to me it has something to do with the the mood of you know a piece of art and the mood that it puts you into to get you in touch with the being mode um and that that to me somehow allows this like weird transmutation to happen where i’m like okay this is you know it hurts so good in a way you know but um can expand myself can make me aspire can make me you know really have that like calardian sense of aspiration become a better person as a result so i don’t know if that responds to what you were no it does i mean there’s there’s yeah no i mean i mean it’s it’s and we’ve layered it over with cliche um and maybe we’re trying to peel away the layers of you know the deep connections between transformation growth and a kind of a kind of pain um so what do you i mean so there’s the famous song love hurts um right um yeah so what do you do you think there’s a a connection so for example mutually accelerating disclosure so if i open up and become vulnerable to you and you respond in kind this is erin’s work you get the reciprocal and that’s how people fall into love not necessarily romantic love it can be friendship love or what but that that that there there’s an aspect of vulnerability sharing that seems to be central to love in a way does that does that land for you does that does that make kind of it does you know and it feels like with with an experience of art that’s especially deep or profound you feel like you are in relationship with it you know and you’re actually you know sharing your life with it which is i think one reason why people you know get so attached to the creators of art you know there’s a sense of intimacy with it that really you know you feel like you know somehow you know them through their work even though you really don’t most of the time it turns out that’s interesting you know anderson todd and the other person i can’t remember we’re on rubble wisdom um anderson todd of course is a close friend of mine and um they were doing a thing on the on the beetles because there there’s been the release of get back right and and he was he was talking about how the beetles almost um almost have become almost like a real almost entered the level of like religious figures for people um and i was trying to get a sense on what’s unique about that but it’s that it’s that and of course it can become pathological with stalking but there’s a sense of which yeah i know what you mean i feel like i have an intimate relationship with john lennon um of course who i never met and i never will meet uh but yeah there’s there that’s interesting that’s very interesting that so there’s a there’s there’s yeah and intimacy of course brings with it vulnerability right because yeah and vulnerability is part of aspiration yes exactly right so there’s a there’s a connection there i like the way this is taking on a life of its own so rapidly yeah there there yeah vulnerability has with it yeah that that sense that sensitization that that’s needed for intimacy but as you said also an openness towards a challenging future that’s part of aspiration that’s really and so art would play that role presumably in the ecology of practices is that is that what you’re suggesting very much what i’m trying to kind of where i’m you know when i’m looking at my ecology garden here i’m putting art in that in that spot yeah kind of in the center toward you know in the aspirational realm um you know symbolic aspirational realm you know i i think um you know like you said there can be there can be dangerous to it as well and i i feel like um this conversation actually comes at kind of a poignant time for me because um a few weeks ago um someone who i was friends with a long time ago you know in an art music scene as as teenagers and beyond um recently died and i’m sorry left a big hole in our community in a sense um you know even though we’re all you know much older now you know there this person was kind of a an inspirational maybe aspirational figure to others and this would you know happen through art music camaraderie community you know that kind of thing and um one person who put it really really well he said it’s like i am i’m going to that first day of high school and that that guy who was there who was looking you know who was gonna who was helpful to me is no longer there and i’m back into my my young you know 14 year old self or whatever only now i’m missing that person and to me i felt like that was an indicator that something had failed in the sense of aspiration like like we had that you know our little music scene back in the day had that sense of like aspiring towards something greater but there was maybe like a lack of grounding for it at the same time and and you know people can kind of you know become icons or idols for others yeah and of course none of us are perfect so um you know i mentioned that because it not to get us straight from this the topic of the ecology but that somehow i i want that role of art to be very central for me it makes a lot of sense in my life as a musician um but i also really really sense the danger you know a lot of people a lot of musicians dying from you know lots of you know drugs suicide etc yeah and just kind of sensing that something often goes wrong there um we have you know there’s that vulnerability there’s aspiration there’s there’s beauty and then um you know and and that’s one thing i would love to kind of explore with you a little bit while we’re doing this to kind of to see where that would fit on a personal level too yeah no that’s very good uh are we what you were saying that it was there was one of real cause lines you know that beauty is