Bridging the Gap: Theory, Practice, and Trust

33:09Yeah. My God, there's so much in everything you just said. I had like this internal turmoil of like being pulled like, oh, which thread do I grab? I think I'll go to the last thing that it feels like you're touching on because it's come up a couple of times while I've heard you speak, but we haven't used the word yet. And I'm really thinking about presence and I'm thinking about how often, at least in the work that I do, I mean, you know, I have a broad scope and do stuff in the philosophical as well. And we want people to be present there, but sort of that cultivation of presence that speaks a little bit to, as you were talking about, I think it was the lake, you know, I have a version of that.

33:47I read some book about, something about a guide to the present moment, this, this book, So the Sky Road, And it was really about just witnessing the tree, but not with any comparison to any other tree, just taking it in. And it's most like I tend to refer to this as like a hyper presence of like the propositions aren't really so much there. It's just I am and it's all there is in those particular moments. And I feel like that's an important thing to cultivate because I think you need presence before you can move on to that covenant or reciprocal opening. Otherwise, you end up into what I heard you talking about is a bit of a reporting on your experience rather than an actual enactment and living through your experience.

34:30So I'm just curious how that lands or if I've got that right. It does. It lands very well. And for me, so I think each one of the kinds of knowing has its criterion of realness. Propositional truth is conviction. Our skills, our procedural skills is power. we're empowered. When we think we, when we can cause things to happen, we believe we're in touch with reality. Um, or we sense, I just misused the word believe actually we sense. Um, um, and for, uh, respect to have all knowing it's that presence, uh, that's that, that sense of presence, which doesn't mean propositional verisimilitude. Um, people can get a terrific sense of presence in a game like Tetris that isn't very similar to the world.

35:22Whether it transfers well is another issue we could bring up. But the point is that sense of presence, right? And why is presence so important to us? Why do we seek out resonance? Why do we seek out flow? And there's a bunch of cognitive scientific reasons. We're training insight. We're training implicit learning. So there's cognitive motivations. But I heard you addressing the existential concern. And the existential concern is precisely to remember that which our propositions blind us to, which is the suchness and the moreness of every, right? And I don't want to say particular thing because a particular, but calling it a particular thing, thingifying it is the shadow cast by a propositional mode, right?

36:09There are things that go into the containers and the containers are the categories and the categories have concepts. And then we marshal the concepts together with the proposition. They're very powerful. We couldn't live without that. And again, I'm not here to diss that. But notice how even in language we sneak something in to make us remember. We have proper names. And then we do a little click in our head where that proper name. So think of the difference between calling something a cat. I've categorized it. And now all I'm aware of are its categorical features, its conceptual features. And calling you Taylor, and I've known other Taylors, so I can't, right?

36:52First of all, it's not a categorical name. And secondly, even as a name, I have to, right? I have to, I'm going to pun here, I have to tailor it just to you, right? Because there is a way in which you exceed all and everything does, but you exceed all possible categorizations I can bring to bear on you. And if I forget that, I start to disconnect myself from the inexhaustibility. The inexhaustibility points to that moreness. There's always more to the suchness. And that moreness isn't, and this is what's where it's so almost paradoxical, but I have William Desmond in my head right now, but your moreness, right?

37:41Well, it is specific to your suchness. Isn't your moreness alone. Everything's moreness is all interwoven and interconnected. And I know that sounds all mystical and strange, but the point I'm trying to get is when we We forget the inexhaustibility of the suchness. We really forget the depth of reality. We forget the constitutive feature of realness. What makes something real is its inexhaustible intelligibility and that we can always go further. And when you start to really know something that way, you're loving it.

38:21Thank you. Yeah, I'm glad you said that. I'm glad we got you to say that. I'm going a little bit back to, you know, the grasping piece that Ethan was talking about and how you sort of you responded to that. And I think in some ways, you kind of answered it the way that I was hoping you would, in that it was sort of a piece about getting this out into the world. You know, I tend to refer to it as like integrating what you learn within these containers out into your real life, even though what we do in the containers is still part of your real life. But it's sort of that thing that why I imagine some people do that grasping and holding on and they don't want it to let it go is because it's sort of a feature of practice and workshops is that if they're well facilitated, they have the capacity to sort of bring the group up to a higher, I know you're not big on developmental theory, but a higher stage of development that they can't otherwise cultivate for themselves.

