In one of my FAVORITE PODCASTS OF ALL TIME, I am joined by Dr. John Vervaeke PHD. John is an award winning lecturer at the University Of Toronto, and has been teaching courses in cognitive science, psychology, buddhism, and philosophy. In this incredible conversation we talk about the meaning crisis in western civilization, meditation vs. contemplation, psychedelics,  love, anti-debate and much more. John also takes me through some incredible verbal exercises that open a portal to personal insight and effective communication. 

AUBREY: John, it's great to talk to you. 

JOHN: It's great being here, Aubrey. 

AUBREY: I've been listening to you incessantly as I've been preparing for this. And I'm so fucking impressed. You're really one of the greatest philosophical minds I've ever listened to. And I was a philosophy major so I've listened to a lot of great philosophical minds. I've done a lot of great podcasts. And I've really just been blown away. 

JOHN: No pressure on me. Thank you for that. That's very kind. There were a lot of people that helped me, there were a lot of people I collaborated with. I owe a debt of gratitude to a lot of people to help me get to the place where I can do work that other people like you find useful. Thank you. 

AUBREY: We all stand on the shoulders of giants. And also, our peers are also the giants that we collaborate together. 

JOHN: And for me, also, my students. The years and years of my students showing up in good faith, giving good feedback, good comments, that helped me tremendously across the years. Tremendously. Still does. I also owe a debt of gratitude to them as well. 

AUBREY: Like Yogi Bhajan, I believe he said, if you want to learn, teach. It's always a reciprocal process. It's a cycle. 

JOHN: Very much. I find that the best way to teach is to share your ongoing learning with your students. 

AUBREY: Absolutely. And then it brings you to their level. They're more receptive to receiving your language because they're not projecting that you are some master evolved being that they are not. And so, different rules apply to you than apply to them, and then they discard the teachings. 

JOHN: That's very much the case. That's well said. And what it also encourages is that many of my students go on to be collaborators with me. We end up publishing papers together and doing work together. And that's been a great joy for my life too. 

AUBREY: Now that I've sufficiently set you up, I want to go into a little game. And the game is that I've heard you on several different podcasts be a bit reticent to ascribe a generalized meaning of life. And I believe that I'm through my own Icarian hubris, that I'm willing to endeavor such a foolish feat as to try and do it. And I would love for you to take the role, as the Buddha recommends, be like the goldsmith. Cut, and scrape, and heat, and see what we can find to what I have to offer. My meaning of life, which I believe is not just personal and perspectival, but could be generalized is really to live. Capital L, ‘Live’ in the most robust sense of the word, the most romantic sense of the word. To laugh, to cry, to dance, to hug, to fuck, to eat, to drink coffee, to take psychedelics, to find our way to God, to really live, to be in peace, to be in stillness, to find the great beloved, as Rumi did with nature, all of these, to really live in this robust sense and live in the world as well. And simultaneously, do your best to ensure that everyone else can do the same for as long as possible. Perpetuating what James Carse would call the infinite game. That would be, to me, how I would endeavor to ascribe a generalized meaning of life. 

JOHN: First of all, the term that's used for what you're describing, it goes back to certain translations of Aristotle, one translation of eudaimonia is flourishing. It's a general term for that multi-dimensional thing you said. That what you want is you want to flourish and you want to afford other people flourishing. Part of the issue I would ask is, what do you mean by generalized? Do you mean this is for all people? Or do you mean that the universe is trying to do that for everything in it? Which do you mean? 

AUBREY: Both, I would say, but differently. Because there's different intentions, different beings, and different intelligence involved at a different strata. What I was mostly speaking to was people. However, from a universal perspective, you have to also bring in the necessity for chaos, the necessity for destruction. You have to bring in this almost a perspectival, you have to just create these large laws, the gameboard itself, without any necessary intention for a finite game or an infinite game, because there is only the infinite game. It's like a slightly different rule applies. Although I do believe that life, capital L life, is looking to continue itself. In some ways, it's similar but different. 

JOHN: What I would say to that is that, when I make the distinction between meaning in life, and like I said, not just me, but other psychologists and cognitive scientists, versus the meaning of life, that's exactly where that distinction lies. The meaning in life is to say something analogous. It doesn't have to be theistic, but it's analogous to this idea, God has a plan for you and your job is to discover what that plan is or what your destiny is or what your fate is, and align yourself as much as you possibly can with it. That's why I asked you, are you talking about the universe without human beings or are you talking about just the content of human lives? That first proposal, and I am willing to talk to people and I talk to people about it. I talk to Paul Vander Klay and J. P. Marceau about whether or not the, just for lack of a better term, whether or not the physical universe has any kind of Telos or purpose to it. I'm still convinced there's no good argument for that. Just a couple of simple points. 99.9% of the universe is hostile to life. It's not set up for life. 99.9% of the time that the universe has existed, there's been no life. Things like that. And I don't want to get into a deep metaphysical debate. What I'm saying is, there seems—

AUBREY: Just so I can counter that briefly because I can't help myself. 

JOHN: Please. 

AUBREY: I would say that if you're talking about the universe, which is infinite in its possibilities, practically. There may be a finite nature of the universe, we're not exactly sure. It seems to be expanding. That idea that there's a limitation to the amount of life because some planets don't have it may not actually be valid, because there may be an infinite amount of planets, given the infinite nature of time and given the infinite expansion of the universe. It may be maximum, like there's no splitting, necessarily splitting infinity. There may be the maximum amount of life. That's one point. The other point would be that I, myself, an animist based upon my own 22 years of ceremonial psychedelic use, ayahuasca, all of these things. I've talked to the moon as a being. The moon is a rock. It's what we would call a dead rock. But the moon has talked to me, the sun has talked to me. And that could be a projection of my own mind. I don't believe it, because subjectively in my own experience, I feel like I talked to the moon. I believe in the animism. You can say that these things are hostile to life. They're just not expressing life in the form that we like to call life. They're life in a different dimensional reality. That would be my counter to that claim. I guess my fundamental claim is that the universe is on team existence and team articulation. It's very limited, though. It doesn't have a Telos beyond that, like it wants things to do a certain thing. It just wants to be, basically, and to be maximized and articulated. 

JOHN: Again, I don't know which way we want to go on this. We could get into—

AUBREY: Let's just go wherever. 

JOHN: The point I would want to make to that, even an easier methodological point is, the problem is I try to peg my study on what makes lives meaningful to particular metaphysics. Yours is not unique and neither is it universal. There are many metaphysics about whether or not the universe is animated, whether or not there's a Telos to it, whether or not we can make any of those positions consonant with our existing physics. That's all very controversial and it's very pluralistic. I don't think I can resolve that before I can study this phenomenon. I remain, therefore, not just metaphysically but sort of methodologically agnostic. I don't even think I have the expertise. I don't know who does, by the way. But I don't have the expertise to side with that issue. What I can do is do what you do in science. I can find observable, measurable phenomena that we can get into theoretical debate about, we can argue about. And what we can do is see if that's predictive of other things. When people are talking about how meaningful their lives are, can we nail that down? Is that predictive of their mental health? Is it predictive of the relationship health? Things like that. That's doable. And I don't want to make doing that contingent on having solved these metaphysical issues that it looks like we have not been able to resolve in several millennia. That's why I take this stance. You're right. I'm reticent. I don't jab at people claiming that there's a meaning of life. I just say that's not what I'm doing. And this is my reason for not doing it. I'm not clear about it. And I don't think there's any definitive answer on that. This is what I can work on. And this is what I want to work on because I want to make a difference in people's lives. That's not me doing a subtle insult to your metaphysics either. I'm just trying to be honest about how I try and resolve these issues. 

AUBREY: I think what I'm also exhibiting is that my metaphysics are playing a very important process in my own personal meaning. 

JOHN: Yes. And that is interesting to me. And see, I want to say, is that a general feature? Not your particular metaphysics. But is people's attachment or their involvement with their commitment to what you might call more neutrally, a worldview, is that significant to whether or not they would commit suicide? That's the kind of question that really interests me. While I may not be in agreement about your particular metaphysical claims, I think there's a substantial reason to agree with you that having a relationship, and that feeling like you are connected to a coherent worldview, does that have an impact on how meaningful you find your life? I think there's good reason to think that is true. 

AUBREY: It feels to me like virtually, maybe not a necessity. But absolutely one of the most helpful things possible is to have a metaphysical purpose beyond just our purely mundane worldly purpose. It seems to be extraordinarily helpful for me believing that I'm on team life and I'm on team infinite game, that really helps beyond, I want to grow the podcast, I want to have a nice family, and all of these different things. It really, really helps. It gets me out of a lot of dark places. 

JOHN: That's a really good point, because we tend to, in the West, for whatever the West means, we tend to reduce meaning in life, if you'll allow me to talk about that, we tend to reduce that to purpose. Do you have a purpose? What's your purpose? But the thing you're describing turns out to be as important or more important. It's called mattering. No pun intended. What really seems to matter to people about how meaningful their life is, is if they feel connected to something, and this is the metaphor that's often used, is that they feel connected to something larger than themselves, more real than themselves. Susan Wolf, that was the main argument she made in her book on "Meaning in Life and Why it Matters." That sense of connectedness, almost reverence, that matters to something bigger, deeper, more real than yourself, that, again, contributes more to meaning in life than I've got an end goal or an overarching purpose to my life. 

