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Integrating the Infinite with Layman Pascal
358 Plays19 days ago
What happens when you stop trying to outsmart life and start letting it teach you? In this wide-ranging and mind-expanding conversation, Scott Schwenk sits down with philosopher and spiritual provocateur Layman Pascal. Together, they explore how to navigate complexity without losing clarity, the difference between real growth and spiritual bypass, and why paradox may be the ultimate teacher. Expect to challenge your assumptions—and laugh a little along the way.
Layman Pascal - Metamodernist, Author, Alchemist
Layman Pascal used to be a Canadian meditation teacher, yoga instructor & philosopher of Integral Metatheory -- but he’s feeling much better now. In his rapidly dwindling spare time, he leads the Metamodern Spirituality Labs, hosts The Integral Stage and Soulmakers+ podcasts, and provides unique online courses for the Parallax Academy. He is a founding member of the Archdisciplinary Research Center, the Endemic Wisdom Council, the SPECTRA think tank for Metashamanics, Sky Meadow Institute, and the RSPND network. He is senior editor of Emerge online and he operates as co-chair of the Foundation for Integral Spirituality and Religion. His written articles can be found in various obscure journals and certain esoteric anthologies including Perspectiva’s Dispatches from a Time Between Worlds and Cadell Last’s Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Logic for the Global Brain. He is the sole author of Gurdjieff for a Time Between Worlds, Sex, Death & the Occult, as well as an upcoming book about Nietzsche. Layman is known for his philosophical work on the metaphysics of adjacency, analytic nonduality, coaxial developmental stage theories, neurological correlates of meditation, sacred naturalism, archaic futurism, many-one theology, embodied spirituality & emerging formulations of the human religious instinct suited to a post-postmodern civilization facing numerous accelerating and converging crises. And he has started referring to all his work as the Serious Playground.
Scott Schwenk - Master Coach, Spiritual Teacher, Culture Architect
Host and creator of the podcast The Choice To Grow, Scott is known for his hugely popular courses and workshops with OneCommune.com, Younity.com, Wanderlust Festivals, and Unplug Meditation, Scott has been catalyzing the inner evolution of others for decades: helping them to grow, transform obstacles into opportunities, and find Love within.
Scott spent several years living and studying in a meditation monastery which introduced him to the core body of Tantric meditation traditions which continue to flow through each of his teachings. Scott continues to study and teach from two key Tantric lineage streams.
Apprenticeships in leadership development, meditation and philosophy training, shadow work/shadow resolution and spiritual awakening are all part of Scott’s development into the thought-leader that he is today. He continues to refine his offerings studying and practicing with key innovators at the leading edges of human development.
Scott’s teachings support the entire person to not only progressively recognize, stabilize and embody our inextricable oneness with the source of creation (Waking Up), but also to resolve the wounds of the past (Cleaning Up), continually expand our capacities for wider and more inclusive perspectives on any moment (Growing Up) and creatively and joyfully participate and collaborate with all of life as a loving thriving human being (Showing Up).
You can receive a free guided meditation and explore Scott’s courses, workshops, retreats, training and master coaching at https://scottschwenk.com and can find him on Instagram @thescottschwenk.
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Transcript
Introduction and Grounding
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to The Choice to Grow. I'm Scott Schwenk. Through these dialogues, we'll explore fresh perspectives and discover practical tools for navigating a thriving life that adds value wherever we are.
00:00:14
Speaker
I'll introduce you to innovators and creators from across our world who embody what it means to cultivate growing as a way of life. Let's prepare together.
00:00:24
Speaker
Take a deep breath in.
00:00:28
Speaker
Hold the breath briefly as you soften your shoulders and soften the soles of your feet and palms of your hands. Then exhale like you're releasing tension and setting down a heavy burden from every cell.
00:00:41
Speaker
Ah. Now let's dive in.
Welcoming Lehman Pascal
00:00:49
Speaker
Welcome back everybody. I am tickled and overjoyed to bring you this next guest, this dialogue partner, Laman Pascal. Laman Pascal used to be a Canadian meditation teacher, yoga instructor, and philosopher of integral meta theory, but he's feeling much better now.
00:01:06
Speaker
He does things like lead the meta modern spirituality retreats, host the integral stage podcast, and provide unique online courses. Lehman specializes in meta-shamanics, I was going to say meta-shenanigans, but I think they're both true, and the metaphysics of adjacency, non-dualist theology, developmental theory, sacred naturalism, psychotechnologies, and cultivating human religious instincts suited to a postmodern civilization facing numerous accelerating and converging crises.
00:01:39
Speaker
Wow, that's a whole lot of words. I promise you that you don't have to understand the entire lexicon of language across the world to really get Lehman's vibe. Lehman's one of my favorite people, quickly became so. We met at a couple of conferences over the last several years.
00:01:56
Speaker
And what I appreciate so much about Lehman is he's raw and real funny. funny and really good with words,
00:02:13
Speaker
doesn't take himself too seriously except when he does, and is really good at bringing things together in such a way that the mind stops for a moment.
00:02:26
Speaker
So let's just see what you experience I'm inviting you to keep your mind really, really open because you're likely to hear things today that are unfamiliar or hear them in unfamiliar ways.
Metaphors and Identity
00:02:40
Speaker
And in the unfamiliar, there's a huge opportunity.
00:02:45
Speaker
So rather than try and slot this conversation into things you already think you know, be brand new, what what we could call beginner's mind. Just be curious.
00:02:57
Speaker
And we'll have a little practice here or there, some practical tips here or there. But really, this is the kind of conversation that's likely to be super beneficial the third listen.
00:03:10
Speaker
Not that you won't get anything on the first, but it's like soup. Most people who really know soup don't want soup the day it's made. You want it to sit around for a few days, mingle, everything gets you know to do its thing together. And then you've got this incredible elixir of flavor. So without further ado, hi, Lehman.
00:03:29
Speaker
Welcome. Have you considered calling this podcast the Schwank Shack?
00:03:38
Speaker
I think it might even get more listeners like radically so if I did that. Yeah, feel like that's a little swanky. Yeah, I could get behind that too. People wanted me to, one of my friends who's a product manager at Meta, he's like, you should be calling it the Scott Schwenk Show because it's about you. I'm like, and this is an integral dude.
00:04:00
Speaker
It's actually not about me. It's really, really not about me. And a big piece of what this is when it goes well is modeling collaboration. without having all the answers, modeling collaboration, verbal and nonverbal collaboration, and something emerges that I hope is a benefit to folks.
Spiritual Growth and Personal Development
00:04:21
Speaker
I love the concept of a choice to grow. It reminds me of, don't know if you know Swami Rudrananda, who was a Kundalini teacher in the seventies, but he had this thing about the wish to grow and used it as a way of opening up the regions of our body we think of as being chakra-like. You get to feel into this area. In terms of my somatic experience and my behavioral experience of this zone, I want to grow.
00:04:48
Speaker
You just repeat the wish to grow. That urge itself sometimes can just open up our centers in a really interesting way and align us with some kind of overall ah benevolent evolutionary impulse. You-volutionary, in a sense.
00:05:04
Speaker
I'm thinking I can see his one of his books, or maybe he's only had one, Spiritual Cannibalism. I can see it on my on my book stack. Great title, right? Yeah. What does that evoke for you, spiritual cannibalism?
00:05:16
Speaker
What does that seem to point to? What is that? It means we feed on each other in order to grow. Yeah. Yeah, his chief disciple that took over the entire scene um I've known, and he said, everything is food for something else. Maybe that was Rudy saying that, Reginanda.
00:05:36
Speaker
Everything is food for something. Wow. And that depends on the levels in yourself that you know how to eat with. and I've been with a lot of teachers and you can, ah there's an interesting thing that happens is that some students are like always on about what the teacher said and other students are like, who cares what he said? We're here to like suck up some kind of experiential vibe this guy's putting out.
00:06:02
Speaker
Yeah. So what of that? you know like I was just talking to one of my teachers recently who was talking about teaching large gatherings in Mexico. This is a ah tantric teacher.
00:06:14
Speaker
And she was noticing she had to actually stop the conversation in the room. She said, OK, what's good? no What's going on? What is happening? Because she felt like like this sucking sensation, literally sucking energy out of her body.
00:06:29
Speaker
And several of them said, oh, well we were taught that when you go sit with a teacher, you're supposed to suck as much of their prana as you possibly can.
00:06:40
Speaker
What of that? That's interesting. um And it's very hard to tell because there's a number of different interpretations that could come to bear on the same situation, right? Maybe.
