https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=dQ-DDNXnR8w
The last time I talked to Zach, he quoted his, I think it was Rastafarian friend, who said that school makes you stupid, the money makes you poor, and the medicine makes you sick. So Zach, Zach’s been, probably I would say Zach is more of an activist than you are, John, but you’re both working on different levels maybe of trying to figure things out. So can you both sort of give a short view of, let’s say, education in the meaning crisis and your philosophies on education in general? Okay, Zach, do you want to go first? Sure. Please. Thank you, John. It’s actually great to be here. And Andrew, thank you as well. It’s kind of an honor. So I think about the meaning crisis in terms of a broader meta crisis that has these four factors. The meaning crisis is one, and it’s perhaps the one that is the most dire and painful in a sense. So aside from it, though, the other three, you also have what I’m calling a capability crisis. Right? So this isn’t necessarily about meaning making, it’s about people can’t do the work that needs to be done. It’s too complex. Or because of the meaning crisis, they never gave a shit about it, so they never built skills or something like that, the capabilities crisis. Right, right, right. So they can interact is what you’re saying. Yeah, and that’s a big deal, the capability crisis, because if you can’t do the stuff that needs to be done at a logistical level, like maintaining infrastructure and that kind of stuff, fighting disease, you just don’t know how to do it because it’s a capability crisis. But then there’s also what I’m calling a sense making crisis, or what Jonathan Rawson called after me something like an intelligibility crisis, which is again distinct from the meaning crisis, but related and has to do with this sense that outside of the meaning making, there’s also just intelligibility. We can’t, everything’s illegible. We can’t read it. The hyper objects are kind of like looming over us. And there’s a sense making crisis. So that just like in terms of what’s the case objectively with the world, that’s up for grabs in a sense to the post truth. And that cascades into the meaning. And then it also cascades in capability because if you can’t think straight about the world, you can’t operate on it. And then the fourth one is what I’m calling a legitimation crisis. Yeah, which I think is really important. The legitimation crisis is in the aspect of the political. It has to do with basically who gets to wield authority and why. And so, and again, they’re all related, but this one’s distinct in so far as it makes We can’t even decide who should be in charge and how the leadership should function. And we don’t believe in the forms of political justification that have been given essentially. So things like the breakdown and the belief of democracy in America is an example of a legitimation crisis. And that term comes from… You said the political, but you also, oh, sorry, you broke up. Well, I was saying that term comes specifically from Habermas, legitimation crisis. Yeah. Yeah. Zach, just a clarification question. So you said it’s largely political, but you think that the disenfranchisement is also in cultural institutions as well, like established religions, things like that as well. Correct. Yeah, precisely. And it links in with my notion of teacherly authority. Right, right. Right. Very much a crisis in the authority structure of the society as a whole. It’s most acute often in politics, but in the university it’s a huge issue. Are our expertise to be respected or not? So I wanted to ask you one question about that, because you mentioned this before and I thought this was… Well, this is why I sort of perked up when you said this. The other ideas aren’t good, but last time you spoke to me about this, this made me think quite a bit about it. I was wondering if part of this… So this is an open question. I’m not framing a cryptic position here. The idea that it’s not only that we’re getting disenfranchisement is we don’t know how to adjudicate between various institutions when they come into competition with each other. Is that also part of what you mean by a legit… So there isn’t an overarching shared normativity that allows us to adjudicate when… Because Habermas seemed to think that, right? You have these autonomous spheres and there’s nothing that transcends them that decides how conflicts between them are supposed to be resolved. Is that also part of what you’re thinking as well? Yeah, in essence, yeah. And that’s what Habermas was seeing. It was a complete fracturing. Yeah, the fragmentation. He was writing that, I think it was like 72, legitimation crisis. And so it was just when postmodernism was beginning, which is what, in a sense, this is all about. Really, it’s not all about, but it’s a big factor with the breakdown in the hierarchical structures and breakdowns and things like teacherly authority and political authority, normative authority, parental authority, all kinds of authority. And power become questioned. Power itself becomes problematic as a conflict. But power could in any sense have good connotations, becomes hard to even think about. And so under those conditions, when you have that fourfold meta crisis, meaning crisis is in there, then it’s encapsulated also in this notion of intergenerational transmission being profoundly disrupted. That’s why the meta crisis is an educational crisis at its foundation. All four of those follow from a certain kind of failure in the dynamics of intergenerational transmission. At least that’s part of it. Why there’s that failure, why the generation gap becomes the way it is, that’s an interesting question. But it’s hard for me not to see these as at their foundation being part of an educational meta crisis. So that’s my that’s my. And your view on education, I think, is larger than just schools, right? I think that’s very important. Like, well, it has to be how you talk and how you talk about education. And so maybe we could think about education. How is education operating today in terms of schools and then education outside of schools? Like education that’s happening, let’s say, right now and in our conversation and education that’s happening in subcultures and everywhere else. So so so, John, what is how does how does that ring that that fourfold kind of crisis? How does that match with your way of looking at things? Well, I’ve I’ve I’ve always said that I didn’t think the meeting crisis was exclusive. I thought the crisis was interacting with Bjorkman’s idea of the meta crisis. And so I think Zach and I are already on convergence on that point. As I just mentioned, I think Zach’s idea that he’s taken over from Habermas and he’s he’s connecting it, I think, in really important ways of the legitimate action crisis. Yeah, I think that that makes total sense to me. I haven’t said anything about it just because I haven’t had it’s not an area that I’ve devoted time and work to. So my my neglect indicates nothing of value is what I’m saying about that. And so that’s why it’s a pleasure to talk to Zach about it on the sense making and the intelligibility issue that I think that might I’m not sure. So this is maybe an open for discussion and it might overlap with an aspect, something that I often pair with the meeting crisis, although they’re not the same. And it would also relate to education. So I often I also talk about the wisdom famine in our culture. And it seems to me when we’re talking about sense making, if we’re moving beyond just sort of the accumulation of information that’s been sort of institutionally vetted, I think we’re talking about, you know, the ability to make judgments, the abilities of discernment, the ability to properly self-regulate in the face of information and problems. And I think, therefore, there might be deep connections between wisdom, the wisdom, what I call the wisdom famine, which also has to do with something Zach just mentioned, the loss of intergenerational, because part of what I say is we we’ve lost our wisdom traditions, our wisdom institutions. And the connection to education is there’s a way in which I think you could understand wisdom as the project of educating sensemaking to reduce self-deception and manipulation by others. And so there might I think that Zach and I might be talking about related and similar things there. Excuse me to interrupt. I also want to tie into Zach’s notion of education and relate that to religion in a way. And so you mentioned wisdom. And so John has a notion of religio, right, which is a bit distinct from religion proper. And I’ve heard Zach speak about the importance of, let’s say, or we’ve talked, Zach, a little bit about how a kind of there’s going to be a kind of religious renaissance going on. So I found that John speaks about how we’re not able to take religion seriously anymore. And Zach