https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=v9xdegXaIZE
So welcome everybody to another Voices with Raveki. I’m joined with my good friend Ben Sanford, and I’m gonna allow Ben also to welcome his audience because he’s also gonna be releasing this on his channel. Yeah, welcome everyone. Really excited to be joining John Raveki this morning. And some of you have seen, you’ve had a couple of talks and looking forward to seeing where this one goes. Yeah, so Ben, you made a couple of proposals about things you might like to talk about. I’m happy to start where you would like. Okay, well first of all, it’s really good to see you and to kind of reconnect after, I guess, that big experience that returned to the source, which was pretty amazing. Yeah, really life changing, yes. Yeah, that was a special time. And then since then I’ve been able to follow actually some of your suggestions upon some of these groups. I went to Iris’s Wisdom Project and your Circling in Diologos project, which was really great. And then actually just recently went to a workshop with Nathan Vanderpool and Taylor Barrett. Oh, excellent, excellent. They’re doing kind of a project that’s actually something I’m kind of aspiring to, which is making, simplifying in a way some of what I’m interpreting as your work and making it accessible to some of the folks that I’m involved with. Yeah, no, that definitely needs to be done. And I’m not the best person for doing it. So I appreciate that. Nathan is doing some fantastic, there’s a lot of people that are now really putting in a lot of effort. Nathan’s doing a lot, Taylor’s doing a lot, Robert Gray’s doing a lot, Giselle’s doing a lot, Alexandra’s doing a lot. There’s just so many people that are really, really happy and grateful that they’re taking up a lot of this work and these practices and trying to make them more accessible, trying to make them more directly impactful on people’s everyday lives. And like I say, I’m not the best person for that job. And so it’s good that other people like yourself are taking it up. So I just wanted to express thanks for that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It’s a privilege. And then your course after Socrates has been really fun to dive into. So thank you so much for everything. Really, really amazing. Well, thank you. After Socrates was long in the making, and I’m grateful that I actually was given extra time. I still feel like it just barely scratched the surface of something. But I’m proud of the work that all of us did. It wasn’t just me. There was a lot of people, Chris and Casey Altoroff and Eric Foster, Ryan Barton, just Chris, Master Pietro playing a huge role. It’s just been astonishing. So it was so great to work with them and I really enjoyed it a lot. So what would you like to talk about? Well, I think one thing that came to mind is I wanted to, in my study of your work and it’s been, the more I get into it, the more I realize I don’t know, of course. So I’m constantly, as I watch videos, it’s really just, it’s a deep, deep training. And so I find myself studying other things. I’m getting more into philosophy. I’m getting, have to basically look up a lot of words as I’m watching, which is awesome. And the one thing I noticed as a pattern, I just thought maybe I could ask you about this and see if you could talk about it a little bit. And then I had a couple other subjects that I wanted to bring in and we can just kind of see. So. Yeah, yeah, let’s follow your lead. It’s just really good to be with you again. Yeah. So there’s a, I don’t really have a, I don’t have a good word for it. Well, I have my best word for it, which is relational. And what I feel like I’m trying to, I guess it’s just something I appreciate about your work that really got my attention because it tied in so well to my training through, I had this kind of bottom up emergent participatory experience as you know, eventually kind of got up to where I’m starting to, the things that you’re talking about are making sense to me, but from a experiential perspective. And there’s like, see if I can capture this. So the essence of this special thing that I think you communicate is like, it’s present in, it’s kind of in the in-betweenness. And so, you know, it’s present from obviously dialogos, this idea of the dialectic in this space in between, the transjective, you know, this like non-literal, non-dual reciprocity, all of these words or concepts that you bring in, they all have this, you know, the co-determination, the co-affordance, mutual modeling, all of these things, you know what I’m saying? So you’re bringing into reality this other dimension, this we space, which I’ve just referred to in the past as the relational realm, if you will. So I don’t know how to describe it otherwise, but everything you’re, every time you talk, it seems to kind of bring us into thinking into this space. And so I’m just curious if you have thought of it that way as like its own realm and maybe that’s, anyway, let’s just start there. I think you’re just, you’re spot on about that. And in, after Socrates, I try to make a connection between my orientation that way and Socrates’ sense of himself as mataksu, as the in-between and that human beings are fundamentally in-between or in-between the animals and the gods, right? Or where love is mataksu, it’s in-between knowing and not knowing. And aspiration is mataksu. And of course, all the other things you mentioned, the transjectivity, the affordances, the we space, the bringing into prominence of the second-person perspective. And this is because I’m joining a company of people who are trying to overturn centuries of a very dominant nominalism, which is the idea that all that really exists are raw individual objects, maybe causal relations, but few even challenge that. And all that really is is just raw objects. And then somehow the mind is a kind of entity that can have real patterns unlike everything else, which of course is never really explained or understood and can directly know itself doing this pattern-making, again, not fully explained, or just assumed as the only reality in a kind of idealism. And so that normalism