https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=0tfp2PZKxro
Okay, welcome everyone to another Voices with Viveki. This is the second in a trilogy that I proposed and with my good friend and colleague Jordan Hall and we’re going to take it up. This is on trying to get some clarity and not just conceptual clarity but existential connection to the sacred in a way that responds to a lot of the need that people have for that deep kind of connection of fount of intelligibility resources to meet with life challenges. And we towards the end we had gotten to where we were talking about the distinction between the imaginary and the imaginal as a way of trying to make more practical the distinction between sort of the supernatural and the natural and we talked about things like genuine deologos as enacted imaginal. I have to act, I have to engage in this enacted image of the other person’s perspective and then correspondingly trust as the internalization, the ability to internalize that other perspective and that we were trying to understand the sacred as involving that those dialogical aspects and imaginal aspects and the trust aspects. And Jordan proposed we talked a bit before we began that we bring this into and I’ll punt a little bit and it’s a good book by Green, The Heart of the Matter, which is what’s the connections between our connection to the sacred and those connections in our lives that are the most important to us, the most meaningful to us. And the reason why this comes up is it’s precisely there’s a bit of a, it’s a paradox almost that these are the relationships that simultaneously have the capacity to nourish us most and also hurt us the most. And what does our connection to the sacred do? Because Jordan proposed this and I think this is bang on, that if the sacred doesn’t in some sense afford, aid, guide us in this, then it’s really not doing its job as the sacred and I think that’s a very good way of putting it. So hand over to you Jordan because I think that connection is one we should explore right now. Yeah so I feel like this one’s gonna take a little time just to build. Yeah. And I noticed that I’m being, I’m a little bit trepidatious. Me too. We’ve committed to something which is by its very nature intense and so what I mean by that is right before we got on camera, you know, one of the things that I said was, you know, if you’re talking about the sacred, you’re talking about the most meaningful and you can’t talk about the most meaningful unless you’re talking about those things that tear your heart to shreds. Yeah. And the ability to really be there. I don’t mean theoretically, you know, in reality, like really those kinds of things. And you know, words like grief, like just grief, like the depths of it are connected to the sacred. Yeah. And to the degree to which you are, it’s almost like you can see how the profane sinks, sneaks in. Profane in many ways is a way of protecting yourself from the magnitude of grief that is associated with having relationships that have the possibility of that level of care. Yes. That classic problem. Right. To put it in a little bit of safe territory, you know, if you happen to be somebody who has a sort of a high aesthetic attunement to a very good meal and you work and you invite somebody who you love and care about into a special occasion and then you spend all day making it and then something, some weakness of your own, like some failure, by the way, let’s make it really, really, really particular, some failure that you’ve long disliked yourself as a consequence. Right. Right. Leads to a ruination of the meal, which probably doesn’t impact your friend or partner particularly, but it impacts you tremendously because of how you’re tuned. You’ll feel something in the direction of grief. Let’s just sort of point in that direction. Obviously I’m using this as an example to keep it safe. By contrary wise, if you pull into McDonald’s and you order a cheeseburger and it’s not quite as good as you want it to be, you don’t feel grief. Right. You may feel mild annoyance. There’s something about sort of loss in the context of the profane that is actually lower stakes. Therefore, there’s a bit of an interesting nudge in that direction. So the invitation to the sacred is an invitation to ensoulment, an invitation to a growing of the capacity to experience grief. Yes. Yeah. I mean, just as a simple example, everybody who you love is going to die. Yeah. Yeah. And so the more deeply and fully and completely you love them, that doesn’t mean that you’re not going to feel grief when they die. In fact, quite the opposite. It means the capacity for grief that you will feel will be enormous. Like it will actually increase. You will also, of course, have felt more joy in life. There will be a flavor of a change of the grief because your grief won’t be about the missness. Imagine hypothetically, which of course is utterly impossible, but imagine two lives well led, truly deeply well led and the relationship between them well led. So there’s very little regret. Nonetheless, grief. Right. Nonetheless, enormous, incredible, intense, soaring grief, but a different flavor than the grief that many of us feel at the missness of life. Yeah. Not having lived that deeply. Yeah. So that’s, you know, I’m bringing that into the conversation. I’m bringing some other stuff, some sort of, it feels to me like more organic, almost like, you know, body parts stuff into the conversation because I don’t think we can really do it justice if we don’t do that. I agree. I agree. I think this is a good topic. I mean, infamously, you know, CS Lewis, a grief observed was trying, I mean, him losing joy. That’s the name of his partner, somewhat eponymous, put him into a state of grief where, and he wrestled with his relationship to God. There’s a, there’s a movie version of that starring Anthony Hopkins. If people are interested and they don’t want to read the book. I haven’t read the book either. And I think, I think if we’re proposing a reinventio of the sacred, we have to examine this relationship between the sacred and suffering because, and I mean suffering in the sense of the way we lose agency. And that’s what we experience in grief. We don’t just lose the person. We lose a world and we lose an agency that was afforded by that world. And that’s why it’s more of a loss than just the loss of the person. Precisely if the person is, I want to use this word to connote deep and sacred that the person is symbolic to us. I don’t mean that they’re