Virtuosity as a Way of Life | Ethan Hsieh and the Tiamat Process

31:32Yeah, yes. I'll shut up in a sec. One of the things you and I talk about is virtuosity coupled to virtue and virtue coupled to virtuosity, where the epitome of virtuosity is the flow state and the epitome of virtue is wisdom. And so we can get people in wise flow states with rituals that transfer. That would be like a great gift that we could give people that is far beyond making them better at entertaining. Yeah. In fact, when that happens, the entertainment value actually becomes irrelevant. Because what I'm trying to do is to say, okay, and I put this in my PhD proposal, so I'm showing my cards here.

32:13The bottom layer of that is building existential resilience. Yes. Say a little bit more about what that is, Ethan. Yeah. So existential resilience is the capacity to retain your agency in high states of arousal a conflict and dysregulation. So this came up largely around the Ukraine war scenario. That's where people start taking existential resilience very seriously, academically. Because there was a concern that like, oh, what happens in wartime is that people's agency drops off, right? Because they are constantly in states of conflict and uncertainty. and this propels itself even outside of the, let's say, the war-torn state, right?

33:08I don't mean geographical state, but like the embodied state. Yeah, I got it. And it becomes a kind of learned helplessness. Yes. For lack of a better term. And also - And what existential resilience allows you to do - Sorry, I'll finish my sentence. Yeah, no, sorry. Sorry for interrupting. Yeah. Yeah. So what existential resilience does is that it allows one to have an awareness of what is happening while still developing the capacities to agentically navigate a conflict or difficulty across time. Yes. And so what I wanted to do is what you're doing with your hands is for me, how I understand existential resilience, which maps because it's part of the work that I've been doing with Arjun Arora on critiquing the meaning in life construct is existential resilience is a measure of your ability to maintain meaning in life.

34:04good connectedness, ratio religio, in the face of serious challenge and problem that is facing your personhood, your selfhood, and your agency. And I think this is important because I think our current construct, one of the 17 ,000 ways in which the current construct is very poor, meaning in life is just my personal preferences and that I have friends that I like, is that it's such a shallow notion lacking in any connection to virtuosity, lacking in any connection to virtue, that it is disconnected from both existential resilience and existential excellence, where resilience is the capacity to resist pathological loss.

34:54Excellence is, but can I enhance my agency? Can I enhance my selfhood? Can I enhance my personhood? And so I just want to say there's deep connections between what you're talking about here and the way I think we need to reflect more deeply on meaning in life. One of the things I think that pilgrimage is doing, I'm now thinking of pilgrimage, as you know, as a meta test for your ecology of practices, is it's the way to do, it's the way to stress test your meaning in life to make sure you cultivate a meaning in life that is capable of existential resilience. And so I just, sorry, I just wanted to resonate on that just so much.

35:39This is what you do. You provoke me so much. Yeah. Well, I want to pick up on that. I want to provoke you further. So, you know, this, I love that you bring in the meaning in life thing because there's a way in which existential resilience can become isolationist. So, oh, I'm very resilient, therefore nothing can touch me. The autonomous buffer itself. Yeah, the autonomous buffer itself. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. And so, you know, it calls the question like, what's the normativity? You develop existential resilience for what? And that's the orientation towards eudaimonia. Like, what is the good life, right?

36:17And so, there is this sort of like the normativity that sits above the existential resilience. And then you can, maybe I'll add this in as like a graphic, but it's kind of like this. What is that? And that piece in the middle, I think, is what the ecology of practices serves. It bridges existential resilience to the good life. And someone whom I found incredibly powerful for helping develop the pedagogical language, aside from you and Barrett, right, is Jung. And Jung is who I rely on deeply to bridge, I think, what is sort of in our current cultural zeitgeist and the, how do I say, the awareness now of things like, oh, shadow and and complexes or, you know, the kind of our pop psychology kind of space.

