Finding Faith: A Conversation on Therapy, Trust, and Transformation

25:30Seth Allison:great so what I'm interested in Um, some somewhat selfishly, uh, because, you know, a lot of this is autobiography for me and, um, I've had to do a lot of sense making, um, both for myself, but also professionally, it's, it's a nice convergence, similar to probably a convergence you experienced, John. Yes. Um, coming out of where you came from, I mean, it's not a coincidence that your talents line up with this topic, you know, wanting to make sense out of how we know and what's trustworthy. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, I think what my focus tends to be drawn towards is a midlife experience and really it doesn't have to be midlife, but experiences of liminality where and you said in your talk, I liked it that a sense of self is a participatory through line of how you are positioned in relation to others, how you experience yourself in relation to the world, the agent arena kind of dynamic.

26:44Seth Allison:And that liminality is when that through line gets broken in some way. It could be dramatically. It could be subtly. It often happens.

26:52Dr. John Vervaeke:There's an aporia in a – exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

26:56Seth Allison:Right.

26:57Dr. John Vervaeke:Yeah, yeah.

26:57Seth Allison:And I talked about it with you a bit about how in my entrance into the 40s, which is the classic kind of entrance into liminality, that depression in kind of a hermetic way ends up being my guide. And not a pleasant one, but very much accompanies me to the underworld where a sense of myself in the roles that had really nested my ego are suddenly taken or constrained. And this is what we go through. And I think Bonhoeffer speaks to it in a way that the reason the quote continues to come back to me is it offers hope about these experiences. That the entrance into a place where perspective can change, where participation in reality can change um there's a requirement to get into those and not one that we generally choose because the ego actually actively resists um the the doorways the thresholds which is um lyman uh is literally translated to yeah the the threshold of a doorway Yes, exactly.

28:20Seth Allison:Right, right. So when Bonhoeffer says, one cannot learn to have faith, this is interesting because Luhrmann is looking at, in a sense, how one learns to have faith, or rather how one kindles and maintains what she calls ontological flexibility, or holding a faith frame alongside kind of a reality, ordinary life frame, right? Right. And that there are things that cultivate. I love the line that believers are aware that they are unbelieving. And that faith takes cultivation. And that it takes practice and a community. And there are things that help make the unseen salient. But it takes effort.

29:11Dr. John Vervaeke:So do you have a thought on that? Well, yeah, because I think, first of all, I wanted to thank you for picking up on that aspect. of Bonhoeffer. And he uses the word metanoia. Or is that one of you? Yes, he does. Yes, he does. And of course, that goes to noesis. And metanoia is seeing beyond where we normally see. It's that noetic vision. But it's also, as you said, it's a turning. It's moving through a threshold. And this is the cusp. You know, this is the pivot points, the pivoting. This always intrigues me.

29:49Seth Allison:This is where I'm most interested.

29:52Dr. John Vervaeke:Yes. Yeah. And of course, one of the things that has come to my mind to address Plato's problem is the sense of voluntary necessity. Because the problem, as you said, and I felt prey to this, and it looks like Bonhoeffer is too, I can manufacture God. I can manufacture a religion. I can make the religion that's not a religion. And then, of course, that is completely antithetical to the logos taking place and taking shape of its own accord and taking you someplace you are not yet thought you were going to go. You cannot do both. That's right. Exactly. Right. And, you know, Jesus was, I think he captures that when he said, you know, you can't serve money and God.

30:42Dr. John Vervaeke:And money doesn't just mean money. It means ego, success, and accomplishment. But Jesus doesn't say don't make a living, you know, render under Caesar what's Caesar and all that sort of stuff. But what I'm trying to get at, and you see this in Zen, is one of my favorite quotes is, nobody realizes enlightenment by seeking it, but only the seekers become enlightened.

31:11Seth Allison:So great. Which is reflected in the Bonhoeffer passage. Exactly. Yeah, that's exactly it. He's a seeker. That's right. He's a striver. You even look at the title of the book, The Cost of Discipleship. Yeah, exactly. Right. It's what can I sack? What must I do to be taught, to learn? Right. And so he switches it, right? Yeah. And I focus on, there are a few things I underline here, right? So after, you know, it is only by living completely in the world that one learns to have faith.

31:54Dr. John Vervaeke:But that's a great, even that. Yeah. Living to, like, to me, that sounds absolutely Zen. And I mean that in a complimentary sense. Yes. Like, notice what he said. He doesn't say, I don't need to learn anything. Right? I need to learn how to live completely in the world. And we think, well, what do you have to do to do that? Because we have been conditioned by millennia to think it's all about getting from this world. This world is the problem and the other world. And it's like, no, no, no, no. Have you actually ever lived in this world completely? And I think that there's a challenge in there.

32:33Dr. John Vervaeke:This is what I want to get at.

32:34Seth Allison:So, I also like, I mean, to go back to propositional, you know, procedural, perspectival, you know, participatory. So much of first half, so much of our culture, as you hammer this quite a bit, you know, we exist in the propositional as if that is knowing. Yes.

32:58Dr. John Vervaeke:Yeah.

32:58Seth Allison:And I hear very clearly of, no, that's not how one learns to believe in things that are unseen. And Lerman backs it up, but in a different way. Yes. What he does, and it's building to this idea, and I think the central thing, I'm rushing ahead here, but... Go ahead, go ahead. Well, the image he invokes is one of the most powerful images in the gospel of Christ awaiting being taken towards his death in the garden, right? And it mirrors Bonhoeffer's experience at this moment. Of course, because he's waiting.

33:39Dr. John Vervaeke:They're going to come and kill him.

33:41Seth Allison:But he's making a connection here. So, let me, you know, don't make anything of yourself. Don't even... He's basically saying, don't even try to be a Christian. Yes. You're setting off in the wrong direction if you say, I'm going to make myself a Christian, which is terrifying for most Christians. It was for me.

34:03Seth Allison:So by this worldliness, I mean living unreservedly in life's duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities, unreservedly. Yeah. In so doing, we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God and I say life. Yeah. Taking seriously not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world or life. And then he says, watching with Christ in Gethsemane. So, I am not a theologian. I'm sure we could get plenty of comments on how I'm misinterpreting this, but I spent a little time digging into that passage. And, you know, I heard it growing up as Christ says, hey, come, come keep watch with me.

