https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=JC3NpMEhGKQ
Welcome everyone to another Voices with Verveki. I’m very excited about this because this is a beginning of a new series that’s going to be appearing on Voices with Verveki, The Philosophy of Meditation. It’s anchored in but not solely based on the Routledge Handbook of The Philosophy of Meditation and the editor of that handbook is here with me and many of you know already. This is the remarkable Rick Rapetti and Rick is the originator and he is going to be the curator of this series. We’re going to go through it together. We’re going to be interviewing and getting hopefully into dialogos with a lot of people who have really considered the relationship between mindfulness practices, the cultivation of wisdom, philosophy, philosophia and so there’s a going to be very rich and very juicy. Now there’s a weird thing here. I’m the host of this channel of course but Rick is going to be the primary host. I’ll be the co-host with him of the series but I’m the first guest on that series because I was a contributor and a very welcome. I was very welcome of the invitation. I was very happy to get it and of the anthology and so we’re going to start with me and that will help to tie in this series to my work in general with which many of you are familiar and then we will use that as a basis for moving into a discussion with a lot of interesting people. So I’m going to now welcome you Rick and turn things completely over to you. Thank you John. Yeah I’m really happy that we’re doing this together. We met through that book when you know I found your work online and then I thought oh it would be so great if you could write a chapter for the book and then you agreed and it turned out to be one of the best chapters and that was also the beginning of our friendship. So yeah I’m delighted to have you be the first interviewee on this series that is on your channel. This is a really great honor for me so thank you for that and I look forward to co-hosting the future guests that we’re going to have on here. Yeah I mean I’m really there’s a lot of really cool people that are going to be on this show so I’m really looking forward to that too. All right so just for the audience in the future we’re going to be asking the future guests pretty much the same questions that I’m going to ask you so we’re going to follow a similar format so that everybody kind of is brought on to the same page somehow or another. So I’m just going to begin by asking you some of the same questions that we are going to be asking our future guests. So maybe the first thing I should ask you to do everybody who watches your channel already knows about you and who you are and what you’re doing so I’ll skip that question and I’ll ask you to tell us about how you came to meditation, philosophy and the philosophy of meditation. That’s a big question. Well I’ll reverse the order so it goes in narrative. How did I come to philosophy? As I said and I’ve said elsewhere I was brought up in a very stringent strict fundamentalist Christianity both my immediate family and my extended family which I later have come to conclude was kind of traumatizing for me. I broke free of that you know as many people do in adolescence but it left as I want to say it left a taste for transcendence in my mouth and of course the figure of Jesus while I rejected Christianity the figure of Jesus still haunted me this sage-like figure. And so I had sort of my own personal meaning crisis and then I went to first year university. I had already been opened up to some eastern philosophy largely through the work of Hermann Hesse and I’ve been exposed to some Jung but then in first year philosophy we read Plato’s Republic and I met Socrates and that had well a life transforming impact on me that is ongoing and that launched my career into philosophy. Now you and I both know academic philosophy is it’s its own special beast in a lot of ways. It teaches a lot of valuable skills about you know theoretical critique, cultural critique, reflection on science, reflection on ethics, questions about rationality. These are all really important and they have an independent value so I’m not here to criticize or dismiss or dis academic philosophy but what I want to say that’s relevant to our discussion is that I felt that academic philosophy especially was unfolding was less and less germane to the Socratic model that I had met that cultivation of wisdom and virtue. And so I decided to look elsewhere and of course I remembered my earlier dalliance with eastern philosophy and down the street there was a dojo that taught it’s called the Tai Chi meditation studio and it taught what I would now call an ecology of practices of Vipassana meditation, meta-contemplation and Tai Chi Chuan a flowing form of mindfulness and that’s how I got introduced. And for a while these two streams academic philosophy and the mindfulness were running independent from each other but then I bumped into this new synoptic integrative discipline cognitive science and especially the work of in 4E cognitive science, Evan Thompson, colleague of mine. By the way Evan will be one of our guests. And I’m looking forward to that, it’s been such a while since. I think the last time Evan and I talked was 2014 directly and that new 4E cog sign said to me that I could bridge these two worlds together and psychology was now talking about wisdom and was also talking about mindfulness and cognitive science and neuroscience were talking about these things. I think I was the first person at the University of Toronto to teach mindfulness academically and then I also started teaching it, the practice of it at the multi-faith center there. And so what started more and more to happen is these two worlds started to interpenetrate each other, the cognitive scientific world and the mindfulness practice world and I got very interested in the academic and so I was an exploration of mindfulness. Now initially that had to do with work I do on insight and it was integrated more into the psychology aspect of mindfulness which of course I still follow. But I started to get interested in these deeper questions of rationality and wisdom and in 2013 Leo Ferrara and I wrote an article making use of my theory of relevance realization. We brought in mindfulness as one of the things you need for the cultivation of wisdom. Other researchers, Monica Ardelt and others for example have taken that up. It’s germinated in, germinated into and come to fruition and the idea that this meta-prospectival ability is central to the cultivation of wisdom. And then that led me more and more into reflection upon what’s the relationship between mindfulness and wisdom and then you reached out to me and you said, hey, you’re talking a lot about this and I had been in my series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis and I was planning to in my series that is now also completed after Socrates and you just, that question and the friendly challenge just drew it all together and I took a lot of pieces and implicit points and brought them together into an integrated argument and now I’m more and more interested in this question going forward. Especially I want to explore it in the third series I’m working on about this relationship between philosophy, mindfulness practices and the philosophy of meditation. I would add the philosophy of contemplation as well but that’s how it all worked for me and that’s how I’m here. Great story, John and I’m glad that I played some role toward the end of it. I’m really thrilled about that. Well, you know, and meeting you, I mean, and people if they’ve seen any of our recorded stuff and of course we have offline stuff as well. I mean, you and I have that we have so many overlapping interests in that area of intersection. This is one of the reasons why we’ve become friends and why we’re in fact working together. It’s been wonderful to find somebody as remarkable as you also as deeply interested, invested and exploring of this area. So I want to thank you. The feeling is totally mutual and this will be true of a number of our guests like our next guest will be Pierre Grimes who’s got a leg in neoplatonism and a leg in Zen. Yeah. And so, you know, there’s a number of us that have been in philosophy and separately in a stream in this meditative sapiential stuff, Asian philosophy and then finally into figuring out how to integrate these things. So I’m so looking forward to our next meeting with him. I just met him in person when I was at the conference and then he graciously had his driver drive me to the airport so we could spend like 45 minutes together just talking and we just hit it off. We just hit it off. Yeah. He’s like one of the real elder sages in this community. In my mind, he’s up there with Alan Watts and whatnot. He’s like a designated Zen master in a whole lineage and all this stuff, you know. He’s a great guy. He’s amazing. I mean, he’s going to have a huge influence on, well, he already has and I hope to talk to him more on when I’m doing the Zen neoplatonism part of the new series. So yeah. Oh yeah, yeah. You should get him on for that. I’m going to try to. I’m going to try to. Yeah. Oh, he has a lot to say about that. Yeah. Yeah. Great guy and also he’s a big inspiration to me as a philosophical counselor. He’s the founder of the movement. I mean, he started doing it in the 1960s. Yeah. All right. So, let me ask you another question. I asked you this once before on Voices with Verveke so it’s a little bit of a repeat but I’m going to be asking all of our guests that and you’ll be asking them too. How would you define meditation and contemplation? I