an ornament. I mean that we see, we see by means of them into the depths. We get it. They are a lens by which we see ourselves and reality more astutely. So I sometimes put this like, you know, people, when people are close to you, they are doorways to worlds that are closed when they leave. And so, so I’m trying to put grief into more of an ontological framework. And so what, what people have done traditionally with the sacred is there’s been two, I’m not saying this is exhaustive, but these are two prototypical responses. One is the sacred is somehow providential and this was all for some purpose and this will all be made clear in the end and it’ll all be revealed. And I just have to wait. And so trust means waiting for the, the, the story that will make all the loss go away. Right. The other is to turn it into the argument against God by there’s evil. I think it goes like David Hume or Epicurus. There’s, this is obviously evil. Why is the world set up such that human beings have to go through this? You have the book of Job that wrestles with it and right. That’s a central theme in the Bible. You know, it’s at the core of Buddhism. It’s the core, like why, why is the world such that I have to suffer in it? And so what many people do is they take their suffering prototypically. Again, I’m not claiming exhaustion, but I’m saying these are two prominent responses. They take their suffering as evidence that there’s, there is no sacred. There is, there’s nothing sacred. And that’s, I think aligns with your cancerous profanity, right? I’m sorry, that was an odd sentence, but what I mean is the profanity that spreads precisely because it is designed to inure us from feeling the sting of the world. And so from feeling the sting of suffering, feeling that. Okay. So try, try this. There’s a couple of things that come up. All right. So, so the thing, the thing came right there was childbirth. Yeah. And the, the, in some sense, this is what may in fact be the error of the sacred. Yeah. Like if we really do the anthropology of it, probably death, right? Death and childbirth is sort of the beginning and the end of life. Yes. And the, but the thing about childbirth, of course, is the physicality of it. The, the, the, the, the undeniability, the inescapability of the suffering certainly for a very long period of time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You’re going to feel pain. You’re going to feel agony. You’re going to feel fear of death and it’s just going to be there. And, you know, as I understand from the various midwives who I’ve spent time with and various childbirth experiences I’ve gone through, there is a way to relate to it. But the way to relate to it is precisely the opposite of the two escape paths that you just outlined, which are quite typical. Right. Right. Right. So there’s two, you just are articulating what effectively as a various variations in the basic theme of escape. Yes. In that case, both through narrative. So you take the lived experience, the suffering that you’re actually living. And then what you do is you tell a story about it. And then you use the story to change your relationship with the thing that you’re actually experiencing. Right. And whether the story is one of it’s all in God’s hands and therefore it’s all good or the one in the story of, Oh, there is no God. And therefore all is meaningful, including my suffering or meaning less, including my suffering. Right. In both cases, the escape is an endeavor to move out of the lived experience of the suffering itself and kind of basically disassociate to use the psychological term. Yeah. It’s kind of spiritual bypassing, spiritual bypassing. Right. That’s exactly what I would say it is. And, you know, in the, in the context of physical pain, as let’s just go back to childbirth or other variations on that theme, of which there are many, you can, of course, try to bypass the physical pain. You can bypass the physical pain by means of drugs that just deaden the sensation of pain. You can bypass the physical pain by narratives. And as I’ve personally witnessed that happens, you know, a woman who’s in the throes of childbirth will go through a transformative experience. And many of this traumatic defense mechanisms that were built through life will come up. The mind is like, I need to, trauma is happening. Pull out all the cards. I don’t know what I need to do or say or think to get this to go away. But if I can, if I can avoid it, I will. But then you kind of, you end up at the, at the zero point again, subject to Western medicine, which is maybe a big problem, which is just being with it. You know, it’s, it’s a, how do you say it? I’ll use a very sort of simple vernacular. It’s annoying as shit to be told, we’ll just breathe with it, be with it, you know, lean into the pain, lean into the suffering because there’s something there. But don’t precisely think meditation, right? Think of the meditative process. Don’t try to disassociate first and foremost. Don’t disassociate growth. This is what growth feels like. If you really listen to it, you really like lean into it. The excruciating pain is, is growth in and of itself. It’s actually, it’s literally it’s birth, like birth itself is that. And so when you feel the grief of, of something, right? Some, some suture, some break, some discontinuity, some world literally going away. Is there a mapping there? Is there something about the, the experience of the grief? And then what I would say is maybe the proper relationship to it. And again, links to that the profane cycle, the reciprocal closing is precisely not to tell a story about it. Precisely not to try to narrate it into anesthesia, but to actually feel it. Like, can you actually build your capacity to feel the intensity of it as intensity, like as just, in just raw, rawness? And then, and then of course, the proposition I would make, and I’m willing to sort of hold that ground for a while, is that that’s the essence of growth. Like that is the, the evolutionary, the force of growth and development that life itself in some sense is. Expressing itself in its most basic energy. Yeah, and it’s funny because I know that there’s this sort of, how do you say it? It’s maybe a cliche. Yeah, maybe cliche is the right term. Without, there is no joy without pain. Like that notion of simplistic dichotomies. And I’m saying something like that, but I’m not saying that. I’m saying what I’m really saying is life is, and there’s a right relationship to life. And a big piece of that right relationship is don’t avoid life. And don’t try to escape it, live into it. And by the way, I’m definitely not speaking from a point of point of mastery of this by any stretch of the imagination. No, no, I avoid pain assiduously. In all sorts of ways. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t know that when I am making, when I am in my best self and making my best choices, I actually do remember to try to have the strength to live, sit in the energy of the intensity of the grief or the pain and allow it to be and grow into it. And it’s funny, my ego just popped up. It’s like, yeah. And also pain is like a very specific sign to move. You know, if you sit on a pin, the right choice is not to breathe into it and allow the pain in your ass to be. It’s to get up and get the pin out. So I’m also not saying that. And it’s important. Spiritual bypass is in one, it happens in both directions. We’re talking about it. Oh, can I keep talking? Actually, there’s something else that just cracked open. Because we’re fundamentally talking about is a honing or refinement of the artfulness of living. That’s what we’re really fundamentally talking about. And I used artfulness there even more so than skillfulness, right? Because there’s a bunch of things that are bound in that. When confronted with a particular moment, artfulness and living supports you in being able to make a choice about whether or not to simply remove the thing that is causing the pain or witness that as being kind of a deeper offering, a deeper possibility for growth. I think this is a very profound point. So, well, at one point, when a significant relationship I had ended and I was going through grief because it had been a long term relationship. I had a Jungian experience. I was a person who was a wiser older man and he sort of came into my life and took me under his wing, not for any long term relationship, but this type of shepherd. And he said two things to me about this. He said, many people think the point about grief is to try and close the hole. And he said, don’t close the hole, grow so the hole doesn’t take up the same proportion of your experience. And then he also said the second thing, which is don’t get deeply involved with somebody who has not experienced grief. That was his advice to me. And it was one of those things that I had an intimation of, but I reflected on it years and I’ve come to realize that those holes, they’re painful and they can be as painful as hell, like you say. And I totally agree with that. But they really are holes that allow us to look outside if we appreciate them in all three meanings of appreciate. They are the holes that let us look through the prison wall of our egocentrism. That’s what he was trying to say. That grief allows you, if you properly appreciate it, to connect to other human beings in a way that you cannot connect to them if you have not experienced grief. And those were two of the wisest things that were ever said to me about this. And it seems to me like they’re appropriate here. It seems to me that when you lean into the pain, and it’s interesting that two of our greatest, I don’t know, spiritual gurus, Jesus, you must be born again, and Socrates, I’m a midwife, and helping you give birth to yourself. And the Neoplatonists even said a lot of the suffering we go through on a spiritual journey is our labor pains. That was their frequent analogy. So what you’re doing is just totally consonant with a lot of these traditions in a powerful way. And what I hear you saying is there is, it feels almost like that when you, well, you’re getting intimation of insight. Grief is the intimation of a way of seeing and being that could be, well, I don’t know what to say. It could be, I don’t want to just say beneficial, that sounds utilitarian, but it could afford growth. It could afford you to move beyond egocentrism in a way that perhaps nothing else can. And so I’m trying to get a little bit more specific about what the leaning into grief feels like. And then how that perhaps relates to the sacred, perhaps, is again, the way the sacred is not something that’s trying to close off and protect us or finish or complete, but the sacred is ultimately the fount of intelligibility. It’s that which beckons us beyond ourselves. And all that offers us, it doesn’t offer us escape, it doesn’t offer us, right? It offers us, it offers us the chance for the new way of seeing. So what I’m thinking of, what’s resonating in my mind right now, Jeff, the book of Job, and it’s all about this, why am I suffering? Why am I suffering? Why am I suffering? Why am I suffering? It’s a really profound book. And the fact that it’s in the Bible is something people should pay more attention to, right? And then God appears at the end, and God doesn’t give him an answer. God doesn’t give him, here’s the plan, and here’s how you’ll benefit. He just says, were you here when I made this? And he shows all these bizarre creatures, and he basically exposes Job to the numinous. And he’s basically saying, if there wasn’t, well, what I take it to mean is, the numinous is that ability to see through the holes, but those holes, and that’s a part of the numinous itself, they’re on the horizon of horror. They hurt us, they threaten us in some way. There’s a movie, it’s another silly movie called Joe versus the Volcano, and it stars Tom Hanks. And he’s lied to, but he’s convinced that he’s going to die within a year. And he goes on sort of this world journey, it’s a farce, but there’s this one scene, and I think the writers all went for lunch, and they left the university student to write a 10-minute bet. Anyways, he’s on a raft, they were on a boat, him and this woman, he’s on a raft, the boat is sunk, it’s Meg Ryan, she’s unconscious, and he’s giving her all the water that they have. And so he’s slowly, it’s very shimaric, he’s slowly dying from exposure. And there’s this scene, it goes silent and the music starts swelling, and there’s a full moonrise on the ocean, and he struggles to stand up and he raises his arms, and he says the following, Oh God, whose name I do not know, I had forgotten how big, and that’s an inequitable word, and then he says, thank you for my life, thank you for my life. And so I sort of tried to put that, and again, I’m like you, I’m struggling with this, I mean, I’m going right now through a period of pain, I’m struggling with it, and I’m trying to understand the way the sacred doesn’t give us the comforting narrative, and it doesn’t give us the escape argument, oh, there’s