00:06:52
Speaker
There's a mode in herself that would be ready for that kind of thing if she knew it was happening. Maybe different temperaments of people do it differently. Maybe the way they're trying to suck energy is not as mutual and generative as it could be. right some people are We talk about things like psychic vampires and also like narcissist is kind of a colloquial way to say psychic vampire. People who you talk to and later you're drained.
00:07:18
Speaker
yeah So there's a way of taking energy from people that's no good. But there are other ways of taking energy from people where you both leave energized. And if you don't both leave energized, then there's something wrong with the way the contact went down.
Energy and Transformation
00:07:31
Speaker
I want to triple click on you that right there as an ethos and as an aspirational movement towards life for all of us. Like, can we, will we choose to grow in a way that every interaction leaves us and the other person more energized, that adds value?
00:07:50
Speaker
Whether we want to have them to dinner or not is not the question. And this for me opens up the the real view that took me years to to hear and then many more years to begin to be able to live from, which is to notice the difference between the universal energy that moves through a teacher or a person and does the transformation and the particular body and personality of the one it's moving through. Said another way, there's the sun in a prism.
00:08:20
Speaker
The prism is not the sun. You could argue that it's all made of the same substance, but sun moves through the prism. The awareness moves through a teacher and gets refracted in and some ways by their personality.
00:08:34
Speaker
What of that? Like when we're talking about, I know you've encountered a lot of what are called crazy wisdom teachers. We don't know if they were crazy or if they were wise or some combination of both. Like Chogyam Trungpa, Adi Da,
00:08:47
Speaker
Rudrananda, the list goes on and on and on and on and on, where there were teachers who employed ways of being in their personality or when they were on stage that were very confusing to people who had rather Catholic Orthodox views about how a teacher should look, sit, dress, eat, recreate, procreate, and so on.
00:09:10
Speaker
What about all that?
00:09:14
Speaker
It's an interesting thing. I think there's a... a big debate about whether crazy wisdom teacher is a valid functional category of spiritual transmission or not. And I think that debate exists because sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't.
00:09:30
Speaker
There seems to me to be a kind of organic function, which is if you are accessing a full spectrum of your own energies, if you are dealing with complexities that might exceed the understanding of the people you're dealing with,
00:09:46
Speaker
If you have a an artistic and protean nature. Which protean? As I would argue, ah shape-shifting. Okay. And I would argue that the biosphere has that, so it's kind of a natural thing to be like that.
00:10:01
Speaker
ah That's going to catch people by surprise sometimes, right? It's going to feel like it's operating outside of some of their expectations because you're dealing with a a natural idiosyncratic full spectrum complex kind of phenomenon. So any box isn't quite going to handle it.
00:10:19
Speaker
And that leads to interesting developmental surprises that can be part of a valid, healthy teaching. But when you start to get the idea and the identity of being a crazy wisdom teacher, right, or you get the notion that I'm going to interfere with you for your own good, then it becomes very problematic.
00:10:39
Speaker
And even somebody who doesn't start out with that idea can acquire that idea if other people around them are feeding it back to them, like, oh, he's a crazy wisdom teacher. And so now you are thinking, oh, when I upset them, when I fuck with them, that's somehow for their own good, right? But now you're behaving like the average asshole on the street who is always interfering with other people and thinks it's helpful.
00:11:02
Speaker
So there's a very fine line. A lot of has to do with whether you take on the identity and the intention of the disturbance or whether it's more or less a spontaneous expression of, your being, your understanding and your love for the process of exchange.
00:11:16
Speaker
So that whether we take on the identity of the disturbance, I mean, I feel like it's easy for any of us to have a disturbance with another human being, whether it's behind the windshield of my car with another driver or somebody who's you know on the customer service line or the internal revenue service or whatever it might be easy to have a disturbance.
00:11:38
Speaker
And so easy to take it on as an identity, as you're talking about. like how So layman's an alchemist. And maybe we say what a little bit about what that means to you.
00:11:49
Speaker
I understand enough about alchemy to be dangerous to myself, which is when we have a disturbance, there's that's that's like a lump of coal, a point A. And there's the capacity with these tools to go to turning the coal to diamond, or rather revealing its diamond-like nature.
00:12:08
Speaker
But I notice if I take on, I become disturbed and stay in being disturbed, I'm not transforming anything. If anything, I'm just transmitting to the world around me, be disturbed with me.
00:12:25
Speaker
It's an
00:12:30
Speaker
endless set of nuances and sophistications. So you start in a very basic way with disturbance, right? The first thing is you have to have some um basic level of self-control, prefrontal cortex ability, human civility, whatever that is, you have to be able to not just indulge in the animal reaction as it comes up, right? So unless you can sort of stop yourself, ah there's no other options available. But if you can do that, then what?
00:12:57
Speaker
Then you can classically very simple first place to start is in the somatic experience of the whole body and you're like, what are the people who are in the middle? Somatic is like the inner experience of the body, right? Not the body seen from the outside as an object, but the lived experience of the body, all the stuff you sense, all the tingles and space and shit that's going on inside you.
00:13:18
Speaker
Okay. So I need to be able to be aware of my whole body and what's happening. c Sensorial. And the disturbance is not just out there. It's actually happening somewhere in here. It's a specific kind of a thing. You're like, oh, I feel it in my chest or I feel it throbbing in my belly or I feel my clenching of my forehead. There's specific signifiers.
00:13:40
Speaker
Right. So that becomes a place where you can relax a little bit and allow more elements of your body to start to go to work processing those energies. Right. So that's already a fairly sophisticated place to be with this.
00:13:53
Speaker
And then you could add in tracking different aspects of it. For myself, one of the things, and coming out of some of the Gerjeffian lineage, one of the most interesting things is, can you intentionally feel into the crux of the upset, right?
00:14:11
Speaker
not the general swirl of the circumstance and not the story about the situation as real or unreal as it might be in any given moment, but what's just a grr point, the point that actually really hurts.
00:14:25
Speaker
And if you check that, you think, I've actually probably felt this exact same pain and upset before on multiple occasions. And in most cases, I tried to get away from it. What if I tried to get into it? What if I tried to feel the point that really hurts, that really bothers me about this?
00:14:41
Speaker
Because that point is a point where different competing parts of ourselves are strongly disagreeing. And if you can remain at that point, you become like a bridge between those competing parts.
00:14:54
Speaker
So they become more integrated and you become more of like an inter-self or a meta-self or the the thing that exists between and beyond all of your parts. And then that thing can suck up that energy and make it into its own sort of extra body.
00:15:11
Speaker
I love, at least how I hear it, the simplicity of it.
00:15:16
Speaker
I notice the disturbance. I track where I'm feeling it in the body. I be with it. I be with it so fully that then what happens?
00:15:30
Speaker
Well, functionally, one of the things that happens is different systems are going to learn to coordinate more inside you in that moment. Phenomenologically, what happens is ah it becomes more interesting and it starts to smooth out, right? This thing, it doesn't, you don't think it's changing, but at some point it still has all the same qualities and now it feels smooth. Now it feels expansive.
00:15:56
Speaker
I had this thing, I went, I don't really like to go to a lot of ordinary social events, but we went to my partner's kids' ah school graduation And afterwards, we were driving home and she said, I'm glad. Thank you for coming. That meant a lot to me. I hope you didn't hate it too much. And I said, oh, I hated it a lot, but that's fine because I have a good strategy for dealing with things I hate. and She said, well, what's that? I said, I just hate them.
00:16:21
Speaker
but So it didn't take a different quality. i still have the same evaluation. I still don't like those circumstances. But the quality of that evaluation becomes more expansive and smoother, more conscious, more part of your general being rather than your reactive modality mode.
Coherence and Emotional Integration
00:16:38
Speaker
And then being at said event and then like basically energetically alienating everyone. it's this
00:16:49
Speaker
So what is it to act? What do you mean? Let's unpack that a little bit because there's a lot in that simplicity of when I hate, I just let myself hate. Some people might not be hearing that at all in in the way that you're meaning it. Like how I hear it is, oh, I'm not pressing against something.
00:17:06
Speaker
Therefore, there's space for it to resolve itself. But what would you say about all that?
00:17:13
Speaker
There's a really interesting distinction in two kinds of self-processing, self-work, right? And sometimes they're thought of as Eastern and Western psychotherapy.
00:17:25
Speaker
There's a Western approach which says you've got these energies and it's like a hydraulic system. You've got to vent these energies. So if there's any trapped in there, you've got to go back and identify with them and re-experience them and move them through and get them out.
00:17:39
Speaker
Then there's this other approach that I've heard referred to as Buddhist psychology, which says everything you do is training your brain to do more of that thing. And so if you go through your negative emotions, you're just getting better at having negative emotions.