always, I confess that I always used to blend these things together until I met you. So. Yeah. In the article for the anthology and also in an earlier publication with Leo Ferraro, I argue for, you know, a proper distinction between them. Their etymologies are different and I propose that they could therefore be used to point to very different functions that can be undertaken in a mindfulness practice. So, I won’t go into extended depth but and I’ll use something that’s become sort of a meme about me but the idea is, you know, we’re doing, we’re constantly framing the world, the frame problem, relevance realization, we’re ignoring most of the information, we’re making some of the information salient, we’re binding ourselves to how it constrains what we search, what we think about, how we consider. We know that sometimes that goes wrong and we have those aha experiences where we realize, oh no, I’ve been, I just framed this in totally the wrong way kind of thing. And so, I use the metaphor that that framing is like, you know, my glasses that have a frame and they have the lens and that what you can do with your, in one kind of mindfulness practice is you can train your attention to step back and look at that framing process rather than automatically, unconsciously, reactively looking through it and that’s a transparency to opacity shift. My lenses were transparent, now they’re opaque. So, and the argument is mindfulness practices when they’re doing that should be called meditation because people generally use in-out metaphors to describe this and they feel like they’re moving towards some center because they’re stepping back and of course you can step back and look at that framing and you can do that quite a bit and you can move towards a very profound state in which most of the way the mind is, the most of the way in which the mind could be disposed to representing the world has been at least temporarily shut off because as I, the more I do that, the less and less I’m representing the world through my mind and the more and more I’m presencing my own attentional processes to myself. And I think that aptly describes how many people understand meditation and the metaphors they use for describing meditation. Now, in contrast, let’s go back to the analogy, right? Well, I do this and I actually note there’s some distortion on my lens and I clean my glasses. Well, how do I know I’ve actually cleaned them? Well, the thing is what you need to do here is you need to put them on and now see if you can see better, can you see more clearly, more deeply? And this is the opposite. This is to learn to look through what you had previously been looking at. This is an opacity to transparency shift and this is to look deeply, try to look more deeply into reality, to see underlying patterns that you’re missing. It’s to try to see the forest, the gestalt of the forest and not just the individual trees. Now, there’s a word for doing that in ancient Greek, theoria, and it’s where we get our word theory from because that’s what we do with the theory. We have all these individual things and we realize, oh no, I can look through them and see an underlying pattern that points to a different principle, right? And I think that is one good etymological derivation of theory. But the original meaning of theoria was not an act of theorization, it was an act of viewing. In fact, you were supposed to go through a journey so you could see something new and life altering that you hadn’t seen before. Now, that Greek word theoria, so remember that metaphor, that Greek word theory gets translated into the Latin word contemplatio, where we get the word contemplation from, right? And so, contemplation would be the kinds of practices people do, mindfulness practices, where they’re also being aware of their framing, but now they’re aware of it not because they’re trying to pull it back, they’re aware of it because they’re trying to push it out and see more deeply into reality. That’s a contemplative practice and you know, meta is a contemplative practice. You extend meta out to deeper and deeper, right? In wider and wider scope, I extend meta first to myself, then somebody I’m close to, then a neutral person, an enemy, all people, all sentient beings, all beings. Or you would view from above be one of those? I think the view from above is a contemplative practice as well, very much. That’s what came to mind the way you would describe it. Yeah, you’re going up, right? And you’re seeing more and more of reality. You mentioned something about the etymology of contemple. Yes. Oh, yes. It’s also where we got our word temple from and the Greek word, the Latin word there, temple is you’re looking up, right? You’re looking into the, you’re looking for a sign from the gods. That’s the original idea of what you’re doing in a temple. And it’s the same thing. You’re trying to see through the, you know, the veneer of appearance to an underlying reality of some kind. And then the idea about that, well, the argument I’m making, I should say, is if you accept that distinction, it maps pretty well onto two stages in insight and two stages within self-regulation. So, if you think about an insight, like you have an ah-ho moment, one I use, people, almost everybody’s had this, something like this, it’s, oh, I thought she was angry, but I now realize she was afraid. Afraid, yeah. Yeah, right. So, what had to happen there? Two things had happened. First of all, you had to break the inappropriate frame. You were framing her as angry. You had to break that frame. That’s what meditation does. It breaks a frame apart, right? First, it shows you the frame looking at the glasses. Yes. You see the frame and then you see the crack in the frame. Yeah. Or you can see, yeah, or there’s goop on the frame or whatever. It’s, oh, wow, right? Exactly. But then, that’s not enough because if that was it, I would just go back to a neutral stance towards her. But that’s not what’s needed in this situation. I need an insight. I need to see into insight. I need to see into the situation. Yes. And so, I have to make a new frame. And that’s the contemplation part of it. And what you want to do, in fact, it’s very tricky to have an insight. In fact, you don’t do an insight. You participate in it, right? Because you have to get the timing of those right. They have to counterbalance each other dynamically. And so, I propose that you can see if you go back to the in situ, the ecological setting of mindfulness communities, you’ll see that they have both meditative practices and contemplative practices and then ethical practices for trying to transfer that. They often will combine a seated practice with a moving practice, all of this. Yeah. That’s great. All right. Thanks. That makes a lot of sense, John. I think you already spoke about this. The question is, you know, how would you define the distinction between academic and practical philosophy? You already sort of addressed it more like an evaluative address, but this is one of our standard questions for everybody would be. Well, I’m happy to answer the standard question. Yeah. Yeah. Because, you know, that way we have a regular schema by which people can make comparison between the speakers, which of course is the intent of what you’re doing. And I want to follow that intent. I think it’s one I support. So I think academic philosophy is largely a it’s sort of a meta theoretical affair. What you’re doing is you are bringing to bear propositional argumentation on theories, either theories in existing scientific or social sciences, or even the humanities or cultural theories, etc. And of course, meta theories are also theories, right? Because there’s theories about theories. And you’re doing this meta theoretical thing. You’re trying to get at what the presuppositions are or what the flaws are or can two theories be bridged together? And for me, that practice is very valuable for cognitive science. So that’s what I think academic philosophy is largely doing. Now, I think ancient philosophy, but I’ll often use the word philosophia instead, is about the love of wisdom. And as I say in the chapter, you don’t cultivate wisdom through argument and analysis. You don’t cultivate love through argument and analysis, right? And so it doesn’t mean that the ancient philosophers weren’t engaging in arguments and analysis, they were, but those were bound up in a wider ecology of practices that contain what Pierre Hadove famously called spiritual exercises, like you’ve mentioned the view from above, which is a contemplative practice. There’s various, there’s there, there are meditative practices, where really, the stoic practice of objective seeing, where you write Marcus Aurelius famous, like in in the meditations, reconceive of sex as the friction of two pieces of skin, and the production of a sticky fluid, you go, what’s going on there? Right? So what he’s doing is he’s trying to get you to be aware of all of this framing that you put around that act, and that that is not identical to the act, and you bear a responsibility for that framing, and you can break that frame when it’s important to do so. But this overlaps, by the way, with how breaking frame and making frame are also relevant to self-regulation. And so there’s much more about the cultivation of wisdom, and the love of wisdom in ancient philosophy, that isn’t the case. Now, for me, I need both of those hats. I need the first hat, if I want to be a good cognitive scientist, I need the second half if I want to be a good person. And so that’s how I would distinguish between them. That’s great. That’s very clear. Thank you for that, John. All right, this is sort of generic to the