has been saying that religion is becoming, is coming back kind of in spades. Or this is religio or religion or whatever you want to call it seems to be coming back. And that that has to be somehow fused with with education. Does that ring true? I think that’s a I think that’s a very opportune connection you just made for having us the three together. I like that framing that you just gave. I guess what? Yeah, I think when I’m using the term wisdom, although I mentioned discernment and judgment, wisdom also has it within an aspiration and self-transcendence as as integral to the notion. And that that brings with it immediately, I think, together, these two notions of education broadly construed. Plato set up the first school, the first Academy, literally. Right. And it was for the cultivation of wisdom. And it was spoke. It was a place where you were supposed to be able to receive the affordance and the guidance for the Socratic, the project of aspiring to Socratic wisdom. I think that’s all very clear. But that also brings in something that was also to point to by Plato, which is that that self-transcendence makes very little sense if people do not have a reverence for an order that transcends their egocentrism. They do not have a sense of where I mean by reverence, a sense of of being connected to something that is in some it has a it is greater than them, from which they can view their previous perspectives in a self-corrective, self-transformative manner. So I think if you’re talking about wisdom, wisdom, we’re talking about not just discernment and judgment, we’re talking about aspiration. We’re talking about aspirations to self-transcendence. And that links us simultaneously on one hand to education and on the other hand to getting back that sense of connectedness to what we consider sacred, that which puts us into connection with, you know, a greater reality, the inexhaustible nature of reality. And so I do I think that those things are all tightly bound together. Totally. I mean, I couldn’t agree more. And, you know, the I mean, there’s many, many things to say. I mean, the first schools were wisdom schools, really. Yes. You know, and it was only much later that we got this thing that we know of as a school. Before that, most of the intergenerational transmission was religious, family-based, etc. But the first things that were built, like in these places between the world’s like outside in the wilderness between civilizations, like on the road when there wasn’t code and there wasn’t norms, you had this mystery school. And yeah, it’s interesting. It’s a very, very important concept in education. And of course, it’s easy to misconstrue it. I really appreciate the way you construed it, but much of the wisdom research I find kind of disappointing, you know, and I think that’s the way it is. You know, there’s it’s interesting, too, that that sensemaking is tied into the wisdom and that you can almost think about the different each of the different of those four crises as having some resolution and certainly in the realm of sensemaking, it seems to be wisdom. And it may be that wisdom operates on all of them in a helpful way. But but that’s making in particular, because right, right. In a helpful way, but but that’s making in particular, because right now, one of the problems is that we’re facing situations where it’s not something that needs to be fixed, in fact, that the sensemaking needs us to confront something that can’t be understood perfectly in an objective way. And so therefore we have to take the forms of discernment and self-transcendence in decision making in the realm of objectivity and causality. Right. And this is Morton’s point with how the hyper object embarrasses the cognitive function. And we’re we’re left to be in community with one another, facing problems that are actually intractable from a purely causal. We have to think about choice and the basis of choice and the way choice works. And then you’re in the realm of wisdom. And as I said last night with Andrew, yeah, you don’t get education without real living religion is what I called it. And I actually meant religio, not like Catholicism that’s working or Buddhism that’s working, but this actual transmission of wisdom between teacher and student. That’s the only way it happens. And right now, that’s what holds the education system together despite the education system. I get a sense that you have you have more maybe I’m trying to think think of the right word that you have more affinity for for actual religion than John does or something like that or for the let’s say the mythopoetic aspect of religion or the wilder aspects of of of religiosity. That’s the word I’m looking for. I’m not sure if that’s true. I don’t know John well enough to know that, but it may be. I mean, I I really think that the religions are quite a remarkable cultural resource. And so in that respect, would never take the view that you find among the new atheists and people of that nature. We think religion was a huge mistake. I think it was not a mistake. I’m not saying John thinks it’s a huge mistake. No, no, I don’t know. Yeah, totally. And so but the question of how you bring it into contemporary contexts is super loaded because it’s very difficult in some rooms and in some cities and cultural niches to use religion in a constructive way. In fact, it can only be perceived in a usually like in a destructive way. And so so I’m sensitive to those dynamics. But but I do think that there’s a there’s something that’s like they’re archetypically loaded. They’re like in terms of their overdetermined, they’re like they’re so much saturated with meaning. And so I think they’re going to be continuing to be useful to humanity for an extremely long time. And we need to come to terms with that. Well, we’ll never forget Jesus. We’ll never forget Buddha or Socrates for as long as what we know of as civilization continues in any kind of way. And for as long as we think that we can somehow overcome it entirely and create this conflict between, let’s say, science and religion, that seems to me to be really weird. Like, why are we doing that? Like for ratings or something, you know, like it doesn’t make actual sense to me that there’s a conflict between science and religion. So, yeah, so I, you know, I’m not suggesting, again, parent schools, but I am suggesting that part of being educated is grappling with the key symbols and practices of the great traditions with a kind of world spirituality, as Gaffney and Milchor called it, or new perennialism as a way to think about this, which is some of the work I’m doing at the Center for Integral Wisdom. New perennialism. Yeah. Yeah. So this is Gaffney’s term that we’ve been building out as part of Cosmomerotic Humanism and the perennialists. It was an amazing movement. And it was like all of a sudden taboo. You know, Ken Wilber was a perennialist and there were many of them, of course, Huxley and so, Orbindo, Thielier, and I mean, the list goes on and on. But looking for those under key underlying dimensions and is part of the reconfiguring of education that’s necessary. It’s one of the key themes in my book. It’s like we need to deal with this. A new form of religion, excuse me, religiosity and spirituality need to characterize the educational institutions of the future. Yeah. Especially if we want peace and meaning and other things. So do you agree with that, John? Did I misconstrued something that you said or? Let me try and say what I don’t know if you do, I did, Andrew. First of all, I liked what Zach just had to say, although I want to talk a bit about perennialism in a bit. I want to I want to know what’s new. I want to know what’s new in neo perennialism that differs it from like Huxley and perennialism, for example. So we can come back to that. I was just at a conference that I was just talking about, you know, that I was giving an argument that you cannot go through self-transmitting. You cannot you you cannot use inferential computational procedures to go through self-transcendence. There’s some very deep arguments for that. And so I think I clearly articulated this goes towards your mythopoetic point, Andrew, that I think two things are really important for aspiration and self-transcendence, serious play and symbolism, where symbolism doesn’t mean a culture, a cognitive ornamentation. Symbolism is a particular way of relating to the imaginal that allows us to move between John with this identity in this frame to that John with a new identity in that frame, which is what we need to be talking about. If John is talking about he’s aspiring to be right and to be in a world because it’s always existential that he’s not in now when he talks about things like wisdom, I mean, or rationality. I’m aspiring. I’m aspiring to an identity I don’t have and a way of seeing and understanding things that I don’t have now. I’m aspiring to a more