35:01Seth Allison:And... That's not what it means. I know. So, I heard it as these guys fall asleep when he's saying, come, you know, keep watch with me. A deeper reading is, this is a guy that knows what's coming. And he's about to experience and he's anticipating betrayal, abandonment, death. He is facing existentially what we face in midlife. He is in great pain. He's in great fear. And so he's not calling his disciples to just keep watch. He's calling them to be with him in his suffering, to feel it next to him, to not be alone in it. Right? So, when we talk about pivot points, we talk about an entrance into a place in life where there's a possibility of greater meaning, where you have the possibility of an experience of realness, of all the good stuff that you are like in great detail describing.

36:13Seth Allison:What is the gateway to it? According to Bonhoeffer, the gateway is a surrender, a throwing oneself into a certain kind of suffering. This is what the ego protects us from. This is me bringing a psychodynamic sensibility to our conversation. that our system, the attachment strategies that we've used, the way that we have gripped ourselves and the relationships to the world and to those that we love, when that gets shaken, you know, we have a moment of being called into suffering. And it's a different call call than perhaps the call of purpose in the world. But I hear it as a call. I think it is.

37:05Seth Allison:And I think Jung heard it as a call. A call from a deeper place of things that have not been attended to. A place where things as our defenses are surrendered and often not by our choice. we enter a state of liminality that in my life, I came to think of it as a period where I was exhausted from rowing the boat. And I was forced to put the oars in the boat. And only by experiencing the constraint of not being able to row, was I willing to put the oars in. And it was terrifying. But what it afforded me was an encounter with the currents. Ah, very Taoist. And what that afforded me was the opportunity to look around and to be able to experience the arena from a different perspective.

38:06Seth Allison:And that in turn allowed me to experience myself from a different perspective. But what called, called violent, it called intensely. It was both compelling, but also there was compulsion. I would not say it was a clean voluntary necessity, but there was a kind of will in it that ended up, of course, getting represented in tattoos all over my body. of surrendering to the data that was coming forward, to the fact that I could not control it the way I wanted to, and that it would need to be lived out in an arena, in reality, in order to be navigated. And I want to pause there because there's more to the story, but is this resonating for you?

39:02Dr. John Vervaeke:A lot. So first of all, my take on Gethsemane, Jesus has previously just prayed that his disciples will be in him the way he is in God. And that's what I hear him invoking, that he's pushing towards, there's this ultimate foregrounding of participation in God and that we can, we best participating in God when we participate in God with others, which is a really interesting, non-egoic way to think about it. And then in Gethsemane, and of course, even more so on the cross, we have, to my mind, the epitome of the tonos of finite transcendence. Jesus is in the garden. Bonhoeffer's in the prison. There's absolute finitude there.

40:01Dr. John Vervaeke:Their death is imminent. They are limited in space and time. They are subject to all the weaknesses of our humanity. Yet, and this is how I think Bonhoeffer is seeing like Jesus, there is ultimately still the recognition of a connection to something that transcends us. So the finite transcendence that preserves us from simultaneously from slavery and tyranny. And in a sense, Bonhoeffer had been a tyrant over himself. and the ego is that kind of tyrant or it can be a tyrant is somebody who often starts with a legitimate rule and then becomes illegitimate in time inflexible and unable to adapt exactly, exactly originally successful but then unable and Oedipus is a classic example of that and of course he suffers and he's blinded so that he because his ego no longer sees and then he's capable of noetic insight right right yes um so that that's all ringing through me and then then the notion of uh of like for me um i've been i've been trying to understand the philosophy of pilgrimage as a meta practice that puts whatever ecology of practices you have onto a stress test to make sure that it's not falling prey into a parochialism.

41:44Dr. John Vervaeke:And where you have to do that, you have to constantly disorient yourself and re-enclimatize, re-enculturate. And so you start to become aware of the through line of the self that's deeper than the ego's self-image. And part of what happens here to my mind is the acuity. Acuity is the ability to see differences. The acuity between the ego's self-image and one's self. That's right. And people go, what are you talking about? I can give you, let's talk about the flow state. When you're in the flow state, the egoic self-image drops away because all of that talk in your head about maintaining your egoic self-image.

42:31Dr. John Vervaeke:How do I look? How am I doing? Am I failing? Am I succeeding? How am I doing? What are they? All of that goes silent. This is a defining feature of the flow state. And yet what doesn't go away is your agency. In fact, your agency and your experience of the world are enhanced. And what that shows you is the ego is lying to you when it tells you that its self-image is yourself. And all of that is coming out for me. Now, the part I want to pause on is that you said it wasn't a pure voluntary necessity. Now, I'm wondering who it's impure for, the ego or for yourself, right? Maybe yourself is striving to love something because it recognizes something that needs to be seen.

43:24Dr. John Vervaeke:Maybe a deeper aspect of you is acting like a prophet to the ego. Okay.

43:32Seth Allison:So I feel the invitation and I invite you to bring the proposition that's floating up here down into my story. Happily. Okay. So yes, yes, yes to all of that. Okay. So I'm going to use some of the attachment stuff, some of the IFS stuff. Please. To bring this alive for me. Again, forgive the personal indulgence,

44:09Dr. John Vervaeke:but it's useful. I don't think it's indulgence. I mean, I appreciate your modesty, but I don't think it's indulgence. Indulgence is to present something for the sake of status or gratification. That's not... You're pedagogical.

44:24Seth Allison:I hope so. I think there's a therapist on my shoulder saying, self-disclosure, careful. Granted. And I say careful because you don't want to impinge too much. Oh, you know what it is, John? I'm suddenly aware of it. It's like,

44:50Seth Allison:I did a wonderful training with a friend who gifted it to me. It was a whole weekend of kind of organizing your narrative and then projecting it forward. And we got to the end of it and he said, I've never really ended like this with someone before but I think this is all suggesting that your calling in life is to basically be yourself. and uh and i thought okay now that sounds great it's a lot harder um than i expected so i think there's some ambivalence in me about just showing them as myself and yet yep there's a conviction that it is probably right so thank you um so what happens

45:39Seth Allison:And something calls, in me it took the form of a deep longing for connection and comfort that suddenly I could not find, right? And as often as the case, as Jung observes, that can take the form of like, the contrasexual, the anima for men, animus for women. And so, there was this loneliness and this longing.

