Reflections on the Elusive I - The Cognitive Science Show (n2MIDmSUKG8)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=n2MIDmSUKG8

Welcome everybody to a Voices with Raveki and this is also an overlap with the Cognitive Science Show. I’m John Raveki and I’m really looking forward to this. This is, this is, I have, I think a rational hope that this is going to exemplify the kind of argumentation, dialogos integration that I’ve been working with and Greg and I have been working on. Anyways, why are we here? We’re here because Greg and Rikas and Chris Metzor-Pietro, they’ll introduce themselves in a minute, and I did a series together, a video series on YouTube, there’ll be a link in the description of this video, called The Elusive Eye, The Nature and Function of the Self, in which we brought to bear as best we could the best sort of cognitive science, psychology, meta-psychology, and also existential and phenomenological philosophy. We brought that to bear on this question, what is the self? And then there are attendant questions like is the self real or not and what kind of realness does it have and how does it function? If it is real, what does it do and what way does it function? And then what happened is, Lehmann-Pascal and Bruce Haldeman, they both did a, they did a dialogical video together where they discussed and reflected on that series. There’ll be a link to that video. And then Greg, as he always does, very astutely said, hey, you know what would be a really good idea is if we all got together and talked about the elusive eye and the, I think it’s fair to say the profound reflection that Lehmann and Bruce gave it. Much, much appreciated. One would hope, I would hope at least in my wildest fantasies that my work would be responded to in that fashion on a regular basis. I think that would be some kind of paradise for me. But nevertheless, they are here. And what we’re going to do today is we’re going to basically get into hopefully a free-flowing and exploratory discussion about both the series, the elusive eye, and the topic of the series, which is the self, because Bruce and Lehmann went beyond reflecting on the series. They quite properly also extended that reflection into their own reflections on the nature and the function of the self. So that’s what we’re going to do. And I’m very excited about it. But what I’m going to do now is let I’ll call out the names in order so we’re not wondering who should go next. I’m going to have everybody introduce themselves and I’m just going to do it according to how you’re showing up on my TV screen. So first of all, my long time, one of my dearest friends, my brother in many ways, and we work together and he deeply collaborates with me on so much. And that’s Christopher Mastro Pietro. Thank you, sir. It’s really it’s really good to see you guys. And like I said before we started recording, Lehmann and Bruce, it’s good to actually meet you. This is the first time I’ve actually had the chance to chat with you guys, which to me was the impetus really for this discussion more than anything else, quite frankly. I sometimes don’t know how much more I have to say on the topic. There always ends up being more, but it’s never obvious to me that there is more. There’s both infinitely more and nothing more to say about it. So it was really the the prospect of meeting you both and and expressing some genuine appreciation to you for how thoughtfully you responded to it. That’s my impetus for being here in the actual series. I would say I took up a position of a certain kind of witness that could echo back some of the implications from a more existential or phenomenological perspective and what kind of responsibilities were incurred by the particular models that were being advanced by John and Greg, how we were to understand those in terms of being instructive or not, as the case may be. And that’s that’s the heat of my interest, really, right. The heat of my interest are the existential implications. And obviously, that’s why I took Kierkegaard as my point of entry. But, you know, no means is that exclusive to him. So, yeah, so that was the position I took. And it’s probably similar to the one I’ll take today. I’m far more interested in just, you know, listening to the. Listening to the the the echoes in the chamber here than anything else. But, yeah, I’m looking forward to it. Thank you, Chris. So I’d like to now introduce somebody who he and I are we’ve engaged in this ongoing project of trying to integrate theoretical argumentation with dialogical practice. And the elusive eye was the middle series in what is now an existing trilogy. Greg and I did Untangling the World Not, which is about consciousness. Then Greg, Chris and I did the elusive eye, which is about the nature and function of itself. And then Greg and I and Zach Stein are doing one on called Towards a Meta Psychology that is true to transformation, where we wrestle deeply with what do we actually mean by transformation and how is it possible for us? And so my good friend and colleague, Greg Enriquez. Thank you so much. It’s just a joy to be here, guys. These are some of these are my best comrades and Deologos, as evidenced by the you talking with Greg initial lineup. So this is a joy. I super appreciated the elusive eye. It’s been influential. You know, I may have tried to create a Logos architecture of understanding. I felt that we carved out some angles of understanding and juxtaposed that position together pretty well and affords a lot of different angles. And then when I heard Bruce and layman’s articulation, I was very, very joyous with regards to the angles they brought, both at the level of sort of theoretical architecture and then the implication and the calling for where we might be. And I’m working with Bruce and layman on a sacred naturalism and then to bring these threads together into a weave. Well, it makes myself and Jewish heart sing. So it’s wonderful to be here. And thanks so much, John, for hosting this. And so I look forward to the conversation. Thank you, Greg. So next is layman Pascal. Layman and I have many of you are probably familiar with layman. We can I have done several videos together on voices with Vickie. I’m always astonished by layman’s cognitive grasp. It it can it’s it bridges on being intimidating, but he never brings with it any sense of being overbearing. He’s always loving and affectionate when he brings like you. It’s like you you’ve been in a cabin and you open your door to look upon a mountain range where there’s all of this happening. And so I’m very, very, very happy to welcome him here. I do sort of feel like I’m just coming out of the cabin periodically to see things and have these discussions. I appreciate that. I’m I do a lot of podcasting with Bruce as well as a lot of philosophical work and writing with Bruce around the ideas of adjacency and prepositionality, as well as both of our what we think of as a integral post metaphysical take on spirituality, because I think spiritual practice and spiritual contemplation is sort of the core of what our lives are. Very happy to see Greg, who we talk with a lot. Very happy to meet Chris. When I went through the elusive eye, there were a lot of things that I resonated with. I thought, you know, you guys do a lot of series and this one really felt like it was going somewhere interesting. It was right on an edge that I wanted to be on. I think Bruce and I both saw some openings where we thought we might have contributions and where some of our own favorite thinking was triggered. But I wanted to say that for me personally, it was the stuff that Chris brought in around Kierkegaard and some of the higher level paradoxical contemplations about the self and what it can be at the edge of or beyond the justification system. So that really got me excited. And that’s where most of my heartfelt is on this topic. Good to be with you guys. Thank you, Eamonn. So last is result of it. I don’t know Bruce as well. So one of the things I’m looking forward to is getting to know Bruce better. Bruce and I have done one video together and I was deeply impressed again by. What you brought to bear in your reflections on the elusive eye, Bruce, I mean, you were you were bringing so much to bear, especially from transpersonal and developmental psychology that I thought was both pertinent and fecund. And so I now get to thank you for doing that in person and welcome you here. Yeah, thank you. It’s a delight to be here with all of you. If I orbit around YouTube, it’s usually ends up circling around what’s going on on your channel, John and with Chris and or Greg. I am involved in transpersonal psychology, not exclusively now. I was trained in that. I’m a professor at John F. Kennedy University as a nighttime, very underpaying job, but nevertheless, a welcome job. I really love being able to work with students in in that respect. And years ago, I started a forum on integral post metaphysical spirituality, wanting Wilbur had introduced that particular phrase. And I was both triggered by some of what he was suggesting and intrigued and excited by what he was suggesting with that phrase. And ended up taking, I don’t know, maybe 15 year deep dive in that forum with a small group of people into the topic. It became kind of our own. Collective self generated PhD training in that we really followed many, many different threads into the literature around post metaphysics and metaphysics and and spirituality and theology. And layman showed up there a couple of years in, and we immediately sparked it off. I think he recognized kin with us and we did with him. And that’s been a wonderful collaboration. Later, I started the integral stage and very quickly brought layman into that and much to the benefit of the whole channel. And so I’m really happy to explore this topic with all of you. It’s a deep interest to me. And I really found where you went with your conversation, both very profound and very immediately relevant. For things that I see being wrestled with in the field, in the work that I do, you know, in psychology. Thank you, Bruce. So what what what I thought we do to start is we’d ask. I’ll I’ll ask on behalf of Chris and Greg for for for layman and Bruce to give us their reflections, perhaps maybe an initial start. Point of the topic they’d like to talk about. One topic I would like to talk about at some point that both of them emphasized and layman at times became almost lyrical about it was the idea. Well, think about this intuitively. What is most both simultaneously most the most familiar and most mysterious entity to you? It’s your own self. And there’s an elusiveness to the eye, hence the term, the idea of the title of the series. But well, the layman and Bruce took that really deep and they took it into and not improperly. So they took it into an ontological dimension. And I really resonated with that because that ontological dimension is convergent with a dialectical, not in the Hegelian sense, but in the erogenous sense, a dialectical ontology that I’ve been sort of working on with Greg and others and discussing and developing. So that would be one point I would like to address. But I want you two to feel free to initiate your reflections or the conversation as you wish. So who wants to go first? Well, you know, where I ultimately like to end up is in discussions around the different modes of going to the end zone of the justicational system. But I think it’s worth touching in on the way I come at this from what I call the metaphysics of adjacency, which will be very close to what Bruce thinks of around certain grammatical forms. This idea that the elusiveness of the self is not a failure of our knowledge, but is in fact part of the constitutive structure of what the self is. Right. And that’s kind of easy to understand at the level of the sophisticated human narrative self, because I have this story, I have this autobiographical self, and I know it’s not quite me. But I think the reason we have that structure is because that’s the structure of all the self-reference and agentic functions of beings all the way down the stack. And I think it’s permeates the whole stack because it’s embedded in the ontology or the functional syntax that underlies being. And I think it’s a very interesting way to think in terms of everything being next to itself, of context in the context of other contexts as being essentially the