https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=wr6ELWVO8_E
You know, I listen, like I listen to the poking and people saying like what is going on, like how does he try to connect, how does he able to connect these things together? I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of transpersonal agency in terms of, again, trying to bridge the traditional categories, like the angiology of the ancient world and the, even just the hierarchy of gods or the hierarchy of principality that you find in every single culture. So the problem is also in terms of the dismissive tone is like, if I’m trying to bridge a way to help you understand in a more reasonable fashion, something which exists in every culture, you know, has existed in every culture for thousands of years, it seems like this is, that should not, unless you want to dismiss those cultures completely as being stupid for thousands of years. Despite, let’s say, also having civilizations which will probably last longer than ours. Yes. No, it’s like, I don’t know, I think that it’s probably a better effort rather to help, to try to help us understand what they were doing. If we can help people in our terms today, help us understand at least a little bit what they were doing. It seems like that’s something that is worth the effort. This is Jonathan Pajot. Welcome to the symbolic world. So hello everybody. There are no introductions needed. As you can see, I’m here with my friend, John Dravecki, who we’ve been having conversations now for several years, this growing conversation. And John is working on a new video series called After Socrates. And so invited him here to talk about it, kind of give us a sense of what it is he’s trying to do. And of course, for certain, we will wander into all kinds of interesting subjects at the same time. So John, thanks for coming. It’s a great pleasure to be here, Jonathan. I don’t think we’ve talked since Thunder Bay. I don’t think so. Like emails and everything. And so we’re planning another conference, people, by the way, just to say it’s going to be in California, probably, I think, in the spring at some point. We haven’t, I don’t think we, the dates are clear yet, but it’s coming. So that’s great. So John, tell us a bit about what this new project of yours is. So this, this is a project intended to be at the scale of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, but it will only be 25 episodes, not 50. And so it’s, you know, and really up the production value. And first I’ll talk a little bit about the format, and then I’ll talk a little bit about the content. I’m trying to do a lot with the format, really explore and experiment with it. So like Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, there’ll be a lecture series, a continual argument that builds. But in addition, there’ll be, I get points to ponder. And my intent is that people will ponder that individually, but also perhaps that will help discussion groups afford discussion groups for me. And then third, for almost every episode, not every single episode, but I give a practice that people can engage in a meditative practice, a contemplative practice, a dialogical practice, and it builds in order to give people a participatory and perspective sense of what’s being talked about in the lecture. So there, there are these three things running. And then I also break from it just being me in about halfway through episodes 10, A and B. It’s me with Christopher Mastapietro, Gysen, Stock, and Taylor Barrett. And then we take everybody through, like we do a demonstration and an enactment of, you know, of meditation, contemplation, some of the stuff I did at Thunder Bay and beyond. And so there’s that. And then also there’s the series within the series, which is I break from the monologue and Christopher Mastapietro and I do, Socrates and Kierkegaard and the deep and important relationship between Socrates and Kierkegaard. And then that of course gives us a venue in which we can talk about the relationship between the Socratic project and the Christian project. And of course Kierkegaard wrestled with that very profoundly and that’s being done dialogically. And so really trying to play with this medium and open it up and really exemplify new possibilities for how it can afford people entering into deep discussion, entering into ecologies and practices, getting involved with other people, etc. So that’s the big sort of difference in the format. I’m very, very, very, very, very happy because I had an amazing crew. Chris Altorfin, his brother Casey and some other people that are just doing amazing work on that. So it’ll look a lot better. It’ll sound a lot better. And it won’t just be me in a room with a whiteboard. I’m trying to as much as possible exemplify what I’m talking about in the series, but maybe I’ll pause there in case you have any questions. So is there a public during the filming? Like do you have people there with you? No, we didn’t do that. But I’m hoping that, like I said, that there’ll be that people will get engaged with it, with other people. I’m really trying to exemplify that, encourage that and give people a chance to bring. I mean, I’m trying to exemplify even in the discussion with Chris, like you and I have been doing, trying to bridge between these worlds that have typically been isolated, even though we have tremendous resources for trying to bridge between them. And again, trying to do that in a dialogical fashion. Chris is an ardent, I don’t know what to call it, follower of Krakogard. And you know, Chris, you know how eloquent. Yeah, I had a discussion with him that was going to probably be up by the time this one goes up. So yeah. Excellent. That would be great. So that’s the format of it. The content is after Socrates in a bunch of ways. I’m trying to, I’m after Socrates in the sense of pursuing him and trying to understand him and all the people who have tried to pursue him and understand him. And then there’s after Socrates in the sense of, well, who are these people that came after Socrates? And so I’m trying to trace out the whole tradition, the Socratic tradition, all the way through up to its culmination in people like Erigina and Kusa. I picked them for specific reasons. I know you, why is it Maximus in there or something like that? But here’s my reason. For me, two of the main themes are this, you know, that’s interconnected of that reality is inherently dialectical in the Platonic sense. And Erigina, for me, is really, really clear on that. And then Nicholas of Kusa is the corresponding learned ignorance. And learned ignorance, I think, is the culmination of Socratic proposal, that the wise person is the one who ultimately knows what they do not know. But of course, taken through this whole huge Neoplatonic and then eventually Christian Neoplatonic tradition. And what I’m trying to do is help people. I’m not claiming that this is what was going on in Socrates or the Platonic dialogues, although I’ll make a lot of arguments around it. But I’m trying to reverse engineer from this whole entire tradition. What is, right, this whole Socratic, Platonic, Neoplatonic practice of dialectic and didiologos. I’m trying to reverse engineer it and make it plausible, make it powerful, make it practicable for people. That’s the content. Yeah, so there. So definitely, it’s not like because the first series you did was more like kind of the history of thought through your lens. And also explaining the notions of relevance and all these kind of concepts that you play with. So here you’re really dealing with basically taking someone by the hand and kind of saying like, okay, so now let’s do this. Exactly, exactly. Now let’s do this. What would it be like to take this up as a way of life and to very responsibly put that way of life into deep conversation with other ways of life? So, you know, I talked at the beginning about, you know, Socrates and Jesus, and I believe this is done very respectfully. One of the people, Casey, is a Christian. And so he said, so I was right, right. And, you know, because they both talk about being midwives, helping give birth. And, you know, and there are