00:17:54
Speaker
yeah like Okay, these are two very interesting theories. So what what can I do to bring them together? What is it that I could learn from Eastern psychology, let's say, a that could make Western psychology more useful and less problematic?
00:18:10
Speaker
What does it take to make the experiencing of a negative emotion into a positive healing thing rather than a self-indulgent and shadow practice thing?
00:18:21
Speaker
And generally, it's what I would call ah coherence of some kind. Now, sometimes another person can be that coherence for you. But if you can do it yourself, you are in a generally expansive, awake, clear, buzzy, hangs togetherness kind of state.
00:18:38
Speaker
And from that, you go into these experiences. You're going to reown them and then you're going to come back out of them to that state. So it's providing the context for your experience of the negative emotion.
00:18:50
Speaker
So if you're ah hating from that expansiveness, ah then the hatred energy is transformed and starts to diffuse back into that expansiveness.
00:19:02
Speaker
and you learn something about yourself, you recover the energy that was stored in that reaction, and you return to the expansiveness. Without that expansiveness, and you're just identified, you're just locked down in that experience, then you are just practicing being an asshole.
00:19:17
Speaker
Yeah.
00:19:19
Speaker
I guess I had a lot of practice being an asshole growing up. And you know yeah at the same time, tongue in cheek, but also compassion, like Most of us probably have had a significant number of experiences, whether we see them that way or not, that were troubling and difficult at times of life when we did not have even close to these understandings that seemed maybe sometimes come up all at once as sensations and reactions to a simple moment.
00:19:49
Speaker
And then i'm and I've lost myself. I've lost my sense of where my feet are. i'm um and taken over by the passion of needing to make something happen or push it away.
00:20:04
Speaker
How do we get to the point of being able to use these technologies more consistently? What's our, what's our task? to Part of it is knowing more about them so that they come up more quickly in your brain, right?
00:20:20
Speaker
Part of it is having some really basic preliminary practices of pausing or controlling yourself or whatever it is that gives you a moment when you can think about how you're responding. If you don't have that moment, no practices apply whatsoever.
00:20:37
Speaker
But this other thing that I've been hinting at in the last couple of remarks is about becoming a more deliberate participant in those energies. right So if you go, hey, i'm here I am, my regular state, I'm reasonably conscious, and then something happens, I feel threatened or I have a legitimate righteous point or whatever it is, and I go into this mode of overwhelm and explosion, and maybe I say stupid things, maybe I wreck some stuff in my life, maybe I just feel burned out later, whatever it is, that seems like a weird exception. And then I go back to being regular me.
00:21:16
Speaker
ah So there's no conversation between these states, right? But if regular me, if my most coherent self gets interested in, tries to even intentionally occupy those states, then there's a bridge between my intentionality and these states, and they can begin to communicate more so that when I'm in my regular state, I draw more energy from the source of fuel that might go into my reactions.
00:21:44
Speaker
And when I'm in my reactive mode, There's more of my consciousness and intentionality and higher values involved. But none of that really happens unless you can sort of intend to be in the reactions that you're in. You have to kind of own them again. You have to bring your consciousness and purposefulness to that experience so that they are in contact with the experience's energies.
00:22:08
Speaker
One of the things for y'all listeners that I didn't mention at the beginning is Lehman is a prolific writer and he led out a book last year on Gurjeev, who is an extraordinary teacher, controversial teacher, a series of essays that are on one hand really showing us some of these technologies through the lens of Gurjeev and Lehman's digestive process, and but more so they're actually magical movements of words meant to release awareness from its captivity and stimulate confusion, frustration, and irritation so that we can work with them. What do I mean?
00:22:51
Speaker
Well, the thing i'm going to pull on is a quote I heard years ago from Gurdjieff where he says that in any one of us there's a theater of selves, like little selves, little beings. Which eye is speaking?
00:23:04
Speaker
And is that the real eye? Verify the eyes. How does this all play into, you know, we've we've heard parts work. We've, you know, in terms of shadow, we've got all these little parts.
00:23:15
Speaker
Is that what he's pointing at? Like we've got all these parts that aren't getting along or these states that don't communicate with each other. First of all, it the the the praise are heaping on me in this podcast where i'm I'm like soup that's been left out for several days.
00:23:35
Speaker
And my book is very frustrating. It's just explicit. but you know um Gurdjieff has this idea, which is much more common now than it was when he was writing, of the plurality of the self.
00:23:49
Speaker
Yeah. Right? There were these people, there was... ah Robert of Saglioli and Gurdjieff in some early 20th century people who thought about this. And of course, Freud and of course, the shamanic idea of different kinds of souls and animal spirits in us. So it goes way back.
00:24:06
Speaker
But really, in the last couple of decades, there's been a lot of philosophy and neuropsychology work on how we are an internal multiplicity. And that the sense of a single coherent self is largely an illusion that each part experiences when it temporarily takes over the system.
00:24:24
Speaker
So in Gurdjieff's way of thinking, there are, on the one hand, any number of different sub-selves, like when you're doing creative parts work. There's all these different elements of yourself that can communicate better with each other and that they're teamwork. The thing you want from a singular self is actually an enhanced quality of teamwork between your many parts.
00:24:45
Speaker
But there was there, let's just let that land for a second. And enhance quality of teamwork between your many selves or parts and enhance quality of teamwork between all my parts, my conscious, my subconscious, my pre conscious, all of it, my big toe and my eyelid.
00:25:03
Speaker
And also your book isn't frustrating because of itself. It's more like, There's a rigor in participating as a reader with it and not sitting back and expecting just basic Netflix entertainment of a sitcom.
00:25:19
Speaker
it's it it's It requires me to actually see myself in ways that aren't necessarily flattering to my ego as I read so that I can actually start to deal with possibilities.
00:25:35
Speaker
I did write it mostly to help Scott face his egotism. You're a giver. nothing like yeah It's an interesting idea because we have this traditional notion of like ah the one God who we read about in the book gave us all a soul.
00:25:54
Speaker
And then the society moves on a little bit and it's like, oh, we don't believe that nonsense necessarily. We just believe that you're magically an individual rational agent of the economy now. You're like, well, that sounds awfully similar. Yeah.
00:26:08
Speaker
Right. So what we're seeing now in in a pluralistic or like at least pluralistic mode of processing that we get from a lot of our new sciences and philosophers is this sense that really there's a whole bunch of different functions in you doing a lot of different things.
00:26:25
Speaker
and Like split brain studies do that, right? There's at least two personalities related to the two different brain hemispheres. You don't see it unless you cut them apart, but they were there sort of disagreeing and switching around the whole time.
00:26:38
Speaker
And the sense that you have of a coherent whole self is the degree to which those parts are functioning really well. They're cooperating well. They're doing internally what we hope to be able to do interpersonally with each other.
00:26:52
Speaker
So if you can get more of your parts on board and increase their degree of coordination, you get more of the positive experiences we used to call individual selfhood, but we don't have to call them that. That's a little bit too tight of framing.
00:27:06
Speaker
It's more expansive, more natural.
Participatory Reality and Serious Play
00:27:08
Speaker
It's an ecosystem of selves, but you can still get all those benefits. Those benefits come from the enhanced mutuality. Enhanced mutuality.
00:27:17
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So if i can if I can have a real consistent practice where I get my parts to collaborate with one another, then I'm actually useful at so-called social change or architecting systems for the world that actually benefit without creating more problems.
00:27:39
Speaker
Yeah, this is that's Gurdjieff's conjecture, for sure. And in terms of a book on occultism, you know one of the discussions around Zagic, this new idea, a different way of thinking about magic that we've been talking about in some other spaces, is the notion of a magical body, which is also a way of saying the more coordinated all your different, mostly subconscious parts are, the more you can be a participatory agent in the recreation of the reality that you're embedded in.
00:28:10
Speaker
When you say recreation of the reality, that that catches me a little bit. what I'm recreating the reality I'm embedded in. What is that? It's just, I mean, you call it magic. You call it art.
00:28:23
Speaker
um You call it agency. It's just changing the things that are around you in order to create more value and experience, right? Ah, so because when I heard recreating. tidy your room, you've recreated the reality around you.
00:28:36
Speaker
Got it, got it, got it. I misheard that in a more um simple-minded sort of way as like repeating the past.
00:28:47
Speaker
Yeah, in in some ways it is in the sense that we imagine creation as a prior activity, right? But now you're going to join that process. It's not just something that existed in the past that you are now suffering from.
00:29:00
Speaker
And you're not just going to repeat it, but you are going to repeat the act of standing in the position of creation. But now it's in your hands. Hmm.
00:29:12
Speaker
Hmm. So I want to weave this in because in your new book where you really unpack Zajic from a course you've given, you talk about a number of magical principles or alchemical or how, just how life actually works energetically.
