https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Ef_tgGSFI-w
Welcome everyone to another Voices with Reveki. I’m very excited to have my friend and colleague Steve March back again. This will be Steve’s second time on Voices with Reveki. We’ve had multiple conversations, multiple interactions at the Respond retreat, and one of the things we’re going to do is we’re going to start offering some shared reflections, even how we’re currently metabolizing, what happened at Respond, and then I want to do something that sort of serves to function. I want to talk about an experience I had, sort of a magic moment in Respond, and Steve played a very important part in that. And I’ll note right off that this is not an attempt to in any way represent Steve’s work comprehensively or in depth. That’s not what I’m trying to do. What I’m trying to do is show a magic moment because it’s important to me, and it’s a chance for Steve and I to see again how our work can start to sew together, but it’s also an attempt to give you some idea of the kind of things that were like not just structurally, but experientially what was happening at Respond. So that’s how the two pieces go together. So Steve, again, always welcome. I feel like it’s only been a matter of days since we last saw each other. It’s so true. It was actually the last person I embraced before I got on my plane to come back to Toronto. So he was literally the last person that I was interacting with from Respond. But it’s so good to see you again. Yeah, yeah. Well, the same here. And you were the last person I interacted with as well. So yeah, yeah. And yeah, I just loved our time together. And it just felt pregnant with possibility. And I think what I loved and I felt this kind of from the first moment was that even just sitting in our circle from the very, very beginning, there was a sense of camaraderie, a sense of a sense of friendship, a sense of, you know, we’re all coming together with deep backgrounds in our own ways, complementary, different, with overlaps and non overlaps and and just with with a tremendous feeling called, I think, feeling called by what’s happening in the world and the language that I’m kind of feeling into is into a certain kind of disharmony. There’s a certain kind of disharmony, especially around wisdom in the world. And and and it’s it’s got us, you know, and I felt that from everyone there. You know, we’re attracted into that. So so I’m happy to be here and and still metabolizing this. So so maybe our conversation can help. Yes, I think that was well said. Just to give a bit of framing for people who are coming into this, like what are they talking about? Steve, March and I and a bunch of other well, we ended up being called teachers were people who are teaching about wisdom, trying to build ecologies of practices, participating in communities and participating in this project of trying to build a community of communities. And we all got together at the Maple Monastic Academy. Beautiful place, magical place, beautiful community in Vermont. And we were basically there originally for one stated explicit goal. And to my mind, at least another goal came up as or a medical. So the first main goal or overarching goal was we’re trying to come up with a meta curriculum. This is the idea of what are some fundamental design principles, organizational principles, orientations, etc., that we that should go into any good ecology of practices that are trying to help people cultivate. I’m trying to use that term very neutrally, cultivate wisdom, because part of the discussion was is wisdom something you train, etc. We can come back to that. But another thing that emerged and I think was always part of it implicitly, but became explicit is, well, how do we knit these communities into a community of communities? How do we go about building a culture of awakening, to use bachelor’s term or a culture of wisdom? And I almost wanted to turn it into a verb there, wisdoming, whizing or something as Vnet wanted to say. And so we got together. I won’t go through the details of the structure. My intent, though, is to have every one of the teachers on Voices with Verveki. And as we reflect on this and publicize it and also say how each one of us, how we think our particular community and curriculum fits into the community of communities and the meta curriculum. So that’s just to give context. And now I’m going to invite Steve to continue on with, you know, just, you know, really extemporaneously your reflections. What did you take away? And then at some point, how why do you want to continue participating? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think what originally attracted me into the project was the opportunity to explore ecologies of practice and and just this recognition that that a lot of us were gathering around ecologies of practice that are helping us to grapple with the complexity, the multifacetedness of life these days and to open up channels for wisdom, to access, to embody wisdom. And so I was I was attracted into that. And the thing that was surprising to me in engaging the conversations was how much and how powerfully, especially for me personally, the topic of existential risk came into the conversation. And, you know, as a kind of lightning rod, as a kind of like something that sort of just crystallized a certain urgency that, you know, I felt like I wasn’t it wasn’t new to me, the topic or the conversation or even the feeling of urgency. And yet somehow what happened for me was a kind of intensification of all of that through through the dialogues. So much so that actually when I came back this week, leading into teaching a class yesterday that’s been ongoing now for about five months, a leadership coaching class in my company. And and I actually we’ve been working on a kind of sense making curriculum, an ontological redesigning curriculum, really framing leadership in some in some novel ways. And and essentially I brought them I brought them the core inquiry of the respond conversation and we started workshopping it in the class. And I was I was struck by the way that that also bringing an existential risk as well in a more potent way. Actually, with that group as well was it was a kind of lightning rod. And and everything sort of sort of cohered around that and started to really engage people in a way