Reconnect to the Real: Vervaeke, Sengstock, and Koch on Nature, Circling, and Socratic Practice

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1:18Welcome, everybody, to the lectern. I'm here with two very good friends of mine, Al-Khak and Guy Sendstock, and I'm going to pass it immediately to Kyle. He's going to make an announcement and then we'll get into a bit of discussion, which we hope will be both intriguing and informative to you. Kyle, take it away. Yeah, so a lot of you already know we're running a retreat together. And today we actually want to talk about like what that looks like and what the impact of that is. And before we dive in, I want to just give you the brief details of that. So it's happening in a little over a month, September or sorry, August 31st.

2:00At the end of the month, we were hosting a five day retreat in Whistler, British Columbia, and we only have five spots left. And we would love for those of you that are interested to come join us. And if you want to hear more about what's happening, that's actually what we're going to get into today. and yeah for me this journey has been really illuminating since i found john's work in 2018 and and i started to apply these concepts and these ideas like what does it mean to be in relationship like what is meaning how how does meaning come to be and why is my relationship with nature, like so important to me.

2:48It's so important to me. And I've been teaching nature connection for over a decade. And I was experiencing this reoccurring theme is when people spend time in nature, their entire worldview shifts, they become more relaxed and empathetic and aware and grounded and their quality of life increases. And I didn't get it. I didn't like get it. I witnessed it for years happening. And then as I came into John's work, I'm like, oh, he just gave me language for things I have been doing for a really long time. And then I got to just really dive into his work and get to know John. And what I like about John is we get to better systematically apply these principles, right?

3:45So we all know that sitting around a fire is really connected, really enjoyable. There's something about sitting around a fire where you can sit next to a person with a fire for hours. And if that fire is not there, it's kind of awkward, right? And you're like, why is this so awkward? And then John started to, you know, kind of illuminate for me the neuroscience and the evolutionary history and the exactation and all the things that is actually happening. So then me as a facilitator, now I get to have a choice when I'm facilitating an experience and I'm choosing whether to have a fire or not to have a fire.

4:32I actually know, not just from my experience, but I have a whole plethora of scientific knowledge that supports the decision of actually having a fire is really important if I want to increase the probability of the impact that I'm having on people. and we'll talk more about that in this conversation but that's like one of hundreds of examples that i've gleaned from john over the years like yes like kyle this thing is actually really important and like this is it's not important it you know it has benefits but if we have to choose we can kind of use the evidence to keep stacking the experiences in our favor and then i ran into to guy in guy's work and i i was on the periphery i didn't get it i didn't really like it i was annoyed at circling it felt like a waste of time i'm like what why are we just sitting here like talking about this one person and then i got to actually experience guy in person and i was like whoa oh is some i don't even i don't i don't get what he's doing but what he is doing is so connected it's taking the experience that people are having and it's binding it it's integrating it it's coming together in a way that creates substance that You know, it's like when you're kind of like jiggling the aux cord and you're trying to get the mic or the sound to work.

6:18It's like guy comes in with like a fiber optic cable and just like plugs it in. And all of a sudden everybody is connecting in this really rich way. And I was like, oh, what he's doing is he's demonstrating this capacity and this skill set where we can integrate these meaningful, deep, connective experiences that are unspeakable. And as I witnessed that happening, I was like, oh, okay, this is important. night. Okay, I get what I'm doing is important. John is helping me to both create a framework and a set of practices that orient to increase the probability of these transformative experiences happening.

7:09And then once they happen, what I know about rites of passage is the most important part of a rites of passage is actually the welcoming back. It's the integrating of that experience and applying it to my life. Because if I go, I can have all these amazing experiences and you probably know people doing like ayahuasca all the time and they're still like wounded and nothing's really changing in their life. I found that the circling skills and I ended up doing the year-long circling experience and just seeing how important these skills are to integrating connection, bringing relationship more into being and presencing it versus just keeping it in the kind of participatory realm.