00:29:30
Speaker
One of the things you talk about is a constructive attitude of serious play.
00:29:38
Speaker
A constructive attitude of serious play. Serious play. Serious play, and I've been using the phrase serious playground to sort of like a blanket phrase to cover my work.
00:29:49
Speaker
and Mostly I associate, I've done a lot of conversations with John Vervecki, the cognitive scientist who lives in Toronto, which is the next town down from me. and He talks a lot about serious play and as like a summary way of describing a lot of things we've worked out in the science of learning and development now.
00:30:11
Speaker
right that children figure out most of the basic skills required to be an adult through forms of play. right It's not serious, it's not real, but it is serious in that it's required in order to become who you are, to become capable of living in this world, and you have to take it with a minimum degree of seriousness in order to really do it, but not so much seriousness that you get trapped in believing that that's reality.
00:30:37
Speaker
right So i let's pretend the floor is lava, right? um You have to take that seriously enough to play and you develop skills in doing so and you coordinate with other people in doing so, but the floor isn't really lava. It's playful.
00:30:51
Speaker
So there's a kind of sweet spot between taking things too seriously and too lightly. And if you don't have both of those, Cho-Gyam Trungpa said this great thing about, he said, how do you ride a horse? You hold on tight, but not too tight. Yeah.
00:31:06
Speaker
but So processes of flow and development are like that. You can't choke them and you can't let go completely. So it's got to have some seriousness and some play to it. And that brings us to the place in ourselves where we can be participants freely and seriously without worrying too much about what the metaphysical baggage of the situation is. Yeah.
00:31:28
Speaker
Yeah, so what I'm hearing is like, we've got this economy of attention. I've got certain amount of attention. And as far as I can tell, it's literally the only thing I own that can't be taken away by a rainstorm, an earthquake, a bankruptcy, like I've got attention.
00:31:45
Speaker
And what's going on with that seems to be the subject of of all this work. Like what's what's happening with my attention and that it seems to have creative power, the power to create and generate for better or worse.
00:31:58
Speaker
And like coming back to recognizing out there is not the cause of my experience, no?
00:32:09
Speaker
ordinary things won't take your attention away, but high performance algorithms in a commercially oriented society might be able to steal some of it. ah Okay. Oh, there's there's extra incentive today to ah be good custodians of and cultivators of our own attention, which comes down to a couple of interesting factors. One is how much intentionality do you bring to your attention?
00:32:35
Speaker
And can you split your attention? like same as our muscles, you tear them and they grow, you tear them and they grow, right? So you have to be able to simultrack attention in a way where it pulls on itself as a kind of an exercise.
00:32:48
Speaker
And this special form of doing that, which I associate with liminality or betweenness or a balance, right? A kind of sweet spot, like a half a trance where you're aware and not aware simultaneously. For me, that's the ideal mode for a cult experimentation, for doing ritual, right? You You don't want to be totally spaced out or totally lost in some other state of consciousness.
00:33:13
Speaker
You don't want to be confined to everyday conventional consciousness. You want to be able to move kind of fluidly in the neutral gear between those. And that's a great version of attention for undertaking a lot of different intriguing practices.
00:33:28
Speaker
I've heard teachings about um alchemy teachers of students creating ordeals for the student to go through, some sort of a difficult circumstance to solve for that student, it's difficult, that is set up to actually release capacities and awarenesses and dissolve obscurations.
00:33:48
Speaker
It seems to me that life does that all by itself for us, or the way we live it, and that the preliminary training which was maybe the advanced training, is to actually be able to manage and regulate my own nervous system, just starting there, as opposed to every time something happens, I'm suddenly extra reactive.
00:34:17
Speaker
For individuals, life provides many opportunities to experiment with the ordeal. For societies, there might be elements of shared ordeal that we do have to artistically craft in order to build a shared social field with each other.
00:34:34
Speaker
But individually, there's a set of prerequisite capacities for being able to make use of suffering properly. I wrote a Substack article a couple of months ago called Ordealology, which is to say there's a lot of ways to think about how negative experiences can be good for us, but they aren't automatically good for us.
00:34:54
Speaker
Right. We know now from, say, sports medicine that you need stress in order to heal and organize your body. You can't just release stress and be relaxed. We also know that there's forms of psychological suffering necessary to organize your attention and grow as an individual. And there's post-traumatic growth. There's all these different kinds of things.
00:35:13
Speaker
But you first beat need to be able to, one, have fairly good regulation of your nervous system and to have enough intentionality to be able to volunteer for these experiences.
00:35:25
Speaker
but One of the famous things is so-called exposure therapy, right? Exposure therapy means you agree to interact with something that you have a strong negative reaction, even a phobia towards, right?
00:35:36
Speaker
I don't, I'm terrified of spiders, but I'm willing to listen to somebody talk about spiders, or I'm willing to hold a plastic spider, or I'm willing to touch a spider lightly. And these can be really transformative for an individual in terms of freeing their energy and moving them ahead in their lives.
00:35:53
Speaker
But if you throw a spider on somebody who's terrified of a spider and they didn't agree to it, odds are you're going to re-traumatize them and make it worse. Right. This fits into the critique of crazy wisdom teachers as well. Right.
00:36:08
Speaker
There's a whole bunch of skill necessary to be a crazy wisdom teacher. So you're not just reinforcing egotism by attacking it. Just like we're not we don't want to reinforce your fear by throwing something you're terrified at. it So the prerequisite is contextually you agreed to do it.
00:36:25
Speaker
So that your attention and your energy is available to the experiment of going through the ordeal. If you just put ordeals on someone, that's just sadism and misery and suffering.
00:36:36
Speaker
It's not transformative unless they're the intentional component of the being is involved in the process. Hmm.
00:36:47
Speaker
So i see a note I have here that's just perfectly this moment from your new book, staying at the edge of normal sensemaking. That seems like a really important piece to unpack here about going from moment to moment in my life and actually experimenting with what we're talking about here, staying at the edge of normal sensemaking.
00:37:09
Speaker
Say a little more about that. There's two interesting components as there are to any any edgeness, because you don't want to go too far this way or too far this way. You're balancing something. So one is to be interested in, and in some ways we could say outthink your ordinary sense-making. yeah Here's what's reasonable to me, and here's the edge of what's reasonable to me. here's Here's a peculiarity. I keep my attention and my feeling alert to the boundary of what I can make sense of.
Liminality and Initiation
00:37:41
Speaker
There's always something at the edge of your awareness or your experience in every moment where you're you're not quite sure what it is, right? It might be the background context. It might be a peculiar object in your space.
00:37:55
Speaker
It might be the biggest unanswered question you've been facing lately. It's always something there. Might just be gas. so Yeah. Could just be gas. ah So one of the skills is to constantly be moving your attention towards something that's present but undetermined.
00:38:13
Speaker
And that's also a great way to go into a trance state, which I would argue is focused attention on an undetermined reality of some kind. What's that mean, an undetermined reality? That's for the new folks. Okay.
00:38:27
Speaker
Yeah. So Ian McGilchrist, who's done more than anybody to bring left brain, right brain talking back to science, he has this very interesting model about how what the brains do in different animals, right? Right down to the the chicken, let's say.
00:38:42
Speaker
right The chicken has to be able to do two things. It has to be able to attack specific things like seeds and worms. So it's like, oh, that's a worm. I peck at it. It has half a brain to do that.
00:38:52
Speaker
But at the same time, it doesn't want to get eaten by a hawk. So it has to have another half a brain that's just generally scanning for anything that might appear. And it doesn't know what that thing's going to be yet. So it's got a very open-minded, undetermined half of its brain and a very specific focus and identify part of its brain.
00:39:11
Speaker
Now, what happens if you turn those to face each other and you make something that's a very specific focus on something that's not determined? This tends to create trance states in human beings when we do it symbolically, verbally, linguistically.
00:39:28
Speaker
So you see this in a lot of the way some politicians speak or the way some advertising is like, um, I want you to think of the most wonderful possible thing, something that's just for you, something that's really meaningful to your life. Now, we haven't specified what that is. It's completely open-ended.
00:39:47
Speaker
And yet I've asked you to focus on it. ah that right It's hyper-specificity about a thing that's completely undetermined. And if you repeat that a number of times, you go into an interesting, slightly spaced out state of mind, which is like the gateway to deeper trance states or to ritual activity, things like that.
00:40:07
Speaker
Why are trance states beneficial and important for ritual activity and ah growth and awareness? normal thing that any hypnotherapist will say is that everyone's in a trance state at all times.
