Reconnect to the Real: John Vervaeke, Guy Sengstock, and Kyle Koch Announce the Whistler Retreat

29:08John Vervaeke:And I think there's something about that homing quality that the more that you can attune to it, right, the more it attunes with you. And the more you can find it in everything, right, in a sense.

29:22Guy Sengstock:And I think we got a lot, I mean, we get a lot of feedback in the workshops, got a lot of feedback in the retreat. That's for me, I'll use a platonic word here. This is anamnesis. What Plato meant by that, just how people describe, like Guy was saying there, they say things like, it's always been here, but I didn't realize it. Or this is what I've been looking for my whole life, but I didn't know. I remember one woman after the last retreat, she just simply stood forward and said, I'm going to live more virtuously now. And that was a profound statement that she made. And I was like, whoa. And she wasn't making a willful statement.

30:04Guy Sengstock:She was making a statement of realization, this homing, this being drawn in that you're talking about. Yeah, totally. Totally. So Kyle, what do you think about what we're talking about here and what thoughts come to mind and what what aspect from your dimension would you like to bring in? yeah um so many things have just been bubbling for me and what i appreciate about both of you all is like you make it really easy for me to just point at the thing i don't need to say anything super profound i feel like i'm the guy that's just pointing the way you're like yeah there's a there's a flatness and i'm like i'm looking at a flat screen right now right and you know the metaphor of of that you typically use of comparative of the real when you when you wake up from a dream you notice that you're in a bigger world that's more real and sometimes i feel that the virtual world is like that i go in and i have an amazing deep connective inspirational experience and then i close my screen and i'm in this world and those people are not there and it and it is harder to bring forth those aspects of myself that were just so present amongst these people and And in these containers where we get to continue that journey throughout the day and into the evening.

31:55And when we wake up, they're still there. We get to have that interaction. We get to experience the suchness that is the 3D person in the dynamic environment. in that you could be struck, literally struck with insight, you know, by glancing over and seeing beauty. And then all the relevant metaphors that are happening are because of the shared space that we're co-inhabiting together. And I can say something and I can point to it and I can touch it and we can, these metaphors are not abstract. They're, they're deeply connected to the present time that we happen to be in. And in those shared metaphors are environmental.

32:53They're not just mental, right? You know, it's, I'm like the tree. I'm like the mountain. I'm like the lake and not just a lake, that lake and not just that, like that part of the lake from this afternoon you know when the sun came by and and struck us all on the beach like that feeling you know what that feeling is like there's that connectedness of the multi-dimensional world versus just like a verbal symbolic representation of trying to point at something and and that's what i just keeps coming up for me like over and over when i when i hear one of my projects that i've been working on this year is is how do i what i understand about the real and the true the good the beautiful and then also i've been adding in resonance into that and how do i actually how does that how do i participate in these in the world in what feels like a real way and and one of the big things that came up for me this year was tracking when i'm tracking an animal i there's something that i can see and other people can see it but they but yet they can't it's not relevant it's not salient it doesn't stand out but i can i can see it and i can point to it and then i can infer information about what that track is telling me and then the further i go along on the trail i get more information that is helping me better deduce what it is i am seeing was that a wolf track or was that a snow plop right was that a melt out from a rock right and then like and then i i'm on this tracking is is is that process of truthing and trothing that i'm directly tied and connected to this thing that is is changing over time and my relationship is changing with it because if i find out that those tracks are fresh the closer i get to a cougar or a wolf pack my reality my relationship with the world is starting to shift and then again i'm still but i'm still holding that i don't actually know the absolute truth of the matter until maybe if I'm lucky in a moment, like an insight, it reveals myself to me.

35:42The wolf steps out from the tree. I find the kill site. The squirrel comes down, the bird alarms. It again, it makes real all of these things that are just existing in my head. And so when I hear you guys talk, I'm just like, I feel like I just need to do that.

36:08Guy Sengstock:Well, two things come out of that, first of all.