has been something that has been a presumption. And I think it’s wrapped up with our Cartesian propositional tyranny. I think it really hampers us at getting the ontology we need in order to really understand human meaning-making, aspiration, nature of the self, the nature of life, the nature of mind. And of course, this is a main claim of Fourier cardinal science. So there’s this whole counter movement to nominalism, the idea that there are real relations, real patterns, and there is much, if not more real than the objects. I mean, structural realism in the philosophy of science is exactly the idea that the patterns are the only thing that’s actually real and that the objects are mere abstractions or static state space points of patterns. And so there’s this great inversion and it’s needed, I think, because we’re trying to grapple with emergence. We’re trying to grapple with emanation. We’re trying to overcome all the dichotomies that the nominalism drives us to. And so I’m in a large, and I consider insightful category of people, company of people, that we’re trying to go post-nominalist. And that typically when you go post-nominalist, you start to recover what you call the relational realm and then notions of form in the platonic sense, not just shape and participation come back to the form. And it looks like we are needing those to understand even the cutting edge of a lot of our science, let alone our cognitive science. So yeah, I think that’s exactly right. And I think that’s the proper domain of human spirituality properly understood. I think the attempts to subjectivize spirituality and make it a matter of schlermacher of feeling or objectivize it in the claims that there are psychic powers and things like this. I think both of those, well, they may have showed us something about subjectivity and perhaps about objectivity. I’m still skeptical about a lot of those claims. I think they miss the reality that I think spirituality is properly, as you said, relational, I would say transjective, et cetera. So yeah, I think that’s, what does that, let me ask you a question back to you. What does that mean for you then as, I mean, this is affordance, constraint, self-organization, all these terms, right? As being as real as, or maybe even more real than the prototypical solid, solid, solitary object faced by a solid, solitary self that’s somehow not material. All of that, what does it mean to you to hear the proposal about sort of radically changing the ontology, the ontology we’ve been living with? Well, I guess it’s, first of all, it’s just kind of validating. So as you know, I’ve had a journey of, I’m a nature educator, so that’s my, that’s the way to describe what I do. But in that process, there’s a lot of transformative work that happens with people. So it’s not just pointing out objects and nature, it’s actually developing real relationships within the process of what we’re doing. It’s actually developing real relationships within an embedded experiential relationship with nature. So, and there’s several of the skills, well, I mean, all of the skills collectively, but there’s a few that are just really kind of loud in their ability to make these connections. And one of them is tracking. And I really, really, really appreciated how you brought up tracking in after Socrates as after him, like the process. So, you know, it was early on when I was watching your courses and hearing this language. So first of all, I learned in kind of a traditional sense, I’d say more of a mentorship, direct experience, a lot of mythopoetic explanation for what’s going on. Definitely some scientific explanation and tracking, but when it gets beyond kind of the obvious objective skill set and other things that are happening, like this pretty intense intuitive training, but also capability that’s forming, a lot of imaginal, I’m not using that word, a lot of imaginal structures to help us kind of frame what we’re learning and experiencing. So coming from that background and then having, well, first I was getting into complexity science a bit too. So I was having another language as far as emergence and some of the concepts there that was helping me kind of understand this systems approach or perspective, this relational perspective of the earth and our relationship. But then you came in and offered a whole nother brilliant, you know, kind of grammar and language for this that as I’ve shared before has been super helpful. So I think what it’s given me, this idea of this kind of flip as you’re talking about, I think it’s really kind of highlighted like the importance of some of these skills and in ways that I think are more significant than I thought. So I, you know, and back to if I was to make a proposal, I guess I would take the primal skills or the primal arts and say that they are good candidates for helping us in a participatory way, really get this, a relationship to the relational realm, you know, so. Yeah, I think that’s deeply right. I think that’s true. I mean, and your work and Rafe’s overlap in that way, but I’m particularly interested in the word you just used because it makes what you’re doing a little more unique. Both you and Rafe point to evolutionary machinery and that it’s, and you know, and we’ve got an increasing amount of work that that primary orientation navigational tracking machinery gets accepted into our highest, most abstract conceptual philosophical thinking, et cetera. And then therefore is very properly imaginal. It is what binds the sexual and the intellectual. Imaginal binds this way and it binds this way. And I think that’s exactly right. But I just wanna give you an opportunity to say a little bit more about that and to say a little bit more about to my viewers, some of the things you do with people. So you’ve mentioned tracking and you mentioned primal arts and what do you mean by primal? And then you give people more of an idea of like what you’re teaching, how do you teach people and what you’re teaching it? And if you could make connection to some of the, I’ll call it primal or primary access to the relational realm, that would be helpful. Cool. Is that okay as a question? Yeah, I’ll