https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=1Aa-ki3Lm7c
So Socrates had a demonium. He had his divine sign. And he said he always listened to, right? He relied on that in his trial, in the Apology, and said that that was the thing that made him different than other men. Now what’s interesting, and many people have said about this, about it, especially in what’s called third-way Platonic scholarship, Socrates both trusts it and always comes up with an argument around it. He never does one or the other. While we see them as oppositional, he somehow saw them as deeply. Dialogical? Yeah, dialogical and convergent. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And see, when I was, when I’d been in this journey and I was in the midst of doing IFS, I had a very powerful, I talk about this in my after Socrates experience. I had, I don’t know how familiar you are with IFS, internal family systems where you do parts work. So what’s going on right now is this huge convergence within the psychotherapeutic domain of dialogical models of the self-dialogical practices. And I was in the middle of doing parts work and I was working with a part. What would that mean practically? What were you doing exactly? So what happens is when you notice that you’re sort of possessed by something, you try and step back from it. You think your mother, your father, some ancestral spirit, fragment. Yeah, and you try and step back into, well, Schwartz calls it the seed of the self, but I don’t think that’s quite right. But what you try is you try and step back into that more sage-like awareness. Right, right, so you’re going deeper or higher. Yeah. And then what you do is you try to, and you don’t demonize this part, you try and enter into a dialogue. You realize that it is guarding something, and it has some adaptive functionality. Now this is my take, not necessarily his, but I think what you do is you bring sort of a mirror of agency or self-reflectiveness to this part. You act like a mindfulness mirror to it. You dialogue and you get it. You get to say, well, oh, well, you try and get it to explicate its normativity. Sure, sure, sure. What’s actually governing and guiding it. And then you get to, and then you get, You can help it develop that way. Yes, and you call it, and then you become socratic with it. But how much part are you following the normativity that you’re enforcing on me? Yep. And what will happen frequently is it will relax. Right, because it’s being listened to. It’s being listened to, and it’s also realized that there’s an opportunity here for growth. Yeah. And of course this overlaps with a lot of these. So Jung recommended naming those things. Oh, you do, you name them, you name them. But something happened, and you’ll probably see a very union thing in this. Like I said, this is difficult for me to talk about, I did talk about it already publicly and after Socrates. Hell of a thing for an introvert to do. Yes. So I was in the middle of one of these sessions, and an archetypal presence came in and pushed aside all the parts and said, no, you’re gonna listen to me. And who are you? I’m Hermes. Oh yeah. The God of interpretation, the God of meaning making. Did he have little wing slippers on him a little bit? Well no, he was, he… Messenger, wing messenger of the gods. Yeah, he appeared, he very much had a presence of a cycle pomp. And when you say appeared, what was the phenomenology? What was happening? The phenomenology is like the phenomenology of the presence of a mind, like I have a sense of, I have a mind sight into your awareness. Now what’s interesting about these things, and this is again my take, not the IFS people, although I’ve talked to Mark Lewis at length about this, and he thinks it’s a good take. I think of these entities as neither subjective nor objective, I think of them transjective, and I think Hermes is in the domain of relevance, and relevance is neither objective nor subjective, but what binds them together. Yeah, yeah. He’s binding the inner and the outer, the upper and the lower, and all of that together. And so it’s the sense of a presence, but it’s like what Charles Stang talks about, the divine double, it’s both you and not you. Kind of like the way conscience is, but it has a, and so I have an ongoing dialogue with Hermes. It’s very much. Is this a presence that you visualize? How do you know of its appearance? I’ve had only one sort of vision. What was the vision like? The vision was very much, well, I’ve had, the vision was very much what I laid, very much like sort of Micah El, the archangel, which is very interesting. And then I’ve had one of sort of Thoth from Egypt, and Hanuman from the Vedic tradition, as well as Hermes from the Greek tradition. And in the ancient literature, they’re often seen as corresponding to each other in some fashion. You understand, I’m treading on this very. So what was the consequence of the appearance of this superordinate spirit, arguably superordinate spirit, in the presence of this domain of chaos? Well, I mean, it made it very clear to me that it, I don’t wanna say it anymore. He wanted to make it very clear that there was a dialogical relationship that needed to be developed and cultivated. And it would be a relationship by which I would cultivate something analogous to Socrates’ demonium. That was the promise that was given to me. Oh, oh, that’s a good deal. I think so. Well, it’s dangerous, but so is everything else. Yeah, excellent things are rare, or we wouldn’t pursue them, as Spinoza said. Or we would all pursue them, as Spinoza said. So I found Raph’s work on ally work, and I’ve talked to a bunch of people that have, you know, the kind of practices you can do to enter into this. Anderson Todd, a friend of mine, very helpful around this. And so what became very apparent was that that this demonium and the way I’ve internalized Socrates as a sage were very allied to each other because