The Elusive I Part 6 (lMNIz4WZyfQ)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=lMNIz4WZyfQ

Welcome back to the elusive eye, the nature and function of the self. And as always, I’m joined by my good friends and interlocutors and dialogicers. We got to come up with another verb, another noun there. Greg Enriquez and Christopher Master Pietro. So welcome, gentlemen. Thank you, John. Love being here. Thank you. So last time I felt was a very pivotal session in which we did some various together. We did some, I think, very central moves in the overall argument. I want to remind people that we’re also trying to exemplify this thing about stitching progressive shared argumentation into, you know, shared distributed cognition, the logos and trying to get those to be more and more consonant together. And I’m very pleased by how we’re slowly working out what that looks like and what that feels like and how it can potentially be improved. So in addition to that manner, some of the central material was I presented an argument in stages about how we can get from the undeniable machinery of self-relevance to something like relevance to a self. And that was that sort of a very proto personal level, if I can put it that way. And then I turned it over to Greg and he can summarize what he did. Yeah. So basically that creates an agent arena architecture, I think, that then builds the relevance to the self. I like to then add the social dimension. I then mentioned attachment theory and the mammal role in relationship to mother offspring. And now all of a sudden, you’re modeling what’s relevant there. Then we move up into cooperation, competition and a social field in the primates. And now we have this sort of complicated influence social matrix of placing oneself in relationship to other. I then mentioned Tomasello and sort of our hominid first hominid superpower really shared attention in a space in terms of really tracking attention. And then that created, I think, really, John, you mentioned pantomime and gesture and coordination. And then finally, that creates a takeoff point for propositional knowledge, propositional speech, the problems, the cognitive problems that creates, but also the unbelievable opportunity for distributed cognition and feedback loop of argumentation, reason giving. And then, you know, I think that’s going to set the stage for the culture of person plane of existence. Excellent. So, Chris, I know that you had some reflections that you wanted to bring to the table and lead us into perhaps a dialogue around that argument that sort of Greg and I laid out cooperatively, collaboratively last time. Yeah. Yeah. So reflections is probably the right way to put it, because it’s not so much of an argument or a criticism. It’s just more a matter of trying to draw some of these different threads together and and and weave them with some of the language that I’m already familiar with and a little bit more at home. And so I’ll ask you to just sort of bear with me as we go along and we’ll just see how we fare. So I asked a question at the beginning of the last session, which was really about how does the how does basically the sort of dynamical model that you’re taking great pains to explicate, how is it commensurate or not with a sort of classic archetypal model of the self that originated with Jung and has since gone on to to integrate all kinds of other models as it’s in the course of its history. And and we sort of left that as an open question. And then both of you gave your your impressively comprehensive accounts onto genetically on your part, John, and then more phylogenetically on your part, Greg. And I just thought, well, this is just too good of an opportunity to waste not to try and wrap these models, these two axes onto that more foundational model, at least that I’m more familiar with, to see if we can find some some some some integrity therein. So if you sort of bear with me, let me start by just talking about in particular the relationship between the ego and the self and then how we might draw things together on that axis. This idea, the idea of the ego self axis is has to do with the succession of the ego from the self as part of the emergence of self-conscious identification. And so at first, the individual is experienced as coextensive to the sort of undifferentiated totality of the of the self in the Jungian model. It’s sort of a priori potential that’s first symbolized in the archetype of the mother. So you brought up the maternity example, Greg, right, about how sort of as a child differentiates from the mother and then the specific mother differentiates from the role of the mother, there’s this process of complexifying identity and consciousness that allows the individual to reflexively and recursively relate to the a priori dispositions that originated in that one womb. Right. And I use the term womb both literally and figuratively here. But this time, the recursive relation to those a priori conditions has distinction to it. Right. So those dispositions, those sort of foundational dispositions might be superordinate or original to the ego, but they’re no longer identical with it as it grows to differentiate from them. Right. So now you have this axis of differentiation between the emergent ego and its founding conditions in the self. OK, so then as the ego develops, right, there’s this sort of fundamental existential experience, which sort of is a fissure that runs through our experience of ourselves, which is effectively that we’re not identical to ourselves. Right. Or as I think Jung says, you know, man happens to himself or something, something along that lines. Right. So we are developing the sort of subjective, idiosyncratic personal model. You might say it’s a conscious suchness, John. That of a sort of a more transpersonal numinous condition, which you might call something like an unconscious moreness. Right. Right. And then there’s a mutual modeling that takes place there. And right. So we talk about we talked a lot in the last couple of sessions about I modeling me less about how me actually is used to model I. Right. So this sort of self relevant relation that’s tutored by that mutual modeling is, I think, goes back to what you were talking about as the witnessing function. Right. By which we relate more decisively. Sorry, excuse the phone. By which we relate more decisively to those a priori conditions that we’re differentiating from progressively. And then so this sort of recognition sets along the path to what the Jungians call individuation. And then crucially, though, when the ego mistakes itself for the totality of those conditions which gave it emergence, then we say it becomes inflated or idolatrous, maladaptive, subject to complexes, etc. OK, are we OK so far? Yes. You’re doing this extremely well. So, OK. All right. Trying to synthesize a lot of stuff very, very concisely. OK, so so this kind of this idea of self differentiation along this ego self axis that manifests in the emergence of the ego, I think is something that a lot of ethologists would call an ontogenetic event. But it also seems correlated to the exaptation of more complex social systems like language that you were describing, Greg, from the relational primate systems in your phylogenetic account. Right. So we have a meeting of these two axes now, the ontogenetic account and the phylogenetic account in self differentiation. And so. The development, I think normatively, when we talk about the proper development or whether we talk about that in psychological terms or even in spiritual terms about the course of the ego is usually with reference to how it manages its relation, its reflexive relation to its own archetypal font. Right. And then in the cultural matrix, that process is mediated by the process of mediated by this field of triangular sociability that you described, Greg. Right. I vow I it to the environment and then I me at the center. And, John, you described how the different sort of the differential modeling of social individuals and avatars out in the world effectively maps the self modeling that’s necessary to record the inner aspects, that self ego axis. Right. So we model ourselves via modeling others, not simply because we interject others, right, which folks like me, I think probably shortchanged the self a little bit when they thought that it was simply a matter of interjection. It seems more like it’s that it’s not simply that we interject others, it’s that the interjected models of interaction that we observe activate those dynamics that are already perhaps a priori to our conditions. And that but what they also do is help to retrofit the self relation with more social agency in the care of those interactions. Right. Right. Right. Right. So like when you watch Achilles being a badass, right, Troy, John, right, that’s part of what you’re doing. Right. So just like, you know, the experience of mother or father actuates the archetype of mother or father while hopefully remaining distinct from it, allowing us to access sort of the new monocity without becoming possessed of the pure unconscious influence. Right. Which is when things go off the rails. So all so all of all of this, having been said, there’s a line that I came across from Anthony Stevens, who was wrote on sort of the relationship between effectively tried to map Jung’s archetypal hypothesis onto a more natural history of the self, basically put it this way that we can perceive our own phylogeny as a personal revelation. And so without saying more directly about it now, it seems to me that that revelation is very integral to a to the spiritual aspect of what we call selfhood. And it seems to me that intuitively that the that the soul will talk about this more later. I don’t want to dive into that yet, but has a decisive role in mediating the experience of that revelation, which is spiritual in nature. And, you know, existentially, one of the most powerful experiences I think that an individual can have of being himself is as a primordial revelation that occurs in the aspect of eternity. And I think that that in part is what the ancients are getting at when they talk about the deiform self, right? The