comprehensive frame. And I need something that’s Janus faced in that liminal place between so that I can keep I can write. It can reach me in this frame, but it can lift me towards the next frame. So I think symbolic activity is really important. I think serious play is really important. And my prototypical example of serious play is ritual. Serious play is how we go into and play with that space between identities and worlds so that we can get a taste of what it would be like to what it would be like to be in that world and have that identity without fully committing to it. And I was in my talk in the talk I just gave, I was pointing out about all these emerging forms of serious play and ritual like Jeep forming in Scandinavia, where people are doing live action role playing. And what they’re doing is they’re trying to create a situation where they’re you’re not doing Dungeons and Dragons. What they’re doing is enacting real life situations. And the Dungeon Master is actually like a director that will get them to cut scenes and switch roles and give them various props. And the phenomena that they’re seeking is the phenomena called bleed. And what they’re after and bleed is that the distinction between what they’re doing in their pretense of game and their real life, that boundary bleeds. So they’re getting a taste of what this could be like in their real life. Well, that for me is deeply, deeply analogous, although it’s taking place formally within a secular discourse and people who consider them suck. That is so similar to what people do when they went into church, right? That kind of serious play, that kind of ritual. I mean, you’re going in like you’re playing with identities. You’re playing with alternative frameworks other than your own. And you’re doing this all with inactive symbolism. Think about baptism, for example, within the Christian context. So I think what’s the difference then? Sorry to interrupt. Like, what’s the difference here between? Well, I know is who was it who said everything is religion in a sense like? Well, well, then I don’t want to do that because then it becomes a useless category. Right. Yeah, I don’t think everything is. The difference is and this comes up and I want to address that point. You know, the new atheists assume that most of the people that are the nuns, the NONES, are basically they’ve been convinced of the falsity of religion and they’re all atheists. But that is overwhelmingly not the case. Only about 10 percent of those people self identify as atheists. Many of them have really crazy world views and they have a hodgepodge of spiritual practices. The hunger for self-transcendence, the hunger for serious play, the hunger for ritual, all right. And the hunger to get outside of the prison of the ego. These are perennial. These don’t go away. But what’s different between the NONES, right, and people who would identify as religious, has to do with commitments, right, to particular institutions and particular sets of propositions. I think I think we should pay very careful attention to the religions in terms of how they can be valuable sources for ecologies of practice that we should pay very careful attention to when we’re trying to cultivate ecologies of practices. But for me, those religions have been often bound up with, and there’s a spectrum here from liberal to fundamentalist. So I am acknowledging the spectrum right now. But they’ve often been bound up with adherence to particular sets of doctrines about the metaphysical structure of a worldview. And I find the metaphysical structure of many of these worldviews, well, first of all, I’ll speak on behalf of the NONES because I brought it up. They find that metaphysical structure and the institutions that identify with it, they find it nigh unviable. It doesn’t catch them. It doesn’t resonate with them. It feels to me that it’s kind of a no-man’s land. It’s like either you make it all up as you go along or you’re trapped in some kind of formal structure. Well, you can understand why they’re traumatized, right? They’re traumatized by the fact that the secular alternatives drench the world in blood. And so they don’t want to belong to big political machines. But many of them have seen the various religions traditions fragment around them and be admired in controversy and scandal and also too often many people, myself included, have suffered personal psychodynamic trauma at the hands of established religions. And so they feel they make a mistake. I think it’s a mistake, but I want to explain why I think it’s an understandable mistake. They think allegiance to any group or any tradition will automatically make them vulnerable to all of these kinds of terrors once again. What they don’t acknowledge enough, and I think what you put your finger on, is that that autodidactic fragmented thing is really, really prone to self-deception and all kinds of bullshit, which you see if you actually look at sort of the things they espouse and the practices they try to cobble together. Yeah, I’m thinking of Zach’s term, the teacherly authority, the crisis of teacherly authority, as being maybe a key right here. Like we need teachers, right? We need… Do you want to comment on that, Zach? Yeah, I mean, I agree with John. I mean, I think the issue of what to do with the religions is a big one because they’ve been massively problematic. They’ve also drenched the world in blood. Yeah. And they’ve traumatized many, many, many people. And so, yeah, it’s really interesting because I think it’s easy to compare the worst religious discourse to the best scientific discourse. Oh, sure. In fact, you would need to look at the best religious discourse. And we could look at the worst scientific discourse, where you’re getting a lot of the same bullshit you find in religion, except it’s called science. That’s a lot of what’s happening right now in the world that’s causing many of the problems that are drenching the world in blood is the religion of scientism, let’s call it. Sort of priests in lab coats or… Well, that’s a whole complicated conversation. It has to do with critical theory and political economy and the nature of the military industrial complex and a whole bunch of other things that reified as Roy Vascar showed related to positivism, a certain kind of worldview. And so at this point, I feel like, you know, if you’re kind of like beating the kind of this dead horse of these pre-modern religions, like those have been passing away and it’s been a death throes, but the largest hegemony on the planet right now in terms of power is the one that’s run by science and engineering. And so that’s interesting to me. Then you look how that’s become an educational thing that the largest reforms in schools in the United States were on the back of the Cold War and that they were not motivated by religion or even ideology. They were motivated to get scientists working to beat the Russians. This is right after Sputnik is massive influx as all the STEM education began and continues to run. You know, whether that’s been handed off now to some kind of economic God is interesting. Part of me wants to look again at the things we used to worship before and think about how we can get self-transcendence as you’re describing, John, like how do we actually have the archetypes to step into? The mystery schools were theaters, right? To your point about the role playing and the seeress play, the mystery schools were theaters. So many of the initiation rites that went down were theatric and the ritual being like the mass being the living symbol and right up to Steiner who actually resuscitated some of those theatrics to encode a new kind of initiation ceremony. So yeah, I’m seeing some need to find a way, you know, some need to work with these symbols and to kind of grapple with the resurgence of religion, which could be an invitation to refine it. So yeah, and the difference between the theatrics of non-religion and theatrics of religion, let’s say if we want to call it theatric, are the two kinds of ritual, right? That would be something to do with the historicity of the religious, right? When I chant a Hebrew chant, this has been chanted for thousands of years. When I make up a chant with my friends and we chant it and we take it very seriously and we can get into an altered state, that chant has not been chanted for thousands of years by humans. And so… That’s the transmission that you’re speaking about. It’s something to do with transmission. It’s something to do with, let’s call them morphogenetic fields, if I can bring Shrelder right into the room, which is perhaps controversial, at least to the scientism crowd. So it has to do with the ensoulment of humanity as an ontological factor, which is to say that even in a Whiteheadian sense, we’re moving through a sequence and there are patterns that remain. And so we step into temples in space and temples in time. And so the