give it a shot. So yeah, so my school is Tribal Edge and it’s a, I call it a primal arts training center. And I focus on three different areas and I’ll explain primal in a minute. But one is, and this is actually kind of a recent distinction that’s been helpful for me. One is primal training, which includes kind of the science, art and philosophy of the skills, the essential skills that have been around and kept us alive basically since our origin. And so I’m using primal in the sense of, well, it’s dictionary definition, which is original, essential, core importance, fundamental, like this deeply core thing, right? So we study these skills, the skills, for example, of some of the primal arts would be tracking and awareness, which are basically one whole section, which is really looking into nature literacy and major connection and being able to make, it’s basically making sense and finding meaning in the disturbances and participating in this like giant narrative that’s going on at all times called our universe, you know, where you actually get to become part of the story and read it like a story. So there’s this kind of dialogical thing there too. And then another area would be survival, which is the primitive skills of living with the earth, generally encompassing shelter, water, fire and food and the tools that we need to accomplish those things. And another area is healing, which is obviously the self care and first aid and healing, and then also more subtle into like interpersonal dynamics and communication and also tending and caring for the earth and stuff like that stewardship. And then basically an area I just call combat or conflict, which is around, you know, it’s where we practice the martial arts and bring in kind of the fitness and movement stuff and look at the archetype of the protector, which is interestingly to me is another reference for the in-between space, just as a side note, the one who goes between, you know, the unknown and the tribe, if you will, the tribal edge. And so I use the archetype of the hero for that, which is actually kind of collectively for all the skills, as in the everyday hero, not like the superhero, but the person who’s ready, willing and able to take effective action in challenging situations. And hero is, I believe, from what I’ve found, Greek, heros is Greek for protector or champion. So that’s been an important part. So that’s some of the primal training. And within that, there’s also the layers of, well, what it leads to as you get onto any of these journeys, as you know, studying any art, you pretty quickly run into yourself, which brings in the journey of training and self-development and transformation. And so we have primal training. And then the next, another layer of study is something I’ve just recently started to call liminal practices, which is the practices that help us, or the ecology of practices that we use when we’re, say, not receiving direct instruction. We’re on our own. We’re in that space in between. The actual work, where this actually all shows up, but also referring to the bigger kind of training and the kind of cultural practices we use that are transformative, such as the vision quest, things that we use to discover more about who we are in our place in the world and our purpose and whatnot, or rites of passage is another one. So, you know, kind of these big liminal experiences that are in themselves culturally a practice. So I wanna know a little bit more about the vision quest. It seems that in some ways that’s appropriate for describing the whole After Socrates project in some ways, but obviously you’re doing it in a more primal fashion. What does it look like and what do people do in the vision quest? So the vision quest that I offer is modeled after, well, it was passed on by one of my teachers, Tom Brown Jr., who runs the tracker school, and it’s a simple, the reason it’s so powerful is because it’s so simple, but it’s like this very pure thing. But basically, I’ll just give you the nutshell version. It happens within an eight-day period, and we have a preparation phase, which is the first couple of days, and then we have the actual questing period. And the quest itself is a four-day, we call it a fast from all things familiar. So it is a food fast, but it’s also a fast from all of our distractions. And we are just in the temple of creation in a special place where you’re sitting next to a tree or somewhere in solitude in about a 10-foot circle, and you’re just there for four days and four nights. And then on the return, we have a kind of a reintegration process for a couple of days. And it’s the most powerful thing I’ve ever been part of. I mean, it’s surprisingly potent. Just this immersion in nature or the rest of nature, I don’t really like to use that. Yeah, I know. That’s a nature distinction. It’s this immersion in nature where it’s just you, the earth, and the mystery. You’re even setting aside normal practices. So you might think, I’ll just go out there and do my qi yang or my, say, stay kind of connected that way. But we just let all those things go. And the only thing, I would say the closest thing that we do a practice that we do there would be basically a state of mindfulness, where you’re just in a state of awareness of the internal and the external. You’re using all of your senses. You’re not eyes closed or anything. And you’re just being you. And I’ve had people that have done a lot of meditation or a lot of different, pretty potent, even like medicinal journeys and stuff. And you go through that and be like, oh my gosh, this is the sledgehammer. So there’s something about that simplicity. So I think it’s, anyway, I could hypothesize about it, but it’s, yeah, it’s a beautiful thing. So I would love, by the way, I would love to invite you, of course, and or any of your colleagues that would be interested in that experience, just putting that out there. Yeah, I mean, I’m very tempted. The problem I have is, you know, my manures and I don’t know if the fasting would trigger an attack. I could probably do some research into that. Well, you know, we do accommodate folks. So I have a policy that everyone