Can Zen and Neoplatonism Solve the Meaning Crisis? Vervaeke and Hsieh

38:38We don't know what's gonna happen the very next day or the very next moment and at the same time, Neoplatonism offers the cognitive flexibility to go, oh but you know what? Let's try this. Let's play that, right? What do you think? I think that's deeply right. I think that

39:02I think that Zen is something that let's try it this way like you got Zen Coens and you've got Socratic questioning and they look they're coming from very different places and then they end up in the same state of aporia and it might be that they give us a stereoscopic vision on this Socrates is saying, let's push your intelligibility, your intelligence and your sense making to that point. And then the Zen person is saying, let's try it. So Socrates is pushing you to make wider and wider or deeper and deeper frames. So he's just frame making. It's a lot of frame breaking, but in the service of frame making.

39:50And then the other way Zen is they're really trying to break all of your frames. So you get this massive all at once frame making, which is the insight. And so they're both pushing like from one from the side of like you need to be really intimately connected to your experience and see how ambiguous and novel and flow like you need. Intimacy is a profound honesty towards reality in which you basically are opening your guts up to reality. You need that. But you also need Socrates saying, yes, yes, but you have to give birth to something. You have to give birth. You know, you must be born again.

40:26Right. You have to give birth to something. And he's there saying, you know, you've got to really exercise in the philosophical sense your intelligibility, that flexibility, that perspective taking. Because you're always going to be taking the large world into the small world. You're going to be doing relevance realization and predictive process. Yes, those need to be shut off. the anticipation and the relevance realization need to realize they need to be quiet in the face of being, but you also have to be able to bring being back into beings or you're not a living being yourself. And so again, these two need each other.

41:13Each one of them, to my mind, is capable. You know, Neoplatonism can become an abstract, propositional intellectualism. Zen can become a kind of aggressive anti-intellectualism that does not do service to the fact that human beings and Zen itself are ultimately about religio, and religio involves connectedness. It involves connectedness. So, I mean, what happens, and here's where Paul Nitter's book, Without Buddha, I Couldn't Be a Christian, is so helpful, because he uses pilgrimage language. He goes through Buddhism and returns to Christianity, and he goes through Christianity and returns to Buddhism.

42:15Now, the Christianity he's using is basically Neoplatonism. We won't be actually reading that book, but, oh, by the way, I meant to tell you, that should be added as a resource book for the course too. Okay. And, you know, and this is what Stephen Batchelor is doing in his book on Socrates and Buddha. It's a new book called Buddha, Socrates, and Us. You keep passing through and recovering. Yeah, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. You know, and here's a premier thinker from the Buddhist tradition, but he's post-Buddhist now because he found that Buddhism was ultimately not satisfying enough for him.

42:52It's really interesting. At the same time, I'm sort of planning and working towards the philosophical Silk Road. He needed to go to Athens and interact with the Socratic tradition. and you know and I've met Stephen and you know I used one of his books alone with others in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis and Buddhism Without Belief was another book I used he's had a huge influence on me so again I see in Stephen the advent of the sacred taking place right taking place of course the whole Kyoto school is about this in a powerful way so so yeah I just like Like, I find that I'm making a proposal.

43:36I don't find. That's exactly the wrong thing. I find myself in this state from which I'm making a proposal that seems resonant with this state, that Zen Neoplatonism can give us a diologos that helps us properly, right, inhabit our full finite transcendence so that we can be best disposed towards the realization of the advent of the sacred and the alleviation of the meaning crisis. So immediately, I love that and I agree, but I can also anticipate a few questions which come up from folks. And I'm looking forward to them. I need good questions. One of the joys I have from the lectern is that the students show up and of course they're respectful and they're not, they're asked, we'll use, I'll use the line that Christopher Master Pietro gave us from Dialectic into Dialogos.

