https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=jr4pj_eP9ps
Okay, yeah, it’s, I think the gradual moving into and realisation of these different modes of dialogue is something that’s very, very interesting. And I know it’s something that is fascinating you at the moment. And I see it tying in deeply to the series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, and particularly, of course, the sort of response aspect of how we come to terms with and ultimately move through and ameliorate, as you put it, the perennial problems we face. And dialogue is one of many modes of expression, experience, we might take to these perennial problems. And I’m just trying to feel back in and sort of drop into where we are now. Yeah, I’ve been engaging with your series a lot the last few days. Thank you. Yeah, I’ve actually been listening to you on occasion double time. So I’m hoping that this conversation will be a little bit easier for me to follow along. It’s funny when you flip back from double time to single I’m like, oh, it feels so slow for a few seconds. But it’s the double time was was literally just to get through some things I thought I need to make sure that there aren’t key pieces I’m missing out on here before we sort of speak. And I definitely prefer that the single time version of it. And you know, John, it’s, it’s, it’s a challenging thing. And this might bring us to a point of sort of articulating some of the productive nature of dialogue, but also the conditions which sort of have to be present to engage in it, because what I’m feeling right now just to speak on my state is a mixture of extreme gratitude for the opportunity to dialogue with you. I’m also feeling the the tremendous breadth of the whole series and an interest to speak to that dynamic and context so that we’ve got as much as we possibly can have on the table between us, so that we can in some sense, both together orient towards what might be of sort of mutual interest to explore. And so much of what you explore, I find deeply important and, and crucial for me personally to gain further insight and familiarity with so that I can in collaboration with others, build the kinds of communities and ultimately experiences that facilitate some of this deep development that is part and parcel of meeting and responding to the meaning crisis. And so there’s all of this breadth. And then there’s at the same time, when it comes to dialogue, a certain sense of a certain sense of safety and smoothness and being just where we are. And, and so in some meta way, I, this is me, I suppose, expressing to you a little bit of where I am, which is gradually feeling into a way in here. And so if I draw into a question, hmm, where do you feel this notion of dialogue? It’s a Socratic dialogue, but there’s also, I sense a bit more of an intimacy to what you’re exploring. Could you articulate how that is a life for you at the moment and how you feel that this may be an important practice to situate within our ecology of ways we can develop and ameliorate and move through some of the perennial problems we face as existential beings? Great. I think that’s an excellent question. Before I address the question, I first want to respond. I really appreciated your careful, and I mean that in a very positive sense, very careful articulation of how you’re framing, the framing you’re bringing to bear into this interaction. I thought that was a very, very helpful thing for me. And I think also very, very helpful for potential listeners. So I just wanted to say thank you for doing that. I think taking the time, in my mind, that’s analogous to the importance I give to problem formulation. It’s kind of like dialogue formulation. How are we formulating the dialogue before we immediately leap in and try to solve or resolve or whatever we’re going to do in the dialogue? Spending that time to first formulate the dialogue, explicate it, make sure that we share, we have a shared commitment to this formulation. So I think that’s an exemplary thing you just did. So I want to commend you on that. I want to express my appreciation for that in both senses of the word, like the gratitude and the understanding for why you did that. So thank you very much for that. And that, of course, is a nice segue into your question, the question that you actually posed to me. So a bit of the genealogy of how it emerged and will give me a way of getting a little bit better where it’s at. So I’ve been, I mean, in conjunction with the awakening from the meaning crisis, of course, I’ve been talking a lot about this need for an ecology of practice, ecology of practices, you know, setting up counterbalancing self-organizing systems of psychotech in order to, as you say, ameliorate the perennial problems and perhaps also enhance and afford increased senses of connection to oneself, to other people, to the world, all of that. And I was in, I want to, another motive for this is to also give appropriate credit. And it’s not just a moral thing I’m doing. I’m trying to also show the role, the vital role of distributed cognition in the work we’re doing that often gets masked by kind of individualistic ideology that I want to challenge not only what I’m saying, but in what I’m exemplifying. So I was in one of these kinds of discussions with somebody who I’ve come to have a lot of affection for, deep appreciation for, Jordan Hall. Jordan is especially important for the manner in which he converses. I’m not saying he doesn’t have great ideas. He does. He has great insights, but people tend to focus a little too rapidly on content and not pay enough attention to the way he’s doing all this really important work again around the manner and the formulation of the dialogue. So I was in discussion with him and I was trying to get into his notion of coherence, comparing it, and he had this insight. He said, well, what I think I’m pointing towards is the need for a meta-psychotechnology whose role it is to help generate, curate, and organize the ecology of psycho-technology. So I use this sort of metaphor of shepherding. We need something that shepherds it. And I thought, and that just struck me as, oh, wow, that’s a brilliant insight. And it was in my mind, there’s a relationship between how individuals cultivate wisdom and then this needed meta-psychotechnology. So then I got thinking and then I realized that the ancient world had something deeply analogous to this, which was the practice of dialectic, which came out of Socratic and Lincus, and it ramifies through Plato, and then it goes in all kinds of important directions in the neo-Platonic tradition. Now the thing about dialectic, and if you read the neo-Platonists, it’s very clear that it had this status of being a meta-psychotechnology. It is sort of the meta-practice you do so you know how to best do the other practices and curate and coordinate them together. And the interesting thing about the dialectic is it’s both something you do as an individual, sort of ontologically, and then something you do with other people discursively, and that these two dimensions are integrated in a powerful way. So while I was saying, oh well, I should better understand that because that would serve as a valuable template for trying to understand what Jordan was talking about. And it was of course deeply enmeshed with the wisdom project, which was the connection I was seeking. So then I thought, oh that’s really interesting because that also ties in with this stuff that’s also been happening. You can see it for example on rebel wisdom about the rediscovery of the power of the collective intelligence that is generated by distributed cognition. And you know there’s now some you know even some hard science, a little bit, some of it’s ghastly about the power of distributed cognition. Like they directly linked rat brains together and that collectivity can solve problems that individual rats can’t solve, the computational powering, right? And then there’s all the stuff about the brain synchrony between human beings. I won’t get into the nuts and bolts of it. So there’s all this emerging stuff and then I thought, oh and then I got to meet somebody else who I’m forming a very deep friendship with. You just talked to him, Guy Zendstock. And you know so there’s all these emerging psychotechnologies and especially Guy’s circling because Guy’s circling is so impregnated with the wisdom project of Heideggerian and existential philosophy that it’s exactly the kind of thing, right? I’m talking about as something that has analogous elements with ancient dialectics. So I’ve been engaging with the help of Peter Lindbergh and the wonderful people in my circling groups. I’m doing participant observation, learning some of these other discourse modalities, did some empathy circling recently, uploaded that video, doing some insight, we’re going to do some insight. Anyways learning all of these things. And so it struck me that dialectic was also the machinery in the ancient world by which people were tailoring themselves to and entering into, right, the collective intelligence of distributed cognition. And they often spoke of this in religious terms. What’s really interesting to me when I’m in the circling practice for example is how spontaneously people often from very secular orientation will will find themselves using very spiritual even religious terms to talk about the phenomenology and the change in functionality that’s occurring in these practices. So I just saw that as an a massive convergence. I saw okay here’s all this stuff going on about the collective intelligence of distributed cognition. Here’s ancient dialectic and there’s all these new and wonderful texts being generated around this like Sarah Rappey’s book on Socrates for example, just amazing. And there’s that coordination with Jordan’s idea about the meta-psychotechnology. And then like I said it struck me that well what we could do is we could, and that’s what I’m going to do in the next series, we could explore right now all these current emerging dialogical practices, put that into dialogue, and I don’t mean that as a pun, I mean that as a real thing, put that into dialogue with what I can get, what I can glean from and garner for the practice of ancient dialectic and see if we can then bring you know some elucidation, some clarification, some insight, some advancement of the project. Because here’s the key idea, just like individual intelligence needs to be exacted up into rationality and then that exacted up into wisdom, we need to take collective intelligence and ratchet that up into collective rationality and in connective wisdom, collective wisdom, and those two projects are deeply interpenetrating. And so that’s what I think we need in order to get to the meta-psychotechnology. So I’m doing a lot of work with Christopher Master Pietro, by the way you should have him on your, you should have, you should interview Chris right. So Chris and I are writing a chapter for the Meta-Modern Anthology on just the stuff you were talking about, it’s also going into the book we’re working on, so I’m doing a lot of work with Chris right now to try and nail down some of the theory. I’m doing a lot of work with Peter on the Imperial Limburg, investigating it through this participant observation, reading the literature together. So there’s a lot of people, we’re all working together, some of them I get to work with directly in collaboration, some of it’s more of a network that I’m contributing to, to try and I think get this. I know that Guy for example is extremely excited, he texted me the other day, he said he wanted to, he’s really excited to do Circling 2.0 because he wants to try and incorporate all of this stuff in into Circling that I’m talking to you about. So that’s why I’m sort of getting very excited right now because there’s a lot of excitement, I think there’s a lot of real potential here to create, to cultivate, to help advance this kind of meta-psycho technology and access ultimately collective rationality and collective wisdom so that we have something that can really vet our attempts to create the ecology practices that are needed to address and ameliorate the meeting crisis. So that’s sort of a gist of, and I ask for forbearance from all your listeners and your viewers because this is very much a work in progress, this is something I’m doing, work on now trying to get the phenomenology and the functionality of all of this worked out, but this is where it’s at right now. Oh yeah, beautiful John, thank you so much for that answer, that was excellent. It’s very exciting, I feel that same sense of interest and excitement about it and we’ll continue to be gathering with people here both in