00:40:23
Speaker
So it's not a matter of trance states or not. It's about which one you're in and is it applicable to your circumstance? If you want to participate in ritual or developmental practice, you're going to want a trance state that's more conducive to those.
00:40:38
Speaker
And those trance states are, um Imagine them at the center of a mandala, right? That you've got all these other modes of consciousness you could go into, but you want to be in the one that's free to move between them. And you want to be in that state, ideally with other people who are in that state, so that you have the maximum number of shared possibilities for engagement and sensemaking.
00:41:02
Speaker
In the ritual, you don't know which sensemaking tunnel to go down. And so you're staying open to the widest set of them. And in some ways that recapitulates, right, a child's experience of being new to the world. It triggers our ability to be learners through participatory process, which is what ritual is.
00:41:23
Speaker
Learners through participatory process. That sounds like life.
00:41:28
Speaker
Ideally. Yeah. Huh.
00:41:33
Speaker
What is initiation?
00:41:37
Speaker
There's obviously formal, ah social, and spiritual initiations of various kinds, right? yeah Anything where, know, here's your graduation certificate from high school. That's a kind of an initiation, right? Your first day on the job, all those normal things.
00:41:54
Speaker
First date is an initiation experience. And then there are these wisdom and transmission lineages that we receive from our ancestors and which are still around, sometimes start up afresh.
00:42:08
Speaker
And they have moments in which um special forms of what seem like consciousness and energy and understanding are transmitted from one person to another in a way that puts them into alignment with each other.
00:42:22
Speaker
makes you a receiver of a kind of ongoing living serpent of knowledge that passes down through the ages. yeah And that can be structured, right? There might be rhythms to how those things are set up. There might be special circumstances that facilitate that.
00:42:40
Speaker
There might be special moods the individuals have to get into in order to do that. There's a lot of technical elements to that. But by far, the most common initiations are what they call self-initiations.
00:42:53
Speaker
And it's not really self-initiated as an intentional process in most cases. It's more just that there's a spontaneous emergence as the result of a circumstance and practice and intention that a person's been going through for a while.
00:43:09
Speaker
I had this, I used to be really obsessed with trying to figure out what activated my most interesting states. So you're like, you're doing a practice and then all of a sudden something's amazing and you, you wander around all day and you feel like you're God or you're eternal.
00:43:26
Speaker
And then it wears off and you're like, okay, I'll just do what I did yesterday and it'll happen again. And it doesn't. nope And I came up with this analogy, which was the one millionth customer.
00:43:37
Speaker
So you go down to the store, You open the door, ding, it rings, you go in, all of a sudden confetti and trumpets and they give you like a free ham because you're the one millionth customer. And then the next day you're like, I'll just go down to the store and it'll happen again. But it doesn't because it was the result of 999,999 other trips and other people going into that same store.
00:43:58
Speaker
So you just have to go back to work in some kind of accumulating process and it pays off periodically. But you can't recreate states with the same practices that you remember doing just before they were initiated.
00:44:13
Speaker
So there's a kind of organic complexity to these spontaneous initiations. And in order to figure out how to work with them better, we have to dissociate them a little bit from the methodology we thought we were applying.
00:44:27
Speaker
Ooh. Okay, so I would like to dissociate it from the methodology of getting it from the past for a moment and be curious about initiations from the future and unpacking that in a way that that makes sense to anybody who's listening, like what I mean or what you mean by...
00:44:44
Speaker
getting it from the future because it's so easy to look over our shoulder and go, well, these people from thousands of years ago who wore special clothes and outfits and special costumes and jewelry must know more and must have something more to give me than I have for myself.
00:44:59
Speaker
However, it's iterative.
00:45:04
Speaker
And not that it should be thrown out, but it's iterative.
00:45:10
Speaker
It's... Interesting things about the past, right? One is you actually receive something. Another one is what you receive is generating something new. And maybe that's what they all did. but I think that's part of esoteric and occult lineage being passed down is there were sometimes hundreds of years go between somebody who knew and the next person.
00:45:31
Speaker
right And in that intervening time, you like sit in front of the Sphinx and go, what the hell is this about? You encounter the mystery and you regenerate the lineage from out of your encounter with the mystery.
00:45:42
Speaker
So I think that's happening from the past. When it comes to the future,
00:45:47
Speaker
We don't know what time is, right? We have guesses. We might watch a video on physics and hear terms like retrocausality, or maybe there's multiple time streams, or maybe classical time and quantum time are different, or maybe time's emergent from a computational process.
00:46:06
Speaker
There's a lot of weird stuff, and we don't really know what it is. But the notion of receiving something from the future is participatorily and metaphorically meaningful to us.
00:46:18
Speaker
And I think it's a good way to think about being at the leading edge of what the universe is trying to do in your case, right? That there's a duty that we have toward our future selves and there are qualities, whether they're really out there coming back toward us or whether we're projecting them based on being right at the leading edge of what's happening. it kind of doesn't matter.
00:46:42
Speaker
Those are just framings. But the idea is that by thinking those things, by having that orientation, we can access certain types or qualities of initiation that we might not be able to access when we're thinking about receiving it from the past.
00:46:59
Speaker
And certainly the past is tricky because we want to honor it and it's where the sources of our energy are. at the same time, species and ethnicity and family and all this stuff can often be a limitation or a trap for a lot of people or ah a sinkhole for their energy and their attention.
00:47:19
Speaker
So we need to be able to honor it in certain ways, but also let it go in other ways and become accessible to things that are, if not ontologically novel, at least novel in their instantiation in this moment of history and on this world where we can like sense the living quality or what we project is the living quality of futures that are possible and align ourselves with those.
00:47:46
Speaker
i think maybe I don't know exactly who listens to or watches this show, but my so my guess is a number of them know a kind of inner distinction between past sages and future sages. I think a lot of people have had glimpses or intuitions or dreams of that kind.
00:48:07
Speaker
And we want to be on good terms with both of them, let's say. Yeah, the term that's coming up is is a multi syllabic, but here it is, trans temporal, trans temporal, like outside of time, you know, I didn't think about it until this conversation. I've thought about the future a lot in terms of ah a way to move into expanded awareness beyond the familiar sense making and open to what could be possible.
00:48:38
Speaker
but it had a like kind of linearity, like the future, like like there's only one, as opposed to infinite possible futures. And where I'm saying going to the future is just shorthand for saying, I'm going beyond what I know, I'm becoming receptive to possibility.
00:48:56
Speaker
Time is a really interesting thing to think about, especially in a developmental context, right? You hear people say something like, uh, You know, a dog only knows 30 seconds of reality kind of thing.
00:49:08
Speaker
He has this little window. That's not wholly correct, but it's an interesting way to think about it. And then there's human beings who just exist in this moment, or I'm just going to eat these chips because tomorrow, the me of tomorrow doesn't really exist for me right now.
00:49:23
Speaker
Right. And then we go, well, then you get this big traditional civilization that we have six thousand years of time since the guy who wrote the magic book created the world. And pretty soon it will be destroyed. We've got this big chunk.
00:49:36
Speaker
then you get this modernism and they're like, no, there's billions of years of time. And we have these clocks that measure seconds very precisely. Now you go, oh, that's pretty good. And then you get this kind of pluralistic time where they say, well, no, no, there might be several sorts of time happening simultaneously.
00:49:53
Speaker
Maybe it folds back on itself. Maybe it doesn't even exist. So this rich, um at least postmodern complexity of what time consists of,
00:50:04
Speaker
And then this next step of trying to make some kind of usable order out of that is extremely fascinating.
Embracing the Present and Values
00:50:10
Speaker
I love the ah the multimodal richness of what time could be because each of the different variations makes a slightly different suggestion to us about how we hold our inner practice.
00:50:25
Speaker
Wow.
00:50:30
Speaker
I have nothing to say to that other than I just feel stopped the mind stops right there.
00:50:40
Speaker
And so I'm curious, am I touching liminal space?
00:50:47
Speaker
When the mind stops? probably
00:50:51
Speaker
And if my mind stops as a listener, What can I explore if that's new to me when I notice, wow, I'm just in a stillness right now. I want to be here. I'm not necessarily tracking word by word, all the content, but something's happening for me while I'm listening. And I'm noticing this increasing space between thoughts. How can I play with that? How can i have some serious play with that?
00:51:15
Speaker
think The two most obvious things you can do with that are on the one hand, um, Try to hold to it a little bit, try to stay with it, try to undergo its pressure a little bit more. Treat it like, you know, if you were like, ah you lived on a mountain and you were gonna move higher up on the mountain, you'd have to learn to breathe in that air, the pressure would be a little bit different.
