https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=LBID1be2BPk
Thank you for watching. This YouTube and podcast series is by the Vervecki Foundation, which in addition to supporting my work, also offers courses, practices, workshops, and other projects dedicated to responding to the meaning crisis. If you would like to support this work, please consider joining our Patreon. You can find the link in the show notes. Welcome everyone to what I think is going to be an amazing voices with Vervecki. This is episode two of the philosophy of meditation. I’m here with my co-host Rick Lopetti on our first episode. Rick basically interviewed me, which was a wonderful experience. And we have our guest here, Pierre Grimes, who is maybe in many ways the godfather of all of our work. And so just, I had the great pleasure of meeting Pierre in person earlier this year in California. And so it’s wonderful to have him here. I’m going to turn things over to Rick and he’ll start us off. So welcome, Pierre and Rick and take it away, Rick. Thank you, John. Well, for most of us who might be coming here, Pierre needs no introduction, but I will mention a few highlights about him here for those who are new to his work. And I’ll note that a more thorough bio will be included in the show notes. Pierre is not only a widely recognized philosopher, but more importantly, as John hinted, one of the elders and founders of the contemporary philosophical counseling movement and the philosophical practice movement more generally. And he’s actually the very first in the West anyway, in the United States, since he began practicing his own method in the 1960s, about which he later published an influential and valuable book called Philosophical Midwife Free. Pierre also founded and still leads the no the noetic society. I have to add that Pierre and I are both on the board of the American Philosophical Practitioners Association, APPA, or APPA, and that his work in this area has influenced my own approach as a philosophical counselor very much. A particular interest to followers of John’s work, Pierre is one of the first Western philosophers to see and develop the link between Neoplatonism and Zen Buddhism. And thus, it’s no surprise that he is a master Dharma teacher and Dharma successor in the Korean Choge Buddhist order. For these reasons, having Pierre as the first guest apart from John and I in our previous episode where we just introduced each other and the topic, our introduction, our inaugural episode, John and I thought it would be very appropriate to have Pierre as our first really outside guest. Equally appropriate is that our next episode will be with Lou Marinoff, another founder of the Philosophical Counseling Movement and the founder and president of the American Philosophical Practitioners Association, APPA, who also does work uniting Western philosophy, Buddhism and philosophy as a way of life. Okay, so there’s so much more that could be said about Pierre, but let’s hear some of it from Pierre. Pierre, tell us about yourself a little bit, where you are, what you’re doing these days, and what else the audience should know about you. Well, I would say I think my life began in Italy in 1944. I was part of an infantry unit that went through Italy, France, Germany, Austria, and my unit did a major breakthrough in Angio. The Germans had all of the mountains and we were in the valley and they had that terrible railroad gun pounding away. My unit found a hole in the German lines. We led, when I say we, I mean, I was in the 142nd Infantry 1st Battalion and my job was with seven men. We were scouts and also part of what is called an S2 unit. We did patrols, we did mostly observations for mortar machine guns and therefore we had a good time in Italy. We made this invasion and we broke through the German lines. What does that mean? That means we took a thousand men behind German lines without them knowing it. We were then charged up the distant mountain that was one of those that were surrounding us and we occupied it, much to their surprise, and that was the great breakthrough. When I was there, I went on a patrol, had a little difficulty getting back and I had to therefore find a new way since it was nighttime and a German squad had blocked the entrance. So I worked my way all the way back into our own unit but I had to go through a difficulty. The difficulty was that no one expected me or anyone else coming up that side of the mountain. But I worked my way up. The other two guys I was with got caught in fire and that ended them. So I worked my way up. When I finally got back to my own lines, this GI came up to me and he said, I want to look at you. You had no damn business being where you were. You know it, I know it. I had you in my sights for maybe five minutes. I could easily have pulled the trigger. I’ve done it before. Something held me back. I want to look at you. Who the hell are you? What are you? I said, thanks, that’s a great question. And I kept that question for a long while. Okay, that shaped the rest of my life really. Who are we? What are we? What am I? So I then came out of the service and I said to myself, there’s something fundamentally sick about Europe. This crazy Germans, Adolf is pushing the Third Reich. What does the second and the first mean? I asked everybody I knew. Nobody knew. He just said he was entering the Third Reich. So I did a little homework and I said, good heavens, you know what that means? In 800 A.D. the Pope bequeathed to Germany Charlemagne, whose name became French, but he was still a German. They bequeathed to the German the right to continue. They were the successors of the Holy Roman Empire. Therefore, they brought together the state and the church into a union. Hey, all of Europe is trying to do the same thing. Carry on. Who’s going to be the successor? Who’s going to be the successor? Who’s going to have the empire? I said to myself, these people are nuts. This whole European civilization is really crazy. They kill one another every 25 years. So I got out of the service and I went to a place called St. John’s Hundred Great Books. While I was there, I made fun of them because I said, you know what, once you left the Greek Empire, the whole, I shouldn’t call it an empire, the Oskar Empire finally with Alexander. You know what happened? I saw that the Hundred Great Books were not the Hundred Great Books. They were the union. They were selected to be the preservers of the European tradition following the Roman Empire. Hey, you know what, the Roman Empire, what does that