entire series, but would you sketch what your conception is of a philosophy of meditation? Not necessarily an analytic definition, but just your take on what that concept means? Yeah, and I think a good way to get that would be to go through the handbook, because there’s a generic sense, but there’s really important different angles many people are taking. What I would say, though, is a philosophy of meditation, to my mind, it’s a proper part of the cognitive science of meditation. So a cognitive scientist will, of course, bring psychology, which I’ve been doing in my discussion, neuroscience, which I could do, machine learning, artificial intelligence, which I also can do, and I do in other places, and try to get those to all talk to each other. And also some anthropology because of the cultural context. How does meditation fit into and work within worldviews, for example? Something I’m very interested in. And then you need to integrate those all together. The way you do that is you really need philosophy, because what philosophy does is stand above particular discourses with their specific methodologies and ontologies, and try to create bridging discourses. It was unfashionable for a while, but it’s coming back into fashion that philosophy is oriented towards the whole. David Schindler has made that argument powerfully again in other people. And a cognitive scientist likes that version of philosophy, because that’s what we’re shooting for synoptic integration. So we need philosophy. We need that meta-theoretical reflection that can bring about a reformulation, an extension of our conceptual vocabulary, a critical reformulation of our theoretical grammars that we bring to bear, that can bring in things that might not have been included in the discourse. Philosophers could, for example, bring in areas from religion that a psychologist might not feel comfortable bringing in because they don’t have the relevant language for talking about it. One of the things that I love the University of Toronto, so that’s the context. They treat me really well. I’m very supportive, and so many good things are happening at the University of Toronto. And the psychology department is especially beautiful. But one of the things that’s missing there is there isn’t a psychology of religion course, and there should be. And so, yeah. And so that, you know, I often find that I’m sort of taking that role. I’m trying to bring in, well, we can actually learn something from, you know, the religious traditions. They have something to teach us. And things like Neoplatonism and Stoicism hang on the boundary between religion and philosophy. And that’s something a good philosopher should negotiate. And so the philosopher is doing this negotiation, renovation, innovation, integration thing that is really, really needed if we’re going to get all of the relevant aspects of mindfulness. It addresses a criticism I have of many of the treatments of mindfulness is they shrink mindfulness down to a single dimension and then try to import that directly into the North American context without any concern and consideration. And this leads me to think of a question that’s just unique to you and a kind of a subset of the last couple of questions that are related, particularly because of the distinction you make between meditation and contemplation. Now, the Rutledge Handbook of the philosophy of meditation, maybe it should be of contemplation and meditation. Is contemplation, is there a category that includes those two things are very related. Yes, they seem to be species of a larger genus that doesn’t have a name, meditation and contemplation. And the philosophy of that is really what I’m aiming at, not just the philosophy of meditation. But and I admitted, I don’t I haven’t differentiated in my language between meditation and contemplation. I’ve taught I’ve used those terms as if they’re interchangeable, like ethics and morals depends on some stipulative way that you differentiate between them. So maybe we need to think about a term that includes them both or and there’s a sense in which also one more thing, sure science is supposed to seek this synoptic integration. But philosophy, I’ve heard you say it kind of plays a through line role in cognitive science. Yes, it’s like the through line of understanding, which is at the meta level. Yes. So somehow or another, that’s what’s being applied to meditation and I mean to meditation and contemplation and related spiritual practices. So we need to sharpen the taxonomy around this. But this is a longer term. I don’t expect you to solve this taxonomic issue right here, but I just thought I’d throw that at you just for fun and see what comes out. Well, I’ve been trying to make the proposal because I’m largely very critical in the 2016 article with Leo Ferraro and in the chapter published in your anthology. I’m very critical of the extant sort of Western definitions of mindfulness. I think there’s structural problems that feature less, which are very problematic. And they don’t distinguish between the meditative and the contemplative. And also, they leave out the etymology. Sati means to remind, right? And that’s not captured. And there’s this focus on being in the present moment, non-judge, the Kabat-Zinn. Now, Kabat-Zinn did a lot and I’m not trying to dismiss, but that definition got taken up. It’s a great definition for training meditation. It’s a horrible definition for explaining. Yeah, you have to distinguish between those. And so, I’m trying to push for the idea, let’s change mindfulness to be an awareness of framing such that we can intervene in it for flourishing. And then that gets both the meditative and the contemplative. They’re both ways of increasing your awareness of framing. And not just a passive spectator awareness, but an awareness for intervention. It’s ancient. Yes, exactly. Develop that more. Well, I’m publicly arguing for it and making a case for it. And to your point about the through line, yes, that’s exactly what I think academic philosophy can do within the cognitive science. I think it does that for all of cognitive science, not just the cognitive science of mindfulness. I think it does it for the cognitive science of anything. Philosophy is what that philosophy is the thread that threads all the pearls from the different disciplines together. Yeah, beautiful. All right. So, you may recall, I’m sure, as a contributor to the Rutledge Handbook on the philosophy of meditation that I argued for and I asked all of the contributors to touch on directly or indirectly three theses of my own, which can be stated as theses or as questions. So, I’m going to stipulate them as questions and just we can go through them one at a time. Please. Or you can either answer them separately or unite and answer. But the questions are, can meditation contribute to philosophy? Of course, if you think the answer is yes, then the question is how? And I assume that with almost everybody who’s going to come on here, the answer will be yes. Second question is, is there, can there, or ought there to be a philosophy of meditation? And of course, similar thing. If you’re a guest here, you probably think the answer is yes, but not all of the guests. But in any event, if your answer is yes, then the question is how or why? And then the last question, which is particularly interesting in the thread of what we’ve been talking about, is meditation itself a form of philosophy? And that might be, that’s the most bold question, I think, because the first two are kind of obvious, but take any or all of those. Well, I’d like to answer them in sequence. So, if you could do the first question back to me, I’d appreciate it. So, can meditation contribute to philosophy? And then of course, how? Right. So, there’s two ways of answering that. One, is philosophy there, could be standing in for philosophia, and then meditative and contemplative practices definitely help to cultivate both the love of wisdom and the realization, the appreciation, the aspiration towards wisdom. So, the answer there, I think, is very clear. And if you look across both our own historical context and across cultures, that association between mindfulness practices and the love of wisdom, the cultivation of wisdom, sagacity, or even enlightenment, right? That’s like, it’s perennial. So, I mean, I’m not saying anything new there. I think that’s rather non-controversial. Now, you may then be asking, and it’s illegitimate to ask, does it contribute to… Or can it contribute to analytic philosophy? Right, right. So, the pandemic, yeah. So, I have two answers for that. One answer is, I think the practice of mindfulness, meditative and contemplative, also both still and moving, I want to keep all these dimensions in play for people, I think can do something very powerful for the practice and the content of certain domains of philosophy. Now, here I’m going to have to broaden it, though, to not just be analytic philosophy, but both analytic and continental. Right, because I want to include the phenomenological tradition, right? And then I want to include something, it’s not really part of philosophy, although philosophy overlaps with it considerably, positive psychology, which is the idea that we investigate people not only in terms of how they break down, but also in how they excel beyond the norm. How they flourish. Yes. And so, I think meditation and contemplation, mindfulness practices, can enhance our phenomenological content that we bring to bear. For example, I’ll just give one, I think by now, relatively non-controversial example. Meditative experience has led people into the pure consciousness event. Forman has made a very important