self that’s identical to the cosmos is that there is the cultivated relation to those primordial conditions that we have in the world. And that’s the cultivated relation to those primordial conditions that espouses this experience of infinite open-endedness of self without somehow loosening the self and careening it out into the cosmos. Right. So there’s this as you talk about this, this complexifying integration and accommodation. It seems to me that that that maps onto that. So then, OK, so then if we think about this in practice, there’s also a problem that it so a lot of people have noted that we need on to genetic rights of initiation to help actualize this sort of archetypal journey of maturation that’s encoded by the phylogenetic evolution precisely because they provide symbols that help to induce us to forms of self-participation that are otherwise easily available. Right. Things like marital rights, funeral rights, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And this, of course, as we know, occurs at the level of participatory knowing. But here’s, I think, the rub or part of the rub is that the and I think something that we’re going to have to continue to talk about if we want this to be normatively instructive, in addition to just scientifically, you know, expositing, is that the sort of transpersonal or primordial conditions of self that are felt as eternal, where the ego sort of modeling the ego sort of modeling this mysterious endowment as it’s modeling its environment and trying to match and mutually model one to the other and attaining that affinity paradoxically seems to require keeping them distinct. Right. A dialectic, in other words. And so then insofar as that distinction, that ego self-distinction is a pragmatic necessity. It’s also a kind of provisional fiction. Right. Dialectically, it’s like we’re playing ourselves. I think of Karst’s idea of the infinite game, for instance. And that’s where narrative to me comes back into the fray, because autobiographically intervening to render a character molded from this deeper, more ineffable kind of script is precisely the kind of modeling I think you’re both getting at. And so the sort of dialectical process of playing oneself, it seems to me, includes a conscious, egoic modeling of those phylogenetic dispositions against the constraints of the environment. And that seems to require an integration of the different forms of knowing. Right. So we just to recap them quickly, right. Participatory, procedural, perspectival and propositional. But that’s difficult, right, because the ego is a differential, pragmatic and semiotic entity, we might say. Right. And it’s and it’s kind of it’s concomitant with propositional knowing, because as you said, Greg, last week, it frames the agent arena dynamic as with factuals and counterfactuals. Right. And it’s provisional, but it also seems to require symbols to sustain a kind of meaningful correspondence to its total potential in the self. Right. Hence the rituals and the myths, etc. But symbols don’t operate at the level of propositions, as we know, or certainly not exclusively at the level of propositions. Right. They have propositional aspects and analogues, but their structures are participatory. And that’s what makes them in a Jungian framework, archetypically activating. So I guess if I could sort of sum up the problem I’m getting at here is that graduating phylogenetic levels from the participatory to the propositional that you described last week, Greg, can ontogenetically estrange us from our capacity to symbolically engage in self-participation, right, to evolve the ego adaptively by maintaining its access connection to the self. So in Jungian terms, this basically threatens the ego with inflation and and unconscious possession. We often hear about like man being estranged from his instincts, right, etc. That that call has often been made in later modernity. And does that, for instance, make him less of a self? So now, but that also to me, this is the last thing I’ll say and then I open it up. I know I’ve been prattling on for a while. The other thing, though, is that dialectically, there’s also great potential in the counterfactual space because it opens. So there’s a counterfactual space that opens when the propositions of the ego are contradicted, right? Garg Goffman calls that a definitional disruption. Yeah. And when the ego is inflated, that that counterfactual space can be very punishing and very aporetic. But that being the case, it’s also a very fecund space for for Socratic intervention, right? Because what Socratic intervention can do is effectively use the aporetic disruption to demonstrate use your terminology, Don, to demonstrably index the eye of attention beyond the ego to that unactualized potential of the self that’s made negatively present when the definition definitions of the ego are disrupted. Yeah. Basically leveraged as a way of restoring or reconnecting that access that the ego has to its to its foundational conditions in the self. Yeah. Anyway, so I’ll leave it there. Those are basically just some some correlated thoughts and both of your. Oh, my gosh, that was wonderful. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, that was a that was a very rich articulation. There are lots of actual threads that I could pull on. John, do you have a particular thread that you want to? Well, I thought maybe what we should do is maybe try to list maybe in a kind of just the fashion, maybe three or four of the central points because that was really rich. It is not meant to be reductive. Chris, we want to go back and you want to expand on anything. So I mean, I think you said at the end about the Socratic and that’s, you know, Sarah Abel Rappey’s thing about Socrates. And I want to come back to that. I think that’s important. So I think getting. Bringing the Socratic self into the discussion of the self, I think we should start doing that right now. And I think that’s a great introduction and you’re weaving it in. And then that brings up one of the central questions from the Platonic Corpus, which you also alluded to, which is the relation between the self and the logos, the relation between the self and narrative, the relation and the relationship between the outer the logos and the inner the logos, Plato was constantly reflecting on that. Socrates is reflecting on that. So I think those are topics we definitely need to get into. Secondly, there was a very long discussion. And that doesn’t mean in any way, you know, there was anything superfluous or redundant. And that’s not what I’m connoting at all. But there’s this idea about this process of differentiation, complexification between ego and the self using Jungian terms. And I want to reflect on how that could be. I think I think you alluded to this. I think it can be I think it can be very well integrated with the ontological proposals I made last time or the ontogenic perhaps. Or the ontogenic perhaps better. And also with great sologeny. And so that’s the second theme. Right. And then the and then the third one is again. Yeah, I agree with you. The external internal relation is not one of simple introduction. That’s why I prefer the Gotsky’s term internalization. And what that has to do with all of this, because there’s something about the capacity for self-correction gets accepted into self-transcendence, gets vectored through other people. I want to discuss that. So, Greg, those are the three threads I want to pick up on. That’s sort of my summary. What jumped out for me. But now I’ll turn it over to you. Yeah, actually, those are definitely parts of the threads that I that I was holding. You know, so for me, you know, I am thinking about this sort of as follows. We have this mental into consciousness architecture. And now we’re building this perspectival participatory self-referential system. Right. When we talk about the Jungian self, it’s sort of that whole architecture. Young’s not at least to me, he’s not always super clear about what the architecture of that self fundamentally is, because it’s whole and diffuse at the same time. But I like the internal family systems view. Yes, at some levels in the sense that there are there’s competing spaces and voices and and protective elements in relationship that’s trying to pull and manage. But if they are held in a coherent integration, what emerges is, you know, what do we call the true self? There is some coherent emergence across the various levels that then when they arise in relationship to they overcome some of the fundamental tensions and conflict, that there is a sense of peace, of calm, of curiosity, of centralness. And there is a and therapeutically, we see this all the time. What is the relationship between a self that is coherently integrated and adaptive in relationship both to its differentiation? We often talk about it like a family that’s really getting along versus a family that is not and is in constant defense. You can see this right into the body in terms of Polly Vagle. And you can think about it in terms of the felt experience of approach and exploration and safety and security. You see this in attachment work versus a defensive, threatened, worrisome position. And then the perspectival differentiation of what am I, what do I need to protect? What am I anticipating to threaten my coherence, threaten my safety, threaten my integrity, threaten my reputation? And then so for me, that coherence or incoherence in relation is central. And we can then think about that in terms of if we’re doing a Jungian model, the archetypal collective unconscious prototypes that are playing certain kinds of systems and my own personal unconscious worries and frailties and defenses and old injuries. And that stage, that battled stage at the level of what I call the experiential self, which then fades into the subconscious and unconscious. And then you have the self-reflective narrator telling the story in relation. And that fundamentally then blends into the ego. So then the ego is the internal storyteller in relationship to this play. And then the architecture of the self is then, you know, the structure of the, you know, some people call it the