Silk Road Seminar - Nicole Baden

28:19And then we're just like what I call my conscious self is sort of just at the receiving end of seeing the result of it. But it's basically, I sometimes say, you know, it's just cold coffee. It's like it's been created in the past and I'm drinking the cold coffee of how, and that's what I'm calling my experience. I'm drinking the cold coffee of how I've learned over just living a life and being culturally conditioned, being biographically conditioned. how experiences are processed. So what the practitioner does in a contemplative tradition, it's like we just started out saying earlier in this conversation, you're bringing awareness into those processes and into those conditionings.

29:04So when the Buddha made that literally revolutionary statement to his disciple Ananda on his supposedly on his deathbed, where he said, be a light upon yourself. I mean, basically what he said to Ananda is don't listen to the truth people may claim. Use your own experience as an authority to validate the truth of something, then he meant the experience of a profoundly trained person who had learned how to release forms of self-deception.

29:45Dr. John Vervaeke:Right. Right. And who has learned, like you're using, I love your term of relevance, realization is so, so like concise and to the point who has learned to distinguish what matters from what, from noise sort of, you know? So that's what I'm, I mean. So it's always you're approaching it as a practitioner, you're approaching a way to observe your own experience that gets clearer and clearer in the sense there's less and less deceptive processing added as like interpretation upon interpretation upon interpretation until like in the end, you just have a sort of self-referential narrative and call that my experience.

30:35Dr. John Vervaeke:So that's very helpful. Yeah, I do think, I mean, and I take it that by experience, you're talking about sort of, I'm going to use a term and I'm going to use it in the technical philosophical sense, transcendental, meaning conditions on the possibility of knowing. One is consciousness or awareness, attention, and philosophers are niggling about how those related, I'm just going to use consciousness as an umbrella term. And then there is embodiment. If you're not embodied, you're not emplaced, you can't orient, you can't, like, I won't go on. Embodiment is needed. And then relevance realization.

31:11Dr. John Vervaeke:And I think they all deeply interpenetrate. And so one way of thinking about it is I like to say to people that there's no claim that these processes are error free or anything like that. but that the only thing you can use to correct them is them. That's how I try to put it. So you're bound into a primordial presupposition. Any correction on your relevance realization is to relevance realization. Any correction in your consciousness is through consciousness. Any correction in your embodiment is through your embodiment and how all three. So you can't jump out of them. There is no view from nowhere.

31:53Dr. John Vervaeke:You can't get into a no place. So you're always bound to them. in an important way. Now, I want to, I mean, I think we're convergent on that. Now, I want to pick up on something though, because again, and this is, so I have the Kyoto school in my head and I'm hearing the debate between Tanabe and Nishitani, you know, be a lamp unto yourself. But Tanabe is saying, well, yeah, but there's other power. And you did start this by saying you know zen also relies on a dialogical component and and and and so it's not solipsistic that's right it's so the interesting thing and so this is this is kind of a i sometimes put this as a paradox how do you involve all of the self without becoming self-centered because uh great question yeah yes yeah so okay um i hope i can really bring this in a concise fashion Before you go on, I just want to mention to people watching, I cherish, I hope you see my reacting to Nicole's beautiful metaphors like drinking the cold coffee.

33:01Dr. John Vervaeke:That tells you what a great teacher she is, by the way. Oh, well, thank you. Metaphors that live like that instantly tell you, there's a teacher. There's somebody who knows how to translate experience into language that gets you to start to experience what they're talking about. So go on. I just wanted to mark that out. Thank you. Yeah, so that's such a great and complex question though. I mean, first of all, let me just state where the seeming paradox resolves, I think. Yes, yeah. We've just talked before about what it means to bring detailed awareness really into the processes of mind. And what that also means is in how mind constructs a moment of reality.

33:49And one can become more aware of it. That is completely possible. People who meditate will have that experience that you're actually getting more and more sensitivity to how it's our own, uh, the concepts and how they are active worldviews, but also like embodied more feeling level, um, conditionings, how they are shaping our experience at any given moment.