46:13Seth Allison:And I was not aware of that contributing to the end of my marriage, but of course, it was in there. But what was consciously contributing was the deep, dark depression and sadness and the longing to get out of the pain. Well, what was beneath the pain? It was a deep, deep longing for love and for connection that was not deceptive, that was real, that was something that must be attended to. And yet, my ego could not really afford holding on to the structures that maintained me while while giving space to all this kind of stuff coming up. And that is one way of talking about the symptom of depression is that things are stuck and unable to move.

47:09Seth Allison:And so, as often is the case, things act out. And I began sort of picking up as I was married very young, I was in a Christian environment. I didn't get to experience pieces of intimacy and identity that were really vital. So I entered an arena of dating and I entered an arena of pursuing relationship and I felt very compelled in a way that felt healthy. Like this is an arena where I need to find my skills and who I am and there's no shortcut for that stuff. I need an actual place to do that.

47:51Seth Allison:And yet, ultimately, a solution for these feelings, it cannot be found and sustained externally in a person, at least not in the condition that I was in. Right. And I think generally, that's true. And so, what became a very useful sense of calling into exploration over a period of maybe two or three years, devolved into a place of compulsion. Oh, I see. And this is where I lost agency. Oh. Where in the confusion, and this is during COVID of course, where resources are, interpersonal resources in particular become even more scarce. So low scarcity. You're in a scarcity mentality. I'm in a scarcity mentality, right?

48:49Seth Allison:Here's what I want to say about addiction and about what I think you're talking about. In IFS, we call them firefighters. And these are the parts of us that we, that our manager parts who are aspirational, who are risk averse, who are attempting in very good faith to help us achieve safety and abundance and whatever we want. They are really pissed at my firefighters who have slammed the brakes on aspiration in favor of soothing and the pursuit of numbing and dissociating and managing all this stuff.

49:31Seth Allison:What addiction does is if we're fortunate, it escorts us to the rocks. It washes our ship up along the shore. And in that, something happens where, you know, we are forced to, like 12 steps, step one, you know, to admit what we are powerless over, right? To come to terms with compulsion. To find ourselves as suddenly taking a different perspective on what has grasped us.

50:06Dr. John Vervaeke:Yeah, right.

50:07Seth Allison:Right.

50:08Dr. John Vervaeke:Oh, can I say something right here? Because for me, this is something I've been wrestling with. Sorry for interrupting. I'll try to be brief. I asked you to.

50:16Seth Allison:Yeah.

50:18Dr. John Vervaeke:I think that the voluntary necessity is how we get through the paradox of self-transcendence. Because if I'm just pushing myself forward, it's not transcendence. And if something else is doing it, it's not self-transcendence. This is Strassen. But then I realize, yeah, and the voluntary necessity, the beauty, the calling, the platonic stuff. But then I realized Rekur's got the shadow side of that. Because Rekur in the symbolism of evil says, we hit this really weird space. Something is tempting us, but what is it? It's us. And so that's the dark side of this. That is the dark side of self-transcendence.

51:01Dr. John Vervaeke:It's self-temptation. But with all the paradoxical understanding that self-transcendence has in it. And so I think, sorry, you're taking me right to the edge of my thinking. That's one of the signs we're in Dialogos, right? That when we get to that horizon where self-temptation, the exact opposite of Sofferson is becoming dominant, I think parasitic processing has a field day. And I'm playing with that word, right? Like it has a field day, That's good.

51:35Seth Allison:Yes, yes, yes.

51:40Seth Allison:So in that field day of parasitic processing, self is at work and this is, Jung is very hopeful about this, right?

51:51Dr. John Vervaeke:Well, because the processes are still there. That's the fundamental, for me that's Although it's not a foundation, but that's the bedrock of faith. That, right, even the processes of self-deception, they are precisely parasitic on the very processes that make us fundamentally adaptive. That is part of my faith. Even though that sounds like a darkness, that gives me faith. Because when I'm in the midst of this parasitic processing, I know the processes and their capacity for self-correction can be found in that depth. At the bottom, right.

52:26Seth Allison:Yeah. And right. Dante, Dante, you got to put on that. Completely, right. So, midlife is that sort of journey. And this is why, you know, Hermes ends up being such a wonderful archetype. Because there are ways in which Hermes, this trickster, shows up and helps to guide, right? So, you know, as somebody who, and the category in terms of kind of like how it's talked about popularly is I found myself in love addiction.

53:01Dr. John Vervaeke:Oh my gosh. That's one of the most insidious of addictions.

53:06Seth Allison:Well, because it – and for a guy who makes his living by studying and applying attachment theory, the irony is not lost on me.

53:17Dr. John Vervaeke:I think that's often the case. I think precisely our strengths are the deepest doorways to self-deception for us.

53:27Seth Allison:So, the arena of partnership, whether it was an attempt at depth in relationship or just connection, that arena with the other was extremely useful and powerful for me as I developed kind of a stronger sense of self. And what do I mean by that? I mean, a broader, bigger container that could hold part of me likes this, part of me doesn't like this, this is what I think here, this is, oh, I show up and this is how I present in this way. Isn't that interesting? And what I wasn't aware of was that there was also a hiding that was happening in that process a kind of escape that the firefighters in me were trying to put something out.

54:29Seth Allison:That it wasn't a play, a field of play, although it was a field of play, but there was a darker part to it.

54:36Dr. John Vervaeke:Right, right, right.

54:37Seth Allison:And so, in love, being addicted to love, the idea is that you are addicted to finding in Allah like an anxious attachment strategy, getting stuck on the side of being pulled this way and that by the emotions involved in trying to obtain and keep somebody. Right, right, right. Whereas an avoidance strategy is minimizing the signals in the body and staying up above and either trying to compulsively perform or compulsively caretake in order to keep that person. When you get thrust into the anxious side where you can no longer buffer yourself from a system that is based on the fear of scarcity and the loss of proximity and the ability to regulate with somebody else.

