https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=DpKnAEQTx2I

Welcome everyone to another episode of Voices with Raveki. I’m here with my friend and collaborator, co-dialogue-er. I don’t know what the correct moniker is, but anyways, welcome again, Jordan Hall. It’s always a pleasure to have you here. So last time we were together, we were together with Greg, and we do intend to get together with Greg again soon, Greg Enriquez. I ended that session, or close to the end, with the question of how do we live well together such that we can catch virtue from each other, because we got to this place, a very Socratic place of the idea that we sort of catch virtue from each other. It’s not something we directly teach each other, which was something that vexed Plato throughout the entire, almost the entirety of the dialogues. So we turned to that question, we did it at a very individual cognition level, and then I proposed that ultimately we need to ask, well, what is it we need to be considering and perhaps enacting in order to live well together so that we can catch virtue from each other? And so I posed the question in a somewhat Socratic fashion, I suppose, or at least a Platonic fashion, and I’m going to ask Jordan to take us into this conversation. Some of the things that came up for me quickly, actually, maybe I’ll just throw them out there, almost like a tarot spread. Let’s just take a look. So one is this question of, of course, is very deeply interwoven with the question of parenting, which creates a very nice reference. So we can explore it with that in mind. The second, in the context of that, there’s also this other thread, which we can think of as development, which has its own independence, but is also related to parenting. And in that, as actually noticing something along the lines of. It almost feels like there’s a stage or like a must have and nice to have, kind of like a little bit of a Maslow’s transition. Yeah, right, right. There’s a certain level of skillfulness and relationality, which includes, by the way, a certain level of sovereignty at the individual level. Sure. The way that I use the term seems like it’s it’s like table stakes, like it’s to show up in fellowship at all. One must have this prior to this. You are not yet an adult prior to this. You are not yet able to show up as a fellow, which doesn’t mean you can’t participate in the community. It just means you’re participating in the community in a particular context. You’re a child in some important sense. Business is when you’re young. Right. And then after that, once that level has been achieved developmentally, maybe stably, and those are not quite the same. Yeah. Then there’s a different thing that happens in the qualities of relationality. And that’s more fluid and more there’s more virtuosity to it, I think, and more specificity. So those are some things that came up. So one might imagine I kind of just going to imagine a fictional world, an O2 post to be distinguished from an U2 post. Right. Where we put a lot of our energy and care and attention on becoming very skillful parents. And by this, I mean actually all adults. So I don’t just mean like the two biological parents in the offspring, such that it is the norm. It is consistent. It is almost always the case that every child will in the fullness of their developmental time, somewhere in late adolescence. Can you hear that? No. OK. Achieve fellowship, right? You know, achieve the level of skillfulness, relationality and sovereignty to begin to be able to participate in this in the society of friends. So there’s actually to me, then this question you’re asking actually has like two, like a temporal characteristic to it. One is what does this look like steady state? What does this look like when we reach the point where we’re in fact good enough at human development that we can consistently produce humans that end up capable of entering into fellowship? And what does it look like almost in its in its clean sense? And then the second is how do we get there from here? Yeah, yeah. Those are not the same. There’s a human piece. How do we kind of return to the capacity to just be humans with each other? And then there’s a growth piece. How do we then begin to engage in the collaborative catching of virtue consistently and with and holding together? Hmm. And it’s really it’s really a beautiful, like string to pluck because I was noticing something about like when you when you’re in relationship with each other. Oh, no. What I’m trying to say, one of the things that ends up being a problem. When you when you begin to have a society of free, sovereign individuals engaging in relationship with each other, it’s something like drift or speciation. What happens if they enter into relationships that begin to kind of separate apart and there’s lack of communication? But virtue, catching virtue from each other, virtue has as one of its intrinsics, something like strength of relationality, deep elements of virtue is that. So maybe there’s an exploration of those that spread of cards I put out. That’s great. I don’t know if I’m much of a seer, but I’ll try to I’ll try to read the spread. So let me just gather a few things because part of logos is to gather and to see how things along together, let something emerge and try to follow it. So I saw I heard and saw you doing, you know, parenting and the intergenerational thing has to be central because parenting is the primary and in some sense, even primordial locus where we turn human primates into persons using some of Greg’s terminology. I understand that. And then then you invoked fellowship. And we talked a lot about fellowship last time about, you know, a sense of being called to something, called to serve something beyond us and that we share that together. And and then I’m wondering. About the bonding you talked about, you talked about the bonding and virtue is about improving the bonding and I’m seeing one connection coming up right away for me. Is around the notion of fellowship, adding a dimension to it that I think goes into like it’s something like a tea loss for the parenting. Because if you look at sort of self-determination theory, what people need is they need they need, you know, autonomy, competence and connectedness. Right. Or if you look at if you look in one of the people I think they’re highly obvious at the work of Tillich, you see he bait. I mean, I see Tillich in a triangle with Boomer and Young. Young puts a heavy emphasis on individuation. Boomer puts a heavy emphasis on participation in dialogue. I vow. Right. And then Tillich basically says we need both. And trying to trying to resolve that is always a mistake, a mistake. So what first thing I would say is so there seems to be a similarity between parents because the project of parenting is to is right. I sometimes say that I see parent parenting and partnering is going in different directions. Parenting, you start infusion and you’re moving so that the other individual can become autonomous in a very important way. And in partnering, you start as completely unknown to each other and you don’t move diffusion, but you move towards this pairing where you become interdependent, which is not the same thing as codependent. You become interdependent in an important way. And it’s interesting that both of those variables are at work when we’re raising children. So what I’m saying is there seems to be is one of the notions of. Fellowship that what we’re crafting over here in parenting and partnering as we’re modeling to the primates that are going to become persons, we’re trying to model to them the dynamic balancing between these two drives of individuation and participation. Right. And so what it is to be able to live well together is that everybody feels or and judges that they have an optimal, not a maximal, because they can’t be, but an optimal state of being able to dynamically balance between individuation and participation. Yeah. And I actually I want to I want to see if we can hit that harder, which is something like, as you said, and there’s been a narrative that has fun. It even divides like East and West, right. Between the East says, no, no, no, more in the direction of of of participation. Yeah, yeah, no, no, no, more in the direction of individuation. Yes. And. And then you kind of get this tepid admixture. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we’ll just give up a little bit and get a little that’ll be OK. But no, what I’d like to say is there’s there’s another location up here. Yes. A higher tone, which is where you where you discover that the right kind of fellowship. Yes. Yes. Is precisely the instrument that is most supportive in the right kind of individuation. Yes. Yes. And then what happens is you get a synergistic feedback group. Yes. Yes. And and that right kind of fellowship takes as its input. It requires increasingly autonomous, individuated, sovereign individuals. Right. To become more powerful, what it is. And one of the primary outputs it gets it produces is more sovereign individuals. Right. So you actually you basically do a double move. You take these two things here, you add, you mix them and then you actually flip them and make them co-creative of each other. Yes. Going to a opening to steal your turn or to steal a term that you taught me. Yes, I like that idea. So that’s cool, because I think in some ways I agree. I hadn’t thought about that. But the way you just connected that, that’s very sorry. I want to slow it. I want to get this. I want to I want I want the seed to take root. You’re making a connection between fellowship and something like Platonic Anagagui, the reciprocal opening that’s happening. But rather but what you’re doing is doing the reciprocal opening. But what you’re doing is doing the reciprocal opening between individuation and participation. And that’s what good fellowship is. Do I do I understand you correctly? Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. So I have one question that comes out of that, which is. It’s more like I feel the dimensionality opening up because we talked about that. We talked about service and we talked about calling. And it strikes to me, it strikes me now that because I was only thinking in one direction and I think that’s that’s inadequate. There’s a sense in which we’re living well together if we have a calling. Let me use let me use spatial metaphors, please. We have a calling from within to individuation and we have a calling from without to participation. These are both callings to service. This is what this is sort of the transpersonal thing that Jung sort of talked about, you know, the relationship between the ego and the self capital S. Right. And then, you know, what Boomer talked about out here, the calling to the act, the calling of the vow to the eye. Right. I’m trying to get out. There’s two phenomenological things and they seem to me to then plug into two meta drives. For me, I would well, I’ll put it out. I’m not sure I’m confident in it, but it strikes me as a reasonable hypothesis that the normativity of the call within is the meta drive to like inner peace, not where that’s just an absence of conflict, but that optimization of the relationship between the parts of the psyche. So they are living as well together with each other as possible. Right. And then that bounces off resonates with right. The normativity of being called into. You know, you know, the real patterns of sociability, the real patterns of distributed cognition. There’s a phenomenology and there’s a normativity. I’m trying to map into this and I’m trying to flush it out. So the note that when you hit it really locked for me was that notion of when you said like the aspects of self and they are in relationship. Yeah. Yeah. The as above so below. So you got your fractal. And this this now I will invoke Greg in the hyper conversation. Yeah. Yeah. The wisdom energy of having that continuity of up and down fractal levels. And that lets us that’s give us a lot of insight into the attunement of what this looks like at the sort of the ordinary mezzo level of, you know, physical human bodies, dancing with physical human bodies. Like, oh, you know, me with you is in some ways very, very much the same as me with myself. Yes. I get myself in harmony and then I’m showing up with I can I can know how to show with you in harmony. And also there is a. There’s a value in our relationship that is most fully realizable. You know, there’s this. God, how’s that work? Well, what the hell is that all about? There’s something like. How weird is one of the things that like feels inordinately true, but I have no basis for it. Well, let’s try it. It’s like. There’s a there’s a felt sense of like a hole in the symphony. It is you know, there’s like a notion of there being something about the the singularness, the uniqueness, the specificity that can only be realized by you in the universe. And there’s like a yearning, a calling for it. Right. So in me, there’s like the world is not yet as perfect as it could be because John is not yet being himself as fully as he could be. And there’s literally nothing that I can do other than do what I can to support you in more fully becoming yourself and expressing yourself more beautifully and completely into the world. But I feel that as a loss at the level of the external. Yes, it’s an absence in the world that I’m in relationship with. But that that that feels very true, like it feels almost obvious that that is the case. And yet I can’t explain why that would be the case. Well, let me think because something came to mind. You said obviously you’re invoking a gap, because that that that’s a purely the universe would be a better place if John was in it. Right. That’s that’s like the way. And that’s again now. Now we’re making again connections to the parenting because that’s the parental. Right. But again, I know I’m having some things I’m having this sort of because I’ve been there’s something conceptual, but it’s OK. I’ll just speak and you’ll help me work it out. I’ve been working a lot on trying to understand at cart and parts of that cart in the neoplatonic tradition. And they have and there’s this idea. And you’ll see how it connects to what you said in a minute. And then I’m hoping you’ll be able to ref on it. There’s this idea that there is. There’s a uniqueness. That’s what you put your finger on there. And then there’s also the unity of all and in some non-logical manner and in a completely interpenetrating manner, they are one. Because right that right that there’s that that in the end, right, we only we get close to what’s most real when we stop seeing them. It’s like in our mind, they move in opposite directions until they come around. And we say, oh, crap. They’re ultimately one, but not in any kind of logical, categorical sense. Right. Yeah. Yeah. OK, go ahead. Go ahead. If I look at this through the lens of proposition, I look at the lens logic. If I presuppose that is the lens which I look, it looks always. And by the way, it must be this very Kantian figurative. They are distinct, right. They are different. They are not the same. When I when I perceive it through relevance. Yeah. Right. There’s something about that that shows up as. More fundamental than the notion of sameness and difference. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s probably the better way of putting it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It’s that sameness and difference are all ultimately this is Spinoza. Sameness and difference are all ultimately modes of a greater, a greater dynamical reality kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. And then this. Yeah. And the modes are in service. Yeah. And the modes are in service. The modes give us access to deeper deepening and a deeper awareness. Those are probably the same like those are both themselves. Also modes of being in relationship, but they they allow the actual realness of the real to. And they allow the perception or the awareness of the real to grow. Yeah. Realization of both senses. Yeah. Realization of both senses. And that’s sort of I mean, that’s sort of that’s that. There’s not a whole lot more to be said. That’s you want to point to the meaning of meaning like the meaning crisis. Yeah. Meaning of meaning is that that’s meaning. Meaningfulness is the the the the actual growth and the awareness of that actual growth and the in the increasing capacity to become skillful in actual growth by virtue of becoming skillful in awareness of actual growth. Right. Yeah, that’s that’s that. So let’s go back to parenting is one of the things I’d like I’d like to do. I think it’s very powerful to move things into first person. OK, sure. So. That great. No, sorry, it’s not good. I’m I’m keeping my phone on in case he does contact us. Yes, because we our society in particular has a very odd, many, many very odd things that it does. But one of it is it cohorts us. Once you get into kindergarten, you’re now in this sort of your relationships with these weird age specific cohorts. Yeah. And then once you get out of school, you still have a lot. Your social grouping tends to have a lot of horizontality to it and not anywhere near the verticality. Yeah, this is one of the criticisms. Yeah, it’s it’s it’s crucial. And it is a rare adult who has meaningful, long term developmental relationships with children that are not his or her own. Just I’m privileged. I do. Yes, great. Yeah, I do as well. Although not as much as I’d like. Yeah, it’s very sad. So so the point is, OK, let’s take a look at just that specific relationship and notice things that show up in the relationship of parenting. And the point I want to make is to say, OK, notice how those exact same things show up in all relationships. And it’s precisely where they don’t seem to be present, that they are the most needful or the most viable. So, for example, when you are in a relationship with an actual infant, you know, one week old. Yeah. You’re dealing with something which is