Christians who have talked about that. And I said, so I want to pick up on that. And then that’s why it leads into, you know, what’s the deep interconnections between the Socratic way and the Christian way? First in that, you know, culmination in Erigina and Nicholas of Cusa, but also in this deep dialogue that I’m having with Chris about Socrates and Kierkegaard and how Kierkegaard is really, I think, I really recommend people to really, like the philosophical fragments where he’s really wrestling about how did Chris put it? He’s a follower of Jesus, but Socrates is his teacher, right. And so there’s this, because, you know, he wrote his PhD thesis on Socrates and things like that. So I’m really wanting to help explicate, exemplify the Socratic way. And I’ll name that for that whole tradition and trajectory. And then how it’s also bound up with the Christian way, how it’s bound up with the cultivation of wisdom. And I will, I do bring some coxsai in. How could you not? Right, I bring it in along the way. There’s stuff around relevance, realization, stuff that’s come up about, you know, in the discussions I’ve had with you and with Paul, the discussions I had with the Buddhist monks when I was at Maple and things like that. So, yeah, it represents really trying to turn this from theorizing into proposing how one could enter into a way of life. So do you think that, let’s say, because you talk about how for you this this process culminates in in Eugenia and Nicholas of Cusa. Do you think that in the West, people went away from what Socrates had brought? Yeah, yeah, I think so. And this comes out at the very beginning of the series when I talk about sort of what’s called new way. And sometimes people, third way, sometimes people also say third wave, Platonism, which is this whole new recent scholarship around Plato. That’s really taken off important figures like Gonzalez, Drew Highland, Kirkland, Ruchik, a whole bunch of important scholars who are really arguing that, and this follows in some way from earlier points. Well, I won’t go into that, but it’s because that’s just another can of words that I do. That what we we’ve treated the the dialogical nature of Plato’s philosophy as ornamental, actually essential and central and crucially important. And of course, this ties in with my argument that the propositional, the procedural, the respectable and the participatory are all bound up together. And that dialectic into the logos is central to that. And I think we we’ve only recently in the last 20 or 30 years has this become the new way of really understanding Plato and correspondingly understanding Socrates because you can’t pull them apart. Yeah. That I think affords us a profound recovery of what was really going on in that tradition. And for people who are even like yourself, who are Christian, right? Why were Christians so deeply attracted to this way? Why did it matter so much to them? Why did they feel that they needed to enter into deep dialogue with it? If you go into most well, so I’ll change that. If you went into the philosophy classes I went into about Plato and Socrates, you wouldn’t have any clue as to why does anybody care about this other than some arcane arguments about whether or not there are universals and stuff like that. So very much trying to bring this back. And that’s also part of a larger project, which is this thing I’ve been talking about. And I mentioned to you how I think neoplatonism can form like the courtyard of dialogue. It can be the intellectual Silk Road because of its capacity to enter into deep reciprocal reconstruction with Christianity and Judaism and Islam and Buddhism, etc. Yeah. And so I mean, I’m curious about what you said in terms of the idea that the importance of the dialogue format in terms of what it is that Plato was trying to manifest because you’re right. Usually the way it’s presented to us and I remember in my philosophy classes, it’s presented to us as if Socrates is the protagonist and the other characters are basically reacting, questioning, challenging Socrates. So he’s the one, he’s the thread you have to follow. And so you see it more, how do you see that in terms of how the dialogue functions in the, how the dialogical aspect functions in the dialogue? So it’s very important to pay attention to the fact that many of the dialogues end in a poria, which really undermines the claim that what Socrates is doing is laying out an argument and he’s got a conclusion that he’s trying to get us to. Instead, so for example, there’ll be a dialogue on courage and you’ll have two figures, two generals, I believe, and they’ll both be talking about courage and then Socrates will do his thing. He’ll ask the questions and the definitions don’t hold. They don’t, right? And if you just follow sort of the propositions, you don’t pay attention to the drama. You’ll come to the conclusion, oh well, look, it just ends in skepticism. Socrates himself says, I don’t have a definition, right? Pay attention to the drama. The two generals, first of all, they represent different things and I’ll come back to that in a sec. The two generals say, we want our sons to spend time with you Socrates, because it was the whole question was, where should we send our sons to be educated so they’re more likely to become courageous? So wait, wait, wait, wait, what’s going on in this? If you pay attention just to the propositions like skepticism, but why if this argument just leads to a skeptical conclusion, do the generals say, and this is a moment of drama, oh, but we want you to be the person that we send our sons to in order to learn courage. And you realize, oh, Socrates is right, he’s exemplifying the virtue. And part of the exemplification is the point that it has to be exemplified. It cannot be captured by statement, but you don’t see that if you don’t follow the drama. Then you have to pay attention to the character of these two generals and what they, this one, the one general, he all he just, I know, here’s my intuition and right and Socrates says challenges that first person intuition. The other person, the other person represents sort of third party authority. Well, the sophist taught me this and here’s a definition and here’s a definition and Socrates demolishes that. So the first person and the second, the third person are demolished and what’s left is the value of the second person perspective, the dialogical perspective. You have to put the character, the drama together with the argument to see what is actually happening and what is actually being conveyed. Did that make sense? No, that makes sense. I mean, it’s like because I think that I’ve also been very influenced by the way that I was taught Plato and so, you know, it also because of Plato’s kind of hostility and Socrates is the hostility that existed between him and the playwright, the hostility between the way that Plato represents the poets and all of these ideas. I mean, I think the way in which you feel as if the dramatic aspect of the dialogues would be accidental. But I mean, I think you’re forcing me to rethink the dialogues myself because what you’re describing makes a lot of sense. I think that makes a lot of sense in terms of how it is that, how it is that it can also help us explain sometimes why Socrates does certain things, which are sometimes rather mysterious, like in terms of logic. Oh, yes, yes, exactly. Because he’s often doing something for a pedagogical purpose than for a strictly logical connection to be made. And like, Reid, I got the great pleasure to talk to him and we’re going to talk again, DC Schindler, his book, Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason, and he just lays out like even the structure of the Republic, how Socrates goes down to Piraeus. And then like, like, he’s, he’s actually exemplifying going into the cave, right, and then coming out of the cave. There’s all of this is going on. And you have to pay attention because why is why is Plato putting in that structure? Because Plato is trying to emphasize that the ascent and the return are both important to understand what Socrates and what wisdom are about. We have tended to only