that I hadn’t yet seen in the class. And and I kind of left thinking like, you know, I think we all went in thinking we’re going to have these conversations, we’re recording them, we’re transcribing them, we’re we’re going to refactor kind of some sort of metacurriculum out of this and as a product. Of course, that that will happen. But what if what one of the things that comes out of this is the inquiry itself, like like engaging people in these kind of questions. And what I did yesterday is I as I kind of presenced the disharmony that we were sitting in and allowed people to feel bothered by it, really affected by it. And then we started to actually work our design method in that. And and so even even without any kind of metacurriculum or curriculum for wisdom, which I have in my own way in my school, as I’m sure many of the teachers do, there was something already that was that was very productive coming out of it and that I’m going to continue to to experiment into. So I think that was one of the big things that was surprising to me, like the catalytic force of existential risk is is is is very potent. Yeah, I agree that the ex-risk was very much a lightning rod. For me. I mean, I’d always been concerned about the interaction between the metacrisis, the metacrisis is a crisis of various ex-risk factors, all causally interacting and potentially mutually accelerating each other. And I think that proposal is becoming increasingly plausible, if not probable. And the meeting crisis. But for me, the lightning rod was in between them. Oh, is that I saw people connecting them more. And this is particularly where I felt sort of a deep kind of unexpected. This is particularly where I felt. Sort of a deep kind of unexpected alignment with Soryu, who is the the Roshi of the entire community, because the connection between suffering, current suffering and potential ex-risk became very, very palpable, I think, in a lot of the discussions. And so for me, that. That has led me to want to come back. And I think this is analogous to you. It’s least convergent and argue more forcefully for. The meeting crisis, which is endemic in people’s lives. I mean, we all, many of us noted that in multiple times and ex-risk and trying to do And trying to do more to make that not a theoretical connection, but a realization for people within whatever set of practices or ecology of practices I’m giving them. So quite similar in a lot of ways. And. I also liked. The fact that. It was clear. That well, I’ll say it was clear to me that all of the teachers had already, to significant degree, made that connection. And so they could all that’s why. The way the extra stuff was foregrounded was so readily relevant to the projects they were already engaged in. So to my mind, that really crystallized in a powerful fashion. So. I also found something very interesting. Around. I’m not interested in interesting is right where that sounds so detached. This other thing you put your finger on that I want to come back a little bit more. And I think it’s connected with this crystallization of ex-risk and its connection to current disharmonies, as you call it, meaning crisis, as I might call it. Right. And this is the sense of calling. That became very apparent. Also. And I’m trying to put. I’m not trying to be obscure or obtuse. I’m trying to put my finger on this, on the nature of the phenomenological change. Maybe you could help me with it. Cause I’d always felt a strong calling to doing what I’m doing. The analogy I would give is, but you know, imagine the calling is like a song. It’s like a song that’s being played. It’s like a song that’s being played. It’s like a song that’s being played. It’s like a song that’s being played. It’s like a song that’s being played. It’s like a song and now the song joins a chorus and it reverberates back on you in a way that when you’re just singing on your own, doesn’t now that doesn’t mean I wasn’t talking to other people, but there was something at respond where there was that concert effect. Uh, I don’t know if you felt that. I, I think that’s a really beautiful metaphor and exactly how I felt it as well. There was like this, this sort of mutual amplification of something that was in the field from the first second. And as we started to talk, it was like, there was a kind of, you know, suddenly a chorus and there were obviously lots of differences were coming from different places where, you know, we have different ways of languaging this kind of stuff. And some of that was, you know, hanging in the conversations and sorting through some of that, uh, which we did. And frankly, I think there’s more to go with that, but, but underneath all of that, there was this mutual amplification and resonance of the connection between, between, um, this wisdom, disharmony and existential risk. And, and it’s, you know, I’m, I’m just, I’m left like struck with, with, and, um, almost like the obviousness of it in a certain kind of way. Um, I think more intensively, more so than I, than I had going into it. And it’s not like I hadn’t connected these things before, but I think the other thing, at least in my work, I haven’t generally used the term wisdom that much. And, you know, for me, wisdom is a term that’s often found in spiritual communities and whatnot, you know, as a coach, I’m trying to put forth a, an approach to coaching that can easily be ported into the corporate world or organizational world and, you know, I’m not necessarily saying that this is better language, um, because it’s more obtuse even in some sense, but I use the term unfolding depth, um, to talk about this, you know, in a way that I can, that I, that I can actually demonstrate inside of coaching conversations so that it becomes an actual experience. Um, and I’m walking away feeling more emboldened actually to use the term. Yeah. We talked about that in the car. We did. I feel like, like I need to, I need to actually, I’m not giving up on unfolding depth at all. I mean, that, that, that distinction needs to be unpacked and it’s, it’s purposefully strange language, which, so that it doesn’t land and into someone’s existing worldview and, and sort of slot in, in a way that it, it demands opening to something, right. Um, but I also think wisdom, wisdom. This is a question for me, like, does wisdom land into, into people’s worldview in such