“You want to know the secret of listening? You don’t listen!” Not fully at least. This is what Circling founder Guy Sengstock taught my inner circle and I in a two day workshop that changed my life. The technology of circling teaches deep listening techniques that provide insights so transcendent and emergent I can only compare them to psychedelics. I have since used the techniques of circling in virtually every emotionally charged or tender conversation I have been a part of since. Whether that is something within my relationship with my wife, my friends, or my business colleagues.

In this podcast we not only explain what Circling is, we model it on the podcast. In addition we discuss some of the tenets of philosophical fellowship and the Dia Logos method as taught by former podcast guest John Vervaeke.

This podcast provides what I believe to be one of the most ESSENTIAL skills a person can master. Communication is everything, and this podcast will level up your communication skills exponentially.

Circling Video Courses | https://circlinginstitute.com/self-study-programs-2/

Connect with Guy SengstockWebsite |https://circlinginstitute.com

AUBREY: Guy.

GUY: Aubrey.

AUBREY: Good to behold you at this moment right now. 

GUY: Yeah, emphasize be.

AUBREY: Indeed. We could emphasize hold, but it's not as good for audio. We just went through a powerful weekend together. Well, I guess it wasn't even a weekend, it was two days, and I really got to dive deep in The Circling practice, the Dia-Logos practice. But really, in my mind, these are technologies that can help solve what I feel is the biggest meta crisis that's going on and that's a meta crisis of a failure to listen to one another. That's what we're seeing play out across the world stage.

GUY: Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I agree big time. Big time.

AUBREY: Is that what drew you into this initially? Was it just this feeling that people were not really listening to each other? You've been in this work for a while and, obviously, it's reached a heightened state right now, where polarization is at perhaps the greatest extreme that I've ever seen, or at least become aware of in my own life. It has always existed, people not listening to each other. Was that what drew you in?

GUY: It's interesting. Circling has just happened one day. I've been finding out what happened that day ever since. In fact, the process of developing Circling and later, Dia-Logos; I'm imagining we'll go into what all those things mean; was something that just really emerged. How it happened was actually in a conflict. There's some tension in the group that I was hanging out with at--

AUBREY: At Burning Man.

GUY: Yeah, at Burning Man. And I just got interested in the conflict. I guess you could say actually, now that I think about it, it started off with just getting them to listen to each other and then following that thread, of what was there for both of them ended up being this opening that went beyond what anybody would have expected. And then it led to every person in that group, this deep process. Afterwards, my friend Jerry and I who spontaneously, without really thinking about it, just facilitated that, unofficially. And then afterwards, 12 hours later, we were walking away and Jerry pointed back at where we were sitting, he didn't quite have a word, and I was like, I didn't have a word. But there was just this moment that we had returned spontaneously towards each other, looked each other right in the eye, and brought out our hands and shook on it. We just committed to whatever that was. I think I've been finding out whatever that was ever since. So that's been my experience. Circling and even Dia-Logos has been an emergent process. Part of what I've come to understand about why Circling has went over all over the world, in spite of the personalities involved of it, as in most things. Open people who can be open to these kinds of things are also pretty hurt and wounded. Therefore, I've been fascinated, what actually was it about it that was caught? It took me a while to realize that I think one of the reasons that it caught on is because we're in a situation with technology now... I don't actually hear a lot of people talking about this part of it. What technology did is it changed the structure of communication by uncoupling where technology... I think it first started with the answering machine, and then multiple levels of social media and email and all that kind of stuff. It just proliferated. But the answering machine uncoupled the relationship from information exchange. The one on one connection, you used to, at least, have to talk to somebody on the phone. And because interpersonal relationships are inherently terrifying, it's filled with ambiguity, like if you think about what's possible, when two people face each other, you could say something that reveals something about me that I had no idea about, that could change my life. Every conversation, there's a way that we're fundamentally open up to each other. And that openness and that confrontation is literally how we become a person, is these interactions. So if those interactions become optional on multi-levels, our nervous system will just move towards the most comfortable thing. I've come to understand that, at a deeper level, I think technology has afforded us to not have to communicate at all, in a relational way.

AUBREY: So if I follow this, then you're really saying that some of the underpinnings and the roots of this meta crisis of listening is actually technology-mediated in a certain way, because we can just send text messages and send voice notes. Look, let's be real, when I get a voice note, I'm not really listening. If I could turn it to 3X speed and just get the information itself, most likely, I would do that, except in rare circumstances with a very close person who I really wanted to hear their sweet voice say it. But really, it's about information. And you were talking about this to us. It's not only the technology itself, it's the attitude of technology that we've adopted in which everything is either reduced to information function, and as a resource that can help us in our request for optimization, efficiency, excellence in whatever way that we want to do. So everything is like instead of relationships between two souls, two hyper objects of divinity incarnated in the flesh, instead of this, "Wow, a person? Holy shit," which is actually appropriate when we behold a person, it's now, "Alright, this is a function. This is information and these are the things that I need to know." So this is at the root of a lot of this division that we're seeing is people are literally, not only not listening to each other, but not even talking to each other. 

GUY: Yeah, absolutely. And it's interesting because there's a lot of natural things that come in, that our nervous system does when I'm facing another person. We all know this, if you've ever driven and somebody cuts you off, you're like, "Hey, fuck you!" You go crazy. But if you have to then sit next to them at the stop light, all of a sudden, you're embarrassed. This whole thing comes up because there's all this stuff that happens when we face each other. There's a vulnerability that we don't have to have. We have all these ways of taking potshots at each other without having to feel the consequence in dealing with the fact that I just told you to fuck off.

AUBREY: It's not even necessarily the retribution. It's the consequence of the mirror neurons and the natural empathy that we have. We say something hurtful, we see somebody get hurt, we have to deal with looking in the eyes and feeling the heart of the person that we just hurt. And that's uncomfortable. In that same example, two cars pull aside and side by side, sometimes in rage or whatever, somebody will just go right at you and their anger will be blinding and it'll create a forcefield of empathy, of separation, which is what anger does. It pushes somebody away from you so that you can attack, defend, run away, whatever. It prevents intimacy from actually happening and prevents any empathy from happening. But usually, one car will speed off and then throw the bird out the window so they don't even have to see the consequences. There's so many instances in which we just are unwilling to bear the consequences of our communication. So we create all of these different ways to create distance.

GUY: And that's happened on multiple levels. Anybody can do it, shoot you a text. We talked a little bit about some of the arrows coming your way as you've gotten more visible and put out there these things that are not common to people's understanding. You've gotten tons of arrows coming at you. If they were standing here, most likely they wouldn't do that because it's good that it hurts when I hurt you.

AUBREY: It's a good thing. It's not a bug.

GUY: Yes. Yes. It's a good thing. One of the things was Circling is, it's so interesting. When somebody new comes in and starts Circling, one of the things that they're blown away by, and I see this almost every time is where we do these exercises. A big part of Circling is about revealing the impact of what it's like being with you in an open way. Having people do that, they come out of that, and their eyes are just almost dilated with amazement, because they had never really done that before. I think one of the things about that is that when you do that, and you open up and you're vulnerable to somebody, and you just are in response to them, and are real about that response, there's a space that opens up that has a level of aliveness that seems to engage our serotonin system, our dopamine systems, all of the things that open up our nervous system that comes from intimacy. It's like a space of aliveness that people can touch in on it And they're like, "Whoa, how have I not known this my whole life?" If you look at it, we talked also about this this weekend, as most conversations are set up triangularly. There's me. There's you. And then there's the thing we're talking about. Tuned into any conversation, it's pretty much that structure. It's a much rarer thing to actually have the thing we're talking about be the thing that's happening right now. And the moment you do that, the moment you do that, people can instantly feel it. There's an exposure. I don't know what I'm going to say. I don't know what you're going to say. There's this ambiguity that opens up that creates a space of the unknown. That unknown can bring up a lot of anxiety. But it also opens up a space where you start to have experiences with the other person and hear yourself say things that you didn't know that you knew. It can lead to these possibilities that no one could have ever imagined that turn into all of these projects and companies and all of that kind of stuff simply by being open with one another and being honest about how we impact one another.

AUBREY: And the amazing healing that can come from this. One thing that was a really provocative idea from Rabbi Gafni, who I've been studying with and working with, he talks about a deep craving, a fundamental craving to be intimate, to be on the inside of each other's experience. But as you said, it's scary. It's scary to do that, it exposes some vulnerability and you have to be really open to that experience and open to be seen and not loved, which is this primordial fear we have, to really be seen and not loved. That's worth talking about but let me finish where I was going with this, which is we have this deep craving, to be seen and loved, intimacy, to be seen and loved. However, we're afraid of it. We're afraid that we're going to be seen and not loved. So we go for pseudo-intimacy. And pseudo-intimacy is trying to be on the inside together but instead of actually going on the inside together, we play something or someone outside of us and then by nature of there being something outside, it's worse on a pseudo level on the inside of something else. So if somebody else is outside of us, I think this is the nature of why people want to gossip so much, and why as soon as two people get together, if they can start talking about somebody else, then all of a sudden, they create this little false bubble of intimacy, where they are on the inside. But they're only on the inside by the fact that they've placed somebody else on the outside.

GUY: Well said.

AUBREY: And so it's this very interesting phenomenon that's happening all the time, which is we're craving something, but instead of getting the actual thing, we're getting the pseudo version, like the drug version. And that's not actually what we're looking for nor is that ever satisfying. We can continue to place people on the other side, on the outside, but it's not going to actually satisfy our deep craving to be on the inside with each other.

