https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=x-MTQcxhh38
Awesome. We are good to go. Welcome back, John. It’s very nice to see you again. It’s very good to be back. I thought our last conversation was just great. So I’m very pleased to be here. Yeah. And I think we’ve built a, I was just saying, I think we’ve built a good foundation to kind of take some next steps on. So honestly, just right off the bat, I think the easiest place to start this is if you have not seen the first conversation that we had together, that is required reading for this because we’re going to kind of just take it with a running start. But I might do a two minute summary for people just to give a sense of kind of where we’re at, because I think we came to a really nice end point with our last conversation. So the kind of arc we took was by nature of being human, you know, a thinking thing in a body, you are always confronted with perennial problems. These are always there, always lurking. They adapt to you as you adapt to them and left unattended, either one or many. These can actually be a highly detrimental force to an individual, a community, a culture at large. They can actually be on the level of an existential threat for the long term viability of these things. And, you know, as they get left unattended, as the kind of weeds grow, you end up with something like a meaning crisis, right? Something where there’s just rampant confusion, isolation, all these things that stem from this. And so okay, you know, humans are highly adaptable machines, you know, we’re not going to stand there and just take the punches. And so to address these things, we actually do have some responses. We have psychotechnologies, ecologies and practices, you know, spiritual and religious activities, communities that, you know, much like the perennial problems, can be adaptive, grow with us, scale in size and number, so that we can actually do this kind of dance with chaos, right? And actually, you know, stay functional, stay healthy and stay smart. And another thing that’s, I think, important with them is all of those things are non-physical in nature, right? They’re not an actual tool that you hold. They’re a mental tool because all of the problems that we have are non-physical in nature, or at least the perennial problems that we were highlighting. They’re just, you know, things that come on a spiritual level, on a communal level. And so then, you know, we basically spoke about, well, when a group of people come together to cultivate those things and put them into practice, it looks very much like a religion. And so, cool. So that’s basically what we need right now, because we also, you know, gave light to the fact that we’re probably in the middle of one of these right now. There are a number of things coming up that are becoming increasingly untenable, if left alone. And so, you know, some work needs to be done. And why does it need to be done? Because the culture as it stands right now, arguably is generating a lot of these things. And if it continues on this path, that’s probably not a way we want to go. So we actually want this thing, and want to create this thing, to kind of bottom up, usurp and steal the culture back in a way that actually prioritizes the individuals, their flourishing, and the, you know, collective well-being of the whole. Well said. Very well said. And we kind of topped it off with a little cherry of, well, how do we do that? We have some avenues. We have diologos, flow states, circling communities at large, the serious play, actually architecting the culture that we want to live in. And so then that leads us here today. You know, the way I was just bringing it up to you is, a lot of that, a lot of that first conversation was making the case for the what and the why, right? What is actually going on here? And A, why should we care? And again, I think if you care about yourself, others in the world, you should actually have some skin in the game here, because it’s on that level of importance. But what I noticed both in myself and in others in this space is, you know, there can be this showing up where you have this motivation, you’re hungry, you’re like, yes, I want to do this. Like, let’s go do this. You know, I’m in, tell me what to do. And that almost becomes the problem, is we show up here, and there’s this kind of gaping void of, well, I don’t know what to do. You know, I don’t know what tools I have. I don’t know where the other people are. And there’s this kind of yawning opening that spawns up. So I hope that, and again, this is a little more uncharted territory here, but I hope that we can, like, fumble our way into, yeah, here are some of the tools you have, here are some of the ways you can think about doing this, here’s some of the scaffolding you have. And if you can start filling that in, you know, you might, and through some iterations, we might actually, you know, have something that looks like a cohesive, coherent answer to this. Great. That sounds fantastic. So one of the things that I think will be important that we kind of just brushed over last time. So we did the whole ecologies of practices, psychotechnologies, what they are, how they can be used, why they’re important. But you and Jordan Hall have also been covering some really interesting ground on the meta-psycho technology. And I’d love if you could just delineate that a little more, explore that, because I think that will be, you know, we were kind of talking about this starting point, where do I start from? What do I have? That feels in that realm. Okay. Thanks, Eric. By the way, just great summary, great setup. So yeah, I mean, I’ve been doing some discussions with Jordan Hall, and then four-way discussions with Jordan Hall, Guy Sendstock, Christopher, Master Pietro, also some three-way discussions with Andrew Sweeney and with Chris, with Andrew Sweeney and Zach Stein. So, you know, doing a lot of this, working it out, and also exemplifying it for people. And my main partner in this work is Chris, Christopher, Master Pietro. We’re putting together right now an anthology of the major players in this movement. It’s called Inner and Outer Dialogues. The anthology is going to be done soon. It will introduce you to all of this, the DIAlogos and Dialectic, and then a whole family of practices like Dialectic for trying to put you into DIAlogos. You know, Guy is going to be there. Chris and I have written stuff. Thomas and Elizabeth from Evolve, Taylor Barrett, who’s doing stuff on bringing an experimental model in, Norbateson in a warm data lab, a ton of people. Okay? So there’s going to be, there’s a resource that’s being generated right now and it’s going to be done soon that will basically do two things. It will introduce you to this whole area and this topic, introduce you to the main players, their main ideas, so you can pursue them individually and also see how they could be put together. So I’m going to try and speak to sort of at that level. Of course, I have to give emphasis to my own particular thing because that’s what I know more intimately. But I do want it understood I do want it understood that when I talk about Dialectic and how it affords DIAlogos, I’m not making an exclusive claim here. In fact, I see it as belonging to a family that’s exemplified in this anthology. Now, another thing about, there’s one sense in which I think you’re absolutely right and it’s appropriate to start here. But so the order of intelligibility, the order of explanation is not the pedagogical order, right? In the sense of the order of training. So you don’t start with dialectic as your training. That’s not how I see it. There’s a pedagogical program you would engage in in order to undertake it. So we can come back to that but I want to understand that, yes, I think this is a good place to start the discussion. I don’t want it understood that this is the place where you would start to answer the question you asked me. How do I get started? Okay, so let’s be clear that this is a good place to start the discussion but this is not the best answer, the initial answer to how do I get started. So the idea, and you were right, I do owe the emergence of this idea appropriately enough to a dialogue I was having with Jordan Hall. Jordan and I have become good friends and Jordan was talking about the need for a meta-psycho technology. And the idea here is what a meta-psycho technology is. It’s a higher order technology whose main function is to help you collect and curate practices and coordinate