person, online and then around the world in person eventually when I get off and away from here for just a little bit to be doing exactly that some attempt to move into insight practice in a co-participatory way, this movement towards presencing wisdom about that ultimately which in some sense we are already bringing to bear and presencing in our own lives to get by in the world, this set of psycho technologies that are already in play, the ones that are already emerging, so is it a fair formulation to think about a meta-psycho technology as the continual renewal, establishment and renewal of co-participatory wisdom? Oh I think that’s an excellent way of putting it, I think it’s participatory in both, if you’ll allow me, the metaphor is horizontal between people and vertical within a person because there’s a sense if this machinery isn’t already to some degree active in you, you need it to start to get into it, it’s like a virtue, you need a bit of honesty to cultivate more of honesty and that sort of thing, you need that germinating spark kind of idea, so I think you ultimately only know this kind of wisdom by participating and then like you said, it’s very much also, and this is what has some of the most powerful phenomenological effects on people, that sense of, that’s why it’s often called the we space, the participation in some emerging, emergent thing, emergent presence, I’ve got to be careful here with my language because I don’t want to invoke a weird metaphysics, but you get this we space that is not reducible to any one particular individual cognition and your relationship to it is one of participation, it’s not other than you, but it’s not identical to you, you participate in it, and again that’s why it hearkens back to sort of theurgic language, and it even survives in some of our metaphors, we talk about team spirit, well at one point that was really a phenomenological thing, it wasn’t just sort of, yahoo, so when you’re doing something like circling, you get that, but it’s not just a metaphor for our shared commitment, it’s the experience, there’s almost like a synesthetic experience of the dynamical system that has taken shape between all the people involved and sort of the power it has to alter and shift individual cognition, so yahoo, I think that it’s deeply participatory in both within you, you have to be it, you can’t just think about it, you have to embody it, and then it’s also deeply participatory in that you have this relationship to the we space, that is again, it’s not other and it’s not I, it’s we, so it’s deeply, it’s phenomenology is inherently participatory in nature, and then as you said, what that’s all directed towards and what I want to even more direct it towards with the help of people like Jordan and Guy and Chris is as you said, towards the individual and collective cultivation of wisdom, so that’s why there’s the subtitle, so the next series is after Socrates, the pursuit of wisdom through authentic dialogue. Yeah, that all seems right to me, so I wonder if this is an interesting way in, because okay, okay, so in one sense, it seems like where we are to go in dialogue, which neither of us know right now, is in some sense, is sometimes emergent, and in another sense, it’s latent already in each of us individually, our current maps of making sense of things, and also our orientation and way we are willing to be that and show up and embody that, right, to be continuous between that propositional and participatory level, and to the extent we can generate the perspectival knowing, so we can both participate in that, to the extent I have the words, right, to procedurally be able to do that as well. We are here at this opening, and I’d like to presence a little bit about where I feel myself ultimately going, and that doesn’t mean we have to go there right now, there’s this balance, there’s this balance that’s important to hold, isn’t it, between being where we are, and being, and ultimately actually, my fundamental goal here is to be helpful in a collaborative way towards that very project, and I would actually love to talk to you about how that project relates to a lot of how I am driven to show up in the world, and broadly speaking, these collaborations toward the creation of communities that enable wisdom, enable the development of psychotechnologies, the practicing of different psychotechnologies based on the sovereign choice of individuals to move towards that in their life, and to realize a deeper connection to themselves, each other, and the world, while we also make sense of where we’re at in our collective moment, for me this is absolutely essential, and serving that is what my primary aim is, yet that is something that’s, it’s a life project, and then we have the moment of this conversation, and I have my own individual places of where I’m at with considering, for example, some of the deeper metaphysical aspects to your theorizing, because your theorizing has been so important to me, or a key influence of mine, because for many beautiful ways that it’s, we don’t have time to talk about it precisely today, and so there’s all of these aspects of myself that, in some sense, are desirings of presence themselves, yet there is a thread that, if I tend to it, is also one that can be between us, that is mutually interesting and revelatory for both of us. I think what you’re doing right now is already extremely helpful. So the interesting, one of the interesting dimensions, I call it the theoria theory dimension, so one of the things we’re doing in this practice is we’re constantly moving, right, it’s a matter of the way in which attention and perspectival knowing are shifting, right, but we’re constantly moving between theory in which we advance propositional arguments, right, and then, but then we do what you just did, we step back into theoria, which is we step back into a contemplative frame in which we’re again, okay, where are we, what’s the agent arena, you know, set up here, how are we formulating the dialogue, and then what we’re doing there is we’re trying to come alive to, we’re trying to increase our sensitivity and transform our sensibility so we can sense the kairos, so we can sense like the way in which this is shifting and directing, and there’s so much finesse here. I talk about it almost like there’s the musicality, and you’re trying to get the rhythm, you’re trying to sense the tone, and so you have to, you have to constantly shift into theoria to sense, and also you’re, but it’s not just a sensing thing, there’s an aspiration thing, you’re also training your sensibility, like music appreciation, so you’re doing this sensing and transforming your sensibility to pick up on the musicality of the dialogue so that when you come back in, it’s not just you and the other person, both of you like are sharing this commitment to what’s emerging between you, so first of all, I think what you just did about, right, and so I think this is a vital, and I’m using that word to try and resonate with as many meanings as possible with it, I think what you just did is a vital thing, that theory, theoria shift, and I was talking to Jordan about this, I would see and about how it’s about sensitizing but also transforming sensibility to pick up on the musicality, I think that’s just, like I think that’s actually as vital to what we’re trying to do here right now, and it’s important therefore for people who are interested in what we’re talking about to pay attention to this exemplification and not just the explicit content of our propositions, so I think that was a very, that for me, that, see that’s the kind of thing that I’m interested in right now, I’m trying to get at like what’s in practice, what’s the transformations of the phenomenology that tell us something about how to access and transform the underlying functionality, and so just here, just now, you doing that and the fact that you did it so spontaneously and so well is exactly the kind of thing that I’m very interested in, and that I think is as I say vital to trying to to get this, and even the metaphor you had of the thread is so good because right, there’s a sense in which you know you have to really play with salience to in the midst of all the other things to find the thread and then there’s a kind of diligence and a respect that you have to set yourself into to follow the thread, so yes, I think all of that is important, and here’s another word I want to use with as much resonance as possible, it’s important to invoke all of this on a regular and reliable basis rather than simply referring to it. Yes, yes, yes, there’s a sense in which, so I’m, let me see if I can use the term theoria here a little bit in practice so that I can further get it, it’s not every day that conversations are available to use the word theoria in. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so well, so this is a different way in, there’s a there’s a movement towards an unscripted mode because there is this necessity, I feel, the language is appropriate, I feel to presence actually gently as we we have almost an opponent processing towards it, we have an opponent processing towards the appropriate place of vulnerability and that vulnerability is more but the vulnerability is involved and that vulnerability from me in this moment, especially when we are skimming along the surface of what are deep metaphysical cogs and highly developed ontologies and epistemologies, these are the kinds of vulnerabilities that can in fact, as you speak about so interestingly in one of your lecture episodes, invoke a sense of horror if they are misplayed or if they are dislodged without the right bounds of safety and I’m very attuned to this and I actually have considerable experience in deep metaphysical unsettling and epistemological and ontological unsettling over the course of many years and in that sense, I feel ready to be here and do this but there’s a sense in which when I’m talking about this stuff, I realize how affectively laden I am looking to presence my words and it’s the affective component that I and it’s the affective component that you also speak about an awful lot as being a key characterization of how we should understand relevance realization. Oh totally, I mean it’s the coping of relevance realization is inseparably bound up with a primordial kind of caring. Yes, beautiful caring, it’s precisely that and for me, I was using the language of an affective relation before I became so acquainted with your work to express to myself that there was some important contrast between an intellectual way of going at the world and that in some sense, our frames were always and already filtered to some degree by something like and you know, I was influenced a lot by your thinking before I came to study you a lot because I had engaged with it a little bit and the term relevance realization is itself, it reveals you know, the more you understand of it, the more you can grok the whole just through appreciating the terms. I think it’s very very appropriate. It’s a very very appropriate. Yeah, the two things, the right terms is a very important thing to do. Oh yeah, yeah and you know and that’s something actually that I think can be afforded like dialogue can help I think spontaneously to generate those terms but it could also be not precisely the place where you look for them and I know this in my own experience because so often I’m looking to communicate the affective component to enable this sense of shared safety and care so I will go about expressing things in all these different ways coming at it this like this like this with these different emotional tones behind it but that’s not how I would sit down to write something if I wanted to make something analytically tight in the way that relevance realization has to be analytically typed for it to play that role between the cognitive science on the one hand and then also the religion on the other. Yeah, but so yeah I think I I wanted to intervene because you made a couple of really excellent points. I didn’t want them to to be left. One, the thing you just said I think there’s yeah I think and there’s a big difference between theorizing which I think we need to do and that is where you need those precise terms and you shouldn’t produce until you’ve come to precision. Yes, I agree with that and that is the appropriate place to do that but I think to go back to two points you made about dia logos and I try to use the Greek now by way of the logos because the logos right is is much more comprehensive than logic right it’s it’s the gathering together so that things belong together so but in dia logos there’s two things you said that are very important. First we’re