can do a quest, you know. So it is like for folks, I’ve been in the past, people with low blood sugar issues or something like that, and we make accommodations. So there is ways to figure out how to make it possible. But anyway, just. Well, let me seriously think about it. I really like to go on a vision quest. It sounds like an amazing Socratic project. I mean, Socrates could stand absolutely still for 48 hours, just so I’m not Socrates nor will I ever be anything like Socrates, but getting a taste of that is something I’m, and also I know you, I trust you. And so that’s the other thing. I mean, Ben was with me, we had talked before and then he was with me at the turn of the source and he was always a very helpful presence and we drank some kombucha together. Yeah, so I mean, I trust you and I trust your knowledge. So I will definitely consider it. For everybody watching, we’ll put some links in here if you wanna do Ben’s courses, if you wanna go on a vision quest. Do people have to have done the courses to go on the vision quest? No, no. And I did wanna mention, as you said, that sense of protection, there is, that’s the purpose we offer a quest like this is it’s a protected quest, which is different than you just went out in the woods to do some sort of solo experience because part of it kind of has, you know, you have to get back, you know? So part of you is like, I can’t let go all the way, you know, whereas in a protected quest, you feel this sense of container and support and it’s done actually with other people generally. So you have, you may have a few other people out in the woods, not that you can hear them or anything, but it’s that sense of community. Yeah, yeah, right, that’s good. So how would you, I mean, I know you and I think this would be an unfair criticism of you, but I can imagine some people voicing it. So how would you respond to people are saying, well, you know, this is a, here’s a white man appropriating indigenous culture, colonizing it and commercializing it. And you can fill in the blanks for the rest of the criticism because it’s a pretty unchanging, unflinching script of criticism. I wanna give you a chance because I know you and I know, I think like I said, I’m convinced of your authenticity, but I wanna give you a chance to at your own pace, to respond to that and to, you know, and I’m not saying that everybody makes that criticism as being vindictive. There are some people who might be honestly bringing it up or they have genuine concerns about protecting indigenous culture, et cetera, which I share. So how would you answer that? Yeah, great question. So, I mean, several layers, I guess. One would be, I’m really careful to appreciate specific cultural teachings. So the way I learned was, or most of my training was through, in the primal arts was through Tom Brown Jr. Who was, he was trained by a Lipan Apache elder, Southern Lipan Apache. And this is back in the 50s, early 50s and 60s, right? So, and he had a hardcore traditional training for about 11 years when he was a young man. And he was transformed by this and didn’t know what had happened to him and spent the next decade or so kind of practicing and he disappeared into the woods and trying to make sense of it. And then realized that he had been taught to teach specifically, like the elder who taught him was teaching him as a teacher, in a coyote fashion in a way that he didn’t recognize. So he started, he wrote a book. He actually mentored one student named John Young, who I’d love to connect you with by the way. And then he started a school and this was in the late 70s. So I bring that up because one of the definitions of, or as far as I understand the definition of cultural appropriation is basically, taking something from a culture that is not yours. And claim me in some way versus cultural appreciation, which would be the appreciation and use and honoring with respect something that’s been given to you or that you’ve received. And so much like in martial arts, there’s another example, I think, I studied Southeast Asian arts and I’m not Southeast Asian, Kali and C-Lot. And, but these arts have been transmitted by masters from those places to my teacher and teachers that given with authority, with permission to practice and use along with some cultural elements, you know, and it’s honored and it’s done in a respectful way. And it’s kind of built into the practice of the art is this transmission. So I think that that’s a good model. Of course, that can be abused as well, but I think there’s a good model there in terms of how to appreciate and to receive an art or a practice in a way that’s respectful and to use it in appreciation, which, you know, so I think that’s one layer of an argument. The other is that ultimately the primal arts themselves, the skills in the way I teach them and practice them specifically are just human. I mean, they are trans-cultural, you know, they are older than all of us. They are almost pre-human in some ways. So even, you know, tracking is, I think animals do track to some degree, right? So, and they have all emerged around the world uniquely and independently in not every specific skill, but there’s many, many patterns such as the bow and arrow or the fire or the, you know, or the bow drill fire or, you know, different shelters and stuff that have emerged everywhere. And so even though I’m not literally in contact with my ancestral lineage, I know that they were doing these skills. They had to, or I wouldn’t be here. So anyway, so that’s my first response. Oh, I think the cultural appreciation conjoined with this is something that’s, you know, part of our humanity. It goes back to probably before homo sapiens, it easily goes back to erectus. We’ve got good evidence for tracking and fire use and hunting and erectus. And so, yeah, claiming that these things belong to any one group is also a little bit of a misframing of things. So I think the balance between the appreciation and the understanding of the primordial nature of what you’re doing, I think it’s a very good, I think, defensible answer. So what do people do after they’ve done your course or division quest? How do they, do you