mean? It means the preservation of Stoic philosophy, Roman philosophy. That’s what’s in undated Europe, our American systems. We only listen to Stoic philosophy and its various forms. We’ve been captured by European thinkers. There’s no American philosophers that anybody studies in American universities. It’s all Europe. And what are they doing in Europe? They’re either being indifferent to the church or defending us. So just like what happened to me when I was 16, they kicked me out of high school. So in my last year at St. John’s, three days before graduation, the dean said, you know what, we don’t want you to graduate. You’re not a St. Johnny. I said, okay, goodbye. I said, before I leave, I’m going downstairs to make sure that I don’t owe you a penny. And so I made my way out. So at that time, I met a good friend when I later became a professor at the time, Joseph Campbell down in Greenwich Village. And I said, hey, Joe, come on now, where is real philosophy? I don’t see it anywhere in Europe. What’s going on? He said, Pierre, it’s dead. What you’re interested in is wisdom traditions. It doesn’t exist. He said, I have a friend of mine, Alan Watts, who’s starting a graduate school in San Francisco with native teachers. They even have a real Tibetan yoga. I mean, he’s 80. He was the teacher of the Dalai Lama, the 13th Dalai Lama. He said, hey, you know what, we have Buddhists. We have. Wow. I said, hey, goodbye. I got in my 1935 convertible, a LaSalle, and zoomed over. Now, how do I get into a graduate school when I never got a BA? Hey, nobody asked whether I got it. I had the units. No one asked whether I got it. So Justin said, I went to San Francisco and at the same time I got my MA, I got a BA and an MA at the same time. So I studied there with some of the most interesting people, Dalai Lama, pardon me, not Dalai Lama, Lama Tata, Alan Watts, hey, Chaudhary. But the biggest one, one of the great surprises were Chi-Ming Shen, with Taoism. So I’m going along and everything changed. 1955, July 22nd, I had a dream. Bang! What the hell of a dream. It was a divine illumination. I had an insight, the dream has the unfoldment of the brilliant light of being as Plato calls it, divine revelation, as others call it. It was absolutely marvelous. It had a depth and a power. It had integrity written all over it. It was beauty. It was truth. It was nature of reality. It was mind itself, whatever you call it, lump them all together. That’s what it is. Only it was real. And it was amazing, totally amazing. You know what happened the next day? I didn’t realize it, but I was walking around like a time bomb. I could listen to people and understand the depth of their problems. My God, hey, I would just open my mouth and say, oh, Europe, there they went. So I suddenly got back into Plato. So from that point, you see, I could then study all of these Eastern systems in view of that experience, but I never shared it with them. A matter of fact, this is probably the first time I’m going through these. By the way, after I had that experience, I had the thought that maybe I could get back into it. And I did it without the dream. And that was startling. Okay, shift gears. So I said to myself, you know, there’s something basically wrong. I could see I still had problems. Enlightenment doesn’t get rid of your problems at all. It subdues them a little bit, but it’s going to work themselves out. That’s why I have why so many priests, I get in trouble with sexuality. Hey, even though they may be enlightened and being being fully involved in the spirit and the divine life, they still have problems. They don’t know what to do with them. That was me. So I luckily in San Francisco, I needed a job. So I worked for the public welfare department. And they said, we only have one opening. I said, I’ll take it. What’s the job? They said, working with alcoholics. I said, my family’s all alcoholics. I know alcoholics. So I worked with what are called indigent men, alcoholics. Then they appointed me as the only, now they gave different names for this, but I was basically a social worker. And I worked at a rehabilitation center with alcoholics. What did I do? I didn’t. Hey, I went to the doctor that was in charge. He said, Pierre, do anything you want. Nothing will work. So as they came in, I got friends with them, with the people. They weren’t really patients. I said, look, I’m not, I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’ll tell you what I’d like to do. I’d like to understand you. So we went to the blackboards. We had eight of them. And after each drunk, I said, can you recount everything you did? And we pointed out cycles, cycles and cycles of behavior that they repeated in each drunk. And I said, what the heck is going on here? Then I had one PhD chemist and he said, Hey, I’ve got a story I want to tell you. He said, I don’t know whether it’s meaningful or not, but I’m about eight years old. We used to play football on the street. You know, we didn’t have fancy equipment. So every once in a while we get kind of scared, you know, bruised here and bruised there. He said, my mother, one day, put her, said to me as I left playing football, she put her arms around me and she said, son, I want you to do something for me. I want to either come home on your shield or with it. I said, Hey, that’s the Spartan ideal. I said, what is it like now that you’re recalling that? He said, Hey, you know what? That’s what I’ve been doing. The last stage, every one of my chronic drunks, I would be brought into a hospital on a stretcher. I was reliving that. I said, Oh my God, that fits. That fits everything you’ve been saying. So from that started philosophical midwifery. I began working with people in here in the area and students at Golden West College, ex-students and started saying, Hey, you know what? It’s important to study yourself. You know, we have to get a way of understanding ourselves based upon this image I just created, just expressed. Wow, that became the WEDEC Society. And I was the director of what we call their philosophical midwife program. It grew in depth as it went on. After all, it still goes on at 50 years. But we developed it to such a degree that some of our major sessions in the last five years are breakthroughs into the realm of the spirit. Many of us, I should say many, at least half a dozen of the people that attended began having an experience as a consequence of these explorations, which we called philosophical midwifery, that when beyond their enlightenment experiences in Zen, these people were heavily