On balance, I could not stop a sense of sympathy for J. I think that after a number of exchanges, conversations transcend into a sense of togetherness or flow or they slide into a manifestation of power (the phenomenology of ‘sliding’ includes other patterns as well).
Yes. As I said, I was overwhelmed with "feeling sorry" for him, and I felt that was patronizing him, and I found it hard to adjust in real time. There was a kind of power-shift toward me, that I didn't want and was reluctant to take on (sticky, like gum in my hair)...
In French psychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan), all discourses are trapped by / vulnerable to, an impossibility to convey, and an inability to receive. There is a Paul Verhaeghe paper (FROM IMPOSSIBILITY TO INABILITY: LACAN’S THEORY ON THE FOUR DISCOURSES) that describes that pretty nicely.
I think so. There are always multiple paths for things fall apart for any elusive and improbable one to ‘go somewhere’. And, to use one of your expressions that are dearest to me: ‘and, ooh, the places we could go... .’
Trust in being and a sense of ontological security beyond being, affords the possibility of simple path for true, allocentric, convivial community with others. A simple, generative, grounded, attuned situatedness, the psychedelic gift of cogniscopic clarity, of incisive, gentle, non-possessive sense of direction. Like in Dao, unlike any philosopher.
I too loved the moment where you name teaching as sacred. A sacredness that grounds itself not in an individual shining but in humble recognizing of our finitude, the limitation of our concepts, and our need for or formation by other, human and nonhuman, in how we fundamentally live, relate and thus how we frame what is unfolding, what is knowable, what is worthy of our investment.
The dialogue of wisdom sometimes categorizes the wise as superior, the worthy rulers of thought.
But i heard a invitation into humility, wisdom grounded in embeddedness and service, manifest in opportunities to inter-be, to hold sacred the learning of young ones, or the loving craftsmanship of shoemakers or the earth herself whose depths are often invisible to human eye. Wisdom as knowing our place within a much broader view.
I wonder if the incoherence came from the historical practice of dialogue and use of language which presses into a continuous privileging of the mind and it’s frameworks which inevitably result in categorization as opposed to embodying (not just on the individual level but also the collective).
Resonance and knowing from a body level often struggle with words, and image or song or movement are necessary for expression. Instead this is the realm of art, of spirit and of story.
And perhaps right relationship comes in how we transmit, transform and decay into what will be.
"I wonder if the incoherence came from the historical practice of dialogue and use of language which presses into a continuous privileging of the mind and it’s frameworks which inevitably result in categorization as opposed to embodying (not just on the individual level but also the collective).
Resonance and knowing from a body level often struggle with words, and image or song or movement are necessary for expression. Instead this is the realm of art, of spirit and of story.
And perhaps right relationship comes in how we transmit, transform and decay into what will be"
THIS. This is what I am trying to get at with the whole Before Socrates thing. And you've put it here, so beautifully. Thanks. Very muchly.
I found myself trying to bushwhack through a jungle of academic jargon in this convo–struggling to tend to semantic mapping, my own sensory experience, and tracking interpersonal dynamics, which was both discombobulating and a bit boring.
Honestly, the only thing that mattered to me in this conversation came at the 72 minute mark. Bonnie: “You can’t be in love with ‘It’ because It’s an incredible experience of humility. The ‘It’ loves you unconditionally. 100%. And there’s nothing you can do in return.”
At that moment, time stopped. Hearing that, I was deeply touched and moved by a visceral experience of those words. Everything that happened before those words slipped into a void of forgetting, and the expression of that teaching superseded all that came before, making all the previous bushwhacking worth it.
There’s nothing we can do in return, and yet we come to realize that we must spend our entire lives devoted to trying.
Had an Image of Thomas and Bonnie gazing into the sky, both in awe.
Could not help it, seeing John running around, “chasing” everything with a butterfly net, trying to catch the sun, the moon and the stars, to be put them into glass jars…
A newborn’s attention appears to be mostly unfocused in its new environment, though there is still a massive amount of input passing into and through it. There is a pattern of attending to the downflow, towards focusing, that seems built into enculturating babies and anchoring them in this place: look here! look here! look here! And that is emphasized to a great degree in our education system, at least it was in the Catholic schools that I attended. In our daily lives, we have been mostly trained on the downflow of energy towards the details of life and, over time, the ability to focus attention here becomes more and more practiced, so a baby may end up being that doctor. And that downflow is an experience and the more energy it is given, the more our energetic systems become habituated to that experience, regardless of the contents of what is being focused on. And it also seems that the velocity of the downflow is, at least in part, what masks the vastness underlying all of it, which is a necessity for becoming facile with operating in our everyday world here. Yet the narrower the focus, the more that is hidden.