34:15Dr. John Vervaeke:Right. So We're bringing awareness into that. Right. So that's becoming more translucent. It's becoming sort of like, Oh, now I'm not just seeing, um, how I, now I'm not just, can I put that now I'm not just seeing John, but I'm seeing how I am seeing you. Like I'm seeing my own views and sort of like the warmer part of the coffee a little bit while it was brewed. I'm seeing how that is present in the process. So the meditator learns to bring more and more awareness into that. The, um, just one truism I would say is the more you do that, what happens is that, um, conditionings keep creating distinctions on so many different levels and, um, they, they create essentially forms of self.

35:12Oh, this is what I like. This belongs to my group. I am like this and so forth.

35:19Dr. John Vervaeke:So this is where relevance realization is bound to self reference in some fashion. Yes. Yeah. And so by dissolving how by dissolving and oftentimes that is goes along with a process of actually um going through oftentimes the these conditionings also have a they can have a kind of protective um function like they also presumably they had an original adaptive function no matter how maladaptive they currently are something like evolutionarily they create a huge biographically like somebody's living with an abusive father for example Yeah, exactly. On all levels. But also just the mere, at the very core level, maybe I'll go there first.

36:13At least the way I've come to just, and maybe it's simplified, but for now I'll do it that way. I've come to look at what makes the human mind, just what does the human mind tick? And that's cross-cultural. That would not be, oh, it's this culture or that culture. I think the human brain has that capacity to project permanence into the world. Maybe other minds have that capacity too, but the human mind does it in such a way that it really is able to create that seemingly out there world.

36:50Dr. John Vervaeke:You think that's bound to the fact that we are the linguistic animal? We use nouns and verbs? I think so. I mean, at least what I do know is that when you learn how to take language out of the perceptual process, which you can learn, and then that's called immediate perception. Yeah. Once you take language out, then that projection of externality is gone. You just don't, you don't feel the world is out there anymore. So I do know that much that when you take it out, it's gone. So you will immediately have, once you take naming out of the process, you'll immediately have a sense of what my teacher Beikoroshi calls interiority, a feeling of, oh, this is all happening in the senses.

37:43Like, you know, I'm seeing the seeing. First of all, there's a space of perception. In this case, let's say the visual space. And within that, appearances appear or objects, seeming objects appear, but they don't any longer appear as out there. So where I'm trying to go with this is that the more awareness you can bring into that process and you're kind of like leading along that path, you're bringing you're learning how to bring attention closer and closer to the original moment of sensorial contact you know i mean just like physiologically if i look at i have this tea cup here in front of me if i look at it there is in terms of if one was to describe the process in a neurology or cognitive science book you would see okay there's light photons first hitting the retina yes that's the first step of the process and usually we're of course hugely unaware at that stage of perception our consciousness kicks in when i already call it a cup and i know it's history i have all the associations yeah but we can learn how to bring attention closer and closer it's a kind of in my experience a kind of approaching coming closer to like the original feeling of contact where it's just okay there's contact beautiful that that sensed contact um

39:11Dr. John Vervaeke:yeah um uh because the and here's where i'll talk a little bit about um the neoplatonic tradition just so uh excuse me very very briefly let me i'm sorry i didn't mean to interrupt go ahead that point to answer your original question which i thought was so important yes yes which was about your original question was like, how do you reconcile the whole self-solipsistic? Thank you for correcting me. Yeah, no, I just want to close that loop here. So the more you learn how to bring your attention into where the contact happens, the more perception itself becomes deeply reciprocal. Yes. So there is no, the more you bring paradoxically, and that's like Dogen Zenji, the great Zen master says, studying the way means to study the self.

40:09Studying the self means to forget the self.

40:14Dr. John Vervaeke:Yes. Forgetting the self means to let the myriad or the 10 ,000 things, and 10 ,000 means each thing in its particularity come forward to actualize the self. So we're talking the self after or within the process of this kind of awareness training is a very different self than the personal self that is in that subject object problem. That's great. That's exactly where I was going to go though. So, I mean, so, uh, um, so the spiritual senses and the sense of contact with reality, and you know, this comes from Marlo Ponti, the idea that when we think of touch as a one way, but if you pay careful attention, touch is always being touched.

