https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=sT9wyTqcHlI
Welcome everyone to the elusive eye, the nature and function of the self. It’s been a long journey and we are, believe it or not, moving towards completion or at least abandonment of the project. Hopeless abandonment. And so, yeah, it seems like you can’t complete something that’s fundamentally elusive, right? And so, of course, I’m joined again by my friends and co-creators, Greg Enriquez and Christopher Mastrochietto. So last time, Christopher introduced us to existential religious dimensionality of the self by one of the best proponents of that dimensionality and its importance, namely Kierkegaard, and he took it through us and we got into a very good deal, Logos, that began to lay the groundwork for what we’re going to try and move to as the centerpiece of today, which is what I’m calling the three S’s, the interrelations between self, soul and spirit. And can we can we revalorize those way those terms in a way that simultaneously is responsible to the scientific cognitive scientific framework we have built and to the existential religious demands that Chris has posed? So that will those are the poles within which this deal Logos is going to unfold. So I’m going to turn it over to Chris. All right. It’s a tall order. We’ve engineered ourselves a number of tall orders. So I don’t want to go over the argument from that last week necessarily, because I know we actually have some time constraints today. So I want to just position us to launch right in. Please. It is worth just recapping the fact that the version of selfhood that that I that I advanced in the care of Kierkegaard is not one that is substantially Cartesian in the way that we’ve taken. You’ve taken great pains to explain and differentiate it, John. But rather, it’s the description of a descriptive state of being that ultimately corresponds to a normative teleology of some kind, and that we cannot speak of selfhood per se without speaking of a notion of becoming that we might think of some kind of some kind of formal cause. I don’t mean to get completely all Aristotelian about it, but as by analogy. We have that language already in. Yeah. I think virtual engines and that’s right. Yeah, that’s right. And so what that really involves is a resolution of dichotomous states in the care of dialectic and that the care of that dialectic has to do with a resignation of certain dimensions of experience in order to interrogate other dimensions of experience in order to migrate the perspective sufficiently as to develop a kind of compass of oneself or a consciousness of oneself in our inward facing attitude towards our being. And that that happens broadly with the use of something like irony, which is a kind of instrument of resignation that understands and differentiates between the possible objects of ourselves in the world and the potential of ourselves that persists at a supertile to those objects at any given point in time. So one of the things that I’m interested in maybe bringing us back to is narrative, because we began with narrative right at the beginning of this and you were detailing the account of Strauss and John. One of that became like a point of contention and a focal point whereby the folk model of the self differentiated itself from some of the more interrogative models and scientific models that you’ve since tried to advance. So I think that we need to come back to that because it’s a it’s a it’s a point it’s a it’s a sore, right? Narrative is a sore. And I think that we need to we need to give it some some attention, because one of the things that one of the things that Kierkegaard serves to explain is that investing our possibility, existentially investing our possibility into narrative is something that we do at our peril. But there is a dimension of narrative and a dimension of autobiographical understanding that is also fundamental to the state of our existence, the state of our being, and that somehow we need to resolve ourselves to the necessity of that narrative and that narrative framework insofar as it has to do with our interpersonal life and the objects that are speciated as a consequence of our encounter with the world, but also as a consequence of our encounter with the world that are inevitably emergent in our experience and inevitably reflect back on us. So we need to somehow resolve ourselves to the dynamic of those objects of self without somehow confusing ourselves or investing our spirit in the terminus of those objects in the world, right, which we might consider to be a very idolatrous and ultimately a somewhat pathological thing to do, because what we do is essentially then our experience of ourselves becomes at some point abortive and circumscribed by doing that, right? And something about the definition of spirit seems to require the sense of possibility that persists above and beyond any one of those objects with which we might be confused. And so one of the things I think in his account of despair, especially as he tracks the development of despair from its, shall we say, less conscious forms to its more conscious forms, has a lot to do with how a person relates to their own narrative. One of the things that we do quite often is we tend to disperse our sense of possibility, our sense of the person we might become across narrative. And that often means across time, because of course, that’s how narrative tracks is across time. I can’t help but think of Augustine here, right? Time being the soul’s distension. And Kierkegaard, I think, picks up a very similar thought and bidirectionally, right? Because he understands the investment of narrative possibility, the spiritual investment into narrative possibility as a kind of counterfeit anamnesis. And it happens in both directions. We can project a sense of possibility onto the future self that seems to bear all of the commitments of what we could someday be. And then past a certain point, when the horizon shifts, we do that except into the past in the form of memory, right? Investing our sense of possibility into a previous version of self that nonetheless becomes an earthly object subject to the consensus of distributed cognition, which for him, is not something that can fundamentally be relied on because it’s subject to those same idolatrous, you would call them perhaps parasitic processes, John, that the individual quad the individual can be subject to, right? Self deception and and a certain nominal way of thinking. And so one of the things that happens, I think, when we look at the past, invest our sense of self into narrative autobiography is that the fatalism that occurs as naturally in the course of life, right? This is I mean, this is one thing that the stoics really got a foothold into, right? The fatalism that occurs across time constantly foists us into a state of aporia in respect of those narratives. They’re constantly being disrupted, invaded. They’re constantly being subject to very sudden and very abrupt disillusion. And when that happens, oftentimes, I think what we do is we try and simply enlarge the frame of the narrative to try and assimilate the fatality, whatever it may be, and integrate it and try and continue to disperse, continue to expand the narrative in order to accommodate these aporetic encounters. Chris, can I just interrupt just for 30, when Chris is invoking the notion of fatality, he’s not invoking in the sense that it’s typically understood as mortality, like causing death. He’s meaning the intervention of faith that is beyond our control, beyond our power. Right. He does. So anything that strikes us as surprisingly absurd, somehow coming outside of our frame of expectation is fatal in that sense. He doesn’t he’s not just invoking the future fact of our death. I just want to make that clear to everybody so that we don’t we don’t get sidetracked into what what what. OK, so please. Right. Right. Yeah. No, that’s helpful, John. Thank you. That’s exactly what I mean. And so I think what tends to happen over time, this isn’t my own account, of course, this is his, but it’s been corroborated and I would say complemented by many others over the course of time, is that there is a sense in which we become more and more estranged to ourselves, less and less known and knowable because we lose integrity across time as the narrative framework that formerly anchored and concentered us begins to be subject to more and more and more declension. It’s very, very hard to keep that narrative integrity intact and not have it constantly internalize the sense in which it will inevitably be undermined. Right. So think of this incredible fragility to it after a while. And I