And yet, our attention is oscillating from narrow to wide much of the time. This occurs in all sorts of frequency ranges. We pay attention to a video, yet our minds will tend to wander off now and then. Focused attention takes energy, thus we let go and sleep. Much of the energy in the universe appears to oscillate. There are gravitational waves, the entire electromagnetic spectrum oscillates, and our own solar system oscillates in the plane of the galaxy approximately every 72 million years. So, to me, it makes sense that the narrowing and widening of attention could reflect that feature too. Now I am not saying that the narrowing and widening oscillation of attention is anything like a clean sine wave, just that there is an ongoing oscillation, in and out, on a many, many levels all at once. And god knows how that works. “I” appear to control it in some fashion, but I do have my doubts about that, as nature is clearly having a say in this.
In my current view, wisdom may be, in part, the ability to take all of our capacities to focus on minutia here, and take the knowledge and talents that we have embodied from that in some way, and move with that, back out into the unfocused expanses from which we arose, and still exist in. In that direction insights occur as if by magic, like Bonnie's insight about the sacredness of education. I believe that contrast matters here. Being immersed in the details, I think, allows for the possibility for fractal-like patterns that are seen there to reveal themselves when my attention moves from the small into the wider contextual range that I currently happen to look out from. A similar pattern at a different scale will often reveal perspectives and details of its own, as well as apparently associated articulations, on occasion. Becoming accustomed to, and deliberately engaging with, the inflow and outflow of attention is fascinating, and often exquisite. And not only does it bring new broader perspectives, it also presences the beauty in the patterns and complexity of both the tiny and the vast.
So perhaps one reason that I am here in this place is to practice focusing on the tiny, so that I might experience the majesty of the beauty found in the varieties, and the infinite relationships, of both the tiny and the vast: The Many
So there is a question in here, somewhere. Let me see if I can find it. ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. oh, yup, here it is. Fell under the table. The conscious mind oscillates between point-ted-ness and wandering. Now I see the bird, now I see the cloudless sky. Now I see the tiny flower, now I see the vast hayfield.
But the flower is always there with the hayfield. The bird is always just there with the cloudless sky.
If it is my mind that is oscillating, what is that which is always there, both, many, all ... at the same time?
I appreciated the format and all the voices that gave rise to what unfolded. I listened to this twice. The first time through I noticed I was trying to navigate the different energies in the dialog; steady, fast, fluid, interruptive, competitive, positioning. With this, an incoherence arose. The second time through I too was glad that this conversation is public, for it seems to be a somewhat beautiful example of what can arise when attempting to enter this inquire intentionally. For me, and when you were talking about what education looked like in a scared society there was a fundamental and welcome shift in the conversation when you said, “to recognize that learning is already sacred.” And then “because we can learn is a sacred gift from the universe, and that everything is arising with this natural intelligence”. This reframe of how a teacher enters the relationship with the child calls forth that which I believe is meant by how the word sacred is being used, and what I would call an expression of wisdom. This example was beautiful, elegant, humble, inviting, connecting us to the life tissue. Through the light of the statement the knowing arises that we are part of and are this naturally arising intelligence. All this is deeply complex, yet I’m not sure that the power of the presence of what we call wisdom can be accessed through a constant and excessive complexification. Also, the conversation around how the wisdom as “that” and “it” shows up was wonderfully hectic and then got grounded in “it comes, and you can’t be in relationship to it because you are swimming in it.” The presence of this presence is, as was said, impermeant by nature. Perhaps a practice of cultivating wisdom then is learning to rest with the humility of “there is nothing, nothing you can do in return” in the presence of “it” “loving you 100 percent.” I love contemplating that. Thanks for this.
It's the same with each other, too, isn't it? When someone loves you 100%. There is nothing you can do in response. You can't hold onto it. You can't reciprocate it. Fuck, it's even tough to "enjoy" it. No. You gots to swim in it. It is there. An array of love.
I don't know that I can say precisely where the incoherence was coming from, but as I listened one thing stood out for me.