them. And we talked a bit about how to coordinate the practices within an ecology of practices. And the idea is it’s going to help you collect, curate, coordinate, bet particular practices so that you get a viable ecology of practice, viable in two directions, viable for you individually and viable so that you can share it with other people. It doesn’t mean that everybody will have the same ecology of practices. There’s going to be, it’s a pluralistic model, not a relativistic model, a pluralistic model in which people are going to have shared principles, shared sort of vocabulary and grammar for how they put the ecologies together. And then they’ll have different, I’ll share this set with you and this set with her and you two, right, it’s like the way families, right, if you look at a bunch of people, they don’t all look the same. They share overlapping features and they all belong together. So that’s the model I want for people to understand this. So the idea here is why would it be a meta-psycho technology? Well, it’s a meta-psycho technology because it’s going to be the place where we can most directly cultivate in a mutually sustaining and mutually affording fashion, both individual wisdom and collective wisdom. So we’re going to try and coordinate how we bootstrap individual intelligence into individual wisdom and that’s going to be coordinated with how we bootstrap collective intelligence, the collective intelligence within distributed cognition up into collective wisdom. And the idea is that’s kind of the best we have. That’s the best place we can turn to in order to get guidance, in order to get well wisdom in how we can choose and, you know, collect, curate, coordinate various practices into what we call a due practice. So the idea is that dialectic is the practice and then dialogos is the process it ensues. So the idea is that dialectic, insofar as it regularly, reliably affords getting into dialogos, is going to give you things that will help to counteract all the negative effects of the autodidactic religion of me that people fall into, which tends to exacerbate self-destructive patterns. It can enhance narcissism, which is very dangerous. It contributes to a sense of fragmentation and isolation. I understand why people do it, for reasons we talked about at length last time, but the idea is it will help counteract that. It will also be a place in which people can practice and also deeply experience those enhanced connections, the enhanced religio we talked about last time, you know, the enhanced sense of connectedness to themselves, the enhanced sense of self-division, the enhanced sense of connectedness to themselves, to each other and the world. What’s amazing when people get into these practices is they discover a kind of intimacy that is, it’s not, of course, it’s not sexual intimacy or anything like that, but it’s kind of, it’s, the adjective is, the adjective that should be used has the wrong meaning, because what happens is people become intimate with intelligibility, with how they’re making sense and how the world can make sense to them and how they can make sense to each other. And all of those three intelligibilities are intermixing. So the adjective I should use for syntactic reasons to talk about the intimacy is intellectual intimacy, but that just sounds totally wrong, and so that’s why I don’t use it. So it’s something more like, you know, what was captured in the Greek term phylia, that sense of reciprocal intimacy of making sense with each other together. And it’s a, so what we’re trying to do is literally enact phylia of Sophia, of wisdom. And so the point is that dialectic has both a group aspect to it and an individual practice aspect, so it also helps you to bridge between community and individual practice. And that’s good, because we want to always keep the tension, the creative tension between individuation and participation going. And so it helps people to bridge, it helps them to see how they can fit in to a larger community, and then also how that larger community can fit into them. So it helps to bridge that way. And so it also helps to build those communities. And those communities are going to be important for people to make most of the transformations they’re actually seeking, because most of the way we grow is through other people, both in the sense of going through them and by means of them. And so those are the reasons why dialectic, it’s a psychotechnology, but it’s a meta-psychotechnology, because the process in genders, dialogos, is so central to addressing all of these concerns about how we would create an ecology of practices and situate it within a sangha, within a supportive community in which people are meeting together to regularly edify, challenge, and promote each other’s growth. Yeah, beautiful. And again, this theme, this came up a lot in the first conversation as well, and for very good reason, this sense of the dynamic reorganizing feedback loop. And I think that is one of, I’ve heard in one of these conversations, I think that is one of the central, not central, but major obstacles with the classic established religions today is that there is almost an entire lack of that feedback loop. It is very much just one way. And in that sense, there is no steering, there’s no turning or realigning. And yeah, I think that was a beautiful explanation. And one of the other reasons that came up for me was just, there’s a growing sense of time is of the essence here. We should have been doing this a long time ago, and we’re still just trying to agree on the rules and stuff. And so if we’re going to do anything, we should have some reasonable expectation that it’s going to at least be our best shot at this moment. If we don’t have a way of actually discerning that and then taking action on it, well, that’s almost a non-starter from the beginning. This isn’t exactly just a spray and pray formula that we want to use. We want to have some semblance of okay, vetting and enacting, and again, getting that quick feedback. And so yeah, that does seem like a, yeah, I think you know. That is, I think, I mean, that’s one of Jordan Hall’s, I think, excellent points. He keeps pointing out, like myself, Jordan is very respectful of the traditional religions. But also like myself, he thinks the urgency of the issues that we’re facing and how those issues are themselves dynamically complexifying issues. They’re evolving and they’re evolving to become ever more complex at an ever-increasing rate. And so the way, again, with much respect, even reverence for the established or traditional wisdom traditions of religions, we have to also, I agree with him, we need something different now. We need something that’s a difference in kind because the difference in the degree of change is so great that we need a difference in kind. So we need to try and think about how to put this together in a way that has a corresponding capacity for dynamic evolution so that we can constantly, as you said, dance with the emerging chaos in an effective and adaptive manner. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And so one of the groups I want to bring up into this, because I feel like they dance around the outskirts of this, and at least in my vantage point, are growing both as a positive side and as a negative side, which is the growing spiritual but not religious group. I have my own thoughts on kind of this group and how it plays into all of this, but do you have any initial thoughts in hearing that? Like where? Yeah, yeah. So I mean, there’s a sense in which the spiritual but not religious are the people that I’m most trying to reach, because with this idea of the religion that’s not a religion, because I understand, well, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to sound pretentious. I think I have a fairly good understanding of where they’re at and where they’re coming from. So on the one hand, to say they’re not religious, what do they mean by saying they’re not religious? Let’s work it that way. Well, they typically mean is they don’t want to belong to any organization that has any kind of political structure, any kind of stable ideological framework that has to be adhered to. Now, there’s mistakes in that, but let’s try and pick up on what’s motivating it. Well, what’s motivating it is they have seen political organizations and ideological worldviews drench the world in blood and continue to do so. And they have an intuition often, sometimes it’s more of an explicit argument, that that way of approaching things