think a lot of people hit that point at a certain moment in life when suddenly the narrative foundation that we have been using to premise the possibility of ourselves seems to lose the grounding and increasingly start to bottom out. And when that and then again, to think of this idea of distension or this idea of being thinned across a wider and wider and wider surface. And think of the thinness of being. And that’s what he means by spiritlessness, because as we try and pass ourselves across the surface of the earthly more and more and more and subject ourselves to the reference of signs of things that refer us back to different versions of ourselves, we increasingly multiply in possibility, but increasingly thin in our potency. And I think in our agency to to cultivate any one of those possibilities. And then you get into this state whereby you’re trapped because the problem with investing in the narrative is that eventually and this is a problem, I think that this is one thing for all the for all that we will append to them. This is one thing that postmodernists pick up on, even though they don’t have a response to it, which is that the endless sense of reference of ourselves looking for ourselves and endlessly referential points of contact with the world ends up simply disorienting us. And so we end up being we end up having a self that we can’t live within and that we can’t bring ourselves to be because it is so dispersed, because it is so undefined, because it’s increasingly formless, increasingly dispersed. But at the same time, there’s no obvious escape. There’s no there’s nothing supernal to it that we can recourse to as a way of resetting and recalibrating its normativity and returning to it with any sense of commitment. And of course, for Kierkegaard, there’s a reason that the movement of faith is bidirectional. Yes, we can resign ironically from the world and its procession of signs. I’m adding, of course, the semiotic inflection. That’s not something that he had. But ultimately, endless resignation only brings us so far because we can be can come. In fact, it can be quite dangerous because we can come to a point where we are trapped within a narrative frame that we cannot escape, that is nonetheless perennially dissatisfying and discomforting and spiritlessness. And I think existence of selfhood at that point takes on quite a spiteful inflection and becomes something rather more defiant and in some ways rather more nihilistic. Right. It’s there’s something very purgatorial to that state because you’re you’re stuck in an arena that is diminishing, the air of which is thinning and dissipating. Right. He has the Kierkegaard says, right, without possibility, it is as though a person cannot draw breath. Right. There’s a sense of asphyxiation, a slow, gradual asphyxiation, right. Bad air. Think of Nietzsche. Right. And when that happens, there is this there is this absolute dilemma of not being able to live with that which is and not being able to find an alternative that could be. And that state, I think, when taken to a certain point of foreclosure, is a deeply, deeply nihilism inducing state precisely because it appears a dilemma that is completely insoluble. And the thing that it fundamentally lacks is a point of reference that is beyond the sum of references that are presented by the world in its narrative form, a normativity that actually supersedes and eclipses that narrative framing. And that that contra the sign that we see out in the world that becomes a mirror for the ego, that is a symbol, right, that which can break the circularity of reference and actually give us ingress into a mode of participation that is beyond the constant, constant self-referential narrative that is ever being undermined. And the problem, one of the fundamental problems, as I see it for Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard has a solution to that problem, right? His solution is Jesus Christ. That solution is not available to many people now. But if we were to perhaps gently set that aside, the point here is that if I can put the dilemma very, very, very simply, it would be something like this. We cannot be self-constituted. We somehow must be told, I mean, told figuratively, right? I don’t mean someone comes and knocks on our door and speaks this to us, but we need to somehow be told who we are. And yet there is no one in the world that can tell us that. Right. And for Kierkegaard, that’s why an orientation to the eternal aspect of oneself is necessary in order to recollect. And I use the term recollect deliberately to be platonic, to recollect one’s, to recollect one’s form under that aspect so that paradoxically, we can return to the world of earthly references and from the work of that world, create a forum, an arena for play. And that’s what the simple does. Right. It is essentially repurposes the world. Into a symbolic arena repurposes narrative or memory for that matter into a symbolic arena. And so the symbolic autobiography, and that was the project that Augustine undertook. Right. The symbolic autobiography is a kind of symbolic repurposing of the narrative forum of the world and its and its its egoic correspondent in order to open the that transcendent form of reference. And that’s precisely what I think is very, very hard to come by. And that I think that form of participation, that form of symbolic participation, the participation of self that exceeds the participation of narrative possibility is what we mean by spirit. Right. So I think that the narrative framing is a is a useful one, because what it does is it gives us an arena in which this condition plays itself out. And it helps us to see those points where our foot goes into quicksand and we tend to get stuck because we don’t have that which guides us beyond the boundaries, right. Which leads us out of the cave so that we can actually return to the cave. Ironically, with a sense of identity with it and a simultaneous sense of disidentity with it. And those, I think, are the conditions. Right. I mean, you talk you talk about this often, John, those being the conditions for flow, the conditions for play, the kind of conditions that are present when you sort of wake up into a dream and it becomes lucid and actually becomes sensitive to your touch, precisely because you’re somehow taking to it in a manner of play, because it’s the manner of play, because it’s no longer literally existing. Right. It’s it’s being is of a different form, precisely because the way that the self is now framed and constituted transparently, as Kierkegaard says, is also of a different form, precisely because it’s been subject to the symbolic reconfiguration. I don’t pretend that I don’t pretend for an instant that any of this is somehow any of this is somehow straightforward. But I think that as aspirationally, it’s something like that, that can perhaps refresh a normativity of selfhood to to complement, but ultimately to advance the descriptive account that perhaps we’ve labored, especially you both have labored so hard to give elegantly. So there’s probably more to say about that, but I think I’ve talked enough. Why don’t I why don’t I leave that off and one of you can pick it up? So there’s a lot I want to say to that. There’s that was tremendously well said by the way. Amen. So cogent and elegant and eloquent. So there’s some resonant points. First of all, the the the way. I mean, the way narrative finds us into a reciprocal narrowing, because that’s basically what you’re describing, right, a reciprocal narrowing in which we fall into despair. Right. We. I thought that was beautifully articulated and that’s always been one of my concerns surrounding narrative. And then. When you get to that, you get to the point that that despair discloses what you described as a paradox. For me, that seemed very convergent with the paradox that we talked about with Strossen. So there’s a which is the paradox of self-creation. If the self makes it, there’s no creation. And if something other than the self introduces it, it’s not self-creation. Right. We talked about that paradox and Strossen says therefore self-creation and therefore by implication, self-transcendence are are impossible. And then. We we related that to, you know, you know, Agnes Callard’s notion because she proposes that aspiration as the self being inherently dialogical, which you also noted in Kierkegaard, the self is inherently dialogical. So what this builds for me is the argument that narrative like narrative binds us into the paradox of self-creation for which it does not have any mechanism of response. Right. And this is why I, with your help, have been trying to get at what is more