I have no lack of faith in you or Tom or John, and only admiration, and yet I wondered about love…
So much talking, so much abstraction, so much complex thought… Sufis, whose very name shares a root with wisdom drive to drunkenness and love! Dzogchen traditions that speak of "primordial wisdom," (as well as our wise friend, Mr. Thomas Keating) lead us towards fewer words, and even silence…
Your invitation to the podcast arose while I myself have been worked by a similar inquiry… Perhaps these words can offer something to your reflection…
When I was at the RESPOND gathering with John V. I said that "wisdom come from the body" and as such realized we need a new understanding of the body to account for that. This year, at the school, we are writing a new "theory" of the body, which intends to put the mind back into the body and the body back into nature. In a recent essay on John V.'s film, I said we need something like a metapsychology wedded to Leopold's land ethic. So yes, I get what you are saying.
Thank you Bonnie. :) Your name has been subtly in my orbit for years, but it wasn't until Katie Teague recently released an interview she did with you (https://www.patreon.com/posts/bonnita-roy-on-82742657) that I was able to catch up to your work.
I have watched quietly as the Pop-up School has come online, and find myself otherwise preoccupied, but admiring from afar. I do hope we can find ourselves in dialogue one day. :-)
The piece I linked above is a mouthful (2500 words of some kind of raw scat poetry at best ;-), but it does speak to that new "theory" of body, both our individual, and the body of expanded awareness…
Not for the purpose of argument, but rather for the counterpoint of melody, I might suggest the view also of putting the body back into the mind, and recognizing the mind as nature.
Philosophically, I wonder, given the nature of our current predicament, whether putting the bones back within the ephemeral mind may be a necessary turn in order to get our hearts back into the world. Can we really BE IN the cosmos without realizing the ground of its arising within ourselves?
I've often said that wisdom is an event not a contents without being exactly sure of what I meant by it. Your description of wisdom entering, penetrating in and being absorbed gives new images for that. And it seems that to be open for it we need to cultivate simple minds actively and presently engaged with problems in the world, our home.
The incoherence was maybe inevitable; it started like a hundred similar conversations, full of historical referents, declensions and comparisons, particularly from John, but then it moved decisively towards the poetic after your description of your breakthrough on the new magazine. Listening to some stammering for language from very fluent people was the heart of it for me.
Yeah, it is so hard for us to notice and accept when "It" penetrates that when we do, silence is the most eloquent response. Of course, then we still have to go write the introduction to the first issue of the magazine.
For me, any conversation of this kind is improved when you participate, I think because you know all the stuff but remain an outlier, an opener of often airless rooms.
I’m happy it made public presentation. Was interesting to feel the energetics of it - for me where the energy was in different parts of it. Head (john) Heart (Tom) Gut (Bonnie). Speedy (john) warm (Tom) completely different (Bonnie)
Final note: The conversation didn't move very far anymore after what I commented on in my "halfway through the conversation" note, as the attempts of unpacking the "silver in the air" moment where doomed to beautiful failure as the concepts failed to really move the conversation one notch deeper... apart from the mutual acknowledgement that I kept enjoying.
Bonni, made a very interesting point about 'it' having a relationship with you, but 'you' not being able to have a relationship with it. And towards the end what I noted down this was reflected by Thomas and John (in the way Thais put it; same same, but different).
My own experience&interpretation leads me to say: 'It' can express its relationship with you, and when you truly/deeply accept it then in some strange sense you can have "relational conversations" with it, and it responds on an adequate level that you can understand. (This sounds a bit strange when I see it written, because I'm not talk about 'you' but about me and I; and not about 'it' but rather the nature of nature, the way reality is being, etc.) So in that sense I would say that when your NOT amidst the intimate moment you can have a deep relationship with it as a 'thou', at least that's what shows itself to me.
Then, it seemed to me that John V. and Thomas S. tried to frame that within different perspectives and the stumbling block seems to be, as far as I can see, that by default the "it-ness" is taken to be a "thingyness" and they had to make an effort to move beyond to the flowiness of experience:
What came to my mind was how in very rare moments of sexual embrace in my life (which I point to when I talk about the 'intimate moment' above) I experienced the meltdown of me as an individual into a felt 'one-ness." That experience's interpretation is non-problematic, usually, because we grok this non-personal experience as something momentary, almost by default.