putting ourselves on the edge of we’re putting ourselves into a system that’s dynamical and and that is going to have emergent features. The ongoing emergence of what we have not pre-planned or pre-practiced or pre-cognized, pre-thought right is again a vital piece of it. Next you mentioned about the affectivity and you mentioned the vulnerability and there’s a way in which I’m sort of seeing these coming together because I was really I really liked what when you and Guy were talking about with the distinction between vulnerability and exposure that had come up. Guy and I talked a bit about that and then I think he talked to at length with Jordan about that because it’s it’s this notion again of sensitization right the difference when you’re exposed right what the you actually what the the response is to is a is a hardening right the response is a hardening and because what you’re trying to do is defend and protect yourself from further incursion but in vulnerability if we’re using it as distinct from exposure because of course people use terms in all kinds of sloppy ways but if we’re using it in in the distinction vulnerability is a kind of sensitization you’re allowing yourself to the things to penetrate into you so it comes with that sensitivity and I think that’s exactly where the affective component has to be our guide because what our affect is often doing is giving us the degree to which our ability to perceive and sense is is is threatening or the degree to which it’s nourishing our affect is often you know deeply attuned to okay what what is this doing and so I think being able to coordinate you know courage and care with vulnerability is what affords it to be actually become that sensitivity and so a lot of what we are doing is and again to try and you know really make this word resonate with people we’re trying to encourage each other and and if you’ll allow me to coin a new word we’re trying to in care each other we’re trying to create right caring between and within each other so that we can that the vulnerability stays at become it stays as a sensitivity it doesn’t harden into a defensive framing of oh I’m overexposed and then that that in turn you know leads me back to the point you made about and this is this is one I hope we can spend some time on because it’s it’s it’s kind of the the the the the the tangled but really juicy part if I can put it that way which is we need we’re not we need a place for theorizing let’s put that aside I’ve already acknowledged that and I do that and that’s important and people know that I care about that so I’m going to take it that that’s a given that nothing that was doing here challenges any of that or undermines it in any way but when we’re doing dialogos right we do need to bring into it the depths of our ontology if you’ll allow me we have this is what this is what I see exemplified in play dough right you can’t if you really want to cultivate wisdom and courage and virtue these are deeply prospectable participatory things and therefore your your your deepest patterns of intelligibility your deepest patterns of coping and sense making are always bound up with your deepest patterns of caring and concern and identification and so I mean if we want this to have existential depth we have to touch upon the you know the the ontological depths as well and so how to do this and you can see that this is a vital issue in play dough they talk about it in the dialogue how to do this you want to be able to take people even to aporia where they’re like ah it doesn’t make sense anymore but but not tip them into as you said horror because the the point isn’t to the is isn’t to immobilize people because they’ve now overexposed and they harden and now they’re stuck what you want to do is you want to take that and get them to commit to it so that that becomes wonder and awe and it draws them forth in an aspirational commitment and so that is also part of the finesse of the the dialogos and so I often describe this to guys I want to take circling but I want to bring phileas sophia into it I want to bring in right so we’re doing all this stuff all this really valuable and rich and juicy stuff with circling but we but if we get aware of all of these dimensions can we then bring them in can we then bring in finally phileas sophia because the deepest and I mean guy is all on board about this because this is heidegger’s whole thing right you can’t actually explore a dasein without exploring being those two are bound together in just inseparable fashion and so um I that’s why I wanted to interrupt you there was like four really important things you had you had you had canvassed there and I thought they were important to slow down and open them up and unpack them a little bit yes thank you for doing that I thought that was beautiful unpacking and I continue to invite you to slow me down and do just that and and in many respects the point I was making was one that was inviting you to jump in and slow it slow it down with me because there’s so much and and it it needs to be there’s there’s time and care to be taken in presencing that and also we’re recording something for the benefit of listeners and viewers as well so there’s all these pieces and um and my sense as well is that so the sorts of meta reflection which not that theory is precise I mean it’s a reflection of a kind it’s but not so much an intellectual one as it is this bearing forth of where we are and our being in the moment which can look for a moment like a type of sort of meta um taking one south one oneself out of the particular frame there’s there’s a there’s a deep um hmm well that is that is a process that should be gentle that is that is a process that should be gentle and and um and I’d like to I’d like to continue it so okay so where may be interesting to explore is where the perhaps where the jump back into theorizing takes place within the space of theory within the space of this presencing our being and our being and our being and our being of theory within the space of this presencing our being this affectively cooperatively realizing a shared space of care and vulnerability so that we can presence truly what we are as much as we can reveal of ourselves in accordance with what we can in an integrated fashion and respectful fashion be together in a space as appropriate to the setting and the setting is an important it’s like not only are we doing this thing we’re also building the table this is often what I’m talking to people about it’s like not only not only are we presencing sort of ourselves in this dance at the same time there’s a construction of the table at which this kind of conversation can take place of course you’ve been around those for so much of your life but with this with this online element right and with this um with that with what seems to me that the genuine novelty of this just because of of how actually of how existentially demanding I truly feel it is to to move at this level right there is you know I come at this a lot as well from a perspective of therapy and what conditions you can’t hear me so let’s let’s press ahead and trust the trust the process anyway it’s it’s really part and parcel of exactly what we’re talking about um because you know it’s this constant dynamic of feeling you know of of the desire to participate and then also accepting precisely where you are and not going too further than this just breaching the boundary and this is a big part of my my day-to-day kind of process but where I believe I was at just to pick things up for our audience is presencing also this therapeutic aspect and the conditions which enable in fact um trauma to be moved through and positively developed or growth to occur from this state there’s a sense in which we want to avoid that which we want to avoid presencing that which locks us and freezes us and stops us from being able to be in a productive relationship with it and so that’s the point and so yes there’s a deep importance to this tenderly establishing this domain of shared care and where I was moving potentially and here’s where I can pose a question is so we we theoria is in aiding us to presence the the being and the depths of our ontology creating a landscape of care in which that can be done and then also also now we might consider how we move back into the theory and I wonder how you’d characterize that term so that’s excellent and that’s that I mean and the thing the thing of it is again we’ve got the germ of it because we’ve been doing it we keep cycling here and so it’s not a matter of creating something de novo it’s a matter of trying to vary through participant observation trying to sort of delicately extricate into sort of stable theory theoretical terms and formulation what is what is what is that’s going on here and so there there seems to be some aspects here the turn back to theory is the kind of thing I see going on again in the platonic dialogue in which you’re not there’s never there’s that there’s never monologic argumentation there’s argumentation but it’s always bound up with questioning because you’re always seeking to involve the other and there’s as much a again a a a receptivity for a seeking of insight as there is the attempt to you know come to some sort of argumentative conclusion so well well there should be theory going on and theorizing I don’t it I sound like I’m splitting hairs but I’m trying to be very very careful here well there should be theorizing going on I don’t think there should be theory building going on which is it which is a different thing right so one of the I mean again again I’m asking for everybody’s patience I’m trying to this is very much a work in progress but you know what theory we keep theorizing we we step back and we do the theory we we re-presence ourselves we restructure the salience the landscape we reinvestigate we re-sensitize we’re doing all that stuff right and then but then we also do this we we bring we and this is where guys in invocation of this phrase I think is so pregnant we come to terms we come to terms about what’s happening there we we try to it’s almost like poesis we try to put into terms and then and then and then we and then we we question each other we challenge each other we we link things together but the inference is always open to being impregnated and redirected by the insight and the insight is always open to being challenged and right restructured again by the inference we’re trying to get it’s very much like when I with this stuff I talk about you know and how in rationality we’re trying to balance insight and inference and internalization off against each other that’s why I think it’s you can’t really come into these practices in any depth if you haven’t already started down a sapiential pathway where you’ve got some ecologies you’ve got some individual practices for insight and inference and internalization and you’ve got some basic ecology for for for networking them together because I think that’s what you’re trying to do in theorizing so the theorizing is yeah I’m bringing up elements of theory in that there there’s inferential moves being made there’s insight and those are talking to each other but I don’t get into monologue right the internalization is always present you’re always there you’re always impregnating and I’m using all these metaphors because those are the metaphors Socrates uses right and we still think about how the word concept originally goes back to concede right and being the midwife so there’s that but we’re not trying to to to to we’re trying to stay with Plato and not get into Aristotle not because Aristotle doesn’t have value but in Aristotle I don’t think it’s due to Aristotle I think it’s due to an accident of history but in Aristotle all we have is the monologic treatise and we want to stay in the platonic dialogue elsewhere when we’re doing the science then we do the Aristotelian thing then we do the theory building we should theorize there should be inference and insight and internalization but we shouldn’t do theory building we should generate lots of things that we can then look back on and say right oh from within that participant observation there’s all of these things I could take them out and do some theory building or I can bring some theory over here and cognitive science to bear on this and that’s why I think there’s kind of a meta dialogue between what’s going on in theologos and the scientific study of distributed cognition and collective intelligence so I don’t know if that’s adequate but I think it’s a good beginning you know that the turn back to theory is appropriate and fine to say but keep it distinct from the desire to drop into monologic theory building that’s