41:00Dr. John Vervaeke:Whenever you're realizing, you're always being realized. It's an inherently relational notion. And so the idea of the spiritual senses aren't like esoteric ESP or something like that. So I know you're aware of this notion of exaptation. Exaptation is when you repurpose. So you repurpose something you're using, you repurpose Cognitive Machini for sensory motor movement, and you repurpose it up for how you're moving around in reality. You move from spatial temple orientation into how am I orienting to reality? And as you said, I moved to from touching things to what is it to contact realness. And so you're exacting touch into contact with reality and you it's this realizing and being realized but sight is also because you also have insight which is not visual it's the sense that you you were like before you were awakened you're asleep and you're a little world and you're enlightened the light comes on you wake up there's a there's an opening up there's an opening out and there's also but the opening out and the coming in are exactly interpenetrating like you can't say there's here's the one and like when the light goes like this it goes like this i'm sorry i'm speaking metaphorically now but i love it and then of course there is the um there's the spiritual hearing um which is the sense of being called um this is the sense of you're neither forcing nor being forced right it's like um it's uh frankfurt has a wonderful phrase where he calls it voluntary necessity, which is...

42:42Dr. John Vervaeke:I haven't heard of that. That's amazing. That's a very good phrase. Yeah. And, you know, it's at the heart. His model is it's at the heart of love. When you truly love, there's voluntary necessity. So I love Sarah. By the way, she sends you her regards and her affection. She has very highly for you. When I love Sarah so much, I know there's a sense in which that's necessary to me, but it's also completely voluntary for me. And same thing when I'm reading a really good argument, right? The conclusion is necessary, but I also like, no, but I agree with it. It's voluntary. And so another great dichotomy, the dichotomy between voluntary and necessity also is broken down.

43:24Dr. John Vervaeke:And you find this thing that's at the core of love and beauty and reason and flow. And that's the spiritual hearing. That's the sense of being called. That's the trying not to try that Slingerland talks about. And so for me, although I get what you mean by saying it's sorterological, not ontological, I think that's actually deeply ontological. I think that is our fundamental. I think that sensed presence of those forms of contact by our spiritual senses is the ultimate presupposition that we can't, whenever we're trying to correct ourselves and say, oh, that was an illusion I'm moving to, we're ultimately always relying on that in however a deformed, like I think we're always relying on that, but all that conditioning you talk about, we're often relying on it in a very deformed fashion, but we can get a progressively less deformed fashion.

44:26Dr. John Vervaeke:Is this tracking for you? Totally. And I'm just thinking, as I say, listen to you, that's such a thing that I've heard practitioners say so much to redirect the attention into how it's a soteriology rather than an ontology. But actually, it doesn't need to stay there. I think it's a way to not have to make ontological claims to direct attention to that other thing. But actually, I think in a dialogue like the one we are having, we could totally talk about the ontology here. And that has profound value, I think. Yeah, but I don't think I can't see a deep, like in a moment of insight, just to use a more everyday example, that's obviously a moment of liberation, but it's a moment of realization.

45:17Dr. John Vervaeke:Like, and I mean that in a deep sense of the word, right? Like you can't, like, I get what ontology can mean, you know, theoretical modeling of blah, blah, blah, but I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about realization of realness. Then it's, yeah, I understand that now. Yeah, that's true. So, I mean, notice I was drawing something from the Neoplatonic tradition and obviously there's a sense in which. This is convergent. It's not identical, I understand. But it's convergent with the great Socratic project of know thyself. And Socrates doesn't mean know your autobiography. He means it's, I often say people, he's not asking you to read your autobiography.

46:00Dr. John Vervaeke:He's asking you to read your owner's manual, right? Like, how do you actually work, right? And that's what he's trying to get at. But the thing that, but I know there's echoes of this in Zen, especially in Koan, because The Socratic question is very similar to Koan in a lot of ways. Because the point of the question, I mean, I belong to what's called third way Neoplatonic interpretation, where when Socrates is asking for a definition, he's trying to show you that you can't give a definition of courage. You can only ultimately exemplify it insofar as you are trying to realize it, right? Right. And so the point of the definitions is to sort of bring people to a realization of non-propositional knowing, as Gonzalez would say.

46:49Dr. John Vervaeke:And that's the kind of Sarah Abolrape. And she's part of the Buddhist platonic dialogue group. I got to meet her. She talks about, as you would say, in her book on what is it? Socratic Ignorance and Platonic Wisdom. Great title. Knowing that you're a knower. Now, that sounds very similar in a lot of ways to what you're talking about. Is that fair? Yeah, no, that's fair. And I agree with how the kind of knowing that this is about. First of all, I think so much, again, we've talked before just to pick up the thread of modernity, just how much we have this overemphasis and almost exclusiveness of propositional knowing.