37:12I want people to have a touchstone of ideas or words that you might have heard that have permeated our grammar, but actually also to proportion that in a way that is commensurate and in deep dialogue with the best of our current science and also our philosophy. And I think Jung, to me, he's a muse. And he's also one of my sages, right? Alongside Spinoza. Spinoza and Jung are very good to read together. Yeah, yeah. Right? To develop the language. So it's really helping me to like, say in tier one, I give a lecture on what the ego is and the reformulation of the ego construct, what it does. And of course, you know, some of the work that's gone into that from Anderson Todd.

38:01So I borrow a lot of his ideas as well. Kevin Liu, who is one of my supervisors, deep, deep scholar of Jung, whom you'll meet on Wednesday or Thursday. Looking forward to it. Yeah, they're really powerful arguments coming forward that I think without throwing away what is already out there can actually help to proportion Jung's ideas, but in a way that allows us to step onto a path together without saying, oh no, he's wrong and fragmenting that further. I don't want to do that. I want to respond to that. This actually came up. We did the last lecture and discussion for the first part of Seeing God Again for the first time.

38:51so the first eight weeks is done very very positive response from virtually all the attendees all the students and so and in that there's an idea I've been playing with and for me this resonates with the Vellman thing about neither Wanton nor Hamlet because I was talking about Jung and Freud and so I took I said let's look at their central insights Freud's central insight is where there was id there is now ego Jung's central insight is the unconscious is compensatory for the conscious mind then I said well look what you've got is Freud is saying sometimes we're locked in the unconscious and we need the conscious mind to intervene and unlock us and Jung is saying sometimes we're locked in our conscious mind and we need the unconscious.

39:48And if we could actually get an opponent processing between Freud and Jung, so we know sometimes the conscious mind has to intervene. And, you know, Wilbur did stuff on that, the pre-trans fallacy, right? You don't, not everything in the unconscious is helping you, right? But also Jung, you know, no, no, But the unconscious at times has to unlock the conscious mind because of the way it's getting locked in. And I wanted to know, for me, that's sort of like Freud is the reflective part and Jung is the bottom up, right? Self-organization. And you're trying to get the Velman thing between them. What do you think about that as an idea?

40:31Yeah. Well, the thing is I have deep criticisms of Freud because I think that when you scale out his idea, it doesn't actually hold. And this is something that I've taken from some of your work on the philosophy of science. So, I talk about this in my opening lecture for tier one, like Freud's hydraulic model of the psyche. Yeah. That's recurred models. Yeah. Yeah. So there's id at the bottom and then there's superego at the top, right? The id being your primal urges, your superego being sort of the social cultural thing and your ego is in the middle getting squashed, right? So if there's too much pressure, it fractures and you're in psychosis.

41:13But if I scale out that idea, there's a bit of a problem for me, which I think I might have brought to you in passing. But the central question is, where's the person in that? Because if the ego is just being squashed between these two things, well, every person is being squashed like that. So that means each individual is just part of the super ego thing. And then they have the it pushing up against that. So where do you get, where is the place of agency? Where is the place of personhood, how does that develop and open up? Whereas for me, I don't think Freud answers that question, but I think Jung does.

41:54And what Jung does with that is to say, hey, look, you know, it's not a hydraulic model. It's an organic model. It's like a living thing, as you often say. And so he deals with that, where there is a dialogical relationship between all of these little parts within the structure. Your complexes have a dialogical relationship with your ego, which has a relationship with your personal unconscious, which is impacted, you know, and gives birth to shadow. And there's this whole network of things, which to me is missing in Freud because Freud doesn't, to me, answer the question of, well, how does the super ego self-correct, right?

42:36How does the super ego correct the ego? How does the id correct the ego? How are they in relationship? And so for me, I feel like it's hard to get on the Freudian train, as brilliant as he was. And I don't want to throw away his insight. But I think that when it comes to the project of the self-correction of a person, when it comes to the process of participating deeply in the world, I don't find it tenable that personhood is not accounted for. I think that's a very good critique. and I've made similar critiques along the way, and I've talked to Anderson about this. I guess, first of all, I agree with virtually everything you said.

