https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=N1byG4RqoTg
I’ve been really looking forward to this conversation. I sort of think of my conversation with you as launching me into all of this in some ways. So it’s your fault. Interesting. And as you probably noticed in a lot of my videos, I make reference to you and make references to criticism and comments that you make and respond to them along the way. So I feel kind of like you’ve been at least virtually accompanying me along the way. And that’s been very good for me and the project. It’s been really intense, really busy. Luckily, I’ve gone sabbatical until January, so I’ve been able to… I’m going to have to cut back on sort of the virtual presence come January, at least a bit. But I did get some very good news. My tenure has come through, so… Oh, that’s great. Congratulations. Yeah, thank you. So I’m going to officially get my tenure. So there’s been a lot like that. How about you? I mean, are you through the grueling thing of returning to your home? It sounded horrible every time. Yeah, no. I could see often you were putting sort of a brave face on like, oh, this is horrible. This is horrible. No, we’re not back. We’re probably going to be back in our house in the summer, like spring, summer, just because there are too many things to do on the house. And we just ran out of time in terms of winter and finding a contractor. Also, that has been crazy, because there’s 2,000 houses that need to be repaired. And so just even finding a contractor was really difficult. Right, of course. But it’s okay. I’m fine. I feel like I’m back in somewhat of a groove. I’m getting carvings out and I’m… My videos are coming out. And so I feel… Oh, yeah. Yeah, you’re doing really good work too, by the way. It’s really good work. Thanks. Thanks. Like I said, I often cite you in the series and podcasts and interviews. Yeah, I’ve been thinking a lot about… I feel like a lot of the language that you’re bringing or the connection that you’re bringing in terms of consciousness and then trying to connect that to religious language and using specific words, I feel has been really useful for me. I find myself using words that you’re using or expressions that you’re using because it seems like they’re the right… They have the right… They talk about things in a way that people can understand because a lot of the problems with religious language is that a lot of the words have been ruined. They’ve just been completely ruined. And so people don’t understand what they’re referring to. And it feels like a lot of the words you’re using are helping to find another way to talk about things so that people know what’s going on. Like what are we talking about? Thank you for saying that because that was an explicit goal for me. I phrased it from the very beginning about a conceptual vocabulary and a theoretical grammar. And that’s what I would most wanna do. Obviously, I’m gonna argue for positions because that’s the nature of what I’m doing. But that genuinely is secondary to me providing some deep tools by which people can reflect and think and potentially engage in transformative processes. And it’s been very gratifying that I’ve received the same feedback from different religious communities too. So I’ve received similar feedback from Buddhists. I gave a talk, it’s on my channel. I was talking with Hamza Sassouris. He was an Islamic intellectual philosopher. And I had a similar response from the Muslim community. So I genuinely think that’s great. And so I’m hopeful that the series that I’m working on now because I’m putting a lot of work into it, both theoretically and sort of research empirical sort of participatory observation. I’m hoping that that will also be the case for the next series. So thank you for saying that. That’s very important to me. Yeah, the concept of relevance realization, I feel when just saying it is, it can help people understand what is this about? And so I’ve been using that term a lot and this idea of optimal grip and just the idea of finding the balance between two opposites. That the way that you’re able to create analogies in different spheres about the problem of, the problem for example of thinking that efficiency is if you’re just more efficient that it’s gonna work. It’s like, no, it’s not gonna work because then you’re lacking, you’re gonna miss the other aspect which is to give yourself flexibility in order to change. And so I think that that type of discussion is so useful and can help people understand why a lot of utopias are just not possible. They’re actually not possible because you always have to leave, you’re leaving buffers and leaving, no, when people talk about let’s say, kind of eugenics or some type of eugenics, you can see that it just even rationally, it just reasonably cannot work because you don’t understand some of these marginal characteristics that you think are useless right now. You just don’t understand what they can be. Yeah, I think messing around in our genetics is, yeah. I agree with that argument completely. Well, I do, I think the frame problem, all the unknown side effects and the fact that because the way genetics operate, they’re gonna be dynamically self-organizing in ways we can’t foresee. So yeah, I’m deeply suspicious of that. I mean, I’m deeply suspicious of all utopias. I make that very clear in the series a lot. I mean, Alexander Bard has criticized me for that along the lines, you can’t leave the people without a vision kind of thing. But yeah, I’m very wary of utopias precisely because of that kind of concern. They seem to be, it’s hard to see them as anything other than hubristic, right? It’s hard to see them as anything other than that for the reasons you just articulated. Yeah, I think that one of the things, I mean, so this is as I kind of discovered your series, at first when we had our discussion, it was great, we were kind of discovering each other and then watching your series, on the one hand I was like, this is awesome, this is awesome and then other things I was like, oh, sir, sir, sir, like I love. Of course. Can I say something? And part of what I would like to do, I mean, I’ve tried to show that I take responsibility in the deep meaning of the word of making myself available, respond to people and to respond to people in good faith and respect and even with affection, that is what I wanna do and I keep showing that. This is not just empty words. I think it’s fair to me to say, I keep exemplifying that that is important to me and I wanna give you an opportunity to do that if you wish to take this time to do that. And I trust you, the same way I trust Paul, Paul and I will disagree, but like I say, I often trust Paul and I trust you often more than I trust people that I might share the same metaphysical presuppositions with because I get, I am convinced that, we’ve spoken at like at least a couple of times, I’ve seen you a lot, I watch you a lot, I see you in interactions with Paul, same thing with Paul, right? And then also now I’m entering conversations with people that are deeply influenced by you like JP and so, and also entering into conversations with Mary. Well, what I’m trying to say is I trust people who are like yourself and Paul, precisely because I have a conviction that you’re coming to this in good faith and I’m much more interested in that. Like the last, the video that you commented on and I commented on it too, I thought the video that JP and Mary made in response to, I thought that it was excellent I perhaps like to talk about one of the points they made at the end because I’ve been thinking a lot about it because I thought it was a very, very good point. And they didn’t quite craft it into what I would consider a coherent argument. So I’d like to steal minute a bit, try and build it up into a stronger argument and then discuss it with you at some point because I found that really interesting. The three of us are gonna all talk soon by the way. But that’s where you specifically put up, I wanted to put my hand up. No, no, it was with Jordan Hall that you did that one. The Jordan Hall conversation the whole time I was like, oh man. It was with Mary and JP that you put the thing up about infinite relevance realization. And I wanted to talk to you about that too. So there was two things though, yeah. Okay, so maybe we can