So the way I would put what Bonni so beautifully pointed to with the example of the seed that falls from a tree is not the same seed as the one it grew out of, and saying that with our concepts and models we don't usually notice that difference: Using the metaphores of intimacy may do the trick, potentially. As we all (well, most of us) have an understanding of how intimacy and the trust that comes with it grows with every deeply intimate moment. It is, as Bonni indicated, absorbed into the background of experiencing and as such enhances the capacity for future moments of intimacy, and so on. Wisdom, in my mind therefore, is the capacity of being intimate with unfolding reality (&complexity) in the moment of experience.
Jun 9, 2023·edited Jun 9, 2023Liked by Bonnitta Roy
Halfway through the conversation...: I note the great mutual respect in which the conversation flows, and that greatly enhances my receptivity to intuit into (is that even a correct wording?) the three perspectives as they present themselves. I also do note the lack of philosophical education I have when some of the 'memes' are floated — Heideggerian, Aristotelian, Platonian etc. And I have to add that it doesn't feel like an impediment to understand the conversation. And the when John V. spells out towards the middle how the conversation itself embodies what it is also about, I remember "silver in the air", which is the meme I use when something 'deeper' unfolds or emerges that all speakers seem to be 'in service' to.
A side note, maybe: Complexity and simple rules; I had reason to contemplate recently how a highly complex happening (a swarm of starlings) abides by 3 simple rules (distance between birds, direction of flight, sticking together).
What it pointed me to is that both complexity, as in complex swarm behavior, and simple rules 'governing' that behavior are concepts. And these concepts are great tools in our technosphere: The rules can help us model swarms in computers, for instance. And from this I would derive that 'wisdom' is the capability to work with the concepts as tools in the ART of living life beautifully.
I think the conversation was good. And painful.
On balance, I could not stop a sense of sympathy for J. I think that after a number of exchanges, conversations transcend into a sense of togetherness or flow or they slide into a manifestation of power (the phenomenology of ‘sliding’ includes other patterns as well).
In chess, J was in zugzwang.
Yes. As I said, I was overwhelmed with "feeling sorry" for him, and I felt that was patronizing him, and I found it hard to adjust in real time. There was a kind of power-shift toward me, that I didn't want and was reluctant to take on (sticky, like gum in my hair)...
I know...
In French psychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan), all discourses are trapped by / vulnerable to, an impossibility to convey, and an inability to receive. There is a Paul Verhaeghe paper (FROM IMPOSSIBILITY TO INABILITY: LACAN’S THEORY ON THE FOUR DISCOURSES) that describes that pretty nicely.
Beyond the inevitable analytic
gobbledygook, there is a powerful signal in it...
Maybe discoursed is constrained by cognitive stance. ??
I think so. There are always multiple paths for things fall apart for any elusive and improbable one to ‘go somewhere’. And, to use one of your expressions that are dearest to me: ‘and, ooh, the places we could go... .’
Trust in being and a sense of ontological security beyond being, affords the possibility of simple path for true, allocentric, convivial community with others. A simple, generative, grounded, attuned situatedness, the psychedelic gift of cogniscopic clarity, of incisive, gentle, non-possessive sense of direction. Like in Dao, unlike any philosopher.
"Like the Dao: unlike any philosopher."
B O O M !
Yes, the F R E N C H ... try to torture language into doing the impossible all the while they are saying that it is impossible.... :-)
Kinda like my Gadfly
I too loved the moment where you name teaching as sacred. A sacredness that grounds itself not in an individual shining but in humble recognizing of our finitude, the limitation of our concepts, and our need for or formation by other, human and nonhuman, in how we fundamentally live, relate and thus how we frame what is unfolding, what is knowable, what is worthy of our investment.
The dialogue of wisdom sometimes categorizes the wise as superior, the worthy rulers of thought.
But i heard a invitation into humility, wisdom grounded in embeddedness and service, manifest in opportunities to inter-be, to hold sacred the learning of young ones, or the loving craftsmanship of shoemakers or the earth herself whose depths are often invisible to human eye. Wisdom as knowing our place within a much broader view.
I wonder if the incoherence came from the historical practice of dialogue and use of language which presses into a continuous privileging of the mind and it’s frameworks which inevitably result in categorization as opposed to embodying (not just on the individual level but also the collective).
