https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=TeR7BiFF4gE
again. Welcome, John. Thanks, Guy. So what I wanted to talk to you about today is, and thank you very much for, you’ve read, I think it’s a penultimate draft for one of the chapters that I’m first author on that’s going in, the anthology that you are also contributing to as a first author, the Internet or Dialogues, to which I try to give a synoptic integration of a lot of what’s been going on in all of these conversations and draw together the philosophy, the cognitive science, and the practice. And there’s a part I’d like to focus in on right now, and thanks, by the way, for some of the feedback you gave on that. I look forward to some part. I want to focus in on this one part, which is the relationship between, well, so first of all, we have this notion of dialectic as a practice that helps to afford dialoguos as a process. And then I want to talk about, right, the two sides of this practice, dialectic, the collective side and the individual side and how they relate to each other and reinforce each other. And then also the relationship between dialectic as a meta-psycho technology and the ecology of practices that it serves and should always be in service to. Dialectic should not be practiced on its own. It should always be practiced in relationship to an ecology of practices. And dialectic should also, there’s another point we might want to discuss, I argue that dialectic should also only be practiced after a particular pedagogical program that develops the skills and virtues necessary to appropriately and properly practice dialectic. So that’s everything I’d like to talk to you about. Maybe this is a good entry point. Maybe not. Maybe we’re going to hold off on it. But it seems like, so I would imagine it sounds like that there’s a sense of danger if you just practice dialectic, right, on its own. What are the possibilities of how that could not go well? So I think, well, if you separated dialectic from the pedagogical, let’s talk about the two possible kinds of errors. There’s two possible omissions. The first is if you study dialectic or practice dialectic without going through the pedagogical program of cultivating mindfulness, active open-mindedness, facility with circling, facility with philosophical fellowship. And I go into all of these in the chapter and also provide links because I have videos and you have videos about all of these practices out there. They’re not just abstract words. I think that the main danger there is that when you practice dialectic, you are in serious danger of misrepresenting it to yourself, falling into deep habitual patterns of conversation and debate and discussion, rather than trying to get what is new and importantly new in dialectic as a practice. You are liable to go down paths of mutual reinforcement, mutual reinforcement of self-deceptive bias. So I think it would be like somebody leaping into a high-level sparring situation without having done all, worked through all of the belts, so to speak, and right, thinking that I can just immediately do this thing and that’s extremely dangerous. The second danger of practicing the dialectic without practicing it as a meta-psycho technology for an ecology of practices is you’re orphaning dialectic. You’re not giving it a responsibility. And so some of the seriousness of dialectic could be lost and that’s I think a definite error. And also you are unhoming it from a broader process by which people are trying to individually and collectively cultivate wisdom and transformation. And so you have dialectic not carrying out its proper role, which is to help to curate, create and coordinate an ecology of practices. And you’re unhoming it in a very profound sense. And I think that will also misdirect it and malform it in important ways. So those are the two things. And of course those two kinds of errors have a tremendous potential to really exacerbate each other and make each other worse. Yeah, totally. I mean in some senses basically what I heard you say is you run into the danger of having the same outcome as a family reunion, right, of a dysfunctional family. Yeah, you do. Yeah, it actually I also think about the culture wars and all the different things that you’re looking at culturally with this kind of really strange thing with social media that we’re still understanding. Exactly. I think actually it’s to the depth of how the depth of how deep it goes. Yeah, I mean the analogous error was the one that Pierre Hedeault pointed out when we read ancient philosophical texts and we think we’ve mastered ancient philosophy by mastering our modernist ways of reading textual arguments, forgetting that that discourse was set within a rich ecology of practices and the cultivation of wisdom and virtue. And the discourse was not a prompt, like the written discourse was not considered central. And so Hedeault argues that we deeply misapprehend these ancient philosophical texts precisely because we haven’t situated it within an ecology of practices and we haven’t situated discourse within dialectic. And so we really don’t get, until very recently, we were really deeply misreading and not getting Plato and Aristotle and Platinus and Marcus Aurelius. We really weren’t getting them at all. Yeah. And just for the listeners who are familiar, I think you made a distinction between discourse and dialectic and dialogue. When you’re talking about dialectic, do you have like a way of distinguishing that that’s that brings it out in the way that you’re meaning it? Yeah. So well, like I said, there’s both an individual and a collective version. Some discourses, you know, you’re just speaking to people. Dialogue is presumably a more open-ended kind of conversation, as opposed to, for example, a monologue or a debate. But dialectic is an actual specific practice that’s designed to try and get people, well, let’s talk about collectively first. It’s designed to try and get people into something like a collective flow state in which what they’re trying to do is not just create personal intimacy with each other, they’re trying to take up for each other, it’s interesting, the role of Socrates. They’re trying to get that group flow to be something that is constantly provoking insight, evoking aspiration, and even invoking a sense of the kind of perspectival presence that Socrates brought to bear on his interlocutors as a way of trying to afford radical perspectival and participatory transformation. And then individual dialectic, and these two, they have to be practiced together, because what you do is you internalize what happened in the group dialectic into the individual dialectic, and then you bring the transformations of consciousness, cognition, and character in individual dialectic into an enhancement of the collective or group dialectic. You’re supposed to get a virtuous circle. And what happens in individual dialectic is you practice a, it’s basically a synthesis of sort of contemplative and meditative practices. In which you’re trying to afford anagogy, you’re trying to get an enhanced psychological depth perceptions into sort of the ground of the psyche, and then you’re using that as to try and get an enhanced ontological depth perception into the patterns, not just patterns that we think about, but patterns we actually participate in. And so you’re trying to get simultaneously an awareness of them and the contact with them. So let me give an example. I use it because it’s a fairly non-controversial one, and it’s a famous one. When you’re doing, you can think about time, and that means you can have words and you can have concepts and pictures and images, and that’s fine. But time isn’t something we just think