https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=K-6zE-06VXc
So hello and happy new years. I did a video while I was up in New England on vacation with Manuel on Enchantment. And what I’m going to do here is video on Enchantment. Now, this sounds a little crazy, but what I’m trying to do is exemplify the difference between an exploratory conversation and an explanatory conversation. And so the discussion I did with Manuel was the exploratory conversation, the dialogos, the let’s figure out what this is. We had a few notes, right, and we proceeded from there. And then I had to do that conversation in order to get to the point where we’re doing the explanatory conversation. And now I get to tell you the difference or rather show you the difference, at least hopefully if I’m successful. So I watched the video. I just got done watching the video. Two and a half hours. And so I took a bunch of notes. I’m going to go through those notes. Most of them are in my head. Some of them I have sort of in front of me here so that I can refer to them, make sure I’m not missing any of the important points and try to explain Enchantment in a compressed form. And then if you’ve seen the long form video, you’ll hopefully see a difference and go, ah-ha, this is what explanation versus exploration looks like. And if you haven’t seen the long form video, you should consider it because there’s a lot of gems in there. We talk about the intimacy crisis. We talk about different ways of engaging with the world. We talk a little bit about magical thinking, right? We talk about some specific forms of Enchantment that I’m probably not going to go into here because I have other videos about that planned. So there’s a bunch of little gems in there that we discussed that aren’t just about, say, Enchantment. And Manuel’s brilliant. So watch all my talks with Manuel. I have three so far. We’ll do more for sure. So with that, let’s sort of jump into an explanation, a short form explanation of Enchantment. And so it’s probably helpful, you know, and again, I’m calling these from the notes that I just took, to sort of define what Enchantment is. It’s a couple of different things, really, right? It’s not one sort of easy, easy graspable definition. There’s a lot going on here. So one is re-inflating the world so that you can access potential, right? And it’s also a direction of attention towards that. So away from sort of the solid, unchanging, discrete material world and out into the world of Plato’s forms, right? Or Eidos or the virtues and values, right? That landscape that’s more about quality than quantity. So when you’re adding quality to something, you’re enchanting it. That’s what Enchantment is. And so in that way, Enchantment in and of itself is not negative. The example I like to use is Tolkien, right? So Tolkien enchants things, right? He created a world and enchanted the world. And he puts elves in the world. And what do they do? They kind of connect sort of the ethereal things and the material things. The rope is ropeier. We talked a lot about that. The qualities that aren’t easy to describe but are there. And he also connects his characters and the reader with these things. So you’re connected with the world he’s created, right? You’re connected with characters that, well, don’t exist in some sense, but maybe exist in the most important sense. And they’re connected with each other and the world, right? And I think good sort of good fiction does that, right? It connects everything together. So that’s a form of Enchantment. And then a negative Enchantment might be possessing of the listeners, right? Or the speaker could possess themselves. And this sort of happens all the time. And possession is a tricky, tricky topic, right? In some sense, because it’s sort of what you don’t know that moves you. That’s what possession really is. And if you’re enchanting somebody by possessing them, right? Or you’re causing them to be possessed, you’re enchanting them in a negative sense. And so that’s when we have to sort of watch out for that. And that’s super important, right? Is to understand that relationship. Because it’s the nature of the relationship that makes the Enchantment good or bad. In fact, I think it’s the nature of the relationship that makes everything good or bad. Not the thing in and of itself. And other forms of, say, negative Enchantment might be if you’re sort of floating away in beauty. So someone’s like giving you a utopian vision, right? They’ve told you about, well, you know, we can have peace, love, and happy rainbow unicorns if we just all meet each other with empathy and understanding and compassion. And we really try to dig deep and give value to people’s individual understandings of the world and give them space. Now I didn’t say anything. And so that’s a form of narrative Enchantment that puts you in beauty, right? It gives you this utopic vision. And that’s sort of the purpose is to give you this vision of something that, you know, doesn’t exist, right? Or can’t exist. And then when you have that vision in your head, you become enamored of