ritual can create those. This is one of the notions of the Sabbath, right? That it’s not a temple in space, it’s a temple in time. And it’s been made for thousands of years. So that’s different from creating focal space to do improv theatre. As amazing as that is, as important as that is, to do in that space a ritual that’s been done for thousands of years is different. And so, yeah, can schools plug into that in any way, right? Schools in the United States don’t plug into that. We plug into traditions that are a couple hundred years old at best, and we don’t even really buy them, like the saluting the flag and other things. So the question of how to unite humanity again around things is an interesting one. And right now we’re desperate for it. Super longing for it, like the Super Bowl and other things, these spectacles. We put in May of holidays, Valentine’s Day, other things. We put so much attention into these things because we want something together that’s meaningful. Also the virtual exodus, how often people are willing to spend most of their time and invest most of their identity in these virtual worlds. Right, totally. Because they possess the orders of intelligibility that many people feel are lacking in the so-called, like in, I think, the properly called real world. There’s a narrative in which you play an integral part. There’s a nomological order of rules that make everything clear and intelligible and makes problem solving understandable. And then there’s also a way in which you level up, you transcend. And all this is very well understood. And your actions directly contribute to success in those three orders. And I think the hunger for this stuff, the spectacle you mentioned, the work to Chris Master Pietro and Philip Misovac and I call the EarthSats religions, like Comic-Con, where you get people, I don’t believe in religion, and they dress up as people and they spend a whole day. It’s archetypal embodiment. They’re getting the archetype, like strong. It’s amazing. The superhero archetypal pantheon today is fascinating. Yeah. A weird replacement for religion. Sorry, you cut out for a second. I think I spoke over you. I didn’t mean to. No, keep going. I was just strengthening your point about there’s clearly a hunger at work. So I guess there’s two questions I want to ask. And I want to enter into good faith dialogue about it because that’s something I deeply believe in. So one of the things, because I followed the debate, the perennialist constructivist debate quite deeply. And it’s even shown up in Cognitive Science and the debate between form and cats. I won’t burden the viewers with all of that. But here’s what I want to say, I guess. I see perennialism as pointing to what’s importantly invariant and I see the constructivist pointing to what is importantly varied. And deep learning actually cycles between those two. You extract what’s invariant and then you have to know how to vary it so that you get appropriate fitted to many different environments. And you need to be able to move very effectively between compression for what’s invariant and generation of variation. I mean, that’s how evolution, biological evolution, for example, works. And of course, I think ultimately that has to do with things about relevance realization. So the reason I bring this up is I’ve been exploring this idea with Jordan Hall in some of our discussions that maybe could we get past that way of thinking, the perennialist versus constructivist, and instead go to a dynamic model where what we’re trying to do is not say no. What people should be doing, instead of trying to get a stable set of doctrines, what we should be doing is teaching people, again, an ecology of practices, that allows them to extract what’s invariant, but also then learn how to run the variations off of it. So they actually instantiate the adaptivity rather than trying to… See, my criticism… I like Huxley, by the way. I’m a fan. How can you not like Huxley? It’s so gorgeous. Right. And what I might say next might be a little bit unfair to Huxley because you should read the Doors of Perception alongside the perennial philosophy. I did. But if you read just the perennial philosophy, it’s very… And how could it not be? Again, I don’t want to be unfair to him because it’s a book. But you can get the impression that it’s about trying to find the shared doctrines, the shared propositions. And to my mind, this is still a problematic way of thinking, that what we need to be doing is not trying to find the perennial propositions, what we need to do is affording people, like I said, that process of, well, can you look at all these traditions and draw out what’s invariant? And then also, can you go back and in this context, it becomes this way and this context becomes this way. You see, my model for this is Socrates. What impresses about Socrates seems to be like he’s… It looks like he’s always looking for his definitions. That’s not right. There’s a part of what Socrates is doing is he’s trying to get what’s invariant. But you know what’s also masterful about Socrates? How he varies that to whomever he’s talking to. That’s what makes him the great teacher, not just the abstraction of what’s invariant, but the generative, the creative ability to vary it as needed. And those two are constantly cycling when you’re engaged in deep learning. So that’s why I don’t identify as a perennialist or a constructivist. I think I’m trying to break out of that at least how I see that often argued about and discussed. And I wondered what this might say, how it could enter into dialogue with what you’re talking about, Zach, when you’re talking about a new perennialism. Totally. I mean, I kind of let the cat out of the bag because that’s Gaffney’s work. He’s been working on this for about a year and I’ve been in close conversation with him. Ken Wilbur’s been in close conversation. But there’s a very real need to get beyond that false dichotomy and to see that even the staunchest constructivist admit that there is some commonalities. And even the staunchest people looking at commonalities, the first thing they say is that, well, the religions are all different. So it’s actually been a false debate for a long time. Again, one of those things that’s like, is it for ratings or why are we making this such a big deal? Why can’t we actually agree here? Because there’s a tremendous amount of important work to do in that domain. And so I’m loving what you and Jordan are saying. We share Jordan as an interlocutor and there’s a sense in which in a friendly way. And there’s a sense in which what you’re getting at also is a developmental issue, that there’s an ability to work at a level of abstraction and complexity with domains of practice and propositions that does allow the Huxley-like move of pulling out things for one’s own, making one’s own personal synthetic perennial tradition for yourself, basically. And so that’s quite a hefty task demand on the individual. And what’s interesting about when you start bridging the constructivist view with the perennilius view and you start to see what it would look like to have both somehow, you end up with that as the educational recommendation. So outside of what it looks like theoretically, it’s like, well, I’m not in theory anymore. I’m actually about an ecology of practice I’m trying to create, informed by this new neo-perennialism. And there’s a whole bunch of other things to say about it, which I’ll leave for when the book’s out, basically. But one of them is basically that there’s a common sense, there’s a kind of what we call an anthroontological givens. And so these are the things that, and Socrates epitomized them, these are the kind of natural working of the human that moves into the realms that would create a religion. What is that dynamic of the human being that leads up through this very complex stack to create these things which you’re identifying, John, which are like the underlying structural features of religion or religiosity. And so being able to distill some of that and saying that the result of that in almost any domain, you start to see things like, for example, like life matters. That’s an interesting proposition. Life matters is valuable, right? That there is right and wrong, right? These kinds of things. Like not, here’s what’s right, here’s what’s wrong. Can’t say that. But that there is right and wrong, right? So you start to get to these anthroontological givens, and you start to be able to work with them in different contexts. And you end up getting something that looks like a set of propositions eventually, but also like a way to craft ecologies of practice so that people can have a refined perception and those become things that they could prove. Instead of things they have to believe. And so, yeah, so I think we’re working in it from similar angles. We’re coming in from different sides of the mountain to something in the