into meditation. And when they got into philosophical midwifery said, Hey, my God, this is such more profound. You’re getting an insight into yourself. I said, that’s it. That’s what’s needed. Well, so I’m working on the issue of the dialectic, trying to define better ways of exploring this. One day, this is some years ago, we were reading Homer. And one of the most magnificent chapters is 18, where Achilles has an enlightenment experience. It’s amazing experience. But the way he describes it, it came out of and from the self. No translation of Homer of the Iliad ever says it comes from the self. There are hundreds of references in Plato and Homer and Proclus that centers on the major idea of the self. It’s nowhere in European philosophy they ignore it continuously. I said, Oh my God, if that’s in that great experience of Achilles and emerges from himself, then he uses a beautiful analogy. I said, Oh, analogies are the key analogies. Hey, you know what, there’s a fundamental analogy, a fundamental analogy between dreams and our waking world. Because in midwifery, we got also into dreams, dreams invariably 90% of them show you what you’ve ignored in your life. That has great significance because what you ignored, you have ignored your whole life. Oh, that is so challenging that I put that in the book, Philosophical Midwifery and developed it. But I had an interest, of course, in meditating. And I studied with various teachers. And finally, I’m sitting one day in a meditation center during one of their meditation retreats. And I got off my Christian and I was sitting in a meditation center. And I was sitting in a meditation center. And I was sitting in a Christian and I walked out. Everything, everything was clear. There was no ego, no resemblance of anything that you could call an image of the self. I was totally free of it. Hey, that gave me such freedom that I walked alone, looking for people I could challenge. Here and there. Hey, there’s one that Graham, hey, let’s talk about this or that. Hey, how come you’re not seeing right now? It’s obvious. Well, that was a major breakthrough. You see, I discovered what I always suspected, that divine illumination, these light experiences, divine luminosity is not the end. Like all experiences that must have a cause. And what I was experiencing at this moment was the cause of that luminosity. And that transcends these great experiences of the brilliant light of being. See, Plato’s Republic, the whole Republic has one goal. Plato wants to bring this subject into and to experience a brilliant light of being. But he says in the Republic, hey, by the way, you want to know about the nature of reality. He said, you know what, I don’t have the time for that right now. I’ll give you something second best, the idea of the good. The word idea in Greek is idea, same word. But what the Greeks mean by idea is to behold, to behold something. Therefore, Plato and the Republic offers, here is something you can behold, you can behold this divine luminosity. That’s what you should try to achieve. Well, I did it, or I did it, it wasn’t an eye that did it, but it came to me. So I said, hey, I know the Republic, I know what he’s after. I already had that experience. Therefore, that tradition, that Greek world knows, and they have the language to express it. I said, oh my God, hey, you know what, real philosophy needs a language. Greek has the language. Greek does not. The Italian Roman tradition lacks the definite article, the. You cannot say the good, the nature of the reality, the justice. Hey, without the, what does that do as an article? It’s magnetic. Without the, what does that do as an article? It’s magnificent, right? It raises an adjective into a substantive. It makes it something real on the highest level. There is no definite article in Latin. I gave a talk in Saint Petersburg in Russia, and I said to them as I strided out, hey, boys, let me tell you something. Your language doesn’t have the. Therefore, what I’m going to say is not going to get through. But you need to try to make your language transform itself. You need some inner dynamic to bring about the idea of the. Then you can play the game of philosophy. Hey, Europe and Europe traditions are stoic. Stoic philosophy is Roman. They don’t have the, the edit. Now, American, right? English, American. We have the best language, but it is overseen and dominated by stoic philosophy, which is really the defense of physical science, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. You know what? Let’s face it. Our problem is that we have imported a philosophy that doesn’t do us any good. That doesn’t bring us to ourself. There’s nothing more important than getting that experience of the self. That became a cornerstone of philosophical midwifery. So for me, there isn’t any difference between meditation. And philosophy. Now, Plato saw this, you see, in the seventh letter, which I really love. He has it in four lines. Here it is. For self is in no way expressible as in other studies, since self comes about by much continuous intercourse with the self reality. With the sudden life, like a light, which springs from the heart. Like a light which springs into existence from a kindling fire. And in such a straight way, it nourishes the self from itself. So philosophy is doing meditation. When you get into this kind of philosophy, Proclus says, you know what? He says, get into Plato’s Parmenides. That’s the true mystical teachings of Plato. And in that magnificent work and theology of Plato, he lays it out. Well, I got into that one. And you can see, here’s the whole thing. Our problems as represented in philosophical midwifery are in essence an imitation of enlightenment experiences. What? Yeah. What did you say? I said the human problems especially belong to a certain class called the pathologos. Pathologos is the name we give to unsuspected beliefs we have learned in our youth, which we’ve never articulated and never found the source of them. But we adhere to them because we have been captured by our parents and people who brought us up. And when they appear most brilliant, most sincere, and give us their family teaching one way or the other, they look so magnificent. They say, hey, the self emerges. They’re imitating a profound state of mind that they never get into again. The child looks at that and goes, wow, that’s my dad and mom. Wow. Everything I’ve seen before is not real as this is. Therefore, they make conclusions from that. All those conclusions are fictions, our lives, which we have to live. And we