about. Time is something we actually participate in. Time is unfolding in us. You know, this is one of Heidegger’s great points, right? Time is actually at, it’s a grounding, unfolding that makes our awareness and our identity actually possible. And this is what Augustine meant when he said he knew what time was until you asked him. There’s this deeper participatory sense. You know time by being in time, by being a temporal being. And you want to, so when you can bring your awareness into contact with the actual unfolding of a pattern, that’s what I call realization. You’re simultaneously aware of it, and it is actualizing and activating within you together. So what you want to do in individual dialectic is you want to get past that thinking and speaking mind into that pure kind of awareness that couples to those patterns, those real patterns actually unfolding that constitute and ground your awareness, your cognition, your intelligence, your sense of self, and realize them, and realize how you are being realized by them. Those patterns are actually making you real. They’re realizing you as you are realizing them. And you do this in sort of a sequence, and it’s called invoking the logos. You move through sort of levels of these patterns, and this is supposed to bring about something like the what Plato called anagogy, the ascent up through levels of intelligibility and being. And so this individual dialectic is this contemplative meditative practice that is also put in conjunction with this group practice in which we are also going through this process of creating an emergent collective intelligence that is bootstrapping itself to become like a sage for us that we can internalize. And then the two. So I mean something very, very specific, explicit, and articulated as an interlocking set of practices that are designed to as close as possible reconstruct what the ancient neoplatonic practice of, at least as faithfully as possible, maybe it’s a better way of putting it, reconstruct the ancient neoplatonic practice of dialectic, and then get it into a form, a cognitive scientific form, that I can put it into, you know, deep, well, what we’re doing now, the deep discussion about how we can integrate that practice with these other emerging practices like your circling practice. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So it’s like hearing- Sorry, that was a bit of a speech. That was a bit of a speech, but I wanted to try and get all that out as an integrated idea. It struck me as you were talking, I was like, oh, you’re exemplifying it right now, right? That sense of as you were talking about it, right? I had this sense of, I’m like, oh, I think exemplifying it, and then that because I was noticing that I was, I noticed it was a right, and there was that that sense of ascent, right? So a descent bringing back into what’s at the ground, back up in the ascent. So it’s an increasing, Yeah, an increasing revelation of what we’re already always in, and specifically what I’m hearing from you is in a much deeper way, an explicit openness to the deeper patterns of what gives that which we find ourselves always already in on some level. I think that’s exactly right. So in that sense, part of what’s happened for me is I’ve gotten a deeper understanding and appreciation of Plato’s notion of the of Plato’s notion of anemesis about this deep kind of remembering, and I think it overlaps with the Sati notion of remembering in certain versions of Buddhism. This deep kind of remembering that, I don’t know what’s the work I’m looking for, but yeah, it’s I’ve been struck multiple times when I’ve confronted this idea about something that you exemplify, which is, and you just did it, this sense of that, right, that there’s a simultaneous sense of a discovery, but that the discovery isn’t an uncovering, a discovering of something that is absolutely novel. Instead, it’s a discovery of something that’s absolutely primordial, right? It points to, right, it points to, and Plato tried to get around it, tried to articulate this with his mythology of the pre-existing soul and recollection, but he was always very clear that he intended that to be taken very playfully and not too seriously. It was a way of trying to say, it’s this weird kind of knowing. It’s, and the Neil Platonists had not just an analogy, it’s like a pedagogical analogy, it’s a platform. Think about how these things come together in virtue when you are aspiring to be wise, you’re not just aspiring to learn, you’re aspiring to transform yourself, but there’s a sense in which if you have no honesty within you, you can’t recognize honesty, you won’t appreciate honesty, you won’t be able to internalize honesty, right? So you have to be able to As you are transforming to become more honest, you’re actually remembering and blossoming, fusis, the honesty that had to have been within you to begin with. And that’s exactly the, that’s why I proposed that the explicit topic for dialectical practice should be virtue, because it’s a way of trying to be more honest. For dialectical practice should be virtue, because it bridges in this powerful way. Yeah, yeah. Well, it strikes me, I think everyone can relate with this, right? Where you have a just a deep connection with somebody, and there’s this experience of like, there you are, like maybe it was the first time you met, right? And you’re like, oh, there you are. Where have you been all my life, right? Yeah. This memory of it’s something somehow it’s like, yeah, that, you know, and maybe this gets into a little bit of why virtue is so important, because it does feel as though, yeah, it’s a memory of something primordial in the sense of the possibility, I realize on some level, even though I haven’t had a word for it, right? The moment it’s experienced, or the moment I’m confronted with it, or the moment I find myself in say, like, honesty, or the virtue, I realize this is what I’ve been moving towards the whole time. It was just concealed to me, right? Yeah. Exactly. That particular, I’m glad we’re articulating this, because that is, that’s really difficult to describe, but it seems to be one of the most profoundly developmental, transformational experiences of my life, right? I think, I think, I think it is good that you do, and you should continue to do so, remind, and so there’s a bit of self-referencing of that, yeah, which is something you regularly do. I think when, so I think dialectic is a practice you learn, both the individual and the collective and the dynamic resonance between them, but when it passes into something that has a life of its own, and we are remembering in this anamnesis sense, the logos within and without, that’s when we pass from dialectic into dialogos. So I think that, that, that kind of, I knew it all along, but I’m discovering it for the first time paradox that you’re talking about. I think that’s a phenomenological marker. That, coupled to, and then the sense that this process is taking on a life of its own, that’s when we get dialogos, and that’s something that we can’t make. We can practice dialectic, and that’s why I’m sort of making this distinction, and we should. I’m advocating for that, but we can’t practice dialogos. We have to await its advent. We can practice, and you’ve used the metaphor before, we can gather the logs together, you know, but the logos has to catch fire of its own accord, and I think that’s exactly right. And so, another, I’m saying this because it’s occurring to me that another potential mistake, if you don’t go through the pedagogical program, or if you don’t situate dialectic as a meta-psychic technology over an ecology of practices, is you will become too technically oriented, and you will confuse the