it, enchanted by it. Because it gives you this world of potential and possibility opening up in this space, right? It’s not grounded. It’s not where you are. It’s where you could be, but you’re in your head. And so things in your head can’t always be manifested in the real world. So that’s a form of narrative Enchantment where you’re just sort of floating out there, unconnected, very bad. And that’s why you need sort of like philia nikea, right? You need hard statements of axioms and truths to start from. Even if you disagree with them, you need to know where you’re starting. You need to know what you’re grounding on. That way it’s not pure mysticism. It doesn’t go into that pure mysticism or lose all possible useful context. Because a lot of times things just lose context. Like they just don’t the context that you need to understand them isn’t there. The framing is gone. And so Enchantment is also wrapped up in the fact that you need to be enchanted. You want to be enchanted because the world needs to open up to the potential. And that’s what Enchantment is. It’s opening you up to the potential and showing you ways that you might connect in the here and now. Or in the future to a world that is bigger than the world that you inhabit today. Okay? And that’s important. That’s important. So you need that interface with the potential, with possibility, with magic effectively, right? With things that you don’t understand today but will become important to you tomorrow. That’s Enchantment. So we’re looking to be enchanted all the time. And so we have to watch out for that. And we create our own narrative sometimes that will enchant us. And you need narrative. You can’t do without it. So narrative is not bad. But we need to know what narratives we’re telling ourselves. And we need to ask the question, how’s that working out? How’s that working out for me? Or ask other people the question, how’s that working out for you? I do this all the time. It’s amazing how people never thought about it. You can see it. You can see it just stops them dead. Boom! They’re like, wait. And then they have to think about it. And they’re like, well, well, you see, well, I thought, you know, okay. So you didn’t think about it until I asked the question. But you can ask yourself the question. You can go, how’s this interview strategy working out that I have? Right? Or how’s my shopping strategy working out? Because I keep running out of food. Right? Or, you know, how’s my strategy for approaching people for dates working out? Right? How’s that working out for me? Because a lot of times we’ll get fooled by somebody else’s narrative. Somebody will tell you a story. This is how Elon Musk became a billionaire. And maybe that’s how he became a billionaire. But maybe only he can become a billionaire that way. Right? And so it wouldn’t work for you if you did it. Because there’s a skills mismatch. We’re not all equally good at everything, obviously. Right? Unless evolution is wrong. But I don’t think so. And so you need to know what fits you, what works for you, what affordances are available. And that’s another aspect of enchantment. Enchantment is about affordance and connection and where it’s pointing. And making that connection to you from potential or from potential to you. Right? It’s got to be both. It’s got to be a way in which you’re interacting with this space of potential. And that fills the world with possibility. And with possibility, there’s aspiration, there’s hope, there’s all kinds of things. It’s all right there. And so we very much need enchantment. Without enchantment, we’re basically depressed. Right? We just live in a drab, boring world that is either predictable or could be predictable or we think could be predictable. And then it’s not quite so interesting anymore. Right? That happens all the time. And so you want to engage with the world forthrightly as a place of potential. And that’s what enchantment allows you to do. And so you just have to be able to recognize sort of the negative enchantment. And you can see how groups can get enchanted. So I mentioned earlier all these adverbs that you can use. Right? They fill in the narrative. If I tell you the world can be a better place, there can be peace on earth, maybe my definition of peace and your definition of peace are different. Okay. That’s problem number one. If I tell you how, through love and compassion and caring about one another, that that can engender peace in the world, I haven’t said anything. I haven’t given you anything actionable. You came up with actions in your head. That’s narrative enchantment. Right? And then other people did too. But their starting points are different, their ending points are different, and the narratives are different. They all heard the same thing. They’re all in different places. And they’re all went to a different place. And they all feel like because they were together in the room, hearing the same words and getting the same good feelings, like they’re on the same page. But they’re not. Right? This is how, you know, people can enchant whole rooms. Brene Brown does