55:26Seth Allison:You enter a world of addiction just like you would with alcohol or cocaine or something else where you have highs and you have withdrawals. And to reach a point of lowness and to say, I can't control this and I don't want this. And the saliency has become very dark and the horizons become very dark.

55:47Dr. John Vervaeke:Did you get a sense at that point of like reciprocal narrowing? Did you get the sense that the world and your agency will be at?

55:55Seth Allison:Everything shrinks and my agency shrinks and the arena shrinks.

55:59Dr. John Vervaeke:Yeah, yeah.

56:00Seth Allison:To the point of, you know, I mean, suicidality for most addicts comes into play at that point. Right, right, right. And I already dealt with it earlier. So, this is where I want to get to.

56:14Dr. John Vervaeke:This is excellent.

56:15Seth Allison:Thank you for doing this. None of that is a moment of conversion. None of that is metanora, right? Though there is a kind of throwing myself into life that I needed to do. I needed to do. I have got a tattoo of Dionysus. Jung says the archetypes come alive in the liminal space. And what did Dionysus represent for me? The disavowed parts of me that needed to be valued were sensual. They were in not an erotic sense, but in the most basic sense. Right, right. So, to go from avoidance strategies and to suddenly be connected to my body and all of its needs and longings and fears was so important, but also not something my ego could manage.

57:08Seth Allison:So, one is called to a moment of reckoning with...

57:16Seth Allison:The question about, you know, if not myself, if I am not able to do this, then what power do I rely upon? Difficult question for atheists. And, you know, there's a lot of God language, right, in recovery. But I came to understand something that, you know, Lorman summed up for me in a way. I've adapted it slightly. But what if faith were not necessarily pinned on a personified spiritual other, but rather a more basic idea? What if faith is a sustained, intentional, deliberative commitment to the idea that there are resources greater than yourself that can sustain you? Essentially that you are not alone, either externally and internally.

58:16Seth Allison:It is, in a way, permission to live relationally and dialogically. faith uh is or requires uh the creation or we might say discovery of a new and very particular salience landscape that i i would call trust and that that kind of trust can't be uh cultivated or learned on a a conceptual level. It's lived in a participatory way. And it is a moment of metanoia to enter into that. It's a moment that everyone that goes through recovery, every alcoholic has to reckon. And it's why we think of recovery as a spiritual program. It's about a different thing. Go ahead.

59:13Dr. John Vervaeke:Well, so much. So much. First of all, I mean, this whole notion, I've talked about this, that the life cycle of a symbol, as our symbolic abilities wither, we have to go back down to the sensory motor senses. And this is the title of Wyn's book. We have to recover the senses. We have to reexapt our spiritual senses again. And our physical ones in service of spirituality. That's the same thing. You're saying the same thing. That's exactly it. It's the shame machinery. It's being used for both sight and insight, both for hearing and prophetic sense of being called, both for touch and being in contact with reality.

1:00:05Dr. John Vervaeke:And the two are living through and in terms of each other. Now, what happens when you get that sensibility transcendence, and that's Murdoch, Iris Murdoch, right? And love is a painful recognition that something other than yourself is real, right? That's great. What you get in that sensibility transcendence, and this is Wyn, is you don't get a focal object. So he's going in the book, he's going through William James, a variety of religious experience. talk and what he's talking about are the moments of metanoia. Yes. Brilliant. Beautiful book. Masterpiece. Masterpiece. And the point he's making is it's not adjectival.

1:00:45Dr. John Vervaeke:You don't have a focal object for which you get beliefs about its properties. It's adverbial. And he talks about reality. Now it's like it faces you. And it's like a face in which the whole and more than the whole, the mysterious behind the hole is present in every part and it's facing you and calling you and challenging you like the way you face another person so that's not a focal god right um and that that's an adverbial god i think if you that's how i put it can i tag team that yeah so

1:01:26Seth Allison:one of the things that um you know uh lerman said i just took some notes here I took a lot of notes, but she says the deep insight here is that talking to oneself is not as powerful as talking to another. That's right. And so, when you say God is facing you and you are facing God. And you get decentering. Right, right. And she says it changes you to speak in public and an invisible other creates a public space. And now she's anthropomorphizing, which is fine. I mean, that's part of what we do. But I think what we're talking about is a place. You talked a lot about this, right? It is a place and a position and a shift.

1:02:17Dr. John Vervaeke:Orientation. It's an orientation. It's an orientation. And orientation is exempted from sensory motor. Wynn has a book before that book called Faith in Place, where he proposes that instead of using metaphors based on things for God, we should use metaphors based on place. And what's really interesting is the first instance in history of the use of YWH or YHWH, I won't say the name because we have Jewish listeners and I want to be respectful, is indistinguishable. It looks like it's a place name, but it could also be the genus loci Right. Of that place. And he's and then you get you get the Kyoto school and Basho saying this is Nishita.

1:03:06Dr. John Vervaeke:Basho is that non place in which all taking place happens. Right. And so I would say we are faced and placed in this spiritual sense, right? And that sense of placement is like what I'm trying to talk about when people feel at home again. And they don't mean a physical dwelling. They mean they are no longer in a meaning crisis because they are faced and placed and at home. The sense of homicide. That's the true line. Yes.

1:03:41Seth Allison:The through line has reestablished itself. That's right. In a new way. And that, that. But with resonance, with resonance to the past as well.

1:03:51Dr. John Vervaeke:Of course, of course. And the word you used is trust. Trust goes back to troth, like in betrothal. And it's also the etymological origin of true, because one of the original meanings of true is to be true to someone. It's an adverbial sense of truth, right? And all of this is we have lost, and this is why Wynn writes the book as a philosopher, theologian, 4E cognitive scientist, phenomenologist, we have lost the sensibility of the sacred. Because we have put it into the supernatural or the ideological utopic future, and all that matters is our ideological commitment. Which is so ridiculous.

1:04:35Seth Allison:Yes. And has nothing to do with spirituality or very little. And so, top down, maybe, but this is what we're talking about is more of the bottom up, right? Yes. So, this is, you know, there's a part of me that feels, hey, you know, addiction still carries this sort of shame with it. And that's part of the experience is that there's deep, deep shame, not around being an addict. There's deep shame around the needs, around the longing, around the loneliness, around deep, deep senses of vulnerability. So, what I think here, Bonhoeffer is calling for me, he's calling for me to be in it, to be with it.