start to, I mean, maybe we can start to talk and talk about God because I guess that’s the big thing. That’s the big thing. I guess the thing that always keeps coming back up. And so I mean, I’ve been kind of following what you were saying in terms of non-theism and I understand, I mean, I understand Buddhism and Taoism in terms of non-theistic religions. I guess my big question is, where do you put mind in your system? Like where, at what level of reality does it enter into? Because even if you look at these non-theistic religions in practice, when they’re actually practiced, there always ends up being a hierarchy of minds that appears in the practice of it. And so even though you can say something like, I mean, even Hinduism ultimately, if you look at kind of Advaita Vedanta Hinduism, like it all moves towards non-being, but then there’s a hierarchy of beings that appear right away, right after, let’s say the statement of non-being. And then you have either a hierarchy of bodhisattvas or a hierarchy of gods or whatever. So my question is, how do you, like where does it come into your system? And the second question is, if Christians, let’s say monotheists want to put it up as high as possible, that they wanna put it up as high as possible. And they do have the idea, like if you look at pronouncements about the divine nature, it always looks like something that is non-theistic. Like if you look at the pronunciations of the mystics on divine nature, it always looks at- And I cite them, I cite them. I give credit, right? I give credit to saying like some of these ideas, like the term, epic cases and others, I say, I attribute it to the Christian mystics. I don’t try and steal those ideas. I make it very clear. I make it very clear that those ideas are present there. But so I guess my point is that, even if you, let’s say, in Trinitarian theology, you say something like the divine nature cannot be spoken of, the divine nature is non-being, you have say Maximus who talks about a God as being a non-being together, something like that. You know, like this ultimate aporia. Yeah, yeah. But then as soon as there’s, let’s say as soon as there’s manifestation, as soon as there’s persons, let’s say anything specific, anything that you can say, anything that you can say even negatively, like then there’s mind appears. Right. And so that to me is, so I guess like I’m trying to understand like how you, so if you want to not have, let’s say, God, like where does it appear in your system? And then also, if you don’t wanna put it somewhere, like in the system, like then you have, to me, you have the problem of Maya, you have the problem of everything’s an illusion, this, you know, the notion that the manifestation is always inadequate, like is always, you know, verging on nothing you could say. Sure, sure. Well, nothing in the pejorative sense, not no things. Yeah, nothing in the pejorative sense, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so that’s a really complex question. So I might need to talk for a bit. I mean, the answer is seven, right? It’s not gonna be like that, right? So first of all, I wanna acknowledge that. And I mean, and I can strengthen your argument by pointing to the fact that once you get sort of beyond platinus, neoplatonism goes that way too. You see a hierarchy of God-like beings, for example, in Proclus. So is that a general tendency? Sure, so I wanna acknowledge that. I’m a little bit hesitant to say that, you know, everything does it. Zen Buddhism, I think, is really straight on, on theantheism sort of all the way up. But we can talk about that maybe another time. Let’s take it that at least there’s a preponderance phenomena that supports your claim. I think that’s fair. I don’t wanna offend any Zen Buddhists who might be watching and say, no, we just don’t do, we don’t make any images and have any persons, so things like that. So let’s turn it over then. I mean, there’s two questions that we have to distinguish and they interact, but they shouldn’t be identified. One might be, and I tried to talk about this, and I tried to make a distinction between metaphysical necessity and psychological indispensability. And I hope you accept that I do not treat psychological indispensability as a dismissive thing. It’s not like a new atheist kind of, oh, you know, and you just dismiss it aside, right? It’s much more that I take it that there are certain ways of framing reality that might be indispensable for people’s relevance realization to create the meaning that they need for their lives. Okay, so that’s, I mean, that’s not the same thing as just saying, oh, you know, people have these illusions or stuff like that. It’s not intended like that. So might it be the case, because the reason why I’m saying this is Paul has specifically made this argument in my presence and asked me to comment on, you know, that it might be that, and Paul, so, I mean, part of it is I wanted to be very charitable to Paul out of good hospitality he invited me on. And so I was trying to be very, well, I wanted to be anyways because I like Paul a lot, but I was trying to be very responsive. But there was, I couldn’t quite understand, I couldn’t quite get clear. We sort of ran out towards the end because the argument had culminated if he was making one kind of argument or another, because the argument he seemed to be making is we need to get into the spirit of finesse in order to enter into a proper relationship with God. It’s a Paschalian argument. And that the best way we can get into the spirit of finesse is by taking a personalistic orientation. And then that’s how we ultimately relate to God. And I sort of, I didn’t have any deep criticisms of that, but I’m afraid that I might’ve been unfair to him in that, because I just sort of translated that in my mind into this notion of, well, you know, yes, that might be indispensable for people. They might, that might be the only way many people can trigger the correct, you know, full being finesse to get into the proper relationship with ultimate reality or whatever we want, what neutral term we want to use until we talk more deeply about God. And let me give you, just so your viewers are clear, the analogy I use, well, the example I use about distinguishing indispensability from necessity. I’m not bilingual by any means, I’m not like you. So English is psychologically indispensable to me. I mean, I can’t do this, I can’t do the work, I can’t, right? Without it, I just can’t do most of my complex meaning-making projects, right? But that doesn’t mean that I should conclude that it’s metaphysically necessary in that all cognitive agents have to think or speak English. That’s a ridiculous claim. So it’s very, if there is no contradiction between saying something is psychologically indispensable, again, not in the dismissive sense, it really matters to me, English really matters to me, right? And it really contributes to my functionality from concluding that it’s metaphysically necessary. So I sort of translated Paul’s argument in my mind to, oh, yes, you want to get into the spirit of finesse, that’s the proper orientation, and you take on a personalistic framing and that gives you access. And I thought that’s an argument for sort of psychological indispensability. I immediately also thought there are also ways in which people do this impersonally. I mean, Taoism is a religion of finesse that does interactional psychosomatic stuff that gets you deeply into a flow state, a finesse state. And it doesn’t, in fact, when you’re in Tai Chi, you’re not in any kind of personalistic mode. So again, it strikes me that I could, again, I’m trying to be very respectful here. I can deeply understand what a Christian says. This seems indispensable to me. I just don’t go the next step and say, I think it’s metaphysically necessary. So one thing we might think is, it’s clearly not metaphysically necessary. Then here would be my argument, because as you said, there are the exemplary figures that don’t seem to need personalistic language to describe the ultimate with all of these traditions, Platinus and the Neoplatonic tradition, at least some of the mystical writings I’ve read within Christianity. Eckhart famously said, God saved me from God and things like that. And so I don’t know if it is, so this is what it comes down to. I don’t want to