https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=St1VmK32Opc
Hey, John. It’s so good to see you. It’s good to see you too. It’s so good to see you, man. Really so good to see you. So good to see you. I’m enjoying your aliveness, right? I can feel your inspiration about in, like I can feel what you’re facing, right? Like what you’re looking at and how they’re talking to you. Because it seems like it’s calling you almost out of your… Well, like we were talking about just before we hit the floor, there’s so much happening right now and there’s just so much I’m being exposed to and learning about that has so much real promise in it. And for the work we’re doing together and for the kind of… Like I was thinking about it the other day, because I get some people who criticize me, you need to be more political and blah, blah, blah. And I was thinking the other day, I’m not after the French Revolution or the American Revolution or the Russian Revolution. I’m after something like the Axial Revolution. That’s what I’m after. That’s what kind of revolutionary I am. And so I’m actually seeing, like we were talking, we can get into a little bit later, the Discord server networks and some of the… A lot of the other people, like there’s this emerging thing happening. I’m just seeing a lot of that, especially in this time of Kairos, right? I’m just seeing so much potential. I’m so excited. It’s a weird place, Gar, because I’ve been telling people this and I still don’t know what the proper affect for what I’m going to say is. I keep trying it on and nothing feels quite right. But the COVID crisis has really increased the relevancy of my work. That’s what people are telling me. And Chris and Andrew and I have been talking about how it’s done these two things. And you need both of these for a Kairos, right? For a lot of people, it’s really exacerbated domicile. It’s really accelerated a lot of the features of the crisis. But for other people, it’s shifted their attention into the being mode. And then there’s two things there that are happening. One came out with the discussion with Johannes. He was sort of prescient about this. That people are thrown back under the subjectivity only to find how shallow it is in a lot of ways. And so there’s that in their bubbling. And then there’s people who are rediscovering this, rediscovering weight. A lot of what really matters is this ability to connect other people. And so I’ve been privileged to just be, I mean, I feel called to it. And there are many people calling out to me about it. And so this has been just a really intense time for me. But in a very good sense, a very good sense. Yes, that’s awesome. How’s it going for you? It’s going really good. I mean, for me, there’s not a whole lot that I’m doing that’s that much different. I mean, I’m doing stuff with the Circling Institute and we’re starting all kinds of new stuff. My wife is home, which is really great. Yeah, that’s nice. And we brought everything online, which is, I was pretty hesitant on doing. But now that we’ve done it, it actually works remarkably well. Yeah, yeah. And so I’m- People are acculturating, right? Yeah, totally. So I’m having people, we just opened enrollment for the first Circling training course online. And so we’re having people from all over the world, right? Somebody from Norway just signed up. That’s cool. Yeah, so it’s really interesting. We have the Circling nights on every Thursday. And to have all these people from all different time zones, even different days, right? Australia, Norway, Russia, and show up, right? And have a quality of interest that everyone kind of meets with this kind of quality of interest. Or something’s been shining forth to them. Maybe you don’t even have words for it. However, this medium allows everybody to actually find each other, which is amazing. I mean, it’s kind of like, just think about it. How would we have ever met, right? If it wasn’t for this. We’ve yet to meet in person. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So yeah, I think this time for me has been, it’s just, well, one thing is I’ve also just moved to Alameda, which is like a little island, right? Right by San Francisco. And I’ve just been able to just, I’ve gone on tons of walks and I live in this old historical neighborhood. And as I’m walking along, there’s Alameda is one of those places that you can’t get it just by going to it once. Like it reveals itself to you. And I’m getting, and it’s turning out to be the perfect place for Rhianna and I. So it’s like on one level for me personally, there’s like a simplicity and almost a meditativeness, right? Like inwardly, but outwardly on all these other levels, I’m like more, I’m reading more crazy stuff and like getting into these different ways and doing all these experiments. And my, I’m exploring and pushing edges on a pretty profound level. That’s great. At the same time. Yeah, it’s really weird how this is bifurcated. So some of us are very lucky, privileged, like you are or I am, that our lives have a particular structure to them that has a resiliency to them. Other people are not so fortunate, right? And both physically and psychologically, they’re being hammered really, really hard. And like it’s a time for some of those people and trying to reach out and provide some kind of support and help for them has been something I’ve been trying to address. As you know, I’ve been doing a free online meditation contemplation class and a course. And the feedback I’m getting is that people are finding it very helpful, very relevant. But I am very cognizant of the fact, like I said, that this is a very strange time. The system is being very radically destabilized. That always brings with it tremendous suffering and distress. But it also brings both individually as you and I are finding, but I think even more important collectively, as I think we’re both seeing within this new, this almost maelstrom of amazing conversations and community building that’s occurring. It’s a tremendous opportunity for people too. And so I feel for both of those reasons, for both of them together, almost like stereoscopic vision, I feel a tremendous urgency right now. There’s a tremendous urgency right now. Oh yeah, totally. Yeah, there is an urgency. And there’s a way to commune about it. I can just get this sense that there’s, when I look at the Rebel Wisdom community and I look at all the people watching our videos and the Discord server, all the things that we’re talking about, I’m like, okay, where were those people before all this? Right? Like there’s a way where there’s a certain kind of quality of conversation or an openness to a certain, and what I like about it, it’s a mode that’s distinct for me, because it’s not just like, as I think you would talk about, it’s not just the embodiment, authentic relating mode, but it’s also, and it’s not just the kind of academic or intellectual mode, but it seems to be attracting people who have a sense for both of them, right? Yeah, yes. And want to hang and have a sense of being interested and drawn to that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, they’re not academics, and they’re not just into the importance, because you know more than anybody else and I’ve experienced the importance of that kind of interpersonal intimacy, and that means a lot for me, right? The interpersonal intimacy, you get in certain things, but these people, they’re connoisseurs of intelligibility. They want a taste, right? And so, yeah, and so they’re the people that, I’m trying, well, we, this is a group project, right? That we are trying to work, what I’m putting a lot of my work into, and I know you are too. This is what I’m trying to craft, double vision, looking back to the best historical templates we have, looking at the current cutting edge emerging practices and P&D practices, craft the psychotechnology of dialectic to afford the logos so that people know what it is like to taste by knowing, right? The serious play with intelligibility and what does that mean? You know, I’m not just as a cognitive agent, but what does it mean as an existential being? That’s why, that community is the community that I’m especially trying to reach. And so generally, I find the people that are sort of purely academically oriented or purely theoretically oriented, they sort of go, what’s this? Where’s the theory? And I say, well, I’ve got lots of theory elsewhere. This is something else I’m trying to do here. The people, there’s other people, you probably encountered this a lot, I was like, well, I just wanna feel close to other people. And it’s like, yes, but we need more than that right now. We need more than that right now. We need a lot more right now. So yeah, the community, the people that you’re identifying as a population, that’s the people that I am most, because most concerned to help, to afford, to address, and to listen to, and to listen to. Right, right, absolutely. And the thing that you’ve been talking about lately, I’ve heard you talk about lately, is these two distinctions, are bringing together a couple of things I wanted to highlight them and pin