nothing, it’s all meaningless. It somehow says that this is the way you see beyond the horizon, because he’s literally seeing beyond the horizon with the moonrise. Right? Did that make any sense? Was that helpful? Yeah, we’re not there yet, but I don’t mean that in a negative way, but I mean, particularly as the way you told, thank you for telling it as a story, the parable of the shamanic death, but the felt sense of that, the felt sense of it, in some sense, the point is an infinite amount of justification, an infinite amount of story does not an ounce of meaning make. Yes, yes. It’s a different kind of thing altogether. And the awesomeness, and thank you for revivifying all these terms from our vernacular profanity, the awesomeness of life itself, the fact of your being at all, and the feeling of what gratitude means, like if you really, really get it, like just, what’s the right word there? It’s like, these are all variations on what heartbreak means, the heart-shattering gratitude, the awesomeness of having been at all, is the redemptive sensibility. It’s suddenly all at once, you’re like, oh, oh, oh, grief is now meaningful, not meaningless. So even though it’s incomprehensible suffering, perhaps, depending on the specifics, it’s meaningful. That’s it, right? It is meaningful suffering, and there’s something about that that is therefore life-affirming. And now we get back to childbirth. There’s a as most mothers know, there’s the moments and days and weeks after childbirth, where the experience of this being to have created or to have been deeply participatory in the creation of a life is overwhelming. I actually have these images of Vanessa just like literally just weeping for days at a time, for like eight hours straight, just weeping in the context of like the first few days and weeks of our daughter. And it’s almost like the grief is almost like, it’s like petroleum, it’s like raw energy, if you really perceive it right, it’s raw energy that has been metabolized into the meaningfulness of the life that’s coming in, that’s unfurling, something like that. That’s not right, but there’s something to it that’s not completely wrong. Well, we’re both trying to feel our way into something that’s unclear. And we should be humble about it, because greater minds than ours have wrestled with this in a profound way. And greater souls. Again, greater souls, yes. And it’s possible as Marlowe said about Kurtz and Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, it’s possible to be clear in your mind, but mad in your soul. A lot of that going around these days. Yeah, yeah. And so there seems to be something there, we’re invoking this word, and I think it’s appropriate to invoke it. We’re talking about soul, we’re trying to say it takes us to the depths, and allows us to see from those depths, the depths of the world. And that is the answer. There’s no proposition, but that’s the answer to suffering. It doesn’t justify it. It transcends justification. Justification doesn’t reach up high enough to point to it anyway. It’s not the right way of being in relationship with it. Yes, exactly. And so this is nice. This also speaks to that notion of the sacred. In some sense, grief is an aspect of the sacred, in exactly that sense. It is intrinsically transcendent of any effort on our part to justify it. To justify it or to denigrate it is already to not be in right relationship with it. Yes. And that’s what I was trying to get at last time when I said, coaching it as that which does not need justification is that when I was talking about Jordan Peterson and Monica D’Souza, the sacred is that which cannot be called into question. That’s another way of saying the sacred is that which needs no justification is it’s a mis-framing of it. They’re trying to get, and there were some good comments about this in the video from people. They’re trying to get to the fact that, and I want to use this word and then I want to erase it. They want to get to the idea that the sacred is in some sense foundational. And so we shouldn’t call it into question. But framing it within the way I just said puts it in the justification frame. It’s saying through the justification lens, this is special because it needs no justification. And that’s still to bind it. It’s just to negate the requirement for justification. It’s just to get it not to transcend it. And so that’s why I want to undermine the foundation. It’s not foundational. It’s not the thing. It’s not. And this is where there was one analogy and other people have used it. So I’m not trying to just pin one person who made a comment. And I apologize if they feel that way. But I don’t think the sacred should be understood as axiomatic. I think that’s to give it, to try and transpose and translate its function into a purely propositional, justificatory framework. And once you’ve done that, you’ve lost it. You’ve lost it. And you’ve actually lost the ability to grieve and to be with people who are grieving. The worst thing you can do when someone is grieving is to try and justify it or explain it to them. Oh, God, it’s brutal. Yeah. And of course, commonplace, because we live in a world that has lost access to that mode. So I’m going to point to that. So I’m going to use the word mode. Spinoza. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. And to say, OK, there’s a mode and propositional, propositionality is a whole mode. Yes. Yes. And it’s not the only mode. That’s the key point. I’m not defined in terms. I can talk about there being different modes. And as you’re saying, and I think this is dead on, the right answer to the question that was put to Jordan Peterson is not that the sacred is a special case in the mode of propositionality. But the propositionality as a mode is the wrong way of being in relationship with the sacred. Yes. Yes. If you’re doing that, if you’re just playing that game at all, you’re already in the wrong place. Right. OK. Well, what are the other modes? Well, there’s another one, at least one more. I would say there’s three, but we can, it’s a little bit longer conversation. And this is the mode of, well, there’s the motive of, let me actually back up a little bit and just use to find some more terms. So one is, I’m just steal the Greek meta and then the Greek trance. I’m going to distinguish them. Right. Right. Right. Propose that there is a good, a useful distinction. OK. And so meta, I would propose, is very much of the case of what we were just talking about in terms of a special case. We move in