The Philosophical Silk Road: A Journey to Rediscovering Theosis and Sacred Pluralism

30:40Our attitudes, our previous attitudes, our first attitude was conquer it, destroy it, an imperialist attitude. The next was it infantilize it. Your sacredness is an earlier version of mine, and I have a condescending, patronizing attitude of growing you up into my sacredness. Those are no longer available to us, I think, in any kind of moral or epistemologically justifiable fashion. And what was interesting is that what was taking shape for me, and I was presenting it to all the interlocutors, and they agreed with that we have to find a through line. We have to find dialogos between all the religious homes, because if we don't hang together, we're going to fall apart.

31:24If we cannot recover a shared sense of sacredness at a global level, we won't be able to tackle the global level issues. We will instead give ourselves over either to tribalism or globalism, which are both very problematic ideas. And so a metaphor that came out, an analogy, was the idea that, I took it from attachment theory, people need to develop a secure attachment to their home religion. I use the metaphor of your monogamous erotic relationship. For example, I have it to Sarah. And contrary to all the bullshit we were given and about dysfunctional codependency and all that. The research shows actually people who are dependent on each other in secure attachment are actually capable of much more fecund and profound exploration of their world than the person who tries to remain autonomous within a relationship.

32:26Alexander Beiner:And so the idea is could everybody find their monogamous, erotic relationship in a way that actually affords them to deeply love, deep philia, other traditions. Not love, like not the Christian loving the Buddhist, you should do that if you're a Christian, but the Christian loving Buddhism, learning from Buddhism, learning that Buddhism perhaps can teach the Christian about mindfulness. The Buddhist learning that perhaps from Christianity you could learn about the integration of agape and logos, that actually none of us can grip the whole hyper network of the virtues, that they are dynamic and constantly reconstellating.

33:07Alexander Beiner:And we could learn deeply from each other and thereby come to mutual transformation that could bind us together in love without us being homogenized or coming into some, you know, global agreement or some really dangerous idea like that. And that vision was actually not given to me by me. It was, you know, it wasn't articulated like that. but it was articulated in the Philosophical Silk Road, but it was originally given to me by Bishop Maximus. He took me aside when I was in Aetna in the monastery. He said, John, stop talking about the religion that's not a religion. You're getting it wrong. He said, do this Philosophical Silk Road you're talking about.

33:47Alexander Beiner:I love that. That's great. Because if we try to manufacture the sacred, which is what I was trying to do with the religion that's not a religion, we're in a performative contradiction. It's like manufacturing friendship. You, I'm going to make you my friend. That's insane. That's insane. And so I think, I mean, there's overwhelming research that we're capable of we perspectives that get us out. I mean, this is experimental work, by the way, rigorous experimental work that we can take we perspectives that get us out of game theoretic, you know, spiraling downward dynamics and allow us to get to something that's mutually better than either one of us can achieve on our own.

34:33Alexander Beiner:We can do the opposite of the tragedy of the commons. We can have the magnificence of the commons. And that's, again, that is not pie in the sky. That's really possible and really available to us. Yeah, it's beautiful. Yeah, I like that a lot. And I was just thinking of the Rumi quote of, or lots of Rumi quotes around burning, around the idea that that sacred essence is present and it's just about burning away what's in the way of it rather than having to manufacture or find it that's always resonated with me a lot um wonderful so we're going to go into breakouts everyone and your breakout question is well actually i'll tell you the question in a moment um again this is this isn't the same as having a chat or a conversation this is an inquiry and so um it's really a process of being curious about what's coming up as you're speaking it, staying connected to your body and your breath, and seeing where the question leads you.

35:39And the question is, what is sacred to me? What is sacred to me? And so we'll have about four minutes each. And the person today with the most colorful background is going to start. And then the rest, you can nominate the next person to go. So the rooms are open.

36:23Rhea, I don't know which account you're in, but let me know if you're.

36:30Alexander Beiner:Yep.