divigial, which really refers to all the different modes of being like a delusional divigial. And so what I was hearing you and see if this how is it that we do align the development with these various domains, with a narrator that’s in a public sphere that then is tracked in a particular way that then either gives rise to a soul to spirit alignment that would then organize and orient in a particular way that would orient the narrator in relationship to the outer and the inner and versus things that fail along those lines. Sort of that existential story and trajectory. That’s that’s what I was, you know, hearing. And I don’t know that I’m specifically emphasizing. I was really also just following along with your lyrical prose. But basically, those are some of the associations as I was getting sort of the unified, you know, Jungian structure alignment. I don’t know if that resonates, but yeah, it does. No, that’s great. That’s great to both of you. Thank you. That’s all I meant. It basically just as an as an offering for a solid for the for the purposes of a of of just mounting the discussion. So that’s great. So the problematic that arises for me, meaning a set of interconnected problems is and I think this is not just a theoretical import. I think of existential import is that we have a multiplicity of languages for this. We have the union and it overlaps. It’s not the same as internal family systems, but there’s there’s there’s like, for example, the archetypal is largely not present in IFS. Right. And Chris and I have been sort of wrestling with that as an issue. You have overlapping ideas and Jung was influenced by them from Vedanta of Ottoman and Brahman. We have to Lickian ideas and till like and Jung are, you know, are duly pairs them together for a reason between what he calls the existential self and the essential self. So we have a lot. And then we have the language that I’ve been introducing from cognitive science, right. And dynamical systems. And so what I think the problematic is, can we get these to converge? Can we integrate them? And I don’t think that’s just a theoretical point. I mean, it’s an it’s an important theoretical point. But I think it might have existential import, because I suspect these different languages are pointing to different fundamental dimensions and that there’s functionality associated with these dimensions and that by more appropriately integrating them together, we can get well, we can get an optimal grip on that functionality so that the theoretical project is not just a a project of producing an accurate theory. It’s a project of of also facilitating a functional and improvement in the functional relationship. So what I hear a couple of things is in this. And this this is just to get started. There’s something going on between right. There’s three entities that we seem to be playing with. There’s ego, self with a big S. And I’m going to make a proposal of what we what we might want to replace that with. And then there’s agency. There’s there’s us as an agent. And one of the criteria we seem to be using here like and Greg just meant it, you know, an I.F.S. and, you know, somehow if I get the the self right that somehow this improve I and this is this is an this is a very old platonic idea. If I get inner harmony or justice, right, then I optimize my my moral agency for external harmony and justice. And then I get an agog a between them. So I think that that’s an important thing. So I want to make a couple of proposals about about these things, this problem. First of all, I’ve I’ve been I’ve I’ve. I’ve always been kind of worried about the mapping that young did between ego and Ottoman and self and Brahman. I don’t think the mapping there’s there’s a difference here. And it’s a it’s kind of a fundamental difference. I like so if you look at transpersonal psychology, the post union stuff, I think a person who did some very good work on this was Michael Washburn. He talks about the ego and the dynamic ground. That’s the title of his premier book. And he proposes the title of the dynamic ground as opposed to the self because he wants to avoid some central confusions about it. And some of those confusions, I think, also have psychodynamic consequences, like they can afford inflation, like you’re worried about, Chris. The idea of the dynamic ground is exactly what you were talking about, Chris. You have this right. This system. That in some sense, complexifies, self differentiates, but also pursues reintegration. And so the idea of a dynamic ground is exactly to understand it as a as something like a set of constraints on a dynamical system, the dynamic ground. Now, why do I think that that’s better? Because it removes the temptation to to treat that as a homunculus, which is problematic. So one of the standard criticisms made of the platonic model that we have to keep in mind is you haven’t explained anything because what you’ve done is well, and what you have is internal selves. And then I need to know what’s going on inside of them and what’s inside the man. Right. It’s a little man and a little lion. Right. And you just get an infinite regress. And so and so one of the problems is is is to try and I want to try and introduce distinctions that help pull things apart more and reduce the homuncularity. So I think the dynamic ground is good. I also think we shouldn’t equate the witness function with the self, if you want to put it, or what I’m calling the dynamic ground. Here’s why, because I think IFS does a good job of this. They talk about this as a distinct function, this witnessing function. They call it the seat of consciousness and it can be inhabited by different things. And I think that’s the I function. That’s the witnessing function. And I think that maps very readily into this kind of capacity we’ve been talking about within working memory and the global workspace. Right. And I think it maps very readily there. And so I think we should we could make some distinctions. We could have the dynamic ground and then we can have the seat of consciousness. And then we could talk about something like the I-me relationship is perhaps the ego. Shifting to dynamic ground allows me to do something else. It allows me to talk shift from talking about the archetypes as in Jungian terms that are hard to map. And I think of more when we talk about dynamical systems, and hence a dynamic ground, we can talk about ways in which very complex systems have attractor states. Right. So they’re multistable. They have different they have attractor states that pulls them around in various, you know, along various dimensions. Totally. If you give me all of that, then I think we could start to integrate this machinery of recursive relevance realization, the various levels into, you know, we could have something like the dynamic ground, which is raw relevance realization. Perfect. Right. Right. And then as we as we recurse up, we get the seat of consciousness. And we talked about that. Right. Right. As that bridging thing between the global workspace, working memory. And that it makes us ready for what Greg calls relational recursive relevance realization. Right. And we know working memory and consciousness and fluid intelligence are exactly that interface. Right. And then, right, we could talk about that. Right. And then we could talk about the ego. And I think this aligns with Jung. I mean, Jung’s model is ultimately an organic model, which is an autopoetic model. I think of the ego as basically an attractor state. Right. Within consciousness. I mean, Jung describes the ego as the archetype of consciousness, which is not a particularly helpful thing to say, unfortunately, because it’s like, what does that mean? I sort of get a sense of what he means, why, where we relate to architects and the unconscious. Right. But I’m hesitant to attribute this to him, although maybe it’s the correct interpretation. What I think we’re pointing to is the way in which we get that acceptation of something that’s autonomous, autopoetic and adaptive into the self-organization of consciousness itself. And so we get self-consciousness in an important way. So I think what we’re talking about when we’re talking about the ego is we’re talking about the virtual engine on the dynamics within consciousness of self-consciousness. And right. And then we have the seed of consciousness. And within that, you can fit in the generalized other, the mutual modeling, the me with all the me’s. Right. And then and then we have the seed of consciousness, which, like I said, is that function that bridges us. So I think it’s possible to map that in. And then we could also make a distinction between our essential self and our existential self. And I think what what Tillich is trying to point out there is the essential self is something like what we’re trying to point to here with all this nomological language, although scientific language is trying to get at right. The core functionality. And then what Tillich means by the existential self is the way in which that functionality can fundamentally malfunction because of the way we’re interacting with the world, the way we’re internalizing other people. Final thing. And then I’ll let Greg talk. What about the Ottoman Brahman thing? Well, here’s a proposal. I want to talk about it. Right. We’ve talked about acceptation. We’ve talked about acceptation of functionality. I think human beings, perhaps in our shamanic upper Paleolithic transition past, discovered a kind of acceptation that right. Which is we can take the and I mean egocentric, not in the not in centered on the ego, but in the standard egocentric, we can take the self relevance egocentric machinery and we so we can take the self glue and we can use it in an ontocentric, allocentric fashion to find a deeper way of integrating reality together. We can accept the machinery, the glue of the self at man, which is not the same thing as I think what Jung is quite talking about. But anyway, we can we can get that fundamental machinery and we can map it right. We can use it to get a deep participatory knowing. And we know that the brain does this. The brain is always using its mechanism for generating and modeling