one of the things I would recommend yes I hear that I hear that okay so here’s something that may open this out in an interesting way or maybe bring it to a more fine point so something that has been a key interest of mine for some years has been the you know a recursive you know seeking sort of a recursive elegance to how I express modes of orientation in particular states of consciousness and the reason I’m presencing this is because also as well I believe what I’m looking to do when I’m using some terms to refer to these modes of orientation in consciousness which may look very much like particular meditative or contemplative turns within your own experience right the mindfulness vipassana and the the contemplation the sort of grasping out again the sort of paying attention to something beyond just the um well there’s like there’s like the internal um quietening um the paying attention to what sort of flowing through and then there’s also it’s moving again towards it’s slightly more on the side of but it’s certainly more in touch with the world in a little way attempting to feel into a deeper connection with it um and and I’m I mean to speak from a perspective that’s process philosophical so I’m not looking to speak from a perspective where we are sort of identifying the fixed substances bashing into each other and certainly not because ultimately what what I would like to move towards as well is invoking a discussion of sacredness and the sacred in here too because there’s a sense in which sacredness as you articulated in the series must be seen through a lens of well of course it’s forever incomplete yet at the same time enabling of experiences of deep connection and unity so it’s the relevance realization that never ends it’s continued transformation and this is very much accordant with how it sits very well with me it’s in my own theorizing it’s a deep constitutive part of that yet I also feel I’m I’m looking for and have been looking for some um reliable ways to refer to what is experienced in cycles of transformation which are something like waypoints which could be mistaken for a certain kind of fixation but they’re not a fixation on the substance side of things it’s not a finality it’s not like this is all there is and the process is complete when we spoke last time we spoke a little bit about teleology and I realized that the way I was using teleology was in a continual self-making sense which is not semantically how you how you how you were using that word and I may not be entitled to use the word teleology precisely because I’m endorsing a continued self-making right but I’m endorsing a continued self-making in respect of what enables like what are the core orientation modes what are the the fundamental features the the almost the minimal viable necessities for a successful transformation that enables further transformation it seems to me like some paths do end fundamentally um and what we are is a process of opening and closing as appropriate to continue transformation and I refer to that in my own to my own self as and and people as loving transformation and this seems appropriate to me and it’s relevance realization may in fact just be that or it might be a key like a very a deep piece of it and then in a slightly more and I guess I have this loving transformation of something like a self-making telos in perpetuity um but it also these notions of agape in there and anagoga so it’s a loving because it’s because your constitutive goal element of relevance realization which which it needs it’s coming it’s like it’s like a givenness that it takes like it takes finds itself interesting for itself I say it’s loving for itself it’s not just the interest isn’t enough isn’t enough for me it’s not enough I think it needs to love okay and in this deep interconnected way and what we’re doing when we’re caring for each other it’s the agape as you as you express it’s this love and so yes um that’s quite a lot of thoughts I know I’ve jumped a fair way ahead here but it may be one it was wonderful though yeah it was I really I found that wonderful yeah I found that wonderful um oh there’s so much there um yeah it’s so so yeah the way you wove that together it’s I didn’t want to interrupt because it was flowing so smoothly um let me try and see if I can riff on some of the the the the points to sort of spring to mind as I review uh the course of that um so let’s let’s let’s start with the love and this brings us back to that notion I had and you invoked anagage as well as agape so I think it’s appropriate this notion of mutually reciprocal opening mutually accelerating disclosure right um and the idea that you know if I understand vulnerability as a sensitivity a sensitivity to allowing not just my mind but my identity to be restructured not just in a cognitive insight but in an existential insight that will call forth that will adduce right and maybe there’s a vulnerability to the world that will call forth or adduce from the world it will disclose itself in ways it couldn’t disclose itself to me before there was a way in which I was imposing on the world and now and it kind of will to power a romantic sense and now if I if I do that restructuring of my identity that that allows the world to disclose itself in a way this is Wright’s notion of a sensibility transcendence and that that and that we experience this is Aaron’s work we we experience mutually accelerating disclosure as love that’s how you fall in love with somebody or something or some place that that’s how it works uh because it’s that deep that that’s the knowing of yourself and the knowing of whatever it is you’re right you’re coupled to are so interbound together that yours the the the inherent self-loving which isn’t the same thing as selfishness of relevance realization is bound up with the relevance realization that is occurring you know directed towards the world I think all of that the way you put that together um yes I understand also uh the thinness of the word interest I tried to use that word and I’m doing work with John Logan on this I’m trying to go back to the original meaning of the word inter essay to be within something to be within something and trying to re-valorize um that we like many of our terms we’ve trivialized that we’ve thinned it out to be just as be a simple referential label and not not something that sort of more poetically discloses the depths of something but to be within inter essay that right like so I was I was trying to play on the idea that relevance realization is constituted by its it exists within this kind of relationship to itself if it if it if it’s not self-monitoring and self-caring and self-coping and self-making and self-organizing if it’s not profoundly autopoetic in that way it’s not going to be functioning as relevance realization uh so I understand what you’re trying to convey with love uh what I’m saying is I it was my intent with the word interest through that etymological exploration to try to get back to that deeper meaning um and and therefore give people a term so let me be careful here give people a term other than love for trying to talk about something that grounds what we normally call love but now you’ve you’ve taken it in another way you’ve said no I want to take the word love and I want to deepen it down to reach this transformative depth I think those two things are actually conversion I think those two points are actually deeply convergent and then that brings me into uh the other thing that and here’s in theorizing we want to talk about it we want to do conceptual analysis on it but in theory we’re trying to invoke it we’re as you’re saying we’re trying to presence it and we’re trying to give it a like we’re trying to give it a functional role right a place in a deep sense of the word within the dialogue and then is the sacred ever well at least sacredness is that ever present in the platonic dialogues as well it constantly it’s invoked like you know Socrates even ends the phagrus by with a prayer uh for to the god pan and and what other other gods were present throughout the dialogue right so I think uh talking about while trying to also simultaneously invoke and that’s what you always have to do in participant observation right about the sacredness I think is also relevant because once we start getting into this this idea of love and inter-essay if maybe if I use the latin that’ll be better we try to get into the so let’s let’s say let’s let’s say the love aspect is the anagogic mutually accelerating disclosure and then the inter-essay is the sinking to the depths right the sinking to the ontological depths so we’ve got the love and we’ve got the right the inter-essay they’re going on I think that is going to take us because it’s taking us into it’s taking us into the womb from which you know meaning as connection um is born it’s taking us into sacredness it’s taking us into the experience that when we get this kind of deep coupling the Hebrew word da’ath comes to mind here when we get this kind of deep coupling with the love and the inter-essay right we’re we’re getting into realizing again playing as you know that I use that word to mean both a subjective and an objective and thereby convey the transjective we’re realizing in a completely inter-dependent inter-dependent fashion the open-endedness of our relevance realization machinery and the inexhaustibleness of the of the combinatorial explosive nature of reality and that when those if we have just the combinatorial explosive nature that’s horror that’s terror if we have just the open-endedness and it’s not disclosing anything that’s that’s a that’s a kind of hunger right that’s a kind of hunger right but when when the two are coupled together such that they are mutually revealing mutually disclosing the open-endedness of the relevance realization and the inexhaustibleness so that I’m experiencing the depths of reality and the depths of my relevance realization as a continually flowing fount of continually emerging emerging intelligibility that I think um is um I think I could make a very good case that in many mystical traditions and philosophical traditions that’s the understanding of sacredness as an experience I use the word sacredness to talk about the experience and then I use the word the sacred or sacred typically the sacred to try to refer to whatever proposal we have as to what the metaphysical or ontological basis of that experience is but I think this is the experience of sacredness is very much and that’s why it’s always filled with awe and reverence and even a tinge of horror because it’s getting us it’s opening us up to that sort of fundamental the no thingness of at the at the at the I don’t I want to at the base of relevance realization and the no thingness uh at the base of of of the way the reality discloses itself to us and so I think that’s a new way of trying to recapture so I’m trying to be very careful here what’s I’m trying to bring some new language to something that I think nevertheless has an ancient heritage and legacy I think a lot of the mystical traditions and the wisdom traditions speak about sacredness this way because it’s it’s a kind of it’s a sense of sacredness that is deeply connected to the cultivation of self-transcendence and wisdom and I offer this as an alternative to uh another uh prevalent and long-standing notion of sacredness as perfection where perfection is understood as coming to rest coming to completion and that was what I always I’ve always objected to the word telos because perfection and completion are bound well etymologically to the word telos and so that that that sense of of a tibiology um um is it that’s the aspect of that I was resisting and challenging because I think the notion of that what I’m experiencing and and here’s I’m not only criticizing sort of standard classical theism there’s a way in which I’m criticizing Plato here because there’s definitely places where he gets into talking about this in terms of perfection and I think there’s there’s a mistake here it’s unclear what he means by that but it’s fair that people have come away from that and saying oh the sacred is something that is perfect that generates the experience of perfection Descartes certainly does this in the meditations right and that’s what this is all about and I think I think that’s just a profound uh mistake I think that’s just a profound mistake so I think that one of the things that dia logos reveals and here think about the logos now as as the anagoga as the love and also the inter-essay the deepening right and it’s taking on a life of its own and then birthing us and giving us life from itself right I think the sacredness in dia logos needs