https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=FVSVUT_DeBk
Welcome, everyone. I’m really excited. I have the amazing, as I called him in a lot of the video promotions for the last video, the amazing Rick Rapetti is here again. And I found the last video just scintillating, electrifying many of the viewers among you. You know, you’ve commented, Paul Van der Kley did a commentary video in which many of you, there’s been a lot of discussion generated by that video, and it’s been excellent. And a lot of the credit goes to Rick, his honesty, his charisma, and his, you know, his conceptual acuity, all of these were clearly demonstrated last time. And so Rick, I’m just really happy to be talking with you again, I’m very excited about this exchange we’re going to engage in. Equally excited. Thank you for that tremendous build up. Now, I hope I could live up to that today. You will, you will. I’m not worried about it. Thanks for having me back. It’s a great joy. I love this kind of stuff. So, and you and I, we have so many points of overlap and convergence, that there’s a lot to explore between us. So, last time you did a lot, and I’m going to put the link to the previous video in here, I won’t do extensive recap, but you did a lot of your autobiography, in which you related, you know, a lot about some profound transformative experiences, both positive and negative that you underwent, and how that has led you into your professional career as a philosopher, especially you do work on the philosophy of meditation, and related things, altered states of consciousness, etc. Now, as we got towards the end of that, that discussion of your autobiography, there was a pivot point that I found very interesting, because I asked you towards the end, where you were now, and you said you had, after you had sort of the breakup of your community, and you had some very negative, you sort of turned the taps off on most of, you know, I don’t know what to call it, the mystical arena was turned off, and it did not have access to your agency anymore, except for, I believe, your yoga practice, some basic mantra practices, and meditation, yes, and then, yeah, mindfulness meditation, yes. Thank you. But then you said, you know, and then you’ve been engaged in a long, you know, reflective career about trying to develop the conceptual theoretical tools, grammar, vocabulary, for properly understanding that, and in a way that would also be, you know, potentially helpful to other people. And then you said something which really piqued my ear, you said, you’re now sort of starting to open up again, you’re starting to turn the taps on again, very gradually, because of the dark night of the soul that you went through, if I can put it that way. And I was wondering if we could start there, and it’s like, what does that mean for you? And what’s the intersection point right now, both ways, between your, I don’t have a good adjective, so I’m going to use this, and try and use it as in Hadou’s sense, between your spiritual practices and your philosophical practice. There’s an intersection point, and it seems to be having something to do with you turning the taps on again, if I can use that metaphor repeatedly. And what is the relationship? Do these experiences help us to cultivate wisdom? Does the practice of philosophy help to appropriately constrain these experiences so they don’t spin us off in untoward and perhaps even unethical or unhealthy directions? So that’s the sort of somewhat broad question I’m going to lay in your lap. Yeah, even that’s a lot. Yeah, we’ll start, I’ll start feeling my way around in that domain, and we’ll just see how the conversation evolves. You know, for me, I don’t have like a well worked out answer to really any of those questions, but it’s a kind of ongoing exploration for me. So let me just kind of speak to the parts of it in whichever inchoate ways that I can, my intuitions, you know. I mean, for me, a large part of my sort of struggles since my, you know, deep spiritual practices and mystical experiences period of my life when those were both happening together. And then when I kind of turn that off, I turn that valve off almost, you know, force it because it was too much for me as a youngster without a community of support and everything. And I think I mentioned this last time without that community. I only really recently realized that the absence of the community might have been a significant contributing factor to the fact that it was overwhelming for me. But so it, in the period in between then and now, I’ve been kind of just wandering around in the world of philosophy with my little mini kind of or modulated, controlled, contained spiritual practices that keep me, they kind of keep me sustained. My meditation practice, my yoga practice, all that stuff keeps that part of me kind of, you know, like a low flame on a warm or whatever. It’s kept me going and it sustains me. It’s been still one of the most important things in my life the whole time, no matter what. But in my career in academic philosophy, you know, like I mentioned last time, there’s been almost no crossover between the two. And anytime I’ve discussed these things with other, and my network of academic philosophers are almost all analytic philosophers because that was my training. So it’s been very little crossover between the two. And if anything, criticism, whenever I try to discuss these things with my analytic colleagues, like I recently gave a talk in my department, my discipline, the philosophers got together. We started having these once a month, let’s share our work things. I gave a presentation about some of my mystical experiences and I just brought them to them. And I was like, what do you guys think? I’m not going to give a paper. I’m just going to describe some of my most intense experiences and see what you think. And, you know, a couple of them, like one of them is a kind of like a young Ian or whatever. And so like he was supportive. Another one is like he’s a philosopher, but he’s also like a kind of theologian. So he was supportive, but a handful of the other ones were very critical, just like logical empiricist kind of criticisms. And that’s what I was the latter, just the criticisms, most of what I’ve been exposed to whenever I was dealing with academic philosophy. So it’s been a kind of empty. My philosophical work has been empty of that kind of support, but I’ve been recently connecting with other philosophers outside of my little circle, particularly when I started a few years ago, I took training to become a philosophical counselor. Yes. And that community is much more open minded about philosophy as a way of life. Yes, of course. Practical philosophy, you know, they are doing the logos with clients, not just kids in classes for credits, you know, and just being around those kinds of people. And also in the like not long ago, I also took training in Gestalt psychotherapy. I was thinking of doing that as