https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=7ZVr7R3LOJk
Welcome everyone to another Voices with Verveki. I’m excited about this one. This is the third episode with Seth Allison and we are doing this ongoing discussion about IFS work, parts work in general, Ally work, issues around the functionality, the phenomenology, the ontology, issues around what’s dangerous and what’s safe and we have a few more things we wanted to talk about. We didn’t really talk about exiles last time. We want to talk about that a bit but before we do any discussion, I’m going to let Seth quickly reintroduce himself and then Seth propose something and I’ll let him make the proposal on air and I’ve agreed. So I’m going to turn things over to Seth. Hi John. Thank you very much. It’s really great to be back again and I just want to begin by saying I appreciate that although I said in our last conversation that I’m sure Dick Schwartz is not watching, it turns out he was and he reached out and I just had a lovely correspondence with him and primarily it was a lot of praise for our discussion and appreciation that we’re doing this publicly. He did offer a very helpful couple of corrections. Yeah, the first one is the IFS concept of self being a kind of a smaller self embedded in a bigger self. So the seat of consciousness that we’ve talked about is kind of the personal essence of a larger self that is in the body. There’s a functional relationship between those two. Okay. Yeah, sort of self and self. I guess capital S might be the interior personal self and all caps as ELF would be a larger self, probably perhaps similar to Jung’s concept of self. Yeah, I would say the seat of consciousness is the I in the I-me relationship of James and then the self is something like the ground of the psyche, Atman and Vitan. Very good. I love that language. I love that language. The other thing which maybe we’ll come back to, we’ve been talking about your experience with Hermes and guide and guides is a term that they use in IFS. I misspoke and said that guides were a part of the internal personal system. In other words, a different form of part. Very helpful correction to say that is not, it is trans. Oh, that’s important. Well, can you please convey for both of these, the first one, yeah, I get the second one is, oh, could you please thank him for these corrections? I think that’s wonderful to know that he concedes of the guides as transjective in nature. That means there’s a potential deep integration between IFS and ally work, at least the way I’m interpreting ally work. I think so. I think they are exceptionally compatible. And as we may have mentioned before, but Dick does the forward to Falconer’s most, I think most recent book, the others. Yes, I have that book. Yes. And it is, I really appreciate the forward he wrote because he expresses his reluctance to talk about the topic. I think as we talked about Dick’s bio before, it’s very important to remember that, you know, the experience near focus that he has maintained with such discipline, actually, as he also tries to avoid being alienated from the Academy and the mainstream. And so he was very hesitant to go there publicly, although I think the idea of guides and the by the way, the which is fascinating this the Falconer’s book is primarily about kind of the other end of the continuum, which would be they call unattached burdens. I think in Christian tradition, we might call it the demonic. But across cultures, this is has many different names. But it is not a part of the system, much like the guide is not a part of the system. So there’s kind of a distinction between daemons and demons, if I can put it that Yes. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I wanted to make sure we noted that that is now formally part of the model. That’s an amazing theoretical move. I from what you said, it sounds like he appreciates the work we’re trying to do. Because I’m of course, trying to integrate this with cognitive science while being respectful and doing participation in the experience near aspect of all of this. He expressed gratitude and appreciation, which, and certainly did not have to reach out. So it was, I was, I was touched by it. And so I think I think actually that this is a part of what we are doing is very congruent with his, I would go so far as to say, you know, his larger mission that he feels tasked with to bring inner work, a model, we talk, we’re going to talk about safety. And I think one of the things I’ll propose to you is that IFS represents maybe the safest mainstream technology we have for exploring for interoception and the exploration of different levels of consciousness and reality where there it’s, it’s opening a, the just degraded imaginal space that our culture has just abandoned. And I think doing it in a way that is not only powerful, but responsible. So, you know, I think this fits really well with the larger mission. I think that’s true. And when we talk about that and we talk about corresponding dangers, this is again, where I’d like to talk about the Socratic shift, the shift into the dialogical self, as opposed to the monadic, monological, monophasic, monostage self, although all the monos that have afflicted us and created Charles Taylor’s called the buffered self. And there’s probably historical reasons, the collapse of the church as an institution, Protestantism, et cetera, the scientific revolution, the self had to be really buffered and protected. It couldn’t remain as porous as it was. But now that adaptive stance has become maladaptive, and it’s suffocating us and strangling us off from reality. And so I want to sort of explore that possibility. I am so we’ve, we’ve talked, leading up to this about doing a session here that you will have the right certainly to make public or private, which I’m very excited to do. And your nervousness, I agree, I think it confirms that it’s a good idea. And I feel I feel a degree of anxiety too. But I’m very excited to to do that together. It is such an opportunity to show the model in a way that can only really you can’t really get a lot of this without seeing it. And so I think it would be a great service. That being said, I have so much that I’ve written down about the topic we’re currently talking about. So maybe I could throw some things out to you, some of which are going to be your own words. Because I really enjoyed and want to refer people to conversation you did. And I’m forgetting their last names, but it was Mike and Michael. Michael Martin is one of them. I forgot the other Michael. Yeah. Yes. And it was really great. So I’d like to give some highlights, but also make sure people Yeah, that’s great. We’ll make sure that there. Yep. Great. So I want to start with some quotes that are right along the lines of what we’re talking about with Western culture. And these are taken from Faulkner’s book. So he quotes Bernardo. Yeah, I’m going to be talking to Bernardo about all of this, because he has a daemon that he regularly works with. Yes. Yeah, great. Right. And he says that we’re in the dark ages of materialism and behaviorism. And then I think it’s George or perhaps Bernanos. You understand absolutely nothing about modern civilization unless you first admit that it is a universal conspiracy against the interior. And this makes me think of the work that you’re doing, which I wanted to help people perhaps understand the intersection of the pursuit of wisdom with the work of the imaginal that we’re exploring here. And the proposal here is that the imaginal as a way of gaining information and wisdom is crucial to rationality. Yeah. And I’ve been making that argument. I’ve tried to show. Yeah. I appreciate Corban’s how the imaginal is, you know, the mystical and that, but I think the imaginal, like many other things like flow and insight is on a continuum where there is the mundane of the imaginal that is in our everyday experience. Like that spirit, it’s the experience of the introspective space inside our head. That’s imaginal. There isn’t a literal space there. That makes no sense, but it’s not just fictional because it actually gives us genuine access to our cognition and affords metacognition rationality. So it’s neither literal nor fictional. It’s imaginal. And that’s just part of your everyday ability as a rational agent. That, and I’m looking for it here and I can’t, it’s one of the poets talked about the secondary imagination and the primary