unit of thought out of which we build reality. So that everything is, no things are distinguished by being the same as something or different than something else. Everything is in a flexible, same difference relationship. This is what characterizes cognition in general, including the unique form of cognition, which is being yourself. And so because it characterizes everything, it characterizes the function of the self, and because it characterizes that function, it shows up as every self-like phenomenon through the evolutionary stack and also then in the sophisticated human versions of that, which are constitutively defined by their elusiveness, by a kind of deferral, going beyond yourself to be yourself as yourself. Maybe we could have Bruce now say before, and then maybe what we’ll do is maybe in general is we’ll have each one of you say something about a topic perhaps, and maybe you could take turns leading what the topic will be, and then the three of us could then respond as we wish. How’s that sound for going forward? So Bruce? Sounds good to me. I think there are two things that I would like to talk about. One, I would like to bring in some thinking from William Desmond, a theologian. I’m not sure if many of you are familiar with Desmond’s theology of metaxology, but I was just in reflecting on the dialogue that we’re going to have today, the territory that you covered in your dialogue, and also I think the dialogue between layman’s ideas and Chris’s ideas in terms of the post justification. I think Desmond brings something that’s interesting to that. He definitely walks the line. Actually, maybe we’re flanking him because he’s before us, but in his metaxology, he touches on themes that are both important to layman’s metaphysics of adjacency and important to my integral grammatology and the metaphysics around prepositions. And we did get into that somewhat not expecting everyone in this dialogue to be up to par on what we mean by metaphysics of adjacency or integral grammatology. But there are some themes that came out in our discussion that related to what you talked about that I think would be interesting to get into, especially opening up what Desmond calls the four hyperboles of being, which will relate both to some of the adjacency issues and also some of the Kierkegaardian issues around, concerns around the absurd and paradox and that sort of thing. So that’s one kind of more theoretical territory I’d like to look at. And then I’d also just like to look at in light of the conversation that you’re also now having on the metapsychology that’s true to transformation is just a little bit of the talk that we got into in that conversation on actual transformative potentials, kind of post egoic development where contemplative and wisdom traditions aim. And there’s some recent research that came out that be nice to talk about a little bit. Oh, OK. Thank you. That’s great. I’m happy to be involved in all of this. So I’m sure Greg and Chris are too. I’ll start first. So, Levin and I think both of you at some point also invoked object oriented ontology. I am influenced by Morton’s idea of hyper objects and Harmon’s ideas of neither undermining nor overmining entities in our ontology. What that means to language that, or at least I see it, to language that might be important to people watching this video. And this is very much inspired by the neoplatonic tradition of our participation in intelligibility, which I think and the metaxu, of course, comes ultimately from Socrates, who described himself on behalf of humanity as always in between. And that’s what it is to be a lover of wisdom and not a god. So all of that is deeply caught up in this language that I’ve been trying to articulate both phenomenologically and also in practice and also theoretically reflecting on people like Regina and Cusa is the language I’ve been using around moreness and suchness. And the fact that both of these are not ultimately catchable in our propositional thought, the moreness is that every entity is much more than any particular aspect we can grasp of it. But that moreness is not chaotic. And Marla Ponti talked about this a long time ago. You never actually see the object. I probably shouldn’t hold that up because it was a picture of my girlfriend. You never see the whole object. You never see the whole object. You can’t. You can’t see it all. But you nevertheless know there’s one thing there. And this was something that Marla Ponti kept coming back to and reflecting on. And Husserl too, because Husserl took the Greek notion of Eidos, the form, that somehow through all this multi-aspectuality, there’s something that’s not itself another aspect that is binding them together. And I use the word logos to try and capture that. So there’s a moreness to things that we can’t cap. They’re an inexhaustible source of aspects and relations. But that is not a chaos. That is somehow it has a logos. But it’s a logos that we can sense and track, but we cannot predict completely or forcefully. And then there’s a suchness, which is the idea that everything has a unique here now-ness that is its non-categorical identity. There’s that. So after I, if I could and I can’t, after I exhaust all the categories that this belongs to, there is something above and beyond all those categorical identities. And this is the Buddhist notion of suchness, but you also see the same thing in Neoplatonism. And we did try to invoke that, because I’m interested in this proposal. And it’s a proposal that when we turn what you might call the cognitive machinery that Greg and I laid out in great detail towards trying to come into right relationship with the moreness and suchness, we properly move into the existential spiritual domain. That’s what happens. So I’m not trying to reduce the existential and spiritual to the cognitive, psychological, but I’m trying to say when that machinery turns to try and not just theorize, but to come into right relationship with the moreness and suchness, first of itself, perhaps, and then perhaps in conjunction with reality. For me, that’s when we get into, that’s the Kierkegaardian turn. You can also see the turn in Plotinus where you get the shift from where he’s giving this argumentative metaphysics to where he then calls you to the right relationship with the one. So that’s my initial response of how I thought what we were doing was picking up on that. I see the elusiveness is, I was even used the phrase in the series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, the thing beyond itself. Right. And so that I agree. I think all of reality is emerging from its suchness and emanating from reality. And everything is elusive in that fashion and that there are therefore truths about reality that cannot be disclosed to us unless we make that turn, that metanoia that I just mentioned. So that’s my initial response. Perhaps we can let everybody from the elusive I, Greg, and then Chris respond, and then we can keep doing it in this sort of cycle. I know this is a little bit forced, but it’s going to give us all a chance to voice. Yeah, so that’s wonderful. Thank you both. I was really moved, as I mentioned by your reflections on the elusive I. I’ve been getting a fair amount of mileage out of really, you know, trying to create a systematic logos for psychology. I find that the work that John and I did first with consciousness layering sort of Balence Qualia into an adjectival, adverbial witness function, evolving that into the self, which really for me is originally the experiential self, the modeling across time, and especially the modeling in relationship to other, pre-verbally in a Tomasello kind of intersubjective field. And the way that jumped into an egoic justifier and creates then a persona dynamic, that getting that right and getting clear and then thinking more and more about the traps that people get into is my clinical lens between what the self experiences, what it wants, what the ego then says, and what the persona needs to navigate as sort of these trapped egoic self functions that drive people into neurotic holes. And then realizing the out of a perspectival shift and both get beneath that and above it. So in terms of awareness of being outside of the self egoic modeling, my friend Rob Scott, fundamental shift and the phenomenological isness that affords down into the animal, into the body at some level and then into the world itself so that you can, John, I heard you talking with Jordan Hall about how to become present, you know, as opposed to sort of narcissistic bullshit. This is non-sacistic bullshitting. What is isness itself, at least in relationship or experience? The way, Bruce, you and Layman, of course, I was super honored by what Chris was doing and then moved by that and basically, well, what is the spiritual existential right relation of trans justificatory aim? And so I’m getting a lot of mileage about, oh, here’s your psychotherapeutic, neurotic ego, self modeling, persona justification, struggles of doing, but then bullshit you into neurotic traps. And then how can we help people see those, get adjacent to them and get both beneath them grounded on isness in a particular way and then oriented spiritually or substantially to the trans justificatory space? I think there’s a lot of good modeling and work to be done there. And I think you guys laid out a lot of that ground in a beautiful way. Thank you, Greg. Chris. So one thing I really appreciated among many that you guys did, Bruce, Layman, in your discussion is you carried the extended linguistic grammar analogy, I think a little bit farther than we did in our initial discussion, although it’s been a little while. I can’t quite remember. But that analogy is so fruitful because it captures the manifold of dimensions that would be analogized by the different grammatical cases, tenses, aspects, moods, right? The constituent parts of grammar, as we understand them, lend themselves really, really aptly to understanding the way that our language is being used. And I think that’s a really good example of that. And I think that’s a great example of how we can actually relate to understanding the way that our existential dispositions are determined by those preconditions that we then have to recur an influence with will and with tutoring and with training and with reflection. Like, John, I really, really liked, Layman, that you began by characterizing the sentence rather than an epistemic problem. It may be an epistemic problem, but it’s almost incidental that it’s an epistemic problem. If it is, it’s also ontological leverage. And I think of that difference, going back to the grammar for a moment, I think of that difference as the difference between a sentence that is elusive because it’s semantically incoherent, which we might say at that point, it’s disjunctive and internally dissonant and alternates without being dialectical in its meaning. And then on the other hand, a poetry, a poetry, a poem, a line of poetry that is elusive because it indexes beyond itself. It is a gesture. Its elusiveness comes from the way that it indexes beyond itself, not the way in which it’s internally incoherent. And the espousal of a certain semantic coherence is what actually transmutes the elusiveness from one category to another. It’s like the transmutation of elusiveness. It’s the cultivation of elusiveness. It’s the population of elusiveness with imagination that actually creates from it the basis of what we might call being oneself in the normative sense. And obviously I’m coming from a position where the descriptive is unto the normative, right? And that the self we are is the self we must be and become and that there’s no distinction between ultimately. But that aside, I was very, very provoked by those two, the consonance of those two ways of thinking. And then Bruce, provided there’s time to talk about this, the idea of like a psycho education and given everything else that we have are and will be discussing, what does a proper psycho education look like? What does a proper psycho education look like insofar as we can agree that there is a normative espousal to all of this that is necessary for the becoming of oneself? How do we get there? And that goes back to your point, Laman, right? How do we get to the end zone? So all that, all that and more. Thank you, Chris. So one thing that’s emerging in our response, it’s not the only thing, but one