36:40after doing this for years and years i have an uncanny ability to look at gallery view and see who's secretly harboring a question but hasn't got the courage to is that joshua yes i caught you yeah um i really enjoyed that um

36:58all these concepts the words are pointing towards really helpful ways of thinking so um thanks for showing up and um yeah i guess i'm curious about the the uncertainty and the confusion and what what's stirring um for you joan as uh in this time as you seem to be landing from this big experience? What's moving below the surface? Yeah, that is the correct question because there's much more moving before the surface than I'm able to put into words. And the thing of it is you know, I'm going to I still have two more legs. The next leg is probably going to be next May I'm going to go to Samarkand in India and then sometime later I'm going to Kyoto so part of me sorry Joshua I am answering your question part of me doesn't want to try and fully resolve until I've gone through the whole thing so I'm trying to stay I'm trying to resist the scientist in me who wants to bring everything into a systematic closure and completeness kind of thing what's stirring in me is after having some I mean so

38:29I had realized because of a very powerful couple of very powerful experiences I had I realized that I had been keeping a duality behind all the other dual in all my attempts to overcome dualities and pursue non-duality I had pursued a duality and an identification in which I had argued that non-duality and non-theism mean that you identify God in impersonal terms, in impersonal ways. And Wynne's book and some powerful experiences made me realize, well, you know, sometimes like there's like Spinoza talks about the face of the cosmos.

39:14Alexander Beiner:He never explains what he means by it. But like in a face, the whole is signified in each part. Rather than building up out of the part, the whole is signified and lives, for example, in the eyes. The eyes are the gateway to the soul. Sometimes reality does this and you're facing reality rather than just looking at it or measuring it. It's facing you and it has this personal dimension. And it's calling forth from you voluntary necessity, which is what we experience in the personal realms of reason and love and beauty. And antinormativity means it's intrinsically valuable, like how we're supposed to relate to a person.

39:55Alexander Beiner:And then I realized there's ways in which I was inflicting and truncating my ability to participate in the sacred by my refusal to acknowledge that the personal is just as real as the impersonal. And that just like Spinoza says, you have to look through God and nature to add ultimate reality. You have to look through the personal and the impersonal to make yourself most deeply resonant with the sacred. And so that is really shuffling my identity around, because one of the ways in which I had sort of preserved a psychological barrier between me and perhaps my Christian background was, well, I'm a non-theist, you understand, and I don't go in for any of these personal ways of naming God.

40:49That's really hard to do if you study pseudodionesis deeply in the names of God. And I've come to realize, and this isn't going to be surprising if you're familiar with my work, but the proper relationship is a Yopona processing between the personal and the impersonal.

41:11because that's what keeps alive that stereoscopic depth perception. But what that means then about my relationship to these religious frameworks in terms of my fundamental identity, some of the bulwarks that I had in place, I didn't even realize because I told myself I'm going to be balanced and open, and I was trying, you know, that was sincere. but some of the bulwarks of you know uh that i had put up for psychological reasons have come down and that has left me uh very profoundly confused um all i know is i'm in service to whatever the pilgrimage is and i'm in service to all of these uh great traditions right now but i don't know sorry this sounds like a silly teenager movie i don't know who i am right now and that I'm not experiencing that as like noxious but it is confusing and that's what you're picking up that's what's stirring around in me right now it's and what

42:17Alexander Beiner:does it mean if I open myself up to a whole domain keeping it in balance I haven't rejected all the arguments I've made for non-theism or dualism, but what did it mean when I opened myself up? Because of other good arguments on the other side. So Pyro, who was an ancient Greek philosopher, he's known as the Greek Buddha because he traveled to India and he sort of created something within Greek philosophy very much like Zen, and he talked about isothenia, a balance of arguments that puts you into epoche, right which is a kind of constructive aporia that allows you to see more deeply into reality that that's sort of where i am at i hope that was helpful joshua i really appreciate your um that exploration and um just uh humility to stand in that uncertainty yeah i mean and i open myself up right uh a lot of a lot of the people who are always a little bit like well you know john talks about the sacred and the weird but at least he you know um and so uh that that that that uh that bulwark is gone too so i don't know what that's going to mean but voluntary necessity for me right now um so thank you thank you for that that was a very pertinent question joshua yeah absolutely thank you joshua that was that was kind of the perfect first question as well and and i'm just curious who has had that experience of that john's describing of not really knowing who you are or what makes sense anymore i think i asked it because i'm there right now yeah me too i thought i knew i was doing three months ago and now here i'm like oh god starting again yeah i know that experience very well myself as well yeah beautiful thank you john for your honor sharing as well um sarah