a way that, uh, that it is, um, sort of like it falls into a category of irrelevance. So, um, I think, uh, that what had dough did with philosophy, his ability to make us remember that philosophy is a way of life for the cultivation of wisdom and, and therefore re-homed it for people in a way that would call to them in their lives. I think we need to, and I think it’s sort of pose that challenge to you as we were driving the car towards the airport. Um, you need to, we, we, we need to do that with wisdom, uh, because if it is just neglected or overlooked because it is immediately dropped into, um, the spiritual in a pejorative way, the esoteric, the fringe, the new age, then we lose faith and faithfulness to the great minds that were genuinely lovers of wisdom and have sought, uh, to help us. I mean that, I mean, in just a simple sentence. Um, and so I want to, I don’t want to restore the term for its own sake. I want to restore the term so that Plato and Aristotle and Plotinus and Spinoza can call to us again. That’s, that’s why I want to do it. And I had hope after doing, uh, the respond retreat that this is now a doable project. This is a, that this is something that where we can bring multiple voices in depth and in concert together such that we re-home this and we bring back to the table the people that have been excluded because of the way we exclude, right, wisdom, or they’ve been reformulated as, you know, theoreticians. Here’s Plato’s theory of this, or here’s Aristotle’s theory of that. And we’ve lost what they’re primarily doing to us, which is trying to, right, provoke us, evoke us. They’re trying to call us to a life of loving of wisdom. And for me, that’s why I think we should endeavor to restore that term. Now, obviously we have to do it carefully and we don’t, you know, you know, you don’t just drop it, you know, initially at any point, but I do think, well, I guess I’m trying to encourage you as a friend. Yeah. I’m trying to encourage you. Yeah. And I hear that I’m taking it up. I already have ideas for how to do that, renaming classes, bringing it out more. And I think, you know, to your point, it doesn’t make sense to just use the language that that’s only the starting move. That’s right. Or one move. We really have to follow that up with actual practices in ways that the availability of this, and it has to become something that is as tangible as knowledge and information if we hope to actually have it become integrated with with the information and knowledge domains that, that seem to, to be valued in the culture right now. So it has to become tangible. And it’s interesting. Like when I brought this, you know, this, this disharmony to my leadership students yesterday, predictably, the very first question is, well, what do you mean by wisdom? Yes. Like predictably. It’s like, yeah, it’s like, and I actually put to them the three questions that you, that you put to us, you know, where do you go for information? Where do you go for knowledge? Where do you go from wisdom? Which, you know, with a, with a response that I’m sure you can anticipate. Right. And so that’s kind of the point that, that wisdom lives in this kind of esoteric, intangible, formless, like, what is this thing? I don’t know. Does it apply? Does it not apply? Is it relevant? Is it irrelevant? Is, you know, that needs to change. Yeah. Right. That needs to change. And I, and I can see, I can see the ways that my work is, is actually able to do that in the way that I can make unfoldment tangible, you know, as an alternative to improvement, and, you know, if I try to talk about that to people initially, mostly I get kind of, kind of confusion because without the experience, it’s really hard to have the distinction. We can have the language, but we can’t have the distinction in the practical sense is the language connected to the experience that we can actually, that we can actually observe something in its occurrence, right? That phenomenal phenomenologically. So somehow we have to use the language, but also to say, yes, that’s what we’re talking about this experience right here is the arising of wisdom. Yes. Yes. That’s why I like Venus proposal of trying to make it a verb or a gerund. We should talk about, we should talk about whizing. Whizing, whizing, something like that. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I’ve been, I’ve been trying to do that by trying to get people to understand that I’m trying to point to something that’s non-optional for human beings, which is, you know, the deep caring about, and they keep caring for, meaning and what that, and how that involves dealing with self-deception, self-destruction, misalignment, you know, profound modal confusion, whether it’s between the having mode of the being mode, or as you have articulated very well between understanding it as self-improvement and understanding it as self-unfoldment. There’s a lot that needs to go into that. But part of what I think we can do in demonstrating it within practice is to show it’s non-optionality, like why, well, why this is indispensable to a good human life. And as we now have been saying, to saving the planet, right? And how those two are bound inextricably up together. Yeah, that’s right. You know, I think the other thing that, that I started to really reflect on deeply during the week was that, you know, one of the prevailing metaphors in our culture is that of the network. Yes. And networks are flat. Yes. They lack depth. And so the flatness of networks leads us into, it inclines us into looking in terms of knowledge networks and information networks. But they blind us to this depth dimension. And the depth dimension is the affordance for wisdom. Yes. So that, you know, it’s like, it’s like there’s a need. So there’s a need to go from like network to ecology or something like that. That’s why I proposed the term. Yeah. The way to get because ecologies are not just networked, they’re layered. Right. That’s right. Precisely. Yeah. And the layers, the layers are all mutually integrated with each other. It’s a totality, right? Yes. Yeah. And right. Yeah. They’re causing and constraining each other in a way that’s self-organizing and, you know, self-preserving, adaptively responding to changes in, you know, in the environment. And that’s very much, I think, part of what we need to bring back into the