is driving the polarization that is ripping the United States apart. And in some ways, that’s of course infecting the rest of the world, it’s inevitably going to. So I understand where that’s coming from. Why don’t they just become atheists then? Why don’t they just line up behind Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins? Funny enough, Sam Harris is actually becoming, is this the right way to say it? He’s becoming more and more spiritual with time as things unfold. But you know what I mean, why not just become an atheist and just go, well, because first of all, the secular political ideological organizations and movements have been just as bad, in fact, if not worse, in drenching the world in blood. So no, right? And then the idea that, and this goes to the heart of what we talked about last time, there was something in these religions, there was something in these religions, there were practices, there’s an intuitive sense that, you know, I get into these patterns, these self-destructive, self-destructive patterns, and I get disconnected from myself and other people in the world. And I don’t know how to integrate aspects of myself in a way that seems to take or to sustain. And so I want to be spiritual, meaning typically, I want to cultivate practices of self-transcendence, self-transformation, and that will make me wiser. I mean, that’s not always the word that’s used, but I would argue that’s always the concept that’s being used. And so they get that, you know, wisdom is needed, and that wisdom isn’t just like learning knowledge from a book. Wisdom, it’s the kind of knowing that requires deep transformation. And so what they mean is, well, I care about these problems of meaning, and I care about cultivating wisdom, but I’m terrified of both the religious past and the political past, and I’m terrified of ideological thinking. And so I’m going to be spiritual, but not religious. Do you think that’s a fair representation of what’s at work for this group? Yeah. So the thing about that for me is, I understand that problem, and that’s why I try to articulate what I call the religion that’s not a religion, in that it’s a religion in that it’s trying to acknowledge that there’s so much from our religious heritage that we need to exact. But it’s also acknowledging that we don’t want to fall into the traditional thinking patterns, even the secular versions of them, within, you know, Nazism and communism, because those are, to my mind, pseudo-religious ideologies. And so we don’t want, we want to somehow do that acceptation without falling into any of the totalitarian temptations. And populism is also a totalitarian temptation, and it’s also a highly pseudo-religious phenomenon. If you don’t think so, look at how people are following Trump. I mean, it’s right. So all of that being the case, I think I take that problem very seriously. Now, I think the spiritually, but not religious people, are also making some very serious mistakes. So one of the most serious mistakes is that tends to be identified with, well, this is a purely individual project. This is something I do on my own, I do it for myself. And that very quickly, is it really not a religion? It’s just the religion of me. The religion of me and why my experiences are sacred and the things I go through. And the problem with that is it has the problems we talked about earlier, that really, really exacerbates all of the dangers of autodidactism. It locks you into individualism as an ideology. And let’s be clear here, I’m not talking about moral individual responsibility. That’s something we all bear and is inescapable, and we are obligated for that. I’m talking about a particular ideology of how human beings are and how they should live that is called individualism, that was generated historically in the Enlightenment period. And I think that ideology is largely bullshit, because most of our development and most of our cognition is done in distributed cognition. And there’s increasing evidence that we are much better at growing and overcoming self-deception in distributed cognition. We are much more rational in distributed cognition than we are in individual cognition. Now, of course, distributed cognition can go off the rails too, and that’s why we have to do what we were talking about earlier. We have to organize it properly. But I think the idea that, well, I can do this individually, autodidactically, that’s going to be rife with error. Secondly, it tends to promote a kind of narcissism. It tends to, and the individualism and narcissism, they tend to reinforce each other. Because what tends to happen is people tend to get into the idea that what I should be doing is collecting wonderful experiences that I can put on my little ego trophy shelf that show to myself and to anybody who challenges me how really unique and special I am, and therefore, why you should pay attention to me or consider me important, even though I haven’t done anything particularly ethically or epistemically useful or important to other people. And that’s a big, big problem. The third thing, and these are not necessarily separate, these are only analytic distinctions, they’re often found together, is the phenomena of spiritual bypass, which is the idea that I will avoid pain and trauma and character flaws and personality disorders or defects by being spiritual. And I’ll bypass all of the messy shit that is at the core of human spirituality. You don’t think it is. Look through the wisdom traditions. They keep telling people, that messy stuff, that yucky stuff, that is an integral part of spirituality. And so people use spiritual but not religious as a way of engaging in spiritual bypass. And so there’s just a lot of dangers. Again, remember what I said at the beginning, everyone. I understand. I think I have a fairly good explanation of why people do this. What’s their reasoning and what’s the motivation? But I’m asking everyone now to understand equally the dangers and the threats, and that we need to pursue an alternative to spiritual but not religious. Yeah, that was incredible. So many of the things, I have actually a few points to add on that, because that was absolutely masterful. And again, I think it is worth acknowledging, it is coming from a place of good faith. It’s people’s like, I do recognize the need in this, because they probably come from a point where I didn’t have this before. All these things came up as expected. Again, wisdom tradition has been talking about this for a while. And so it’s like, okay, I’m going to do this. And then we run into this like baby in the bathwater thing where it’s like, well, I don’t want to believe in the resurrection of Jesus in these fairy tales. So obviously, the whole thing is bunk. Let me go discover all this for myself. I think the biggest point of it that comes up for me is, we were just talking about the times of the essence here. And it’s like, I’m sorry, I don’t have the time to wait for you to make all the mistakes that people have been making for several thousand years. And they wrote it down. And I think that’s the they wrote down the ways to actually avoid that or get through it easier. And yet you’re just off, running around, doing all this stuff for yourself. You come across the, oh, I realized I’m God. It’s like, okay, we got to go through this thing that’s going to take up some more time. There’s just all these things that have been written down. And again, one of the ways that gets avoided is, if you are taking this seriously, because it can be, I think there is the sense of the spiritual world as kind of hippie dippy nonsense. It’s all just flower stuff. But digging down or taking it seriously enough, it can be extremely difficult. You’re rewriting the way you view reality. You’re rewriting your place in the entire story. It is not always easy. And to counterbalance that, you need containers. You need containers that are conducive to do the already difficult work. And if you’re doing that by yourself and you don’t have the community, the container, again, it just goes haywire. It goes haywire really quickly and you can actually do an extreme amount of damage to yourself. This is how you get stuff like cults too. This is how you get ridiculous stuff. And it’s like, yeah, so to your point, there are real threats and dangers. And the greatest part about that is we don’t actually have to figure out how to answer those because they’ve been answered by several different traditions for several thousand years. It’s like, yeah, okay, like they are