imagination. And I think you’re referring to like the secondary imagination. Yeah. Well, Courage had a distinction between yeah, fancy and imagination where fancy is just where you’re just playing with. Yeah. But imagination was the imaginal very much. Yeah. Right. And I think a quality of that is that it is a dialogue, that it is relational. There is a degree of activity and engagement, not just a passive self. So like Jung’s concept of active imagination is not fantasy. It’s this, the liminal space between where consciousness interacts with the unconsciousness. He called it, I think, the psychoid space where things are crossing over through the archetypal. So I think Falconer says that we need to learn how to navigate the inner world to increase interoception, right? Which is the looking in the study inward, our ability to see and interact and the interact part is key with our inner world. So is he using this distinction? It sounds like it’s close, but I want to make sure I’m not smuggling in an equivocation by not excavating it. So in cog-sized psychology, introspection means where you go into that space where you can do like mathematics in your head or picture a sailboat. Interoception is your awareness of your body. Like when I ask you, how’s your right big toe doing? And you can go, it’s okay. That’s interoception. So it’s very somatically functionally oriented interoception. Introspection is much more cognitively, I don’t know what to call it, more and more cognitively oriented. I’ll just say that right now. I love that you’re bringing it to the body and somehow it also connects to, and it’s tricky to tease out, but like being embodied in the psyche. Go ahead, what were you going to say? Well, I just want, they are, they do overlap and there’s a liminal space where you can’t tell which is which. And both introspection and interoception have an imaginal quality to them. Introspection, very high imaginal. The interoception is closer to detection, but there’s still an imaginal element to it because you’re still doing predictive processing. You’re still taking little samples and imagining the whole from them, all that stuff. Great. Great. So the general sense here, I wanted one more quote for you is John Keith’s, when a man is capable of being in uncertainty, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching, sorry, irritable reaching after fact and reason. He calls this negative capability. I think the romantics at their best were discovering the imaginal. I think the romantics at their worst were not realizing the deep interconnections between the imaginal and the rational. Which brings me to danger. There was a great quote, where is it here? Oh, yeah, this was in Falconer. The ability to become absorbed in our inner world is much like fire, a wonderful servant, but a dangerous master. So I want to kind of move in a little bit to some of your work. And I’m going to kind of frame this a little bit from just pulling out some of the things that I think are significant. So a little context with the meaning crisis. These are just sort of domains. You’ve called it a wisdom famine. I am adding to that a degradation of our imaginal faculties, an atrophy of our spiritual musculature, a disconnection from nature, but also from our embodied selves, a loss of relational and communal resources and embeddedness, and a loss of our dialogical facility. I think I would just sort of put that as the context of the meaning crisis. All of that together and brought into a kind of joint attention on the transcendentals and through that the sacred. This goes back to the fear of the Lord is the beginning of all wisdom kind of idea, where I don’t take that to mean fear. I take it to mean something like the fear of the Lord is the beginning of all wisdom. There is always a normative dimension to wisdom, which is moving towards the true, the good, and the beautiful. And that’s rationality in the deep sense, the ability to be sensitive to and reliably responsible to the call of the true, the good, and the beautiful, and then through the true, the good, and the beautiful, and ultimately, an ultimacy that we can love. And so I think that’s the kind of thing that I would just call the true, the good, and the ultimacy that we can love. And so everything you said, but held in concert together, sort of noetically held in concert together, directed towards the sacred in that way. Love it. And we don’t have much in the way of structures, teachers, pathways, practices that we can call on now. So this is how I frame your working on developing an ecology of practice and the work of the Vervecki Foundation. How do we bring this back? Unfortunately, religion, for a lot of us, has lost its credibility or lost its safety. That was beautifully put. I just want to savor that. That was so succinct and captures it. It’s lost its credibility. If we include in that not just truth, but relevance, people, but also lost its safety for many people. Religion has, all the religions have piled up sins. And the good people within those religious legacies, the good people within those religious legacies are taking responsibility for that. I don’t want to pretend that they’re not, but nevertheless, there’s trauma on one end and it just doesn’t work for me. I know lots of people who say, I want it to work for me. I wish, I mean, in some ways that’s my case too. I feel like Corellian from Childhood’s End, I can always point people to their sacred home, but I will always be on the Silk Road kind of thing. I just wanted to pause Seth and just open that up, expand that, because I thought that was beautifully put. Yeah, boy, what you just shared resonated very deeply for me. In fact, these conversations have caused me to dive into, for lack of a more precise term, and I need something that holds all of this, I’ll just say spirituality, in a way that I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to. I grew up, I think we both grew up in conservative Christianity. For me, it was evangelical Christianity. And some of the split and the disavowed elements of humanity that I grew up with there, I found deeply wounding and even traumatizing. And my psyche has been so bent and twisted around some of the unhealthy interpretations of Christian tradition that I had to throw the baby out with the bathwater for a couple decades. And I don’t know if I’ll come back to it, but I’m just, in the last couple of months, beginning to feel like, okay, I’m going to have to, I think I’m called to a path back, but probably not to anything that I would recognize as Christianity from my past. And actually, it feels like creating a new path and yet probably more than anything discovering a very new path. That’s exactly what the Silk Road is. Nobody lives on the Silk Road. This is like C.S. Lewis’s hallway Christianity. Nobody lives in the halls. People live in rooms, but you need the halls, right? Boy, I feel like I’ve lived here for a while. Yeah, we’re resonating on that. Yeah, I actually have a tattoo of the word Lyman, the root of liminality for years. And hopefully I can look at that. I’m starting to look at that as a period of time that so much had to be put through a crucible. Go ahead. Well, for me, it’s becoming the living symbol on of how I am being called. Like people are traveling on the Silk Road that are seeking a place, a new home, but it also is hopefully affording people to return to their homes and recover it the way Tolkien talks about the recovery theory, or the way an anthropologist goes to another culture and then comes back and can see this place and then they can go back to their home and recover it. And so, I think people can see this same culture, T.S. Eliot, see it again for the first time kind of thing. The Silk Road will be the Silk Road if it is doing that. And I can’t justify what I’m about to say. So perhaps in one sense, it’s how I’m remaining imaginably faithful. I feel called that I need to be in this liminal state right now because opening this up so that the legacy religions can more deeply enter into profound, mutually transformative dialogos. And this is already happening. This is not something I am initiating. One of the functions of the series is to call this up and show people and see all the resources and see what’s happening. And the Verveki Foundation is committing itself to trying to explicate this, foreground it, elucidate it, make it available for people. And this comes out of