a terror that deigns to not destroy us or something like that depending on the translation from the german um and and of course all is right on the right off on the edge of horror where we’re losing a grip yes uh that that’s very interesting um so let let’s slow down and zero in on that what like there is there’s a way in which i don’t know what to call it the machinery of beauty and love that is bound up in the arts can consume people i’m trying to come up with a metaphor right is is that fair to what you you put yeah you know i i toyed with the thought of a pseudo religious ideology and that didn’t quite fit because it actually did afford some transformation for people and and you know kept them yeah alive or healthier as well you know in my experience maybe like quasi religious or something but but yeah yeah that’s a really good question about and you can see Plato wrestling with it in like in the in symposium around alcibiades because there’s the love the attraction to socrates there’s the beauty of socrates the beauty of the beauty of alcibiades and yet alcibiades gets consumed by something and it gets right goes down a very dark path yes gets derailed right yes so i mean i’m trying to think about what might it be so is it that like is it i’m really i’m really on the edge of my thinking here so is it that people are drawn into sort of a kind of i i want to say something like a false vulnerability what i mean by that is they move to vulnerability without dealing with the actual some actual trauma or some actual disorder broadly construed within them that would be actually more appropriately realized as exposure like i need to deal with this and if i don’t deal with this you know i i’m open to destruction so yes like a bypassing stage there yeah so exactly i’m thinking i’m thinking of something analogous to spiritual bypassing that you’ve got what’s what’s happening is people are using the art to transmute the exposure into vulnerability but in a way that’s like spiritual bypassing and they’re actually not right i’m what i’m saying is there there are aspects of us that should be properly framed and appreciated as exposure like no no you need to this needs to be dealt with because you are open to destruction right now if that’s not properly dealt with that’s that’s an initial proposal well how does that land for you i like the sound of it you know because it’s like it’s that again that kind of you know pseudo-religious thing of this we’ll just throw all this into one basket you know we’re just going to transcend with this like you know in our case it was really you know angry punk music or whatever you know that we were doing and that was going to like provide the energy to like the transgressive energy to break through all this stuff that had happened or you know how the world was and yet we’re more complex beings as it comes to mind you know we have the we have that emanation we have emergence you know we’ve got all these layers you know and it makes total sense that we would you know in looking at an ecology where our society is so focused on the spirit over the soul right like we just want to transcend and find the moreness and i do that too all the time and that’s what i’m concerned about is like when i’m in the musical flow or you know and and it just feels great there’s a sense of like oh like you know my life is good now but i don’t want to and maybe there are other practices you know like i’m thinking of your perennial problems you know ways to kind of frame all of this in a way analogous or similar to the noble eight-fold path so that you know someone like me could have those those check check digits you know or whatever yeah yeah doing art i think i think the perennial problems would be something that would be helpful but um i and i think doing that’s important especially if we’re doing something collectively because we we want to plausibly touch on things that we share um and the perennial problems are i think are very pertinent to that i’m also wondering though the degree to which because art also is this weird place in which the personal becomes the universal in strange way the the degree to which people’s also their their idiosyncratic issues have to be uh appropriately addressed and i don’t know how to i don’t know how to be proactive precisely because they’re idiosyncratic okay this brings up another another thing i was thinking about which is you know i’m reading um eris murdoch like you suggested great book and um which one is good sorry yes i’m in essay number two right now so i’m she’s talking about art quite a bit and she’s really she’s really not at all a fan of like art that looks at the self and kind of uses the self as material because she’s like it’s too easy to go astray you’re going to use your will too much you know it’s things are going to go bad for you and this is bad art basically but and i i feel like there’s there’s definitely something to that i can you can see that kind of expression all over the airwaves and everywhere else in society and i also feel like there might be some benefit i was thinking of like joni mitchell’s blue album which is to me one of the classics you know bordering on sacred for sure right and um just the way that she you know i don’t know how much you’re familiar with it but she is it’s really you know considered confessional in tone but she’s like dissecting her emotions her idiosyncratic self and she’s doing it in a way that is not self-pitying you know it’s not it’s not um oh you know just kind of morose or whatever but i mean there’s definitely a lot of dark stuff in there but but then you can look