deny, and I don’t know if you would like, Mike, how I’m gonna use this word. I won’t want, I think it lines up with you, but maybe not. I mean, I think personalism is, at least John Hicks would like it. This is a deeply symbolic way, right? It’s in that it’s psychologically indispensable for people, and it might be indispensable beyond the personal, like an individual indispensability. There might be sort of cultural historical reasons why for certain groups of people, something could become indispensable, to think and relate to God through the symbolism of personality. I don’t know if, for reasons I’ve tried to articulate, if that licenses any claim towards it being a metaphysically necessary, and therefore an inherent feature of ultimate reality per se. Now, I guess the question then becomes if, and this is part of the argument I wanted to make, like if we go that way, then we’re into, there’s some sort of analogous relationship to personhood and Godhood, if you’ll allow me that term, and I don’t mean any disrespect by it. I hope you understand that. I mean, Eckhart uses it, so presumably it’s right. And then here’s the problem I have. I mean, I’m just, I’ve deeply, I made this argument in a series, so you perhaps are familiar with it. I’m just deeply impressed with Goodman’s argument about similarity. There’s no logical algorithm for similarity. There’s no rule for deciding similarity, everything is infinitely similar and dissimilar. And I mean, and isn’t that technically the case? Isn’t it equally legitimate to say that God is totally not like a person as much as he’s totally like a person? And so Goodman’s argument seems to have purchase here. So I regard the argument about whether or not even it’s symbolically true, if that means something beyond psychological and dispensability, I regard that as, for the reasons I just tried to articulate, I regarded that as just undecidable. I don’t, there’s no way of coming to a conclusion that, it’s ultimately, this is the best kind of similarity, the personal similarity. I just don’t see that. If best means something beyond, it’s often psychologically indispensable to people. So that’s where I sort of stand. Now, I haven’t answered your second question. I did say there was two, but I’ll let you respond to the first thing. I am keeping a mental thing that you want me to place in the ontology. Where did you place it? Yeah, where it is. But I wanted to say first, I wanted to separate that first question from the ontological question, because they’re often spoken together. And I think it’s often confusing to speak them, to address them together. So I wanna pull them apart. I wanna give you a chance now to respond to that first question. I think, I mean, the way that I would approach what you said is, it brings back the problem of Maya, the problem of illusion, because let’s say our experience of person, or the experience of relational experience of a being that is, like you said, like me, different from me, and that communion that you experience, that has to come from somewhere. It has to come from somewhere ontologically. It has to come from somewhere metaphysically. If we can’t place it, then it is illusion. Then it has to be a kind of Maya. Sure. And so to me, that is one of the reasons why, like you said, for sure, I think that Eastern Christians, they don’t see God, everything we say about God is an analogy. It is never speaking directly about God. So when I say God is a person, I don’t mean it in the same way as I am a person, but what I mean is you could say that he is the source of person. He is the source of these things. Of personhood. Yes, exactly. But he is not a person in the same way I’m a person. Everything we say about God is always, it’s always missing the mark. And I think that that’s really important in terms of theology is that there is no, every word we use about God is not, how can I say this? If we say God is love, there’s a hierarchy, which means the way that we say God is love is like the source of all manifestations of love. It’s never equal to my experience of love or whatever. So it always kind of moves towards this infinite. And so that to me, so I guess then you’ll have to answer the second question because I’m bringing back the second question, which is where does it come from? Yeah, okay. So yeah, sorry, I’m gonna be a bit of a philosopher here. I wanna go step by step. That’s okay. Because I think, I mean, I wanna be fair to both you and to me. And so I’m gonna try and, so I like the move you made and that’s how I’ve sort of tried to think about it, to be fair to me. I tried to think about what people are saying is they’re saying like, God is the source of personhood, but God is of course also the source of oceanhood. He’s also the source of treehood. He’s, right? I mean, that’s the sort of the Neo-Platonic idea, right? And again, and you know, Sudo-Den Di-Nisa sort of does this. He says, you know, you could even say, God’s a stone and the Bible, and he quotes verses where God’s compared to a rock. And he says, you know, and so I guess what I’m trying to get at is why this, there might be an implicit claim here. So I’m asking you, I’m not foisting it on you, right? That, right, when I’m communing with, like again, Godhood, ultimate reality, whatever, the real, the really real, as people often describe it phenomenologically. So at least that’s a somewhat neutral term because it picks up on a lot. That seems to be a convergent thing. I don’t think the ground of my personhood is a person like within me. I mean, this is almost like a Jungian idea. I’m not saying that, I’m trying to point to other people who have talked in a similar manner, or Tillich talks about, you know, the ground of my being, right? The existential. And I don’t think that’s a person. And to be fair to me, I tried to articulate that. I tried to articulate how the notion of personhood is grounded in something like, you know, the processes of relevance realization, and that our relationship to that is, you know, something that’s a source. And so what I was indicating is, I think a lot of times what people are doing when they’re trying to communicate, if you’ll allow me these metaphors, and I know they’re problematic, when I’m trying to communicate with external, you know, the external ground, the best symbol for me isn’t actually the personal level, it’s the level of my ground, right? It’s the level from which my meaning making and my consciousness and all of those things emerge. Maybe, I don’t know, maybe that’s something like what people used to mean by a soul, I’m not sure. But I think of that as, well, I don’t like what soul became, it just sort of in Descartes. It just became an animal. I hate that too. Okay. So that’s why I’m putting it in quotation marks. And so I think, in fact, I think that when you look at the mystics, that seems because they make, when they’re making identity claims, because they do make identity claims, they’ll often say, I am one with God and things like that. I don’t think they mean that they’re communing with God at the personal level, because they don’t talk that way. They talk about dropping into the ground of their being and that that is the only thing that allows them to commune or participate. And I don’t think that’s in any way an illusion. I don’t see why that has to be an illusion. I’ve tried to articulate all kinds of language that I think makes that a viable way to talk. So I don’t think I’m committed to the problem of Maya by saying that I think what I see happening in a lot of the non-theistic claims is that people are saying, no, no, the best, the deepest way, right? The deep, calling to deep, as it says in the Psalms, right? The deepest part of me is actually, the ground of my personhood is not itself a person. It’s something deeper, more basic. And I think there’s aspects of, I mean, that’s where the deep participatory knowing comes in. The way my psyche is self-organizing and the way it’s self-presencing and all of that sort of thing, I think that gives me much better, if you’ll allow me, analogs. Although, again, given my own argument, I can’t give you a logical argument that that’s the best, because I think they’re logically equivalent. So I’m back to saying, I find that captures a lot more of the phenomenology and therefore is more responsible to the psychological