itself to help model the world. I argued that last time. Right. And so we can accept the glue of self relevance, especially these complex versions of it so that we can get a very and we do this. We have a leveled but integrated sense of the oneness of reality. And this gets us into the new neoplatonic thing, the one without and the one within, which I think also influenced Jung very deeply. And the relevance realization puts us into exactly where that wanting occurs, which is intelligibility. The relevance realization makes the world intelligible. But intelligibility is not a property of our cognition. It’s a property of how our cognition fits to the world and discloses it. And we use levels of the psyche. I’ll use that in place of the self. We use levels of the psyche. Sorry, I got it. OK, sorry about that. I thought I had turned my phone off. We use levels of the psyche, and this is what Pearl makes. We use levels of the psyche to have a participatory knowing of levels of reality. And then we use the deep continuity between the levels within the psyche to to disclose a deep continuity between levels in the world. We use the self relevance gluing function to find and realize ways in which reality is glued together and which in which levels of reality are glued together. And we are exemplifying that last time when we did the ontogenetic and phylogenetic leveling. So that’s my proposal about how we could potentially integrate these very existential and essential self, Ottoman and Brahman, ego and self. That’s my proposal about how we could integrate it into the machinery that we’ve been talking about here. That still leaves unaddressed the sort of logical question about how do we achieve salvation in that? And so maybe I’ll make one final proposal. I said I was done, but I want to do one thing. We’re putting all the pieces together, John, go. No, no. And this is this is from the neoplatonic tradition. And, you know, in Chris and I, we’ve been trying to integrate this into the practice of I.S.S., right, which is. I’m sorry, Jason, can you come and answer the door, please? Hang on one sec. All the obligations of the cell. Oh, goodness gracious. There’s a there’s a good while John’s doing that. It reminds me something about what you just said, John, about the using the machinery of the self to to to adhere the connection, the connection to the one. And there’s a there’s a line, I think, from the Upanishads. It’s one of the aphorisms. And it says, makes an analogy, it says the the. Oh, what does it say? An analogy to a bow and arrow. The the the the word is the bow, the self is the arrow and the target is Brahman. Well, let me let me I think that’s beautiful. And let me let me share my favorite. It is not what the I.C.’s, but that by which the I.C.’s that is Brahman. We take the deep functionality and we use that in order to try and get a model for the deep functionality of the world. And so here is what I wanted to propose in that, because I want to give it back to the topic of the soul that Greg introduced and you introduced, Chris. And this is the idea that that is the idea of the I.C.S. That relationship. And this is a platonic idea. It’s also in Vedanta. I’m not saying they’re the same, but they converge in certain ways, right? That there’s a nutritive relationship between the one within and the one without. As we and this is the platonic idea, as we more one ourselves, we complexify and disclose emergent functions that allow us to glue reality more together. And as we one reality, we get a better capacity to realize and then that we internalize, not interject, we internalize that and that helps us deeper one ourselves. And then we we are at one minute between the one within and the one without. And that’s that’s nutritive in some powerful way. It’s somehow right. There’s a psychoontological nurturing and nurturing and nutrition that vitalizes us in a way that’s analogous to metabolic vitalization, but is not the same thing. It’s this existential, spiritual and all these words are somehow now inadequate. But it’s this existential spiritual vitalization that, you know, and then we hear, you know, the abundant life and and and you’re in the Dow and you have Chi and there’s all this and Washburn talks about this, that what happens is we’re disclosing a kind of potential in the dynamic ground that isn’t originally available to us or that we’re at least not aware of. And so I think that I want to propose that and then we can come back to this. I want to propose that that psychoontological, nutritive, natured, nurturing function as we do this, the resonant at one minute. That puts our suchness and our and the moreness together, as you said, Chris, not only within, but without. I want to propose that’s the soul dimension of the self, that when we’ve been talking about the soul, I mean, and we’ll have to challenge a lot of other ideas, that that’s what we’re trying to point to. Whereas I want to use the word spirit for something we’ve been talking about a lot all the way through, which is the self corrective, self transcending aspect of this, of the self that allows it to write to well, to transcend itself in a weird in the fashion that is somehow both the othering of itself, it becomes different but it’s also the fulfillment of itself. And we got to talk about that. And the aspirational dimension, the aspirational dimension, which is the Socratic dimension. And that’s the connection to the Socratic dimension. And I’ve talked far too long and I’ll turn it over to Greg. No, no, that’s so why don’t I, there’s a lot of threads. Let me just sort of give the basics of where I try to sort of grounded. First off, I love the dynamic ground. Okay. There’s an agent arena dynamic ground that’s creating what I would call the mental behavioral field, right? All right. A bit of reciprocal investment and coordination, all of that. And then that’s going to, that’s basically the cognitive architecture of recursive relevance realization. And then we’re getting, then we move up. And so for me now, let me just talk a little clinically, what do I see clinically? Okay. And, and then this will speak for popular, just listen. So when I sit with somebody, I’m basically can be thought of as, as tracking what I call their experiential self, the experiential self is perspectival participatory affect latent. Okay. And very intuitive relation. Basically what’s the we space, what’s the felt sense of value and who am I recursively modeling and feeling about myself? Okay. But it’s in the language of image, desire, and affect the PME language, perception, motivation, and emotion. Okay. It’s the embodied agency of a conscious simulation that’s having feelings about shit. Okay. Um, and then it’s in dynamic relation to between the perspectival, intentional system on the one hand, like, what are you paying attention to? Like we talk about somebody repressing something or avoiding something, something will be a trigger, a signal anxiety, and they’ll look away. And you know, you do this, like if you’re at a party and somebody starts bringing up something, you’re like, Oh, no, don’t bring up. How about the weather? You know, it’s like, Oh, all of a sudden you correct and you change. And you do that with your, there’s a thing called the Malong triangle, which just maps sort of the image affect impulse and then get signal anxiety and then activates a filtration defense. Okay. So, so this experiential core is tracking at one level of process. And by one level of process, I would mean the participatory perspectival level of process, which operates on a different time scale than I would argue the self-conscious recursive propositional narrator. Right. Right. And, and first off, I’ll notice this is a different language. This is a different information processing system. It speaks literally a different language. Okay. So it’s mediated by a totally different form. Of course they are complicatedly iterative. I say, fuck, right. That’s an embodied comment that goes all the way down. So that’s so much propositional. It’s a symbolic statement that organizes, but this entire conversation is being processed by your propositional system and not being processed by the perspectival system. Okay. So it’s a different system. And then the weird thing about the propositional that I really emphasize is that it, although of course we participate in procedurally connect with people, propositions go through the skin with, without losing their form. Okay. So you can have direct access. We can, I can’t help you see exactly what red is like to me, but I can describe the red right behind you and the exactly the same propositional thoughts that I have in my head. Okay. So what that means is, is that the dynamic relation between our propositional thoughts in the interpersonal field operates on what I then call the public self management, which is sort of like, what am I narrating to myself? And then what am I narrating to the other? Okay. And then how am I feeling? How am I behaving? And then I’ll have to navigate all of that complex dynamic interrelation. And the feeling, behaving, perceiving is one side of the self, what I call the experiential self. Right. Right. And you have a private narrating and a public narrating. Right. I identify the relationship between that experiential self and the body as the attentional filter, you know, sort of what comes on the stage, how do you move it all around? The relationship between that experiential self and the narrator are called a Freudian filter or the experiential to private, the Freudian filter. And it’s basically like, Hey, how does the ego manage the id? And then there is the private to public, which I call the Rogerian filter from Rogers Rogers. Exactly. So Carl Rogers, what was his fundamental insight is that, Hey, you have an organismic value in system. That’s kind of like that complex dynamic ground that then grow an experiential self towards something, unfortunately, judgmental others decide, give you conditional love, right? They judge you and they give you conditional love. And then you realize, Oh my God, I am injured. Although I have an organismic valuing process. If I, John, I want your love. And so