primordial than narrative and what is more aspirational than narrative. And this is why I want to talk about soul and spirit. And so I want to point to something that I think in a way in which Kierkegaard is unfair to the Stoics, because the Stoics have an answer, right, that the answer is not just narrative resignation. I want to be I want to push back on Kierkegaard here because the Stoics do, I mean, you know, Vicer’s full book about beyond faith, the Stoics are really wrestling with fatalism and the fatality of all things. And the Stoic response is the non-logical identity that we get trapped into with narrative isn’t, right, isn’t, isn’t, isn’t exhaustive of non-logical identity. So if we take it as one of the defining features of the self captured in the paradox of self-creation is the self has a non-logical identity with itself. That’s what we’re trying to get here. That’s what we get with things like self-creation. And if you remember, Kerry’s book on Augustine, you know, you have the narrative dimension of Paul, but you have the ontological dimension of Platinus, because the neoplatonic tradition, and it’s implied in the Stoics and it gets explicated in neoplatonism, is no, no, there’s another form of non-logical identity in which the self-dialogical nature can come to fruition and give us, you know, relief, escape, I don’t know, moksha from the reciprocal narrowing of narrative. And that is the non-logical identity of ontological participation. Everything is non-logically identical to the form in which it participates. And so the Stoic, again, more implicit in practice, explicated in theory and neoplatonism, is the point of narrative is ultimately mythological. You’re supposed to use it as a form of tutoring so that you become capable of the non-logical identity of participation. And this properly discloses the dialogical nature, the dialectical nature of reality in which the self finds its true and final home, because then it is participating in the very structure of reality itself. So it cannot be inherently alienated from it by its non-logical identity. And I think that is the profound answer to the inherent entrapment within reciprocal narrative of its claim, which I keep bumping up against, but its claim to have exclusive, exclusive control or ownership of non-logical identity. And I think the degree to which we are bound into that is the degree to which we lose the possibility that we can, as you said, symbolically, we can no, no, we don’t have to do that. We can say there is another place home for the non-logical identity of the self, which is the non-logical identity of participation. And in that, we are not alienating ourselves from the fundamental fatality of the universe because we are actually moving in terms of its fundamental ontological grammar. And that is the final way in which we can put the non-logical, we can redeem the non-logical identity of narrative in something that is properly both primordial to narrative. Right. It’s pre and post narrative in a profound fashion. Pre-trans. So I think I think there’s a way of answering that, which I mean, I don’t I don’t want to trespass on Kierkegaard’s Christianity, but I’m being more and more persuaded that most of these arguments rely on what Tyson calls Christian Platonism. And it’s the Platonism within the Christianity that’s doing not that not the Christianity. It’s not Platonism for the masses, like Nietzsche says. I’m not that’s it. I’m not that’s a preposterous proposal. I’m not taking that up because you know, because Christian, Christian Platonism integrates agape from Christianity with logos from Platonism. But what I’m saying is this this move, like this is the and this this is the move of Augustine. This is the city of man bound into the despair of history, actually realizing itself in its participation in the city of God. Right. And so I think that is is how I would want to respond to this. And then I would want to say, but the model that, you know, that Greg and I have worked out is very much a naturalistic neo Platonism in which this. Look at Greg’s work. These levels of ontology and their relation, you know, of, you know, emergence up and I would say also emanation down, you know, they’re deeply, deeply consonant with the argument I’ve just made. So I think it’s possible to bring this existential problem very well framed and posed by you beautifully into deep. I think there’s a response available from the naturalistic framework. If we read it neoplatonically and says it’s offering us the participation. Right. Right. What do I want to call it? The intra ontological participation in which the self can find that kind of Socratic knowledge of the self that was always, I think, what Kierkegaard was seeking. You taught me, you know, that the phrase that, you know, Kierkegaard’s a follower of Jesus, but Socrates is his teacher, because the main point people make again and again about Socratic knowledge is it’s not autobiographical knowledge. That autobiographical knowledge is at best useful for giving us an image by which we can start to participate in the ontological dimensionality of the self. And so that’s how I would try to respond to the Kierkegaardian problem. In a way that doesn’t dismiss the Christianity, but is not bound to it either, and is also on the other side, open to considerable convergence and potentially even integration with the framework that Greg and I have built here. So that’s how that’s my initial response. It’s beautiful. It’s beautiful. And however it’s attributed, you know, between the Stoics and the Neoplatonists, however it’s attributed, it’s a beautiful response. And I actually don’t really find, I mean, the naturalistic framework notwithstanding, I don’t find a lot in it that is, you know, that is discordant with Kierkegaard necessarily, right? I mean, the Platonism implicit in his thinking is simply pronounced in that, in that anagogic process that you’ve just described. And however we come to it, I mean, for him, there is a certain assumption of paradox that is requisite to that anagogy. But however we arrive there, we can dispute, but fundamentally the ontology you’ve articulated, I think, is broadly very consonant. And it is very beautiful. Very, very beautiful. And I’ll just say a couple more things and let Greg respond, because I don’t mean the first thing. But I think that the machinery of emergence and emanation and their dialectical interpenetration is the proper way to respond to Strossen’s paradox, right? Because Strossen’s paradox, right, is basically, he tries to understand it in a historical temporal dimension, right? Whereas, right, if you move to see, no, no, no, right, self-creation can happen in the fact that there is emergence that is interpenetrated by emanation and emanation that is interpenetrated by emergence. And that’s actually sort of, you know, this is an erogena, this is sort of the fundamental structure of reality itself. Then I think that that is a way of, you know, being able to address Strossen. And so I want to propose that if we think of the self as like sort of the nexus point where the eternal ontological dimension and the temporal historical dimension connect, we can then think of soul as that which reaches down into the grounding of our emergence and spirit as that which reaches up to, right, the way emanation affords our aspiration. So I’m going to propose that. And that would mean they share, they share in some important non-logical sense an identity. Exactly. By that very definition, there is a continuity between them. Right. And the self then in that model, right, there’s a non-logical identity between soul, self, and spirit. And self plays a central mediating role, right, both this way in time and this way, you know, in eternity. Again, one more clarification. Eternity doesn’t mean everlastingness. Eternity means the non-temporal spatial relation between ontological levels of reality. Yeah, exactly. Sorry, Greg, I know you’re being very patient. Just one thing before you do. I’m just being, man. I think in a phrase, much of what you’ve just said, there’s a quote that I often think about a lot that was by Jack Lindsay, which says, very simply, the self is a symbol for life, right? And when you describe it as that nexus, it plays host to the poesis of reality, right? It plays host to the emergence and emanation of being. And by that description, it is precisely that, right? Because the state of the self is the state of life itself. Yes. Well, exactly. And think about, you know, Hans John Lewis and others and the phenomenon of life, right? Which is, well, life is obviously unfolding itself through time, but we can’t understand it by also talking about