47:36Dr. John Vervaeke:Yeah, it's one of my great themes. I know, it's one of, yeah, and that's very much also just the kind of work when a person enters contemplative practice. One of the first things a lot of people need to learn is how just understanding something is not what the knowledge that Zen is about has nothing to do with understanding it. But I like the metaphor to inhabit that place where you're inhabiting a location. In your example of courage, I like to think of a quality, say like courage, but it could be compassion, to think of a quality like a field and we're inhabiting the field. It's adverbial rather than adjectival.

48:25Dr. John Vervaeke:Yes, very much. Yes, yes, yes. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah. And then like once you're inhabiting the field of courage, then to learn how courageous action emerges from that. So, yeah, anyways, just but that's the kind of knowing. No, I think that's excellent. Mark Winn, who's a philosopher, very much influenced by 4E, Cogs, I Embodiment, Marloponti, but also by the Christian Neoplatonic tradition. um he actually recommends he i wrote i read a book by him uh well a brilliant book called renewing the senses which i've sort of used a few minutes ago um but also he talks about faith and place and he and he makes a big distinction between place and space yeah place you're inhabiting you're indwelling the place and you're internalizing the place you're having as that wonderful adjective you used you have a reciprocal relationality uh you're in placed um and he talks about he makes the proposal that we should use place as a way of thinking about god rather than thing as a way that's i i i without having read that i know exactly what he means but i resonate with the language of that a lot and that's true um you said before at some point how images we internalize images.

49:46And, um, you know, I think one of the things that's become obvious to me when I walk in the mornings, you know, I'm responsible for opening the meditation hall. Right. So I offer incense and then people are sitting there and my job is to kind of walk through the hall. And, uh, there's a ritual of, um, but just by walking behind each person, there's a that's intended as a greeting or the feeling of that as a greeting and i just walk past them and one thing that is becoming so apparent is um from some point of view from some perspective we may think oh everyone is meditating you know say there are 20 people sitting in a row and they are supposedly all doing the same thing they are all which is called meditation they are all meditating but if you're walking through each person's space like physically and reciprocally feel each person is like it's almost like a fish swimming in their own medium right right right our own again we talked about the power of conditionings each person like the medium we're sitting within on that one square meter the space that that contains our body we're always carrying it with ourselves um that it's it's often it's a charged space with all our accumulated experience and again conditionings within it so it's literally like each person's space literally feels different yes can see it in a posture so are they all meditating they are all each is within their own activity which is from that point of view i sometimes think again drawing words out it's wildly absurd to call each of these activities by the same word.

51:27It's like...

51:28Dr. John Vervaeke:Oh, I see. But, I mean, and this is what I want to say this to bring a point, but nevertheless, they are all together in some sense. That's right. That's right. And so, did you want to say something? No, you go ahead. I want to listen. Because, I mean, so the Socratic Neoplatonic tradition plates a great deal of emphasis on the dialogical, where the dialogical means interpersonal communication and communing that is reciprocal realization, mutual transformation, and the way we've been talking about here. I used the term dialogos for that. So this interpersonal. So when I say dialogical, I don't mean the just everyday sense.

52:11Dr. John Vervaeke:I mean this Neoplatonic, Socratic Neoplatonic sense. Now, what you described to me there sounded very dialogical in nature. So let me turn it into question. What role does the interpersonal dialogical play in Zen practice and Zen realization? Yeah. I think one of the geniuses of Chan Buddhism, you know, when Buddhism came to China was to recognize that it just makes a huge difference when people are practicing together. Yes. That something happens. And, you know, again, first of all, just experientially, if you're sitting in a meditation hall with other people versus you're sitting all by yourself at home totally totally different yeah different ball game i mean not even like if one is a ball game then the other one is a whole different kind of dimensionality or game yeah um a shared friend of ours sarah ben uh oh yeah yeah i love sarah ben she said this really great thing um when the first time she ate um orioki is what it's called but it's a mindfulness ritual for eating and she just she had this this sudden realization doing this with others it's a silent meal and this is gesturalized you know all the all the embodied gestures are have a certain um i have certain practice and she did that and she got out of it and she just this blew my mind she said you know It felt like I've been throwing the basketball in my backyard into the basket all my life.

53:54And now I suddenly realize it's a team sport.

