https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=O0mxMzkyoOc
Okay. How are you today? I’m very good. Thank you. How about you? Yeah, very well. Thanks. Very well. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so I don’t really have much of an idea of where I want to go with this conversation. I just kind of wanted to speak to you because I’ve been following your work for a while and really, really found a lot of value in what you’ve been exploring. I loved Awakening from the Meeting Crisis. I devoured that series like you wouldn’t believe. I just wanted to get to the next episode, the next episode. Really, really enjoyed a lot of, you know, not only the content that you presented, but also the style. And to me, it felt like you were very alive with the ideas as they were unfolding. And, you know, there was a presence to you when you presented it. And yeah, I really enjoyed that. And also, you know, untangling the world knot of consciousness and the elusive eye, what you’re doing most recently. And I think that’s what really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really cognitive sciences field is that I, I had been pursuing philosophy, largely because when I met the figure of Socrates in first year university, it inspired me. I began an aspirational path to try and better and better follow Socrates and the love of wisdom, which I hope doesn’t sound too pretentious. I’m just stating an aspiration like he didn’t know. But the, and the problem with academic philosophy is that until very recently, the topic of wisdom, which is at the core of the word philosophy by Leah Sophia drops off the table. And you get involved in this other project. Now this other project, it has its own inherent value, the project of sort of meta science and meta culture and meta ethics, and that’s valuable, you get valuable tools and it’s, it’s an important thing to do. So I’m not denigrating it, but it did not satisfy the original reason why entered philosophy. Yeah. So after I did my MA, I actually dropped out for a year, because I was very disillusioned. But I started taking up, because I wasn’t finding what I needed within the Western tradition. I started taking up Tai Chi Chuan and the past meditation and meta contemplation. I’ve started to go through these transformative experiences. And then about that time I became aware of this new discipline called cognitive science, where they were initially starting to talk about the mind in ways that were much more conducive to affording transformation. And then I found that although philosophers at that time were not talking about wisdom very much anymore, psychologists and cognitive scientists and neuroscientists started talking about it. And then neuro and then cognitive science was more and more shifting into what’s now called 4E cognitive science, emphasizing how embedded, embodied, enacted, and extended cognition is, and how issues of meaning are central. And then, right, I, as I was entering into this, more and more and more what happened is my interest in wisdom and the direction of cognitive science were both moving and they moved more and more towards each other like that. And so I find the interdisciplinary approach to understanding sense making and meaning making within cognitive science to be importantly similar to what we would now consider the very interdisciplinary approach of people like Plato and Aristotle, the Stoics, etc. Yeah, yeah, very cool. And I’ve heard you mention previously somewhere that you were involved in the Christian church as a young man. Yeah, well, that’s how I ended up meeting Socrates. I was brought up in a fundamentalist form of Christianity. And it’s taking me some significant amount of therapy, some significant amount of my practices, a significant amount of time of reflection, the significant amount of help from friends to come to a more balanced appraisal of that because when I initially left it, I left it for reasons I would now call because it was having a traumatizing effect on me. It was very traumatic. At what age was that that you left? About 15, right, sort of the prototypical age, right? Yeah. And I’ve come to appreciate the value of the exposure to Christianity. I often use, I often use the analogy, just like English is my mother tongue, and I will always carry it with me. Christianity was my mother religion, and I’ll always carry it with me. So it’s given me a taste for self-transcendence. It’s given me a taste for aspiration. It’s given me a taste for internalizing the sage. Jesus was my first sage that was internalized. And all of these things, I’ve come to deeply appreciate and be gracious for and be gracious about and be hopefully grateful for. But I also have come to realize how, and this I found has been the case for many people, their experience with Christianity has been traumatic or at least neglectful or negligent to some significant degree. Yeah. Now, that doesn’t mean that all Christians are pursuing the Christianity that way. I’m not claiming that. I’m claiming what I experienced and what happened to me. And so I left, but that hunger that the mother religion had given in me was not going to just be simply denied in sort of militant atheism. And that’s when I encountered the figure of Socrates, and I encountered somebody who was a Christian, and I was a Christian. And so I mean, a lot of my life I’ve come to see and even helped by the And so I mean, a lot of my life I’ve come to see and even helped by the And so I mean, a lot of my life I’ve come to see and even helped by the And so I mean, a lot of my life I’ve come to see and even helped by the And so I mean, a lot of my life I’ve come to see and even helped by the people like Paul VanderKlay and Jonathan Pagio, JP Marceau, Mary Cohen, even Jordan Peterson. I have these two sages within me. Jesus, my sage of Agape, and Socrates, is my sage of logos. trying to, not so much trying, it’s more how they are working themselves out in me, and I’m trying to figure out how to best conform to how they can best coordinate and cooperate and cohabitate within me. And I’m hopeful that that can be helpful to other people because I think you can understand a lot of the human endeavor for the good life to be one in which we are trying to realize, in both senses of the word realize, logos and agape and how they belong together, which was the central project of sort of Platonic Christianity or Christian Platonism, however you want to describe a lot of the spiritual heritage, the mystical tradition within Christianity. There’s similar things, of course, definitely going on within Buddhism with Dharma and Karuna and similar things going on in Taoism. Those are the three that I feel comfortable talking about. I was brought up in Christianity and then I’ve been doing Buddhist and Taoist practices for, I don’t know, close to three, no, three decades. It’s been three decades now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s awesome. There’s so many rich topics that you’re touching on. I just want to give you a little bit of context for me and where I’ve come from. Yeah, please. So I have been a practicing Buddhist for about six years now. For me, finding the spiritual path was kind of through suffering, through some kind of existential crisis, looking around for some way to make sense of my life and then stumbling across different podcasts and YouTube videos and things like that that started to land pretty deeply in me as, oh, this is a way to make sense of life and find some meaning. I’d been meditating for a few years prior to that, so I had an understanding of the mechanisms of meditation, but my meditation teacher was an atheist and was coming at it from a scientific point of view where it was simply a mechanism to find relief from stress and anxiety and things like that, which was useful. But yeah, coming across some of these spiritual insights just in the written word made meditation much deeper and richer for me. Of course. You always have to embed an ecology of practices within a phallia sophia, or you are denying yourself the depth of transformation that those practices could afford. Were you always called Maitreya then? I mean, because that’s the coming Buddha. I was called Matthew, yeah, and Maitreya was actually given to me