magnificently vulnerable, like utterly and completely vulnerable when you are in a relationship with another adult. You are dealing with something which is magnificently vulnerable, right? Not the whole of the other is magnificently vulnerable, but some very important aspect of the other is magnificently vulnerable. And the care that you can develop in relationship with an infant becomes a part of your capacity and relationality that you can and should bring into relationship with an adult that you encounter and so on and so on. And when you deal with a two year old, you’re dealing with a sort of a developing ego that has a capacity, you know, easily overwhelmed by its interior states. It’s very confused about how to achieve agency. It’s exploring very creatively and with a certain ruthlessness. And obviously, you oftentimes can find yourself encountering that in in your ostensible peers and fellows, right? And the ability to hold a level of care and a space of care, which is, by the way, the way Benita Roy puts it, which is the mountain, which is to say, neither pulling back nor pushing forward, but actually holding like nature itself so that the developing two year old has a real context from which to begin the process of learning how to really become a person. You don’t bend them that way or that way. You actually create this same thing in your relationships with other adults. What did that come up? Oh, the reason why I came up was just to to just kind of remind, to put it out there that this notion of parenting is such a useful if you’ve had the experience at all of being a parent, it gives you such a nice embodied experience of the specific qualities of relationality. In my case, I don’t know, I think we’ve talked about this. I’ve actually gone through it. Well, kind of twice. I’ve gone through parts of it twice and parts of it not yet twice. And so I can look back at my previous arc and all the ways that I didn’t learn or all the ways that I failed quite tremendously, which is parenting, right, par excellence. And it gives me awareness. I can notice like, oh, wow, I can see how this way of showing up is actually a more mature and solid and kind of high quality way of showing up with regard to a two year old. And I can also feel where my skillfulness is lacking. But because of that awareness, I can also then bring that to bear in relationships with other other people. I can notice in myself the shifts. And of course, you can turn that same skillfulness into your interior. You’ve got your own two year old going on, right. You’ve got your own infant going on. So those are all just trying to anchor this, that there’s a. There’s a real sense, there’s a very beautiful simplicity in what we’re calling for, the space for being able to show up and infect each other with virtue is a very available space. I think that I mean. I do want to I want to make a connection from what we said and what you said, but I just want to riff on that last point. I mean, I take it that again, that’s one of the central insights of Plato. You can only catch virtue from another person if you already have some of the virtue and a virtue is in this is a strange word, but if it’s natural to you in some way and I think what you’re trying to do is say, look, what’s really and this is Aristotle’s take, right, I take it to be, you know, what’s really, really deeply natural to us is relationality because we’re born out of it. And you’re using the parenting example. But when I was thinking of that, because of what you’re doing is you’re saying, look, I mean, and again, this is a Christian notion and the idea is, you know, I figure I get this, I get this. I don’t want to say arena because it makes it sound like a sport of it. I had this dojo when I’m with a child where I’m getting I’m getting sort of, you know, go in there and learn agape, right. And you can’t learn agape if you don’t have some agape. But here’s the thing, right. And this was sort of a Christian idea, too, right, that you can only give agape if you have really received it. And so, again, what I’m thinking about here, again, is, yeah, I’m called to the child. I mean, we’re talking about calling. I’m calling. I think what you’re saying is and you’re putting it in concrete. And I think it’s right. You’re called and that that calling is a is a is a relationality and it is the development of skills in that relationality. You’re called to the uniqueness of that child because, you know, you’ve had multiple children and I have to don’t treat your second child like you treat your first child. That’s a big, big mistake that people get into. Right. And you have. Right. And this reminds me of Aristotle. And when you were doing that, I was thinking of Aristotle’s notion of prognosis, right. Yes. But I do want to have agape towards a one week old. And I do want to have agape towards Jordan. But I don’t want to have the agape towards Jordan that I have towards the one year old. So part of that is part of this is like, so what I’m trying to say is I think this uniqueness, right. You the uniqueness in each, but also the unity of all is coming is right at the core of what you’re talking about right here. And I think it goes this way, too, because not only am I called to the child, I’m called to the agape I’ve received and I’ve a call. I’m called to that which makes agape like. Right. There’s there’s I’m called if you’ll allow me this metaphor. I’m called to something above and beyond and behind me. So that while I’m looking at the child, I don’t think I’m the ultimate viewpoint from which the child is being seen or understood. And for me, what that means is that there’s if you see agape as going both down to the unique and up to the the the all. Right. And both are equally important. We all we just talked about that. Right. That that that means that there’s always humility in the agape. And there’s and what that means is, I think, the way I think that’s important because I think from this is impossible without humility. Right. So what you’re tempted to do is I’m at the ultimate viewpoint. I know how to give agape. I know what it is. And now I’ll do it again and again and again. And that’s exactly to lose what is being called to you. Right. Which is the uniqueness of the child and the person. But also what’s being called to you is this. But how do I act as a vector for the unity of all to the uniqueness of that child? And and you know, and parents used to have resources for doing that. They used to have a religion that told them how to relate to the child and how to relate to God. Right. You know, and that’s why we even had God parents, if you think about it. The point of the God parents to make sure that that relationship. So the God parent was supposed to be over here. They’re not just they’re not just sort of take over if the parent dies. The point is it’s called a God parent for a reason. And you have God parents for a reason because they’re supposed to help the parent maintain that balance. Right. Between God and the individual soul. Yeah. So the question now becomes a shift. So we have always in this kind of question, we have three modes. Right. One mode is the mode of the your particular interior. Yeah. Second mode is the mode of your specific relationality. Yeah. Yeah. The third mode is the mode of the larger social media, the larger social. Which am I called religious? Yeah. Yeah. Gaffling and architecture and put in place to support us in the previous two. And I think this is. Undescribably important to make very clear. Good. It has certainly been my experience, my life experience, and I think it’s pretty commonplace that you need with the religious mode. Because life is much more complex than individual sort of discipline or attention can can respond to. Even if it’s as simple as just having a ritual like one of the rituals that I built a long time ago, the ritual of gratitude dinner, I grew up in a very secular family. So we didn’t pray before you didn’t say grace. But I grew up in the South. So many of my friends did. So I was in this weird experience of what are these people doing? And this was in the 80s when when the US was going through a secularization. So not only was this weird, but also weird and kind of bad. I am. And as I talk with my friends, it was weird and kind of bad and also had this sort of not how do I say it, authoritative sense. Right. Not not the meaning. You weren’t you were just sort of going through the ritual. You just said grace, like whatever the words were. You get that. That’s what you did. I know why we do that. And we got kind of move on. It wasn’t landing as the thing. And then about a decade ago, I found myself exploring the same space. And I noticed that most of the time I had dinner. Oftentimes I had dinner with people who I cared about. And so it created a really nice tempo. So I began a very simple practice, which was a practice of feeling gratitude, not saying any words, just trying to learn in my body, like feel the feeling of gratitude in its most fundamental and