GUY: Absolutely. Absolutely. That's really interesting. I like the way that you put what happens in gossip. Yeah, you're right. You even lean in and you're like, "Oh, that bitch. How could she do that?" There is this pseudo insular quality of belonging that happens. You're right, and it's predicated on othering somebody? You see that all the time? I like that. I like that way of conceptualizing it, because it speaks to this. This is so interesting, I have so much wonder when I think about this, of what a human being is like. Developmentally, if you think about what an infant is, an infant is literally the most vulnerable spot in the universe, literally. Comparatively to any other mammal, maybe any other organism, there's no other creature that's born more helpless, without instincts and vulnerable than a human infant. The mystery is, when you ask yourself who's on top of the food chain, who has the ability to conceptualize and have an image of the cosmos, and then wonder about where it comes from, who's colonizing Mars, who's aware of their own awareness, there seems to be this very deep link between vulnerability and ability. The difference that makes that difference, I think, between that vulnerability, and it transforming into this ability, is simply relatedness. It's the way that we're related to. I have a son who's six months old, and I'm just appreciating this, it's my second son and at this age, I'm almost 50, watching in these older eyes, watching him become, I'm so appreciative of that everything about him comes to be in this inner subjective encounter, this inter-subjective relationship. We had this moment a few weeks ago that really struck me where I think I witnessed him have his first break with reality. If you've had kids that, you know this where they go from an amoeba to, all of a sudden, one day they have an ability. And he happened to not be able to move like himself at all, then I discovered that he could flip himself over when he flipped himself off the couch while I was in the kitchen. And he's screaming, he's screaming, and I went to get him a bottle, my wife was at an appointment, which is rare for those two to be separate. And he's screaming, I'm getting the bottle and all of a sudden, I hear a thump and a silence. And I was like, "Uh-oh," and I ran out. And there he is and he's like, I picked him up and I realized he was fine but he was super scared. He got really disoriented and then he freaked out and started screaming. He did this really interesting thing. He looked directly into my eyes. Anywhere I moved him, he was screaming, shaking and I just took him and I held him. I had the bottle and I got him to feed right in between his screams, but he wouldn't break eye contact with me. There was this process of him shaking and then drinking, and then starting to fall asleep, waking up, disoriented, screaming, finding my eyes, falling asleep. This process happened over 20 minutes until he went into the deepest sleep I've ever experienced him have. It was an interesting moment for me, because when he fell asleep, I was sitting there with him in silence. His mom's gone, so I had this rare moment with just him having that just happened and I could literally feel, I can almost literally feel or see this throughline or the platonic form of a family, of a father-son relationship, which I had this deep sense that we were both participating in. What that means is that where he becomes who he is, is through the recognition of us. That's where he looked to find reality. I think that's so telling. That's so telling. It's strange, it's a little bit confusing for us, because if you ever meditate, you will find this out or if you want to get enlightened, just sit down and try to find yourself. You'll realize anything that you find is not you

AUBREY: John Vervaeke says, "The elusive I."

GUY: That moment really highlighted this deep truth about how we're evident to ourselves is I am the beloved, I become through your agapic love, through the parents' agapic love. I became who I am through that, such that when he lost contact with reality, it was disjointed, and he just knew where to look into our eyes. It shows how fundamental ontologically, we are in a relationship all the way down. I think that remains true through our whole lives. I think relationships are the way that we grow or don't grow, we develop or don't develop way into our adulthood. I think people get that.

AUBREY: Let's just imagine, for a second, the infant, this is probably his first encounter with gravity. This is your son's first encounter with gravity! I mean, of course, he's in a weightless womb, swimming around, all things are taken care of. First of all, you have encounters with hunger, you have encounters with thirst, the way that your waist is moved, all of these different things are now different, completely different, you're breathing air, your whole world is upside down. How do you orient back to that? Well, you orient back to that through agapic love, through the heartbeat, through being held on the chest, through being rocked and nurtured, through being talked to lovingly and through eye contact? Of course, in this moment, there was another huge revelation about reality. Oh, my goodness, I can fall down and it doesn't feel good. How is this even possible? What the hell is going on? I'm just forming my understanding of reality. It all looks like a hallucination and a vision and a dream still, because none of it has meaning, nothing has words, everything is just in this dreamlike state. But he finds your eyes and he's like, okay, I'm okay. Now, move into adulthood, and especially in the time we're in, lots of things are in chaos. And we have information coming at us this way and that way in our fears and anxieties, and our world is getting turned upside down, who are the eyes that we can look into? We don't have that divine father leadership that's coming in where the President just sits down and he says, "Listen, I see you all, and love you and I really have your best interests in mind. Trust me, we got this. Here's the tough news..." We don't have that. We know that. That's not coming from the leadership. It's not coming from corporate America, it's not coming from maybe a few people here or there that people gravitate towards. We don't have that ubiquitously so people have all of this free-floating anxiety, like the infant before it found your eyes, all of this anxiety and all of this, but we don't even have the intelligence to scream it out, to shake it out, or anything. So we're not screaming, we're not shaking, we're not releasing the feeling and we don't have anybody or anything to assure us, we've also discarded most of our religious beliefs. So spirituality is this amorphous thing unless you've really gone deep experientially and you have a gnosis, a felt sense of the Divine and you can look to the divine's eyes, God's eyes and say, "Okay, okay. We're okay."So, no wonder so many people are experiencing so much anxiety and so much suffering, which leaves them susceptible to hysteria and mass formation and all of these things. But if you go back to the root, it's just who are the eyes that people get to look into? How can we reorient ourselves? Of course, we can all be that for each other. That's what Circling is and that's why it's so healing, it's all of this pain and anxiousness and anxiety, and depression and sadness. All of a sudden, you have somebody who's looking at you in the eyes and just listening, and you become the beloved and you become the beloved to them. I won't go into it, because the Circling is its own container but we had one of the most powerful experiences I've ever witnessed inside or outside psychedelic medicine, felt like something shifted, literally in the space-time continuum of our culture. No medicine at all, just the Circling exercise, just looking in the eyes and listening.

GUY: It opened up fundamental issues. We had an African-American man talk about what that was like for him in ways that he couldn't quite comprehend that he was doing, he felt comfortable to do. And out of that, because I had that feeling too, as we were doing that circle of, "Whoa, this doesn't happen often, first of all." And I had a feeling of that experience of what he went through, I felt I got close to understanding what it was like being him.

AUBREY: As close as we could. People were gutturally weeping. It makes me emotional just thinking about it. Even to catch a glimpse of his life, even to be let on the inside of that, it was overwhelming, overwhelmingly powerful and the healing for everybody involved, the understanding it was unbelievable, what was able to transpire there. And that's just from that glimpse of true, true empathy.

GUY: Really, really, really, really listening. Really, really, really listening. I was really struck by that whole weekend. It's not uncommon on those weekends to have those experiences. It's interesting how strangely close they are. All we did is we did what's always available, we sat down and we pointed our faces at each other and we made sounds, back and forth. It's really strange when you think about it from that angle. Just doing that, making sounds at each other in a rhythmic way, out of that, comes the whole world. When we talk about listening, people may go, it's a therapy kind of thing or something, something soft or self help or something like that. But when you really look at where the world comes from, it comes from conversation. Where does the possibility open up in? It opens up in language. I'm sure if we sat down and talked about Onnit and this podcast and sitting in this office and those paintings, I'm sure what we'd ended up talking about is, at some point, you heard a possibility open up, you heard it, and then you started talking about it. It comes up, and then you start relating to it, and then a whole organization comes around it. So listening, on one level, there's a sense of listening empathetically, but another level, when we talk about listening, listening is I think, if we think about ourselves ontologically speaking, what a human being is, is listening.It's a deep listening to possibilities, to context, multiple levels of meaning and to be struck by them, and be opened to them and then be able to respond to them in conversation. So I just want to highlight that what we're talking about is not just a therapeutic kind of encounter, that's unusual or exceptional, what we're talking about is the very thing that makes the world go round, literally, in a big way.

AUBREY: And to listen, really means that we need to stop listening to ourselves all the time, at least this separate self, the mind, that is constantly projecting our own opinions, thoughts, ideas onto other people, and other things so instead of actually listening to a person, we're listening to what our projection of that person is, and filtering it through our own filter. So we're not listening to anything at all, we're actually listening to ourselves through another person, we're projecting onto the divine and listening to the divine, as ourselves. Well, that's an interesting topic, of course, we can say that we are divine, but I'm talking about our separate self. So we're so noisy, and so projective, that we're not actually listening to anything at all. And all real insight and all the real magic comes when we can bring all of those projections back within ourselves and actually allow the truth of another person's expression in its entirety, or another thing's expression in its entirety to permeate us.

GUY: Yes, absolutely. It's interesting because listening is so mysterious to me. I think I can talk about listening forever. One of the things that Circling is, is almost like a spiritual practice in listening. I have been struck and continue to be struck with how transformative listening is for the listener and for the person being heard. One of the things about listening is, I told you this story with a mentor of mine. One of the things he would do is, just out of nowhere, he'd go, "All right. Let's talk about listening." Or he'd go, "Let's talk about reality." His name is Ron Bynum. He was instrumental in est back in the '70s, a long history and leading courses and now he consults with big companies and stuff like that. He befriended me and was a mentor of mine for a while. I'll never forget when he said, "All right, let's talk about listening," which led to a six-month process with him of going up to his house in Healdsburg, and walking along the river and spending three days there and staying up all night and in going into these deep conversations, but the one about listening is it was a question that he asked me that was striking, he said, "What is it that you need to get about listening such that if you don't get this about listening, listening is impossible"? We were at Healdsburg and Healdsburg has a little town square and a park in the center of it. We did laps around that square with me, emptying my mind of all of the smart philosophical, right answers that I had for him. We probably lapped it about three times. At some point, he just stopped and he's like, "Alright, you ready?" I'm like, "I think so." He's like, "What you got to get about listening, such that if you don't get this, listening is not possible for you or anybody else, you're ready?" I'm like, "Yeah." He looks me right in the eye and he says, "You don't. You don't listen." And if you just let that sit for a second, and work its way into you, it starts to make real profound sense. Because we, as you were alluding to, until I can hear that I don't hear, until I can listen that I don't listen, listening is impossible. But the moment I recognise and overhear myself not listening, is the moment I start listening, is the moment I start listening. And that's where it opens up. A lot of times, we don't really listen, we listen to all of our preconceived ideas, all of our preconceived judgments and prejudices, and assumptions about things. I can go my whole life not even recognising that I never ever actually heard you, I never actually listened to you. But when you do, and you start to recognise, "Oh, I wasn't hearing you just now," that's like an opening, that's an opening.

AUBREY: One of the things that occurred to me is that nobody knows the same person because of the inevitability of our projections. We're always projecting a little bit and filtering somebody. But the closest we can get, just like we said, the closest we could get understanding my brother's experience was by really deeply listening, and then opening our hearts as fully as possible. And in doing so, we not only felt as close as we could to feeling what he felt but we also got to see him through unfiltered eyes as close as we possibly could. In that moment, we all got to see pretty close, pretty close to the same person and we got to feel pretty close a little flavor, a sliver of what he had endured in his life. That's about as good as it gets but it's one of those things, it's the finger pointing at the moon, we're going to point to this thing, it's not that we get to the moon, it's that we're striving, we're striving to really see reality, see each other without our biases, without our snap judgments. I made a post about what's happening in Ukraine right now and I don't know when this podcast will be released, but in a couple of weeks, it was interesting. The first paragraph was let's take a moment, and listen to the sorrow of those that are affected, not from a place of acknowledgement as a virtue signal. Before I even share any of my thoughts, let's just make sure we take a moment and connect. A lot of people were moved by that. You could see that some people who were so charged up about their own stories, they just blast right through that and just start commenting about the New World Order and the great reset and this thing and that thing and Trump and blah, blah, blah and it's like, let's just take a moment here, and sit with this. It's such an essential skill. We'll get into this a little bit in the Dia-Logos that we're going to model but it's called aporia, this moment of reflection to let some overwhelming thing, let it sit, let's all just sit in it for a moment, before immediately responding, or reacting, I should say. It's not even a response, it's a snap reaction, it's like someone hit your knee and you kick. But if you take a moment's pause, that's not only important for our thinking, but it's important for our humanity. It's deeply important for our humanity to just.

