Silk Road Seminar - Rick Repetti

30:14And his theodicy also is very, very parochially Christian. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

30:21Dr. John Vervaeke:Now, the other thing that was coming up was I'm reading two. There's two thinkers that are becoming increasingly really important. I taught a course on one. There's one you've probably heard me mention William Desmond. And he's basically reviving this Platonic tradition, but deeply within a kind of Christian spirituality, which is very Neoplatonic in flavor. Sorry, that was a very cumbersome sentence. And then so he. Not at all. Oh, he represents, to me, he represents sort of the modern analog for Thomas Aquinas. He's the best that the Latin West is producing right now in terms of a philosopher, theologian.

31:04Dr. John Vervaeke:I think a hundred years from now, people will be talking about William Desmond. They will have long forgotten about John Vervicki and Rick Rapetti, but they will be talking about William Desmond. But and then Ionaris is Christos Ionaris is somebody I'm just getting into. And he's basically the best. He's the analog for Maximus the Confessor. He's the best from the Greek East. And part of what I see I'm trying to do is integrate the two of them together. And both of them have something insightful to say about this recovery of Platonism within a living spirituality that then, again, sort of opens us up towards Buddhism.

31:47Dr. John Vervaeke:uh yanaris talks about apophism oh sorry being apophatic apophaticism yeah uh sorry and he talks about it and he said uh the west locked it into negation which is a deep deep mistake the via negativa he said so and what he does instead is he says no no it's not about that at all it's about a constant recognition of the inadequacy of language and a realization of the inexhaustibility of being and so just right just like the glory of aletheia yeah yeah yeah so and it's like and then and he says and then when within that we have and then the language he is very careful and we have to hear it very carefully there is a communal criterion not a definition not an essence not an essence but a communal criterion of truth because truth requires meaning and meaning has to be generated dialogically.

32:47Dr. John Vervaeke:And so truth has to ultimately return to the dialogical, the dialogical matrix of meaning. And if it's not, if it's not bringing the inexhaustible into that matrix, we put it aside and saying, however, correct the propositions that is not leading us into truth. And it's like, Ooh, wow. Yeah. Right. I love that. Oh, my God. I have to read that. And then Desmond, you know, so as you know, I've deeply and I want the two of you to talk at some point. I've been deeply influenced by James Filler's work on the deep critique of Aristotle's substance ontology and subject predicate logic, which, you know, is very similar to some of the critiques that Nishita and Nishitani make from the Kyoto school.

33:40Dr. John Vervaeke:influenced deeply by Zen. And, you know, James's main argument, I know him, we talk a lot. I'm really, read his two books, everyone. Read his two books, James Filler. But he makes very powerful arguments that you can't get relations out of relata. They're not properties, they're not actions of relata, like all this stuff, and he goes through it. I won't repeat all those arguments because I've done that a lot. But then I said to James, I said, You can hear Pyro in here a little bit. I said, but James, there's a balancing argument here. There's an isothenia. You also can't get Rolata out of relations for exactly the symmetry of argument.

34:20Dr. John Vervaeke:And he was like, and then I said, and then William Desmond has the, I found out William Desmond has the same argument that you can't get, right? You can't get the relations from the Rolata. You can't get the Rolata from the relations. They both co-emerge in a codependent fashion. Think of Indra's net. Think of Indra's net. That's exactly what I was thinking, John. Right. And what, and this goes, and this is the potential connection between Desmond and Yarns. And Desmond says his word for that is common unity, community, like a platonic dialogue. Right? That is, and then you see the communal criterion of truth, and you got, oh, and this is, this This is a deeply, it's both are deeply informed by the Christian Neoplatonic version of Platonism, but nevertheless, a powerful and legitimate one to my mind, a living one at least, that is so opening towards like a central, some of the central motifs and metaphors you find in Zen.

35:28Yeah, fascinating. Wow. This is really incredible stuff. Yeah, the convergence is absolutely spot on and perfect. Like you couldn't make that up.