44:39They ask interested rather than interesting questions. The questions are designed to further knowing and so I really look forward to that. I welcome that. Well, I will go further. I've seen the FC students really step into the confrontation with themselves and we've had very intimate conversations in the lectures themselves and the classes themselves of people wrestling with the way in which having grown up in a particular context, right? What you're offering is actually kind of opening that, but also like softening the kind of pressure that one might have or the attachment to like, ah, you know, I got to really stay away from this or really lean into it.

45:19So, you know, with Zen Neoplatanism, I can imagine that there's a way in which folks who are perhaps well acquainted or at least have been practicing within a say a Buddhist community right or a Zen community being able to step on board and likewise you know folks who are coming in more from a familiarity with stoicism which has been on the rise for many years right I find this appealing and so what what do you think is available for folks to kind of step in from different places, whether it's from a Sufi tradition or from Islam or walking in from Taoism, for example, or indigenous cultures. What is the accessibility here?

46:09Because I'm trying to... I know you don't hold this stance, but as somebody who looks at or tries to keep an eye on the zeitgeist as a whole, like more gestalt but lower resolution. It's like, I would have questions around, hmm, is Zen Neoplatonism just taking, you know, the East and the West loosely formed, put together and shutting everybody else out, right? So I'm asking almost a hostile reader question, but what do you think? No, no, that's good. That's a fair question. I don't think it's hostile. I mean, it could be hostile, but that's sort of, that's irrelevant. It's not the stance I hold, but it's something that yeah yeah no no and the question the question has merit on its own um and so first of all i want to be clear um that this isn't being a dilettante this isn't smorgasbord this isn't autodidactic shopping uh to consume what is tasty from the two traditions this is to wrestle deeply with each and to get them to thereby wrestle deeply with each other transformation of identity should not be easy that seems to be a fundamental normative standard that people carry implicitly and I endorse that I think there's something profoundly right about that we think there's something both intrinsically valuable and complex about agency selfhood and personhood transforming it should not be easy so I grant that I so first of all i just want to grant that um secondly um first of all zen neoplatonism there's there's a book it was written a long time ago and this might be in another course on zen neoplatonism called zen catholicism uh rich right and so we've had and zen christianity we've been we've been zenning other things than buddhism for a long time um i asked nicole bodden about the possibility of zen neoplatonism and she was very open to it um especially because she's aware that neoplatonism isn't, Zen Neoplatonism isn't its doctrines the same way Zen isn't its doctrines.

48:19For those of you who are hostile, well, it's all these propositions about the one and the, I guess Zen is just all these propositions about emptiness, yeah? Well, no, right. So play fair. That's my second point. Play fair. Play fair. Third point. I don't see why there couldn't be, I mean, Sufism is basically Neoplatonic Islam, and I don't see why there couldn't be a Zen Sufism at all. I don't see any, I'm not trying to propose a product. That's why I'm not founding a religion. I'm really not. Even having to say that sounds arrogant, and I don't want to be even saying that, but people accuse me of it, so that's why I'm, right?

49:01And proposing a process by which religio can be re-realized so that we can, again, properly aperceive, apprehend, and appreciate the advent of the sacred. The Sufi person should find this eminently enriching to their Sufism. The Jewish person should find this eminently enriching to their Judaism. I think it is fair for me to say that I've always carried that as a goal, and I have gotten continual feedback, both at the university and on the online courses, from people who have a religious home, that this has in fact been the case. They have found the courses ways for them to deeply recover, re-exapt, and enrich the religion in which they are practicing.

49:57same. So this is intended. This is, again, if you would allow me to not make it sound grandiose, this is intended for everyone. Because to my mind, Zen Neoplatonism has to afford, you know, I keep referring to this, Jonathan Pagiot and Michael Levin and John Verveke having a deep deal logos together because we are trying to talk about the revolution that's happening in biology that is interpenetrating the revolution in cognitive science that is affecting uh the the theology of eastern orthodox christianity and all of this is happening this weird powerful synergistic semiotic symbiosis that is right a way in which the sacredness is saying and here i'm quite here i'm quoting echoists account for me account for me that's what the sacredness is doing it's facing us and placing us and saying account for me account for me be accountable to me that's what i want

51:20so

51:24yeah what i'm i want to be very careful here so let me give some context for this right so please growing up in singapore um there's always been a tentativeness around let's say religious events, right, or religious conversations. And this is instituted bureaucratically. Like we say if we want to get like a public performance license for something, it cannot have any religious content in it or cannot challenge other people's beliefs. And it's done with the intent of respect. So I'm not trying to be derogatory here. Well, and it's also trying to avoid violence. Religions have had a history, Europe is the worst, of bloodthirsty war.