GUY: Really pause. As you were talking, it's interesting, as I was listening to you, when you said take a moment and let's just pause and listen to the suffering, listen to what's happening to the people being affected, it was interesting, because I was experiencing one, as I just flashed to all of the scenes on the news that I had been watching and then the people in the subway taking shelter. And then I noticed, when you started talking about pausing, that your words were both revealing of what's happening, but also instructive. I found myself just sinking more into my body and getting a lot, my energy was a little bit higher and now I feel a little bit deeper. So thank you for that.

AUBREY: Yeah. Yeah. And it's a reminder that I'm not giving to the world, because I do it right all the time. It's a reminder for myself to just take that moment. Take that moment, whenever it is, whatever challenging thing happens, whatever thing you find out in your partnership, or this thing that's revealed, or this new piece of news, just take a moment. I see it too in the whole COVID debate, people celebrating when there's some revision of some death statistic in one way, they're celebrating because there's more deaths reported from vaccination. I'm like, “Take a moment.” Yeah. All right, you may be a little more right than people are giving you credit. But what you're talking about is death. Death. That's tragic. The lockdowns didn't work? Okay, that's tragic, how much suffering was endured, take a moment before you just get into your argument. Being right, people are so excited about being right, that we're willing to be right at the cost of our humanity. Way better to be wrong and have humanity suffer less, but we've lost this idea. It's this antagonistic, we're in the war, casualties are part of war. It doesn't matter. But it doesn't have to be that way. The way out of war is not the war mindset. It's the removal of the war mindset back to the human mindset of this is all tragic. Let's feel this first and then we can discuss the issues, of course. Those need to be discussed, but until everybody pauses, not a lot of communication is going to happen, not a lot of listening is going to happen either.

GUY: Yeah. I think what you're talking about is this, we talk about this in Circling, a big part of being authentic has two components to it. On one level, authenticity in terms of communication has to do with being transparent like I'm authentic about what's actually going on inside of me and I allow you to see it and I say those things to you that you could only know if I shared them with you. But then there's another part of being authentic, which is also what I call being permeable. Really being porous to the world, being porous to someone else's pain, to being porous to what's going on in Ukraine. Your words were instructive in porosity, right? It's funny, over 25 years of leading courses and coaching families, I've even moved in with families for a couple of weeks to work with them and I've never had the experience where I've suggested somebody be like, "Hey, it might be a good idea if you were vulnerable right now." I've never had anyone go, "Oh my God, I've been waiting for someone to tell me that." Mostly, it's like they shake in their boots. They're like, "Okay." But it's really interesting. I want to make a distinction between what I call vulnerability and what we also often associate with vulnerability, which is exposure. Exposure is really, really different than what we're talking about. Exposure is that experience that usually traumatizes us. It's like you're in the playground, and somebody comes and pulls your pants down and you're humiliated, or you trip and fall, or somebody calls you out in public and disgraces you or something like that. These are the kinds of things that just lead to deep humiliation and shame. People get traumatized by that. Vulnerability, I think, is what makes the difference between exposure and vulnerability has to do with voluntarily turning toward. As you just instructed, right there, let's take a moment and voluntarily open our pores. There's something about doing that and facing it, proactively being vulnerable, which is a completely different experience than being sidestepped or sideswiped or being exposed in that sense. This is where I think vulnerability becomes a virtue. This is where vulnerability becomes a virtue.

AUBREY: It's so necessary in so many other fields. I mean, we're talking about geopolitical issues right now. But I was CEO of it for a decade. And I had to terminate a lot of people. And as CEO, you have two choices in a termination, well, three, really: one, you let somebody else do it because it's uncomfortable, coward's way out. It's the coward's way out. If you had anything to do with them being hired, and you have anything to do with them being fired, sit your ass in that meeting. It's important. It matters. It matters to you, it matters to them, it matters. This is Season One of Game of Thrones, where Ned Stark says, "If you read the sentence, you wield the sword," like you can't not get your hands bloody. If you're condemning someone to death, you don't let the executioner do it, you gotta do it. There's something very honorable about that. So that's part one. But then you can also then choose to take a sociopathic posture where you're not connected to that individual at all and this is just handling business, and I'm just handling business, sorry, it's just business, just business and you remove yourself, you close your pores, you become impermeable, opaque to those different feelings. That leaves the other person without... I've been in situations like that on both sides, I've been terminated and I've been in the room where an executive was terminating and took that posture. It's really brutal for the person who's experienced it because it tells them about the world, that the world is callous, and they don't fucking care, that those above them are callous, and they don't care. It creates this idea, well, fuck them, I'm going to get mine. We're in an antagonistic relationship, because obviously they don't care. And then option three, which is the option I did my very best always to take, which is, it's tough. I knew that it was coming and I knew that it would be painful. You wake up that morning and you're just dreading the whole situation, because I knew I was going to go in and I was going to feel them and I was going to let myself be porous. And if they start crying, oftentimes in that situation, I start crying, doesn't mean I changed my mind. I still stay firm in my decision, but I can feel it. I can feel the weight of what just happened. And in all of those situations, I can't think off top of mind anybody that's been a part of that termination that wasn't ultimately still an ally down the road. Because in that crucial moment, we established something and we established a care, I care about you. Yes, I'm making a decision, and you may not agree with it. And you may not like it, it may be uncomfortable for you. But I care about you and so the decision isn't done callously. You matter and that's super important. Relationships too, you can take that removed, closed off posture. I've definitely been probably worse at that sometimes in my history, breaking up with somebody and just being closed off. That's fucking brutal. But I understand, it's scary. If you open your heart, then it might change your mind. So you might think I need the courage and I have to close myself off. Sometimes we might have to do that if we don't trust ourselves, and that's okay. This is not about judging it.

GUY: Skillful means.

AUBREY: But ultimately, the way to do this is with your heart, like fully out, and allow yourself to really feel the experience, and I think that's an important skill. It's like ice baths. You just go in, and you deal with the cold but if you can do it, you come out better for it. And both people come out better for it.

GUY: It sounds like you're staying open to the person, that you're not just firing an employee, you're changing a fundamental relationship with a human being. Just staying open, and porous and permeable, and transparent to their humanity all the way through that, it sounds like it's funny, as you talk about this, it sounds like a bonding experience, actually.

AUBREY: I'm there with them in a very dark and challenging time. At least challenging, if not dark. They know that I'm there with them. And there's something that even though they might blame me, and they might talk shit about me that night at the bar or whatever, it's okay. There's somewhere they could feel that I was there with them and I was willing to go deep. And I think that's and that's important.

GUY: It's huge. It's so huge. It seems to me, one of the scariest things for human beings, for all of us, is to be known without being loved. This is a little bit of what we're talking about with social media. It creates this opportunity for people to be exposed, without having to really address the thou with the other. Martin Buber, his work has been a big influence on me, really highlighted this. Martin Buber was a philosopher, a Jewish theologian, a lot of people called him a mystic. But what he saw, what was missing in modernity was this numbness, a nihilistic numbness in which we were losing our ability to actually see other people as ends in themselves. And he called that I-Thou. What's interesting about this, on one level, we could look at that whole experience of firing somebody and doing it, firing a person, being in the impact of that, what he would say is that what you did is you genuinely addressed and were addressed in a real encounter. He talked about how I-Thou, used to say this thing that I-Thou is spoken as one word. And he said there's two, existentially, we have two fundamental ways of relating with anything. We either have an I-it relation or an I-Thou relation. And both of them are spoken as one word. And essentially, he would say that when I relate to something as an it, you become a means to my own end. However, when I relate to something, as a thou, I relate to you as an end in yourself of I'm before something of ultimate concern of ultimate value. What's interesting about that is, is that they really are, when he says they're spoken as two words, you know that because you can feel it. You can feel that when I relate to you as thou, there is an I, that I am that's different than when I relate to you as an it. 

And you mentioned about we don't want to, necessarily, indiscriminately open to anybody. Anything can happen, as Jordan Peterson would say, "You're a whole vat of snakes." No wonder we want to close off and I want to relate to you as an it. However, I think the thing I want to emphasize from my own experience with this is in Circling. One of the things that's been really interesting to me is that when people experience Circling, the way that they go about practicing it is about learning how to facilitate it. I've always found it really striking. It's like if you look at it from the vantage point of say, something like psychotherapy, let's just say that the goal, or the outcome is you go to therapy, and the goal of therapy is, you know it's working when you want to become a therapist. There's this element of Circling that I think reveals something about that there is an openness, when I can relate to you as a thou that I get to have, that it's deeply satiating for me when I'm honest with you about something, and I have to say something to you that may hurt you or I have to cut off a relationship with you or fire you, as you're talking about. I open up to the chaos and the pain of that with you and I feel it all the way. It may be painful, but it's not suffering. It's not suffering. It's when I cut off and make you and it and I defend myself against the chaos of that, that I shore up this I that now becomes brittle, because I have a wall around me. I think this is what happens in judgment when people talk about being judgmental. Essentially, I think you could look at judgement as the mind's way of resisting anxiety. 