practice of dialectic, you will confuse and conflate the practice of dialectic with the emergence, the advent of dialogos, which is something that is sacrilegious beyond our capacity to make. It’s not something we make, except in the, perhaps, in the sense in which we make love with another person. We’re not really making love. That’s sort of a misuse of the word, but we’re trying to, because it’s not like, well, I start to make love, but I’m not making love, but I’m not making love. It’s not like, well, I start and I followed the recipe, and then there it was, the structure, that’s ridiculous, right? So, yeah. It’s more like we fit ourselves. Go ahead. It’s like there’s a sense in which, yeah, there’s a sense, what I really liked about, in your paper, a couple of things. I got the distinction at a deeper level in reading in your paper about this, or your chapter, about affordances and coupling and co-fittedness, right? Yep. In that sense, I really like, especially this coupling, co-fittedness, where in some sense, you and I are, we know we can’t produce it, right? We can’t make the logos, right? No. But there are ways that we can move towards it and mimic it, if you will, like, in such a way, Yes. In the process of that, there’s that magical moment where you find yourself already in it, right? Exactly. Daniel Platon has put a lot of emphasis on this kind of intense practice to actually cultivate a state of dynamic receptivity, which is very antagonistic to our bottom line mentality of I do steps one through four, and then that produces five. What you’re doing is you’re doing this intense practice in order to cultivate the appropriate receptivity. Dionysus said, that’s actually how we love God. He says you’re like a patch of clay that’s about to receive the impression of a seal. They used to have seals to roll impressions on clay. And he said, imagine if the clay had, I’m extending for him, I’m paraphrasing, but imagine if the clay had to get, like, you don’t want the clay to be too watery, and you don’t want it to be too hard, and you don’t want it to be too lumpy. You’ve got to do all of this work, to have the most appropriate receptivity, to get the most clearest reception to the impression from the cylinder. And he basically is arguing, well, that’s what we mean when we love God. It’s not like we’re doing something or making God appear by loving him. What we’re doing is making ourselves receptive for something that transcends us, because that’s what we’re actually after. We’re trying to matter, be connected or coupled to something that transcends us, because ultimately that gives us meaning in life, and that affords the self-transcendence that’s so central for individual and collective cultivation of wisdom. Is that done? Is this a lot of what happens in mimicry? Like when it’s dialed, right? Is they, we acquire language, right, through mimics, right, over and over and over again. Yeah, so it’s, but what, in fact, what I would say we’re talking about, let’s pick up on this analogy because it’s a valuable one. Dialectic is a very sophisticated form of mimesis, of imitation, right, but imitation is not where the process ends. Imitation passes over into internalization, right, so the child pretends to take my perspective on situations, especially my perspective on how they are seeing things, and the child imitates my language use, but at some point what happens is the child internalizes, right, the child stops imitating me and actually identifies, incorporates that way of seeing into their own language use with, you know, and you can even see this higher level for yourself when you’re trying to write, and at first all you’re doing is imitating other people, but you keep doing it and keep doing it, and then you get this flip where you’ve internalized it and you get your own voice, and now you’re writing unlike any of these other people precisely because something in all, use your metaphor, all the logs of mimicry have been appropriately put together so that something new is born from them. That’s internalization, and so what we’re trying to do is the dialectic allows us to imitate actively, seriously play with patterns of logos, but the point is it should flip at some point. It should go to the point where there is a voice, right, that has emerged out of the mimicry, and we are now internalizing the logos individually and collectively. We are instantiating it. We are opening up to how it is something beyond our mimicry. Right. Imagine a child that, so you get this as a teacher, you get students that initially parrot back to you what you’ve taught them, and that’s fine because they’re practicing, they’re imitating, but you have to keep coaxing them. Okay, now make this your own. Yeah. Right, bring, like what is, and this is the Socratic element, what’s being invoked and provoked in you that has not been said in everything that you’re imitating? You have to make the mimicry a scaffold through which something new emerges. Right. Right. That’s I think where, see there’s this quality of where I always, whenever that happens, right, where it goes from dialectic to dialogos, right, the experience I have is this experience, it’s like this, it’s like I walk away and I have, there’s an experience of faith. And I have, there’s an experience of faith. It’s like, it’s the experience of that, that can happen, right, that we, that there is, and that just happened, that that’s possible in the universe. Yes. Right. Makes me want it, right, makes me, makes, it liberates me, it makes everything worth it on some levels, that experience. So just like I think that’s one of the things about raising kids is it’s precisely that, it’s where they’re mimicking something in them that doesn’t even need to know how to do it or what they’re aiming at, but they end up mimicking the right thing and it blossoms in this moment and then they realize it as their own and you experience that, like this, it’s almost like looking right at the logos of the universe and it’s deep, it gives me a deep sense of, I think just a sense of faith. It does. I’m happy to use that term in a sense that Jordan Hall and I have talked about it, you and I have talked about it, the sense of a faithfulness, an agapic coupledness to a process that you have an ongoing sense is affording realization in both senses of the word for you and so in that sense there are, there, yeah, teaching requires a faithfulness to your students, being a lover requires a faithfulness to your partner, being a parent requires a faithfulness to your child, but what dialectic gets you to awaken to is that there is a responsibility, a similar kind of agapic faithfulness to being, to the logos of being that is also incumbent upon you and you will not, imagine a life in which you never had the faithfulness of a teacher, of a friend, of a lover, of a parent, imagine how empty that life would be, well what dialectic is saying is, but there’s an, there, I’m using emptiness in the western sense, not the Chinyada sense, but imagine what they’re saying is there’s a degree in which you’re still empty because there is a faithfulness to something really profound which is the logos of being, I mean and this is, this, you see this in so many different traditions, trying to get people to wake up to the fact that, and this was the whole platonic metaphor of the anagogy, all these other faithfulnesses, right, they are ways in which we can tutor ourselves and transcend ourselves to this deepest form of faithfulness, the faithfulness to what is most real and realizable by us and to us and for us. Tutor ourselves, that’s a great word. That’s great. Interesting. I think for me this is the closest I can get to what people have met when I have regard that, when I have in my appraisal of them or apprehension of them is perhaps better or both, I see them to be truly faithful and not just asserting ridiculous things. I don’t have much to, much, I don’t really value that modern sense of faith, but when I’ve met faithful Christian or Muslims in the sense we’re talking about and then they, what I was just mentioning, that sort of ultimate concern as Tillich would say, that ultimate faithfulness, that’s the closest I can come to understand from my perspective what they mean by having faith in God. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s like the condition, it’s the, and actually as we’re talking about, I’m realizing there is, it’s very close to reverence. I think it is reverence, I think it’s reverence, and I think it’s an amnesis. Augustine said, you know, we have a hole in our, our God-shaped hole in our heart, and he doesn’t mean the emotional center, he means what we’re talking about here and now, and I think realizing that amnesis of a faithfulness to what’s ultimate, or ultimate at least for us, it’s a profound kind of reverence and remembering that makes life worth living. The analogy I have for this, I’ve given you several, but Nietzsche, you know, famously said life would be a mistake without music. Well, why? Well, because music does this, it couples you, right, it helps you to be faithful, right, from the depths of yourself to the depths of other people and to the depths of the world. Well, why? Music does nothing, what does it do? It does nothing, it doesn’t make anything, doesn’t consume anything, doesn’t empower, it doesn’t do anything, but well, what it does is it awakens, right, a faithfulness in you, it has you remember, in the sense we’re talking about, a faithfulness to the logos, and so this is enough, and this is why the musical analogies come up throughout neoplatonism and Christianity and Buddhism and especially Daoism, right. Dialectic is, dialectic is learning how to play your scales so that you get to the point where you go from mimicking the scales to remembering the music of being, and that’s theologos. Right, right, right, yes, and then I just think about the sense in which, you know, Heidegger, Heidegger talked about, he saw, Chris and I are reading the dialectic conversation between Martin Heidegger and a Japanese philosopher. Probably, I think it’s probably Suzuki, but go ahead, yeah, yeah, it’s just, it’s such a ride, it’s such a ride, like pages, you know, Heidegger’s, they’re discussing the thought that they’re not saying, right, yeah, like, and there’s a sense of like, they’re respecting something that they’re not saying, right, and they’re, in some sense, they are impregnating themselves and bearing the thought without saying it. We still didn’t get to the thought, but the whole ride, there was the sense of it, something was impregnating the conversation, right, in reading it, right, this kind of sense of, by the time, I have this sense by the time they say it, it will have already been said in some respect. So that kind of attunement to the emerging, right, in a dialogue, right, is something like, and I think what I feel personally, I think the reverence is why these moments, these experiences, these conversations where these kind of God seizures happen, if you will, right, is it wakes me up to the conditions of what made that possible, right? Yes. And I think there’s a way in which, as you notice those patterns, right, which is basically what I think you’ve been doing for years, noticing that happened there, it happened less there, what is that, is there a word for it? Maybe this is what Augustine was talking about, and, you know, later and videos later and conversations later of just tuning into something, right, and in some way this book, right, is gathering, right, is gathering the very thing. Yes. We’re back in some way. The book was always intentionally designed to exemplify what it was talking about. That was one of the intents that Chris, we’re speaking of Christopher, Master Pietro, one of the intents Chris and I had right from the beginning, right from the beginning, and that’s why it’s an anthology and etc., and all kinds of other things went into it, but that’s very much the case. But now we can circle back again. There’s two things I want to mention. One is quickly, I’ll mention it and to foreshadow, that dialogue, which has had a profound impact on me, I think of everything I’ve read by Heidegger, that dialogue is one of the things that’s most influential on me, and the thing is I think the Kyoto school is the blossoming, the fuzis of the seed that we see in that dialogue. I think that’s what the Kyoto school is, and I think we need to talk, and you and I are going to, and you and I, Chris, are going to, and hopefully you and I, Jordan, are going to explore this deep connection between theologos and the central ideas of the Kyoto school. So that’s one thing. The other is, I want to circle back, tuning in, imagine somebody who wanted to get to the ability to pick up other people’s patterns and mimicry and then play with them and innovate that we call jazz, and imagine I don’t need to learn all that other stuff first, and I don’t have to be with other people and practice with other people and practice on. I can just sit down and start jamming, and we’d think, wow, you really don’t get it. You’re just going to make a cacophonous noise, and to you it might sound like something, but it’s really not going to be jazz. What I’m alluding to is, again, if you think you should just practice this without a proper pedagogical program, without putting it into resonance within ecology of practices, you’re probably going to go seriously wrong, and this is, again, what the Neo-Platonists had this terrific pedagogical program that you may progress through, both individually and collectively, before you practice the dialectic. The thing that I can say I can definitely, from experience, emphasize about the progressive building and layering up of practices that’s actually aiming at something inexhaustible. Oh, yeah, but that’s the point. It’s very rare that I ever see that progression be anything linear. I see this in circling all the time where people will do it, and they’ll be practicing, I just don’t get it, and they’re just struggling with it, and at some moment, boom, it blossoms. Whereas somebody else who’s making incremental progress, it’s just there’s so many different factors that are involved. I want to highlight the sense of having a sense of progression around it that makes a lot of sense that you’ve been working on around this that’s intelligent. Even though it’s layered with intelligence, the progression of it is very, very unique. I like the metaphor that you just used. I’ve used it myself, too, this idea of layering, but with the layers being permeable to each other. The higher levels emerge from the lower levels. They are accepted from the lower levels, but they also emanate back down and disclose, and allow us to return and remember more from the lower levels. It’s this kind of layering. What’s important about that is I think that’s a very deep feature of us. It’s just been a profound impact on me, Evan Thompson’s idea, the deep continuity hypothesis. That’s the way cognition works, this emerging emanation, self-exacting, self-developing, dynamical process of cognition. Then the idea is reality is like that, too. Reality is a deep continuity from the primordial fields of the quantum level up to the cosmic fields or whatever, the cosmic shaping of time and space and relativity. It’s a deep continuity as well. This is something you get in Harmon’s work, in object-oriented ontology. Our deepest way of realizing the deep continuity of