discussions with Hermes. I’ve come from grieving my liminality. So I was always in one discourse with Hermes. It’s like, it really bothers me that I’m almost. He said, what do you mean? I was like, well, I’m sort of almost famous and I’m almost this and I’m almost this and almost this. And he said, John, I don’t know if I mentioned this to you. He said, first one thing, he said, well, that’s great because almost famous means you can interact with the famous, but you’re protected from the temptations and corruptions. And then we returned to this again and I said, there’s still something. And it was like, yeah, because you don’t get it. You need to be almost because a traveler is almost. You need to travel the road. You need to be almost right now. Don’t know what the future is, but right now you need to be an almost. You need to accept it. That is your calling. That is what you need to be and you need to do. And when it moved to that, it was like, ah, ah. And I was really in a tough place because and I’ve had one conversation we’re going to publish and a private one and then public one we’re going to publish and doing another one with Jordan Hall. Jordan Hall’s conversion really, really impacted me. There was a lot to sort through there. And I mean, part of it was a feeling of abandonment. He and I had been brothers on this path and he suddenly had found a home. And I felt, right. And but of course I love him as a friend and I want the best for him. And we are trying to see does his current project and my projects, do they still, can they still deal, enter into deal logos with each other? It looks like it is, but I needed that inner work. I couldn’t just do the outer discussion with Jordan. I needed that inner work to get ah, this is where I have to be right now. He’s where he needs to be. I have enough faith in him that that’s the case, but I need to have faith in myself that this is where I need to be and what I need to be doing. And that also went into a conversation I had with Christopher Master Pietros. You get this sort of thing happening that’s inner and outer kind of like union synchronicity, not as pronounced, but it’s that sort of inner and outer worlds are sort of really talking to each other really well. So I just wanted to relate that. That, that, that, and I, I’m not, I’m not saying that this is your call at all. I’m just saying for me, I appreciate and I hear the pain in your voice because, and I know the pain. And there is a longing and I hope that my work can help people of good faith who genuinely are experiencing that longing both within and without a legacy religious home. That is my, that is what I want to do. That is what I am committed to do because I think this advent of the sacred that is happening right now, and I think part of what we’re talking about that is exactly the expression of the advent of the sacred. I think that is what is needed for everybody who wants to be on the Silk Road. Thank you. Thank you. We share something deep and it’s important to integrate and it’s also important to differentiate because that allows for reflection and mutual transformation. That’s just why I wanted to do that. 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. If I could take a risk to meet you there. I think I’ve told you this, I can’t remember if it was on camera or off, but I actually have a Hermes tattoo on my ankle. It felt quite synchronous to me when you started sharing. The grieving that you mentioned, to me, part of entering liminality, which I did not choose to do, and I don’t know that any of us would ever choose to do it, was the grieving literally and figuratively, many leveled grieving of the loss of home. But the learning to live in the discomfort that Keats is talking about. To me, the metaphor that helped the most was that I am now exhausted and can no longer row this boat. I have to put the oars in and begin to trust a current. I have no choice about it. So I will see where the river goes and I will spend my time trying to look at the shore and what’s passing. That begins to develop a stance of participation without the ego doing all of its work. I could not learn that at the pace I wanted to. It was a slow letting go over and over again. And it did. I not only dealt with depression, but the movement into addiction and then out of addiction was really the beginning of the awakening of spirituality, as it is for so many millions of people. Well, capitalism has come up with this wonderful way for creating pervasive, low-grade addiction through the salient manipulations of social media and advertising, etc. I’m not sure how low-grade it is anymore. I think we’re just habituated to it. Yeah, it’s killing people. In one way, it’s very high grade. Yes, you’re right. Well, and it is absolutely crushing the meaning in our world and our access to our inner life. We’re consumed by dopamine addiction. We’re just consumed by it. So thank you. It’s wonderful to connect on this deeper level. Well, when you said that about the I’m going to… There’s a song, it’s a little bit cheesy, but I really like the song Moon River. And what came to me was the line, up beyond the river’s bend, my huckleberry friend, and that kind of shared sense of, I’m in the same place with you. I don’t know what’s around the river’s bend. And I’ve stopped trying to plan what it’s going to be. And I’m going to… You know, the Buddhism, I’m going to enter the stream. I’m going to do it carefully, but I’m going to enter. But that’s the conversion experience. That’s the movement of the ego and the dropping into a different high position. And it allows in IFS, that allows access to the exiles that have lost so much or that are carrying grief and pain that must be let go. So I think IFS, we’re going to get to what an amazing tool it is for spiritual work. Man, I hate to jump back up. That’s okay. You know, but I do want to just a couple more pieces here about… By the way, I think the facility, I mean, we’re doing in and out, and that’s good. But I think jumping up and down, you need practice with that too, because you don’t want it to be jarring. You want it… I talk about theoria and theory. They need to flow. That’s another tearing that we have to sew back together and heal. Well, I’ve always thought of it as intellectual scaffolding, that manager parts of me that are hyper rational, which are really just very fearful. They really need the map quite… They need it badly in order to relax. And so it is important. So let me just throw some things out or actually just repeat them and mirror them back to you, because these are your thoughts. The hermeneutics of experience, the ways in which reality is disclosed to us. You talk about four dimensions of cultivating wisdom, the dialogical, the imaginal, the mindful and the embodied. Do I have that right? Yeah, that’s correct. Dime. Yeah. Did what was that with Nathan Vanderpool? Yes. I love this. And those almost act in my mind as the categories that we can use as safeguards as we enter into spiritual practice. That’s exactly. They’re all domains in which we can cultivate being reasonable, right? Looking for self-deception, properly proportioning our salience, taking the right perspective, assuming the right responsibility and role. They are all ways in which we can bring reasonableness to bear on what we’re doing. So let me read some more of your thoughts to you. So I want to set the context again that we’re entering a period with psychedelics in particular, but also the field of psychology coalescing around a dialogical self. Altered states, experiential modalities, psychedelics, these are profound opportunities for confronting the meaning crisis as we set it up earlier in this conversation. I’m going to assert that our primary problem here with these experiential learnings is that we lack structures to hold the process of integration, not the doing, but the after the integration. And I think the integration is important. Integration is important. It’s more important actually than the experience itself. That’s what I meant to say. It is more important. And the integration is in both of those dimensions again. How well does it integrate with many domains broadly and deeply in your life? How well does it transform many levels broadly and deeply of the psyche? That’s the integration. And you are absolutely correct. Our culture gives us precious little on both of those and even more importantly, not only both of them, but how they