this. Right? Not good. You got to watch out for that sort of thing. Because it’s everywhere. And people that are doing it aren’t necessarily being malicious. Right? They don’t necessarily know. They’ve got a trick where everybody agrees with them. That’s great. I like agreement. We’re always looking for agreement. Right? I went over that in my iWii video. Right? We want answers and people want to give us answers. Fair enough. So it’s, you know, enchantment’s right there. Right? It’s right there to be done. And it will be done because it has to be done. Because, again, we want to be enchanted. We want to enchant ourselves. We want to enchant others. All of that seems to be true. And, again, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with it. It’s more about the relationship. And so one way we can identify our own enchantment or enchantment in others is this idea that, you know, if you’re giving them good news and they’re not responding to it, they’re like, oh, no, that’s not right. They’re like, oh, no, that’s beside the point. Or that’s not what I mean. Maybe they’re enchanted. Right? Maybe they’re caught up in their own little narrative. And that’s why. Or if you give them evidence that what they’re saying isn’t true and they don’t consider, oh, wait a minute, you know, or try to fit that into their narrative in a way that modifies their narrative, you’re probably enchanted. And you can do the same for you. Like, did somebody give you a counter example and you ignored it? Did it bother you in your head? Because it probably did, even if you ignored it. And maybe that’s a good indication that, you know, you’ve enchanted yourself somehow. And enchantment has to point at the ineffable. It can’t point at the material. Right? You can’t point it and say, well, look, the bottom line is if we just take people and we put them in a nice space, they will become nice people. Okay? That experiment’s been tried, by the way, many times. It doesn’t work. Spoiler. Doesn’t work. And we enchant ourselves into that story because we think, well, yeah, I mean, if you’re in a nice place and there’s beauty all around you, that suddenly that will fix something. And it may for some people, but no. Because it doesn’t point at the ineffable. It doesn’t point at the good, at the beauty as such. It points at the manifestation of beauty in the world. Absolutely. And you need that. But it doesn’t point at pure beauty or the concept of beauty, the idos of beauty. Right? Which, you know, that’s an indication of bad enchantment. Good enchantment would be pointing at the ineffable. And so there’s a way in which we can enchant things. Right? And should, again, you know, enchantment required. And the example I gave was a desk. So you can describe a desk. You can say, oh, I have a desk. You know, nice oak desk. Okay. Right. Or I can describe a derby roll top desk that was used in a telegraph office, you know, that was visited by a president. Right. And then say, and now I have that desk. Right. I’ve just enchanted the desk. I’ve used historical context. I’ve used some narrative. Right. I’ve used some tonal enchantment. It’s another form of enchantment. Okay. To make that desk, you know, more real or more interesting or enchanted with more potential because I’ve linked it in history. It’s an object. I’ve linked it to an ideal, a president, a telegraph office right there at the crux of history. I don’t have such a desk, by the way. I almost bought one years ago, but I did not. But, you know, these sorts of desks are interesting when you connect them up to these things. And history gives us a value, a grounding, right, dimensions beyond the material. Right. And, you know, there’s a way in which Tolkien talks about the rope-ier rope. Right. It’s a bad description. Right. What’s a rope-ier rope? But you know what that means. Somehow it inflates the ability of the rope and makes it better. It’s a quality argument. It’s not a quantity argument. It’s not the rope’s longer or the rope’s thicker. The rope’s rope-ier. It has all the qualities of a rope, but more. Right. In a qualitative way, not a quantitative way. And engendering that connectedness, that’s part of the enchantment. Just having that connectedness to people, events, history, right, to your excitement. Right. And you can tie the materiality into the web of enchantment. And that adds potential for interaction and affordances. And it also leaves space for intimacy. Right. This is also the space of intimacy. And you want intimacy with one another and with whatever spirit arises. Because when you invoke history, you invoke a spirit. And it’s the connection to that spirit’s part of the enchantment. And spirits can be good or spirits can be bad. So again, enchantment is a neutral thing. So you’ve just got to be careful. And there’s a bunch of types of enchantment that we sort of went over. Right. We noted sort of cults use a lot of enchantment. Salespeople use enchantment, right. They give you a vision of what you could do if you had this used car or this object. Right. Where it might go in your house, what it might look like, why this