emphasize the ascent, but Socrates’ return into the depths of the cave is as important to understanding the Socratic project. And so again, you have to pay attention to the structure. And I think it, I agree, it’s, it helps to explain so many things like there’s dialogues in which Socrates is the one that’s getting sort of beaten up with the Parmenides famously. Right, right, right. And there and there and there are dialogues when Socrates withdraws, or he’s not even present like the later dialogues, because Plato is, he keeps trying to dramatize and write something, and he’s trying to, and in the letter, right, the seventh letter, Plato talks about how he gave the world a more beautiful Socrates, right. So I have to, like, there’s something going on there above and beyond. This is just, you know, a stage so that Plato’s mouthpiece Socrates can utter propositions about some theory that Plato has, which I agree with many of the current scholarship. Plato doesn’t have a theory of the forms. The forms don’t play that role in his theory. They have a much different function and that’s related to all this dialogical stuff we’re talking about, but I’m talking too much. No, no, no, this is great. So I mean, what are you hoping to, like, what are you going for? What are you hoping to accomplish with this? Well, I’m hoping that, well, some things have already happened. Some people are, even before this, because of some of the interviews I’ve been having and discussions, they’re going back and rereading Plato and getting stuff out of it that they didn’t get before. And I think that’s important because I agree with Arthur versus Lewis. Because we often don’t read, we often don’t read the actual dialogs. We read, you know, regurgitations of them, like, because we read in secondary sources. I had a similar experience. I read the Phaedra recently because I was talking about the problem of Pharmacon and I was in Yehuda. And so I went back to read Phaedra and now that even what you said just lit so many things for me because there’s some gestures that Socrates poses, like he covers his face at some point because he’s too embarrassed to say certain things, you know, because you know it’s like this weird relation of seduction. And you’re not sure exactly what’s going on in terms of Socrates and Phaedra. And so you realize that the gestures he’s posing, the actual physical, the way that he’s described his acting is part of what he’s trying to bring out in the problem of it’s outside world that he’s in, you know, crossing the river, going outside the city and now what is that space? Yes, yes. And you get the emphasis. This is, you know, this goes way back to Gonzales’s book, Dialectic and Dialogue, and Plato, which was one of the first books of the Third Way, arguing that Plato is really trying to point us towards non-propositional knowledge, non-propositional knowing. You can see why I would find that important and how central that is for actually enabling and affording profound transformation and that the Socratic cultivation of the self is a properly aspirational cultivation of the self and therefore it is committed to profound transformation. So all those things that Socrates are doing that are so weird, right, if you go back and reread them, they make a lot more sense, which is what good exegesis should do. If people could read in this new way, that’s important. I agree with Arthur versus Lewis that I think Neoplatonism is kind of like the spiritual grammar of the West. You and I sort of agree and sort of disagree on that and that’s fine. But I think the degree to which people are, and I don’t mean this in an insulting way, but the degree to which people are ignorant of it and the degree to which people only know of it as a set of propositions about weird things that people used to think. I think is the degree to which people are cut off from this very valuable way of life. And I want people to be, I want to be able to afford people returning to this way of life. And as I keep emphasizing that returning to that way of life in a dialogical fashion, which means that way of life has to be put into dialogue with other important ways of life. And that’s what is needed right now. Well, that’s my proposal at least. Yeah, I what I love about what you’re saying in terms of our constant discussion is that there is a sense in which you seem to be proposing that the vision that Plato presents or even the vision that Socrates presents through Plato is bound in the drama. Like it’s a story. It’s so Socrates’ story. Yes. Which is carrying, let’s say, preventing the ideas from being only propositional, which is bringing them into this engaged experience. Yes. And again, I don’t deny the importance of the narrative. But I would say that the point of the narrative, given my previous point, is to take us to what is beyond the narrative, the non propositional, the non narrative in some fashion, the relationship to the good or to the one. And I think that’s important. I’m all I’m because because of you. I’m in and I’m grateful for this. I mean, and these videos are going to be released and I, I mean, I’m going to have two videos but I’ve had discussions beyond this with with Bishop Maximus from Patagonia who’s Eastern Orthodox Bishop and also but also philosopher he teaches in the seminary, and we’ve been having an ongoing discussion about this. He has a proposal about what he called and he’s very strict about this, the transfiguration of neoplatonism within Christianity. Yeah. And how that differs from how it was taken up in the West in scholasticism. I think that’s, that’s very, very cool. And so I don’t want to deny what you said. But I, but I want to say that and Plato uses mythos. And this is something people forget like, and he uses symbols in your sense of the word the divided line is not an out is something more like the sun isn’t just an allegory. We literally do depend on the side. Right, right. Right. And so, they’re like, you have to take all of these things to take the symbols the narrative, and the argument, and also the character that’s being put all of this has to be taken in. And I would argue, because but Plato is trying to do is, I mean, he’s clearly trying to get us. He’s trying to activate and integrate and make it present to us the non propositional and how important and central it is. And how much it affords a way of transformation. And that’s why he uses all of these things because he’s trying to simultaneously trigger the the propositional the procedural the prospect of a little participatory and integrate them, and then orient them towards something. Yeah, that’s I mean, I think what you’re saying I mean, like I have to stop thinking because, because it’s really I’m really like I’m going through what I know like I haven’t read all the dialogue but like the dialogue that I have read, I’m kind of going through them and I’m seeing. And also because there’s some elements like you said there’s some elements of the dialogue which gets pulled out. Sometimes and shown as being exemplary of what Plato thought. But then you find contradiction if you if you see it that way. Right. Right in the, in the symposium, you get this silly myth right this silly myth of the, with the round people like they’re like, you want a logo so you want to get this like really silly of these circuit round people like the two opposites that join together, which is weird because the modern people are not sometimes using that as a actual like myth that ancient people believe but when you read it in the text is clear that this is they’re making fun of. They’re making fun of this. And so I read I remember having professors tell me like this is Plato not mocking mythos and how mythos isn’t part of, of his thought, but then when you go into when you see some of the images you use like the image of the chariot for example, with the two horses like there’s these images that he uses that are that are right out of like my symbolic playbook right they did it’s perfectly fit into this idea of. And even there I think Plato’s critique of Aristophanes is very is nuanced I don’t think it’s walkery I think he also thinks there’s