the relation between ontological levels, right? You know, this is found up in the whole very notion of autoprocesis. And again, I’m offering autoprocesis as the way in which we respond to, you know, to Strossen’s paradox of self-creation. And if I’m right about the convergence, thereby we have the machinery, theoretical machinery, to respond to Kierkegaard’s paradox of existential despair. So, I mean, I’m just concerned about the fact that we have in the West, and this is a way in which the West is fundamentally different from the East, right? I don’t like those adjectives, but we’re stuck with them right now, which is the West has really, the West has become increasingly bound into, right, the historical narrative. I’m influenced by how Corban is struggling to articulate the symbolic as a way that frees us from a complete identification with narrative temporality and says, no, no, no, the self is also, we have to pay attention to the way it mediates between the sensual and the conceptual through the imaginal this way. And so, like, I’m concerned that, like, especially, you know, the Abrahamic relations and the ones I’m most familiar with is Christianity, the way it’s bound the self and the meaning of the self, and your point, Chris, is that those are, those are inextricably, you can’t separate them. The self and the meaning of the self are bound like that. That was what, I mean, that’s your argument and what you, your summation. And the point is that has been bound too much with the narrative unfolding of time, such that I think we are bound to that kind of Kyrgyz Guardian despair when we hit the fatality, right? That no matter, like, I often use this example, you know, I’m in this amazing narrative, I’ve met this amazing woman, and I’ve finally found my life partner, and I’m growing and she’s growing, and I step into traffic and a truck hits me. Because a truck doesn’t care, and physics doesn’t care about the momentum of my narrative at all. That’s an example, although it’s also an example of my death. That’s an example, though, of that kind of absurdity. We do real, and we, like, and we create closed genres of popular entertainment in which we try to convince ourselves that narrative somehow will compel the physics of the universe. And I think that’s a very worrying, like, I think Kyrgyz Guardian is right, if we bind ourselves in that, we are going to find our sense of self just spread thin, and I would even say dispersed into disappearance. And I mean, that’s why, I mean, that’s why Kyrgyz Guardian is a follower and a believer of Christ, right? Precisely because it is the intercession of the eternal. The intercession of the eternal into the historical, whereby the self in it becoming itself need no longer be mediated by the historical, right? Because it’s an absolute relation to the absolute, and for him, that absolute relation is manifest in that symbol and in the intercession of that symbol. Now, if we don’t have that symbol, if we don’t have a correspondence to that symbol at our disposal, then, you know, we’re in trouble. But I think that’s part and parcel of his piety, actually, is that recognition. Yeah, and I want to acknowledge the way the symbol of Christ does exactly that, and it does it as a symbol that to which we can enter into personal and participatory relations, and that’s why it has the value and power it does. Again, I’m not dismissing that, but I’m saying the explanation for the efficacy of that is, I think, the one I’ve just articulated, which is consonant with the ontology of the self that Greg and I have tried to articulate. And now I’m going to shut up to the Greg Kinsby. Me too. That’s beautiful, guys. I mean, it’s remarkable for me, you know, coming from an empirical psychology tradition and trying to do therapeutic, as how much my own narrative reflects this unfolding, it’s really. So for me, you know, I’m big on justification, something happens with the self, and I would basically say the evolution of the ego. So the ego is this justifying system, you know, and it’s got an analytic propositional angle on it, you know, you can do math with it, but in everyday life, it is this narrator, you have to learn to become a person and tell the story of why you do what you do and what is and what mom and dad say is okay, and then you grow up into that ego, you know, but what all the great wisdom tradition says, let’s hope it doesn’t stop there. Yes, yes. And I was actually just talking with somebody about not to make politics, but it just came up. But what am I view of Trump? You know, what kind of person is he in relation? And I said, well, he doesn’t have much development, the level of soul and spirit. And in fact, he is on record as saying, well, I never self reflect, I might not like what I see. That’s a Trump quote. Okay. And it’s basically like, hey, I want to acquire many toys as I can. It’s just a complete egoic, you know, fantasy of control, of proving to dad that I have as much as I can. This is what’s real. This is what he enacts in a particular way. And I don’t mean to get political, but he said, you know, he’s a presence that we could see in enacting in particular kinds of ways. And to me, I think that what he represents is the egoic trap of I’m going to now justify in instrumental ways what it is that I am. And I think the wisdom traditions say that to the extent that we invest in that kind of ego in a competitive, self-righteous, narrating sort of way, we’re in deep trouble, potentially. That creates the cascade of that for the community and collective and for wise living overall. It is deeply disheartening. You don’t want power in those hands because this doesn’t come with the wisdom of the gods. And so that’s, I think that’s a, and so what is the wisdom of the gods? Well, speaking for myself, you know, I sort of like psychologically, theoretically, I identify this justifying system of the psyche, you know, and put it in evolutionary terms, which then allows me to see, oh, this propositional system is networked to manage the self and manage it in the public world in a particular kind of way. So then becomes the self-reflective loop on the architecture of the experiential self, which is what you’ve been laying out on this grounding structure that emerges out of the dynamic relation and then the conscious field and then the self-modeling and then the adverbial consciousness. And now you have, you know, we sync up with each other, like Tomasello says, and then all of a sudden we start justifying. And it is the process by which we then justify, which to get socialized, we need to turn it into a narrative, but ultimately we’ll be trapped by that. You know, that’s the danger, the fate of limitations, of reciprocal narrating, of identifying with the story that you have to be. And we see that in therapy all the time. People get neurotically trapped by the reciprocal narrating story, you know, and huge amounts of therapies. Well, how do you loosen that? How do you create flexibility? How do you get in touch with other elements? How do you shift to adjacency to the egoic demands of what it wants to be in order to feel safe and secure? You hold that and you loosen it in particular ways. And what I would argue very clearly is you go down into the body, down into the world of being and up, you know, up into some transcendent. And in certainly speaking for myself, like in this last, as you know, went through sort of a bit of a bump in my ego with, you know, two years ago and all of a sudden I, who was I, you know, and then and injured in particular ways. And my narrative hit that fatalistic kind of spot of basically, I invest and then I’m treated in a particular way. What am I then? And who am I? And then you feel that in the core of your soul, you know, and then coming out of it though, and then finding some developmental path, ultimately, like, you know, in the false wisdom energy. And what was the statement I brought out of that as I was walking my dog was loving being without memory or desire. I was a, you know, loving being without memory or desire. In other words, the ego is gone, the past is gone, it’s eternity. I mean, that’s eternity in a nutshell. And it’s just as some intuitive participatory oneness with the ontological reality that at some level my body senses, you know, to be in tune with. So from my vantage point, as somebody who comes from a sort of egoic, analytic, scientific, and I do believe Ian McGilchrist is a very big point here, we trap ourselves in propositional knowing and have narrowed ourselves into particular ways of that actually cut the legs out from a lot of our being, both below and above. And much of what we’re saying is that doesn’t need to