7:56Well, I know that was probably a lot, but I just wanted to kind of share the story of how I feel like this came together and what I see as the ecosystem that we create for people to step into. I'll pause there.

8:19John Vervaeke:Thank you. well, thought guy. We should probably just warn people, John, that those same studies don't indicate fire is good if you like set your house on fire. It doesn't work the same way, right? Okay, we'll put that in the asterisk.

8:39John Vervaeke:Yeah, thanks for lighting that up, the whole course that really came across. I think about this in a sense that and sometimes Kyle is tending to the earth, right? And our connection to the earth, which by the way, in itself is something that is surprisingly foreign to us, strangely, because we kind of live there. But in this sense of, in this sense that when we're always around kind of human-made cultural things, right? We're always around beings that are made. But then there's being around beings that are born, right? And so when you go into nature and you dwell in nature, we all know, right?

9:39John Vervaeke:If we're messed up about something or stressed out, we all know it's like, well, if we go for a walk in the woods, everyone knows that, yeah, that'll be a good idea, right? I always thought, well, like, why is that a good idea? Is it just, what is it about the woods? Is it just the way that it is that you feel better after you get back from spending time in nature? What is it about nature, right? There's a lot of death going on in nature. There's all kinds of things going on in nature. Why does it have this kind of quality of truing us up in some sense? And I think that what happens there is that we actually start to recall and remember things that are born.

10:30John Vervaeke:We start to get present to something called origin, right? Something original in us in a way that is non-conceptual. And this is something that we've become increasingly disconnected to this in a profound way. You add on AI to that and your computers and your mediation with your screen and it becomes meta levels like disconnected with that. And so, just spending, just imagine this, like just spending five days, right, with the kinds of people that would watch this video, including the one who you are. In this kind of conversation, dwelling together in nature, imagine the kinds of relationships that would start to happen, the kinds of conversations that would start to happen.

11:24John Vervaeke:eating together, playing together, drinking coffee together, waking up and talking to each other before you're totally awake, but then kind of waking up together in conversation, in practices. So, this element of togetherness, right, which is also corroding in our time, right, is one of the key elements of the course. And so, some of the work that I do in circling and some of the things that I'll be bringing is just simply to midwife that, midwife that element. Not create it so much, but actually bring out its implicit potential into being. And I never know what's going to happen after that, but it's usually quite beautiful.

12:16John Vervaeke:And in some sense, I think that what John is really doing, so it's like as Kyle is bringing the earth, right? and tending to the earth and I'm tending to the relationships togetherness we got John right pointing to heaven and not just pointing right but actually participating right in the higher level ideas and abstractions that you know go all the way back to even before the pre-Socratics. So he's going to not only be bringing all of the things that you hear him lecture about, but John is also a facilitator. He's also a teacher in the deeper sense of the word. So he's not only just going to be talking about them, he's mostly going to be facilitating exercises is such that we participate with those higher things together.

13:27John Vervaeke:If you think about that, what that brings down, what brings us up, where we are together, connected to the earth. And now we start to have a, I don't know what to call that. I think we just call it a retreat, a powerful retreat, right, of togetherness. In fact, we have most of the course, we did this last year and most of the course who took it are going to be at this one. And so, they're all coming back and I think that has a lot to do with the quality of the relations and the connections that happen there. Thanks, John. Thanks, Guy. I like that. I like that model. Yeah, I really like it. So, as many of you know, I've been working a long time on issues of meaning, transformative experience, etc., etc.

14:33That scientific work is still ongoing and getting major publications and presenting at conferences. But for me, while I love that and I love the fact that there's growing scientific excitement about my work, I ultimately aspire to be like Socrates. And so after awakening from the mean crisis, this really kind of crazy guy named Guy reached out to me and said, we should talk. And we started talking and we hit it off right away. and this natural kind of flowing conversation between him and I and Christopher Maspichetro and Jordan Hall we just released a fairly recent one about the sacred they started taking shape and we're all going what's going on?