AUBREY: In my case, I can't imagine that I would ever believe something enough without experiencing it. Like the difference between knowing with a K or being told something or taking something. Traditionally, we've been told like an article of faith. Just believe it because it said so or believe it because it's in this book. Never could work for me. But I do a, let's say a Bufo, a various %-MeO-DMT journey and I become God. And there's no other word for it. I'd love to use a different word potentially. But God is the word that makes the most sense in that case. It assumes me, I assume it, I dissolve into it, whatever you want to say. And then all of a sudden, it's real. It's real. I can't deny it anymore. It's real. I know that it's real. This experiential gnosis seems to be, to me, essential for me to actually believe something enough to have meaning. But it doesn't seem like it's necessarily essential for everybody. It just seems like for me it is though. 

JOHN: I can say a couple things. We ran an experiment in my lab and we've presented it at a couple of conferences. There is a relationship, a prediction relationship. Now it's a correlational study so I can't say the cause but I can say predictive. There's a predictive relationship between how many mystical experiences you've had in life and how meaningful you find your life. That's a general finding. And then you've got work coming out of the Griffith Lab, that people who have a genuine mystical experience show a real change in their personality structure. If you're aware of the big five. Openness reliably increases for the long term after having a mystical experience. That's a fundamental change in the way you're oriented and understanding yourself in the world. And then thirdly, I do a lot of work. I talk about it in my series and some of the stuff I'm trying to get published, and some of that I've got published this. There's a fancy name I've given to it. It's called onto-normativity. This sense of the ‘really real’. That this is a really real experience. And what people have found, Gayden and others, is this is a reliable result. People will have this experience of the really real and then they will change their life to be more in conformity so they'll feel more connected to that really real. And by objective measures, their lives get better. Like their relationships, their mental health, their sense of subjective well-being. With lots of objective measures, their lives get better. For me, I've had such experiences. I've done meditating and doing Tai Chi Chuan for literally decades. But for me, as a scientist, what's really interesting is, I share that phenomenology with you, but if you stand back and think about it as a scientific problem, it's really interesting. Because normally, we decide the realness of things by how well they fit into our everyday pattern of how things make sense. Let me give you a prototypical example. You have a dream, and you come out and you say, that wasn't real because this is real. The everyday is real because the dream doesn't fit in. Or you get drunk and you have some weird experience, you go, that wasn't real, because it doesn't fit into all of this. What's really powerful and interesting about these experiences is people do exactly the opposite. They go into these experiences and they say that was real and all of this is less real. Why are they doing that? How are they doing it? Why are they doing it? How are they doing it? And then a really interesting question, are they justified in doing it? I argue that I think they are justified in doing it. That, for me, is a really interesting question. All of the things you talked about, there's things, like I said, I'm directly studying and I'm trying to understand. And by the way, your claim about, maybe not many people. Reliably, it looks around 30% to 40% of the population have these potentially transformative experiences. But our culture is not set up to give people a worldview that allows them to make sense of it, or allows them to turn it into that motivation for transformation into some kind of well vetted educational program. For many people, these experiences can be disturbing or troubling, because they have no good machinery to help them assimilate and properly metabolize it. I don't think that these experiences are prevalent. It's that our culture is not open and conducive to people, talking about them, and developing, and expressing them. 

AUBREY: Based on everything that you just said, the fact that we're entering into this psychedelic renaissance. I've heard you talk about this as well. This is not a new thing, like the Eleusinian mysteries, what happened at Delphi, all of these things. These have all kinds of ancient corollaries, all the mystery schools, all of these places, whether it was psychedelic, Ergod, we don't exactly know. But it seems like entheogenic use was something that's been historical at the very least. Brian Muraresku talks about it in so many ways. We're entering into a new era, where this is possible. It's possible now, but there's some repercussions depending on where you go. I've always been fortunate enough to be able to go to Peru to drink ayahuasca or go to different places to experience a lot of these medicines. Given what you're seeing from the science and what you just mentioned, is this a source of optimism for you as we're looking at the meaning crisis that we're currently in? And I'm happy to talk a little bit more about that. Obviously, that's a core tenet of what you're working on. But is that something that's giving you a sense of optimism based on where we're headed? 

JOHN: It is. I just want to put a caution out there. I think of psychedelics, both, I agree with Aidan Lyon. We should broaden the category of psychedelic to be anything that's mind-revealing. It can be a substance, it can be a practice. 

AUBREY: Breathwork, meditation, all the things that you mentioned, ecstatic dance. All that. 

JOHN: All that. Very much. These are very powerful tools, I would call them psycho technologies. They're very powerful tools. And therefore, I'm hopeful for the renewed interest as long as it's being integrated with a renewed interest in the wise transformation of lives. I am concerned about the possible commodification of these and the reduction of them to recreational kinds of things. We know for example, ecstasy within a therapeutic context can be deeply transformative. But people were also taking it, I don't know if they still do it, at raves. And that's a very different—

AUBREY: They'll do. As long as raves exist, ecstasy will exist. 

JOHN: Right. My concern about this is that we're doing something that. For example, let me give you an analogy. The West has done with mindfulness. If you take a look at other cultures, look at Buddhism, you have the eightfold path, you have meditative practices, contemplative practices, moving practices, ethical practices. You have this whole dynamical system that's rich and self-correcting so it can deal with the dynamic complexity of the human psyche. And we've reduced it to what's been called McMindfulness, sitting and doing just meditation as if that's going to be sufficient. And I worry that we will do the same kind of commodification and trivialization. I don't believe in prohibition. The evidence is clear that prohibition does nothing. All you do is criminalize people, provide money for organized crime, and destroy lives. But on the other hand, I think we should consider that psychedelic should be, the use of psychedelics, substances and practices should be properly integrated into like an educational program, in which people are being taught, like what you see in indigenous cultures, how these experiences fit in, goes back to what we were talking about earlier, into a more comprehensive worldview, and into a set and ecology of practices that are working together. Because all practices have their dark side. You need to have many practices to counterbalance and counteract each other and also mutually afford and synergize with each other. And if we would situate. So I'm going way beyond the simplistic leery set and setting. I'm talking about a sap essential framework, an ecology of practices. That's what I think. And if we move in that direction, that gives me great hope. But I fear that we will do to these experiences what we have done to mindfulness. 

AUBREY: I think there's going to be some of that. Commodification is inevitable. You see all of these different companies springing up. Most medicalization, I think, is actually more likely than the recreational kind of issues that you're talking about. Because the actual legalizations that are happening, there's some decriminalizations, which is a different thing. But the legalizations are happening on the medical front, which is, they're very well attended. Like the work that MAPS is doing in training the MDMA-assisted psychotherapist, same with the psilocybin treatments. It's all in conjunction with therapy, with follow-up calls, with the whole thing, which will help give a broader context. I 100% agree with you about this sapiential framework. I don't know if that was the exact language you used. But it makes perfect sense to me that a more robust framework. I do also think that people need some kind of transcendent experience in order to even want to work to create this framework. Enough people need to be, whoa, holy shit, this was big. How do I contain this? What do we do? How do we create the right thing? I think there's an inevitability that there's going to be some really tough experiences, there's going to be some people who take these entheogens that shouldn’t go through experiences that have difficult times. But overall, it's I think, the part of the process that's going to lead to hopefully building this world. This world that you're describing is the more beautiful world that our hearts know is possible, like Charles Eisenstein says. That's what it is. It has this all built in. That these transcendent experiences are part of our culture. And this is something that we're talking about. And this is something we're working to integrate. And it's not like we're being gaslighted by society when we say, “I just experienced God.” And they're like, “yeah, whatever, bro.” That's not the reality that we're in. They're like, wow, tell me about it. How was your experience? It was similar to this. That world is just a dramatically different world than the world we're in now, at large, while there's pockets that do exist exactly like I say. 

JOHN: I think that's well said. In Canada, marijuana was decriminalized, and then medicalized, and now it's recreational. And I'm hoping, and I think maybe we're in agreement about this, from what I hear you saying. I'm hoping that the step beyond medicalization of psychedelics will not be directly into recreation. That we'll get the intervening step of no, no, no. Let's use this to address the spiritual and existential concerns of people in an intelligent, organized, and coherent manner. It's very important, and this is, again, part of the indigenous use of entheogens, is that this is not something that people are doing just as isolated individuals. Obviously, there's just core safety issues. But there's also the general issue that a worldview that's not shared is not a functioning worldview. If I would put it this way. Ecologies of practices need to be homed within shared communities. We need to rely on distributed cognition, not just individual cognition to properly help us curate the development of these practices and the development of the use of these kinds of substances and transformative experiences. 

AUBREY: It seems like we're always in a state of shared cognition, even when we believe that we're deciding things on our own. We have this belief, I think this, I believe this. No, you don't. I who, first of all? Start there and then say, and you have all people are exempt from the conditioning of the world and everybody around you because you have such a powerful mind. Of course not. So intentionally cultivating communitas is essential, because otherwise you're just receiving this nascent communitas that's around, the culture that's around without any intention, and you don't really know, you're not choosing the people around you that you have this shared cognition with. 