at that and you can go well i’m not her but she her experience reflects you know i can reflect on that as another individual and then we can triangulate that into more of like the universal and use that as like a parabolic you know experience like then that the universal reflects back on me you know after refracting through me and out and in if that makes if that makes sense that did that was excellent um so what what what where we’re getting to is the knife’s edge right we’re trying to find white ways of guiding people’s involvement with art along the knife’s edge between narcissism and socratic self-knowledge i mean so that that’s the place where we’re trying to get to it sounds like at least on this this and this dimension yeah i feel like there’s some value in that like emotional exploration of self like via music and other art like i don’t want to throw that out completely although i think murdoch might you know i don’t know but um you know i just i feel like there’s something that some way you can see your own idiosyncratic self through that process that you it’s hard to do through other methods at least for me that might just be no no credit to me i think that i think that’s good so let me bring up there’s two things bouncing around inside me right now because i can always tell when i’m getting into real dialogos there’s like this stuff starts to take on a life of its own one is murdoch’s definition of love as the painful recognition of something other than oneself being real which relates to what we’ve been talking about this sort of right recognition that wait something other the real recognition the painful recognition something that other ones than other something other than oneself is real so there’s that that connects to previous stuff but then i’m also thinking of wright’s work on sensibility transcendence which murdoch talks about uh right she talks the example of the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law that wright picks up on is in the sovereignty of the good and there’s something about right so i’m trying to use murdoch to to uh constrain murdoch i guess but the idea that you know their insensibility transcendence we’re not translate we’re not transcending to the universal we’re trans we’re transcending to being very tailoring our sensibility to the specificity of a particular individual by undergoing a transformation to them this is what happens when you’re when you when you form you know a romantic partnership with somebody you’re not transcending into universal humanity with them yes i mean that might happen at least i’m not but at ta but what you’re doing is it this is i mean there’s going to be a phenomenological description it feels like they’re filling a hole in you and vice versa and vice versa that you didn’t know you had until you met them it’s very much like the vlog augustin talks about god right and what you have to do is learn to like really um shape and experience that hole if i can put it that way um that that’s what i think she means by that painful recognition and that’s the sensibility transcendence and so i think what what michael does and and you know and lennard cohen does this too a lot of his stuff is they figure out uh they sort of make they do an art in which they do their own sensibility transcendence on themselves but yes exactly as we as we as we pick up how to do that but if art’s done well we don’t do it in order to generate our narcissism we do it in order to come to a deeper self uh socratic knowledge yeah that’s that knight’s edge right yeah exactly and and that that puts us on a place where we can genuinely recognize and in murdoch’s sense of love the reality of another um and maybe it’s recognizing ourselves then in that case or could be another definitely recognizing ourselves as as a being who has always always been in relation to others that are not oneself i mean it’s it’s a deep remembrance of deep recognition so this is very interesting go ahead when you’re writing you know like you know i think at least when i’m when i’m writing lyrics i’m i’m not i’m not you know trying to write for others or for myself really but um what what hopefully happens is then there is that recognition that you know my experience is connected to others and i’m yeah you know not not just pushing out my you know oh i like peanut butter or something to the world yeah that’s very good because i think what we’re doing is articulating the space of vulnerability what does it feel like phenomenologically and how is it functioning yeah so so circling back then um you see do you see art as one practice among many or more like a meta practice the way so so i i’ve proposed dialectic into dia logos as a meta practice right that helps you curate and coordinate the individual practices do you see art as similar in that fashion as more of a meta practice yeah okay well i’m going to reveal my ignorance here so when i when i started with your work you know i kind of i was trying to figure out how to fit art into you know the practice of art not the you know consumption of it um as like a narrative to accompany the ecology and then you know the way i write is the way i write music and lyrics is so it’s so much like a quilt or a stew or something you know it’s not it’s a it’s a narrative that hopefully does self-transcend you know and kind of shows you something more than than the story so that that didn’t really work out so well and so that’s that’s i’m on that kind of edge too of trying to figure out like is it is it a is it a meta practice is it binding all these other practices together that’s kind of what i would like to happen