are properly coordinated and speak to each other in a self correcting fashion. Oh, this is going broadly and deeply. Yeah, but it’s keeping me locked in this one level of psyche. Oh, that’s a little, oh, it’s going so much inside of me. Yeah, but it’s not transferring into your life. Think about that, right? So that, so the, what the poet and the artist do is they, they have the equipment and the musculature to dive deep, the canaries down in the coal mine of the psyche, but to excavate and bring back for us. And I think, you know, my experience with psychedelics is it gets you down there. It gets you down there, but the challenge of bringing it back up is, is profound. It’s easy to take psilocybin. It’s not difficult. It is very difficult to bring back what you learn and to integrate it. I agree. And, and, and our culture again, super salience of the intensity of the experience that can be consumed, very little attention to the cultivation of virtue. Right. So you have these two axes of intensity, right? We talked about this back in our attachment talk of the cogside processing, but the linear integration of if this, then this, then this. And so the bringing this and this together is hard work. Very, very hard. And you need a framework. And it cannot be done, it can’t be done alone. And, and so whether it’s the, the intellectual framework or even better is a relational dialogical framework in community, I think is the safest way to proceed with this stuff. And I call it a sapiential framework because I don’t, I think the word intellectual, it’s the right word if we use it the way the Neoplatonist used it for noesis, but we don’t use it. We, we sapiential, it’s in safety with wisdom. It’s an actually word. It’s an archaic word, but I’m trying to bring it back because we need an alternative word to both intellectual and spiritual. And this word, I think is, it’s, it is a real word. I’m going to add it. I’m going to add it to my verbatim dictionary that I’m beginning to write. So let me, let me give you some things that you said with Mike and Michael that you laid this out really well. You quoted or summarized Drew Highland, Platonic scholar. We are simultaneously finite and capable of transcendence. If we embrace our finitude or if we only, sorry, if we just embrace our finitude, we fall prey to despair and servitude. Love that. So I think that’s our current state in many ways. And then we have, I think in some hyper religious communities, we have the opposite. If we just embrace our transcendence, we fall prey to inflation and hubris. By the way, it’s not just in religious communities. There’s a real danger in psychedelic. Oh, totally. Totally. People think they become the voice of God. Yes, I know. Yeah. So that that’s the extreme of inflation and hubris. If we hold them together in tension, tonos, we will properly realize our humanity. I want to say that again. If we hold them together in tension, our finitude and our transcendence, we will properly realize our humanity. The middle path is to live in tonos. And I think your work is that I think that’s a wonderful summary of what I am experiencing your work as being aimed at. So here’s how I think you framed the opportunity at this point in time in our culture or the challenge at which you said earlier, how do we metabolize mystical experiences or experiences of the numinous, right? So you said, opening to other dimensions of cognition in the psyche is epistemically and morally a pursuit that we are called to. There’s this huge family of phenomena and the scientific investigation into it, not just practices, but participatory knowing, which I think feels scary. Proper, careful, rigorous, reflective study from the outside and the inside. Love that. We have a moral, these are your words, we have a moral obligation to ask what is a proper framework to bring to bear upon these experiences so that people could metabolize them and realize them as the cultivation of virtue and wisdom. And I like this part and not spin them off into narcissism or inflation and go down rabbit holes of their own personal magical metaphysms. I don’t know, you spun that one off. It was great. I mean, there’s the idea of inflation and hubris. And you talked about the scientific gaze. And Michael had concern about the scientific gaze. And you said, it’s not a dissecting gaze, but the intention is to afford the flourishing of this practice. So I thought I’d pause there and let you, I mean, do you want to reiterate any of that? I’m just summarizing, I think the big picture. No, no. I think you’ve made your just as choices in so far as they capture the gist of what I was arguing for. I don’t have any significant revisions or amendments to what you’ve brought up. Other than the ones that have spontaneously been occurring between us. I’m happy I’m having these series of conversations with you. We get into genuine dialogs. I’m appreciating the relationship that’s growing. I just want to say that I think that is, like you said, that is a proper safety framing of working with the numinous in an important way. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. I had some hallmarks of safety, but I think we’ve covered a lot of it. And I’m looking at the time and just wanting to make sure we leave space for a dropping in and an embodiment of a practice of IFS, which you have courageously been willing to kind of join me in this. I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t have that sense of calling. This is very not what I’d like to do, but I am called. So please continue with what you wanted to emphasize. Well, I think we’re called together. I feel called to this too. Yeah, I agree. I agree. Michael, very friend. We’re called together. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. Very nice. So the way that I often ask people to enter in is to close their eyes and to check in with their body. So if I will say this before we start to the people watching that I would encourage them to bring curiosity and compassion. You and I hold this energy together right now, but in some weird, unexplainable way, I think the energy of the audience matters too. I think we’re both going to be a little bit parts of us will be afraid. Very much. And we’re going to try to, you and I will try to sit with that. And I think the more we sit with those parts, the more others will be able to, and I just want to voice my faith in that because I’ve seen it. Share that with you. Yeah. So let me walk you in and we’ll walk in together. If you close your eyes, check in first with your body and in the spirit of EFT, I want to just be responsive to any areas that feel tight or unsupported, any stretching or adjusting that needs to happen. Do you want me to remark on that at all, or do you want me to just do it internally? No. Okay. Yeah, just internally. In fact, most of this is your relationship to what’s happening internally to you. Is your relationship to what’s happening internally to you. And I’ll guide you about when to report to me. I’ll just follow your lead. Yeah. So you check in and you’re just noticing right now. So one of the things that I like to do to get centered is I like to imagine that my ears are like my eyes. And so as I take a deep breath, just a cleansing sort of deep breath, I bring my attention to my ears and to the soundscape around and John, I want you to just imagine that the soundscape is much like looking at a sunset or a painting that you’re picking up the colors and the details. You may notice things outside of your office or cars or planes, or you may just notice silence. And I’m going to ask you a trick question. Focus on one of the noises, one of the objects that’s moving through space and time around you and ask yourself the question, is that thing that I hear right or wrong? And of course, it’s neither right nor wrong. Is it good or bad? It’s neither good nor bad. It’s just there. And the spirit that we’re looking for is a spirit of observation. Just noticing. We’re going to bring that same attention to your inner world now. And I want you to just take a moment to notice what you notice. Parts, maybe up and about. And parts communicate visually, images, memories, scenes. They communicate in the body with sensations, emotions, and they communicate with words. And then you may experience right away the presence of parts. And I just want you before we move anywhere to the next part to just notice them. Take a deep breath as if