them, because it gets to what you wanted to talk about in the beginning, I think, and which I wanna circle back around to, which is this way of looking at, where the two, you could say, bottom up and top down, kind of meet and bleed into each other and point to each other, right? This sense of being with somebody and their suchness. Yes, the suchness of the moreness, yeah. And in the same time, there’s in dialogos, there’s reaching into and being reached by the inexhaustible, right? The beyondness, the moreness, right? And when you put it like that, right, it’s interesting, because I thought, I had a felt sense of exactly, I thought that was the perfect two things to bring it together in that way, because I’ve noticed the sense, in fact, I just uploaded a circle I did, a training circle I did onto my channel, which was kind of watching, going deep into this, getting this person’s essence, right? But it just bled into these kind of really big insights, right? Yep, yep. And it was almost like you could talk about the most difficult personal thing for her and what’s opening up around that to the nature of the universe at the same time. It’s like at some point, they became figure ground and then they just started to bleed into each other. I think that’s exactly right. And I think you’re alluding to the conversation I had with Paul Vanderklay about this. So I’m not very happy, sorry, with the term, but I don’t, and some of the people on the Discord server are saying, can you come up with a better term? But I mean, it was circled around this idea that I was playing with, trying, serious play with, or trying to give a secular version of soul. Because one of the things that I’m really working on right now is, I’m not gonna be talking about a rebel wisdom, I’m trying to break out of the three mottos. The idea that the mind is monolithic, it has one way of knowing, propositional knowing, right? The idea that the mind is ultimately monologic and that reason is monologic rather than what all the accumulated evidence and practices showing, no, it’s ultimately dialogical with nature. And then the mind is monophasic. There’s one state of consciousness you should be in, and only that state of consciousness gives access to reality, and all the other ones are just aberrant. I’m trying to break out of all of that in a significant fashion. And so what Descartes did was he tied the notion of soul and self, he first of all fused them together, and then he tied that to that inner point of subjectivity that is the center of that triple mono mind, that three dimensions of being sort of monolithic, monophasic, monologic. And I’m thinking, well, what if we try to read, so there’s this wonderful word that Kerry uses in his book on Augustine and the invention of the inner self. He says the word he actually wants is the Latin word, inventio, which means both to discover and to invent. So things that we see as dichotomous, think about how relevant that is to dialogo, say, could you go discovering and inventing, right? Right, right. I said to Paul, I wanted to try and reinventio soul to break out of that triple monism of mine, that triple monism of mine, and I wanted to redo it in terms of its phenomenology and functionality. And that’s what I was trying to get at. Oh, I was trying to get at something like analogous, geez, I hope I’m not offending people. I really don’t want to, Paul didn’t take offense, something analogous to worship, like what reverence is, because this is part of what you and I are talking about with the dialogos, right? The reverence for the logos when it emerges. And I was trying to get at, okay, well, the soul was the faculty of worship. What does that mean? Well, normally that means just sort of praising and stating things. But then I thought, well, what if, right? What if it was the faculty that mediates between the moreness and the suchness? Yeah. Right, your soul is that which, right? So your spirit is that which affords you self-transcendence, but your soul is that, is the locust, right? It’s the horizon of intelligibility, the Janus-based thing that is simultaneously synoptically, right, like stereoscopic vision, like symbol on joining together. It’s when seeing together, symbol on together, the moreness and the suchness, that’s the soul. And then just like you were saying, you picked up on this perfectly. I’ve been talking to Chris about that, the soulful nature of theologos, right? That what happens is you get, if the logos is present, you get a sense simultaneously of the moreness of participation, but the suchness of individuation. And those two mysteries are just resonating with each other. And there’s this faculty that comes into awareness. So I’m trying to reinvent you, right? So there’s something soulful about theologos. And what it does is it picks up on that part of us that is the active symbol on between the moreness and the suchness. Paul actually really liked that as sort of a secular version of the soul. So I’m just trying to, I mean, you know what I’m doing, of course, I’m trying to bring as much of the theurgia into the theoria of theologos as possible. So that thing you just said, sorry, it was so pregnant, I had to unpack it a lot. Totally, yeah. There’s so much going on. It’s midwifing. There’s so much going on there. Because it picks up on what Chris and I are talking about in the chapter, the sensibility transcendence is really picking up on the suchness of another person. And the anagogy is picking up on the moreness. But you, every participant is soulful in that they are the symbol on, right? The stereoscopic fusion and symbol on the moreness and the suchness. And that’s part of the phenomenology and the functionality of being in theologos. Right, right. Yeah, yeah, totally. And there’s- This is to remember sati, anamnesis. Sati, anamnesis. This is to remember the soul. And to break out of the Cartesian monism, right? That monism of mind, monolithic, you know, monophasic, monological mind. And they don’t know. Mind is, let’s reserve mind for problem solving and cognition. Soul is this existential mediating function. Yeah, totally. And this, you know, bringing that back into just, you know, I’m taking all this and I’m just bringing this back into this sense of what you’re talking about, which is this, help me out with this, but what you were talking about, this sense of speaking or thinking. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. In this- Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, people sometimes ask me to give them the elevator pitch for dialectic. So dialectic is the psychotechnology, dialogos is the process you participate in. Right, so you can do dialectic, but you can only participate in dialogos. It’s very similar to the distinction between dialectic and dialogue. Right? In the book that you and I are both reading. So, but the, so the elevator pitch I give to people is you’ve realized dialogos when you’re both getting to a place that neither one of you could have gotten to on your own, right? And so that, and people have an intuitive sense of what that means. It’s a great word, practice. Oh, yeah, yeah, I sort of know what that means. And then they’re like, well, how do I get there? And then that’s a really good opening, it’s a good elevator pitch. Uh-huh, yes. Right, but then I was thinking, I was thinking, okay, but let’s get a little bit more fine-grained, let’s, you know, let’s, you know, a finer resolution. And I was thinking about, well, part of what that means, not comprehensively, but part of what it means is I’ve been noticing that when I’m practicing it with you guys, with other people, that I’m doing this weird thing. Normally, you know, people think and then they speak, right, and then they listen and then they think, right? And there’s a little bit of online. But there’s something different when I start practicing dialectic and dialogos starts to present itself. Yeah. Which is, I find that I’m thinking by speaking. Thinking by speaking, yes. So that’s, like, I’m trying to get, there’s a felt sense and a felt difference in functionality between being monolithic, you’re just talking in your head, and that when I put it out and I’m speaking to you and I’m getting your online feedback, even gesturally, you know, intuitively and implicit learning, that what happens is, right, I’m noticing that the act of articulating my words in your presence is actually, you know, it’s articulating in the sense of, it’s articulating my thinking. My thinking is coming into shape as I’m speaking, right? Like, I can’t tell you what my thought is going to be until the speaking has sort of finished a cycle of resonance with me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, interesting. And so that reminded me of something, and you and I talked about this before. I tried to think about where else have I felt that kind of thing, and it reminded me of when teaching is going well, I’m learning as I’m teaching, right? And I’m teaching because I’m learning as I’m teaching. Yes. Like, I don’t, my learning isn’t done and then I’m teaching, and I’m not just learning. I’m simultaneously teaching