43:30I'm trying to give where, what, I'm not trying to defend Freud comprehensively. I'm trying to say, what can we retain from Freud that's of value here? because we want to be able to reach out to that side of the world as well. But I guess what I'm saying is, and maybe this goes to Wilbur's critique, right, is that one of the things that Freudian analysis can help you do is to pare away that stuff that's coming up from the unconscious that is and you know and Jung even has this division between the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious where he's I think trying to give some recognition to Freud where what's going on in our unconscious is undermining our agency rather than helping or healing and the reason I like that idea is because I do think we are capable of a lot of unconscious parasitic processing.

44:34We get caught up in these patterns that are very much alive, like archetypes, but are not alive for our life. They're sucking life from us. And you need the kind of intervention that Freud talks about, where you're trying to bring rational, egoic reflection into that process to break it up. But I also see what Jung has to say, was saying, no, no, no. Sometimes you need insight. And insight is you have to open yourself up and let self-organizing processes well up in you to give you the kind of comprehensive insights you need. And so I guess I'm trying, okay, you say, go ahead. But John, you've just done it.

45:17You've just done it, right? So I think what we can retain from Freud is yes, the conscious intervention. I'm not saying no to that, right? And where I think Jung meets Freud is that Jung goes, ah, yes, but don't identify with that. Ah, good point. And so, and this is the thing that Jung does, which you've implicitly said is like, you have to do this thing, right? You have to allow the unconscious to show you things. And then what Freud does to go, okay, yes. And then you can be discerning around what you actually need to listen to and what's not. And that needs to be housed within the normativity of the eudaimonia.

45:52So I think Freud and Jung have a tenuous history, but the influence that they each have on each other is at this point quite fundamental. They're deeply biological in that way. Jung presupposes that you can consciously intervene on those processes. Otherwise, if we assume that to not be the case, then Jung would never have done active imagination. Yeah, that's a very good point. And it was fair for him to assume that because of the prevalence and power of Freudianism at the time, that everybody had these skills and abilities. I think that is no longer the case. And secondly, I think Freud did not do enough about the proper re-education of the superego, which is a big part of the ancient project of eudaimonia.

46:52Oh, yeah. Okay. But I'm not going to leave my conscience and my character just as how my culture happened to give it to me. I'm going to actively intervene and reconstruct that and educate it in powerful ways. and so I think both of them could use a little bit more Plato perhaps because both of them read Plato. There's no doubt about that. So it's not unfair for me to bring that to bear. But I think I might have derailed us a little. I think this was powerful. But maybe bring it back. So you've got this thing you're doing and you're getting people neither Wanton nor Hamlet and then not just making you, giving you virtuosity, but orienting you towards eunomonia.

47:40What's that middle piece look like? How is it getting the unconscious and the conscious to go this way? How is it getting the agent and the arena to go this way? You're doing all of this and it's just like, okay, so pick it up again. Okay. This is the thing that you do, right? It's like you toss out a ton of sticks and now I'm going to, okay, I'm playing pick up sticks with things and then trying to build a tower, which is a very active imagination endeavor. So here's the thing, right? Like when I think about, okay, this ultimately, what is an opponent process between kind of like your consciousness and your unconscious?

48:17I don't use the term subconscious for many reasons. Yeah. Yeah. Me too. I don't like that term. Yeah. Is that actually you named it when we were workshopping Tiamat, which is that you called it, and I think rightly so, is come around, I've come around to be more and more convinced by this, which is that TMD is an Aristotelian character intervention process. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah. So for those of you who might be unfamiliar, is that we have a personality disposition, that's a dispositional baseline, right? And then what we're trying to do with ecologies of practice is to be able to develop the character traits that compensate for shortfalls in our personality.

48:56So if I'm particularly accommodating, I need to be able to learn how to share my wants in relationship, to be able to recognize when I have resistances, articulate boundaries in a way that's graceful, but then not so much that I'm isolated, right? And these are not skills. They're not instruments. They're not tools. They're developing the embodied motivational states that go, huh, Well, I might want to put up a boundary here, but actually, where's the place that this relationship would be best served? Oh, so you're kind of replacing an automaticity of personality dispositions, openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, neuroticism.