you’re breathing for the whole system, like a little bit of a gift. And in a gentle inner voice, and if you’d like to place your hand on your chest, I always enjoy using touch as a way of communicating, but you don’t have to. Allow your inner voice to be in the center of your body. Allow your hand to be a symbol that says to them that you’re here. And in an inner voice, you can even say the words, I’m here. I’m present. My hand is a symbol that I’m not going anywhere. This is the attachment frame that you’re available and you’re present to all the parts that want to come. And just notice how that feels before we go any further. And I’m going to check in with you now. You can leave your eyes closed and your hands where they are, or you can move and adjust. But just tell me a little bit about what you’re experiencing. I’m experiencing a presence I’m experiencing a presence that’s very familiar. It’s the, yeah, yeah, guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is all bullshit. Yeah, you know, it’s just going to be over soon. This is just a waste of time. That voice, that voice and trying to not be put off by its arrogance. I’m trying to remain open to it. And there may be even another part that’s put off by its arrogance. I’m trying to just hold that aside for now. Just ask it. Yeah, wait possible. I want to hear it. I want to hear more of this guy. Wonderful, John, I can tell that you’ve practiced. I have a guy too. And he’s got a foot on the brake. And then there’s another part it sounds like that has a foot on the gas. And let me just suggest that we turn from the yeah, yeah, yeah guy for a moment to the part that is a little frustrated with him. Can we do that? Can turn your attention here and it helps. I was going to ask over here. But I can sort of feel me. I need the gesture, but I can feel me bringing it sort of center stage. Wonderful. Now just take a moment slowly to be with that part. And the first question I want to ask you as you notice it is how do you feel towards it? How do I feel? Yeah, I feel. Oh, it’s kind of a blending. It’s angry at arrogance. I can’t tell that anger is the parts anger or my anger at the part. Perfect. So I want you to ask the angry part of you to just take one step back so you can enter into dialogue with it. Is it willing to do that? Yes. It’s going to step sort of over here. It’s not going to go far. It wants to watch. But it’s going to. Yeah. It’s it’s giving me a pro tem opportunity. I’ll give you a bit of time. Great. Before we pivot, I want you to say thank you to that part. We want to stay with it. And before we leave it, I want you now to just ask it a question of how is it here to help you? What is its job? And just notice what it says. Don’t analyze. Just listen. Yeah, it says I’m here to prevent you from fucking up because of your arrogance. Thank you. Yeah. Would it be willing to soften with you if it knows that you’re going to turn and deal with that part so that it doesn’t have to? Would it be willing to trust a little bit? There’s hesitancy. But you know, does it make sense to you that it would be hesitant, John? Yeah. Yeah, it does because there’s this part here feels something something tremendous about around arrogance. And this this part is saying, you know, that tremendous that that takes you got to be careful about that. And you got to be very hard and fast reactive. That’s what the angers were. React hard and fast, because this is very good. So that’s why it’s like that. But it’s it’s there’s a little bit of I’ll give you a bit of time with this. That’s all I can get. Excellent. So thank you. Let’s let’s make sure we just say thank you. And I would like to I’ll let that part know if I could speak to it. I would say that that’s all we need is a little bit of space. And that I invite it to watch. And I can hear very clearly how important its role is for protecting John. And if it could just agree to not flood you for when we’re trying this, I would like to try an agreement that if it needs to get your attention, it would just ask and not flood you while we’re trying. Is that okay? Yeah, that that’s okay. It’s as long as yes, as long as I keep my promise. It’s so there’s doubt, but there’s willing there’s a bit Yeah, of course. Of course, there’s doubt. How could there not be right? So thank you. I want you to pivot your attention back to the yeah, yeah, yeah part now. And I want you very right off the bat to just notice how you feel towards farther away now. He’s more Yeah, so you notice a little more distance and he’s sort of over here. More on the periphery. If I turn to him, he moves a little closer. But yeah, he’s sort of there now. He I don’t know, he doesn’t seem quite as powerful. Yeah, so he’s his intensity is coming down a bit. He’s he’s been deescalated a bit just just by having some space here. Yeah, I’m now I’m now more focused on this practice me. Yeah, good. Yeah, I feel it. Yes. Yeah. So could you stay with him? Yeah, yeah, sure. And, and bring some curiosity here, john. I want to listen to him and I want to understand what it is he’s worried about. Could you just ask him and hear that’s easy. He’s the yeah, yeah, because, right, he wants to dampen things down. So we don’t have to have all the he wants to make things boring. So I don’t have all the intense emotion of this other stuff. He calls it this other ship. He’s a little bit still. So he’s Yeah, well, I like him. He’s salty. And he’s direct. And he’s saying, he’s saying that he’s essentially his job is to protect you from being flooded by all this intention. This stuff. That’s what he that’s what he means that. Oh, that’s what he means by bullshit. He means anything that triggers this in some way. Oh, this is great, john. Can I what I want you to do is kind of like a therapist, reflect that back to him and just say, do I have it right? In your inner voice? Yeah, yeah. No, no. Yeah. Yep. You got it. Yeah. Okay. Good. How are you feeling towards him now? Kind of fun. Yeah. Uh huh. You appreciate that, right? I do. Yeah. I I used to get annoyed with him because I felt he was just trivializing things that were important. Oh, he didn’t like it when I brought that up. So I’m now I’m, oh, I want to apologize to him. I want you in your inner voice to notice that you have some sadness and that you feel for him and let him know as you apologize, let him know what you feel towards him. Yeah, I’m just letting him know that I didn’t treat him fairly. I’m sorry for that. Yeah. Yeah. And having something important. Now I feel I feel regret and a little bit of grief. Yeah. Yeah. Let him know. I am. I am. Yeah. He softens with that. It’s like almost like my grief is a water that’s softening things between us. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I’m going to share something. I’d love to hear his response to this. He hasn’t felt an emotional bond with you in a long time and to know that his pain affects you and you feel pain really feels reassuring and comforting to him. Yeah, that lands. Yeah, he feels more trusting is all I’m getting. I can’t make it clearer than that. That’s right. Yeah. I think the relationship between the two of you is healing a little bit. At that moment where I realized and it brought up genuine regret, even grief, that was completely unexpected. Yeah, this is the relational component of IFS happening. It’s very real. It’s very real and it is embodied and you felt an emotion and you feeling that emotion for him. He felt that and the connection deepened and both of your bodies relaxed. I could see that. Yeah, it’s interesting. This is the part where I was talking to you about, I don’t mean it abstractly, there’s a capacity for self-reflection. He’s appreciating. Oh, lovely. He’s appreciating the capacity for self-reflection. Yeah. He’s a little bit sorry too. Yeah, I see you expressing that too. Yeah. We’re hugging each other. It’s beautiful, John. Just telling him that I’m telling him I really care for him. Yeah, that’s really beautiful. He’s wrestling with something. There’s strong emotion coming up between us and his grammar, if I can use that language, is to try and resist strong emotion. So he’s struggling. Yeah. I’m just trying to just be with him like you are with a friend who’s going through something. I get the struggle. I don’t want to impinge because I feel like a lot is happening. He’s going through a lot. He’s like metabolizing. This is this call to integrity. It’s when the part… Yeah. Yeah. I