and learning as I’m teaching. Like, the act of teaching is opening things up. Yeah, yeah. There’s the teaching and the learning are happening in this completely parallel and interpenetrating fashion. Yeah. And then I realized that’s not just an analogy or a similarity, because in the figure of Socrates, both of those are happening, right? The speaking, the thinking by speaking and the teaching by learning are also like this. Yes. Yes. Right, right. Right, totally. And there’s also this sense in which, yeah, I mean, I’m just seeing visually all the, the normativity, right? That is, that’s being this, you know, you’re using your hands and me too, like hands back and forth, like this sense of like finding each other, right? Co-finding each other, shaping each other. And in that, as that normativity starts to catch hold, right, you start to break into, you start saying stuff that you didn’t know about. Yes, yes, exactly. Like, but it’s wedded in some way to the other person’s listening in that particular way, where it’s like the speaking, it’s almost like, it’s almost like it’s as if, it’s as if, you know, my words are more like the thought and the other person is more like the, the representation of that thought, like realizing itself back around, right? Yeah, like that’s very well said. Yeah. That’s very well said. Cause there is that part, there is that part of listening, which is really interesting to think about listening, like this relationship between listening and thought, right, because- Did you get this book? I think it might, one of my students recommended it to me. Yeah. Right? I’m just about to start it. Oh yeah, totally. Yeah, I’ve read that like five, 10 times. Yeah, so I’ll be happy to- That’s a really good book. That’s a really good book. But one of the things that she actually goes into a lot is that, well, she talks about how, and this is what had me start thinking about it, is how listening is really, we think about listening usually like being an empty vessel and sound comes in and we receive the sound. No, no, no, no. That’s not it at all. No, no, no. It’s synonymous with interpretation. And in some way, right, when you talk and I listen, if I’m listening, right, and I start thinking, is the moment I stop listening. Yes. And that what that, I think that shows is shows how wedded listening and thinking really are. You’re left together. Yeah. Right? So I think of listening more and more like, the internalization that is needed for genuine sensibility transcendence in John White’s sense. Like, this is again, right? Part of, when I’m listening, what I’m doing is trying to tailor my attention, my memory, my receptivity to your suchness. Yeah. Right? So like, I feel like, oh, here’s the suchness. And then behind me and behind you, sort of around us all is the moreness, right? And so, right, I try to speak the moreness and I try to listen to your suchness. Does that make any sense? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. That’s how it’s. I speak the moreness and I listen to your suchness. Yeah. Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. It’s almost like where my, it’s like, in some way, like right now, I’m kind of, I can hear it. I’m like listening for what’s being thought. Yes, yes. And then you said, yes, yes, exactly, right? So there’s that sense in which, there’s that sense in which, I listen for what to, and then I speak it, right? And then you respond in that sense. And there’s something that, like, what’s the feat, like then that goes back over here. What does that do, right? So. And I’m wondering about if that’s kind of the normativity or the sense of honing into the sweet spot, like feeling into, oh, and here’s that thing about like, okay, that sense in which, I’ve noticed this too, of where you’re listening to somebody, and then something happens and it breaks the flow and it’s agitated, right? But I didn’t know, like I didn’t know that there was a flow I was tuned into until it broke, right? Right, right, right, right. So there’s that sense of like, that sense of like, on some level, we both are finding out what we’re tuning into, right? Yep, yep, yep. And that seems to be that sense of like, is that what you and Chris have been talking about, the geist, right? Yeah, the geist, the third factor. Yeah. I think the geist is the soul of the logos, the way, right? So what you’re getting is, like, so it reminds me of Fisher’s notion of wonder. In wonder is you’re on the horizon of intelligibility. And what the logos is, the logos is, right? It’s the presence of the horizon of intelligibility. It’s the moreness of intelligibility shining through the section of what’s particularly spoken in a non-repeatable fashion, right? If we try to make this in any way formulaic, we’ll lose it. We’ll lose it. It always has to be jazz, right? It always has to be jazz. And I was trying to think about, okay, well, again, what’s that doing? Well, we’re not just talking about the logos. We’re embodying it. We’re instantiating it. But then we’re also, right? It is also symbol on, it’s also affining us to the way being is disclosing itself. But as I keep saying, the deal of those affines us to the onto logos. And so for me, that moment of the third factor, like you said that, where, I mean, part of it is, cognitive science, part of it is what’s happening is you and I are figuring out, right? How to get into the zone of proximal development. You’re putting enough challenge on me that I have to stay really engaged. If I start to break out of authenticity, you start to give me error signal really rapidly, even by, like your brows will go down slightly or you’ll, and it’s tightly coupled. So we’re getting all the flow stuff, but we’re doing more than that, right? Because there’s also this, and this is what I’m trying to talk, we’re trying to, right? We’re trying to give birth, right? It’s a deeper conception of conception, right? We’re trying to give birth, like this flow itself isn’t, that’s not the goal. The flow is, it’s great, but the flow is ultimately the affordance of a reorientation of faith coming into right relationship with other people, right relationship with ourselves, right relationship with being. That’s what this is ultimately about. Right, totally. Coming into right relationship. Yes. Like this co-op, it’s both a reveal, yeah, it’s a revealing, right? And a coming to being revealed. It’s, yeah, exactly. What I like about that, it’s almost like undogmatizable. Exactly, and so, you know, corresponding to trying to reinvent your soul, kind of reinvent your faith in terms of this sense of faithfulness. And you know, Jordan and I have been talking a lot about this, Jordan Hall and I, think about how you’re faithful to Brianna. It doesn’t mean that you have a, you don’t have a set of dogmas. You don’t have, I now have you fit in. I have my set of unchangeable beliefs about you. Right. That’s not what it means. In fact, that’s a disaster, if you get it. It means I am, I have coupled the emergence of me to the emergence of you, so that those will always be affording and constraining each other. And so that’s faithfulness, right? Yeah. That’s faithfulness. And so that’s what I’m talking about. And that’s that continuity of contact. Yes, that continuity of contact, yes. Right. The continuity of contact. So thinking about right relationship as evolving, adaptive continuity of contact, not as you said, as any closure or dogmatization. Right. Right. Right. You know, I’ve been, by the way, I really have enjoyed the psychologist that you’ve had on a couple of times. I think he’s also, yeah. That last one, yeah, that last one where he laid out, he brought up the picture and laid out the model. The justification stuff. The justification, yeah. So there’s something about, this thing about being a forum, right? Like the world being a forum in which I, am on trial, right? On some level for justification, right? So I wanna just kind of like think about this, right? But that’s so Socratic. Right. That what we’re doing, and this is what Christopher Moore argues so brilliantly in his book and you see it also in Gonzales book, right? Yeah. That we only really know ourselves as persons when we enter the field of justification, right? Which is not the field of blame. It’s not the field of accusation. This is how we mess these things up. It’s the field of justification. And that, you know, Greg Onrix and I are, I’m gonna have him on regularly like once a month voices with Raveki. I really want you to talk to him. Right. I think it’d be really amazing. Yeah. But Moore’s idea, right? That I only, it’s, I only, it’s not introspection. It’s not even reflection. It’s not going over my autobiography. How I know myself as a person is only seeing how I enter into and commit myself within the arena of justification. So self-examination and the examination of the ways of life to which I’m willing to commit myself and how they are affine to the ways of speaking to which I’m willing to commit myself. That’s the only way of knowing yourself as a person. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I thought, I’ve thought about this a bunch of times of like, if you took an infant, right? You put it on a desert like an island and it just grew up. Like, what would it, would say it could speak, right? Which it couldn’t, but like, what, when he asked it about itself, what would it say? It reminds me of Wittgenstein’s things. Even if lions could speak, we wouldn’t understand them. Yeah. It would be, this would be, this would be a biological human being, presumably linguistic in some fashion. Yeah. I mean, I say this really carefully and I don’t want to fall into some sort of easy moral error or be subject to unreasonable moral judgment. But I don’t, it wouldn’t speak as a person. Yeah. It wouldn’t speak as a person. Yeah. Because it hasn’t had to, it hasn’t had to take response, listen to the word, it hasn’t had to take responsibility for, you know, tending the logos. Yes, yes. So there’s something about, so there’s something about, right, if we look at like, the logos and the conditions of the logos, right? Like, at one level, what we’re talking about is like the, it’s like what you’re saying is, is the very stuff of which our development develops through. Right? It’s like, it’s on some level, it’s like, this is, some of this stuff is just, this is like developmental psychology in a lot of ways. However, I think the thing that we’re, for whatever reason, right, this kind of sense about what’s possible in relating this way as a spiritual practice, right, has not really, I’ve not seen it, right? I’ve not seen it in the way that we’re talking about. I think that there was like, is the, you know, the platonic dialogues, right? But the, you know, most of that is just, I mean, most of that stuff has just been studied, you know, systematized and studied in academic settings. But the sense of, and I just, I wonder too what you think about this blind spot where when Gonzalez starts to talk about, like, no, you gotta, you can’t just interpret the content of the dialogue. You gotta like look at the, it’s, the process itself is kind of, in so many ways, is the place where you find out where the thing really is. It’s the point of the dialogues. Yeah, yes. That’s what Gonzalez argues, Alba Rappi argues, Moore argues, like this isn’t, this is, like you and I are paying attention, I’m saying to the listeners, pay attention. There’s this growing convergence about, you know, how much the drama is doing as much work as the arguments within the platonic dialogue. All of that, very, very much. Right. In fact, oftentimes the arguments are just bringing you to this aporia where all of a sudden, none of the answers, right? That classic, right, ironic, like Socratic thing is, where everything just falls apart. And then, and then everyone’s really like ecstatic, right at the end. Yeah, and people, and Gonzalez points out that, but what you get is, you get the people who are often the combative interlocutors with Socrates, but I want my sons to come and spend time with you. Because again, a way of life, a right relationship to the logos of intelligibility has been disclosed to them. And they have an intuitive sense that being around somebody who can regularly bring this practice about is gonna be beneficial to their kids in a way in which the over-technolization of the sophist and just the obviousness of common sense won’t educate. Because think about what you said a few minutes ago. This stuff we’re talking about here, this is the guts of personhood. Spirituality and reverence are about accessing and activating and celebrating and accelerating personhood. I mean, that’s what it’s about. It got me thinking about also what you just said a minute ago, sorry, you’re setting up firecrackers in my mind, right? Fireworks, about the normativity. And I was thinking that when we want to turn this, because we’re doing it all naturally, but I’m trying to think about, okay, but to teach, to model, I thought, you know, I don’t think it’s happenstance that the dialogues are about virtues. Because virtue is the place where the moreness and the suchness, where the intelligibility and the normativity are coming together. It’s like, that’s the top, because it’s both, by its very nature, it has to be shareable with others, but it has to be personally relevant to you within your ability as a person to commit yourself to the forum of justification. The logos brings together intelligibility and commitment. So the main topics of philosophia should be the virtues. It should be like, what is love? But I’m gonna expand the virtues. What is meaning? What is wonder? What is beauty? Like all of these, that’s like, so it’s not gonna be like pure philosophy where we’re gonna talk about the nature of cause, or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s gonna be, it’s not happenstance that the topics are the virtues. And this is where your intuition about how, if you do lecto divina in a group, will kind of naturally kind of just give rise most likely to dialogos. Yeah, yeah. Because, I mean, so if readers wanna see this, they can go to my channel, and the lesson I gave yesterday on how to practice lecto divina. It should not be practiced until, it’s an advanced technique. You should go through, you should have at least an introductory course, meditation or contemplation before you practice lectio. But let’s take that for granted. Yeah, I think the point about lectio as a bridging practice is because on one side it reaches into the propositions because you’re reading. But part of the lectio is you set yourself to listen, right? You recite it, and you set yourself with an intention to resonate with it and to read for transformation, not to read for information. So you recite and you resonate, and then you’re open to what grabs your attention. And then you internalize it, and then you enact it imaginarily, not in your imagination space, introspectively, like projectively on the world. And then what would it be like to live this way, right? What would you like to actually commit myself to this sort of existential ethics? Then what’s disclosed about being if I were to live this way, and correspondingly, here’s the normativity, what would be demanded from me in order to come into conformity with that realization? And then the idea is, so I’m teaching people how to do it individually like on the Discord server, we talked about, yeah, but we wanna do this communally. And that’s so, so important, right? Yeah, yeah. So what I see it happening is, one person would do the recitation, and then everybody has their own individual moments where they’re going through this process of Lexia Divina. But then they start to share all the different perspectival and participatory transformations that they’re getting an inkling of, that they are getting a taste, kind of sewer of how to aspire. And then I think that will naturally start to lead into, right, into dialogos, because the sacred prose, the sacred poetry and the sacred prose, and you should read both, by the way, one of each, because you want them to talk to each other so that they can talk to you, right? Right. But that, right, that’s gonna naturally, that you’re gonna, the delexio is gonna reach back, because you do it after you’ve done a meditative or contemplative practice or a prasana practice, a non-duality practice. It’s gonna reach back to that, that’s gonna afford you, resonating with the propositions but moving into the perspectival and participatory, and then that’s gonna, when you’re doing it in group, it’s gonna naturally feed into dialogos, because what you’re training is really the virtue that is needed for aspiration and transformation, which is the virtue of reverence. Paul Woodruff’s idea that reverence is a virtue. Reverence is a particular kind of relevance realization that properly puts you into right relationship to what awe and wonder disclosed to you as possible. Yeah. It’s fact I’m wondering about, so now I’m just flashing back to all the moments that were like that. Like this body memory, but things, and so some of the most immediate ones, right, are, it has me wonder, is the thing that becomes present, and we, in a certain sense, see, right, when the suchness and the moreness, like are, you know, we’re foreground, they want to become foreground, back and they do this switching at some point, they bleed into each other, we’re just animating. I’m wondering, is like, it’s kinda like when I think about that sense of being deeply moved by somebody, right? Yes. That sense of being in reverence, right? Yes. Like I’m disclosed in their, in disclosing them, right? And that there’s that sense of like reverence where their suchness is just a lie. I think it’s usually, I’m wondering about on another level, if that’s like almost like we’re in the direct tune, the virtue, that I’m actually seeing a virtue in you, right? That is, that in some way is like the, I don’t know, if there was an S, if there was an essential, if it was a sound, right? Like is that the sense of where the virtue, where the suchness and the moreness meet, is that’s the point where the virtue, the sound of the virtue goes, ooh. I think that’s exactly right. So Murdoch talks about this in the