right here. And yes, again, nothing is perfect. No one is perfect. Nothing we’ve ever made is perfect. But that does not mean by any sense that we can just toss out the entire utility of it. I think that’s well said. The difficult task is again, to, as you said, respect the good faith is that how do I, and this is where again, where you’re doing this on your own is not going to be not a good idea. You know, you should, so when you think about holding in two hands, on one hand, you should be looking at these traditions, but you’re trying to, you have this question. Well, how do I know what I should take from these? And also, how should I take it from them? And this is where this is where cognitive science can be a tremendous help. And science is also something you don’t do autodidactically. It’s something that you don’t by getting involved, right? You may not want or want or be able to belong to that community, but there are many people, you know, I’m one of them, who are offering to help bridge, who are offering to help say, here is that cognitive science and here is how you can make use of it. So you can get guidance on how to draw from these traditions and how you can draw from these traditions in a way that will ultimately fit into a scientific worldview, potentially transform it. And that’s a tricky thing. And it’s also interacting with this other creative tone-offs, this tension we’re trying to manage between, as you said, providing people with containers, you’ve got to frame, or you’re going to hit the frame problem if you don’t frame things. So totally, totally on board with that. But you also want to give space, right, you know, so that emergence can happen, precisely because we can’t just repeat the past. This is where Jordan’s argument comes in again. And we have to acknowledge that there are emerging communities of practice that are doing what we’re talking about, but they’re also innovating and coming up with new ideas. Like I was just talking again to him yesterday, my good friend, Rafe Kelly, and the kind of things he’s doing. And so, like trying to get all of that held properly together, this is again why we need, we need distributed cognition, we need DIA logos. We’ve got to tap into our evolving very best of distributed cognition in order to help people with these problems. Oh, that’s beautiful. Yeah, the one thing that came up there as well is when people do try to take stuff, because they might actually get to the point of also acknowledging, well, it’s like, okay, well, the whole thing isn’t nonsense. But then you end up with this, I called it, I was writing about this the other day, I called it the Mr. God Tato head, where you just end up with this mashup of like Christian, neo-Buddhist, Hindu stuff. And it just comes together in this amorphous blob that actually ends up making less sense when they try to articulate it than any of the individual ones. And it drives this sense of, well, this is the process of a lifetime. And in some ways that point is valid, but in others, it’s well, what are you actually trying to do here? And again, even that question becomes impossible to answer, because they don’t know what they’re exactly trying to do. They don’t have language for it. They don’t know how long it should take. They don’t have pathways to actually go do this. And it’s like, yes, your evolving relationship with life is an ongoing process. But if you’re just trying to come into right relationship with yourself, that doesn’t have to be something that takes eight decades. That could actually be an outcome of a process. However, you’re not in a community. You don’t have the scaffolding to actually do that. And so, yeah, there’s this growing just no man’s land of I’m doing this, but I don’t know what I’m doing, why I’m doing it, or where I was going. And it’s like, again, guys, we need to get this together like yesterday. We need to all be able to sit at the table and again, to your point, actually be a contributing player to the game and not just kind of fumbling around the game board. I actually need to go from players to designers. We’re designing a new one. And if this thing is going to take you a lifetime, well, you’re never going to be able to take your seat at the table with the rest of us. That’s that’s well said. That’s very well said. Yeah, we by Leah Sophia, we need the best wisdom we can come up with the chances that you’re going to get that on your own by being an eclectic dabbler are very small, are very small. Again, I understand why people are tempted that way. And I want to be responsive to that. But I agree with you, I that that is not that is not a good strategy. And it’s certainly especially now, not a good strategy because of the exigent nature of the situation we’re in. Yeah, I have one, one line I want to introduce here from one of your other conversations. I don’t even know if it’s going to require a comment. It may very well not, but I just love the way it was said. You spoke a couple weeks ago with Jun-sung Kim. Yes, I say that reasonably. Jun-sung Kim. He is a former student. He is an ongoing RA and TA and co authored with me that and big hat tip to that conversation, the cognitive science of magic. That was unbelievable. One of the lines that came up is, you know, religion and spirituality as practices do not require the supernatural as a theory to function. That’s right. And I don’t even know if you have a comment on that. But I think that’s absolutely worth putting in because it may very well be. Again, there aren’t many current examples of religious spiritual institutions that don’t invoke some sense of supernatural whoo, which I think turns a lot of people away from them. It does. It’s not a requirement. No, it’s not. I mean, and, you know, and the work that I’m doing and the work that Jun-sung is doing, the work we’re doing together is gathering increasing empirical evidence to support that claim, by the way. Beautiful. So there’s good theoretical argument and good empirical evidence. Part of the problem, I think, is I mean, the Abrahamic religions were really successful in sort of getting us to deeply believe, almost like into the grammar of how we think about this, that their model of religion was how all religions work. And I mean, this caused so much disaster. It was one of many reasons why European colonialism was so devastating, because the Europeans would go into these other cultures. They couldn’t even find a phenomena that was separable out that they could call religion. So they would have to sort of, you know, force that with sort of the opposite of pigeonholing, extracting something out that really shouldn’t be extracted out, and then re-understanding it in terms of a belief system and all this stuff. And, you know, that was one of the reasons why, and then often just treating it like noise and garbage, right? And so I think we should, we’ve got good historical reasons why we should pause and think about that. But we know that the supernatural is something that, and I talk about this in my series, I give the argument, it’s something that emerged historically within the West. And so thinking that, well, that’s the way it just has to be, or it’s not a religion. Okay, fine. If you don’t want to call it religion, if it doesn’t have the supernatural, then I’m interested in shmoligin or something else, right? I’m interested in whatever it is that’s enhancing religio so that people have experiences that they call are sacred, because they get into right relationship with what is most ultimately real about themselves, each other, and the world. And if you don’t want to call that religion, then fine, I don’t care. But I think that is the core of what religions have done. And I’ve given arguments for that. And we have very clear historical precedents, the neoplatonic tradition, right? Yes, it has, right, it has metaphysical levels, but they’re not like our notion of the supernatural. In fact, you can see the some of the church fathers taking the neoplatonic tradition and wrestling it so it fits in, right? And eventually gets organized into, especially people like Aquinas, right, gets organized into our category of the supernatural. And there. So first of all, that’s a problematic category. Second, as I’ve argued, I think it’s a way in which we sort of legitimated and ossified the two. I don’t know where that noise is coming from yours or my end, legitimated and ossified the two worlds mythology, the idea that reality is made up of two fundamentally different worlds. And I, again, I think that was