https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Fz1cGlLOiHY
So what I’d like to talk about now is pragmatic participation online related to my experience with online communities and how they best flourish. A lot of this is going to be centered around my more recent experience on Discord. We used to have a thing going on, the Awakening from the Meeting Crisis server. And the way that came about was John Brevecky’s meditation series. When I was on there, I was building a community. It sort of comes naturally to me. It’s not like something I planned to do, it’s some grand scheme. But I naturally build communities online, so I’ve been online my whole life. And it’s very natural to me. I just sort of do it. And when Brett came on, he said, hey, I’ve got this Discord server. And I didn’t know what Discord server was. I was like, oh, fantastic, we’ll go over there. And we continued the meditation long past when John stopped doing his meditation. So we were still using videos from him. And sort of Manuel Post and I noticed a bunch of patterns, right? That’s what I do, right? Patterns. You may have noticed that from the name. And the pattern that played out was a bunch of people who didn’t like the experience of reading poetry anymore. Maybe they had read poetry in the past and now it’s no longer working for them for whatever reason. And we found this very odd. And one of the ways we discovered this is that in John’s meditation series, he had this practice called Lectio Divina, which is a modification of a Catholic reading practice where you read scripture and meditate on it. And in John’s version, you kind of read prose and then you read some poetry. And then you combine those together, roughly speaking. And we sort of developed group practices. Ben Ang, Manuel Post and myself developed a group practice around this. Wonderful instructions if you want to ever engage. They’re all written out. They’re reasonable. They’re not fantastic, but they’re reasonable. You can do group practice. And the reason why I think this group practice works so well, and it really did work well, is because instead of having people participate up front, they can just watch. And so the way we have a format, it’s very structured. You’ve got a reader and a facilitator and everybody else is an observer. And the observers are allowed to do more than observe at a certain point. So it starts out with a meditation to clear your mind, a quick one. It’s a guided meditation. It’s not a fully guided meditation. It’s just kind of a half guided meditation just to clear your mind and get you in the mood for the practice. And then you’re instructed to pay attention to the reader. So you’re supposed to drop your own thoughts and go into observation mode. And we’re explicit about it. And that actually matters. These little things are not little things. They actually matter. So we clear your mind and focus your attention on the reader. And then you’re supposed to observe what the reader is going through and relate to it in a way, but not make it about you. And that’s very hard for some people to do and some people can’t manage it. I totally get that. But repeated exposure to this sort of a practice actually seems to do something. And the facilitator helps the reader through the process. Now, why is that important? Because the reader is forced to explain what they’re talking about to somebody else. The facilitator is supposed to make sure it’s clear to the audience. And not just to the facilitator and the reader and not just to the reader. Because when people explain things, say in a TED talk, for example, it only has to be clear to them. It’s clear in their head. And what the audience is normally responding to is that up and down, up and down. There’s a whole TED talk on how to make a good TED talk, by the way. The tonal, the lyrical aspects, the resonant aspects of the talk. That doesn’t mean the TED talk made any sense. I’ve heard TED talks where people just spewed well-known, completely debunked BS all over the place. And nobody caught it because it was a good TED talk. They were enchanted. And fair enough. So as a way to break the enchantment. And look, you’re not deliberately enchanting other people necessarily. You’re enchanting yourself. And then people see authenticity. Fair enough. When you’re enchanted, you’re authentic. And then they go along. And that’s a normal thing. It’s not necessarily bad. It’s dangerous for sure. That’s why we have facilitator. Facilitator helps to make sure that doesn’t happen. It helps to clarify, to make things clear, not only to the reader, not only to the facilitator, but to the audience. The audience can see what’s going on with the thought process, with the interactions, the perspectives that the person is holding on the prose. What stands out to them, what’s salient to them. And then they do it all again with the poetry. What stands out to them, what’s salient to them, and how they relate to that. And then they do it a third time with combining both. And keeping track of that is hard. The facilitator is supposed to do that. And then when that process is done, then you bring in the audience. Now, the reason why you do that is so that they’re not relating to the texts. They’re probably not texts they’re familiar with. But they’re gaining an appreciation for the texts by watching somebody else. This is really important. This is a pragmatic way to use some of the work that John Vervicki has to get people out of a meaning crisis. Or to at least start them on the path. First of all, it’s community based. We do this with at least four people. If we don’t have four people, because you get a reader and a facilitator, we won’t do the practice. We prefer five or six. Six would be good. You could do it with seven or eight. Maybe you’re going to run long on time. It does take some time. And the facilitator keeps track of that too, which is times an important component. So you don’t have to be super rigid about it, but you also can’t be super loosey goosey about it. So there’s a give and take there. When you do this practice, people who don’t like poetry, who don’t enjoy poetry, start to engage with