therefore I will then redirect and filter my social self out here from my true private self in here. And that discordance between my core heart and the public imposter syndrome that I hold out here is the source of a lot of distress, that discordance between those domains. And the therapeutic from a Rogers perspective is I will love you unconditionally with unconditional in a nonjudgmental space. And the whole therapeutic psychotechnologies tend to get a line that experiential through the private narrative, through the public and mirrored back again to create that kind of resonance. So that’s that’s the dynamic relations that I’m would bring to the table in relationship to some of these parts. So, Greg, some potential bridging. And I think we talked about this on untangling the world, not those filters also set. I mean, obviously the attentional one is a relevance realization machinery. And then is the Freudian one where we’re starting to get some relational recursive like, yep, that’s great. It’s a it’s a it’s recursive relevance generally in narrative form. So this would be cognitive dissonance in particular. Right. So in other words, I need what the ego wants is to maintain a justified state of being. OK, it wants to identify what’s accurate and wants to create a propositional accurate of is and ought to be so that it can create a particular kind of propositional map so that we can share that. So that’s the positive function. The defensive function is captured by cognitive dissonance and notions. OK, so when is the data come in that you are foolish or deserve your reputation to be blocked or anything along those lines that narrator? So it will track recursive relevance realization that way and then engage in rationalizing ego changes. And it is the process by which that it is doing that. That is your egoic immune defense system. That’s your that’s your Freudian filter, as it were. So what I’m seeing, sorry, and then I’ll let you respond, Chris. What I’m seeing is this interesting thing that’s helping happening to the self relevance function, the self relevance function. We we we we we I propose it emerges out of this self modeling function, self relevant, self modeling. But what seems to be happening here is the self. Sure, I’m just working this out as I’m speaking. But the idea is the self relevance machine or the self relevance machinery and the self modeling machinery are being integrated because now the self relevance is also how the various parts. Right. So it’s it’s not only how the external world is self relevant, it’s how the various parts are relevant to each other. In maintaining a coherent self model. Did that make sense? Yes. Now let’s put that in dynamic relation whereby as it engages in these different domains and you get conflict. Right. What is conflict? The conflict is that there would be different processes that are tracking different aspects of the field and its potential and generating different consequences, which then I would say they’re they’re conflicting paths of investment that the system is going, hey, you know, and different parts of the system are going to process that in different way. Does that resonate with you in terms of like why would somebody be like if you internalize the classic, what is the superego? Well, I’m going to internalize important others. I will represent the way they judge me and there will be a particular, you know, authority self relevance realization, recursive model operate by a set of rules in relation. Right. And that will that will carry a particular kind of energy. However, if I see I’m 16 and I see the alcohol and my friends are hanging out right with me and they say, Hey, do you want to have a drink? Now, all of a sudden I have my friend landscape. I have my impulse for, you know, a dopamine shot or whatever would be reinforcing, and I have my father in the back of my head saying, you would never violate this particular agreement that we have about what is it to be a good kid, right? And then you would have the conflict between the self relevance in relationship to this authority and then the self relevance in relation. And one of the things I noted very early in my own trying to model my own like, and I will under various modes, I’ll privilege certain things, right? You know, like a diet or anything. All of a sudden, certain is like, Hey, and then you try to justify the justification gets all week. Then you satisfy your need. And then the justification comes right back online and say, how the hell could you, right? It will, it will create. So anyway, I’ll, I’ll shut up and see if that lands with either you or Chris or whatever. Right. Yeah. So basically this sort of this, this, this, this sort of egoic function that you’re describing, Greg, that’s kind of assisted in the therapeutic context is basically trying to thread the needle through these filters in order to keep some level of consonance between the different systems that are ultimately going to have diverse reactions to the same fundamental arena. Totally. And the fundamental, so if we look at now model of psychopathology, the, the, the primary domain of psychopathology that’s most readily amenable to psychotherapy are what I call the large class of internalizing disorders. Okay. Especially one-on-one psychotherapy. What is an internalizing disorder? Basically an internalizing disorder is a constant battle that creates what I call a neurotic loop. You have negative feelings about negative events, okay. That then create a negative reaction in the secondary reflective system. All right. So you’re, you’re kind of overreact. Your father tells you you’re overreactive or your mother or your friends or whatever, and you have a high negative affect neurotic system. You bring that onto the stage and then you criticize yourself or you wish that the world was totally different, which in turn then creates the experiential self. It either gets jammed into a closet. You overregulate it and control it, but it doesn’t get metabolized in a particular way and often then it will build up and then become a very active mode, it will spill out and then become all of you and this dynamic relation between the conflict of the, usually the egoic ego that’s narrating why the fuck is this bad thing? And the system does not know how to hold that relation. What we try to do then is change the relation with the experiential self. Okay. So fundamental change, the feeling narrative, meaning back into feeling in the relational world matrix. It’s in a vicious cycle. And then you create a particular kind of, in fact, I developed calm. If you bring curiosity and wonder as opposed to critical control, if you openly explore, if you’re able to accept rather than resist and deny, if you have loving compassion towards yourself and others, and if you’re motivated toward valued outcomes, those are the kinds of principles of reflection that you can then track what happens when all of a sudden the intrapsychic dynamics go awry. And instead of driving you into a neurotic loop that then basically creates more and more conflictual dysfunction, you then reverse the loop and create a much more coherent flow between the body, experiential self, the narrator and the relational world. Sounds very much like a mindfulness intervention of sorts. It’s actually called a psychological approach to mindfulness. Absolutely. So, so I think this is all very apropos and very good. The thing that I want to step back then and say, again, notice how we, we carry this around, this discourse and it’s become pervasive. And then we have the discourse of the individual self, the non-divisible, the unified, integrated, identical to itself, self. And putting these two together, I think is a problematic we have to discuss because they don’t sit well together. Now, one of the things I was hearing, and maybe this, I mean, what I heard Greg doing and this is very much like Plato or even model, current models of dual or triple processing models of cognition is you would say, well, you know, you’ve got self-relevance and it’s working out self-relevance is not just a unified homogenous thing like I was previously talking about it. This is what I’m starting to see. Instead self-relevance is relevance. The relevance, because self-relevance is precisely not relevance to itself. Self-relevance is relevance to particular sets of functions. What’s important to that function. And we have multiple functions. Is that okay so far, Greg? Yep. I would agree with that. But that’s, but that, and then the other thing that I was trying to articulate, I didn’t go ahead is that, but there’s this other sense of, right. But how do these fit together so that they are relevant to autopoetic agency, right? And so do you see what I’m saying? There’s both, there’s both a, there’s both a differentiating dimension to self-relevance, but right in which we get, that’s relevant to my hunger, to use a platonic model. That’s relevant to my sociality, right? That’s relevant to my pursuit of virtue, right? We have these, right? That sort of thing. So we have that, but then somehow there’s also, there’s an integrating function, which is saying, no, no, no, autopoetic adaptive agency. And this is the mutual modeling thing. All of these things have to be able to mutually model each other. I think cognitive dissonance arises out of a failure signal that mutual modeling is breaking down in some powerful way. I actually think there’s two vision forms. One is a justificatory egoic specifically referencing the self modeling and others have dissonant beliefs in relationship to each other. It’s actually, I think they’re two kind of that’s a little other. I think that goes even more towards supporting the point that I’m making. I believe. Yeah. So can I, let me ask you this, John, what happens when the system is able to extend itself across time when we see all these different parts, right? What happens when the system can track itself? Oh, I just have this instant moment, but wait a minute. I have the next moment. I have, I know that these other latent functions that is not attended to, but this system can now remember that it has these other latent functions. And what is the coherent central