JOHN: That's very well said. And my hope is that the psychedelic renaissance is going to integrate properly with another renaissance that I'm involved in, which is the whole renaissance around things like circling, authentic relating, a process I call "Dialectic into Dialogos." I've participated in this. And what's very powerful about these experiences is, for example, in a circling practice, people get a sense of the we space, they get a sense of a geist, a spirit. It's not reducible to any one of the people that's somehow shared, or a logo that is unfolding itself. What's interesting is how people from religious or non-religious backgrounds start talking about this experience reverentially. They start talking about it using spiritual or religious language because they're getting a sense, I would say, and I don't mean this in an explaining away, I don't. They're getting a sense of the collective intelligence that is available in distributed cognition and the potential for collective wisdom that is there. I've said this before. Long before we networked computers together and released the power of distributed cognition, like the internet that we're relying on right now, human culture networked brains together to release the power of distributed cognition. That power is powerful. And people rightly respond to it as, oh. And what's so interesting phenomenologically is people often realize, and this is so interesting. It's almost like a new taste. They realize a form of intimacy that they're not familiar with, but feels deeply at home. They say, this is not romantic intimacy, it's not like friendship. It's more like the old Christian idea of fellowship. But they feel an intimacy with each other, people they've just met. They feel an intimacy with the world and even with themselves. And they don't quite know how to classify this. If we could take that, that communitas, education, and integrate it with these transformative experiences and then also integrate all of that with people doing more reflective practices like philosophical fellowship, etc., I think that we could give people reliable tools to have these experiences, situate them within the community, and be able to reflect on them collectively and individually in a powerful way. 

AUBREY: I'm very familiar with the Ayahuasca sharing circle and circling around transcendent experiences. This idea of circling and its dialogos is what you're talking about? And the utilization of, it seems like some form of the Socratic method and some kind of unique thing. Can you go into this? Let's say, hypothetically, I wanted to get 12 of my brightest friends together and we wanted to do this. No entheogens involved, we wanted to do this this way that we're talking about. What does it look like? How do you prompt that? How do you get it going? 

JOHN: Great. Excellent question. We recently did a weekend workshop, Guy Sengstock, the inventor of circling and one of my deep friends and partners, Christopher Mastropietro. You take people through a program, you take them through a pedagogical program, you can't just blah, just jump in. It doesn't work. I'll just quickly what we did and what and the results. You start with a basic meditative practice, because not everybody comes in with mindfulness. And you have to have mindfulness for this to work. We took people through a meditative practice, a contemplative practice. Then you take people through some basic circling practices. Mow the circling practices—

AUBREY: Let's just back up real quick. You’re a longtime meditator. You take somebody who's a novice. What is your meditation style that you recommend? And then let's go into the contemplation, more specifics of contemplation. Real and pragmatic. 

JOHN: Excellent. The meditative style, and I've been teaching meditation for like two decades. And I also published work on it. I'm in a bit of a privileged position. I both practice and study it. It's based on Vipassana. But what I do for the core, for people who, because you only have a couple of hours in this workshop, is I teach them a centering practice where they're learning how to first center their posture. You get people to close their eyes, move backward and forwards until they feel centered. Sideways. They learn to center and align. And then you teach them how to center their attention. The metaphor I use has become a bit of a meme. Right now I'm looking through my glasses, by means of them and beyond them. They're literally framing my experience. Sometimes what I need to do is I need to step back and look at my glasses rather than through them. Most of the time, this is what we're doing with our mind. We're looking through it and we are not, therefore, aware of how it's framing reality. We teach people to step back and look at, for example, their sensations, look at their mental framing. You teach them how to center their attention. And then you teach them how to center their attitudes. Centering the attitude is, you've probably heard of the monkey mind, the thing that chatters and jumps around. You don't want to fight it, you don't want to feed it. You want to center your attitude. You don't fight it, you don't feed it, you learn how to befriend yourself. The same attitude you would take to a friend that you're trying to teach and encourage, you take towards your meditative practice. You center the mind-body posture, you center your attention, and then you center your attitude. And these three centers are just three different aspects of the same centering. That's what I do to take people through basic practice. I've got a whole online course I taught during COVID. I did it every day. I took people through it. And after centering, you learn to root and to find your flow and find your focus. But if you give people the basic centering, that gives them enough. And the centering is really important because people need something like that, because they're going to be confronting a lot of new crap in the course. And they've got to be able to return to your center, return to your center, return to your center. That's the meditative, I'll stop because I don't want to just give a speech. If you want to ask any questions. 

AUBREY: No, I love it. And I love the idea. That is so valuable, that thing you did with your glasses. I understand why it's a meme. I understand why you put it on T-shirts because it's really important. And it's great. So, thank you for sharing that. 

JOHN: That's the meditative practice. If you'll allow me to return to that metaphor. Imagine if you wanted to clean your glasses, you need to do this. And you might make a change. But how do you tell if you've actually cleaned your glasses? We have to put them back on and see if you see differently into the world. That's contemplation. That's what the word contemplation actually means. It's not a synonym for meditation. You can hear the word temple in contemplation. Temple means to look up and out to the sky. The Latin word contemplatio is a translation of the Greek word theoria, we get our word theory from it. Theoria means to look deeply out into reality. So, while meditation is this, contemplation is this. You teach people contemplative practice. The contemplative practice we teach for the "Dialectic into Dialogos" is drawn from the Neoplatonic tradition. Basically, what you're getting people to do is to look at, there's co-determining levels of the psyche and reality. Realize that within you that is just emerging and realize that that's also happening in reality. There's a here nowness to you, and there's a here nowness to reality. You get people to become aware of that. That's phusis, things bursting forth. But notice there's a suke, a psyche of the phusis. Because it's not just this. Things are becoming determinant. They're falling into patterns. There's a pattern. And the pattern is within you, and without you, and between you and the world. And then you say, ah. But those patterns aren't just random. There's a patterning of the patterns and it forms a world. And you have an inner world, that's your consciousness and they're conforming. And you get people to realize that and you say, but what's happening on that? Is there's a oneness that was making all that happen? There's henosis, and you experience the oneness. Notice that it's not dependent on you, it's much more that you're dependent on it. And you take people through this, where they're learning to, and this goes back to the Neoplatonic tradition, they're learning to remember that there's an aspect of cognition and life that are about not representing the world, but conforming to it, sharing an identity with it, bonding to it. And you talk to people through this contemplative practice. 

AUBREY: Almost seems like you're becoming aware of your perspectival bias. 

JOHN: Exactly. That's exactly right. And what you're doing is, you're modeling how you're making sense. You probably recognize this is also very similar to the Stoic practice of the you from above. And not just moving out, but also tapping deeper into parts of their own psyche. As you're getting them to move to these more encompassing perspectives, that allows them to see the limitations of the automatic and habitual limitations of lower order perspectives. Exactly. 

AUBREY: I love it. I love it. This is great. Next step. 

JOHN: After you do that, then what you do is Guy Sengstock, dear friend of mine. You take people through some basic circling practices. In circling, what you're doing is you're trying to do two things at once. It's very similar to Tai Chi Chuan. In Tai Chu Chuan, you talk about the two eyeballs. That you're trying to get as mindful within, as mindful without. And like stereoscopic vision, the way the left and the right fields fuse and you see a depth. You're trying to get the within and the without. And you're doing the same thing in circling. What you're doing is you're trying to be very mindful of yourself, but as a way of being mindful of the other person. And what you get is what Goleman calls mindset resonance. If you're very mindful of me, and you're being very mindful of someone else, you can actually make yourself more, you can change your behavior even facially, so that it's easier for me to pick up on you. And then as I pick up on you, I go, oh. And then I can change myself so that you can more pick up on me. And we can loop like this. We can get into this mindset resonance. And it's a conversational practice. But you're not using conversation to convert people. You're not using conversation to inform people. You're using conversation to commune and create this mindset resonance, this looping. That's part of why the intimacy, I think, emerges. Because if you look at Aaron's work, that's the last thing, not the first thing, the way you get people to fall in love, not necessarily romantic, but friendship, is mutually accelerating disclosure, mutually accelerating disclosure. If I disclose something about me and then you respond by disclosing and we keep doing that, that's what circling does. It's really interesting, because, like I said, people discover this new kind of intimacy. And it's fair to say, it's not even just a new kind of intimacy with other people. It's a new kind of intimacy with themselves. It's so odd, it's almost paradoxical. It's simultaneously new and this is how it always should have been. The way people talk about it. 

AUBREY: Of course. Are you posing a question like a Jeffersonian dialogue or picking an object? 

JOHN: No, no, not initially. For the circling practices, you'll do things that are initially just for the sole purpose of setting up this resonance. I'll say things like, if you and I were facing each other and I'll say, being here, I noticed about you that you're a little curious. And then you'll say, being here, and you can either report yourself. Being here I respond to that. Or being here, I notice about you. And then you do these things like that and you get into sequence. And then what you do is you add more and more complexity, more and more dimensionality to the way in which you're showing up. The original meaning of education, edeus, draw out. You're drawing each other out in this mutually affording fashion. People learn to generate, that is what I published on. You learn to generate collective flow as opposed to individual flow. You learn to get into the flow state coupled to somebody rather than just on your own rock climbing or playing a video game. That's what's happening with people. They're getting to this shared flow state. 

AUBREY: When you say mutually accelerating disclosure, is there a point where you flip it and you start talking about yourself with the other person? 