AUBREY: It's the ultimate iting of somebody else. If you judge, you've created another, you've created it. You've reduced this thou to a function or an expression of a being. It happens in all forms of scapegoating at its most extreme, but all minor levels, even as we were talking about earlier, as soon as you play somebody on the outside, you start to it them. And then that creates this false sense of thouness, I-Thouness between you, but it's not really real, because you've just ited somebody else, so you've just tried to create artificial contrast. We inherently know though that it's wrong. If they want to paint a ruthless executive in a bad way, they'll have that ruthless executive, they'll hire somebody who'll be like the X-Men company, a company will come in to do the terminations. We inherently know that that's wrong and we inherently know that the person who did that is a villain. Ultimately, they are not going to be opening up to people, they're going to say, "Well, just doing what I was told." There's no gripe with them. They're an intermediary, interlocutor, between the person making the decision and the actual execution. But technology is that same kind of catspaw. Technology is the same way where yes, it's you, but it's like, the technology becomes the catspaw that receives, buffers all of the actual feeling. It's not like this is a new thing. We've been trying to buffer ourselves from an executioner's back in the day, buffering the king from having to deal with his thing, generals not being on the battlefield and seeing the soldiers. Of course, the great generals were right there leading it and feeling it. That's what makes great generals, their willingness to be there with their men, like the great story of Alexander the Great. Whatever his reasons were, he's deep in India fighting elephants. It's swampy, it's muddy. There's mosquitoes. It's fucking crazy, his men want to go home, they're a long way from Greece but he's always out there with Bucephalus, his horse, with his double-plumed helmet, letting everybody know, you want to know who Alexander is, here I fucking am. Here's the guy with that. So the men are like, "We want to go home, Alexander. We want to go home. We're ready." It was at the point of mutiny. And as the story goes, he just pulls off all of his armor, his robes, his tunic, and he shows all of his scars, all of his scars, and he says, "Bring forth a man who has bled more than me. And we will go home." Everybody looks around, they look at all his scars, just riddled with arrow wounds and slashes and they look around and they say, "All right." And they just start pounding their chests like, alright, we'll continue to follow you. Why? Because he was one of them. He could feel them. He knew their pain. He was suffering with them. And then all of a sudden, that created solidarity. We know that. We know that. That's what we are, that's what togetherness is, the feeling of it, the bond.

GUY: The bond. And you're going like this with your hands. And as you're talking about the intensity of it, it's more and more taut. It's interesting. Vulnerability, in that way that you're talking about that, that story completely exemplifies this connection between: one, vulnerability in leadership; and two, vulnerability and the sense of ground, and a sense of orientation, and a sense of being held and belonging into something that I can relax and it makes me, interestingly, more powerful, more able. The thing about judgment, which is if you ever want to just really get to know yourself, just start tracking throughout the day anytime you just noticed yourself saying stuff about other people in your head and your responses to them?

AUBREY: You need a big notebook for that.

GUY: Totally, totally. If you look at judgment as the mind's way of managing anxiety, it becomes really interesting. What makes a judgment a judgment is usually, it has some discernment. But what makes a judgment is an insinuation of a claim of identity. Basically, what I think you just modeled in the way you fire people, is that in some sense you've made a judgment and discernment about this isn't going to work. And you have criticisms about the way that they do things. But what you didn't do is you didn't use that discernment as an identity claim about who they are. That hook, that identity claim is the thing that manages the chaos. Nominalizations and generalizations are always, it gets too chaotic, it's too threatening over there. All I gotta do is go, "Oh, you're just..." or, "That's just..." And in that moment, I separate myself from that chaos. I keep it out. But I'm also separate, and that's where the suffering is. The reason why I want to double-click on this is because I can't emphasize this enough because the one who suffers in judgment, the one who suffers in contracting your heart is us. You can just look at it like this, when you fall in love with somebody or you see people in that early stage of a relationship where they're just wide open, they're wide open with their new lover, but during that whole period of time, the  Sun sets brighter, your mother's less irritating, there's more possibility. I think what that shows is how, whatever it is in us that judges somebody personally, is not local. It's always global. If I have a resentment against you or a judgment against you, the sunset isn't going to be as bright, the world isn't going to be as possible. It's like there's one artery or something, like if I can track you, I can track everything else. That's one of the things I think why it's so powerful, for my own benefit, in terms of my own happiness, in terms of really, really relating with people as a Thou, and noticing my judgments and letting them go in a big way is simply the way that we are open, the way that we are open.

AUBREY: Yeah, it's beautiful, looking at it that way. What I could see, and what I could imagine when you were saying that is, you were talking about the hook of identifying someone and placing a judgment on their identity, and then recreating their identity and reducing them to an it. It was part hook and part like the Spider-Man web, that just keeps them stuck in this thing that they can't get out of. You've placed a Spider-Man web in your mind, over the entirety of them, and they're stuck in that thing. But what we don't see is there's that same hook, that same Spider-Man web that comes all the way back around and hits us right in the back, like a phantom version of that, that's also equally real, that's coming around, and locking us. It goes back to this idea that we are not a drop in the ocean, we're the ocean in a drop or in another word, atman, which is our internal divinity, Brahman, is all of God. So our internal divinity, which is who we are, is all of the divine. So the moment we start judging an aspect of the divine, we are inherently judging ourselves. And to judge ourselves is to exile that part of ourselves. The more judgments we have, the more we have exiled a piece of our own divinity.

GUY: Yes! Yes!

AUBREY: And you continue to do that more and more, and then you're shrinking and shrinking and exiling more and more pieces of yourself until what's remaining is hardly anything at all, because you've judged someone for pretty much about anything.

GUY: Yeah, absolutely. If I can track anything, I can track to everything. I think that's so telling and comes back to how fundamentally relational we are as human beings. There's no way around that. We're not things. We're an opening, even when I'm alone, my very aloneness is given by that I am alone from the context of being in a social environment. It's all the way down, we're relational. This is so, so, so important.

AUBREY: And people will assume, well, fuck, what about people doing legitimately evil things? This is where it gets hard, because people need to separate, disentangle the conflation between non-judgment and non-discretion and non-action. You can still have discretion and take action, even up to the point where someone comes in with a gun into my house and is trying to kill, rape, assault my wife, I am going to grab my own gun and defend us, I will, if that's the option on the table, and with least lethal force if necessary. It still doesn't mean that I have to go through that loop of judgment. Now it's going to be very difficult to avoid it, of course, right? It is very difficult to avoid it. But you can still do everything that you think you need to do with discretion and action taken on that discretion but without the judgment because the judgment is actually you think it's doing something for you, but it's not. All you really need is discretion and action. The judgment is always going to come back and hurt yourself.

GUY: Yeah, totally. And it's interesting because discernment isn't what makes it a judgment. What makes it a judgment is, basically taking this hyper object and summarizing as you're just filling in the blank. And at that moment, my whole being closes.

AUBREY: And we get that because we watch a movie like "Joker". Joker in some older "Batman's" is just a psychopath, just a fucking psychopath. And then in later "Batman's," you start to see more of his humanity. And then, finally, in the movie "Joker," you see Joker as, yes, a psychopath eventually, and a guy who is a little bit off and really wanting to be loved by the world, who really wanted love and that love was closed off to him and something very dark happened when that love was closed off. So now, Joker is not just the psychopath or the robber or this thing, which we love to do, and I think when you get a felony or something, you're a felon. All right, you're a human being, an amazing human being, a hyper object, as we've been saying, of a human being who happened to commit a felony. It's all true, not trying to deny that or excuse that. You did something but nonetheless, you're far more complex than what you did, and even the Joker, the psychopath, is not just the psychopath. He's the human all the way through that eventually expressed in this way that was psychopathic.

GUY: Yeah, absolutely. If I remember right, he was isolated. Isolation, we get so crazy when we isolate in a big way. I saw this, I think it was a documentary on some serial killer, and at the end, he got sentenced to 8,000, I think he actually got sentenced to death, I think. They showed the families of the victims having their last words, they let them say some stuff. You see, people getting up there and going, "I hope you die in hell. I hate you. You are an evil man." All of these, understandably intense, intense, hurtful things. And then there was one woman that got up there. And she said, "I think you and I have suffered enough here. I don't know what happened to you but I bet if I did, I could begin to understand what you did but I've suffered enough. We've suffered enough. I fully forgive you. I fully forgive you. And you ought to go to jail, and you ought to face this but I'm going to let go of my resentment of you and my judgments of you." And it was really interesting, because when all of the others spoke, he was like a stone, he was unresponsive, and he was just a stone. And when that woman spoke, you see tears start to come up to his eyes, and he starts to crack. And in that moment, he became human, just for a second. And what's interesting about that, is if you look at that moment, that was a moment where he actually, by her seeing him as a thou and for forgiving him, not approving of what he did by any stretch of it, but genuinely contacting him as a human being and forgiving him, was a moment that he cracked open and for a moment, faced what he did. When people were throwing daggers at him, he did not confront what he did. When that woman was loving him was the moment he actually faced the consequences of what he did for a moment. And I was like, "That's so so deep."

AUBREY: You can imagine that he was in a world where everyone was in it, in a world where everyone was an it, in this technological, extreme sociopathic technological mindset, and if everybody's in it, then he can justify his crimes, and his violence, because it's not a real person that he's doing that anyways, and that person would just judge him like everyone in his life has judged him and deny him love, like everyone would, he was in this it world and all of a sudden, she collapsed his entire world. We think that forgiveness lets somebody off the hook, but in this case, that actually opened him to the real pain of what he had caused, the truth that you cannot do something to someone else and not feel it. It opened him to that. Going again to the to the Joker story, even in Heath Ledger's version, you could see a moment where his world started to crack, he created this scenario where there was two boats that were pulling against each other and they were both going to perish, but if one hit a button, then the other boat would explode. They had the option to kill all of the people in the other boat. And Batman's all fucking dishevelled, he got knocked around a bit, so he couldn't really help anything. Joker's waiting, because he's like, this is all a joke, people don't give a shit about each other. Everybody's pretending to be righteous, but everybody's a piece of shit and nobody cares about anybody and that's why this whole thing is a joke, and it doesn't fucking matter. And then the people on the boat, nobody hit the button. Nobody hit the button, and the Joker starts to lose his fucking mind. Because at that moment, his world, that nobody cares about anybody, because nobody cared about him, so nobody cares about anybody, this whole paradigm that he created, this entire worldview starts to collapse, and he starts to lose it, starts to lose it because his world was shattering. We underestimate how powerful these acts of goodness, these acts of kindness, these acts of forgiveness are in recreating the type of world that is just and where people aren't committing these things. We have this old indoctrinated belief that the only way to keep people in line is the code of Hammurabi. Smite them, as they have smite thou. Doesn't fucking fix anything. Yeah, you get the Hatfields and McCoys shooting potshots at each other for centuries.

GUY: Yeah. Totally. This sense of just going back to how we become a person, in these inner subjects, I-Thou relations, that I become who I am through noticing how I impact people. There's no way that an infant can have any sense of who they are, until they are responded to, and then they respond to that and it impacts the mother in a particular way and they get their own shape. We are constantly forming each other in that way. I think one of the things we're talking about is this porosity of being open to the other, and also the transparency and sharing the impact of how you've touched me, how you've moved me, how I felt hurt when you did that, what didn't work for me in that moment, you open up that exchange. So much importance is going on but it's also these moments of deep vitality when we do that. If you want somebody to face the consequences or help them face the consequences of something that they did in your life that was difficult, that you didn't like, really share it with them without judging them. Really point at it.