52:13Yes. But let's be very fair. The idea that religion is the primary cause of war is empirically disconfirmed. There have been historians who took that proposal by the four horsemen and carefully went through a historical analysis. And it's just not the case. So is religion capable of it? Yes. is religion the sole perpetrator or even the primary perpetrator or provoker of war? No, it's not. No. It can be used post hoc as a justification. Yes. And as a motivation. And as a motivation. But what I'm hearing you say is that Zen Neoplatonism is not oh, come do this course, come to this building, right?

52:58And definitely not saying leave your religions no this is not a membership call this is not a membership call right um but instead it's offering to my mind and this is the way that i've experienced it which is that zen neoplatonism allows me to and i i'm really just speaking for for my own personal experience but I found myself being more receptive and open to speaking to people from different religions, different legacy traditions. That's what I most want. And in a place like Singapore where you can literally have like a church next to a Hindu temple, next to a Taoist temple, it's like I can walk down that street which is funny enough where my art school was.

53:45I can like walk down that street and recognize in a lot of ways the pluralism that is real. It's there. It's there. So, what would you say? Not only recognize, realize it. It's not a problem to be solved. It's a promise to be realized. Right? That's the point. Look, here's another proposal. The reason, it's not religion per se, it's And this is another thing that came out of the philosophical. It's not religion per se. It's people's attachment styles. Now, I'm not using the attachment in the Buddhist sense, although it's not completely free from that. I'm using it in the psychological sense. Attachment theory, which is the way and the truth and the life, as my friend Jeff McDonald says, of human relationships.

54:37And if human relationships matter to you, attachment is at work. And again, do people have a secure attachment? And here's the mistake. And this is something that I want to start really flagging. Secure attachment is not propositional certainty. You do not get... I wouldn't have secure attachment to Sarah by having propositions about her, of which I'm certain. That's not what secure attachment is. Right? Secure attachment is about trust, and trust is I am willing to, I want, there's an eros. I want to imitate you. I want to indwell you and internalize you. And I want that to be agopic, not just erotic.

55:28I want to be an affordance for you as well. And that is secure attachment. Now, the question to ask, do you have a secure attachment to your religious home? or do you have an anxious or avoidant or disorganized? My hope is that Zen Neoplatonism will allow a Christian to find a secure attachment to Christianity if they do not have one. The Muslim to find a secure attachment to Islam if they do not have one. That is my hope. My hope is not to take anybody from anything. My hope is I think there are a large number of people, because of the way attachment works, that have an insecure attachment, anxious, avoidant, or disorganized attachment to their religion.

56:18And Zen Neoplatonism is a way of healing you from that. To use an analogy, and it's a strong analogy, a lot of people get messed up in their relationships on a repetitive, compulsive basis because they do not have a secure attachment style. And you have to go outside. This is one of the main findings. You have to go outside of yourself to realize secure attachment because it involves you stepping outside of your current way of identifying in relationships. that's what I think Zen Neoplatonism can be it can be that kind of and I'm putting this in scare quotes because I'm not being reductive here I'm using an analogy but Zen Neoplatonism can be that kind of therapy that helps people come into a secure attachment to their religious home

57:18so we started to kind of like move I think into what it is for an individual on a daily basis to encounter the neoplatonism wow it's so it this is i feel i feel like really tenuous kind of like like moving around in this conversation because i feel it like um and this is the ambiguity of it it's like something is opening but at the same time it's like i don't know how to step into it with the right proportion of care and respect. And I also don't want to just go, you know, ah, screw it, you know, let's just jump in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? Yeah, I understand that. So let me be a little bit careful here with this.