reality is to cultivate that deep continuity within ourselves. That’s also what the anemnesis is. It’s the cultivation of that deep continuity within, so we can realize and be realized by the deep continuity without. Yeah, that sense of that cascades. Maybe this is something we want to just also bring into what you talk about with the flow state. That cascading of insights. I heard you talk about that in other places, but there’s a way that you wrote about it that really, I was like, yeah, there’s something that there’s something is when you have these layers that are mutually affording and transparent to each other where it’s like you can start to get this. It’s funny. It’s like, I guess you start to get good at having insights. Yeah, you do. I mean, and this is work. Chris, the second author on that chapter, one of my one of my students and RAs, Emre Alcar, is the third author, and he did some independent study work with me on what goes on in group flow. And so I brought him into this chapter, because what’s interesting is what do you need for flow? What you need for flow is you need tightly coupled feedback. You need that there’s a demanding environment on you. So error matters. You need clear signal. And you need to be in a framing in which you’re doing something for its own sake. Because that’s the right. And that what Emre pointed out is the best environment is being in a situation with another human being who is dedicated to doing this practice for its own sake. They’ve moved out of the having mode. They’ve said, no, we’re going to do this for its own sake. We’re going to play with the music of intelligibility and being together. We’re just going to play for its own sake. Right. And then that person is doing their best to provide clear, tightly coupled feedback and put a demand on you to show up more, to be present more, to be intelligible more, to be insightful more. And you’re going to get into a flow state. And if you do it right, you will afford them getting into a flow state. And then you get this self-perpetuating flow state of flow states, this meta flow that creates a sense of the language that people start to use for that is religious. They talk about a collective we, a spirit, Chris and I use the term geist to try and play with that, the German sense. You get a sense of this tremendous, I don’t know what to call it. I’m struggling for a noun and I don’t have enough. You get a sense of this presence that is deeply continuous with each one of you and even the set of you, but also is something exacted above and beyond each one of you and even this just the collective set of you. That’s what I’m trying to say. Yes. Yes. And I’m going to practice, I’m going to encourage us to practice restraint with this one, but I’m wondering if this is where the notion of sinata maybe starts to enter that place that you don’t have a word for right there. But I think so. I mean, and in so far as I understand both the Nishita and Nishitani on this, right? It’s this. Got to that sense from a Western perspective of when he started to bring back his Eastern notion of sinata through basically Hegelian dialectics as for 20 years, right? Which is not the same thing as the dialect. It’s not exactly the same thing as dialect you’re talking about. No. He got, I mean, he gets it. You were gobbled up for a second. You say Nishita or Nishitani? Nishita. The older guy. Yeah. Nishita. So, yeah, Nishita gets it. But he’s also deeply influenced by James and he’s deeply influenced, of course, also by Heidegger because he actually was a student of Heidegger. Yeah. Yeah. So that, I think, yeah, there’s, I can feel two things moving towards each other. I can feel the sense, these three things moving towards each other. There’s the notion, right, that we’ve been talking about here about this interbeing. And then there’s this notion of like transjectivity. Yeah, there’s a sense in which when you are in participation, you are realizing interbeing and you’re realizing something that can’t be, what’s the verb I want to use? It can’t be, you can’t grasp it in the way that thought requires a localization of the object of thought. It’s not localizable. So, you know, you have Indra’s net, you have all these metaphors of how it’s like this dynamic holographic, right, interpenetration of everything. Yeah. And so for me, when there’s deal logos, that logos is something that allows me to participate in a mimetic fashion. In, I start to, in and through the logos, I start to have, like in this very reverential sense, I start to mimic Shunyata and that allows the point where I can start to go from mimicking Shunyata to actually internalizing it. That’s not even the right word because it’s not internally. I’m trying to pick up on our earlier idea. Like, so for me, there’s, and this is also in the neoplatonic tradition, because eventually you pass beyond the logos to the one or to the ineffable Damasius says it, right? I like one that’s like, I can count that high. But here, let’s do it. So like, notice the transjectivity and the inter being even in our attempt, like Damasius says, you can know it as you approach it, but soon as you are one with it, you can no longer know it because you don’t know it, you are it. Right. But there’s a sacred word you used. When you say oneness, there’s a dialectic in there. Because if you think of oneness as a homogeneous, right, oneness, you’re not getting it. If you think of it just as the totality of all things together, you’re not getting it. You have to do a dialectic between them until something beyond them springs forth for you. It’s not the oneness of homogeneity. It’s not the oneness of totality. It is stereoscopically beyond them. You have to run the dialectic, the moreness into the suchness, the mystery of the moreness into the shining of the suchness and the shining of the suchness into the mystery of the moreness until it goes boom for you and you are beyond it. You run the dialectic until the dia logos catches fire and then the dia logos merges you with that oneness. And then it’s like, it’s like when you look in a mirror, right, in some sense, if if all you did was ever look in the mirror and you just saw reflections in the mirror, right, the most difficult thing to see would be the mirror itself because the mirror, it’s precisely it conceals itself in its total revealing because the mirror itself is the one thing that can’t be reflected, right, so yes, but once you see the mirror, right, then you, you don’t you don’t, you don’t, you don’t represent it to yourself. It’s represented through all the things that you see, right, like the mirror. But you also, I would add one more to it. I think that’s a beautiful analogy, but you’re actually only capable of doing that move to the degree to which you have a mirroring capacity within you. It is only that which in you that mirrors that allows you to see the mirror as the mirror as opposed to the things within the mirror. The mirroring capa… Yeah, that’s… Wouldn’t that, well, that would be the mirror, wouldn’t it? The mirror capacity is… You can notice that… …ability, yeah. What I’m trying to get you to see is when you make the distinction in the object scene between the things in the mirror and the mirror, you are also simultaneously and in a coupled fashion, erect, enacting a stepping back and looking at the mind as opposed to the content of the mind, and those are bound together. Yeah. Yeah. And that is… Because I remember talking with Chris when he… I remember he was struggling for a few days of trying to… He wanted to reconstruct our conversations to put into the book. He was like, the problem is that he just had to put the actual conversation in the book because he said every single part