middle. And maybe we’re taking the faster, longer route, but you’re taking like this direct route. And the, yeah, so I think, yeah, we’re talking in similar vein here. That feels like a convergence in the sense that you’re not talking about commandments or rules of behavior, but you’re talking about some kind of something more dynamic or something more educational. Yeah, that’s educative. And yeah. Sorry, did I cut you off, Zach? I didn’t mean to. No, please. Well, I was just going to say, yeah, I think so. And it comes back to this notion of serious play. I think of Sinkler’s work on, if you actually watch how children learn, you see this dynamic process. Let’s say they’re trying to learn something for solving a set of problems to achieve some goal. They’ll come up with a strategy for it. But what will they do is they will, they don’t stick with that strategy initially. And this is what happens in play. They will generate all kinds of variations on the strategy. And then they will put the strategies into competition with each other. And then they’ll, until they get one that sort of wins that out, and then they go with that. Right. And so what I’m saying is you see this movement of, they’ll, here’s the situation, they abstract some invariant thing, they come up with a strategy, but then they don’t stop there. Then they do this generative variation. Right. And then they keep cycling and cycling and cycling and cycling. And I want, I guess what I’m trying to say, and you see the same thing in Hinton’s deep learning. That’s how these things work. They cycle between compression and particularization. I want to put an emphasis on keeping the cycling going rather than trying to stabilize it into a complete set of propositions that have sort of resolved the baffle between the constructivists and the perennialists. That’s what I’m trying to advocate. It sounds like you’re saying something similar, Zach. Am I? Yeah. I mean, and I think it’s that focus on the ecologies of practice that allow for the self-transformation, that allow for the personal synthesis, like that you each end up being able to have for yourself a set of propositions, many of which will be in overlapping consensus with the propositions of others. And pedagogically, it’s interesting because you do end up needing simple lists of propositions to tell kids. And so when I think of the free play and I think of the way ritual spontaneously emerges, I actually think of Piaget’s the moral judgment of the child, whether the kids are playing marbles. And so this is a completely free, and I was actually talking to Jordan about this, there’s a completely open space. Like literally the kids have, like the teachers are there, but they’re not teaching the kids how to play marbles. The kids literally create the game of marbles. And it’s a very serious game in which they’re right and wrong and morally good and bad. And they have, the young kids don’t have rules, but the older kids get rules basically. But the rules are flexible. Often they know that that can change them. And at the beginning, when you ask a kid who invented the rule of the marbles, he says basically God or Dad. Oh, wow. Right. Or something like that. But by the end, by the adolescents playing marbles, when it’s very high stakes because they’re taking the marbles home, they each get marbles to take away if you win, you get a bunch of marbles. They know that they created the rules. And the play there is both physiological with the marble, but also dialogical, which is to say, how do they, without parental intervention, without the teacher coming in, how do they resolve a conflict? Either is the rule being applied or is the rule a problem? And then how do you know if a rule is a problem? Is it fair? And then you go right up and into the Rawlsian and Colbergian developmental sequence. But yeah, so there’s the creation of the free play in these different realms and the free play in the realm of the intersubjective and specifically in the realm of let’s say the ethical is what’s interesting. I think pedagogically, it’s hard to create those environments because, and so this gets to your point about it. We can’t codify a list of rules that makes those environments disappear. Right. We need to create environments precisely where young people and young adults and adults probably find a way to resolve their disputes through dialogue and through the creation of norms together, as opposed to the procedural application of a norm to a situation like legal, for example, or force. And so, yeah, with the disappearance of the playground and the retreat into the digital, the whole intermediation of that and resolving a conflict in asynchronous text-based exchange is completely different than doing so in the so-called real world, as you’re saying. That’s right. We’re running a horrible social experiment. We don’t know what the consequences of that are going to be. Exactly. The disappearance of the playground conjoined to the virtual exodus. We’re running this huge social experiment that’s going to have, I think, some pretty nasty consequences that are kind of unforeseen by us right now. I think you mentioning that, Zach. I just want to put a pin in that because I think that’s something important that needs to be brought more into the public discussion as something that we need to be thinking about much more carefully. Zach, can I ask you another question, then? Sure. Because you said something more provocative, and I’m going to really commit to trying to stay open and relaxed here. I mean, I am a scientist by profession, and I also think by vocation. I love doing science. I don’t just do it for a salary. I do it because I believe in its capacity to make things better. I think I get what you say about scientism. I’m definitely not a positivist. I do not think that meaning is based on our capacity for verification of our statements. I think positivism is a self-defeating epistemological view, so I completely reject that. I think I know what you mean by scientism. I think I’ve said something similar along those lines, and that I talk, and Chris and I talk about propositional tyranny, that we’ve tried to reduce all forms of knowing to inferential, computational, propositional knowing, and the generation of theory and belief, and that has cut us off from procedural knowing, prospectival, and participatory, and those which are much more embodied and embedded and inactive kinds of knowing are the main locus of where religio and meaning is made. And so that propositional tyranny, which I’ve tried to trace the history out, I think is a significant cause of at least the meaning crisis part of the fourfold crisis. So I’m deeply critical of that. So I guess I’m also dealing with a bit of cognitive dissonance right now in myself. I’m trying to, like I say, my vocational allegiance to science and my rejection of prophets. I’ve sort of found a way, I think, of holding those two together consistently. But I want to know what you think about that. And then of course, Andrew, I think we should pursue this because I think this is directly relevant to how we see the academy right now. Because I do agree with Zach that we’ve tried to scientize the academy in a way that’s inappropriate. I was talking about this today that this fixation on STEM is removing the training of imagination and serious play and symbolic and the imaginal and all the processes, which goes also with the disappearance of the playground. Those go together, which were the places where we really cultivated perspectival and participatory transformation. So what do you like? Totally. Yeah, I mean. That was just sort of a blob of words, but I’m just trying to sort of lay out. For me, this isn’t, obviously, what I’m saying is this is not just a theoretical issue. This is an existential issue for me. And I have great respect for your thinking. So I want to, you know, enter into some dialogue here. Totally. Yeah. And I may have said it a little sloppily, but do you remember I was saying we sometimes compare the worst of religion to the best of scientific discourse? And I was saying, could compare the best of religious discourse to the worst of scientific discourse. And I called the worst of scientific discourse, scientism, as if it was a religion capital S. And then I said something like military industrial complex and a couple of other things. And another way to talk about scientism is something like techno industrial scientific reductionism, which is. Is this like the Heideggerian pique? I couldn’t say. I couldn’t say actually. I haven’t spent enough time to hide it. Maybe, but it’s much more running at it’s not an obsession with propositions. That’s true. It is in fact an obsession with applications specifically for remuneration and capital gain. So after Baskar wrote his philosophy of science, he then went on to a dialectical period where he cashed in the check that he had written