another career. I did two out of three years in it. And that community is very supportive of my spiritual experiences. So it’s been that my community and it’s not one community, but the informal network of my peers that I’ve cultivated over the last 10 years or so has been more supportive. And that’s been the primary factor, I think, that makes me feel comfortable about my spiritual experiences, that there are other intellectual, intelligent people who kind of get it. Whereas, you know, my model had been analytic philosophers. Right. And that just kind of put a wedge into my, like, it was so strong for me that, I mean, I had what most people would describe as, like the kind of gnostic experiences that people say, when you have those experiences, you can’t possibly doubt them. Right. But my training in analytic philosophy had me doubting my own experiences. Yeah, I can do that for pretty much for any experience you can have. Yeah. And, you know, so it’s been really hard for me to integrate the two things over the years. But it might just be a thing about maturity and time and feeling like, you know, especially doing academic work about Buddhism and meditation and writing a little bit about my experiences, that’s helped me to kind of figure out ways of seeing that, you know, they’re not necessarily incompatible. And it doesn’t matter necessarily if, like, the critics on my shoulder who are my analytic philosophy colleagues don’t get it. But I still want to do my best to try to convince them that there’s something intelligent and important going on in this domain. That’s why I’m working on figuring out, you know, some of the philosophy of meditation. So I don’t know if I’ve said enough to start a good. Yeah, you have. You have. There’s a couple things. So at some point, I want to come back to philosophical counseling, because many of the viewers are probably unfamiliar with that as a phenomenon. And I’d like to open that up and its connection, a potential, like you said, a bridging between sort of philosophical discourse and these transformative experiences. Because in philosophical counseling, people are thinking something analogous to a therapeutic transformation of some kind. I’d like to get clear about what that is. So let’s put a pin in that. I want to come back to that. I wanted to pick up on, you know, the anthology is how you and I met, you know, the Routledge Handbook on the philosophy of meditation. What about the philosophers who are doing work on the philosophy of meditation? Are they are they as a group of philosophers? They’re not just philosophers. I noticed that some of them are cognitive scientists and psychologists. Are they more open to altered states of consciousness and transformative experience? Because certainly this is a long standing promise. How many of these meditative traditions is that they’re going to afford such a transformation. I get it. The mindfulness has reduced meditation to being contented with your station within capitalist systems or something like that. And that doesn’t really I really object to that reduction. But I mean, at least the traditional presentations of many of these traditions, right, are that they will afford, you know, radical transformations up to, you know, the possibility of enlightenment or whatever that might mean. And so one of the things that Leo and I did when we wrote the original our original work in the 2016 book chapter is we tried to link an account of meditation to the kinds of mystical experiences that arise in it. For example, there’s a lot of discussion within cognitive science of the pure consciousness event. There’s some discussion about, you know, the radical at one minute, some discussion about non duality. Do you are you finding the philosophers of meditation and philosophers of mindfulness? Are they open to considering the transformative power that of, you know, of a commitment to these practices? Does that are you finding a bit more community with them? Yes, some of the contributors to the volume, I think there’s 26 chapters and co authored. So plus me, that’s about 28 of us. And you’re one of them. But yeah, a number of them have written their contribution addresses this, you know, in favorable light. Some of them are more, you know, skeptical. There were a couple of skeptical pieces in there. You know, some philosophers just tackled a specific issue, like going through eagleness without the right supports could be damaging or painful. And there’s like a chapter about that. Another fellow, Chris Leatherby wrote a chapter about psychedelics and meditation and how they both can can afford those kinds of experiences. You know, and he just came out with, I think it’s an Oxford. It’s a big book about the philosophy of psychedelics. I think it’s Oxford. I’m not sure. Oh, I’d like to get it. I’ll send you the link. Yeah, please. I said I teach some of his material of the course I do on the on the the nature and function of the self, the Letheby and Durand paper on psychedelics and the no self experience. Yeah, that’s a really that’s a really good paper. Yeah, I’d like to I’d like to get that book on the philosophy of psychedelics. Yeah. Well, he has a chapter in our anthology, and he just came out with that book. So I was happy that he was in there. There’s another fellow up at Fordham, Christopher Gowans, who had one of the earlier chapters in the anthology where he’s talking about meditation as a kind of part of philosophy as a way of life. Yes. And that the kind of wisdom that meditation generates is more like knowledge how than knowledge that it’s procedural rather than propositional. Yes. The first chapter, I put the most critical chapter, I put it as the first one to kind of lay down the gauntlet for the rest of the believers in the collection. Yeah, was a total criticism demanding that for meditation to be meaningful, this alleged state of, you know, no mind or Nirvana or whatever you want to call it, it seems to have no content. What proposition can you justify that comes out of meditation? You know, and this and he went through this whole analysis about foundationalism and whatnot. Yeah, it is like the standard analytic kind of. Yeah. A number of the other chapters without even having because nobody really read each other’s chapter. Yeah. But some of the other chapters do kind of address that. Like there’s another chapter. Oh, what’s his name? John Spackman, which is all about whether or not meditative states attainment, not just practice, have conceptual content. And if they do, if they don’t, another fellow, Sonam Chakru also addresses that. But he goes into this whole thing about it has all these other pragmatic wisdom oriented, you know, the variety of these views in that among those that collection of individuals. Yeah. Yeah. You know, many of them I just reached out to because I knew that they were doing some work. I don’t know them personally, but I got them to put a chapter in the book. But this is the beginning