by my current spiritual teacher, Vishwant. Ah, so you’re one of Jung’s second-born, the people who adopt a second name indicating an important fundamental transformation. That’s very cool. Yes, exactly right. So I’ve been part of this community, I guess, now for six years, and it’s under the umbrella of Buddhism, but it’s not traditional Buddhism in the sense that there’s study of scripture and things like that. It incorporates a lot of Taoist elements, actually, as well. The Yin and Yang. I’ve been with this teacher for six years, learning what he has to teach, and a lot of it really aligns with what you’re talking about, about agape and wisdom and self-transcendence, self-transformation, development of the psyche, and the ecology of practices. My teacher would teach an ecology of practices. Of course, all good teachers do. Yes, so that really resonates with me deeply. Also, in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, you were touching on things like higher states of consciousness and mystical states of consciousness, and what enlightenment is. That’s really fascinating to me, too, because my teacher is enlightened, and he’s teaching a path towards enlightenment. Can I ask you a question? Yes. If I may interrupt you, because you just said something deeply provocative to me. I’ve met a couple people who, I think, legitimately claimed to be enlightened. Of course, I’ve read some text by people who claim to be enlightened. I want to ask this question very carefully, and I would like your considered response to it. What is it about him that gives you the trustworthy sense that he’s enlightened? Yeah, that’s a very good question. Yeah, that’s a really good question. I’m asking it both as somebody who’s on a path and as a cognitive scientist. That’s why the question is kind of a pivotal question for me. Yeah, yeah. To answer that question, I would have to come at it from an energy standpoint. Because to me, anyone can speak the words of enlightenment, spirituality, reality. You can’t really judge someone on the words they use. It has to be, to me, on the presence. Their presence? The other way. So you feel a presence through the words? No, not through the words. It doesn’t have to be through the words. It can be just sitting in silence. It can be through the words, but it also can be in silent communing as well. Sorry for interrupting, but I want to unpack the detail. The scientist is coming out right now. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so I’ve had a couple of experiences with Vishra very early on in sitting with him in satsang where my vision all kind of went white, started to go white. He was in the room and everything disappeared except for him. Right. And then he disappeared and there was just whiteness and the energy in my body was super light and super vibrant. And that lasted for a few minutes and then went away. And then there was a separate incident a few weeks later where I was sitting in satsang again and was just meditating and I had my eyes closed and there was an energy that was very light and very nice. It was like blissful almost, vibrating in my sort of solar plexus or stomach area and then even lower, so probably down to the navel. Right near the dorsal fin then. Yes, that’s where it started and then it became stronger and stronger and came up and up and into my chest and then into my neck and then further up into my forehead and to the top of my head. And I had my eyes closed this whole time and things were happening around me but I was just really really intrigued by this sensation in my body. And then I felt like a pull on my forehead here. Yeah. It was almost like someone had a fishing hook and stuck a fishing hook in my forehead and was pulling on the fishing line. That was how strong it was. And then at some point I opened my eyes and things started to slowly return to sort of normality. And those two experiences for me were foundational because I’ve always been trying to get back to those two experiences and never had experiences as strong as those two. But sitting in his presence even today I still feel a lightness of energy and my mind will quieten down to some degree. And did you feel that the second experience, the third eye, did you feel that that was somehow connected to him in some fashion or? Yes, yes I think so. Yeah. That would be my guess but again it’s just a guess and I’ve read about other spiritual experiences and I can only guess as to what was happening there but I would say that it was almost like the chakra here was opening and the Yeah. So this is very interesting for me and sorry I don’t mean to derail things the way you might plan but this is genuine ideologos for me. So if I’m understanding correctly and please correct me if I’m wrong because I want to know, I don’t want to be right, I want to know. It sounds to me like you’re saying you have a trustworthy sense that this person is enlightened because of his capacity to trigger in you these kinds of profound experiences of realization and of self-realization. And I think that’s so it’s not just what he says but somehow he is having for lack of a better word a symbolic effect on you that is deeply transformative. So you’re knowing of him and your the transformation in your self-knowledge are bound together in some very intimate fashion. Am I understanding you correctly? Absolutely, absolutely. Yes, yeah, yeah. So and the self-transformation that I’ve experienced during my time with him is also testament to that same energy. And you see other people around him also going through similar kinds of transformations? Yes, yes. I know you’re not doing this as a scientist that so I hope I’m not being intrusive but this proposal I think is a very valuable one because a lot of the attempts to understand of enlightenment are done internally. What’s it like inside the mind? But and then we try to decide from that whether or not the person’s enlightened. But one of the things you’re saying right is no no but one of the things you could look at is like enlightened people have this kind of effect on people around them. Yes. We should be paying attention to that. Yes. I think that’s a bit like he’s triggering this deep kind of participatory self-transcendence in you. Yes. And then the way that you and others are finding enlivening and enriching of your lives. Is that fair to say it that way? Definitely, yes, absolutely. Wow, thank you for that. That’s very helpful to me. I hadn’t sort of put those pieces together in the right way. That’s very helpful from my understanding. So I’m sorry for hijacking this. I’ll turn things back over to you but I really wanted to follow that. No, no, it’s not hijacking at all. I actually want to participate in a dialogue with you, dialogos, if we can manage it. But I want things to be free-flowing. I don’t necessarily want this to be an interview where I’m just asking you questions. Sure, okay great. Yeah, because I’m fascinated by the same things you’re fascinated by. It intrigues me as much as it does you. And the questions that you’re asking in me provoke the same curiosity in me because I’ve asked myself the same questions. You know, you look online for enlightened masters and you find people like Ajay Shanti and Mooji and Gangaji and various other awake people around the world. For me, it has to be the final test of whether someone’s awake or not. It has to be an energy phenomena in some sense. It has to be the presence of the other. The presence of the person with the power to transform others that come into that presence. Yes. And they’re not, and that is freely given. It’s agapically given. It’s not being used to manipulate. People can confuse, I think, the presence of someone who’s awakened with the charisma of somebody who’s very, very sharp. And those aren’t the same thing. Those aren’t the same thing. Yeah. That’s very, very interesting. So I want to, I mean, one way I think, I, Scythiancia, which is where we get science from but originally means knowledge, right, and Sapientia, wisdom, I want to get them back together. And so I try to, one thing I try to do is I try to ask questions that come from both. Yeah. Right. So that’s really, really interesting. Well, I don’t have much more to say right now because that was a lot. I mean, about