JOHN: You'll do both. That's why I said even in the exercise, you can report what's happening to you. You don't do it in a monologic fashion. Let's say you notice something about me, you say, John, I noticed that you're high energy. 

AUBREY: I notice that there's a lot of joy that you have. That's inside of you. 

JOHN: What I can say, but directed towards you is, and that just made me feel safer. And I felt that really here. See how you're picking up on that. And you just thought it. You're resonating with it. 

AUBREY: I would say something like, it's beautiful to see you draw that into your heart. And as you draw that into your heart, it awakens my own heart even more. 

JOHN: And when you say that, and as I felt you moving into the pause, I actually felt this expanse of possibility just open up between us. 

AUBREY: Amazing. This is incredible. I've run different groups of masterminds and fellowships, sometimes informally. One is formal, it's called Fit For Service. And we do a lot of these disclosures and vulnerable sharing and circling. But this structure is just so incredibly valuable. I'm just really in a lot of gratitude that I'm learning it. Please, let's keep going. I want to learn more. 

JOHN: And throughout, you also remind people, you remind them, make sure you remain centered. Make sure you're doing this, especially some of the later practices, don't stay on just one level. Remember the levels that you saw in contemplative practice. Don't just stay on one level. You're reminding them to explore the dimensionality of this and not just stay at this one level. After you've done the circling, you take them into a practice called philosophical fellowship. This is a practice I've derived with the help of Chris and other people. And it's based on Ran Lahav's work on what he calls philosophical contemplative companionships. He emailed me. We're on good terms about this. He doesn't feel like I'm stepping on his toes or anything. What happens in philosophical fellowship is... And this is something that Guy and I have talked about. You know word philosophy comes from philia and sophia. All this stuff, the meditation and contemplation, the circling, really gets philia going. But then you want to get the philia directed onto Sophia. Now you move into philosophical fellowship. What does that look like? What you do is you get a group of four people. Four is a really good number for a lot of these things. You see a lot of traditions converging on it. And what you do is you pick a text, and you have to give some people guidance initially. For this, we actually had pre-selected a bunch of texts, philosophical texts. Now one person will read it. But you read it in a fashion called Lectio Divina. You don't read it just to inform. You read it very slowly. And people are supposed to, they're supposed to try and do with the text what they've been learning to do with each other in the circling. They're not just trying to get the information, they're trying to resonate. They're trying to open up the text and let the text open them up. What you explicitly say to them, is, you're trying to invoke the perspectival presence of this wise author. You're not just trying to get the information. Let's say you were doing Augustine. You're trying to present Augustine. The way a child is presencing an adult, or the adult is presencing a sage. You read it slowly like that. And then you do a philosophical chanting. The reader picks one phrase that really grabbed them. And then they chant it in the circle. They chanted it and they chanted in this resonant fashion. Then you move into what's called precious speaking. 

AUBREY: Wait. With the chanting, is everybody chanting it in the same way? Give me an example of what the chanting looks like. 

JOHN: Spinoza said, only in God's being do we find happiness. And then the next person will say, only in God's being do we find happiness. And you let people chant to whatever degree they want. This isn't a musical competition. Some people just speak, some people are more chanty. And that's fine. But what happens is you circulate it around, and you get the circling effect because people are tuned into each other. But they're also resonating with this particular phrase. And that phrase is like a doorway into the depths of the text. Because now what people then do is they move to what's called precious speaking. And this is really interesting. What you have to do with precious speaking is try to convey as much as you can, with as few words as possible, like a sentence or two max. About what's being provoked, evoked, and invoked by you when you hear this passage by Augustine or Spinoza. You cycle that. And you can imagine how they jazz off of each other. Because they can't monologue, they do these pregnant pronouncements and then pregnant pronouncements, and everybody starts to, and people start to get a sense. People will start to say, I kind of feel like Spinoza is here. And I kind of feel like Spinoza is here. And then you move into conversation where people are allowed to say four to five sentences. And then it just keeps circling. And you find people, they don't have to have a philosophical background, they start to deeply appreciate this, I don't know what to call it. This existential spiritual confrontation with the possibility of wisdom. 

AUBREY: I love it. I really love it. And I could see how this could work with philosophical texts. It could work with spiritual texts. It could work with poetry very much as well. 

JOHN: Poetry, it will do it too. When I teach people Lectio Divina, I often recommend that they should do both a poetry reading and a prose reading. That's philosophical fellowship. And then the last thing is "Dialectic into Dialogos." Now they're ready to try directly Socratic practice. What that looks like is again—

AUBREY: I'm literally giddy right now. I'm literally giddy. But please continue. 

JOHN: Thank you for that. Just to be clear, I use this somewhat awkward phrase. Dialectic is something you can practice. Dialogos is something that you can only participate in. Let me give you an analogy. I can teach you things that will make you better at getting into a good conversation. But I can't teach you the art of, do this and I guarantee you'll be in a good conversation. Because a good conversation has to have a life of its own. It has to have a logos of its own. The point is for people, they do this practice, but what it does is, it's only to afford this sense of the logos. And I'll talk a little bit about what that means in a second. You bring people in, and you follow the Socratic, Platonic model. We're going to do a topic you're going to bring all this machinery; mindfulness and circling, and the sense of sophia, wisdom, philosophical engagement. And you're going to bring it in, and now you're going to do it with each other. And the topic is going to be, like it always is, and there's a very good reason for this, it's going to be a virtue. Because the thing about a virtue is it's both philosophical, but it's personal. The first person is going to pick a virtue, let's say it's honesty. And then what they're going to do is they're going to say, they're not going to state a third person definition, blah, blah, blah, proposition. They're going to say, I propose that honesty is this. The next person in the line, their job is to draw them out and say, in multiple ways, they can ask them a question. Can you say a little bit more? Or they can note back to them. I noticed when you were talking about honesty, you made a fist. Go back and make a fist. What's going on there when you make a fist when you're telling me what honesty is? What you're doing is acting like a Socratic mirror and getting people to go deeper. 

AUBREY: Would you mind if we do it with honesty? 

JOHN: Sure. 

AUBREY: This might be a long process, but we'll just go a little bit. Start it off. You would say, I propose that the virtue we're going to talk about is honesty. 

JOHN: Honesty. Are you going to question me, or do you want me to question you? 

AUBREY: You question me. You're the leader of this exercise here. 

JOHN: What I would say is, can you give me a proposal as to, let's give a little bit of background. You will have been instructed. Don't just monologue, pause periodically so I can have a space to interact with you, ask you questions. Both people should, as much as possible, avoid going off into masturbating their autobiographies. Try to stay on the joint project of disclosing what this particular virtue is. 

AUBREY: Honesty. I propose that honesty is the authentic expression of your being beyond words. 

JOHN: I noticed when you were doing that, that your hand would go like this, and then like this, and then like this, and then like this. What was going on when you were doing that? 

AUBREY: As I expanded my hand, I was indicating that there was an expansiveness to the honesty, a more holisticness to the honesty. And as I contracted my hand, I was referring to the condensation of something into a word, which I believe and propose is always a little bit of missing the mark to honesty itself. 

JOHN: That's very interesting. What are you feeling is the relationship then, between the expanse and the narrowing? Can you unfold that for me a little? And what does that tell us about honesty? I'm asking you not just to tell me what your mind is thinking about honesty, but how your mind is thinking about honesty? How you might even be exemplifying honesty. What's going on there? Can you unpack that a little bit more, please? 

AUBREY: Honesty, to me, has to be felt in a way that's beyond just the reduction to a single sense, the reduction to what we would ascribe to the mind. It has to be felt with both heart resonance, it has to be felt through the emotional body, it has to be absorbed through the intellect. And it has to be coherent with all of these different things to be truly honest. It has to encompass a more holistic view of our totality. 

JOHN: That's very interesting. Because I noticed your gesturing changed its dimensionality. Your hand became like this. Your arm became very vertical, moving much more up and down and looping like this. What were you conveying? You're now adding complexity, in a revealing manner, to the dimensionality of honesty. What was the up-down and the looping? What was going on there? 

AUBREY: I believe that we're multi-dimensional selves, that our self cannot be condensed and identified on one loca of consciousness existence. It's far larger and more encompassing than we normally attribute. And so, to be honest, you have to account for the complexity and the robustness of the totality of who we are as this multi-dimensional consciousness, as an expression of the mind of God itself. 

JOHN: That's really interesting. I might not be understanding you but let me see. It sounds like honesty is in some way connecting. It's like a through line in all this dimensionality. What does that through line feel like? How is it different from, for example, another virtue perhaps, like kindness? What's that through line through that dimensionality that makes it honesty as opposed to kindness? 

AUBREY: I haven't thought through all of the other virtues in this way. However, when you say kindness, my instinct is to say that kindness is exactly the same. That kindness must also encompass the entirety and the totality of who we are to truly be kind, other than being transactional, other than being self-serving, other than being some idea that we're being a good boy or a good girl and we're doing this. It has to be authentic from all levels, heart, mind, spirit in all our dimensional reality. 

JOHN: What I'm hearing you say is that both honesty and kindness insofar as their virtues are doing this pan-dimensional, multi-dimensional integration. What makes them different then? Because remember, you did this. 