49:42You're replacing that with an opponent processing that is seeking an optimal grip on the world. Is that? Yes. Yeah. Yes, exactly. And I can articulate this further. So, you know, there's this, we've talked about the active, passive kind of extreme, right? Like the active being this self-optimization, I'm going to do the self-help thing. I'm going to optimize myself on my own terms, right? By reading all of these things. then on the other hand there's the more sort of passive piece around i'm just going to do therapy i need someone else to help me fix my problems right right right which you've named both of them are a kind of egocentrism yes and what we're trying to do in the middle is participation yeah yeah deep participation in the world right because you run into that issue where you know i call it the i call it the second full-time job if you're doing your your self-work is doing your inner work, your shadow work, your deep work through breath work.

50:47It's like, there's so much work. It's too much work, right? But then on the other hand, being in the more sort of therapeutic space, it's like, oh, I'm just going to try this and try this and just leave it up to the therapist to just, I trust them to know what they're doing and then I'll just receive it and that will magically make me feel better. No, no, no. No, therapy is a participatory relationship, right? And at the same time, the self-optimization problem, it doesn't go anywhere. If you fill out your entire calendar with all of the things that will optimize you, you'd have no time for anything meaningful in the world.

51:27And then it becomes an end in and of itself, right? One still has to live in the world properly. So I think what's happening with an ecology of practices is that it affords the capacity to proportion that and to go, okay, when do I need to actually receive something that's happening in the world at this point? And when do I need to actually step up and to be more agentic? Or let's say be more active. But both of those are homed in agentic participation in the world. So people are doing this and they're doing these very concrete dialogical practices or imaginal practices or movement practices. And you're bringing it into like and you're integrating it with all your experience in how to get people into performance.

52:19And I mean, you're doing and I mean, this is a compliment to both sides. It's very much a religious framework because religion is theater. I mean, and I mean that in a positive sense. It's serious play. They're like you're talking to God. you're enacting Jesus, you're embodying him. For example, if you're going to a Christian church, there's all kinds of sounds, there's singing going on, there's choruses, there's response, like it's theater. And many people have noted that theater comes out of a religious context cross-culturally. And so what you're doing is you're sort of reverse engineering what we used to do, if I can put this in a powerful way, in a very concrete, interactive, participatory set of practices that people can deeply get into flow states about.

53:08They can open up. They can challenge each other. The best arena for flow state is another human being who's ratcheting up their skills as you're ratcheting up your. And so what happens with people in these practices? What are the kinds of things they say? like how do they like what what do they report is happening to them yeah i know there's there's a lot and we i mean we'll come back to it again and again and again because we we got two more of these but i just want to i want to get people also to get at least an initial foreshadowing feel of okay well you're doing all this and it sounds all wonderful but like what is it doing to the people what are they saying what like i remember not that long ago you and i were talking because with some of, because you'd run one workshop and we were talking about, you know, what happens when people sort of grow that witness sense, that sort of perspectival metacognition that, you know, doesn't disappear and is constantly there, like their philosophical conscience, you know, and people were, well, what do I do and how do I live with that?

54:13And there was people asking me, sorry, I'm stealing your thunder. We're like, what happens to people? Oh, well, let's share the thunder. So one of the things which I've reliably heard, and this is bizarre, even to me, it's almost magical. At the start of tier one, I always say this is not a safe space. This is not a safe space because we're training, you're going to be challenged, you're going to be confronted, there's going to be conflict. And so it is not, given to you. What I hope that happens is that you come in, you develop capacities, and you find a way to be competent and to generate safety for yourself in the midst of arousal.

54:59And I make it very clear, like at the start of containers, I always give out the objectives of that container. So people know that that's what we're gunning for. And I've reliably heard across containers in different countries, we go with different cultures in at least three different languages. Different socioeconomic status, different genders, all of that stuff. Yes. All of that stuff, somewhere in the container, they'll go, this is actually a really safe space because I can name how confused I am. I can sit in the ambiguity of what is about to happen. and I know that I might be dysregulated, but I always feel like I can do something.