argument about what’s going on phenomenologically. I have then argued that the pure consciousness event and related things like what happens in multiple object tracking make a good case that the beloved adjectival qualia of philosophers of mind, the blueness of blue and the greenness of green aren’t necessary, are neither necessary nor sufficient for consciousness because they’re not present in the pure consciousness event. But the adverbial qualia, the sense of here-ness, which becomes a sense of profound presence, a now-ness, which becomes like a pronounced sense of eternity, togetherness, which becomes the sense of unity. All these things are still present. These adverbial qualia are present within the pure consciousness event. They provide the content, which is why you don’t completely black out. But what I’m doing is I’m making an argument drawn from the content of the phenomenology that is only positively revealed in a mindfulness practice to provide evidence. The fact that many different people in many different traditions across different historical periods have reported this, take a look at Forman and other people’s work, means this can’t be dismissed, which means the thing that has typically been held up, chalmers, the hard problem, these qualia, but they don’t seem to be necessary nor sufficient for consciousness. And therefore, we have to reconsider our best theories, analytic theories, of consciousness. That would be an example of exactly how we can improve the content in that phenomenological way. Now, the practice of science, we have focused, and this is something we’re coming around to now, we’ve focused too long on science on just induction and deduction. We’ve left off the person abduction or inference to the best explanation, which is also integrated with synoptic integration and other things that Philip Kitcher has talked about. Mindfulness really improves your capacity for that kind of broad, deep, and systemic, and even systematic insight that is really crucial for practicing the science of doing any exploration, and therefore would also have an impact on any analytic reflection on that science in an important way, especially a science, like cognitive science, that aspires to synoptic integration, and especially what I would consider the best versions of analytic philosophy, which attempt a synoptic integration of the whole. Nicholas Rescher has talked about this as inference to the best system. The sciences are generating inferences to the best explanation, and then philosophy comes up and tries to generate the inference to the best explanation of all the best explanations, and I think that’s very important too. So in both the content and the practice, I think meditation contributes significantly. That was incredibly well put and comprehensive, John. That’s maybe one of the best answers that I think we’ll ever get to this question, so thank you. I think it’s going to be hard for our next guests to follow your act. All right, so, but yeah, your incredibly rich answer to the first question pretty much answers the second question. Is there, can there, or ought there to be a philosophy of meditation? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I think that’s kind of redundant. That’s entailed from the first answer. Yeah, certainly. Yeah, a rich answer to the first one, I think, answers all of them, but maybe not the third question. This is the one that I think most, at least, academic philosophers will resist, although your Chalmers rebuttal just now, I think, might even count as an answer to it. But the question is, is meditation itself a form of philosophy? And I think we mean the more narrow sense of philosophy, academic, or some umbrella sense that includes both, perhaps. Yes, well, yeah, like I said, clearly, Yeah, and philosophia. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Obviously, yes. Yeah. I think so. If we are willing to admit that things like Heideggerian phenomenology are properly philosophies. Now, maybe analytic philosophers won’t do that, but I kind of think that they don’t have, they can’t make that argument anymore because of a lot of meta arguments about analytic philosophies based on the analytic synthetic distinction, which has largely been undermined by Quine, because any attempt to stipulate it or explain it turns into a circle and it gets you nowhere. So it has no intelligible content. It’s a mere tautology, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we know all this, right? And all the stuff that Catherine Prickstock has gone through and show, the fact value distinction is breaking down. The is art is breaking down. Case beer is demolished. So all of the things that we use to isolate ourselves nicely from continental philosophy, analytic philosophy has done this amazing thing of largely destroying them. And when we get to something like post-modernism, like the distinction has in many ways completely broken down. So I’m going to take it that within the, within philosophy departments, something like Hegelian phenomenology is considered legitimate philosophy. And then if you look at what Heidegger is doing, first of all, Husserl, phenomenology is a way of seeing. Don Heide has brought this out very well in his little, his masterpiece book, Experimental Phenomenology. And then of course, Heidegger is trying to get us to see in a way, to see thing in a way so we can see being itself or maybe it’s better to call it the ground of being. And that just seems so similar to meditative and contemplative practices. That’s why he, you know, he resonates so well with the Japanese scholar in the discourse, right? And why the Kyoto School sees these amazing resonances between his work and what they’re seeing in Zen and Pure Land Buddhism. And so it’s like, yeah, if that counts as philosophy, then I think not just sitting meditation, but if you have an ecology of mindfulness practices, I think that’s a philosophy. Yeah, I agree. I think that to exclude these practices and say that they’re not meditative practices requires the very narrow distinction about what philosophy is, which you just said is no longer really tenable. Yes, yes, I think so too. Once you, yeah, once you have a more comprehensive understanding of philosophy that includes phenomenological analysis, there’s no way you can coherently reject meditative practices. Yes, yes, I agree. Self-refutation. Okay, great. All right, so shifting gears a little bit, can you tell us about the importance of meditation in your own personal life? Yeah. I would add for you, and I think I might have to add this for everybody else, and contemplative practices. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, I mean, I was taught that ecology, I was taught a meditative practice, Vipassana. I was taught a contemplative practice, Metta. And occasionally we also did contemplating the three marks, impermanence, interconnectedness, dukkha, unsatisfactoriness. And then of course, like I said, Tai Chi Chuan, which is a moving mindfulness practice. And so, but the practices themselves have been deeply important to me. I think a significant part of my success as the kind of thinker, and I hope this is the correct way to put it, exemplar that I’ve become, is due to these practices, and related ones. Like I have other practices, but those were the core practices that really got me. I did a core four. I did Vipassana, Metta, Tai Chi Chuan, and then I added in a healing art, Chiatsu. So, which you’re supposed to do. And then I built, and then I was recovering the whole neoplatonic tradition and I’ve drawn practices from there. But that core four, and Chiatsu is a mindfulness practice too. In fact, you’re constantly shifting between those two frames, constantly when you’re doing Chiatsu. Could you speak a little more about that? I’m not familiar with it as that kind of practice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. I mean, so Chiatsu is kind of flowing, and I mean that like the flow state acupressure, and the musicality of it, the rhythm of it, and the timber, which is the how much pressure. It’s got John Roussin’s musicality of intelligibility all through it, and you’re sort of playing with that. The way you play Tai Chi, you’re playing with the yin and yang, and then you’re doing a contemplative practice where you’re trying to indwell the person. You’re trying not just to see them, but see into them, feel into them. And then you’re internalizing them, you’re drawing them back in, and you’re trying to pay attention to your own framing and how your own framing might be thwarting, allowing them to dwell within you. And so you’re doing this kind of thing, and you’re trying to draw them back in, and you’re trying to draw them back in, and you’re trying to dwell within you. And so you’re doing this kind of thing. And when it works, you get this flowing resonance. And I mean, I don’t want to sound like Wu, and I can back this up with work I’ve done elsewhere. But that resonance, I would argue, that’s a much better model of Chi, by the way, than energy, which is horribly, horribly, two more times, horribly, horribly misleading. I heard you gave a very long talk once, naturalizing Chi in a practice that was a brilliant explanation, by the way. I would refer your listeners here to that. Thank you. So that resonance- That was at a conference somewhere. Yeah, it was at U of T. It was conference. Evan was actually up, also spoke at the conference. And so, right, all of that has, it transformed me, and it transformed me often unawares. I wasn’t aware of how it was transforming me. And the way it was, you know, permeating different domains of my life, like it permeated into how I showed up within