processing unit that is tying all these disparate functions together? Right. Well, and I think this might get, get us back to Chris’s question, because I think there’s two things. I think there’s one that takes the credit for it and there’s something else that’s actually doing most of the work. So that always the case. So part of what I want to say is notice that this is getting us into a central issue here. So I want to introduce this, which is, you know, when we talked about this earlier, the self isn’t, doesn’t possess logical identity, right? I am not logically identical to the 20 year old John. And, but the self also isn’t categorical identity. My identity is not just I’m a, I’m a human being. There’s something that’s supposed to be non-categorical, but also non-logically identical and philosophers call this personal identity. And that doesn’t solve anything because we, like what, how are, how is it that I’m John and yet I’m, I’m individual. I’m an individual. Like, and so one of the things that people talked about, and we brought this up at the beginning and, and I want to remind everybody that, that Strossen did not put it on his list of the folk models of, of the self, but nevertheless, many people like Taylor and others talk about it, which is the role of narrative, right? Narrative is how we do non-categorical, non-logical identity. And we noted that it was problematic because it presupposes a kind of continuity, which we maybe do not have in terms of memory. We can come back to that, but narrative helps us. It prepares us for non-logical, non-categorical, temporally extended identity, which, and I take, and this is the work of Hutto and the work of Hutto and Mayen that it’s narrative that, and this is some of your concerns about long-term planning, Chris and then there narrative is what turns us from episodic entities into right, temporally extended entities. The problem with narrative is it comes of course, with this overweening, almost tyrannical bias. It’s called the narrative bias, which is, and you can track it in people. You can, you, right. Notice we are practicing this as part of Hutto’s notion. We have narrative, we think it’s natural to us. That’s how insidious it is, but we actually have to practice it for a very long time. And we continue to practice it and refine it because we have to, it’s a long, complex process of internalization. That’s Hutto’s narrative practice hypothesis. Right. And the narrative bias is, right. First of all, like, here, here’s, bring it out. Okay. So there’s some horrific, like, and I, I’m picking this because it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s current in people’s thinking. There’s a horrific mass shooting and people are deeply perplexed. And what do they need to know? They need to know the narrative. They need to know the story. And people will express relief. I’ve watched it happen repeatedly. People express relief with, Oh, right. Nothing has changed. All those people are still dead and injustice has still not been, but right. And the negative or the more even negative version of that, which is the narrative bias as it’s studied is people regularly are over-satisfied with a narrative. When they get a narrative for some pattern, they are confident that they know everything essential about that pattern. So narrative has narratives, this really powerful double-edged sword. Right. And the thing is, right. So we become temporally extended selves through that. And I’ll point to the thing that I said that takes a lot of the credit. We know what, sorry. We have very good evidence that there’s a part in the left hemisphere that is doing that all the time, just flinging the narrative bias on thing. We know it from, you know, the split brain experiments, Sperry and others. We have a confabulator. We have a thing that’s constantly saying, I did that. And that’s why I did that. And I did that. And that’s why I did that. And I did that. So it’ll take, and so if you get people like, it’ll, it’ll take credit for things that it, that we do not initiate. Oh, I did that. I actually, I meant to do that. I did that. Right. And it will confabulate and say, that’s why I did that. That’s why I did that. And it’s doing this all the time. It’s doing this all the time. And, and, and, and so I think what I’m, what I’m trying to stick this together and I can’t quite do it is the way in which narrative, this complexified recursive self relevance, mutual modeling are all fitting together. Somehow narrative helps us intensify, improve mutual modeling, coordinate these different kinds of self relevance together. But it’s also a tear. It’s also a tyrant for us. Right. So we know, and we know from work on flow and other related experiences that people experience a fundamental, profound relief when that narrative, that narrative ego goes away, that’s what happens in the flow state and they nevertheless experience enhanced agency because they experience weight independent from all of this, I still have, and I can fact in enhance and experience more deeply my adaptive, autonomous, autonoetic agency. And so I think the, for me, the, the, there’s two questions. There’s the question of what’s taking the credit and that’s this. And, but then what’s actually stitching the psyche together. Now narrative is playing some role in that, but we know from the non-narrative experiences of enhanced agency and people take, think of these, they typically call these the most optimal experiences in their life that there’s something else at work. And I think it has to do with this other thing I was talking about, the acceptation of, right, of the glue into an anagogic relationship with this, with the, with reality. And we were getting this fundamental connectedness within and without. I think one of the things that’s interesting too, though, John, is that the very, like, even though, even though the, the, the temporary suspension of narrative seems, seems like a, a constitutive aspect of those kinds of flow states and experiences and, or mystical experiences for that matter. Narrative is also one of the most useful mechanisms to retain and then encode the significance of those experiences after the fact. So there’s this pliable quality that it has, there’s a plasticity to it where the very things that can make it maladaptive are also the things that make it. That can, right? So there’s, there’s something, yeah, there’s something, there’s, there’s something to that as well. And also this idea that, that we, you’re right. Cause we look to narratives, we look to narratives to provide intelligibility after something unintelligible has occurred, but the intelligibility of a narrative also evolves, retroactively evolves over the course of time. Right? So my story of myself at this age is not my story of myself 10 years ago. And the story in order to actually remain useful and adaptable to me has to continue to change and to basically re-figure itself, to re-envelop the totality of experience as it goes along. And the fact that it’s actually able to rewrite itself is precisely what makes it useful and what prevents it from ossifying and then, you know, derailing. Well, that’s what I want to challenge. Cause I wonder if it rewrites itself. Cause I’m, I think I’m moving towards the idea that there’s something non-narrative. I don’t want to try and place it yet. Right. Because there’s something that affords the evolution of narrative that is not itself narrative. Yes. Right. But just like affords the evolution of organisms, that’s not itself an organism. Right. And, and, and, and allows us to, to do it. Not only, it’s not only the, the, the field of the evolution of narrative. It also allows us, right. To move from one narrative to another and to compare narratives together. And so I’m really interested in the relation because there is something about us that I think is actually, and I don’t, sorry, I don’t want to be exclusive. I think there’s something that’s more responsible for our, our autopoetic coherence than the confabulatory narrative. I think the, the, the narrator helps, but the hair, the narrative, like you said, it’s an adaptive function and like every adaptive function, it brings with it, you know, it brings with it tremendous capacity for self-deception. So go ahead, Greg. So, no, no, not at all. But to me, you know, I definitely have a phylogenetic bent here. And what I mean by that is I want to place this in the stacked hierarchy of mentation into culture, the entire primate system, from my vantage point, you look out at, you know, um, chimpanzee politics and all Jane Goodall stuff and all that’s all non-narrative rich mental life for me. Uh, I don’t, I don’t think they have a narrative, but they have rich mental lives. I mean, and so that’s key to another, uh, you know, I’ll, I’ll sometimes invoke the stage model of consciousness. You could watch a play without any narration. You can watch a ballet. You could watch an enormous amount of, and I believe for humans, enormous amount of non-narrative rhythm music, interpersonal interaction that has archetypal experiential richness and meaning clearly sexual meaning, dominance meaning all of the things that would be embodied. And then you would add, and I believe that we then add this interpretive. I mean, it’s called the mental organ of justification in the language of the unified theory. It’s like, you then add this interpretive system, which then sits in this culture person field, because we actually, as human beings, in order to get along, we have to have some, why, what are we doing? Well, there’s an elusive eye and we don’t know, and it’s nature and function of self and we’ll get together and create a DL logos, right? I mean, these all create systems of justification now that contextualize this entire process, and then they put the guard rails, they put propositional guard rails on it. So if all of a sudden we start changing the rules, you immediately will then say, Hey, that’s not justifiable the justification structure, but it is not. It’s definitely not everything. It feeds back on it, but it also dissipates. So it’s like, you know, I mean, think about making love or something. I mean, all of a sudden the depth