have to live in the way that we have to live. And all those conclusions are fictions, our lives, which we live out and don’t know. Philosophical midwifery goes to the roots of those and discovers those fictions that have ruined our life and undercut our success and our achievements and make us a victim. You know what? This class of human problems, there’s nothing other than an imitation of a profound experience. And better than that, now, we can talk about human problems in the same language that we talk about the highest philosophy in the platonic realm based on whom? Proclus, pseudo Dionysius. Hey, it’s all there. And we’re lucky to have it because a certain group of people destroyed everything they could. That was Greek. And Seneca said, one of the stoics philosophers, he said, the biggest thing is forget the Greeks, forget the golden age. That’s what they’ve done. You know what we have to do? Bring it back. Share it with our friends. Share it with our teachers. Hey, let’s go back to real philosophy. It’s the same as meditation because you know what? When you think about these ideas, you’re training your mind to see. You’re training your mind to see. So, you know, I met this great Buddhist, Korean Buddhist, and he said, hey, Pierre, you know, you’re a profound teacher. I said, no, I’m not. I just teach reading and critical thinking. That’s really, that’s really, he said, I’ll translate the Diamond Sutra and I’ll give you a copy of my translation less than five minutes before you give a talk to my own students. And you have to give a talk and show the insights into the Diamond Sutra. I said, okay, for my part, I want you to do something. Let’s make a test. I’ll give you a copy of Plato’s Parmenides. And you have to come before my group on Friday nights and give them your insight into it. He said, you’re done. Well, I did it and I got to a very important part, the 25th section of the Diamond Sutra and bang, oh, it was a great experience. He recognized it and he said, by the way, you are now my Dharma successor. So I became a Dharma successor without ever becoming a monk. And Pierre, did you anoint him as some kind of Parmenidian successor? You know what? How did he fare? Just one more thing. The whole Parmenides, the whole thing that they mistranslated in just one word, the Parmenides is a magnificent piece of work, you know, it has the nine hypotheses, but the first hypothesis is, as Parmenides says, I’ll give my own, from my own self, my hypothesis, which is the one self, whether it is or it is not. No one translates that except the Balboa translation. And then in the second section, they left out the word self. Europe has a major problem with the self, you know why? Hey, if one of these people want to be honest, then the Gospel of John, there’s a key section at one five, you know, the anarchy and all logos, without the self, nothing that ever came to be could be without the self. They ripped it out. They put in phony stuff. Hey, Christianity is really Pauline philosophy. Know what that is? You know what it is? The denial of the role of the mind. And that’s their whole goal. Hey, you know what? Christianity could become Greek philosophy if they lived up to their real essence. I did a book that’s going to come out next month called A Dialogue in Heaven Between Socrates and Jesus. Socrates comes up to Socrates, Socrates comes up to Jesus and he says, Hey, you know what? Maybe we made a mistake, maybe we’re the cause of a good deal of the chaos going down. And Jesus says, Whoa, what? He says, Yeah, neither of us wrote down anything. We left it to interpreters. That’s the whole book. See what happens when you ask a philosopher to open his mouth? Yeah. Well, thank you for this. Thank you for this wonderful foray through a very rich tapestry of your experiences. You blended together a kind of biography and almost like a Dharma talk and a whole bunch of other things. And we came prepared with some canned questions, but you already know. I just put them all together and thought I’d talk this way and answer them all. Yeah. Yeah. You touched on many of the things that we were going to ask you. So I’m not sure how we should move on. Well, I’d like to talk about some stuff. Good, John. I can’t pick up all the threads in that tapestry that he wove, but I’ll pick up on a couple that I’d like to zoom in on. One here is, because I know you make it explicit in some of the stuff I’ve read, there’s a distinction you make between sort of the light of being, the intelligibility, and then the one. And then you tend to map that onto certain similar distinctions within Buddhism. And I’d like to hear a little bit more about that. And in connection, I’m also interested in what’s the relationship between something like dialectic that starts in speech and then moves beyond it, and something like what is standardly known as meditation, in which speech is shut off. So those two questions, because as you know in my work, and you saw some of it, I’m trying to get clearer about how all of these things can be properly related together. You and I, when we talked on the car, we were both sort of interested in the possibility of something like Zen Neoplatonism, which sounds ridiculous to many ears, but you and I sort of think that’s a real thing. So just again, the two questions, there’s the distinction, of course, in Neoplatonism, even in Plato, between the one and being, or the intelligibility of being, the realm of the forms, right, the realm of the news, but there’s also the one. As you said, there’s a source of the illumination, right, that is not itself directly visible. And you map that onto certain similar distinctions in Tibetan Buddhism and Zen Buddhism. And then there’s also the relationship between dialectic that starts in Dianoya, spoken discourse, and moves into Noesis, beyond words, and meditation, which seems to put words aside from the very beginning, and you know, emphasis on silence. Yes, you see. I hope that gave you something to work with as a series of questions. Buddhism lacks one Greek element that changes, and that is the logos. They don’t have a logos. They have a meditation that brings you, if you’re lucky, to either one of these two stages of enlightenment that I just described. But you see, they have one principle, which is, I hesitate to call it a principle, but I’ll call it just that for now. They see the function of the mind as the enemy to enlightenment. They want to reduce all of the thinking and all of the kinds of experiences associated with thinking as Maya, as an illusion, and to fix