AUBREY: The moment they feel that judgment, their walls of porosity are going to go opaque. They're going to close off, the force fields are going to be up, so what you're actually sharing is not going to actually land. You really want to make an impact, do it without judgment. It's counterintuitive. We think judgments are the arrows. Let me point all my guns and all my arrows at you. And that'll get you. No, they're closed off, the Klingon shields are up. But if you go without the arrows, then all of a sudden, all of the softness and truth of these words actually starts to work and the convulsion of sorrow has the chance to actually shake through the body and release.

GUY: Absolutely. Absolutely. There's also this element of if somebody has violated a boundary of yours, all upset basically signals there's been a boundary violation of some kind. Whenever somebody crosses a line with me, there's this cool thing that happens, is I get upset. And that upset lets me know that I care about stuff. There are things that are okay with me and not okay with me. Now, that's upsetting, I would say; one, alerts us to the boundary violation and, two, it gives us energy to do something about it. Now what we do about it, what we do with that energy, is the difference that makes the difference.But one of the reasons, one of the benefits of openly, non-judgmentally sharing the impact of when you said this thing that I felt hurt about, is that it could become a moment in which you get to know me. My friend, Mark Lewis, likes to say, "If you know that the line is right here, you could be 100% all the way up to that line." But if that line is unclear, a lot of times people stop a lot shorter and all of the aliveness is as close to the boundary as possible. So upsets are these really amazing opportunities for you to realize that you have boundaries. If you asked me what my boundaries are, I can probably say something smart, but I don't really know. But the moment you piss me off, I know exactly where they are. Upsets are these moments of you get revealed to yourself in that, and you have the opportunity for the other person to get to know you. And through that exchange, this allows you to be 100% all the way up. I think it's an asymptote in that sense, if you can get infinitely close to that line by just simply noticing how we affect each other and openly and lovingly sharing it with one another. There's all of this possibility of relationship and aliveness.

AUBREY: I think also, it's important that if the line is crossed, that it's not the unforgivable, the unforgivable thing where your identity is linked with the line that you cross, which is also culturally and inter relationally an aspect of somebody fucks up and makes a mistake.Yes, I think there are unforgivable things in certain elements, in certain ways in which you may never want to be with that person ever again. In a relationship, for example, if someone gets violent, all right, that could be the thing and I think most likely should be the thing that says this is done in this capacity. Still, forgiveness is, I think, ultimately, the way to heal the scenario, but there's ways in which that will never come together again. I'm not talking about that. I'm not talking about the extremes, I'm talking about little instances that happen that we never let go of. And so, of course, then when you make a little instance, a little mistake, and the reaction is so strong, then you pull away way, way back. 

Actually, I experienced this when I was a child, I could say something as a little joke or some way in which I didn't really understand that what I was saying could be an insult to my father, when I was young. I remember one example was he was playing ping pong, he did a ping pong match with some friend of his and he took competition really seriously. He mishits a forehand smash, the ball goes off the top corner of the paddle, off the edge of the paddle, rockets up into the sky, way over the top of the table and to the corner of the room. I'm like four and I go, "Home run!" And I'm bouncing around just watching my dad play, and didn't think anything else about it. Knew enough about baseball that if you hit one really far up in the corner, it's a home run. Later that night, he started yelling at me, "How could you insult me like that in front of my friend?" And blah, blah, blah, this whole thing. So that was one of several moments. I had a typically great relationship with my father but this was something I made a deep impression on, one small transgression of laundry, which I had no idea about, then became this massive thing, this huge thing. That actually caused me to pull away from ever getting anywhere close to aliveness with my father. I was always measured. We were relegated to very intellectual conversations, and very measured conversations, which has, in some ways, has become a superpower of mine, because I'm very careful with my communication and I'm very precise with my communication. So I don't even regret it. And certainly I forgive him as well. But nonetheless, the impact that that has of a small transgression having a big reaction, either unforgiveness or that thing that gets brought up a million times. Well, remember when you said this, remember when you said this, and this thing never gets remedied? It's going to cause everybody to pull back from the proximity. Well, as you said, the aliveness really is, it's close, it's close to the edge here things are tender. And otherwise, you just pull away the fuck back? Can't joke about things anymore, you can't really get in there and play.

GUY: Yes, exactly.

AUBREY: It's denying play.

GUY: Exactly. Exactly. First of all, as you were talking about that, and you talked about oh, yeah, that really affected your closeness with your father, I think is what you said, your whole body changed a little bit when you're talking about that. I imagine there was some kind of sense of compression imagining that. I had a really volatile father, same thing with you. He's an extraordinary man. Both my parents are extraordinary men, my mom, extraordinary woman, but they suffer from addictions. It just had a huge impact on our lives. And my dad was very volatile. At a snap of a finger, you could be publicly assaulted basically. He was my coach, my little league coach, and man, I had some moments where he would yell at me on the mound and I'd start crying in front of, it was so humiliating. As I've worked through a lot of that stuff, one of the things I've come to realize is that if you added up all those moments of being yelled at, all those moments of traumatic situations, in terms of time, you probably get a certain amount of time that you're yelled at, and those things happen. But really, it's not those events themselves that I think affected me so deeply. The consequences of those events had me live in a way that I was always: that that was possible, that horizon of any moment, you could just be slammed, that's what my nervous system oriented and shaped around. I used to remember being able to tell what kind of mood my dad was in, by the way he pulled into the driveway, the way that the rocks the noise that they got, I could just tell what kind of mood he was in because there was always this sense of having to stand outside and hidden and be in response to his moods right. Those kinds of possibilities that you're that you're shaped around, that's where the trauma is.

AUBREY: And the absence of something like Circling where you get to go in there with him, we're all going to fuck up, we're all going to get mad sometimes, but to have a technology like this, and after this, I think we should dive into it, just to give people a flavour of it, but to have a technology like this where imagining my father, at the time, just sitting down afterwards, after an apology, and then going in with heart open and with the skill, just seeing what I'm feeling and allowing me to express myself, and really feeling seen and then feeling him be seen. I remember there were certain times where he would apologize but what was a missing component is he wasn't really listening to me also. He was apologizing and crying. I remember one particular time after a particularly bad incident, he was apologizing and crying but it was almost like there was some part of me that knew he was doing that a little bit for him, for his own guilt and his own self-reproach and he hadn't taken the time to really see me as well. So I was still like, "It's okay, dad. It's all right." And I appreciated it. It's not that I didn't appreciate it, but it didn't heal it. It didn't heal it because I wasn't fully seen at that moment. I wasn't seen for my pain.

GUY: This felt sad. I just felt sad imagining that little boy missing that moment. Yeah.

AUBREY: Yeah. Sad for him too.

GUY: Yeah, absolutely.

AUBREY: This is one reason, just one of many reasons why this thing that we've been talking about for an hour and a half, is so important. So let's give people a flavor, and we have about an hour left, so let's give people a flavor of this. I wouldn't mind getting into philosophical fellowship, and then also Dia-Logos at the end. So just gauging that time, let's try to give people a sample of these different technologies.

GUY: Just the way you and what you call your family, how it impacted me this weekend, I have to say that, one, is your invitation to come, is much, much appreciated but that you invited your family, your wife, some of the closest people to you and trusted me, I felt a deep sense of honor and I noticed it called out my best. There is a way that your openness in doing that, you communicated that openness through your actions, but also just in your way of being. And the way that you did that, really had me feel super inspired and honored. And then there were many moments through the weekend, and inside conversations and watching you doing some of the exercises and then after the Circle that we did, when I saw you open up to what we were doing in a deep way and allowed yourself to be really moved. That experience, for me, I felt so humbled. And the thing I'm going to appreciate about you, I can love somebody with all my heart, and I can write letters to them, I can throw it at them, tell them, I can stand on one leg, I can share it with them and try to communicate to them with every ounce of my being but the one thing I cannot give you is the experience of being loved by me. That's one thing that I can't do. It's like you're free. There are moments where I watched what was happening go into you and I felt so grateful that you let me do that. You related to the moment, you related to me, I want to let you know I know that that is, that you did that. When you did, I felt loved. This is really what this all comes out of. This is just my way of loving. Watching you receive my love, I felt so humbled and deeply loved by you.

AUBREY: That's the way it is with love, right? Love is a two-way street. It's bilateral. You can love someone but if they don't receive that love, you won't be able to feel the love that you feel. It has to be a mutually accepted plane of existence. Going back to that story, I had a very interesting dichotomy growing up. My mother loved me as unconditionally as a human being I've ever seen in my life. My father could turn that love off and on. I both trust love and I don't trust love, by conditioning, not by choice. I would prefer to trust love always. But by conditioning, I'm teetering on the edge of "Oh, yeah, baby. Love is who we are and it's where we're at and I feel it all." And be careful, be careful because it can't get removed. A lot of times when I really do let that love sink in, it's this overwhelming, of course, it's love, nothing feels better. But there's also a little alarm that goes off in my head, be careful, be careful, be careful, be careful. It can get turned off. So that's a big part of my journey and I've done some deep journeys, this six-day immersion in darkness. If anybody watches my documentary, "Awaken the Darkness", they'll be with me as I went through this in real time and recognised how much of the love from the world that I closed off because of that little alarm. And so a big part of my process is to just unwind completely those knots that were tangled and just open myself to love in all of its forms. I feel myself doing that more and more, so glad you got to witness that experience of being loved not only by you, but by the whole circle.

GUY: It's interesting hearing that, what I'm hearing you say is, "Be careful," that sense of–

AUBREY: We're Circling right now, by the way, everybody. This is it, this is it. It was just a smooth entry by Guy here. But this is what we're doing. We're getting it. I can tell, I can smell it, I could smell it happening. So let's continue.

GUY: I think I sense that. I sense that, what you're talking about, just that carefulness? I think that's one of the things why I felt moved when you did, when I did see you just open up to the value of the work and really take it in, it was an act of your freedom. I could feel that place where you possibly couldn't or wouldn't. I could feel the outline of that. So in that sense, there was a way of, where I think that's where I felt so interesting, my feelings are touched that you would trust me.

AUBREY: I can see in you, notice in you, the genuine truth and your love of that process. I think that's what makes not only this practice, but you, as the founder and the leader of this Circling exercise that was going through, that's what made it so impactful is you lead by example, that you really wanted to get on the inside. You really wanted to see our experience and I see you right now just enjoying that, savoring the flavor of that moment and this moment too.

GUY: Yeah. That's another thing that I want to just talk about too is there were also moments with you, if you're working with the room and I would just look over you and you would just make eye contact with me and I think I got a sense of your gaze, the gaze that you had over here, I felt everything that you just noticed about me. For one, I just feel heard and seen in that but there's a subtlety in what you said, that I really just want to get on the inside, you could feel that as a genuine thing in me. I feel an extra, I really get you in that seeing. That's really true. I feel seen and I also get, well, I think I get you as a seer.