58:08We've talked at length about what you've called the religion of the self. Yes. And, you know, that's the proposal that individualistic culture has moved us into that place of, oh, I can form an attachment to the sacred and my belief system on my terms, only for me, right? And I think there's, well, I'm sure you'll speak more about it, but I'm also looking at, on the other side, coming from, I suppose, a more collectivistic culture, the religion of art. Yeah, yeah, the opposite. I mean, this is Tillich's great. I mean, all of this is deeply informed by Tillich. The God beyond God is what happens when Zen Neoplatonism unfolds, I believe.

58:56But, you know, that we will always be doing a opponent processing between individuation and what he calls participation. Yeah, yeah. So that's between our individual and our collective identities. Yes. Yes. So if I can sort of like round out the other side of the pole, on the back of that is the religion of others as, you know, oh, I'll just do what everybody else is doing, right? Right. Without having the reasonability and reasonableness to discern and to go through that. So I'd love to hear a little bit of how you see Zen Neoplatonism helping to balance these two, to balance the individuation participation trade-off such that somebody who might be flip-flopping between the two of like, I want connection, I want belonging, and I feel a sense of communion with people.

1:00:03but I also don't want to lose myself in, you know, just what everybody else doing. But, you know, in doing that, like people probably wrestling with sin, right? So, solipsism, idealism, and nihilism. So, how do you think Zen Neoplatonism in practice particularly helps this kind of balancing out? And if you could tie that to the course and how you are explicating that, that'd be great. So, here is where I think... You have to do a figure ground reversal, which I think was Tillich was pointing to, on the creative tension, the tonos between individuation and participation. And it's kind of a William Desmond move, but William Desmond goes back to Plato.

1:01:01And of course, this is also the case in Zen, which is, As long as you're in a particular substance ontology, where you think of reality as things, you will experience that opponent process as deleterious, destructive vacillation. You will go into the group and lose yourself. You will draw from the self, the group, and become lonely, and you will cycle. Because you are trying to grasp a thing. You're trying to get a determinate final solution. I use that word, I always use that phrase with the illusion in mind. And what you need to do is instead move to, so here's an idea. Intelligibility, relevance, reason, these are thick terms.

1:02:13Thick terms are simultaneously descriptive and evaluative. They're about facts and values at the same time. They cut across. So if we dive deeply into thick terms, like intelligibility, and like intimacy, by the way, we start to prioritize transjectivity as opposed to all the substance dualisms. I'm either in or out. I'm either in myself or out in the world. No, you're not, actually. The out in the world and the in of yourself actually come from something that is before, beneath, between, and beyond them. The religio, the intimate intelligibility between you and the world so that you have a macrocosmic relationship.

1:03:04So the idea is, can you move then from substance to relationality? Both Neoplatonism and Zen do that. And then can you move from relationality, can you even empty the emptiness, as Nargajuna might say or Dogen might say, Which is, but even the relations, right? The relations can't exist also without the relata. The relata are the things related. The relations and the relata come from something communal. And the adjective there is meant to be used symbolically, metaphorically. What's the idea? There are no persons without communities. You need a community to turn a being into persons. But there are also no communities without persons.

1:03:51because persons make up communities because persons are entities that are bound together by promise. And that's what a community is, a common unity held together by mutual promises. Is that like it takes a village to raise a child? Is that a similar idea? Yeah, that's the basic idea if you want to raise a child into being a person. And so the idea here is if you allow me to use community as a metaphor, as a metaphor that's pointing beyond itself. That is, this is William Desmond, hyperbolic thrown above me. And here again, see, I need transcendent. I often need transcendence. This is one of my critiques of Zen.