39:13And then the problem is, is that, you know, that that goes away, the weekend ends, they go home and they don't know how to cultivate it because you have not trained them or they have not practiced long enough to build the as i often refer to the muscle within them such that they can cultivate it so it makes sense that some people come into the containers and just grasp and don't want to let it go because they don't know how to create it anywhere else without the structure so in many ways that's that's a thing that i think is great about practice at least gives people a place to gather and have that experience but i always get worried about the thing that they only come here like there's a part of me you know we've we've misused the term ethan and i about planned obsolescence it's not really what we mean but what we mean is is like we want you to come in and not rely on us after a period of time come in build the muscles and the skills integrate this thing into your life especially you don't need it anymore and i always sometimes find that that's a tricky thing to necessarily get people to do they come in and then they don't quite do the extra in between practice and stuff like that.

40:16So it's, it's always sort of this, this weird space about how do you really get people to take these experiences and integrate them so that they can, they can cultivate, or how do we help them cultivate it? I think what we're doing, I mean, I think that's what makes us in some ways a little bit different than, I think, as you had articulated, John, like, you know, just going in and doing that one thing and grasping it, because we have an ecology of practice that go into opponent process that don't lead us to rely on any one particular capacity. So I wonder if you can speak something in sort of that area of integration into the real world.

40:52Yeah, that's important. I think what you said, I just want to flag something you said, because I think it's an important marker, because I want to put that marker down because it will help to context. So I'm going to say after I contextualize on this afterwards, which is for me, that's a heuristic and it's only a heuristic, but it's a good heuristic. You know, what's the difference between a cult and a group? And a cult is trying to increase your dependency, where I think a school or a church or a temple is trying to enhance your agency and your selfhood and your personhood outside of the dojo or the place of practice.

41:35And that has always been our orientation. And we have frequently together made decisions in which we have foregone certain kinds of benefits that we could have gathered to ourselves by sticking to a commitment that we're not going to make people dependent on us. And that's tricky because we're trying to walk a line between making sure people aren't depending on us, but also letting people know that they can rely on us. And there's no hard and fast rule for that. And we're constantly trying to walk the razor's edge. On the second point, and this is why I wanted to contextualize with the first point.

42:23This goes back to Tave's book. Ethan knows about this because we talked about this in Seeing God Again the first time. Religious Experience Reconsidered, an important book in the cognitive science of religion. And what she points out is she wants to get this category because she wants to, for reasons many of you have heard me articulate elsewhere, we should stop talking about religions as if they're these pristine, you know, permanent, homogeneous, pure things. That's just not true. Instead, we should talk about how it is that people come to have experiences they deem religious. And, you know, you can see why I put the cult flag up, because what she points out is we have experiences that are special.

43:13And what we're doing when we're becoming religious is we're trying to make them, mnemonic means like good for memory. We're trying to make them good for memory so that we can take them with us because we want to be able to re-encounter this specialness because we have a deep intuition that it can educate and orient us. And so we get this sort of comprehensive metanoia, comprehensive turning, and we're trying to remember. She says what makes things special are that they're anomalous and highly salient, which is predictive processing and relevance realization. So, yay. Oh, no, no, no. Back to the actual point, which is, right, we have denuded people's sense of how to properly make things mnemonically relevant other than propositional storage.

44:10this is yates's book on the art of memory where memory used to be regarded the art of memory mnemonics used to be regarded almost as a magical it was definitely a spiritual and often had religious overtones to it uh remembering um remembering right um and so i think what we have to do for people who come in and they want to grasp it from what the propositions is we have to give them like we have to properly reawaken and educate them in multiple kinds of remembering um so that that would more properly help them to first alleviate right and i agree with you that's a sincere concern and i think it's a legitimate concern given taves's argument like they're basically saying i want to be able to take this away But their culture and the modernity has told them the only way to do that is by turning it into a consumable possession that you have stored in your propositions.