drops away basically, and then you come back and, Oh my God, that was so meaningful to me that we had that. And to me, that’s the dynamic interface between whether we’re wearing more primate, perspectival participatory modes, or we’re in our person propositional modes and the flow dynamic relations between those are absolutely crucial. They have different energy information flows at different times. And the balance between them is super central to mental health. That’s that reminds me, Greg, just the way you described that really well. It reminds me of the classic Jungian difference between the archetype and the archetypal image. One is not to confuse one with the other, right? One is one emerges from the other and effectively becomes a technology of attaining or restoring a connection, but cannot be reducible to the other. And that very much the same dynamic is what you’re describing. There’s a correlative relationship. They’re not, there’s no identity between them, which would explain why narrative can be more than mere epiphenomenal without being somehow essential in the way that I think you’re reacting against, John. Yeah, I mean, I’m trying to get and I’m trying to get what are I think this is excellent. I’m really happy to be involved in this is really good. I’m trying to get what are like Greg said, you know, there’s the there’s this dynamic flow and interaction, you know, between the complex mental lives. And I take it largely integrated agency like of the primate because they’re really wickedly intelligent creatures. Right. And they’re really powerful general problem solvers. And then, as you said, the justification system now, this this like what’s I get that. But I’m trying to get at what’s there. And I don’t want the flow chart because the thing that always bugs me on the flow chart is what’s the line? What’s the line? Right. Right. And so that’s why last time I proposed maybe there’s there’s these intermediary ways in which self-organization unfolding. I referenced our Beib’s idea of pantomime as that which bridges between the primate perspectival participatory because we basically use sensory motor schemas of action and then we turn them into inter well interpersonal at least intersubjective or what I don’t know what quite the right word is because we know that chimps have very sophisticated gestural languages. And that’s why they can be taught gestural sign languages quite quite readily. Very well, very well. And they can get they can get quite sophisticated in that. So there’s all there’s like there’s something that like there’s and this this, Chris, makes me want to bring in Corbin to balance out young right that there’s the imaginal. The imaginal is that right that Panto meant the pantomimetic mimetic function that helps to organize right helps the self-organization between the the I’ll just use Greg’s terms, the primate and the person. Right. Right. And but and then Corbin also says, but the thing about the imaginal is it’s right. It’s also gluing together the sensual and the conceptual. It’s also gluing together the internal and the external, even using external and internal is an imaginal strategy. I’m using the imagery of space to try and pantomime to you write something that’s trying to integrate theory and phenomenology together. Well, like active imagination is doing very much something very, very similar to that. And so is I.F.S. I.F.S. is using an imaginal strategy all right all over the place. And so I mean, and I’m trying to bring out a dimension of the symbol that you talked about way back when, Chris, at the beginning of this of this discussion. Can I pause you there, John, just to see if was there something about my the framing that didn’t quite feel right or was it it didn’t or was it just the interface between the perspectival and the propositional that was it. It seemed to me like there were some I guess I’m just trying to hone in on what it is that doesn’t if there is something that’s not quite sinking up. I want to I’m just curious about. No, no, I don’t think so. I think it’s I think I’m not trying to convey that. I’m OK. Let me let me explicate and make make sure that we’re we we I mean, we have a disagreement. Let’s bring it out for for for dialogue. What I was saying is I wasn’t disagreeing with that relation. And we’ve talked about it over here functionally in terms of recursive relational relevance realization. But I’m trying to I’m trying to get a bridging language between that and your clinical language and the kind of existential psychodynamic language that that Chris is using. And it’s largely you’re both sort of using, you know, and I don’t mean this pejoratively, you’re using kind of an extended Jungian post Jungian kind of language to do it, you know, psychodynamic language. I’m not trying to rule that out. What I’m trying to get at is I’m trying to say I’m trying to map that into sort of established cognitive science functions. I was saying, you know, we’ve got this narrative thing that tries to organize and confabulate and it does something, but it overreaches. And I was saying, maybe that’s mapping into something like inflation. And then I was saying, but I want to know what it is that’s actually doing most of the heavy lifting that affords right the the the capacities for organization of narrative. Right. It grounds it, but it also affords its evolution. Exactly. And so what I would then say, so for me, if I look at the social cognitive literature and I ask what is the fundamental design of that thing, it is to justify the self. I mean, that the social the way it confabulates the whole narrative, it needs a way of maintaining its place in the social cultural field. I’m not disagreeing with that, Greg. What I’m saying is let me try it this way. You said that the narrative narrative depends on the propositional. And I’m trying to get what’s the relationship. OK, what’s the relationship between propositional and the non propositional? Because we’ve already agreed that the chimps don’t have language, they don’t have narrative. That’s what I’m trying to get at. I understand. And that’s why I’m trying to get the pantomime. Nice. Yeah, I know. And I’m trying to get the field that, you know, that actually affords the evolution of the narrative that we are called to. That’s what I’m that’s what I’m trying to get. I’m trying to say the imaginal is the phenomenological and possibly functional field within which that coordination occurs and within which narratives evolve. That’s and I’m trying to I’m tracking now. Right. Right. I’m trying to I’m trying to I’m I’m I’m I’m I’m sort of thrashing around, but I’m trying to say, can how can we integrate that into, you know, this idea of our. Of our of our selfhood as a person. And what I was trying to say is perhaps that starts also bridge to a point Chris has made repeatedly and made it at the beginning of this, that there’s a symbolic dimension to the self, which is not to say ornamental or metaphorical. I’m now starting to try and think of this more as imaginable, right, right, as an imaginal thing and that the kind of identity we’re talking about here is participatory identity in the platonic sense rather than categorical or logical identity. Right. The imaginal allows these two to mutually model and participate in each other in a profound fashion. Was that helpful at all? Yeah, no, that actually something about that tweak was like, oh, OK, yes, I know the terror. I now have a grip on what we’re trying to grip. You see, and I see the logos is the attempt to take language and put it back right into that field so that gesture and drama and movement and pantomime and all these other musical elements are brought to the floor when we’re trying to enter. We’re trying to enter into the logos. We’re trying to get that logos, the thing gathers things together so they belong together and become intelligible together. There’s a low. I’m not saying that the imaginal is the logos, but what I’m saying is that I see the logos is trying to get the imaginal and the propositional right in sync with each other. Yes, nice. Right. Yeah, it’s trying to it’s like it’s trying to recast, repopulate that and that the sort of the sort of preconditions of that imaginal field that would ostensibly give rise to various forms of narrative are trying to reflexively repopulate that field in order to establish that fundamental reflexive connection with what we keep calling this this this greater capital S self. Because it makes me think of something we’ve come to the dynamic ground. Sorry, sorry, go on. It’s me. You know, it’s made me think of something we’ve come to and are sort of fundamental explorations of I.F.S., which is you. I mean, to make I.F.S. work, you have to you don’t narrate, you dramatize. Right. Right. Right. We talked about that when you’re trying to get great. You’re trying to get the family members, you know, you don’t stand back and narrate. Totally right. Right. What you do is you try and create a field, an imaginal field in which the drama can unfold and in which dialogue between them becomes possible. Does that make sense? What I’m saying? Totally. In fact, I mean, this is and for me, then what the the the participatory perspectival field or at least the influence matrix then provides a particular kind of embodied, intuitive, self other dynamic, affectively charged field. Right. Drop the person. That’s why it’s so important. In fact, I had to learn this because I was so intellectual in my therapy. It’s like, oh, I’ll help you understand shit. You know, it’s like that’s just propositional. No, you have very much get in the chair, have the it is you have to get in contact with the socio emotional embodiment. That is that’s where the richness of the foundation of it is. And then you you encounter that and then all of a sudden you relate to that in the experiential moment. And I think this is what I have to do it right. I mean, it’s like it’s getting you in the bottom up affective heart mode of being that when then basically the narrative is just trailing that. I mean, you’re just just your habit system of talking just translates it. You don’t have to that egoic is not self consciously reflected in it and