to the positivist about the fact that there was something in this that had to do with the nature of how the economic system was run. So basically scientism, the reason scientism holds strong, even though it’s actually not great for us, has to do with messed up incentive systems in the production of scientific knowledge so that in many cases, it’s not the unforced force of the better argument. And it’s not even the thing that makes the most scientific sense. And so that is one of the key vectors there that’s had downstream impact on, I think, leading us to these forms of propositional obsession and kind of reductive way of thinking about the nature of knowledge and wisdom doesn’t make sense. There’s no interiorities and all that stuff. But mostly the stuff that worries me has to do with the places where we can’t even really do science. I love science. I also consider myself a scientist and I want to save science from scientism. And I want to save science specifically from the techno industrial opportunism and instrumentalization of science, which is different than science. Is that a good place to bring in the iatrogenic plague that you talked about last time? Yeah, I mean, that’s the most scary place where it happens, but happens. I don’t know what you’re referring to with that term. Can you unpack that? Iatrogenic has to do with injury caused by medical care, basically. Oh, I see. And so the notion being that if we have a medical system that runs not for science, right, but for profit, you could say, does it run for profit? Well, in America, it does. Right. And the pharmaceutical industries, which are multinational, which make more capital than almost any other industry are for profit. I’m not reducing everything to the profit motive, but I am talking about an incentive structure that makes it so that advertising is direct to consumer advertising. Revenues occupy most of what the pharmaceutical spend its money on, not research. And so the question of also how to bring to the public attention things that are problematic with the medical infrastructure from a scientific perspective, when they’ve been so encoded in the social fabric that it becomes hard to even talk about them. But this happens in all fields, right? So there are scientific discussions that we had about fossil fuels, which can’t be had. There are scientific discussions we had about solar panels and the fact that can we create net positive energy production from solar panels or not? That’s actually a scientific debate. It’s not clear. Maybe we put them in space, we could, but right now it costs more energy to make them than they can pull. So that’s a scientific debate, for example, that’s not being had that needs to be had. But because of certain motions in the culture and specifically in industry and economic growth and incentives of those nature, you get scientism, which is a set of propositions about what’s true. That set of propositions about what’s true about the objective world, or about your own body, or about your own mind, that proposition becomes the thing that regulates all of these institutional domains and interactions and ritual spaces and question them is very hard. Right? How do you question it? You actually have to become a expert, PhD expert. And so you’re at the whim of the propositions wielded by scientism and institutional capture. That’s like the most negative way to paint scientism now. That’s what I was asking for. I think you’re doing a great job. So I actually know somebody personally here in Canada, who’s working very hard to address the plague you were talking about. We’re trying to bring a lot of transparency into, and we’re getting legal success on this, into the funding of pharmaceutical research, medical research. This is a big movement that’s gaining steam, largely due to one individual. And because Canada has a different culture towards healthcare, it gets more traction here. So I deeply appreciate what you said now that I understand the plague you’re referring to. So I was talking with Johannes about the Heideggerian idea about science and technology being in dis-framing and a way in which it sort of traps us into a cultural having mode. We see the world, as Heidegger’s idea, as a standing reserve, and it exists only in the service that it can provide to us, and that we lack an ability to even ask how we might matter to it, or how we might be in service to it, or that it might, to what degrees it transcends our grasp of it, and that we should therefore respect it precisely because of that. This is sort of the Heideggerian critique, and it meshes back with what we were talking about earlier, because I think of Thomas Bjorkman’s argument that as we’ve lost sort of religion and perhaps science, at least in the way maybe you and I and Thomas are all using it, Zach, the market has been left as the default authority. We don’t have anything that represents values from the being mode, but we do have values from the being mode. So we have values from the being mode. We don’t have anything that does that. We don’t have an institution. I’m just wondering, because we used to have three things that played off against us. We had the market, and we had the church, and we had the king, right? You could always play them off against each other, and so there was this tremendous capacity for self-correction and self-constraint, and not just in action, but also in theory. What I’m trying to put my finger on is it seems like we’ve got this homogenization of power down to the market, and then we’re getting into deep modal confusion. The only mode is the market mode following from, which is the having mode and modal confusion. Then this lines up with perhaps what I think I hear you’re saying where science is understood, or I would say misunderstood, as the having of propositions. Then all of those things would line up. They would mutually reinforce each other in a powerful way. Does that land with you? Does that sound like it’s connecting with what you’re talking about? Very precisely. Bjorkman’s point about the fact that all authority—the crisis of authority that we were talking about, legitimation crisis—the result of that is that, well, it’s the market now. That’s the only thing that can serve. That means that, yes, science, you can apply the commodity form to science itself, which is you put the scientific finding on the shelf, and you actually occlude everything that created the scientific finding, actually by design, so that it speaks to you as a commodity, almost like second nature, and then you just accept it. That’s, again, the worst scientific discourse, but there is science going on, or we’d be dead by now, basically. Somewhere there are institutional niches where there’s been a preservation of the kinds of interpersonal relationships and personal practices that actually allow for science to exist. There’s another thing to remember about science is that we’re actually talking about scientists, we’re talking about people, and their capacities, and their meaning-making, and their legitimation, and all of that stuff, and where are they, and how do they get trained. So, yeah, it’s interesting because as much as I am critical of STEM and the overemphasis on STEM, but I’m also like, we really need actually better scientists. So it’s not that I want STEM to be dialed back. It’s that I want somehow there to be an understanding that you can actually do STEM if you don’t have the human figured out, that the scientists won’t be able to work if they can’t make meaning of their lives. This is just what’s going to happen. If that’s the case, then we actually have to handle these other dimensions of education in order to prepare scientists to actually be able to value truth, for example, as opposed to value renumeration, which is the default value that decides what you should value if you’re not given the sense of what is actually valuable. And so, yeah, the call for the humanistic education is actually to save scientists and to save scientific civilization. It’s not to pull the funding from science. It’s to say, no, actually, look at this world we’ve created with your pure scientists who haven’t been trained holistically as, let’s say, Plato or Socrates would have demanded that they were trained. And so, yeah, that’s an interesting kind of confluences of where the conversation is led. And I think it’s very important, right? Because who’s the wise scientist? Where’s the wise scientist? I think we need wise scientists. I’ve actually made that argument. I’m just wondering then if, because we’ve now circled back again to our educational history, because I think part of the problem has been, at least I’ve made this argument, that for various historical reasons, we separated two educational institutions. I think it’s fair to call them this given the broad notion of education we’re all three of us are using here. You know, when we separated the monastery