follow up with any of them? How do they, how does it, so for me, part of what makes a ritual, and I think what you’re doing is a ritual in the proper sense of the word, is, you know, what you do in the ritual transfers broadly and well to the unritualized aspects of your life. So what do people, do you see evidence of this kind of transfer? Do people, do you follow up with people? Do people reach out to you later and talk about the transfer? Yeah, actually, I just was on a podcast with a friend of mine who, down in California, who came up for a quest a few years ago, and it blew his mind. Like, he was kind of like preaching about the quest. I was like, geez, man. So it’s, and he claimed, you know, he’s an example, just one example, but he has all kinds of, you know, claims of how this has impacted him in endless ways. So, but I find also like, most of the people I’ve offered quests for have been people that have been part of, you know, our little, our family, our community here, our tribe. Our tribe. And it’s, that’s been very special to watch because I’ve had the pleasure of being able to mentor people in a more traditional sense where it’s like, it’s years and it’s an invested, it’s an investment in them as a person, but as well as their developmental path and skills. And I’ve, it’s been amazing to watch, you know, cause I know this thing, this technology of the quest is sitting there and it’s waiting for them because it’s just, you know, watching them get closer and closer and they start to ask questions around it. And it’s really neat because as these, especially younger people come up in age, the quest has been there as part of, you know, they’re aware of it in our community and in our training, it’s like this thing that, you know, people do, but then it becomes more relevant to them. And eventually they find themselves in that circle. And then it becomes a touchstone for the rest of their lives, you know, to where it’s something that, the way that you experience yourself in the quest, there’s something about it that teaches you and continues to teach you in that sense, it’s, you know, sacred as you use that, this unfolding teaching that’s just always, you’re always coming back to it as a reference. So it’s like a reference experience of some kind that- Yeah, touchstone experience, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Do people largely get insights about themselves? And I mean, like, Socratic insights, I don’t mean therapeutic or autobiographical, I mean, do they get those kinds of insights, that kind of profound realization, you know, what they know and what they really know and what they really don’t know, who they really are, not in terms of the things they say about themselves, but the things they discover about themselves. Is it that, or do they get, you know, insights about the nature of reality or the world, or is it the connections between those two, or is it all three? Or is there just a lot of variation, or is there sort of regular patterns that people come out of the vision quest? Yeah, there is a lot of variation. So I would say it’s, in some ways, the quest is a mystery, it’s unknowable, you know? And so I try to not build up too much expectations for people because everyone’s coming from such a different place. And one of the biggest challenges in the quest is dealing with expectations, because you end up judging your experience and you’re wasting all this time, like, you know, in that cycle. But there is some overall patterns. I mean, there’s two big categories of insight, I would say. One is, which is just called personal, teaching their personal vision or personal insight, which would be kind of what you’re talking about. Some of it is, well, that’s the thing about it. It doesn’t, no part of your life is untouched. So it’s embodied, but it’s also at all levels. So you will have insight physically. You will have insight emotionally. You will have insight spiritually, right? So, and in sense of reality, it’s like, it just drops all of the distinctions in a way. Well, ultimately, I guess that’s kind of that oneness state, right? But so you will have insights in what you know, in your personal blind spots, in your personal, what you need to work on. And, you know, people have different experiences. They have their whole life kind of go before their eyes, that kind of thing. They have, I mean, it’s just, there’s so many different ways. For some people, it’s a totally blissful experience. For some people, it’s totally hell, you know, but not the whole thing, you know, it oscillates. And it just shows us how, I guess, in some ways, how unreliable our self is, you know, or how it’s not a thing. So it really challenges that. And I think that’s part of, I would say, everyone experiences that, is like this sense of, oh, I’m not who I thought I was, you know? And then there is like what we call, so that’s personal vision, but there’s also like grand vision, which is a little more, you might get a sense of your relatedness to the rest of reality, or like how you fit, what your purpose is, like why you’re here, almost kind of thing, in that kind of cliche way. But it really gives you a sense of meaning, you know, too. So, yeah, and they’re meant to be done, well, not meant to be, they’re able to be done multiple times. So the first, if you do one one time, it’s totally challenging, the next time it could be totally amazing, or vice versa. So, you know, I’ve done a number of them, and I’ve had some people go through a couple of times, and it’s always different, so. So what happens in the, you said it ends with an integration phase, what does that, like what does that mean? Is that about helping people facilitate that transfer? Is it about? Yeah, it involves that. So basically people come out, and you’re probably familiar with this, people come out, one of my favorite experiences, my wife helps me with this, in the whole process, but in the reintegration, it’s like watching, so they come out at sunrise, or at first light, the last day, it’s like watching these bare souls float out of the woods, I mean, it’s really amazing, just the presence and the quality of contact, and it’s