45:14We have to get people to awaken to the remembering that there are much more profound and important ways of remembering that will alleviate that maniacal attempt to monopolize with propositions and also afford them to more powerfully transfer it into their skills and their states and their traits in their everyday life. And so that's how I would. And we try to do that to my mind on a regular basis. We make, in fact, we've regularly made. I was doing this independently when I was teaching meditation Tai Chi. And then when I met you and Ethan, we had all been doing this and then we've built on this.

45:54We make the going into and the exiting from the practice part of the practice as trying to address these concerns that I've been raising. I want to double click on the dependency bit, John, because there's, I'll do this, I'll do another thing where I kind of like draw a couple of bookends. Because on one end, I do see a way in which the meaning crisis is alive and well. But that also means that when we do practices with people, and there's a specialness to the experience, right? Like a sense of, wow, we're really like growing together. And this is unlike anything that I felt before. One of my concerns, and it bristles me sometimes is that like, you know, independent of us pushing forward the dependency like structurally, look guys, I'm making a bad business decision right here in front of everybody, right?

46:47It's like we don't do the dependency thing. But at the same time, you know, there is contextually this hunger for like, no, I want this specialness. I'll keep coming back here because these are the people and this is the context whereby it is most special, I feel most connected. And that's another kind of grabbing, it's another kind of attachment which concerns me because then I then look at it going, well, sure, but what about, you know, your family? What about your partner? What about your kids? What about the, you know, the kids that you have to teach if you're a teacher. And so that's one part, that's one end of the spectrum.

47:32The other part of it that stretches for me is kind of like the instrumental pole, which is folks coming to practices and going, well, if I learn authentic relating, I'll be better on dates, you know, or it will help me to get over my social anxiety or something like that. There is a way in which the practices lose the intrinsic value on their own, which I think is in service of developing that capacity. Taylor, you like to talk about it as looking in the rearview mirror, like you keep doing that over time, here's kind of like track it, right? And instead it becomes something I can employ that will make me more wise.

48:19I will gain a wisdom point here if I keep doing this. And as a teacher myself, I sometimes find it difficult to guide people towards the middle. Or at least I'm keeping my eye on it. But how do you... Is this something that you're noticing? or have noticed? What's your stack? What's your take on that? Well, let's try the second poll, the instrumentalizing. First of all, people have got deeply ingrained habits and it would be lacking in proper compassion to just sort of forbid that. Secondly, don't preach the gospel to somebody that needs a coat, which is, right, if somebody really needs help with dating and they're going to use us to do that initially.

49:14We shouldn't forbid that. Now, and this is Plato's model of philosophical seduction. And so please put aside all the Me Too problems around the word seduction. This is the idea that when people come, people will come into a community and an ecology of practices for one set of reasons, and those reasons will change as they are in the practice. This is Carson's notion of the infinite game. They're, they, it's not a finite game. And if they, if they stick with the finite game, they, they will eventually leak because they'll get what they came for and they'll go. Right. They're self-selecting that way.

49:51But, but what happens, and I've seen this also just as a university educator, is I'll get people who are starting the class, but I just want my mark and get out of here. And, you know, and, and there are rules that allowed them to play that game. But what I attempt to do is again, please give me the charity around this. seduce them so that the goals of why they're there change as they're doing it. And one of my marks of me being a good teacher is my ability to actually do that. I get that from Socrates. People would come in to, I want my boys to study with you so there'll be better soldiers. Well, let's talk about courage, right?

50:29And then we'll do this and we'll go through this whole thing. Hey, I think my boys should hang out with you and spend time with you, Socrates. Yeah, right that's the move that plato's on about so for me that that's the that like um i used to be and i'm not saying anything about you ethan i used to be very judgmental about that i used to you know you're instrumentalizing it well like capitalism and blah blah blah blah blah right and then i realized you know don't preach the gospel to somebody that doesn't have a coat first give them the coat and then once they're warm they might want to change what they're how they're interacting with you.