from the university in the Middle Ages, I think that has had, that has sort of reverberated and it’s let, I mean, because then the university attaches to the state and then the university then attaches via the deconstruction of the state to the market. And that’s what I think in a very powerful way, how we’ve ended up where we are right now. Yeah. I mean, that’s an incredibly exciting, what you just said to me. Because that’s like the thread through and it has to do with what happened when the enlightenment got going, right? And the 30 years war and the fear of religion, right? And the needing for that’s to separate these things and eventually the separation of church and state. But yeah, you get the powers of truth and beauty and goodness, if I can say that, attached to the state as opposed to attached to the church. So there was a university got handed over to eventually the state apparatus and then eventually the market. And so yeah, the question of how to pull the academy back into the sacred and make the places that make the person, which are traditionally the religions, but as we’ve been saying, that needs to be rethought. So now you’re imagining academic knowledge production, you know, what it is with the kinds of technologies and practice that produce it. And I like that way you just said that. I like that idea about trying to make the creation of a person within a community of persons, the central task that we’re talking about, because we’re not oriented that way right now. I mean, we’re not oriented that way. We’re oriented towards, you know, making consumer producers as effectively as we can. But I think what you just said there, I think that’s a real gem in the dialogue, trying to make that awesome. And I mean that in the sense of filling us with awe, that awesome project, that sacred project of making persons within a community of persons, that the central thing we’re trying to do. I think that’s a beautiful thing to have said. Thank you. I was struck by that as well. Also Bonita said the same thing when I talked to her, it’s just the redefinition of the human being or going back to another vision of the human being, right? As not being some kind of end product or a process. And that should be the main thing, right? Yeah. The main point of education. It seems like an almost overly obvious thing, which is missing out completely, right? And the way you articulated, and this is what you’re saying Andrew, is correct. And it’s because of what John was saying about Heidegger’s notion of technology, right? That we ask what it can do for us. Basically, we don’t ask what we do for it. And even in school, we’re thinking about, well, I’m going to go get this job so I can get that money and then do that thing, right? Or whatever, if you’re thinking conventionally or something. But you’re not thinking about, well, wait a second, if I get that job, how much of my labor time will actually contribute to the wages that go to that guy? And if I buy this thing, how much of that goes to… So you’re not thinking about how you are actually needed by the system to run. And so if you flip the script and you realize, oh, the school is actually making me so I can be useful to that as opposed to a lot, right? So then if you flip it, as we discussed, Andrew, and put the temple of learning at the top of the whole economic stack, then you end up saying, oh no, what it wants from me, what the whole technological, civilizational apparatus wants from me is for me to be me, is for me to develop. That seems to be a de-complexification of everything because one of the reasons why we’re in this state, when I think of my students, is we’re entirely confused about that question, about what it means to be human. Does that make any sense? I don’t know if we should ask that question. Uh-oh, Andrew. I think the question we had before is a little bit more precise question, which is what does it mean to be a person in a community of persons? Because I think that’s what we’re pointing to with the word human. The problem I have with the word human is it’s nebulous and it shows up in multiple domains. You can get into all kinds of equivocations. But whereas I think this notion of person making, and I keep hearing Tlaque in my mind, you never have a person without a community of persons around it. And that’s just a developmental truth, right? Persons are not made in an individualistic fashion. They’re made in a communitarian fashion always. Sorry, Andrew, I hope you don’t feel I’m being harsh. No, no worries. I’m also maybe a human is something that’s, we’re all human, but a person is something that we become. Well, that’s what I want to emphasize. That’s what you want to say, right? Yeah, I want to emphasize your humanity is something you have. But I want to talk about, to go back to what we were talking about, I want to talk about this, you know, that to which you aspire, right? Which is the being mode. So there’s an element of transcendence there. Yes, yes, exactly. What we’re saying. And therefore it carries with it. It carries with it. It carries with it the deep connections to, well, as we said, the deep connections to education and to a sense of reverence for something that is possessive sacredness for us. Totally. I actually like the reframing of the question from what is a human to the question of what is a person or what does it mean to be a person in a community of persons. And the question, what is a human is one that I ask a lot, but I realize I’m actually asking that question. That the human is perhaps the only thing we know that can become a person. Right. And different from being sentient, different from being intelligent is being a person. And this is part of the AI problem. It’s like the making of a person and the being of a person is, it’s actually interesting because it’s part, again, that talk about the best of religious discourse, right? Very, very interesting stuff about the nature of personhood in the theistic traditions. Like if you look at Corbin’s work on the angelology and the notion of the imaginal and that it’s populated with the persons, then you get all of these possible transcendental operators that can lead you through the imaginal, but it’s with the concept of a person, not human, which is very interesting. So thank you for that. Is the human also something to kind of transcend in a way? Or am I going too far here? That’s the thing. Like if there’s like a human nature, you know, like there’s this question of limitation, right? But the person is kind of playing an infinite game, if I can say that. And because you’re lifted up into this realm of person making, which is something like this communicative realm, it’s linguistically mediated, it’s imaginal. And so again, now we’re back to the Hebrew tradition, but that notion that we’ve each got a letter in the Torah, right? That sense that the person lifts the human into something deeper than just material reality. And yeah, the new etiquette and the imaginal basically are the qualities of the person you don’t find in material or the animal, arguably. Now animals have personality. Personality is different from personhood. Yes. Got you. Right. We sort of misused ended up misusing that term in psychology when we talk about personality theory, because that’s fine. We need to talk about sort of dispositional traits. I get that. But when we started using the word personality for that, we didn’t replace it with personhood as another phenomena that needed to be talked about. And so we got a neglect because of an impoverishment of our conceptual repertoire that I think has been sort of disastrous for us. So this, I mean, I don’t know if you guys know, but I got to talk directly to Thomas Cheetham about Corban and all the work he’s done on it. We’re going to talk again about it and about Corban. So this brings me again to something about maybe, I want to move questions, about a reformulation of the notion of person in some way. I don’t think it’s a degradation of concept. So Zach, you talked about Corban’s angiology. And I talk about the sacred second self. Stang talks about the divine double. And he talks about us not being individuals, but being dividuals. It’s like a Polanyi’s idea that attention is always a from to. It’s not just a single thing. We are always from to. We’re from this self, right, to the sacred second self. And so, and Angus Callar talks about that, about how you have that weird structure and aspiration that I’m the cause of the future self, but it’s actually the normative authority over me. And if we’re going to really wrestle with that, we, can we, this is a difficult question, because we have a long heritage of the self being just the secular version of the soul. And again, you guys both know I’m deeply respectful to the mystic religion, so I’m not trying to be insulting here. But there was the idea of something encased, or at least it’s come to be understood