their mind, therefore, on a simple, as it were, koan, which is, what is it right now that is seeing and hearing? That’s it. See, that’s the whole thing. What is it right now that is seeing and hearing? What is it right now that is seeing and hearing? It came up with this one. What, after all, is seeing and hearing and thinking? That’s the difference. You see, we all experience thinking. When you focus on just listening to yourself thinking, each word, what is it that’s listening? Where does it come from? How is it that it holds fast to you? That’s the Greek kind of meditation. You see, that brings in the role of the mind to discover the mind. Now, I’ve sat with many different kinds of Buddhists. Hey, they have everything except words. They look down upon words and the power of words. There’s only one place where they really make distinctions, but they have no philosophy to describe those distinctions. That’s in the Oxfordian pictures. The Oxfordian pictures are 10 Oxfordian pictures, eight of which are different kinds of enlightenment experiences. And they have little con, little, little, little, little, little, little, little, little, little, little, little, little, little, statements that illuminate what is current in each one of those pictures and stages. In principle, therefore, they can develop a logos for those that would create a meaningful language that would save them and bring them into the mind. Now, they are very resistant to this using the mind to discover the mind, except my teacher, Vyobhang, who became, he’s a dharma successor in a patriarchal line. He said, Pierre, you’re right. What you do, what you do with your people is Buddhism, my kind of Buddhism. I said, thanks. And that’s why he made me a dharma successor. And I was initiated, et cetera. And look, the difference, you see, you can move from Buddhism to Chinese Taoism. They have so rich a system, they have so much power, they have so much power, they have so much power, they have so much power, they have so rich a system, but it lacks the, their calligraphy lacks the. Therefore, they use symbols and images which are beautifully sketched out, you know, the way they do with calligraphy is beautiful. And to understand that is really exercising the mind, and you can make a comparison between the eight stages of Taoism, because in Taoism, you know, in the family, father and mother, they have three sons, three daughters, together there are eight, those eight principles themselves you can find in Plato’s Parmenides. But they don’t have the self, oneself. Why is oneself so important in Parmenides? Because it means you first have to realize the nature of the one as all negatives and assign those kinds of negatives that you just described in the idea of the one to the self, and make your conclusions then about the self. So therefore, the Platonic vision can subsume within itself all religious traditions, spiritual systems within itself. I mean, I think that I also see Neoplatonism having that terrific capacity you just described, but do you think that there is anything that you, I mean, you said in one of your articles, you said that once you had been practicing some of the Tibetan Buddhism, that awakened you to a deeper understanding of Plato, that there was very much, you had to go outside how Plato was being taught in the West, and you’ve got these other experiences, and you brought them from Buddhism back, and you saw things in Plato that you had not seen before. So it sounds to me that there’s also a way in which Buddhism has something to teach those of us who are followers of Plato. I agree with you about that Buddhism lacks logos, although I think there might be similarities in some versions of the notion of Dharma, but we’ll put aside that. Isn’t there also something that, because I share that with you, I went through my undergrad, I read the Republic, I did all that stuff, and we did the usual thing, we extract the arguments, we put them on the board, we judge the arguments and all that sort of stuff. And then I started doing Tai Chi Chuan and Vipassana and Metta, and also I read Pierre D’Aude, and then I came back and I saw things in Plato that I had not shown in the book, that I had not shown in the university at all, and that opened me up to the noetic dimension. So I understand your argument about subsumption, but it sounds to me, at least in your experience and in mine, that there’s almost a dialogical relationship between these two, that they can speak to each other and draw each other out and enrich each other. Is that landing for you, or am I saying something that you’d want to resist? You see, the fundamental problem is that we as a species, we are moving from barbarism into the modern world, and the power of these unsuspected false beliefs that I call apathologos had once great survival values. It kept the family together, loyal. It kept them sacrificing for the common good of the family with all kinds of illogical premises, but nonetheless, it had that power. It was a survival. That’s how we survived. In truth, you know what? Here is the truth. Adolf Hitler and all of his legions had only one myth, duty. In every family, the family teaches duty. Duty is the primary moral perspective. I found it real interesting when we finally got these Germans, these Nazis, at the end of the war. Hey, they all gave up. You know why they gave up? Because there was no need to believe. Their leader told them, you don’t have to go to war anymore. You don’t have to follow your leaders. Therefore, they could all give it up. Hey, we are still emerging from that. There are certain political parties and forces in the United States. They’re not. They’re groups of people who are still primarily loyal to these pathologos. Trumpism is not Trumpism. It’s a number of people who still have this vital dynamic, which is false, which they learned in their family and their culture and maybe even dramatically presented in their religion. It’s all the same. And that is they have to follow the leader. Hey, that’s primitive. That’s what we have to emerge from. It’s our job in this century to finally wake up and become truly human and rational. Only one thing can do that, philosophy. Well, that’s the thing I want to pick up on. And you put your finger on it earlier, which is the logos. Now, you don’t mean simply what Descartes meant. You don’t mean simply logic. I understand that. You mean this ability to overcome profound self-deception. This is what you talk about in midwifery. And of course, you’re invoking Socrates there, who claimed to be a