55:43I can still be in the world. I'm not lost in it. There's that resilience you were talking about. Exactly. I can always have an agency of ratio religio available to me, no matter how ambiguous, novel, ill-defined, complex the situation is. That is a powerful realization for people. And there's one more thing, which is actually quite interesting. People reliably enter a flow state in these practices. So one of our nexus practices, nexus practices are exercises that we repeat throughout the container that we're always going to come back to so that when you do auxiliary exercises that isolate a particular capacity, you can always come back into this nexus practice and try it out.

56:35And it serves as a common touchstone. In one of our nexus practices called the playground, which also scales out, there is no context for how you need to behave in this place. It's completely emergent, right? But we are instead guiding folks into a place of epistemic vulnerability, where the rules of the world somehow are loosened up considerably, right? And we are encouraged to pay attention to what impulses are coming and arising for you. So, I'm trying to make metacognition relevant, as opposed to saying, get out of your head, or just be more in your body, right? So, it's trying to develop that dialogical relationship, and then folks reliably go, huh, like, I don't know why, like, I feel this impulse, but I recognize that I can't follow it, right?

57:33So, they have that awareness that's occurring, that self-corrective, and then when given a note or after a couple of instances of practice, they can go, oh, I feel it, like, I can be in it now and they can report back to me what happened right what happened there oh this person said this and i did this and i didn't quite know why but i went with it and then this is what occurred and as opposed to being dissociated and then going i don't know it just all felt good like they can they can report what actually happened in the environment at what time and this is the kicker they experience immense time dilation uh right right so so what what what to them might feel like 10 minutes was actually like 20 minutes long or 25 minutes very powerful flow state yes yes and so do they do do they experience these moments also as moments of enhanced i mean they're in the flow state enhanced connection enhanced presence enhanced awareness uh uh sense presence of other people uh at one all that sort but it's it's not just for fun they're they're cultivating virtuosity and bringing that to virtue and cultivating virtue and bringing that to virtuosity so when they when and we'll come back to all of this because right now we're trying to do the overview um do they later like because you said many of these people repeat so they come back when they come back do they report to the degree to which they carried this into their life.

59:16Yes. So after every container, we give about two weeks and then we do like an integration call, which you're participated in, or we meet up ideally, we meet up in person. And it was really amazing. One of the participants from the previous container, she started her share by going like, I went to therapy after TM at tier one. I mean, She had always been going to therapy, right? But she was like, I went into my therapist's office, you know, and I held some regret that like, ah, maybe I didn't participate fully. But then I realized that the reason why I did that was because I feel the need to be perfect all the time.

59:54Like I'm such a perfectionist, I need to do it correctly. And so me and my therapist are now working through that and where that came from. Excellent. And it enhances the therapeutic relationship. it. And then there was another participant who had issues with repressing emotions. The way that she had named it was, I have negative emotions that I don't want to hurt people with. So I pushed that down. After the container on the last day, she came and she asked me, what do I do? Because I don't want to do this anymore. I can see how it's damaging my life and my relationships. and but I also don't I'm not quite sure what the next step is so what I did with her was I asked her I said you know how do you define what a positive emotion is and a negative emotion is and we got into a little bit of a of a Socratic kind of salon with her and I saw her two weeks later just the other day right and she went yeah well she did she did two things one is indeed and indeed, what she did was she would just name, I feel so pissed off right now because I'm so confused and I just want to be, but I still want to be here with all of you.

1:01:08And actually, when I say that, I feel glad, right? But she can track that. But then she also named in the two weeks after Tiamat, what occurred for her was previously, because she's in a period of transition where she has to move countries and do a lot of things, that she will normally feel dysregulated and overwhelmed. But something that seems to happen for her now is she can automatically go, oh, how's this occurring for me? Ah, right. Okay, I can take a pause. And then go back into it. And it's shifted the qualities of her relationships quite drastically. Those are really amazing. And I just want to reinforce, I have talked, as Ethan said, to people on integration calls, and I can see this has a lot of bleed to it.