be that way. A naturalistic account doesn’t need to be that way. In fact, it actually points precisely to the insights that Chris just laid out from a Kierkegaardian perspective. And that’s a freaking miracle, people. And that’s beautiful. So, you know, that’s what I’m thinking. It’s really interesting, like, when that happens, as it happened to, you know, to you, Greg, it happens to so many of us that we’re forced to, the ego is, we’re forced to ironize our relation to the ego when it meets an aporetic end. It becomes, I think, though, if we’re able to do that, to make that bidirectional move, which sounds like a two-step, that’s, you know, it’s ultimately a one-step, then it, I feel like, then the egoic narrative becomes a kind, and I mean this in the original Platonic sense, becomes a kind of noble falsehood. Or an icon. Right. Or a flexible fiction. I mean, that’s often. I mean, in terms of there’s, I think there’s, and quite frankly, I’ll say this, I’m looking at this sort of like emerging space over and over again, however we call it, metamodern, whatever’s happening in the digital, the getting adjacents to our cultural narratives about what we are and getting proper relationship to the justification systems that we’re embedded in, in a radically different way, which was, which was our, I mean, look at Christianity in 12th century, you know, Europe. I mean, Christianity is everything. The ideological justification is the world that you live in, and you legitimize the outside as being evil or dangerous or othered, and you have to control that. We’re actually now at a place where we actually have to figure out how to transcend these justification systems, not give them up because they absolutely are necessary for us as human persons, but to the extent that we commit to them as if they are the antique reality, and the only antique reality is clearly not accessible in a global society, clearly not workable. So somehow we have to get adjacent to them and hold them simultaneously. That’s right. That’s it. So there’s something that’s coming up for me in that, which is again, like, so we talked about this space, right, you know, this imaginal space, you know, where the seat of consciousness can move around, and then when it’s, when it sort of stops, that’s where the eye shines forth, right? And it seems to, and we’ve talked about this before, there has to be some, I want to call it trans-narrative space or non-narrative space that allows us to move, like, to get outside of a narrative, like in therapy and also to do this. It’s a perspectival shifting that’s non-narrative. Yes, exactly. Exactly. And so that’s why I’m proposing that it’s, you know, we’re making use of an ontological grammar to talk about that. So there’s that connection there. And then there is also something we’ve talked about before, right? So there’s that. And then there’s the fact that, you know, that the identification process is again, is another way of talking about this dialogical process, the paradoxical process of self-creation, self-transcendence in which I, by becoming another, become myself. That’s an identification process. All of these terms are actually different ways of pointing, right, in different dimensions of some, what’s coming more and more to my mind is this sort of core function. And what it says is, no, no, no, there is a real sense in which, right, the self identifies with its grounding and identifies with that which affords its transcendence. And it indwells its transcendence, it indwells its body, and it internalizes its body and internalizes its transcendence. And that that trying to, try to shave that away from the self and reduce it to just a mechanistic participation in causal history is to, I think is to commit it to despair and to commit it to nihilism. But we don’t need to do that if we have a proper ontology of the self, as we’ve just argued for here, we can talk about, again, stole is the way in which we identify down with our primordial emergence and upward with our, and spirit is our identification with our us, our upward aspirational transcendence, and they put us into right relationship with reality, our reality and reality itself. If we’re doing, we can put it in integration, integration language, all of a sudden there’s an integrated, coherent, complexification across different scales. So we can have that sort of quantifiable five, you know, and then at the same time, we can do it in terms of a platinus ideal or one in many states that are somehow coordinately organized. And we can, should be able to bridge them between a naturalistic logo scientific account and the subjective soul grounding and spiritually aspiring frame of reference. And that is a coherence we have totally missed in the enlightenment, the enlightenment broke that up, at least as far as I’m concerned, and did not afford us an opportunity to hold all of that as different vantage points of self, soul and spirit with coherent epistemological and ontological frame. So it’s like self, it’s like self, soul and spirit are basically three dimensions of some er function, I don’t know what to call it, right, er function process that, right, that is somehow located in that imaginal space with, you know, that moves the, within which the eye, the elusive eye continually moves. Well, actually I can, I’ll shut up in a second here, but then if you, so for me, if you go and go, okay, well, there’s an objective logos epistemology that’s exemplified by science. Now we can take the word of self and consciousness, we actually have a logos frame that does justice with what those concepts are and anchors them to my own, my own, my own, my own mind and life and matter in a particular kind of way. And then culture on top of that and say, oh, okay, here’s something that can be specified with scientific ontology. That’s sort of self. Now, if we then jump over and say, well, soul is my particular unique embodiment experience, my pathos. Okay. So you have your logos and then my pathos, there’s my dark pathos, my shadow and my childhood, emotional ways of being in the world. Right. And then ultimately there’s a mythos, there’s a spiritual mythos, which would be the collective intelligence that would point us to what ought to be based on what can be. And so now you have basically spiritual mythos and soul pathos and a self logos that seems to me to be relatively in tune and then provide a transjective ethic of being in the world. That’s great. Great. That’s beautiful. It’s funny that what we’re coming back to in some form is, is a tripartite model. We can’t get away from Plato, man. Isn’t that uncanny? Isn’t that uncanny? Right. A tripartite model that, that corresponds not only to, to the self in its, let’s say individual form, but also to its fundamental ontology. Yeah. And that’s another thing that we’re, I think, deriving from both, both pagan and Christian Platonism. Right. And we’re circling back. And, you know, and Greg invoked the shadow and Jung is basically, basically the Plato of the psyche. And, you know, and so for Jung, the soul is the relationship between consciousness and unconscious. And so, you know, I think that’s, I think we could do much better than that because presumably there’s relations between the conscious and unconscious and animals and things like that. But I mean, if we talk about it more specifically as the self with its capacity for self consciousness and that from which it emerges as the unconscious, then I think we could also, you know, you know, we, and I’m not just sort of netting everything with a vague similarity. What I’m saying is I think that’s a proper theoretical integration, both with Jung, but we have to remember Wilbur’s fundamental critique of Jung, right? Is that the pre-trans fallacy, Jung doesn’t adequately distinguish between the pre-Egoic and the trans-Egoic, which is why we have first of all, psychology. And I, it’s not that I don’t have criticism for it, but there’s a fundamental insight there, which is I think if we, if we respond to that critique of Jung, we see that not only do we have to have the soul downward, we have to have a distinct, you know, spirit upward. And so I think that again would bring in, you know, some, those aspects of psychodynamic psychology that claim to talk about soul and spiritual things. I think the other thing we need to get, for me at least, you need to get clear on what exactly is a scientific ontological language, epistemological language, that we need to get epistemological language game. Like what is actually, what are you allowed to say from playing by the rules of science? And it is a generalizable, inductive, abductive reasoning system. We talked about this in