of friendships like mine with you. Yeah. Yeah. People professionally, but then it’s going to grow over the years. So I’m looking forward to, you know, deeper involvement with folks. The last couple of books that I came out with, we put together one of those author meets critics panels at the APA, the American Philosophical Association. So I’d get to have a couple of the other people who were in the contribution there and then others and you meet them at the conference and, you know, develop friendships with people. So yeah, I’m looking forward to building some kind of community. I would imagine, I don’t think there is one yet. I mean, there’s a journal called mindfulness, but there’s no philosophy of meditation journal. And I think that it might be time for something like that. If you want to undertake that project, you can count on my support for it. Yeah. No, I’m thinking about it. And, you know, Rutledge does the journal of consciousness studies. Yep. Yep. So they might be interested, you know, I have a very good relationship with my editor from the, this will be my fourth book, the one that I’m working on right now, my monograph on the same subject. So that might come out of it. And, you know, this is the fusing of meditation and philosophy for me publicly, just not in my own mind is a relatively new phenomenon for me. And I’m meeting lots of nice people like you, and I’m growing this informal community. And I think it might be that that’s making me feel confident about my ability to do those two things. And also my personal practice, like, as far as me being open to like mystical experiences again, I think it might be a combination of my philosophical, I think my philosophical resistance, my accepting the analytic criticisms as grounds for skepticism and doubt. I did a session recently, a philosophical counseling session as a, as like a demo for the Philosophical Counseling Association that I belong to. And they, I was the client and I brought that issue, like, whenever I get a chance to do a free session with anybody about anything, I bring, I can take all the free counseling I could get on this subject, because it’s like my life mission really to figure this stuff out. Right. And in the mission, this, this counselor, her name is Shanti Jones, she’s really good. She almost converted the session into psychotherapy, whatever is appropriate, you know, in the context of CSB. Is it conceivable that your philosophical skepticism is kind of like a mask or a cover for something deeper and psychological? And I was like, in the process of like going back and forth with her, I said it might be the fear of those negative experiences when I was younger. I think that might have played a role. Like, you know, when you’re angry at something and when you’re fearful, you can get angry and you can become critical. And I don’t know, it might be, I mean, I’m psychoanalyzing myself, like, just by skimming the surface of an iceberg, but I don’t really know. But I can see that that might have played a role. So and I think I’m not as frightened about that. Like, I’m not a kid anymore. I’ve been around a long time. I’ve done a lot more reading about this. So yeah, my, my conceptual landscape, you know, of the whole thing is not as opaque as it was when I was going through that stuff. So I think I’m just this combination of factors. And I think there’s a need in my soul. Like I’ve been holding back. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that’s a huge part of me. So it’s kind of like just, I think it’s time for it to bubble forth, you know, I can’t sublimate it too much longer. So I’m getting older too, you know. Well, there’s, there’s a few responses I want to make and see what you say. And one of them will be about the philosophical counseling. One is I resonate with what you said, I, when I came out of Christianity, I was very angry at it. It was a fundamentalist kind of Christianity. I always been wanting to know what that was like. But you don’t have to do that now. Maybe another time. Yeah, okay. Well, you always describe that in a very superficial way. Well, I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian, and I escaped. And that’s about all we ever hear about it. Yeah, I mean, there’s, I don’t want to derail you. So no, no, no, that’s fair. That’s fine. And I’ve come to appreciate the taste for the transcendent that that religious upbringing left in me. And so I’ve come to a more balanced appreciation. Doesn’t mean however, I want to acknowledge the point, right? There was a lot of anger, there was a lot of criticism on, you know, militant atheism, I don’t describe myself now as an atheist, but as a non theist. And I, I, I am, I know, but I know it abstractly, knowing it concretely is the challenge, but I know abstractly, that it makes me biased in certain ways when I’m interacting with Christianity or the other Abrahamic religions, there’s sort of stimulus generalization, as a learning theorist would say. And so I try to, I try to address the fact that I’m probably biased by entering into good faith, both senses of the word, dialogos with committed practicing Christians who come in the same way. That’s my attempt to try and address that. So I’m saying I can, I can see why a community, a community that in that could in fellowship, you know, push back on you in appropriate ways could be very, very, very helpful for addressing that. What I’m saying is, when I went when I allowed them to challenge me, that’s a way of me letting that anger and criticism be addressed from something outside of me, don’t know if this is making much sense, but that’s very helpful for transmuting it. Often what will happen is, like Paul Van de Klay or JP Marcel, they’ll, they’ll, what will happen is that criticism will come to light in a form that I can take to heart. And so that is my way of trying to address how I, I, I, I’m biased. So I think it’s plausible, I think it’s plausible, given our similarities, that that might also be the case for you, that getting to what I’m trying to suggest to you, and I’m suggesting, I guess, I hope I’m not coming off as patronizing, I’m suggesting it in friendship, right? That not abandoning the criticisms, but learning how to transmute them almost as if they’re coming from somebody else that has your best interest at heart, is a way of changing them from a knife being stabbed at something to being a, you know, a, you know, a protective filter for dealing with these experiences. If that, if that string of metaphor makes any sense to you. It all makes perfect sense. It all resonates very well. And it’s just hearing that is helping me realize that, and I think I kind of said something about it, that just me talking to people like myself more frequently over the last few years, this is this dialogos thing. And some of them are my teenage friends from the satsang, you know, who I’m still in contact with, who are still like members of the cult, so to speak. You know, they