understanding of wisdom is that wisdom is very much the capacity to realize, to curate, to participate, and to draw other people in to such ecologies in a profound way. So this is where I see the connection in my work because framed in this language that we’re using right now, you know, a coaching conversation, especially one that’s attuned to depth is what, which is the, which is primary for us in Aletheia coaching is, is like an exploration of the ecology that we’re, that we’re, that we’re embedded within. And that is embedded within us, right? There’s this double embeddedness, right? It’s not we’re in it, it’s in us as well. And it’s this exploration of it by, yes, there’s in some sense, sensing inwardly, how, what am I sensing in my body? What’s arising in my felt sense? How am I feeling emotionally back and forth with noticing what’s happening around us? What’s happening between us? And we’re exploring this, this ecological network because resourcefulness is found there. Yeah. And in coaching conversations, I’m always trying to, to, I think of the arc of a conversation ideally as the client comes in and they’re feeling perhaps stuck or, or challenged, maybe confused. You know, something is that they’re feeling an impedance of some sort. They’re not able to move into life to take care of the concerns that they have in a way that they might like to. And what I’m always trying to do is to help them to feel resourced, to be resourced at the end in a way that they weren’t at the beginning. And, you know, my secret to that is we explore the ecology that’s here. It’s not so the resource is here. It’s available. It’s not over there. It’s not on the other end of a project or something. Now, of course, we can learn skills in that kind of way. And that’s a little bit there, but it’s helpful to feel resourced and then go learn a skill, you know, so there’s something here in the ecology that’s usually being missed and is not being embodied and fully, fully enacted. Yeah, I got two things that I came to see in your work that I hadn’t seen from our previous conversations. One is this tracing, tracking, explicating of the ligaments of an ecology of practice. And that that in and of itself, you know, empowers people that maybe that’s not the right word, but you use resource, resourcefulness. That word works. OK, it empowers people in a way because it gives them it gives them something like a sense of I don’t know what I’m trying to get, like sort of the geometry of the ligaments and how they can properly move and orient within that, which is much better than an often inchoate intuitive participation and sort of grasp of it. But it’s very partial, very inadequate in a lot of ways. So I saw that and I thought, whoa, that’s really cool. And then and in line with that, and this came out in some of the discussions and also watching you is how Socratic what you’re doing is in the deep way that, you know, myself and Christopher Master Pietro and others are trying to bring out because, you know, when we talked about it, there was a lot about sort of, you know, Genland’s focusing and this inward sensing and this dropping down levels of experience, which is all very valuable and not just note that. But I didn’t get a strong sense in our previous conversation of the dialogical component of what you’re doing. But that became much clearer to me as we were participating in respond, which I thought was great. And those two are like those two things sort of tracing, tracking the ligaments and this Socratic element, they actually sit very, very well with each other. How does that land for you? Yeah, yeah, I think I think it lands well. And I shared this with you. My you know, my admission here is that I haven’t really studied the Platonic dialogues as much as you’re inspiring me to study them. So I always, you know, I hear I hear you and Chris saying things to me like, how Socratic and how Platonic. And I I take it as as, you know, I take it well and appreciate it. And it actually is making me want to go study that stuff more and and and and and see what I can learn further from it. But yeah, you know, one of the things that has become really, really clear in my understanding of all of this is that the relationship itself, or we could say the ecology itself is the locus of transformation. Yeah, the individual. Yes, yes, yes. I just want to say, yes. Excellent. Excellent. Excellent. Yeah. So so even when I’m coaching an individual, when I’ve contracted to do that, really what I’m working on is actually unfolding the coaching relationship and in some sense, entering their ecology and having them enter my ecology. And there’s this dance that goes on that that when that relationship, when that field of relatedness is unfolding and unfolding in depth so that we’re able to the client and I to meet at deeper depths and to mutually palpate and explore those things together, I know they’re getting value out of it. I know that they’re unfolding or they’re getting what they came to get. Right. This is actually why I’m not a big fan of assessing clients against some kind of competency model or something like that, because for me, that actually puts the client at a distance. Now the focus is entirely upon them and how they stack up against whatever model I might be using. My preference is to actually enter into relationship and begin to explore. And mostly in those relationships, I’m not sure where it needs to go. Right. But I but I don’t need to know where it needs to go. What we need to do is actually explore what’s already here. And that will unfold because what’s already here is always more than and more than what’s currently being felt, more than what’s currently expressed. And that more than is actually what begins to unfold. And curiously, in some cases, the way it unfolds is the client feels less than something. So so there’s there’s even a dance between that. And in some of the work, you know, we were talking about the ways that there’s this deepening in that you just that you just mentioned. And then there’s there’s four different styles of transformation in this work. And so the first style is a deepening in. The second style is more of a more of a moving outward in this kind of way. The third style is actually more of a moving up. Yes. And then followed by another moving down that feels qualitatively different than