15:22It's kind of like circling it feels like circling 2.0 and I started to bring all the coxci and then I started doing a participant observation of all these emerging dialogical practices with the help of Guy and Chris started putting together, trying to sort of reverse engineer what it was that Socrates was doing and came up with some practices philosophical fellowship dialectic and the diologos, the stratic search space we ran them all at the last retreat And they're really, really powerful for people because they transform people's relationship to how they're making sense of their sense making.

16:16If they get a deeper understanding in an experiential appreciation of their potential, but often not fully actualized connectedness to each other, to the world, and to this sort of living, like flowing, shared sense-making realization, disclosure of reality. We call it the logos of ancient philosophy. philosophy. So that's what I will largely be bringing are these Socratic practices and the Socratic way of doing. One of the most powerful moments of one of the leading retreats is this last one we did by Kyle and Diane and I. We had done these practices and one One woman said very simply, I'm going to lead a more virtuous life.

17:14There was no fanfare. There was no long autobiographical. It was just, boom. She had seen something. And so there's something about the witness. We are all pointing to this really fundamental connectedness. I like Guy's way of metaphorically, Kyle to the Earth, him to, so they're being, what really do we call it? The tattoo? Yeah, yeah, or the shared space with others and me towards the sky. There's something about the nature connectedness, the interpersonal connectedness, and this kind of platonic, Socratic connectedness. that all they think we don't quite understand it ourselves uh and uh and that's probably probably bespeaks the reality of it uh but somehow these three forms of connectedness really speak to each other afford to each other we got a lot of feedback on how people were just hey these three things just go together so well and they meet make each other sing um and that goes towards something I've been talking a lot about.

18:29You know, we need dialogical practices, imaginal practices, mindfulness practices, and embodiment practices. And we're addressing all of those in this way that really catches fire. And, yeah, you know, Kyle was talking about, and Guy too, like there's things we can only learn when we're actually living together. Plato talks about this the seventh letter you can't really teach philosophy to somebody the way you teach the math you have to live with people that's it it's more like an apprenticeship relationship uh than it is you know being in a classroom um and so um i'm very kind i it it's it's i always feel deeply i like people i i i help facilitate multiple retreats in a year now and for me it's it's how I go to church.

19:22I find it so powerful. One thing that I'm excited about is I sort of introduced in a very primitive form a new practice, the last retreat called the Socratic Salon. I have been developing it and working on it and workshopping it for the past year and it's growing with a lot of very positive feedback into a more developed practice and I'm excited about bringing it back to the group of people who did the earlier version and seeing what they say. So there's a lot that I'm looking forward to. There's a lot that you can look forward to if you want to participate in this. This is, as Guy said, we are people coming back, the overwhelming majority, and that's for good reason.

20:15And we all put ourselves in service of something that the people who come find serves them very well. And so that's what I'm very, very excited about. I'm looking forward to this a lot. And Kyle always finds some really beautiful place. And he takes us into nature in a way that's beat-to-restorative. And I agree. Guy is a maestro. and watching him conduct circling. That's the best verb for it because it's both music and electricity. He's conducting circling. It's just, it's, it's, ah! So you gotta come, you gotta come. It's just, it's like, it's a chance to put into practice and realize and experience a lot of stuff that people are talking about because it needs to be talked about right now as we face the meeting crisis.

21:11and other related things like LLMs and so forth. But this is where you can really put it into your life. You can start living it. All the way back up to the two of you. Yeah, there's a couple things that really stood out to me. Like, well, right at the end, it's like, I have been a person, you're a person, that we've all listened to lots and lots of podcasts. We have no shortage of information and intellectual understanding about things. And this is like, boom, I get to actually put into practice and apply in a very real way with both the people I'm listening to who are kind of giving me these ideas and I get to experience it.

22:02But then also with the other people that this is a co-created experience and other people are bringing so much. There's such high level individuals, highly cultivated people with their own ideas and their own experiences. And very much what I do and what John and Guy do is we are facilitators, right? We're not teaching. We're not putting in information. We are creating the constraints and the context in the arena for you to step into and to let express and emerge all that you are bringing to it. And that in that experience, this thing is emerging. We're not, this is not like, Hey, like, let me tell you all these facts and information about stuff.