color’s amazing, or the story of the artisan. Right. And there’s all that sort of enchantment. There’s magical word enchantment where people use fancy words with reasonable definitions. Again, I’m not saying that’s bad, but something to watch out for. There’s tonal enchantment where you can use a low tone and get people to listen better, more closely to the words that you’re saying. Right. And you can obviously you can combine these. There’s resonant enchantment. There’s that idea of mirroring. It gives you safety and predictability. Right. It’s greater. The resonance is greater than the sum of the individual parts. So you start out with these little things and they kind of grow. They stack up. There’s rhythmic enchantment. Right. And resonant rhythmic enchantment. You hear a lot of music. Right. It’s accent. It’s an accent. And then a lull. There’s a predictability in the structure. It’s got a cyclicality to it. Right. And then there’s a way that things are enchanted. Very lyrical. Right. Lyricists use resonance and rhythmic enchantment to get you to listen to the story better. Right. They also use tonal enchantment. There’s, you know, there’s also that narrative enchantment that I’ve pointed out a couple times. Right. Where you insert a narrative or you can insert a narrative into somebody. So that works both ways. They can use a bunch of adverbs and then you’ll insert a narrative to try and make that vision come true in your head. Or they can give you a vision, you know, like, oh, we’re going to have a big one world government. And because one person is going to be in charge, everybody will get along. Right. Sounds reasonable. It’s not. But it sounds reasonable. And you again, you can combine that with other forms of enchantment to make it sound even more reasonable. There’s sequential enchantment where the sequence of the items provide you with predictability and intelligibility. And it’s easy to break. And a lot of times people will switch the sequence that things occurred in history on purpose to prove that something’s possible when in fact history says it’s not because it didn’t happen that way. Right. And there’s a way in which sequence is important. And we’ve lost the ability to understand and interact with sequence. And that’s actually a big problem. When you when you sense that there’s a sequence there, you should be careful about what it is because it’s one way people and they make sequential connections that are false or wrong. And one thing can’t come before another. So, for example, you you can’t say that, you know, the government corrupted the people because the people made the government. So the only way the government can be corrupt because the people came first. And that’s actually really important is if the people are corrupt and then they corrupt the government. Right. Because they built the government. So either they built the government wrong in the first place or the government got corrupted by people that got into it later. But it didn’t happen that the government corrupted the people. That never happens. The government, once it’s corrupt, may corrupt people. But it’s actually important which happens first. Right. And sequence matters. And you see this this sequence enchantment all the time. So it’s something to watch out for. You can always be enchanted by something correct. Right. So because, again, we need enchanting. Enchantment’s not bad. Enchantment relies on relation. Right. And so you have to be careful of unearned wisdom because just because you’re enchanted correctly doesn’t mean you’re not possessed. Now you can be possessed by a good spirit and that might be better than being possessed by a bad spirit. But you should know when that happens. Because things like wisdom won’t necessarily save you. Wise people build cults all the time by accident, basically. And I do think it’s by accident. Right. I don’t think people trying to be wise are building cults on purpose. Part of this is just you build something in the world or people build it around you. And if you don’t take proper care of it or it’s not properly cared for, it’ll corrupt. And that happens all the time. But that’s not necessarily the fault of any one person. But you have to care for the things you bring in the world. Otherwise, they can become corrupted. We talked a lot about Rudolph Steiner with that. Right. That happened to him in contemporary times from what I understand. Right. He built something and he couldn’t manage it. And it got out of his control. And his full vision has never been correctly implemented since. And that seems to be true. And that’s bad. And so that’s no good. Going to Steiner School doesn’t prevent you from becoming a professional and a drug addict. It doesn’t prevent you from becoming a serial killer. Or it doesn’t prevent you from becoming an alcoholic. And maybe it reduces the chances. Maybe, sure. Absolutely. Probably does. But it’s not full enough. And it’s corrupted by time and by people who didn’t understand the vision. It’s not that they were bad people, even they just didn’t understand the vision the way it was originally