1:04:32I often need transcendence so I can get above to see the transjectivity. And so what happens is you move from substance that keeps you trying to be in or out to the relation. And then the relation then moves you into the communal realization of being. And that is the proper realization of the nature of reality. And then it goes from being the problem of individuation and participation to the promise of individuation and participation as the opponent processing that allows you to optimally grip. and they're right between them and thereby realize the communal nature of reality. But John, what would you say to somebody who, you know, again, just more taking on a kind of imaginal perspective or someone who goes, well, you know, John, I go to church on Sundays, right?

1:05:30My family is doing well. I love my kids. My wife and I have a great relationship. Do I, I don't need to know and neoplatonism do i right no no no no you don't um and um what i might say to you is a couple of things um which is that meaning system that you have do you understand it do you know how it operates because if not you've been lucky and do you want to continue to have that meaning both for you and all the people you just mentioned dependent on a luck on a on a state of ignorance do you want that or do you have a responsibility and responsibility requires knowing and and and meaning has to be shareable and mutually correct correctable so you need to explicate it you you don't need to become a philosopher but you need to be philosophical you need to like okay this is great.

1:06:31Why is it great? Like, what is the meaning system, the meaning processes at work within us, between us, beneath us, beyond us, that is making this all happen? And I don't want to live in ignorance depending on luck, because lucky man, Emerson, Lincoln, Palmer, if you live by luck, you'll be killed by luck, right? That is the thing. You don't want to make yourself a slave to fate. You want to recover your agency, your selfhood, and your personhood as much as possible. And in doing that, you will also confront the second question, which is, yeah, but how much of this is bound up with self-deception?

1:07:15How much of this? How much work have you done on making sure that the meaning you're claiming isn't actually being projected by self-deception. For example, it can be very much possible that your kids and your wife aren't enjoying the meaning you are having, and I'm using that word deliberately, with them. Have you, while they seem happy, seem? Are you satisfied? The doctor seems like he knows what he's doing. Is that good enough for you? be responsible be reasonable you have a responsibility to meaning because other people are bound up with it and you need to be reasonable it is always being threatened this is what all the sages and saints and shamans say it is always being threatened by self-deception so you don't have to become a Xen Neoplatonist but the The unexamined life is not worth living.

1:08:28It may be wonderful right now, but it is definitely fraught with the threat of fate and fatal comes from fate and foolishness.

1:08:43I like this character, so I'm going to play him a little bit more. But John, if I look at all of these things that you're talking about, then does that mean that whatever I'm experiencing in the happiness of my church or the intimacy of my relationship or what I think is now happening in my kids but now because of your question, I don't know if it's actually happening. Doesn't that all just go away? And to be honest, I'm scared. I don't know if I can understand how difficult it is to go through all this. I'm not studied in it. I don't necessarily understand it. And maybe I'm being self-deceptive.

1:09:32But it's scary to take up that responsibility. And frankly, much easier to enjoy what I have until my time is up. Yeah. And so first of all, you got to really hope in a magical sense, like the person who hopes, the person who's in an abusive relationship and hopes the partner will get better. You have to hope that fate and foolishness continue to cooperate with your enjoyment.

1:10:04And magical hope is a very dangerous thing. would you want to know if your wife is unhappy in a way that might lead her into having an affair that might actually end up destroying the relationship well talking to her might upset the cart yeah it might it might and nobody anybody who offers you an algorithm for how to do this is conning you. It might. It might. But here's the thing. Where is the balance of probabilities? Where do you have the best chance? What is the one thing that's always good? Wisdom. That's where you have the best chance of always, in a good way, moving the needle towards a good life.

1:10:55And sometimes we have to lose in order to gain that. I don't want to pretend. I don't want to give that person who's asking me like a really honest answer from fear. I don't want to pretend that there might not be loss. What I can say is what I've realized, what I've seen realized in the lives of others, both living people and the beloved dead, is that everybody who has made that move and can compare the two worlds said they are glad that they made the move. You're on just this side. You don't know. You have to trust people who have gone and can then compare both sides, right? Siddhartha grew up in a palace surrounded by beautiful women and delicious food.