23:03It's like, here's an arena where you get to participate fully in this experience with other agents to see like what, what, what these ideas actually mean. Like, how do I actually relate to them? How can I speak about them from this experiential place so that I actually know what it feels like so that I can apply them to my life and connect to that feeling? And I think the other part of that is like the curiosity that I think dwells in all of us around the mystery of what we're doing is the thing that keeps us hungry as facilitators, as mentors, as people wanting to really get it in a way that we can give it to others.

24:01like i'm constantly like i don't get this nature thing i don't get it and and the more that i try to get it right like john talks about it it's it's the you know the intelligibility of reality is continuing to reveal itself and the world is getting actually bigger and and it makes more sense but at the same time and it's also mysterious and i don't get it and it draws me into that and And that's what I also see in Guy's work where he's just like, I don't know what I'm doing, but I know exactly what I'm doing. And in being in that space, like what happens, it's very much like the fire, right? We're facilitating a fire.

24:50We're bringing into the ingredients, but we don't know how big the fire is going to be or how smoky the fire might be. And then we're kind of adjusting those things. And I, and yeah, and for those of you that don't know, John is an incredible facilitator that he, his passion and his interest in the things that he talks about a lot will really come out. And that's one of the big things that shifted for me and John, because I think we all experience a lot of people who like talk about things. and and when john showed up to return to the source and was like going down canyons and like wrestling in the forest and running through and and bringing to life these practices it really shifted my perspective and how i see him and it made me even more invested like this person is is yes he's incredibly intelligent and has cultivated and is co-creating and shaping these ideas but he's actually also testing them right and and getting curious and being like that that actually that's kind of bullshit i believe that and that you know was maybe true for a while but it actually doesn't stand the test of time and in tinkering with these new ideas and and that's what I appreciate about these experiences and why people are coming back because they're not the same.

26:23Right. They're not the same. It's a different place. It's a different time of the year. Right. I'm currently holding the question right now. Like there's a whole bunch of emotional turmoil in my kind of like greater sphere, like relationships are like falling apart or going through challenging times and i'm like what is it about peak summer the energy the abundance the like the thing that's alive in the world that is shaping our reality and and last time we were in the spring and there was lots of new growth and excitement and this time we're going to be like going into the fall equinox like the darkness the and we're also in the time of the harvest right and and how that is going to shift like that's the biggest question that i'm continuing to explore and and also want to like take very seriously with john is like how like what is it about our environment that shapes our thinking right we know that song song is so relevant to place language accents clothing there's so many features of culture that are relevant to place?

27:42What is it about a place that can actually shape our thoughts and our insights in a way that we can come into better relationship with? And also apply that. Like a lot of people go to the desert for a vision quest, right? What is it about the desert that makes that like highly relevant and salient and powerful? And, you know, maybe we go to the forest for like a grief ritual and maybe we have a party in a meadow like what what is it about places that call to us and allow us to like um express in the right way yeah oh that's so that's that's so cool kyle all right yeah as kyle said we we uh we met at return to the source and i'm glad to hear that i impressed him um this old guy humping it coming around with all these 20 somethings uh but he impressed me too he impressed me and when you can see what he does uh he weaves together worlds that have been sundered um and in a very healing fashion and that idea about place how this started it it's kind of leafed out to me he said you know we started doing some dialectic into deal logos in nature and it does something doing it in nature like really and i thought yeah yeah yeah yeah i you know he didn't make an argument i just got the insight i like i caught i caught it from him um and and that's what germinated into this um and that that that's i mean of course i could give you all kinds of for e cognitive science about how cognition is embodied and embedded and adapted and extended.

29:35And place is as important to you as other people. Wynne talks a lot about that. We also give places proper names and we can miss them and they're part of our sense of home. And so we could do that. And I do do it elsewhere. I just got a paper published with Dan Chiappe on how rationality depends on your ability to orient. and orientation is something that you have to really practice it. You have to go with Kyle. I mean, that's what I say. You have to, like, he, okay, take out this place and you, well, you know the way back, yeah, but are you oriented to the place? Can you be connected to the, and oriented and connected to the place so it comes alive to you and speaks to you and challenges you?