relation, and it is, it is very vulnerable to treating idiosyncratic contingent reality as essentially error. I mean, it basically then says, well, there’s no real explanation as to why the car that Jeff drove by has a license plate that says XZJ194. There’s no, I mean, it’s just part of the scientific universe, but that is a contingent phenomenon. But if your license plate is that in a particular way, or your life contingency is a particular way, then all the things that make you unique is not error, but it’s self-defining in relationship to what is actually valuable. You know, the thing that makes you unique is not error, it’s the thing that defines you as a unique individual. So for me, the thing that, then this is that we wrestle with this in psychology a lot, especially in therapy is the scientific versus humanistic onto epistemological ethic. You know, what is that? And I just think that we need to, that part of the confusion is understanding what science affords us, brilliant and cool. And what are its blind spots? It’s as, it’s as blind to the ideographic contingent as it is to the moral and ethical, as far as I’m concerned. And as a function of that, it doesn’t make it not true. It just doesn’t make it available to speak. So what you want is you want a contingent structure that understands where its blind spot is and recognize how to fill it in relation, in proper relation. And that’s what I think for me, the soul then is that then positions it in relationship to the humanistic, spiritual, theological lived experience of being as a unique self. So I would gen, I would pull that and want to tie, entangle soul with the uniqueness of being from a particular vantage point. And that’s a legitimate thing to do because one of the functions of the self is it’s supposed to specify some kind of uniqueness of the agent in which it inheres. So I think that’s completely legitimate. So let me make sure I understand you, Greg. So like we, all of the language that even today we’ve articulated, I mean, it’s language that is supposed to be properly general, because even when we’re talking about aspiration and embodiment, we’re talking general language. But the point you’re making is when we’re ultimately pointing to this process of identification and individuation, we’re pointing to something that like, and this brings back, you know, this brings back Taylor, that there’s, that the self, the self creation, self identification also has a self interpretation, self creation aspect to it that is properly outside of the purview of science. So we can point to it with these terms, but we can’t capture the core or the essence of the phenomenon that is being pointed to. Am I getting you correctly? Absolutely. I would say that the language and explanatory function of science is to create abductive generalizations that constrain and frame so you can then explain what’s going on, but it can afford then all sorts of different kinds of explanations. So if I told you the car that just drove by was driving a foot above the ground, our nation’s a generalizable gravity would be like, wow, that’s a metaphysics that makes no sense. Okay. But if I tell you that I’m having turkey burgers with my family in a little while, and we’re going to do something and talk about, well, and this has meaning, this is within the constraints, but science can’t tell us, well, this is why it has this precise meaning. This idiographic contextual event has the particular meanings that it does. It’s just a silent and blind in that regard. It doesn’t afford that any more than it affords it’s wrong for you to eat turkey. You should be a vegetarian. Science doesn’t tell us that morally. You have to struggle with that in different ways. So I think that we, I believe as scientific as I am, I believe we also need to understand the constraints and blind spots of science as a system of justification, which actually is a knowledge system that affords us an ontological frame of reference in relationship to the world. And I mean that by the way, a scientific scientific worldview. So there’s two different meanings of science. There’s the epistemology of science, the methods by which you ask questions, gather data, apply the particular methods in various ways. That’s a different angle. I’m talking about science as a generalizable explanatory framework. Right. Right. So what do you think then of the proposal I’ve made that we can use this sort of naturalistic neoplatonism to bridge between the science, the nomological scientific and the existential, uh, it’s a brilliant, it’s absolutely essential. It’s what was missing in the enlightenment. And I believe at the root of the men, meaning the mental health crisis, that’s really interesting because, you know, neoplatonism, especially later, the neoplatonism saw itself as bridging between, you know, the scientific that I’m gonna have to stretch it to apply to antiquity, the scientific intelligibility, and then, you know, the individual practices of redemption and salvation and return that were captured in things like theurgia, where people are doing things that are, are very much unique to them, fitted to just to them. What’s interesting, I have very little background and knowledge about the neoplatonic, but I will tell you that as a humanistic and scientific psychotherapist that wants to be grounded in the science of psychology, it’s a very similar dynamic. Then you want to be committed to a scientific explanation. That’s what defines you as a psychologist. I then got committed to empiricism, which I then realized was inadequate in relationship to the task. But then my task was, how do I relate to the ideographic person, their particular worldview and concerns, which I’m not there to then bring to bear and critique, but I have to engage with, to foster their own growth and development ideographically, but also constrained and guided by a particular explanatory ontology that actually affords me as a psychological doctor, which I argued actually commits you to some sort of scientific worldview as virtue of the profession. That’s interesting because I hadn’t thought about it that way, but I also want to pose a question. I’ve made a distinction between the language of explaining and the language of training. The language of training is very much, you have to fit it to the individual. You can think of therapy as a kind of training in an extended sense. Oh, a hundred percent. Right. What’s coming out of here is there’s also a need for a mediating language. There’s a need for, I don’t know what to call it. There’s symbolic or imaginal, there’s a need. The reason that that’s really interesting is because Nick Winkleman in the language of training, and I’ve had some good conversations with him, talks about when you’re coaching, you’re trying to take these general principles and get them into the particular individual, and you have to rely on these symbolic utterances. You have to rely on enacted analogy to get people to take, like to somehow get them to take it. So they, I mean, we’ll notice that we’re struggling with language here. I hadn’t thought about that, but that’s the point that’s coming out here. That’s exactly the point. I mean, therapy and coaching are almost the same thing. You just get a professional license. I mean, seriously, but basically you enter into the system and you then identify what’s going on from the very vantage point. They’re the person that when we say the person’s the expert on you, which is what most humanistic therapists say, he says the ontological worldview frame that you have has at least validity within the subjective world that you live. And we’re going to work from that. We’re not going to try to reboot that, although how, and then of course, if you’re totally worked from it, then you’re trapped, but you then have to work bridge to it. And then their training life, their creative fiction, if they, if they’re fundamentalist Christian, and they say, Hey, I pray to God. And then I don’t say, well, actually evolution is pretty convincing. That’s not what you say, but you work within that particular structure. And you, I would view them, they’re training their lives and they’re constrained in a particular way, like we all are. And then we work within that system of the ontological sense making system to then afford. Well, given that we’ll see where we grind up against, because obviously if you’re constrained in a particular way, your language of training actually really contrast with the level of explanation. Then you have problems like you believe these crystals will really soothe your trauma. It’s like, you couldn’t believe in that, but you’re really doing placebo stuff. I mean, you’re going