44:20so i guess it's going to be lots of thoughts right now because it's all coming together but um it's kind of building from that last point of alleys but there's it seems to be a tension um from like needing to know that something is tangible like needing something that's tangible and then versus an acceptance that there's a deep sense of knowing that is just a deep sense and we don't need anything that's tangible um so um and recently i don't know if it was on this course but somebody said something about um that if we're seeking something then we know that it exists because we're looking for it so therefore we already know um and so say we're seeking god we already know because we're seeking it that it god exists so then that's within us so sometimes i feel that i'm looking outside all the time for answers when the answers are within me um so that idea of like actually will you ever resolve it um and i'm a big fan of james hollis and in one of his recent works he's talked about the fact that um you know that it is this mystery like life is a mystery and actually our journey is accepting that mystery so is that i was just wondering your thoughts on that tension between seeking something we're looking for something we're exploring it which i love to do i love philosophy but at the same time that deep acceptance sense of mystery.

45:56Yeah, thank you, Sarah. First of all, I want to give credit where credit due. I don't know who said it on the course, but the person who first said it first and perhaps said it best was Plato. That is one of Plato's key arguments. It's one of the central claims in a dialogue called the Mino, but it also shows up in the Theotetus. It shows up in the Symposium. A version of the argument goes something like this. You're seeking virtue. Let's say it's virtue of honesty you don't completely know what it is but if you were completely empty of honesty i couldn't interest you in honesty and nothing would guide you towards honesty and and so that's why we're in plato's terms metaxu we're always between um and of course that goes a lot uh towards the work of william desmond and the work i do on relevance realization um and i think that's I think that's profoundly right.

46:50I think we have to be very careful, and that requires, no pun intended here, that requires a tremendous amount of honesty on us, because we have to get

46:59Alexander Beiner:very, we have to become really fine-grained connoisseurs of our relationship. So accepting mystery doesn't mean giving up acuity. It doesn't mean making everything blurry and confused. In In fact, mystery demands exactly the opposite. It demands the most acute discernment we have. And of course, Sarah, you know I'm not accusing you of this. I'm just responding. But a lot of times when people start making that move, well, I know it because I seek it, they're drifting into wish fulfillment language. And there's a lot of stuff we wish for that isn't real. A lot of pathologies have at the heart of people, I'm seeking the perfect romantic partner and therefore the perfect romantic partner must be there.

47:49Alexander Beiner:And this is just endless bullshit that causes endless suffering in people's lives. So we have to be very careful around this. I think you're right. That's why I began by saying I'm in profound agreement with it because in the end I am a Neoplatonist. But, you know, Plato said, once we understand that love is drawing us to something we do not know, but that we do know in some mixed way, we have to be very, very, very acute and very astute and very clear. because the mystery can be a place in which people build mystique and they build manipulation. So I'm only saying that because, you know, this is something I'm wrestling with.

48:49I'm wrestling with how do I know the difference between when I'm really resonating with something the way you're talking about it from when I'm projecting onto reality in a way and one of the things that's been helpful is an exercise from William Desmond called absolute zero which is to sit do some preparatory practices and then really try to take on the perspective and the identity of the nihilist that everything you think is meaningful and beautiful and true is a projection let it go let it really really let it eat as deeply as possible don't do this if you're still working with trauma by the way right and then what remains is exactly what you're talking about what remains is what is not being generated by projection but what is calling to you.