30:25that's what he's doing and he does it very well he he has some of the best instances of imaginatively augmented serious play that i've been able to participate in um so like he does this thing i won't take the secret sauce but when it's done you see the forest as a bird guys and it's a really cool experience. You go, oh, oh, oh. Right? And the propositions don't capture it because it's not propositional. It's perspectival and participatory. It's your seeing and being in the world. It's very different. And then you may say, well, why do I want to feel like a bird does? Because then you are connected to birds in a way you can never be connected just by having concepts and language about them.

31:19John Vervaeke:that that's the difference yeah and that difference is is the thing that actually has what happens in the five day intensive that we're going to be doing dwelling together that difference is the thing that actually has it make a difference right in our life because in some sense you know i i think usually people think about the senses as like receptors but we often don't think about the sensors as a reaching out toward, right? But our senses are the way that we reach toward, right? Like there's actually a meeting that happens. It's not just me receiving things, right? It's like I'm actually coming out to the world and the world is coming to me.

32:09John Vervaeke:And the thing that it feels like almost all the things that we'll be doing, right, have to do with developing what I would call something like a sense organ for the sacred. And not in the sense of something super abstract, but in the sense of what we would often talk about as abstract, as being in the wood, right? So like being able to see the sacred in a person, to be able to sense the sacred, right, in a conversation, in the neighbor next to you. And when you start to do these exercises and you dwell together, right, in this way that we're designed to dwell together, as John Verbeke often calls, likes to call it, all that primate bonding.

33:06John Vervaeke:right like you know the internal nature of our nervous system start to link up in in a way that's deeply homing and we open up right to all that's around us and all this around us starts to open up to us and then we start to actually as we develop these kind of capacities and sense organs and broaden you could say broaden our palate for what's actually there that's something that you don't leave there, right? That's something that you actually take home with you and you walk, right? And what will start to happen, I see this a lot with people who do circling, right? Is, you know, they kind of come in and we do this deep kind of dwelling and this inquiry and all this kind of stuff, right?

33:59John Vervaeke:And at some level, it's kind of strange, right? Like, Like, you know, people would never have any context where you're going, why is everyone talking so weird and like all this kind of stuff. But what's interesting is that, you know, people, in other words, people would say like, well, how is this connected to anything else? Well, I can tell you how it is. Because when you go home and you're talking to your mother, before you just, there was just like one kind of thing called your mother that you've always experienced. But then all of a sudden, when you circle, for example, and you do these exercises and you make these kind of kinesthetic verbal distinctions and they get in you and then you go talk to your mother, all of a sudden you start to see dimensions and layers and things that she said and backgrounds and foregrounds.

34:55John Vervaeke:And here's the thing is you can only relate to what is distinct for you. If something's not distinct, it's in the background, right? We can't actually relate to it. We can't act in affordance to it. And so all of the exercises that we're going to be doing have to do with this, not an intellectual, not just an intellectual, right? But a felt, a sensory, an enacted, an embedded education, if you will, in the deepest sense of the word. Schooling of our very senses, such that our senses can start to make distinctions and start to see meaning and the sacred in multidimensional ways in our ordinary life.

35:44John Vervaeke:and once you start to see that you're already belonging to it and you start to have conversations that you never would have had like you can't ask your you can't ask your wife or your best friend right about things that you can't see or experience or feel and I think what you can expect is by going through these obstacle courses in a certain sense dwelling together is that we're actually not doing something outside of your life. We're actually participating in the very engine of your life. And so, I just want to really presence that. It's going to be an extraordinary experience, right? And something that you'll probably remember for the rest of your life.

36:32John Vervaeke:However, there's a real value to that experience in that it's at the core of your life and And you'll feel it in your own enactment, in the way that you relate outside of it as well.