the first kind of moving down. And then there’s the beyond. Then there’s the and I know we’re going to chat about that a little bit, but I just wanted to say that there’s like it is curious. And I see this consistently between people, that there’s just a sense of certain ways of working and exploring and inhabiting these ecologies and this kind of implicit sense of directionality to it. I think that’s well said. I think that was another theme that came out. And you often voiced it at respond was that we we need to be sensitive to the demographics. We need to be in the sense of there are different populations, different groups of people who are going to come into this and they’re going to have different pathways in and to pay attention to that. And that is also something I’ve been trying. I have been talking about, but I feel called to try and foreground it more. One other thing that came out and I actually made a specific project proposal and then maybe we’ll move to that exemplary case from my from my point of view. And then you were involved so you can talk about one of the things that came out for me was. Was. I there was almost unexpectedly, so there was significant convergence. I’m not saying that we all came to we did we didn’t do data compression. So there was we can work together and we can produce something together. And there was a lot of poor things that where we were seeing overlap. And this and this reminded me of the work I had done with Igor Grossman and a bunch of other people, Monica, Delta and others, where we got all the scientists studying wisdom and we were able to come up with a consensus paper, which did not represent what each person individually thought, but it represented something that we could give to the scientific community. And then what came very, very clear for me is that these two convergences, if I can put them that call them that they need to converge. They need to talk to each other. They need to inform each other. And I proposed, you know, and there’s some of the other teachers are going to work with me on this precisely because of what we were saying earlier, a way of getting wisdom back on the table and taken seriously. But I’m interested in these two questions. This also came out for me. I’m interested to what degree. Sort of core dimensions of wisdom in the scientific consensus paper were actually showing up in respond. And I’m also interested in what was coming out of respond that wasn’t being talked about in the scientific paper, so getting an actual integrated dialogue going between them, because I think of the scientific paper as very theory driven, very top down and appropriately so. And I think what we were doing was very I mean, there was a lot of theory, but it’s very practice driven, it’s very bottom up. And I think getting the two of these to talk very, very clearly with each other, that was another thing that came out for me as part of this. Yeah, I could see that as being really valuable. For sure. I’d be really curious to see how that conversation goes. But yeah, you know, from the science perspective, much more than I do these days. I read I skimmed over the paper that you that you sent to us. And there was a lot of really fascinating ideas there. I feel like I need to go back to it and spend more time with it. That there were kind of points that I could sort of reflect off of. So I was having it, I guess, in a certain kind of way that conversation was happening inside of me, but I realized more of that needs to happen. Yeah. Yeah. And I I was very careful to present it to the group as this is not an authority you have to conform to. This is a powerful perspective you need to dialogue with. Yeah. And I and so and I was actually happy to see that was it was taken up in that way. So I think we’ve given a pretty good flavor of what’s going on and why I’m I’m simultaneously. I mean, X-Rex is now really palpable for me, but I’m also more hopeful because of the momentum that I just the palpable momentum, I felt that respond. Yeah. Yeah. I’m feeling the same way. I really came in, you know, came into this week after this with a lot of momentum, with an urgency that’s been that’s been honed with with a sense of the kind of experience that the kind of experiments, the kinds of things that I can already begin to do. You know, I don’t think I’m waiting for this product of a metacurriculum because I already have a kind of curriculum now. Sure, it can be improved in all kinds of ways. And I’m I’m curious to see how that can happen. But I also feel like there’s no need to wait. I mean, there’s no need to wait at all. There’s an urgency here. And so, you know, can I immediately begin to move forward with this? And the answer is yes. And so I’m already seeing the impact of and the effect of of participating in this network. And and so, yeah, lots of it, lots of lots of excitement, enthusiasm, stronger sense of calling and vocation here. So I now want to relate and it’s I’ll repeat. This is not an attempt to be an exhaustive presentation of Steve’s ideas or his program or Zach Stein’s theory or his work. I’m trying to relate something. And the point is it for it to be, to my mind, exemplary of what I would call a magic moment. And I had many of them. But for me, it was the power of the logos to get me to a place, to an insight that I had not had before on my own. And I found it very significant. And I want to do a little bit of the narrative of how that arose and then where the conversation is now going between Steve and I. And again, I’m not claiming that Steve completely agrees with what I’m proposing, but I feel that he senses a resonance and that we’re now really starting to resonate and move towards each other. I think that’s fair. Yeah, I think that’s that’s fair. And I’m curious to hear how you articulate today and and to kind of like re-engage the re-engage that that because I think it’s more there’s more of this sense of possibility in this conversation that. Yeah. So how is it sitting with you today? Well, like I said, I want to go over the narrative. And so it’s very interesting. So I presented a talk, a few of the teachers presented a talk, talks during lunch. And I gave a talk which would probably be familiar to many of the viewers of this channel and also people who are familiar with my published work and my scientific work. They gave an