51:05And so that's the first one. The second one about the dependency, see, that's where I think there's a golden mean around that. There's one sense of dependability, which means I'm reliably there for a person. So in that sense, Sarah, and I hope both of you can depend on me. That's not a dependency sense of dependence. That's a sense of, oh, we're bound together, we need each other and we rely on each other. And if people are relying each other insofar as we are inherently porous and participating in each other in a way that is enhancing their agency, their selfhood and their personhood, I don't regard that as dependency in the pejorative sense at all.

51:49And so is it possible that people could be practicing with us for decades under those circumstances. Of course. Why not? I would hope so. I would hope that in some ways, and I don't mean this sacrilegiously, we were doing what a church could do or a temple could do or a mosque could do or a sangha could do. The Buddha, the Dharma, the sangha. You always have to have a sangha, right? You always have to have a sangha. So if this becomes a sangha or helps people form saying is, that's how I see it as right livelihood, right practice.

52:32John, I was sort of thinking while I was hearing you say all that, and I think the answers already exist in what you were saying, but I'm also aware of even my own capacity to sort of, I don't know if I want to say tune out, but just sort of not pick up on things when they're actually relevant to me because of how we started the conversation or how I started what it was I was sharing. And what I'm left with is sort of the idea of the perspective of the person. I don't know how many of them are necessarily here on the live call. But the perspective of somebody who's done a lot of practice, right?

53:07So they've done a lot of meditation. They've gone through yoga teacher training. They're like, there's an embodiment that's there. I know for me, and I'll save that for whenever you guys are talking to me and centering around me. But I know for me what the benefit has been just to be introduced to you, to bring in more propositional framing into and then reflecting it back. But what would you say to somebody who's really strong in practice, but who's like, I don't need to learn about Socrates or I don't need to really understand cognitive science because this thing's really real to me already.

53:44What would you say to somebody like that who feels like they have no use for propositional it's ironic because i was giving an in-person lecture at sivananda yesterday uh to uh to people who are well practiced in yoga and meditation and i gave a lecture uh well as a workshop because i took them through uh some some of my regular uh dog and pony show the tapping on the cup and all you know and very tough.

54:19And I got, it was exceptionally well received. Like applause and laughter and engagement and wanting to talk to me. The room was full and people wanting to thank me. And so putting aside the ego gratification, which I always try to acknowledge because I don't want to pretend it's not there. Um, it spoke to me that, um, people who don't want to listen to others have lost holy listening and that there is a way in which you can go into theory so that you can return to practice and recover it in a way that you couldn't do before. This is like Tolkien's recovery theory. I get it. You don't want to be the escapist.

55:11You don't want to escape into abstraction. Yes, that's a sin. I get that. But you know, there's the opposite. There's the sin, right, of not realizing why do you have a capacity for abstract, reflective thought? You're not being true to yourself in a certain way. What that can do is I'm here, I go up here, and I can move and I can come back at it and see. This is the pilgrimage of Theoria. This is moving to a different perspective so that I can see it again for the first time and recover things in my practice that I had covered over with the dead hand of habit or that I had one-sided because of a particular construct that historically ushered me into the practice.

56:05And so, yeah, I find that I find the practitioner snob as bad as the theory snob, which is you can't teach me anything. Well, of course I can't if you have that attitude. And well, I don't need to learn anything. I doubt that you're perfect, right? I really seriously doubt that. I really doubt that. And nobody is challenging your satisfaction in your practice. What we're trying to say to you is if you're not, you're, you're in, and this is where I do this. I do, I don't disagree with you. I do agree with you. Your cognition is inherently dynamic. It's inherently developmental. It functions by developing.

56:52And as it develops, it functions and you can't separate development and function, Right. And you've got to keep developing. And so, like, there's a value to a theory that is looking at the sun, a theoria, but then brings that sun, those sunlit eyes back into the cave of practice so that you can see you renew the senses and see them in a different way. My go-to example of this is the way MMA has devastated the purists within the martial art world. It's like, all I have to know is my practice. If I get good at that, it's like, turns out, just empirically, repeatedly, repeatedly, empirically, over and over again, that's false.