had by the author of the program. And so there’s a way in which these things get out of our control. And that’s enchantment. The thing can enchant us. And again, we’re looking for enchantment. So the only way around it really is to understand engagement and affordances. Because if you don’t understand what affordances you have with the thing and what your engagement is, how you’re participating with it, then you run the risk of being enchanted and possessed. Enchanted in a negative way. And possessed by a thing. And possession is not good. That’s when you’re acting out a narrative or embodying a spirit that you do not understand or acknowledge. That happens all the time. We have to do some cognitive outsourcing. But you should know what you’re enchanted by. So maybe if you’re enchanted by a particular biblical story, maybe that’s not bad. Right? But maybe if you’re enchanted by a sci-fi story that you can’t live in because it’s not real, it’s not based on anything in our material world, maybe that’s bad. Maybe that’s a bad form of possession. So you just have to keep your eye on these things. And practices are important. The problem is when you think you overcome, you think like, well, I know about enchantment now, so I’m safe. There’s no enchantment for me. You’re enchanting yourself. The enchantment is still there. It’s not going to go away. You need practices. You need to make sure you’re checking yourself on a regular basis, that you’re pulling yourself out of these things. You have to engage in a way that enhances your ability to notice changes. And it’s hard work. And you don’t want to enchant yourself by telling yourself you know something or can do something that you can’t do. And the things you used to be able to do once, maybe you can’t do anymore, maybe you didn’t keep them up. If you don’t run and then you go to run, you might have a problem. You could pull a muscle. You could just not be able to run. I can’t run anymore. I stopped being able to run a long time ago because of an illness. So running is out of the question for me. I can run short distances. That’s about it. Please don’t chase me. You’ll win. And the process of removing things like dogma out of your brain is something that’s ongoing. And it requires participation with other people, with yourself, with your past self, journaling, things like that help. And in order to make sure you’re being, you know, we’ll say properly enchanted, the thing to watch out for is basically this enactment, this participation, this ability to engage on a regular basis with a practice so that you’re over and over again getting a connection, a deep affordance from the things around you and taking out the dogma. Because there’s always dogma is always sneaking back into our brains. Dogma is one of the great enchanters because it’s so easy and we need dogma. We can’t do without it. We just have to not stop at dogma and revivify and renew our understandings of the things around us. And proper intimacy is really required for proper enchantment. And I’m going to do a whole thing on intimacy at some point. I’ll get there. It’ll take a little while. But I’ll get there. I’m still working on some of that stuff and lots of help from lots of people, obviously, Manuel and Sally Jo and Michelle and Jonathan, a bunch of people. And these intimate connections that we make, again, are part of the connections out to the potential. And that’s the proper enchantment is from you to potential. And not only that, right, because there’s lots of connections, but that’s the primary focus. And you’ll notice that something like music has a lot of enchantment going on, not just the tonal enchantment and the rhythmic enchantment, the resonant enchantment, right? Not just the lyrical enchantment, not just that, not just the narrative enchantment. There’s something about music and its connectedness and the way we participate in our movement or singing along or a little bit of both probably that connects us deeply to that music. Now, maybe you listen to lyrics one day and you go, oh, these are terrible lyrics. And maybe that’s a possession and maybe that’s bad. So music, you’ve got to be careful. But there’s lots of forms of enchantment going on. And I think that’s that’s what you see. That’s why we like it so much, because we’re constantly trying to re-enchant the world. We just have to be careful with it. Now, there’s different relationships that we have, right? We engage with, say, magical words and we’re really relating to a map and not to the territory. And maybe that’s OK, but we should know the difference. Maps have no sequence, just relationships. And so there’s a limit to what maps can tell you, whereas models have sequences. So they have not just the relationships, but also the sequence, the ordering. And it may be a repeating ordering in a good model. But at least that’s a better way of doing the interface with magical words or with a narrative, right? Getting a good model that you can fit it into. And that’s why engaging the archetypes and archetypal stories helps, because you can see a good narrative from a bad