53:58Dr. John Vervaeke:That's a great metaphor. Yeah, it really is. How different it is. Or if you're playing a musical instrument and you think that's music, but then just how it would open, blow your mind if you're suddenly part of an orchestra. And you're seeing how other people's notes participate in what your own note feels like. It's not the same tone. You may be playing, say you're playing the flute or whatever, you're playing a C. That C, if it's just that C in an isolated setting, is a very different kind of experience than if it's in the midst of an entire orchestra. So it's that kind of feeling. The mutuality plays a huge role.

54:40And it also, the basic feeling here is that, yes, while each person is, it's both true. It's like, maybe the worldview wouldn't just be, it's not independence. It's not only interdependence. It's maybe more interindependence or something.

54:57Dr. John Vervaeke:Yeah, yeah. William Desmond. So let's pick up on that because that's something I'm really interested in. So let's go back. You have Aristotle, the structure of language, nouns, verbs. And the reality is like that. There are substances, which doesn't mean stuff. Substance means independently existing things and then their actions. And then you have James Filler and the whole Neoplatonic tradition says, but wait, where are the relations? Like the relations don't seem to be properties of things. And you can't reduce relations to things. And I think James's work is titanically brilliant. And I've talked to him and he's been on this channel and I highly recommend it.

55:35Dr. John Vervaeke:but then you know i was talking to james about this i said i get this i get that relationality supersedes substance ontology i get that but i said the problem i have is i also don't see how you get the relata there's an exactly symmetrical argument you can't get the relata out of the relations and without relata there's no difference between the relations in fact you don't have relationality you just have a homogeneous whatever and then he's oh yeah yeah right and then so this The notion that is from William Desmond is what he calls the, and this is from the Christian Neoplatonic, especially the Eastern Orthodox tradition, the communal nature of being.

56:16Dr. John Vervaeke:It's the idea that relations and relata co-emerge from something more primordial to both of them. And they're also oriented to something, and these are somehow non-logically identical. They emerge from something more primordial and they're oriented to something more ultimate. to them. And then the idea is that community, because you can't have persons without communities and you can't have communities without persons. Communities and persons co-emerge. And so human communities are the best icon for the nature of reality. And the reason why I like this is because it sounds like it's convergent with, you know, that impermanence isn't annihilation.

57:07Dr. John Vervaeke:It's neither essentialism nor annihilation. It's somehow between either one of those. And so this idea that the proposal is something like this. And you can do like a pilgrimage with people. You can do like a metanoetic passage with people. You can move people out of substance ontology into relationality. And then you can move them from relationality into communing. And then that starts to get them to realize impermanence as neither like essentialism or annihilation, but as what we're talking about here. Is that landing for you at all? Yeah, totally. And maybe just then I think once you've taken that pilgrimage, I think the important thing then is going back, which you're not going to go back to the same place.

58:01Dr. John Vervaeke:Pilgrimage always means to return. To return. That's a good point. Yeah, exactly. And you're obviously, I mean, you know this, but I'm just pointing it out. You're coming back as a different person. Once you've been to that place, it's not the person that has left, right? That's why I call my course Seeing God Again for the first time. I love that. It's like the T.S. Eliot poem, we wander and then we return and we see the place we left, but we see it again for the first time. It's exactly that. Please go ahead. I just offer very short formulas for these three perspectives that you've pointed to.

58:34And that may not be entirely congruous, but it's pretty close, I think. So one is, I think, the perspective of where we're just the focus is the relata. The focus is how there are these different things or persons and they are essentially separate and the relationships are like, they don't. They are not what that ontology is based on. Maybe that perspective is, I think, very simply the perspective of the personal self in an external world.

59:04Dr. John Vervaeke:I agree. I agree. I agree with that. Totally. Totally. You can shift perspective very simply just with one sentence. I've seen people do that now hundreds of times. I always offer the phrase just as a formula. We're also a feeling body in a living world. Like right now we're a feeling body in a living world. It's being touched. It's inherently relational. And that like, I mean, sometimes I do that by just having people bring their attention to their hand and feeling their hand and then seeing like, and then letting the hand feel the space. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. People like, you know, just to make a complete here, usually I ask them at first, please draw your hand, right?