to be the sacredness not of perfection but the sacredness of the inexhaustible yeah I hear that John that’s beautiful I agree I agree um you know I hmm so so what is so there’s so we are not we are not we are not perfecting the sacred but we are continually optimizing our capacity to make sacred yeah yeah so that’s that’s where the analogy to evolution biological evolution is so helpful to me if you I mean and people do fall prey to the temptation to think that evolution is a ladder that there’s a teleology in it I’m talking about biological evolution if I have a cultural evolution aside I understand that that’s different I just want to use the standard model of biological evolution to explain my analogy right right there isn’t a ladder evolution isn’t evolution isn’t seeking the perfect final complete design what it’s always doing is this has worked for a moment or two in geological time which means it’s a reliable basis for me to make something new now from that which will then if it works will be a reliable basis for me to make something new which if it lands to use Peter Lindbergh’s favorite phrase right and the phrase I hear in circling if it lands then it gives me a stable platform from which I can make something new again and so on and so forth I thought I’m not trying to bring it to completion and here’s where here’s where I want to say another point because this this relates again to dialogue and the difference between dialogue and story even though we put dialogue in story but so I think narrative is psychologically indispensable for us developmentally I think if we don’t cultivate narrative we can’t narrative teaches me to grasp non-logical identity it teaches me what it means to say I’m identical to that four-year-old and I’ll be identical to the 75 year old man who’s retired so narrative gives me deep practice in a temporally extended self that has non-logical identity and that is so important for my rationality and my cognition and my metacognition I think narrative is indispensable but I don’t think narrative is final or complete a lot of the traditions and so there’s some psychological work say that people can move to sort of a post-narrative state in which they operate I think you can see various trends of Buddhism, Taoism, and Stoicism advocating moving to a trans-narrative state and why do I say that because the thing about narrative right is right if you try to impose a narrative on biological evolution what people do then they get it fundamentally wrong because narrative is teleologically oriented it moves towards closure it moves towards finality it moves towards perfection and they live happily ever after narrative right ultimately while psychologically indispensable to giving us all of the machinery we need to exact for wisdom ultimately I think has to be left behind if we’re going to operate within dialogue the way it does that’s why although there’s clearly sort of some narrative elements to the Platonic dialogue many of them don’t end with narrative closure they’re not they’re not they’re not resolved completed stories and the relationship between the dialogues is not one of narrative it’s one of sort of an ecology in which they’re talking to each other and check it’s a dialogic relationship there’s there’s a meta dialogue between each of the individual dialogues and I think that we have to be paying more more and more attention to that and I think there’s been a deep connection for deep historical reasons between the ontology of perfection and and the symbolization of narrative we’ve tended to think of narrative sacredness and perfection as as as inextricably bound together again I want to be really careful about this I’m not denying right I’m not denying the importance of narrative I’m not denying the fact that often what people are trying to express with perfection is they feel as something is perpetually transcendent to them I’m just saying there are post-narrative post-perfection ways I think of referring to what people are ascending towards in a way that doesn’t misrepresent the kind of as I said it before the kind of formulation we need the kind of yep the kind of as you said the way we’re presencing in order for dialogs to work yes yes and and then we find ourselves here and now in a collaborative always collaborative participatory making realization of the course that we can be on together in coherence that enables us to continue to be on course together is still this notion of course that you speak about and yeah and so very much very much let’s let’s bring this in here because what because because yes that’s why that’s why we use the word discourse that’s why we use the word discourse where we’re picking up on the fact that there is a there is a coursing there is a coursing going on and and of course was also bound up with the sense that there’s a course to history right and of course we use course of course we use course as a way of pointing to a a pedagogical path all of these things yes very much okay now I’d now I’m going to see if I can bring in a frame here that that may well be concordant it may be meaningfully different but it is if I want to bring it forth then I’d be leaving something important to the side because I’d like to please I’d like to take what we’ve presenced here and then see if if again we can because I’m still I’m interested in let’s say for the sake of this conversation seems part of what seems to be driving me I’m interested in in in saving keeping what is necessary and helpful in the notion of telos while while already already in some sense absolutely changing it by by saying okay we are only going to take forward for the purpose of this conversation that a self-making a continually self-making telos and it’s not a finality of thingness that we’re looking for okay yeah uh Evan Thompson Evan Thompson talks about this and living things as an imminent tele theology beautiful right and he’s harkening back to Kant there um and so and that living things because they’re self-oriented it’s they have an imminent teleology in that the teleology is is completely recursive the the the purpose is to maintain the ability to like it’s it’s it’s you say it’s it’s it’s it’s the purpose of maintaining the self-making yes yes beautiful so we are absolutely on the same page with that what very much I have no objections to that sense of teleology I have no objection whatsoever I think it’s integral if we’re going to understand autopoiesis and aspiration I I think it’s integral beautiful okay okay excellent um what we encounter in experience and what we are also containing within our lives is the supreme depths of our lineage and the vast unknown of the future and also the inconsistency of duration as we experience it different experiences we can you will commonly hear people refer to you know like it felt like three years in that in that few short weeks or whatever it felt like hours and it was just mere seconds or minutes and we can talk about this thing perhaps from the perspective of the brain and the release of chemicals and stuff like that that’s that’s fine but but there’s actually but I I am I am very influenced by Bergson as I know you are as well I heard you in a conversation I heard you really appreciating that notion of duray and for me yeah with JP yeah yeah with yeah with JP yeah and given my um interest and exploration with psychedelics as well as other kinds of practices I am I am well aware of the the atemporality and the vast expansiveness that can seemingly be experienced right and become very very difficult to integrate into a coherent theory but perhaps in the right dialogue in fact we can begin to work with these things because okay so here here here we are this self-making to enable further self-making must realize itself according to patterns it must like it must be it’s it’s humble before and within the patterns that already enable it and yes yes and it deeply participates in the realization of patterns that will continue to afford its flourishing if we were to step back and look at that we’re not seeing chaos we are with the right tools in mind seeing a certain pattern and the certain kind of pattern that can be beautifully artistically represented people might use a mandala they might use just a beautiful image of you know a human being I’m I’m struck I’m struck by feminine beauty and I’m struck by how there’s a sense of a timeless alluring drawing forth the beauty in it and a magnificence and and there’s a sense in which there’s a sense in which there’s a sense in which if I attend to myself I am I can become a more caring a better person and whatever way we want to wrap that up over that over a period of time I want to be I want to be able to be more and more appropriately realize my potential and I and I feel very strongly that in so doing I can more effectively contribute and be in caring in a caring relationship with the world and I want to look at that aesthetic and go this here to me is meaningful and there was a course here that would there was a there is a way that was walked which had a pattern to it which while itself is not in any deep sense the only one it’s not fixed that’s not what there is there is there is there is was a cycle of development there you know I loved and I let go appropriately and I opened myself again and I faced courageously the depths of experience and so okay so the final thing to add into this I can then I’m would absolutely love to hear your responses is this is this take your time take your time please the modes of orientation which enable that continued pattern making the humble for the past that you know learning as much as possible and then opening up and creating that future because we must create our future we must create it in an important sense by not making many of the mistakes we’ve made here to fall I follow the line of thinking associated with Jordan Hall an awful lot with respect to civilization design and what have you but it’s so okay so that’s how I stopped there and then there there’s another piece to introduce but let’s see if how that sort of sits yeah no no that there’s so there’s lots of points of resonance that are coming up for me so there’s there’s a you were talking about the deep connection between temporality and how ontology can put a call upon us so and you see this you see this in higher states of consciousness when people experience the really real they experience what I call onto normativity they feel because because meaning is about being connected they want to be deeply connected so they want an increasingly more intimate conformity with this really real and so they will transform their lives and their identity so it deeply empowers the aspiration to transformation that you’re talking about so and that again I think that’s very much a platonic model and then you’re invoking something that of course Plato sees as bound up with that um wow this is weird bringing Plato and Bergson together you would that’s a just struck me as a very interesting and odd thing to juxtapose them that way but Plato of course talks a great deal about beauty and that it has a capacity to inspire us to aspirations. Ascari talks about this in her book about how beauty prepares us for truth and justice because of the way it transforms our sensibility and transforms our motivation so that we become more and more capable of seeing the truth and we become more and more capable of acting justly and so while beauty isn’t truth it is a deep affordance of a aspirational path to becoming more truthful and to becoming more just and I think all of that um I mean and I think Iris Murdoch saw that that was clearly what was in the center of a lot of the platonic and the neo-platonic tradition so I think all of that is very interesting I think it resonates with everything you just said um and then let’s bring it back to the thing that started it which was the the difference experiences of a temporality because we’re talking again about we’re talking about this anagogic process we’re talking about the process that the way beauty couples me in such a way that my identity is restructured my sensibility my salience landscape is restructured so the way the world can disclose itself because beauty and love are bound intricately up together you get that mutually accelerating disclosure and beauty is often a call to that it’s often right if it’s right it it it has that kind of call upon us it draws us forth but then there there is this and you know and of course this is a heideggerian notion too I suppose but there’s there’s the sense in which we’re moving and and this is something that I talked about with JP JP or more so I’ve had a bunch of really excellent conversations with him I’m