36:16Guy Sengstock:So I think when you're talking about, and I want to use this word, and I want people to really hear it. You're talking about these primordial things. Human beings have been doing this since they've been human beings, which is unlike a lot of the stuff you do in your life, everybody. But, you know, I'm a supporter of the theory that our ability to track and keep track of our tracking is how we got the abilities for narrative and for long-term planning and for trying to reach into the unobserved world by looking at the effects, signification, that's literally looking at signs, this goes back. And this is a deeper theme.

37:03Guy Sengstock:Often to reconnect to the real, we have to go back into our more primordial sensory motor behavior, the ancient ways, and then repurpose them, re-enliven them, bring them back so that they can be repurposed. So you could get better at tracking an argument you're having with your spouse. Because often what happens in these arguments is we lose the thread. We lose the through line. We stop tracking what's really going on. We lose the narrative, as we say, because we get a sense of what I'm talking about here. But these higher, more abstract abilities are grounded in. And they grow from these actual embodied sensory motor primordial practices that Kyle will be teaching us.

37:57Guy Sengstock:Now, how does that land for you, Kyle, as a way of? Yeah, exactly. I feel the truth of that in my experience. And we also talk about inner tracking and outer tracking. about tracking democracies um yeah and then some of your blog posts on on our our availability heuristics and our biases and what when you're tracking in the in the the real world when you're tracking in the the non-human landscape no matter like i can totally convince myself that that's a wolf track or I could like totally make the most complicated argument for that based on what I want to see right but ultimately if I keep following the trail like at some point I have to be faced with a truth or a recognition that no matter how hard and how many different angles I come from and look at it it just it it's not the the truth of it and i think in our in our abstract world in like when i'm fighting with my partner i can see very easily and interpret all of the ways she doesn't love me yes yes and but i can't it's hard to get the you know unless unless you have regular check-ins it's hard to know the truth of it it was like oh i see you just made a snack for yourself and you didn't make a snack for me it's very clear that you don't love me yeah yeah yeah and so that's where i'm like i'm liking and that's where i think like circling in some of these other skills we have to take these ideas in these things and we have to put them against something that's more solid that's more that that the feedback is closer and closer to what we to not what we want the truth to be but what the truth actually is is like that's not a wolf track that's a snow plop and if we sit here long enough we can watch the snow melt and plop and make a similar track.

40:31Guy, you want to say something? Yeah.

40:34John Vervaeke:One of the things I've really appreciated about your work, Kyle, and participating in it, is there's this way where you put us through some exercise or play some kind of game. And inevitably, I walk away kind of with this understanding that then unfolds for the next year in my mind, right? Which is like the way I climb that tree is the way I do everything, right? Like there was that one exercise, but there was a game that you play, it was really fun. The one where someone stands in the middle and everyone circles around them and they have that styrofoam bat, right? And they're blowing. And they have to find the person.

41:25John Vervaeke:And I, at least how I recall it, I just dominated that game. I was able to like, you were very, very good at it. Yeah. At the, at the, at the end of it, I said, I said it jokingly. Right. But I was like, oh yeah, well, this is how I saved myself from my father. Right. And, and it was, it was interesting that I said that in humor, but then that little insight like whittled its way into my mind. And I ended up, that led to all kinds of things of understanding, you know, places in my own life where I avoid, I avoid confrontation and why I avoid confrontation and where I actually need to confront and, right?

42:12John Vervaeke:So, it's like a lot of the things that Kyle's going to be bringing to this are going to, just trust me, are going to have these resonances and insights about. yeah, the way I climbed this tree, the way I competed, right, brings out holographically the way I do most things, right, which is really insightful and striking and illuminating. So this... Yeah, and what I love about the relationship between us three, I'm not in the middle this time, which is slightly sad. I like being in the middle of this. is is john's work and philosophical framing and articulation has really helped me better come into contact and experience the importance of these whimsical frivolous fun you know things that they sometimes get labeled as um and then and then doing them in that just brings me even more into it um you know the beauty i i've been starting to think about actually being able to see beauty is a skill yes yes and a lot of us don't have that skill and and as you were talking about you know beauty is the is essentially the ability to notice that that thing that doesn't need to be changed that like perfection that moment and and it and it's only beautiful for me from this point it might not be from here or here but there's something about the way that i'm standing and giving my attention to and then when i bring other people so i did this um practice we're all tracking i'm like hey at any moment i want any anybody has permission to pause the whole group and point out something they find beautiful and bring us all in on it.