59:50Before I do anything, I draw your hand. And then they will, when I ask them to do that, I ask later, so how many of you drew something that looked like, you know, something with five fingers, an object with five fingers? Literally everyone, when I first asked them, draw your hand, they draw five fingers. And I call that the conceptual hand. That's what the hand looks like from the outside. And that's, that's a true picture.

1:00:15Dr. John Vervaeke:You're a great teacher. You're a great teacher. Keep going. So, but then I asked them, bring your attention into your hand, feel your hand. Now that's me feeling the hand. That's a transitional state. But then I let them, then I say, but now let your hand feel space. Let your hand feel the surrounding space. That's a different, now the hand just turned into the subject, right? That's right. Before it was me feeling the hand, but now I just turned the hand into the feeling subject of space. Then I have them do that for a little while. They feel, they bring attention. And then I ask them, now draw.

1:00:54What if you had to draw what that felt like? What if you had to draw the feeling?

1:00:59Dr. John Vervaeke:Excellent. Excellent. And I get wild responses. I get wild responses of what that image looked like if they were drawing it in their minds. like what happens when the hand feels space but the one of the first things always is it just turned three-dimensional and it suddenly has color and then i get various personal accounts of like sometimes roses explode out of just rays of light and especially though it's always changing you can't really one thing that a lot of people are noticing the moment they bring attention into the immediate sensorial experience of the hand you can't like the moment you're you have it it's already changed do do any of them note spontaneously the sense of space changing as well that's the third step and that's where we're going to unity then i have them now let your hand receive space oh touching and being touched oh yes let space receive your hand oh what is it like when the space that surrounds your hand receives your hand what is that like and now draw that that's beautiful i'm gonna use that if you don't mind that's fantastic no that's i i like it when people use that yeah so yeah i think that's deeply convergent what i what i was talking about and what's interesting for me is the parallel um i i I agree with you.

1:02:31Dr. John Vervaeke:You have to prioritize the practice. I'm always telling me what you practice, not what you believe. But I am impressed by the parallel within phenomenological philosophy that has moved along that passage in the same way. The work I see in people like William Desmond, who I think is just titanically gifted as a philosopher. So I think there are philosophers who are, I mean, I know William practices in some way, but they're moving. like you're doing with your pedagogy, with your teaching. They're moving back and forth between the philosophy and the practice. And they can be, so the thing is not so much, I think in my, my way of working with this right now, and that may evolve, but right now it's very clear, these three perspectives are simultaneous.

1:03:15They can be simultaneously. So it's not either or, is it, is relata true or is relationality true? No, it's just a matter of perspective. And I can, And that's where this image I used before of the circuitry of attention, I can shift the circuitry as if attention was the electricity that runs in the circuit. I can take that attention out of the circuit of a personal self and an external world, plug it into a different circuit of the feeling body in a living world. And that creates a radically different perspective in which relationality is the only, that's what happens. There is no entities. There's just relationality.

1:03:57And just the third to complete that is formless presence. I just call that formless presence. And that's almost like not really a circuitry at all anymore. That's just free spreading and converging attention.

1:04:10Dr. John Vervaeke:Nishito would call it the basho in which... Yeah, that's right. You would call it the basho in the Kyoto school, yeah. Yeah. The no place place in which it's happening. Yeah. So I want to ask you now a kind of a provocative question, given that there's a lot of resonance happening between us. And I'm sort of speaking from like the Socratic Neoplatonic tradition and you're speaking from Zen. And we're exemplifying exactly the philosophical Silk Road. So first of all, thank you for that. Oh, thank you. Yeah, I'm enjoying it. So this is a question that I consider, and it's a personal question to me.

1:04:47Dr. John Vervaeke:I don't mean in personal self. I mean, it's something that matters to me existentially. Yeah. was socrates enlightened that's yeah yeah i would say just for the purpose of what it does to give an answer i would say yes yeah because that yes opens us to wanting to hear socrates in a way that i think we should nowadays excellent answer nicole that is a truly beautiful answer because one way you could sum up everything I'm trying to do is to get people to hear Socrates again. I'm sorry, I'm deeply touched by your answer. I need a moment. That was, that was, that's beautiful. That is, that's the, that's the best answer I've heard to that question.

1:05:44Dr. John Vervaeke:Thank you. Yeah, I think that's deeply, deeply right. Is there anything you might want to ask me? Oh, 10 ,000 things. Let's see.