1:01:59It really, Tiamat really bleeds into people's lives. So I want to just disabuse some people of preconception they might be forming. Tiamat is not just for people who want to be professional actors, is it? No, it's not. It's made to be general. it takes from actor training because I think there's a lot of the non-propositional, more ritual kind of pieces. So a lot of my work is far more embodied. We're on our feet a lot. We're moving around a lot. It's silly. It's fun, but it's serious play. But it's not only for people who want to be career actors. In fact, I found in my containers, and this is why we offer it free for actors who have gone through drama school and are now working as career actors or people who are still in drama school, right?

1:02:49That when there is a mix of people who want to be actors, and so they have a formed idea of what that looks like, usually commercial and entertaining, and people who are non-actors, who have a different orientation, however that might be, actually this is mutually beneficial. They learn a lot from each other. And I always feel very gratified when we have that mix of people in a room. Yeah. So I cut you off, but I wanted to No, no, you didn't cut me off at all. That's exactly what I wanted. So, I mean, and you know, you and I both agree this wasn't going to be a commercial for Tiamat. This was going to be a real lectern.

1:03:27And I think it has been. We're really, we're really. But I just want to say, I mean, at this point, I sound like an American. I just want to say.

1:03:39um people often ask me after they do the work uh for example you know people going through seeing god again for the first time people are saying can the third course like be more of a practicum um and it's like um well yeah no uh sort of but but um one of the things you know we should seriously think about is when people ask well what can i do next is to point them to Tiamat and also to point them to what Taylor Barrett's doing on Awaken to Meaning and you two are cross-pollinating all the time you know with the Socratic search space, the dialectic and theologos, philosophical fellowship, Socratic imaginal self-reflection, those sort of core practices and so there are places where people can go who want to do the serious play, the serious practice the ritual that turns what they might be learning philosophically and scientifically into a way of life we can offer that to people and of course i'm very very happy to be able to point people to you and tiamat or taylor and awaken to meaning because i know both of you i know your character i know your expertise i know your experience and the work you've done so for many of you, what you like, well, what can I do with, how can I do, it's like to do Tiamat and you can do tier one and tier two.

1:05:07And if you, if you do it well, you can get invited into tier three. You can be introduced to all kinds of different communities that where you may find a home. This is, this is, this is a real opportunity of where to go. If you think my work has opened something for you and you want to go forward. Ethan has done, I keep saying I need artists and poets to take this and make it. And Ethan has done that, but his poetry and his artistry is an ecology of practices that can help you turn all the philosophy into an ongoing way of life. So I recommend this. I strongly recommend it. Thank you, John. That's very heartening.

1:05:54And to add to that also, after tier three, we've recently launched our SPIRE program, which is a facilitator training program. Yeah. Say what the acronym means, Ethan, because you and I worked that out together, actually. Yes. So, we had talked about DIME being domains of practice, and I articulated to John that spire are the context in which you can stress test the ecology of practices. And so spire stands for service. Where are you in service? It's almost an agapic orientation in that sense. P stands for pilgrimage, which you have a lot of videos on now. The metanoetic passage, how it moves through different contexts, different cultures, different kinds of people, and how you as a participant move through those.

1:06:48There's inquiry, which is, that's the I, right? And that sense of, okay, inquire deeply into oneself and into the world, right? The scantia intuitiva kind of orientation that there is always something that is to be known, right? And as yet unknown. Ritual, which is the notion that one must transfer, be trained for transfer in the domain general fashion. And E is for enlightenment, which is not the destination, but the process, right? The way in which reality itself unfolds to you. And so when you have service, pilgrimage, inquiry, ritual, enlightenment, we train these capacities and these contexts in the SPIRE program so that folks can ultimately lead these ecologies of practices, not just what I've made.

1:07:39And this is important, John, because it's not contained to me. I appreciate the compliment. But what I see for Tiamat is that Tiamat is a foundation, the version I've made anyway, is a foundation that people can build on and grow from and add stuff. We've been talking recently, not even jokingly, but very seriously about Tiamat for kids, Tiamat in nature, Tiamat to address neurodivergence, Tiamat in different languages. right? And so that there are people out there who are working in these spaces, who are responsible for the development of others that I would love to see on these programs so that we can really research and jam something out and go, ah, what's the best adaptation here?