indispensability than the level of personal language. Well, I mean, it’s because the person, maybe it’s just the problem of what a person is, because to me, maybe that’s where we’re hitting a rock here because you read in the Fathers, you read in the Mystics, they always say, you are not your thoughts, you’re not your feelings, you’re not your desires, all of those things, that actually doesn’t constitute your person. A person in Christian language is an instantiation of a nature, that’s a person. And so there’s a nature, which is human nature, and then a person is a person, it’s a human, and that’s what a person is. And so it’s the actual, it’s the landing of a nature, it’s the landing of the nature in an actuality. I need you to be a little bit more specific, sorry for interrupting, because I don’t wanna lose, because I think I’m gonna be misunderstanding you if I let you go on. I’m just worried about everything in stency, it’s a nature, right? Trees instantiate treehood, that’s the platonic. Exactly, well you would say, I mean, in Christian language it’s the opposite, it’s the opposite of the, I don’t have a problem with this emergent thing, but give me the little moment to see it from the top down, let’s say. Yeah, Jonathan, it wasn’t a challenge question, I wanted you to, I need to see where the specificity of personhood comes in, other than in the instantiation of a nature, because everything instantiates its nature. Exactly, well everything, exactly, but so the idea of that is the notion of a hypostasis, like that’s the idea of a person in terms of Christian language, like it’s an actual tree, it’s not just, so that’s what to me. So it’s fair to say you see, sorry, personhood in the being meant as the active presencing of a tree, you see personhood in that? Oh wow, oh okay. Person in the sense of hypostasis, like in the sense of, I mean not in the sense of, can I say this, not in the common sense that we understand person in the sense of an individual, like a human individual, but. Well, but there’s more to that, I mean that human individual sense, I mean, I think that’s the idea, that we extend moral rights and privileges to it. I extend those to you that I wouldn’t extend to a tree, because I consider you a person. So I mean, obviously it does also depend on the nature of what is being instantiated, so the idea, like let’s say, in terms of understanding personhood in terms of Christianity, the way that we understand personhood is that in commune, it’s almost like emergence, it really sounds like emergence, as a person, I am in communion with other persons, and that is what makes me exist as a person, because I am in, as a person, as an instantiation of my nature, in communion with other instantiations of the human nature, that’s how we exist as humans, that’s what makes people, that’s what makes human. And so the instantiation, so the Trinity is what makes God. No, I understand that, and I’m sorry, I’m not claiming to understand the Trinity. I’m also not claiming to understand the Trinity, but I’m just trying to help see things a little, maybe a little differently than, because I feel like we always confuse a person with like an individual in the sense of my individual rights and my thoughts and my feelings. No, no, no, this is good, I wanna go with this carefully, so thank you. That was first of all, very helpful. I mean, because I’m very familiar with the notion of hypostasis, because I’m deeply, I mean, it seems to emerge in literature in Plotinus, right? And I, and to be fair to me, many people describe it this way, they regard the emanations of the hypostasis as something non-personal, because of the way some of the things you’re saying, we tend to attribute certain mental and dispositional properties to persons that the hypostasis don’t have, for example. So there seems to be a key thing in that, what you’re saying, if I’m understanding you, and please interrupt me if I’m misunderstanding you, because I interrupted you, okay? What you seem to be saying is, there’s two things. The first is, at least the Eastern Christian, I’m pretty confident that I didn’t hear this at all in Protestant circles when I was growing up, so I wanna be careful here, but I’m gonna take you as an authority of Eastern Christianity. That’s dangerous. Sorry. Sorry for putting that hat on you, but you’re the only one here in the dialogue, so I’ve gotta do what I can do. So you’re saying there’s a sense in which the idea of any of that emanation, right? I don’t know what you, like you said, instantiation as a process, as opposed to just a label, any of that instantiation, the hypostasization, if you’ll allow me to turn it into a verb, you regard that as kind of, that’s a personal, that’s part of the personal dimension, and then there seems to be something specific in that instantiation of human nature that makes human persons, if you’ll forgive me, as opposed to tree personhood. Is that, am I understanding you correctly? For sure, in the sense that, so the way that St. Maximus understands it is that there is a hierarchy of natures, and the human nature, because it has mind, because it has meaning, because it makes and participates in meaning, it gathers, it also gathers all the other natures in himself. So the human person gathers all the natures in himself, so the image that St. Maximus talks about is that the human person is at the top of the mountain, he’s in the center, he’s in the center, and he’s in the middle, and he gathers all the natures in himself, and then when he does that, in love, then he unites himself with God. By doing that, he’s actually uniting himself with God. I mean, I understand this, so I’m not gonna make an identity claim here, but this reminds me of Aristotle’s notion that everything has the form, but the human mind is capable of gathering all the forms into itself, and then you have Plotinus’s idea that that allows, that gives the human mind a capacity to conform to the source of all the forms, which is the one. Yeah, that is definitely how Christians see it, but they really do see it in terms of love, and the reason why they see it in terms of love is that it prevents the problem of the hypostasis, or the actual manifestations of things being secondary, or being illusions. No, no, I get that. So, remember, I have noted you making that point, and I take it very seriously, so I do wanna come back to that point. Because this is really important in terms of understanding why Christianity is part of, let’s say, why Christianity is also part of what made science so powerful. We believe that the instantiations are real. Yes, yes, yes, and the idea that Christianity, okay, you’ve triggered about four things in my mind. Sorry, sorry. No, no, no, no, no, that’s good. Okay, so first of all, I wanna go back. So the question now seems that maybe then, if I’m happy to extend sort of personhood in that sense, if you wanna use that term to that notion of the process of hypostasization, with the idea that what is hypostatized, oh my gosh, is not illusory. So that’s fine. But then the question becomes, like, then we did it. We ended up doing it, and you sort of agreed with my presentation back to you that I’d understood you, that mine seems to be something ontologically different in that it is a logos of forms. It can gather and form belong together, and that gives it an ability to conform source, right? And so the question then becomes, I guess for me again, is the degree to which I see the logos as equivalent to my mind. And that’s gonna be a little bit tricky. I understand what you’re doing here. Let’s ask the question this way. Let’s look at it this way. And so let’s say you say that that mind is different because it gathers, right? It’s able to gather and it sees and participates in patterns, okay. So in terms of your, let’s say, ontology, does that come to the human person and then stop? Or can you see mind above in the higher beings? Well, why I was hesitating, sorry, I didn’t mean to be obscure, is the term mind has multiple reference. I even have a talk on that, right? When we use the word mind nowadays, we point to many different things at many different ontological levels that have different ontologies, have different ways. I mean, and people do this to be fair to me. They mean brain sometimes. Oh yeah. They mean information processing. They mean