1:05:59I'd like to get back to, you know, in your opening statement, you mentioned how this kind of dialogue that we're doing, how that could be meaningful in today's world. And I'd be very, very interested to hear your own stance on why do you think it's, it obviously is meaningful, but how, how, and why do you think it is meaningful in today's world?

1:06:28Dr. John Vervaeke:So I'll answer with the specificity you give it. I think there's a way in which it's perennially meaningful, but how and why is it meaningful in today's world? I do think, And I'm not going to repeat all the arguments, but there's the book. I do think we're in the West and its global influence, which is now global, is in a meeting crisis. And the meeting crisis is getting worse and there are things that are exacerbating it. And I do think there is a move to a recovery of everything we've been talking about here. I do think that there is a way in which that is not just something we are doing, because I'm trying to state this from a non-dual perspective.

1:07:11Dr. John Vervaeke:I think there's a way in which reality, there's a way in which, I'll have to use language, there's a way in which individual collective relevance realization and reality realization are doing this in an interpenetrating fashion, which I call the advent of the sacred, which is a recovery of everything we've been talking about here. But the recoveries are not going to be homogeneous any more than evolution makes life homogeneous. homogeneous or relevance realization means you and i are thinking the same thought we're not we're doing relevance realization but it's so there there is a plurality of ways in which our people are fitting to all of the ecologies and his histories of where they are so there's a proper pluralism but like ecologies they interlock they interpenetrate they mutually constrain and shape each other.

1:08:03Dr. John Vervaeke:They historically influence each other. And so I think that advent of the sacred always has. So I'm going to do something you do. I'm going to use a metaphor. My metaphor is from a great play called Equus. I don't know if you've ever seen. I highly recommend it. I identify very strongly with the psychiatrist in Eckhart, Dysart. He's treating a young boy, Alan. Sort of spoiler alerts, everybody. And Alan did something really horrific, right? And he's trying to figure out what it is. And the boy's disturbed. But as he starts to do therapy with the boy, he realized the boy is a religion, a new god, Equus, that lives in all horses, is coming into existence for this boy.

1:08:49And he's now caught in the dilemma.

1:08:52Dr. John Vervaeke:He has to cure the boy of this, but he longs for what the boy has. He wants to come into the presence of the emergence, the advent of the sacred. He wants to be touched and transformed by it. This is the great artistry of this amazing play. So he's caught. The ending of the play is he talks about how Equus sort of confronts him and Equus says, account for me, account for me. And he can't, And he says, I can't, I don't know what, in fact, I'm doing ultimate things here and I don't know what they are. Ultimately I'm doing. And he compares himself. I always have this chain in my mouth, like a horse that has the bit in its mouth and I can never get it free.

1:09:35Dr. John Vervaeke:That's how he's caught. Now, why I talk about that is this equis eros, this equis energy in which the sacred is always drawing things together. Like if you look back in the history of the Abrahamic God, and I don't take this as what I'm going to talk about here. Some people might hear it as sacrilegious. I don't take it. I take it exactly the opposite. So give me a chance because I'm rejecting a substance metaphor. What you see is like El, who is like the high God. And then you see, I won't say his name because it's offensive to Jews. You see YWH, who is basically a God of metallurgy and transformation and storms.

1:10:16Dr. John Vervaeke:and they come together and then that god interacts with the platonic good and then that god goes to right is also has interacted with ahura mazda in persia and then it meets jesus and the titanic figure like and jesus draws together all these like do you see what i'm talking about you get and this is what equus was what what dice art sees is how all these things are magnetized together and something is that is that yeah yeah like how much more time do we have there's so much i will talk to you about do we have a little bit more time yeah we do but so for me the advent of the sacred the sacred well like abraham heschel said no religion is an island and by religion i mean religions and philosophies because they bleed into each other is buddhism a religion or philosophy like who cares right So I think there's this, and I see it in the history of Zen.

1:11:19Dr. John Vervaeke:See it in the history of Neoplatonism. Neoplatonism is drawing Platonism and Aristotle and Stoicism and aspects of Pyronianism. And Zen is drawing Taoism. I'm reading this amazing book, China Root, Taoism, Chen, and Original Zen. I have that, yeah. I haven't read it, but I haven't. Yeah, it's a good book. Which he's arguing that Zen is maybe not so much a Taoist form of Buddhism as a Buddhist form of Taoism. So anyway, and of course, you know, you got – and then, you know, Taoism has already been interacting with Confucianism. And then that goes into Japan and it interacts with an indigenous religion, Shinto.