00:51:38
Speaker
So imagine it's like a different atmosphere with a different pressure. And by sort of like letting yourself experience the pressure of it, you're allowing your body and your brain to adapt to it. And so you can start to become an inhabitant of that space.
00:51:52
Speaker
And then the other thing, which is just as valuable, maybe more so, is come and go from it, right? Get really good and have a really good conscience about going into it and coming out of it, going into it and coming out of it. Because it's not something where you have to be a mystic specialist in that particular aspect of experience.
00:52:10
Speaker
It's just a normal part of reality's personality. panoply, the multifariousness, I'm using words that are too big here. Reality has a lot of different facets and you want to be able to move through all of them. So every time you can come and go from one of them, that's great practice.
00:52:29
Speaker
I'm really like sucking up every bit of this conversation like it's like it's nectar. For me, it is. and Because it's so easy to get pulled, I see, for human beings, my students, my clients, friends, even me at lots of different moments of the day, get pulled into, like, there's some story I'm living. I'm the hero of the story, and I have to solve it. And once I solve it, everything is going to be lovely.
00:52:55
Speaker
And this kind of mono myth of a linear flow of time in my life that's getting me somewhere that's better than here.
00:53:10
Speaker
I mean, the classic thing there is to just compare that feeling to the last 10,000 times you had that feeling and did it work?
00:53:22
Speaker
Nope. thats but Not once. So it's got some explanatory deficits, let's say, to use that interpretation. Is there a pill for that? Or or a cream?
00:53:43
Speaker
You have to, to some degree, be in contact with the state that you want in order to proceed toward it.
00:53:53
Speaker
And this is the this is the thing that I see. I'm currently giving a course called Prospering. It's a 90-day course. it's ah It's a work. It's an alchemical working. It happens to have some possible information in it.
00:54:07
Speaker
But it's really a participatory exploration of how am I meeting the moment?
00:54:16
Speaker
What am I projecting onto the moment?
00:54:20
Speaker
Everything we're talking about here, for me at least, is a release from this trying to strangle something out of reality that's already here. like All these teachings I've been freshly diving and revisiting that I've studied for years about the Hermetic Laws of Alchemy, loosely often called the Law of Attraction, so much more than that.
00:54:43
Speaker
But like how energy actually works, independent of anybody's religiosity, how energy works and how it fits into prospering health, wealth, wisdom, and love, they all say some version of the same thing. I have to be actively practicing the state that I would experience when the fulfillment of my desire has happened in advance of the fulfillment or I don't stand a chance.
00:55:07
Speaker
And for so many people, this is the kind of paradox that just has them throw their hands up and quit and go back to reacting. Thoughts?
00:55:17
Speaker
I think there are at least three usefulnesses to that kind of approach, right? On the one hand, there's a kind of... ah Is it part of the mechanics of reality?
00:55:32
Speaker
And as far as I'm concerned, in Zagic, in occult thinking, we can be pretty agnostic about does this cause, does this drive the mechanism of the world, right? Will I really get this thing because I had this feeling?
00:55:44
Speaker
Maybe yes, maybe no. You don't have to decide. You can just experiment and see what happens. We don't need to draw conclusions about reality. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. Here's what definitely happens is,
00:55:55
Speaker
In order to be your optimal self, you have to be in it able to go into flowing modes, which are modes of function.
00:56:06
Speaker
And those modes of function are associated with your ability to embody the values that you're working on. but You can't just um achieve a good... ah like Many people have this experience where they're they're so upset by something that they want to fix that they end up doing a very shitty job trying to fix it.
00:56:25
Speaker
right Because you're not in your mode of optimal function. To get into your mode of optimal function, you have to be in contact with your actual values, which are positive feelings associated with the thing you're working on.
00:56:37
Speaker
So there's a sense of that's very practical. You just, you have to feel some success in order to be successful enough to try to succeed at things. And then you could say there's a very, not reductionistic, but simplified version of this, which is, does your brain know enough to be able to experience the win, even if you were able to attain it?
00:57:01
Speaker
Right? So you can take somebody in and go, ah okay, I'm here to help you. I'm a psychiatrist or a counselor or a life coach. And what I want to do is help you. What do you need? Your life sucks and you need a car. I'm going to help you get that car. Then you get that car.
00:57:17
Speaker
Do you feel successful or not? Well, that's not necessarily dependent upon the car. It's dependent upon the car and Your brain's ability to experience happiness, contentment, success, right? That's an actual skill to be able to move the electricity and the chemistry around in your system to feel that.
00:57:35
Speaker
So you, in addition to working on your manifestation projects by straightforward and sometimes non-straightforward methods, right? You have to be practicing the capacity to be content, to be happy, to be satisfied, to ah experience the biochemistry and the posture of what it's like to get what you want so that if you get it, you can actually have the satisfaction you hoped it would bring.
00:58:05
Speaker
ah So many things come to play on being able to do that. And it makes me it makes me consider that the real po one of the real possibilities of so-called manifestation work or prospering work is not about the so-called outcomes of things and circumstances,
00:58:26
Speaker
maybe the meta circumstance of freeing myself from my presets, my preset reactivity, my preset attachments and aversions, and being able to be resilient, adaptive, and playful with whatever's showing up.
00:58:48
Speaker
So there's, I wrote this Gurdjieff book and I'm working on this Nietzsche book. And in between, Parallax wanted to turn a course I did into this third book. right i'm I'm actually sort of, it's happening now, but I'm less involved in that one. It's something they've been working on.
00:59:04
Speaker
My focus is on Nietzsche right now. And Nietzsche has a lot of very interesting things to say about value. One of his great phrases is, he who despises himself still honors himself as one who despises.
00:59:18
Speaker
And what I unpack from that is even to make a negative evaluation means that you are in contact with value, right? Even if you go, the universe is meaningless and I suck, right? Well, how did I determine that?
00:59:34
Speaker
I had to have access to the the thermometer of evaluation in order to make that value call. But if I'm in contact with the scale of value, that scale includes maximal value, right?
00:59:48
Speaker
I was trying to determine how much of maximal value this circumstance has, and I decided none. But that means I was able to compare it to my experience of maximal value, which I must therefore have right now.
01:00:02
Speaker
Therefore, I am currently, whether I can consciously access it or not, currently in contact with maximal value. Right. And then, okay if I've got that contact, how can I zero in on that with my attention? How can I demonstrate that with my body?
01:00:17
Speaker
How can I convert my heart and my thinking to be able to really be a version of that thing? Because I'm not just in a field of variable values seeking out something good.
01:00:29
Speaker
I'm actually beginning my experience as an evaluator from a position that touches absolute value, whether I know it or not. So that's a like background skill set we can practice.
01:00:42
Speaker
That sounds like all the practices of of alchemy where I have to recognize that I'm already in contact with the Philosopher's Stone. I have to recognize that everything I'm seeking is either already here or not existing.
01:01:00
Speaker
The Vishwasara Tantra says what is here is there, what is not here is nowhere. I grew up with these books that my grandmother left me that had a lot of images of alchemical notebooks from the Middle Ages in them. I love these images and the slogans that went with them.
01:01:17
Speaker
And one of the famous alchemical slogans is you have to have some gold to make gold. and Different ways to take that. One way is if you want to like draw in subtle energy from your breathing, you have to already have some subtle feeling of your body for that to mix with.
01:01:34
Speaker
Another way to think about it is if you want to access value, you have to already be in contact with value, right? Gold is a symbol of valuableness.
01:01:45
Speaker
I want valuable things. I want to have more valuable experience. But the part of me that gets that is a part that already knows what value is, already feels its current and sort of, let's say, everlasting access to value.
01:02:01
Speaker
I say everlasting because we can't. We can't see any moment in which we don't have it. I know a lot of people who want to say now, like, value is implicit to reality.
01:02:12
Speaker
Maybe. It's always there when you're there. If it's there when you're not there, we don't know. But it's definitely always there when you're there. One of my colleagues, wonderful female practitioner and teacher of Sri Vidya Tantra, years ago we were talking about, we talk all the time about you know the ease, the love, the difficulty of teaching and being a student and all the things. And she was very clear, she is very clear as a teacher that any inner workings are about confronting our value system. Does that feel true to you too?
01:02:49
Speaker
more or less, right? It's a lot of variation in what confronting your value system might mean. Uh, but there's a kind of participation and alignment and, uh, existential contentment that are necessary in order to make any progress as a being in my experience, right? Even if we look at like, there's kind of two basic methods of meditation, uh,
01:03:16
Speaker
Shamtha and Vipassana, the Buddhists would say in various pronunciations of those words. right One is you're going to intentionally focus on something in order to get the results of focus.