behavior, right? They mean language communication. They mean participation in culture. They mean what’s available to us in distributed cognition through culture. They mean all of those things. And the disciplines that study them don’t speak the same language, don’t use the same methodology, don’t gather the same evidence. So that’s why I’m hesitant about just using this word mind because I find that term deeply, deeply equivocal for us. That’s why I was trying to shift off of mind and I was trying to get at the grounding of our ability to sort of make sense. Okay, well, I’m fine with that. I’m fine with making meaning, making sense, gathering patterns, recognizing patterns, even the idea of relevance realization. Let’s say you use that word. So if we wanna use that expression, that’s fine. But my question is, does it go up to us and then stop or does it continue to, is there that relevance realization at higher levels? Sure, sure. Okay, so now I feel like I’ve got the question and thank you for giving me that. That was generous on your part. But I do think there is a deep consonance between the ancient notion of logos and what I’m talking about in relevance realization. Oh, for sure, yeah. Okay, great, thank you for acknowledging that. And so I think that it’s, and I’m demonstrating that I’m committed to this. I’m committed to the idea that there is forms of relevance realization that exceed individuals. And I have acknowledged this to JP. I’m doing a lot of work right now. And this is a big thing. You can see it being a big topic in places like rebel wisdom. The idea of distributed cognition, possessing collective intelligence. And there’s been some rather horrific experiments, by the way, sort of demonstrating this. There’s a scientist who literally wired rats’ brains together. Yeah, yeah, it’s very Orwellian. And what you can show is that system of rats can solve problems that the individual rats can’t solve. So we always knew this sort of intuitively, but now you have sort of quantified measurement evidence for this claim. So it’s no longer just the woo woo claim, right? It’s, so I mean, yeah. What’s really frightening, Jonathan, just to portend what might be happening, is they’ve done some preliminary experiments with humans with direct linkage through the neural chips. And so, yeah, that’s scary stuff. Yeah, that’s scary stuff. So let’s put the Orwellian stuff aside. So I think, I mean, I think I should be, and I think I have been a responsible scientist in acknowledging, I think, and the reality of collective intelligence and distributed cognition. That’s why I’m very interested in the Socratic Project, because I think the Socratic Project is a project of trying to do something analogous where we do an individual, where we take intelligence into rationality into wisdom. And the Socratic Project is, can I take collective intelligence, bring it up into collective rationality and bring it up into collective wisdom? And I think all of that is viable. That’s one of the things I’m exploring in the next series. So I think all of that is the case. And you should know that this is taken very seriously in cognitive science, this idea of distributed cognition, having something like collective intelligence and having a kind of problem solving. So I think, I can, I’m happy with saying that relevance realization extends beyond us into something, I don’t know, is this sacrilegious? I don’t mean it to be, but like the ecclesia, a gathering where people are gathering together and trying to form a cooperative. Yeah, and you see that, I mean, in scripture, you have the idea of the angels of cities. You have these notions that there are patrons and those beings manifest the communion of a group. They are like, they’re the head. But I mean, I think that, I guess maybe now is where I wanna get back. Because once you express something, which I was like, ah, I was like, you’re on the track that I wish you were on. You talked about Euregina. And Euregina obviously takes a lot of his stuff from Dionysus and Maximus. He translated Maximus into Latin. Yep, I’m so interested in him because he’s the last great sort of synthesis in my mind of East and West. And so, let’s say I used to always, I think top down, like I’m a Platonist, I’m a Christian Platonist, I think top down. And then it’s all discovering Jordan Peterson and you and being in contact with agnostics and atheists, it’s like I kind of forced myself to think bottom up. Yeah, thank you. And to think of communion and to think of things coming together and these complex systems coming up. And once you said, it seems like Euregina is saying that those two, like the emergence and the top down. Emanation, yeah. Emanation, they’re actually happening at the same time. Yeah, and his notion of creation. I’m still committed to that. I’m still committed to discussing that. And I think that that is so, you see the same in St. Maximus. He says that explicitly. He talks about, there are some quotes of him where he talks about how, when the mystic sees, let’s say, the particulars separate from their essences, and he can see it, he also sees that they’re the same. Like that they’re actually, that the coming together of the particulars is the same as the naming coming from above. Yeah, and what’s interesting, yes, totally, and I’m reading some Maximus, well, I’m reading about Maximus right now quite a bit. Because as you said, if you wanna understand your agenda, you gotta understand Maximus. I’m not claiming to understand in the way you do, but I’m trying to get it. It’s hard to understand. It takes a while to get to the language too. Well, but that’s usually what it is for a great philosopher. You have to, it’s not just the words, it’s their mindset. You have to have a test to it. You have to learn how to inhabit it. And that’s what’s often most, I often find that that’s what’s most valuable about a philosopher other than the particular proposition they insert. So I like everything you said. Because I’m trying to get beyond an ontology that privileges emergence and emanation. And why this connects up to what we’re talking about is, Erichina specifically uses dialectic. He writes the Perifusion, the division of nature, as a dialogue, and many people comment on it. They sometimes call him the Hegel of the ninth century, which I think is a disservice to Erichina. Because his notion of dialectic, I think is much more Christian platonic than it is Hegelian. But so because he sees creation as inherently dialectical because it is this complete interpenetration, top to bottom. Yeah. Right, and for me, I’ve tried to indicate also that that’s our best models of cognition are inherently, bottom up, top down, completely interpenetrating. And so there’s something deeply analogous between how the mind works and that kind of ontology. And so I find, I think I can make a case for that. Well, I think I just did. We’ve already countenance that ontology deeply in our practice of cognitive science, an emergence up in some kind of top down thing. And then the idea that maybe that’s the best way. Because the problem with each one of the two, emergence has the problem, like many people pointed out, is how do you get to these sort of normative, right? And then emanation has the problem of why doesn’t it just stay in the one? Why does it come down, exactly. Yeah, now, if you’ll allow me, so first of all, I’m happy with, that’s what I mean about an analogy at the top. I’m at the ground of my cognition as opposed to like an identity with my mind. See the top down, bottom up aspect isn’t a content of my mind, it isn’t an aspect of my will. It’s a constitutive structural functional idos that makes mindedness possible. Are you okay with me speaking? No, I agree. I mean, in the Christian mystics, they really do separate the notion of noose from the idea of mind or of mind in the sense of thinking and all the active processes. That noose is this direct connection. It’s like, I mean, you could describe it as the ground of your being in that sense. And then the connectedness would be, I don’t know bottom up, top down as a thought. I know it by participating. That’s right, there you go, that’s great. Yeah, that’s perfect. And then there’s the participatory connection is vertical and horizontal at the same time, which is by the way, the same thing in dialectic. Dialectic