know, I’ve been arguing with them for a long time, but I’m also, you know, so I take the philosophical critical side when I’m debating with them. And then I, I take the spiritual side when I’m debating with the philosophers. This is the a logos in both directions. And it really is, it is what is, it’s somewhat cathartic. It’s a slow cathartic process. Yeah. And it’s a one, the also there’s, there’s a dimension of when you’re doing it in the logos, it could potentially be beneficial to other people. That’s also helpful because it, it de-centers you from the egocentrism of your own pain. Pain tends to make us very egocentric. And when you can see it being a value to other people, you get de-centering and that alleviates some of the way in which you’re stuck. I wonder also if the, so for me, I found by returning to the neoplatonic tradition, I found a tradition that deeply interweaves tremendous philosophical conceptual sophistication with also the promotion of very powerful transformative experiences. So I’ve been digging very deeply into that tradition. And I’m wondering if, well, for me, getting a kind of conceptual acuity and conceptual dexterity also is helpful in that, right? There’s, there seems to be deep connections. This is kind of a Marlo Ponte thing to say. There’s deep connections between, you know, a conceptual articulation and a perceptual articulation and an ability to, right, instead of this being this in-cohate gestalt that just sort of hits you like a wave, right, you can realize, and you have to be careful to not impose, but you can realize the articulations within it better. The metaphor, like, when I don’t have my glasses, I can’t parse things the same way as I can when I have my glasses on. My glasses aren’t my seeing, but they give me a way of getting a kind of acuity and dexterity in my seeing that I wouldn’t otherwise have. That’s what I’ve been finding, especially by pursuing, you know, the neoplatonic tradition, you know, from, you know, Plato, Platonus, Proclus, Dionysus, Aquinas, John Scott of Syracuse. And that whole tradition has been, Nicholas of Cusa, has been tremendously helpful for me as well. And it helps me do two things. It helps me get this kind of upaya, skillful means, in a directly experiential functional way, but it also helps me, again, afford a kind of rapprochement with my Christian background because of the way there’s a whole neoplatonic Christian tradition that is also going through a revival right now. So I’m wondering if that’s also part of what’s happening for you right now, that you’re starting with the philosophy of meditation, you’re starting to develop, right, again, sorry, I really don’t mean this to sound in any way condescending, Rick. I’m trying to… I’m reading this up, John. Okay, good. Because I really respect you. I sense a depth of insight and honesty in you that I really want to do justice to. So thank you for that feedback. Yeah, I’m wondering if, like, as you’re turning those tools to philosophy as a way of life and philosophy of meditation, maybe you’re getting also a sense of being able to articulate these experiences and therefore render them less overpowering. The problem I had with experiences was a certain kind of phenomenological ambiguity that I would often overlook because it’s all the coincidence of opposites and it’s all paradoxical and you’re given that sort of thing as a cover story. But sometimes what we’re doing is we’re kind of bullshitting ourselves about things or we can get into a lot of runaway interpretations because we don’t have any alternative interpretation available to us, right? Most of the time we’re engaged in an inference to the best explanation and we only have one explanation. It always comes off as the best and therefore the more certain. But when you have many alternatives that are generatable and you can compare them, then you can evolve a more appropriate, well-fitted interpretation. Does any of this? All of it makes perfect sense. Two things I want to say. Radhakrishnan, Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, I don’t know if you’re familiar with him. No. He was a former president of India but he’s also a philosopher and a Vedantist. But I want to mention the, oh goodness, I said two things and now I forgot what the second one was. But it’ll come to me as problems. I talked about him first. So instead of giving the one and two, we’ll just start with one. He wrote an article called The Personal Experience of God. I’ll send you the link to that. In that he argued, it’s a Vedanta view, but he argued specifically, it was the kind of condensation of this particular idea that the mystics in every tradition have this non-dualistic or deeply different mystical, transformative, noetic, gnostic, whatever you want to call it, trans-conceptual yet intelligible experience and they don’t have the language for it. And they’re in a culture, they’re embedded in a culture that has a spiritual tradition. So that’s the only language that they know. That’s the nearest conceptual framework for it. And so they immediately come out of that and translate it into that language. Exactly. And he said, I think they’re all having the same experience because when you, well not all of them but many of them, but because they’re from multiple traditions that have no contact with each other, they seem to be describing the same thing. And the other thing is that that like traditionally that state has been called ineffable or describable. But I think that’s just, it should be more like difficult to F rather than ineffable. It’s really difficult to describe, right? Because we don’t have the conceptual framework, but oh, I knew the other one would come to me. The Jains, Jainism, they have a doctrine called Anekantavada. Anekantavada, A is negation and Vada is a doctrine or path or way. And the middle part means one-sided. So it means non-one-sidedness doctrine. And they think it’s a kind of pluralism, like a lethic pluralism, every claim is based on a cognitive agent’s perspectival locus in the universe of reality. So it has some validity to it. Every perspective is true in some sense. So there are multiple truths, but the more of them you know, the closer you get to reality. So you were just saying the more conceptual different paradigms, if you’re stuck in one paradigm, you have that experience, it’s going to be filtered through that paradigm. But if you are familiar with all these different conceptual paradigms, then you can say, well, you can pick it and choose and construct the one that works the best for you. And that’s what I’m trying to do. And I know it’s a tangent, but it goes back to something we said earlier. Since I got my PhD and I got hired full-time in a community college, where often, you know, you either get like in most philosophy jobs, you get hired as the Leibniz guy or the this guy or the that. In a community college, you’re just the philosophy guy. So they didn’t care what I did. So even though I