going to have one very shortly with him and with Mary Cohen um so I’m looking forward to that a lot but there’s a sense in which I it think about Whitehead because in Whitehead Whitehead of course is deeply uh platonic he he clearly indicates that but he’s also very deeply consonant with a lot of Berg song so maybe he’s somebody we could use to to talk about this bridge between them but what I see I what I see in Whitehead as I see this bipolar um ontology let me try and articulate this a little you definitely you know he says that you know the many are gathered into the one that becomes something new so everything everything is interpenetrating everything else and then it causes new emergence so you’ve got this if you’ll allow me these metaphors you have this bottom-up emergence but he talks about the fact that you you put your finger on this the way right the way things emerge they emerge in a way that again we get the sense that possibility and you know that I take possibility to be a real category and not just a conjectural category that possibility and this is this is Whitehead’s notion that the platonic forms were in some sense a way in which possibility is structured and if you’ll allow me a neoplatonic notion that that structuring of possibility emanates into the patterns that are afforded to emerge within the emergence and then those patterns of course access the structured possibility there’s a way in which the bottom-up emergence and the top-down emanation are completely interpenetrating with each other this is why I’ve been so deeply attracted to the work of John Scott as a Regina from within the Christian tradition he’s he’s this titanic figure and it like in from the ninth century and that he but he’s also regarded as a heretic but it’s interesting because he’s seen as the great synthesizer of eastern and western Christendom Christianity and neoplatonism he was he was elevated to very high status in the court and then he was asked to produce a document and he did the paraphysion the division of nature and then when this came out controversy swirled around him because he tried to articulate this idea of creation right as something that should be understood as being the complete interpenetration of the emanation from eternity and emergence within time and that instead of thinking them as opposite we have to think of them so his metaphysics he doesn’t just use a dialectic because he writes the his the paraphysion as as a dialogue but dialectic is the ontological structure he feel he sees like in reality itself that it’s inherently dialectic precisely because of the complete top to bottom interpenetration of emanation and emergence within creation and so and then and then to and then to top it all off because of the particular notion of God which I think is where the heresy comes in he sees all of that as one with God’s inherent self creativity that when God is creating that that is always just an act of self-creation so it’s that this dialectic of that the dialect of creation is is is inseparable from God’s ongoing self-creativity and so he see again again it’s a different notion of the sacred as this ongoing inexhaustible production of intelligibility as opposed to the at rest perfection so that’s why I imagine he was regarded as heretical he’s now sort of come back around and people are starting to consider him much more carefully even within theological circles precisely because this this ontology that he talks about seems to be so apt for talking about these these two things that we’re trying to bring together within our world view and I would add apt for providing a deep grounding a deep ontological grounding for discursive dialectic like what you and I are doing right here right now yeah it’s beautiful it’s beautiful okay okay so two things come to mind both take a long time to say let me see if I can reduce both quickly so that hopefully we don’t lose either the first is that I would continue to like to hone in on what I mean by modes of orientation yes I would and the second is just how much I’m interested in the continued discussion and careful experimentation with the embedding and invitation of more people to participate in community regarding what we’re speaking about in such a fashion that well that that that that well does it justice cares for it but I’m also interested in that I do feel a sense of urgency and I appreciate the importance of being slow and smooth I deeply do and I also feel a sense of urgency and I and I feel that in our culture we are lacking the pillar where a polis can be together and mutually inform each other and disclose themselves in this fashion so that we can become more in touch with the state of our collective moment and our connection to ecology and how we can actually begin to take powerful decisions powerful decisions must to me they should be taken from from an already exhibited capacity to presence oneself in relationship with this very process of the generation and development of wisdom if they’re not coming from that then it’s it’s it’s deeply it’s it’s actually horrifying it’s horrifying yes and um which is why we’re getting into what we’re in in some ways yes okay so that’s that and but maybe we could go the the modes of orientation route first which is please first of all I like the terms I think it’s excellent um and I’d like so I’ll get I want to turn back things to you very momentarily I’ve noticed that at crucial points you invoke this as something that was paying a pivotal meaning capacity to turn things um playing a pivotal role um in one note uh one moment of theory by the way it’s important to step back and in a heideggerian fashion like I just did and like you’ve done to step back and to the degree to which you can and sometimes we make mistakes about this and I’ve made some myself but the degree to which we can and so more education is needed but the degree to we can pay attention to the etymology try to give life back to the words so that they can resonate in a way that is beyond our normal everyday manipulation and control of them give them back some of their being so they’re not just words that we have so like I said so we’ve got and we’re trying to do this right now I think with modes of orientation and I was trying to do it when I was invoking this term pivotal that you invoke modes of orientation because it’s a pivot it allows us to move and shift things that are otherwise heavy or hard to move because we’ve we’ve we found a balance and a point at which such redirection becomes possible for us so you know the ways in which mode of orientation um is pivotal I think is what what I was picking up on and what I want to try and explore with you I just wanted to make that note again that theoria note about the value of re-impregnating our words as much as possible by paying attention to their metaphoricity and to their etymology yeah that’s that’s beautiful and it’s something that you evidence to a incredible degree in your lectures and I think it’s one of the one of the many chief reasons why they afford people to open up their conceptions so much and um yeah it’s great so so okay um so modes of orientation then fundamentally like well I know fundamentally a key piece in the role that these modes of orientation are playing is in our relationship to death and dissolution and broadly speaking the chaos that can enter our experience the horror as well right the dislodging yeah very much how is it how can we find ourselves again how can we find connection again from a place of disconnection in some respects that’s one that’s one thing that’s important and the other is also how we can front up to change how we can from a place of sort of coherence that’s become stagnated and stultified decide bravely to move over the boundary right to confront and attend and it seems to me the the capacity to attend in different modes is is sort of um it’s it’s hard for me to imagine the pictures with that we’re speaking about without those fundamental building blocks of just how autopoetic processes can be in relationship which is other than their immediate domain of autopoiesis at all how can we how can we transgress and trans frame our boundaries without in some sense the the courage to be with the not knowing and ultimately to to surrender in some sense and also to confront the two terms that were pivotal for me in making sense of some deep psychedelic experience i had were confrontation and surrender i’m not attached to either there is a negative and positive mode of each but they’re just what the terms are maybe i would be interested to hear how you would take the this kind of discussion and i’m not attached to having to do it through the lens i’m bringing sure so there’s a lot there’s a lot there i like so let’s let’s let’s gather together logos gather together so that things belong together that that you know there’s this there’s this there’s this encouragement and in caring that is bound up with the modes of orientation as you said because what we’re facing is we’re facing the real possibility of dissolution a kind of death and so it’s interesting there’s a term of course in dynamical systems that tries to point to this which is criticality a system is critical when it is undergoing enough dissolution that it can restructure and reframe itself but if it if it takes too much then it will actually fall into dissolution so that’s why it’s called critical it’s playing on both senses of the word critical i think in a very nice fashion so i think one of the things that’s critical one of the things that can get us into criticality and that we don’t our culture is not good at and this is why i’ve spent some time on i keep coming back to it is serious play and serious play i think is i think i think it’s it’s it’s something that has been accepted you see it in mammals not just in us right serious play is i think indispensable for qualitative development the kind of development you’re talking about here the development that the kind there’s development that is quantitative where you just acquire more and more knowledge and more information and then there’s qualitative development which i think you can best understand is development that must pass through criticality to get to the developmental stage you can’t just keep sort of more of the same and acquire more you actually have to you need new functionality and so you have to put the current functionality at risk it has to go into a period of criticality and what we see is and and you know and i think this just is convergent with the brilliant work of la paul and the brilliant work of agnes callard about we can’t sort of and and and voters work about you can’t infer a stronger logic from a weaker logic you can’t infer yourself through these transformations you have to you have to aspire through them and i tried to argue that this is that the notion of serious play was part of what was at work in in nos in the gnostic or at least that in within gnosis because gnosis is again the greek word for that deep kind of participatory uh knowing and and of course the gnostics they sought to place themselves into exactly the kind of existential risk that you’re talking about here the conic talks about that how transgressive uh of they are so the point about the serious play is it’s it’s how i think human beings it’s it’s it’s how we put ourselves into a a what’s called meta stability a state of criticality so that qualitative development is actually possible for us while also setting up a whole bunch of constraints and systems so that we can back out or reverse out uh if needed we don’t over and completely commit um so that uh like we there we create a situation within serious play in which we can taste and touch the criticality but error is not completely disastrous for us there’s there’s more error tolerance um so the child is playing with the plastic sword um right um and you know and perhaps you know and i’m not saying we should have it in military militaristic culture i’m just using it for ease of expert of explanation you know and the point about the plan i do touch you with a wooden sword there we go i do touch you with a wooden sword it’s serious play because you know i’m putting myself into you know clumsiness following i can hurt myself for sure but because it’s a wooden sword and there’s it’s done within a particular context as opposed to combat with a military sword error isn’t quite as disastrous there’s much more error tolerance so that i can and i want to use this we’re very very uh deliberately i can play with the possibilities to try and get that dot that sense of okay how do i how do i course my way through this how do i course my way through this and i think why