49:53And of course, you should always be challenging it and reflecting on it. Sorry, I'm going on about this because I think it's really, really crucial. It's really, the worst things come from the best things turn bad. And that knowing by loving and seeking,

50:11Alexander Beiner:but being open to mystery, is so quickly and easily perverted in our culture.

50:20So I'm trying to be encouraging that we have to bring discernment and astuteness to that. And I'm talking to myself as much as to anybody else.

50:34I personally think when you've had experiences of a really deep connection, particularly with other people, especially after friction or after you felt quite angry. and you you actually managed to move past all of that ego um and you experience what i would describe as agape and true grace then that is when you experience that i think that's i think that's right um and um i'm trusting uh because the way you're presenting it that you understand uh agape um of course here's an example our culture reduces love to an emotion and emotions to feelings, and they think that agape is to have certain kinds of feelings.

51:19And it's not to do that passage, that metanoetic passage, beyond egocentrism. Iris Murdoch said it best, love is the painful recognition that something other than yourself is real. And that's, for me, what you just said is exactly a concrete example of the kind of discernment I'm talking about. So thank you for that. And wonderful, wonderful question, Sarah. Thank you. And thank you, John, for your answer. Could you remind us that that absolute zero practice, what was the name of the person who came up with it? So the best, it's based on the work of William Desmond. I just did a course on William Desmond called God in the Between.

52:02There's a book by Dunn's on spiritual exercises for a secular age based on the work of William Desmond. Dunn's, and he talks about, he takes Desmond's talking about absolute zero and he sort of turns it into a spiritual exercise in the sense of Pierre Hadot. Brilliant. Guys, guess what you're doing for your pod inquiry this week? I think it's quite, it's very curious about that. I'll check that out and look into that. We might not, but I just think it sounded quite appealing. Wonderful. Let's go a bit of time left. John, you able to go five minutes over? Of course. Amazing. These are wonderful questions.

52:42They are. That was my thoughts. Exactly. So, Frederick and then Gibran. All right. Thanks. So last week we were talking about with Joshua about myths. And like one thing also that came up during the breakouts was this, you know, subtle difference between like a myth, like a story that is alive and a myth, like a lie. and it's sometimes so hard to see the difference between the two and I remember listening to your Awakening from the Meaning Crisis videos, which I really, really liked but was building up to this great thing and then the conclusion was a religion that is not a religion because the conclusion almost had to be something religious and then now you just told us your your pilgrimage and your openness to religion.

53:37And this journey sounds so familiar. Like, are we trying to build, like, am I trying to build my own myth-making, my own story, my own, you know, model of the world? Or should I just go out there and seek, you know, the religion, you know, the things that are already there, but that I'm not open to because I'm too busy building my own world and my own systems. So can you maybe tell me a little bit, maybe some advice about choosing either of those two? There's another fantastic question, one that sits on my heart.

54:16Alexander Beiner:I'll start abstractly and then hopefully become more concrete. So what you're proposing is autonomy or heteronomy as the answer. I make it by myself or I go and receive it from somebody else. And the answer is that's not theonomy. That's not how the sacred shows up. You have to participate in it. You don't make it. You don't receive it. You have to participate in it. And it's like friendship. You can't just wait. You can't just make it happen. You know, it's Zen enlightenment. You don't get enlightenment by seeking it, but only seekers will become enlightened. You know, Zen likes to do that, that kind of thing on an ongoing basis.

54:54And so for me, and this is picking up on the discussion I had with Sarah, I'm trying to pay attention to moments

55:10Alexander Beiner:of voluntary necessity that are shareable in some fruitful way with other people. because I think these are the two dimensions of meaning. And this is also, I'm preparing, I'll be releasing a video essay, but also a paper for submission. I've engaged in a very deep critique of the standard psychological construct of meaning in life that I just used to always use unquestionably. There's a part of self-critique. See, meaning is a normative term. It's not just a descriptive term. A descriptive term is like blue. A normative term means you're praising it or blaming it. When I say someone's life is meaningful, I'm not just describing it, I'm praising it, I'm recommending it.