35:42I had this similar intuition and I've argued in some of my writings and discussions with other Buddhist philosophers, similar points when they try to go so far into saying all there are are relations. you know you can't have relations without ralada and you know it's it's got to be two ways that yeah yeah you know and this this is the same thing about i think we've talked about this the um well i know yeah we've talked about it a little but you've talked about it a lot the um the argument against the self in buddhism yes makes a similar kind of confusion that there's no node in the net that's your node?

36:27No, there has to be. But what its nature is, is processual and changing and so on and interdependent and everything. It doesn't mean it's not there.

36:39Dr. John Vervaeke:So I've sort of seen the argument as the sequence of arguments as a metanoetic pilgrimage. So you have substance ontology and the arguments about relationality being more primordial shift you over here and you get to see oh wow substance ontology and subject predicate logic leads into all the nominalism and you know dualism and blah right but then you're over here and but then you and like taylor says but once you're outside of the corral then you can also look once you once you learn to look back you then look to look learn to look forward you go wait and you go over here and you look the through line through both and you go oh Oh, and yeah, that's.

37:21Dr. John Vervaeke:And so I think I think I think of that as a metanoetic passage in that fashion. So I like this idea that I like the idea of pilgrimage within your own psyche. Yeah. Yeah. And how that is afforded and enhanced by actual locational, what is it, geographical pilgrimage to actual places. This is a beautiful, beautiful idea. One of the things I wanted to bring up that's similar to the kind of confusion. I like the way you just did that about going from substance ontology to process ontology, et cetera. And how it all it's all they're all parts of the elephant. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You just have to be kept in the right perspective.

38:11And the more of the parts that you see, the better the overall view that you have. Yeah. And there is this kind of an agage through these different metaphysical kind of models or domains, whatever, however you want to parse that.

38:28Dr. John Vervaeke:To my mind, the more parts we have in concert, the more we get a sense of their common participation. I like that, yeah. Yeah. So the other thing that came to mind that I wanted to share when I'm thinking about like the confusion within some of the treatments in Asian philosophy about Indra's net and there being no relata or no self, etc. etc., related kind of almost a performative contradiction or some kind of contradiction is that the primary criterion in almost not only Buddhism, but good chunks of Indian philosophy in general for the real is causal power. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And this is a scientific idea.

39:21If something can't be affected or affect something else, it doesn't exist. Right. So this throughout Buddhism and good chunks of Indian philosophy for something to be real. Like, okay, so the Buddhists reject the Atman. When they reject it, it's because it's described in texts like the Bhagavad Gita and whatever as being inaccessible, unalterable, permanent. It's immutable. So it can't do anything and nothing can happen to it. Right. So it has no causal power. So it doesn't exist. Right. So like that's just one example of the many, many causal criteria. I call it a causal ontological criteria.

40:07I've written about this. and mainly in my book on buddhism meditation and free will subtitles uh a theory of mental freedom yeah i i i spend a lot of time talking about that but then the the path the buddhist path requires causal efficacy yes you know agential the agent has to do things it's part Part of the fourth noble truth, right? Yeah. Effort, et cetera, right? So there's a way out there. So there's these contradictions.

40:41Dr. John Vervaeke:Yeah, yeah. I think the way out of the cave, yeah, the way toward enlightenment. So that's just something I wanted to bring up because. Well, let's talk about that. I think that's really good. Yeah, the different criteria, like in Neoplatonism for the real. Yeah. And this is one of the criteria in Buddhism for the real, maybe not the only one. because there's a there's a two truths thing that complicates things yeah right there's pragmatic causality and then there's ultimate causality then it gets way too metaphysically complex and i always found that dichotomy extremely problematic because of the if the pragmatic doesn't fit into the real why does it have pragmatic power um why does it have causal efficacy.

41:28Dr. John Vervaeke:Why does it make sense? What they are saying. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I've done a lot of, I've written a lot of criticisms about the two truths. Yeah. So let's go back though, to this central idea, because I want to, I want to pose some things to you and that gets us into this. So I've been, I've been trying to, well, I've been reminding people of something and then reminding them of something that had been lost. And I didn't even know it was lost because I I just, so there's Aristotle's four causes. And then there's the Neoplatonist introduced a fifth, the paradigmatic cause. Right, right. I remember.