want to invite you to just stay with him in whatever way you can, whether that’s visually staying close to him. Yeah, we’re just close and he knows that he’s allowed to do this. Good. So there are a couple of questions that you don’t have to answer because there’s a connection that’s happening that’s more important, but you could ask him what he needs from you and see what he says. I know it’s just stay with him, he says. Just be with me. Good. Just be with me. Do you feel you can do that? Yeah. I mean, it’s tricky because I’m finding it hard to find the point of discernment between empathizing with his pain and bleeding into it. So a little trouble with the boundary? I’m afraid that I’m owning something that belongs to him or vice versa. So perfect, John. We’re not going to leave him. He can stay connected to you, even if it’s just like holding a hand or just staying right by. That’s what we’re doing. But I’d like you to pivot your attention from him to the part of you that’s scared right now, scared that you’re doing it wrong or scared that you’re blending. Yeah. Yeah. Can you find that? That’s rational man. Yeah. So rational man. Now, same thing as before, ask him to take one step back so you can dialogue with him and then take a moment to just take him in and observe him. What does he want you to see? Just ask him, what would you like me to witness and see what he does? Well, his initial response is there’s not enough theory here. That’s what he initially says, right? Of course. Of course. So theory is the way he keeps you safe. Not enough theory here. This is going off on all these directions. And he’s starting to do this very analytically, starting to list. Yeah. So how do you feel towards this? I have a friendly relationship with him. That’s why when he came up, it was funny. He does a lot of good work for me. And I’m appreciative. I owe part of my job to him. If he doesn’t come into way, I can’t do the work I do. So I like him. We like each other. But he, yeah. But like he said, I love the relationship you have and you feel a lot of self-energy with him. It’s a very, very good relationship. So I think he’s just perhaps wanting to touch base and check in with you. Can you ask him if he needs anything from you? No, he said, he just said what Seth said. Okay, great. I love his efficiency. Okay. So if it’s okay with him, then we’ll turn back to- And now I’m not afraid either. The part we were with. Good. I’m still holding on to him over here. There’s still this very localized though, sort of processing, metabolizing, sort of grief, pain, reunion. That’s still running over here. That’s interesting. It almost has a life of its own over here. Yeah. The relationship continues, even if you’re not paying attention to it. That’s a great observation, John. So let’s check in with him. And is there anything he wants you to witness now? He’s crying. But he’s telling me, it’s good. It’s good. He’s actually telling me not to get upset, which is interesting. He’s still trying to take care of you. Yeah, he is. He still cares about me. And that’s nice. And I tell him, I really get the struggle he’s in. This is the core of who and what he is, right? His job, like it’s really clear. His job is to prevent intense emotion. Yet he needs to connect with me. And that has intense emotion attached to it. And so he’s like, I get it. Like I’m telling you, telling him, sorry, I switched to talking to him directly. Yeah, I get it. I really get it. I get what you’re wrestling with and I’m here. I get it. So good, John. So good. I’m going to just play a hunch and ask a question and it could very well be no. But would he be interested in going with you to a safe, secure, different place inside of you? Yeah, he doesn’t want to do that. He wants to stay where he is. No problem. Because he’s on the edge of what he can handle. Perfect. So I want to let him know, and you, that we are going to respect his boundaries. And when he feels like he’s at a point of saying stop, that is totally what we’re going to do. All right, I’ve let him know. And I’m just going to hold this space with you and allow that to take whatever course it wants to take inside. He’s tired. He’s processing and bound up. He’s tired. He hasn’t got that sense until now. He’s really tired. I find myself imagining that he’s been. Great. He wants me to sit down too, so I’m sitting down with him. He’s really tired. Does it make sense to you that he’s tired? He’s just been carrying this for a long time and then confronting with this on top of it, sort of this self-reflective awareness. It’s exhausted. Really tired. His job has been exhausting. His job has been exhausting and he’s telling me he’s not upset about it, but getting him to, like connecting with him is also exhausting. He wants it, but it’s exhausting. So he’s been in a bit of a double bind. That’s exactly it. Boy, that landed and he feels like he’s struggling. He’s been struggling against that. That makes sense. There’s a little bit. I can hear a little bit of intensity on there. His voice. Powerful for him to have that. There’s this image of almost like, I can’t quite draw it with my hands, but there’s this rope, this twisting upon itself rope thing that’s binding him and I and himself in this. He’s trying to articulate it with an image. The double bind is exactly right. Good. I feel a lot of compassion for him right now. He’s smiling. What’s coming up? When I said that, he smiled. Oh, some of the negative affect is calming a little bit. Yeah. It continues to calm before this settling in. He just wants to be with me, very calm and just be with me without all that upper of the upper l layering, which is like the He’s settling in, he just wants to be with me, very calm and just be with me without all that craziness. What I’m getting, John, is that maybe for the first time, it feels safe for him to be connected with you and to not be scared of getting flooded by all the intense stuff. Yeah, there’s a bit of a sense of confidence. You said that there was the negative affect rose a little bit, but it didn’t go, it just went and it sort of hit that confidence, that shared faith. He likes that, he likes me saying that. One of the things that is done in the IFS world is to, if possible, if he wants to, where there was all that angst and fear and intensity, a space might clear in him where he could take in calmness and confidence and breathe that in and feel it in his body. Yeah, and he wants to get up and move around a little bit. Wonderful. He’s sort of dancing. It still hurts a little, but he’s dancing. Breathing in creativity and expression. He’s returning. He wonders what’s next. He’s returning to play. Now that he’s free of the job he wasn’t supposed to have, he can become embodied as a natural being that has its own organic nuclear agenda. So what does he want to do? Well, I had to hold rational man off for a sec. He came in. Sorry. Yeah, I think I brought him in. Okay, so this needs a label. This needs a name. We’ve got to put some concepts on this. I’m saying not yet. I’ll give you time later. I promise. That’s right. That’s exactly right. He’s going to come and get his turn in a minute. So if he could step back. He did. Like I said, he and I have a very good working relationship. Great. And when he stepped back, again, even more calmness here. He’s considering. I don’t know how to put this. So this isn’t quite right, but he’s considering. Can he just like putting down his job? Like he’s really open question. Is that possible? Yeah. Yeah. I told him. So he’s contemplating. Yeah. I just. Go ahead. I said, I think it is. I’d like to help. Yeah, he’s. Yeah, he’s really. Huh. Yeah. He’s in that state of huh. That’s what he keeps sort of doing. Huh. Maybe. And he’s still dancing around too. He dances and he pauses and he does that. He does that. Huh. He’s feeling into it. Yeah, he doesn’t want to rush. That’s for sure. Well, that makes sense to me. Yeah, me too. Yeah, me too. Yeah. I. I. I. You wanted me to forgive him. I do. Get it. Okay. Okay. He really needed to hear that. Yeah. As he’s considering it, he’s. He’s. He’s. He’s. He’s. He’s. He’s. He’s. He’s. He’s. He’s. He’s. He’s. He’s. He’s. He’s. He’s. He’s. He’s. He’s. He’s. He’s. He’s. He’s. He’s. He’s. He’s. He’s. As he’s considering the possibility, he’s sort of sharing with me, see all the places in your life where I was this trivializing thing. He wants to make sure that I’m fully appreciating his job, what he’s