went to that analytics school, ever since I got that job, I started working on Buddhism and meditation and all these things, because I could, as long as I could publish, they didn’t care. And doing that kind of work, I realized that there’s a lot of philosophical conceptual frameworks in Asian philosophy. My prior knowledge of it was very limited. It was only Dharma teacher stuff, like Joseph Goldstein and all that kind of stuff, Vipassana people. That’s all meditation practice oriented literature. I didn’t know about Nagarjuna, Shanti Deva, Tsongkhapa. I didn’t know about any of that stuff. I’m vaguely familiar, but I didn’t know how rich their philosophical conceptual framework were. So just diving into that also helped me feel confident that I can link philosophy and my mystical meditative practices. Sorry to jump back to it. No, that’s a great connection. Yeah, the two groups that have done that for me, like I said, is that and they talk to each other, which is really interesting, which is the Kyoto school, right, which is just how I’ve heard you speak about Nishida and Nishitani. Nishitani, Masoabi, profound influence, especially Nishitani. Religion and Nothingness is, to my mind, one of the greatest books of 20th century philosophy. It’s one of the top fives I’ve read in my life. I told you last time, every time I not only speak to you, but watch one of your talks, my reading list keeps growing. I want you to give me a short list of the neoplatonic stuff that you found so helpful. I will. A lot of literature out there and I don’t want to feel my way around it. No, I’ll give you a short list of some really, really good stuff. Yeah, those two traditions and they actually talk to each other. D.T. Suzuki famously compared Eckhart and Zen in Buddhism and Christian mysticism, which is a good little thin book, by the way, on where these two traditions are talking to each other. Yeah, I guess that segues then into, well, I don’t guess, I think, I believe it segues into philosophical counseling because it seems to me that what philosophical counseling does is it especially helps you focus in on the process, the skill set and the virtue, the character set of virtues of exercising that conceptual acuity and dexterity and getting people to look at things in a multi-perspectival fashion. This is the platonic idea. You get multiple people and you get multiple perspectives and you get some sort of convergence, typically not to a proposition, but something emerges, the logos within the dia logos. I mean, I have had some training in psychotherapeutic practice and I’ve done some significant reading about philosophical counseling. My understanding is you’re not typically presenting a doctrine to people. While Epicurus said this or Socrates said that, instead you’re somehow trying to give people kind of like Vygotsky, the great educator, you’re putting people into this zone of proximal development, you’re giving them a scaffold, you’re acting as a cognitive prosthetic for them so that they can exercise more philosophical reflection on their particular issue or confusing. Is that a good way of thinking about philosophical counseling? Yeah, that’s a very good way. But everybody is different and every philosophical counselor is different, just like every therapist. You’ve got Gestalt therapists, you’ve got Freudian therapists, you’ve got all different cognitive behavioral, whatever. So similarly, every philosophical practitioner, counselor has some toolbox of preferred tools based on their development. And A, B, different clients come to us with different kinds of issues and it depends. If a client really is treating you like a psychotherapist, then you will play the role of psychotherapist with that client to the extent that you’re qualified to do that as a philosopher, but you will try to structure it in a way that you’re blending that in with philosophical counseling. It’s a thin line that it’s hard to differentiate because so many of the issues overlap. Lou Marinoff is kind of like the pioneer in the United States for philosophical counseling. There are others in Europe and Israel and whatever, but he wrote one book called Therapy for the Sane, I think is the title. But one of the issues that philosophical counselors are always trying to figure out at the meta level is what are the similarities and differences between psychotherapy or other talking therapies and philosophical counseling. It’s hard to generalize. It’s really hard to generalize. So somebody might come to a philosophical counselor with an ethical dilemma, but they might go to their psychologist with their ethical dilemma. When I was in training for Gestalt, the training for it was mostly practicum. We would engage in counseling sessions as the student or as the therapist, but we also had to be in therapy with a Gestalt psychotherapist when we were students. Many of the issues that would come up, this might be something unique to Gestalt, where Gestalt therapist’s attitude is whatever manifests in the session, that’s that layer of the onion that’s presenting itself, and that’s what we’re going to deal with. Similarly, in philosophical counseling, whatever comes up, you’re going to deal with it. Unless it strikes the counselor as this is not something in my wheelhouse, this sounds like something that I need to refer you out to somebody else. But the overlap in topics that therapists and philosophical counselors have expertise in, there’s a lot in that overlapping the two Venn diagrams, there’s a lot in the middle, so it’s hard to differentiate between the two. But I like the way that you said, ideally it’s a dialogos thing going on. And most people, I think, who come to philosophical counselors are coming with some kind of meaning crisis. Yes, that’s what I was going to ask. It’s part of the meaning crisis. I think death of God ever since that, you know, we’re all feeling our way around the dark and latching on to, you know, people are latching on to whatever they can. But some of them who are more, maybe they took a philosophy class or they were a minor in philosophy, they might have even majored in philosophy, but then went on into IT or some other career. But they have a need and they’ll come to a philosophical counselor knowing that they could have, they want to talk to Socrates, they want to have somebody who’s a professional friend slash philosopher, to do what you and I are doing right now, really. Yeah, yeah. Have a deep conversation. I love what you said, they want to talk to Socrates. I mean, I think better than any sort of conceptual definition you could have given a philosophical counseling, I like that one the best, right? Trying to afford the response to that, wanting to talk to Socrates. That strikes me. It’s kind of like what you said, and I think it was in the Meaning Crisis series, I forget which stoic, one of the followers of Socrates said he learned how to talk to his inner Socrates or something like that. Yeah, antistinies, antistinies. Yeah, yeah. So