1:05:27Seth Allison:Now, what affords me the ability to do that? reaching the rocks was the initial step. So, through this whole process of liminality, I started a couple of groups for clients I was working with and I called them oars up. And they're six week intensives where it was folks in liminality coming together to put the oars in the boat and to navigate a bit with a kind of collective nervous system. It was amazing. But what came out of it for me was this sort of synthesis of attachment work and spiritual work and the eight Rs, you know, kind of Schwartz has the eight Cs. And the first one is to relent and that every process of shifting perspective and of opening to being met, being faced, being helped, being loved, involves some sort of relent.

1:06:32Seth Allison:And in my case, and in a lot of cases of addiction, you pull up on the rocks and you have to relent your strategies. And there's a confession that is for your benefit to say the eye that was steering over here, it is not, I am not just this, right? But I can't make that move without there being something else. Right? So, I want to just say, because I think everyone probably knows it, but the most succinct prayer about relevance realization that I know of, God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

1:07:28Seth Allison:Yeah. I've not encountered anything like that, that prayer.

1:07:41And it summarizes this shift that I think is universal.

1:07:49Seth Allison:And the important part to me isn't so much kind of what's asked for, but it starts with something that starts with God. And this is from somebody who doesn't believe in a deity. it is the shift in position that is so vital. It's the de-centering. Yeah, that's McNamara's point. And it's the opening to the currents. Right? Now, that is not done in privacy. It can't be. And that's extremely important, is it's done in community.

1:08:28Dr. John Vervaeke:That's not just utility. I mean, this is part of the critique that Arjun and I have been making about meaning. We have made meaning a personal, private preference that soothes our self-esteem. That is not how meaning works. Meaning is shareable, which means it's mutually correctable. How do we get the meaning of English? You didn't make it. I didn't make it. Right. We make it collectively and we revise it collectively. The meaning of nice has changed from what it was originally an insult. Right. And things like that. Sorry, this is important. Part of the way the ego is held rigid is the way our society tells us that meaning is a personal, private, preferential relationship of self-esteem.

1:09:20Dr. John Vervaeke:This is all dangerous to the opening up and opening into and through reality that actually is meaning. And I think that I wanted to put that on the table.

1:09:34Seth Allison:So I'll add to that. And this is a thesis that's meant a lot to me, especially in the times we live in here in the States. In that sense of the cultural currents that work against this process, trust is subversive. Totally. The cultivation of trust is subversive.

1:10:00Dr. John Vervaeke:But Seth, what is trust other than shared, mutual, corrected meaning? It is to participate in a shared meaning. That is exactly what trust is. I couldn't have said it better.

1:10:13Seth Allison:Now what I want to make accessible is that, and this is not the solution for everybody, but we often have these conversations and we reach the point of, and where do we find this community? And we're a bit baffled, right? Because all we can say is, well, the old structures are gone. Let's all agree with that, right?

1:10:44Seth Allison:I just want to offer something hopeful I guess. Me too. Go ahead. There's a tradition that's a hundred years old that has never made a dime and has nobody running it or leading it. That was the ecology of practices that completely afforded me the chance to come into Metanoia, afforded me a conversion experience. And it was not a single moment by any means. It was a slow, painfully slow experience. I have a friend who says God moves at three miles per hour. And because God is moving through eternity, that's why. Right. But you look back after six months and it's a bit of a distance, right?

1:11:38Dr. John Vervaeke:One of the wisest person in my life said to me, it's like a locomotive. It looks like it's never going to get going. It starts so slowly and so incrementally. But that's because so much has to be moved. Yeah. Well said.

1:11:52Seth Allison:Right. Right. So, I know we have the constraint of time, so I'm going to move this along just a little bit. So, the idea of Gethsemane for me, right, is called into facing some powerlessness, which I think is what Christ is inviting his disciples into. Come into this powerlessness with me, come into the feeling of being deeply human. Release the shame around it and be with others who are in that feeling as well. Don't just live this out on a propositional level. Like they would say in a program, you got to make three calls a day. Why are they telling you to make three calls a day? They want participatory knowing.

1:12:38Seth Allison:They want you to do the reps. You want to go learn how to play golf, don't read a book. That's right. Go take swings, right? So I want to kind of move forward a little bit because life changes dramatically. There's a kind of irony that things begin to fall away, things begin to arrive. In liminal spaces, things show up and they have deep, deep resonance that they normally wouldn't have in part because you're so close to the unconscious. You're so close to this stuff that the ego had moved you away from, right? And somewhere in all there, a new partner arrives for me that I didn't see coming. I initiated contact with professionally not knowing.

1:13:27Seth Allison:And you talk about Sarah. And for me, my Sarah is Kate and a partnership that's built not on compulsion for the first time, but is built on a sustained commitment to love.

1:13:47Dr. John Vervaeke:You reliably bring out the best in each other. That's why we bound ourselves to each other. Doesn't mean we don't make mistakes, doesn't mean we don't hurt each other's feelings, but we reliably bring out the best in each other continuously.

1:14:00Seth Allison:And we stay connected to liminality without sacrificing the structures of life. And so these two things, the transcendence and the finitude in this relationship, can live together. And the moments of disconnect aren't mistakes. They're enactments that can be learned from and lived through. And so in the second half of life, to find a relationship that orients around growth for both people, where love becomes defined as this sort of mutual escorting. Yeah. It, wonderful, could not have happened had that perspectival shift occurred.

1:14:44Dr. John Vervaeke:Go ahead. Where are you going to say? Well, I was just going to say, it's like you go from a single person having the oars to two people in a canoe. relying on each other, right? In a really deep, in a really, really deep way.

1:14:57Seth Allison:And in tune with the current, no longer fighting, no longer fighting against it. And you know what happens now when we fight against it? It sucks. Your relevance realization and your resonance realization resets. Yep, exactly. And so, right. So, what I sustained and what I tolerated before Or it used to be I could live at a bullshit 10, and now I get to a three, and it's like, that's disgusting. I automatically want to move. Right. Yeah.