AUBREY: Feeling seen and acknowledged, not only in the past, but right now, in the present, letting that wash over me, then I feel seen. And when I feel seen, I feel trusted. And feeling trusted and creating this trust that's between us allows me to open to love. Because all of the times that love was removed in my life, it was because I wasn't seen, maybe not all of the time. Sometimes love was removed and I overstepped, said something I shouldn't have said and the temporary removal was actually them seeing something that was warranted, but most of the time. And actually, if you always look deep enough, you look deep enough, you would see that it was love, my love never wavered. And so now already, in the short time we've known each other, there's a sense of trust established where I feel like even if I did say something, comment in some way, you would see beyond that, and then our trust wouldn't be violated. And so the love wouldn't be removed. You wouldn't it me. 

GUY: Yeah. Yeah. Totally. We were just talking when we were taking a little break here about your crew sees you're really putting yourself out there and how deeply willing you are to be known. There's a privilege that I feel being led into your life a bit right now. There's a knowingness of the arrows that get pointed in your direction. And so to voluntarily be an example, a proactive example of opening yourself up, yourself, but also everything that you're doing and everything that you're up to, that are really unusual for people, I just want to let you know I see you doing that and I can just imagine what that takes sometimes. I could imagine some mornings, getting up and reading some of those comments or whatever the criticism that comes at you, there is a sense of I think I see you voluntarily, or I'm imagining you just really voluntarily turning towards the world and opening to it and even opening up to the arrows, opening up to all of it. The thing that I just want to say is I sense that you're at some new place in your life. I would imagine you don't even know exactly where it's going but I can feel it, I can feel the possibility of what it's reaching into. In the moment I was talking to your crew, they were just genuinely impressed by you and saw that in you, you allow your listeners to know you even better than some of the people in your life because this is what you're up to. I feel impacted just by being around that for a couple of days. I'm partners there with you. I can also sense your radical, unreasonable interest in this stuff, and that is enlivening for me, big time. I just got that sense of you, when we did Dia-Logos, I just got that sense you would have just stayed there all night and gone deep into that. I don't meet many people that have the kind of appetite that I have for an endless interest and attention in these deep waters. I can just do that forever. I sense something like that in you, as you feel like a brother to me.

AUBREY: When you're saying that to me, I can sense not only are you seeing me, but I can imagine your own journey, I can imagine you being in places that are similar to the places that I've been in, places where you've opened yourself up to vulnerability, places where you've been willing to take on criticisms, and where you've come through and continued to make the choice to open. I'm just imagining that part of your life that I haven't gotten privy to, because you've come, in some way, as an already baked cake in many ways. Now you're giving us windows into all the ingredients, but I wasn't there. I wasn't there for all of that process but as you speak, I can imagine the baking of that cake and the way in which sometimes it was burned, and sometimes it was doughy and sometimes it just broke apart in the heat of the oven. And all of those moments, I feel the subtle and imagine the subtle subtext of your own journey and recognise that.

GUY: It's as funny as you say that, I'm just flashing on all the moments of everything from when I got a divorce from my first wife, and basically just lost everything. I had a really hard time. I really, really went through a pretty dark night. I knew something was happening inside of me that just needed to happen but it went down pretty, pretty far. You're witnessing here, me, is it Nancy Armstrong? She talks about stages of a man's life of you go through, you become a prince and then there's the late prince, and then you go through a period of being disillusioned she calls the tunnel. Then if you make it through the tunnel, you come into kingship. And kingship has a quality of effortlessness and easefullness. My tunnel, I barely made it through my tunnel. But the other side of it, that you just talked about, the cakes that I've baked, I feel like I'm in that part of my life where things are just opening, they're just working out. I feel so less attached to the outcome of how things go. You're right. Going through a divorce while being someone who helped start a whole movement about relationships, I felt so much humiliation and shame about that. A part of me just went into a hiding that I think I needed to do. However, coming out of the other side of that, there was a sense, it's funny, it's like there is a sense in which something happened there for me, it's like I shook off this part of me, that was, on some level, always trying to make sure I was seen in a particular way. It was always this thing that always felt like it was like a dog in heat constantly humping on my leg. It puts so much pressure on me. And there was something about going through that death process, where I'm actually like, "Who gives a shit what people think about me?" I'm a lot more interested in what I think about them and what I have to give, but whether I get recognised for it, all those kinds of things that were so shamefully important to me at one point, stripped away.

AUBREY: As you were talking, I noticed when you were talking about, through the tunnel, on the way to the other side, it was almost like you looked over to the right in your eyes and you were talking about that time in your life and the person that you were then. I could see you looking at yourself, looking at a guy of 10, 15, whatever, 20 years ago, however long that was, I can see you looking at him. It was a look of remembering, of course, our eyes do things when we remember. But it was particular; you were looking over to your right. And I also saw you look over to the left, when you made a gesture of your hand that was like a beating heart, that you also see this beating heart, the beating heart of who you know yourself to be, you see that as a throughline of who you are. But in looking over to the right, it was interesting to me, because it felt like there could possibly, and this could just be my imagination, it could still be some separation that you've created from that guy with the beating heart that's right here before me now, that was still there then but a little bit of separation from that guy and actions potentially. This is all that I'm imagining and the place that he was.

GUY: That's interesting. I appreciate that, you saying that. That was scary. I would imagine what you're seeing acknowledges how scary that was for me. I'm glad I'm scared of that. I'm really glad I'm scared of that. Is it someone who said that wisdom is being terrified of the right thing? I think that that sense of terror, for me, is seeing that there's something in me that could really take it down. Even when I don't want to, it could take it down. That I got that in me, has me feel a sense of respect for it. 

AUBREY: I'm curious, this makes me curious, as I imagine now, you looking at that, it's almost like there's a part of you that wants to hold that separate, as an example that you can reference and you can look at in order to be this kind of guidance. There's this holding that outside of yourself as a reference point. I'm curious, I'm curious, if there's a place where you trust completely, that you've internalized all of those lessons and perhaps this is my proclivity towards internal family systems and that theory.

GUY: I could use all the family systems work I can get.

AUBREY: But perhaps, I'm curious as to whether there's a point where you really trust that enough that you can take that guy that you're keeping as a guidepost and invite him fully back home, knowing that the lessons are completely integrated, and there's nothing to no longer fear?

GUY: First of all, I'm just really appreciating you going here with me. I'm surprised but I feel like my pores are open, welcoming it, relieved. What's funny is, as you say that; I have a six-month-old child, I have my wife; the stakes are high. I don't want to ever go in that direction again. I could feel the sense of rejection there. But there's also though, I think the thing I appreciate about him is, in some sense, he expressed an extreme in me.

AUBREY: He, the Guy of the past?

GUY: The guy that went all the way down. He expressed an extreme in me that is actually, although it went into some destructive ways for me, that extreme that still lives in me. It's going extremes into in directions I want to go into. That extremeness, the one that could just sit there all night and just do this with you for three days straight, and just do this all day, that extreme, he was there too. He was there too.

AUBREY: What I'm hearing and feeling is also a deep appreciation for that version of yourself, a deep appreciation that you've bent some of his natural instincts and proclivities, but alchemized them and used that as fuel to be the person that you are now. I also want to reflect that as you talk about yourself, the me, your eyes go to the left again. It's like this is the you that you know. And there's the other one. And I just want to notice that the threads of appreciation and respect and love that's still there, mildly exiled as the other guy might be, there's still a lot of love. The relationship is still a loving relationship to that exile. I would just like to offer as someone that knows you, that if you were my father, I would trust all of you. I would trust all of you, every bit and your son will too.

GUY: Yeah. Yeah. Hearing that, I feel like it just went all the way in. Nice to meet you, brother.

AUBREY: It's great to meet you, too, brother. All right, so let's zoom out and zoom out of this. That was an interesting moment where we reached a natural aporia. And we'll talk about that moment where we just let things seep in, let things seep in. Let's talk about, from the meta level, because we just dove into the Circling practice, and gave people a little taste of what did we just did there? How did I arrive at that moment? What were the steps that we were taking because, obviously, we've been practicing this now for a couple days. So just give people the meta overview of what just happened? 

GUY: We have our own worlds. One of the things that we talk about enCircling is this idea of getting your world or being deeply seen or deeply known in a deep way. One of the ways that we express this world, because our worlds aren't something that are like an object in front of us, that we always know about. There's the place we come from and all the layers of that. One of the ways that that background or that context, that world expresses itself, is in these little gestures, these little ways that we move our hands or our eyes. One of the things you did, is I think; one, is you just had a sense that there's worlds, that I don't even understand, that are in some sense constituting me and how I see things and how I feel. So you caught a moment of the way, I think I was moving my hands, while I was talking about something and the way that I looked. And then you didn't just point at it and say what you thought or give me an opinion or an instruction, you, one, shared the impact of what it was like for you hearing that and then you talked about what you imagined. So there were a couple of things that you notice something, you noticed, and you said what you imagined about it, in terms of something that I wasn't at all even thinking about. And in that moment, you just brought a whole world, my whole world in front of me. And then we had a conversation about it and then you were like, "Yeah. I wonder if you're totally with that guy or not?" For example, my relationship to that history and that part of myself, is something that I never leave home without. So on some level, when I'm not even thinking about my history, in some way, it's orienting me, and has everything in the foreground show up in the way that it does by virtue of that orientation. You just saw that background, and then shared the impact on you, so there was a sense of relationship with it, brought it forward, and then we related about it. That just becoming from the background to the foreground, made it possible. That became possible.

AUBREY: I think some of the key things that people want to start to dabble and dive in, and of course, I recommend that they take the courses and learn from you, get the reps in in a proper way, but just a few things to think about: one, important is, notice first. Just be purely in that witness mind, just noticing without judging and preventing yourself from all of the projections as best you can, and then feeling like that's the substrate of connection, what are we feeling here? What's being communicated through the felt sense of things? Then from there, when you think you might see something, recognise that it's always just an imagination, that you don't know. And by saying it, and even phrasing it as an imagination instead of, "I saw you, and therefore..." which is telling somebody, you say, "I imagine," which then gives the invitation for the person to imagine with you, without any confrontation, without any judgment, without any of the implications of that and it's just this living invitation to explore that, without any need for defensiveness. There's no point at which the pores go up, like, oh, my gosh, am I going to be exposed? Because I'm owning that it's just an imagination. It's my imagination. You can even go further and say, "I imagine and I desire," and recognising that there is some vested interest that I may have. We didn't get to that in this one but I notice, I feel, I imagine and I desire. All of those things, you put those on the table, it's like, okay, now all of a sudden, all there is, is just mutual invitations, back and forth.