poetry. Now, we’ve got our theories on to why. And I’ve got the model video. If you haven’t seen the Knowledge Engine video about the model of knowledge, it’s different from John Verveckis. Highly recommend it, because this will all make more sense if you have that understanding in your head. People who weren’t engaging in poetry suddenly start to read poetry. Why? Well, because they see the wonder of the reader. And they go, huh, what are they getting? How did I heard the same words that they did? They read the poem out loud and they see something. And I don’t necessarily see that as the person watching, or maybe it’s a new point, or maybe there’s just a depth. Because like you’re a divina in the group practice anyway, it’s a depth exploration. It’s not a breath exploration. You’re not trying to read like 50 pages of poetry here, right? Like I read William Blake’s The Tiger, right? I read a lot of Blake. Most of Blake’s stuff is really short, right? I read a lot of at least songs of innocence and songs of experience, which is where I tend to focus, which should be for obvious reasons. But if it’s not, I can explain it to you. Leave a comment. When they see somebody engage with something that they think is banal, like poetry, I don’t understand poetry, poetry, William Blake, what’s he on about? Just some crazy engraver who walked naked through his gardens. That’s true, by the way. I like to talk to angels. Also true. In the trees. Because where else would they be, duh. So if you’re Blake, it works out great. So you see somebody having an experience and going deep and giving you a perspective on something that maybe you didn’t think had one. And I do think people are there. They’re not able to engage in poetry with a perspective that allows them to see the depth. And they don’t have to in the lectio practice. They don’t have to do any of that work. They don’t need that circuitry in their head at all. Because the reader has it, hopefully a good reader anyway, or the facilitator tries to bring it out of them anyway. And a good facilitator can do that. And not everybody can be a good facilitator and not everybody be a good reader. And then they get curious about poetry. And maybe they don’t do the group lectio practice ever or the private lectio practice ever. Don’t care. Don’t know. Doesn’t matter. But that engagement makes them curious. You know, not every time, maybe. But maybe. Maybe every time. And they go, oh, what’s this person doing? And then they want to mimic that activity, that behavior. They want to engage with that. They want to see what this is. What this is. They want to experience that experience. So now all of a sudden you’ve opened the door, or maybe, you know, tried the existing door open again or something or opened it wider than it was to an experience with poetry. And now all of a sudden. That’s a way of opening them up, opening up their perspective, right? Opening up their understanding, opening up ways to connect things in the world, because it’s one of the things that poetry does. It allows you more connections in the world. It accepts out quite nicely to use John’s John’s language. There’s a nice exaptation between, say, poetry and prose. And again, you’re mouthing poetry and prose in the practice or you’re watching somebody do it. Right. And then so you’re seeing not only the appreciation of the prose and how deep it can go, not only the appreciation of poetry and how deep that can go, but also how to put it together and how to put it together in practice in your life. Because that’s actually part of the questioning in the practice is how does this relate to your life? Like, what does this change about your life? Right. And if you watch somebody go through an imaginal experience, you watch somebody talk about poetry, you watch somebody go deep in perspective and you watch somebody else help them in their perspective. So there’s a lot going on. And you as an observer get to see that. And then maybe that opens something up for you. I would argue it always did. Whether or not it lasted. I don’t know. I mean, for some people, it clearly did. You know, they ended up out of a meaning crisis and off to better things and not on the discord, which, you know, on the one hand, it makes me sad because I miss some of the people I befriended. On the other hand, makes me super happy because, yay, they’re no longer stuck online. They can now engage with real people in the real world. Was that the group like to your divina practice? No, but maybe part of it was. I don’t know. I don’t care. It seemed to work. People had great reports on it. And look, there are other possible group practices that can do things like that. There are other practices that we have thought about and to some extent come up with. I’d have to check with Manuel to see because he sort of took that over, which was fine. Right. It’s fine. You can do work. It’s good, you know, to try and engender certain certain things like that. But watching somebody go through the process of staying in an imaginal space, reading a text, going deep on the text. Relating that to the imaginal world relating that imaginal world to how other people behave relating how. That imagine world and how other people behave to how you would have to change to live in that world. That’s very powerful. And then doing it all again for the poetry and then doing that all again for the combination of the text. Now you’re seeing the melding of ideas in real time by one person. Right with the assistance of another person. The assistance of another person is important because you see this person reaching a height greater than they would be able to reach any other way. And that’s clear to you. And now subconsciously, at least or unconsciously, you start to think in your brain. Your brain is doing thinking while you’re not paying attention. Right. The attention part of your brain is your conscious mind. Unattentioned part of your brain is the unconscious mind and subconscious. It starts to leak in through the through the mimicry circuit. I want to do that. I want to know what that is. Right. You start to engage in that way. You start to search for that. You go into seeking