it’s hard to do that on your own. And everybody’s trying to do that in their own way, if they’re struggling with the Meaning Crisis, every day you’re thinking about what matters, but having somebody who’s got fluency in that domain, it makes it easier. Like you said, the philosopher creates that space in which the client or the other person or whatever is facilitated and moving into that. And eventually, that’s one of the major differences between philosophical counseling and psychotherapy. We try to awaken the inner philosopher. We try to get our clients to be able to talk to the Socrates in their own. Yeah, to replace. And it’s short term. It’s almost always short term. Right, right. So antistinies meant sort of replacing, well, I’m reading him to mean replacing, because everybody talks to themselves, the rumination, to replace that with talking to Socrates with Olencus in your head. That to me is like a very important thing to do with people. So Rick, you’ve given me a very good, I really like it, explication and explanation of what philosophical counseling is sort of directed at, I don’t know what to call it, the patient, the client. The client. Yeah, client. Okay. But I mean, from my experience with just both Jungian therapy, I went through Jungian therapy, did training in it, emotion focused therapy, some CBT work, right? It’s, and especially what you said about philosophical counseling, of it being dialogical, right? It’s not going to leave you unchanged, right? You’re not going in once, like the practice of philosophical counseling must also be reverberating and resounding back into you in some way. So can you talk to that pole? Like, what does it, how is it, what’s it doing to you? What’s it calling forth from you? And again, how does that relate to your big project of weaving those two together? You know, I’ve never really thought about that consciously, but I’m glad you asked. That’s a great question. Thank you. And I think that that might also be part of the reason why I’m more comfortable. Right. Opening up all the, because I’ve been doing this with clients who are treating me like Socrates. Right. And I’m, I have to play that role. So it has to summon that part of me, the best part of me, to be this kind of character in relation. And it’s an exploration. And just like you’re a teacher, the best way to learn something or cultivate some skill is to teach it. So it’s having that impact on, yes. I just thank you for that insight. You’re welcome. So can we zero in on that, that one, that point, because this is a point of resonance and you want, you’re somebody can talk to about it. Because both as a teacher, I mean, my style is explicitly pedagogically Socratic. And then of course, with the whole DIA Logos project, I’m often, I am committed to internalizing Socrates as a sage and trying to do the serious play of enacting Socrates when I enter into good faith interactions. And I’m always caught by the, there’s hubris sitting beside me on my shoulder. Right. And it’s like, so I, again, I’m asking you this in friendship and in respect. And it’s an open answer. It’s an open question. How do you know when you’re doing that? Well, right. I have some thoughts, but I don’t want to prejudice you by giving you my thoughts first. How do you know when, if you’ll allow me to write, you’re incarnating the voice and the presence, the perspective of Socrates in a way that is good, right. From, you’re just play acting. So the difference between the serious play and the play acting. We’ve all met therapists who you can, like, you know, when you’re, and you can tell when they’re, when they’re, when they’re, when they’re doing the script and you go, ah, I don’t want you as a therapist. You’re not here. All you are is a script, right? I can read if I want to. Right. Do you get the point I’m trying to make? Right. Absolutely. So what, go ahead. Yeah. No, the same question is one that I asked myself over the years when I’m teaching. Yeah. Yeah. Where I’m, what they critically say is you’re playing the role of the sage on the stage. You know, you’re lecturing, you’re performing, and you know, there’s, there’s that ego thing in there where you’re just kind of indulging in your analytic prowess and all that kind of stuff. You can feel it. It’s kinesthetic, right? Well, the mindfulness thing helped me over the years. Yes. Where when I would feel, it’s almost like, it’s almost like, and crystal therapy also helped me become more somatically conscious. Yes. Yes. The 4E thing is new to me. Yeah. And so I love that though, but I was already cultivating some awareness of that because of mindfulness and, you know, mindfulness of the body and yoga. But I was doing yoga for so many years in a yang style. Right. You know, pushing my body, they’re getting to that maximum. What a pose I got, you know, I really have to, I got to grow, grow, grow, you know, physically and everything. The same thing is like my yang style karate method. It’s not like chai chi or chi kong. Shotokan is very hard, you know, it’s broken. And, but like just after teaching yoga for many years and like finding the good yoga teacher, the analog of Socrates as yoga teacher, right. In my yoga classes, the kind of sage, real sage, fine tuning that I would be giving to my students in yoga sessions. I realized that that carries over into the classroom. Right. Right. And when I’m just kind of churning out a yoga session, I feel it. I know I’m tired, I’m this, it’s a routine. That narrative instruction is robotic. I’m aware of, I hear it. And then I just try to make it more spontaneous to come from a deeper place. Same thing in the classroom. So if I feel my body parading around, parapetetically, and I’m in the wrong kind of zone to be, then I’ll just kind of slow down, sit on the edge of my desk, breathe, try to, you know, make the adjustments. That’s in the classroom. Right. But same thing in the client session. Same thing in doing therapeutic work, you know. But that, I love that kind of work so much that I think I’m almost always in the zone when I do that. But when I think it’s real, the feedback is what lets you know when it’s working. Yes, very much. You see whether the client is struggling a lot or a eureka light bulb goes off, anything strong on the part, anything powerful is some sign that your interaction is having impact. I don’t have like a pat answer. These are just- Oh, these are good answers. This is a good answer. Keep going. These are intuitive, spur of the moment, trying to figure out ways of answering that really good question. I’m curious to hear what your answer is to that question. So for me, I had something similar when I’ve related this story in other places. I was doing tight, when I first started doing Tai Chi, and I was doing it very religiously, like three or four hours a day, almost like your meditation practice. And I was going through the, I go, you know, where you get super hot or super cold and all