narrative, because a lot of people don’t know the difference. And orientation is the key. And maps can give you direction, but actually they don’t typically give you orientation. You need a lot more than just a map for orientation. And that’s how we can avoid bad enchantment, because is the thing is the spell that we’re under is the thing that we’re responding to. Is the emotion that we’re having pointed at the good? Is it pointed towards values and virtues? Is it aiming high? Is it giving us a common ground that we can relate to? Or is it just giving us the illusion of a common ground? And that’s the sort of thing that we need to know. And that’s the sort of thing to answer. It’s not mere direction. It’s also the ability to orient when the direction says, fails us, for example. The direction says, go this way and we can’t. We have to go a few other ways first and then we can get back going in that direction or towards that higher value, making those intimate sort of connections out to the potential. And one thing we can watch out for is, are we engaging with something as a vending machine? Are we expecting to put in a quarter, hit B6 and get a Snickers bar? Which I highly recommend because Snickers bars are good. Because if we’re engaging in that way, it’s not enchanted. That’s not enchantment. That’s the opposite of enchantment. And if we’re being sold something like that and we’re liking that idea, because it gives us a level of certainty and it gives us a degree of predictability, like, oh, I’m going to hit B6 and put in this quarter and bang, I’m going to get a Snickers bar. Not good. Right. That’s probably not a real vision. That’s a bad thing to think about. There’s no potential. There’s no intimacy. There’s no multiple connectedness. It’s just a vending machine. And that happens in relationships. Right. We go after certain aspects of relationships and those aspects are not necessarily what we want. This is sort of like trying to be in love by having lots of sex. That’s that modal confusion that Fromm talks about, that John Dervicki talks about. Yeah. And one way to break enchantment is to ask yourself what’s the frame. And what are the results of the action from the frame? So that can help you recognize the vending machine. Oh, the frame is if you elect this politician, he’s going to enact this law and then everybody’s going to operate this way. That never happens. But you can just observe and see, oh, that didn’t happen. I was enchanted. Enchantment bad in that case. Right. Another thing is, you know, there’s the issue of charisma that we went over where charisma is not bad. You need charisma. Charisma happens. It does not corrupt by itself, but it’s needed to do anything, not by yourself. Right. Like if you want to do something with somebody else or something bigger than yourself that requires other people, you need some form of charisma to help to get them on board because otherwise they’re not on board. So that’s good to know. All charisma is not bad. There are different forms of charisma. I’ll probably go over that at some point. And then again, you always want to look at what you’re aimed at. Are you aimed at the ideal? Because that’s what you should be aimed at. Is the person talking to you aimed at the ideal? Right. Are they aimed only at the ideal or can they connect the ideal to actions and participation in the world that you can do? Because if it’s not connected to actions, participation in the world that you can do, you’re in floaty space again and you’re not going to be able to manifest. So you don’t want to be enchanted by things that are purely spiritual, purely ethereal, or purely outside of the realm of materiality because you need materiality to manifest things, to make them happen. And so these are the sorts of things to watch out for. And hopefully to some extent, I’m enchanting you with my videos in a good way. I think so. That’s usually my aim here. And I hope you’re finding them useful. And I will keep making them as long as I have material. And I probably have material for quite a while. So if there’s something you’d like to see or a topic you’d like me to to take up, leave in the comments and I’ll do my best. And I just want to thank you again for giving me your attention and your time in the videos, because that’s the thing that’s really the most important part. And, you know, more attention and time and comments, even better. I try to do my best to get my points across and I never know if they’re landing. All right. Sometimes when I don’t when I don’t have any feedback, it’s hard for me to know is this good, is this bad? And so I always want to encourage you on all my videos to comment and reach out to me if you’ve got something you want to see or something you don’t understand, if there’s something that wasn’t clear. And, you know, doing this builds community. I’m trying to enchant you into the community of thought that I’m engaged in with all of you. And hopefully if we work together and we aim at the good, then we can manifest more of the good in the world. And that will make everything better for everybody.