1:15:32Dr. John Vervaeke:You're in a totally different salience landscaping. Not just a different salience landscape. You're in a totally different salience landscaping. Yes, totally. I use the metaphor, my radar changes.

1:15:44Seth Allison:Yes. Yes. I work with couples a lot. In fact, I have thoughts about how all of this can play out via relationship. You don't have to go through divorce to have this happen, but you do need to go through loss and change in your partnerships to have this happen. Proper grief too. Well, and all of that can be afforded by the right container, which is part of how I hear my calling in the world. So, I just read before this that Hermes is the god of awkward pauses. So, this is exciting. I didn't know that.

1:16:29Seth Allison:I want to jump ahead in the narrative and I'm going to trust that this will land.

1:16:37Seth Allison:And there's a reforming of the practice that I ran at that time that we rebranded away from my last name to Grow, you know, which was this sort of wonderful kind of vision of what we want to bring to the world. And so much shifted like it was the end of COVID and half of our therapists as most of the workforce suddenly just changed jobs and decided to go out on their own. And we had a moment where we thought, maybe this is over, maybe this isn't going to work. And then it rebuilt and it rebuilt better. And then you and I started doing our talks and one of the wonderful weird things that happened is Dick Schwartz reached out and he and I have become friends and that gave I would like the three of us to talk at some point.

1:17:30Seth Allison:I would like that too. I think we can make that happen. And it gave me the chance to speak at the IFS conference and to talk about attachment. And this just created these great opportunities, right?

1:17:42Dr. John Vervaeke:I love to hear this, you know? It's just wonderful. I mean, a good teacher, and I'm not saying I'm just your teacher, but I'm just speaking here, you know, in terms of my work. If you can see your students taking up and it gives birth in a way that you aren't responsible for, but nevertheless, you made that possible. Like you're a midwife in the really Socratic sense. Like that gives me joy. Like when I hear you saying, you know, because of our conversation, you know, Dick Schwartz and you have become friends. It's like, oh, wow. Yeah, that's joy for me.

1:18:20Seth Allison:This is the kind of joy you can access via liminality. Yes. That happened. It didn't... You and I didn't make it. We participate in it.

1:18:32Dr. John Vervaeke:Right. See, only participatory knowing can give you the actual sense of things happening by participation.

1:18:44Seth Allison:Which is why the ego must put the oars in the boat.

1:18:47Dr. John Vervaeke:Yeah, that's right.

1:18:49Seth Allison:So, more bad things come unfortunately and this is sort of moving, now I want to talk about moving out of liminal. Right. So, right, I start at the 40s, I'm turning 50 this year. The

1:19:07Seth Allison:tragedy, I'm not going to go into great detail but there's my kids experience a profound loss, the practice that I had built and the deepest friendship that I had.

1:19:20Dr. John Vervaeke:I think you should let people know. I don't want to take any details from you. You want to withhold, but there was a profound betrayal of you, which is very hard to take. Betrayal is one of the things that can psychologically traumatize us because it calls into question any kind of just world hypothesis we might have built implicitly. I hope I'm not trespassing, but I think that's an essential piece to make clear what was happening for you. It was a deep betrayal.

1:19:47Seth Allison:I trust your judgment about that. I was mixed about sharing it, but I trust it. And it might be important because it's along the same continuum of putting the oars in.

1:20:08Dr. John Vervaeke:That's what I want to say, Seth. Like betrayal is the avenue by which the ego often says, I told you so. Let me be back in control. Look what happens when I don't control everything. You can't trust, right? That's why I wanted to put that on the table. To me, this is one of the great messages of Jesus. That's one of the greatest moments. When we have been betrayed and we think of ourselves as a victim, that is one of the greatest moments of temptation to evil for us. yeah yeah wow okay thank you for that

1:20:48Dr. John Vervaeke:so my like i wish i had handled betrayal better in my own past is what i'm saying i'm saying something aspirational here where i relate most with bonhoeffer is the last year that's unfortunate, where this time around, I felt a kind of capacity to stay in the suffering

1:21:11Seth Allison:and not to be lost in compulsion in order to cope. And what I ended up calling it was living in first gear. I was never able to, in order to maintain connection with self, I could not shift out of first gear, which meant literally one day at a time. And attempting to orient with help, attempting to orient to what was the suffering of the people who worked for me, the clients that depended on our practice, and to strive towards a soft landing that minimized suffering for everybody. And to take seriously that suffering, not just my own. And that orientation allowed me to navigate and things came in that I didn't control.

1:22:04Seth Allison:Somebody came along who was a friend, but a peripheral friend and had a really wonderful practice that they'd taken such great care to build. And originally, I thought, gosh, we have to close our doors. Maybe I can see if they can hire some therapists and take on these clients for us. And we realized, oh, we can make it. We can keep floating. But I had to reconcile that I could not. I could not stay in that situation. The pain was too much and it was time. And they said, without prompting, they said, what if we could take it? What if we could take it over? And everybody stays. And you turn off the lights and we turn them on.

1:22:54Seth Allison:And that's what happened. And it was amazing. And it didn't feel like me doing it. I didn't have a sense of pride about it. It just felt like suffering with and staying with and watching it play out.

1:23:13Dr. John Vervaeke:Can I ask you a question at this point? Yeah. And this is a phenomenological question because I've noticed a difference. It's a phenomenological difference. And it's like the aspect shift that sometimes happens in therapy where, oh, I want to deal with the fact that I'm so stubborn. What do you really like about yourself? Well, I persevere, right? People do that aspect disguise, right? So it's like the opposite of aspects to size. It's a waking up that's an aspect shift. Did you note, and maybe you didn't, but I've noted, and this is why I'm asking you. I'm trying to see, like, I'm trying to get clearer about it.

1:23:49Dr. John Vervaeke:Meaning is through sharing. is there a shift from suffering to like there's a lot of pain but there's a I use a different term there's a shift from just suffering which is just like ah and undergoing I'm undergoing something I'm trying to get something it's a it's it's it's like when it's a difference between like when you're hit and you're in pain and you're you know you're working out and you're in pain I know there's ego stuff in there, but I'm trying to get at the phenomenology, not the teleology. You know what I mean? Where you feel like, because I'm trying to get, like there was something that held you back from the compulsion and I'm trying to get what's the phenomenological touchstone of that.