that popular cultural. I think that’s fair for me to say that. It’s something that’s encased inside of me in my head, right? And that’s what myself is. And then I understand personhood in a completely interior way, and a completely almost like brain-centric way. Such, you know, well, you could, like the matrix, you could somehow just download me somewhere else, right? And, you know, the kind of cognitive science I practice calls all of those assumptions deeply into question and says, no, no, no, you are, you know, your body isn’t clay, your cognition is constituted by you being embodied, you being embedded, you being, like I say, enacted. And now, you know, I even want to add this extra component that your personhood is constituted aspirationally, right? And so you’re much more distributed than you are sort of isolated and compressed and locked in sort of a brain-centric notion of what a person is. Did that make any sense? Or was that just- Totally. Yeah, that was beautiful. I mean, I completely agree. And, you know, there’s a few things the same. And that notion of the divine double is just beautiful. You know, I just love this notion. And there’s so many ways to, I think, work with it. You know, one of the ways I think about sometimes is with regard to like someone like Hillman, who actually probably many, right? That you don’t want to be monotheistic about your divine double, that actually they’re probably a set of trajectories that you’re on. So my divine double as a musician, like the panarch type or whatever, is completely different from my divine double as a scholar, let’s say, Metatron or something. And so- Do they form a community, though? I mean, they’re not- They form a community. Yeah, for Hillman, for Hillman, what’s evolving, and in a sense, what presents as the personality, is a conversation. That the self is actually a core conversation between the many divine doubles that you have. So the self is inherently dialogical? Inherently dialogical, precisely. And potentially, the self is witness to a divine dialogue between the archetypes that are basically living within its container. Oh, oh, oh, that’s tasty. So we can actually instant- This goes back to, you know, sort of, you know, the analog within the Augustinian framework of the, you know, the psyche instantiates some of the, you know, the form of the Trinity. But what you’re saying is, right, the dialogic self, you know, has participatory knowing, it actually instantiates, right, the features of the dialogue of the divine. Of the dialogue of the divine through action, which is not just your head, that’s the thing, but the whole body, the whole body becomes basically like a, it’s what, I forget, it may have been Corban’s quoting, someone said it was the imaginal ship of death. This is what the body is. And so that sense that, yeah, and so in this, there’s a movement tradition, actually, the Rasta, who told me that quote, practices spatial dynamics, his name is Hunter Toran, which spatial dynamics is a movement-based practice in the Rudolf Steiner tradition. Essentially, if you’ve gone to a Waldorf school and done games, and you’re a games teacher at a Waldorf school, like they trained in spatial dynamics, possibly with Hunter. And the whole movement, the most, one of the most incredible things they ever said was that every gesture begins in the future. Yes. That there’s actually, there’s in the imagination when you’re doing movement practice of any kind, there’s actually, you create an imaginal shell around the body and actually move into the forms of the imagination. Yeah, it’s very, it’s very much like, he works with Tai Chi you guys a lot. And so, yeah, so there’s that notion that, yeah, actually, when you’re holding the divine double correctly, you’re holding the full image of the body. And in a sense, it’s the way of thinking about the resurrection of the whole body. That you are revivifying the actual matter of your body through exercise of imagination. It doesn’t mean you’re not material. It just means that you’re in this imaginal ship of death instead of being in some bag of snob and bones and skin. It’s also very helpful. That was dope. That was a good, I’m glad we got up and into that. Well, it’s helpful because it’s helpful for the DIA Logos project that I’m engaging in right now. Right? Because I’m trying to get what’s going on in DIA Logos and dialectic as, you know, an ecology of practices for trying to afford DIA Logos and how it’s something much more beyond dialogue as we where we use that as a synonym now for discourse. This kind of stuff we’re talking about here is exactly, you know, and you see aspects of this in the neoplatonic tradition around dialectic. So I’m just saying, I’m sorry, I don’t want to waste everybody’s time. I’m just explaining why I find it very helpful. And it is, I mean, I found it, I found reading Hillman and then Corban and looking into these ways of thinking about the imaginal realm within basically as extremely therapeutically helpful. Because once you understand the divine doubles not one, then you get that there’s going to be internal tension between your divine elements basically, that even the best parts of you could be in conflict for time and attention, let’s say in your life. And that’s going to cause emotional tension. And so then you can actually set up internally and sometimes you can put it out in front of you in constellations, which I’ve seen that when you create, you actually create a dialogue in the constructive imagination between your two divine doubles. Yeah. Well, that’s an interesting addition to this dialogue-less idea too, isn’t it? That you’re not just dialoguing with another person, you’re dialoguing with all your different sub-personalities. That was always there. That was always there. Yeah. I just, I’m hearing that for the first time. It’s all through the Republic, right? It’s all through the Republic. And Young also has it to some degree too. But what came out for that for me was what this move of taking that sense of the sort of the intra-psychic, you know, dialogue and also putting it out into the aspirational dialogue. And then so there’s sort of this dialogue and then there’s a dialogue out and then there’s a dialogue between all of the angels, right? You’re allowed for that symbol. So there’s actually sort of three dialogues that need to be brought into consonant together. That’s what’s sort of lighting up in my mind right now, Andrew. That’s what I’m sort of going, aha. Yeah. And I’ve never seen all three of those. I’ve seen a couple of them in isolation. When I think of the divine double, I think of this one thing. That’s what’s lighting up in me is, it just makes total sense. It’s the pagan glory of polytheism basically. It’s also the Lord of hosts, right? It’s also the host, the Elohim, right? Right. Yeah. Beautiful. It is the Elohim, you know? And yeah. And that, yeah. So there’s that, there’s the refinement of that conversation within which helps to get the actions basically correct. The Anagagay becomes this much more multi-dimensional process. That’s what I’m thinking, which is really, really interesting to me. Yeah. That’s very cool. I’ve got to go soon, gentlemen, because we slotted 4.30 to 6 and it is almost six o’clock. We have, we have, I would very much like to do this again. I found this, well, as you just saw with my enthusiasm, I found this extremely insightful and helpful to me. I hope you guys also found it valuable, but I would very much like to do it again. And I want to thank Andrew for putting this together. Oh, I feel like I’ve just wandered into an amazing place and this is, you know, fantastic for me. I’m so grateful to you guys. And I have the sense that other people would be very interested in this conversation too. So I’m really happy to put this out. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I would, Andrew, if you don’t mind sharing the files with me, I’d like to put this out on my channel too, because I think it follows up. And I mean, I released our first conversation on my channel recently too. So, you know, it’s all of a piece, I think in an important way. And I would also very much like to introduce Zach, because I’ve mentioned him multiple times, but this would be a wonderful way of introducing him to my viewers. It’s amazing, guys. This is like, I had anticipation of this, almost like it was going to be a music jam. That’s what it felt like. I had a nervous position. I felt like this is going to be a jam because it’s a triple. It’s a triple. It’s not a dyad. I think this went extremely well, Andrew. I think it feels like that to me. I’m very pleased. I’m extremely pleased. Me too, guys. If anybody has some closing thoughts they want to state, I’m still here and willing and, you know, happy to listen. Did you have anything else to say, Zach? No, I mean, the moon is gorgeous right now in Ramachandran. It seems bigger than usual.