that topic, there’s lots more to talk about. But yeah, I think when two people can start to come to things together that they couldn’t come on their own, that’s when Deologos is starting to take shape. We were having a bit of Deologos there. There were something was catching fire between us and self-organizing. That’s what Deologos feels like. Yes. Yes. Totally. Totally. Absolutely. And I love that when I can drop into that flow and things just emerge of their own accord. It’s not necessarily anything that I’m doing, but something is emerging by itself and I’m participating in it. Yeah. Very much. Yeah. Yeah. That’s another thing that just, you know, participatory knowing that I feel strongly about. You’re exemplifying it. You’re exemplifying it so much. You know, when there’s that interpenetration of self-knowledge and self-transcendence and knowledge of the other and its self-disclosure, that level, the fundamental level of your identity machinery, that’s participatory knowing. That’s participatory knowing. And you were exemplifying it there, which is why I found I tend to be attracted, I hope, with good justification towards people who are speaking from that and not just speaking from their propositions. Yes. Yes. And that’s something I’ve learned from Socrates to seek out that kind of participation. Yeah. So yeah, you’re exemplifying it. Yeah. And it is so much richer than propositional knowing because it’s based on experience. You experience something and it transforms you. You can then speak it because you know it to such a depth. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it comes with a kind of self-intimacy and other intimacy that propositional knowing doesn’t carry. Yeah, I’m trying, I mean, in the work I’m doing, I’m trying to, part of what I think wisdom consists in is the proper alignment of the propositional, the procedural, the perspectival, and the participatory. And I was, I’m wondering if people who we regard as awake or as an enlightened or even just wise, although I don’t think you can really separate those, the degree to which they’re helping people align those properly. Yes. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I’m interested, just as a curiosity question, your, you know, exploration of the self has been really fascinating. I really like the episode where you’re talking about the two academic papers that were published in 2017, one with the self exists and one with the self doesn’t exist. Yeah. The amount that they agreed upon about the machine that makes up the self and then just the conclusion is different. I find that fascinating. I would be curious to know your thoughts on the ego, what the ego is, how the ego plays into the self and our experience of life and how it plays into self-transcendence. Yeah, that, I mean, that’s a difficult one to answer simply and I’m not trying to do the usual academic thing, but because the ego means many different things, that’s the problem. It’s a very equivocal term. Yeah. So I’ll stipulate how I’m using it and if that resonates enough with you, we can go forward. If it’s too disconnected from what you think, then we can talk about what it is you’re referring to. So for me, I mean, this is still very much a work in progress because I mean, I’m doing it with Greg Enriquez and Christopher Mastapietro. I’m trying to actually exemplify as well as explain, right? We’re trying to exemplify. You definitely are. Yeah, it’s beautiful, some of the episodes. Yeah, well, for me too. The ones that are coming out, I think the ones that are coming, I mean, the one that came out last week, Greg, the second part of Greg’s argument is amazing and then Chris has one where he takes center stage and he brings in Kierkegaard and the whole existential question of the self, the existential religious question of the self and that’s just a whole other dimension of this. Yeah. So rich and juicy, right? So for me, I mean, we were talking and the idea, you’ve got this seat of consciousness which you can move around, the place from which you’re eyeing, eye and also playing with the eye metaphor, right? From which you’re doing the perspectival knowing, and when you move around and when you move around, you activate different aspects of your agency and then different me’s are disclosed and different corresponding elements in the world are disclosed, so all of that’s going on and I tend to think of the ego as a narrative situating of the seat of consciousness that often claims to have exclusive authority over my agency. Yeah. And so that is why I’ve also embarked on this. I mean, I have a tremendous, so the ego needs to be appropriately respected because of the tremendous power of narrative and narrative makes us temporally extended moral agents. We can’t come to personhood. This is why the ego thinks it’s in charge of your agency because it does so much and we know there’s even a part of the brain that tries to take credit for everything you do in a narrative fashion. Oh, I did that and it’ll confabulate some story as to why you did what you did, right? And you can see it overactive in certain psychopathologies, so it has this powerful function and so I think it tends to eradicate the ego, move off of what a Buddhist would call the middle path. I think that’s a set of systems right away. So for me, it’s to again, to properly re-negotiate its functionality. You get this from psychotherapies like IFS, internal family systems theory, where you find a part and it’s malfunctioning. You don’t try to eradicate it. You try and get it to restructure so that it regains its appropriate functionality or acquires a new and better functionality. And so when you’re in, so for me, to give people a sense of what I want to talk about, I want to talk about something that’s at least universally accessible because it’s a universal phenomena, which is the flow state. Now, we’re in the flow state. One of the things that people reliably report is that narrative seeking of consciousness that is trying to create a narrative and take credit for all of your agency drops away. And what you discover is actually a super enhanced agency, your agency and your at one minute and your connectedness while you’re in flow. And so you realize, oh, wait, my sort of ego, my narrative centering of the seed of consciousness and my identification through that with my agency, that is not what it claims to be. It is not equivalent to, it is not the final or constituent authority of my agency. And so for me, that’s when people, and this is used in transpersonal psychology, that’s when you get trans egoic experiences. And I think there’s a big important difference between a trans egoic experience and the attempt to say that, you know, that I’m completely egoless. The people, I understand what people sometimes mean by that. They mean that in that state, the ego is no longer, you know, active or dominating, but to claim they can give up the functionality of narrative in their life. I find that I find that a claim I cannot believe. There’s no evidence in their lives of these people that they have given up, you know, moral agency, the way narrative gives them a sense of like that hasn’t gone away. What I think they mean is a trans egoic experience in which that function has been reintegrated into a more comprehensive and expansive sense of agency. I don’t know if that gels with anything or lands with you very well, but that’s how I think about it. Yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense to me. I’ve always thought of the ego as the identified part of the mind. So that narrative links into that. It’s something that takes credit, something that yeah, likes to think that it has the authority over agency, because it’s making all the decisions, it’s in the seat of control. Yeah. And I’ve had experiences of the flow state, one of the most tangible experiences of the flow state for me has been playing cricket. Right. Yeah, we play a lot of cricket here. And I used to play, you know, hell of a lot years ago, and I would get into the flow state batting, because I would be just, you know, focused on the ball coming out of the bowlers hand, and everything else would melt away. And the best, you know, the best innings I would have would be, I wasn’t really doing anything. It