academic philosophical discussions. It was percolating through different levels of the psyche. I was opening myself up, becoming more vulnerable, more emotionally expressive, etc. Yeah, I remembered once you saying that a signal for you, a signpost of some kind of growth, was people asking you, what’s changing in you, Joe? Exactly, exactly. And I passed that on to my students. I say, don’t get enmeshed in all the wonderful, wonderful phenomenology that’s happening. And it is wonderful. And treat it like an amusement park. It’s fun, but you wouldn’t want to live there. Okay. And instead, pay attention to when people are picking up on transformations in you, especially outside the context of the practice dojo, because that means it’s transferring broadly and deeply and effectively. But what I want to say is that’s what’s happened for me. And then the other thing was this introduction to me that I’ve only explicated upon reflection of an ecology of practices. I got that also in that training. And that’s had a huge impact on how I think about a lot of things. At the outside, the training zone, how you’re acting in life reminds me of, I think I told you this story once before, but I’m not sure. I was co-teaching a course on contemplative ethics with a friend of mine who is in the same meditation satsang that I was in since we were teenagers together, a professor of religion at Vassar College, Rick Jarrow. And because it was contemplative ethics class, we were talking about meditation a lot. We were leading meditations a lot. And so we were talking about enlightenment once. And one of the students said, how can you tell if someone is enlightened? And my friend Rick said, ask their spouse. Great answer. See how the person really lives when they’re not on the display. So that’s where you see it in your life, how it altered your life. Yeah. My partner, she would definitely say I’m not enlightened. And I have no question on my mind she would say that. But she also says that she’s proud of me, which means she does recognize that these practices, she attributes it to my practices, have bettered me in some consistent longitudinal way. Yeah, this is a kind of abductive inference too. I can’t prove that my meditative practices are the things that have led to transformative insight and whatnot in my life, but it’s the most rational abductive explanation. Totally. And the more the work that some of the people, including myself, are doing in the anthology, the more plausible, because we can disclose plausible underlying mechanisms and processes, the more plausible that abduction becomes. Yeah. So this might be really the answer to the next question, which you’ve already partly answered elsewhere also today. What do you think about the importance of the philosophy of meditation? So like I said, you kind of… I think it’s very important. But I want to say something that I haven’t said so far, which I think is also important. I touched a bit upon it in my article, and this is also something that came out of that ecology of practices. And then my initial attempts to merge, you know, mindfulness practice and scientific reflection on mindfulness, which is now just, oh yeah, of course, when I started it, it was like, oh, right. But anyways, and that’s right. The philosophy of meditation, I think one of the things it can do is foreground and also make more salient, give more value to non-propositional kinds of knowing. And the other piece, right? Because you become what you’re what you are deliberately shutting off. That’s too stark of a metaphor, but I’ll just use it because people get a sense. What you’re deliberately sort of shutting off in a meditative practice and also in a contemplative practice is the propositional processing. Yeah. And the whole belief generation, maintenance system and all that sort of stuff. Yeah. And looking through propositions at the world all the time. Yes, exactly. The parents, you’re not seeing your framing whatsoever. Exactly. Well, propositional framing largely for those of us in our culture. Like you said, we’re under the tyranny of propositional. Totally. Perspectives. Yeah. And then what the philosophy of meditation can do is, especially if it’s combined with people undertaking a mindfulness practice, is people can become aware of instead of unconsciously relying on the procedural kind of knowing, perspectival knowing and participatory knowing. And the philosophy of meditation can help disclose those, can help make a proper case for them. I think, and I’ve argued elsewhere, the non-propositional kinds of knowing play a much larger role in our sense of meaning in life, our sense of belonging, our sense of connectedness. They play a huge role in wisdom as distinct from knowledge. And so. Positive psychology. Yes, totally. And so I think there’s tremendous importance for the philosophy of meditation. Great. Thanks for adding all that. So you sort of talked about this already with the Tai Chi and everything, but I’ll ask anyway, in case anything else comes to mind, would you like to share any of your meditative practices, teachers, sorry, or trainings? Yeah. So I walk and in my walking, I do a contemplative practice drawn from the Neoplatonic tradition where you start at the level of Fuses and then you go up to Suke and then Noesis and then you open up towards the possibility. You can’t do theosis. You open yourself up to the possibility of it. And for those who have Christian feathers that I might have just rustled, please pay attention to the fact that the notion of theosis was independently and prior developed in pagan Neoplatonism before it was taken up. So if you don’t like me using it as a Christian might use it, I’m fine with that. But I do have the right to use it as the way it was used in the pagan Neoplatonic tradition. So I do that practice. John, can we pause for a minute? Many of the listeners will know what you’re talking about, but many who might come to hear the philosophy of meditation might not be familiar with that Neoplatonic practice and those levels. Oh, sure. Can you just rattle off a quick little summary of each one of them? Sure. So first of all, you try to come to sort of an aporetic aperture. You try to get to the place where, right, sort of maximal, first of all, maximal opacity, the emergence of awareness, the awareness of awareness to its orienting origin, right? That’s where you get, right? And this is to get you into sort of a state of non-duality where you’re neither prioritizing the objective or the subjective, but what I would call the transjective, their interpenetration. And then what you do is you contemplate fuses, you contemplate presencing. I’ll use some of John Roussin’s musical metaphors to help. There’s kind of a rhythm to reality that things are now, now, now, now, and there’s this presencing and fuses as you’re trying to become just aware of that. And I’ll use, and I got, I learned this from Nishitani, so it must work in Japanese as well as English. I use the word realization in both senses of the word to actualize and to become aware, right? So that’s fuses. And then suke is, right, where we get psyche from, is you’re picking up on, right, like the melody, all the patterns. And I ask you, are the patterns within you or without you? Well, they’re both, right? And music brings that out really profoundly. And so, and then noesis is, right, the grasp of the whole. And this would, in the analogy, would correspond to the harmony, the all at once belonging togetherness of your experience. And then you, right, and so you can see I’ve done emergence up, but then you do the emanation down. Yeah, but the whole, right, expresses itself in the patterns, which expresses itself in the rhythm. And then you pick up that, right? And then that gives you the one wanting, that gives you a sense of henosis, being at one with everything and trying to realize that there’s a deep interrelationship between realness and wanting. And I won’t go through the whole Neoplatonic argument. I’ll just point to it and say, look elsewhere or look at other stuff I’ve argued about, right? And then the idea is you can then open that up, right, to theosis, which is you try to realize that even in that experience of wanting, it’s probably to some degree egocentric, self-centered, limited in time and space. You try to open yourself up to the primordial past, the far-flung future, from the infinitesimal to the infinite. And you try to get a transpersonal centering. You know what it says in the Libra philosophicum, right? God is an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere. You’re opening yourself up to God in that way. And then you let yourself be, and you can’t, it might not happen. You open yourself up to being reborn, right? And the levels that Maximus talks about, you’re reborn in your being, right? Your well-being, your eternal well-being, and then the ongoing epictasis of that, and that’s theosis. That’s a practice I do when I’m walking every morning. That’s great. And this can be done also really seated. Sure. It can be also, somebody can lead you, which can be very powerful. It has disadvantages because it doesn’t transfer as well, but it can be very powerful at some points because it can allow you to just let go and really flow with it because you don’t have the monitor to like, okay, right? But doing it for yourself also means you’re not dependent on an independent. So doing both is, doing it individually and in group is good. Doing it seated and moving is good. Doing all of these really powerful practice. And I would interject that having practiced mindfulness and other things like that will sensitize you to be able to sense these differentiations and