common thread is the move that both Laman and Bruce made about, I like the way Chris put it, the elusiveness goes from being an epistemic problem to ontological leverage. It’s kind of a renewal of Ottoman is Brahman in a very interesting and powerful way that the fundaments of the I participate, conform to the fundamental reality in an important way that discloses them. It’s kind of an answer to Heidegger’s, we are the beings whose being is in question. So I wonder if perhaps, feel free to respond how you wish, but could you like respond to our responses, I guess is what I’m asking for. Because I think what we’re all saying is we deeply appreciated that move. Is there something more to be said about it is what I’m asking. So perhaps Laman first. Sure, there’s plenty more to be said about it, but maybe I’ll try to pick up a couple of points that were scattered in all of your remarks there. I think this sense, and Bruce can probably speak well to this, of different modes of this adjacency like structure is really important. I’m going to be, I’m thinking about next and next to as very fundamental senses of how something can be passed itself as itself that I think will come back. I think these modes are very important to understand in terms of an educational system, because part of what that is, a secular Dharma has to be able to instruct people in the different modalities of moving into that end zone. And I think there’s something you see in the natural move to that end zone, which is very much like the move that Chris described me as making relative to adjacency, which is the transformation, the kind of Hegelian transformation of the problem into the condition of the solution. Right. So in the sense that the autobiographical ego fails, that could be a psychological therapeutic problem, or it could be something which is actually your opening to the trans-justificational self. And I’ll probably come back to Zen a lot because the inability to solve the koan is in a way the gateway to the solution of the koan, right? Your failure to get any substantial knowledge, the knowledge lack is the presence of the thing you’re looking for in the koan. And to me, there’s so many patterns like that, that it really makes sense to think of it as potentially ontological and to deploy this move where the elusiveness is substantial as a presence rather than an absence. And I think that that kind of thinking, that kind of thinking, that’s the key to the solution. Opens up the solution to one of your outstanding questions, John, which was what’s the mediating language between the explaining and the training? Yes. That’s a language, I think, which has to, its alphabet has to consist of things that do the move of the training and the move of the explaining. Yes. So the referring to something has to itself have the form of the cultivating and the cultivating has to take the form of the referring to something. So there’s a kind of structure that they both have in common when you put them together, which is that, you know, here’s the unit as if it’s something we can refer to, but the unit consists of a move to make a transformation. So any kind of, you could do a mediating language without really doing it very sophisticatedly, which is you could just say, hey, we go back and forth between these two modes, but there’s also an implied space there and that space seems to have to consist of things that in whatever their structure is, it performs both of those functions already. So I think when anything goes past itself, it sets up that structure. And like Chris said, setting up that structure, that kind of scaffolding of a dynamic interspace also affords you the opportunity to then fill that structure in in the imaginal sense and activate a lot of these functions that we associate with spiritual and religious training. OK, I’ll just real quickly, the the framing that’s being offered in relationship to the self, I just invite people to contrast that to our normal education and therapeutic systems, you know, basically download complicated things for procedural skill sets to upgrade aspects of control for the self. And this is a radically different framing. Yeah. Let me just say one more thing. I want to come back to this. Bruce and I have talked a lot about using grammar as a way of thinking about a kind of periodic table of adjacencies. And I really like because thinking in terms of space time is a very traditional time honored philosophical approach to think of those as basic. So the basic structure of a next to and a next to is a very traditional context in time also relates to these two kinds of languages, because the language of training is a language which is trying to cause the next moment of a person to be different. So that’s a temporal move. And the language of explaining is going to say, here’s a proposition and here’s a reality there as if spatially related in the same moment, you go back and forth and check out whether they’re valid or not. So I think those are two very pertinent basic forms of adjacency. And I think we’ll see something like that when we come to the discussion around the end zone is that there’s an unfolding type transformation where I’ve internalized myself as a developmental being and I’m in relationship to my emerging more authentic, the moreness of my wisdom self. And I’m constantly in the play of dying to who I am and becoming that as a time like move. But there’s also a move that’s very similar to the Zen Koan. I think Kierkegaard deploys this a lot where there’s an as if spatial relationship of bringing two things which are mutually self undermining and holding them together in such an intensity of approximation, such a relationship that it basically violates the underlying supposition of the entire narrative field and forces you forth into something else. Yeah, I think the Christian tradition has a direct analog to the Koan in the parable when the parable is properly understood. And Kierkegaard also wrote parables as well to try to exemplify that. Bruce, what are some of your responses to our responses, the meta responses? Yeah, several things are standing out. One, that move of flipping what’s conceived of as an epistemic problem into possibly an ontological reality. I think that’s one of the fundamental moves of object oriented ontology that our inability to grasp the object may be in a sense a quality of objectness in itself. What sometimes is referred to as the withdrawal of objects. But also in Desmond it would be referred to as the over determination of objects. I might get to that in a little bit. In my integral grammatology, I think there’s a move that’s made historically in a number of different contexts. There’s a kind of a holding of something in a literal way to a more analogical and metaphorical way. And ultimately towards what you could call a sacramental holding which moves you into a deeper participation with that which is normally pointed to by a sign or a symbol. And you see this in tantra where in the Mahayana in Buddhism, first there’s an explosion of myth and beautiful mythic forms and representations of the divine. The tradition doesn’t hold them literally. It just sees them as ways of generating insight and creating a vaster narrative that you can participate in that’s generative. But tantra tends to take what is presented in the metaphorical form and then it’s used in the form of a form of a form of a form of a form of a form of a form of a justification. So tantra tends to take what is presented in the metaphor and hold it in a sacramental way so that you participate in the presentation of that. That’s an opening into the contact with being as opposed to just being in a system of justification. What I feel like I’m attempting to do with my integral grammatology project is partly that, is looking at the different parts of speech, not only as logical syntax or ways that our meaning is stitched together, but almost at every grammatical form as a kind of hierophany that invites a participation in being, the more that you meditate on it and open to what is suggested by that form. And so it opens up different types of ontologies and beginning to do that and circulate through that, what I call ontochoreography, you begin to see how different world spaces are organized and you can begin to correlate and bring them together, but also I think begin to make meaning across the traditional boundaries and new ways that are generative for meta theory and other things. And for perceiving hyper objects and that’s a whole other topic we can get into. The other element is from Desmond that I wanted to bring in. I’ll give a very brief snapshot of it and we can go into more depth just in interest of time here. But in Desmond, he talks about the difference between univocity, which speaks in terms of the oneness of things. And it typically object oriented ontology would ultimately criticize those approaches as going towards undermining or overminding in that it tends to be reductive of everything down to some core presumed element or privilege perspective. Then there’s equivocity, which is a recognition and an intuition of the plurality of being. And it’s a holding of that plurality at the same time, but it tends to vacillate between the options and it can be undermined in that very move. It doesn’t have a ground that it stands on in terms of making ethical and moral determinations and other things. Then there’s the dialectical, which basically brings together the different elements and unites them in a new whole. And so he says that that’s an important move, but to the degree that it reduces difference into participation in almost a reduction to a new sameness, it falls short of what he thinks of as the overdetermination and kind of the giftedness of being, which escapes all such determination. And so he posits metaxology after that, which is the sense of the persistent between of things that opening that slippage point where sameness and difference are always in play. And so the metaxu is the slash mark between same and difference. And I think that’s partly what Layman is getting at with his adjacency and what I’m getting at with my exploration of prepositions. So for him, the hyperboles of being, John really explained the very first hyperbole very well at the very beginning of the talk. I know that Desmond is drawing on multiple sources for this, but he calls it the idiocy of being. And being is presented in its finite being in its presentation to us, resists all of our efforts at finitization through categorization, that we can’t capture its finite determinant form in any of our efforts to wrap it up in our abstract universals. It always exceeds that. So John was getting at that very well. And there’s a kind of, he says that this finite being is given to us in a way that is without reason. It’s just there. It doesn’t explain itself, it shows up. And he says, we can look at that as a kind of absurdity, but he prefers to look at it as surplus-surd, that there is this surplus-surd there that makes finite determination possible. It’s that excess that makes it possible to make any kind of finite determination or take any kind of profile. And so for him, there’s, again, that points to this kind of over-determination and giftedness of being, an excess of being. The next hyperbole is the aesthetics of happening. And he would say, in our initial encounter with the sheer giftedness, and you could say over-determination of being, the first response is astonishment. We’re presented with being in a way that can’t be accounted for, can’t be justified. We sense that there’s a horizon there beyond our determinations and we can’t grasp it. So there’s astonishment, but he says that opens up into almost a deep mode of appreciation as you connect to the adjectival, as you connect to all of the aesthetic presentations of being, which he would say is that there’s a, even in the aesthetic presentations of being, there’s a resistance to being captured in our categories or reduced to any fundamental scheme. And that opens us up into a deeper, more participatory mode of appreciation with being, the more that we recognize that excess beyond our models, beyond our attempts to grasp and justify. Then the next hyperbole of being is, he calls it the erotics of salving. And he would say, following Kant, we always seem to move towards our maximum and the self recognizes itself both as finite and yet as