was all just by itself. And I was just kind of there to experience it, you know. Yeah. And so there’s another there’s the flow experience is one of those trends ago. Another one is the experience of awe, because if you ask people what’s happening at all, you can get even get them to draw it. Their sense of self is shrinking. Most times when people are having that they find that traumatic and horrible. But in awe, they find the shrinkage positive. I think there’s deep connections between the flow state and the awe state. Yes. There’s also something I’m reflecting on about right now, both the flow statement. I wonder if I might share that with you. Yes. And ask you, because you’re a meditator, if this lands or resonates, if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. But so, I mean, I’ve done a lot of work and I’ve published on Chick-Sent Mahais, Sense of Flow, and I get a lot about it. But most like cricket or, you know, other like sparring, right, or jazz, right, right. You’re you’re in what I call the hot flow state. There’s tremendous metabolic expenditure, right. But I’ve noticed when I’m doing Tai Chi Chuan, or in some of my contemplative practices, I get into what I would call the cool flow state. Yeah, I’m in flow, but I’m not burning all of this metabolic calorie, right. It’s a much more yin form of flow as a yang form of flow. Has that ever happened to you? Yeah, definitely. I do Tai Chi myself. I’ve been a Tai Chi teacher, yeah, for a few years. And I’ve experienced that cool flow state where, you know, it’s just the breath and the movement of the hands and the weight subtly. And I’ve experienced that cool flow state just meditating. Like, yes, yeah, when the mind quietens down and that constant background chatter isn’t there, that’s what it feels like. It feels like just being present to the breath and body. Yeah, you’re flowing with things, but you’re not doing this like they’re both good. I mean, I’m enough of a Taoist to think you should have both the yang and the yin forms of flow. Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you for sharing that because I’m just, like, this is something about flow that I’ve now, like, I’ve done a lot of work with Leonardo Ferraro and with area area, Caria Bennett on sort of the cognitive machinery of flow. But now I’m going back to the phenomenology and trying to say I think the phenomenology is richer than sort of the prototypical examples. And of course, Western scientists would really emphasize the yang flow. Yes, science is very much about right and intervening and not very much the Laisenheit. But yeah, so that’s so thank you for sharing that because that’s yeah. To me, to me, there’s something there’s something of value in the flow state, but also in those states where the ego isn’t as present, let’s say as a thing. And there’s something about mystical states of consciousness where that’s true of consciousness and higher states of consciousness, the ego seems to be backgrounded to some degree, like it’s not foregrounded. Yeah, very much. There’s something valuable about getting into those states and finding those states more and more often. Yeah, I think what it affords, I mean, so I proposed this in the elusive eye with Greg and Chris is so this idea that this one of the functions of the self is self relevance, the way it glues everything together. And because we’re inherently cultural beings, and it’s not just how things are relevant to us, but how we’re relevant to other things and other people. I think it’s possible to exact that self glue and use it, go this way with it and use that machinery to glue the world together more rather than Yes, yes, yes. Right. And then to get that tremendous sense of, you know, of revelation of disclosure of sort of the fundamental oneness or connectedness of the world. And that can, I think, really improve our sensitivity, our ability to look for deeper patterns in reality. So I think that is deeply important to cultivate that. Yeah. And there are enlightened people that will report that that is their experience, they don’t really experience the self being here in the body. They experience the oneness all of the time, like the world is their prevailing experience of the world. And of their self, I would say, but they don’t want to say itself, because that usually refers to this egocentric sense. But if we have an auto, they have sort of an auto centric, like, you know, how we talked about how the self knowing and the other knowing are deeply enmeshed in participatory knowing, I think for awakened enlightened people, they have become all well, not identical, right. So there’s no deep distinction now between the machinery of self knowing and the machinery of world knowing, they’ve now become completely interpenetrated. Yes, yes, I would say that’s true. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And that to me is really, really fascinating, because it’s like, okay, so, if we can start to say things about what enlightenment is, and what the experience is like, and there’s commonalities that are reported between different enlightened people, and, and there’s agreement from those around them that observe them in their daily lives, that yes, these are, you know, ways in which they live their life, then to me, it seems possible that we can develop an ecology of practices that can accelerate our transformation to get closer and closer to higher states of consciousness, mystical states of consciousness, enlightenment. Yep, yep. I think that’s right. That’s why I’m very, that’s why I brought up the first question, and getting an appropriate set of criteria by which we would identify such people, because there are, I mean, I get a sense of honesty from you. So if we’re honest, there are lots of charlatans. Absolutely, absolutely. But yeah, and which way it’s so important to the first question you asked about how can you tell your teachers enlightened, what makes you think that it’s very important to watch your teacher, if you’re going to be with a teacher, to watch your teacher closely, and be very, very careful before trusting them, because you don’t want to trust someone prematurely, because that’s dangerous. Yeah, I agree. I agree. The thing, the thing I would say about that is, so I’ll say it this way, which will be a little bit bold, but hopefully in a friendly, provocative manner. Just because somebody is a great artist doesn’t mean they can explain to you the cognition of art. Yeah. And just because somebody is enlightened doesn’t mean they necessarily can explain to you the cognitive science of enlightenment. Yes. Right. Now, it’s equally hubristic to confuse the cognitive science with enlightenment. I agree. So somebody who’s studying enlightenment shouldn’t thereby think, well, just by studying it, I’ll become enlightened. That’s hubristic. But I think the, I’ve heard some hubris on the other side, which I think is right. Well, I’m enlightened. So I have sort of omniscient knowledge of how my cognition works. I don’t believe that’s true. And so I think for me, an additional marker, and this might be more challenging for some more traditional schools, but I think it’s the marker we need today, is if the enlightened person is very much open to learning the cognitive science. Yeah, interesting. Yeah. Yeah. See that. I met somebody who was. Yeah. And it was very interesting. Because I was actually sort of talking to him and interviewing him, but it turned out that he, and this doesn’t mean anything about me. He turned more about him interviewing me. He wanted more of the knowledge and the concepts. And so for me, that was like, ah, that was an additional marker for me that this person isn’t confusing enlightenment with science, because they are not the same thing. And that, so that respect should go in both directions, of course. Right. The scientists shouldn’t think that because they’ve studied something, they’ve also realized that those are not the same thing. I don’t know. What do you think about that? Yeah, well, that question strikes me as very provocative. If the enlightened person would be open to exploring the cognitive science. Yeah. Because, you know, I think about my teacher and other teachers that I’m familiar with, and they will really dedicate their lives