42:12Yeah, yeah. I forget that fellow that you had on that brought this up. Yeah. Michael. It was another P. Yeah. It was another P, paradigmatic knowing too, right?

42:23Dr. John Vervaeke:Yeah, yes. And so the idea here is, and I think this means there's going to be some, I have deep appreciation from your arrow, but I think she sometimes conflates the formal cause and the paradigmatic cause. So to give people a modern version of somebody invoking the paradigmatic cause is Michael Levin. Michael Levin says, okay, what we, like, so Michael Levin has all this amazing, like, and you can watch it, literally watch the videos, of if you remove the cell from its bioelectric, top-down, communal, right, information communication, right, it can go off in all kinds of different development.

43:07Dr. John Vervaeke:So the idea of genetic determinism is gone. There's bottom-up genes, but there's top-down, right, constraint from the collective that have as much to do. And I think he, I think he, is he the one who says that what a cancer cell is, is one that's disconnected from the collective? Yes. Because there's no constraints on it from the community of cells that it's supposed to participate in. Yeah. It just keeps replicating itself. Yeah. That's right. So you can, you can hear the bottom up and the top, the bottom up causation, the top down constraint, the shaping of actuality, the shaping of potentiality or the shape.

43:43Dr. John Vervaeke:I now change it into the shaping into actuality and the shaping into potentiality, which I think is a little bit more precise. But what Mike does is he talks about, OK, but so there is. And he now, by the way, I've been I've been prodding him and prodding him. And he now admits he's a place. He's a neo-Platonist. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He says there's this, there's, there is, there is, you know, there's an eternal realm of the forms, possible structural functional organizations. And then listen to his language because it's so computer metaphor. Well, what we have, we do is we access that and then we download it.

44:22Dr. John Vervaeke:And everybody goes, oh yeah, I know what you're talking about. That is modern language for the paradigmatic cause. And notice that we do it vertically. I'm somehow accessing this realm of really existing forms because they can act as real constraints. And then I'm downloading them as constraints into this situation so this cell takes this form in the formal causal sense. And then it is auto poetic and self-covering. OK, so Aristotle is only focusing on when it takes the form. Exactly. That's the formal. He's ignoring. Yeah, he's ignoring the vertical. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So the vertical causation, that's what Wolfgang Smith called it.

45:16Dr. John Vervaeke:Right. Is missing in Aristotle because for him. Right. He will. Oh, yeah. The efficient the efficient cause is what transforms the substance cause into its formal cause. That's right. But somehow the formal cause is doing something in terms of the final cause. Right. And there's all of that. Yeah. So the reason I'm doing that is to go towards. Where is this going? This is going somewhere, John. Yeah, it is going somewhere. um the one the one point is mike basically has the noose he because i said well that space of the forums has to be organized in some way so our relevance realization can reliably access it or the organisms metabolisms can and he went yeah it has to be organized and it has to be accessible and somehow comport with life and mind and i said we sort of have a god there don't you and then he said i have to leave the conference now goodbye so which he did I'm going to be talking with him and Jonathan this week.

46:19Dr. John Vervaeke:So it becomes very Neoplatonic. But here's the now opening up to the Zen, especially when I forget the author. Reading a book right now, very careful, convincing argument that Zen is a Buddhist form of Taoism rather than a Taoist form of Buddhism, which is the Taoism should be more prioritized than we have traditionally done. Why am I saying that? Now here's where the shoe drops. The Tao has a kind of paradigmatic nature to it. That's right. The Tao has a paradigmatic nature. And what's also important is the reality, the eternal reality of shaped possibility. It is not the clay of the cup, but the space within the cup that makes it useful.

47:14Dr. John Vervaeke:It is the potentiality is as real because it is the mother of form. That's the thingness. Yes, exactly. That's the formlessness that takes priority, but is not distinct from form. And so now I'm playing with the platonic term, form, eidos. But in Neoplatonism, you see this growing, yes, but the formless, the one, and they have a terrific problem, right? What's the difference between the formlessness of the one and the formlessness of matter? And by the way, I'm going to be talking to Zevi Slavin because there is a Jewish Neoplatonist, Ibn Gabaral, who basically said, well, they are one. There isn't a difference between them.