object, nonspecific sense, but just gratitude in its purest sense and just sitting there for a moment in the process of feeling gratitude in its purest sense. Right. And I’ve continued to maintain that practice with a pretty high degree of fidelity for a very long period of time now, not because it’s super important to me. And I remind myself to do it. Right. But because I eat dinner every night. So the physicality of the physical world, the materiality of the environment we live in, the architectures of life shows up as having a support structure. We’re like, oh, yeah, I forgot. I totally forgot. Well, let me remember this very important thing. So it’s brought back into my life. So part of the question you’re asking is, what’s the religion? Like, what’s this architecture of rituals and structures and institutions and social habits and feedback loops that creates a support structure, which which helps us in doing these other two things we’ve talked about and all the way very much doesn’t get in the way. Right. See, the religion is not a religion. It’s a little bit like the religion that doesn’t take itself for the thing and literally usurp the sacred and identify itself with the sacred, but actually always continuously acts as a lens or a support structure to draw in the sacred as a reminder. Yes. And those are that’s a very powerful and funny. Like this becomes for me becomes a almost a a very banal engineering exercise, at least at one level. I’m like, OK, well, what are the what are the characteristics that make up a good religion? Well, one is it needs to be regular. You need to have some things that are stable. They need to be very stable. OK, well, this is one of the reasons why seasons have often been anchored to religious rituals, because you live in a particular place. The seasons tend to come. They tend to come in a certain order. They tend to go with regularity. By the way, if they don’t, it’s a really good sign that something’s really fucked up. Yeah. If you’re sitting there in Boston or North, northern North America and you don’t have winter at all, something is deeply wrong and you need to pay attention. It’s a good medicine, a meta religious habit built in. But when the sun is showing up less and the nights are coming earlier and the days are getting cooler, it’s a reminder. You’re like, OK, what kinds of things fit in that reminder zone? This is almost like, oh, shit. Can I do a quick shift? Sure. This shift is a big it’s actually a huge shift, but it feels very related. So the term that I want to bring into the conversation is hypermedia and the notion of skillfulness with hypermedia. OK, and. The physical, the milieu of the physical, which includes things like seasons and temperatures, I want to identify all of that as part of hypermedia. And so the ability to load content or load meaning and significance on the real, I’m sorry, on the real, on the physical. Yes, yes. Is the work of mediation. And so one layer of mediation is that I can attach symbolic meaning to something like the sun has symbolic meaning. So now I’m getting a very basic form of mediation. There’s a piece of physical reality and I’ve loaded it with a symbolic meaning. Yeah. Second order mediation is what we’re doing right now. Well, not quite. If we were in person, second order mediation would be that orality, the ability to load discrete phonemes in specific sequences with increasingly complex symbolic value and then to significations and language. Second, second order mediation. And first order mediation continues to happen while second order mediation happens, right, which is why we have weird confusion between symbols and words. Third order mediation, which is when we begin, we begin to really operate at the level of the hyper conversation, is when we are able to envelop second order in first order. And that’s called writing. So what happens is we are able to inscribe the content of a conversation in an artifact of culture. Yes, yes. Is we invent the psychotechnology of writing. And that’s a hyper conversation because what it does is it shifts the possibility of relationality in a very unique, meaningful way. This is Mcclellan and all those other theorists of media. Yeah. And of course, it makes massive impacts on the nature of who we are as humans and how culture works, right. The notion that I could have a conversation with Spinoza tomorrow or even right now, but picking up his book is a total mind blower to people who culture pure orality. Yes, yes. Now, and sort of very much so, like even Gutenberg was sort of just a shift in the nature of writing. Now we’re in this this carrying explosion of modes of mediation, our ability to manipulate physicality so that it can carry the content of significance is going through the roof and the qualities that it can hold and the differences between them are going through the roof. So if I send you a text message, that’s different than if I send you a voice message, which is different than if I have a send you a video message, which is different than if we have a symmetric real time video conversation, which is different than if somebody watches this exact video conversation in an asymmetric way. Right. Each of these are different media that carry different possibilities of relationality. And yet first mode, second mode and now third mode are now fourth mode are all happening, they’re all present. And one of the primary problematics and opportunities is the the innovation of inventio of artfulness in relationship with hyper conversation and with hypermedia. And part of what that does is it begins to glue all these things together. And so how I load symbolic value on artifact or characteristics of physicality turns out to be exactly the same across this entire continuum. And so the degree of meaning that you are deriving from the modulation of photons and modulation of phonemes that I am expressing is has a strong concordance with the degree of meaning that you would be gathering from the rising and falling of the sun, for example. Right. And so the artful creation of the religion, there’s not a religion, is the artful instantiation of meaningfulness in hypermedia. Yes, that’s what I wanted to say. Well, I’m glad you said it. So so I mean, there was a sense in which you were also getting. So the religion that’s not religion is is part of part of what it needs to do is learn how to instantiate rationality within hypermedia. Is that what that’s basically your proposals? Yes, yes. And then our artfully do so artfully. Well, that’s when you say artfully. I’m hearing from neesis. I’m hearing from neesis. OK, exactly analogous to the art of being a moral agent, whereas I just can’t I can’t simply follow the rule, be kind because there’s a universal to it. But there’s also a uniqueness. And I have to find the the at one minute between those if I’m going to be kind. Right. And especially we’re going to try to be comprehensively kind. So that’s what I when you hear art, when you say art, I’m hearing that’s what I’m hearing. I mean, I am not hearing like expressive art. I’m hearing from neesis. That’s upaya, skillful means, a kind of notion. And so. You had mentioned that one of the things it has to do is give us. I think I think you said regularity might have been regularity, might have been reliability, I can’t quite remember they’re close enough that maybe maybe both were intended. Right. And you said one of the things it has to do and then that’s where you got into the sun and then you and then you and then you had that insight. Well, wait, the regularity isn’t just unidimensional, it’s multidimensional and finding the regularity in the multidimensionality of hypermedia is a task that is now set for the religion. That’s not a religion. Have I understood your import? Yes. OK, so I want to add to that, then, because we’ve had previous discussions about this. And I’ll remind you that we have talked about how religion not only gives us the heart of home, it takes us to the horizon of horror. Also, right, because it’s right, because the numinous is that which does this right. But and so it sounds to me like in addition to religion helping us to find the. Regularities, the reliable regularities within the hyperdimensionality of the hypermedia, the multidimensionality of the hypermedia, I should say. The other thing it has to do is take us to a place and encourage us and encourage us so that we can come to the horizon of horror so that we can also experience a new kind of awe and wonder there as well. Yeah, absolutely. I would say I would say that those two things are almost like like this, right? Because to be to be encouraged is to have a place from which one is coming in relationship with, right? What if I if I if I come toe to toe with horror, if I come toe to toe with chaos and and and death and knee hill and and by the way, opportunity. Yeah. With no with no place, with no stability, with no structure, then I will likely turn away and probably quite wisely turn away. Yeah. But if I have if I am well held, then I