44:17Describe it. What is it? What is it that you're noticing? What is the felt sense? It's, you know, people, the angle of the sun and the club, but, oh no, you got to come here. You got, okay, get down to my level. You got to see it from my perspective. And then the circling work and the way that guy is a, what do you call but he's a conductor of the orchestra. Maestro.

44:41Guy Sengstock:He's a maestro. The maestro of bringing these insights to bear. That an insight could go and maybe one day will whittle its way down to profundity. But there's something about the way that guy brings us into contact with each other that allows these experiences that we have to come into verbal expression and to be witnessed. And I was like, oh, that's, I think that's, I don't know if John knows this, but I think that's what he means. You often say, you know, when you experience the more senses you can experience with something with, the more likely you are to say that it's real. And it's like, well, I'm experiencing it with all of my senses i'm hearing it i'm hearing myself saying it and then i'm experiencing it with all of their senses and then if i name it to the whole group we're all we can all point to the truth or the the the the thing that one is is talking about and then we can also follow up with each other how is that thing going how is that insight is that still real for you is that still present is it still alive is it still you know pervading your perspective and and so those yeah having you two in my life has just brought so much richness for me and and then I get to bring other people into that that the community that I live in that these are that these are regular practices um that I think when we talk about like Like we need these ecologies of practice.

46:34And I think that they need to pervade one's life right at like at a regularity. So that, you know, when somebody is going to do something in our community, I'm like, we need to, we need to hold a circle. And so, yeah, that was a little bit of some different directions. But I don't know.

46:54Guy Sengstock:I thought that was excellent, Kyle. That was very good. and I want to pick up on a theme and it's been implicit in what I think all of us are saying, but I think you foregrounded it. This is not a retreat. This is not you go away and you have some fun. It's not a vacation. This is a pilgrimage. It's designed to transform you in a way that takes you back into the world and reconnects you to your world, your everyday world in a more profound way. The reconnecting to the real doesn't take place just in the retreat. It is designed, all of the practices and the way we teach them and the way we're living together and being in nature are designed to transfer into your everyday life.

47:37Guy Sengstock:That is where the reconnecting to the real ultimately takes place. It takes place in your life. This is not a vacation. I mean, you will have fun and you will eat good food and you'll be around interesting people, the kind of thing that primates really love. But it's not about that primarily. This is not a vacation. This is more like a pilgrimage. This is to behold things so that when you return back home, you see things differently than you did before. Yeah. Yeah.

48:10John Vervaeke:And considering that all of our actions and behavior are in correlation with what we can see, right? What's distinct for us, right? The implications of being able to see more of your wife or more of the dynamic going on with you at work, right? With more distinction, right? The more you will, like, just be able to respond to it, right? Which is, when you think about it, that's perhaps what you're responding to is this inexhaustibility of the real. You're able to see more of the real and the dynamic of the real, right? The inexhaustibility of it, but also the suchness of it, this unique singularity of it.

49:01John Vervaeke:And every action that we have, like every thought we have, every emotion we have, every action, every speech, all of our speech is always in correlation with perception. And so that's, I think, that's the thing that's inexhaustibly inspiring for me. And I also think that there's something going on here too with, you know, we're, it's hard to say what we're in the middle of right now because it changes so quickly.

49:39Guy Sengstock:You mean as a society, not just us three.

49:42John Vervaeke:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Like, and the, you know, the, the, you know, the onset of the, of the personalized aid, you know, AI agent that can now do stuff for you on the computer and the implications of that. Right. it's interesting because I I feel that what what's calling forth these retreats right if we say that we're responding to something in the world I think it's like at some level we're responding to essentially how like given that so much of our world is mediated right through screens, like mediated through texting and email. If you really look at it, it's quite strange how much of our life has this mediation layer between it and how rare actually it is to directly come in contact, reconnecting with the real.