to teaching practices that can help students on their journey. And that’s great. But, you know, I make a case and you watch the series, you know, I made this case. There’s a, there’s a, you shouldn’t confuse the language of teaching and the language of explaining. Those aren’t, those aren’t the same thing. Right. Yes. And I’m both a teacher and a scientist. So, yeah. Yeah. And I don’t think, yeah, I don’t think at least my teacher would be attempting to explain. No. He’d be attempting to teach and he’s quite pragmatic about the way he teaches. So it’s, it’s what’s going to get. Yeah. I wonder if he would see a value in an explanation because of how it could contribute to the project you were talking about earlier about getting clear about how to find people and build ecologies of practices around them. I mean, I’m not saying we should throw away tradition. If you followed any of my work, you know, I’m not saying that. Mm hmm. But I’m also saying that all traditions have to be living things. They have to adapt to what is learned. Yes. You can see like, you can watch the history of Awakens people and how they make use of the best. Yes. Schiancia of their time. Right. Yeah. That’s been a reliable pattern. Yes. And the best Schiancia of our time right now with respect to enlightenment, I would propose is cognitive science. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When you use that term Schiancia, how are you using it in that sense? So I want to include science, which I think is sort of the, you know, the epitome of propositional knowledge. But I also wanted to mean the other kinds of knowing. I wanted to mean the epitome of skill knowledge that we call expertise, the epitome of perspectival knowledge, which you rightly call presence, and the epitome of participatory knowing, which is this capacity for transformative, you know, intensification of the connectedness between you and the world. Yeah. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. Well, I mean, in terms of the formal, I don’t know how you would put this, but you know, formal academia, I’d never come across anything like cognitive science before I watched Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. So it’s too bad. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I’ve always been fascinated by it, psychology, philosophy, different religions. But cognitive science was a new thing to me. And yeah, some of the concepts in cognitive science are, yeah, incredibly rich. The four E’s, the, yeah, yeah. You know, the way things are investigated and explained, I find very, very useful. So yeah, I mean, that claim may well be true. Yeah. Well, that’s good. Because, I mean, I think, I mean, it would have to take place in phylaia, right? It would have to take place in friendship, mutual respect, mutual coordination. Yes. Although, like, when you invoke Socrates, you know, one of the things that Socrates did really well was the challenging. And I think there’s value in the challenging too of course, of course, it should be. It should be. Yeah. That’s what I meant about phylaia, right? They should be willing to challenge each other, but committed to being each other’s best avenue of self-correction and self-transcendence. Yes. Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I’m curious in terms of your ecology of practices, like what are the practices you include in that currently? You, so what my practices are, are I do, well, there’s some practices that are preparatory, there are some practices that are core, there are some practices that are bridging practices that help bridge between the core practices. But, you know, for example, I will do, I’ll start with some yoga and some breathing exercises to get me into the right state. Then I do some jianjian, which is a kind of standing practice. And yi chuan, which is a moving practice. These are all different kinds of sort of qigong. Yeah. Then I do tai qi chuan. Then I sit and then there’s a bunch of practices that are designed to get me into, to really stretch the attentional scaling and get me deeply embodied and engaged and inactive. And then I do a practice, you know, a variation of vipassana, a variation on sort of metta, combine them together and kind of prajna practice. And then I do a practice drawn from theurgia, where you spend time cultivating kind of an archetypal figure. You see this in aspects of Tibetan Buddhism, right? And definitely in Taoism and the sages. And you sort of invoke their presence to help you start to shift out of an egocentric frame and aspire. And then I do a neoplatonic practice where I enter into participatory knowing of the levels of connectedness, starting with the level of emergence and then the level of intelligibility and then the level of consciousness and then the level of oneness. And then you move into a kenosis practice, which is an emptying. You try and remove that from being self-centered and move into what Nishatani calls his definition of religion, the real self-realization of reality. And that’s actually the center. And then I generally often return to, and if there’s any sort of in that sort of back to sort of taking that into a very present mindfulness, right? And then if there’s any therapeutic, like if there’s any part of me that needs to be spoken to, I do a version of IFS, internal family systems theory therapy to get that. And then I move into lexio divina and I read passages with lexio divina, sacred poetry, sacred prose. And then I read from two neoplatonic texts, the elements of theology by Proclus, the Paris Zephuzion, the division of nature by John Scott and Sarah Gina. And I do philosophical reflection on them. Then I do some stoicism and practice active open-mindedness and a commitment to active open-mindedness. And then I end by reading some imaginal work. Right now I’m going through the work of Corvand, Corban to really train the imaginal faculty to help me bridge all of this that I’ve been doing in my practice, integrate it with my experience of the world. And that’s what I do every day. Wow. That’s a lot. Well, and the thing is, like you have to spend quite a bit of time, like years, in each one to some degree before you can bring them all together. So there’s a lot that you have to do like along here until you can then weave the, but they’re talking to each other, hopefully along the way. And then they get to know each other really well and they start to weave together. Yes. And then, oh, I preface that by going for a walk every morning. And when I go on my walk, I do a movement practice, a moving meditation practice and contemplation practice as I’m walking to prepare for the more in-home practices. So in the world practice and in-home practice, also to bridge between the two of them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Beautiful. Yeah. Awesome. There’s certainly a strong commitment to your practice. I mean, if you’re doing everything you’ve just listed every single day, there’s a strong sense of this means something to you. It does. I mean, so the danger in that is to fall into kind of an engineering fallacy that you’re going to engineer your way in if I just build enough things in. And I try to be very aware of that. And I try to let practices call me more than me just sort of, well, I’ll take this and put it in here. I try to do it dialogically. I let the practice call me, but I also try to rationally reflect on, well, where would it fit? What would it counterbalance and what would it condone and what would it induce? Right. And so that it would genuinely not be an invasive species, but properly come to take up a life that enhances the entire ecology. So that’s what I try to pay attention to. Yeah. Yeah. It’s interesting you use the word engineering there because, you know, one of the, you know, enlightened people out there at the moment, Sadguru, have you heard of Sadguru? No. Okay. So he’s Indian. He uses a terminology called inner engineering, which is essentially this, you know, this, you can take a course of his and learn inner engineering, learn, you know, self-reflection and learn the transformational practices to hopefully take you to, you know, higher consciousness, essentially. And that’s, and that’s, and I mean, I don’t want to criticize this training method because I don’t know it. Yeah. What I’m criticizing in my own, like in my own, I mean, criticizing in the Socratic sense, right, is, and so I make a distinction between dialectic. And this goes to the work of Tanabe from, you know, the Pure Land tradition, you know, where you make a distinction between Jiriki and Periki, right, self-power and other power, right. And so dialectic is self-powered. This is all those things I can learn to, you know, enhance these, these connectedness and enter into communication and communion with things. But theologos is something I can’t engineer. This is what I get most from Socrates and Plato. The logos has to take shape of, of its own accord, or it’s not the logos. If I’ve made it, it’s not the logos. Right? So I can do the dialectic. I can build this, but, you know, if you’ll allow me to speak biblically, God has to breathe the breath of life into it. I can’t, I can’t do that because if I do it, then it isn’t connecting me to reality that’s beyond me. And I’m just projecting. And so I try to make a deep distinction between the dialectic I do and the theologos I receive and participate in. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Absolutely. And so, so where are you trying to take yourself with these practices? What are you trying to achieve with these practices? I mean, I want for myself and for other people to reduce self-deception and to enhance flourishing. That’s all I, I mean, that’s all, that’s all I want. I mean, I mean, I’m, well, that’s what I aspire. I’m sure that I have egocentric and defensive and motivations that are at work, because I do not claim to be enlightened. But those that I aspirationally foreground, the motivations that I can aspirationally foreground and at least I can, I can, I can I can aspirations that I can aspirationally foreground and at least can commit to with, I think, real sincerity, if not complete authenticity, but at least real sincerity is that I really want to reduce my own suffering, you know, distress and loss of agency. Yeah. And the, and the suffering of others, and I really want to afford flourishing that sense of being connected deeply within and deeply without and those two being connected with all. I mean, that’s, that’s what I want for myself and others. And, and, and if you say, well, why do you want that? There is no why why I want that. That is, that is, that’s the only reason why we have a why is to get to there. And once we get there, we should throw the why away. Yeah, so I hope that answers your question. It did. Yeah, absolutely. And I Yes, I love the way you spelled out self deception in awakening from the meeting crisis, because it is so prevalent, and there is so much bullshit out there. And it is so hard to navigate. If you’re attempting to navigate just on an intellectual level, it’s so easy to get lost. It’s insufficient. It’s insufficient. It’s not going to do it. Nearly using your informational capacities are insufficient. You have to learn to engage and develop your transformational capacities. If you’re going to deal with the tsunami of bullshit. Yeah, ever increasing. Yes. Yeah. And I love that you also said, you know, for myself and others, like you want to increase your own flourishing, you want to reduce self deception in yourself, but then also for others to take up these practices and do that as well, because that brings back it brings back agape, it brings back love, and it brings back hearts, the care for others and heart is something that my teacher teaches as a as a core part of teaching me, he teaches the way of the heart, which is, you know, being developing maturity, developing the ability to be responsible in the world. And having self acceptance, men and acceptance of the other, but then being able to take care of everyone around you. And that is living the way of the heart is being able to take care of everyone around you all the time. And that’s that’s a hugely aspirational thing to do, particularly when we we get caught ourselves, we go into, you know, the reciprocal narrowing and from time to time. There’s, there’s, I mean, pain, fear and desire are the things that make us most egocentric. Yeah. At least that’s been my experience. Right. And there’s a, there’s a sense by which, you know, why pain and hunger, they’re naturally sort of set up to make us egocentric because they’re about trying to, you know, preserve and save this. But the issue is, the issue for me, and this is easier said than done. And again, I’m not claiming to be enlightenment. I’m claiming to have learned some things. I’m still in the process of learning. Which is right to be able to discern, not just in words, but in awareness to realize and discernment, the difference between the intensity of that self directedness and its ferocity. The fact that it’s such an intense thing doesn’t mean that its claim is ultimately real or right. Right. So, really getting to the point where you can sometimes, and I get glimpses of this, see through the egocentrism that your pain and your hunger drives you to. Yes. Again, don’t try to, to my mind, don’t try and like abolish that machinery because that’s like trying to kill yourself. And again, the Buddha rejected that as the pathway. Right. So it’s like, yes, this has a place, but can I properly replace it within reality? And so that’s for me. That’s my daily task. I mean, I’m trying, I mean, I’m going through right now where I’m really wrestling with this in my life and trying to get those moments of clarity, you know, the way the Buddha says, you know, drop by drop, the jar is filled. Right. And just get those moments of clarity that take me a little bit farther or a plate would have it help me a little bit farther ascend out of the cave. Right. But for me, you know, coming down to see that, like I tweeted something this morning. I don’t very, I very rarely tweet things. I just make a comment. But like something came to me and it really, it really sunk to me in the, in, in, in sort of at the heart of my own distress and the heart of my own practice, those two coming together. You know, the, the thing I put it this way, the thing we’re avoiding at all costs has the power to cost us everything we love and getting to the point where you can see that which you’re avoiding at all costs is to see what you’ve empowered to potentially demonically destroy or cost you everything that you could love in your life. And really trying to get to a place where you don’t just think that, like a proposition, but, but you know it as a person. Yes, but but you know it as a person. Um, yeah, and so Yeah, try and I Think when we when we own up to our own This is hard for me to say when we own up to our own cowardice in the face of That we are less likely to project it on to other people And treat them inappropriately that is what I’m starting to see Yeah, I don’t know if that was helpful and I was great. That was fantastic. Yeah, absolutely there’s so much there that resonates for me, so the the the pain the fear the the difficult sensations that we experience in daily life being our most identified or most egoic states and and To wisely navigate those states absolutely, that’s that’s that’s the most Difficult obstacle on on the path for me is is navigating. Yeah Because you come to realize how much And it sounds right to say it but like how much you fear particular feeling states Like you’re like no, I don’t ever want to be in that feeling state ever again Yes, which is deny the fact that you know, yeah, maybe that feeling state was exaggerated But it’s to deny the fact that you have a feeling that feeling state capacity in you for a reason It’s there to do something. Yeah, trying to build your whole life to avoid that You’re doomed you’re doomed to fail. Yes, right. So for me, for example, I realized Because I’ve been through some major grief I’ve realized and I think I think I want to tell you a story about the Buddha because I pull it and other things because But I write Because it’s exactly about this but let me first make this point that I’ll tell the story They’ll give me a bit of a chunk of time here for a second Okay, right Because I’ve come to realize that I you know that I am I’ve adopted a stance of I will avoid grief at all costs And that’s impossible. You like