AUBREY: Honesty is kind but it's only always kind on the broadest expanse, and in the broadest context. Because there's certain timing and there's certain acknowledgment of the other person that might mean that honesty may not be kind in a certain situation. For example, someone is already having a very difficult time and you have another very difficult thing to express. To stack them too close would violate, not violate, but it wouldn't be helpful to their pacing and calibration, their ability to absorb. There's a way in which kindness can actually shield, temporarily, and it must be temporary, but shield certain expressions of honesty, to give people time to assimilate what you're saying. 

JOHN: That's amazing. You're talking now and your hands are doing this gesture of coordination and resonance. You're saying there's a difference. I've heard you saying something like there may be a risk to honesty. And that kindness and honesty are now counterbalancing each other. Is there also the reverse? Does kindness need honesty, as much as honesty needs kindness? 

AUBREY: Kindness needs the honesty of the heart, and it needs the honesty of intention always. It cannot exist without honesty of the heart and honesty of your intention. It can withhold the honesty of factual expression, or opinionated expression of a certain topic. 

JOHN: We've done it for almost 15 minutes. All of this now said in no more than a sentence or two. What's honesty? 

AUBREY: Honesty is a form of love. 

JOHN: That's different from where you were when you started. 

AUBREY: Yes. 

JOHN: That's what it looks like. 

AUBREY: It's amazing. I love it. 

JOHN: And then what happens next is, I would say to you, I was doing it throughout. But I would say to you, this is what I heard you saying. And I would say this back to you until you agree that I have understood you. I would say, what I heard you saying was honesty was a way of being authentic but in a multi-dimensional fashion that encompasses a lot of the different facets and aspects of a human being. Part of what it is to be honest is to be in relationship to other virtues in a coordinated manner. I was hearing you say all of this. And that's why you summed it up in something that's very comprehensive like that, like love. Did I understand you? 

AUBREY: You understood me. 

JOHN: Once I get the acknowledgement, I would say, here's what I learned. I hadn't thought about honesty, in that multi-dimensional way that you articulated. That was very insightful. Then I might say what I found mysterious. I got a sense of mystery towards the end. You started, from the very beginning with this expansiveness, and somehow it goes out like this and comes in like this. But that expense got really big for me. That was the mystery. And there were times when you were falling into silence because I could tell you were stepping back and trying to, I got to try and see what's going on here. And then I would also say what I thought might be missing. And I’d say, one of the things I thought was missing from this was the relationship between honesty and truth. For me, that's an important thing. Then I would do this, Aubrey. I would turn to the next person. And I would make use of everything that I've had with you. But I would build on it by bringing in what I thought was missing, and try to go deeper into the mystery. I'd say, all of that multi dimensionality but for me, honestly also has to involve the truth in some important way. And then the next person in the quartet would do with me, what I just did with you. And then you circle all the way around. 

AUBREY: For people who want to really dive in and learn how to do this, this is a great initial kind of explanation and understanding of how to do this, but you have a platform, a way that you're teaching people how to do this? 

JOHN: We've done the workshop and we're going to do it more. I'm actually in the process of trying to get properly certified in circling. There are some legal issues. Guy and I are working together. 

AUBREY: You're certified. I certify you myself.

JOHN: Thank you. Like I said, we're going to do more workshops. And I would invite people to come to them. We do them virtually and we might do some in person. There's a book that Chris and I edited. Chris Mastropietro and I edited and we both contributed to it called "Inner and Outer Dialogues," where I give the background of "Dialectic into Dialogos," the historical, philosophical background and then lay out this program. This is very much a work in progress. This is the cutting edge of what I've been trying to do and responding to the "Meaning Crisis." This has been something, basically, since the series came out in 2019, that's what I've been diving into both theoretically, academically, and practically, and existentially. This is the cutting edge of what I'm trying to get people engaged in. There's other practices. I'm not claiming that "Dialectic into Dialogos" is exclusive. There's many other practices. There's inquiry, there's Buddhist dialogue, and there's families and they can be properly coordinated. Also, there are practices like Edwin Rutsch's empathy circling, that you use when people are much more confrontational, to get them into a shared space so that they can then move through this program that I just took you through quickly. 

AUBREY: Let's go there. I do want to say that it's really interesting. We'll go back to this later. But you said that there's the necessity for keeping the logos coherent with agape. And this is what naturally, and agape being love, that's what naturally emerged in that last question, which I think was really interesting, because I wasn't thinking about that, that thing that you mentioned, until that actually became emergent out of that thing. I get it. It has to be love that's tied into this. 

JOHN: And this is the thing. You move between theory and theoria, you move it properly. You move between the theory in which you're proposing and it's legitimate. And theoria in which you're trying to see how his honesty actually shows up here? How am I exemplifying it? Instead of just talking about it, how am I actually engaged? Because that's what you were doing? You're trying to, what's it like to be honest. You're trying to do the whole perspectival participatory thing. Very much. And the logos is, notice how... I couldn't predict how that was going to go, I didn't have a script. It's this own thing that starts to emerge, and things start to emerge in you, and things start to emerge in me. And things start to emerge between us. And all those are completely interpenetrating forms of emergence. And they are unpacking the intelligibility of something fundamental, like honesty, that's the logos, and properly coordinated with agape, like you just said. 

AUBREY: Logos, which is a biblical reference, and it's talking, I'll have you describe logos. But it seems to me, the point that I'm making is that logos seem to be something that will reliably emerge from this process. In many different ways, you will arrive at this place if you do it with enough earnest and with the right intention. You'll arrive reliably at logos. And that's what makes it logos. It's something that's not just in your own individual perspective. It's something that multiple people could arrive at. 

JOHN: Very much. And that's what I meant at the beginning when I said, there's dialectic, there's things I can teach you as a practice. But I can't make the logos. The logos has to appear of its own accord or it's not the logos. 

AUBREY: Define logos for us. 

JOHN: Sure. Logos go back before the Christian tradition. It goes into the Socratic, Platonic, even the ancient Greek philosophical tradition. Heraclitus famously said things like, don't listen to my words, but listen to the logos. Logos originally meant to gather things together, so they belong together. But it's also the etymological origin of our word logic. And notice how much journey goes on between those two. The reason that I use logos is because it has the ordering of intelligibility that we convey with logic, but it also has this gathering together so things belong together in this dynamic fashion. That's logos. It's also the root of our word, like when we put ology at the end of anything, like anthropology, the logos of the anthropos. It's this involvement. It also means speech, it means reason, it means formative principle. The clearest translation from another culture and another language for logos would be dharma. How it conveys a reality, a structure, a way of thinking, a way of being. It's all of that. And it's fundamental. To dialogos, by means of the logos. And part of the proposal here is that we have lost the capacity for dialogos because we have reduced it or replaced it to debate. And debate has been reduced to a zero-sum game argumentation. We've lost the capacity for dialogos in a kind of truncation process that has happened historically. 

AUBREY: That's a perfect segue to how to do this. Because this seems like a practice you get some people who are already very allied and willing to go there. But what we find in the world now is a lot of heated, emotional arguments that are very difficult to reconcile. What is your suggestion if you have somebody who is on very different sides of a particular issue that you want to bring together and have this discussion? And then also, just dealing with the more general problem of, you have somebody maybe online, you have somebody who wants no part of going through a meditation and contemplation and doing all of this with you. What is the best way to interact with them that's actually going to be productive to actually finding meaning and making sense and coming to common ground? 

JOHN: One of the things you can do, there's three things. One thing you can do, and this is a practice that my friend and colleague Peter Limburg talks about, is you can see if the person is willing to engage in anti-debate. Anti-debate is, before we debate this, let's make sure we understand each other. Now the competition will be who understands the other person better. Before we get to who wins, let's do who understands the other person better. You're going to state your position and I'm going to understand you. And then you're going to see if you understand. And that will generally move people to a different position. The next thing and this is drawn from, his name just escapes me. He wrote the "Knowledge Illusion." If you get people to state their position about a topic, they will polarize reliably. I think he did this for something like health care. Free health care. And then you say, wait, before we do our positions, can somebody explain to me how healthcare actually works? Can you and I figure, and people go, what? How does it work? Let's try and help each other. And when you get people to try and explain the mechanism of a phenomenon, they will start to move towards consensus. If you get them to state their positions or valuing of the phenomena, they will polarize. You can also do what's called empathy circling. Empathy circling is a little bit like the thing we did. What I'm trying to do is, you will state your position... Edwin Rutsch did this with vociferous Republicans and Democrats. You state your position and I have to say to you how I understood you. But I say it to another person in the circle of four. And then they have to say .And what happens is nobody gets to defend their position, everybody is caught up in the project of understanding everybody else. And it constantly is moving around in an unpredictable fashion. And what happens is people start to move towards, you're not the evil bastard I thought you were. You have a life. Please don't misunderstand me. I'm not proposing that do these three things and people will just naturally start singing Kumbaya. There's no protection against bad faith actors or things like that. But if people have enough good faith in them to do those kinds of things, in good faith, you can often get them to a place where they might consider this more developed program. The other thing you have to do, and I thank you for affording this, is you have to expose people to the beauty of this program. They might move from, wait, I'm getting a taste of that. Now I see where that might go. You do this two-pronged strategy. 