of it reflected every other part of it. It was fractal all the way. Exactly. I thought that was a beautiful revelation of the realm it touches into. Yeah. And the thing about it is… And this goes back to the anamnesis and the faithfulness, right? This from our… And this is part of your chapter, right? Our technological way of thinking finds everything we’re talking about the most useless thing at all. It’s the most… Why would you do this? It’s such a useless thing. Right. But the thing is, until you… It’s like, if you don’t have honesty, you can’t appreciate, you can’t apprehend and appreciate honesty. And if you, right? Unless you taste and see that the Lord is good, until you do this tasting, you won’t understand what you’ve been missing. This is the whole point about these kind of profound transformative experiences. You don’t really know what it’s like to be deeply in love with someone until you’ve been in love. You can watch movies, you can read books, but you don’t know what you’re missing until it’s happened. But once it’s happened, you don’t say, well, I could do without that. You go, life without love would be a mistake. Life without music would be a mistake. And that’s… It’s the most useless thing, but it’s the most important thing for us as human beings. At least that’s what Daniel Platon has said. That is the state that acts as the touchstone by which we can, again, create, curate, coordinate all of the particular skills and virtues we aspire to. Because if they lead me closer to that touchstone, I’m on course. I have the off. If they lead me away from that touchstone, I’m off course. I’m sinning. I’m trespassing and transgressing. I’m using all this biblical language because I think it’s appropriate. Yeah, absolutely. It’s like that. And I just got this, as you were talking, I just got another a few things that kind of came together for me. As a practice, right, as the ecology of practices, on some level, well, first of all, that thing of like where you were talking about the best conditions for a group flow state is for someone to show up in the being mode, right, for its own state. And I thought when you said that, I thought, yeah, good luck. Because I think that’s what I was getting at in writing the chapter when I really started to kind of think through it and I had the feedback of the text back and forth. I just got such a deeper appreciation for their, yeah, just like, mechanician allowed us to be able to function without moving as much. Therefore, we now have to tend to our bodies because life as it is lived is insufficient for that, right? I really think that this sense of the touching into the inexhaustible, the moreness and the suchness in increasingly rapid way, if you’re just born and you live on the internet and you go to school and do all that kind of stuff, just the even width of that you would do something for its own sake that wasn’t operational at a deep level, right, the window is closing on that in a way that’s natural, right? So just in the sense of, funny, I just had a picture of like the ecology of practices and in everything, in some way, it’s like almost creating a constraint around technique, right? Like, right? It’s like, or a counter movement to that narrowing. The whole point about the ecology of practices, and this is why dialectic needs to be in service, is the ecology of practices is ultimately about the reciprocal opening, right? It’s about the reciprocal opening. And again, if you try to practice orphaned dialectic without that actual enacted developmental reciprocal opening, it’s gonna fall prey to being, you know, turned into a tech not like a particular, what did you call it? You had a instrumentalization, right? It’s gonna be like that. It’s gonna be reduced. What comes to my mind is the way in which people have regular, I mean, there’s the mythology of the evil sorcerer who takes all of these practices for wisdom and then twists them and becomes deeply self-deceptive and self-destructive and looks wise in one way, but is ultimately foolish in another. And so I think you need to have the ecology of practices progressively waking you up to and remembering the being mode, or else you’re not gonna practice dialectic in a way that’s going to lead you into dialogos. You could even get a kind of group flow going where what you’re doing is just reinforcing each other’s biases because the flow is being pursued as a commodity to be consumed for enjoyment and entertainment, or even narcissistic enjoyment, as opposed to being something that is supposed to transport us beyond ourselves. Yeah, right. And that listening to be able to hear and that listening to be able to hear. So it’s kind of there’s this sense in which, so Ivo DiGenerro, Johannes’ teacher and professor in college, he’s like one of the, they just came out with another conversation. You’ve got to see this. It’s like, it’s really dark in the best way. I mean, it’s just kind of like, it’s this dyslexic sense of chills. And one of the things I really like about DiGenerro, because he’s got this, it’s funny. There’s a book that he wrote called The Principles of Philosophy. And he kind of talks like this too. It’s, it looks like this benign little, you know, maybe boring textbook. And then three, four pages into it, you’re just slowly going, okay, and then all of a sudden you’re like, you start one person at the beginning of the sentence. And by the end of the period, you’re no longer the same person because you just, right? It’s that whatever that process is of, in order to understand something, you must become someone who could understand it. Right? Yes. He’s got that quality about him. And one of the things that he talked about was, and I really appreciate the way that he put this, is that in some sense, philosophy has been the recognition of keeping open, right, the ontological relation, the twofold, the being of being. And no one knows exactly how that happened, how someone kind of woke up and went, how is everything intelligible? What is this thing that’s non-appearant that allows everything to appear as it does? The basic fundamental philosophical question. And philosophy has been the, it’s had the job of keeping that domain of sense open. Right? And it’s funny, I got the sense is like, as the understanding of that has gone forward, it’s been more and more difficult to keep that open. Right? And where at some point Hegel, Hegel, like Heidegger talks about Hegel being the sub, like the culmination of metaphysics, right? Right after Hegel, right, is Nietzsche screaming, right? Right? Like they’re basically, it’s funny reading them as like somebody screaming like this. And so, so in this, like just, I can’t tell you just how inspiring it is, right? To have a practice where there could be a communal practice that is outside of academia, right? Includes academia, but is also people can find it and there’s a vocabulary for it, that you can start to just at least begin to hear the withdrawal of sense, right? That we can hear, we can hear the withdrawal of being, we can hear it’s not here. Like, because one of the things he said is that, you know, as you really be with the abandonment of sense or the abandonment of meaning, and you really, really take it seriously, and you really be with it seriously, you allow yourself to drop into the origin from which the abandonment sprung. And it’s in that origin, right? And I’m sensing a very similar movement of this practicing of all of this as being very, very, in some way, in some way, a very, like a deep response to that, that sense that I think he, right? I think that’s right. I mean, I think Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are both doing that. They’re both saying, they’re both