GUY: It opens up a whole new world in relationships, because we usually don't make the distinction between what I notice and what I imagine. Most arguments are about that, you did that to me... But if you really slow it down, and you just say, "When you moved your face to the left, I imagined you didn't like me or something like that. And I felt afraid. I want to feel closer to you." If you just notice, what I just did is I didn't say anything really about you. I revealed myself with you. I noticed something and I disclosed the meaning I made about it, what I was imagining, I exposed what I felt, and I disclosed what I wanted. In that sense, it's up to you to go, "Am I hating you? Am I not right?" The way to open, if you want to open with somebody, those distinctions, saying those things are the means of self-disclosure. And underneath it all, and here's the key point, here's the real key practice, you are coming from, in that, with an intention to relate. That's the key. If you have an intention to control, which is where we come from a lot, which is I'm saying what I'm saying in order to make sure something happens. Oftentimes, it's like I'm saying what I'm saying to make sure that you think a certain way about me or that you accept me or I'm managing something. When we share the intention to relate, it's really one in which I open up the truth of my own experience with you and then I find out what happens next. I could feel that intention to relate such that everything that you said, there was like an open invitation for me to take it or not. My mirror neurons could pick it up, and there is safety there.

AUBREY: It's not just the language. You're tapping into so much more than that. You're tapping into the entire holistic expression of somebody. I've always said this, people can use nonviolent communication absolutely violently, which is missing the whole fucking point. Non-violence in communication comes from a felt sense of things. You can say all of the right words, use projection 100 times, use all of the terminology or whatever, but the feeling is violence. And if you can't get to talking about the feeling, and also one of the other things you had as practice is, "What I'm sensing that's unsaid, what I'm sensing that's unsaid," or what I'm imagining, even potentially better; "What I'm imagining that's unsaid," recognising this still could be you. Imagining, but what I'm imagining that's unsaid is this, which is then an invitation, another invitation. And that way, this is the essence of nonviolent communication. It's not about the words, words are almost inconsequential, although important, certain ways that you phrase things are important, but the energy combined with the words, really is what makes it valuable.

GUY: It's your intention that ultimately has the meaning shows up. Just that, cultivating the intention to relate. On some level, that's all we've been talking about, this whole time, cultivating, and seeing how important it is, to have the intention to really, really want to relate with other people, really open up with you. If we come from there, we could probably say everything wrong and it'll still turn out. But if there's a background intention of trying to control or manipulate, either consciously or unconsciously, we can follow the letter of the law, and what will come through at the end, most of the time is the intent. So that's that quality of openness that really was underneath everything that you just did that made that moment possible.

AUBREY: Beautiful. Let's move into philosophical fellowship. And we may need to hyphenate some of the repetitive rounds just for the podcast format, but we can point to those. So the way that we did this, and I'm sure there's other ways that it can be done, was to take a passage. I'm just going to use the same passage and I know we'll iterate differently, because we're a different circle than we did. Somebody, you agree, first of all Circling, getting in the Circling practice, which we just did, it's a good way to start, making sure that you're seeing each other and have the intention to relate. But the idea of both philosophical fellowship and Dia-Logos is for some emergent truth to come out, some way in which our relating creates intense a fire, each of us putting a log on a fire of understanding and watching that thing blaze and seeing, sometimes, if it just catches and we catch some thread. So I remember how to start it, you'll have to guide me through some of the different steps, especially the three different things. Oh, it's invoke, evoke to provoke?

GUY: Yes. Yes. 

AUBREY: I think we can make it through this. The passage is from Hafez. Hafez was a Sufi poet. And the Sufi poets, the mystics, understood the flavor of God. They could taste God in the wine. They could taste God in the water that was scarce. They could feel God whipping at the edges of their silk. As they danced, they could feel God moving and animating their body. They were in touch, they were in contact. In a place where God was all judgment and all harsh, like the environment they were in, all sand and heat and judgment; for the Sufis, they found the sweetness, they found that the insides were always lined with love. He was part of that tradition, part of the Rumi tradition. He wrote, "Even after all this time, the  Sun never says to the Earth, 'You owe me.' Look what happens with a love like that. It lights the whole sky. Even after all this time, the  Sun never says to the Earth, 'You owe me.' Look what happens with a love like that. It lights the whole sky." So, from here, I select a portion of this that we'll repeat just once back and forth. Even after all this time, the  Sun never says to the Earth, 'You owe me.'

GUY: Even after all this time, the  Sun never says to the Earth, "You owe me."

AUBREY: What I can sense being invoked by Hafez is a sense of the infinity of gratitude, the ever presence of gratitude that requires no response. What is evoked in me is a recapitulation of the times I've created a transactional ledger between those that I love and myself. And the question that is provoked in me is how do I be more like the  Sun?

GUY: Can you read it one more time?

AUBREY: Even after all this time, the  Sun never says to the Earth, "You owe me." Finish of the poem, "Look what happens to love like that. It lights the whole sky."

GUY: Even after all this time, the earth--

AUBREY: The Sun never--

GUY: The Sun never says to the Earth, "You owe me." What it invokes in me is a radical openness of time, all this time. It evokes a generosity of temporality, a temporal generosity, and a vertical sense of eternity that's not horizontally give and take but an unconditionality. That's invoked and what it evokes, what it evokes a voluptuous, proactive, vulnerable giving and beholding the given to as had. And what's the last one again?

AUBREY: What questions or ideas does it provoke?

GUY: The question it provokes is this, is there a giving or a generosity, is there a generosity in which in the giving it reveals what is already had?

AUBREY: One more round of this. What is being invoked is a recognition that we are both  Sun and Earth. We are both the  Sun and the Earth. We can give generously, and receive graciously. What is evoked is an understanding that, or an idea and imagining that when we point up for God, that we've identified God as  Sun, that which illuminates, that which lights but perhaps forgotten, that we're also Earth and God is also Earth. So, what is provoked is an understanding that receiving graciously and a question of whether receiving graciously is just as important in divinity as giving generously.

GUY: What is invoked is this verticality of time, where the Sun and the Earth are given as already belonging together. And what is evoked is a sense of living through linear time as an unfoldment of what is already there, as a possibility that's always present, that I don't take actions in order to get something. I take actions as an unfolding of something that was already always present.

AUBREY: So let's move into the Dia-Logos format here. We have moved from this kickstarter philosophical fellowship. And often, with Dia-Logos, you can use a virtue, but we're in the realm of virtuosity. We're blending things together.

GUY: We're mixing in a few things together. 

AUBREY: Dia-Logos starts with a proposition. I'm going to try and turn a bit of our conversation into a proposition. I propose that the openness and receptivity to receiving is part without the desire, without the sense of owing anything in return, but just full open, gracious receptivity is what calls forward the divine generosity of the one that gives. If you want to create generosity, therefore, your own openness to receiving and receiving all of it, is what calls that forward.

GUY: Let me see if I got that. So that generosity, real generosity, you're saying is called forth out of your openness to receive? Yeah. 

AUBREY: Yeah.

GUY: This openness to receive. What was the last thing you said? Calls forth?

AUBREY: Gracious receptivity calls forward generosity.

GUY: Gracious receptivity calls forth generosity.

AUBREY: Calls forth generosity. By that reasoning, if we want more generosity in the world, the necessary place to start is with gracious receptivity.

GUY: So if you want more generosity in the world, the best place to start is with gracious receptivity? Yeah.

AUBREY: That's it.

GUY: That gracious receptivity, is that sequentially? Is that horizontally? Do you mean receptive first, then generosity or is it you actually receive something first and demonstrate your receptivity that calls forth generosity?

AUBREY: To answer that, gracious receptivity is a virtue, is an important virtue, that when present, when present, before the actual generosity occurs. So it's a priori to generosity. It's a virtue that can be sensed. And when that virtue is present, it calls forward the generosity and then is reified by the generosity, and proven. But the virtue exists first.

GUY: And what's the virtue?

AUBREY: Gracious receptivity.

GUY: Gracious receptivity. Take me through that again?

AUBREY: Gracious receptivity exists within you, as a virtue, and then it calls forward generosity.

GUY: And it calls forward generosity.

AUBREY: And then when the generosity is called forward, your gracious receptivity creates this loop that reifies the generosity and you create an ascending cycle of giving and receiving. But the first key place is actually a virtue of gracious receptivity. That's where it starts. That's the proposition. 

GUY: Okay, so where it starts is a virtue in you of gracious receptivity. And that's what calls forward the generosity. From the world?

AUBREY: Yes, from the world. I think you can participate in the world, but yes.

GUY: So in this example, from the world, and then a reciprocal opening relationship gets started between gracious receptivity and generosity, starts to feed and build on each other as they go up? Yes. Yes.

AUBREY: That's it.

GUY: Yes. So taking that in, what I appreciate about that, is this way in which you distinguish that was, it was distinct but you distinguish them as implicitly together, of receptivity and generosity. I appreciated the way that you made that distinct and whole and you left open the possibility for it to form and to build on itself. I really liked that. I can get this sense of it building on itself and then folding back on its own process and complexifying it, complexifying it in such a degree that I can imagine someone's face being formed and articulated, their generosity, their generous eyes, that see deeply, are also deeply receptivized in this complexification that can fractal back in this auto-poetic, self-organizing sense of this virtue that you said is where it really begins, which is gracious receptivity. That's what I appreciate about that. What's mysterious to me is this gracious receptivity being a virtue, even with my hand, and use your hand like this, what's mysterious to me is what's the hand doing? Is it the hand already giving? It seems like it goes both ways. What calls for the hand and it has this quality of its opening is already a giving to whatever it is that is.

AUBREY: And the gesture, for those listening, is it's an open palm. It's a hand moving into an open palm.

GUY: Yeah. Yeah.

AUBREY: I think that's a keen insight because my gesture, that gesture of opening your palm is both a gesture of receiving and holding the gift, holding the gift. It's the same gesture that you would use to give the gift. I'm playing with revising my initial proposition to say that, actually, gracious receiving and generous giving are the same virtue. They are the same virtue, because to give generously, you must receive the gift of the gracious receiving. It's actually the same thing looked at from different angles but they occur simultaneously.

GUY: So there, you're revising the proposition. So we're coming full circle, where gracious receptivity and generous giving are the same virtue? They're two distinct things, but as a virtue, they're the same. One, is I'm appreciating in some sense, the generosity of the dialogue is somehow present. So the virtue itself of gracious giving is a function of gracious receiving and generous giving. The virtue of them being together as a virtue feels like it's present in our attention, in the way it's unfolding. So I sense right now, one, is I feel like I'm definitely receiving and it looks like you're receiving. I feel myself given over and you've given over. They keep finding each other but one seems to be already present for the other one to be present. It's given itself as they're already together, which is generous. So it's not just virtue. It's not just the receptivity, it's not just the generosity but it generously arrives as one virtue, which seems generous of them actually. Right?