is happening ontologically within the individual and then horizontal between individuals. So I think I’m sort of making sense of what Regina is doing there. So what if you look, like if you look at then, once you let’s say you see that, or you understand that those two things are happening at the same time, then when you look at, if you let’s say look at Christ pronunciations with that lens, with that lens, all of a sudden you’re gonna see that he’s constantly shifting between both. He’s shifting between the two. Where on the one hand, when he talks about, when he says things like, you know, where two or three are gathered in my name, you know, I’m there. There I am also. There I am, and that’s it, that’s exactly it. It’s like, if you gather in love, then the logos is there. But then there’s also the whole image of the head of the, you know, the idea of the head of the body. St. Paul has that analogy, the head and the body. And so that is more of a, like you get the sense of more of a top down, but then he also talks about the members of the body that are well-fitted together in love, and that is the totality of the Messiah. Like the totality of Christ is both the head and then the joining of the members in love. And so you get that. I think it’s an interesting exercise to do, is to look at some of the, to look at those. And so then when you get, for example, an image of Christ who talks about the seeds, you know, when he tosses the seeds. So the seeds come from above and they fall, and if they fall on the right ground, then they grow. And so you have that meeting of the heaven, which comes down and meets earth, and then the earth also, let’s say, brings forth, like God says in creation. And then ultimately then you have the image of the creation of Adam, which is the gathering of dust and the blowing in of spirit. And that’s it. Like that’s the two at the same time. There’s the gathering of dust and the blowing into the spirit. You have the bottom up, like gathering, and then you have the top down, which is like the naming or the, you know. This is wonderful. I mean, first of all, I’m really happy to be involved in this conversation. No, no, Jonathan, this is not empty flattery. Your symbolic skills are really, really, really powerful, and I respect them. I’m liking what you’re doing. Now, I would say in response, I mean, the reason why I don’t associate this with classical theism is that Regina was persecuted as a heretic, right? And so this model, which I think is articulated very well in Regina, it’s not clear why he was persecuted as a heretic either. It’s really obscure. And he just sort of disappears historically. And part of the people I’m reading, and I believe everybody I’m reading in there, Gina is self-identified as a Christian. So this isn’t hostile, Christi. And part of what they’re pointing out is, why, like this was sort of rejected and thrown away, and it’s too bad that it was, because it would have been very helpful for us right now. And that’s sort of the tenor of what I’m reading. And so that’s why, I mean, I’m very hesitant to apply this model to classical theism, because it looked like, at least in the West, the church said no, right? It’s sort of officially said no. And no, we’re not going that way. That’s not how we should understand things. Yeah. There’s also a reality, which is that, to a certain extent, this is gonna sound weird for a lot of people, that there is not a necessity, but there is an inevitability of a certain amount of suspicion coming from an institution. And that suspicion, how can I say this? The way that I see Christianity, maybe it’s very different from a lot of people, I see that there are different actors, and they’re playing out a story. And so I think that when we see, let’s say the church give us warnings about, okay, we could use even, let’s use an Eastern, so I don’t bash on the Western church, I use an Eastern example. It’s like, they go after origin, you know? And it’s like, they go after origin, and it’s like origin is bad, this, this, this, this, this. But it’s like, origin doesn’t go away. Origin is still there. We have Evagrius, Evagrius is brought back into the Christian literature, using different names of different saints, and pseudo-text, and all of this. And so it’s like, it never goes away, but there’s something about the institution, which in serving its role, it also has the danger of crystallizing, and of, let’s say, of wanting to fix things, which is good sometimes, and sometimes can be dangerous. And so it’s like, you always have to see all the stories at once. I don’t know if that makes sense. That’s fair, that’s fair. I guess part of, so, yeah, I think that’s a reasonable. I don’t wanna get us off track, though. I don’t wanna get us off track. No, no, and I don’t want to equate criticizing Christianity with criticizing God or anything like that. Yeah, I wanna keep those apart. I was just trying to tell you one reason, and I’ll give you another one, I’m sort of hesitant. I see the same kind of attempt to get, and I think I make a really strong case for this, and especially coming out of Nargajuna, within Buddhism, of trying to get an ontology in which there’s the deep interpenetration of emergence and emanation. This is, form is emptiness, right? And emptiness is form, and nirvana is samsara, right? It’s the idea that the form, the emergent, right? The structuring, and the emptiness, the source, are completely interpenetrating, because the identity claim there is not a logical identity. That’s very clear from the text. So it’s, no, what they’re trying to do with the is is they’re trying to say the emergence and the emanation are completely, completely interpenetrating, and it’s the realization of that, in the sense not of an idea, but of existential conformity that actually brings, that actually brings release, right? That brings salvation, that brings the amelioration of dukkha. And so there, again, like I said, the reason why I keep using the sort of saying, I want to say this as non-theism is, I’m not quite convinced that, sorry, I don’t want to call you a heretic. I’m not trying to say that. You can try. Some other people have done it. Yeah. What I’m saying is, the way we’re talking, I think, is, would make a lot of people who identify with classical theism uneasy, but it’s also a way of talking that would make a lot of people in Buddhism, Nargajuna, for example, very, very happy. And so this is why I try to use the notion of non-theism because I’m not trying to commit to a particular frame, and I’m hesitant to say that I see this way of thinking, I’m hesitant to say that I see this way of talking very prevalent in a lot of the people that identify with classical theism. But this goes back to, I mean, this goes back to two points. One is the degree to which, because you have this interesting thing that I keep referring to where you think Christianity is itself going through, essentially, some kind of resurrection process, and I think that’s very interesting. And then the other one goes back to the point that I wanted to do with Mary and JP, and that goes maybe back to the main thread of our conversation. So if you wanna come back to the other thing about Christianity, I’d be happy to do that. But they said something very interesting, and it didn’t quite, but, because I basically, to be fair to me also, when I was talking with JP, I was also sort of challenging or append psychist interpretation of sort of a supra-consciousness. Because I don’t have evidence of consciousness, I don’t even have evidence of a consciousness for the ecclesia, for the distributive cognition. I have evidence for intelligence. I don’t have evidence for anything like consciousness. And I was trying to get at this problem of I don’t see relevance realization sort of ontologically writ. And this gets back to your point of infinite relevance realization. So let me try and, they don’t quite say this way, but I’m trying to strengthen their argument in good faith. So I’m not trying to straw man it. There’s something like the idea that, because I’ve acknowledged sort of the idea from Whitehead that possibility, first of all, you know, I think possibility is real, it’s ontologically real. The possibility has to be structured in some way. And that sort of emanation is how that plays out in how constraints are