1:24:35Dr. John Vervaeke:And for me, I've had moments where it shifts from I'm suffering, which means loss of agency, into a positive sense of loss of agency, which is I am undergoing and that means I'm participating in something. Yes.

1:24:51Seth Allison:Placing. You're placing there. I'm undergoing. Oh, yeah, yeah, yes, yes. The sense of self is that something is going under me. Right, right. Right. And I am participating in it without being possessed by it. I'm not losing agency. I'm experiencing agency, but I am undergoing. That's right. So, yes, it is not pleasant, but it is ultimately self-building, whereas compulsion is self-reducing, self -destructive. So, what do I mean by self-building? It is like a working out metaphor, right? Like it is trying to maintain a container that has to hold more and that container is maxed but with an ecology not a practice as much as an ecology of support, a borrowing of self from others.

1:26:02Seth Allison:So, I mean, this is a wonderful IFS kind of concept of that, you know, that the client can borrow self-energy from the therapist and it strengthens that container. And then the parts realize, oh, there's something here. There's something here, just like that perspectival shift. Parts have that perspectival shift with self, right? So, oh, I didn't know there was something here that was creative and courageous and calm and centered with me and present and that was reliable and that was actually available. And so, you know, I watch parts go through metanoia, right? And you know, it's controversial because self, you know, Dick would, you know, we would say to Dick, self feels like a place, you know, and he would say it is, but it also has agency and it's also connected to something bigger.

1:27:04Seth Allison:And which I've grown to appreciate about him, how easily he sits in those tensions. Anyway, I digress a little bit.

1:27:14Dr. John Vervaeke:I don't think that was a digression. I think that's exactly right. I think what you're saying there is the distinction. First of all, I like that you're under the going. I think that's beautiful. So thank you for that. That's helpful. And you're being placed into participation, which means the pain isn't gone, but it has often gone from a meaninglessness, which drives, I would say, compulsion, by the way, to a meaningful. And that's the difference I'm picking up. And meaning is not subjective well-being, and it is not pleasure, and it is not a sense of success. That's what the research shows. And because all of those things fail, and what we ultimately fall back on, fall into, and maybe ultimately have to flow with, that's the Taoist in me, is that kind of meaning.

1:28:02Dr. John Vervaeke:Meaning always is a way, it's beyond us. It's not our personal project. It is the way we orient by participating.

1:28:13Seth Allison:We throw ourselves unreservedly into life's duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities.

1:28:25Seth Allison:How can success make us arrogant or failure lead us astray when we participate in that kind of life? Right. So, yes, yes.

1:28:39Seth Allison:I land in April thinking, okay, I've handed off this practice that has been my self object for me. It's been an extension of myself for 20 years and I hand off, I let go of a relationship that has been probably more defined for me than anything else. It was a deep, deep twinship. And I think, okay, we'll hit the ground running in May. And no, it didn't work that way. and there's been a period of

1:29:22Seth Allison:what would we call I think protective maybe even firefighter parts saying not so fast rest, recover and the anxiety of how then will I live what is the vocational calling what's going to fill this space

1:29:41Dr. John Vervaeke:Notice the word you used, by the way. Which one? Vocation, calling. Right. Right.

1:29:48Seth Allison:Well, you know what my managers would love is for that to show up a little quicker.

1:29:58Seth Allison:But oddly, again, and this is why I still am doing Ours Up groups, is like, there is more structure to me and there is more structure to the life that I am in right now. It's wonderful partnership, my kids are growing, they're approaching college. And actually, the work I'm doing now that I'm freed from the constraints of running a practice feels more and more congruent and in line with just giftings who I am. But you know, what's wonderful is self or the universe is just not letting my ego get much purchase. Although people may disagree with that around me, but it's part of what's wonderful showing up here with you is there are manager parts that are like, oh, this is going to help that sort of come to fruition.

1:30:55Seth Allison:And it's like, well, the more I try to perform here, the worse that whole thing goes. And so, I'm just going to try and show up and see what happens with John. And here's what's happened. I'm getting some clarity in my life and this conversation helps too that what I want to be able to do in the world is to create containers. I want to create containers that constrain strategies, parts, ego, things that are no longer adaptive for people. And in that container, I also want to afford these perspectival and participatory shifts, these different experiences of knowing.

1:31:52Seth Allison:and these opportunities present. So, one of the ways that I wanted to talk to you about, because I'm actually curious about your thoughts, we discussed this a little bit about leadership and I have kind of two theories. There are probably one theory and that is organizations are organized energetically top-down most of the time. Yes. And it does put an emphasis on what is going on in terms of relevance realization and resonance realization in leadership in different systems. They don't have to be corporate systems. Family systems as well. What happens if we create these containers that afford liminality or the embrace of liminality?

1:32:51Seth Allison:How does that shift not just the people, but the entire organization? Right, right, right. My fantasy, my theory, I don't know how I'm going to test this so much, is that there would be two ways to do that. One would be, and this is something that my partner Kate does almost exclusively, is assemble a team and bring them gently into the liminal where they change their grasp and their perspective

1:33:29Seth Allison:towards what is being undergone, I guess we could say, and what it evokes. My thought is, man, I want to just get whoever the leader is and I want to get their partner and I want to get them in a room. And I want to be able to do EFT and IFS and then I want to see how it changes the rest to their world. Because what I've gotten to watch for 20 years is that that attachment relationship is the field where all of it plays out most vividly, where the ego is most exercised, but where there's also the most opportunity to be seen and responded to in new ways, where participatory experience is right there.

1:34:21Seth Allison:So, that's what I'm thinking about. I asked you about it a while ago when we talked. I'm wondering if given this whole conversation, I think this is the move towards praxis. Like, how does this kind of play out? Where are the levers of change culturally that you feel... Seth, this would be good for you, or John, this is where you are moving with this. I would love to hear that.