sovereignty of the good, and that’s where John Wright got the notion of sensibility transcendence from. So when those two, like the virtue, I think is the virtue, I think is the virtue, I would say this, this is how she says it. I’m now seeing you in a virtuous manner. She says that the primary act of virtue, of ethics is proper attention. Attending to things justly is the core of any, that’s the core virtuous act for her, right? Because that’s where that’s that’s that nexus point you’re pointing to. And I think attending to things justly is a part of what reverence means, right? And again, this is the secular overlap with what worship used to mean. Worship used to mean being sort of a synchophanic toady to God, and I don’t mean anything insulting to the people that I know who I think, you know, but I’m talking about a caricature that has become prevalent in popular culture. Martin Luther has made fun of it, like in the meaning of life, right? Oh God, you’re so really big, don’t burn us, you know, all that kind of crap, right? But what I think was what was going on in what I guess, for lack of a better term, I don’t like this adjective, but authentic worship, right? What was exactly that is the sense of, you know, there is a just attention that carries with, that I should have to God, and that brings with it a sense of reverence that I add to into that virtue of maintaining the right relationship with that which continually can be a fount of intelligibility for me through awe and wonder. That’s, see, that’s what I’m trying to unpack here. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And there’s that sense in which the virtue in which I’m seeing, let’s say like, just to say I see something about you and your life, right, in that moment, and something shines and just moves me. Yes, yes, and Pedro talks about that. Remember in the symposium he says, you move from, and we talked about this, the beauty, right? You move from the physical beauty, right, to the beauty of virtue, right? Yes. Right, and exactly that. So I think that’s exactly right when that moment sort of crystallizes. Right, and there’s that, and it’s really interesting because at those moments, I notice that the, that it’s so, there is a silence that’s so much at ease in partaking, right? Because I think that’s where the theory of theory, like when we talked about this, because what happens when you’re talking about virtue, people are, what they’re doing is they move from reflecting to participating in its exemplification. Yeah, yeah. You and I, you think about how you and I are doing this. I know you’re doing it, I’m doing it, right? We’re trying to notice in what we’re doing, the very virtue that we’re also talking about. This is what I mean by thinking and by speaking. The speaking, right, is sort of, you know, what you’re doing is you’re constantly moving between reflection and exemplification. That’s why I can’t think independently of speaking it. The speaking is where I engage in the mirroring of the exemplification. Right, right. When we connect, it’s like, ah, and so I can continually go back and forth between, right, and this we should be doing in good phenomenology, right? I continually point back and forth between, here’s my conceptualization, here’s my articulation, here’s my attempt to speak the intelligibility, the logos, but here is my connectedness, here’s my participation in exemplification of the very thing, and virtues do that for us. Yes. Virtue is the topic that not only commits us to aspiration, it also constantly toggles us between speech, reflective speech, and speech that exemplifies and enacts. Right, totally. Oh, interesting, it’s like, it’s interesting because the virtues themselves, right, it makes sense to call it themselves, right? Yeah. It seems like virtues are those things that like, it’s a little bit, they’re starting to occur to be a little bit like light. You know how light has, it withdraws in its complete disclosure, right? But that’s it, that’s the whole point about, you know, the virtues, and Plato makes very clear, and Hyland makes this really clear in that question of beauty, but things like beauty should be, your ability to relate to beauty properly should be considered a virtue as well, right? But think about what constantly happens, as you pointed out in the dialogues, we can’t get a definition of courage. What we can get is an ongoing right relationship to it, not just in thought, in reflection, but because we’re exemplifying it, it’s also calling us to commitment, it’s calling us to the space of justification, right? It’s calling us to transformation. We can’t get a definition, but we can’t rely on just our untutored intuitions about courage either. You have to enter into this process, and all we get is an ongoing right relationship. Virtues are also the thing that steer us between definition and untutored intuition. Totally, it’s almost like there’s a sense of, I’m getting a sense of like tuning an instrument, like to pitch, right? It’s a tone us, yeah. Yes, and then you’ve got to say that guy, you have to say that. You’re Heidegger incarnate here, right? Yeah, right. And the attunement, right? Yeah. But for the longest time, when I first read that, I only got it sort of conceptually, and then I sort of got it phenomenologically, but now, and I hope this is the right adjective, I’m getting it spiritually, I’m getting what that attunement means. I was bound up with soulfulness and faithfulness and virtue in the way we’re talking about here. Right, totally. Well, it’s interesting, when you think about attunement, it’s that thing where it’s interesting. Attunement is one of those things where it’s like, it’s kind of a little bit like, Aquinas talks about time, right? If you don’t ask me, I know exactly what time is, right? So the moment you ask me, I realize it’s, I have no idea, I’m perplexed, right? There’s a sense with attunement that it’s kind of like that. Like, if you don’t ask me what attunement is, I know exactly what it is. Because it’s, but there’s something about when you go, what is attunement? But there is this quality of, I was thinking about this, with the sense of, right, I was thinking about tears and grief, right? And oftentimes what I see is that when someone’s in grief, for example, it’s like, and they’re alone, there’s a way in which it’s not totally grief until they speak about it, in person, right? I’ve got to tell you about something. Yeah, please. So, I want to slow down. I want to treat this with proper reverence. But I was doing one of the live classes, and somebody brought up, and I won’t disclose their name because I want to trespass on privacy, but I do want to express gratitude for their honesty and their courage. They brought up that they were in grief, and they were asking, well, how can the practice help? And part of what I tried to articulate is how grief has to be shared, not because there’s a solution. Grief is a permanent coria, right? Let’s use our language here. But what we’re after is the way in which grief deeply humanizes us, in the sense of, puts us into that soulful faithfulness, right? Yes. Because I was talking about, I related the story of, well, I’ll quickly do it here because I think it’s helpful. So, a woman comes to the Buddha and her son has died. This is, I love this, one of those things that moved me. And she says to the Buddha, resurrect him, because I love my son, such deep grief. And he says no, because he always refused to do miracles. And she keeps asking and she’s persistent. So then he turns to her and he says, okay, I will do it. But first you have to do one thing. You have to go into the city and you have to go to a household and find a household where there’s a mustard seed. Oh, great, that’s easy. Wait, one thing. It has to be that nobody in that household has tasted death or grief. Yeah. Right? So she goes in and she knocks on the door. Do you have any mustard seed? Just one. Oh, yeah, sure. Oh, but has anybody tasted death? Oh, yes, of course. And then she goes from house to house to house to house. And then she goes, oh. And then she comes back to the Buddha and she says, thank you. Now I get it. Now I get it. Right? And then I said that what we need is, there’s no answer, there’s no proposition. What we need is we need to felt that we’re, we need to felt seen. I thought about you when I was saying it. We need to feel seen, we need to feel heard and we need to be deeply in touch with, that grief is one of, I don’t want anybody to go through grief. I’m not some sort of massive, but there is nothing that humanizes us more than growing through grief. Yeah. One of the wisest people I’ve met in my life, perhaps the wisest I’ve met in person, he gave me this advice. He said, don’t get involved with anybody, like he meant deeply, friendship or romantically, who hasn’t experienced grief. Think about that, like it’s the opposite of the Buddha’s story. Yeah. They will not have sunk roots into the depths of their humanity that have not gone through grief. Totally. Exactly that. It’s what we’re ultimately, the only thing is to be connected with people who can afford