found within reality. Constraints are instantiated from the way possibility is really structured, something like that. And that’s a very neoplatonic notion. You can see it clear in Whitehead. But they were sort of, Mary sort of brought up this idea and JP did something interesting with it, that is it there’s something analogous to relevance realization in that infinite possibility self-constrains down to the finite things. This is an act of self-constraining that’s very analogous to the self-constraining that’s at the heart of relevance realization. And it’s very much kind of analogous to love because in love you’re doing this sort of, you’re doing an inherently self-limiting thing that’s also a self-transcending thing. Because, you know, Erogena sees creation as God’s ultimate act of self-transcendence, right? God is sort of, all of the creation still remains within God, right? And so there’s this ultimate act of self-transcendence. And I thought that was a really strong argument because you could say, okay, there’s something analogous. It’s not the same as our finite relevance realization. But this, if you’ll allow me a metaphor drawn sort of from the language of physics, there’s a collapse of infinity into finite things. It’s a self-constraining. And we always find that bound up with how we care about things. And so analogous for us, it feels like kind of like what love is. I’m being very hesitant here, right? And then of course we can enter into a communion with it that gets the mutually accelerating disclosure, which of course is experienced as we can fall in love with that. So I’m sort of prepared to acknowledge all of that. Okay, interesting. Yeah. But like I say, I don’t, so I sort of give it one take. No, no, no, but this is, this is a good line. Like the way that I see it is similar to what you say. I don’t use the word possibility. I just use the word infinite. I like the word infinite because infinite can really just mean non, even categorically infinite. That is there, it is boundless in every manner. So you can imagine that the notion of God as boundless. So we have, we believe in one God, the Father, right? And this boundless, completely boundless. And then the sun, like the logos is exactly what you said. It’s the, it’s the, it’s the, that it’s not limiting, but it’s like the expression of the boundless. And through that expression, that’s how limited things appear. But what’s important, like I think, and that what’s important in Christianity, this is the most important thing in Christianity is that the expression of the infinite is equal to the infinite. That’s the most important thing. That’s the most important thing in Christianity. And that’s why the whole fight in the fourth century was all about that is to say that the expression of the infinite has everything the infinite has, which is, which seems contradictory. But what it does is that it makes, it makes the world exist. Like it makes the world exist and be real and not just be an illusion. Okay, so the first thing is I use the word possibility because I wanna use something that has the same scope, but is paired properly with actuality, because I’m trying to get out of kind of a metaphysics in which actuality is equated with realness. So, so I think the distinctions are orthogonal. I see what you’re saying, but I could see, I could say you could have an infinite actuality in some sense and that might not include possibility. Right. Infinity is a weird thing. I’m trying to make it. It is a weird thing. Yeah, so, and the reason why I use, and the reason why I use possibility is because as I tried to argue, possibility is real, although not properly acknowledged ontological category in science itself. There’s one thing because laws and potential energy, these are all real possibilities and science absolutely needs those. Also, and constraints in biology, for example, but also I use the possibility because it overlaps with combinatorial explosion. So that’s why it’s my chosen term. I’m not committed to it in an idolatrous fashion in that. I’m just, and it also lines up with how, like I said, how Whitehead tries to articulate how God fits in his model, right? Although he’s ultimately says that God has to be an actuality in a way that I think gives into aerosol, put that aside. So there’s that. So what I’m trying to get at is, yeah, I don’t wanna get into, well, it’s not that I wanna avoid it. I don’t know if I can do anything of value to you or your viewers talking about the incarnation. I’m because I mean, like I said, I see other places. I mean, the Tao Teh Chen says there’s the Tao and the manifestations, but they’re ultimately one and that one is darkness, right? Or form and emptiness are one and it’s a non-logical identity. And here’s another point that I would wanna make that there’s something analogous. Again, it’s not part of my mind. It’s not part of my consciousness or my intelligence. I’ll use those two words then, okay? But this is a feature. In my personhood, I participate in non-logical identity because I’m in some sense personally identical to the child that was one years old, born in Hamilton. Now that child and I, we don’t share a lot of properties and we don’t even share any atoms, right? And yet, so there’s non-logical identity. And I think my participation in non-logical identity gives me the analog for participating in the non-logical identity between form and emptiness, the Tao and the manifestation, or perhaps if you’ll allow me to, right? God and the sun. That’s, again, that’s not something in my consciousness or in my intelligence. It’s part of the, well, I think that’s part of, again, the logos of my being. And I’m also willing to grant to Paul that where I disagree with Paul, he calls out a machine code. I think it’s clear evidence it’s not a machine code, if he’s using that term the way I would. Because we have to, he says narrative is our machine code. All right. And I disagree with that because the machine, we have to teach people narrative. We have to practice it, and we do practice it. You have to teach kids narrative. That’s the narrative of practice hypothesis. You have to teach them and teach them and teach them and teach them and teach them and teach them. And you have to really water down narrative to something like the Teletubbies. Like I did this twice with my kids, right? And you go through this, oh, right? It’s horrible, right? And you have to practice and practice and practice. And that’s why they take a long time to get a sense of humor properly, to be able to tell a joke, right? There’s all this developmental stuff and we keep practicing it with each other all the time. So I’m not convinced that it’s part of our machine code. What I think Paul, what I could agree with Paul saying is narrative is where we practice non-logical identity. So narrative is where we get a temporally extended sense of self that allows us to get that non-logical identity. Yeah, well, the thing is that narrative does for time what names or identities do for space. Like that is that in order to create pattern in time, you need narrative. And in order to create that’s a pattern in space, you need things that are connected together in a certain manner, in a recognizable manner so that you can see them as an identity. And so narrative does that in time. And it’s a more usual categories in naming does that in space. Like geometry, geometry. Yeah, so geometry, there you go. Or just, you know, and so to me, that’s what narrative is the capacity to identify with time. Like to have an experience. Temporally extended self. But I think what I wanna say is if you’ll allow me these metaphors, I mean, there’s not only non-logical horizontal identity through time, there’s non-logical ontological identity through the levels of being. And I think that people pass, I mean, because that’s what I’m reading and that’s what I’ve experienced. You can pass it to a trans-narrative state. Perhaps it’s a state that transcends both the spirit of geometry and the spirit of narrative in which you get this ability to participate in non-logical identity that is not just the non-logical identity of narrative. Yeah, no. I think this is probably where, this is where I get the biggest confusion in terms of, so there’s a story that my brother told me, he studied Kung Fu for a very long time. And that story