midwife. And so part of what’s going on and part of what I hear, what Platonism can offer, Buddhism is a notion of reason that is actually profoundly transformative. See, part of the problem I’m wrestling with, Peter, is a lot of people see reason as just what Descartes turned it into, Descartes turned it into, computation. They don’t see reason and its contemplative ability, that dialectical ability that Plato talks about, the ability to free us from the pathologos, the ability to midwife us, to get us to come out of the cave, all of these different metaphors. And we’ve lost the sense of that. And one of my concerns, especially about how Buddhism has been taken up into North America, and I suppose the Beat Generation typifies this, Jack Kerouac, is that Buddhism has become associated with a kind of irrationalism, a kind of denigration of reason. Anti-intellectualism. Anti-intellectualism. And I think that is a profound mistake. And so I get the point that Platonism can offer a significant corrective to that. And the dialectic or the dialogus, the dialogical notion of reason, I think is really important. What I’m wondering, though, again, is I find when I’m teaching people that if they can both meditate and practice Socratic dialogue, the two help each other. The meditation helps them, well, I mean, in my work as a cognitive scientist, the meditation helps to generate insight capacities, and the dialogus helps to do what you’ve been talking about. It helps to unwind all the ways in which we’ve ensnared ourselves. And so you said something that struck me as a place where the Buddhism and the Platonism came together. We realize, the one, and all the negative, it’s apophatic. It’s not this, it’s not this, it’s not, but it’s not a privation. It’s the superlative that can’t be grasped. And then you said something really striking that I wanted to come back to. And then we have to apply that to the self. And you don’t mean simply the ego. You mean something more profound. And that strikes me as something very similar to what Buddhism is trying to do in some of its practices. Emptiness, you confront emptiness, and then you realize the emptiness of the self, which is not the privation or simple absence. So can you go back to that? For me, that’s a real pivot point there. You said you come into the contemplative at one minute with the one. Of course, that language is inadequate, but just allow it to me so we have something to say. And then we somehow apply all the apophatic, the one is not, the one is not, the one is not. We apply that to the self. What does that mean? Can you go into that? You expand on that. And can I add one little thing? And isn’t it also the case that you’re asking, John? I think it’s true in all three of our cases that practicing meditation helps us find our way into that, into the zone where the realization in both senses that you say, John, which is recognizing and making real, occurs for practitioners. This is a union of philosophy and meditation, so to speak. Yes. And that’s what’s, yes. Thank you, Rick. I was trying to say they come together in this moment, right? The ineffable, right? The ineffable realization of the one and then its internalization into the self. So how- Can you speak to this? Yeah. I mean, that was a profound thing you did. Like, I’m sorry, I don’t want to slow down. You have a train of thought that’s going full power, but you said that you realize the one and then you internalize that into the self, and that’s profoundly transformative. Just expand on that. Blow that up. And then tell me how that is both rational, like the Platonists would say, but also, I don’t know, insightful, the way the Buddhists might say. I’m giving you a really hard problem, Pierre, but I think you’re up to it. I would say one thing. Either there is a power that is immense, called ignorance, that we do not recognize within ourself. And the only way you’re going to get rid of it is to discover its roots and then confront it. That’s philosophical midwifery, since it seeks the very answer to these questions. You can be crowned with any number of prizes. You can be called spiritual in any number of ways, but unless you have understood and found the causes for these pathologos, you’re not free in the real sense. And the point is, I have never known anybody in Buddhism or any yoga system that ever reached that or discovered that, and therefore are still subject to it. It is, that’s why philosophical midwifery is a vital necessary tool for our spiritual practices. And what’s most important about it is that once it is discovered, one can then discover the same principles on a higher, much more profound level, operating on the metaphysical level. Let me put it this way. The mind wants to discover itself, wants to be free of these fundamental issues. I have never found anyone who’s been able to do that, Buddhists or otherwise, that hasn’t come to it through philosophical midwifery. It is the spiritual beginning, the freeing of that kind of ignorance. That’s either true or it’s not true. This is the first philosophically based, based upon one’s experience, what kind of experience, the rational understanding of experience, the rational understanding of experience. In order to free oneself of a primitive ignorance one didn’t know we had, you can be any kind of Roshi or yoga or spiritual master and still be subject to what you don’t know. The only way out is philosophy, a Platonic philosophy that includes philosophical midwifery as its necessary tool. That’s either true or it’s not. It can be empirically verified, by the way, because you’re using the mind to discover the mind and discover a mode of reasoning that will justify whatever you’re doing in respect to that which is beyond experience. First of all, I really applaud the way you are standing very firm on Platonism in a way that is a great counterbalance to the way I’ve met many people who stand this way about Zen. That’s a very needed thing, a very good counterbalance. Well, then let me try and make it more personal because I’m still not quite getting the question I want. You still meditate, I take it. I could reread the seventh letter. The way of my philosophy is you are continuously meditating if you’re doing philosophy. That’s it. That’s the key. And not only that, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun. It’s the highest kind of play. It’s a playground that you can play with. And I think that’s the way you’re doing it. I think that’s the way you’re doing it. And I think that’s the way you’re doing it. And I think