Socrates also portrayed himself as being Mataxu, being between the human and the divine. And then to get to the deep answer to this, this all started to psychodynamically integrate with the intellectual philosophical realization of the Platonic proposal that human beings are supposed to always hold in tonos, creative tension, Nicholas of Cusa, Heraclitus, our finitude and our transcendence. If we only hold onto our finitude, we fall prey to servitude and despair. If we only hold onto our transcendence, we fall prey to hubris and inflation. But if we can hold the two together, if we are the Mataxu between the beast and the god, right, we can properly realize our humanity. And this is what Socrates sees himself. This is how he portrays Eros. This is how he portrays the task of philosophia. And so for me, that Socratic spirit and Hermes as a psychological, dialogical presence have become integrated together. So that’s the answer to the question. Well, that’s quite a trip. Well, I mean. That’s very much like, it’s very much the conscious equivalent of a dream. It’s like a dream. But what’s intriguing is the Platonic Socratic possibility of it being filled as much with logos as it is with mythos. That there is also as much, because when I dialogue, I write out dialogues with Hermes, it’s very much, at times it’s very much like encountering an archetypal figure and there’s all this. Have you read the Red Book? I’ve read parts of it. Because it’s what you’re talking about is quite reminiscent of the sorts of exercises that you undertook. Well, what you find out is this is also deeply reminiscent of a lot of the theurgic practices that were going on in the Neoplatonic tradition, as I’ve come to discuss. And that get taken up into Eastern Orthodox Christianity by Dionysus. And Gregory Shaw has done some excellent scholarships showing that. So let, okay, let me. But I just wanna make clear. That there is a lot of rationality in this discourse, where I don’t mean sort of Cartesian logicality, I mean the calling to the full person recognition and responsibility towards the ongoing proclivity to self-deception. And trying to comprehensively address it. And seek systematic. There’s a deep hole. It’s a deep hole. And it’s not, there’s something mysterious about it in Marcel’s sense. Do you ever think you’ve got a full phenomenological grasp on the engine of self-deception within you? You, of course, have fallen prey to one of the deepest forms of self-deception. So whenever you think you frame it, you have to not idolize. This is, tell it again. You have to not idolize that framing. You have to constantly, it has to be constantly open to self-correction. Yeah, well, the opposite of self-deception is probably something like the constant openness to self-correction, rather than a stance per se. I was deceived, now I have the truth. It’s like, no, there’s a process by which you continually discover the truth. And allegiance to that is the opposite of self-deception. So that’s what I would call my faith. My faith is a faithfulness to a process of self-correction, not to any one faculty as the voice of the divine. I think the capacity for the self-correction to take on a life of its own, and a life on its own that plugs into transpersonal and transjective aspects of my being, for me, that is better. I’m very impressed that you managed to bring all of that back to the point where it started, by the way. So I would say in relationship to that, that first of all, that I agree that that, in fact, the eye that’s at the top of the pyramid, let’s say the eye of Horace that’s at the pinnacle of the pyramid, is a representation, as far as I’m concerned, of the aware attention that allows for continual self-correction. Part of the implication of the ancient Egyptian theology is that nothing should be put higher up in the pyramid of value than the thing that’s gold at the top that’s associated with the open eye. That’s right, watch and attend. And in that spirit of, you said guilt-free, there was two criteria you had, free of guilt and free of- Pride. Pride, yes. Just apprehension of what’s there in front of your, this is, Christ says something like this too, this is in the Gospel of Thomas, though, he says, the kingdom of God is spread upon the earth, but men either do not or will not see it. The will not being the more interesting one, as far as I’m concerned. And part of that organization of the psychological hierarchy to put the eye, not the letter I, but the eye on top, is to prioritize that neutral isn’t exactly right. No. It’s an attention that’s oriented towards the highest ineffable good, to put that above everything else. Now, I would say that I wasn’t trying to reduce that to conscience and calling. I didn’t think you were. Okay, okay, I was thinking about those as, what would you call, they’re part of the dynamic process of attention that allows the attention per se to rise to the top. So because I could pay attention, careful attention, to how it is that I’m calling myself out, let’s say, in a Socratic manner, because you also are granted the right to the presumption of innocence, right? So even if you’re accusing yourself, it’s perfectly reasonable to set up a defense, but there’s a starting point with the prodding of conscience. If conscience prods you, two questions come up. One is, I’m falling prey to an internal tyranny, and the other is, I’m wrong. Well, you need to figure out which of those two is right. You can do that dialogically, you can do that in conversation with someone as well. And calling is the same thing, I would say, is that a calling can emerge as a consequence of your possession by a particular ideological spirit, or it can be a manifestation of the real thing. And it’s up to you to tread very carefully to make sure you get those right, and then the dynamic interplay of those two things is even more reliable, probably especially if you share it with other people.