01:03:28
Speaker
Great. The other way is you're going to deal with whatever is arising through the intercession of a particular insight. Whatever comes up, I'm going to see that it's temporary or that it has component parts or that I have some role in creating its limiting qualities or whatever it is.
01:03:46
Speaker
and So one of the things that seems to be involved in that sort, that Vipassana-like meditation style, where you confront whatever is arising, is that you discern what your actual values are relative to what that thing is And when you become clear about what's valuable to you in what's arising in any moment, that thing tends to dissipate or decontract or release.
01:04:16
Speaker
And it gives you this little moment and then you go on to the next one. So if you're trying to figure out the solution to a problem, very often there are Very basic things about your relationship to that circumstance, which if they come up for you, allow you to dispense with the rest of the considerations.
01:04:38
Speaker
Right. Like, um what am I going to do about food in my life? You're like, well, there's all kinds of potential solutions, but really I'm going to have to try to eat well. That's valuable. I'm going to have to try to enjoy myself and I'm going to have to accommodate circumstances as they show up and other people.
01:04:56
Speaker
These are all valuable to me. And outside of that, there's really nothing I can do. I'm going to have to operate in those values. Right. And then that becomes so obvious. Well, of course, of course I would. No matter what the solution is, it's going to involve those values.
01:05:10
Speaker
And then your brain's like, well, OK, we don't have to worry about that right now. It's clarified by our values. And if you do that to everything that comes up for a while, like if you sat for a half hour and did that, you can get into some extremely released and super valuable seeming states.
01:05:28
Speaker
Hmm. Values. So here's a value question. And I ask every guest this. So my favorite quote from Shinryu Suzuki Roshi, who opened the Zen
Existential Focus and Value Systems
01:05:38
Speaker
center of San Francisco in the sixties.
01:05:40
Speaker
A crooked cucumber. A crooked cucumber, none less said death is certain. The timing is not. What is the most important thing? So layman death is certain. The time is not for you. What is the most important thing?
01:05:58
Speaker
I'm, I mean, there's life practicalities, you like the things I'm going to focus on, people in my life, um creative activities, my participation in these overlapping developmental, transformational, regenerative communities, my love of my inner practice. Those are all circumstantial elements. They're very high on my list, but there's also an abstract component, which is the most valuable thing is the most valuable thing, right? Like, um,
01:06:28
Speaker
Meaningfulness is more meaningful than any kind of meaning you could come up with. Value itself is more valuable than any of your values. And so for me, there's a certain desire to existentially relate very intimately to the, to value itself, let's say.
01:06:49
Speaker
Right. And if I only had a limited amount of time and, or an uncertain amount of time, I would want to make sure that I'm, uh, very intentionally and persistently related to the the fact of value itself.
01:07:10
Speaker
What do you see that bringing into your life and the lives of people you care about as you're actually doing it?
01:07:22
Speaker
First of all, like we were just saying, Mona, a kind of clarity, right? It allows you a certain distance from the social and psychological problem solving that we're always engaged in.
01:07:36
Speaker
Because in addition to the values that are at stake in the various conundrums of life, there's also value itself. And that allows you to, if you can feel it, depressurize the seriousness of those issues so that you can approach them in a manner of creative flow,
01:07:54
Speaker
of serious play, not necessarily as life and death, even though you do have to seriously devote yourself to the responsibilities of the world. But the other thing it brings in is a kind of existential satisfaction that is self-evidently enjoyable.
01:08:17
Speaker
and allows me to show up with my loved ones as somebody who's more or less a benign and enjoyable presence in their lives and encourages them to have similar feelings.
01:08:31
Speaker
I mean, almost sounds to me like the that valuing is the is the verb version, the action version of love
01:08:44
Speaker
and There's a lot of language games we could play. When you say value, it sounds more like you're in the philosophical discourse. When you say love, you go into more interpersonal or religious discourses.
01:08:55
Speaker
But they're all ways of signifying useful, maximal... useful maximal emotional coherence and existential satisfaction, which is the thing we hope all of our desires will bring to us and which our desires only sometimes and temporarily bring to us.
01:09:18
Speaker
Hmm. Hmm. So let's just say it's the end for the layman Pascal body.
01:09:29
Speaker
All your writings are gone. Just burnt up. All your talks are gone.
01:09:37
Speaker
You can leave something like, i don't know, three, give or take, three important things behind four people. what What might they be?
01:09:48
Speaker
Which people? Well, which people do you want to leave three important things for? This is totally made up. This is serious place, so we're just going to this however we want. listen Going to need more details on this completely imaginal situation.
01:10:05
Speaker
I need some certainty here, please. Before I conjecture possibility.
01:10:11
Speaker
there
01:10:18
Speaker
like don't really think about it in that way. I feel like what I can do is endlessly produce from where I'm at.
01:10:29
Speaker
And those productions will all have a lifespan in the world, but I don't need to try to figure out what specifically I want to leave behind. I need to keep moving forward and keep outputting.
01:10:42
Speaker
And then whatever happens with those are out of my hands at that time. I hear it there again, the same thing with value. You know, what I'm noticing and see if I can put this into words.
01:10:57
Speaker
is through circumstance, accident, and direct practice and lots of serious play, you've basically made this movement from getting caught in a linear timeframe of making things happen to have some sort of an experience to
01:11:20
Speaker
what are the qualities I'm bringing as an experiencer to the moment And that's where I'm going to put my attention more than output, products, books, numbers of students, podcast listeners. I keep coming back again and again. I'm valuing something that can hold all of those things and participate with all of those things and shape how I participate with things, events.
01:11:52
Speaker
But that's not where the focus of my attention is. Am I tracking with you? I relate to that. And I would add that it's, um, was not my plan.
01:12:05
Speaker
Uh, that's not something I would have tried to do necessarily. It's not like I like, Oh, it would be a good idea to, just be in the present moment and participate with what's coming up. Yeah. ah i have pursued various practices and ideas and forms of,
01:12:29
Speaker
self-expression for a long time. And for a while now, there's been a shift in my sense of myself as an existential being, right? I don't always have to check on it, but when I check on it, it seems like it feels different than it used to feel.
01:12:46
Speaker
It feels like something got solved. that it wants to give me like a thumbs up whenever I check. So there's some like underlying human existential conundrum that was resolved. And as a result, when I try to figure out how to live, I don't live around trying to solve that thing.
01:13:07
Speaker
Either trying to solve it as under the cover of the different elements of life or trying to solve it as its own special spiritual existential problem. It seems like that feels resolved.
01:13:20
Speaker
Now, maybe there's way more to go. Maybe there's 30 more levels of resolving that. Fantastic. I'm looking forward to that. But what it does is it depressurizes the rest of the experience so that I can go, yeah, I don't have to worry about all those directions. I just have to sort of show up and participate because the thing that would draw me out along those different directions, that thing's more or less taken care of.
01:13:46
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if it's similar or different in each person as you talked about this thing that solved itself. There's a palpable sense of of
01:14:01
Speaker
something that feels very similar over here. It's so subtle that when my nervous system is particularly maybe overwhelmed and I'm busy, lost in a ah certain projection reaction, i don't notice it. But when I check on it, it's here that this awareness is here and it deescalates my nervous system. When I check on it, it deescalates my attachment to particular outcomes in favor of
01:14:34
Speaker
this trusting in this something, this underlying something that's always here and always well.
01:14:45
Speaker
And I think that's something we recognize in each other, which is part of what makes our interactions so interesting and pleasurable. I have the best time interacting, chatting with you, whether it's in the back of the car or wherever we are, because I have the experience that you foreground the relationship over any activity we're involved in.
01:15:13
Speaker
And it's ah my experience is with you, it's assumed, unless somebody's just egregious, it's assumed that the relationship matters and is always intact and doesn't need monitoring.
01:15:23
Speaker
And yet my experience is you're the the predominant thing with you is we're already connected, all is well, and everything that happens along the way is play, fun, and discovery, even if it seems terribly serious.
01:15:41
Speaker
That is how I feel. Now, i you know I've got to like a certain like rational robots that guard it a little bit. and Certain moral robots are like, yes, what about the fight against evil? You're like, okay, okay. oh fuck yeah ah Basically, yeah, absolutely.
01:15:57
Speaker
The relationality is secured and essentially good. So what about the fight against so-called evil? you know We live at a time when there's lots of fingers that could be pointed depending on one's experience of the moment, whether it's a political leader, whether it's a whole party, whether it's a whole country or an industry, it seems like if we look for things to point at, the list would never stop.
01:16:25
Speaker
And yet it does seem like wherever we might be, like in my particular state or city, there's some egregious something that needs seems to need to be taken care of for the better good of humans surviving, planets surviving.