you know but that’s not necessarily what’s good for the ecology you know i i just hold art in such high regard that it might be unhealthy in a way but um it also you know for someone like me it might be this kind of um you know dialogical binding agent that really brings the whole thing together in a symbolic way maybe not narrative but you know has that symbolic transformative power to it at least and and you know the lovely thing about is you can just you can be inspired in art by all kinds of stuff it could be your meditation practice it could be a green cup it could be you know whatever it is um so it’s got that that versatility to it um that can really help it you know look at it can you can think about virtues you can work on you know anything you want to um and so that that in itself makes me want to think of it more as this this binding agent for the rest of the ecology but i’m also like am i just getting a little too over the top about it well i mean i mean the thing about art um if it’s imaginal in corban sense right is it mediates between the conceptual and the sensual and the individual and the universal the inside and the outside like that’s what that so i mean it is sort of inherently a binding thing it allows people individually and and especially collectively to hold things in mind that otherwise you can’t hold in mind sorry let me just shut that off um so i’m thinking of um you know this goes back to my my boyhood um people i think really feel or felt god’s presence not so much when god is being spoken in the sermon but when they’re singing hymns together and you’ve got the image the shared imagery the shared music and right and so you get something properly symbolic you can hold things in mind that you can’t otherwise hold in mind and you can share them with others in ways in which you can’t you can’t this is a way in which you can share with people perspectively in a participatory fashion not just uh proposition so i i don’t think it’s inappropriate given the the imaginal nature of art or at least its capacity to be imaginal maybe i should say that and also it’s um it’s symbolic capacity uh to to uh to justify um the proposal of it having more of a binding function a religio function a meta function so that leads me to the more specific thing i alluded to earlier that i was talking to with brendan and leman the idea of using technology to create to create an active dynamic of this mediation the idea is you know and i’ve seen versions of this on youtube where you get a collection of people and they are allowed to perform a certain number of modifications and you get the you get you get a collectively generated art that is constantly morphing and shifting yeah yeah that’s it i was thinking about this when you were talking with jordan hall a long time ago and you were talking about how you know one person says something and the other person picks up on some you know relevant features and kind of helps compress you know the information or whatever and i was like it would be great to like write a song send it off have someone you know do their thing with it and do that in a similar fashion like a dialogical fashion which is kind of what musicians do when they cover each other’s work anyway exactly and and to so and that’s that’s for me which is especially exciting and intriguing and therefore i might be prone to bias about it but getting a kind of higher order uh like isomorphism between uh the logos as right like the way i talked about it etc practiced it and this sort of dialogical co-creation collective creation like like instantiating the logos symbolically and imaginally rather than propositionally uh and then and then so you could get a meta dialogue between the artistic dialogos and the philosophical dialogos that’s that’s what really excites me that’s lovely well because that way we are accessing and evolving the collective intelligence of distributed cognition in a multi-dimensional and sort of self-complexifying fashion we’re creating something that could be a very powerful um taste touchstone for people when they’re trying to pursue ecology to practices they could they could they could sort of point to that and say my ecologies should bring me into greater conformity with this kind of the logos in this fashion yes yes yeah what you’re saying it’s like it’s giving me this like feeling of like my brain hemisphere is wanting to sync up around my third eye or something like you know it’s exactly exactly exactly wonderful sense to that that possibility of something and then that is like that connection between you know the artistic and the dialogical versions of logos like that is like that’s that cutting edge you know like it’s something that i couldn’t name at this point you know whatever that that growth plate is on the edge of the bone you know it’s just it’s just beautiful well thank you and uh and and it wasn’t really possible until very recently because we didn’t have the technology that would support this so there’s a potential art form that is now available and um i i i think it’s very appropriate for trying to for participating in this inventio of the sacred that we’re going through right now um and i i mean i was talking with layman and brendan about you know we’ve already got some of these mediating art forms like the meaning wave genre is really really interesting me a lot um you know haven’t heard of it oh so there’s a cure of the dawn and oh i always forget chris’s last name i just looked at it again recently he’s doing some on some of my work and jordan so you take okay the steal the culture piece was yeah okay yes video and or