really stuck with me for a very long time. He was talking to me about the different legendary swords that exist in this Kung Fu mythology. And he was telling me that the very, like let’s say the second highest sword in their mythology was the sword where if you put the sword in the water, all the twigs and the branches and the leaves would come and would strike up against the sword and cut in half. And that was the second most important sword. And the most, the highest sword, the highest sword was a sword that if you put it in the water, the branches would come and avoid the sword and would never touch it. And so to me, it’s like if you say something like that you can reach a state which transcends narrative, I would say yes. And then I would say, but that when it comes back down, it’s narrative again. Like, so it’s not, so the denial of something in a hierarchy, the denial of the particulars actually is the invisible essence of their coming together on the lower aspects. And so to me, and so if like, for example, so that’s why I really struggle with the arguments sometimes where someone would, tries to kind of like step up above religion and then look at the different religions and say, there are examples of different things. And it’s like, yeah, but if you come down, you have to be on a path and that path is coherent. Like, I don’t know if that makes sense. Like in terms of, let’s say that if you can reach a state, let’s say a mystical state where you’re above, where you encounter something which is above narrative and is above even identity and is like, this kind of infinite moment that doesn’t destroy reality. It actually feeds it, it makes reality real. Oh, and that’s exactly how people respond to experiences of onto normativity of the really real. They come back and they transform their selves and they transform their lives to try and bring it closer into conformity. There’s a inspiration in that sense, right? It informs and transforms their selves, their relationships and their world. Yeah. I wasn’t denying that. I mean, I think, I think that’s a very important point that I mean, I think I agree that if we use the language when you’re coming back down that, and that’s where I think you get the gap between sort of metaphysical necessity and psychological and dispensability. You fall into a particular narrative. I do think the different narratives do emphasize different things. I think, I mean, I think Christianity speaks about and does the best sort of on the gap. I’ve made that argument. But, you know, I think there are other experiences that are deeply contributory to meaning in life. And I have good empirical evidence for this. I think flow is really deeply important. And Christianity doesn’t say much about flow that much when Taoism is the religion of flow. It’s got a lot to say about it. It’s got a lot of practices and you’re gonna, if you wanna become a much better flower, Taoism is the place to go. All right, all right. And I’m speaking not just from the outside. I’ve been a practitioner for like 28 years. So, again, I’m trying to, and I said this to you at the very beginning in our first talk. And so not that it gives us any special authority. I’m just trying to say that there’s a consistency. I’m trying to reject both relativism and perennialism. And I’m trying to use the notion that I got from cognitive science of synoptic integration. Cognitive science doesn’t try to eradicate neuroscience or computer science or psychology or linguistics or anthropology. It’s not trying to put them out of business. It’s trying to create an overarching framework so that they can insightfully talk and transform each other so that we stop equivocating in powerful ways about when we try to talk about mind and meaning. And that’s a different thing than both perennialism and relativism. I’m trying to get beyond both of those. And that’s a different thing. So I’m definitely not, I’m not, I’m not trying to say, oh, they’re all saying the same thing. And I’m not cats. Oh, they’re all talking about totally different and commensurable things. I’m not trying to say either one of those. I’m trying to say, no, no, it’s much like what cognitive science tries to do between the various disciplines. That’s what I’m trying to talk about. And so people often, I guess that’s where I’m getting misunderstood, where people are trying to say, John, it’s funny. I think the fact that I get both sides indicates that I’m being misunderstood. John’s trying to destroy religion. Oh, no, no, John is actually trying to defend. And they’re both sides are, I’m gonna suddenly pull this philosophical rabbit out of a hat and show, aha, right? All along, I was drawing you in so that I could. Look, Jonathan, I mean, I wanna take this opportunity to say, and I’ve said it in the comments, but I wanna say it here, because that way it’ll reach more people. If people can, if they can use my work and they can return to Christianity, but also if they can return to Buddhism or Islam and Taoism, and that will enrich their ability to find meaning and cultivate wisdom and compassion, great. I’m happy, right? I am not anti-religious. That is not. No, no, no, I don’t think, I think it’d be very difficult for people to come to the conclusion that you’re anti-religious. And I’m not simply eclectic. And that’s, I’m trying to. That I’m not so sure about. Okay, okay. I mean, I think, look, I see we’ve been going for a while and I have an appointment in 15 minutes, but I would like. So do I, so do I. All right, so I would like, so maybe we could have a conversation sooner rather than later, because I do wanna talk about your project, like the actual project. I have, like, you know, I’ve been thinking a lot about some of the things you’re saying, and I have a lot of questions in terms of. Sure, and I expect you might have criticisms, and I’ll take them in good faith. I’ve tried to do that here with you today. Well, I appreciate, I love these discussions. I really appreciate it. And let’s do that. Let’s try to do it, because I think we, last time we talked was almost like a year ago, maybe, or quite a while ago. Let’s try to do it sooner rather than later. I would like that, I would like that. All right, all right. Pick out a time. Especially because you’re running out of time, too. Yeah, that’s a practical. If we could get it, if we could maybe get it sometime in December, that would be good. All right, let’s do that. So send me some times and we’ll work something out. I’m very happy to talk to you always, Jonathan. You know that. I’m looking forward to when the three of us will be all together. That’s gonna be so much fun. That sounds like a lot. So people who are watching, we’re going to do something in Northern Ontario. John Ravecki and Paul VanderKlay and Jonathan Pajot, all the three of us together doing a, I think it’s like two days even. And so we’re gonna have different talks and meetings and also have a question period. So I think it’s gonna be, I think I’m really looking forward to it, too. Me too. I’m hoping people are going to come with a lot of interesting thoughts as well. People, you even have come into the audience. So I think that’ll be great. I agree. I think what the Urban Abbey is doing is just fantastic. I encourage people to get there if they can because I think it’s just gonna be an amazing thing. I’m really looking forward to it. All right, John. So I’ll say goodbye for now and then we’ll have another meeting sometime in December. Thanks again. Great. I really appreciated this discussion, Jonathan. Thank you very much. All right. Okay, bye-bye. Take care. I hope you enjoyed this most recent discussion with John Vervecky. As we mentioned in the video, check out my website once in a while. We’ll be putting up dates very soon for an event with John, Paul, VanderKlay, and myself, which will be in Northern Ontario. As Christmas comes to, I wanted to put up a few things on my Teespring account. I have some, obviously Santa Claus exists, t-shirts that I designed with my children. And that was a lot of fun. And also I made a hand-drew, an inked version of my logo with the six days of creation and put in the inscriptions in English. So if you wanna check that out, there’s a link below in the YouTube channel and you can also check out my Teespring account. So thanks a lot and I will see you soon.