mode. You want to see that you want to you want to experience it. Right. And over time, like I said, it worked like people would go from watching like three of these or four of these. And then the next thing you know, they want to they want to try it and they stumble through it. And then they’re like, oh, I don’t think that went well. And of course, we always thought it went great. Right. Like because it did. Like, oh, OK, it wasn’t as good as the last reader or whatever. Like, it’s not there’s no objective measure for these things. Right. And there shouldn’t be there shouldn’t have to be. And then they do it again. Maybe not next time, but maybe in a couple of weeks or three weeks or whatever. And then they’d have a breakthrough. And that’s what they would report. And that breakthrough would have what other observers would call a lasting effect. How long that lasts for? I don’t know. I don’t necessarily care all that much. Giving people new tools is great. If you don’t use tools, you lose them. However, so and that’s very much a problem of our culture. I think we’ve lost the ability to cooperate. We’ve lost intimacy. We’ve lost the ability to be around each other in disagreement and still do the things that we can do in common. And I’ll go over that in a future video for sure. But giving people the tools by showing them what can happen and then they get curious and they seek it out. That’s super powerful. And that was one of the things that we did with the practice, like the practice that we had this group like to Divina practice, which, again, is all documented. We’ve done it many, many, many, many times. It works. It does something. It’s very powerful. It’s the most powerful thing that I saw on that server, to be honest with you. And it may sound a little self-serving since I co-developed it, but it is what it is. And I don’t think that if you engage with anybody who was there, that they’re going to say anything different. And if you want to know more or whatever, like I said, we’ve got all the instructions written up. I probably have to put them in a better format at some point because we have them up on our website. The website got attacked by hackers, of course. And making that available would be fine. Showing people how to do it. That would be great. Love to do it. I’m sure Manuel would love to help me do that. And there are others that can help because we’re not the only ones that know about it or anything. And I think it helps people. I think it’s a good beginner-style practice to get people interested in things and to help to lift them out of the meaning crisis. Now, I’ll argue there’s a bunch of other things. I’m putting them in a document. We’ve got this other project called the Mark of Wisdom project. I’ve been working on that for a little while on and off. It’s sort of picking up steam again because people are interested. And we haven’t gotten too many comments yet, but we’ve gotten some feedback. So that’s good. And we’re hoping to get more feedback so that we can build little wisdom communities and get people out of meaning crisis. And I think that we’re uniquely poised to do that because cultural cognitive grammar is the approach and the focus. Right. That’s navigating patterns is about cultural cognitive grammar and fixing that problem. And then these practices, this all comes out of John Bravicki’s work. All of it. These practices are designed not just to fix the cultural cognitive grammar, but also to show you through through exemplification the things that you can do. To get skills to connect to the world better. Right. And that’s what poetry does for you. That’s what reading prose deeply does for you. That’s what connecting them in your imaginal realm and your imagination does for you. It allows you to exact out those skills and start seeing the world differently and start engaging in the world differently. And then things happen differently. That’s that’s the way things actually work. So I just want to share that experience. That’s a pragmatic approach. It’s one of many that we have access to. Some are more developed than others. That was a practice that we ran for well over two years, I would say. Probably close to two and a half years. It didn’t run as long as the meditation, obviously, but it it pretty closely did sort of petered out at the end is we sort of lost people. And, you know, what are we losing people to? We’re losing people to them leaving and going offline and doing things in the real world. So on the one hand, again, very sad. Really enjoyed that. On the other hand, very happy. Whatever whatever sacrifice I have to make to get people offline. I’m OK with I’m OK with that. So, yeah, that’s that’s the pragmatic approach or one of many. And I thought it was important to do a video on it and talk about it. Because, yeah, there are people that didn’t do practices that didn’t have things going that weren’t doing daily meditation to help people out. But we were and we did it for almost three years. You know, it only stopped recently. And we’ll start it up again as soon as we have a better way to do that and better engagement with with people who really want to make a difference. And if you’re one of those people, leave a comment. And look, if you think somebody could benefit from watching my videos, let them know about my channel. Trying to grow the channel a bit here. I think it’s time. So leave a like, leave a comment, tell people at the channel, subscribe if you haven’t tell other people to subscribe. There’s some interesting stuff. There’s more stuff coming and I take requests. So leave those in comments. I’ll do my best. I can’t guarantee. But, you know, things get on the list and sometimes they get checked off the list. You never know. But, you know, the most important part about all of this engagement is that any engagement is better than no engagement. And so even you watching these videos to the end in particular is is very helpful. It’s a form of engagement and it can lead to bigger engagement, right? More engagement, deeper engagement, all of which is important. And because of that, I just want to take the time to thank you for your time and attention.