to have to know that at some level. And it’s super complicated. This is why the field of psychotherapy is a shit show at the level of debate, because you have not only have all sorts of conceptual debates, you have all of these value-based issues, which nobody gets trained in the field just punts on completely. It doesn’t look at philosophy of ethics or anything. It’s just sort of like, well, wing it. And that’s, but it’s an, it’s unbelievably fascinating because it’s the nexus of the humanistic and spiritual soulment concerns and the scientific ontology of sense making. And finding the bridge between the explaining and the training is a great way of, I mean, as the two sides of the tree, it’s the theory and the approach to cultivate development and wellbeing. So Chris, I’m sorry. Did I say one more thing here? Go ahead. Because I mean, so I know you’re both familiar with Iris Murdoch’s, you know, the sovereignty of the good and also, you know, Wright’s take on that and his notion of sensibility transcendence, which he juxtaposes to, you know, Nagel’s sort of view from above or view from nowhere, which is much more like the neopana. So there’s a, there’s a transcendence that’s this, but Wright’s sensibility transcendence, which he gets from Murdoch and Murdoch argues that this is at the core of moral responsibility, which is the ability to respond. She brings us back to that. If you remember the example, the mother-in-law has a daughter-in-law and she thinks the daughter-in-law is sort of coarse and, you know, sort of brutish and then she realizes, oh, oh no, no, she’s actually spontaneous and really grounded. And what happens is the only way she can do that is she has to, she has to have an insight, not only into the daughter, but she has to have an insight in how she was, she had too limited a framing on these terms. And what she’s doing is she’s not generalizing. This is Wright’s notion of sensibility transcendence. What she’s doing is tailoring her framing to the specifics, right, of the individual. It’s similar to what Collingwood said art does. Art goes, is the opposite of pointing to the categorical identity. Art tries to remind us that there can be this specific thing that we have not been aware of before. So like there’s something about that the language of training is bound to a normativity of sensibility transcendence and then the language of explaining is bound to a normativity of ontological transcendence because laws are more general and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and that what we’re talking about here is to really get the self is we have to somehow be responsible to both, right, ontological transcendence and sensibility transcendence if we’re going to come into an appropriate understanding of it. And then for me, I don’t know what the normativity of the mediating language is. I mean, I’m posing a problem, which is good, right? So this is exactly the problem. I mean, and so you’re working with somebody and yes, they’re in their particular world. You have to cultivate a sensibility to foster adaption with ever the models and frames that they’re going to use. And you want to then cultivate the flexibility within the constraints. And that’s then ultravert. That would be the training kind of sensibility to stop the vicious cycles and cultivate more. But most people then don’t immediately be like, wait a minute, what’s the abstract principle that’s operating here? You know, some people do, but many people don’t, you know, they’re just sort of like, okay, now I have another pragmatic schematic reference that I can now apply and see my daughter-in-law in a different way. And lo and behold, if I relate to her different, she then positively rates to me and we get a virtuous cycle. And I now learn something with self-efficacy that I can apply to a new model. And so they train themselves in that way. For me, though, as a psychological doctor who both want science, I also then said, well, what the hell is good? What is the good? You know, and there’s the issues of what we attend to, of course. So attention is unbelievably, while you have to have these moral judgments of where you invest your time and attention, there’s that. And then there’s broad principles ultimately. And I then searched for broad meta-justificatory principles. And on my signature line, you’ll see B, that which enhances dignity and wellbeing with integrity. And I found those as generalizable principles. Dignity is holding people in honor and esteem at a fundamental level. And then, you know, incremental dignity, I can talk about this, but holding, loving the human as a being worthy of being loved, okay, cultivating wellbeing. So you can see what suffering is, obviously sometimes suffering is necessity, but unnecessary brutalizing suffering, as opposed to wellbeing and more optimal functioning, and then do so with honesty, truth, and integrity. That’s the, which basically is my value towards science, my value towards health, the World Health Organization, and my value towards justice. The United Declaration of Human Rights begins with a declaration of human dignity. And those are then abstract. So there’s the scientific side, and then there’s the abstraction of legitimizing value, meta-value that informs me on both accounts. And so it’s actually the intersection of all this. It’s the science, it’s the abstract humanistic, and then the particular sensibility for training. And from those are the, that’s the struggle certainly I had trying to put together. And it’s very, very complicated. I can say feed off from each other in different ways. But anyway, I think as, you know, my version was like, actually, I think this may work. And now as I listen to both the cognitive science and existential frames, and this whole notion, it’s like, actually, no, maybe something really works here. I mean, you said a lot there, and I’m not trying to reduce it. But it sounds like part of what you’re saying is there’s a language of explaining here, and then there’s a language of training here, and then there’s the language of exhortation here, which is more, most properly a kind of moral discourse that bridges between them in some fashion. And so that’s, you know, the proletic aspect, right? That which calls us to aspiration, right? And this is not, I mean, I don’t have anything conclusive to say about this, because this is now just coming into my thinking right now. But that idea that, because I’m looking for what, you know, it’s a Wittgenstein, what’s the language? What’s the language game? Science is the language of explaining. And then over here, we have the language of training therapy, and, you know, the sensibility transcendence, and affording that, etc., right? Affording that in identification and individually. And then you talked about how you were creating this, the model of the good life. And I’m trying to think, what’s the language there? Well, that’s proletic language. That’s the language of exhortation, right? Where you’re trying to encourage people. You’re trying to, but I’m struggling, as you can see. I mean, to me, it’s really a philosophy of ethic and value, and that’s embedded in it, meaning that, the problem that I give my students is, okay, somebody, John comes to you, or Joe comes to you, all right? And he’s basically like, hmm, you know, I’ve watched these women, I follow them around, but I don’t really have the courage, trigger warning, I don’t have the courage to jump into their apartment and rape them. Okay? And I want that courage. I want to overcome that problem. And obviously, you know, if it’s going to a party, immediately we say, oh, we’re sorry, you have social anxiety, and we will help you recognize that that impairment is in your level of value and training. And because we have certain some value structure, we would then say, of course, we would want to help you go to the party. Okay? But obviously, we wouldn’t want to help you do that. So instantaneously, there’s like, well, what knowledge of, and science doesn’t tell me, I have to have a knowledge grounding that basically says, well, when I intersect with somebody to use my knowledge of explaining and my interventions to foster adaptive training, what ultimately is the ethic that I’m grounded in? And there has to be then a humanistic ethic of what is the good. You have to have a philosophy of what the good is to guide and constrain what it is that you’re engaged in, because very often you’ll be like, no, I don’t want to do that. You know, I agree. What I’m trying. Sorry, I’m not being clear. I apologize. I get it. We have the language of explaining over here. And then we have the language of training. And then I agree, we’re talking about