something I understand, and I try to explain why that mythology arose. But the scientific worldview will not countenance that. And if you say, well, I’m just going to ignore the scientific world, good luck, go try that. Try that right now during COVID, right? What does that mean? Like, I don’t, like, all I don’t believe this. Yeah, you do, because you go to the doctor, and you turn on the internet, and you use all this technology and electricity and electromagnetism and physics and chemistry. And like, you can’t, that’s just pretense, okay? Now, I’m not arguing for scientism. I’m not saying that science is the only thing, or that all of the current claims of science are true. I think that’s ridiculous. But the idea that we can somehow, well, I’m just going to ignore the scientific worldview, and I’m just going to somehow keep the supernatural, the two worlds mythology, that strikes me as very non viable. It’s like I said, we have good historical and cross cultural reason to suspect that category, to suspect that that is of the essence of religion. We have geniuses like Plotinus and Spinoza, who gave us alternatives, profound monisms, ultimately, that do not support the dualism of a supernaturalism. That dualism tended to support an internalized version of the two worlds. We internalize that dualism as a deep dualism between mind and body. The mind and body are two separate and two distinct kind of things. And we sort of reduced religion into like very much in the head, and our sense of who and what we are, and what we’re now discovering both in cognitive science and the whole rise of the embodied movement. They should come up with a better name. Is that no, that dualism of mind and body, it’s just not sustainable. So we’ve got to get rid of that commitment. And so I think trying to come up with a way of being spiritual, and you now know that I don’t mean in an autodidactic individualistic isolated monological fashion, trying to be spiritual without recourse to the supernatural is deeply needed today. It’s deeply, deeply needed. And it is, I’ve already given you arguments for why it’s possible. It’s definitely possible. And it’s already happening. It’s already happening. So if we can come to a place where we don’t have to invoke, we don’t have to invoke or commit to these powerful kinds of dualisms. These dualisms were originally functional, but the problem is they became malfunctional. And a dualism that becomes malfunctional becomes a profound dichotomous disconnection. And it disconnects you in profound ways from yourself, from each other in the world. And that undermines the religio, the meaning making, the sacredness in a profound way. Yeah. And actually that visual you just gave, there is, I think, a feeling that a lot of people have coming into this space. It’s like I am torn between these drives or these feelings inside of me. And it’s untenable. I feel like I’m coming apart at the end. It’s like, yeah, it’s very true. It always makes me laugh, particularly for your whole Meaning Crisis series. Yeah, these ideas were actually invented. Mind-body dualism wasn’t just a thing that existed. It was actually created. And it’s like, wow, these things have become extremely, extremely ingrained. Yeah. Greg, Enriquez and I are doing a new series right now that’s on my YouTube channel called Untangling the World Nod of Consciousness, in which we’re going through that history and we’re trying to come up with a non-dualistic account of the nature and function of consciousness, as again, trying to ultimately address the Meaning Crisis. Beautiful. There’s a big setup, folks. Take note. So, and we spoke about this after we stopped recording in the first one, but I do want to weave in another thinker and some theories into this that I have found at least personally very useful, that of Jamie Weal and some of his work around ethical culture. We talked in the first one about how this kind of religion, that’s not a religion, and stealing the culture and the importance of culture are more of like an interweaving DNA than separate initiatives here. But a lot of this conversation, a lot of our first one was around, well, we need to get in relationship to self, other, and world. And again, we bookmarked this whole beginning as a kind of, well, what do I do? I understand that I need to do that. How do I actually do that? And Jamie puts forward, and again, I think this wasn’t with some collaboration from you as well, these three pillars of if you’re going to have practices, they should probably address these three things. And I love them. Ecstasis, like a feeling of self-transcendence, connecting to something greater than yourself. Catharsis, the kind of deep healing that comes from that sense of, that we can get of being an isolated individual. And community, communitas, right? The sense that we are actually in this together, all going through the need for those first two. Anything coming up for you around that? Yeah, I mean, I have talked with, give all credit to Jamie and organizing those. I talked to him, I think, at an extended conversation with him just once. And then there’s been some email exchanges. I think that’s important. I’m independent of him. I was talking about ecstasis. I have ecstasis tattooed on my leg. I was talking about ecstasis and communitas for a very long time. So the part that Jamie has put more emphasis on that I haven’t addressed as much, but I am turning my attention to is catharsis. Again, with that, and Jamie doesn’t mean it this way. Don’t think of it just in the Freudian sense of sort of, right? The big discharge, right? Freudian pun intended. So it’s not that, it’s more of an Aristotelian sense. So Aristotle invoked the notion of catharsis as a way of trying to explain the aesthetic experience and the transformative experience of witnessing tragedy, a tragic drama. And so catharsis is properly understood as a way in which you are playing with identity in order to release ways in which you are hurting or in ways in which your development is being thwarted or ways in which you have been wounded and give you a way of, well, a serious play, the pun intended there too, a serious play that would allow you to start to break the grammar of how that has become immovable within you. I talked about overcoming existential inertia, the way in which these patterns get locked in and they’ve so reciprocally narrowed us, and we talked about this last time, right? Reciprocal narrowing that we’re sort of addicted to the identity we have and the world we’re in. And we don’t, I want to be over there, but we’re locked in and there’s a tremendous inertia that almost like a locomotive that just can’t get started because there’s all that inertia. And so that notion of catharsis, I think, is something that needs to be brought into this discussion. And I think it needs to be integrated with the pursuit of self-transcendence, which is something that, as you know, I’ve been emphasizing a lot, and that connects to what you just indicated, mattering, being connected to something that has a value beyond your individual egocentric perspective. And so that, yeah, ecstasis. And then, of course, we’ve been talking throughout about communitas, all of this stuff about dialogos and dialectics is communita. But I want to give Jamie credit for, yeah, the catharsis element needs to be properly brought in as well. The danger there is, and this comes up specifically within specific practices like circling or like dialectic, the danger there is for these practices to degenerate into therapy, even group therapy. We’re trying to steer between theory and therapy in what we’re doing here, this sort of skill and correctness. And so the really tricky thing is people, you know, when you’re teaching people to meditate, the brain has two things. It’s like you close your eyes. Oh, I know what we’re doing. We’re mind wandering. Yeah, yeah. No, no, brain. That’s not what I’m doing. Oh, I know what we’re doing. We’re falling asleep. No, no, brain. We’re not doing that. And these are the two big options. And you’re trying to find that little, you know, the narrow path and you’re, you know, you’re trying what you’re largely doing is trying to grow the width and the depth of that path with practice, right? And it’s the same thing here, right? People, oh, I know what we’re doing. We’re theorizing. No, no, we’re not. Oh, I know what we’re doing. Right. We’re doing therapy. No, no, we’re not. We’re trying to find the space between those and then widen it and deepen it through practice. And