self-transcending. It’s both a determinant finite being, and yet it’s always moving towards another maximal inclusion of whatever can be encompassed in that field. And there’s this ongoing gesture or movement that, he connects Eros to the dialectical movement of bringing together different elements in greater unified holes. Then the last element, I wanna look at what the name of it is, I forgot here. That one is, let’s see. Hopefully you have somebody who can edit out my little gap here. That’s okay. I leave these little moments in because they made people feel included. Okay, good, good. These are real selves here, Bruce. So that’s exactly. The fourth is what he calls the agapeics of community. And basically it’s where you see that beyond solving, beyond that effort of solving, there’s an otherness, there’s an excess that is the context for self to make itself. And there’s an overdetermination even to self in its efforts to determine itself, that there’s a determination of self that exceeds it. There’s a participation in community, in the community of being that basically is beyond determination. And what he says is, yeah, what he calls us as the metaxu. So that’s a brief overview. We could get into more of it, but for me, I wanted to say a couple things there. One, looking at the elusiveness, you can speak about elusiveness and elusiveness. That being is both elusive and elusive. And the aesthetics of happening, that excess there, to me, it reminds me of different Japanese aesthetic terms of mononouawari or yugen, where you are both appreciating the transience of things and the elusive suggestiveness of things, that there’s always a suggestion of the more. But also in recognizing being as, in a sense, this sheer unjustified giftedness that the self can recognize in itself, I think that’s an opening to the whole Kyrka Guardian exploration. Very rich responses from both of you. I’m trying to glean something so we can get a thread, because then the problem is I have a poverty of richness here. One thing that seems to be coming out, one thing that’s emerging for me is a bit of a question that perhaps, and then I’ll let Greg and Chris see if they want to pursue that or take up something else, which is just so we can include people listening undermining is when you try to reduce something to its component parts. When people say things like, love is nothing but a chemical reaction. That’s a case of undermining love. Overminding is when you reduce it to the system. Love is just to participate in a network of relationships to other human beings. So you can reduce upward and you can reduce downward. And as Bruce said, one of the things we come to, especially in the Kyrka Guardian exploration, especially if we come to a Kyrka Guardian reflection on the self is there’s something resistant in ourself to either one of those reductions. And so when you do that for the people, they’ll get angry both ways. And part of that is probably egocentrism and narcissism, but I also take it that there’s a Kyrka Guardian point to note there’s a resistance there for a reason to the undermining and the overmining. I’m trying to tie this back into the phenomenology of the self. And one of the things we can ask is, what is that resistance? What does it tell us about the self? What does it tell us about the self’s ontology? And so that brings me to this question because there is the withdrawal, but there’s also the phenomenon. There’s also the shining in. And the reason why this matters is, and like I said, although there’s the moreness, there’s a through line. It’s not chaotic. It’s an inexhaustible fount of intelligibility. This is the sort of neoplatonic idea. What I mean by that is part of the project of the series was to try and get, and Lehmann said this in getting the language, but it’s also to bridge between the phenomenological, existential, spiritual aspects of the self and the scientifically disclosable. What I mean by that is, I’m not disagreeing with anything that’s been said about the self in a more expansive understanding, but nevertheless, it seems to be like everything else in reality, it is also that that expansiveness is somehow non-logically identical with its ongoing intelligibility, such that I take it, maybe some of you don’t, but I take it, I think Greg does, I think Chris does too, but I’m not sure. I take it that the scientific investigation of the self is both a possible and a useful. I don’t think it’s an exhaustive project, but I think it’s both possible and useful. It tells us something very important, precisely because there is a reliable intelligibility to this entity that makes scientific reflection upon it a reasonable and helpful, and I don’t just mean scientifically, I mean existentially and spiritually helpful thing to do. And the reason I bring that question up is I think we can use it to segue into this idea about the trans-justificatory, because that was all, the relationship with the apophatic and the cataphatic was one of the great tensions within Neoplatonic Christianity, which is what are we doing with this? How do we, I mean, I’ll put it sort of metaphorically, how do we leap out of the space of justification in a justifiable manner, which sounds paradoxical, but here’s my concern. My concern is not just epistemic. I think I have an abiding proposal that if we cannot properly, we read the scientific worldview and the spiritual worldview together, we will just propagate or potentially exacerbate the meaning crisis. So how these sit together for me, how the intelligibility and the scientific exploration and how the phenomenological and spiritual mystery, how they sit together and what that means about the horizon between the justification system and what Lehmann I think is helpful to call the end zone, which I like, I wanna use that name for that. So that would be my question back to Lehmann and Bruce, but I’ll let Greg and Chris also perhaps. Well, that’s a, I love that. You know that that’s a deep concern of mine, bridging science, psychology, psychotherapy and wisdom. You know, in New Talk, I’ve been working on the tree of knowledge and that’s our scientific language that point our embodied phenomenological first person being and garden as a wisdom ethic philosophy to try to emphasize that, yeah, we wanna be aware of the arena we’re in and what the touchdown is that’s structuring it and to afford intelligible conciliance across those domains. And at the same time, recognize there are certain kinds of epistemological, justificatory narrative trainings that are operative in those domains. It’s crucial. If we’re gonna bridge the landing of explaining to the language of training healthily back in educational context, in a therapeutic context, in societal context, we have to be able to move with intelligibility across those trainings in my estimation, to do it cumulatively, richly and depth in the context we find ourselves in the 21st century especially. It needs to have all of those facets. To me, that was part of what was exciting about the series and our emerging synergies, John, and then into Chris’s existential framing. And then to listen to Layman and Bruce bring those aspects together, I thought it was really very powerful. I’m also loving and certainly felt this in my own history, you fall into a vortex of justification. It’s one of those damn words that sucks you in. And then getting perspectival shifting around with what that word is, the ego and the proposition and the language context and the language games, it’s a fascinating word. And I really love the way that that has sort of picked up and afforded us some, I think, getting adjacent possible and then getting under and over. That seems to me a transjustificatory end zone framing that you guys picked up on. And the last thing I’ll say about integral grammatology and the philosophy of adjacency, to me, having sort of a, I don’t really, I have a now no verbal framing, basically historically, and now bringing adverbial, adjectival and prepositional framings in their language of adjacency to create the glue between the bricks I was developing is just a beautiful thing from my vantage point is afforded me a lot of metaphysical, cosmological, ontological flexibility, fluidity and dynamism. So I deeply appreciate you guys, all of you for that edification and utility and helping me achieve my self potential. Thank you for that, Greg. And I just wanna echo the idea of adjacency and the prepositional ontology and the mataku. I think that’s very valuable and very helpful. And I wanna enter into that more. Yeah, I guess what I was saying and I think Greg’s picking up on it, I think, I mean, we touched on this in the reality of the self and it’s perennial in a lot of traditions, but most explicated in the neoplatonic tradition of a deep fundamental connection between intelligibility and realness. And so that’s the part that I guess I’m also trying to get us to zoom in on. I’ll turn things over to Chris now. Mm, so much. So while we’re talking about this idea of the transjustificatory self and what… So one way of understanding that I think is… So Bruce, you were talking about this, sort of the dichotomies, the dichotomies of the infinite and the finite and how, in all of these traditions, to take things in some broad strokes. But in all of these traditions, there is something like the reconciliation of that dichotomy and precipitating it into a form of dialectic, whereby each of those dimensions to the dichotomy are somehow mutually impregnated, right? And the sameness and difference are also reconciled in the one and the many and so on and so forth. And so one way of thinking about that, and I think even though I’m always tempted to then slip sideways into absurdity and paradox as a way of understanding that, I’m grateful that you picked that up, Laban. I also think of it as the coniunctio of the alchemical tradition too, right? Or that very process that precipitates the transcendent function in the Jungian tradition, right? I think of these as variations on a theme in some sense. And one thing I think about in respect of Kierkegaard is the encounter with death, in death in its many meanings, death in its many forms. And this despair, that condition of not being a self, which is also the condition of coming into the awareness of not being a self, is the inability or the failure to encounter death. Because I think that the creation of the dialectic or the realization of the dialectic in that perennial dichotomy and the gap in between is effected by putting some great undo, unjustified stress upon one side of that dichotomy. And the confrontation with death is one way archetypally of doing that, right? Kierkegaard has this beautiful quote where he says, he’s lamenting, he’s saying, would that I could encounter, would that I could become embattled with trolls and pixies and hard-hearted fathers, right? Would that I could so risk my life, I would be infinitely preferable to the multitude of bloodless, lifeless entities that I myself give existence, right? That’s of course the zombie, incidentally, right? And so the sickness unto death is the failure to encounter death because it’s in the encounter with death that absolute necessity can be known. The kind of absolute necessity that puts an unjustified and unjustifiable, arguably, unjustifiable stress upon the egoic narrative. And then there’s almost a sacramental process, I think, implied by this, right? Because that encounter, it’s an encounter with an absolute necessity that the willing imagination must make possible, right? The necessity that must be made possible. And that’s the irony, right? That’s the irony right there, is that the encounter with death as an absolute necessity makes known the infinite gap between that absolute necessity and the implicit sense of possibility that remains a priori. And in that infinite gap, the infinite, ironical gap between the absolute necessity, I can think of it as like a penumbra around an eclipse, almost, right? That’s kind of how I think about it. And that gap that becomes infinitized invites a power of perspective, the third factor, right? The power of perspective that establishes it beyond all justification, right? The gap that is made infinitesimally small by the absolute necessity that engulfs it and yet remains infinite by the implicit presence of possibility that remains. And that of course is a way of understanding faith in the Kyrgyz-Guardian