47:56Dr. John Vervaeke:And he turns everything on its head and he makes matter one of the prime features of the essence of God by doing that. because yeah yeah it's like oh and he's hugely influential on maimonides and oh who else oh who else was a job on erigina like like like this guy's hidden uh anyways do you see what i'm doing here yeah neoplatonism you know sort of goes like tries to get everything it can out of form and intelligibility and ends up in formlessness. And yet in Zen, especially if you hear the Taoism, there's this great understanding of formlessness, but then a realization that it is non-dual with respect to form.

48:51Dr. John Vervaeke:And I think, you know, you and I, I think we agree that the two truths was an attempt to explain the relationship between those, but very unsatisfactory attempt to explain. But Do you see what I'm doing here? I'm playing with the, they're each, they're sort of one, like they're foreground, they're like duck rabbit, Wittgenstein with each other, right? That's what I'm trying, do you see what I'm trying to do here? Yeah, this is great. Oh, man. Just wow, John. I love this. Yeah. Well, yeah, the Dow and the 10 ,000 things. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

49:36Dr. John Vervaeke:wow so that's what i mean about we there can be a deep philosophical framework in where we mean philosophy the way hado means it and you and i've always been talking that way the love of wisdom right now that can and can do this profound pluralism this dialogical opponent processing, right, between Neoplatonism and Zen. And that's why these two anthologies are now pertinent. And then now here's the more provocative and slightly perhaps weird thing. You mentioned it earlier, these growing convergences, the growing sense of this, the fact that Jonathan Pajot, Michael Levin, and John Verveke are going to be talking very soon and that seems perfectly appropriate and even needed and my to my mind and maybe yours is different because you've been sort of on this in some ways longer than me um that couldn't that wouldn't that dialogue wouldn't have been possible 10 years ago um and some i feel like that and for me that's the primary criterion of the advent of the sacred that sense of convergence that is happening within humanity but is not being engineered by humanity this convergence and which I try to symbolize with the philosophical Silk Road and that to me is the advent of the sacred as our most promising response to the meaning crisis and its acceleration by AGI and social media and malevolent super corporations.

51:22Yeah. Yeah. So I don't think that this is just a coincidence. Yeah. Personally, I'm not sure about the metaphysics of Jungian synchronicity, but I, but you know, I'm not sure about the metaphysics of hardly anything, but that's beside the point of, you know what I mean? It does seem like there's something I don't want to use the word, but I'm going to use it almost providential about this. Yeah. This emergence at this time when it's most needed.

51:57Dr. John Vervaeke:That's a funny story, because Bishop Maximus, I like we have become very close. Our time together and. And I said one of the things that's, I mean, I went through Jungian therapy and I did dream work and I did all the workshops. And, you know, the synchronicities I would get would be few and boring and trivial. Right. And there was like, OK, like I got in there and other people would tell me if there are glorious synchronicities. And I would just say, oh, well, OK. And while I was on the Silk Road and since the Silk Road, if I was a Jungian, I'd be saying my life is just booming with synchronicities.

52:36Dr. John Vervaeke:Or if I was a Persian, I would be saying serendipity is happening everywhere. I wrote that to him. And he said, and if you were a Christian, you would say it's providence. So that's what I said about like it's providential. Yeah, it feels like that in some way. It feels I go ahead. Go ahead, please. Al-Ghazali predates Jung, and I think he's not the only one, but he specifically said in that text that I thought Descartes might have plagiarized from a little bit in the first meditation of Descartes, where he talks about dreaming and waking. And Al-Khazali says, and this is similar to the child, adult, and sage.

53:15Al-Khazali says something like, in the sage, the sage's state of mind is to the waking mind, what the waking mind is to the dreaming mind. Oh, that's beautiful.