audio and then you do stuff with it and you put in rhythm and you put in music and you revert stuff and you get stuff to repeat and then you also play with the juxtaposition of the images you’re basically what you’re doing is you you you take it’s almost like what i’ve been talking about in some of the places around idetic induction you take the original form and then you do this imaginal extension on it but the point is then you’re supposed to reflect it back into the original form get a deeper appreciation you’re supposed to bounce on it like oh yeah right so it’s meaning way yes you’re getting the meaning wave and i thought okay cool yes that’s already like that’s already starting to explore this very space so i mean there’s a possibility like of a dialogical form a kind of evolving fine art imaginal form and then this kind of intermediary form that mediates between them i mean it’s like a lecio divina for yeah yeah yes exactly it’s yes yes and so the possibilities here for the expression right it’s it’s always much more the new tools the new skills the new virtues and virtuosity than the particular propositions right so there’s new potential for new art for this for a new disclosure of this emerging sensibility around the sacred this for me is deeply deeply exciting as a realizable possibility right here right now that is wonderful yeah that’s just wow okay sparks flying for sure like we’ve got a chance to like work out because like one of the things i’ve been stuck on you know i i you know wrote to you and i called it my proto religion of no religion that i was working on through music you know it’s like i don’t want to call it that but i don’t really know because i don’t want it to be you know my religion of you know yeah there’s that the danger of the top down and there’s also the danger of just too many people doing their own thing um and then you know aside from like founding a school or whatever yeah there’s this whole like this binding of you know this process here these processes you’re talking about that could that could provide a third way that’s not not stuck in that old dichotomy you know that’s great and that’s exactly what i mean because that’s trying to break out of the iron age dominance hierarchy way it’s either top down or you know top down in position or bottom up fragmentation but yeah this way of people being bound together rather that is that transcends that dichotomy that’s exactly it’s kind of dynamically present uh perspectival and participatory evolving logos right and yeah so and i’m not an artist i can’t but you are poetry i write poetry sarah i mean i shouldn’t mention her name but my part my partner um she finds the poetry i write her quite beautiful so i’ve been writing poetry for about 40 years so i think i’m getting to the point where um it has value beyond my own self reflection or something like that yeah after 40 well you know some of us are more humble than others i think um well i mean it’s um i mean there’s a lot there’s a long there’s a there’s a long process of finding your voice um in which you have to write other people you have to you have to both internalize other people’s voices but write them out of your system so that there’s a space for your own voice i’m sorry that’s not describing it very well it takes a long time to become young i think that’s what miles davis said or that’s it i like that that’s a good way of putting it but the possibility of jazz poetry also like where people are a little bit like what you do in philosophical fellowship where you pick up on a phrase but you chant it but you would allow the chanting to introduce variation and like yeah there there’s a lot here that needs to be explored precisely because we have the technological connectivity and we have the the dynamic nature of this medium right and related media allow us to pursue this this is where i think we’re going to get right the new disclosure of the sacred um yeah above and go ahead i want to i just want to agree because i i do feel you know like i said i tend to overemphasize art and its importance and i’ve been burned by that before but um you know i feel like the artful scaling you know of the religion that’s not a religion is is gonna be largely mediated through art i mean very much artful you know that’s that’s brendan’s um core proposal core proposition and i think he’s right about that i think especially the especially if it’s in the dialogical relationship to uh by the asophia right where we’re where we’re getting people are like i said doing that this oh yeah that that like that might be part of that you know like i was talking about earlier that the missing part of like are we keeping each other kind of grounded in a in a positive sense you know and some of that phileas sophia stuff like when i did the weekend workshop with you guys you and guy and some other people um you know it just really it demands a lot of you and it’s not it’s not that free expression of just no no no no no not at all and jazz is not just free people who well can’t do jazz and this is what we were just talking about unless you’ve done read and written a lot of poetry for decades i don’t think you can write poetry very well either um no no you have to you have to commit to virtue and virtuosity i’d like to pair those two now you have to commit both of those before uh any of this is going to work for you but but but there are people right there are people that i think already are at the place where they have some of the requisite virtues and virtuosity to start pursuing the kind of projects we’re talking about right here right now and then bringing in