1:11:56He gave it up and he left his wife and kid. And there's a moral challenge there and I don't deny it. But when you asked him, he was in that world and then he went through tremendous loss to realize what he realized. Would he go back? Does he regret leaving the palace? No. No. And so, for me, that's non-magical. That's reasonable hope, because these people have given me good reason and evidence to deem them trustworthy. And I would rather trust the wise sage, the holy sage. saint, the transformative shaman, that I would trust fate and foolishness.

1:13:01Some part of me wants to explore the atheism pole of that argument a little bit. Of course. And I think Zen Neoplatonism smash the shared presuppositions of theism and atheism and disclose non-theism that is the best way of relating to the sacred as non-dual in nature. Yes. And that doesn't mean impersonal, as I've already argued. Another dualism that's overcome is the dualism between personal and impersonal, which is just another version of the value-fact dichotomy. and so it's interesting I'm reading a really good book I can't remember the author, I apologize it's called Buddhism and God and he's criticizing both Buddhism and largely Christian theism in terms of the shared so he has this really interesting interpretation of the middle way which he does not limit to Buddhism he actually He wrote a book on the Buddha in the Middle Way and Christianity in the Middle Way.

1:14:20Oh, what's his name? It's with the E. Anyways.

1:14:27Anyways, and he's doing exactly that. He's criticizing both the theist and the atheist. And so this is where Pyro comes in. Pyro seems to have taken the middle way and the concern for abstractionistic over-intellectualism and brought it back and proposed his method of isothenia, which is, I find something that I deeply believe and I provide an argument for it. And then I, in all honesty, provide a counter argument to it that is just as plausible. So equally plausible. And then I hold that tension. For me, it's opponent processing. Pyro didn't quite say that. But I hold that tension and I get epoch A.

1:15:24I suspend judgment. And instead, what I do is I open myself up to non-propositional reciprocal opening. And then that is what actually alleviates my suffering. And that's how I get ataraxia. That's how I get the peace of mind. So that's what I tend to do with theism and atheism. I tend to, right, but I get an isothenia between them. And there are now times when it releases me from the shared presuppositions that the sacred is the supernatural. The sacred is an individualized substance. That's what we mean by person, right? And that's all we can, and our proper relationship to one is one of asserting various beliefs and propositions.

1:16:16All of that gets deconstructed. And both Zen and Neoplatonism converge on that because they both are pushing this, they share this claim, right? You need to get past inference to get to insight. Yeah. So Neoplatonism says go through it and launch yourself beyond it. Neoplatonism, that's Neoplatonism. Zen says try to silence the inference in mindfulness so that the insight can occur. And both of them, both of them function and they don't have to function, right, in an antagonistic fashion. They can be complementary in opponent processing. and thereby make yourself even more prone to insight. Yeah, because sometimes you have to do one over the other.

1:17:10You can only have the affordance of one. And when I think about the atheistic kind of pole of that, it sounds like, I'm just going to play this character. But it sounds like, John, you're just talking about basically being a good, decent person. right so care about other people's feelings uh be reasonable right be aware of science and and fact the good work that other people have done um and don't get too attached to any of it so that just sounds like that sounds like what you've been talking about with zen neoplatonism um but do you have to like attach it what do you mean to attach it to the to the tradition of zen or or the neoplatonism, can't that just be on its own terms?

1:18:01Does it have to be sitting in that particular context? Yeah, so here is the European enlightenment speaking that what we will do is we will reduce everything to morality and mastery and if I have a sort of a good mastery over my life and I'm a moral person, that's all we're really talking about, right? And of course, that's just a secularized version of Kantian pietism and other such things, which comes out of Protestant Christianity. The problem with that is the philosophical arguments and the scientific research that points that meaning in life is non-reducible to mastery and morality. meaning in life is about being connected to what is real in a way that is significant to you that can comprehensively orient you and help you realize what is real and connect you to it with an intimacy of participation and perspectival presence that takes a lot of work that takes a lot of skill and virtue cultivation and you can't just do that individually it not only takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to raise a sage.