can venture into this space with courage and I can dive into the abyss with Nietzsche and swim deeply, thereby to further extract from it that which is most most needful. So I think these are very closely related. Now, what I hear you saying is even more powerful, but actually it’s more powerful, which is to say. It not only does it again, again, now think about this in the point of view of parenting, not only does it create a place where you can explore space, it also kind of pushes you into the abyss. Yes, yes. It’s not it’s not that doesn’t kind of leave you to your own devices. It actually creates a shape that forces you. You know, it has an evolutionary push that does actually pushes you out of the birth canal, for example. Yeah. Quite a quite a horrifying event, I would imagine, for every every being that is born. So the symmetry there, right? There’s a this is, by the way, the fellowship, right? We’re not we’re not engaging in fellowship. All I’m doing is kind of glad handing you and supporting you and making you feel good about what’s up. Fellowship is about finding the edge in your developmental possibility and both supporting you and pushing you. Right. Giving you that. It’s the Socratic midwifery. Right. Yeah. Midwife. Right. Yeah. But what what what I’m getting from this and I hadn’t seen this before and maybe it’s going to be, of course, but to me, it’s like, oh, is I mean, you’re you’re kind of proposing hypermedia as a sacrament. Yes, I am very much so, and it has to be. If you think about it, like one of the one of the concepts I came to a long time ago is to realize that part of the characteristics of sacrament or the sacred has to do with I’m shifting to a very secular language in here, actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Has to do with the recognition and the realization of our capacity to create super salience for ourselves. Yes, yes. And that and this but and this would not treated with real carefulness is disastrous as our encounter with modernity has taught us. And so hypermedia, more than anything else, when we become. Masters of hypermedia, we also unlock the capacity to. Produce reality for ourselves, or at least augment reality, perhaps. Yes, and in this case, I’ve made it so much so that we become less than like 80, 20, something like that, yeah, yeah, yeah. And therefore, if we don’t want that to go off the rails and in fact, we must we must fully exercise the high the utmost level of care, which, of course, is to say we must relate to it as a sacrament, must relate to it in the modality of the sacred, which I’m proposing with no strong attachment was originally discovered in the context of, oh, shit, we’re we actually have decisive power here as humans in relationship to our ability to innovate and change reality. We best be careful. Yeah, yeah, I think that’s the ultimate. And I mean, this is a compliment. That’s sort of the initial shamanic insight impulse. Hmm. Yeah, yeah, that really that raises a question for me. And it’s both a phenomenological question, but also a praxis question. I’ll use two adjectives that aren’t quite right, but so they’re pro tem, but they’re just to get the conversation going. It’s easy. I find it very easy to see the demonic in the hyper media. I find it very, very difficult to see the divine. And a sacrament can’t if what you’re proposing is the case, the sacrament cannot the thing that is being proposed as a sacrament, it has to have something like a demonic potential in it, because that’s part of the horror. But it also has to like it has to have it has to have the other aspects that we we I’m saying it’s insufficient for the media to be the hyper media to be a sacrament. If it’s only presenting itself as largely demonic, it’s not going to call people into everything we’ve been talking about here, it’s not going to be an affordance and a place for the fruition of the religion. That’s not a religion. If the phenomenological presentation of it, the way it is, the way it the way it shines to me, phenomena, right, because it’s this stuff is halaciously shiny. So it is it’s really phenomena in the Greek sense of the word. It’s shining at me like. But. We and we have a lot of evidence to back up what I’m going to say. Most of that shining has been deeply deleterious to people deep. And that’s what I mean by demonic. It until it’s sense it it it it infects them with parasitic processing, it robs them of their agency, it opens them to manipulation by bad agents. Overwhelming evidence for that. And so I’m not this is not well, it’s meant to be a challenge in the fellowship sense, I’m not trying to refute, I’m trying to say, I’m saying help me to see where I would look for the divine in the hypermedia in order that I may be able in good faith, no pun intended, both meanings intended, relate to it more sacramentally. OK, so so Zack Stein noticed a similar distinction. Right. And the way I would name it is simply hypermedia is. And then there’s two ways of relationality, one you might call hypercontrol. Right. The demonic. And the other is hyper conversation just to kind of put it back. Yeah, yeah. And I will avoid the the play with trying to go to day, Monique, because that’s a little bit too tricky. We’ll just go to keep the distinctions clean. OK, and I’m going to bring back up the notion of artfulness. Oh, my gosh, Jesus. Holy smokes, hold on. This is all right. I may have to I may have to do a whole thing here. Let me see if I’m going to do this thing and see if it works. This is a I guess. You said you did this. One of the signs of deal logos is you have to follow the logos where it goes. If you’re not by the logos and you only know you’re only called by the logos, if you get what just happened to you, that’s what I propose. So this is a I will simply do it, as you said earlier, we’ll we’ll trust to our fellowship to navigate it. All right, so I’m going to tell you a story. And I think the stories end up being a very obviously it’s deeply related to the to the question that we’re dealing with, sure, really super deeply. There’s a lot of weird concepts that get thrown into it and and hopefully you and other people can follow along. So. Conflict, combat. Yeah. The Rivalrous, yes, fitness. Yeah. Like evolution that it’s at its biological, most basic. Broadly speaking, there are two fundamental strategies in the context of evolutionary theory. There is hill climbing and there is a valley crossing. Now, in hill climbing, what we might say is that that organism, which is higher in the hill. Out competes that organism, which is lower in the hill. Yeah, yes, yes. And this, of course, is at a population level, but we can also make it at the individual level, a bigger, stronger bear out competes a smaller, less strong bear in the context of males competing for mates, for example, or for food, totally. If that phenotype happens to be if that particular capacity to out compete turns out to be determinative in the in the survival and mating capacity, bear, then it’s higher on the hill. OK. To the degree to which a particular niche is relatively static. Hill climbing is the optimal strategy. Yes, very much, very much. Yes, conversely, to the degree to particular landscape is relatively changing. Yes, valley crossing. It’s like the evolution of a volvability that we were talking about before. Hardcore, very much so. All right. Now, I have to layer in niche construction here because it’s important. Yep, I get it. Construction precisely is your the ability of an organism to maintain the relative stability of the niche that it’s in. Yes, yes. Feedback by organism on niche to maintain the landscape as it is. OK, so now to the degree to which a given organism in its hill climbing strategy also opens up niche construction. You get to a like a deep, a very particular kind of meta strategy, which is it has a characteristic of long duration followed by fragility. It will tend to select out valley crossing so as to further optimize hill climbing, so as to further optimize niche construction. And as long as it can maintain its niche, it’s the best strategy. But if now it’s fragile to minor shifts in the niche, therefore it actually can have a catastrophic collapse. OK. That dynamic has had a huge impact on my thinking about relevance realization. Oh, yeah, yeah. And vice versa, by the way. Yeah. OK, so now. Now what I want to do is I want to transpose this to our friends, homo sapiens. So we show up. And. When we are engaging in conflict, and I’ll just kind of put this in Greece since we’ve been using the Greeks. OK, there’s a particular landscape in military conflict. Right. How how one human tribe is able to sort of take territory and food or whatever from another human tribe called the phalanx. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, the Spartans pick the hill climbing strategy. Yeah, they become the best fucking phalanx ever. They radically dedicate themselves from top to bottom and left to right to be the best possible phalanx ever and become kind of the saber-toothed tiger of phalanx niche. And for so long as the phalanx is, in fact, the landscape. Their hill is a very high hill. You kick everybody’s ass. OK, now I’m going to shift a little bit to David and Goliath. OK, so. Sparta, in this case, is Goliath, right? And David shows up, it’s like, I’m not going to fucking be able to beat Sparta in failings. So David has to innovate to change the landscape, to break the niche construction, to make the entire landscape amenable to valley crossing and fragile to hill climbing by inventing the sling in this particular archetype. Or what what Thebes actually did in the historical example, the two brothers, the Thebes, invented the oblique line. And then when you attack a phalanx and an oblique line, you bend one of them. And that’s how they and they kept defeating the Spartans. And once once once they once they kind of create that innovation, the Spartans literally can’t keep up because they’re interiorly selected out flexibility and evolvability in favor for optimization for particular dominant strategy in a niche. OK, now we enter into a very, very long history of a dynamic relationship between what I would call the meta strategy of fundamentally hill climbing and niche construction, right? A micro strategy of innovation. Right, right, right. So because we learned we know like, well, shit, if all I do is play a fundamental hill climbing and construction strategy, then I become radically vulnerable to innovations that come along that are strong enough to break. Right. So I have to have like a penumbra of valley crossing. I have to have like a subclass of innovators and artists and freaks who are exploring the possibility space of what could happen and then migrate what what is discovered and innovated into the interior of my social structure through a membrane that has the capacity to adapt it to me while maintaining the integrity of my being what I am, like my most conservative core at the center. And this is the imperial strategy. In many cases, the Romans like really nail this. How can I encounter the frontier, learn at the edges while maintaining the integrity of the interior at a highly conservative level? This is like a super version of the saber tooth tiger strategy. Or, by the way, now the paradigmatic strategy popping into Kuhn. This is a paradigm. How do I have a paradigm which is totalizing and owns total totalizes my sense making infrastructure, but also has the capacity to engage in sort of epicyclic modification at the edges so that maintains its integrity in the context of novelty. And that strategy works real well for a while. Right. Until the rate of change goes past, the capacity to hold that edge, the magnitude of change, which is to say either its magnitude or its velocity is above a certain level. That particular approach begins to break down because it’s the thing that is holding itself becomes the thing that’s holding you back. Yes. Yeah. So now I’m going to zip forward to World War Two. OK, good. Historically, I’m just literally fast forwarding to moments in historical discovery of this landscape. So I get to World War Two. We’re now at a point where there is a self-awareness of this conflict, of the one who is the innovation happens fast enough that we’re actually able to change our capacity from World War One to World War Two. The Germans. We’re able to change the possibility of war so significantly that they obsolete it, the entire approach, strategic approach that had become that was that was the category killer in the previous war in a period one human generation. OK, this, of course, lit up everybody around the world. They’re like, holy shit, we’re now in a stage where within one human generation, the entire capacity to engage in war can change so completely that a dominant strategy is utterly obsolete. So now what happens is the conflict now happens at a second derivative. Now we’re not fighting in a conflict in sort of like lots of energy, embodied energy optimized for particular milieu with a bit of an innovation strategy to the edge, which slowly gets migrated in like for the great. Now the ability to innovate itself is the dominant strategy. You can’t innovate as fast as the other guy within decades, years, months, minutes. You will simply lose. You will become obsolete. And when that happens, we’ve been now in the throes of that for the past century, that thing in the center, which at the end of the day is the meta strategy of hill climbing and construction becomes the primary thing that can no longer hold. Yes, the threshold at which that inhibits your capacity to engage in Valley Crossing rapidly enough to keep pace that whoever is able to maintain and develop a new approach, which can be fundamentally at a meta level, Valley Crossing and instantiate hill climbing strategies bespoke as necessary and useful can achieve both a faster rate of change and a faster capacity to take advantage of that change to be agentic in the world than anything of this entire category. Yes, I agree. That’s the eye of the needle, by the way. That’s that’s the process through which this and this fundamental meta strategy, which has now been with us since. The first like since David and Goliath, since the awareness of that as a maybe even longer, right, maybe even like since organisms evolved that can’t make it through. Right. That’s the thing that finally is like the the knot that has to be cut off for the rest of the thing to come through now. OK, hyper conversation. And hyper control, right, are mirror images of this tension. So this the way that this does what it does is hyper control. Right. Right. The abstraction of that which maintains itself as a hill climber. Yes. And niche constructor has to become increasingly abstract, increasingly disconnected from any particular mediation. Right. I’m going to shift this to a different language to really make it land. You know, if I’m a captain of industry and I’m entirely dependent upon my command of the automotive industry, petroleum engine, automotive industry for my power and influence in the world, then I rise and fall with that particular industry. Right. In the 50s, that’s awesome. What’s good for GM is good for America. 2020, it’s not so awesome because GM is largely irrelevant. So if I’m engaging in a hill climbing domination, domination strategy, niche construction, and I’m tied to a given instantiation embodied in form of, for example, in this case, the automotive industry, or by the way, any other one, then I am vulnerable to the rise and fall of those, which do they rise and fall. And they have their S curves built into them. So what I have to do is I have to abstract. I have to actually be my my my instantiation has to be as abstract as possible, which, of course, is capital, for example, and the medics, right, the relationship between narrative and capital, the ability to instantiate arbitrarily across all possible media to control the narrative regardless of media that is instantiated in and to control the landscape of physical reality, regardless of its institutional form, right, is the most abstract version of this the the hill climbing niche construction dominant meta strategy. OK. That shows up as the thing that pulls hypermedia towards hypercontrol, right? That is that is the essence of hypercontrol, right? And by the way, it’s largely unconscious, right? It doesn’t require any given Yeah, not at all. It’s merely just playing out the underlying logic of what it looks like to be a peak, to be at the peak of this particular thing, which is, by the way, been selected against now for millennia because any any any lesser version of that has been pulled away, like in the fifties, version of that that were more concrete just got evaporated, right? On the other side of it, right, so I’m doing my little sort of open infinity side. It’s this thing hyperconversation, right? Now, hyperconversation has been building in its presence in life for a long time. We’ve seen episodes and stories, but each time it emerges into the environment, it is immediately captured and brought into the control. It’s brought into the pulverize, right? Can you keep it? You keep that at the periphery. The things that it produces that are the innovations that produces are then brought under control and then brought into service of the main maintaining of the integrity of the center. Right. But we’re at a tipping point where we’re a point in time where. Now, now we’re going to get to the answer to your question. Good, I think I see where it’s going, but please go. So I had a conversation with somebody, I think, yesterday and the the way we ended up being in conversation, it’s actually a beautiful story, so I hope it doesn’t embarrass him. He originally got he read a book by a guy, I think, Steven Kotler called like from man to Superman or something like that, but it caught his attention. It was shiny to him. That then led him to read a book called Stealing Fire that even wrote with Jamie Weill. Right now, in this context, this this individual felt