the good life here. But it’s neither the language of explaining nor the language of training. It’s somehow right, it mediates between them. And that’s, that’s the difficult thing I’m trying to understand about like, okay, because if the good life is just a description of my idiosyncratic thing, then there’s no recourse to the person who wants to rape those women. There is no recourse. And of course, it’s not an explanation of the normal logic of principles that run the causal structure of the universe. It’s not that either. It somehow says this, what I’m running up against right is what like, what is that language like? We don’t have to answer that here. But I’m, what I am suggesting is the bridging between the existential and, you know, and the normal logical, and the bridging between the historical and the ontological, I think is also bound up with this question. This question of what does that language look like, because that might properly be the nexus language of the self. Because if we think of the self as this ultimately nexus mediating function, like we’re articulating in here, then the language of the self is exactly that language that bridges between the language of training and the language of explaining. That’s what I’m suggesting. Yeah. And I mean, the placeholder would be like a religion that’s not a religion in some way. Yes. Something in relationship to, okay, well, we have our ontological explanations over here. We have our pragmatic realities over here. And there’s some arc, there’s some collective spiritual arc at some level that then would tie those two together, allowed us to live our idiosyncratic lives, recognize we’re tied up, recognize we’re embedded in some sort of explanatory constraint system. But at the same time, we’re headed towards some collective idea, hopefully. Right. And that’s part of Kierkegaard’s critique of Kant, right? The good has to not only be universalizable, it has to be individuated as well, or it’s not the good. It has to be able to do both. Right? Right? Wow. So I mean, what we just did is the fundamental, the language, the proper language of the self that mediates it between soul and spirit, but also mediates it with the scientific worldview, right? It is bound up with the meaning crisis, the fundamental problem of the meaning crisis. Right. I mean, can we paint back forth between, okay, my installment, my training, my soul in the real world, the scientific reality and the spiritual values of being? I mean, right? The science, spirit, I mean, you know, you can start to see that kind of thing. We do. We do move between them. And I think that movement is very much like the movement we talked about, right? Where we move, we non-narratively move in an imaginal space. But I mean, maybe it’s imaginal, maybe it’s imaginal language. Some of it’s going to be perspectival because it has to be positional at some level. Like, if you take the vantage point of a sort of some moral perspective, or you take the vantage point of me feeling in my body, or you take the vantage point of some public generalizable scientist, those are definitely to have a sexualized framing. And I think there’s something there. And I’m trying to wrestle with this when I talk from the, you know, from Spinoza, Stanskia Intuitiva, and the Buddhist tradition, Krasna, they’re not, they’re not, I’m not claiming they’re identical, but they’re convergent in that we develop this trans-perspectival space in which we see the whole in the part, the part and the whole. But I mean, that, but it’s supposed to cover, right, this grand mediation between that which in us, which is drawn towards the universal and that which in us, in the self, that requires the particular, the Kikardian paradox, of course. And so I do think there is a state that many of the religious traditions point to where we, where we relieve the tension of absurdity. And I’ve talked about this, I talked about this in Awakening for the Meeting Crisis, and I think Spinoza, Stanskia Intuitiva is our best example in the West. And the guy, Zlaven, I’ve listened to a lot of his, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And he talked, I mean, brief history of mysticism, ego death, so the justifier dies. And then all of a sudden, you get a sense of perspectival oneness, like your ego narrative. And then all of a sudden, there is some sense of oneness, what I would then say across a wide variety of different perspectives, there’s some multiplicity there, but also there’s a foundational oneness. Okay, so now we’ve got the language of training and the language of explaining, and then we have the mystical language that is somehow mediating between them. And I’m trying to figure out what that is. But, but, but this is really, really, I guess for me, the issue is the the mystical drops out of the languages, basically. I mean, the mystical is what I mean, it’s the language, not language. I guess, yeah, so it’s almost like there’s four, for me, there’s actually four things. There’s actually, there’s objective science, there’s subjective pathos, that’s objective logo science, subjective pathos, my perspective, that’s my idiot, and I need to train myself, that’s my little world. There’s the mythos, mythopoetic, cultural narrative, and ultimately drop it into a transjective ethic that would supersede them all. Right. So to me, and to me then that affords participatory, it drops out of narrative in a particular way, it goes down and up simultaneously and across time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then so, and then it leaves these sort of epistemological frames, subjective, objective, and intersubjective, as, you know, coherently interrelated in that dynamic space. So Chris, this reminds me a lot of what we were doing with the chapter we wrote, or the article we wrote on Nishatani and dialogical practices. And on being beyond being. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, we were committed to wrapping things up. So we returned after all of this labor to the fundamental mystery in some way at the core of the elusive eye. But hopefully, it was a virtuous cycle and not a vicious circle. And I believe- Well, actually, if we think about it, sort of the language of explaining cognitive science, the language of training therapy, right, and then some transcendent existential framing, you know, I think that actually we each hold a particular, you know, space in that bar. I like this idea, you know, Michael, is it, what’s it, Michael Sells, you know, languages of unsaying. It’s the language of not language. It’s the language in which what we’re trying to do is break break out of like narrative structures, break out of categorical, and we’re trying to use language, you know, we’re trying to use language like we do in parables or co-ins, right, in order to somehow disclose something more fundamental. So what we’re planning to do, and we’ve got to try and work out the technicalities of that, is have one more session. Well, this is the end of the argument the geologist and the journal, but we’re going to plan to try next week at the time of this release have some kind of live streaming in which we’ll work out the timing and we’ll announce it on our various platforms when we can take some potentially, you know, some questions from people who have been following this series. That’s been suggested by some people and both Chris and Greg thought that was a good idea. I think it’s a good idea too. So this is, this, let’s say, this brings to the end the argument and the geologos, and I want to again thank, just thank, thank, thank, radiating gratitude, supernova of gratitude towards Greg and Chris. You both brought your A game repeatedly and it was beautiful. Chris, again, you were, the way you played, I love that. So impressive. And so this is where we are at in the elusive eye and like we said, please consider joining us. We’ll announce when the Q&A for the elusive eye is going to take place. We’ll live stream it and answer it and that’s what we’ll do going forward. So once again, gentlemen, any final words, any final things you want to say? John, thank you. I mean, you know, this was your structure that starts it and affords us the opportunity to develop the skeleton that then this geologos, you know, fills out and it was a hell of a journey. And Chris, these last two narratives have been deeply inspiring to me. I felt it in my bones and I deeply appreciate that. So I really do feel like there was some webbing that occurred between us that was quite rich and meaningful and will have an impact on my self-soul and spirit. Thank you, gents. The honor was absolutely mine. I can tell you that. It definitely was mine. Thank you both.