57:39That's false. That's just simply false. Okay? And so that's my response to that. And so I have an obligation to practice that, which is to try and listen to people outside of my wheelhouse. I'm having a wonderful series of discussions. They're on my channel right now with Adam Walker and with poetry, something that I've never, I've mentioned poetry, but poetry is a spiritual practice. and just trying to listen. And he's really listening to me. And what I'm really encouraged by are so many people commenting on the deep dialogue, the dialogos that's happening between Adam and I. So I try to put into practice what I just said.

58:27I try to be a mixed martial artist of the artistry for the cultivation of wisdom and virtue. Mm hmm. And and what I'm hearing. So one, we were just, you know, we're sort of talking about, you know, the the the well practiced person and sort of in a resistance or sort of an ignorance of what, you know, theory can offer them. And then, of course, we have the other one, people staying in the proposition, not really understanding. Oh, well, I actually know this and therefore I have safety in the world. So why would I need to do this? My relationships are fine, that sort of thing. But it occurs to me the thing that we're trying to do for both groups is offer a frame break.

59:07So as you sort of said, going up to here, this provides the frame break such that when you come back down into the practice, you see it differently than you did three months ago when you didn't have any concept of insert theoretical cognitive science concept here. And that speaks to my experience, too, is that I felt that it created a much stronger foundation of my practice. Like, yes, there was my practice and in it, my hyper presence and sort of being with people. I'm in the really real. It's like, yes, this feels so right. And with that, I had ignored theoretical stuff for some time, not resisted it.

59:44It was just more like there's still so much novelty here for me to get. But then once that novelty had settled, then I started like, okay, so everybody else is talking about integral theory. Maybe I'll go check that out. Oh, this is what they're talking about. You know, I'm mapping it back into my experience of the practice, which I think is really very helpful, important, and probably necessary to be somebody who trains other facilitators, right? You know, kind of say it's seeing the matrix. To me, that's what the sort of the propositional and the theory offers is allows me to see the matrix of what's actually going on in my cognition and others.

1:00:20So, yes, there's a relational part that I'm in and the rightness of that moment. But then there's also like this this foundation. Well, I know I'm up here, but there's this foundation that tells me also that, you know, this is actually what's happening, you know. So it's actually like I'd step back and look at it and not just be stuck in a potential self-deception of this feels good and this feels right. Something comes out and says, well, actually, the studies, the statistics, all this work of all this theorists actually also says, yeah, that is right. Oh, OK. So now I can put down the question, am I bullshitting myself?

1:00:58Yeah. I don't know. I just I I'm just really with the sort of that piece of what we're trying to do, or at least what I'm often trying to do is provide that frame break to provide something such that, you know, when they come out, they see things a little bit differently, regardless of where on the spectrum they are in terms of, you know, heavy proposition and heavy participatory. Can I just say one thing, Ethan? Yeah, it'll be brief. Um, and, and, and, and, and that sort of, uh, bi-directional framebreaking, uh, you know, it's Murdoch's, uh, Iris Murdoch's, you know, uh, sensibility, transcendence, all that, all that juicy stuff.

1:01:39Uh, but it's allowed me to reframe something that used to bother me. And now I find it amusingly encouraging, which is I get some people say, John just talks and talks and talks. It's just all talk. And then I get other people that say, I don't need to write, write, write. I don't I don't need any of this practice. I know I've got my own practice. It's right. And they criticize me. And it's like, oh, both sides are criticizing me, which means I have good reason to believe I'm actually somewhere in the middle. Right. And so it went from being like I was being irked by it to being, oh, right. That's a good marker.

1:02:30If both sides, right, this is just word salad. Oh, John doesn't practice the way I practice, right? And it's like, oh, that's good. That's a clear feedback to me that I'm probably in the middle where I want to be. yeah walking the middle way means you'll open the arrows on both sides and just to yes and um taylor a little bit like as well like to to add to that all of all of that has happened for me as well and i think also like there's been a development of like fluency like i can jump i i now feel i can go into the practice and back out to the theory and back to the practice and back into the theory even more and that's smoother.