Resonance and knowing from a body level often struggle with words, and image or song or movement are necessary for expression. Instead this is the realm of art, of spirit and of story.
And perhaps right relationship comes in how we transmit, transform and decay into what will be.
"I wonder if the incoherence came from the historical practice of dialogue and use of language which presses into a continuous privileging of the mind and it’s frameworks which inevitably result in categorization as opposed to embodying (not just on the individual level but also the collective).
Resonance and knowing from a body level often struggle with words, and image or song or movement are necessary for expression. Instead this is the realm of art, of spirit and of story.
And perhaps right relationship comes in how we transmit, transform and decay into what will be"
THIS. This is what I am trying to get at with the whole Before Socrates thing. And you've put it here, so beautifully. Thanks. Very muchly.
I found myself trying to bushwhack through a jungle of academic jargon in this convo–struggling to tend to semantic mapping, my own sensory experience, and tracking interpersonal dynamics, which was both discombobulating and a bit boring.
Honestly, the only thing that mattered to me in this conversation came at the 72 minute mark. Bonnie: “You can’t be in love with ‘It’ because It’s an incredible experience of humility. The ‘It’ loves you unconditionally. 100%. And there’s nothing you can do in return.”
At that moment, time stopped. Hearing that, I was deeply touched and moved by a visceral experience of those words. Everything that happened before those words slipped into a void of forgetting, and the expression of that teaching superseded all that came before, making all the previous bushwhacking worth it.
There’s nothing we can do in return, and yet we come to realize that we must spend our entire lives devoted to trying.
Beautiful exploration.
Happy it got out.
Had an Image of Thomas and Bonnie gazing into the sky, both in awe.
Could not help it, seeing John running around, “chasing” everything with a butterfly net, trying to catch the sun, the moon and the stars, to be put them into glass jars…
yes, that's what it was like
A perspective on wisdom:
A newborn’s attention appears to be mostly unfocused in its new environment, though there is still a massive amount of input passing into and through it. There is a pattern of attending to the downflow, towards focusing, that seems built into enculturating babies and anchoring them in this place: look here! look here! look here! And that is emphasized to a great degree in our education system, at least it was in the Catholic schools that I attended. In our daily lives, we have been mostly trained on the downflow of energy towards the details of life and, over time, the ability to focus attention here becomes more and more practiced, so a baby may end up being that doctor. And that downflow is an experience and the more energy it is given, the more our energetic systems become habituated to that experience, regardless of the contents of what is being focused on. And it also seems that the velocity of the downflow is, at least in part, what masks the vastness underlying all of it, which is a necessity for becoming facile with operating in our everyday world here. Yet the narrower the focus, the more that is hidden.
And yet, our attention is oscillating from narrow to wide much of the time. This occurs in all sorts of frequency ranges. We pay attention to a video, yet our minds will tend to wander off now and then. Focused attention takes energy, thus we let go and sleep. Much of the energy in the universe appears to oscillate. There are gravitational waves, the entire electromagnetic spectrum oscillates, and our own solar system oscillates in the plane of the galaxy approximately every 72 million years. So, to me, it makes sense that the narrowing and widening of attention could reflect that feature too. Now I am not saying that the narrowing and widening oscillation of attention is anything like a clean sine wave, just that there is an ongoing oscillation, in and out, on a many, many levels all at once. And god knows how that works. “I” appear to control it in some fashion, but I do have my doubts about that, as nature is clearly having a say in this.
In my current view, wisdom may be, in part, the ability to take all of our capacities to focus on minutia here, and take the knowledge and talents that we have embodied from that in some way, and move with that, back out into the unfocused expanses from which we arose, and still exist in. In that direction insights occur as if by magic, like Bonnie's insight about the sacredness of education. I believe that contrast matters here. Being immersed in the details, I think, allows for the possibility for fractal-like patterns that are seen there to reveal themselves when my attention moves from the small into the wider contextual range that I currently happen to look out from. A similar pattern at a different scale will often reveal perspectives and details of its own, as well as apparently associated articulations, on occasion. Becoming accustomed to, and deliberately engaging with, the inflow and outflow of attention is fascinating, and often exquisite. And not only does it bring new broader perspectives, it also presences the beauty in the patterns and complexity of both the tiny and the vast.