argument about the centrality of relevance realization as a way of understanding intelligence. Of course, there’s arguments about extending that to consciousness. But what happened was and I and I laid this out and I talked about the relationship between intelligence and wisdom. And and and so that was. Powerfully in my mind, and I was presenting the centrality of framing again, this idea that we have to avoid combinatorial explosion, we have to frame and then we have insights where we’re reframing. We can have insights where we’re not just reframing the problem, but reframing ourselves so we can be trans framing. And all of that’s already extant in the work and how flow is a cascade of insights. And that was that came up in other conversations. Well, it was a topic that so that was all I don’t mean to say that was all useless repetition, but that was all very familiar. That was right. And I was actually I was actually taken by how receptive the intense interest was because I was you know, we were speaking not just to the other teachers, but to the monastery and all the monks. And I was by the end they were all sort of like really focused and many of them wanted to talk to me. And so I thought, oh, wow, great. Because, you know, I have some sense of how well it lands within scientific communities, but this is a very different community. And that so that was all there. And that was so that that’s part of how I was being sort of energized by this. But then one of one of the monks asked a question and I could tell she was wrestling with the question. So she was she was not it was not only that it was in co-ed, she was trying to formulate it, but she was trying to wrestle with, you know, I think an appreciation of the argument that had been made, but also where she was and the kind of setting she was in. And she asked a question that I wish somebody had asked me before. She asked about, well, you know, our tradition claims a place where we’re not where we’re beyond any framing. And you seem to be saying that that’s just combinatorially explosive. And then I heard myself, I see it was such an odd experience. I heard an answer coming out of me that what that I want to be clear. It felt totally authentic. But I felt it emerging from me much more than because I can say this very honestly, if I’ve been asked that in a university context, I would have been I would have just said, yeah, that’s all it is. If you try to if you try to claim you’re beyond all framing, you’re just hitting combinatorial explosion. And then I heard myself saying this. Right. And right. Which is this idea that I think is so important to me. That we can. If you’re within the field in which framing makes sense, then trying to go to no framing will expose you to combinatorial explosion. But perhaps there is a domain in which framing itself no longer makes sense. And then right. And then right. I may be confusing the orders in my memory of which came first. So the two of them are simultaneous in my mind. So I don’t know which one came first. Maybe it was a conversation with you and Zach. I don’t know. I can’t remember which event was first. Because I but you because I think it’s that way. I think I gave the talk at Thursday at lunch and then I thought the three of us were doing our small groups were Thursday. You gave the talk and then later on after lunch, I caught you walking through the dining room and I said, hey, that question. Yeah, yes. We had a little conversation about it because you said there was something that you were unsatisfied in how you answered that. And I said, I said, I’m curious about what you were unsatisfied about. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And then that carried into when we were having a small group and I was I was talking with Steve and I was talking with Zach Stein and I put it and this take this as it was intended as humorous. I was trying to I was trying to, you know, integrate Steve and Zach with some verveky glue. And I did think that framing actually turned out to be very helpful for the conversation. So I don’t think it was an imposition or oppressive. But we got to that place and I was able to I brought up the satisfaction within myself and then I was able to propose something because I thought it would be a way of bridging between what Zach was saying about transcendence and something that I had heard Steve say that had been rumbling around in my mind, Steve. And right. And I and it sort of crystallized when you had talked about, you know, people get this place where they are where they’re transforming their relationship to transformation itself. And then what I what I what I what I propose and again, I acknowledge this is not identical to what you’re talking about, but it really moves. I said maybe it’s possible that relevance realization can come to realize that it is itself irrelevant. And then I would say, what kind of situation would that be? It would be a situation where it is no longer engaged in problem solving and is no longer trying to deal with the combinatorial explosiveness of all the beings, but is trying to enter into right relationship to being per se. And the relevance realization machinery and its framing is going to actually thwart the attempt to come into right relationship, ratio religio to the ground of being. And that therefore there’s a modal change here. But I thought that was at least convergent with what you were saying about transformation, about the relationship to transformation. And I also heard it being convergent with what Zach was trying to put up talk about when he was talking about this, right, this other kind of wisdom within awakening that’s not the same as everyday wisdom. And so for me, it was just an example of the deal logos because you’ve got the we’ve got the students question. Steve and I have you and I have this micro conversation. Then we’re in this dialogue and then it all with this thing of its own. And I came to this and I had never I had done a lot. You’ve seen my series. I’ve done a lot about higher states of consciousness. I talk a lot about non-duality, but I had never got to use my own language, a throughline between the relevance realization discourse and the non-duality discourse. And it just dropped for me in that moment. And it was like, oh, my gosh, oh, my gosh. And I found that I was at least talking. And I don’t mean empty talk. I mean, rich talk. I was at least talking more fluently to both you and Zach as that was emerging. And that was the moment for me. That was the moment for me. And again, before I respond, I just want to remind everybody. That was not unique and not even unique for me. Right. There are multiple magical moments like that, and there are multiple magic moments between and within all of us. And that, for me, above and beyond anything we said, the constellation of those stars of insight, right, those right for me gave me hope, gave me hope. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I underscore that. You know, there’s three there’s three things, sort of three connecting things that are coming up for me around this. So first, I think that what you’re describing is a beautiful articulation of how I understand it. I couldn’t have articulated in the same way. But as I hear it from you, in fact, in this in this particular transformation, I often come to the place of finding I really struggle to articulate it because it’s it’s it’s maybe this is the way to say it. It’s it’s beyond framing. Yes. Right. And that’s the problem. And so I’ve you know, we can call it we can, you know, paint it and so like the opening to the mystery or or, you know, I’ve sometimes called it the beyond. Yes. Like, what do I what do I what do I do with this? But but in the traditions that that inspire me, there’s one one tradition that calls it divine indifference. Right. Right. Which I think is interesting is the suspension of relevance realization. Right. This like opening to something where relevance realization realizes its irrelevance and releases or something. The other thing that’s interesting is that the other kinds of transformation that I understand all have a kind of hierarchy to them in a sense that there’s one kind of transformation that has implicit within it the other kinds. And they kind of one by one unfold as needed. And there is a sort of developmental progression, although as they unfold, we’re just opening range that we nonlinearly go back and forth between. But there is there is that does seem to be a kind of some kind of maturation. And then there’s this last move, which is qualitatively different. Yes. Any of the other ones beforehand that it’s it’s that’s why I say it’s like a transformation in transformation itself. It’s like this other completely different thing. And and you can you can feel that that all along this has been implied inside of what we started with and at some point it just unfolds. And so another place where this this comes in is in states of secession, you know, where we drop into a state of secession and there’s no sense of being or nonbeing, there’s no sense of existing or nonexisting ever before or now or in the future. There’s no sense of time in that kind of way. And I think that these kinds of states also are are what you’re talking about. And I’m wondering if it’s possible to understand cessation as a as this the suspension of relevance realization. Yeah, I mean, Nevada means blowing out, right, blowing out the flame. The flame is the self-organizing principle, right, of relevance realization, the logos. And of course, Heraclitus used the flame as the primary metaphor for the logos. Then if you’ll allow me some cross-cultural poetry, there is there there isn’t the attempt to burn the whole world. That’s the point. You’re not you’re not keeping the relevance realization machinery running and then opening it to everything you’re saying. Right. No, no, no. There’s there’s an aspect that’s not even the right word. I’m just going to say there’s being which is not a being of any kind. Right. And then to open to that is to have to realize the irrelevance of relevance realization. And in that sense, it’s blowing out the flame of the logos. But only because that discloses and you use the word implication and if we use this to mean non-logical because and that’s what we have to do. And this is the great struggle of the neoplatonic tradition. We’re disclosing how all beings are how being is implicated in all beings. But that is not a logical implication at all. Yet it is it is a sacred implication, if I can put it that way. Yeah, that makes sense. So I just want to make sure I’m understanding you. So so if this is relevance realization, realizing its own irrelevance. Yeah. And so so it’s not a suspension of relevance realization. So so it’s so I guess that’s the question. Like like in that moment of relevance realization, realizing its own irrelevance. What what unfolds there? That’s what would happen if your salient’s landscape became a complete salient’s gunspelt in which there was no topography at all. And then and then what it would do would not it would not disclose to you any being, but it would instantiate being itself. Right. Right. It would instantiate being itself. Yeah, that’s exactly it. I mean, that’s enlightenment. I think so. But I mean, I want to be cautious around that. I mean, I like to call that awakening because I want to reserve the term enlightenment for awakening that is situated in other things that help people address the perennial problems. Right. So if you have if you have this experience and you can’t you you can’t help people deal with absurdity or anxiety or alienation or any of the perennial problems, I don’t call that enlightenment. And the reason I do this is because there are people who who are supposedly enlightened and I do not see them being able to address the perennial problems. Whereas I see people like Socrates or the Buddha. Not only do they have some kind of fundamental transformation like we’re talking about, but that translates into them really addressing the perennial problems that beset human beings. So I. Yeah. And Zach has a similar that’s why he was calling those people awakened, but he wasn’t calling them enlightened. That’s how I was trying to integrate there. Because I for me, if enlightenment doesn’t do the second thing, I don’t care about it. Right. It’s just another state that human beings can get into. And then as a state, it has no particular justification beyond the state of being drunk. It’s just a state people can get it. Yes. That makes a ton of sense. Yes. Yes. But but if it translates into, you know, addressing the perennial problems and the historical situation. Right. And that’s where