like right, right you Will lose every relationship either through separation or death, right? I like so trying to avoid greed and the stoics are on about this too And I you know, I had all this language about it now blah blah blah blah But then I was like, oh right, but here in my sort of right in the feeling form and functionality of my sense of self I’ve built this no no grief at all costs. Yeah Right. So now I want to tell you the story the Buddha. Yes So this woman came up to the Buddha And her son had died Just died infant son and she’s asking the Buddha to resurrect him, right? And he’s you know, and you know the Buddha refused to perform miracles, right? And so no, no, no, no, but she’s persistent. So eventually he returns to her And he says okay, I’ll bring him back to life, but you have to do one thing for me first And she said well anything of course anything at all costs at all costs, right? Said I want you to go into town and you have to get a mustard seed from a household And she said well, that’s easy to do. Ah one condition you have to get it from a Household that has never experienced grief No one in the household has ever experienced grief. So she goes in and she knocks on the door. Do you have mustard? Yes. Yes. Has anybody in this family experienced loss of grief? Yes. I lost my mother Oh, and then she goes from door to door to door to door and then after a while she goes oh And then she goes back to the Buddha and she says thank you because then she gets it You know and that story has always been deeply meaningful to me But though but there was still and I’m not claiming that I’ve crossed this gap by any hubristic means but there was still a gap between how deep this was and how deeply it touched me and Part of what I’m trying to do is to let the wisdom of that lesson Get into the very very core place where I am no grief at all costs and trying to get Is I’m saying it now I could even feel the pain Right here trying to get those two right and to not turn away even though the pain is there Yeah, yeah that that to me what you just put your finger on is is the path Well, I mean I think I wouldn’t I think it is I think it’s I think we have other things I mean, I think grief is one of the things we also have things we pursue at all costs some people, right? But yeah Trying to get to some of those core places where we have empowered things to consume our love That to me is Becoming more and more central to me Becoming more and more central to my path of you and also to my theory. I’m trying to understand What what kind of therapeutic interventions? How should we put together an ecology of therapeutic practices? To best address that kind of way in which people get deeply stuck at the center of their heart Yeah, yeah, well It’s like all the practices in the world and all the therapies in the world and all the understanding cognitively in the world is not going to Make someone turn towards grief if they don’t want to well, that’s that’s exactly that it’s like Oh, I forget which Zen patriarch said said Zen enlightenment cannot be found by seeking but it will never be found by people who do not seek Yeah, yeah, which is right, which is perfect. It’s again Yeah, you don’t confuse the dialectic with the dia logos, yeah, right. Yes. Yes. Yes Yeah, absolutely. And to me that that’s so It’s a really powerful. Um way of Getting down to something really really fundamental like If it’s not the path in its totality, it’s a large large part of the path being able to accept Extremely Extremely difficult pain extremely difficult emotions inside of us and and allow those to pass through us um with everything else that passes through us with the joy with the elation with the love with the bliss with the Boredom with the sadness, you know with it all Having no barriers up to any of it Yeah For me, like I said, it’s not knowing it as a proposition. It’s knowing it as a person It’s knowing it at the right at the level of your identity for so for me I’ll say something that’s meant to be a little bit humorously provocative. I’m not on a quest for immortality I’m on a quest for mortality. I’m on a quest to deeply realize my mortality because for me A mortal is a being that is subject to this to this kind of grief. Yeah, right. Um and so This kind of vulnerability to existence. Yes and so Yeah for me It’s like that’s what I mean about a kind of self-knowledge and a knowledge of reality or deeply into penetrating really coming to know Myself as a being that is subject to mortality which doesn’t just mean death it means all these little deaths Yes, right. Yes and and knowing myself in such a way that that no longer blinds me to to reality that’s that’s That’s what that’s what I aspire to Um, that’s what i’m aspiring to right now in my practices um, and like I said also in my theoretical reflections for me, it’s always a case of Trying to realize in the practice and then trying to realize in the reflection on the practice What’s going on? But I use I use uh, theoria which is the greek word for contemplation And theory and theory came from theoria, right the word so I try and always have a dialogue Dialogos between theoria and theory all the time. Yes. Yes, absolutely. Yeah Yeah Yeah, I For me this this is Where I struggle on the path, uh constantly over and over and over and over again where I fail Um all the time and it’s it’s being with my experience In the present moment without defense, um with that vulnerability with that acceptance um And it’s it’s so easy to say and it’s so difficult to do In the heat of an argument with my wife, let’s say for example. Yes Yes, great great example. Yes, where all of my all of my stuff is being triggered all of my abandonment issues all of my desire to be right and be validated and be Appreciated all of that all of that survival mechanism stuff that’s inside of us all Uh is right at the surface And being having the skill and the capacity to hold that Not suppress it, but right, right Be be present with that and also present with my wife and be um able to communicate effectively and stay open and stay You know on her side Wouldn’t it be heaven enough if you could just do that all the time? Wouldn’t that be heaven enough for anybody? I would love if I could be that way with my partner All the time for me No, that’s good enough That is heaven enough for me if I could give if I could get to that place With the people like my partner and my kids and my friends and even the people my students Like if I could get if I could be there if I could live if I could dwell there the way the bible talks about dwelling If I could indwell There that’s heaven enough for me. That’s heaven enough for me. Yes. Yes. Yes exactly right. So so That’s that’s totally right. That would be heaven and that would be amazing to be able to do that as a Mortal as a mortal person. Yes. Yes. Yes my my teacher, um talks about The bhakti path and the yani path right the path of um devotion and love and heart and the potion of practice and discipline and and and meditation, let’s say and You need both you need things to be You need logos and agape. Yes, you need logos and agape and And so you can meditate and do self-inquiry and do all the practices on on You know Your awareness your consciousness But if you’re not practicing it in an enacted way in your daily life with relationships that are important to you practicing that openness vulnerability heart then You’re missing half of the practice and that that to me is the most difficult thing to To show up in relationships and to try and be open It’s so easy to say it’s so difficult to do Trying to trying to be responsible Without merely conceding or giving in to that adaptive machinery while simultaneously being almost stereoscopically responsible To the other person who also has their own adaptive functioning and malfunctioning machinery And to get like an optimal grip on both of those like, you know, i’m using like the left and right visual field You know being coordinated in depth that stereoscopic like like when when that happens And i’m lucky enough to be with an amazing woman who affords me getting glimpses of that Um, and I have amazing friends, too But like I said Like when I get glimpses of it when i’m in that place There’s there’s a sense of