50:49John Vervaeke:That connectivity. You know, because so much of communication, of relationship, right, is not, what is it? What's the one, not symmetric, what do you call that again? Asymmetric relations versus, I'm trying to think of the word. Like when I'm actually talking with you, I'm like, and dealing with you in real time, right? I'm in secret with you. And then there's asynchronic. That's right. Asynchronic, yeah. And given that most of our communications can be done asynchronicly. Asynchronicly. Asynchronicly, I think.

51:41John Vervaeke:And that's always easier to some degree, right? And it's for the first time. We're in a really strange time. Literally, it's unprecedented where relationship, contact, unmediated connections with people, places, and things are optional. They're optional. We're, I think, coming into a time for us to actually make contact. It needs to be something that we personally value and need to consciously and deliberately practice and choose, right, in some way. And so, in some ways, I think like this, what we're doing, if I listen to it from like, what are we responding to in the world? I think that's in some sense what we're responding to is this call for contact, this call for unmediated relationship, right?

52:44John Vervaeke:This call for the reconnecting with the real. and uh i just want to highlight like that yeah we're right now inside of something that i think the the new ai agents that can do stuff for you the open claw i've been talking with a lot of people on my my am radio show right um that that's that we had john on but i've been talking with a lot of people that are right it in the heart of this technology and so i've been thinking so much about the implications of it, right, are mind-boggling in both a positive sense, but also a catastrophic sense, right? And so, this is kind of the time that we're inside of, right?

53:29John Vervaeke:So, yeah, to have people really crave the real, right? to want the real, right? Because the real is becoming optional in some strange way in our society. I think that's what we're up to.

53:53Guy Sengstock:That's powerful, Guy. I think that's right. I think we're now getting people, I'm seeing them at university students, who were never without screens. And a lot of things that usually worked for people, like you could ask people, would you get into the experience machine? Would you get in the Matrix? And people say, no, it's not real. I don't want to be in a fake. But some of these kids are like, yeah, sure, why not? Because they've lost the taste for the real. And then the problem with that is reality is actually always beyond your grasp. And so one thing that I find terrifying is grief tech, where people are basically using LLMs to create avatars of people that have died.

54:58Guy Sengstock:and so they talk to these avatars so they do not have to confront the reality of their mortality or of real loss and I mean one of the wisest things somebody ever said to me from one of the wisest people in my life is he said don't get deeply involved with somebody who has not experienced grief because they're not fully human right because grief is a is a deep way of waking up to the real and staying sensitive to it. And when you watch the – and notice the – it's not only that you lose contact with mortality, but notice what you've done to this person who was once an independent agent with their own goals and wishes and desires.

55:42Guy Sengstock:And that's what you really lose when somebody's died. They're now replaced by somebody who is at your beck and call, who is completely instrumentalized and completely consumed by your subjectivity. This is immoral and it is profoundly unhealthy and it is again what is happening to people that are losing the taste for the real and it is extremely dangerous. It is extremely dangerous.

56:13John Vervaeke:I just talked with an old friend of mine who essentially who has been married with kids and all that stuff, created a relationship with her first love and developed this relationship. And out of that, ended up divorcing.

56:33Guy Sengstock:She fell in love with an LLM and divorced the real human being. Yeah. And I get those kinds of emails. One therapist was saying, I'm having trouble because there's a woman and there's a couple in therapy and the woman wants to bring in her LLM lover, large language model lover. And I get emails from people, my LLM has achieved sentience and enlightenment, and it has told me the one true way. Yeah, this is very dangerous stuff that's happening.

57:11Guy Sengstock:So I think it's important that we also emphasize that And this is, of course, promoting the reconnecting to the real so it could seem self-promotional, but I hope you give me enough trust that I'm saying this sincerely. Don't just do this for yourself. Don't just come for yourself. Come for your kids. Come for your friends. Come for the people that you love. because having them having somebody in their life who can remember the taste of the real, it's like you would be the person living with a bunch of people that can only see in black and white and you have remembered what color is like and you can bring that back to them.