that’s the way you’re doing it. That’s the piece. That’s what I was looking for. That’s what I wanted here. That’s what I was looking for. Yeah, that’s it. That’s it. Yes. Good. Yeah, it’s the most serious play. Yes. Yes. That’s the piece I was looking for. That’s it. Okay, I feel my question has now been answered. Yeah. And I think that that also answers all of my questions. I had three hypotheses in the Rutledge Handbook on the philosophy of meditation, which John and I both contributed to, but which I edited and I wish I had access to you when I was doing that because you certainly would have had a chapter in it. But the three main questions in that book were, of course, it is the same thing. There isn’t any split. Yeah, well, that’s the third question. Is meditation a form of philosophy? And the second question was, is there, can there be or ought there to be a philosophy of meditation? And I think we’ve been hearing one the whole time you’ve been speaking. So this captures something for me that I’ve been trying, I have words of Plotinus tattooed on my leg because when I was, when I, I experienced what you’re talking, I was reading this and I’m reading on one hand, a completely rational, in the Platonic sense, argument. And on the other hand, I felt like I was going through a spiritual exercise of meditation and contemplation and the two were inseparably woven together. And that, and I, and I said to myself, I want to get to a place where I can do that. And that is what the place you’ve been talking about. That’s what I’m hearing. Yes, that’s what it is. You see, we were lucky. A small group of people in history saved these records, saved these fragments of the golden age. But hey, can you imagine a literary tradition such as the golden age of the Greeks? There has not been discovered, pardon me, there, we have only discovered one letter in 2000 years of our searching from a Greek to a Greek living in the Greek world. We have no correspondence between Athens and a friend in Alexandria. We have nothing. It’s all been destroyed. When they destroyed the library in Alexandria, it was destroyed three times. Christians, Islam and Julius Caesar. Hey, they had a million volumes in one. There has been a systematic destruction of the way of reason. The highest function of reason, which is to know yourself, which is the Greek ideal. You know, the Greeks stayed with Homer as a spiritual tradition. But you know what? Nobody reads it that way. You can find the principles of philosophical midwifery in Homer’s Iliad, because Achilles was the worst SOB in Greek history. And after he saw the price he had to pay for his thinking, which is the death of his comrade, he went through a series of reasonings. Those reasonings, by the way, include, hey, once you get the idea of philosophical midwifery, go back to Homer, you’ll be able to see who his real mother was, Phoenix. Phoenix reveals that he brought up Achilles to serve his purposes. The whole dynamic of philosophical midwifery can be found there. What’s different? Achilles did it without a midwife. Woo! What an achievement. But if this became their morning breakfast, if this became their if this became what they read and shared with one another, what were they doing but examining how a person can go from the worst to the best? Because he had to have an enlightenment experience, which was so immense that, by the way, he still had his problem. And he had to go then to the end of the Achilles to discover that when he has a talk with Priam, he then recognized that he could free himself from the last burden of his own adherence. Hey, what a piece of work. But we don’t teach it that way. We can. We should. I do. It’s great. Pierre and John, I hope this is okay, since we had just tremendous conversation that was outside the parameters of the constraints that we came in hoping for. If I could ask an impromptu question, Pierre, I’m wondering, you know, there’s a I see a parallel between what you’re calling pathologos, but every individual has a path to the path. But every individual has their own pathologoi, so to speak. But is there a generic one like for the Buddha and Buddhist, you know, the the ironically, the incorrect conception of the self is at the core. That’s their pathologos that’s shared by all Buddhists. So do you do you ascribe to that? Like, does that idea land for you that like that’s at the root of everybody, the ignorance about themselves? This is the Greek idea. And it’s ironically, Buddhist idea. And I’m wondering if that’s the universal pathologos. But it had it takes on unique, idiosyncratic forms for all of us on your analysis. Yes, there are levels. See, the most amazing thing about a pathologos is I’ve never encountered anyone who had a problem about the logos like someone else, or identical would be a better word. Everything is unique in the mind, yet it conforms to the same principles. Therefore, the same principles, you can see therefore exhibited also on the highest philosophy. Look, you know what, every one of these systems, once they can bring in this stuff, they can continue, but they’ll be transformed. Hey, you know what, we need to transform the human race can only be done far as I’m concerned by philosophy. That’s our job. There’s no more profound job, because you know what, we see how stupid man is. He’s ruining the planet. He’s going ready for another third, another terrible war. The same people are in charge. Hey, the same people are in charge. Hey, the same people are in charge. The same people, by the way, who had parents just like Putin, create Putin, and he pums them for themselves and each and every one of their families. It’s the same with Adolf. It’s the same with all. Hey, you know what, we have to have a new kind of education. And by the way, I happen to know a really great midwife. My wife. Every morning, we sit together, and we go over dreams. We never, ever stop dreaming of the future. my midwife, my wife. Every morning we sit together and we go over dreams. We never, if we can help it, ever let a day go by that we don’t review our dreams. They’ll always bring something vital that we ignored. Or it takes the next 10 percent, which I won’t talk about for a while. Well, in the Fado, when they come upon Socrates as he’s facing his death, he’s composing music and a poem because he was told to do so in a dream. And I think that’s a very, very appropriate resonance with what you just proposed. Yeah. And he also had a dream that was pretty cognitive about when he would actually die after the festival. Yeah. And yeah, that was in the Crito, I believe. Well, this has been quite a journey. There’s one thing I kind of pass on. I’m so glad we got to talk with you, Pierre. And I’m really, you know, there’s this war about man and sexuality. Passionate and articulate. By the way, a philosophical hero called Socrates. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, there’s one thing I kind of pass on. You know, there’s this war about man and sexuality, you know. By the way, a philosophical hero called Socrates was seven years old when they put him to death. And in that final scene in the Apology, he happens to mention that his wife happens to have one of his children on her lap. What does that mean? He had several sons. He was a warrior. You know what war was. You know what life was. He engaged every day with people meaningfully. That’s the good life. To share yourself, to take the challenge. Everybody you meet, you’re meeting a mind and a different configuration. Every person has a problem, brings forth a problem. You can, hey, there’s a hell of a lot of work, but a lot of fun. Yes. Even when people are resistant. That’s what Socrates had when he talks about solid geometry as one of the great teachings for the philosopher King. He says, you know what? Nobody understands it. As he talks further, he uses one word to describe what real solid geometry is. You see what it is? He said, it’s having a certain attitude. It’s a certain way of being. That’s what’s needed. See, because he could go down into the Piraeus and the Republic. At the house of Glaucon, which is really the house of the people living in the cave. And he could engage each one of those people. How did he do it? He had a certain what’s called grace. Hey, that’s being able to deal with the worst in the best way. Not many of us can do it, but that’s also an achievement he reached. Much less look, you know, Tibetan philosophy. I could go for a while with that, but I learned a good deal for Lama Tata. But one thing became absolutely clear. He said, hey, Pierre, you know what? Socrates went across mountains without shoes through the snow with only a cloak. You know what that is? That’s called Thumo. That’s called Thumo. That’s building up the yogic heat in our heath to survive in those climates. You see, you know what? In the middle of a battle during a lull in the fighting, he stood 24 hours in constant meditation. He said, you know what that is? That’s a that’s a good state. That’s Samadhi. That’s the Mahamudra. Hey, that’s the Mahamudra. Hey, when he then read his army retreated, Alcibiades came by with a horse and said, hey, we’re retreating. You see, yeah, yeah, yeah. He said, you know, the way you walk, no one wants to fight you even when we’re retreating. So for me, hey, he’s a good guy. It went to war. He fought it. He knows what it was. He got married, had children, had a lovely wife, lived to be 70 and still did you know what? Live fully. And maybe sometime we can talk about dialectic, but not now. Yes, I would like that. I would like the dialectic and I would like to talk about both the dialectic between people and the dialectic. Yes, but we do need to wrap this up. And I appreciate everything you’ve been saying about Socrates. I’ve done a whole series on Socrates called After Socrates, a YouTube series. And yes, pointing out all of these dimensions of Socrates that he’s not just the stater of arguments, but he’s also an exemplar in many ways. And I appreciate you doing that. But I wanted to thank you for coming on our episode. You are an important figure for many of us and it was very important to have you here. And I’ll now turn things over for Rick and then we’ll bring this to an end. Yeah, John and I have agreed to always ask our guests to have the last word. So would you like to leave us with a parting thought or anything that was unsaid or plug any of your activities such as that book you mentioned earlier? Yeah, I’m interested in that book. And maybe even how people can contact you. The Noetic Society or something. What are your concluding parting thoughts and last minute thoughts that you want to make sure you get to cover? Thank you, Pierre. I’m interested for inviting me. Thank you for letting me share what I’ve never shared before. Thank you for sharing that with us. That was great. Okay, my pleasure. All right, so then I’ll repeat your book. It’s Jesus and Socrates, a dialogue in heaven. Jesus and Socrates, a dialogue in heaven. Is that the title? Right, right, right. By the way, I got another one that I don’t think will ever get published. But it’s called Return of the Gods. It’s 700 pages. I might be able to find you a publisher, Pierre. We will talk about that. I might be able to find you a publisher. So we’ll talk. Well, okay. And I’ll mention on your behalf because I’ve done it myself. I’ve hunted you down at the Noetic Society. I’ve attended a couple of those meetings. They’re great. I’ve sent other people there like our friend Robert Gray, John, who’s gotten a lot from coming to your sessions. But the Noetic Society, there’s a link there to contact Pierre. If you’re interested, I would encourage people to go there. If you want to do some serious platonic work, midwifery, dream analysis, this is the place to go. This is a great opportunity for people that Pierre is around. He’s almost 100 years old. So take advantage of this while you can. And I guess, yeah, true. John. One more year and I may be hitting 100. And John, I think we also agreed that we would always try to end these sessions by inviting people to look up the Vervecki Foundation. Is it dot org? I believe so. Vervecki Foundation dot org. They can join our Patreon support community. I have a Friday morning meditation going on in connection with the Vervecki Foundation. And then there’s also something else that we’re involved in. Awaken to meaning. That’s one word. Awaken to meaning dot, what is it? Comm, I believe. Yes. Yeah, dot com. For these morning half hour ecology of practice things, we’re trying to help on board people who either have or want to develop an ecology of practices. So a dialogical practice. An imaginal practice. A mindfulness or meditative practice. And some sort of embodiment practice. We’ve got those these half hours at 9 a.m. Eastern. So you can go to Awaken to meaning dot org or the Vervecki Foundation. I think either one of them will put you in contact with this community of communities that John and his colleagues are trying to build. So other than that, Pierre was really great. Happy. Yes. Thank you, Pierre. We’re very fortunate. Thank you.