saying that Hegel forgot about the fact that, well, it depends. I mean, it depends. I mean, I don’t want to get the Hegelians jumping on me right now. But at least what Nietzsche and Kierkegaard are saying is that Hegel forgot the way in which sense is withdrawing, meaning is withdrawing, that he forgot about how humans have this sickness under death. They are so capable of despair and mere conceptual, mere conceptual theorization is insufficient. I mean, my critique of Hegel is that he represents that, like, although he says so much that I find I’m in deep agreement with, there’s a sense in which Hegel represents the zenith of the fundamental mistake in ontotheological theology, which is the opposite of what we just said. The idea is that without undergoing deep transformation, I can nevertheless speak the truths about ultimate reality. And yet the counterclaim of both, especially of Kierkegaard, but you also see it in Heidegger, sorry, in Nietzsche, especially if you take into account Heidegger’s critique of Nietzsche, is no, no, no, let’s bring back the ancient idea that the most important truths are only accessible to us in and through transformation. They are never speakable. All we can do is extend towards them in an ongoing trajectory of transformation, and only the trajectory of transformation. Pardon me? Couple with them, embody them. Yes. Well, yes. Yes. And also be be adduced by them, be drawn beyond ourself by them. So I think that what, you know, existentialism tried to do is to, to wake us up, up to that fact. But the, the, the, and that’s why I like the existentialists like Marcel, who tried to reintegrate the Kirsten Neoplatonism into existentialism, more the Kierkegaardian side of thing. But the problem with the existentialists is, for all of their talk about this, they don’t actually do any of the pedagogy. They don’t tell us how to do it, how to practice it. Right? They tell us we should do it. And they give us wonderful, you know, I just finished reading The Plague by Camus, I read it with Dan Schiappi. And you get wonderful examples, wonderful examples, and plays, and essays, and books. But you don’t get the Philosophia. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. And you, and, and, and if you’ll allow me, I hope you take this in the spirit of love. You have enacted a critique of Heidegger. Your whole endeavor to create circling points to that Heidegger shared that mistake. He did not do enough of, yes, but how do I transformatively practice this? Your whole project is an existing critique of this deep lacuna in Heidegger. Right. Right. Totally. Totally. Well said. Well said. Yeah, well said. Although, also to give him credit, like, listening to the ways that he lectured, right, and hearing the accounts of going to a lecture of Heidegger, was an enactment of, he would pull it out of talking about that thing. And that’s what was so luminous, I think, to people. Yeah. But this is also, that can be a version of the Experts Fallacy, right? The Experts Fallacy is one is still good at enacting something that one is actually a very bad teacher at enabling other people to do it. Right. And so, yeah, I don’t want to get into an argument with you about evaluating Heidegger. I think I’m saying we’re doing something really important, all of us, this whole community, we’re doing something important in that we are trying to, like, right now, we, and this is good, I’m not disparaging it, we’re talking often very abstractly, and that’s important, because we’re trying to work out the cognitive cultural grammar for this so that we can communicate and commune with each other. But in the end, right, you and I are talking about how all of this can be put deeply and progressively into practice. Absolutely. That’s what matters. Right. And specifically, specifically, practice in such a way that when you’re not thinking about practicing and you’re living your life, you find yourself responding more beautifully. Beautiful, beautiful. Yes. It’s a practice that permeates you to the primordial guts of your being. Yes, exactly. That’s what I mean about, you know, I’m using the word internalization, but it’s deeper. It’s internalization not just into your metacognition, it does that, but it’s an internalization into the very machinery of yourself, the very machinery of your agency, the very machinery of your being in the world. Yes. Because that’s when, because it’s when it’s, I mean, I mean, so many people said this, but I’m thinking of Gregory Bateson, right, he’s considered the second father of cybernetics, right, where he talked about behavior and perception are so tightly coupled. You can’t, it’s like that your behavior is an expression of the way the world shows up for you. And so these are, this practice is in some sense is like a, they’re almost like asanas, right, of stretching things like perspective, right, participation, participatory knowing, right, all listening, all of these things where you’re just going, doing these deep dives and these asanas, right, so just like after a yoga class, you’re in the next few days, you’re just more centered in gravity, you’re responding better. So I think it’s like these, the philosophical philosophy of practice, this, the meditation, all of these things have to do with allowing you to hear more of the profundity of the world, right, in a way that it just shows it, it shines forth to you, right, you’ll know it in your response, you’ll know you see it because when you respond with more tears, you’ll respond with more, you’ll start to want to, you’ll start to hit domains in which you wish that there were words for that you don’t have, right, like you’ll have experiences, right, and less fantastical, not necessarily fantastical, but you see the innate, it’s like been there the whole time, like oh my god, my mother’s been that wise and I’m just seeing it now, right, yeah, yeah, that make life so where being can shine through. Exactly, I mean it’s, I think of Rue Sintens’ work in, you know, the musicality of the intelligibility of being, and you imagine if you had been deaf, and you were given hearing so that you could hear music for the first time, and you get that weird remembering because music is so natural to human beings, and then you realize in a way you could never have realized before how much you were missing music, and how much life is a mistake without music, and so that’s, you know, that’s what we’re trying to, I mean the neo-Platonists had, you know, a myth for this, you know, you become capable of hearing the music of the spheres, and we don’t believe in the sphere, you know, the concentric universe or anything like that anymore, but ultimately that’s not relevant to the metaphor, the metaphor for them was you start to hear what was something you couldn’t hear before, and only after that transformation do you realize how much you were missing it, and how much you were living a life that was a mistake because you couldn’t listen to it. I would, I honestly, and sorry this just, I don’t want this to be self-aggrandizing, I’m not claiming to be enlightened or a sage or anything ridiculous like that, and it is ridiculous, but to the degree to which I hear this with the help of beloved people like you, I don’t want any human being to not hear this. I don’t, I think, and I think we could, I mean again, but we have all the problems in the world, yes, and we need to solve them, but contrary to what you might think, being able to hear this actually makes you better at responding to reality, and that’s, and what we’re talking about, about all these other big problems, is that human beings talk and talk, but they don’t really, they don’t seem to be really capable of responding to the reality of the