1:34:57Dr. John Vervaeke:What just happened? What just happened there is a shift. When we've been talking, I've been very enthusiastic, and at times I've been... I don't think you would have experienced it that way, but some people might experience it very aggressive because I'm very much trying to deconstruct both the individual and the cultural egoic straight jackets that were in that throttle meaning and make people suffer. Thank you. Yeah, that makes me slightly angry. And I'm trying to, you know, it's Aristotle. It's not about being angry or not. It's about being angry at the right time to the right degree for the right reason.

1:35:41Dr. John Vervaeke:Right? And I'm trying to cultivate that. So that, I'm getting that little that. And then there's a shift where it's like shifting gear to use one of yours. And sorry, this sounds, this saying it will undermine it, but you asked me, where there's a shift to an orientation of humility, which is what I'm, now it just came out to me as the through line. We have been talking, I think, profoundly about, and this is the answer to your question, about humility as a virtue and how is it properly cultivated and what does it mean to go back to, but also go beyond the Christian idea that the best leader is the one who leads from a place of humility.

1:36:32Dr. John Vervaeke:This is exemplified by Jesus and it's exemplified in Gethsemane. And so what's coming out for me, and part of it was a bit of self-correction too, like I'm trying to be more labile in the place from which I'm taking my stand and my stance and my status. I'm watching the three S's all the time. And so my answer to you is we are trying, we have birthed in Dialogos, this is a Dialogos ultimately. We didn't propose it that way, but I propose it to you now retrospectively. This was a dialogos about the virtue of humility and what it really means and why it's not weakness and why we should stop associating it with humiliation.

1:37:26Dr. John Vervaeke:that in fact, the best leaders are the leaders who have the virtue of humility, who are able to acknowledge undergoing, and that's a kind, a kind, please hear that qualifier, a kind of submission underneath, right? Underneath the mission, right? To catch currents that they cannot be the authors of. And I think that's a profound kind of leadership that is being proposed. That would be my, an answer to you. What's going through me right now is I'm reading a really powerful book called The Philosophy of Jesus as a Way of Life. And this is what's coming out, this kind of model. And to me, I mean, and of course, Socrates represents a profound kind of humility.

1:38:21Dr. John Vervaeke:The deep, deep, I mean, and you did it multiple times. You didn't use these words, but you kept saying, I knew what I did not know. I knew what I did not know. And he doesn't mean facts. He means I realized my operating manual needed massive updating kind of knowledge. That's humility too. And I'm trying to see how does Socratic humility and Christ-like humility, how do they go together? Anyways, that's what resonated. That's what you picked up on when I shifted. And then, and notice I'm doing it here. Like there's a part of me that, but there's a part of me that wants to hold on to the softness and the silence that humility often demands as a way of presencing the virtue and letting it enact what it needs to do.

1:39:12Dr. John Vervaeke:So So that's what was going on.

1:39:16Seth Allison:That was really lovely. I realized as you were talking, and more manager parts, I think, had posed the question and your response being much more embodied, I think captured a more self-led idea of humility in leadership, not, you know, as, well, I really like the phrase undergoing now. How did you put it? Catching the current that we are not.

1:39:54Dr. John Vervaeke:The authors of. The authors of. Like the people, the two people in the canoe, right? Yeah. The two people in the canoe. Catch the canoe. You're constantly doing rhythmic humility because you have to let the other person, you keep flipping between who is guiding and directing. And because the two of you are trying to create an ability to catch the current that neither one of you alone can do well.

1:40:26Seth Allison:So, the thing that I'll share with you that is, I think, most exciting for me is that I've been asked, I have the privilege of being very close to this community because Kate works for a group called Conscious Leadership Group and they do coaching and consulting. And I think one of the moves that's happened as the practice decoupled from me or I decoupled from it is that there's been a desire to get out of the clinical room more and to see what happens. And I've done some work with them on IFS and on attachment and how it might be in dialogue with what they do to create a more conscious leadership.

1:41:19Seth Allison:And they just asked me to come on and do a more extended training with them. Excellent. And that's the stuff that's lighting me up right now. And if some of these ideas we're talking about can make their way into organizations, into people who are setting culture for many other people who spend the majority of their lives in these buildings or in conversation with each other or sharing around a task that they're attempting to accomplish.

1:41:54Seth Allison:I'm hopeful that there's the possibility that work, which is the one thing we all seem to still be just compulsively engaged in, could become a different kind of place, a place that affords, I don't want to be too ambitious, but the kind of encounters that we're hoping for people. Places where growth can be nurtured. Yeah.

1:42:24Dr. John Vervaeke:One of the positive, and I've been a critic of this, but trying to balance things out more, one of the positive features of the Protestant Reformation was to bring work back into a place for the sacred. Of course, we've lost that, and it got translated into a completely secular compulsion to increase profit. But if you look originally, what's going on is the idea that part of the Protestant revolution is that family life and work life are places in which the sacred should be showing up on a regular basis. And so, it hasn't happened before. So, there's the project. Yeah. Okay.

1:43:08Seth Allison:There's the project. Well, it's a tough sell for people to be like, all right, well, life's going to get a lot better, but it really depends on your capacity for suffering. Always.

1:43:22Dr. John Vervaeke:You have to die to get your life.

1:43:25Seth Allison:But it really is the case.

1:43:30Seth Allison:And I don't want to be masochistic about it, but the ego does become tyrannical as we get older and further into life, and there's a lot of suffering. I'm struck by how he ends the quote about, and I think about your transcendence versus finitude. when I read this. And I just said it before. How can success make us arrogant or failure lead us astray? I mean, he's talking about relevance realization. That's right. Yeah. And he's saying it is by entering suffering that we move into a more optimal grip on reality and on ourselves. That's the spiritual journey.

1:44:26Dr. John Vervaeke:We're out of time, my friend. And that was a good place to end.

1:44:34Dr. John Vervaeke:So, of course, I want you to come back. And let's continue this conversation, both off and on camera. Thank you, Chuck. Yeah, thank you, Seth. And I always like to give my interlocutor the last word. So, please.

1:44:54Seth Allison:Well, I think I've ended with this word before, but the word that I think my life kind of circles around is trust. And I will say it again, that I think trust and the cultivation of trust is subversive. And I hope we all take the chance to build it when it presents.

1:45:19Dr. John Vervaeke:Excellent. Excellent words to end. Thank you very much. Thank you, John.