the martial arts yes right right like especially especially the martial arts that you know pick up on on the aesthetic aspect like you know in tai chi there’s a lot of connections symbolically between the practice and music um like that would yeah that would like putting that into this i think we yeah so there’s another grounding element for one thing but there’s more to it than that obviously but but that’s really helpful yeah putting the body in yeah that’s very grounding keeping it connected to the earth when i when i was growing up uh in the again when i went to church um we had an expression and it was often used by primates to do sort of maliciously and gossipy but there was truth to it too which is being too heavenly minded to be any earthly good um right and you can teach you can see people uh doing that they they become self-righteous or they do spiritual bypassing or they’re convinced that their particular wonderful experience um is automatically shareable by by everybody else and there’s all kinds of things but there yeah but but martial arts shake you free from that possibility because it’s it’s beautiful in itself yeah oops got punched in the face yeah exactly exactly um i mean i sometimes i have recommended to my students in the proper context and please anybody who’s listening to this don’t take this out of context you’re being unfair to me but within proper context proper supervision proper safety measures it’s good to be hit especially in your face so that you’re knocked down because it go it does it does part of what we’re talking about here you go from being exposed to more like vulnerable to the punch rather than just exposed to it there’s this ability to right you still don’t want to get punched it’s an unpleasant experience but it loses it loses i don’t know it loses a kind of magnification that it has in your imagination when you actually get the concrete experience does that does that jive with you does that land that makes complete sense it’s like um you know i’m thinking of um greg enriquez’s i quad coin right now which probably not a ton of people have seen but um just this kind of idea that you’re you know for yourself is spinning between the imaginal and you’re more like you know first person empirical yeah perspective among other things but you know that you need that you need both of those and that’s a way to really you know cut the bullshit you know just not just not just like oh that didn’t work kind of bullshit or i’m in dreamland kind of stuff but also just that imaginal that extra the it’s you know associated with fear or anxiety or you know well you wouldn’t say anxiety but you know kind of all that other stuff about like well if i get hit in the face it’s gonna be terrible or whatever narratives we have about that kind of thing yeah you know you can sort of cut yourself loose from some of that like you’re alluding to and the good thing about many of the martial arts especially they have katas and other things is you can practice them both individually and and collectively um which which is very very good um yeah so bridging between that and you know the the dynamically evolving imagery the meaning wave and dialectic into the logos that could create a very powerful a very powerful i don’t know what to call it inventio of sacredness that could help act as a touchstone for people who are trying to curate and curate and create and coordinate individual or small group colleges or practices yes that sounds you know really wonderful like you know my martial arts one of my martial arts teachers really encourages people to do an art you know and we have body work in our system you know you know it’s in it there’s a there’s an encouragement towards some kind of you know spiritual practice as well um and i just i feel like those kind of systems are really really strangely profound in their simplicity you know like do an art do a martial art do a creative art do a you know do meditation do maybe body work or whatever it is yeah i was taught you know you do a martial art you do some sort of mindfulness art practice and you also do a healing art of some kind therapy shiatsu uh counseling something uh to help people um and that that set of arts is very important because they mutually they’re different enough from each other that they can transform each other but they’re aligned and similar enough to each other that they don’t just fly apart from each other like i’m constantly looking for connections uh between them yeah yeah that’s why i knew this would be a i was really hoping to introduce this subject to kind of explore these connections before like what yeah what is that the martial healing you know fine art connection or connections you know how are the i mean they’re called arts it’s it’s just really interesting you know even even body work or you know massage therapy is often referred to as as an art form and i feel like you know not to segue too far but with with body work i was really influenced by um this woman diane jacobs who is a physical therapist and she kind of you know had this had some terminology about moving from an operator mentality to an interactor mentality in body work so you’re not you’re no longer doing something to a person you’re not you know and some of those constructs are pretty pretty shaky to begin with it turns out as far as being the being the operator working on someone else but you’re interacting and then that becomes the true art is how is your nervous system and their nervous system interacting mediated by touch yeah yeah you know and i just i find that to be like really rich in terms of like what it can