something right about this idea of love, finding something that it right right to that is like that is lacking in us, and that we we are not native to ourselves but we nevertheless need for our core self like like there’s stuff in there, because Socrates actually says that he thinks that well it’s sort of Plato seems to indicate that Socrates Aristophanes speech is the best one until Socrates right because all the other ones are like sort of medical reductionism and just self self indulgence but they’re Aristophanes is so I agree there’s a critique there, I think it’s more subtle than market. Yeah, okay, good. I think I think it’s like, again, it’s like, what’s going on there. And, and so it’s, I think it’s Plato, in that sense, sort of being better than Aristophanes. He’s not simply like Aristophanes does in the clouds, he’s not simply mocking. You know, but he’s doing something a little bit more nuanced and sophisticated around that. Yeah, you’re probably right. I maybe it’s because I want him to be mocking yourself. I mean, but, but think about it. I mean, there’s even something in your work, a lot about the left and the right hand and the masculine feminine that, you know, I get it, it’s presented in a comical fashion he’s Aristophanes. But there’s something in that myth that myth is also pushing on those. Yeah, the idea of the androgynous being for sure like I tend to see the creation of Adam and Eve as being something like, like, like when it says that it took Eve from Adam’s side I tend to think of it like cut in half like this idea of separating and being into two opposites that’s the way that I tend to see it so yeah definitely definitely. I mean, I think this is, it’s exciting I can’t wait to, I definitely can’t wait to see it and so are you are you offering it on YouTube, are you going to be charging for it are you it’s going to be just okay. It’s free. It’s going to be free. And it’s going to start. January 9, which is a Monday and it’ll be twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays. And you just go on the YouTube channel and you can watch it and there’ll be some more promo videos and I’m going to release a couple of videos to try and try to help people, hopefully not in a heavy handed fashion, like how to how to take this how to relate to after Socrates. And so I’m very excited about it too. It’s, it feels awakening was really comprehensive that was this huge argument. This one is much more like you said it’s a bunch more about trying to induce people into right a pathway. And I think one that we’ve lost. And one that I think we need to properly recover as a way of responding to the meeting crisis. So it goes towards a criticism and a good criticism that many people made and you made a version of it and you know that I’ve responded in the ways that I can to your criticisms I take them. I take them to heart. But, you know, but at the end but but what do you do like, oh, you have a few practices and like and it’s no yeah that’s exactly right that’s a good criticism. There’s been two fundamental responses and they’re bound up and after Socrates one was you and Paul and you particularly, you know, this is a very individualistic project and, and so I’ve, yeah, no, no, you’re right. And this is why the dialogical so important. Secondly, it’s like, there’s some practices and all that boat you know there’s a way of life and yes right and that’s what I’m trying to bring out together in after Socrates yes the not make this, you know, individualistic in nature, make it properly dialogical rather than monological and also not don’t just talk about some practices and some. But talk about something much more comprehensive a way of life. So that’s, that’s how I’m trying to respond to some of the criticisms. Yeah, and in some ways also, I think what’s interesting is, I kind of see you honing in on a new platonic like more and more like honing in on this new platonic strain. And it also has a. It also I think has the advantage of being something that already has a coherence to it right it already is a kind of coherent body. And so in the one hand you can reinterpret and you can, let’s say, let’s say play with it in ways to emphasize certain things and not but it. But I think that it definitely will. I think for people for people kind of coming to it it’ll it’ll present more as this as a path like this here’s this coherent path that has existed for that for thousands of years it’s like it’s part of the western path for sure like there’s no way to avoid it this has been. You know this has been something that has followed through from before before Christianity it influenced Judaism and then it kind of went into Christianity. And so for even if Christian sometimes can criticize and say like no we need the, we need the Christian version let’s say it’s at least I think a robust position to hold like it’s a, it’s a place to stand where you can really engage in the discussion and, and, and you have all this foundation to to pull on and it doesn’t see because a lot of the new spiritual spirituality sometimes people, they pull in from everywhere right, which is, which I understand why because in some ways that’s what happens when you’re kind of lost, not lost here when things are broken you’re like okay, you know pointing like this. And so, and so you you you know you go to, you’ll go to a conference, and then people will be, you know it’s a Western person standing in front of you who probably grew up as a Christian and and all their citing Buddhist texts and Indian texts and a native and native perspective and everything and it’s like well okay I get it but now what like what do I do. But the platonic tradition. It has that core it has that place to stand on it feels like. Thank you for saying that the, I mean, I am of course proposing. I’m not proposing nostalgia I’m proposing we pick it up and how to move it forward. That’s a big part of it too. But exactly thank you for saying that. And secondly that that that hopefully shifts the focus off me on to this path and way of life, and I’m trying to articulate it, and I’m trying to, I’m trying to contribute and propose how it can be taken forward. And so, and so I’m trying to deal with the guru problem like the modern guru problem. Yeah, exactly, exactly. I want to avoid the guru problem. And, and so that both of those things are important and after Socrates is an attempt to address those two, like you say, can can can this can this be a coherent thing that feeds back into tradition. And then the second one is, how do we, how do we get this focused on a way of life and not sort of just on me and the things I’m talking about. And so it’s trying to do both of those as well. That’s also why I have people other than me playing important parts within the presentation. I mean, we’ll definitely be paying attention to that. That’s, I mean, it sounds great. I can’t wait to see and then I’ll and I can’t wait to argue with you about things that I don’t agree with. Of course, of course, and I expect you to. And I hope you see that I’m responding to a lot of criticisms and, you know, criticisms given with affection and respect by you and others in how I’m doing this. This is my way of trying to be deeply responsive and responsible to a lot of those points. And of course, I expect that you and Paul and other people will like, well, this is what I disagree with John and that’s fine. But but I do. There’s a there’s a way of responding to criticisms that is not the attempt to silence conversation or prevent disagreement, but that at least people acknowledge. Yes, you heard me and you’ve done something constructive in response. And that’s what I’m trying to do. That’s great. Yeah, that’s wonderful. And so based on what on that, I think that one of the things that I’ve appreciated that’s been going that I’ve seen happen recently is, you know, there, there has been there was this contention. We didn’t seem contentious when we were talking about it when we had this discussion a while ago with rebel wisdom, and I brought up the idea that the way that you talk about transpersonal agency in seems to connect very closely to the ancient way