sense, right? But that stress, that absolute unjustified stress put upon that dichotomy, when inculcated perhaps by proper training, I’m not saying that every such encounter with death in any form automatically induces this transformative process, right? It can just as easily be the end, but that there is some necessity of that stress. And then again, this comes back to my question that you provoked, Bruce, about the education of such things, right? How do you control for the encounter with death and usher it in and through without, you know, and to do so artfully? Because of course, one of the problems of this time is that is our failure to encounter death, is our failure to encounter the absolute necessity against which possibility becomes realized, right? And when that possibility becomes realized in the face of that absolute barrier, it’s something like waking up inside a dream, right? Something like that. I think of that in a very sort of Socratic way or waking up inside the cave as it were, right? Yeah, yeah. You know, you make the work, right? And this comes back to the mood, the grammatical analogy, right? Despair, the state of not being a self, you could think of it as the Irealis mood, right? The Irealis mood that suspended between possibility and necessity. And that somehow the realization of the Irealis properly cultivated, the elusiveness properly cultivated. It was what makes manifest the possibility of the self proper. It’s really fascinating. I’ll just comment. I’m about halfway through James Hillman’s terrible love of war, which is basically analysis of war. He’s exploring the deep archetypal drive for, you know, what is it that drives it? And he’s bounced around to a number of different things and I’ll see where its final thesis is. But what you said gone in relationship with the real and then some of what you were saying about Kierkegaard and the nature of death and those kinds of elements, just there’s something about, and I’ve never been in war, but in relationship for watching, I’ve been with people who have and for particular kinds of moments of real that are fundamentally transjustific at the bottom in that particular kind of mode that just speaks to what then the potential transformation of that encounter with the self and with death and the epitome of realness that transcends the Koak bullshit justification. I mean, it would be the absolute epitome of in front of the realness. This is amazing. So we’ve got a bunch of themes that are all, and I’m trying to weave them back to give something back to Lehman and Bruce. We’ve got, I think these themes are interrelated that there’s a properly sacramental relationship. And I would say that the invocation of sacrament is precisely that that is simultaneously embodied and mysterious, it’s both intelligible and transformative. And that gets us into the paradox of transformation. And then there’s the notion of that within that is confrontation. And Chris is highlighting that with the Kierkegaardian confrontation with death and the realness of death. And death is both something that confronts us and is present to us, but also deeply withdraws from any framing that we try to give it. And then of course, the self is bound up with death. This is a Heideggerian theme in profound ways. And then there is the theme of education about this. And that’s another way of reframing my question because how are we going, education is this impossible project of trying to bring about transformation which is sort of paradoxical. It presupposes simultaneously a through line of intelligibility. If there’s no through line of intelligibility, forget education. You can’t draw something out if there’s no through line. But on the other hand, if it’s just the eternal return of the same, there’s also no education. My Plato wrestled with this paradox profoundly. So we’re getting these themes all coming out. And then they’re all sort of ways of trying to bring some articulation to the horizon of wonder, the horizon of intelligibility, the trans justification. And I want us to remember Greg’s point that that points both pre propositional and post propositional in important ways. So I tried to gather as much as I could of everybody and weave it together. It’s getting harder and harder each time, which is probably the sign that something other than us is now alive here. And what I’d like to do is have Layman and Bruce respond. And then maybe we can move to a more free flowing, just moving between as we see. Because I think we’re now, we’ve got the rust off the wheels. We’ve got some, the logos is starting to settle and maybe we can trust it. But maybe first, what Layman and Bruce have to say, follow the sequence and then we’ll go into free form if that’s okay with everyone. Perfect. Sure. I guess I wanna say that I think the, there’s a way of thinking about spirit that’s completely commensurable with a naturalistic coherent scientific ontology. As long as we are thinking of science as something that is itself contextualized as being one of our modes of finding things out. And we’re also thinking about spirit as something that can A, be contextualized and B, be described as if it was based in contextuality itself. So I’m, yeah, I think agnosticism in a way is the root of the descriptive form that allows us to do all of these things. As long as everything’s in quotation marks, and we also don’t understand quotation marks to be a diminution of the significance and power of what we’re dealing with, then we have a way of framing these things where they work together very nicely. I think of the self as a kind of, as a real thing, but everything’s in quotes. So one of those things is the hyper-object of the self. It’s sort of distributed, like it has tentacles that go into these different components and each of these components to me has a kind of an adjacency structure. So there’s a relationship of me to my, of my more specified self. There’s an I-me relationship. There’s a relationship to the more authentic self. There’s a relationship to the more complete self. There’s a relationship to the self as other. All of these are flexible. I can experience you as more as different than me or more as actually being myself. So it’s a number of these different adjacency gradients that work together to make a hyper-object of the self that can operate at different kinds of operating systems. And that will become very obvious in the end zone of the narrative justification self where these structures become very transparent to themselves kind of Gibbs-Aryan language. Laman, could I interrupt just for a sec, just in case? I mean, we went over in the series, but just in case hyper-object, this is a term from Morton and object-oriented ontology. A hyper-object is simultaneously real, but it resists our normal Aristotelian way of thinking of bound things as the ground of reality. So let’s take just two examples. I’ll do this very quickly, Laman. I don’t wanna interrupt your thread for a minute. I want people to know what we’re invoking here, especially if we’re talking about the self as a hyper-object, right? So one non-controversial one, evolution. Where is evolution? Like with sort of on wherever there’s life, but it’s not in any one particular organism because that organism can die. So it’s distributed across all the living things that have been and will be, but it’s also in every living thing because every living thing is undergoing the process of evolution and contributing to the process of evolution. So it’s simultaneously deeply within us, but it also transcend us in a powerful way. You can’t locate it determinately in time and space. Another example, Morton’s example is global warming. Another example might itself be social media and the way it works. So these are all things that thwart our kind of paleolithic way of determining what is, where we, you know, it’s thick. And notice how we’re bound to thing language, where what we typically mean by thing is a spatiotemporally bound object. And Morton’s point, and I will just, and then I’ll turn it back to Laman, is that what’s happening in the acceleration of hyper technology and our increased access to distributed cognition is we’re becoming more aware of these objects. There’s no one person, you can’t perceive global warming. You need an entire worldwide network of human beings and computer and math and satellites, then you can perceive global warming and hyper objects are those kinds of entities. And their realness is sort of slamming into our everyday ontology in a powerful way. Sorry, I thought, I think it’s just important that people know what that means when we’re invoking. I appreciate that, because it’s a vague and novel word for a lot of people. Yeah, yeah. There are objects that are different than locally bounded objects and the self may be one of these. Yes. And we can, I think, bridge the scientific to the spiritual in one way by thinking of the self as this distributed set of these recursive adjacency structures. And then when we get to the end zone of the justification system, then that will be available to operate in different modes of either sort of recapitulating and standing at the edge of the justification system or trying to go beyond it in some radical fashion. I think there’s ways that are more and less stable for that to happen. Obviously, people can encounter this kind of phenomenon when they lack the psychological and human stability to be able to pull it off, right? So that if we’re, and you might encounter it before you’re ready, so to speak. There’s a natural process of rot. Chris talked about this sort of the narrative self being extended, becoming thin and washed out because it encounters itself now as through experience or through perspective taking, as having too many possibilities and not enough meaningful potency. It’s not doing the job of a self anymore. And I think this is a very natural process, it’s a kind of rot of the justification system that makes you aware of the failure of the autobiographical self, and at the same time puts you in an ironic relationship to self that you slowly get used to doing so that you can arrive at a kind of natural stabilized version of this as a maturational phase. But we don’t necessarily get that, right? We don’t always arrive at a stable, nicely naturalized version of each maturational phase. So I think there’s something in each of us, and Greg and Bruce and I have talked a lot about what does it look like to have a kind of integrative platform of where we want society to go to, not where everybody has to get all the time, but a form of thinking that takes all the disciplines into account, folds in development, can exhibit care toward the other stages and afford options for going beyond that if you want to. So I think there’s a social form and there’s a personal form of stabilizing our relationship with this phenomenon, because if it’s not stable, we either suffer from it in a way that does not allow us to access these transcendental moves, or we try to do it too soon because we’ve heard about it and it sounds wonderful, and we’re not really ready to go beyond justification, but we take, we justify a form of justification that says, hey, I’m gonna jump beyond everything, and we never really do. This comes up a lot in spiritual teachings is spiritual materialism or forms of false transcendence, which are really just reiterations of the basic narrative structure of human thinking. Spiritual bypassing. Yes, spiritual bypassing. And death is the quintessential example of the phenomenon, but I think like Chris mentioned this, it’s not every death, right? Not everybody in the war has that relationship to the vividness of reality being intensified through their confrontation with death, and Heidegger distinguishes a little bit between demise and death, right? One is an encounter with the possibility of the end of possibilities, and the other one is just organisms are finished. So there’s this sense in which death and not every death, so which kind of death, a kind of death which embodies a more general, logical impossibility or unjustifiable condition, which I think Kierkegaard rightly says is largely missing from Hegel, because Hegel can take failure modes and contradictions and say, hey, that’s completely reasonable. That’s actually how this thing moves forward. And Kierkegaard, I think, wants to say, yes, absolutely, but what you’re missing then is