1:03:15And the thing that I've realized which really caught me off guard was like I can actually, I feel myself be able to practice deeper, like going more into the an action of something knowing that, yep, kind of like that piece I know I'm not bullshitting myself piece. It's like, ah, great. Predictive processing is here. Now I can really pay attention to my breath. Now I can really do the local piece. and in a lot of ways, I found that impacting the people around me the most where I used to be told quite a lot, I don't know if you got this, John, before, but it's like, well, you know, Ethan likes to lecture at a dinner table.

1:03:56It's like, once you get him talking, he'll start lecturing, right? I've now been able to kind of like listen to that and like, oh, right, but that doesn't mean that I have to throw away all of the knowledge that I've necessarily absorbed by just being around you or being around Taylor or being around Mark and folks like that. But there's a way in which, oh, this is kind of like clay and I can play a game with it, right? Like I can mold it in a different way and that ironically allows me to put more attention on the other person to go, what do they need right now? Like how might they need to hear this right now in a way that lands for them that matters for them.

1:04:37And so I think it's easy to think of theory as being cold, analytical, calculating and all the way over there in the ivory tower of whatever university you happen to hate growing up, right, or not been able to be accepted to because you didn't manage to secure a scholarship but that's fine.

1:05:00But I think it's also about being able to see it and reframe it as like, ah, Derry cares. People cared enough to figure out about a pattern in the world so that they could write about it. People could care enough to read it because it probably mattered that someone in their life needed to hear it. And I think moving into practice is just different forms of bringing that to other people. I just want to sort of like offer a last word to John because I know we're like five minutes over time. If we have the link, we can just put it into the chat right now so people can already perhaps start moving over as we move into our practice session.

1:05:46But just thought I'd leave you with that, John, in the last word. Well, I'm just going to respond to what both of you said with sort of two of my aspirations. Socrates always adjusted himself to his interlocutor. and then was able to be fully philosophical with them. I've always aspired to that, and I've been given a lot of help by all the practices, interacting with people like both of you, Sara. One of the great moments of my life was yesterday. Sara has, for the longest time, heard me giving more sort of academic lectures. And Simananda is her spiritual home, and I was doing this to help, but she was worried.

1:06:32like don't yeah and then I and then when it was done she was that was some I like that was so much fun I like that and I've tried to say I've been practicing and workshopping for years or I'm not I know how to still do lectures I do those but I've built I've picked up other virtues and virtuosity and and that's actually helped me getting closer to being more Socratic and then And my other inspiration, respiration is Plotinus. Plotinus was also, people said, he was simultaneously fully with you and fully with the one at the same time. And it's like, well, so I'm grateful for the way I've been able to move the needle towards those two aspirations by all the work we do together.

1:07:24So thank you.

1:07:28Thanks, John. All right, everybody. That takes us to the end of our first hour-ish of the chat. So we're now going to move over to the Zoom room. If you just click the bottom right-hand corner, a little speech bubble chat button, that will take you to an Awaken to Meaning Zoom room where John will take us through some practices. Now, also please remember that this is the first of a series of three conversations, which means next Sunday at 10 a.m. we'll be here again and then we'll be following up and passing the baton over to Taylor. So that'll be John and I kind of like taking a little deeper dive into Taylor's perspective.

1:08:09And so if you would like to get onto that conversation, keep an eye out for the newsletter, either on the lectern end of things or the five to midnight end of things, Awakened to Meaning. Please check out like where we might be nearby in your area if you're on the west coast or if you're up north of the border and toronto will be there in north america right um there might be more things coming up forward for the rest of the uh year right but we'd love to see you around and you know john will be around as well at least for a few of those so yeah i mean john's sort of new home for facilitation is awakened to meaning so yep that's got his place to lecture and he's got his place to facilitate exactly exactly we just need to get you a little cabin where you can write your poetry as well

1:08:59after speaking with Adam I would be intimidated I mean I've been writing poetry for 40 years but I now am more properly humbled in the face of poetry I believe yeah alright so let's just call it there we'll see you all next week if you are not joining us for practice and if we are joining you for practice we'll see you in the Zoom room in a few minutes. All right. See you, everybody. Thank you. Take care, everyone.