the shininess of Jamie Weill is more shiny. Oh, OK. So he begins to follow that and searches more broadly for the Jamie Weill vibe. In that context, he finds himself watching a video that Rebel Wisdom did that had Jamie, Daniel Schmeckenberger and me. Yes, the son’s making one. Yeah, it was years ago. Yeah. Now, my relationship with that particular event, that that video was mostly disappointment. And my felt sense was, you know, it happened. And I clearly I chose to be part of it, but it didn’t feel artful. I certainly didn’t feel like I wouldn’t like if someone to say like the things that you’ve been participating in that you’d like me to see, which it would not even be on the top, but right, right, right. And yet when he watched it, he’s like, wow, that’s like that lands. And I’m now going to be interested in following this thread that’s tagged with the name Jordan. So then he kind of into that. And by the way, what ends up happening is he starts talking about me so much with one of his friends, a woman, she contacts me via email and says, hey, would you mind like talking to this guy, which is like the most beautiful, like as like a Christmas gift? Like, yes, absolutely. That’s the best invitation I’ve ever heard. And it was a great conversation, by the way. He’s holding some really cool and interesting stuff. The point being is there’s no fucking way I could have planned that. Right, right. There was no sort of intent at all, like zero percent intent that I’m going to show up in this particular thing with Daniel and Jamie with the purpose of having this kind of like a lot like lackluster conversation and you end up with me having this call with this guy. Yeah. OK. Art fullness. Art as distinguished from virtuosity. OK, I think that distinction is this distinction that we’re looking for. The the control structures, the niche construction and hill climbing is expertise, expertise per se, is virtuosity at its best. It is simulation and simulacrum at its best. It lacks connectedness to relevance, realization, groundedness, lacks access to the transcendent. It lacks access fundamentally to the capacity to navigate creation and creativity as a primary modality, there’s always reacting to that as a change in like a very disrupting mystery, which then tries to re coordinate structure and control. Right now, to the degree to which it has the time to do so, it can build and integrate and build a new kind of structure of control on top of which we’ve actually witnessed historically over the past five years, by the way, for those who are paying close attention. And then it can begin to do the thing that it does. Right. It change it needs constructs. It changes the new milieu into something that it knows how to play with. But. The the there’s a fundamental bandwidth constraint on the mode on that particular form of. Abstract choice making. There’s only so much perception and processing and action of velocity that it can engage in. Just think about almost like the structure is that there’s a out and in and then back out. It has almost like a centralized, centralized characteristic to it. Again, and I don’t mean necessarily a cabal. I just mean there’s like a centralizing characteristic. It’s a hierarchical characteristic. Yeah. And to the degree to which the the magnitude and velocity of novelty increases, its capacity to do that begins to break up. And now now the question is. How do you do that? How do you actually how do you actually become artful and I want to keep hitting that tone because I want it to land because artful and sacred artful and this notion that you said earlier, this like this this metagogy and this this this felt sense of being like playfully participating and they’re now in this conversation. I have no agenda at all. I do not have an intent to have a consequence in this other than a felt sense of like. Rightness like I I hope that I hope it’s hopefulness. I hope that the energy and time I’m expending in this relationship, in this conversation, how it shows up in the world ripples out to infect virtue in those who encounter it. And that is a very sacred relationship to to action. Right. There’s a there’s a trusting almost to certain aspects of how human beings can perceive and distinguish and how how they know how you relate between between the simulation and the real thing. There’s a hypothesis at the end of the day that there’s a way to tell the difference between cotton candy or a Kit Kat bar and food. There’s a as human beings build up their skillfulness or reawaken their more of their naturalness and learn more fully how to listen with the whole of themselves. This kicks us back to that notion of the whole of yourself. The whole of yourself is not just sort of like your your sort of dispositions and attitudes. It’s your completeness of your entire embodiment in real. Discernment becomes the instrumentality of the ability to distinguish between hyper control and hyper conversation. And as you awaken discernment, it has this characteristic that you talked about earlier, it is reciprocal opening. As you grow, you begin to tune out the signals on hypermedia that are hyper control and tune up the signals that are hyper conversation. And you begin to engage in a new form of niche construction, begin to shift the architectures and tools. This is a religion that’s not a religion when taken fully properly. I remember the religion that’s not a religion is an intentional artifacting of hypermedia, which includes the physical infrastructure and physicality. All of it, everything from the sun to some new app on the Internet. But but in alignment with this new mode, in alignment with and supporting a Valley crossing primary, this the infinite game, the sacred, all these terms of sort of around this side. And so it’s a reciprocal awakening and it’s reciprocal turning and learning. And this notion of fellowship, this notion of like a space, not just of trust. We use this term earlier. It’s really funny. It actually showed up. It was faith. Yes, right. We really hammered on that notion. It’s like this profaning of the term faith, which means something like. Obstantely believing in things that are have no necessary relationship with reality, right, which is not it, right. The whole point is that’s not it. And there’s something else. There’s something like community. Yeah. Yeah. And again, a commune and continuity of contact. Yeah. Right. So so the answer to your question is that the answer to your question is literally live, the answer to your question is there is no guarantee, but there is a competence and capacity and a commonality and a fellowship that creates the space where that distinction has birthed the hyper conversation has room to grow and nurtures hyper conversation until it has the capacity to simply outcompete structurally, fundamentally and categorically in the way that the thieves outcompeted Sparta so long ago, this other thing altogether, comprehensively, and I would say by proposition. Maybe not forever, but for the long duration, subject to very significant shifts in the nature of how reality works. So. That was that was great. The first a couple of light proposals and then something more deep, more hopefully more profound, I think we should. I think we should resurrect virtuosity for what it originally meant. Ooh, nice. And the thing that the hyper control has, we call it efficacy because that’s closer to efficiency. Right. And that’s language. That’s efficacy over here and expertise. But what we’re over here about is virtuosity in its original meaning. And then I was thinking what was accepted past Harvey proposal accepted. All in favor. I. Great. And then all the way through, I was hearing Yates in the back of my head. You know, the center cannot hold and the second coming. So that imagery helped me get a sense because my question, what what you were saying is and this is a good answer, by the way, because it’s a it’s it’s it’s deeply appropriate to the practice of phenomenology, which is the phenomena only discloses itself in comportment to the appropriate discernment. And so I asked, where can I see you? Where can I see the divine as opposed to the demonic? And you’re and you’re saying, well, right, you have to get this discernment where you can see the hyper conversation as distinct from the hyper control. And that’s a that’s a that’s a that’s a true metanoia. Right. That’s a transformative thing. And then what I heard you saying, like woven through it is. And look how it has, you know, important aspects of the sacred in it. It has a logos, a life of its own. It is beyond us. We we we are we are called to it rather than controlling or manipulating. There’s something mysterious about how it’s unfolding. And it’s sacramental in that that in that that participation in the hyper media, that’s the hyper conversation, give us gives us one of our best enacted symbols for aspects of reality that we’ve always found sacred, but are now being renewed in the disclosure of the hyper conversation. Did I did I get you