situation, and so hearing this music makes you more responsible to reality as it unfolds for itself, not as you wish it were unfolding. Right, Mr. Mears, UDIs. Yeah, there’s, I mean there’s two sides to it, right? Think about listening to music as this metaphor. There’s discernment and there’s disclosure. I have to sharpen my discernment, but I have to be receptive to the disclosure, right, and the two have to mutually afford and interpenetrate each other. That’s the musicality, yeah, and that’s the thing, like as you’re saying, that this is, this is actually what I mean, is that consider, consider the music is playing all the time, right? It’s even playing in the most nihilistic moment of evil. There’s still the music playing, right? It’s not that it’s not playing, right? It’s that it has to do with, there’s a, the thing that can hear it is the exercise. This is the yoga, right, is such that you begin to hear the music that’s always playing. It’s in the silence, it’s in the most anal, ordinary sense, it’s in the grandest sense, it’s the music that’s playing, yeah. Yeah, and it’s like what we’re learning to do in Dialectica de Diologos is to sing ourselves into that music so it is more disclosed to us and to other people. Yes, right, right, right, and here’s that, here’s that, here’s that kind of open thing about, I got this, I got this actually from, from, you know, Rack just living with, living with the, the Heraclitus basically in his fragments. Yeah. When he talks about, when he talks about, at least, at least the translation that I was, I was using, it’s, instead of listening to me, yeah, instead listen to the logos or, yeah, more precisely, gather yourself into the gathering itself. Yes. Knowledge, oneness atones all. Right. And what I, and I, so when I, when I started thinking about that, I was like, you know, first pass, right, just first one, it’s like, oh yeah, okay, if you listen to the logos, you realize everything’s one. No, no, he’s not, it’s, it’s basically saying on some sense that it, that if that were the case, there’d be no reason for the beginning of the section, right, it’s no, it’s when you gather, when you gather your logos into the logos itself, right, it, you become fitted to it. That is the process of the one atoning all, like, yes, you in some sense, it’s through your participation, right? We’re not separate from it. It’s on some level, you are participating in the music, right, in some deep. That’s one of my favorite fragments from Heraclitus. The other one that comes to mind when you mentioned that, and I think they belong together, is, you know, I searched out myself, that’s well, I’m putting two fragments together, and the psyche has a logos that grows beyond the psyche. He has a logos that grows beyond itself, right? So the, the, the logos of the psyche is not just sort of a stable, you know, space or structure. The psyche is the logos of the psyche is like, like we’ve been talking about here, it’s constantly emerging from itself. And that is what gives him the sense of how the logos in reality, you know, the universe is an ever kindling fire going out by measure and kindling by measure, right? Where the fire is, of course, a symbol of the logos. And I, you know, I share Heidegger’s astonishment at these guys. Like, I don’t know what, like, what did I do today? Like, I compare it to, like, what was going on then? What’s going on in the actual revolution? What’s going on with Parmenides and Heraclitus and then with Socrates and Pythagoras and, and Plato? It’s just, yeah, it’s like, it’s just, and we have to, we, we have to, we have to recover them in our recovery of ourselves. We have to be recovered together if we’re going to hear this music again. Right, right. This return to origin, right? In the deepest sense, right? Yeah, well, you talked about that in your, your chapter. Yeah, the, the origin area, as opposed to just the original. Yeah, very much. Yes. Initiating, right? Not, not the, of course, from which, which is earliest, but that which, that, that which is already coming towards us, right? The origin of, yeah. Yes. Yes, yes, yeah. This, and the, and the, and the deep sense, I mean, and you, you get this in both Parmenides and Heraclitus. And I think Plato’s great insight is that the two of them have to be put together. We may not completely agree with how Plato put them together, but that they have to be put together is, I think, one of, one of many, one of several profound insights on Plato’s part. But you get the sense in both Parmenides and Heraclitus, what they share is this reverence, right? For all of the ways in which we have dichotomized them and represented them as opposites, right? Heraclitus says change is real, and Parmenides says, you know, eternity and timelessness and changelessness, and they’re opposites. But there’s a sense in which, at a deeper level, they are so bound together in this profound reverence, right? This profound reverence. Right. And that reverence, that’s, we keep returning to that word, that reverence, that virtue, as a virtue, reverence, just seems it keeps going back there over and over and over again. Well, reverence is the virtue of wonder and awe, right? And would you want to live a life without wonder and awe? I remember wonder isn’t the same thing as curiosity. I wouldn’t like, I want, that’s, that’s the unexamined life that’s not worth living, a life in which I can’t hear, I can’t experience, I can’t participate in wonder and awe. But you need the virtue. Remember, virtue is a power, it’s a habit, a skill, a capacity, both to experience wonder and awe and to appropriately respond to it when it appears. That’s what reverence is about. And we’ve lost it, of course. And we’ve lost it not just because, you know, not just because, I mean, sorry, this sounds like I’m diminishing your argument. Your argument is powerful and important. But I think we’ve, you know, the argument about the emergence of, you know, the technology that as our ossified metaphysical lens that puts everything into a standing reserve, totally in service of, I think that is profound and important. But I’m also, I think that needs to be conjoined to a kind of psychodynamic critique about the way in which religions have traumatized people and confused reverence with kind of a deference to an overweening and oppressive authority that has made many people psychologically incapable of reverence because of the way they have been traumatized. And I think those two things obviously have to do with each other. But I think I just wanted to emphasize, I think there’s a way in which, in addition to the commodification of the world, we’ve had the traumatization of individuals that has made reverence very, very difficult for them. Right. Right. Right. That seems like a whole other conversation that we could dive into. Yeah. This has been great, John. It’s been wonderful. This has been really, really, I really appreciate it. I appreciate you. You’re doing, I appreciate this conversation, the project. Yeah. Well, I feel the same for you. I appreciate you and everything you’re doing and the way your project and the way your project contributes to our joint project in such a beneficial fashion. So, like I said, I’m looking forward to our discussion where we can bring some of this into, with Chris, into the relationship between Diologos and Sunyata. Yes. And having Western Neoplatonism talk deeply to the Kyoto school. I think this is so needed for our time. Yeah. And I think the way you just said, for our time, just a little pre-frame of where I’m thinking about, that’s what, like time and Sunyata. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Very much. Very much. Take good care, my friend. Take good care.