the propositional mode. OK. So I have some scheme of justification. And what I do is I basically think of that as a container now. It’s a box. Yeah. What I do is I create a bigger box that’s outside that box. Yeah. Yeah. Like, OK, well, it’s a bigger box. Everything inside like the fairy Russell, Bertrand Russell, everything. I’ve just defined a set and now I’ve defined a new set that is precisely everything in that set plus something not in that set. Right. And of course, the point of meta, sorry for those who were following that, that was a very abstract formulation, but precise. The problem with the meta is that there is a way of articulating every move in the meta by definition as being part of the meta. Right. It’s that set of moves, the whole, that, you know, I can close on that logical construct. And by the way, for those who are interested, Gurdel gives us the answer to that question all the way to the end. There is a intrinsic non-closure to that mode. Yeah. So then we’ve got this other mode and now I’m going to shift modally and move us into first person. So now let’s meditate for a little bit. Yeah. And so there’s the classic awareness of sort of meditation 101 where you are noticing the arising of things like narrative images, too, but for most Americans, Westerners, it’s mostly talk. Yeah. Mostly words. Yeah. Mostly words. And there’s a point at which there becomes an ability to sort of distance from that. And then notice that there’s an awareness that is the observer observing. Yeah. And okay. Well, there’s a question of what the heck is that? There’s something that’s not the other thing. There’s something going on here that’s not exactly the same. And the proposition is that there is a quality, now this is the modal shift, and the trans, the trans, which is precisely not the bigger box. It is the, I mean, we’ve talked about this in the context of sacred before, the infinite. And the infinite is not a bigger finite. They’re not the same things. Like the infinite is modally distinct from the finite. No amount of numbers are going to get you to the infinite. And yet it’s also part of the real. Yes. There’s a, the real is in many ways sort of the relationship between the finite and the infinite. Yes. And not contained in either one either. That would be the third mode. And so there’s something about that. There’s something about recognizing that these are all aspects of the real. And there’s a way of developing competence. Now that we can make it very simple, like, you know, competence, skillfulness, artfulness, of relationality in that mode. There is a proper mode. There’s a proper way of being in relationship with the transcendent, with the trans piece of that move. And it has nothing to do with systems of justification. They are just not the same kind of thing. But it’s not, also it’s not a null set. There’s a thing there. And as we’re just talking about this, there are people, maturity, like this notion of maturity, the ability to know like wisdom. Okay. It’s a whole, it’s a whole, man. It’s there. He is to grow. Oh, okay. That’s interesting. That’s a totally different thing. That’s oblique to the notion of like increasing sophistication within a closed domain. It’s where growth comes from. Growth comes from the outside. Growth comes from the transcendent per se, that which is intrinsically in and of itself, the outside, right? The creative principle. We talked about the notion of creation and creative. That’s growth comes from that, right? It comes from the creative principle per se coming into like transferring or being metabolized into something and openness to that and artfulness in that. And then of course, what happens, as you say, is that the capacity to be in relationship with life grows with it. And so much more to more happens. I’m gonna throw a bunch more on top of this, by the way, if you don’t mind, if you would not humor me, but permit me to do so. Sure. One thing that came up for me as you were talking was that the word was oceanic. Yes. Grief is oceanic. Yes. And in some very, very deep fundamental sense, it’s kind of like a singular ocean. That while I cannot feel the specificity of your grief, there is something deeply akin. Yes. And if I have delved deeply into the ocean of grief, then this gives me the capacity to be in relationship with you through grief. A deep participatory knowing. A deep participatory knowing. Yes, exactly. I don’t know the specifics of your grief, but I know grief. Yes. And I can go there with you in my own grief, but there’s something about us being both able to touch that and feel it together that has that, like there’s a kinship, there’s a sharedness at the level of what I would say, but that’s the level of the soul or something like that. That was one piece. The other piece was strength. That when you encounter someone who has your mentor, your union, archetypes, wise words, when you enter into a relationship with somebody who has experienced grief, one of the things that you can have some confidence in is the strength of the relationship has real possibility. Because life can throw stuff at them and they will not shirk because they have lived through stuff and therefore can live through stuff. It deepens their character. It deepens their character. Yeah, it deepens their trustworthiness. Right. And therefore, you can invest more deeply and fully into the relationship because the relationship has more possible strength. And then as you invest into the relationship, it begins to build more actual strength. And then as the relationship itself experiences grief, a whole new level of possible grief is possible in that that continues to strengthen and enrich. And so the relationship becomes more meaningful, but also becomes stronger and more capable of living in life. And that is almost like a triadic cycle. The individuals are experiencing life and feeling grief, among other things, hopefully not exclusively. And if they step into it, if they learn how to like, okay, boy, that’s growth time. I’m going to grow into that and building more maturity and more strength in self, more character. And then the relationship itself has more capacity. There’s a third player in this story. And there’s something about that triangle that is the secret answer to the question of the moment in which we live. This religion is not a religion. And the swiftly approaching catastrophe that I think we’re all noticing, a big part of the answer to that question has to do with strength and relationality and the ability to be present to what’s happening and step into it with increasing growth and maturity. And the nerdy language there would be something like that’s anti-fragility. Yeah. Okay. That was amazing. I’ve got a lot I want to say now in response. Ready to listen. Okay. So the first was in what you just said, which is what you’re making an argument for. The way grief affords a deep participatory knowing that itself affords what we’re talking about last time, the enacted imaginal, the ability to take another person’s perspective, internalize it and become trustworthy. And what people who haven’t appropriately leaned into their grief, I would propose to you go the opposite way. They are people that we should suspect are not trustworthy. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Because they can’t get to the depths. So this is a connection to the sacred because we talked last time about the sacred being this imaginal, dialogical, ability to enact the imaginal, augment reality, reciprocal opening, internalize. And what you’re saying, the argument you just made, Lisa, that’s what I was hearing, is people are deeply trustworthy, deeply internalizable. They can really imagine in the imaginal sense our perspective and we can theirs if we have equally participated in grief. And people who don’t have that, everybody experiences loss, but people, I’m going to use the word grief to mean people who have experienced the loss and as you said, have leaned into it as opposed to have adopted strategies of avoidance. And those people, I would say, by symmetry of argument, are people we should not extend our trust to as readily. Yeah. They’ll tend to be reckless with your heart, for example. Yes. Yes. The next thing that came out was I wanted to zero in. So there was this and it was great, but there was the kairos of what you said, which was the modal shift. And two things came to mind right away. One was Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Illich. And there’s this line and it was one of the first lines in literature that started to wake me to the distinction between the propositional mode and the other modes, perspectival participatory. So it goes like this. Ivan Illich always knew he was going to die the way he knew that two plus two equals four. But now, and it’s in capital letters, he knew he was going to die. And then there’s no way of capturing the difference propositionally, but it’s that modal shift, right? It’s that modal shift. And then part of stoicism is to get you to realize that every moment, that you’re not immortal at the end of your life, you’re immortal throughout your life. Right. And so that resonated. The modal shift. And then the second, and I’m trying to, brilliant literature that puts its finger on the modal shift. So the story of the Buddha, this is a story I often tell when I’m trying to give support to people suffering grief. So a woman comes up to the Buddha and she’s lost her son, and she’s demanding that he resurrect her son. Now, the Buddha, of course, famously refused to perform miracles, which I think is an important thing, but we’ll talk about that another time. So there’s- I also, by the way, refused to perform miracles. Very Buddhist. It’s a very good thing. But she keeps badgering him and she keeps badgering him and she keeps badgering him. And then he says, all right, I’ll do it on one condition. One condition. She says, anything, anything. He says, go into the town and get a mustard seed from somebody. She said, well, that’s easy. He said, aha, that’s not the full condition. The condition is you have to get a mustard seed from a house that has not experienced grief. So she goes into the town, she knocks on the door. Do you have any mustard seed? Yes. Have you experienced any, has anyone in this house experienced grief? Yes. My brother lost his brother. Oh. And then she goes from door to door to door to door. And then the parable goes, and then she went, oh. And then she walks back to the Buddha and she says, thank you. And that’s how the story ends. That’s the modal shift, right? That’s the modal shift. Yeah. Damn, dude. Those are good. Obviously they’re good and thank you for recalling them, but also thank you for living them. So in the telling of the story, I felt both like they hit. And again, that’s kind of the point, right? Yeah. And the God, they’re brilliant because they are ostensibly propositional. Yes. You’re uttering words. And they’re both Cohen’s in that very specific sense of like, they’re using words, but they have an artfulness to them where there’s a way for them to actually present and then hit. And when they hit, you feel it. Like I felt a kineticness in both cases, when the modal shift landed and the dropping and therefore an awakening and entering into, oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. That’s that. And that’s that. Like that’s it. Okay. So what I’m feeling now is a looping back. Okay. A recovery. So we’re talking about this notion of the sacred and we’ve done some journeying through it both days, but I think today, particularly interesting or nutritious journey. And yeah, I talked about Graeber before, right? Excuse me? Daniel or David Graeber, the anthropologist. Possibly. It sounds vaguely familiar to me. I think I can say what I mean to say pretty quickly. So I was studying money and he wrote a book called Five Thousand Years of Debt. Right. He’s brilliant guy. Probably a little bit hard to deal with, I imagine, but brilliant guy. And there’s a point in his story. So he was telling, he said, hey, by the way, the story of how money works is totally not real. Like not even vaguely history. Let me tell you this story from an anthropological perspective. Like, let’s get it right. And one of the just kind of like almost passing things in the story, he said, and by the way, it’s kind of interesting, but it kind of seems to follow an arc whenever we do the money thing. It starts out with real relationships, people who know each other and something along the lines of debt. And then something around the notion of externalizing those relationships into an artifact. Usually a pretty simple artifact like a chalkboard at a pub that happens to be the center of the village. And then there’s a movement, by the way, this is very, you’re going to, this is right, you get this from the participatory up to the propositional movement of a continuing externalization, alienation, alienation of the relationships of debt. You’re like, I am in your debt at a heartfelt level, yes, into an increasingly abstract