right? Yeah, it was great. Thank you. I really deeply, deeply appreciate what you just did. That’s a good answer. I think that’s a very good answer. I mean, I that’s what I meant about, you know, I I think. I think that is the virtue that that, you know, I’m thinking of Gonzalez and when he talks about the Socratic dialogues and he says, what’s courage and you do all this stuff and there’s no answer. But you realize that Socrates has enacted and embodied courage precisely because it’s he’s he’s he’s exemplified the virtuosity because it’s not something you can put into the propositions, especially the hierarchical control propositions. And I was thinking of the same thing here, right? The answer to the first question is how of how do we live such that we can catch virtue from each other was exactly the answer you gave there. This deep enactment of virtuosity that discerns and discloses the hyper conversation as sacramental is the answer I proposed to the original question, and that was good. That was awesome. Like that was really beautiful. Who? Yeah, I guess that maybe the only thing I would sort of layer onto that are. It was like an epilogue is how natural that is for humans, you know, the children. And I’ve said this many times that I’ve seen it even more times. It was was it do as I say, not as I do. I can work my way. No emulation and imbibing. Yeah, you observe with the whole of yourself. Yeah. And you buy that which is possible for you in the way that you can. And then you metabolize it and you become it. And the two the two directions of the calling again. Yeah, that out there only calls me if it’s if it resonates with something that’s calling me also in right. If it doesn’t call to the child’s developmental logos, the child is not going to pay attention to your spoken word. Right. Exactly, exactly. And therefore, by the way, as a quick kind of like an interesting heuristic in the direction of discernment, the devil is the silver tongue to devil. I don’t trust the words. The words are secondary. Yes. I trust trust the thing that is expressing itself through words and listen closely to it. Yes, Heraclitus, listen not to what I say, but listen to the logos and recognize that all is one. Nice. Huh. Hmm. And then we have the memory, we have the remembering of why it is nobody listened to Heraclitus and not enough people. Listen to Heraclitus. Yes. And it’s OK. I think that there’s like a forgiveness of history. A giant rock was dropped into the pond of Homo sapiens. And it’s taken a very long time for those ripples to play out. They come and go. You know, you see it obviously taken up by Plato and then you see it taken up again by the Stoics and then you see it taken up again by, you know, in a sense, by Hegel. I mean, yeah, I like the metaphor of the ripples. And by the way, it calls back to your hills and valleys, which is really. Yeah. One thing that came up when you’re saying it, it’s not it’s not like it’s not in the main flow of this, it’s an eddy off to the side. But there was a moment where I saw you do. I don’t know if you realized you were doing it, but it’s like the you gave an indication that, you know, the people that pursue the hill climbing strategy, they they turn themselves into hills as well. They sort of they write their their the way they are modeling reality is internalized in the way they model themselves. Right. Right. I thought and I thought, I mean, that’s a particular instance. But I thought, I bet you that’s a more general principle, right, that there’s this deep relationship between. And that’s where I got to the connection to the virtue. Right. If you’re modeling reality in a certain way, you’re going to internalize that as how you model yourself in a powerful way. And if you’re conceiving of reality or that’s the wrong word, if you’re if you’re pre-hending reality, right, as this hill to be climbed, you’re going to you’re going to see yourself as a hierarchical kind of being. But if you if you pre-hand reality in virtuosity, you’re going to become you’re going to model yourself as a virtuous being. That’s that’s that’s what I that’s part of what I was also hearing and what you were doing. Yes, very much so. And you and this has lots of interesting care. This shows up very much in things like. Actually, what’s great points is out in therapy. Yes, yes. When you model yourself in this fashion, one of the things that happens is large aspects of yourself are shit on a large aspects to yourself are the repressed underclass of yourself and they tend to be unhappy and you tend to be dealing with all kinds of interior in literally a straight up mirror image of the interiorization. You’re engaging all kinds of weird, like narrative manipulations of your own fundamental self. Yeah, yeah. Like, yeah. And it shows up like it’s not that hard. And this is where the discernment is actually very concrete. You know, if you’re interacting with someone and you notice they’re showing up in this way. Then you know a lot about what you’re about to encounter in terms of what it is they express into the world in relationship with you. It also strikes me and we’re circling back now that we’re talking about discernment as a resonant discernment, right? As I get better at the metanoia of the inner discernment, I get better at the metanoia of the outer and they and we’re back to that reciprocal opening. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, because as you say, as I get better at the metanoia of the inner discernment, I get better at the external and one of the characteristics of higher discernment is an opening of the highest possibility of the nutritive encounter of the relationship. Yes. And so when I discovered that I’m in contact with, say, a two year old, I am now capable of being in relationship with that individual at the level that they are in the way that they’re capable of being in relationship. That’s totally right. And that was one of the you see this described about the sages that they have this capacity to tailor their shining into the world so that it is appropriate to the person that they’re meeting. You see it in Socrates. You see it in Jesus. You see it in Sartarta. You see that they they they they have this this communion like ability to share. Right. So that they get that what you just described, that optimal resonance with who they’re talking to. Yeah, I can I can see how that would happen. I can see how it happened from my own first person experience being almost the inverse. And that’s what I definitely brought the large number of people very much the wrong way. I mean, doesn’t surprise me. And in the very few moments where I’ve actually watched my own videos, there’s almost none, I just sort of turn them off. Oh, God, that guy’s really annoying. But I can totally see how a person who had really, hmm, it’s really interesting to think like there’s like a real powerful beauty in a person in the stage, as you say. And they would meet somebody. No matter how they show up, right, no matter how anybody shows up, you’re always encountering yourself, right? So I’m watching, you know, Daniel Schmackenberger at the end of the day, I’m encountering myself and I’m seeing in him aspects of myself. But if he’s able to sort of invite me into being in better relationship with myself. And how he is showing up, then what happens is, is that I encounter in him what’s actually what I really need to encounter in myself, which is a shift in my interior that allows me to be more healthy with myself. Yeah, that’s the I can see how that would happen. Yeah, that’s the midwifery again of Socrates, right? And then Stephen Batchner, his book on Alone with Others, which again brings back the poll we started from the beginning, the individual participation. He he proposes that enlightenment is is the capacity to flow at that sapiential level, not just to have a flow experience, but to be flowing in the way I’m talking about here, that I go to this person and optimal grip, this person optimal grip, this person in this situation, optimal grip and right now do this in hyperglycerin. Media. Yeah. Right. Where you have no idea who you’re in a relationship with, when, where or what the medium will be. And yet still, that’s where I think you’re right. The next Buddha has to be a sannyā. I don’t think any individual is going to be that the capacity we need to be the sage of the hypermedia, which is great. There’s a lot of good built in checksums and failsafe in that. Yeah, very much, very much. I think we’re coming to a place of completion. And I’m sort of I’ve sort of expended the energy I have available right now. I’ve got to go back to doing some marketing and stuff. This was wonderful. I thought this was really wonderful. And hopefully Greg, I’ll have a chance to take a look at it. And then the three of us can connect in a couple of weeks and follow up on it. But thank you for that. Yeah. Take good care of my friend. I always appreciate our time together and I appreciate our friendship. Me too. Very, very much. Goodbye.