just the most beautiful thing, but they have really no idea where they are, or how transparent they are. And there’s something about being in nature that just brings us back to a whole different pace, and a whole different layer of being, and talk about breaking frame and reframing, it’s like this, it reframes you in this embedded state, they come out, and we encourage them basically to channel their energy into capturing their experience, so we’ll do, spend most of the day journaling, or some form of capture, some people it’s recording or whatever, but just at first, kind of discouraging a lot of talking, because people, there’s a lot of, I mean, sometimes it can be almost painful to hear your own voice when you first, you know, it’s just like this, wah, so, and we just encourage people to kind of start to form their container a little bit, before they start to interact, but we do have some dialectic process in there, we have dialogue, especially towards the day they go home, we have people kind of supporting each other and sharing a little bit of experience, but it’s also just the physical needs of grounding people back with food, making sure they’re healthy and feeling good, and coming back into their body, so to speak, and then we have this whole like, preparing to go back into the world, where, you know, there’s a hole in the world that is the shape of what you were, and you’re going back in this fluid state, you know, and what shape do you want to, because there seems to be about a week of recalibration, reformation, where people are very, very fluid and very elastic, you know, and it’s a very powerful time to make new choices, so we encourage people to take advantage of that. Yeah, memory reconsolidation kind of stuff, yeah, for sure. Yeah, it’s- That’s really profound. It is. Yeah, I’m very thankful for that experience, man. I tend to run them spring and fall, kind of in the natural seasons of transition, so that the earth is also kind of reflecting some of the- Right, right, right, right. Yeah. Did I, I mean, just for the sake of time here, can I ask, unless you have another question? No, you answered all of my questions, really beautifully and wonderful. So I have, back to, maybe we should just, back to the primal arts, so, thinking of tracking in particular, and you mentioned in our ancient origin, I thought that was cool, you mentioned tracking and fire, and those are two that are very powerful teachers, I found. Right. And I had this idea, there’s a couple ideas around them, as good candidates for this, this participatory connection to the relational, as I’m calling it, or, what was the word you used again? The non- The non-propositional, or? No, you were talking about the flip of- Oh, post-nominalist, not- Post-nominalist, yeah. Yeah. So, so both, let’s just use tracking and survival skills as an example, or maybe just fire. I was actually listening to one of your lectures recently, I think I wrote this down, I had a quote. It was a talk you had with Jonathan Pagio and Paul Vander Quay, and it was the one on narrative emergence and emanation, I don’t know if you remember that, but you said, we need a trans-narrative dialectic practice that reconciles the nested emanation-emergence relationships, and if we can enact them coming together, the coming together of the emergent and the emanation, emanating with an open-ended dialectic, which is an enacted symbol of the way that the logos of the universe unfolds. I was like, I think you just said that, like out of nowhere, by the way, and it’s pretty awesome. But it brought tracking to mind as a candidate, when I heard you talking about Yeah. these trans-narrative dialectic practices, because one thing tracking, one of the things I’ve discovered in tracking is that we are, you know, just tracks are not objects, you know? The whole art is based on looking at basically real relationships. So if you think of what a footprint is in the sand, right? Yeah, yeah. On a beach, you’re looking at something, but what you’re looking at is not there. You’re not looking at a foot, and you’re not looking at the sand as it was, you’re looking at a preserved interaction of a relationship. Right, right. Right, that’s kind of symbolically, or a pattern that’s there, that was a interaction. And so when I kind of got that and started looking around at tracking in that sense, I’m just like, because the other, one of the principles of tracking is that basically everything is a track, you know? Everything is, any disruption in any baseline is a track, any disturbance, and you can kind of keep going all the way out to the Big Bang, in a sense. So, you know, the first big track. So, you’re looking at, it shifts you into looking at the world past, beyond story, or beyond, at first, beyond narrative. You don’t have to have that. You can bring that in, because that’s the interpretive aspect of tracking, is like, oh, this is what happened, right? But before that, there’s just this pure sensory kind of experiential operation. And that’s part of the art. And so we use questions to direct that process. But I just, once I realized that I’m tracking relationships, like I’m looking at, I’m literally looking at the world that way, and it’s affecting how I’m seeing the world. Like I’m seeing the world now as relationships. I just thought it was, since it’s such a ancient and built-in, well, possibly led to our, or contributed to our cognition. I mean, I don’t know what you would think of that, but. I think a lot. I think narrative presupposes the tracking ability. I agree with Stegmeier, like orientation, navigation, signification. You need all of these in place in order for narrative to unfold, right? And yeah, I think tracking is what gives us the extended signification ability to use language. I think Arbib is right that language evolves out of pantomime. And what you’re doing is basically using actions for a purpose, but not for that purpose, but to get to people thinking about what that purpose, right? And so you’ve got, if you think of people, and if you watch some of the last endurance hunters when they’re tracking, they’re also pantomiming, they’re gesturing, they’re doing these