us the only way we can go through grief, which is to grow into somebody else, living in another world, because that’s where we have to go. When we lose or somebody dies, our world is destroyed. We have to grow into another person in another world. That’s the only way. And that process, that puts us in touch with our humanity and our personhood. Absolutely. And then it’s kind of like when we go through that, there’s a sense in which when we sit with another, because I was thinking about this back to this thing about with attunement, right? And I think this is kind of also what we’re in dialogo, it says we are tuned by and attuned into these virtues. Right? Yes. Right? There’s a way in which, for example, when I’m sitting with somebody with grief, there’s attuning to them. There’s kind of feeling what it would be like to be them and sensing it and tuning into it. But not in a way that’s trying to exclude them. No. But here’s the thing. Yeah, here’s the thing where I think that the practice of what dialogo, the machinery it exercises, is that I think real attunement though is like, yeah, I’m attuning into your grief, right? But I’m also attuning into something that you may not be able to have access in because you’re grief, right? Which is I can tune into qualities of being. I can be attuned with you and your grief. So I’m like, I can tune into you and I can tune into your future. I can tune into these. And that’s like sitting with a wife, right? Like you get the sense. Yeah, that’s good. That puts into speech sort of an image I had of when people, they need to feel seen and heard, but your presence, I was thinking about, like what can happen is people are cramped in their grief. Every long time you ask me what’s different now and I said, I’m not stuck. Yeah. Remember that? Yeah, yeah. What happens is you open up this space. You don’t say anything to people. There’s nothing to say. There’s nothing you can say that won’t be useless. Absolutely useless. But what you do is, what you just articulated is you open up a space. You scaffold access, right? And so they’re not cramped in their grief. They still have to unfold it and unpack it. There’s no way, there’s not, this is like what that wise person said to me. He said, there’s nothing you can do about grief except go through it. Yeah. Like, right? But what you can do is like when you’re with somebody and they felt, they feel seen and heard, and then you can, like again, if you try and do this in any kind of manipulative fashion, it turns into vice very, very quickly. Yeah, oh, totally. If you can do it virtuously, you can open up a space so the person, you’re not alleviating their grief. What you’re doing is preventing the grief from being cramped into a kind of stuckness. Yeah, yes, yes, yes, absolutely. And there’s a way that you, you think about it, you see, you know, it’s just kind of like, just imagine grieving, right, with Yoda, right? There’s a sense where he would not look away, he would not diminish, he wouldn’t deny. In fact, if anything, he’ll uncomfortably reflect back to you how painful it is in all of its dimensions, maybe even more than you’re feeling it, but at the same time, he’s also probably revealing eternity to you at everything beyond it, right? There’s that sense of, I really like this sense of attunement and attuning into things and what’s happening in, and also with speech and thought, right? Like hearing, right? All these things kind of working together. And this sense of, you know, there’s always that sense of where, you know, when the geist that we’ve been tuning into, right, at some point shows up as the thing is the thing that was always already the case. Yes, yes. Like there’s that quality of, at some point, the always already becomes what you’re inside of, yeah. But this is the platonic insight about that, that feature of the logos, which, you know, one of the things I love about you is you always, you always give voice to that, you always call us back to this, and you always wonder about this, probably to do reference about it. But think about, this was Plato’s point, and this is part of the anamnesis idea, right, is that virtues have to have that to some degree. If you have no, and this was part of Aristotle’s worry about education and why you have to have the right products, but if you have no, if you have, if you do not have the power, if you do not have the potency in act, like the actual potentiality, the activated, the power, if you don’t have some honesty, I can’t teach you honesty, right? I can’t. Because if you don’t have that commitment, if you don’t sense its normativity, like there’s no way, right? Yeah. You may be, think about the grief, you may be, I’m thinking of Socrates, you may be cramped, you may be stuck, right? And I can afford you unfolding that. But there’s a sense in which it’s anamnesis, like you always had to have some genuine virtue of honesty. That’s why you can exemplify it in the practice and then be called by it. See, the virtue is where we can really pick up on, we can really, and amnesis works very strongly now, where we can personalize that feature that you keep putting your finger on, that we discover, we come to discover something that was already something present and affording us. I come to discover what honesty is only because there was some honesty in you and I, already there affording the discussion of honesty. Right, right. Oh, interesting. So yeah, so interesting, I just wanna kind of hang with that for a second. You had that sense of, that always already, right? It is, when it reveals itself, right? There’s a sense, like this is where things like faith and trust seem to be something just indigenous to it, right? I agree. There’s something about finding, there’s that experience of like, you know, you just think you’re fucked, right? You just think you’re in some kind of catastrophic thing and it’s like, you’re just convinced it’s all gonna fall apart. And then at some point, something happens or you realize there’s somebody says something and all of a sudden you’re like, boop. And you’re like, oh, it’s fine. In fact, it was fine the whole time, right? And there’s that sense in which, like where it’s been okay in this way that I couldn’t produce it, like out of nothing. There’s something about that recognition of the background. It’s already always already been in there. Like that, it could be concealed for me and it still operate and organize the experience and be present without, like in a certain sense, without me. Yes. Right, even maybe in spite of me on some level, right? That there’s some kind of sense of, cause there’s that quality, there’s that quality of, like I’m thinking about like the quality of awareness or being or the felt sense of what Wincott talks about the holding environment. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Cause on some level, I think that there’s a way in which we’re always tuned into a certain way cause we’re always inside of something. We’re always in the world. So there’s always this, the way it seems or it is. And there’s a quality of like hold of this, right? And so there’s something about these kinds of dialogues, right, that are so encouraging, right? Yes, good work by the way. Totally, it’s like they’re encouraging. And I think the faith part is this kind of recognition of, oh God, there’s just like, there’s something, there’s an intelligibility that’s beyond me. It’s operating through me and it could be concealed from me and it still goes, right? And then when I find out, there’s something about that just goes really deep in the nervous system. I think your point about how that engenders virtues, like courage, it encourages us. I think that it entrusts us, trust us, it brings us into a kind of faithfulness. I think that’s deeply right. Notice again, come back to the point that Gonzales makes. Notice how the way you could be mistaken about this, that which I discover, but which was always there, you could mistake that with the untutored intuition of common sense. Oh, it’s just my intuition. It’s not that, it’s not that. Or you can mistake that with, oh, well, there’s a definition that captures this and I can then hold onto it by holding onto the definition. You can’t hold, faith is not holding onto a dogma or a definition, nor is it just your untutored intuition. See how both of those are mistakes. We’re trying to talk about something that’s neither just intuition nor formalized possession. Yes, you said, you discovered that it was always there, but it’s also a real discovery. That’s why I like this term inventio. It’s sort of a discovery and invention. Right, right. And it’s not your possession. There’s a virtue here of getting that sensitivity to that sweet spot where you’re scaling between the skill and correctness of the obviousness of my intuition and common sense or the self-evidence of this formal definition. Capture everything completely and consistently. And you’re trying to find, right? And that’s what you see the dialogues doing again and again and again. Sail between those, sail between those, sail between those. Right, totally. And then in finding that