01:16:38
Speaker
How do we confront things that really through contemplation were like, no, this really would be beneficial if this transformed. How do I participate in that transformation without trying to get caught back up into something should or shouldn't be?
01:16:56
Speaker
But like, how do I become a useful participant in the transformation of larger systems than just my own body mind?
01:17:06
Speaker
Well, first of all, I think a lot of it has to do with the what we might call the development of our line of moral intelligence, right? Like the the transformation of that aspect of ourselves. And in the Gurdjieffian language, like intentionally suffering from that stuff is a good idea, but intentionally, not just casually suffering, not watching the news and going, oh my God, but sitting down and going, all right, I'm going to really let this hurt me for a while.
01:17:34
Speaker
Taking it on board. There's that. I think there's It's very important to, i think, streamline the process in a way, right? In an age where there's algorithmic attention hacking, when people are getting paid for trying to get you to feel morally engaged, you have to be super cautious about what's actually your moral engagement, which is to say,
01:17:58
Speaker
Where do you really have leverage? That's where you have participation in the good evils thing, right? Things you've just heard about that other people are very upset about and want you to have feelings about, that's not necessarily where good and evil shows up in your life, right? It's where you actually could do something, not just that it's a situation you should have an opinion about.
01:18:21
Speaker
So we have to, I think, offload a lot of other stuff that we're asked to pretend to have moral feelings about. so that we can focus on the areas where we're actual participatory moral agents.
01:18:34
Speaker
ah Then in those areas, there's the fight against evil and the production of the good. And every individual might have a slightly different leaning in that regard, but we have to, wherever possible, undertake those actions.
01:18:49
Speaker
Given the extra thing, which is We have stupid human brains that will define things we don't like and people who aren't us as evil or anything that threatens us as evil.
01:19:02
Speaker
ah And so we have to be able to discriminate what the threshold is. Where is this something that bothers me, something I don't like, something that belongs to another team? And where is this something that for human beings, for living beings is fundamentally a regression of the emergent evolved value that exists in the world?
01:19:22
Speaker
right So there is a line where people have to be protectors, defenders and warriors, but not everybody has to do that equally, because there's also this line of how do we produce things that bring more good into the world?
01:19:35
Speaker
and right Both of those are equally a struggle in the so-called good evil plane that we have to responsibly undertake. So like an example would be... I always think water purifiers, right?
01:19:48
Speaker
Technology is interesting. You can say it's neutral, but there's some that's more harm than good. There's some that's more good than harm. Every water purifier more or less makes the world a better place.
01:20:02
Speaker
More or less. So you'd be like, okay, I'm not going to fight evil. I'm going make water purifiers. But that is in that context of being of service to the advancement of good and the retardation of evil in the cosmos.
01:20:16
Speaker
ah
01:20:19
Speaker
So much here I'm going to be contemplating, particularly at this moment, you know we just had massive protests across the world this weekend. And I'm remembering the protests during the Black Lives Movement, Black Lives Matters Movement that is still happening and still important and other things around the world, the Arab Spring,
01:20:42
Speaker
There's a view that's like if i'm if I'm simply protesting in the way that I'm saying no to something, I'm actually giving it energy, the thing I don't like. So if I rewind this entire conversation and I replay the kind of key notes of it for myself, I go, all right, I've got to be in touch with the gold.
01:21:03
Speaker
on the other side of the thing I'm protesting. Otherwise my protesting is just adding noise and more energy to what I don't want for myself and people.
Mutual Recognition and Moral Engagement
01:21:14
Speaker
Thoughts?
01:21:16
Speaker
In specific circumstances, it may be that a negative valence stance is the absolutely necessary thing, right? You've got to drive off someone one who's a threat to things that you care about.
01:21:29
Speaker
Okay. But... Beyond that circumstance, there is a problem of getting too involved in the negation, and the negation tends to drive you to expressions that might represent improvement, but don't necessarily cause improvement.
01:21:46
Speaker
And then that leads to a whole set of complicated ideological critiques, which is like, does protesting do anything? Or does the system as it is want you to express your values because it knows that doesn't do anything?
01:21:59
Speaker
Or read all these kind of complications. But there is this element, like you say, that we've been looking at throughout this conversation, which is how do you work with, work toward, and begin with the positive qualities, the values, the satisfactions that you're after.
01:22:18
Speaker
And when it comes to a lot of socio-political and human affairs, for me, a lot of that is the exquisite pleasure and possibility of mutual recognition between humans.
01:22:32
Speaker
right that there's something gorgeous about humanism per se. I'm not just trying to correct an imbalance in the systems. I'm not just trying to repair a historical...
01:22:45
Speaker
horror of some kind. I'm not just trying to fix a problem in the dominant ah sociopolitical administration. What I'm trying to do is accomplish that for the sake of a very beautiful thing about complex human beings that I feel in myself and I feel in others, regardless of what type of human being they are, and that I require our systems to foreground and support and encourage because of how much I love that thing.
01:23:17
Speaker
So like that, right? Bringing that value forward. The reason I'm doing this is because there's something I love, not just something I hate. That, that there's something I love, not just something I hate.
01:23:32
Speaker
And can I be focused on and interested in and organized around nourishing the thing that I love to be further born into that can people can interact with.
01:23:47
Speaker
Like what's being born, what wants to be born, what could be born. We live at a time when we've got countless humans all over the place over 8 billion, how do we organize forms of social safety net or organizing forms of institutions so that there's an optimal flow of humans and resources that's regenerative for that many people? And I feel like we've got to do a lot of inner work. We need to do a lot of inner work. to become capable of collaborating and intuiting these kinds of possibilities, let alone supporting them to be birthed, especially if it's going to take more than a one human lifespan to birth is something like this into existence.
01:24:36
Speaker
And there is a special role, let's say, for people who, you know, there's all this language around developmentalism, around...
01:24:47
Speaker
complexity and nuance and these different sort of gradations of the human being. And that has utility in some areas and it can be problematic in other areas. But people who are capable of seeing and feeling and appreciating the the diverse richness of the human experience, they have something important to contribute to the general discussion because it's very hard to love the human love humanity in a way that isn't just nominal, isn't just a Hallmark greeting card that says I'm in favor of humans, right? That really loves the human experience. In order to do that, you have to appreciate the complexity of it, right? You have to be like, oh yeah, it's really tough to be this thing. And you're always going to have these choices and,
01:25:36
Speaker
Sometimes you're going to feel this thing, but you're going to do this thing. And you're going to have this value, but actually you've got this value too. And you're going to look back and be like, oh, I behaved poorly under those circumstances. Or I feel these 10 different things. It's a really rich, complicated, jungle kind of a being to be a human being.
01:25:53
Speaker
And the more facets of it, the more contradictions within it that you're capable of seeing and appreciating and uniting, that's the more you're capable of demonstrating and helping others to see what's so beautiful about this kind of being, which is the basis of taking a moral stand in the world.
Closing Reflections and Invitation to Silence
01:26:11
Speaker
Wow.
01:26:15
Speaker
That feels like a good place to move towards completing this particular dialogue.
01:26:22
Speaker
Yeah. Thank you so much for just being you and showing up together. I love connecting with you. I love dialoguing with you.
01:26:35
Speaker
the playful seriousness and especially the the way Bohm describes dialogue as discovering together. Like when I'm with you, I feel there's so much room and encouragement to discover together. Even though you're very passionate and clear about the things you share, I always feel so much room that there's another or many other points of view possible and welcomed.
01:26:59
Speaker
So thank you. Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here with you. All our interactions are wonderful. And I look forward to coming back and talking with you again when this has been renamed the Schwenk Shack.
01:27:15
Speaker
Well, the big question is, will there be French fries at the Schwenk Shack? This is the big question. And will they be you know served with aioli or ketchup? But that's another discussion for another day.
01:27:29
Speaker
Yeah, we'll table that one for now. I have some opinions on that, but I'm going to leave a lot of space around it. Excellent. So listeners, as you've been listening for a while to these episodes or not, we take the end to be together and just be in silence.
01:27:44
Speaker
Like you heard in my voice in the entry, you can soften the soles of your feet and the palms of your hands like you're opening fists with your mind and just let the exhales become long and sweet and longer and sweeter and we'll be together in silence together.
01:27:59
Speaker
Part of this is for my editor. Part of this is because it's actually sweet to explore being together without having to fill the space with objects and words.
01:28:26
Speaker
Loving the episode? Click to follow, like, and share it as widely as possible. Want to go deeper with the choice to grow? Explore the show notes. You'll find links there for going deeper with our guests, as well as how to work with me in the work of waking up, growing up, cleaning up, and showing up.
01:28:47
Speaker
Thanks for listening. Can't wait to join you in the next episode.