the unreasonableness of it, the incommensurability of the contradiction. And that’s where the system actually is sutured to living beings. That’s not just in the form of death, it’s in the form of every intense impossibility that violates the basic preconditions of the narrative space. So we find that in the Koan as well, or in the Christian assertion of the simultaneous mortality and immortality of Christ. If you really allow these things to get closer and closer together, and Chris touched on this as well, because that’s an impossibility, it’s a paradox, but it’s also the condition for integration, for a conjunctio is for things to be adequately close together. I know Greg likes to use adjacency in terms of getting just next to something so that we can be not totally defined by it, but also capable of being in connection with and using it properly. So that’s one form of adjacency, but another one is you’re too far away and you need to get closer. You need to get to an elevation threshold. So if you can bring things like presence or locality and omnipresence or life and death or the possibility of all possibilities and the possibility of no possibilities close enough together to get that activation state, then you have something like an impossibility and something like an integration at the same time. And that violates the basic cognitive structure of what the narrative space is. And it forces you to that edge. And if you’re in a good position, if you’re stable, then that’s a really good thing. If you’re unstable, that could be a very dangerous thing. But I think there’s a large set of modes of possibility for doing that same basic move. So that brings up the education question again. Right, that brings up the education issue again about getting the proper virtue wisdom for bringing people to that place in a way that’s going to help them to realize rather than to fall into depersonalization, derealization, all the kinds of traumas that Greg is very familiar with. So let’s let, oh, go ahead. Let me say one more thing, which is a symbol comes in as well. Yes, we’ve learned something from our general knowledge of education systems and development and therapy that was not always brought forth in these spiritual traditions, who wanted to say we just have a fact about reality that you should conform yourself to as soon as possible, because we understand it can be abusive and traumatic to force forward something before it’s time. So we want to not push anybody to this point before they’re ready to take it. But when they get there, we want them to be both stable and equipped with the basic skills that would allow them to make that transition when they’re ready for it. Amen. That’s good. And Chris interjected with the importance of the symbol in the Jungian religious sense, not in the sort of the way it’s used in computational psychology. Yeah, that’s right. That’s exactly, because I think, I don’t think that that form of education, I think you articulated it very well, the preparedness up to the point of the crucible. And that preparedness and the capacity to face the crucible, I think, has everything to do with the symbolic endowment, right? I mean, for Kierkegaard, that’s the crucifixion, right? Which basically makes sacramentally manifest the very dynamic, the very paradox synthesis that he’s trying to describe. It won’t be that perhaps for everyone, for him it sure is. But it’s very, very difficult. And I think to separate that educative function from the symbolic function, even though the educative function has a grammar that has to be explicable in a way that a symbol can’t be, I find it very difficult to imagine such a possibility without a symbolic grounding to anchor it. That’s well said. There’s the rub, there’s the rub also. So I want to give a bit of space for Bruce because he was still absent from that final circle. And then we’ll go into complete free play if we can. Serious free play. Well, serious play in the symbolic and the educational and the sacramental are all bound up together in very important ways. Amen. Yeah, I have a few threads, not to make this unwieldy ball of yarn here for all of us to work with, but picking up on a few themes. One of them is on the language that mediates between training and transformation, or explanation and training, explanation and training. One of the ways that Bruno Latour talks about this is as different modes of verediction, that there are different ways of speaking truth. And for him, religious truth is the statement that transforms you when you receive it. Yes. And so it’s not pointing towards factual justification of things in the normal sense, in terms of explaining everyday objects or systems or anything like that. It’s a truth that is true. And usually it often lands in a powerfully charged symbolic form. Yes. So there’s that element, and he uses in his system the preposition as the linchpin around which different modes of verediction are braided together. And usually you can’t think of any enterprise like business or law or education as consisting of just one mode of verediction. There’s a braiding of modes of verediction that you have to find the right balance with. And I’ve spoken especially to Greg a little bit with Layman in the past about my work at a Krishnamurti school in India, and speaking about death and about different modes of education. We had a school that sat right there at the confluence of the Ganges and Varuna River. And gorgeous there. There’s a beautiful temple where Shiva’s pillar of light came down centuries ago. And also the trail that the Buddha walked to go to Sarnath to give his first sermon was right back there behind us. Talk about history. That’s pretty auspicious. A wonderful place to be. And it was a place where you saw death very much. Usually there were the burning gods down the way in Varanasi, and the bodies were put in the river and they would float up. And sometimes the bodies would wash ashore in front of our school. And so students from grade one on up could walk down to the shore of the river. And at any time of year, sometimes you usually encounter a dead human body. So it provided a very Buddhist-like opportunity for when the students were ready for that, to go behold it, to reflect on it, to explore it in a way that is not often afforded to us in Western educational contexts. But the school was unique in having a room at the very center of the whole school in which no one spoke anything. It was the adverbial core of the entire school where you would go and basically touch into here now, togetherness in a non-coercive way, non-religious way, but in a way that was designed to slip between the narrative work that was being done. And we would go there even with first and second grade students. And I was very impressed by how early on they learned to navigate between that silence and listening and taking in in a participatory existential way, and the whole biological work that we did in the school itself. So just a little narrative part that I wanted to add there about that system, we could talk more. In terms of like the realness of the self or the realness of objects, and what do we, are we getting into any kind of undermining or erasure and talking about this excess and constant slippage of things? One way I look at that is that the open-ended, I could almost say infinite, I won’t, but the open-ended reducibility of things is their irreducibility. In the unending yield that anything gives us in terms of the profiles we can take on it, the depth that we can, that also presents it to us in a sheer bareness that is beyond reduction. It’s so that the reducibility is the irreducibility. And so to me, that points to both the fruitfulness of constant psychological and scientific inquiry into the nature and depths of objects, but rounds it with the horizon of humility and openness to a participation in the surprise, the astonishment, the giftedness of anything that we don’t, you know, in playing with the integral language of holons, where the asshole on is what we imagine is the final hole that encompasses everything. That’s what we’re talking about. We never get sucked into an asshole on, so. That’s in the touchdown. That’s the most testamentary touchdown is the asshole on. There’s the end zone. Yeah, exactly. And the last thing I wanted to point, bring in is just a thread that we can play with or not, which is that speaking of or thinking about the adjacency of the self to itself or any object to itself, really, the prepositional, one way to get at it that I think stays closer to scientific language is like the language of complexity and emergence. Yes. And any emergent thing, whether it’s the self or any other object is both more than its constituent parts and less than its constituent parts. In that, of course, what emerges familiarly, you know, has qualities that exceed what’s contained in any one of the parts. So there are new emergent qualities of the whole. That’s very commonly known and discussed for centuries. You know, one of the things that complexity science has been emphasizing is that it’s also less than the parts in that any regime of wholeness that emerges is a negotiation that draws on potentials of the parts but doesn’t exhaust the potentials of any of the parts. Yes. And so that whole that emerges is one way of calling forth the cooperation and coordination among them that yields certain new qualities, but it doesn’t exist the existential potentials of any of the parts. And that’s why transformation is possible. That’s why new insight and learning is possible. That’s why evolution is possible. And I think there’s also important ethical dimensions to that in that we’re always cautioned to think that however we’ve summed up the human being psychologically, scientifically, culturally does not exhaust them. It’s just in some sense, the whole that any individual presents is in part what the system is calling forth through the conditions of the system, but that it doesn’t tap the hidden reserves of any individual. I would like to compliment that, Bruce, by saying, I think it’s also, I mean, this is being emphasized in Forie-Cogg side that it’s not only the emergence and the way you described it as both more than less than its constituents is very good, but everything is also the repository of how everything else or larger structures are emanating into it and constraining its possibilities. So your example of the human being not being, that they are both more than less than their biological components, that’s an emergence, but the human being is also being conditioned by social and cultural structures that supersede in the individual and constrain the possibilities for. So this is why I think, I think, no, not everybody would agree with me. I’m wondering if you do that, the complexity work is moving towards something very ancient, simultaneous emergence and emanation. So bottom up and top down causation are now equally being talked about in important ways. And trying to get a model of the self that is both scientifically and existentially responsible to the bottom up and top downness, if I can put it that way, that to me is part of what we’re, I think we’re all wrestling with. What does that look like? What does that mean? Because our standard ways, our inherited ways of talking about the self, I don’t think are adequate to that task anymore. And I think that’s part of what I’ve, part of the general thing of the meaning crisis. And Chris invoked that a few minutes ago when he mentioned how, you know, Kierkegaard is basically talking about the zombie in important ways. So I wonder like, what, we’ve talked a lot about this, but maybe part of what we could talk about is, what’s at stake in what we’re talking about? What’s at stake for part of me, what’s at stake is exactly, you know, the Socratic project of know thyself, which is not just to grasp your autobiography or anything like that. It’s to do what we’re doing here, which is to wrestle with the fundamental ontology of the self, but not just theoretically, but also existentially. So I think that for me, that’s what’s at stake. And the fact that our culture has become so inept, allowing us to talk and reflect on this is a significant contribution to what I, what Chris and I have called the meaning crisis. So maybe that’s something we can riff on or, but riff how you wish, because it wouldn’t be riffing if you didn’t. Well, I think that