get into these different levels, really. This is the neoplatonic levels. Yes, very much. And instead of having them just as metaphysical propositions to assent or disagree with, these are actually, they’re moving metaphors of practice. And both they move you and they are- Different modes of awareness. Yes, yes, very much. Yes. And so I do that. And then I do practices. I come back and I’ll do three kinds of Tai Chi, one, a weapons form, a fast form, a slow form, because they all have checks and balances on each other. And then I’ll do a meditative practice, basically a sort of a variation on Vipassana. And then I’ll do a contemplative practice. I’ll usually do the same practice we just talked about, because as you said, you should do it seated as well as moving. And then I fold it back. I just let everything fall away and I just try to do a pure presencing practice in which I let however it’s going to synergize happen and I just be with it as much as I possibly can. Yeah, that actually sounds brilliant and resonates with a lot of my experience, even though I don’t have a practice of, I’ve tried it a few times, the steps, who’s this and whatnot. But over the years, the practices that I’ve cultivated are kind of functionally similar. Yeah, of course. I think there’s good reasons for that. I think there’s good reason we got to get this balance between what fits a person and what will challenge a person. And so what should fit you is going to be very, in some ways, idiosyncratic, but what should challenge you should fall outside of your idiosyncrasy and mind. Right? Right. And so you try to get that balance between those two. Yeah, this kind of calls to mind Greg Henriquez’s the eye and the eye coin, you know, the idiosyncratic, you know, there’s something universal about all of us, but there’s also something importantly idiosyncratic. Yeah. And you want to get those two in deep dialogue with each other, very deep dialogue with each other, mutually transformative dialogue. Yeah, yeah, that’s the dialogical element. Yeah, very much, very much. And then, you know, and I often add into that, I’ll do some Lectio Divina practice, which is also other practices like that, that will add to it. Yeah, yeah, certainly all the things that that you’ve led at those circling Institute and all that are, yeah, sure you engage in them periodically, but you are mostly talking about what you do all the time. Yeah, that’s my core thing. I generally try to try to make the the Lectio Divina a constant practice. Yeah, because you’re constantly doing like Spinoza’s ethics and this and that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. About these things all the time. What book you’re reading as a Lectio thing. Yeah, it’s a great bridge for me between these practices I’ve just talked about and the propositionally based practice like philosophy, right, even philosophia, Plato, right, and going back and forth. So the Lectio is really powerful. And so is the philosophical fellowship practices I do with other people and dialectic and ideologos, right? So yeah. Yeah, awesome. Thank you for sharing all that with us. So this is a little more personal and you know, you might not want to go into this, but would you like to share any unique or key meditative experiences that you’ve had? Well, I mean, if we broaden it from mindfulness, I mean, it’s a wide penalty of things. I mean, you know, doing the Tai Chi Chuan, you know, I had the cold as ice, hot as fire experience. I’ve definitely, I almost always now have a profound version of the flow experience. So I don’t mean to, sorry, that sounded arrogant. I didn’t mean to sound arrogant. I mean, I’ve just been practicing so long. It’s become like second nature. I’ve been there, not recently, but I’ve mentioned to you that there were years of my life that I think I was in altered states and in flow states. This happens when you’re practicing seriously every day. Yeah, yeah. There’s definitely that. I mean, I’ve had different kinds of mystical experiences. I’ve had the pure consciousness event that Foreman talks about. I’ve had profound resonant at one minute. I’ve had the prajna between them. I’ve had those kinds of mystical experiences. I know you’ve had a lot of them. I’m sorry to interrupt, but I remember you talking about, was one of the first things that happened to you, some kind of vision of Plato’s forms? Oh, that. Oh, that. We see. So before I took up any of all of this stuff I’ve been talking about, and where I fell in love with philosophy as philosophia, the love of wisdom, the cultivation of wisdom that I was talking about earlier, and I was reading, I was an undergraduate and I was reading, you know, Republic. Yeah, yeah, I was reading the Republic and especially, you know, from books four onward. And I had been very, I’d been just on my own. This was before I went for formal instruction, just playing with some meditation. And I sat up in my bed one night and I just got into this contemplative state and I had a mystical experience of the forms. And I can’t describe it to you because if I could describe it to you, it wouldn’t be the forms. But like these, you know, these, you know, slightly beyond your grasp, you know, emerging patterns, but eternal patterns of intelligibility that are neither subjective or objective, but, you know, transjective, you know, in a really powerful way. And that’s why the way, I mean, there’s two things. The existential, and I mean that really in the existential sense, the existential encounter with Socrates and that mystical experience is why I have always throughout all of this been some kind of Platonist. I now consider myself kind of a Zen Neoplatonist. And so, yeah, and that- Was that your first deeply mystical experience? Yes, yes. I saw, that’s not the right word. I realized and was realized by the forms. And that’s, I don’t know how else to put it. And that experience upon reflection, of course, it’s dimmer upon reflection, but it’s lost none of its authority for me or its profundity. As I’ve done, you know, decades of work trying to understand Plato’s theory of the forms and perhaps made some progress on it. It has not in any way diminished by comparison the profundity of that experience. Yeah, that was probably my, that was my first mystical experience. Yeah, my intuition is that regardless is your inability to articulate it in more than the sketchy way that you did. And I have the same problem because I had a similar experience. I can’t help but think that having that experience significantly determined, not in a deterministic way, but where you are now. I think that’s, I think that’s right. Touching that or encountering it or however you want to, what cognitive encounter with it, you want to label it as. I think once that happens to someone, it has a transformative, there’s just no turning back from something like that. I have to tell you now that you’ve brought this up, right? Later on when I, because of the first, the fantastic work of Pierre Hedot and then the whole third way of, you know, Platonic scholarship, but all of that was right. And I had a mystical experience of the one, I had a full blown and it was powerful. And that was it, that was, that was, it was, I hadn’t thought, you know, I hadn’t thought about this, but those two, and it’s just sort of coming up now for me, which those two were like, they’re like bookends, they were resonating with each other. And I had this powerful experience of hypnosis. And, you know, and what was interesting is it was full blown hypnosis, but it wasn’t devoid of emotional content. In fact, I was weeping at the time because just the sense of the one, I don’t know how to put it, you know, sort of pumping out being that this is not the right way, but this is the right, but that just, and it was almost, almost like, listen, there was almost a musicality to it. I was just, and that was, that was the moment when I started considering myself a full blown neoplatonist. So I thank you for this, Rick. I hadn’t put those two together in my mind, but you calling me to those are right. I mean, I’ve had other experiences that since then, but that experience of hypnosis, I hadn’t put those two together, but it called back to that first experience. Both of them are the kinds of experiences that will just permanently transform your gestalt, you know, it might take you decades to figure out an inkling about it, but yeah, those things, I don’t know what to, I don’t know what to make of them, but I know that they’re important. So thank you for sharing. I said, are there any key or important? We’re talking about a whole bunch of things, but I just, what about that platonic thing? Yeah, no, that’s, and I mean, I have had many, I mean, powerful flow experiences in my Dallas practices, you know, radical experiences of the no self and the Buddhist practices. And they’ve been important to me. I don’t want to diminish them. They’re nourishing, but I hadn’t realized that those two neoplatonic mystical experiences are really much bookends for me in a powerful way. So thank you for that, Rick. Oh, thank you. I loved the way that, you know, you were like stuck without words, but emoting and gesturing, I’ll be the herald right now. And you were really like exploding with emotion and joy and recognition, but without the right words. So that was really nice to see. Thank you. All right. So, all right. We only have a couple more questions and we’re getting toward the end. Do you have any doubts or caveats or concerns or unanswered questions about meditation or maybe perhaps even warnings for others or something like that? So I know you and I disagree on this a bit, but we disagree as good friends who love