AUBREY: Yes, indeed. Now, we're going to cut this off because we gave people a little flavor and I want to just freely talk about it. And in the container of Dia-Logos, we would continue to go back and forth revising propositions, you would offer another one, we'd continue this until we distilled this wine into an even finer, finer wine, maybe even a grappa that got us drunk on God at the end. What's really interesting is, this actually has this fire that we tend quickly because of the format and a slightly more hurried way than you normally would, is incredibly valuable, because it's something I've always sensed, and always felt that people make, and I didn't realize this at the start, because I was saying, one has to come before the other, and then we revised it, but I've always felt that the giving is the receiving, and when you separate those, you're thinking about it in the wrong way. You're not actually generously giving, nor are you receiving because when I give when I really give, I'm so full. People, especially in the self-help community, spiritual community are like, "I want you to receive at the level that you give." I was like, "No, you don't get it." I am receiving at the level that I give, always. So you don't need to create some kind of little circus drama, I see these at parties and things and it's all beautiful and comes from a beautiful place. You sit in this chair, and we'll all give you all of this because of all you've given us. I recoil from that, and I would never want to be in that chair because you don't get it. I'm receiving every fucking time I give. So for my birthday, I'm going to give away so many gifts for my birthday. Why? Because that's my gift. That's my gift. And if you get that, you get me, you get me when you realize that me giving to you is my gift.

GUY: It's really interesting. When we came back from break, what I started off saying is basically that, is you gave to me by me giving to you? That's exactly what I was acknowledging. 

AUBREY: Interesting how that went full circle like that. 

GUY: When you receive the value or you receive my love, I feel deeply loved in the most intense way. That's exactly the thing that you were talking about. I'm just feeling the throughlines pickup. And that's the thing about Dia-Logos. Logos, if we go back to the Greeks, logos have this quality of the gathering intelligibility, that everything that's anything, is what it is by virtue as it's gathered in all of its aspects, and showing its gathering. Everything is gathered together and shown in its gathering, that's the Greek sense of logos. So Dia-Logos; dia, through, to look through logos, it's an ancient conversation where we highlight the sense of, in some sense, looking through the logos and following that throughline that starts to open up between it explicitly. This is the process of, in some way, you give a proposition, you propose something. The important thing to think about this, and John does a great job of talking about this where the ancient epistemology, the ancient understanding of knowledge, they took as self-evident that the world was intelligible, and therefore, coming to know the world or coming to know reality was a process of fitting with the world, co-forming the world. And therefore, as you go back in time, philosophy wasn't this dry academic thing of people just writing out propositions--

AUBREY: Yeah, it's in remembering the propositions and the knowledge that somebody else earnestly arrived at? So implicitly their ontological structure of how they knew it was sound? So when they said it, not only did it make sense, but they understood why it made sense and they went down all the blind alleys and all of the side roads, so that they arrived at this thing and it was theirs and they earned it. And it's that earned wisdom, that comes from the love filler of wisdom itself, to earn it to give it the respect, to dive in and say, no. I don't want to just take this from someone else. I don't want to just read a Nietzsche quote, or read a Joseph Campbell or whoever your favorite philosopher is, I want to earn it. I want to go find it, and then see if I can arrive back at that same place with my own way of building a geometrical proof yourself. When you do that, you're like, "Yep, I understand that this right angle is then bisected by this, I fucking get it! I built it!"

GUY: It's knowing through being transformed in the process of coming to know that thing. So your knowledge is indistinguishable from your being fitted or transformed by it, that deep sense of contactfulness. Dia-Logos is, I think John first used that term in the way they were talking about it and it's been a communal project of it emerging through these deep dialogues that we had. We are in the process of refining a process. So what you guys just saw was a little piece of that process of where you made a proposal and my job was not to agree with it, or disagree with it, or relate to it. No, it was to get it, it was to understand it, and then amplify it. So if you notice, I would get it, and then I'd come back and I'd say, "What I'm appreciating about it...," and then I would amplify it and deduce more of it out of you. Then the intelligibility started to shift. So you went from oh, it's not just receptivity, it's receptivity and generosity is one. That shift, you could say, is a little moment where the logos gathered differently and we followed it and we sensed it right? It's so interesting because at some moment, I lost track of even noticing whose thoughts we were articulating.

AUBREY: Yeah, because of the desire for ownership, we know that there's a fire. And just like a fire is mesmerizing when we sit by an actual fire, that's why campfires have been such a powerful tool, you just sit and you're mesmerized by the fire, also, technology mimicking the artificial fire is also mesmerizing, but in a different way. It's like a pseudo fire. But in this case, we're both just tending the fire. While in some regards, you can say, well, look what I came up with, what was actually there was a mutuality of coming up with this and you asking, first, the kind of interesting question that helped illuminate more. Another log, what comes first? Is it the gracious receiving, or the generous giving? And I was like, "Oh, well, it's the gracious receiving that comes first that calls it." And then, actually by pointing out my hand gesture, you questioned, perhaps my subconscious intelligence knew something that I was trying to communicate but I wasn't even aware of it. And that's where capital I Intelligence lies, it lies in this unknown awareness that we all have access to. And all of a sudden it was like, "Oh, yeah. There it is, that question." That's the same motion forgiving as it is for receiving it. Giving, receiving, it's actually collapsed into the same thing from different perspectives.

GUY: Right, exactly. Then what would happen is when that was complete, you were complete, then what I would do is I would then make a proposal that would be riffing off of that one, and then you would then listen to me in the same way and deduce it out. And then we'd go back and forth and back and forth. You could just imagine, over time, where you end up. I was thinking about this, that one of the things that this does, and people will appreciate this. If you have a really amazing conversation with somebody about something, oftentimes you look at that thing that you were talking about differently from then on, you perceive it differently. There's a very, very deep weddedness between seeing, between perception and thought. It's meaning that we see. We have eyes that see meaning. We don't see things exactly. We see what they mean. Therefore, when you get into conversations that open the domain of meaning itself, you in some sense, walk away and your perceptions, your ability to perceive is refreshed. Old ideas that were dead and just hanging on, get slumped off and the logos moves over here, and you throw some words at it, and then I throw some words at it, and then you realize it's so much more. Therefore, you seeing giving and receiving, you're going to perceive it so much more richly. I think that's one of the parts of it, why it feels so ecstatic, right?

AUBREY: No, it is absolutely a form of ecstasis. The interesting thing about psychedelic journeys is, sometimes you'll get the thought process that leads you to the felt sense of things. But oftentimes, you just arrive at the felt sense of things, which is a much more powerful form of knowledge because you feel it, you feel the knowledge but then trying to explain it is impossible. You've just taken this shortcut, through the bridge of the plant, through the bridge of the intelligence of the plant, if you will, and then the bridge of the intelligence of the plant and your subconscious arrive at a place where you know God or know something, but you can't explain it, because you took path that does not have words. That's been a big part of my journey. So I'll often arrive at a place and then backfill an understanding of that, and that helps me with my ontology. But there's still many things that I know that I don't understand how I know. But the beauty of this is, now instead of an insight that comes in plant medicine, where I have a vision or I feel something, yes, giving and receiving is the same, we've built it. We built it together, I've gone down a blind alley, I've corrected my way and I can talk about why that's the case, which also helps the mind in transmission, help to explain and understand. Like why are giving and receiving actually the same virtue? Now when I go to a buddy's house, and they're trying to do this big fucking giving, boo-cocky ejaculation of giving on to this person, I'm like, "No, you don't get I! He's been receiving it the whole time. You don't need to do this. We can just have fun."

GUY: There's the meta part of it too, which is you learn so much during this. You learn about the thing that we're talking about but I think that you also learn how to learn, which is a distinct thing. And there's something about this conversation, and I've noticed this by Circling that, because it's so participatory, and just like you were talking about, you go through the ride, and in some sense, you conform your nervous system in that ride, your whole body's getting trained, and you're noticing patterns. In the process of realising this particular thing or content or idea, you've also realized how to do that. And that repetition of these kinds of exercises, afford when you look at a business plan. Your ability to grok that business plan in ideas and ability to see, can be enhanced on it, when you look like you're talking about it at your friend's party, mostly with perception, the way that you can see something because you can only respond to stuff that you can see. If it's undistinct to you, you can't relate to it. The more distinctions that you're able to have, and your ability in getting those distinctions, increase your ability to get more distinctions and know how to make distinctions, the more eyes you have to see the world with.

AUBREY: Yeah, no doubt. I'm just thinking back to that party. And I got to break because we got to carry on with many beautiful things in my beautiful life. What I could also sense is that everybody was so eager to share this gift of gratitude and expression of what that person has meant to them. But you could tell that that was a gift to them too. It was like everybody wanted to give that gift for themselves, also, as well as them. It is, in some ways, I don't want to say that this is a terrible idea in all circumstances, it can be beautiful. But just recognising that the person speaking is not just giving, they're also receiving, receiving in a very powerful way and also receiving everybody watching them give the gift. It's working on a lot of different levels that I think, I was unconsciously attuned to the subtext of what was happening and so was unconsciously averse because it wasn't explicit. And I was like, "Y'all don't really see what's going on here." I didn't really understand it, either. I was like, "Yeah, not for me." But now I understand it and it's still beautiful. It's still a beautiful gesture from a beautiful place. But nonetheless, I see how my own understanding now justifies this feeling that I was feeling and, at least, explains it and justify's probably a bad word. But really fucking cool.

GUY: This is really cool. Yeah, really, really cool. Yes.

AUBREY: Yes to all of this. Thank you so much. 

GUY: So this is what we do at The Circling Institute. Everything's online right now, because of COVID. But we have open events every week, anybody can come to them, Circling. We have weekend Circling events, we have three levels of training to learn how to facilitate it. And then we just started doing the Dia-Logos courses, which are our two days taught with John Vervaeke and Chris and myself, all of this online. Please come check it out. I also do one-on-one coaching. I'll give you my email and the links and all that stuff will be in the show notes, I'm sure.

AUBREY: I highly recommend it and also your partner, Korenna, at The Circling Institute, she's a wizard. And it was just beautiful to have her presence as well. So I want to present her here, in this acknowledgement. So thank you so much for your work, brother. And thank you for listening to that whisper that guided you to this point right now. Thank you, everybody. So much love. Goodbye.