and artifacted form that, you know, moves from a ledger into a tally stick and moves from a tally stick into a coin and moves from a coin into a piece of stamped coin and moves from a stamped coin into a paper bill and moves from a paper bill into a, you know, just, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So there’s, he’s like, there’s that move. And here’s the other move that I keep noticing collapse. There’s actually a whole bunch of other stuff that happens. You know, for example, you can’t do highway robbery of the fact that I’m in your debt for telling me that story, John, like there’s no highway robber who can come to me and extort from me the meaningfulness of the Buddha story. It’s insane to even think about it, because of course I would share it with them. Please listen. You can only steal gold, right? You can only steal alienated artifacts that are holding something which is a reification and a, um, and a, uh, well, an alienation of the real relationship, right? And that by itself creates a society built around alienation and reification and propositional artifacting of relationality, which leads to a society that has two characteristics. One is that it explodes in superficial materialist proliferation. And the other is its soul shrinks and dies and it collapses. Yes. Yes. This seems to happen. Like he talks about the bronze age collapse in those terms. He was able to get back behind that. And he said, and here’s the other thing that seems to happen, at which point he just leaves off. Cause I think he just, just wasn’t interested in going into it. Then you get religious revivals. All the religions that we’ve seen more or less have had been born in these moments where there was a, uh, literally like a monetary collapse, which associated with other things, but a monetary collapse followed by a social collapse. And then there was religious, a new religion was born into it. Right. Right. And this is like 10 years ago when I read this, maybe, maybe even more, maybe 12 or 15 years ago, but I took note of it. It’s like, that’s really interesting. It’s just a sheer hypothesis. Maybe there’s something to track. And I got to tell you as days and weeks and months and years have passed on more and more, clearly that’s what’s up. So when we’re talking about the sacred today and many of the conversations we’ve been having, the religion is not a religion to steal the culture. Is to reawaken the soul in this sense, to reawaken an awareness of this modality to, and then to, and then to begin the process of supporting. And we’re all now like learning together, co-parenting each other in the artfulness of living through and with this modality. And by the way, not exclusively, right. That’s a, that’s just as much of an error as the other. But that’s it. And this is like awakening from the meaning crisis is awakening to the awareness of this modality and then stepping into the oftentimes very difficult, in fact, by their, by its very nature, excruciatingly painful learning how to actually navigate in that light. Because one of the things that will happen, you know, just think about your, for example, I, I was somebody who had not experienced much grief into adulthood, right. As one of these not trustworthy people and dangerous people as a consequence. I should say, by the way, one of the interesting artifacts of our particular economic and political system is that that’s how you rise to the top of power. This is how you get a psychopathic civilization. Right. Is skillful avoidance of, of metabolizing grief and becoming mature goes hand in hand, not perfectly, but hand in hand with the kinds of skills that enable you to be very effective at a kind of game theoretic sociopathy. That’s a great connection Jordan. And that’s how you get powerful. So now you’ve got a world run by powerful people who are dangerous and not trustworthy. And that tends to collapse by the way. So that’s one of the reasons why it collapses and collapses in the way it does. Okay. So I’m one of those people. And where’s that? What’s happening here? And in the process of awakening, come face to face. This is like AA. I got a lot of shit I got to deal with. Yeah. Right. Many of which, much of which I still haven’t dealt with in myself. I got a whole bunch of defense mechanisms that have built up over decades and have hardened and the stuff that they’re built around, therefore like festering wounds that have been sitting in there for decades. And of course are wrapped around narratives and are wrapped around identity structures. Right. This Gordian knot of self has to be entangled. And every single time you entangle it, you kind of go through this process of coming to terms with the thing, but then the grief, then the suffering of actually having to actually metabolize it and go through the thing that you avoided so studiously for so long. And all the interest, right? It carries a various interest. It carries a lot of interest. And if you, in my experience, at least there’s an avoidance. Oh, okay. It seemed like it had to happen and that sucks. I’m not going to do that. Maybe not quite so explicitly, but you build some certain skillfulness and avoidance. It’s funny, actually, so many people, this is one of the things I want to really put out there because it’s so true. It simply seems to be the case that the further along you go on that journey, the more preciously you hold those things that have survived not being worked through. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. There’s in some sense, there’s all kinds of trauma and all kinds of shame and all kinds of defense mechanisms that you can work through, but almost by a process of evolutionary selection, the stuff that you didn’t work through is all the more intensely held. Exactly. That’s right. Which makes it a harder and harder thing to do, which is why we have to have friendships. It’s only in relationship and only with an increasingly intense and sophisticated and trustworthy and caring relationships that we can find a way to continue to kind of get through that. There’s no singular way of doing it. So anyway, sorry, that was- No, that was beautiful. That seems to me to be the journey as far as I can tell. If you really want to kind of wave your hands at where we are, and I mean this at a geopolitical, socioeconomic, technological level, I’m going to use a lot of cool nerdy words. It comes all the way back down to the fact that we’re all going to have to heal a lot in all the ways. Really hard to do. The only way for us to do it is to get better and better at being good friends and better and better at building this coin, this term sovereignty, building our own sovereignty and building our relationships, supporting each other from zero, from the base state. No preconceived propositions guiding what’s up because that’s all secondary. If you allow that to become primary, it gets hardened on the inside and re-affys itself back out into the world that you create and fast. The clock is very much ticking on this particular collapse event. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but if you look around, it really does seem like it’s all sociopaths and psychopaths in charge of the tools of power, and the tools of power are very powerful and a good place to be. There’s two things that I’ll try to bring to bringing it towards the end of our dialogue. One was that it seems to me that you specified, again, more aspects of the sacred in this journey through grief, which is, like I said, there’s a modal, that the sacred affords the modal shift that allows us to awaken and remember and recover our humanity from the depths that only our suffering takes us. But there’s also what occurred to me in the end is you were taking on the prophetic role, not the fortune teller, but the one who speaks forth. The sacred is that which speaks forth, speaks about, I mean, the biblical prophets speak about the abuse of power and how the abuse of power has replaced the love of the sacred. That was the main job of the prophet. The prophet was supposed to speak forth and try to recall people back. The prophet’s main job was to try, and sometimes through horror, to snap people into a kind of a modal shift awakening. And so there’s a prophetic aspect and an awakening aspect to the sacred that triangulate in on how we, and that model you made, and I heard Gollum when you said the precious, our most precious traumas, the ones we’ve gotten rid of all these and we of course, we fall into the hubris of saying, well, I’m done, without realizing that no, no, the thing that’s left is like the thing in the bottom of Pandora’s box. The thing that’s left is actually the hardest ones of all. And so the temptation, and this is where the biblical word is also good, to harden your heart, right, never goes away. In fact, the deeper we go, the deeper the temptation to hardening our heart, and the more we need the prophetic challenge of the sacred to engender the modal shift in us so that we’re willing to go further. That’s what I was, that’s how I’m trying to put it together. Yeah, that’s beautiful. I really like, huh, yeah, by the way, thank you, that was beautiful. And what I was particularly noticing is just sort of feeling the notion, the sacred, now, and in comparison to the way we were presenting it last time, which by the way also felt really good. Yes, it does. But this is a different aspect of it. Yeah. And this allows us maybe to have a little bit more of an orientation towards it in the sense of thingness. I don’t mean that, I definitely don’t want to slip into it, but there’s, you know, there’s events or encounters where we have, actually frankly, like just a moment ago, like I would say that your retelling of those two particular stories partook of the sacred. There was sacredness in there. And that was an opening, there was a reminder. And that is one of the aspects, one of the aspects of the sacred is precisely that, that it awakens in us, it reminds us, it remembers us into relationality with that. And this is, I think one of the reasons why, oh, yeah, oh, this is another thing I wanted to share. One of the reasons why I think we often can get lost in the reification of that, you know, I have an object, whether it’s a 50-foot gold statue of Buddha or a cathedral or a beautiful landscape that has that power. It actually does that, right? When I step into it, if I have the lineage or the culture, the toning, it rings in me and I’m like, oh, right, thank you, I remember. And then you’re like, oh, and that’s sacred. And you’re right. And you’re also wrong. You don’t want to get, you don’t want to get lost in the artifact. You want to get, it’s a symbol, right? That’s the whole point. You don’t want to turn it into a graven image. You want to allow it to be a symbol. An icon rather than an idol. Yes, yes. And then the thing that was coming to me much earlier, when you brought up the term symbol and you were talking about it in a very interesting way, it was like a person, a relationship, a partner as a symbol, an icon, not an idol. Yeah. And the potency, like other people are, I would propose, maybe not too strongly, but I’ll put it out there. Other people present the possibility of being the greatest symbols that could be. Yeah, that’s Boober. I think there’s something fundamentally true about that. Yeah. So the symbolic relationship and the ability to really recognize the sacred by virtue of relationality with another person as a symbol is, well, maybe that’s what we talk about next time, but that’s something that can be a big time now. Yeah. And I’ll add one nuance that I would like to talk about next time, which is the other, the people that receive the symbolic, I don’t know what the word is projection, but that’s not the right word. They receive, like when you realize you’re in a symbolic role, how do you maintain yourself as an icon without becoming an idol? Very nice. Very nice. Yes. Yes. Yes. Crucial. Yeah. I think crucial. Otherwise you can’t be friends. That’s right. That’s right. That’s really right. Well, just to the point, I think your friend or at least your colleague, Jordan Peterson, yeah, who seems to be rushing back onto the stage over the past couple of days. He comes to mind. Yeah. In that context. Yes, he does. So maybe we can support him and be his friend. Yeah, I publicly done that on other videos. And I think that it was the first non political video that Jordan did that went big was his discussion with me for the mind master series. And so I’m, I mean, I can be extending that invitation again, if he, if he would rather, if he would like to return not to debate and adversarial zero sum game, but to genuine idea logos, I’m offering myself as a potential partner in that. I also offer myself as a potential partner in either deal logos or tree logos, whichever that would be great. All right. Okay. Take good care of my friend. That was deeply moving for me. And I deeply appreciate the fellowship we have together. So thank you very much. Yeah. Thank you. Bye bye. Good care. Bye bye.