each other. I’m very critical of what’s happening to mindfulness practices in North America. I do think that I stand behind the derogatory tone of the term mick mindfulness. And I’m critical of it. I have a friend of mine, Ron Purser, and he and I have friendly disagreement about this as well. Yes. And so I mean, I dislike that mindfulness has been reduced to a feature list because that’s not good for understanding or science. I’ve made arguments to this effect. I don’t dislike the fact that one mindfulness practice meditation has been taken out of an entire ecology of practices with all the proper dynamic checks and balances they are in, which opens the isolated and orphaned, I would even say practice, up to corporate exploitation, which of course is now happening very significantly. And I dislike the fact that there was some of the criticisms that Leo and I made that there needs to be more careful distinctions between the language of training, the language of explaining between meditation and contemplation, between seated practices and moving practices, etc. Things like there needs to be a greater philosophy of meditation. That I totally stand behind. And I do not think there is, and here’s something was largely implicit in the article I published with Leo and the article I published, a little bit more explicit in the article I published for your anthology, which is the connection between mindfulness practice and its attendant things like mystical experiences, transformative experiences, flow experiences, etc. The relationship between that and the cultivation of wisdom, I do not think has been properly developed. I tried to lay some ground for that with Leo’s help and in the article I wrote for you, because I tried to show the tight relationship established, by the way, independently from meditators and whatnot, between mindfulness and insight and mindfulness and self-regulation, and then how insight and self-regulation go into this reflectiveness gap problem that Velman talks about. And so try to lay some initial bridges of, well, how does meditating make you more wise? And also reverse engineering. When we talk about enlightenment, as long as we leave it as this mythical, optimal state, can we reverse engineer it in terms of wisdom? And I’ve tried to do that in some of the work I’ve published. Quick interjection, John. When you mentioned that you wanted to reverse engineer enlightenment with wisdom in mind in the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, in one of the early episodes about the Pre-Socratics or something, that’s when I was like, oh my God, I have to listen to this whole series now. That’s what hooked me on your work. I said, this was a brilliant idea. John Svigel Well, I want to make, I mean, I’ll use some sort of technical language, right? A little bit. I want to make the notion of enlightenment operationally realizable, right? It has now reached levels of mystification and mystique that it has lost its ability to transform people in other than purely mythological manner. And I think that, I can’t see Siddhartha Gautama wanting that. I just can’t see him wanting that. John Svigel Yeah, I think that this kind of, maybe it’s orientalized or something. I think it’s a kind of orientalism. I really do think it is. John Svigel Yeah, this framing of enlightenment as this explosive, cosmic, orgasmic, bizarro, mystical, Shambhala, hidden universe thing that happens only in like a, you know, a Daoist heaven or something like that, with mystical masters. It makes it seem so inaccessible and impossible. But what comes to my mind is like this Zen saying that I find myself repeating a lot when these questions come up about what is enlightenment. Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. So it’s just a shift in perspective. It’s a transformative shift in consciousness. It’s totally related to things like the pure consciousness experience. And you know, we need to start thinking about it in more naturalized and like you said, we need to reverse engineer it and make it more accessible and less far off and unattainable. Some of the mystical traditions and the religious traditions, so I’m giving my opinion here, they make it seem like, oh, there’s this 10,000 steps from where you are to enlightenment, which is at the top of this mountain. And unless you go through all the, you know, and you know, maybe if you’re a part of a tradition where that’s the methodology, that can be useful. But my thought is, oh, skillful means has to be relative, this concept of skillful means, maybe that’s a skillful means for some people, but not for everybody. I agree. It’s relative to the individual. Some people I think can just kind of get really close to enlightenment by practicing zazen, just sitting or tai chi or whatever it is, you know. I agree. I agree. And the mystification, which should not be confused with the mysticism of this, I am a stern critic of. I mean, when the gods persuaded Siddhartha to remain and, you know, preach, like, what, to the one person on the planet per generation? Like, come on. Like I said, that note and, you know, this is a slight criticism I have of Foreman. He’s reduced enlightenment to a purely phenomenological sense and completely left out the sapiential dimension. And so I think like, I don’t want to make it mystified and I don’t want to make it merely, you know, an experience people have. I think that the sapiential framing, which the Buddha uses, you know, sapiential words a lot. And most of people that I think I would consider enlightenment, they talk about the deep interpenetration with wisdom. That’s something I’ve been arguing for. And so. Yeah. Well, there’s a whole strain in Buddhism about enlightenment as wisdom. Yes. Yeah. Oh, wow. All right. Great stuff. So, all right. One bit of advice that you might have for practitioners of these practices? So, don’t learn by yourself. Once you’ve learned a lot, you can practice by yourself and you’ll have to practice by yourself even from the beginning. But don’t learn this by yourself. You will fall prey to autodidactic self-bullshitting in ways you can’t comprehend and you’ll be uncovering things. You’ll be grabbing the sword from the wrong end often without realizing it. Prajna, the mind sword, right? Also, I think and you know, I can hear some of the Zen people just sort of like, but try to integrate any practice with ancient philosophy, either Eastern, if that seems more cool for you, or Western. Keeping the proper, right, the point is not to isolate the proper even, just as much as it’s not to isolate the propositional from all the other. We don’t want propositional tyranny. We don’t want propositional ignorance, right? So, that was a mistake I made at first, right? You want, and for me, the metaphor of East and West has been very helpful. I try to integrate Eastern and Western practices, Asiatic and Eastern practices, and I think that’s the point. I try to integrate Eastern and Western practices, Asiatic and European, both, neither one of those two distinctions work, but whatever. I just don’t want to offend anybody. Yeah. And so, try to keep, try to cultivate wisdom, both propositionally and non-propositionally. That would be my second piece of advice. So, pay attention to wisdom traditions, which are traditional and practical. Yes, yes, that you said it better. And then in connection with that, try to keep a connection to the degree to which you have the relevant educational background and blah, blah, blah, blah, to the science of this stuff, right? Because it will do what science does. Science is particularly good at flushing out bullshit. Exactly. And there is a lot, a lot of bullshit in this area, and there’s a lot of exploitative evil bullshit in this area. And keeping one foot in the science, right? And then training yourself to be philosophically reflective. Those two things will enrich and enable you to deal with the bullshit threats. Yeah, they’re like cognitive inoculations. Yes, exactly, exactly. Very great. Good stuff. All right. So, we are almost at the end. Now would be time for you to plug any of your activities, like maybe on the Vervecki Foundation or ATM. What does that stand for again? Awakening to Meaning. So, Awakening to Meaning. So, with the amazing help of Ryan Barton and Taylor Barrett and Eric. Eric, who’s here in the background running all of this. So, we’ve been building the Vervecki Foundation. We have a whole bunch of volunteers. Robert Gray is a prominent example. We have connections to the Respond Network like Nathan Vanderpool. I’m sorry, I can’t name everybody. They’re all the patrons and it’s just, it’s a vibrant, wonderful community. And the Vervecki Foundation is basically trying to help address the meaning crisis, cultivate wisdom and those two are interwoven. And so, we have a new online website, Awakening to Meaning, which is a portal to areas of practice where you can take up practice. And you might be referred to this referred to this weekly practice by this guy named Rick Rapetti, where he takes people through a regular meditation sitting. And I had the great pleasure of guest appearing in one of those. And then there’s a core basic ecology of practices. More advanced courses are now being offered. So, there’s daily places, or at least weekly, where you can practice. There’s courses you can take. There’s workshops you can attend like the Dialectic, the Circling into Dialogos workshop. And then there’s going to be a 12-week workshop, Dialectic into Dialogos. There’s the Becoming More Wise. So, all of this and then we will also, we have a bank of you know, therapists and philosophical counselors to refer you to. If you hit confusion on one