AUBREY: Beautiful. I understand the first, who understands me better? I understand empathy circling. That's pretty clear. I understand in your specific example about healthcare, understanding the mechanism of healthcare, but just trying to figure out what that question is. Let's take some actual debates that are raging right now. There's the people who are very pro-vax. Vax for everybody, vax mandates. This is what everybody should do. Doesn't matter your own personal story. Everybody needs to do this. And other people are saying, no, this should be a sovereign choice. This is something that every individual should decide for themselves. I'm not talking about the extreme conspiracy, like the cabal is doing blah, blah, blah. I'm just saying health sovereignty, and the ability to choose for yourself whether you take it. And then the idea that, no, everybody should take it. This is our social contract or social responsibility. You have that topic which is a hot debate. What would be the mechanism question that you would ask? 

JOHN: How does the vaccine work in your body? How does it work in your body? And is it a violation of your sovereignty? Or is it actually your body acting in a highly sovereign manner? Are we clear about this? Do we know how it works? You open up, what's the mechanism? And is it tied as directly to the things you think it is? Get people to talk about it that way? 

AUBREY: It seems like people will try to throw their opinion into all of this. One in three seem like we can keep those pretty clean. But it seems like two is going to get messy, because people are not going to be able to withhold and resist putting in some digs. 

JOHN: And that's why I wanted to put the caution. Even in the things I took you through, even when people are good faith, really good faith, it's still hard for people, for example, to not get into an autobiography. Even though you caution them, you tell them you're in service of the person who's talking, they'll start to start to spin their autobiography. They'll say, why are you doing that? Step aside. I agree with you. Again, I want to be cautious about what I'm claiming. I think if you are trying to get people, so to speak, off the street that aren't already religiously committed to a position, if I can put it that way, then you'd have to flexibly move between all three of those in some fashion. You might try the mechanism. And then as it gets there, you say, wait, wait, we're getting bogged up. Let's do the empathy circling to see if we're really understanding each other or talking past each other. Or perhaps we're starting to get entrenched. Let's try the anti-debate to loosen things up again. And part of the thing we need, this is what's hard and on the street, although people are trying to deal with Street Epistemology is you need people who are willing to say, I'm not going to take a position here. I'm going to try and facilitate your discussion. Are you both happy with that? And I'm going to really try my best to do that. That exists in other cultures. 

AUBREY: It's a type of mediation. 

JOHN: Yes, exactly. It's not anything impossible to human beings. It's going to be difficult in our culture. Is the difficulty in the practice, or in the culture's capacity to adopt the practice? Those are two different problems. And the way you dress the second is what we're doing here. You try to educate people, you try to exemplify. Do not take this the wrong way, anybody who's listening. But Plato talked about, you have to seduce people into this. You have to see how beautiful it is. Draw them in. You do this with meditation. People come in and you say, why are you meditating? And they'll give you XYZ. I want to relax. And you say, you do this. But you try and show them that by the time they get to the end of the meditation course, their reasons for meditating are very different from the reasons they started. You're doing a similar thing. 

AUBREY: One of the beautiful things that's emerging from this process, and it's something that you talk about, is you're creating a flow state between the different individuals. I'm just going to put a little footnote there that we're going back to that. But I want to just continue with this and see what your thoughts are. This is obviously a great process for a small group. Is there a way to do this in a larger format? For example, I made an Instagram post yesterday talking about unifying polarity by having reverence for both sides, while still holding your opinion. And then a lot of people got it, a lot of people loved it. It reached half a million people and it was a powerful post. But there was also a lot of people who then came in and say, fuck your opinion, this is right, this is truth, blah, blah, blah. But with this, do you think there's a way to do this in mass, where you kind of set the premise for this and say, we're going to collectively have. And there will be people who just don't do it. But we're collectively going to have an antidebate, where we're trying to understand this one position first. And then tomorrow, we'll try to understand this other position. We'll try to understand everybody's position on this thing. Is there a way to do this at scale? 

JOHN: There's a middle answer to that. There's a final stage, by the way, in the program. All the little groups come together. You have a whole bunch of groups of four and then they all come together. And they've all done different, for example, different virtues. This is just one example. It can go different ways. And then I will say, let's have a discussion. And people, they're all in this charged state so they're ready for it. I'll say, using what happened in your group, but listening to the other groups, let's not ask the question, what's honesty or kindness? Let's ask together the question, what is virtue? And then what happens is the various groups, the people from various groups start talking to each other. And you get this group dialogos thing that takes shape people. You can do that. The other thing you can do, and I don't have any direct experience of this, but I've talked to her, Nora Bateson has the Warm Data Labs. Warm Data Labs is you have this ongoing. You have a whole bunch of groups of four and people are doing something similar to what I just took you through. But what happens is, one person gets up from there and goes to another group. And then this person gets up and goes to another group. People are moving between the groups, and the groups are constantly reconfiguring slowly. And they're inseminating and pollinating each other. It keeps shrinking to the group of four and then expanding out. And people get this, almost like a musicality to it. And I think it's possible, by the way, to integrate the two things together that I just mentioned. What I can't tell you, because I don't know, I'm just ignorant, is how you could get that beyond like 80 to 100 people. 

AUBREY: Sure. It's interesting because there's so much, even in our own little experiment and discussion, honesty is a requisite of, my version of honesty and also receipt and intimacy is really tuning into the person holistically. We're actually limited by just having the screens and not actually being able to be directly in the field, but we got there pretty good. And at least, we're looking at each other and we have live feeds. We pick up cues in that way. it's definitely harder to do. But I don't know. And we can take this maybe, and if you'll afford me, maybe I'll reach out to you and talk about, as I tried this experiment and just keep you appraised of how we could do this experiment on a larger scale, and just give you the results of how this plays out? 

JOHN: Please. Please. Very much. One thing I would want to know, sorry, I stumbled on my speech there. I strongly suspect this cannot be done by text. I strongly suspect that this needs the dynamic looping of spoken. This is something Plato articulates, puts into the mouth of Socrates to say. Because notice how I was not focusing just on the content of what you said, but all this other stuff. It's very, very hard. We don't have in the way we do punctuation. We can put emojis. Try that. Try to have a really emotionally serious conversation only using text and emoji. It will go awry almost all the time. I don't think we have, in text, what we need to do when we're trying to commune with each other, not just communicate. 

AUBREY: Maybe a Telegram group where you can put videos or something like that. We'll figure out the logistics of that. I'll keep in touch and let you know. I want to talk just briefly about this idea of one of the ways to get into flow. Because a lot of times we think of flow, flow, surfing. Got it. Risk and waves. And you made a distinction that I thought was cool between hot flow, which I guess that would be considered hot flow, you're in an intense activity, and cool flow, which is what's developing in these conversational dialectics? 

JOHN: Hot flow is the prototypical one that people think about. And Csikszentmihalyi, most of his examples, but not all of them are hot flow. And what I mean by hot flow is you feel like your, and I don't mean this in the negative sense. But you feel like your mind is racing, but like you're running a race in an articulate, elegant fashion. I don't mean racing like when we're nervous. I'm not talking about that. But you feel like your mind is really running, if I can put it that way. There's a kind of flow. And for me, this became very apparent when I do Tai Chi Chuan. I'm clearly in a flow state, but that's not happening. I'm also not metabolically like a fire. And that's the whole point. Daoism is the religion of flow. And that's the whole point of doing things like Tai Chi Chuan, is to get into the flow state. You can get into this, where you're getting a lot of the features of the flow state, the sense of at onement, the sense of super salience, the sense of grace. A lot of the features that Csikszentmihalyi talks about. The loss of the nattering narrative ego. How am I doing? How do I look? What are people thinking about me? All of that can go away. But you don't have to be necessarily on fire. Please don't misunderstand me. That's a legitimate version of flow. But in a cool flow. You get this in different martial arts. They'll tend to emphasize the cool flow rather than the hot flow. There's even a distinction between different types of jazz playing, where you're playing cool rather than hot. And similar things. The emphasis isn't so much on... I want to be really careful here. In both of them, all of these things are shared. The at onement, the grace, the sense of presence, the loss of that nattering self-consciousness, the ongoing sense of discovery. But it can either be you're on fire... I'm trying to think of some language where I'm trying to convey it with this sense of cool. When you're really cool, and you've really found the groove and you're just– 

AUBREY: Seems much more sustainable. The hot flow, it's much more temporary when you're in that. It's almost like you can't burn at that heat for that long. It can go from hot into cool, where you reach this peak, and then you settle into this nice comfortable, here we are. But it seems like that moment where everything just dissipates and it's just you radically in the present. It has, usually, a shorter expiry and then you can transition into a cooler flow. 

JOHN: Yeah, and I think you're right. And of course, you can get the cool flow in doing things like Tai Chi Chuan, or certain meditative practices or contemplative practices. 

AUBREY: Or even in surfing. The hot flow might be when you're paddling, and you're dropping into the wave, and you're right there in that moment. It's hot. But the whole time you're just on your board, the sun is rising, you're in the water. 

JOHN: Exactly. I suspect that the cool flow, I think there's a pedagogical relation. I'm trying to state this very cautiously because this is just a suspicion, that being able to move from the hot flow to the cool flow helps you to move to, almost something like, Stephen Batchelor thought that the Buddha's enlightenment was kind of a comprehensive flow state. And obviously, that would even have to be something beyond just in cool flow, it'd be something a little bit beyond. But that movement, I'm suggesting, and I'm only suggesting, because a lot more work needs to be done. But I'm suggesting that when you take a step from, as I go from a hot flow into a cool flow, that starts to scaffold you from this is how I can go from cool flow into life flow. And that's a possibility that I think people should consider. Myself included. 