it’s a problem for us in our culture is we don’t have we don’t we don’t think about or talk about or do a lot to valorize or validate serious play play is either trivialized into fun for us or we think if it’s important and serious it must be work and then with there’s a step and an algorithm and a recipe for getting there which of course is not how development works and the place where cultures generally do serious play for adults and also perhaps for children but primarily for adults is ritual that’s what ritual is it’s the place where we do serious play i mean if you go into church and it’s and you open yourself up modes of orientation to the serious play that’s going on there if if that’s viable for you i’m not saying it is i don’t think it would be viable for me but if it’s viable for you right and you get involved with the serious play of the eucharist or let’s say it’s easter the portrayal of the crucifixion and the rest like like you’re playing with your identity and you’re playing with some of your deepest affective machinery and you’re really allowing you like you’re you’re involved with a kind of profound serious play that nevertheless there’s a community around you there’s a tradition around you you’ve been taken into a space outside of the ongoing profane space of the world so you’re safe from the world for a while so there’s a lot more error tolerance there’s a lot more support and there’s a ritual that other people have tried so you’re not just starting it in an autodidactic fashion from scratch and so i think there are there are deep connections between the meaning crisis and our inability to take up the appropriate modes of modes of orientation precisely because our culture is really really poor at dealing with serious play like and notice how how poorly and i mean that even economically we reward people who who live lives in which serious play like musicians and artists and other people who have decided that serious play is something that needs to be exemplified and enacted we tend to say but that’s not as important as work you know this protestant work at work work hard make you know all this not that we shouldn’t work i’m not saying that but we i mean again another symptom of the meaning crisis and this has become a pervasive we have a culture and work workaholism right workaholism what is it workaholism is i think it’s i’ll accept it workaholics yeah it’s it’s basically people people do not know how to be other than work so they do not know how to become really because they can’t engage in serious play and hon talks about this in the agony of ecstasy they they get into a you know a mode of self-exploitation where they’re constantly driven to achieve to achieve to achieve and they can’t engage in actual development in serious play so when they’re not working all they can do is to drop into a kind of tupper almost a lethargy of luxury they like so the idea that um that something really important goes on all you’re doing is basically recovering so that you can go back to work and so i think that’s also a very important social problem that is feeding back into the meaning crisis because of the way it is foreclosing for us access to the modes of orientation that are most appropriate for deep development yeah that’s beautiful and it’s remarkable to me because you tied the link there between modes of orientation and the development of a space within culture where people can precisely come together and seriously play in the fashion we’re doing it we’re doing it we’re doing it right now and this is what i mean about and and this is why i often so i typically don’t respond to comments uh in the videos because first of all there’s too many and i couldn’t i can’t and secondly people are people are often just extemporaneous you know expressing and that’s fine i don’t that’s fine do that and they often they want to talk to other people all of that there’s all those reasons sometimes if somebody catches me on a factual error then i’ll i’ll admit it i’ll respond that way or if there’s a somebody else that i’m like you if you commented i’d respond because we have an ongoing dialogue and i know that i have access to you in a deep dialogue not the superficial format of commenting on youtube which i think can be very irresponsible in in so many ways so but right i i replied a couple times when people have commented in my dialogues with jordan hall and they say like this isn’t going anywhere and i’m trying it’s like no no stop thinking of this as work right what jordan is doing is he is exemplifying a very profound kind of serious play he’s showing us how through participatory knowing what serious what serious play and dialogue is like because he is trying to afford development much more than he’s trying to come to a conclusive proposition and that’s what needs to be paid very careful attention to yeah beautiful i absolutely agree and that’s certainly a deep reason why i respect jordan so much for what he’s doing and um i feel a i feel a deep resonance actually on that point um you know generally speaking moving around in the world i’m engaging with people much the same as this i think usually with more with a bit more lightness not that i haven’t felt light in this but there’s also the sense in which that this is recorded and i’m sort of sitting still i actually like to move around quite a lot you know i’m yeah um yeah um and but but but fundamentally the way in to meaningful relationships with people is almost always maybe it is always i just want to have a bit of humility in speaking extemporaneously like this is to meet someone precisely where they’re at with presencing the part of themselves in relationship to you that is ready and able and willing to transform itself in a developmental fashion even in a small way like i want to show up as who i am with what i have and the way into all of these things is so i mean it’s it’s it’s myriad it’s infinite because it’s precisely where that particular unique instantiation of a person is in their life yet fundamentally we’re all going through the same cycles it’s still the theory theory of dance it’s still checking in and being there and making sense of where we can together cultivating a shared space of care and sense relying on much of what our culture has given us here at the same time drawing in some create co-creating some potential together that is joyous in its opening up of the world in that way for us then and there um john i’m conscious now that we’re coming to i don’t know how long we have left um so i can go a little bit after six to make up for my time a little bit past this scheduled two hours to make up for that gap that we’ve counted so that you can have a more complete thing uh but let’s say uh about another sort of 25 minutes okay beautiful okay excellent okay then so let’s let’s see how let’s see it’s you know it’s it’s an incredible i feel so grateful to have this kind of opportunity and i have worked fairly hard to have this kind of opportunity but there’s a thing in dialogue that i feel i’m bringing people together to do this kind of thing and contend with deep issues and i would love there’s so many beautiful areas of dialogue and places we could go but it almost feels like i’ve got a special power right now because i can drop in i can drop into myself and draw up a question and i can throw it over to you and you’ve sort of agreed to answer it’s hilarious you know um yeah it’s like the world can open up to me just from doing that and it’s it’s quite remarkable so so i’m i’m going to if you don’t mind take that opportunity to do just that and see in what way we can uh we can unleash what you can have to offer so oh this is it so okay so there’s there’s a there’s a few areas of inquiry that have come to mind first of all i was really motivated by this notion of joy and in what sense in what sense we you can create for us here or speak to how of how of how aware may be ripe in our creation of a an element or space within culture that can afford a sort of joyful opening of people’s expression and then you know what came to me john i felt the maybe they are you know metaphorically you know metaphorically they’re the sort of opponent processing of that and i felt i felt into a a difficulty and a certain trauma of our time and and that is is going to be a bit of a lateral jump but it may be somewhat resonant and that trauma is one experienced i think by both men and women by both by in a both masculine sense and a feminine sense but there is a the whole world of me too and just not what me too is specifically but what it’s tapping into in sort of a certain disconnection and in some sense an inappropriate kind of relationship at an environment fundamentally of not caring there’s a there’s a deep sense in which an interlocking sense of care has not been managed for whatever reason for the psyches of people involved in this milieu that we find ourselves in and something i’ve experienced is that there is a there’s a particular i don’t know maybe not a particular but there’s a deep sense of a a woundedness for both masculine and feminine but let’s maybe concentrate on the the feminine perhaps they have to be taken together that’s crucially important and i think people don’t do that enough really speak to both masculinity and femininity together but there’s a there’s a a a block there’s somehow an environment of safety that must be cultivated to presence a certain kind of i would like to say and it has to be metaphorical is a distinctly feminine kind of energy a feminine kind of vulnerability in certain spaces for that to be presenced but not in not to be looked for that not to be an exposure for that presencing not to be seen then as prey you know what i mean it’s like it’s there has to be an enabling of that vulnerability because without that and the appropriate relationship there in men and women seriously playing together you know joy is going to be hampered joy is going to be concerned with whether or not its vulnerable expression is in some sense unsafe so what are your thoughts on that mode of inquiry that’s that’s very that’s very very important one of the things i try to do is in order to discharge some of the reactivity around the words i often shift to yin and yang rather than uh uh uh feminine and masculine because that those tend to have a more ontological association as for as opposed to the now highly politicized understanding of uh masculine and feminine not that there aren’t important political issues there are i’m not i’m not denying the history of feminism or its value i’m just saying that sometimes it’s hard to talk about the things you want to talk about i notice how you’re there’s trepidation yeah how you’re moving around these words um so the yin and yang aspects to me come in so wonderfully when i move from adversarial pro an adversarial framing to an opponent processing and then i see this very much at work in circling in which i there’s men and women in in the circling right um and and you know the there’s all kinds of overly simplistic things oh everybody’s the same that’s ridiculous being a man being a woman that makes a difference pretend it doesn’t is is pretense uh but also to to come up with simple you know categorizations of what that means is also that’s why again i try to use this yin and yang because these these are much more comprehensive and deep and you know multi-vocal terms right and and and and they’re and and and they’re they in the dao in the symbol of the dao they are represented in dynamic relationship and interpenetrating each other with no with no sexual uh intent meant there um and and so i see i see that the people that come into circling and i’m deeply grateful to to to meet these people and i can even see it within a person like when when guy is doing his thing or where jordan is doing his thing and i mean that thing with respect right i don’t mean it is dismissive um i like i see there’s a deep reverence for the expansion of the yang and the contraction of the yin uh the and the contraction of the yin uh the the right the the the attempt to project of the yang the attempt to sensitize at the end and that and that they’re they’re they’re flowing and you get this sense of they’re they’re both sort of parametric constraints on the self-organizing process it goes on and people aren’t trying to pin them down or position themselves as representing one of these constraints rather what they want to do is they want to participate as fully as possible if the rhythm of the process that’s taking place within the space that is constituted by the by the constraint so they’re trying to hold the constraints within opponent processing rather than position themselves adversarial as