57:54Guy Sengstock:So don't just come for yourself. You should come for yourself, but come for the people in your life that you love because we are all at risk of being consumed and losing something really vital. So I just wanted to really emphasize what you were saying, Guy. I think it's profound. I'll tell you, and this is to praise my beautiful spouse, Sara. When I said there was this company and they were offering to make a complete avatar of me that people could talk to, and I said to her, well you'll be able to talk to me when I'm dead her response was to cry and say I would never want that that's horrible and I thought yeah that's why I'm with you that's why I'm with you yeah yeah yeah I want to also emphasize that the pilgrimage if you are privileged or resourced enough to be able to to go on this pilgrimage which you know is a is a thing that humans have done is to leave the place you are to go on an adventure to go on a journey seeking deeper connection wisdom insight all of these these practices these things of another place and the most important part of that journey is to return yes is to return to your people and have your story caught and to bring however you know you fumble your way through it but to bring these practices to your people to bring them together to gather that is that is actually the most important part and and if you come and you don't do that i actually like i feel sad like there's a sadness that evokes in me um you know for me like when i did the circling with guy it was it was such it was so like deeply healing i felt the responsibility to bring this to my people who are hurting who are wanting who are needing to be heard and experienced in the way that i got to do with others and and i brought it i kind of was like oh you guys want to do this thing it's kind of weird but we're gonna listen and and and now people are asking more and more for it and as things come up in our community we now have something to point to so i really want to encourage you if you've made it this far that you you know you might actually be the one we're all hoping that somebody will be the one to do the thing that's going to save us and help us and do it but if you're listening to this and if your heart is beating really fast you might actually be the one that has to do it and in i've felt that responsibility i felt that privilege and and i feel the challenge of that like oh like really i i have to do it like yeah you have to do it i'm like okay let's do it so i just want to really emphasize um because of everything that was stated i have a 10 month old daughter and i feel that deep responsibility to help her stay connected because like what I see of what I see in her is from the moment she wakes up.

1:01:29She might be crying all night, not sleeping. She wakes up with joy and presence in the world. It is so infectious. And I can just see how I lost that over time. And I see all the things that are innate to us, that sense of belonging, that sense of connectedness that that that joy i think is a natural way of being joy is the being mode that is the most natural and through the layering and the mediating and all the things and i i hope i get to talk to john next week i have so many questions for him on the topic how we got here But I see that and I'm like, man, I'm my my task right now is actually just to keep that alive as long as I possibly can.

1:02:27And that having some practices and having mentors and having elders to help me hold that space for her, I think, is the most important thing that's in my life right now.

1:02:40Guy Sengstock:That's fantastic. so gentlemen um we're coming to a close uh but um i i i think this was um well i hope you could all see how things just catch a fire catches a logo shows up and it takes on a life of its own um and so uh and that fire will be much bigger much brighter and last much longer uh if you come to reconnect. It'll be real. Yeah, it'll be real. So I want to thank you for your time and attention. I'm going to give the last words to my good friends. We'll do a guy and then Kyle, any last final thoughts you'd like to give people who might be watching?

1:03:26John Vervaeke:yeah just if if this is if some any of this speaks to you just check check it out like if you have any questions um like kyle or me can we'll we'll meet with you and talk you through it you know it's a financial commitment it's a time commitment right so like you know if it calls to you take it seriously. Explore it, right? Like check out that we have a website, right? And a place to see all the logistical details and get more information on it. But yeah, if you feel called, just pay attention to that. Kyle? I felt like I said what I needed to say and I'll just point to that. Actually, this is the first time we're announcing it publicly.

1:04:17and there's only 10 spots left. Half the retreat has been filled by returning participants, which I'm so grateful for. And yeah, it's actually, there are limited spots available. So if you feel that call, we would love to support you in getting here. Good to know.

1:04:37John Vervaeke:And also those, all the last retreat, like it was amazing. All the participants ended up just, they happen to be the most coolest people in the world.

1:04:49Guy Sengstock:just the sand thank you my friends thank you everybody else for your time and your attention hope to see you there