you, like that sense, I know Jordan does this a lot, right? Where he’ll be like, he’ll recognize, oh, wait a minute. I realized when like this, maybe it got too fast or something like that, like when it went off, that I was tuning in, there was a flow that was happening that didn’t reveal itself until it was gone, right? And then what is that? That sense of finding all of our attention being oriented to something, right? I think so. And I think it’s about, I think it’s all of these things. It’s a sense of an emerging relationship, the connectedness, that sense that we are being educated in the sense of deduce, draw forth, that I’m cramping and unfolding a virtue, but that virtue is always bound up with this necessarily with the way in which, right? That speaking that is thinking of the logos is becoming beautiful to us and drawing us and saying, look, and you’re going, oh yes, this is what I could be. Oh yeah, this is, well, that’s that, there’s like the hermuneic circle, right? That sense of, that sense of, yeah, there’s that sense of as I step forward, right? What I was stepping on, like goes into the background, but then becomes in front of me in that autopoetic viral, right? That’s a fantastic connection. Yeah. Exactly, exactly. So Hermes, the messenger God, language, right? Yep, totally, totally, between the two. Right. Two, always moving between the two. Yeah. So good, this is so much fun. Yes, it is. This is so much fun, thank you, John. Well, thank you, God. It’s like, I mean, it’s, this, sorry, I don’t want this to sound self-congratulatory, but I want to say I’m trying to express reverence and not be self-congratulatory, but this is, this is this kind of stuff. Yeah. And then, you know, and then the work I’m doing with you and Peter and Jordan, you know, and Chris, right? And like trying to, you know, theorize about it, but never to lose touch with the theoria or now the theurgia, right? And trying to get them all, like that’s the most important thing I’m doing. That is the most important thing I’m doing. Yes, right. It is what Jordan said it would be, he foresaw that. That as this gets worked out, it becomes, you know, the meta-psycho technology that shepherds and curates and coordinates. It feeds from, but it also really feeds back into all of the other practices I practice and teach and try to share with people. It’s becoming so important to me. Yeah, it’s like it’s gathering. I get this sense of, and I’ve been watching this with you. I’ve been watching this with you. Because when I first, when we first talked, I don’t think the sense of dialogos was articulated yet. In fact, you were, I think you were, I watched one of your, one of your first videos with Chris when you were doing the series. In fact, you were like, yeah, I’m trying to work this thing out. Like that there’s something, right? If you were talking about it in terms of like the role of religion, right? And like, okay, traditionally religion has taken this. That’s become less and less viable. So how is it that we get these things together? It is so interesting because it, you could tell you were like, Yeah. It was present as the struggle of it’s missing, right? Oh yeah, totally. Hang on one second. I just, my neighbor, I have to close my door, hang on. I got a little bit too socratically inspired for my neighbor’s case. But that sense of, you know, that’s, there was just that sense of, you were aware and then it seems like dialogos, right? And this thing just went, oh, like everything’s just started to come together and I’m getting this sense of everything seems to be gathering itself. Like, and there’s the logos, right? Totally. The gathering of the logos in the face, like really picking up on that, in the face of the Kairos, that this is what is singing to me right now, most pressingly, but also beautifully. Like that’s exactly. And that moment where Jordan said that to me, right? So I had these very good, I mean, good faith criticisms by Jonathan Pageau and Paul VanderKlay and they were like in, right? And then when Jordan said that, and then I had that moment of coming to something that responded to them, but I couldn’t have done any of it on my own. It had to be, like it was with and through him. And then, you know, and then I started, you know, I was already in dialogue with you, I think just starting, and I started to see this unfolding. That’s when it all came together and I realized, ah, this, this is, this is it. That was, you know, that was, that was the touchstone, right? That started to reveal, you know. When he said, yeah, when he said the meta technology of, yeah, the tech, yeah, the better technology. And then you were like the next day, you’re like, I think the thing that’s circling may be the thing that, and then that’s been the conversation that. Going, going. And more and more people now are spontaneously, this is, this is how you can tell where I think you’re really starting to get something. It’s more and more people are starting to see how these things could, you know, how they could instantiate and exemplify and afford the religion that’s not a religion. So more and more people are saying, I’m getting a sense, like you just did, and again, I’m not the author of this. I’m not a founder. That’s a ridiculous idea. This sense, right? Like, yeah, I’m getting a sense of what this could be. Like it’s now, it’s gone from being an abstract proposition or just some image. It’s gone to being, no, no, no. This is actually nascent. There is something that is coming to birth right now. And so that for me is like, okay, I stop and I pay very careful attention. Same thing I do with my students. When they start to, oh, right, when they start to get the gathering, like you say, and it starts to take on a life of its own, that’s when it’s like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you’re exactly right. This is what is so exciting about, right now. And again, how to do this virtually, how to be properly in relationship with this excitement and this creativity without losing touch with the suffering and the distress that are happening and how to keep them in proper proportion. That’s what Ratio eventually, Ratio was the Latin of logos, right? But it was trying to, the proper proportioning was how they tried to get the sense of logos. That to me is something, again, I’m trying to get, like how do we do that? And that kinship and that friendship with the logos. Yes. Like I was thinking about in a certain sense, like Aristotle would talk about that we think with the logos, right? Like that we think with it, right? But then there’s a certain point where it’s like you think with it, but then at some point, it kind of like the logos almost takes over, right? It’s through you, yeah. And there’s a point where the logos thinks logos, right? Well, yeah. For me, and that’s where the musical metaphors from Taoism are more really helpful. Because initially you’re listening to the music and then you start to pick it up. But then what starts to happen is instead of you just sort of listening to the music, it’s almost like you start to become yet another instrument in the orchestra, right? You get orchestrated by the music like just any other instrument. It goes back to your tuning metaphor. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And that sense too of, you know, in the kind of going back to the, like towards the beginning of our conversation is bringing in that whole thing about, just wondering about this. Like, and I don’t know if I understand his model completely, but that whole thing about the justification. What did he call that when it comes out? Your friend where it comes out of his, out of? So, I mean, he originally talked about it as the justification hypothesis, but then he moved into sort of a justification system. It’s great on reeks. I really recommend people check out that discussion with him. That was, he is really, like he’s, his ability to think really clearly, right, about and just take all of these things. He’s just really, I really, I wanna speak with him. Well, you should, you should. Yeah, I wanna speak with him. I mean, he’s gonna be on the, I think he’s been on the Discord server, my Discord server. Like I said, he, Greg and I are gonna do, he’s been sort of following all of the stuff I’m doing on consciousness right now. And so he and I are gonna have another session and we’re gonna do it about sort of consciousness, the problem of consciousness, but we’re gonna try and circle through his work and mine. He sees, he sees, he sees really deep connections with, you know, the tree of knowledge that he’s been working on, the attempt to get a synoptic integration of ecology and the work I’m doing on relevance realization, the synoptic integration in cognitive science. What’s happening is that, well, it’s reciprocal opening between his work and mine. But yeah, he, he, I mean, there’s been a later book by Sperber and Wilson, no, not Sperber and Wilson, my mistake, Sperber and Mercier called The Enigma of Reason where they basically argue for, that reason is properly, is properly a property and process within distributed cognition. It’s dialogical, not monological, a big tome of a book. The thing of it is, Greg, I mean, there’s been a dispute between them, right? But it’s clear to my mind after looking at both, Greg has absolute precedent. He published way before they did. His argument, almost everything that they have in their argument, he has in his, right? I think the way to think about it is, I don’t think they stole from him. At least I don’t have any good reason for saying that. I think they should properly give him academic precedence. That’s what you should do. Sort of held off on that. I’m not happy with that. But what you’ve got is you’ve got two, and the similarities are so telling. You’ve got this powerful convergence of all of this work being integrated independently and then converging on this idea. And Greg deserves real credit for this. I’m not trying to take away from Sperber and Mercy, but Greg really deserves credit for this, for that reason is ultimately dialogical in nature. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. In this sense of the justification, the form of justification. No other animal justifies. We are persons precisely because we justify. The justification is always bidirectional. We are always justifying to others and justifying to ourselves, justifying ourselves to others, but we’re also justifying others to us. Who do we trust? Who is worthy of my trust, right? Totally. Now here’s the thing about that is that there’s a way, no wonder, what I thought when I heard that, well, no wonder people get nervous when they make eye contact, right? There’s this, I think that’s what Levinas really pointed out, kind of phenomenologically, it was like, why is the human face always confront me as an enigma? But there’s a sense in which that sense of obligation, I wonder if the obligation is the obligation and responsibility of justification on some level. And what also he said, the thing about the reverse engineering of being able to speak, I thought was a great way of putting it, of like- Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, he and I have been talking about that. And I told him, the design sense is the methodology of cognitive science and reverse engineering. I mean, this is what you and I are trying to do here. We’re trying to reverse engineer dialectic, right? From the historical sources and the current practices. And yet, Greg was very much doing that. I mean, there’s something weird, right? Because when we, it’s the face, right? Because animals have something, they have, like if they’re facing each other, there’s threat. Either a social threat of dominance or a threat of predation, right? Or even just confrontation for sexual competition, right? So there’s animal threat there. But then, as you said, and Levinas points out, there’s this existential ethical, because we’re persons in the space of reason and justification. There’s this extra thing that comes on top of it. And then what’s really problematic is not only are both happening, we confuse them, and we equivocate, and we get messed up about those two different things, right? Very, very odd. You know, I’ve heard people reliably say, and apparently, and there’s surveys and polls to support this, that the fear of speaking in front of others is greater than their fear of death. Yes, right, right, exactly. Because they could die, their personhood is on trial. Yes, exactly, exactly. And so there’s, so this is what’s really interesting is like a couple of things. To look at dialogue goes in the context of that, right? Of one, it seems like, so there’s really toxic versions of that, right? There’s toxic versions of that thing going on, right? And that’s that experience of shame and humiliation and having to prove yourself, and you have to hide it. Or you have to be, your justification is defensive, right, in some way, like it’s like being in the courtroom. But I’m just wondering about, it’s interesting to think about is like, well. Even from the courtroom to the courtyard, that’s sort of the metaphor that’s in my mind. Yeah, from the courtroom to the courtyard. Yes, exactly, exactly. So what’s interesting is like, what is it, when you make that move, right? What is the L, or like you could say, the elevation of that structure, right? What is it that’s getting justified? Or maybe it’s like the experience of justice, right? Yeah, but I think that’s it. I think instead of the project of justifying ourselves, I’m gonna play with that word a little. Yeah, please. Because serious crime is part of the logos, right? Yeah, totally. You know how when you justify a text where you’re right or left justification, then you’re trying to come into right relationship so that intelligibility is maximized? So I think of it, this is a metaphor, that the justification we’re pursuing is not the inferential defense of our proposition. It’s again, the proper alignment for attunement. It’s coming into the right relationship. And if people are oriented for that, what happens is I go from the attack mode, because I’ve been thinking about this for the rebel wisdom thing on Saturday. I go from attack to amplification, right? If there’s something, so the way I challenge you, think about in order for there to be flow, I have to challenge you, right? This isn’t just, oh, I agree with you. We all love each other and isn’t this wonderful and that’s even all of it. It’s not that crap, right? I have to challenge you because if I don’t put a demand on you, first of all, you don’t have to respond and secondly, you won’t get into the flow state. There is no flow state without demand. If I attack you, right, then we’re into the courtroom. But if I move to amplification where I say, well, you’re talking about courage and I hear you, first of all, I acknowledge, I make sure that I resonate with you. I commit to the process, not the proposition. And then after that, I say, but there’s something about courage that I love. There’s an aspect that I didn’t hear in what you’re saying. And what do you think about this? And I try to get you, right, to unpack. I heard you saying this, is this right? Is there more here? You do this, guy. And then what you’ll do is you’ll first help me unpack. Remember the un-cramming? What I’m thinking. And then you’ll say, and we all do this to each other when we’re there for it, we’ll do the amplification. We’ll say, but there’s a, I’m putting words, but we usually enact it rather than saying it. But if we’re saying words, it’s like, but here’s another thing about courage that I love that I didn’t quite hear in what you were saying. But you do it in a jazz way. You say, here’s what I heard. And here’s another, can we jazz our way from the one to the other? Can we find the connecting flow? And so we turn, this is what I mean about moving from the courtroom into the courtyard. We challenge, but the challenge is not the challenge of attack. The challenge is the challenge of amplification. I try, I acknowledge the suchness of what you said. I acknowledge in what you’ve said what I have not yet seen, but then I challenge you with the moreness of what you might not have yet seen. And together, stereoscopically, we come to see something more than we could see before, both of us together. That’s the moreness. And that moreness is both the ground and the aspiration. Yes, exactly. Totally. Oh, interesting. Yeah, interesting. And that starts to get into like where, whereas normally like in a courtroom, it’s all about like, it’s like there’s something that you’re trying to like win and avoid. You’re trying to establish a position. Yeah, yeah, it’s positional, right, exactly. But this is processual. Yeah. One of the things I’m gonna ask people, like when you ask them to set an intention for Alexio, you’re gonna say set the intention for reverence, for transformation, and a commitment to the process rather than to any position. And not attack. What we do is we acknowledge, we amplify, and then we anticipate. We’re anticipating getting to somewhere we couldn’t get to. These are the things that I, this is what I’m gonna bring into the presentation on Saturday. This is what I want to then get feedback on and circle it back in when you and I, when the four of us regularly keep trying to reverse engineer dialectic. Right, absolutely. Beautiful. And I have a client, as a matter of fact. This is a great place to complete. That’s a great place to complete. So, please remember to send me this file. Deep reverence, my friend. Yeah, yeah, deep. Send me the file, I’m gonna upload. You upload it first on your channel. I’ll upload it on Vroses with Reveki, and then hopefully you’ll get on the Discord server right away. Okay, great. What should we call this one, you think? Yeah. Yeah, what was coming out here was, I think what was coming out here is virtue in dialogos. In both senses, the virtue in dialogos and how virtue reduces, virtue, how dialogos reduces virtue from us. The virtue within it and the virtue that is drawn forth from us. Bingo, all right. Oh. Take care, my friend. This was wonderful. This was awesome, I’ve missed you. Yeah, me too. Me too, I’ve missed you so much. Yeah, bye-bye. Bye.