1:19:21And so we need to do this in deep dialogue, that your cognition and meaning making are largely not propositional, they're perspectival and participatory. You need imaginal practices as well. The imagination plays a central and crucial role. And your imagination is at the heart of your being reasonable. The space inside your head is an imaginal space where you do your metacognition. Your orienting to your future self is an imaginal relationship, and I have made these arguments at length. All of this machinery of meaning is not captured by the machinery of morality and mastery, which is the reduction that is claimed by modernity.

1:20:02If we can just get economic mastery of the planet and moral mastery of the society, then we will have the utopia. And that just doesn't work. It hasn't worked historically, And it doesn't work because of really good philosophical and scientific argumentation that meaning is not reducible to morality and mastery. And then once you pay attention to the machinery, and by that I mean the processes of meaning and our participation and cultivation and mutual correction in meaning, you very much are into trying to get clear about the colleges of practices that will properly educate your religio and your reason.

1:20:50And that's what we've been talking about. okay but if if i look at it this way it's like all right so let's say i i agree with you it's not it's not it's not morality uh maybe i will don't reduce that but just in terms of my own daily life right if i'm doing i i do i do ifs i just don't call it prayer for example right i do uh i do tai chi right but i i don't i don't consider it meditative walking right so it does that mean that also like i can i can go to a church and still be an atheist if i want like what do you how is this affecting my my beliefs what i have been growing up with or i've been talking a lot about because i might have a lot of atheist friends i also have a lot of religious friends and so far it looks like nothing is going terribly wrong.

1:21:48We just keep our respectful distance and hanging out seems fine for the most part. But I think that's important. Like I want, I still want to be able to say, you know, I don't need to believe in God to be a good person. What do you need to believe in to be a good person? Goodness. that good is possible yeah yeah and is that goodness a real goodness uh if it's yeah does it exist in a way that is beyond you or are you just saying uh i believe in myself uh no i'm not saying i believe in myself i'm saying you know like what is good is definitely good. Like don't kill children is a very good thing.

1:22:41Right, and you've already admitted that there's aspects of that that are not captured by morality or economic mastery, yes? Yes, yes. Okay, so there's an aspect of this goodness that is real and meaningful to you, and you are orienting towards that reality. and don't you think if you're orienting towards that reality you should understand it on its own terms as best you can but aren't you telling me that the terms of that are you know basically god like it's it's theology can it doesn't have to be again it i mean i don't want to be ethnocentric or eurocentric about this if by god you mean the abrahamic god doesn't have to be that god um do i Could it be the Tao?

1:23:31Could it be Brahman? Could it be the one of Neoplatonism? Could it be, you know, Nirvana? Could it be Sunyata? Could it just be life, John? Could it just be that... Yeah, like so even as a friend, your life is important, right? Your life and your living, it's important it's just not it's not nirvana or shunyata or any of those things or that again this is such a weird character for me to play but i'm trying to stay in it no no no it's fine but you know i just like do you do you so it would it be a good life to be uh trapped in childhood uh no okay you want to mature which means you so you have to transcend childhood egos like you You can't get the economic, even the economic mastery and the morality you think is central if you remained childish, egocentric, like unskilled, lacking in virtue.

1:24:35Yes? I wouldn't even be able to talk to you. I wouldn't be able to. That's right. Right. So you think the primary way to move towards goodness is through self-transcendence? If that's what you want to call the process of maturity, I can get on board with that. Yes. Well, why not call it self-transcendence? But anyways, okay. So, and then what reason do you have for believing that that maturation process should stop? I don't think it can. I don't think it ever stops, actually. Right. So then, do you think you grew up by just listening to yourself? or did becoming an adult, did you have to actually imitate other people you found trustworthy who were pointing you to ways of being and seeing that you didn't currently have?