So perhaps one reason that I am here in this place is to practice focusing on the tiny, so that I might experience the majesty of the beauty found in the varieties, and the infinite relationships, of both the tiny and the vast: The Many
So there is a question in here, somewhere. Let me see if I can find it. ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. oh, yup, here it is. Fell under the table. The conscious mind oscillates between point-ted-ness and wandering. Now I see the bird, now I see the cloudless sky. Now I see the tiny flower, now I see the vast hayfield.
But the flower is always there with the hayfield. The bird is always just there with the cloudless sky.
If it is my mind that is oscillating, what is that which is always there, both, many, all ... at the same time?
What comes to mind is:
Perhaps whatever the Higgs Field represents in consciousness?
Beautiful. It is this.
I appreciated the format and all the voices that gave rise to what unfolded. I listened to this twice. The first time through I noticed I was trying to navigate the different energies in the dialog; steady, fast, fluid, interruptive, competitive, positioning. With this, an incoherence arose. The second time through I too was glad that this conversation is public, for it seems to be a somewhat beautiful example of what can arise when attempting to enter this inquire intentionally. For me, and when you were talking about what education looked like in a scared society there was a fundamental and welcome shift in the conversation when you said, “to recognize that learning is already sacred.” And then “because we can learn is a sacred gift from the universe, and that everything is arising with this natural intelligence”. This reframe of how a teacher enters the relationship with the child calls forth that which I believe is meant by how the word sacred is being used, and what I would call an expression of wisdom. This example was beautiful, elegant, humble, inviting, connecting us to the life tissue. Through the light of the statement the knowing arises that we are part of and are this naturally arising intelligence. All this is deeply complex, yet I’m not sure that the power of the presence of what we call wisdom can be accessed through a constant and excessive complexification. Also, the conversation around how the wisdom as “that” and “it” shows up was wonderfully hectic and then got grounded in “it comes, and you can’t be in relationship to it because you are swimming in it.” The presence of this presence is, as was said, impermeant by nature. Perhaps a practice of cultivating wisdom then is learning to rest with the humility of “there is nothing, nothing you can do in return” in the presence of “it” “loving you 100 percent.” I love contemplating that. Thanks for this.
It's the same with each other, too, isn't it? When someone loves you 100%. There is nothing you can do in response. You can't hold onto it. You can't reciprocate it. Fuck, it's even tough to "enjoy" it. No. You gots to swim in it. It is there. An array of love.
This is a beautiful and powerful reflection. Thanks so very much
Bonnie :-)
I don't know that I can say precisely where the incoherence was coming from, but as I listened one thing stood out for me.
I have no lack of faith in you or Tom or John, and only admiration, and yet I wondered about love…
So much talking, so much abstraction, so much complex thought… Sufis, whose very name shares a root with wisdom drive to drunkenness and love! Dzogchen traditions that speak of "primordial wisdom," (as well as our wise friend, Mr. Thomas Keating) lead us towards fewer words, and even silence…
Your invitation to the podcast arose while I myself have been worked by a similar inquiry… Perhaps these words can offer something to your reflection…
https://wisdominquiry.substack.com/p/wisdom-and-context
When I was at the RESPOND gathering with John V. I said that "wisdom come from the body" and as such realized we need a new understanding of the body to account for that. This year, at the school, we are writing a new "theory" of the body, which intends to put the mind back into the body and the body back into nature. In a recent essay on John V.'s film, I said we need something like a metapsychology wedded to Leopold's land ethic. So yes, I get what you are saying.
Thank you Bonnie. :) Your name has been subtly in my orbit for years, but it wasn't until Katie Teague recently released an interview she did with you (https://www.patreon.com/posts/bonnita-roy-on-82742657) that I was able to catch up to your work.
I have watched quietly as the Pop-up School has come online, and find myself otherwise preoccupied, but admiring from afar. I do hope we can find ourselves in dialogue one day. :-)
The piece I linked above is a mouthful (2500 words of some kind of raw scat poetry at best ;-), but it does speak to that new "theory" of body, both our individual, and the body of expanded awareness…
Not for the purpose of argument, but rather for the counterpoint of melody, I might suggest the view also of putting the body back into the mind, and recognizing the mind as nature.
Philosophically, I wonder, given the nature of our current predicament, whether putting the bones back within the ephemeral mind may be a necessary turn in order to get our hearts back into the world. Can we really BE IN the cosmos without realizing the ground of its arising within ourselves?