53:25Dr. John Vervaeke:Yeah. And he said, and when you attain this spiritual enlightenment, you have, he didn't use the word synchronicities, but you have synchronicities all the time. Yeah. increasingly and this is an evidence for him that you're progressing is that you're having these kinds of meaningful coincidences that are not mere coincidences yeah and he said that from the inside in the same when you reach a certain point it's a different kind of knowing that it's not just oh well maybe it's meaningful maybe i wonder you know i'm an empiricist like no no there's a kind of gnosis to it yes that these things are happening in a certain way in your life that it kind of has a kind of spiritual confirmation i think that i'm putting these words into my own to try to share them better yeah and win does something uh very similar in renewing the senses where he said where he talks about those kinds of experiences count in um a certain kind of way and what we're wrestling which is to figure out how they count and without right The metaphysics.

54:30Yeah.

54:31Dr. John Vervaeke:Well, and the epistemology, too. Like, how do how do they count? Yeah. Well, still without undermining our proper loyalty to platonic Socratic rationality. Right. Absolutely. And what I say is, you know, you know, I've had a lot of those experiences. Yes. Socrates. Socrates had them. Yes, very much. He's one of my hero. He's one of my heroes. And when it comes to testimonial epistemology, he's got top value. Like if it was an Amazon seller, he's got five stars. Socrates. Very trustworthy. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And that's part of like you've given these plausibility arguments. Right. So that that that transfers over to testimonial evidence.

55:20I think, you know, within within these spiritual philosophical traditions. there's a tremendous reliance on testimonial evidence from the forebears. So I think, you know,

55:39Dr. John Vervaeke:so I want to make a distinction between propositional and processual presuppositionalism. So I have a lot of respect for Plantinga, but he tends to talk about basic beliefs, and I have a problem. But you saw the thing with Bishop Maximus, and he was doing Clement's version of faith as a form of presuppositionalism. But then I think, and he did not object. In fact, he was very like, oh, he liked it. I turned it from like a proposition into a process, which is the sensed presence of voluntary necessity, which is somehow like the elephant at the core of reason and love and beauty and flow and resonance.

56:25Dr. John Vervaeke:Yeah. Yeah. Right. That's perfect. That's beautiful. I love that imagery. And then it sits well with faithfulness. It sits well with faithfulness. I just want to make one point. Don't lose your thought. So I'll pause for a sec. Put a pin in your thought. Okay. I just wanted to say, I think there's a convergence between processual presuppositional or presuppositionalism, right? And testimonial evidence, because we ultimately always have to rely on testimony. We have to even rely on the testimony of our own memory. Like there is no way out. And this is where Yanaris' communal criterion of truth comes back again.

57:05Look, Wittgenstein's private language argument. You say it all the time. We didn't invent language. Language is a distributed cognition system. It's an interest net level thing that a whole community speaks a language. Languages have all these taxonomic capturing of experience into ways of knowing that are propositional. But not only, there's also the processual or the procedural. A good amount of what gives testimonial traditional evidence within a spiritual practice lineage its value is the fact that those procedures work.

57:41Dr. John Vervaeke:Yes, yes. Well, and this is Wittgenstein. The use matters. and then the used which is like procedural knowing through and through by the way depends ultimately on forms of life which are perspectival because that's why he's doing all that stuff on aspect shift and participatory it's a way of right forms of life um i'm reading i'm doing a deep dive there's a now a good scholarship on the mystical within wittgenstein and i'm reading through a bunch of authors talking about this because i've done it when you yeah yeah well what i want to do was I want to do a course on the convergence, or at least the Dialogos, between the mystical within Heidegger that is now properly being recovered and the mystical within Wittgenstein, the two great philosophers that have founded continental and analytic philosophy.

58:32Yeah, great. Yeah, I'm always curious to hear what Wittgenstein thinks about when you kick the ladder away of language, you know, that metaphor of his.

58:45Dr. John Vervaeke:And what's interesting, because the mystical is quite pronounced, like I mean literally written in the tractatus, but a lot of these authors are showing no, it actually, it's also running through the investigations of the notebooks in really, really powerful way.