1:12:02Dr. John Vervaeke:And that's how you – like, do you see what I'm saying? The equis eros. And I think that is the way in which the Silk Road and the advent of the sacred talk to each other. What's happening between you and I is that equus eros. And that's what I mean when I'm talking about Zen Neoplatonism. I'm trying to found a religion. I'm trying to make people as responsive and responsible to that equus eros as I possibly can. Did that help? Totally. And that hits like, I don't quite know. I have never spoken about something that I'm deeply wondering about. So let me see. It's like, I don't have views on this yet, but I do feel a calling that seems independent of a person's particular worldview or something.

1:13:00but just like you're calling it the advent of the sacred but just some kind of it's a heart i can't

1:13:06Dr. John Vervaeke:pin it down and you know so many people especially astute people like you are saying this to me nicole so many people from like from biologists to like like all over the place they're saying yeah i'm getting the same response i'm just like really are other people feeling feeling like i mean the metaphor i hear the most is oh i felt called that sense of being called exactly yeah So I'm wondering, and it's like, so, um, you know, I I'm, I'm off essentially, I'm actually of a pretty scientific mindset. So what would that agency be like? What, what is that? That's calling, but who cares in a way, you know, it's just more about like, there's this beautiful, uh, Zen, Zen koan around, um, uh, Zen as, and as Taoism, I think that that whole thing you said there about that relationship.

1:13:59It's a form of Taoism. And from that view, there's a whole, the worldview is that the world is, it shouldn't be, it shouldn't be fundamentally divided into sentient and insentient.

1:14:13Dr. John Vervaeke:Oh yes. This is Michael Levin's work. Yeah, exactly. So there's like the, the, the, the insentient is teaching us all the time. Right. That's the that's the view. And like Dogen's Mountains and Water Sutra is not a sutra about mountains and water. It's it states that it helps you how to inhabit the perspective from which you can hear the teaching of the mountain and the teaching of the water. That resonates exactly with what I'm talking about. Yeah, it feels like it. And so it's like, so there is a, that calling and maybe the world itself calling it, maybe existence itself calling in some way, but we do need to listen like in that koan that I'm, that I'm referring to the monk goes to the national teacher, Nanue and says, Oh, everyone says that insentient beings are preaching the Dharma, but I don't hear it.

1:15:16And then they have a little dialogue there. But the punchline is, Nanue says in the end, even though you do not hear it, do not hinder that which hears it.

1:15:34Dr. John Vervaeke:Yes, exactly. Exactly. Well, it is such a joy and pleasure to talk to you, Nicole but we are running to the place we're not done but we're running to the place where we're done on YouTube and we are going to move to taking questions on Riverside from my community but before we do that I always like to give my interlocutor the last word but before I do that I want to say I hope we do this again and I hope we continue to do it for the rest of my life. It is great joy. Me too. That was... And pleasure to talk to you. Yeah, you too. I have invited, and Nicole has accepted, so I'm not trespassing here.

1:16:19Dr. John Vervaeke:I've invited Nicole to accompany me at some point on the philosophical Silk Road to be the person who accompanies me to Kyoto to talk about Dogen and Nishitani and the Kyoto School more broadly. And so I'm looking forward to that and we're going to make that happen. I'm going to make that happen. I can make sure that happens. But again, thank you. This has been truly wonderful. Really the epitome of the philosophical Silk Road in some very significant ways. Any final parting things you would like to leave with people? Well, maybe just one word, really. We've now just opened that whole territory of hearing or listening.

1:17:00And just, you know, I'll just share one piece of personal experience. how do I know that I'm actually hearing?

1:17:11Dr. John Vervaeke:Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. The symptom, I think, is that there is, when you actually hear, for me at least, there is a silent companion of appreciation. It's like there's hearing. In most senses, the word appreciation. Yes. Yes, exactly. And so that it comes along with, I call it a silent companion, but just with a feeling of appreciation. It's not just information, but it lands in a mind of appreciation. You're a very good and astute phenomenological guide. And your propensity for poetry to put it into living metaphors is, well, I'm just recognizing it and appreciating it. Thank you. Thank you.

1:18:05Dr. John Vervaeke:Thank you. Thank you. It's a pleasure to speak with you.