I've often said that wisdom is an event not a contents without being exactly sure of what I meant by it. Your description of wisdom entering, penetrating in and being absorbed gives new images for that. And it seems that to be open for it we need to cultivate simple minds actively and presently engaged with problems in the world, our home.
The incoherence was maybe inevitable; it started like a hundred similar conversations, full of historical referents, declensions and comparisons, particularly from John, but then it moved decisively towards the poetic after your description of your breakthrough on the new magazine. Listening to some stammering for language from very fluent people was the heart of it for me.
Thanks for this reflectoin. I was trying not to get caught up in philosophical debate, and was often at a loss for saying anything at all!
Yeah, it is so hard for us to notice and accept when "It" penetrates that when we do, silence is the most eloquent response. Of course, then we still have to go write the introduction to the first issue of the magazine.
For me, any conversation of this kind is improved when you participate, I think because you know all the stuff but remain an outlier, an opener of often airless rooms.
I’m happy it made public presentation. Was interesting to feel the energetics of it - for me where the energy was in different parts of it. Head (john) Heart (Tom) Gut (Bonnie). Speedy (john) warm (Tom) completely different (Bonnie)
Love this reflection!
Final note: The conversation didn't move very far anymore after what I commented on in my "halfway through the conversation" note, as the attempts of unpacking the "silver in the air" moment where doomed to beautiful failure as the concepts failed to really move the conversation one notch deeper... apart from the mutual acknowledgement that I kept enjoying.
Bonni, made a very interesting point about 'it' having a relationship with you, but 'you' not being able to have a relationship with it. And towards the end what I noted down this was reflected by Thomas and John (in the way Thais put it; same same, but different).
My own experience&interpretation leads me to say: 'It' can express its relationship with you, and when you truly/deeply accept it then in some strange sense you can have "relational conversations" with it, and it responds on an adequate level that you can understand. (This sounds a bit strange when I see it written, because I'm not talk about 'you' but about me and I; and not about 'it' but rather the nature of nature, the way reality is being, etc.) So in that sense I would say that when your NOT amidst the intimate moment you can have a deep relationship with it as a 'thou', at least that's what shows itself to me.
Then, it seemed to me that John V. and Thomas S. tried to frame that within different perspectives and the stumbling block seems to be, as far as I can see, that by default the "it-ness" is taken to be a "thingyness" and they had to make an effort to move beyond to the flowiness of experience:
What came to my mind was how in very rare moments of sexual embrace in my life (which I point to when I talk about the 'intimate moment' above) I experienced the meltdown of me as an individual into a felt 'one-ness." That experience's interpretation is non-problematic, usually, because we grok this non-personal experience as something momentary, almost by default.
So the way I would put what Bonni so beautifully pointed to with the example of the seed that falls from a tree is not the same seed as the one it grew out of, and saying that with our concepts and models we don't usually notice that difference: Using the metaphores of intimacy may do the trick, potentially. As we all (well, most of us) have an understanding of how intimacy and the trust that comes with it grows with every deeply intimate moment. It is, as Bonni indicated, absorbed into the background of experiencing and as such enhances the capacity for future moments of intimacy, and so on. Wisdom, in my mind therefore, is the capacity of being intimate with unfolding reality (&complexity) in the moment of experience.
Halfway through the conversation...: I note the great mutual respect in which the conversation flows, and that greatly enhances my receptivity to intuit into (is that even a correct wording?) the three perspectives as they present themselves. I also do note the lack of philosophical education I have when some of the 'memes' are floated — Heideggerian, Aristotelian, Platonian etc. And I have to add that it doesn't feel like an impediment to understand the conversation. And the when John V. spells out towards the middle how the conversation itself embodies what it is also about, I remember "silver in the air", which is the meme I use when something 'deeper' unfolds or emerges that all speakers seem to be 'in service' to.
A side note, maybe: Complexity and simple rules; I had reason to contemplate recently how a highly complex happening (a swarm of starlings) abides by 3 simple rules (distance between birds, direction of flight, sticking together).
What it pointed me to is that both complexity, as in complex swarm behavior, and simple rules 'governing' that behavior are concepts. And these concepts are great tools in our technosphere: The rules can help us model swarms in computers, for instance. And from this I would derive that 'wisdom' is the capability to work with the concepts as tools in the ART of living life beautifully.
(Back to the conversation/podcast...)