that’s absolutely central. I mean, the meaning mental health crisis in relationship to what we are seeing and how people generally make sense out of the world, what’s true and good and how they make sense out of themselves. And then we’ll, I’ll take, when I do evolution, emergence, emanation, although I’m now using that term, I didn’t always, I would always drop in the concept of identity for the individual when I was like there in social psychology. And so when you think of identity, you think of yourself, yes. And at the same time, your identity is what you carry into the social field is what your name, your name before you’re born and an identity is created for you that’s gonna set up the constraint of being, the way your family’s talking about you or wish you weren’t even born. I mean, before any of your real selfing or in justifying emerges at all is a field that you’re in. So your identity is obviously this complicated inner network of what you’re emanating and what’s being emanated upon you and what’s evolving and all of that dynamic feedback. And then if we think about this and really, to me, I’ll just extend this, what’s our, at least in the United States, the fundamental crisis is a political identity crisis. There is no fundamental, there’s a complete cold civil war about what we all, and what’s good and true. And then also a decompensation of clarity and a capacity for de-logos that would afford us and capacity to come together and create shared ground, shared values, delineate and discern and make good complex adaptive decisions. So for me, what that state is just enormous. It’s a sense making, it’s getting clear about science and it’s bridging the explaining through the training that affords and cultivates transformation of the self and society in a way that affords us the capacity to meet the challenges that are pressing upon us with ever greater urgency. There’s something I’d like to say just with the symbolic way of representing some of what you’re saying there. Prepositionally, sometimes I talk about the conjunction of with, hi slash in, the within. And that as any object, we’re both with each other and we are in each other, mutually indwelling, mutually interpenetrating that there’s what Bascar calls co-presence where everything is part of the all but in some way the all is part of every thing. And that if we can conceive, sometimes I call that the wild knot. I use the image of the wild knot, which is the knot in knot theory that doesn’t have any final terminus. And it’s a weaving, in an integration in a particular well of coherence, but that’s unbounded. The within and that sense of co-presence, that sense of mutual indwelling, I think can be useful. It’s also to like hearken back to ancient theological language and other things, but it’s a way that we can potentially potentiate cultural relationships if we can recognize that me facing you or this group facing that group, this culture facing that culture, that not only are we with each other, but in some important way we’re in each other. And that whatever any individual or group is actualizing is only, you could say, it doesn’t exhaust the potential that’s present in any group system or individual. It’s only what’s manifested historically under certain conditions, but that the in this part of the within points to a deep participatory mutuality that allows us to honor both the difference among individuals and groups and the participatory sameness and that there’s still reason to listen to and attend to each other because we can see in the other what they have actualized of our own potential. And if it can call us forward through dialogue to actualize that in ourselves, but we’ll actualize it along our unique historical trajectory, it won’t be theirs. And yet it’s inseparable from theirs. That makes sense. No, that was beautiful. That was beautiful. Thank you, Bruce. I think what’s at stake for me is, what informs an education for the world and for myself that moves toward four maybe complimentary types of goals and one is an understanding of the self. This goes toward Greg and that’s rich enough to explain and make consistent all the modes of therapy and to empower them beyond what they’ve previously been capable of doing, right? To set up a, like I mentioned before, a kind of a platform, a meta level or an integral level or something like that as the expected, the normative personal and social platform for a multi-dimensional human being. Something that can stabilize many perspectives in a developmental sense and also affords us, this would be the third thing, this radical rupture, this access to the transcendent in some form because if you spend enough time in the richness of the narrative universe that human beings exist in, you realize it can’t solve anything for you ultimately, right? The only thing that can solve it, the only only thing that’s complete is something that exists outside in the proper sense of outside from that whole space where each thing is already complete and is not simply a developing process of some kind. It’s already perfectly complete. We might say in its incompletion, but there’s something about this trans justification sense that is the only thing that can satisfy us because it is the, by definition, the thing that operates outside of the normal standards of determining whether something’s satisfying or not. And the entire field of things that may or may not be satisfying, that whole field is ultimately unsatisfying. And only the always already satisfying thing is satisfying. And then the fourth part, I guess, that I think is really at stake for me is then how does that show up in everyday living as well? And in that sense, I think of it as a kind of, the gradient of adjacency between self contraction and a sense of expanded beingness, right? That we undergo experiences or we operate in postural modes that make us feel contracted and it makes us feel like we have a sense of self in aggressive separation or tragic separation from others that isn’t really the self. It’s simply a feeling of distress, like a clenched fist. And as that is released, then we have this operational space in which many of our subsystems can work together really well and afford us this extra quality of beingness. They go, oh, that’s what I really am. That’s my selfness. So there’s this whole scale here between those two, between very contracted and very expanded into your beingness. And in terms of what the self is supposed to do and the understanding of the self, it’s supposed to afford me the capacity to be much more on one side of that than the other, as much as I can in my daily life. And I want that for everyone else as well. Beautiful. That’s really beautiful. I just wanna hop in there. Cause the last one that you said a lot of wonderful things, but the last one that you said, it’s really, when I started to say things are really coming online through the conversations I have with John in this emerging consciousness self frame. I am definitely, John, remember some of our talk was like, what is that thing that’s bouncing around? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The relationship. Is that that adverbial, the adjectival plain thing that where does that go? And then what’s the relationship with the self? I’m definitely finding at least the following five spots that that act of spectralizing things landing on. So one is my core experiential self, my heart. Like, am I known and valued intuitively? Am I protected? Am I my attachment system in core relation? My ego justifier, am I good? Am I okay? At the level of legitimizing, what do I believe? I can feel a slice of that in my internalized parent. I met with my parents, hey, are you good enough? And what are you actually doing and blah, blah, blah. And then that blends out into my persona, the ways in which I project and imagine other people have that identity. And those are my normal modes of being. And I listen to the people at that intersection and the interface between those is where I see an enormous amount of struggle when they’re getting conflict with each other. But the other things I can now immediately as spectralize are what isness. Like I can just drop into the phenomenological, like coming from the body into the field of sensory awareness and sense making that is distant or disconnected from the personal personality drive, the egoic function structure that gives us and it’s trying to control it. It’s, you know, there’s what you’re just naturally presented with and then feeling transcendent in relationship to that. So then it’s like down into the body of isness at some level, up into the spirit, which takes out of a heart and mind and persona dynamics, you know, and allows me. So I find myself very just tracking, or then the metacognitive tracker of the spectralizer but that dynamic interrelation is affording a lot of glory for both my scientist, psychological scientist side and my spiritual dynamic interfacing with being itself side, a lot of satisfaction. Wow, that’s beautiful, Greg. I’m glad I asked what’s at stake. You guys have, things are reaching to another level here in terms of eloquence and thoughtfulness. I’ll add one more, which I think is conjoined to everything you guys have just said, which is what’s at stake aside from everything is the mood of reality. You know, one of the things that, we’re particularly afflicted by this right now, we right now in the last, you know, couple of years because we cannot accord on the mood of reality. We can accord on the facts therein. I mean, not always, but even when we can accord on the facts therein, we cannot accord on their mood, on their aspect. And it is the mood that enjoins the action. It’s not the facts, right? It’s the mood that enjoins the action. And if the moods are dissonant, the actions will be dissonant and the normativity will be full of fault lines. That’s what I see when I look out is all I see fault lines in the normativity because we do not accord in our mood of reality. Because again, if we’re living in the throes of an irrealist state, all at different points along that continuum, not realizing many of us, I’ll include myself in that, that the hue of the world is backlit from the way that our psyches are organized and that the way that we harmonize the instruments within in tone the world. And… Wow. And… Nice. And the stakes on that are immeasurable. I mean, you guys, Bruce and Lehmann, at the very beginning of your discussion, you talked about that, right? Like, how do we define the limits of self? Well, the limits of self would encompass the world entire. We can’t find the border of it, right? As Heraclitus said, right? And so we’re afflicted with sort of the symbolic phantoms of the irrealist state. That’s something Suzuki said too, right? Because we cannot properly differentiate the way in which our state of psychic coherence or lack thereof is distorting the world and refracting it beyond all possible recognition. And then the question is, how do we reclaim the recognition and recollect it? And the paradox, of course, is that the work is within and the perspective that gathers it is somehow without. You know? Nice. That’s really beautiful. And I was thinking about the paradox that disidentification brings intimacy. And it’s sometimes the confrontation with death. Sometimes it’s love. Sometimes it’s just coming to that place where we can’t move anymore. In terms of our justifying thoughts, all of those can lead to this moment of disidentification, which then opens us into, it can open us into intimacy and participation in a deeper way. And if you think about being at a table with a long lost friend or just a beloved friend and you’re talking together and they’re just being present to you without any particular expectation for you to be this way or that way. And in that unconditional type presence, all of the elements of you are free to arise and you can participate in more of your own being because there’s no need through their objectifying, or if they had an objectifying gaze, you would need to identify with some particular aspect of yourself and then shield off other aspects of yourself. But in that gaze that is just with you in presence, soul to soul, without condition, more of us is freed to come into play without a need to grasp it or to fix it or to hold onto it defensively or to put forward as the persona. So that clearing of that kind of gaze opens us