that people talked about. Yeah, about spiritual beings and how spiritual beings affect us and everything. And it seems like there was an interesting possibility creating the bridge. And that I think, since I’ve been speaking on YouTube, it’s the thing that I that has brought about on me the most criticism. And it’s also because it probably until then, I didn’t touch. Like I was far enough from from, let’s say touching the modern psychological apparatus, or the modern way in which we understand things so that people either didn’t know what I was talking about or didn’t see how it was going to affect like their worldview. Yeah, and challenge the worldview. Exactly. And so I’ve appreciated I’ve seen you, let’s say being forced to like defend just even talking to me. In terms of this question. So, so I wanted to express that thanks as well because I really appreciate it. I know that in some ways probably. It’s still an exploratory discussion. Yes, I know that that there are several questions that still need to be, let’s say, that have to be dealt with in terms of understanding how these things bridge or not or how they connect but but I appreciate the fact that that you defended me let’s say are you tried to defend my position, even though you don’t necessarily even hold my position. Yeah, I, I. Well, first of all, the defense of the proposal is because I think there’s, there is parts I deeply agree with. We do disagree on some points but there’s parts I deeply do agree with and and even the parts I disagree with I think it is a proposal that should be taken seriously. And, yeah, I, yeah, there was a couple of videos, and I also did, I did a stupid thing I tried to make an argument on Twitter defending you. Yeah, we’re never do that. Yeah, I try. I mean, I had to say there was a lot of positive uptake of that argument. And so, yeah, there were sort of three venues in which I tried, like, because they were trying to make you sound like an idiot, and I am. I’m, first of all, I’m really convinced you’re not an idiot. And secondly, I just, I also deeply dislike that strategy that that I mean I get it a lot to. It’s usually along the lines of john is just blah blah blah blah blah, therefore I can dismiss him. It’s a dismissive strategy rather than an engagement strategy. And I think there’s no defense at all for dismissive strategies. I think if you do it’s just a strategy, you deserve to be dismissed. Seriously. And so that also sort of got me a little bit like, first of all, Jonathan’s not an idiot. He enters in good faith and he brings a lot of intelligence. I tried to bold out what I thought the argument was, at least how I was taking it. Right. And then, and then it’s like, don’t be dismissive, engage, or shut up. I mean, it’s like, like, please. Right. We, we, we, we do not need. We like that dismissive. I don’t have to think about you because here’s my, you know, you’ve put in, you know, two decades of work and I can dismiss it by this. It’s a three premise, this three sentences response. I like, like, come on, like, please, right, enter in, like, ask questions, make criticisms, but don’t, but do it in an engaged fashion. Don’t try to be dismissive. And what I was hearing was an attempt to dismiss you, which is also what, what, what that irks me. Yeah. And so, and so I, I’ve been thinking a lot about because that, you know, I, I, I listened, like I listened to the, to the, the poking and people saying, like, what, what is going on? Like, how does he try to connect? How does he able to connect these things together? I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of transpersonal agency in terms of, again, trying to bridge the traditional categories, like the ancient world and the, even just the hierarchy of gods or the hierarchy of principality that you find in every single culture. So the problem is was also in terms of the dismissive, the dismissive tone. It’s like, it’s like, if I’m trying to bridge away to help you understand in a, in a in a more reasonable fashion, something which exists in every culture, you know, for has existed in every culture for thousands of years. It seems like this is a, that should not, unless you want to dismiss those cultures completely as being stupid for thousands of years, despite, let’s say also having civilizations, which will probably last longer than ours. Yes. No, it’s like, I don’t know. So I think that it’s probably a better effort rather to help, to try to help us understand what they were doing. If we can help people in our terms today, help us understand at least a little bit what they were doing. It seems like that’s something that is worth the effort. I totally agree. And I think you’re right. I think that part of this is right, exactly sort of the enlightenment mythos of the priority of the present and the future and the past is something we leave behind because it was bound in superstition, et cetera. I think it’s completely legitimate for us with knowledge that we have that people in the past didn’t have to make criticisms. But I think it’s also important to realize that we, as you said, are also locked into ways of seeing that might be open to serious education by paying attention to what other cultures at other times have said, even our own culture in previous historical epochs. This is part of what I was saying earlier about, like, we had a way of reading Plato that was largely so that we could put Plato behind us so that we could get to Descartes. This is like this introduction to philosophy. Here’s Plato. Here’s Samaritonal. See why this doesn’t work. Descartes, right? And then Descartes can’t. And then we and then and because all that really matters. Are these core epistemological problems? It’s like, well, maybe not. Maybe that’s actually the wrong way of framing the whole problem of right. And so I think that that that that there’s a lot of. Trying to dismiss you because you are doing exactly what you’re talking about. You’re talking you’re trying to say maybe there’s something we can learn from these people and their mythological worldviews. I happen to agree with that. I don’t happen to agree with everything you say about it, but I happen to agree with that part of it. Yeah. And and I’m not quite and I even and I even I made the argument, I said, like, putting aside the religious thing, Durkheim makes similar arguments. Yeah. And Durkheim is like central to anthropology and sociology. I’m not saying Durkheim is right, but people don’t go, oh, stupid Durkheim, who like no, no, he’s a pivotal figure like like like. Yeah, I think the difference between between, let’s say, what I am trying to propose and what Durkheim would have been proposing is that I am proposing a type of agency which is real coming from above. And so it’s not just that humans put things as you know, elevate things as being, let’s say, totems, you know, or or characteristics that they that they create their identity around, which is what seems to be more a bit what Durkheim was proposing, rather that there is also what there’s definitely a top down relationship that that identity then binds and that there is a form of agency which binds coming back down on the group, which is which is bound by it. OK, so two things to say about that. First of all, that second part, I think there’s a cognitive scientific argument to be made about that, about distributed cognition and collective intelligence, top down causation. And you know that you and I talked about that. The other thing is, I think I think you should be a little bit more charitable to Durkheim. I think Durkheim, he doesn’t have that developed, but he definitely has the idea of super organic and and and you know, and and that that represents or has an impact on people. It’s I think it’s it’s preliminary in Durkheim, but I think there’s a legitimate opening even within Durkheim for talking about right, collective intelligence, distributed cognition and its top down effect on individual participants, which only strengthens the argument to my mind. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so and I’ve been thinking a little bit about the question of independent existence, because I know that’s one of the things that came up in the discussion, which is that do these angels exist without humans, right? Do these transpersonal agencies exist without humans? And I tend like I always have the same approach like my I really believe in a fractal structure of reality. And so if I want to test something up here, I’d test it down here at my level. And I and I I use that as an analogy to help me transpose the problem. And so the question happened, the same question can be asked about me. The question is, do I exist without my body? And the answer is, it’s a ridiculous question. It’s actually not a question. Like, what are you asking? You know, at least in the Christian position, like St. Gregor of Nyssa says clearly that humans begin to the human begin to exist in their bodies. They don’t pre-exist in some temporal way. You can say that they exist in the mind of God from all eternity, if you wanted to say something like that, or they exist in the totality of all things. Like there are ways to formulate like a kind of pre-existence, but it’s not it’s not a pre-existence in time. And so the idea of understanding transpersonal agency seems to be the same. So there’s a manner in which we can say it pre-exists, just like you could say about you to a certain in certain manner. Just follow me through this argument that you pre-exist your body. And the reason why you could say something like you pre-exist your body is because the elements of your body are changing. And so like the actual chemicals in your body and the parts, like they’re not the same that you had when you were born. Right. They moved. It’s like it’s a what is it? The ship of Theseus problem. Right. Yes, yes, very much. And so you pre-exist your body in that sense. And so you could also understand that transpersonal agency pre-exists the bodies in that sense. That is a basketball team that has a coherent agency acting on it, that acts as a body. The players can change. Right. And even the management can change. There’s a certain amount of variability possible in the body, but the agency can remain the same despite the change of the body. There’s a limit. There’s a limit. At some point, if you shatter the manifestation too much, like if you shatter the body too much and at some point, at some point it separates and then there’s no then there’s no being like there’s no being anymore. But so I think that if we see it that way, then we can both understand the reason why we talk about angelic pre-existence, but also understand that angels don’t exist without their subtle bodies either. Like they exist in the world through the effects that they have. So that, you know, the angel of charity doesn’t exist without charity. Like there has to be acts of charity in the world for the angel of charity to exist. Like the angelic virtues, which are one of the hierarchy of angels, are the easiest to understand in that sense. It’s like there is no angel of hope without hope. There has to be hope. There has to be a body of hope for the angel of hope to exist. OK, first of all, this is tremendously helpful. I let me let me try and say something similar. So we talked about, you know, non reducibility, the you can’t reduce. I can’t reduce you to your chemical structures because you are instantiated in different chemicals and your body isn’t the same even physical body it was when you were 25 and all that sort of ship of these kind of thing. Same thing with a computer program. I can put this computer program in this computer or that computer or that computer. What makes it the same program? Now, can it be free of any computer? That’s weird. But can you reduce it to any one computer? No. And in that sense, it you know, it pre-exists being in that computer because it’s in this computer, etc. And then secondly, like you said, that these things can’t exist independently of their manifestations. And and I think. Let me let I’ll try and phrase this as a question. There’s a connection that coming up. We got into a point in our discussion where I proposed to you that these higher things might not have consciousness or self-consciousness. And you and you were very gracious about that. You said, you know, there might be something in that because the angels are actually really weird in a lot of mythology and they like the angel of death. Is that like is that a self-conscious being and stuff like that? Like and I thought that was also very helpful because I think there’s a lot of questions that are being mixed up together here. And so are these things self-conscious? Do they exist before us, independently from us self-consciously? And I think what you’re saying and I’m not saying we completely agree, but you’re saying those questions are kind of picking up on the wrong parts. Like you’re emphasizing aspects of the mythology that are not actually the parts that should be emphasized. So. I guess what I’m asking is, does that sound like I’m getting you fairly? I think so. I think so. I think I do think that I’m definitely. I’m far more open to the idea of consciousness, trans-personal consciousness, because I really don’t see any reason apart from that, I can’t experience it, that consciousness and self-consciousness should that human beings should be the crown of consciousness. Like I don’t necessarily see that that’s necessary in any way. Like because I see consciousness scaling up to me, up to a human, I have like I said, just the reason why I hesitate is because I can’t experience the consciousness of a trans-personal being. Like I don’t have access to it. I don’t even know what that would be. Like what type of consciousness would it be? But I definitely don’t exclude it because there’s something. It’s interesting, though. There’s something about agency and consciousness, which I find fascinating in some of the secularist type of arguments, which is that there seems to be a desire to make the human person very, very special in some ways. Because the offense that I feel, there’s almost this sense of that all of a sudden, you’re touching this deep taboo when I say, why wouldn’t there be trans-personal consciousness? Why does it bother you that that would be a reality if you notice the pattern of agency acting on groups of humans? Why does it bother you that there would be consciousness as even a materialist, like even as a naturalist? Why would the human being be the summit of all things? That’s also something that I’ve been wondering about in terms of why people… Let me help you on that point. First of all, it’s like, notice how important consciousness and self-consciousness is for agency and for attribution. And you’re trying to put that into a worldview that often tries to claim that consciousness and self-consciousness are reducible, epiphenomenal. Like, that’s a big tension. That’s a huge tension in that sort of position. It’s like, then you’re saying that there really is something ontologically real and important about consciousness and self-consciousness. And that doesn’t fit in well with any kind of reductive materialism. So, first of all, I think you’re giving me strength in there. Secondly, I… This has to go… And I don’t want to repeat our conversation, right? I never said in principle that it wasn’t possible. I just said, I think I do kind of something like you do. I look at what are the conditions that seem to track here with consciousness about connectivity and recursivity and stuff that really exemplified in the nervous system? Do we have good evidence that that’s possible? Is it logically possible? Yes. Do we have any physical means of instantiating that right now? I don’t think so. So I tend to say I think we have clear evidence for intelligence. I think that not in principle, but in practice right now, I don’t see how it can be. Yeah. So you would say intelligence and agency, but not not consciousness. But so here’s my full thing. But not self-consciousness. Right. Intelligence and agency, not consciousness or self-consciousness, but not in principle impossible, only in fact. Not the case. That’s a different thing. Yeah. So like, so sorry, because we are going to kind of jump back into our conversation. But so if so, when