been doing. And he’s wondering if I. Yep, that’s so important. He’s wondering if I can really accept that and forgive him for that scale. And I really can. He believes me, but he’s still not fully settled. Now he’s sitting down again. He wants to sit with all of this. I’m getting a thing from him of that’s enough for me. I don’t want to do any more. Yeah. Well, he has done an amazing work right now. Yeah, I mean, really amazing. This is a point where we can just remind him that you’re not going anywhere and that he can reach you whenever he wants. It’s not on the door. That’s it. And we want to make sure we’re clear about how he can connect with you if he needs to through your body, through emotion, but through words would be great too. Yeah, I’m letting him know. Good. So he’s asking if I can just leave that little bit of energy running for him so he can keep processing it. I said, that’s fine. Wonderful. And just if it feels right to you, John, you could let him know that you’ll check back in with him later. I will check back in with you. OK. Good. And you can say your goodbyes in whatever way you want to. And then when you’re ready, come on back here. Well, I’ve always found it powerful. That was very powerful. I think that your expertise, your virtuosity was helpful. You often said something that landed just beyond where I was, but landed well. That was very helpful. Good. It was pretty easy on my side too. In fact, the hardest part was just restraining myself because the work was going so quickly. Your system, I would say your system was very ready to do that. So at the very end, I had a sense of Hermes, almost like a translucent presence surrounding the whole thing, sort of saying, well done. That was unexpected too. That just came. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for your trust and for allowing me to be with you. Thank you. I’d like to take the opportunity to let Rational Man have his time because there is a lot of sense making that could be powerful here. But I don’t want to do that at the expense of the connection that you just established and the experience you’re having in your body right now. So maybe we start with just checking in on how you feel. So I really, really good. And then right here, this little tiny sort of running that’s happening and it’s him. It’s not pleasant, but it’s not distressing to me because yeah, there’s a moment of sort of friendship there. This is just the metabolizing going on, just metabolizing. Just keep checking in with me and yeah, I will. I will. Uh huh. That’s great. That’s great. It’s I love your interception. So well, you have really developed your ability to stay relational and dialogical and present. Learned it from Socrates. And embodied it. So. Pretty good teacher. So I want to take the risk and you tell me and interrupt me at any point if it feels like it’s not going intuitively where you would like to be. But I’d like to draw some things out that we’ve been talking about that that I just witnessed, I think. So the first thing I want to do is say that we encountered a couple of different parts in there. Rational man clearly is a manager who is in charge of keeping things safe. And we also had this frustrated part that I think is a manager that seems to be also charged with keeping things safe. And I think I think we had a bit of a firefighter there in the the bullshit detector who both was trying to keep in a manager way, trying to keep you from being flooded. But also responding to the flood when it would happen by kind of trying to cut it off and call it out. And what happened is as you brought what shorts call self-energy, which we first had to clear other parts, we had to we had to get them to give you space so that you could be with him. And people will have noticed as soon as they gave space, we didn’t have to do anything. You turned back and the relationship field had changed. He wasn’t flooding you and super close. He was a little further. Your system was deactivated and you were present and curious. And the relationship dynamics just took hold. And I would say this is where, from my perspective as an EFT therapist and an attachment based psychotherapist, we watched a beautiful scene of attachment unfold where it was nervous system to nervous system. And so what I was trying to draw out was that connection that you felt emotionally to him. And I wanted him to see it and feel that your system was connected to his. He felt pain. You felt sad about it. And there’s a natural so when we work with couples, primary affect when it comes up when I see my partner who I love and my whole world depends on hurting, some kind of fear comes up in me and I want to make it better and I feel sad that they’re in pain. That is trustworthy because that can’t lie. That can’t be untrue. You can’t have those automatic responses be feigned. And so that gave him an opportunity to experience something that is truly trustworthy between the two of you. And he began to soften. And as he softened, we had grief. But we also had the possibility of something new emerging. And I agree with everything you said. But there’s that there was and I wasn’t imposing it. There’s that there’s a Socratic aspect of him coming to try to live by the principle. Like that’s when he got into the double bind. That’s a Socratic aporia. Right. And he got into oh, oh, oh, oh. There was a ah. Right. And that was that was I thought really important, too. And the part of me that didn’t want to do to I like part of what I’ve been learning in my practice is to stay with aporia rather than product. And that’s rational man coming in to try. Let’s get this. Come on. Like and let’s hold that back. Stay with the aporia. Really stay with the aporia. Give it some autonomy. Let it unfold as it needs to. Or in this case, what I heard was he began to try to work with a symbol of a knot. Yes. Yes. Yes. And that something needed to loosen and and kind of become untied. I think he came to the possibility that emotions are not inherently dangerous. That’s that kind of realization. And that he actually wanted an emotional connection with me. And he was really I mean, yeah. So that is. No, no, no, please. For me, that was that was like that was a real I felt like a profound moment because it was him. Like getting it like he was like it’s like the existential confront. He was confronted by, you know, a kind of inner contradiction. No, no, I want an emotion and it’s not so it can’t be that they’re inherently bad. But my job is to dampen down emotion. And that was the knot. And I felt that that and I’ve had I’m I’m surmising because now we’re doing theoretical reflection that my practice in dialectical dialogs of being apophatic and staying with a poria came in to help me there because it helped me also keep rational man over there. And it helped me. OK, you need to I can’t unravel this for you. Right. But I can be here with you and say I’m going to support you and empathize with you as you try to do. Even as I’m saying that right now, this is getting calmer. In IFS, we’d say that self-energy, that compassion, curiosity, courage, creativity, calmness, connected. That’s the Socratic spirit for me. Well, and there are five I always forget there are five P’s as well as the eight C’s. And I wrote them down here. Patience, perspective, which I think is a lot of this presence. Persistence. No, no, no. Rational man. Yeah. Yeah. Playfulness. I think this energy can be helped by people if they have a practice of internalizing a sage. I think that would help concretize it so they can enact it better. So. This is this is the guide idea and that your attachment with Hermes, not a coincidence that appears at the end as he is, he’s blessing us. Very much. That was that’s the word. And that’s the word. Exactly. I feel very happy right now. Isn’t that lovely? Can I just one thing that I really want to kind of draw out here is we talked about parts having attachment styles. I heard primarily I heard in an anxious attachment style. That and the the the oh, oh, was his dropping into security. Ah, maybe for the first time. I love this. I love how you’re integrating the I.F.S. and attachment. I mean the E.F.T. and the attachment. That’s oh, it’s so good. But John, listen, listen to this. This is the definition in my mind of secure attachment is about the ability to process them. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s that emotion. Emotion is not a threat. It’s data. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s data. And you and he were learning to interpret the data together that it is not flooding. But it can be I can actually feel it and use it and symbolize it. Feel it in the body. Symbolize it in a way it can be understood. Be responded to. Feel regulated. Four steps to attach. That was beautiful. Yeah, feel it. Symbolize it. Often in language. Be responded to accurately in a way that works. Be soothed. That repeated creates a secure attachment style. And that’s what you were doing. Yeah. You’d never done it, John. No, of course not. You’d never done it. Of course you had, right? But you got and we got to witness the transformation that like that kind of presence and love, Billy. That brings sadness to me. Did you never felt it? No. And it’s almost assuring. I have I think my attachment style as John is one of anxious attachment and that has caused me a tremendous amount of loss and suffering and put relationships at risk. So that just came back to me very powerfully. Of course. So I feel for him even more. But it brings up that sort of anxious empathy around. Yeah, I know how bad this could be. It also makes sense to me when you say that why he would be so curious and scared about your ability to forgive him. Exactly. That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. He knows his cost to you. Yeah. Yeah, that lands very deeply, very deeply right here. But it’s not his fault. Yeah, yeah, no. Yeah, he gets that. Yeah. Good. And this is why I.F.S. represents one of the best technologies that we have in our endeavors of, you know, dealing with the meeting crisis. I think it’s very exciting. This idea of creating or not creating, sorry, accessing self-energy. I use inventio. I use inventio, imaginal inventio. You’re discovering and making. It’s a mixture. It’s inventio because it’s transjective. It can’t be either discovery or making. It has to be inventio and it’s imaginal inventio. And in your experience, we have an even fuller demonstration with Hermes coming as a transjective object that he brings the eight C’s and the five P’s into the system in a way that maybe you couldn’t access before. And that’s the larger self. He’s creating this bridge to. I was going to say I didn’t. I make a difference between asking something from him and invoking his presence. I didn’t invoke his presence because I didn’t. I wanted to. And so I didn’t do that, but I asked for his help in the practice that I that I could come into it as authentically as possible. And you did. Yeah. I experienced Hermes as holding space there. That’s where he was. And that’s that’s where he was in the final image. Like there’s I don’t know why there’s sort of a hillside behind and he’s like and it’s that translucent figure. Yeah, very much. I didn’t I didn’t get that until you said it. The translucency was a way of presencing the transjectivity. Excellent. Excellent observation set. I love that. I love that. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that’s what really pumped the movement through that he embodies a kind of liminal transitionality. What was wonderful about that presencing is often when I’m working with him, we have to sort of scrape away automatic projections going on to him given to me by my fundamentalist past. That wasn’t there at all. This is one of the this was like pure presence and it was quite wonderful. Quite wonderful. Beautiful. Even sublime. I think I’d point out one other thing that is really important and that is that there was such a strong relational element to the work between you and I as we did this and that that was not work that you know you were doing by yourself, but it was in dialogue going this way and going internal and maybe going this way hermetic. And I think that creates a picture of safety that we can reference when we talk about encountering the numinous as a way of kind of accessing wisdom that it is connected in all these directions. And that feels it feels like the container you know that’s needed. Yeah. Yeah. That’s landing very deeply for me. And for me I see it as containers within containers. This is the container and then it sits into a larger for a neoplatonic framework and like yeah there’s this is there’s these nestings and but they’re not ossified and hard. They’re like they’re like cellular membranes. So. I had one other question for you. About how old was he? He was a 25 to 30 year old man. Okay. Interesting. He got a little bit younger as the practice went on. I was wondering about that because he had exile qualities and we haven’t talked about exiles but he was clearly carrying a lot of pain and exhaustion guilt and anger and sadness a lot of like the anxious attachment stuff that he began to release in his way. It’s interesting. I kind of wanted to go that way as John but no that was not that wasn’t going to happen. That was not going to happen. He was that’s not it was he needed he needed to dwell. That’s the word I was looking for. He needed to dwell here for a while. That I mean reminds me dwelling at home. He needed to feel at home. Yeah. Yeah. Well I know like 1115 was our hard stop or 1215 your time. You normally give me the last word but I’m wondering if you would like it. Yeah let’s break with that tradition just for this one time. First of all thank you for that. And I think the integrity of the practice as a container and as a vehicle is both a container and a vehicle. I think that was apparent. It was spontaneously there. I didn’t have to force it. It had it was Dow. It wasn’t right. And it’s important to. Important to share this responsibly. I agree with you. And all these dialogical practices I think. Well we’ll talk about I want to talk about them now. I want to talk about the next. What does that mean. Because I think they push on deeper frameworks and right. So I talked about the four E and the cognitive 40 cognitive science and neoplatonism because we’re really challenging the buffered self. And I think I think and I don’t know how this works. So this is a question I don’t I want to know how these I’ll use a convoluted thing. I don’t know how these cultural spirits interact with these psychological parts. We’ve got. In culturation towards the buffered self and we get social reinforcement and salience incentivizing around it and that’s a deeply internalized machine that it’s almost transparent. And I think in practice we we press up against that when we’re doing these kinds of practices. But for me I feel especially. As I bring this whole framework of reflectively trying to philosophically trying to challenge the monadic monophasic monological monostage self that. It’s it’s it’s very amplified for me that sense that deeper sense of what is it like. And that didn’t come up here because there was enough. But it’s coming up now as I step back from it. It’s like as it’s percolating through my psyche is like yeah but. What is it to challenge that cultural spirit and challenge it in a way that integrates with what’s happening with these psychological parts. That’s a question that I have. So what I’d reflect is I feel like rational man. Yes. Yes. And and is now we talk about I think the theme for today was that the imaginal is crucial to being rational and he’s picking it up. I feel like yes. Yeah. This this practice you just engaged in has clarified something for him that he now has sharper questions. I think that’s exactly right. I think that’s exactly right. OK. Yeah. That’s something. Thank you for all of us. We’ll set up another another episode because I do want to explore some of these themes around danger and framework and cultural spirit versus psychological part. If I could just coin those terms as the whole two things conceptually different for a while. Oh yeah. And so I invite you to come back for a fourth episode. Oh. John. Well I tell you. Yeah. Thank you. And I would love to. It’s it’s wonderful to dialogue with you and it’s a gift and I’m very excited if you choose to share. I’m going to put this on my own. Wonderful. I know this may seem like a very shame less or shameful plug but because the spirit of this is to promote these practices we are going to offer the attachment workshop and the I.F.S. workshop again through the foundation coming up. Please everybody. You see what this can do. OK. So you know you’ve got an amazing opportunity with Seth. Please make use of it. I’m going to end the recording here. Thank you so much. Thank you John.