representative of the of the polls and put them into some kind of competition with each other now i think all of that is very very important um now we have to take great care because that that that is a very real possibility and it is a possibility that both the men and the women i think in the circling deeply value i that’s that is my i’ve come i i have a strong conviction that that’s what i’m seeing in in in the circling um so are you still there tim yes i’m here i think we’re first there for a second yes yeah you’re from yeah okay did you hear everything i said about both yes both the men and women are deeply valued okay and so i i want to acknowledge all of that and i want to acknowledge it reverentially and i want to recommend it as something you should be paying more attention to that instead of positioning and adversarial we can we can hold the opponent processing and move to the space given by the constraints right i want to acknowledge that reverentially while also acknowledging that we have to address all the traumatic damage that’s been done by the kind of disconnect you’re talking about the way in which we for all kinds of cultural historical and psychopathological reasons have hurt each other around you know issues of gender and the masculine and the feminine i i i i think i think i think what i want to say there is my one criticism about how many people talk about for lack of a better adjective and it’s not quite the right adjective but it’s one that i’m going to use right now how people talk about the political aspect of this the one criticism i have is it seems to me that the expression of anger and resentment on both sides or multiple sides i guess is being prioritized over trying to create a shared goal of bringing about healing from the trauma and here’s how the two points connect together i think if we recover the yin yang dynamism that can tell us that it that healing is really possible and that therefore we should be balancing the needed criticism with the ultimate prioritizing of the goal of healing um and that is not to trivialize or equate everybody’s suffering or to do anything simplistic like that right i’m not i’m i hope i’m not being stupid here in that fashion but i do think that we are running out of time and we’ve got to figure out how to more deeply live together and love together and work and play together and develop together if we’re going to save things and so we’ve got to give my more priority to the healing we just have to there i mean i i don’t see a real alternative for all of us together yes yes yes and um the movement we not us in terms of us and them this how can we be part of this yeah this uh opponent processing is like a the rhythm i i love the metaphors i speak so much most mostly to open up to to to people about where i’m where i’m thinking and feeling and and how i’m being in the world is through the metaphor of rhythm and music what i’m finding most powerful is this notion of the deep drums to tap in and feel into the deep drums that are present you know all the noise all the noise it is it it’s an innate capacity of all of us to tune into the deep drums yeah i like that metaphor yeah yeah and i like the the shamanic associations that it’s calling forth i think that’s i think that’s very wonderful that’s wonderful thank you that’s very i like that metaphor a lot the deep drums yeah so i think i think uh you know i it worries me because we’re you know the adversarial processing is becoming so um so prominent and such as being sort of indicated as so meshed with the only way to have power and influence i do worry about our ability to get back to um the sense of opponent processing see the to me one of the one of the crucial differences is in opponent processing and this is again the difference between dialogue and monologue it’s the difference between phileas sophia and philea nikea the love of wisdom versus the love of victory right is that we what we should share about both of us always is a commitment to the process as opposed to the victory of whatever position we’re advocating and see democracies were supposed to and they did for a long time work and people being committed to the process and the idea that the conflict within right between the parties was ultimately the best way to embody self-correction that what we were actually invested in was because i think the the ultimate value of democracy is its capacity for self-correction that’s what sets it above the other systems and i think once it loses self-correction it becomes what winston chritchell i mean it’s the worst to next winston chritchell said it’s the worst system next to all the rest but i think if you remove that the commitment to self-correction then it just simply becomes the worst system right and and so i think that you have to have a commitment to the process because of an unwavering understanding and appreciation and reverence for how much self-correction is continually needed by all and therefore why the opponent processing must be respected above and beyond your own particular party and position at all times and when democracies have that i think they function very very well and when we lose that which i think we’re losing all around and especially in the sort of the major democracies like the united states and and britain i mean we seem to have lost this capacity for understanding the need by all for self-correction and therefore the commitment to the superlative valuing of the process and the self-correction therein over our particular goals and our particular party in our particular position if we the degree to which the democracies have have lost that commitment is the degree to which we’ve entered into very serious trouble and i think you know the fact that it’s becoming like difficult to take a stand above one’s party for one’s country how difficult that’s becoming in the united states how is i grew up with the americans being the epitome of patriotism that americanism was almost like a secular religion and now americanism is dead and people are going oh no no no if you are not committed to the process into the country over your position in your party americanism is dead it is dead dead dead oh john it’s it’s very very powerful there’s um there’s there’s there’s something we can presence here that brings this to life in a way that’s even in some sense more horrifying which is which is that you know i follow english politics quite a lot particularly in this brexit period watching parliament and what have you and what’s what seems to be one of the key markers of a successful politician in this combative sense not in this deep sense my god not in this deep sense is the capacity to perform as if you were extending the hand but you’re not extending the hand you’re deeply you’re you’re deeply insinuating that the other side is is not to be yeah and the level of the level of articulation capacity that boris johnson and um speak and uh uh what’s his name um oh i know yeah i can’t remember yeah extremely posh in his presentation and wow uh jacob reese moog and his capacity to deliver to deliver communication in such a in such a flowing way he he evokes the sense of the gentleman in just an incredible incredible degree and it has me buying into it when he speaks an awful lot and then there’s part of me that it’s like if that if that is really functioning by way of if it’s if you know it’s just you know through the little sly lines of the communists on the other side or just the a certain kind of derision to to the the the energy like it’s it’s not it’s not extending the hand to what is what what is virtuous like what where where the virtue is coming from it you know sometimes when we are outraged it may be the case that much of what we’re saying turns to noise quite quickly but the very motivation to be presenting something we care about in that performative way we are being vulnerable with that that has to be spoken to and heard right it has to be heard and and appreciated and there’s a sense in which just how good at just how good at acting as though we are building bridges but fundamentally not building bridges is is it is a core danger it’s the performance of authenticity and that in that deep sense rather than rather than a true offering yes yes yes the pretense yeah i’ve tried to i’ve tried to think about that very deeply in a way that would call me to my own personal response what are the markers that i’m actually entering into dialogue as opposed to earthsats or protests um i’ve tried to look for the degree to which i’m open to an insight from the other i’m open to acknowledging a good criticism by the other i’m open to dialoguing with people who and i do do this who have ontological religious commitments um other than mine and try to it’s let me give you a clear example jonathan pageau who i deeply respect um you know very much a committed Christian eastern orthodoxy um he made a criticism you know john’s talking about you know the all these ecologies of practice but what he’s telling us to talk about is very individualistic and he’s leaving he’s leaving out you know what was in the ecclesia the gathering together the collective and i thought that’s that’s that’s right i took that criticism and let’s remember what this used to mean i took that criticism to heart that’s one of the things that motivated me to take a look at circling to get involved in these collective psychotechnologies precisely because uh you know i took jonathan’s criticism seriously it was like that no that’s a very very good point i take paul’s criticism about when i’m talking about the religion that’s not a religion about the issues of scalability and you know what do you do that’s gonna do you know what how is it gonna match up to something like what tradition gave us i take i so you know we have to remember this goes along with serious play it between accepting and rejecting there is the important liminal transformative place of taking seriously taking seriously it doesn’t mean oh i agree you’re right or no you’re wrong let’s fight about it it’s like i’m going to take it seriously and i’m going to try and see what insight is in there you know open myself up try as much as i can to self-correction doesn’t mean that i’m going to sort of just give ground because then that’s also not of service to the person that i’ve been dialog with right but this idea this is why i doing all this work with leo ferraro on plausibility as opposed to certainty because certainty is about right about coming to conclusions which are very rare to actually get to whereas plausibility which is so important to the practice of science is you know having a sense of we should take this seriously we should take this seriously which that doesn’t mean the scientist says that’s the truth i’ve concluded but the scientist says no no we should take this seriously a deep part of serious play is what things do you do what habits like to use aerosol what virtues do you cultivate so that you regularly and reliably show up and take seriously what the other person is saying right and so that you and and then you can also you know encourage them and then care them to take you seriously as well oh well john you you embody this and show up with that in um with that disposition in such a beautiful way and i’m deeply appreciative of of it both personally and also as someone who cares about how we are making the world together all of us and the moment at that the moment you know i appreciate i really appreciate how you’re showing up and um look i’d i’d um i feel i feel as though bringing this dialogue to a closure now is is right yeah appropriate yeah and so you know thank you so much i um i look forward to i look forward to further further dialogues in the future yeah well you you can tell how uh how excited i was when i saw you showing up uh that that i’m happy to see you and i’m happy um to interact with you um i think you too i think you bring um i think you bring a tremendous depth and flexibility and finesse um to how you show up and how you engage and how you participate in these dialogues and um and you also are so articulate i i would really love to see you talk with christopher master pietro my dear friend because his innate capacity or well it’s both innate and i think how do you train um his innate capacity for lyrical expression and insightful articulation i think the two of you would just vibrate off against each other in just a powerful and profound way um so i encourage you to uh speak with him but um i i think what you bring to this makes it deeply enjoyable in that not so much pleasure but i experience deep joy in in this time we’ve shared together so thank you very very much for it i really appreciate it