55:54Alexander Beiner:There's normativity there, which means there's also the possibility of error and self-deception. And meaning has to be shared. If I say to you, Google, Google, frip, frip, well, do you agree? If we don't share the meaning, this is an old point by Wittgenstein, there's no such thing as a private language. And you say, well, I have things that are just meaningful to myself. Probably not. You're probably talking in your head, to other people and getting feedback in a semi-conscious fashion. And so I've been trying to find moments of voluntary necessity that are calling to me, that are nevertheless correcting me, and that I can find helpfully shareable with other people, which is what I'm trying to exemplify right now.

56:37Alexander Beiner:And that's helping me. That's helping me neither make it nor merely receive it, but participate in its self-disclosure, if I can put it that way. I'm trying to engage in theonomy so there's a theophany that calls to me. I tried to make it more concrete, but then maybe I just ended up in poetry. Was that helpful at all?

57:04Yes, it was. It will take some time to decipher, but I think I understand what you're saying.

57:13Alexander Beiner:look at the things that call you to faithfulness and in a way in which challenges you to become more wise and more in community common unity not group think not social contract but as william desmond talks about common unity community look for those things and then start working with others from that that would be my recommendation as long as as long as you do that along with all my older recommendations like don't just do propositions do an ecology of practices rituals of receptivity you know dialogical imaginal mindful embodied but in addition to that um yeah um some of you know i have like a dialogical partner with my muse hermes and um he basically said to me john stop trying to make God stop it just stop it it can't be done in it wise advice beautiful so last but certainly not least uh Gibran thank you so much uh John uh what a privilege what a blessing to be with you from this place that you're speaking from thank you deeply deeply moving the transmission is powerful and the tenderness is very, just very enlivening and deepening.

58:46So thank you so much for the courage.

58:52What is coming up for me is so much of this mess is our resistance to life and its terms, right? Like the tragedy of the human condition, It's a big no, right, to the fact that we will die and we will get old and we'll get sick. And when I, you know, I also grew up Christian, but I grew up in a fundamentalist Catholic context. So I had the crucifix, which is different from the cross.

59:32And I never learned this in the theology I grew up with. It might be there, but I didn't learn it. but in that contemplation of that crucifix which i thought about a lot like what would have been like for native folk to be exposed to this tortured man on a cross what sense does it make and what it has come to mean to me is you can be god or at least one of the goodest men to walk the earth and it doesn't matter you are subject to life and its terms torture right betrayal humiliation and what there what you do before the terms is you open your arms you forgive and you love anyway and there's something about that's the in this particular religion about the incarnational nature of that and and that the symbolic visual visualization of that body on that cross that i think allows for a kind of what's the word a kind of theosis that is different from from the what can feel quite esoteric and contempt and like big it's like no it's like in the flesh in this reality under these conditions this is the posture and it feels it just feels like there's a first as they keep hearing you speak about where you are it feels like there's something there that i just wanted to lift up and see i think that's deeply right.

1:01:17I'm sort of, I'm not intimidated, but like extremely impressed by the perspicaciousness of the questions that are being asked here, and I'm very grateful for that.

1:01:32Alexander Beiner:This is part of the idea that as in the incarnation, Jesus emptying himself in his humanity does not in any way mean he lost his divinity. In a similar way, our theosis in no way means we leave our humanity behind. And that those are exactly held in parallel by some of the Cappadocian church fathers. And what was interesting for me is I was reading a book, really astonishing novel on the philosophy. so much was given to me so much was given to me I was reading Orbital by Samantha Harvey and it's this astonishingly lyrical beautiful book about people in orbit around the earth it sounds boring right but the thing is she's playing with the human beings they're in this super finite vulnerable mortality is literally inches away kind of and they're intermeshed and it's like the finitude the finitude the finitude but they're also overview effect looking into the transcendent moment by moment and they're constantly moving and her prose is weaving between those but to me that's also I read by Capobianco who's a Heideggerian he was going through the I purchased a reproduction of a crucifixion and he says this is the epitome of finite transcendence, that the finite and the transcendence are being held together like in orbital.