Zach’s notion of prophecy, I think, is so relevant. Right. Then for me, that’s when you have I think that’s when we should start talking about people as enlightened. Yeah. Yeah. That’s a that’s a good distinction. The other thing that’s occurring to me about this about this moment when relevance realization realizes its own irrelevance is is there’s no I’m going to go out on a limb and say there’s no method. There’s no practice for that. It’s it seems like it’s a grace. Well, I mean, there isn’t a method. Sorry, but this is I’m preparing for after Socrates. Yeah. And people have called this thing a Socratic method, but most of third wave scholarship says, no, Socrates doesn’t have a method. That’s exactly what he does not have. He does not have a tech. But what he does is he has a way of, well, you would say sort of, you know, affording unfoldment. But I don’t think that would be a misnomer for what he’s doing. He has a way. He calls it. He says he compares himself to a midwife helping people to give birth to themselves. He’s the other person, by the way, we have these two people that are cultured. Jesus, you must be born again. But Socrates is also claiming to be a kind of midwife. And so I think there is a way in which there is something like Socratic midwifery that can bring people to. A porio, so Socrates would bring people to a porio where they would realize not that they were like they would realize that their framing just was not they lost their sense of orientation. Well, porio later means literally means I don’t know which way to go. And then and that in and of itself can lead to two response. People can and many people do they retreat out of it and double down and get aggressive towards him. But there’s a minority of people that open up in the way we’re talking about it. And so I don’t think there’s a method, but I think there are ways in which people can interact that can do a porio that can do awaken them. That’s how I try to qualify it. Yeah. So this brings us back into the conversation about affording wisdom, I think, is that there there is a way to do this midwifery. I love that. I love that term because I think it’s like there is an approach. Yes, there just isn’t a thing that we do that takes the last step. And I think that’s that’s. That’s what this is why I make a continual distinction. And I am really hoping people will take it up between dialectic, which is a set of practices we can do and the logos, which has to emerge on its own. It has to take shape on its own, like that magic moment I pointed to. You can’t do the logos. You can practice dialectic and that can if you’ll allow me to go back to Heraclitus, that can gather the logs. But the spark and the fire have to take shape of their own accord. You can only participate in the presencing and also the withdrawal of the logos in the logos. You can’t make it happen. Yeah, right. It moved to use a phrase that I use at respond. You can move the needle on the probability of it occurring. Yeah, yeah. And that you do that and I’m going to switch to my language here, which I’m familiar with, is we do that through what I call deep participation. Yes. Right. So there and you know, the attempt to the attempt to improve, I would argue is actually we have to distance ourselves from that. We have to put blinders on to even see the world in such a manner that says I can improve this thing that I that I care about. Right. And what we fail to see is the way we suboptimized the rest of it because we’re trying to optimize one thing. That’s a disconnection. You know, the other alternative, which is I throw my hands up in the air and say, oh, well, I can’t do anything. That’s disconnection as well. The middle ground between the two is deep participation. And that’s what I find is most people when people experience this kind of unfolding practice, that’s the thing I hear the most is they say, wow, we really got into it. Yes. You have to really get into it. You have to really sink into in this deep participation with things. And I think that is what at least as far as I can tell, what what opens us to to the logos, what opens us to something that can can come through. Right. Yes, I agree. I agree very much so. I think that that that that’s well said. I you. There are truths that are not available to us except through transformation and transformation isn’t something you do. It is something you participate in because doing it, you’re just extrapolating. Right. And that’s not the same thing. And there are many domains in which extrapolation and generating methods are the right things to do. But being in right relationship to the to other people and to be in and to the world, it’s not the same kind of thing. It’s not the same kind of thing. Yeah. Well, Steve, this has been fantastic. It’s been really wonderful. I I’m I’m hoping that well, you know, I’m hoping outside to everybody that I can actually take Steve’s alopecia coaching course, at least the introductory course. And Steve and I have been talking about how to make the mechanics of that work. And it looks like it should be able to to work. I don’t know. It might be October or it might be January, depending on day timing and things like that. But that certainly works. And I’m looking forward to it because many people that I respect deeply have taken Steve’s course and have recommended it to me. David Fuller said it’s you know, it’s the real deal. It’s central. And so and of course, I’ve come to know Steve and I also see his interaction with other people of depth at respond. So this is a very. Maybe complex that I didn’t mean it to be, but this is my way of, you know, really recommending this this practice. This ecology of practices that Steve does. Yeah, thank you, John. I’m excited for you to to get a taste of this. And I I feel like it will deepen our friendship and deepen our conversations. And and I’m looking forward to just how how that unfolds the work more because it’s you know, it’s it’s it’s an emergence of a kind into the world. And and there’s a lot more to go. So so I feel really blessed so far and blessed by by knowing you. And and I completely reciprocate that. Any any last words, Steve, or are we? No, I don’t have any last words. I just thoroughly enjoyed this conversation and look forward to the next one. Me too. Me too. Take care, my friend. All right. Take care. Bye bye.