so, yeah, bringing in the catharsis brings with it that risk. And that’s why it’s rare. That’s why I’m doing a lot to try and situate this within, within Phylaeosophia. It’s interesting because Randall Hath in his work on philosophical contemplative companionship does the same thing. He says that this is, it’s in the family, by the way, the dialectic family. He says this is a group practice you do that’s trying to not be like philosophical counseling where you’re doing, dealing with a person’s individual sort of therapeutic needs. And it’s not like a philosophy cafe where you just get together and talk about topics. You’re trying to get the transformation from the therapy, but you’re trying to get the education that you get from theory. And you’re trying to get like almost like, you know, scary stereoscopic vision. You’re trying to look through both into something beyond both of them. Yeah, that was beautiful. I have this kind of clunky visual coming up. It’s like a pyramid of focus. So we have, again, at this top, this kind of reinvigorating religio in both individual collective. You know, we come down to the second tier, which is, okay, well, that is done through right relationship of self other world, which we laid out. And again, one of the reasons I love Jamie’s work is because he seems to always come from the bottom of the pyramid, while everyone else is coming from the top. And so then we get this other layer of like, okay, well, to do that, you can tweak the dials of ecstasis catharsis communitas, right to trickle up to that. And he actually, this is all in, I just want to give him a shout out. He did a talk called the potential and pitfalls of transformational culture. It’s up on YouTube. If you want to see him riff on this stuff for an hour, please go check that out. Cause it’s amazing. And, you know, below those dials, the three dials he lays out, he actually has like a kind of five tools that you can use scripture, sacraments, ethics, metaphysics, and deities. And it’s like, look, if you actually want a game plan to go build some of this yourself, you know, you have your aim, right? You have what you’re working towards. You have the kind of knobs and the tools that you can use to do it. Get a group together, play around, talk about it, put some practices out. And then you get this thing that when iterated over time becomes what we’ve been working towards is like this group of people tackling these problems and actually making some, hopefully making some good headway on them. Yeah. I think that’s well said. Again, I think we need to do that in some way differently than we have in the past. Cause there’s always been the bottom up aspect. And that’s good by the way that there’s always been like you’re pointing to. And I think we need as much cognitive science about that machinery as we can possibly bring to bear. It’s still, I’m really interested in both the innovations happening within the innovations happening within the cognitive sciences telling us about all of this bottom up machinery and the top down, but more to the bottom up. And I’m also interested in like supplementing that with a participant observation and discussion of the bottom up emergence of people tweaking these things, trying to figure out what will be the kinds of things that will not be idiosyncratic to an individual or just to a particular group within a particular historical or physical environment. This is Paul Van der Kley’s issue. This has to be scalable. It has to be something that can be shared across a lot of the things that normally divide us or else, as you’ve reminded us repeatedly, we’re not going to have what we need in order to deal with what is facing us right now. And COVID, well, we talked about this last time, it just accelerates all the issues of the meeting crisis. And it does that. And in conjunction with doing that, it’s accelerating a lot of the way in which things are fracturing and fragmenting. And I think people are starting to understand that. I think they’re starting to understand it, unfortunately, in a kind of unhealthy way. People are starting to talk about pandemic fatigue. People are starting to realize it’s not going back to the way it was before. A lot of people, I get the sense, were holding their breath. I’m waiting. Okay, now let’s go back. It doesn’t look like that’s the way to frame things right now. And so what I’m saying is we need to, again, I feel like I’m repeating myself, but we need to reach as deeply into the roots of our tradition to grow up into the novelty of the sunlight. If we’re going to grow what we need here, we have to be doing both. If we’re going to really create something that has the structure, the growing structure that we need to address our issues. Yeah, beautifully said. And I’ve certainly had this sense in myself, and I think it’s shared by many, this sense of, oh yeah, but who am I to do anything about this? What can I actually do? What can I actually contribute? And again, I got to shout out Jamie on this. I love the little progression that he gave. He was like, what we’re actually trying to do here is we’re trying to take as many people from NPCs, like non-player characters, actual players to show up and play games. Maybe again, games that have been already established by people, totally cool. But once you’re an experienced player, actually becoming an architect, start building these things with people and the architects of culture. Actually just show up, start doing this. You can fumble around the dark a little bit. Again, that’s also why containers, communities are super helpful. So we’re not fumbling as much as possible, but it’s like you can always do something with what you have, with where you are. And if you do feel the, A, the growing need individually or collectively, you recognize it, like let’s go. There’s a seat at the table for you. You’re a human on earth. There are enough seats for everyone, but it’d be really wonderful if we all showed up, shared our voice, started playing, started building. Very much. I mean, and I want to emphasize that and extrapolate a bit on it. So when systems are very stable, it’s actually very hard for any individual part or component of that system to make much of a difference because there’s all these redundancies built in. There’s all these constraints. But when systems are very destabilized that they are now, you get what’s called sensitive dependence on initial conditions, a very small difference by an individual component can, you know, butterfly effect out into the system in ways you can’t anticipate, you know, for want of a nail, for want of a nail, the horse, right, was on shod. And because the horse was on shod, the message wasn’t delivered because of the message wasn’t delivered. The battle was lost. And because the battle was lost, the kingdom fell. Right. And so you don’t like when we’re, I get it again, because we have, again, we’ve developed these worldviews and these models that, you know, have unfolded across millennia. You know, how old is Christianity, right? And things like that. We get a sense, well, you know, I can’t do much. And maybe that was true. But I would argue that’s not true now. You like you don’t know and the way things just boom now, they just take off. Like, you know, I’ve been doing the weekly morning meditation contemplation, you know, and it’s saying it grew up. I didn’t make that happen, by the way, it’s saying it grew up. And then people started forming relationships. And then a discord server was created, right? And then the discord server, the signers, like, and it just moved. Right. Don’t try and move the world. I’m quoting Socrates here. Move yourself. If everybody moves themselves, the world moves, right? And so, yeah, I think there, I’ve been, I mean, I’m also influenced by stoicism, you shouldn’t inflate how much you can change things. You’ve got to be always rational about it, because you can get very inflated. But I have been, again, let me try and do this very carefully. Let me thread the needle here. I’ve been impressed by how my actions interpenetrated in connection with the actions of others. And then how that created things so rapidly and so powerfully beyond what I foresaw happening. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that’s worth underscoring. Some of the team and I over on these parts have a word that we love, it’s called indicated. And the way I would describe it to people is like, if you’re standing on a road, and it’s a black street, and you don’t know where to go, you don’t know what to do, you don’t know what the next step forward is. If you earnestly search for it, both just with what you can think yourself through and actually feel is appropriate, eventually something comes up that’s like one of the streetlights turning on. Boom, it’s like, oh, okay, I need to move in that direction. A really silly example, but can be useful is like, if you’re thinking of you want to take a trip somewhere, and the next week later, your friend comes up telling you a story about Costa Rica, and then you see on Facebook, this other story about Costa Rica, you’re like, there are a lot of countries in the world, and only one has come up multiple times. There’s this flashing alarm, this signal to you. And if you can just take the next indicated step over and over and over again, again, you get these massive snowballs where it’s like, look, there’s a pandemic, people are freaking out. Can I help them meditate? Sure. And they’re so small, so simple, so basic. And yet, a couple months down the road, we’re now here with this organic, evolving community doing beautiful work together. And it’s like, well, if I tried to do that at the beginning, maybe I couldn’t have held it, held that weight. Yeah, maybe I just wouldn’t have done it because it would have seemed too big. But I’m just going on YouTube doing meditations for people. I can do that. And again, we are such a large body of people. You can’t underestimate the power of everyone actually doing that over and over and over again. And if the steps are small enough, you can do daily, you go far. And this is again, why we’ve got to give up, again, not individual moral responsibility, but we have to give up individualism. Because I mean, this is where Jordan Hall, I think, is bang on with his slogan. The next Buddha is the Sangha. The next Buddha is the Sangha. The only thing that we’re capable of that will have the cognitive computational power for solving the complex issues, and at the rate at which those issues are evolving and changing, is our very wisest, most comprehensive forms of distributed cognition. Yeah. You always stand on the shoulders of humanity, regardless of where you are. And I think for a lot of us, this is actually where again, religion is something very useful. Those with religion seem to absorb that very nicely. Like, yes, of course, I’m part of this beautiful thing. Those of us who are maybe a little more Western scientific, it’s like, well, no, I’m a self-made man. I’ve done this all myself. And it’s like, you use English that you didn’t create. You use farming techniques that you never made. There’s very little about you that’s self-made. You didn’t even make your body. Your parents did that. There’s very little of you that’s self-made. Yes, I agree. It’s actually a perspective, right? That can be empowering or, I guess, an obstacle for some, but it definitely doesn’t have to be. Well, I mean, again, you have to look at these things historically. I mean, individualism as an ideology arose to try to counterbalance the way in which collectives can become totalitarian. And again, but it’s a kind of overcompensation. It’s a compensation that has worked by denying the overwhelming reality of distributive cognition. So the solution is to acknowledge the critiques that motivated individualism, but propose ways of keeping distributive cognition wise, meaning dynamically self-correcting so that we avoid some of the perils that individualism rose in response to. Yeah, beautiful. Beautiful. So I have two kind of last things I want to bring up. One we’ve touched a little bit on. One is a little bit, I guess you could say selfish, but I think it’ll end up being super useful. So actually, again, inspired by a lot of your original series, I was off looking. I was off looking for an answer of like, what does this thing look like? Can I find an example of this? Because I’m down to be a player. I’m down to participate in it and see if I can bring something to the table there as well. One of the few things that kept coming up for me over and over again was yoga. Yoga has a philosophy and has a way of being, particularly the way of being thing, because I think like many things that we’ve kind of poured it over, it’s been a little distorted with the classic, Monday morning, Lululemon, yoga mat, but that’s not exactly what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the much more robust philosophy that’s endured for, again, generations and generations. And there were a few things in there that appealed to me really deeply about this that I’d love to just kind of get your sense on what you think of. So again, we talked about self other world, we talked about ecstasis, catharsis, communitas, scripture, sacraments, ethics, metaphysics, deities, all of these things. And actually, for all the kind of check boxes that I was looking for, again, yoga seemed to be one of the few things that actually checked off something near a majority of them. It has a very clear overarching goal, which is basically recognizing yourself as the awareness that all things show up from and recognizing that as, you know, basically all that is. Cool. The thing I found extremely interesting was that it actually doesn’t force you into a path to that realization. There are actually kind of four larger branches. There’s an academic intellectual one where you can come to that realization through study of scripture. Cool. There’s one of kind of devotional ritual where you do prayer, chanting, dance, come to the same realization, totally different path. There is the very classic kind of self mastery, awkward poses, meditation one where you come to the same realization. And then there’s a selfless service, like, you know, showing up for others and in that way coming to the same realization. And that felt like almost something I’d never seen before. Because at least in my conception, you know, a lot of the other practices, a lot of the other religions was like, yo, get on this car, take this path, it’ll take you here. But of course, different people have different dispositions. Some are way more intellectual, some are way more in the heart. And to have something that met you where you were at, but took you to the same place, that felt absolutely incredible. And then of course, you know, it actually increases in levels as you go up, you know, you can the classic asana posture practices, probably the greatest example where it’s like, if you’re a beginner, it can meet you there. And after you’ve been studying it for three decades, and are much more have much more mastery over it, you still have in the same vehicle, a set of practices, a way to live your life, a daily routine that is still just just as useful for you. And that whole flow from like, the way I spend my Tuesdays grows with me and leads me to the same thing. And I can do it in a community. I don’t know, something about that just feels like resoundingly hopeful, or like, wow, this could actually have some serious potential. So, I mean, I think it’s what you said is well said, especially how you preface the important I want to return to the caveat, because yoga, Tai Chi Chuan, mindfulness practices have all been reduced and commodified. Yeah. And if I mean, yoga originally means yoking, it’s the same, it’s got the same Indo-European root as conjugal, like when people are having sex, right, it’s about it’s about da’ath, it’s about that kind of falling in love with that which transcends you. So, right, you are drawn into self transcendence. So, I think all of that is exactly right. And I do think that what you’re pointing out is, if we ignore the Western reduction, there’s an ecology of practices, because even if you’re in any one of these paths, you’re not just doing any one of these paths, you’re not just doing the postures, there’s a whole. So, before my manures got bad, I had taken up with my partner, she and I were doing yoga regularly, and it was very much a spiritual practice, and being taught more in that way. Of course, that varies with the instructors, with some instructors, we have a joke in martial arts of punch and kick studios, dojos, where you just go there, you run out of punch and kick, and it’s like, oh yeah, great, when you’re 15, that’s so cool, and when you’re 33, that’s so useless. And so, to my mind, there’s some instructors that are more just punch and kick yoga, they’re just, oh, do this, and bend that, and oh, right. So, but there’s people that come in, like what I was taught with Tai Chi, and there’s a whole ecology of practices going