let’s say a city defends itself against parasites, like when a city defends itself against criminals. And so you can’t see that there’s a form of consciousness of its state. Like there’s a form of consciousness of its borders and how it’s well, because you’re not crumbling and how it’s how it’s, let’s say, holding together or functioning smoothly and sends out, it sends out like some kind of bodies do that without consciousness. I understand. I understand. That’s what I say. Your system is fantastically intelligent at that. And yet I have no reason or evidence that it’s conscious, let alone self-conscious. Yeah. But it happens through like it would happen through meaningful orders, especially in that case, like the law will be like a law. There’ll be like a statement. There’ll be like a general telling the military to go and do these things. There’ll be this. There’ll be like at least at the level of the humans will be consciousness going down towards the action. To a degree. But even that is not all the way down because your consciousness doesn’t permeate down to the chemical interactions that are making your body move. No, for sure. Not for sure. So I see consciousness attenuating at both ends. OK, right. All right. So like I said, I mean, I definitely hold the traditional I hold the traditional kind of Christian position in some ways, so I tend to. But I understand why we need to definitely to do. I need to think about it more and we need to do more work in terms of trying to find ways to formulate the analogies so we can see how far we can go with this question. And I also, again, want to say, you know, the three papers that I published with Dan Chiapi about, you know, the scientists moving the rovers around to Mars and all of this are two things like this is this is this idea about collective agency, collective intelligence, distributed cognition, we agency. This is cutting edge stuff. So this is innovative and important. And secondly, and and this is not inconsequential, you know, and I’ve picked up on this in some of the talks I gave at the talk I gave at Cambridge. And like there was a there was a spirituality that naturally sort of emerged within the scientists, this weird thing about how they they really almost sympathetically, magically identified with the rover and they did these rituals where they would embody the rover or they would anthropomize the rover and personalize it. And this was not just ornamental. This was crucial to them being able to do the work. Like that’s also an important point to be made. And I make it like, again, it’s not the same as what you’re claiming. But it’s also but it also means that you’re not like saying something completely like, you know, out of the blue. Yeah. Well, for sure. In the case that you’re talking about, it could definitely help you understand totem ization practices, like different types of of practice, the tribal practices of identification with with spirit animals, you know, like this idea of certain characteristics that we recognize as as identifying us and then binding us, but then also manifesting in the way we act. And so there’s you can you can see how that would function to cohere a group and get them to act coherently against their enemies in the world, together with other tribes, like they would do that. You can understand that with your Mars rover experiment. Definitely right. And it also it points to the ritual and the imaginal like that. That’s not just sort of a belief system. They’re enacting it and they’re and they’re and they’re drawing on the photographs and they’re doing all this stuff that’s imaginal in order to afford them actually being able to be present on Mars to get that actual perspectival knowing. Like it’s so again, I agree with everything you said about. And Vertesi does use the word totem, by the way, the rover became a totem for them. But I want you to understand that it’s simultaneously like a social process, but also it interpenetrates deeply into cognitive accordance, it actually enables people to do to see and to do the work they need to do. Yeah, it’s not. Yeah. It’s not just like you said, it actually makes it easier for them to to exist this way, like it’s not just that they’re not just they’re not just telling themselves. I mean, like, let’s say it’s not just team rallying themselves up with their mascot and with their thing. There’s something more. There’s more of a kind of an actual embodiment of the rover through practices that that make it that what they’re trying to do is more effective. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And that, by the way, then feeds back that see the spirituality and the affordance of of agency feedback into the point we were making before about top down effects actually making a difference in the cognition and the sense making of the individuals. All right. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And definitely, definitely it is it is more food for thought. And I know that we’re going to continue this conversation forever. As long as we as long as we still breathe. So I would want to say that this stuff, actually some of the more recent stuff I’ve done on the imaginal, the ritual also gets developed and articulated in after Socrates. Yeah. And I think that’s great. I also think that there’s a there. I mean, I’m going to say this, I might get in trouble for this, but, you know, the notion of the imaginal has been controversial in in Orthodox circles because of the ascetic practice of hesychasm and as he has the the because the these because what the monk or what the practitioner is trying to do is to attain unity, full union with God. There’s a sense in which the imaginal space becomes a dangerous space. Like it’s a it’s an intermediary like it’s like the spirits of the air, right? It’s this intermediary space that has to be that has to be crossed in order to reach the higher space. And so the tendency is to say ignore the images, ignore the ignore the imagination part so that you can reach silence and beauty and light. Right. So basically going all the way up into the highest sphere. But I think that a lot of work that that certain people that I know have been doing a father, Sulawan Justiniano, some of my work and other people’s work as well. By using iconography like what we did in Thunder Bay, right, using iconography as the support to show that this imaginal space also has a positive as a positive manifestation. And it’s like the church full of all these paintings and drawings and images. Like it really is. And the way that it’s structured and how it does represent a cosmic image and all of this, I think, has been has been a good bridge to help people understand that that there is room in Christianity for this notion of a positive vision of this intermediary world and the imaginal space. And we need it because without it, I think that where I think that we’re very like Christians are very vulnerable without developing a robust vision of this intermediary space. I totally agree. And I think the imaginal is I mean, it’s just it’s like what we said about narrative or it’s bound up with human cognition in an important way. I would propose to you that my attitude towards the narrative is the same when you’re trying to propose about the imaginal. Yeah, you’re so right. It’s not even my but it is a deep tradition in the Orthodox tradition of being suspicious of that space. So I kind of have to deal with it. I myself am more obviously more. I mean, I if people know what I’m doing, I’m writing comic books. I mean, I’m making all these things. I’m obviously more I have more room for it. But I also want to formulate it in a way that’s respectful to the tradition because I do believe that there are good reasons why hezikasm had the form that it did. So maybe then what I’ve been trying to say again, we don’t have to pick this up because we keep going. This is another one of our things. By the way, before I forget, you released a video, I think it was part of your Q&A, where you sort of said flat out, you know, John is right about this, about the normal logical. I want to now return and say thank you for you doing that. That