these one, and I was getting in the flow state and I was having all of that. But that’s not what made the impact on me. One of my friends, when I was in graduate school, came up to me and said, what’s different about you? You’re much more balanced when you’re approaching people in argumentation. You’re much more flexible in your dialogue. I think I heard you say this in one of your other talks. Yeah. And so for me, right, I look for spontaneous transfer noted by other people. And then, right, so that’s one of my, so if people are noting, you know, and people have their various stages, and I hope I’m not saying anything hubristic by it. Some people will say, oh, that you’re very like Socrates or you’re very Christ-like or very like the Buddha. Like when people are doing that, right, and because, right, like you said, you’ve got that resonance going on and they’re noting it. And I’m not trying to do it, but they’re noting. And then I think, okay, what’s that feel like? And that’s one pull. And it’s like a pilot coming into a port and they have these two poles and they’re still steering between them. The other is, do these people interrupt me when I’m on an ego high? Does Socrates come in, and I mean almost like a presence, right, and say, John, you’re bullshitting. Or, you know, the Buddha come in and say, John, like, you’re just out of touch, right, you’re not present, right, or Lao Tse come in and say, you’re really being clumsy here and pretentious. Like, so if I get, and then I try to pay attention. I get those. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I also teach, I’ve been teaching, well, I’ve been teaching guiding or leading, facilitating meditation group on campus for like over 15 years. Yeah. Faculty, staff, and students. And so they all know me as the meditation guy. Right, right. So when I’m at meetings or this and that, sometimes I get feedback about how calm and Buddha-like I am. But other times they’re like, aren’t you the meditation guy? And I’m like, wrong state of mind, man. So when I get both of those and then I try, and then I also like, what does the flow state feel like? Where’s, where do I feel like, like that there’s co-emergent insight, the students getting insight, I’m getting insight, we’re affording that. When I get all three of those to lot, sort of like what I can sense, how they, as you put it, how they psychosomatically overlap. That’s what I, that’s what I try to use as my sort of experiential, phenomenological, functional touchstone. There’s a certain taste in my mind and body that, that touches all three of those poles, if I can put it that way. And they, they help sort of guide me. I hope that that seems to be my best answer to that. That’s great. That’s a very good answer. Thank you. Sounds similar enough. Yeah. They both involve feedback loops from others and also the embodied sense. And then the internal, the mindful, the part of it wakes up and says, wait a second there. Yeah. What are you doing? Why are you doing that? Yeah. Sometimes it’s almost like Socrates runs onto center stage for me. It’s like, what, what are you doing? Right. So that’s really, really powerful. So what, I don’t know. I don’t know if you, you said they’re mostly short-term. So I don’t know if you can answer this question, but I’ll put, I’ll pose it anyway. Some of them are long-term. It depends also on the counselor. Right. I have friend counselors who’ve had clients for 10 years. I have one client who’s a clinical psychologist who I’ve had for a few years. You know, okay. So then I can ask this question then. That’s great. Thank you for sharing that. Most of them are short-term though. Right. But you’ve got some long-term. So there’s some data that you can use to answer this question. So for your clients, how much of philosophical counseling reverberates back into them taking up philosophy as a way of life? I don’t mean academic philosophy. I mean, where we talked about last time when we talked about Piagod and philosophy as a way of life. One of the things that I’m looking for is again, the transfer. One of the criticisms of some therapeutic traditions is they’re only in the office. Right. There’s not a lot on like, how does this transfer back in generalizing to a person’s life? One of the potentials, and maybe it’s not being realized. That’s why this is a question, not a statement, but one of the potentials I see for philosophical counseling is exactly that capacity to transfer back and generalize into a person’s life. So that such that they, I’m just using this as one example, they take up stoicism as a way of life or something like that. Does that happen? I think it happens more often than not. And I think that’s why most of the clients are short-term. And that’s our goal. Our goal is to awaken that inner Socrates. Right. Right. So they have enough philosophical wit about them to come for this kind of boost. And then normally it’ll be, yeah, we’ll be helping, often enough, it’s helping them figure out what kind of philosopher they are and where they can get that kind of network of support, texts and traditions or communities or whatever, whether it’s stoicism or neoplasism or Buddhism or whatever it is. So it’s usually in dialogue with them that you’ll make recommendations. Have you read this? Have you heard, and will you have a discussion or whatever? And they often go that way. That’s great. Once you stay long-term, I think that they’re kind of treating philosophical counselors more as either a guru or a psychologist. Right. Right. Right. I see. Yeah. And the one client that I had that was a clinical psychologist came to me, I think, for therapeutic counseling, but she was just tired of psychotherapists. Right. She wanted something different. Yeah. And apparently it works because she just keeps coming back. But I’ve been having, I think, this gradual philosophical impact on her. Right. That I can kind of tell from the kinds of changes that she’s making in her life, about her value structure and things like that. So. You’re really wedding my appetite for this. I am seriously considering taking up training, official training to become a philosophical counselor. Before I forget, there’s a group of Indian in India, philosophers, who got trained and certified maybe a year or so ago during the pandemic. And so it was all remote. They did their training online with Lou Marinoff. And I was a part of some of that. Oh, they know, I met them right after the training. They invited me to give a presentation because they’re a group. And now they’re having a conference. The first international conference on philosophical counseling. It’s in Delhi, India. I was going to go, but there’s too many things going on. It’s in a couple of weeks. It’s January 14th to 16th. But anybody can go. I’ll send you the link for that. Yeah. I’m presenting. I’m going to be presenting one of the key. Is this in person or virtual? I was going to go in person, but too many things are going on right now. And there was travel ban at CUNY and all kinds of things going on. I was just like, I’m too busy right now to too many balls to juggle for me to pull that off with the visa and all the, you know, all the, I just said, I’ll do it remotely. So anybody can go remotely and watch the conference, but you have to register, but I’ll send you the link and I’m sure many of your viewers will want to pick their interest. They can all attend that as audience members. That’s thank you for doing that. Yeah. And there are going to be some great people. I think Pierre Grimes is one of the speakers. Yeah. I was supposed to speak with him at one point. Midwifery guy. Yeah. I’ve got, I’ve got the book. I was supposed to speak to him at one point, but our schedules just didn’t intersect. And I think I’d like to learn more about the conference. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well, I very much want to. It’s a three day. It’s the 14th to the 16th. Yeah. I’ll have to see. There’s a chance I might be busy schedule. Yeah. Because that’s the first week of classes backed for me kind of thing. But send me the link though. Anyway, Rick, I really, we really appreciate that. I certainly will. Yeah. Cause I very much, I mean, I see it as consonant with the philosophical fellowship and the deal logos, the philosophical counseling, the Alexio Divina practices. And of course the contemplative practices. It, it, it, I see it as aligning with those very, very well. I imagine that this was a significant part of the Academy, Plato’s Academy, although we, we have no records of it, but it’s hard to believe that this was not going on, on a regular and profound basis within the Academy. So I want to ask you a question about this because not that this would dissuade me. In fact, I don’t know. I think it’s sort of neutral in terms of motivation, but so there’s a, there’s a more of a theoretical interest. To what degree do you think philosophical, I mean, Jung said this of the psycho therapists, right? The psychoanalysts, right? The analytic psychologists that they were basically becoming secular priests. They were taking over a whole role. And it strikes me that the philosophical counselor is even more like that because the philosophical counselor is much more open to philosophical topics that often overlap with religious concerns and theological concerns. So I mean, do you think the emergence of philosophical counseling as a thing is another response to the meaning crisis? We’re trying to fill in holes that have been left by the way the church, just to use a broad term to mean all religious institutions, has vacated. Absolutely. I don’t think that’s a criticism. I think it’s not a bug. It’s a feature. The meaning crisis is a bug, but any response to it that’s supportive and that helps people construct or discover somehow or another meaning in a wholesome way is a great thing. You’ve got psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, you’ve got, let’s say, mental health counselors in a variety of categories, right? Who I don’t want to sound, many of them do great work. Probably most of it is good, but I’m sure many of them, their clients are just cash cows for them. They just turn on the knob and they do, like you said, the script. You can get good or bad sessions and work being done, no matter what the modality is. You’ve got good and bad guru figures. There’s a whole culture of guru types in almost every Asian philosophy, master, teacher, sensei, whatever. Some of them are authentic and do tremendous work and support people in their search for meaning, and some of them are not doing so great. I think the same thing holds for philosophical counselors. They’re human beings. Just think about the range of professional philosophers that you know. Some of them are on the spectrum socially. I doubt that they have the skills to be able to do that kind of work with people that are meaningful. They’re logic nerds or something. They don’t have any sort of skills. It depends. I think the paper that I’m going to be giving at this India conference is on these differences. I look forward to reading your paper. I could send it to you if you don’t get to show up. That’s incentive to show up in some way. If I attend, I probably have to attend virtually. Oh yeah. Well, I can’t go. I’ve always wanted to go to India. I’ve never gone yet. Me too. I have this sort of dream. Especially as I approach retirement, I’d like to have a place where people can come and cultivate a rich ecology of practices. Tai Chi, a meditative practice, a contemplative practice, philosophical fellowship, lexio divina. I have the same dream. I like to get the deal. Philosophical counseling. All of this is available to them in an integrated. You have the dream too, eh? It’s setting up a network of these places. There’s similar things already being generated like the work that Daniel Thorson’s doing with the monastic academies. They’re building ecology to practices. The work that Rafe Kelly does on integrating parkour and narrative and genuine mythic practice and deal logos. Martial arts, mindfulness practices. A lot of people are doing this. I’m trying to put together with the help of, oh, I forgot Nathan’s last name, a network of these emerging communities and perhaps also help create one. There’s a discord community associated with awakening for the meaning crisis. They are trying to build ecologies of practice. Like I said, I think there’s going to be need for any such ecology of something like philosophical counseling to give people a place to go when they’re getting stuck or stuff’s coming up that they can’t. What happened to you and to some degree happened to me? When stuff comes up. My concern right now is that for all of their obvious and admirable benefits, a lot of these ecologies of practices do not have something like philosophical counseling in them and need that to be present in an important way. My interest is both personal and professional. I see it as addressing a lacuna in many of these emerging communities that I think is vital and important in an essential way. I’ve heard you talk about that in different podcasts of yours and I agree with you 100%. It’s a great idea. Well, good. Thank you for that. And yeah, count me in on any of that. I will. You can count on that. This feels like a good place to end for today and we’re at about the right time. Yeah, it’s nice. Already, I’m going to invite you to come back. You and I discussed before we were recording. I mean, it doesn’t have to be till then, but at least come back once the anthology is released and we can do a deep dive together on the anthology, the Routledge Handbook, Philosophy of Meditation, which Rick is the editor of and contributor to and I contributed to as well. So I look forward to talking to you again. I’m not going to say goodbye. I’m just going to see you again soon, Rick, because this has just been wonderful. I absolutely look forward to it. My pleasure always. Thank you.