59:03Interesting. You know, there's an element of aporia. One little thing. There's an element of aporia in Wittgenstein with that problem that Kripke took up from Wittgenstein. I forget the problem. It's a kind of hybrid of Kripke and Wittgenstein. I just can't. It's something about the limits of logic and reasoning. But I know that there's an element, deep elements of aporia in Wittgenstein. And I wonder if that's connected. and going to show up in your investigation. Because so much of what he's saying to me is something that you would intuit when you reach moments of aporia trying to make sense of that model that he ultimately rejects.

59:47Dr. John Vervaeke:Yes, yes, yes, that's right. This is a kind of dialogical within his own. Well, he's also in his head arguing with Russell and all these other people, but Frega and so on. Interesting, yeah. I'm looking forward to that. Well, I think there's deep connections between the aporia, the aspect shifting, and the fact that he keeps crafting and recrafting an ascetic style of life as he sees what is – which he basically – he doesn't even argue. He just, I don't know, demonstrates or exemplifies as essential to being a philosopher, which is really interesting. Like he's putting as much effort, if not more, into his ascetic way of life as he is into his writings, which a couple authors are pointing out.

1:00:42Dr. John Vervaeke:It's like, oh, yeah. And if we care about performative contradiction and not just propositional contradiction, we should be taking that into account. I remember the name of the problem, Kripkenstein. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Kripkenstein. The other thing I wanted to talk about is orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Yes. Orthopraxis. So what differentiates these traditions is usually more orthodoxy, you know, straight line of beliefs. But within even different schools of Buddhism, there are some orthodoxy differentiations. But what's bigger is the emphasis on different practices. Yeah. Yeah. So, but, but that Hick point that I mentioned earlier, there's so many similarities across practice traditions.

1:01:33That's right. You know, these contemplative and meditative prayer, this, that, ascetic, it's a, there's a kind of, it's a heteropraxy, which there's a through line through it all across most of these traditions.

1:01:47Dr. John Vervaeke:Yeah, yeah, I think so. And I think, I think, so do you know what a Klein is? A klein is like population variables. They sort of do a Wittgensteinian family resemblance. They overlap and shade, right? And I think there's a klein in ecologies of practices, just like there's a klein in ecologies. It's not like there's this one ecology and then it ends. No, ecologies, biological ecologies overlap and interpenetrate. They participate, they're parts. So ecologies - This is a good one. Yeah. Yeah. Klein is what I was trying to grab at with this heteropraxy idea. Yeah. Very good. Yeah. And that all that all is related to Mike Levin.

1:02:33Like, you know, if there is this reality, then the ways of accessing it are going to keep showing up across different traditions. That's right.

1:02:42Dr. John Vervaeke:And that's what Mike, Mike, Mike is a. He's a philosophical pragmatist in it, like in a committed way, like James. I have criticisms of pragmatism, which I've sort of made to Mike. You know, I think it confuses relevance with truth and you need them to be distinct from each other. Although they interpenetrate, they have to be distinct so they can correct each other. And I also. And you can't go too far with that because then you wind up being Donald Hoffman who says that. Yeah. And you can't go too far with the continuum because differences of degree have to become differences of kind or you fall into sorority's fallacies.

1:03:21Dr. John Vervaeke:Right. And so, yeah. Yeah. So I'll see in the heat, et cetera. Yeah. So we've talked a lot, you know, I guess because of the, and maybe there's an egocentrism, but also just the prominence of the philosophical still growed for me. And so I've been talking from Neoplatonism towards Buddhism, especially towards Zen. And I like Zen because it brings in the Taoism as well in a really deep way and strong cases being met for that, which I'm finding very, very persuasive. And because that's actually how I lived it, too. I was always being I was always doing Tai Chi Chuan as I was doing Vipassana. Right.

1:04:06Dr. John Vervaeke:So. I want to turn it to you and do that. What would you say as somebody who is perhaps a deep friend of Buddhism? Maybe that's the best way of putting it. What would you say about the Buddhist looking towards Neoplatonism now rather than the Neoplatonist looking towards Buddhism? Well, what comes to mind if like from a Buddhist perspective and identity? What comes to mind when you take that stance towards everything we've been talking about? What comes to mind for you?