into a deeper mode of mutuality and participation both with the self and the other. And I’m thinking about some of the things I talked about in our, I for an elusive I discussion where we talked about the different locations and I was thinking about this because of what Greg was saying about that rotating a spectralizing self. In some of the locations that emerge for people, there’s a dropping away of that aspectualizing identified center. And they open into a non-centered presencing of being that doesn’t refer to any part of the system but the whole thing is presenting itself and it’s marked by a deep sense of wellbeing. And you can hear Zen language talk about this but I just listened to a person talking about this that this happened for him last year and it’s been persisting up till now where he doesn’t like if there’s music in the room and a bird and whatever, he doesn’t hear the music from here and the music’s over there. He hears the music as originating from its source and everything is happening in its place as a presencing and a knowing without reference to a single aspectualizing identified center. It’s still part of his overall sensory field but it’s not organized in a way anymore that it has to be referred to a point of identification. And he’s describing that condition for himself as he used to read the literature that said when you get to a place like this, suffering is 99% reduced and he thought that was ridiculous. But now that he’s there, he understands it that so much of our own psychological suffering and wellbeing is tied to the contraction that Layman was just talking about and that when that contraction is released. So to me, I’m bringing that part in as in a sense, the same kind of, there’s a letting go, there’s a dis-identification with needing to be here or there as a particular identified center and allowing for a fuller presentation of the full phenomenal field in a much deeper mode of participation that is marked by wellbeing. So I think that’s definitely one thing that’s at stake is that can we look towards that as a true realizable potential for us? I don’t, as we said in our last lecture, you know, lecture dialogue with this, we don’t think that we need to aim for that as a society as a whole, we need to wrestle with existential questions first before we go to this trans justified, de-identified place. But I think it’s nevertheless in terms of thinking about a wisdom culture and educational system to recognize that that is a horizon of possibility and even just the light of that can inform how we work on more narrow and conventional levels. I think that’s what I said. I’ll go, okay. Because I was just talking at Real Wisdom before we came here and, you know, part of the project that Chris and I are working on with Guy, Guy Sendstock, the dialectic and the dialogist, you take people through a program, you teach them a meditative practice, a contemplative practice, then working with the texts and philosophical fellowship and then you take them into a dialectical practice that’s afforded the logos, you see that and you do circling sorry, in between the contemplation and the philosophical fellowship. And what you get is the progression of people doing exactly what you talked about, Bruce. People move from an egocentric to an ontocentric. There’s an intermediate thing where they’re egocentric onto a we-centric and then there’s a, what Chris and I call like a geist-centric, not even the we, but the logos, the geist. And then some people, not all, some people go even farther and there’s kind of, that itself is participating in the ontos, the ontologos, right? And so, and what was, I guess, sorry, I don’t want to sound self-congratulatory, but we recently did a workshop together. I’m not saying we had a random sample of people by any means, that’s ridiculous. It was a self-selected sample, but we had around 90 people or 90 to 100, and we took them through this program over a weekend and we gave them full opportunity to individually email criticisms and all kinds of things back. And just looking at all the feedback was enormously positive, just people. I mean, I’m not saying this is the panacea or the way or anything ridiculous. I’m arguing that this is a proof of a concept for the possibility of an educational program that can take people through stages in hopefully the careful way that Layman talks about and give them a taste, taste and see that the Lord is good. It gives them a taste of that kind of shift that you’re talking about, Bruce, and it has an impact on them. We know from the work of what I call onto normativity, when people get a sense of that intimacy with the more really real, it calls them, it haunts them in a positive sense. So for me, what I’m hoping these kinds of things do is give, I don’t know what to call it, it’s not an academic, it’s some kind of cultural cognitive framework to home these educational programs that I think are now becoming viable for people. So for me, that’s what for me is really pressing on the edge of what I think is at stake right now. I just wanted to pick up on what you said and the fact that there’s a hunger for what you’re talking about, and there are ways of putting together a pedagogical program that scaffold people without traumatizing them the way that layman is legitimately worried about. I think this is possible. I have reason and some preliminary evidence to say, I think this is possible now for us. So I just wanted to just emphasize what you said and try, I guess, encourage that we can, this is not just some vapid discourse we’re engaged in. There’s a lot of going on where we’re trying to realize these proposals. Sorry, I’ll stop. Yeah, and that’s terrific. I think it is possible. It’s plausible and it’s something we can continue to learn more about, even though we already know quite a bit, both from contemporary analysis of how these things work and also from the inherited history of the experiments that human beings have been undertaking. I’m really attracted to what Bruce and Chris are saying here about a form of sharing that creates the mood that is both healing and liberating and that that’s something that goes on amongst our subselves and subsystems just as much as it goes on between people. And when it goes on between people, there’s a Dharma, there’s a skill, there’s a structure to be established because we know if it’s your friends, you have the right relationship or the right circumstance or you meet somebody with a special talent for it and they can give you this space to be all of yourself. But often it doesn’t happen and it doesn’t usually happen in a very structured way. So in order to get that structure, in order to get past the fault lines in the space of all the narrative possibilities where the different kinds of perspectives and styles contribute to different moods that are at war with each other and are somehow inherently not satisfying ways for people to get together, you either have these fluke moments like a friend or a person who’s good at creating this or you work to create some kind of wisdom whereby, A, somebody can hold a space for some system, can hold a space for all the different styles of moods to be validated in a shared fashion where they have something in common. And that creates a space in which hypothetically they can start to work together as a set of moods and as a set of skills. So what are the ways of framing it that can put all of those different moods in the same category? And what are the skillsets that can allow people to experience that with each other more fully? And then you were talking about the we and the geist and then something even beyond that because there is this other form where people who are beyond the justification all recognize something about each other in a mood that not only reveals them to each other but simultaneously distinguishes both of them from the entire set of the possible diversity of moods that are established by the different segments of the narrative space. So the two Zen masters get together, they have very different ways of talking and they have very different emotional modes of being with their students but it can be recorded historically as a fun illuminating poem because they recognize something about each other that they have in common outside of the divisions of the narrative space. So a form of mood sharing that is based on being outside of the narrative space and a form of mood sharing that is based on skills and frameworks that bring together all the different facets of the narrative space. I think those are important. Beautiful. Gentlemen, we are at two hours. So I think we should think about wrapping this up. Maybe we’ll have a follow-up but… I think you made it to the end zone there, Laman. Well, there was so much, I deeply appreciate it. There was so much I was learning in this and so much articulation and a lot of wisdom. And so I would like to give everybody like maybe a one minute, don’t try to sum up everything you said or was said because that’s ridiculous. It’s an impossible project. Just your final sort of response to everything and I’ll take people around in a circle. So we’ll start with Chris. Nothing further to add except just to reiterate, Laman, Bruce, it’s really a pleasure to meet you both and to talk to you, Greg. Always a pleasure to talk to you and John, my friend. So yeah, that’s all for me. I like to return to what is most real. To me, that’s what’s most real. So thank you all. Bruce. Yeah, I really enjoyed this time with you and I feel energized by our encounter here and encouraged and inspired. I’d love to hear more about what you are doing, John, with your experiments. I know that Peter Fenner, Jeffrey Martin, and there are a number of people out there who are experimenting with this, who are also showing and studies are revealing that they’re actually having a real impact even over short time periods through certain intensive and I think very carefully cultivated and held ways of working with all of these elements. And so I’m hoping to see more of that. Laman and I are also experimenting with some workshop oriented stuff as well as some writing. So hopefully we’ll be able to talk to you about that more later. But thank you again. I love being with all of you. Thank you. I would love to have that discussion. Laman. I’m just having a really nice time with all of you guys. Not gonna recapitulate all of your points or our points or anything like that, just to say that this is really nice. And one thing that I would love to go more into in terms of bridging the spiritual and the scientific is the potential role of bioelectric fields in generating the self and also generating spiritual experiences of various kinds. That is an emerging area of inquiry right now. Yeah, totally. Super fascinating area. I’ve got a book on several books on that I need to read. Yeah, just beautiful being with you guys. I really, really enjoyed it. I thought this would be a wonderful synergy. FBI is really the kind of loop we’re after. And it was certainly filling and energizing for me. I love all you guys. It’s just great spending time with you. One just little note in terms of if outcome stuff starts, I’d be happy to dialogue. But actually what I got trained to do is run randomized clinical trials for outcome studies and then that kind of stuff, measurement issues and development issues and all of that kind of thing. Maybe we should chat at some point about cultivating that because one way to get the institutional structure of attention, which I think is misguided in many ways, but ultimately it is anchored to empirical outcome structure and its architecture and its old modernist systems of justification. And certainly we can have these conversations out here, but ultimately bridging back to the traditional institution and using the leverages of influence once we have some clarity here to infuse what is being offered here into that system, it’s those kinds of sort of pragmatic jumping that eventually will need to take place or at least need to be considered. Thank you, Craig. One final request from all of you gentlemen. Many of us have mentioned names, William Desmond and others. If you could send me some links that you would like to have added to the notes, that would be much appreciated. And so I’m gonna end by just thanking all of you. And I foresee that the five of us will talk again. Take good care, everyone. Thank you.