AUBREY: One of the things that I found, especially conversationally. I was in a polyamorous relationship for close to eight years. And one of the things that reliably gets you into flow is the novelty of the first few dates that you're with somebody new. There's this novelty. You don't think about your phone. You don't think about any other thing. You're in rapturous attention to their story, their autobiographical story, whatever that is. You're right there with them. And then you're sharing for the first time your stuff, which is not. And it drives you. And I think that's one of the things that people love so much about that. It's not so much the other person, it's the fact that the interaction with that other person is driving you into a flow state because you're present. Now I'm really present because of these other factors. And in a relationship with someone that you've been with a long time, now, I'm in a monogamous marriage with my wife and I'm so happy and I love her, but we have to create situations that actually provide some novelty. And I think with a little bit more intention about that. I guess I would love your comments on novelty in general as a cool flow trigger. Because it can create the sense also... Novelty in the environment. You're in a new place. You get this sense of wonder and awe, which is correlated with this. Or novelty with a person and this new intimacy. But you can still create that with the same person. But it has to be a little bit more intentional. It's not just going to be situational. It's going to have to be more intentional to get to those states. Just like we did with our conversation. Having that type of conversation with your closest friend, all of a sudden, it's novel, and all of a sudden, you're right there in it. 

JOHN: That's exactly right. I think you answered your own question. But let me comment on it. I'm pretty convinced of the hypothesis. The reason why some of our functioning is conscious, as opposed to most of our functioning, which is unconscious and intelligent. But the reason why we have conscious functioning, is that consciousness is about dealing with novelty, complexity, and ill-defined as opposed to well-defined problems. The degree to which you can bring those features into any situation is the degree to which you're going to start engaging consciousness, that sense of being present. I think that's very reasonable. But I think there's also something, and this goes back to what we were talking about earlier, and you can see this in things like Buddhism or Daoism, the mystical aspects of Sufism, or Sufism as a whole is mystical, mystical traditions within Christianity, for example, is coming to a place where you realize that everything. And saying this as a sentence is easy. But that's not the point. You realize that everything is ultimately complex, and ill-defined, and novel to you, even the most familiar of objects. I think this is properly a virtue that has to be cultivated. I think this is what reverence is about. You can come into a room and know. There's a combinatorial explosive amount of information, and patterns, and intelligibility. And all of those have the capacity to trigger different aspects of you. And you can do mutually accelerated disclosure in so many dimensions, you can know all of that like this. But that doesn't mean that you've cultivated the virtue of being able to engage in it. I think you can both look for ways of enhancing in any particular situation, the novelty, the ill-definedness and the complexity. But you can also properly cultivate virtue within a worldview that makes that more and more transferable to more and more contexts where you can go into a situation, and you're much more likely to fall into wonder about that situation. 

AUBREY: That's beautiful. Because every human being is a hyper object. It does have all of that complexity. With choice, choosing to recognize the novelty of any situation, just as Heraclitus talked about the river. No man steps in the same river twice because it's not the same river and he's not the same man. He's not going to the same old river. It's a new river and it's a new you. And if you choose to recognize that novelty and choose to have reverence for this new experience, it's a practice. It's not going to click in automatically. It's not that kind of gross, massive thing that happens when something is actually radically novel, like all of a sudden, you're in a hot air balloon and you've never been in a hot air balloon. But to take the power back, to say no, we can make this a choice is so valuable for any relationship and for life itself. 

JOHN: And if you'll allow me, I want to riff on that in one dimension. And you made a contrast between when you were polyamorous and now you're monogamous. And there's a sense in which you being faithful to your wife is not you believing things about her without evidence. It's the commitment you just made. I'm committed to a continuity of contact. It's always going to try and engender mutual wonder, open things up between us. That's what faithfulness is as opposed to, I believe things without evidence about my spouse. What? I don't know. But if you're telling me what you mean by that is I'm committed because this is how I feel about my partner. I'm committed to try and do that, what you just described so beautifully a few minutes ago. I'm committed to doing that. Sati. I'm going to remember, mindful. I'm going to remember that this person is ultimately, and not in words, but in practice, cultivating a virtue. I'm going to remember that this person is mysterious. I'm going to remember that they're complex. I'm going to remember that they're going to exceed any definition that I give of them. They're ill-defined. And I'm going to engage and commit to mutually accelerating disclosure and vulnerability about acknowledging that because that makes that person, in some ways, unpredictable to me, and surprising, and sometimes scary. And that's what faithfulness is. And I'm suggesting this for a reason is that we could bring back a notion of faith that is more about faithfulness to reality, as opposed to the assertion of beliefs without evidence. That's something I just wanted to suggest. 

AUBREY: Beautifully said. I want to talk a little bit, since we're on the topic of relationships. The Greeks had at least three words for love. Maybe more. We have one. It seems like we muddy it up all the time. There's things that we just accept as true because of the language. Love hurts. No, it doesn't. Love doesn't hurt. You can't say that love hurts. You can say that there's an effect that love can have, that could cause you to hurt. But it's not the love itself. We get very confused about what love is. We confuse it with many things. Let's talk about trying to clean off our understanding of love, and maybe help people understand the way that the Greeks divided it, and how that's helpful in keeping love meaning what we intend it to mean. 

JOHN: That's a fantastic question. And this sounds like a Hallmark card. But I mean it, hopefully, deeply, and sincerely. I really want to understand love better. If you were to ask me, John, I'm going to grant you a superpower. I want to be able to understand love better. Really, really understand it. Let's start with a couple. I'm indebted to a lot of wise people, Plato in particular, about this. There's certain philosophers that are paragons for a particular topic. And Plato on love is just astonishing. One of the things to start with is to not think of love as a feeling or an emotion. And you were putting your finger on it just a minute ago. If I love somebody, that can make me angry, it can make me sad, it can make me happy, it can make me lonely, because I'm missing them. It's not a feeling. It's not even a single emotion. Because all of those are different motivational states. It is a way of being oriented to someone else and in terms of that other person towards the world. It's an existential orientation, rather than a particular feeling. And this is why the Greek notion of love is like a god. You have to get the Greek notion of a god not our Christian notion or post Christian notion of that. The gods are transjective. They're not just in you. They're not just in the world. They're between you and the world. Eros is not just within you, it's without you, and it's between you and other people. You have to get that sense. First of all, it's not a feeling and it's not just in you. It's also outside of you. And it's also between you and other people. First of all, once you get that reorientation, then you can say, is it one orientation? The Greeks have maybe four, like you said. But the ones I concentrate on, because these are the ones that show up in both the philosophical tradition, and then the Christian tradition are Eros, philia, and agape. And what they are is about ways in which I'm oriented to the world that are fundamental. This is, I think, one of the defining features of love. Love is something you participate in. It's transjective. It's not objective or subjective. Your knowledge of yourself and your knowledge of what you love are inextricably bound together. That's the shared orientation, but the way that plays out is quite different. In Eros, I want to be one with something. That's how my self-knowledge and my other knowledge are going to be independent. You and I are going to become one. It could be sexual. Or it could be consummatory. I could eat a cookie and become one with my cookie. 

AUBREY: It's like the desire for union. 

JOHN: It's the desire for union. It can go from the very carnal to the very spiritual, this union. Now there's another way in which my self-knowledge and the knowledge of the other can be bound up together. That's philia. That's reciprocity. That's what you and I were doing a few minutes ago. You open up to me, I open up to you. I'm knowing myself as I'm knowing you. You're knowing yourself as you're knowing me. And we're doing it through this reciprocity. That's philia. And then there's agape. Agape is really powerful because what you're doing is you're switching. Eros tends to be this way, although it can be this way. But what I mean by agape is I don't, let me do it by contrast. I'm stumbling, so let me do it by contrast. Eros, I want to be one with something and emerge with it sexually or... Philia, I want to be friends or at least fellowship with somebody. Think about when you bring a child home from the hospital. Having any kind of erotic relationship, and I wanted to make people twinge there a little bit, because you know deeply, no, no, whoa. I will just overwhelm this being because they're so helpless. We can't be one in that sense. I'm going to be friends with this neonate. We're going to hang out, we're going to do get into... You can't be friends. What is it? What kind of love do you have? I think you said you had kids. So have I. It's powerful– 

AUBREY: Not yet. Not yet. 

JOHN: My mistake. I'm sorry. Powerful. It's a very powerful kind of love. And I don't love them because I want to be one with my kids. In fact, the goal is the opposite. I want them to eventually become independent from me and autonomous. That's not what's going on. It's not Eros. No, I'm being friends with my kid. What am I doing? What's Agape doing? I'm basically taking, and I don't mean this morally, I mean this psychologically. I'm taking a non-person and the point of my loving them, is it's going to afford them turning into a person. This is how Agape is like God. God creates people. And we are making people. This is what the Christian church offered the Roman Empire. 

It said, we can take all the non-persons, all the official non-persons, the women and the sick and the barbarian, and we can turn them all into persons. That's why it's so powerful. It's such a powerful thing. That's agape. What you're doing is, you're committing to, you're faithful to the personhood of another being, either helping to emerge or produce that personhood, or helping to protect it, or helping to promote it. I would say to you, one of the problems we have in our culture around relationships is, first of all, we think of love as a feeling. That's a mistake. But the related problem is, we should have all three of those in our so-called romantic relationships. There should be an erotic component, a philia component, and agape. 