there’s a sense. Well, there’s a sense of onto normativity. This is really real This is really real And then when i’m away from it at least what I have Again, i’m not claiming any like right but what I find i’ve got at least now when I can remember it sati When I can really remember remind myself gives me a touchstone because then I know When i’m when i’m away from that. Yes, right. It’s like right. Oh i’m What’s coming now is really intense and i’m very angry or i’m very scared But at least I know i’m at least i’m getting I hope I if I I think i’ve got good reason to believe I have good reason to hope It’s giving me a sense of oh, but i’m away from this And this is where and this is more real and this is where more can be realized. Yes Yes, yes, totally and so you have that touchstone to me there’s some there’s some things that make that touchstone more Realizable more of the time and touchable. Yeah more touchable. Yeah. Yeah And and it comes back to some of the things I was saying earlier, which is um, you know You know The flow state and getting beyond the ego like the ego seems to be the thing that gets in the way quite often is it takes our attention away from The present and it will get righteous and it will get angry and defend ourselves and our right It loves self-righteousness because self-righteousness is the way the way you marshal, you know external resources to help with your pain and your hunger Yeah, for sure and I I I fall prey to that For sure Yeah, I guess for me I try i’m trying to get the place where I and this is what i’m learning from I of us where I can acknowledge The legitimate, you know self-preserving autopoetic aspects that the ego is topping into try to acknowledge Yes, you this yeah, you’re trying to do something here. I get it But can you see that You’ll allow me a slogan that adapting is better than avoiding. Can you see that? Can you begin to see that and like to to I try to use my more mindful? state of mind as a as a Mirror by which that part can reflect to itself and start to see That there’s other possibilities for it if that means any sense. Yes. Yes. No, absolutely. Absolutely Yeah, and that ifs stuff is is is rich. There’s there’s many models just like ifs You know in in yeah, yeah um, i’m also Oh, sorry. I’m for I just want to I just want for the purposes of anybody looking Yeah, there’s a there’s not just many they’re they’re convergent in a lot of ways. They add plausibility Yeah, you are you’re trained in you were going to say i’m gonna say i’m a trained counselor and so so having those models available afford me the ability to connect with my clients and to understand what’s going on for them and to be able to See the different parts playing out and Can I ask you a question then because I have I have training too Yeah, and and the problem is I have not only therapeutic training. I have scientist training, right? and so one of the difficulties for me is to Bring that inappropriately into an interpersonal Relationship like with my with my partner or right because it’s so easy to confuse that sort of Detachment that we’re talking about. Yeah with mindfulness with going into the therapeutic role You’re going into the scientist role and then diagnosing the and putting yourself sort of outside of the situation Which is very very different From remaining inside the situation and trying to be ontocentric rather than egocentric and for me I can use those To also a lot right a lot of like no, no, no, you’re not a therapist use that machinery, but don’t use it as a therapist Yeah, you’re not a right. You’re not a scientist here. Don’t you know use the science if it’s helpful But you’re not a scientist in this situation Does that land with you at all? Do you ever confront that as a challenge sometimes? Yeah well, absolutely and and and I am also very lucky in that my wife is um, you know very open to these kinds of things She’s she’s part of the spiritual community with me. She is is looking at herself and developing herself um, and our relationship, you know evolves over time and we we both I would say get better at it slowly over time but absolutely get slowly over time, yeah, but we get caught all the time and Yeah, it’s so tempting to Um Step outside of a situation and look at it through the lens Of a particular model or framework to try and get some understanding of it. But what i’ve what i’ve actually been trying to do um more recently, um in relationship with my wife is It’s just forget all of that stuff. Just kind of park it to the side and just try and be with her because That’s really all that she needs if we’re yeah I’m trying i’m trying to let it influence me implicitly rather than explicitly like there’s skills there but they have to be taken out of those roles and Replaced within what’s happening and yeah Slowly slowly like like a jagged curve right up and down like right like it’s like very it’s like drop by drop, right? Yes, indeed. Indeed. Yeah Yeah, so I mean Um Yeah to me to me one of the one of the things that I find most useful and that seems to cover a lot of different bases in that um It’s multi-act to use to use a term that i’ve heard you use uh is is the practice of openness which is Essentially just trying to be open and present in the situation that i’m in be aware of the stuff For me be aware of what’s what’s happening outside of me and And basically not closed down. So if a feeling state comes up that i’m trying to avoid I notice the avoidance that that means the closure And I try and dissolve the closure if I can because the more I can do that the more I can stay connected Situation and if I can stay connected that gives me a much much better chance of navigating it skillfully than if I don’t Yeah, I I agree I I i’m I’m practicing that um, not anywhere near perfection The other thing that i’m helping is is the openness and the connectedness so when Attachment I don’t mean it in the buddha sense. I mean it in the psychological sense when attachment issues come up um I try to see through the layering You know, here’s the anger and then underneath is the sadness, but here’s the fear and then it’s like, okay What would be a like so you actually want to be connected to this you’re actually afraid You’re afraid of well instead of being angry at them or sad and withdrawn like Be opened like you have to make yourself vulnerable like I and you know be Be Request from the person that they connect with you. Yes, and I know that again sounds trite. Uh, but um Trying to it’s it’s funny how a lot of the the the sort of more core or base drives Often want sort of very basic Kinds of actions on your part that you’d seem when you describe them sort of theoretically they seem so trivial Yeah, you just want to hug from the other person sure that’s not going to be enough Well, if you just hugged them No If you hugged them while you were in an angry sad reactive state of mind, it’s not going to do anything But if you can get to the base Then that basic activity can be deeply deeply right adaptively healing it can really help to ameliorate The fear in what I feel like is an appropriate manner um, yeah And it also allows me hopefully to hear the other person’s fears Yes And what they’re afraid of and try it become more responsive to them Yes, but that even that requires a tremendous Amount of awareness because you you you mentioned the anger the sadness the fear in the layer To have the awareness in the present moment. I’m feeling angry but underneath my anger right now is is a lot of sadness and Even deeper than that is a fear that i’m going to be abandoned or whatever. I’m going to lose connection To have that is that requires some some work and some some Some some self-conception and some self-understanding to get to that one So, you know I I I you know, I had training in efp Emotion-focused therapy and then i’ve had decades of the mindfulness but even so in this particular Uh, sort of I don’t know what to call it situation i’ve been working through What I just said is the result of like eight and eight to nine months of work. Yeah And i’m not claiming that that will work in some other situation over here. That’s that’s that’s that’s more but what I just said was like eight months of trying to Get to that place that we’re both talking about