around it. And then, what you just pointed out to, the pluralism, right, that different people are going to need because of their own idiosyncratic timing and placing in how they are going through their lives, and the relationships they’ve formed, and the histories they’ve had, and the woundings they’ve suffered, and the socio-economic and political structures that they’ve internalized and endured, right. All of those things, as well as, as you said, you know, personality variables, etc. All of those things, we just can’t ignore them. But, of course, other traditions have this too. They’re harder to see, but if you take a look, for example, within Christianity, you don’t have a single monastic tradition. You have Augustinian, Jesuit, Dominican, right, you, again, right, and you have, and there’s different mystical traditions, even within those different monastic traditions, right. And so, we, even something that looked like it was, you know, monolithic, you know, hence the name, the Catholic Church, like the universal one church, it was very much in practice a very pluralistic model. And notice, again, you had priests and you had monks, they were even different individuals. So, I think if you look carefully, this is not to take anything away from yoga, but I think if you look carefully, many of these traditions have understood, at least in ortho-praxis, if not in orthodoxy, right, they have understood pluralism, not relativism, but pluralism. And so, to a degree to which I think you saw yoga as giving you an ecology of practices and really exemplifying pluralism and having a pedagogical program, Afalya Sophia, yeah, of course, that’s what, sorry, I don’t mean to trivialize, but my excitement is, yes, that has to be, I would argue, the way it has to be. What I would say and what I’m trying to say is, I do think the other traditions have that, but, well, for reasons we talked about, like, last time, the West’s connection to its own wisdom, tradition, and heritage is seriously severed and fragmented and malformed. And so, and it’s interesting because we finish, we’re no longer doing, as of, was it last Friday or the Friday before, I can no longer, because my schedule, do the weekly morning classes, I’m back at university, my son’s back at university, my tech advisor is getting a new job, it’s great. So, we’re now no longer doing them, we did 111, how auspicious is that, eh, 111. So, we finished the weekly morning classes, sorry, the daily morning classes, we now go to a week, we’re now doing a weekly Saturday Sanger from 10 to 11. But the point I was trying to make is, so we went through the Eastern traditions, we went through, you know, Buddhism and the Taoist traditions and what we can draw from that, but now we’re turning to the Western wisdom tradition, we’re going through McClellan’s book, The Wisdom of Hypatia, and we’ve learned Epicureanism and now we’re doing Stoicism, Epicureanism is like sort of primary school skepticism, not skepticism, Stoicism is high school, and then we, and then you go into Neoplatonism, which is like university. And it’s amazing how people are resonating as profoundly as they did when they encountered these practices from the Eastern tradition, how much they’re resonating with this, which is actually in the roots of their own tradition. It’s really, really an interesting thing to witness. So along, again, there’s a pluralism, the ancient world recognized it, the Marcus Aurelius endowed four chairs, right, a chair in Aristotelian philosophy, Stoic philosophy, Epicurean and Platonic. He’s a Stoic, but he recognized the need for pluralism, right? Again, not relativism, pluralism, these all talk to each other, they mutually inform, constrain, they share principles, etc., etc. So I think, yeah, I think, I think the fact that that so plugged into you is evidence for how important the ecologies of practices, pedagogical programs, pluralism, how important it is, just how important it is. Yeah, there we go. Again, this is, this is really what I was hoping to kind of explore with this, of like, these are the knobs, these are the dials that you can tweak yourself, that you can look for in the world, that if you feel called, you could damn well very well build with other people, right, you could build with a community, because it does, you know, that feels like the next step. So actually, you know, I really just have kind of one thing I want to cue up for you, which is just any other, just any other thoughts, you know, so we started the first conversation with making the case, right, building the foundation, what is going on here, why should you give a damn, you know, we walked through a fair bit today of, okay, if you actually want to answer the call, if you actually want to show up and move either into being a player of this game, or an architect of the whole game itself, you know, here’s some things you can consider, here’s some dials you can tweak, where do you want to leave people with? Like, where should someone, if they listen to both of these, and they’re like, hell yeah, like I’m in, I’m going to go build something amazing, I’m going to build something super cool with super cool people, where to next? Well, I mean, that’s a difficult question to answer, especially because of the very thing we talked about, pedagogical programs and pluralism. I mean, you need to know where people are at. I think people need to cultivate a lot of skills, both individually and collectively, you know, skills of mindfulness, skills of rational reflection, training of the imagination, psychosomatic, meaning body mind, right? Like yoga, skills, movement practices, like that Rafe talks a lot about, I agree, I think those are central to transformation, because of the way cognition is so embodied and enacted. So there’s a lot of, you need to individually and collectively, collectively and individually, interpenetrating, individually and collectively, you need to cultivate skills and virtues. And so there’s lots of places to go. I mean, that’s why I’m not just doing these dialogues, like I said, I offered the daily morning classes, and now at least the weekly morning classes, and I’m putting up courses, and you’ve got people like Rafe Kelly, you know, who are organizing, or Chris and I are putting together the anthology, which will introduce you to people who are literally creating ecologies and practices and communities that you can get involved with. So there’s a lot there. But I mean, in neoplatonism, there’s this wonderful idea that you can receive things according to your degree of receptivity. And Jung said something similar, don’t try and take on a wisdom that you haven’t earned, right? And so start where you’re at and ask yourself, start where you’re at and ask yourself, really, you know, what is what ecologies of practices do I have? Now, what do you believe? Don’t tell me what you believe. I’m sick and tired of that. Sorry, that’s a little too rude. But like, don’t our culture is so drenched. This is what I believe. Who cares? Who cares? Right? Sorry. You know what I care about? Tell me what you practice. Tell me what you practice, because practice is how you can be transformed, and how you can help others transform, and how together we can transform the world. Tell me what you practice. And practice means what do you do that challenges you to change and development individually and collectively, review your practices, look at what’s out there, go to places where you can learn to start practicing to acquire the skills and virtues that you need in order to move more and more towards being wiser. Wow. Wow, that was incredible. Yeah, you know, it came up was just a show me where you spend your time, attention and money, and I’ll tell you what’s important to you. Yeah, exactly. That’s true. Yeah, wow, that was that was extremely beautiful. Honestly, I don’t think I have much more than that. That feels that feels good to me, too. It feels like it’s at least got the closure of this particular dialogue. Yep, for sure. That was incredible. Well, there you have folks round two with John Verveke building the religion. It’s not a religion. That was really wonderful, John. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Eric. Again, this was wonderful. I’d be happy to come back again. I find these discussions are well, they’re true dialogos. We I get to a place with you that I can’t get to on my own. And I know that the people that follow my work found our last conversation last video tremendously helpful. And so thank you once again. Thank you.