was gracious. And that was part of what we’re all trying to do here together. But what I want to say is I think the narrative is important. It is powerful, but it is intermediary. That is, in a nutshell, what I’m trying to say in a lot of ways. I keep getting cast as John doesn’t like it’s unfair to attribute to me. John’s a critic of the narrative or doesn’t think narrative. I’ve never said that. I never said that in Awakening from the Meeting Crisis. That is not my position. And it’s really straw personing me to attribute that to. Yeah, but I think that understanding, and this is the same for the imaginal question as well, is that you see it in the aesthetic. I really St. Gregory of Nice’s Life of Moses, you see it clearly in that text. You see the Moses goes up the mountain, he removes the garments of skin, he removes the layers, he moves into divine darkness. So he basically moves out of any form, any form, any representation. And then but then when he crosses that space, he’s given the pattern of the tabernacle. And so the idea is that. This space, which is above the narrative and the nomological, let’s say the transcendent or the non dual or whatever, however you want to name it, it’s the source of it, but it’s the source of that other space. And so it gives birth to it and it gives it its proper form. So it’s like so there’s no so you can have both the aesthetic understanding of moving into that which is beyond being, but then also understanding that it’s also the father of being. It’s also that which gives being makes it makes it exist. You just you just did to my mind. And I don’t think this is dismissive of what you just did. I’m not taking anything away from Gregory, but that’s also Socrates. That’s a republic. And then the return. And if you if you separate the ascent from the return, you don’t understand the ascent. It was very, very clear about this. And DC Schindler makes a fantastic argument. And that is see, that’s what that that the fact that there’s that convergence there about exactly that point. Right. And that’s again, that’s why that’s why I want to be doing what I’m doing, because then we can all write, let’s make these connections. Let’s draw this out. Yeah. But that point, I think the point about how the transcendent gives birth to the world and how the world actually exists out of it. I think it’s important today because there’s in the thing, in the spiritual, but not religious. Yeah. Get that argument right where it’s like, well, I don’t want the religion. I don’t want the form. I don’t want any of the practices. I just want the top thing. Right. You know, I believe in non-duality. I just want that and everything else like I don’t want. And so there’s a there’s a there’s a kind of naivete about then. How does then the world exist? Like how is it that there’s more than a night? There’s more. Here’s Schindler’s read on Plato, which I think is profound. The absolute that does not include the relative is not the absolute. Right. Because then it’s not if your non-duality does not afford and properly, I don’t know what to say, give birth to. I’m trying to like I want to get there. But then you don’t understand. You haven’t properly understood it. You’ve reified it. Like, again, the the the ascent and the descent, the emanation and the emergence. You can’t you know, you and I have been sort of not arguing about this is something we’re converging on a lot on and and and I think that that connection you just made is so appropriate. Right. There is a profound naivete because it’s based on a profound misunderstanding and misapprehension. If you think the absolute does not include and I mean, deeply encompass and interpenetrate the relative, then you have not understood it at all. You’ve turned it into something like a totalitarian thing, totalizing it rather than an absolute. And that and I think Schindler just knocks that argument out of the ballpark and just says, look, and this is Plato’s argument again and again and again and again. I think what you said, I’m just deepening it. That spiritual bypassing is not just naivete. It’s naivete that is driven by a kind of profound misunderstanding and misapprehension. Yeah. And like you said, it does it leads to it leads to two impulses. It leads to a totalitarian impulse and it leads to a kind of anarchic impulse. Yeah. Both at the same time. Like it’s like either anything goes and could just do whatever because it’s like nothing. It’s all it’s all nothing compared to the absolute or rather to control. Like everything has got to be got to be completely ordered and has to. So yeah, so you’re right. So there and in a way like that’s the that’s the right hand and the left hand. Right. That’s that that that optimal grip that that you talk about, you know, this idea that there’s this letting go and everything has a letting go and a grasping to it. That’s a necessary it’s necessary for the thing to actually exist. I think that’s exactly right. And I think you like you have to be you have to be constantly opening to the the the the one, the absolute, the inexhaustible. And you also have to be closing to the finite right there, right. The suchness. And you have to be constantly doing both or you don’t have, like you said, don’t have a world. Yeah, you don’t have a world. And you don’t have the you have neither an intelligible world nor the optimal grip needed to realize that intelligible world. And that’s why. But I mean, insofar as it is spiritual bypassing as a psychological category, which it is, that’s what people are trying to do, right, it’s kind of a cryptonostic thing of trying to pretend. And I think there is something pretentious of it that we can somehow be free from the world, like in our embodiment. And and then we don’t have we don’t have a moral we don’t have moral and epistemic responsibilities, which we do. I mean, I’ve got kids like if the absolute makes me not treat my kids well. Well, I’m sorry. Like that’s not what the absolute did something else. Yeah. And so I and I to be fair to me, I did make this explicit criticism in a way beginning from the crisis, I said any notion of enlightenment that that does not have something to tell me about how to deal with the perennial problems and cultivate wisdom, I’m not interested in that notion of enlightenment. And why should you be? Why should you be other than you’re having some unique experience that you find really personally wonderful, like how is that not just self-indulgence or narcissism? I’m sorry. That’s right. I’m not saying that people don’t have a right to engage in spiritual exploration or anything like that. I’m not saying that. But when we’re talking specifically about what goes wrong in spiritual bypassing, I think that’s what goes wrong in it. This is great, John. I need to I need to go. I need to go to another appointment. But this is always we could just keep going. That’s the problem. Keep talking forever. So everybody. So so give the last tell people again where the after Socrates, when is it coming? Where is it going to be? OK, so after Socrates, January the 9th, there’s going to be lots of promo videos. There’s already been one released. It’s going to come out on YouTube. You’ll subscribe to my channel and you’ll get it right away. It’s free. You don’t have to pay. It’ll be released twice a week, probably Mondays and Thursdays, twice a week is for sure. We’re not quite sure if it’s going to. That’s the Mondays and Thursdays is probably Monday for sure. Probably Thursday, but definitely twice a week. January the 9th. Look for it. Really strongly recommend. Try to watch it with some other people. Do the discussions around the points to ponder. Do the practices individually and collectively and then discuss the practices and the relationship between the practices and the propositions. Please. I think I think you’ll find it of great value. I think, John, and you will definitely be talking soon again, if not very soon, then for sure. If we have this conference in California, that’ll be great as well. So, as you know, I’m always looking forward to talking to you. It’s been great. Thank you so much, Jonathan. All right. Bye bye. Bye.