1:25:33By, if you mean like physically imitating, not really, but like I have to read books, I have to, I like watch audio books or I listen to podcasts. Oh, you do physically imitate them. Yeah. You're physically speaking a language. Did you invent that language? No. No, no. So you actually have to go out through, you have to trust people who are wiser than you in order to afford the maturation, I'll use the words you like, so that you can get closer to the good that is what you're ultimately oriented towards. Yes? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Welcome to Neoplatonism. That's what Neoplatonism says. As the child is to the adult, the adult is to the sage, the sage is to the sacred.

1:26:15That's Neoplatonism. That's what it is.

1:26:24that's that that is a that is a lot of fun that is a lot of fun to like go it's so hard because like i know i i can i can kind of see that but i'm so like doing this you did a good job you did a good job yeah um i mean i'm trying i'm because i'm trying to to imagine also where folks might might step into i i think that's right and i want i want to be clear people are watching i mean And I was playing also with Ethan and I knew he was doing a double role. You know, so if I was, I probably, I would hope and aspire that I would be a little bit less aggressive with somebody who was truly in that. But we had compressed time and we were also in a state of serious place.

1:27:09So that's why my comportment was the way it was. Yeah. And I'm also like, you know, actually taking the perspective quite seriously without trying to be derogatory or denigrating. Yeah, exactly. Obviously, it's not exhaustive. You did a good job. But it's a lot of fun. You did a good job of that. Yeah. All right. Well, on the back of that, you know, I think it's time that we can wrap this up. So if you would just, you know, maybe give us some parting words around, how has this conversation sort of informed the way that you look at Zen Neoplatonism and how you're going to be stepping into the course in the position of, well, in the position of someone teaching it, but maybe that changed for you too.

1:27:53Like how are you looking at Zen Neoplatonism, even slightly differently after this past hour and a half? Well, as I said, and I am coming to terms in all of the possible meanings of that phrase. More and more I like to try and speak the way William Desmond does. I'm coming to terms with Zen Neoplatonism. And more terms came, and I came to more terms.

1:28:24and I have become comfortable, I hope this is epistemically virtuous, with a particular heuristic, I still recognize it as a heuristic, of where it is doing this reciprocal opening and taking me beyond where I thought I could go as a way of tracking the truth and keeping track of how I track the truth. And so I very much found that. I mean, you know, this is another conversation. I'm coming to realize this central claim of Christianity. There is no logos without agape, and there is no agape without logos. And what we just did was logos with agape and agape through logos. And I think that's very, very, very powerful.

1:29:22And I think if you get Socrates speaking on behalf of following the logos and the Buddha speaking on behalf of following agape, karuna, compassion, the compassion that liberates people and helps them give birth to their true nature, which I think is very convergent with agape, then the Zen Neoplatonism is a powerful way of integrating, realizing the integration, the interpenetration, the interaffordance of Logos and Agape. And that's what happened here. Yeah, I think something that I'm sort of taking away from this conversation is the way in which Zen Neoplatonism is merely pointing at that which is at the ground of all of our interactions.

1:30:08and it's worth it to also understand kind of how that works at every level. It's not, in that sense, it's really not a religion in the proper sense of the word, you know. Well, I mean, again, I think it's a way of being religious. Yeah. I don't think it's a religion.

1:30:35And I'm, well, Well, part of what's happening very recently, and it came in this talk, is I'm becoming very suspicious, doubtful of religion as a construct. So it's analogous to don't tell me what you believe. Tell me what you practice. But I would now add, don't tell me what you believe. Tell me what you practice and tell me what way you follow and who you follow. That's the religious part. And so for me, those are becoming the central questions. I want to know, who are you following? What way are you following? And what are you practicing to follow that way and follow that person? Thank you, John.

1:31:21Well, if you would like to follow the rest of this conversation as it evolves, as we continue playing, there should be a link down in the show notes to learn more about the course between East and West. You'll find it on the lectern.johnverveke.com. and we hope to see you in class. It's going to be amazing. Thank you, John. I look forward to it. Thank you, Ethan. You were fantastic. And I look forward to meeting as many of you as possible. I get deep joy out of the lectern, deep, deep joy. So I look forward to this. Take care, everyone.

1:32:06Thank you.