things, and they’re doing all this imaginal stuff, and they’re building up displaced signification. Like you said, it’s not about here now. This points to the past and the future in a powerful way, and they’re linking signs together to get clearer about how they should orient and navigate and what they should find significant in both senses of the word as relevant and also as signifying. I think the evolution of tracking communicative pantomime together are the things that make the evolution of language possible. And so in that sense, I think not only are these things pre-narrative, they’re pre-linguistic, and they make our ability to use language and to extend it and to become extended temporal agents. I mean, that’s what you, think about it. Somebody who’s a tracker has to be an extended temporal agent, right? They’re opening themselves up through time in order to do what they’re doing. So I think part of what happens in a lot of these practices is we get to pre-linguistic, pre-narrative, but I think that can also be not only taken up into the linguistic and the narrative, it can be even more accepted into the post-narrative, the post-linguistic when people have these profound experiences of reorienting a sense of, think about depth, that’s a tracking term, they’re moving into the depths, right? And they’re finding super significance. So I think, yeah, I think what you’re tapping into is definitely before narrative and after narrative, because I think it’s before language and after language in the important ways. That’s very cool. So yeah, I think another word that comes up is transjective. It allows us to perceive the transjective realm in a way. Yeah, totally. Yeah, because that being a track is not something in it or in you, but- Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. So, and the fact that there’s a preserved training methodology, there’s a way to get good at it. There’s a way to practice it is pretty amazing too. So anyway, just wanted to kind of champion tracking as a practice. No, I think it’s really important. And it sounds to me, because you said you’re invoking it, there’s a tremendous amount again of the imaginal in this. Again, binding the abstract to the concrete, what Corban calls the intellectual to the sensual, but also binding the subjective and the objective together in the affordances. The word track is actually an affordance term. It allows you to follow something and find it. Right? So yeah, I think all of that is really, really, really powerful. How many, how many, like are you offering Corban courses all the time? Yeah. Of course it’s pretty much have to be in person, right? Most of them are in person, but I do, we do have some online stuff going on. In fact, there’s one just to bring up another skillset back to fire. And I mentioned to this, I sent you a message on the idea of reexaptation, which is something I’m kind of, I don’t know if that’s a word yet, but the idea of, you know, we potentially accepted, I, you know, I’m looking at my experience with fire and how to tend fire and the analogies that you guys are using in dialogue, dialogue or dog, or doglectic. Yeah. And have we exact, have we accepted the technology of tending fire into tending conversation and could, what would happen now that we are, you know, humans now doing this, trying to rediscover this technology. If we did this around fire together and like actually tended fire, I mean, how powerful would that be to activate these, these things? We’re like, first of all, I think this is an important thing. And this goes towards the layering. I talk about as design principle, but this is a way of articulating it a little bit more specifically. First of all, Heraclitus is, you thought of the logos as fire. So, so yeah, this is, this goes back to the beginnings, at least within what we call Western civilization. I think this note, and I talked about it towards the end of Awakening from the Meeting Crisis, because of course, Tai Chi Chuan did that for me, you know, you go back into the sensory motor balancing thing, and then you really seriously play and you, you become a connoisseur of it. And then that gets re-exapted up into all the ways we’re balancing things in more abstract symbolic fashion. Yes, I think that’s an important part of any ecology of practices it should layer. And I think what you’re proposing is exactly right. I think if people did some fire making, especially from scratch and fire tending, and also did the practices around the fire, I think that would really, I agree with you, this idea of let’s re-exapt. I think that’s what a simple problem, no, I’ll be stronger. I think that’s what a symbol plausibly is. It’s an invitation to re-exapt in a powerful way. And ritual is about, in some ways, doing the re-acceptation. So I think, yes, I would like to do this. So one of our courses, back to the yes, the course is, most of them are in person, and it’s very powerful that way, because we can layer it so effectively like that. And I do all the teaching layered like that, especially over time. But we do, a friend of mine and I are putting together a online fire keeping practice. It’s gonna be like a nine month practice. And that’s just coming out of the spring. So I’m really excited with what I’ve learned about, dialectic and dialogous from you to bring that in more. But it will certainly, I think, help facilitate people in the relationship to fire. Yeah, but I mean, let’s maybe we can make this more, I don’t know, more official, that’s not the right word, we’re friends. But maybe we could make it more formalized. That also doesn’t sound right. But what I mean is, like, you know, maybe asking people who wanna do the dialectic and to be a logoist workshops, maybe start doing the course, the fire keeping course, and see if there’s a synergistic effect. Right, yeah. So I mean, there’s a way to coordinate that. You know, you could give me the, make sure I get the links to the, and I wanna, the trouble is I live in Toronto in an apartment. Like how would I do it? I’d have to be able to get to wilderness to some degree. Not necessarily, we’re working around it. We know that’s a concern. You’d be