1:04:47Well, you mentioned this from the very beginning, that the risk of anti-intellectualism, the eclipsing of logos, of logic, of reasoning, of dialogue, all that kind. You know, the power of all those things as, what did I say, heteropraxy and even heterodoxy. You know, there's lots of ideas and practices in this whole Western Neoplatonic, et cetera, framework that can enrich a very often the Zen Buddhists, even more so than other Buddhists. are in a kind of narrow vision of everything. You know, it somewhat simplifies the complexity of existence. You know, samsara, nirvana, everything's the same.

1:05:50Don't worry about it. Just sit. You know, so many of the tools that could get people to have more transformative experiences that are more opening, enlightening, expanding, connecting. Connecting what I worry about, and this might sound horrible to a Zen Buddhist, but there's something like the isolation that we were talking about in only my cave, Zen Buddhist perspective. Like this is the right view. many people in that tradition have that view like that they have a kind of monochrome or monovision about everything that it's it's just what the model and the teaching says and they're kind of yeah not open to all this other rich converging wisdom yes so i think there's just a tremendous amount of amplification to use one of the terms from dialectic into yeah It would be good to have a Neoplatonist do amplification on a Zen Buddhist all about their philosophy and pull in, you know, as much as possible to get them to have aporia and then maybe be interested in the ways in which all this other stuff could be incredibly supportive, affording, etc.

1:07:22Dr. John Vervaeke:etc that's helpful i have talked to a zen abatis and i said um i first asked does then have to be attached to buddhism and she said no i don't think so um and and she was that was a thoughtful answer not like not a quick no no i don't think so uh and then i said well don't you think there could be a zen neoplatonism and then she sort of she said yeah yeah i think there and she was deeply intrigued. So I think what I'm just saying, there's resonance with some Zen people I've talked to about what you just said. Do you think the other is the case? If Neoplatonism can sort of challenge Zen away from anti-intellectualism.

1:08:15Dr. John Vervaeke:Can Zen challenge Neoplatonism away from over-intellectualism? Yeah, well, just a funny image came into my head of the Zen master hitting John over the head because he talks too much about Neoplatonism with the cane, you know. But the short answer is absolutely yes. Um, we folks like you and I with our philosophical training, I suppose, and all the work that we do, we can easily get lost in a complex labyrinth of our own understanding and our desire to have the metaphysical models, right. And all that kind of stuff. Yeah. And that's useful. It's helpful. But more important is, but you're already doing this and so am I.

1:09:08It's not you and I, it's other people maybe who are, let's say, you know, in any of these Western traditions who are not practicing. That's right. Things like Tai Chi and Zen sitting and stuff like that. Yeah. And there are seeds of this throughout Western philosophy to people like, you know, Wittgenstein saying, get rid of the ladder. Aquinas at the end of his life had a brief mystical experience. And he said, compared to that, all of my tremendous writings, some of theologica, et cetera, are like straw to be burned. So yeah, what we get from the Zen practitioners is just sit. Practice is important, right?

1:09:53Just sit. A. B. You don't have to hold all those things in your head when you're sitting. No. It's okay to let them go. In fact, you're advised to let them go so that you can transcend. We're doing so much in the realm here, this little space of propositional knowledge right now, sharing all this brilliant stuff. But when we practice, we want to have something more like theosis. And so how do we get to something like that? By just sitting, you know, so these, that's my, my, my, my intuition is that of course, both, both traditions can and should benefit from each other, but you can't tell other people what to think or do or, or want or value, right?

1:10:39We can just say, look, here's all these affordances. Are you aware of them? And then hopefully light bulbs go off. That's why I love that image of the light, I said, oh, the light is a great metaphor. You said that these people are like lights to you. An image that came to mind about light, is it Shelley? Some kind of poetic phrase about the brilliant light of reality coming through a stained colored glass. I forget this line in one of his poems. But it may very well be that the ultimate real is this brilliant light, like the sun that Plato says it's like, and that it comes through every one of us and every little blind person, every little thing.