1:03:13Alexander Beiner:And when we hold that tonos, right, and we become godlike without ever inflating or trying to bypass or leave in some sort of crypto luxury Gnosticism, our embodiment behind, right then we actually realize the depth of our humanity um and that that and and when i when i saw that that clicked with drew highland's work that plato's whole philosophy is about getting us to use socrates to realize and identify with our finite transcendence if we hold just our finitude, we become slaves. If we hold just our transcendence, we become tyrants. But if we hold them together, we become persons in community.

1:04:01Alexander Beiner:And so all of that has come more clearly together for me. And that is part of what I was trying to convey in the notion of theosis. Like, just as the emptying of God does not mean that Jesus loses his divinity, and again, I don't know what I mean by these words completely, but what they meant is, in a similar way, our becoming godlike does not ever sever us from our humanity. Those two are absolutely interpenetrating and symmetrical with each other. And I think properly understanding that offers an alternative to the sort of inflationary proposals that are being given to us by transhumanism and accelerationism and all kinds of other pseudo-enlightenments.

1:04:59Wow. Thank you for that beautiful, yeah, really insightful question, and John for that answer as well. I just watched Peter Thiel's conversation on transhumanism, and I'm writing a book about ai and religion and so i could talk for a long time about how i feel about that i think that's incredibly important right now i mean finite transcendence like that's an incredibly powerful notion um it seems to me um just just wrapping up it there was a kind of um synthesis synthesis feels like too i don't know weak a word for it's too hegelian yeah it's too hegelian right but there's something of a coming together and a transcending and including to use, you know, Wilbur's term that's been a theme in this whole conversation that I think is also a, is, is what I feel is most important right now culturally, because if we don't move towards that new territory, then the, as you pointed, John, we have this pendulum swing between the, the autonomy and the heteronomy.

1:06:09which I think is also a key framing. And I think we all see that happening, but I think actually even naming it as that is a very important thing right now, because I think most, uh, certainly you don't see that on the nightly news. You don't see people talking about that swing in the nightly news. All they're doing is reporting on the symptoms of it and struggling to, to make sense of it. And I think what we're trying to do here is go to that deeper level. And I think you've really helped us to do that. So, um, And also just thank you for really touching honesty and openness. You know, we've done a lot of conversations over the years, and they're all wonderful in their own way, but I really feel very touched, and it's a privilege to be having this conversation with you right now.

1:06:59So thank you. Well, thank you, all of you. Ali, I guess this is my first public conversation about the Philosophical Silk Road. so it's still very raw in me, but a lot of you were very, very helpful. Many of you know I think that things can only come out in dialogos and they cannot ever come out in monologue, and so I greatly appreciate it. Again, take everything I say with, you know, like this, because everything's in flux for me. I'm glad that you're finding some of my insights helpful. I would then point back through me to the fact that, you know, the Abrahamic West's wisdom traditions, especially the Neoplatonic thread that runs through them, this is what I'm drawing on.

1:07:50The West has rich, rich resources that we have lost connection to. And I'm coming to think that we can't really understand moksha or kensho or satori unless we can revivify theosis within our Western way of being. that is the only thing that will give us the deep way to understand uh what comes from the indian or uh the chinese and japanese worlds beautiful yeah yeah i mean that's uh again what you call the advent of the sacred right this this communication between the different traditions it feels like that's that for me feels like a very beautiful future if that can start to happen, which I think the possibility is there.

1:08:48So thank you, John. Thank you, everyone, for your wonderful questions and your presence. Let's do our traditional unmuting and a thank you to John and a goodbye. You know what's wild? Most people are still overpaying for car insurance just because it's a pain to switch. That's why there's Jerry. Jerry's the only app that compares rates from over 50 insurers in minutes and helps you switch fast with no spam calls or hidden fees. Drivers who save with Jerry could save over$1 ,300 a year. Before you renew your car insurance policy, do yourself a favor. Download the Jerry app or head to jerry.ai slash Lipson.

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