do in that ecology with martial arts at its side you know like where where both of those are interactions between people you know and in a playful sense martial arts can be a really you know positive emotional experience for both people and body work you know you and i have talked about this um privately but body work you know can go a long way toward ameliorating some of the perennial problems that you bring up as well um in different ways and i think there’s a lot of promise to that but i digress i’m getting off track no that i mean it does go back to something that we had sort of left as a thread which is you know that the ecology of practice has to provide and this gets very tricky but it has to one way in which people can bypass is they they leap too quickly into vulnerability because they haven’t dealt with things that need to be healed because the problem with like pain is naturally egocentric right and so when we’re in pain right we become that so when we have when we have unprocessed pain there’s ways in which it makes us unnecessarily egocentric and that of course gets into my side bias within reasoning and thinking and there’s all kinds of stuff that can be going on so i don’t think that was necessarily too much of a digression trying to um trying to thread that needle though is hard because like these one of the things for example we’re we’re we’re you see guy talking about and i do is making clear to people that these practices are not free therapy right because there are people that come in right and it’s like and it’s like the same needle you were talking about with joni mitchell right yes we want to address this but we’re not going to address it in a way that stays enclosed within your idio idiosyncratic right yeah then you just reinforce it otherwise yes right exactly exactly and therapy is allowed to do that that’s a proper role for therapy when i go into therapy and it’s just the therapist it’s all about me and it should be right that yes fine yeah but that’s not what we’re doing here that’s not what we’re doing here what we’re talking about here we’re talking about something that can’t get sucked into um uh a sort of a therapeutic black hole it’s got to always stay independent from that so i think bringing up the topic of you know addressing healing without necessarily again art needs to help heal people without countenancing um individualized idiosyncratic egocentric therapy because that’s yes that’s what we’re trying to do here yes that’s yeah that makes tons of sense to me you know that it reminds me of the phrase i thought of existential body work you know as opposed to bodywork therapy right excellent i like that that’s a good turn of phrase yeah exactly that um and uh so to my mind that goes towards something we were talking about last time which is you know socratic aspiration it involves a self-knowledge but it’s not this autobiographical self-knowledge it’s the kind of knowledge that’s affording you to go through transformation yeah so i think there’s that that’s interesting um artists i guess are particularly good at that they’re good at um helping people to heal without indulging people’s um we we all each one of us find ourselves infinitely fascinating and salient the super salience of the ego um yeah yeah so i find that good art in fact and playdo talks about this um but it it has the capacity to insinuate itself into that sort of narcissistic attractor gravity well and yet and then blow it up from the blow it apart right yes yeah yeah that’s that’s great you know i i i were you know not to add yet another thread but when i want to do peer support as a professional practice i often try to go beyond like a a therapeutic type mentality into like more of a like well what do you think about the optimal form of government and then just kind of right going out and then somehow it always comes back to the person and and the issues that they had originally but it’s so healthy sometimes to be able to get out of that little box into like greater i think you know intelligibility well well because some sometimes the most important healing we need is to just escape from the prison cell of our ego right of our egocentrism um and as i get as i get older the the longing for that grows in me um right that’s a painful experience of you know exactly that’s a painful experience right because there’s a kind of suffocating staleness of being always trapped inside john vervecky if i can put it that way a kind of a kind of weariness about that um and it and it’s not just because i have a sort of sadistic self-loathing that is a problem for me but putting that aside right the the the yes but there i want to breathe i want like like murdoch said you know to to to encounter the really real other than me i want to breathe that fresh air um in a way um that art can afford and i really appreciate that yeah so uh this makes me like drawn back toward the martial arts and the beauty of martial arts that we touched on a while back because you know i feel like martial arts can bring you out of yourself into that into breathing that air you know yeah um with a with a with or without a partner you know a good kata practice or something can really can really do that if you’re if you’re tuned into what you’re doing um and it just i’m really um wanting to bring the the idea of beauty in martial arts back in here because um you know there’s there’s obviously like kind of the the fake performance beauty of certain martial arts that are more like dance performances but but what is that what’s going on there when when we like feel you know a beautiful punch or something you