you’re being it. And then you come back out of it. And as Chris said, though, also, you then want to then create the reflective, the egoic story of what it means about you now going forward. So you actually reconfabulate the past of your trauma. Now I feel now I fit differently in the person matrix. And now I think about my I narrow myself differently. And it is really that reconsolidation of the affective narrative relation is key. Clinical. Points of view that makes perfect sense, right? Because what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to take the logos of narrative coherence in order to to basically fertilize your phenomenal logical affordance to repeat the experience and repeat it more meaningfully, meaningfully, beautiful. Exactly. Exactly. That’s a great way of articulating. Because what I mean, what’s happening is you’re using that that that that right, you’re exacting the dynamical ground into the imaginal space, right, because we’re talking about it as this self-organizing field logos. Right. But but but but you’re that space, I don’t know. Notice all the imaginal stuff I’m doing. But you’ve got you’ve got the the seat of consciousness, that witnessing function. And then you’ve got right. You’ve got that as a function. And then you’ve got something which I find very problematic, but also very powerful again, which is, you know, there’s something that. Represents into that imaginal space or dramatizes into the imaginal space, the autopoetic agency of of the person. And then you have also all the all the attractors, all the all the sub self-organizing systems that the way self-relevant like, right, all of that’s somehow being coordinated together in this imaginal space. Well, and that and that’s why those subsystems, if we’re reverting to the original archetypal language, that those various functions emerge as you as you know, John, because you experienced it, emerge quite spontaneously in the process precisely because they are protruding to help organize the experience, the phenomenal landscape as it unfolds functionally. I feel like we could probably talk about this for another hour, but maybe we should close. I like I’m not we’re not we’re not done, but that’s not meant to be a criticism. Like I feel that the the you know, the clinical language, the psychodynamic language, and they’re fairly close, but also Greg’s theoretical system. Right. And then the cognitive science language, I feel like they’re all starting to do this. They’re all starting to come closer together in an important way. Is that what you guys are sensing? That’s what I’m sensing. Let me share. Can I share a little personal story that’s like clinically relevant about me? OK, and then see how this lines up in terms of bringing that what it means. So an interesting fact about me, I was you know, I went a long time actually without crying from like 1994 to 2006. OK. Oh, and I think that, you know, that’s partly I have a bit of a masculine identity of counter what I would call counterdependence. And, you know, I’m enlightened and I’m OK. And I actually in retrospect would then basically have an identity that would then if I started to feel vulnerable and sad, that would be a particular kind of threat to my identity and I’d repress it. OK. OK. So during this time period, actually, I didn’t I developed this was actually from 1996 to 2000, I developed the unified theory. And actually, I had some serious conflicts with my dad about this. OK, because my dad was like, what are you doing? And, you know, very doubt doubted. And I was very grandiose. And you said sort of a kind of classic father, son Freudian challenge, and it was meaningful, a lot of meaningful. Do you believe in me, Dad? Do you who are you? And, you know, what there’s a lot of that. So for about three or four and we got through it. But it was a three or four year tough period with a number of highly charged emotional experiences, but regulated. OK. So then I was in the midst of explaining to my doctoral student 2006 and explaining my doctoral students about father, son relations. OK. And being held in esteem. All right. And I had some story about where my dad and I, we watched a Tiger Woods video back when we were having this challenge. And Tiger, if you know the story of Tiger Woods and his father, his father identified him as a super special kid early on. Of course, he was really authoritarian. There are problems. But there was a moment in which I said, oh, hey, there’s what a father that kind of believes in his son is. My dad said, well, his son’s Tiger Woods. All right. So that was, yep. So I was like and I at the literally at the moment when it happened, although obviously I remembered it, I laughed it off. OK. So how is it that I laugh it off to eight years later or whatever? I’m in the midst of just in a conversation with a doctoral student. All right. Talking about father, son dynamics. And I tell this story. OK. And in the process of telling the story, it hits the floodgates. All right. I mean, I literally brought that out in the entire my entire body. Literally. I mean, I just like say, I got to leave. OK. I literally had to get up and leave this, you know, because I’m with a doc student and all of a sudden I was flooded. OK. With a network of act. And then it was just on the stage of of, you know, and it was all of what I would say would be there were all these affective memories, self other relational stages about am I loved and who am I? Who’s narcissistic? All of those kinds of things that were regulated through. Hey, I have to be regulated. And then there was a particular moment. In fact, I had changed quite a bit in terms of my relational feelings so that they weren’t nearly as threatening in some ways, which allowed them to be not defended against. And then all of a sudden, boom, you know, and and and quite frankly, I then came home, told my mom, I actually called my dad. You know, later we had a nice long conversation revisiting some of this, and then it’s functioned to rework the narrative of who I am, his memory of that event and all of that. So if we put that in sort of an embodied experience of being, it seems to me that my my agents and then self system is then feeling a huge amount. My narrator is sort of keeping it at bay. And then all of a sudden, in the proper way, it floods. And quite frankly, because of where I was, my relationship, my wife who helped me, my dad, and then it was we were able to re narrate that in a way that I can talk about it now. It feels very different. What I get from that. Well, thank you for sharing that first, Greg. That was like, wow, I have empathy for you. So sorry, I should have done that first. No, no, no. But this is what I found really interesting and profound is the way the eye was moving around. Like the eye, the eye, like eyes from the narrator. And then it goes down to the affect. And then it goes out to the like the eye is not stable in where it is situating itself and and what it’s taking to be. It’s me. And right. And so that’s also something I want to explore. Like the identification process is not localized right in some stable fashion. And yet we somehow sense. And this we somehow sense an identity between all those like all those different eye stations, I from narrative, I from affect, I from dialogue partner. Yes, yes, yes. What the hell is that? Yes, that’s the question I keep asking. All right. I get it. Right. What is it that’s but and there’s something like there’s something like a non self imaginals field that’s doing like this is what I want to try and sink my teeth into because in there is the paradox that we somehow think of ourselves as one and many and a one in many. Totally. That’s why. How neoplatonic is that? Yes, that’s what I think. That’s why I think the neoplatonists are right. And that’s why I think creating a neoplatonic world view is so nutritive to us in this fundamental psychoontological domain. So as I tell the story, now that you speak to it, I’m definitely doing adverbial framing. I’m definitely dropping into my heart and seeing the world that way. I’m dropping into my regulatory head. I drop out and see myself for my graduate student. I drop out and see myself from my father. And then totally notice all this pantomimetic movement in imaginal space that we naturally use to try and describe what’s happening as we’re selfing. Right. Let’s turn it into verb because I think it’s more properly a verb than a noun. As we’re. Sorry. OK, actually, that really helps because now I did have a question and now I see what your question is and actually I see it. Yes, this perspectival shifting, what that is in that interface is. It’s perspectival participatory shifting. Yes. Right. It’s perspectival participatory shifting. Right. That’s by the way, is actually then that’s actually transjective. That’s why you emphasize the transjective so much. Yes, exactly. Because we are able to jump across all this. We’re not just sitting observing something from some point for constantly interactive across multiple perspectives and have to be able to see in some degree of coordination of relational space rather than just the thing and then, you know, phenomenon, nominal or whatever. Anyway, that’s great. There’s something there’s something implicitly spiritual about the migration of perspective that way. Hmm. Yep, there is. Yes, because that would be the expansion of the particular perspective. Right. I mean, that’s the essence of shifting from into spirit. Right. Is the expansion anyway. I’m excited. So well, why don’t we leave it there? I think we’ve got at least we, I think it’s already that sort of final question or problem, I think we came to not a conclusion, but we came to a culmination point, right, a pivot point, and we can pick it up next time. I really, I’m very pleased with how this unfolded. I thought we had an even better weaving together a progressive argument and, and dia logos, and I was really pleased. And I like, I thank you, Greg, but I particularly want to thank Chris for the way he framed it, set this up and launched us into it. I think it was really, really important. So thank you very much, gentlemen. Guys, as clearly all of a sudden, very excited.