hand, the philosophical counselors, if you hit neurosis, I know those can overlap, but just allow me this distinction for now, right? Then there’s the therapy, those people we can refer you to in therapy to help you. And so, there’s ongoing things. There’s basic practices. There’s core courses. There’s more advanced stuff coming. So, that’s the Vervecki Foundation. And then we network with other things like the Respond Network, where we’re trying to get many of these emerging communities of practice around the cultivation of wisdom, the enhancement of meaning into a mutually supportive, mutually vetting network. So, some of you would know, for example, I have very deep connections, friendship, more than friendship, something. Rafe and I are like brothers. Rafe Kelly and his Evolve Move Play. I went on his Return to the Source, damn near killed me. It was one of the best events of my life. And I can’t recommend it enough to people. Learn about it and prepare for it before you go. But man, this is the work he’s doing important. So, the Vervecki Foundation is kind of a, I’ll say something that sounds oxymoronic, but we’re kind of the leading partner in trying to get all of the Respond Network, all these different communities working together, mutually supporting, mutually vetting. And then the place to get started is, we’ve got the new website, it’s your portal into this, Awakening to Meaning, where you can get access to everything at all these levels and you can progress through it as you want. There’ll be people facilitating. You’ll meet Rick at different places along the way. Rick is, as I say, he’s doing a regular meditation practice for us, very much appreciated. I encourage people to go to it. I’m going to ask Rick at some time to maybe do another more advanced course. And of course, that’ll come up as it works both for him and for us. I would like to also say that the Vervecki Foundation, it’s also interacting with, funding and supporting the relevant cognitive science. So, there’s that aspect. It supports my research as well. So, it supports my cognitive scientific and philosophical research. It also supports all of this kind of work that I do. So, the Vervecki Foundation, and then it has maybe its most important function, which is to keep the fame and wealth significantly distant from John Vervecki and how many, many other people that have voices and are steering things almost autonomously from me so that John Vervecki cannot explode in some sort of megalomaniacal ego inflation, which people want to do. And I’d very much like to avoid doing that. I would like to die a good man. And I would like to be a good man for my kids and for my partner and for my friends. And so, that’s also one of the most, for most of you, that’s, oddly, that’s a selfish thing, I’m saying. But for me, that’s one of the most important functions of the Vervecki Foundation. And so, there’s Awakening, as I said, to Meaning. We’ll be having more and more courses coming online, more and more resources. Christopher Master Pietro is almost done, his final editing of the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis book. We also have the book coming out. Both of these are with Story Grid, working with Sean Coyne and his amazing team, Mentoring the Machine, which is the first of the four books that are sort of more popular versions of the video essay I gave on the looming threat of the advent. It’s not quite here, but it’s on the horizon of artificial general intelligence. So, this is the kind of thing that the Vervecki Foundation is doing and is involved in. And like I said, there’s the Awakening to Meaning website is your portal into all of these. That’s where if you want to go, and for those of you who are interested in anything we’ve been talking about here, and you want to go from the propositional to the procedural, the perspectival, and ultimately the participatory transformation, start sitting in at Rick’s Sangha. That’s a really good place to start. And there’s some other good places. We have an Introduction to Wisdom course. That’s all there. And I have to tell you, I’ve been having meetings and there’s been something that’s been both therapeutic and thrilling for me, Rick, about this, which the therapy is I’ll be talking and Chris will say, I’ll be in a meeting and Chris will say, and this project and it will refer to some project. And I only have this like 30,000 foot view of it, right? I laid out some basic, and people have taken it and it’s like, wow, that’s amazing. And having people like Taylor here, Taylor Barrett is just amazing. And the work that Eric is doing. So I’m just, this doesn’t matter, but I’ll say it. I’m just so pleased by how this is growing and taking on a life of its own. And it’s becoming this virtual dojo for people, virtual dojo. So that when people say, well, what do I do? I sort of like what happened in Awakening from the Meeting Crisis or I like this voice with Rebecca, but what do I do? Well, here’s the dojo. It’s on offer. It’s there. And then the dream is that the dojo will inseminate and help to found actual physical dojos. And I don’t just mean martial arts and not excluding martial arts, but I mean all of the sapiential arts together. Dojo literally means place where the way, the do, the do is practice. There you go. It’s not just martial arts. So that’s fantastic. Thank you for that, Rick. So that’s all what’s happening right now. And I encourage any of you who are interested in taking up, and not in some arcane esoteric woo-woo fashion, but in a serious Socratic fashion, taking up the call to wisdom and virtue. And if those words aren’t landing for you, that means something’s wrong. Something needs to transform so those words can land for you, not just in you, but in our culture. And that’s what we’re trying to do here. Okay. That’s my best blurb. No, that was beautiful, very well said and inspiring. I just want to add for technical stuff. So it’ll probably be in the show notes, but for people who are just listening and who don’t get to see, it’s vervekefoundation.org and it’s awakenedtomeaning.com. Those are the two main portals into all of this stuff. Right. That’s fantastic. Thank you for that, Rick. I tend to forget those kinds of details. That’s one of my besettings. Yeah. Well, I’m sure it’ll be in the show notes. Yeah, we’ll put it in for sure. Yeah. I’m not sure if you made it clear right now, at least in July and at least into August, I believe, at least the first week, there’s four morning things going on through awakenedtomeaning, these half-hour drop-ins that cover four different aspects of the dime model for necrology practices, D for dialogue or dialogos, I for imaginal, M for meditative or mindful, and E for embodied. And they’re like Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday at 9 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. So they’re great to just pop in. It’s a great entry point for someone who doesn’t have an ecology of practices to just start wetting your feet in these things and getting a sense of them and becoming part of a kind of online sangha. Yes. I am so happy to be a part of this. And yeah, I’m one of those volunteers and some people who are giving more complicated courses, they should be compensated. We can’t all be volunteers all the time. So it’s not about, nobody’s making money on any of this stuff. This is a labor of love. Yes. So it’s a beautiful thing. So John, this is something I learned from you, which I’ve seen many times on Voices with Fervakey. You always say, we want the guest to have the last word. So. Yeah. Yeah. Now you can guess. First, first of all, one of the reasons I wanted to do this, apart from the intrinsic value of the material we’re discussing, is I want to hang out with you. So thank you for that. And thank you for putting this wonderful series together. I’m very appreciative and I look forward to it. Rick’s been doing a lot of work organizing this, getting the people selecting. I’m very, very grateful. Very, very happy to be part of this and to promote it as much as I can. I guess beyond that and recommending that, Rick has put this framework together, the format, which will really afford you making connections between. So don’t just watch the series each episode. Don’t watch it just episodically, but look for the continuing story arc between all. That’s what this structure will afford you to do. So you can look for the synoptic integration of the whole series. I think this is very good that Rick has organized things this way. And then after those two expressions of gratitude, the final thing I’d like to say is. I think. I want. The philosophy of mindfulness, if you’ll allow me to change it slightly, Rick, the philosophy of mindfulness, I think is and I’ll use these words differently so people know what I mean now because we’ve distinguished them. The philosophy of mindfulness is a proper part of philosophy, the cultivation of wisdom, and I strongly recommend that you do that. And I strongly recommend, you know, checking out this anthology, especially if you’re a more advanced practitioner and you’re feeling that perhaps things are getting a little bit stale and you may be thinking, well, I need a new practice. You might, but you may need a new framework for your practice. And this is a great place to start that sapiential exploration. So thank you. My final thank you to Rick for putting that wonderful anthology together. Thank you, John. This is a wonderful, wonderful experience. I’m really thrilled to inaugurate it with you. Thank you. I’m looking forward to all of our all the amazing guests you have set up. So that’s fantastic. So let me thank you, my friend. Okay. Thank you, too.