1:08:27And for me, at least this Euro tour was the first Euro tour that we did with our first group of Spire aspirants. We call them aspirants. That's great. Aspiration. Yeah. yeah and my god it has the one thing that is taught me which i've been desiring to learn for the longest time is how much i can actually like step back and lean into um the expertise of my co-facilitators right to help refine practices and this is one of the things i'm really really proud of john like the tier mat that i did as far back as a year ago or two years ago now has adaptations and refinements which were brought into the fold by people who had seen problems which I didn't know were there.

1:09:16I'm like, oh, you know, I think this connection is missing. And well, okay, how do we build that? How do we service participants better in those spaces? So it would be a dream to run like a series of containers with you, with the whole aspirant team, with Taylor, I would love to at some point. And one caveat is that you know, Taylor and I have talked at length, both about TMN, about ATMs programming. He's worked on this with me. He's been such a brilliant collaborator. He's just irreplaceable. Yeah. Yes. And I would say at this point, the distinction is quite arbitrarily geographic. Like, you know, I work so much more in the EU and in Asia, and I don't want to take Taylor's pie, right?

1:10:06And Taylor's services, so this North American... And we all were together in Toronto, you and Taylor and I running a retreat recently. Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, to be able to expand and for folks to get a sense of, okay, well, what's actually happening here transfers broadly, not just in my life, but also throughout the network of the stuff that we're doing. Yeah. I mean, that's the dream. That's the dream. Yeah. That is amazing. So next time, what I'd like to talk to you about is, because we keep touching it. I mean, we're bumping into the four ways of knowing a lot. And then once we get to participation, that's where, knowing and being are interwoven.

1:10:50And we can talk a little bit perhaps about how the logos shows up outside of speech or, or beyond speech and what's happening. And I also want to talk a little bit more to you about how would people like Like how, how, how could they bridge between some of their existing practices and Tiamat? So, you know, I imagine you've got quite a bit of experiences. Most people are, I mean, I imagine some people are coming in tabula rasa, right? But I imagine some people are coming in and, well, I have a meditation practice or I've been doing this or I do Alexio Divina. And how do you, like, how, how, how does that work for them?

1:11:39and so I think we'll move into that knowing and bridging and being next time. How does that sound for you? I think that's great and I would throw something in there. I think the boat that takes us across that would be sort of what I offer in tier one, which is the metamaps. So we call them metamaps as like a structure of guidance, a conceptual structure of guidance for knowing and being that actually collapses a lot of the dichotomies that you've been attacking in your courses. Yeah. And I want to talk about that. I want to talk about that. I want to talk about non-duality and the active collapsing of the dichotomies that has a real impact on people's phenomenological experience and link that to Wynne's renewing the senses.

1:12:29That's what I really want to talk about next time. Yes. And I have a small, it just occurred to me, I have a small correction that I need to make regarding what I said about ATM earlier. So please hear this the right way, everybody. When I say that there are ways to participate in TMI, ways to participate ATM, we don't offer our containers all the time because it's all very in-person. We don't have online offerings yet. And it's not to say that just because you're in the EU that you can't go to ATM. Please do. I'm more speaking to the in-person. If you want to meet an in-person practice and do stuff and maybe not have to fly across the continent, I'm happy to receive folks who are in the EU, as I'm sure Taylor also runs in-person things in the NA region.

1:13:20He does. And then ATM is also online. So we're trying to, we, meaning me and especially Taylor, and Ethan, we're trying to build places where people can go to turn the philosophy into philosophia, a way of life. So, Ethan, I always say if you give my interlocutors the last word, you're coming back for parts two and three, but thank you so much. This was really powerful. Any last parting words?

1:13:59I hope that when we speak again, the more that we say, the more silent we are.

1:14:06That's always a good thing. Thank you very much, my friend. Thank you very much, my friend.

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