AUBREY: Let me dive in a little bit deeper into this a little bit. Agape could also be, we've used examples with people all of the time, which I think is helpful for contrasting. But it seems like agape could be your love for your garden, for example. Or it could be your love for a pet. Or it could be your love for a sunset. It's the most nonspecific to a person while still applying in certain cases, and maybe all cases, to people as well. I suppose there's a desire for union with nature in some way, an Eros with nature, Eros with a cookie. You don't know an avocado until you eat an avocado. That kind of idea. But agape seems, like you said, more like the universal God love. 

JOHN: This is very interesting. And this is where we have to tread very carefully. I'm aware that you're animist, so I don't want to step on your toes. Part of what we're doing when we do it with a tree, as opposed to a human being, I still think we're doing something like personification. And I don't mean that just in the simple literary fashion. To put it into language I use about participatory knowing, it's not only that I'm personifying the tree, I’m letting the tree treeify me, if you'll allow that. There's that mutual indwelling. But what I'm trying to say is you're affording, although you're not turning the tree into a person, you're trying to get into a thou rather than an it. That's what agape is doing. You're not treating it like I'm using Buber's distinction. And Fromm uses a similar distinction. You're not treating it as a thing from a category I-it. You're treating it as an I-thou. And I do believe you're correct. I do believe we can take the I-thou relationship, which I think we are properly taught in our agapeic relationships to other human beings. And I think we can realize it with other things. We can do it with the tree, the garden. We do it with works of art. Some of Wilco’s poems really convey that. But what we can't do, what agape is doing is it's refusing to frame the relationship as an I-it relationship. It's allowing the thing to have one of the properties that we most attribute and value about persons. It's allowing it, again, that mystery, that complexity. If I'm thouing a tree, the tree takes on a depth, it takes on a mystery, it takes on a novelty, it takes on an ill-definedness. And part of what we mean when we say something's beautiful is exactly that. I think in that way, we can talk about agape being extended to entities that are not human persons. 

AUBREY: What about the universality of a state of being, a Samadhi, a place in which you're in love with all things simultaneously? It's this almost enlightenment state. Is there a word for that? Is that just agape maximized? 

JOHN: That's a good question. I suspect it's actually all three, but almost like three dimensions that are joined together and taking you into another dimension. Because there's clearly an erotic element, for example, in mystical union. This is why often mystical language or in sculpture mystical experiences are represented erotically. People have noticed that. And there are whole traditions that bring that out, like Tantra. I think there's clearly an erotic element. You have to be careful when talking about mystical experiences because they have a variety to them. But there is also something like philia. And you have this in the Neoplatonic Christian tradition, epictasis, the idea that I'm continually transcending into God, and God is continually allowing me to transcend. It's like that philia aspect. You're right. There's an agape. It's like Nietzsche's great affirmation, but it's more you're saying yes to all of being. But you're doing more than that. That yes, there's almost like cheering for being. Yes! Very much. I think that the mystical experience points to an er kind of coupling that's deeper than the Eros, and the philia, and the agape. It's sort of the root kind, the common ancestor, if you'll allow me to use an evolutionary metaphor. 

AUBREY: What about self-love? Let's talk about self-love because this is a very important thing. What forms of love and how are we applying these different types of love to the self? 

JOHN: I just released, not that long ago, a series with Greg Henriques, another good friend of mine, another psychologist, and Christopher Mastropietro, called "The Elusive I, The Nature and Function of the Self." And one of the arguments that we talked about, I was proposing, and they were getting into dialogue with me about it was, okay, I'll just try and point to it. One of the core things I study scientifically is the process of relevance realization. Out of all the information available to you, and all the information in your memory, and all the potential patterns of activity you can engage in, how do you zero in on the irrelevant? How do you ignore the irrelevant? To me, this is the core ability of intelligence. And I think it's the core ability of consciousness. That relevance realization machinery that makes us a cognitive agent, it's bound to the fact that we are, this is from Francisco Varela, my friend, Evan Thompson, we are auto-poetic things. We are not just self-organizing like a tornado. We are self-making. We self-organize to seek out the conditions that produce us and protect us and promote us. We're auto-poetic beings. And I mean this literally, initially. Things matter to us. Sugar matters to the paramecium. It literally matters to it. That's why we have that language. Or look at what I'm doing with my hands. It's import. Import. It's important to me. That means that at the core of, at least the initial versions of relevance realization, is self-relevance. And we're discovering this, the work of Sui & Humphreys, that self-relevance is like the glue of cognition. How things are relevant to me is how cognition and agency get glued together and work together and become integrated. Because what you're doing is you're taking the relevance realization that will make you an intelligent problem solver and you're binding it to your being a living thing, an auto-poetic. So, of course, that's going to be core. The thing about that is, of course, you don't stay there. Let me say one thing and then I'll get to your question. Because you are also a mammal, a primate mammal, and a cultural primate mammal, you also realize that it's important, not only how things are relevant to you, self-relevance, but how you can make yourself relevant to other people and to other things. That move is fundamental to the guts of your being. You learn to become aware of yourself and understand yourself by internalizing how other people are aware of you. That's the main argument of Vygotsky. You learn to step back and look at your mind by internalizing how other people are looking on your mind. And you start to get these other perspectives and you internalize them into yourself. The self-relevance—

AUBREY: It can be dangerous as well. 

JOHN: Yes. Yes. All great tools, the chainsaw, very dangerous. This is what I mean about how we're born out of love. That capacity to internalize and indwell other people. The self-relevance and the other relevance are constantly going like this. We should not think of self-relevance and other relevance or self-love and the love of others as separate opposing things, is what I'm arguing, but as interdependent and interdefining things. 

AUBREY: It feels like almost to love yourself, there's, in some ways, and maybe this is an intermediate step until you've reached a state where you're unified, but it almost seems like you have to separate a part of yourself to create the polarity and create the dynamic in the subject-object relationship, to actually love yourself enough. Because the world is not going to love you in any way that's anywhere close to unconditional. But if you can create an aspect of yourself, a divine aspect of yourself, call it your higher self, your god self, or this really loving aspect and separate that temporarily, and pour that love into the self is incredibly complex. And we're coming up to the end here. So, we won't be able to get in. Maybe another podcast. But you separate enough to create a subject-object. You create that loving relationship with yourself, the rest of yourself. And it seems like that's the way. You take a position where this is my divine aspect of self. And I'm going to love all of the rest of myself in mutuality until I can bring the totality of myself up to a higher state of love so I can be more resilient to the very poison cocktail of love that we get from the world. 

JOHN: I think that's very well said. And I think it beautifully actually draws out what I said and leads it into something I want to say, so that's very helpful. Having the divine double, the sacred second self. I talk about that in the series. There are periods, like In the third century ancient Mediterranean, this becomes just a pervasive idea. You see it through Gnosticism, Christianity, Neoplatonism, pervasive. I'd link that historical phenomena to the philosophical work of Agnes Keller. Aspiration. Aspiration is the way in which we take a relationship to ourselves in order to become a self-other than we are. That's the name for that process. And then I noted that, very often, religions, which are in the business of transforming people, both individually and collectively, what they often do is they will give people a sacred second self through which they can do that aspiration. And notice, I'm still doing the Vygotsky thing, but I'm doing it with, you said, the higher self, the future self. Saint Paul says, it's not I who live, but Christ who lives within me. Within Buddhism, I'm trying to realize my Buddha nature. Or stoicism is, I'm internalizing, I'm becoming Socrates. And I'm aspiring in that way. I think the proper, I guess that strongly. Yeah. The proper, or at least best, maybe that's better. The best form of self-love is that kind of aspiration because it is the opposite of narcissism. In narcissism, I'm not going to change. I'm a blackhole impervious to change that sucks in everything and makes it change towards me. It's self-relevance without any other relevance. And that means of course, that the narcissist can't even have relevance to their future own self. They can't properly aspire. That's the hell of narcissism. Not only are you alienated from other people, you are profoundly, deeply, ultimately alienated from yourself because the central feature of your capacity to grow and self-transcend, to aspire, has been truncated by the black hole of narcissism. 

AUBREY: John, this has been one of my favorite podcasts of all time. I hope we can do this again at some point. 

JOHN: Invite me, I'll come back. I enjoyed this thoroughly. We had a lot of dialogos. There was a lot of back and forth and things were emerging. It was really wonderful. Thank you so much. 

AUBREY: It was beautiful. We mentioned some of the things that you offer. What's the best place, is there a central place people can go to find all of these different things, a website? 

JOHN: No, go to my YouTube channel. Go to John Vervaeke on YouTube and look at "Awakening for the Meaning Crisis" series. Look at the "Untangling the World Know of Consciousness" series. Look at "The Elusive I: The Nature and Function of the Self" series. Got a new one with Zachary Stein and Greg Henriques called "Towards a Meta Psychology That is True to Transformation." That's out right now. It comes out on Fridays. Go there. And then I have the ongoing "Voices with Vervaeke" where I do something similar to this. I meet with somebody, and we try to get into genuine dialogos together. 

AUBREY: Amazing. Amazing. Thank you so much, brother. I appreciate you coming on. And thanks, everybody for tuning in.