amazed what we can accomplish. There would be at some point a need for an open flame, but we’re working creatively to make that happen, so. Okay, well, I really wanna, yeah. We could also create something, John, too, another, you know, something that would support specifically your workshop as far as a shorter or a fire making practice, you know, if you would. I like to think about doing that. Why, sorry. That was, that was too weak. I want to do that, and I’d like to get some thought into how we could make that happen. I think, I’d like, you know, again, I’m really trying to get back to what ritual really is, and this ocean of layering and re-acceptation, which, like, I remember when I came back from return to the source, and this is hard to explain, you’ll get it, but people who haven’t done, like, the geometry of my cognition was altered in a fundamental way, like, I could just move through. Yeah. And also, you know, the way I had encased fear in my body was significantly realizing, oh, because you had to let, I mean, because you’re confronting real fear, right? Yeah, yeah. Right. And so all that, all that, all that anxious expectation fear, you get, leave it behind. I remember driving around for quite a few days feeling, oh, I don’t have that, I’m not carrying that around in my body. So I very much, this idea of re-acceptation, I really want to do something with you on this and see how we can make this work. I think the idea of fire tending, fire generation, fire tending, I think connection with dialectic and the dialogus, I think this is a brilliant idea. And I think it will properly help ritualize this. The Zoroastrian tradition, and you know, my partner, she’s Persian, has a lot of ritual around fire tending. I would like to understand this from the inside, not just from the inside. It changes things. It’s, you know, I just did a fire last night, actually in preparation for this. Yeah. Amazing, yeah. Okay, is there any final thing you would like to say before we wrap up? Well, basically just thank you, you know, and invite people to, to, yeah, dive into the embodied practices. I mean, there’s a growing list now thanks to what you’re making aware and, and, you know, great stuff. And it’s just super exciting. So, and I think actually I wanted to add the embodied practices are becoming popular and I’m kind of starting to want to speak for the embedded practices. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Actually becoming nature, not just playing in nature, right? Yeah, no, I agree. I agree on the embedded. Yeah, very much, very much. I think we could get the embedment going if we were able to get clearer about this re-acceptation part of ritual. I think that could help the embedment very much. Yeah, there’s, there’s something that those like fire as an example, just it, it helps with the modal confusion. I’ve been playing with, playing with the idea that it helps you, helps humans behave, behave, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you’re in the process, you’re making and doing, but you’re being and you’re, it becomes sacred. So there’s something about that that’s That’s a good point. Relieves the confusion, you know. So, awesome. All right, so this has just been really amazing. I wanna thank you. I really liked this suggestion you brought in. And yeah, this has got real potential. You know, I’ve got an intuitive sense and my intuition could be wrong like anybody else’s, but I think this, let’s at least really explore this. Let’s make this happen then. So, you know, like, time is very stretched, but I wanna make time to regularly design something here. I think this would be really, really crucial. As it fits, it would be great, yeah. Yeah. Is there anything else we should discuss before we end? Well, I think I wanna honor your time. I know you’re tight, so. I could talk forever to you. There is a, well, just maybe just let me mention a little more skill to put in there. It has to do with dialogue in a way, which is the art of stalking. Sounds strange, but it’s. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s a good point, yes. Yeah, so stalking is where you are literally embedded within the environment in a way that you’re trying to, you know, be aware of as much as possible and have as little disturbance as possible. And so it puts you in this strange tension of conforming to the landscape, to the earth, whatever landscape you’re in, and to extend that to doing that with people. And this is an interesting thing. This goes back, it must go back to like, I don’t know, bands of chimps, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hunting together, but it’s, we call it team movement. And it’s a profound ground for learning kind of that, what’d you call it, mutual modeling. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So a lot of empathy building, and it’s basically like a nonverbal dialogos where you use your physical body. And I guess sports teams probably tap into this, but anyway, it’s something that I’ve specialized in for years and- It is, you know, it strikes me that both of these should be things that go into the re-acceptation for dialectic and the dialogos, both of them. So yeah, let’s note that both the fire tending, yeah, too bad that you pulled it stalking. Yeah, I know what you mean. Team movement, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but yeah, we’ll come, you know, we can also try rehabilitating the term, but- Yeah, we can. I think both of those would really help people going in, you know, I’ve been thinking of things, I’ve been thinking, I mean, I hadn’t thought of these, fire tending and stalking are very primordial. I think people also doing some improv training would help very much. And I could see a program where you do- You get Aaron. The fire tending and stalking, and then, yeah, yeah, and then you do the improv, and then you move into the whole workshop for the dialectic and the dialogos. I can see us building a deeper, richer course together. Yes. Very exciting. Okay, I should go. All right. That’s been wonderful. Thank you so very much. Really appreciate it, John. Thank you so much. Take care. Take care, bye-bye. Bye.