know that move that move was beautiful like that you know and it may be really hurt to receive it but you could still say it oh that was beautiful at the same time yeah you’re getting outside of yourself somewhat you know i do think there i think there’s deep connections between beauty and optimal gripping um i like d.c shindler’s proposal that uh beauty is a way in which appearance is disclosing reality as opposed to acting us from reality um when and that’s how he distinct you distinguish beauty from just taking pleasure in um and in the consumption of something yeah um so insofar as beauty transcends gratification egocentric gratification beauty again the murdoch quote right about love is is that proposed here beauty is a way in which um i think chindler doesn’t say this but this is me sort of coordinating with him when beauty is when i i the appearance is helping is acting as a doorway into the depths of something um so it’s an invitation uh into the depth so it’s it’s it’s it’s an optimal grip but not not in the practical sense of using something it’s an optimal grip in the contemplative sense in fact i often say what i’ve been saying recently i’ve been i’m talking to dan about this i’m playing with this we go from optimally gripping something to being ultimately gripped by it we go from having an optimal having an optimal grip into being ultimately gripped by something oh yeah there we go yeah yeah that sort of that sort of sense yeah that can draw you out yeah in the martial sense you know you can you can put yourself into a situation that simulates violence you know and yet still and this is such great life training right because then you can be drawn outside yourself by the beauty of events occurring um as you’re losing that ego narrative in the process even if you’re getting hurt you know um or whatever you know maybe maybe maybe not but um it can draw it can like it’s a higher challenge level for aspiration to me you know like like art is in a certain way kind of easier because you know you can play a song or whatever in martial arts you’re dealing with instant threat in front of you a lot of the time you know and yet you’re still being drawn into this thing you know and i just feel like that’s such wonderful it is wonderful training it is and and the um the way you you wake up inside your body and and your body is um uh irreducibly immersed and connected to the physical world and so you can’t like you can’t like that like i said you can’t float off into headspace but you can you can definitely get into flow and you can definitely get these moments where you feel like you’re seeing deeply into situations even into other people like there’s like when you’re doing work with other people healing art or martial art you often get insights into them that are unavailable to you in any other way Mm-hmm puts that pressure on us right in certain ways and and it’s and in such a healthy way it’s not like that ugly like oh i saw someone aside of someone that you know came out during this really violent encounter or something it’s in a supportive environment that’s well crafted like in a lot of good you know one thing that traditional martial arts does have going for it is it knows how to build respect for each other you know in a healthy way a lot of the time you know when that’s working well you can really see some some other sides of yourself and other people in ways that you just kind of invited in instead of rejecting it you know as it goes to that vulnerability you know if it’s if it’s running in the right way yeah i keep laughing because i’m thinking of all the examples of that not happening in martial arts schools but um that’s a different story yeah we’re not claiming we’ll just speak on both of our house for a second we’re not claiming this is the standard case we’re talking about something that does occur but it’s more exemplary than average or nor or normal yeah very much yeah well this has been this has been wonderful uh i really i’ve really enjoyed this things have really opened up i i’m gonna i’m gonna ask layman if he can uh once he posts uh the third to link to this i’ll post this in a couple days to link to this uh the logos that we’ve had because i think it just fits in with that whole artful scaling of the religion that’s not a religion just perfectly yes and i was really excited to see that first episode of it for the same reason yeah and the second episode was on brendan’s channel and the third one’s up because i’m exploring also that i’m exploring the possibility like we’ve done i’ve done it a couple times now did it with uh uh with greg uh and um who else was it with uh no i did it with sorry not not with greg i did with zevi and guy we moved between our channels on that when we do all right yes and more and more uh trying to get uh this sort of circulation between people’s channels as well um uh in the series so uh yeah uh yeah i’m gonna ask if we can at least link this video to that that that series because i think it’s really apropos is there anything you’d like to say in closing rachel before we boy you know so many things and also this feels like a good stopping point well we’ll talk again for sure uh that goes with what i was saying and yeah it’s great to see you and catch up it’s great to see you too and uh like i said i’m looking forward to uh working with you as we start to do some of that work on or towards the ecology of practices network and conference and that’s just all starting right now so i’m looking forward to working uh with you on that and a bunch of other wonderful amazing people yes great thank you so much thank you so much