1:11:23And it reflected like different colors, same class, you know? And so when, when, when a colorless light goes through or comes out of a light bulb where the glass is a little bluish, it casts a blue light. When it's in a red light bulb, it casts a red light, et cetera. So that's the idea that I have, like at the ultimate reality in Zen and Neoplatonism, it has to be the same. And it's just being refracted in different ways. Yeah. Yeah. This is great. This is a Neoplatonic idea, right? It is. It is. Yeah. And all the shadows, every shadow, every reflection, it's all emanation. Right?

1:12:08Dr. John Vervaeke:Yep. and i'm just going on now a little no no not at all poetic here and when newton discovered that all the colors are actually in light yeah that that that really rejuvenated the metaphor and some power which we never see in and of itself that's right we never see light and the yeah neoplatonist knew that through and through well my friend this has been glorious we're going to turn it over to take some questions from the students on the lectern. But before we leave this public space, I always like to give my interlocutor any last words they want to leave. This has just been wonderful having this conversation with you, John.

1:12:53We had a lot of fun together in Croatia off the camera, but I also enjoy these conversations in this kind of forum. I really appreciate being invited. For sure.

1:13:05Dr. John Vervaeke:Thank you. We'll have another one because we didn't get around to the four thetas, the theoria and theosis and the theurgia and theophany. And we'll come back maybe and talk about those. And maybe you could propose parallels or dialogical partners for that from the Buddhist and Zen traditions. Yeah. And I mentioned the criteria of causality and I thought we could talk more about that too. I was curious what you thought about that versus the criteria in the West. Right. And the only, so I did respond because I wanted to say that we have to, we have to broaden the ontology from cause to include constraint.

1:13:49Dr. John Vervaeke:And we talked about paradigmatic cause. And I But I do think the more basic question of what are the criteria of realness. Right. That was the more abstract question. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because I think that's important because I have a sense that intelligibility is the key criterion in Neoplatonism. And I'm not quite sure what the corresponding one is in Zen of realness. Yeah. I have some ideas. Yeah, I don't know about Zen. Yeah, I don't know about Zen, but I know in most other forms of Buddhism, because Zen is significantly anti-intellectual. Yes. It would be hard to figure out what the criterion is, whereas in the other forms of Buddhism, there's this whole almost like analytic philosophy going on in the history of Well, there is, and we could talk about that.

1:14:41Dr. John Vervaeke:I have a suspicion, and please note that word, that because I think Zen is more Tao than Buddhist, it's a Buddhist form of Taoism, that yeah and in and Taoism the criterion of realness is flow I think that's apparent I mean you know right oh that's brilliant right and so we've got intelligibility and flow and I think insofar as I see it in Zen I see it as something like flow but it's flow with a lot more emptiness in it or something like that I'm sorry that that's really no that's good very good intuition john that makes sense to me yeah all right my friend uh we're gonna uh close it off i'm gonna thank everybody uh on youtube who uh is watching this um um the the philosophical silk road is um it's still reverberating through me it's taken on a life of its own um it's becoming a way of life for me i'm i'm i'm trying to seriously think about how to propose and encourage people to pilgrimage as a meta practice, a way of stress testing your ecology of practices.

1:15:55Dr. John Vervaeke:And so I want to thank all of you. Many of you have been either in person or via email or commenting, have been very supportive about this. And that's very appreciative. I'm used to a forum in which precise conclusions are what is rewarded. and being able to be in a forum in which exploratory gestures are appreciated is much appreciated by me, is much appreciated by me. So thank you very much for all of that. And thank you again, Rick. Yeah. And John, I mentioned this to you somewhere. I don't remember when, but that your whole Silk Road pilgrimage thing has inspired me to want to do my own actual geographical pilgrimages too.

1:16:44I mean, I've always had that in my mind, but it really became so much more important. And I'm thinking about it also within myself. Yeah. Thanks. You're a trailblazer spiritually for me.

1:17:02Dr. John Vervaeke:Well, thank you. There's somewhere in the New Testament where I think it's Paul recommends that we should be trailblazers. So that's good. Thank you very much. Thank you, John.