After Socrates: Episode 1 - Introduction | Dr. John Vervaeke

how does your mind how does your bodied mind the Socrates was a soldier and Plato was a wrestler how do they actually work and how does yourself work what kind of thing is it how how could your mind body and self malfunction go off the path to wisdom [Music] foreign [Music] welcome to after Socrates a wisdom spirituality for our time I'm so excited about doing this series I've been looking forward to doing it for quite some time covet intervened but maybe that was fortuitous it allowed me to dive even deeper into this project and Savor its richness and hopefully I'll be able to share that with you before we get into that I'd like to take the time to acknowledge and thank some of the people that made this series possible people that I've been working with and and in discussion with the first is my dear friend and colleague Christopher Master Pietro Christopher and I'll explain this a little bit later we'll show up in this series in an important way but the work we do together on Socrates on dialectic and to deal logos has been just pivotal in helping this series be what I think it needs to be and should be Chris and I did work with guy senstock and the work with especially we do on the uh the workshops we've created we've done three so far we're doing another one this October around circling into dialectic into dialogues also pivotal Central to what's going to be happening here so I need to thank guys send stock as well I want to also thank Rafe Kelly I'll mention his particular Retreat I don't think Retreats the right word called return to the source a little bit later in this lecture but Rafe in a really important way reminded me that Socrates was a soldier and Plato was a wrestler and bringing an embodied aspect into following Socrates is Central and crucial lastly I want to thank Dan shiapi Dan and I are publishing papers together we are reading books together we're trying to marry the best cognitive science phenomological philosophy and work on platonic and Socratic philosophy I can't tell anymore where my insights are and Dan's insights they're so woven together and so I want to thank Dan chappie for everything that he has done again integral to making this series possible so this Series has a kind of odd title right is after Socrates why this title what am I trying to convey about this series how am I using the title to guide you like obviously many people have been after Socrates in just a temporal sense I'm after Socrates in that sense that's rather trivial that's not helpful I want to talk about the sense of being after Socrates like when you're after someone you know when like when a hunter is trying to catch its prey and in that sense we're trying to track Socrates we're trying to find the signs that which is the most listens into the word significant significance significance we're trying to find the signs and track him and determine his significance leibenberg has done work on how tracking within our human evolution was probably fundamental to our cognition think about what's what's happening in tracking you're not directly aware of something you're picking up these signs and these traces and you're trying to put it together and see how it leads to something and takes you beyond where you currently are and of that of what you are currently aware in that sense we're going to be trying to track Socrates we're going to be trying to leave our comfortable place we're in and see if we can move into something a little less familiar and more interesting for us so I've seen a video I've mentioned it before in Awakening from the meaning crisis of son these are hunter-gatherers in Africa the Kalahari and they do persistence hunting where they constantly are tracking and running after think of they think of this right a particular prey and of course they're doing all of the stuff they're that you know that Lieberman talks about sorry liebenberg talks about they're picking up the signs they're looking at the Spore of the animal they're looking at the depth of the track and so they're doing all this important inferential stuff and we have to do a lot of important influential stuff if we're going to track Socrates but they also do something else as they're running along they're often making a gesture that's a sacred symbol for the particular animal they're tracking so they're constantly reminding themselves that I'm tracking this kind of animal not that kind of animal and why did why that constant reminding because they're constantly moving between General tracking and this more specific following okay that gesture though is connected to something else it's a way of triggering more sophisticated Behavior at certain junctures in the tracking they'll come along and they'll they lose the trail and the person who's running and doing the gesturing will drop into enacting the animal take trying to take on the perspective of the animal the way the animal what the animal cares about what the animal finds significant trying to take on the identity of the animal and then create this right sense of ah from that oh that is the way the animal went this is the imaginal part of tracking what's the distinction I'm invoking here it's a distinction from Corban between the imaginary and the imaginal foreign use the imagination the imaginary uses images and takes you away from perception so for example if I ask you imagine a sailboat and I can ask you how are it sales up how many sales does it have and you can answer me that's the imaginary what's the imaginal the imaginal is when a child picks up a stick ties a blanket around them their neck and says I'm Zorro not picturing anything they're trying to take on the perspective and the identity of Zorro so that they can taste what it's like to be Zorro what would Zorro do how would I do this and that's of course how children primarily develop how they go through this self-transcendence they do that serious play when I'm teaching people Tai Chi Chuan I tell them to stand and imagine from their knees down is sinking in the mud of a river this area is Flowing like water you want this area of you to feel like water flowing and this this is like the air you want this to feel as Airy as possible and when people do this what's happening is they're using this imagination in the imaginal sense to enhance their perception of the world they're doing imaginably augmented perception just like we have sort of virtually augmented perception when you play things like virtually augmented reality game Pokemon go things like that but for way before there was that technology people were using their imagination in an imaginal fashion in order to track something better and in also in order to augment their perception of reality and of course those two feed into each other and depend on each other so in this imaginal sense I'm going to be asking you to imagine Socrates not as a model of Socrates not as a picture I want you to become as much as you can like Socrates Carl friston really important thinker the has created one of the most important Frameworks within cognitive science called predictive processing recently with Mark Miller and Brett Anderson I published a paper integrating my work on relevance realization with this work on predictive processing I think this is powerful stuff but for instance says something really interesting about the self that entity that we constantly are sort of organized around and oriented from he said the self doesn't have models of the environment ultimately of course you have models in the environment there there's this is my bathroom right this is what it looks like when I go to the university we have these Maps but the self is much more fundamental the self is a model of the environment it is a way of orienting to the environment so you can find your way in it in a way that develops who and what you are so what we're what we're doing here is we're going to try and use these inferential strategies looking at texts making arguments reflecting conceptually on things of course we have to this is Socrates a master of argumentation but that's not all Socrates is we're also going to do this imaginal and these two are going to come together as we're tracking Socrates we're going to try and capture what it's like to be Socrates and this of course would be to take on his really provocative kind of self-knowledge as we'll see Socrates Socrates took for himself the slogan know thyself from the delphic Oracle I have it tattooed on my back this kind of self-knowledge was Central and we're going to find it it's it's it's it's a radically different kind of self-knowledge it's a kind of self-knowledge that in some sense problematizes the self it's it's not your autobiography it's not your autobiography it's much more like your owner's manual how do you function how do you really function how do you function well how do you break down and malfunction that's what we're going to do we're going to be internalizing Socrates and we're done I hope that yourself and Socrates will be deeply interwoven together in a way that helps you aspire to a life that is carried along by the love of wisdom so this internalization of Socrates is we have is also how it connected to how we catch Socrates in a second sense what do you mean we were catching we're trying to catch the prey well there's another sense here and it's also what I want to invoke with after Socrates we're going to catch Socrates the way you catch something alike the way you catch a virus you're going to catch a virtual virus that's going to change the genetic code of yourself and therefore how that world is disclosed to that self you're going to see and be differently now this leads to a third sense of how we're after Socrates and it follows from this previous one the previous two in fact this is we're going to catch up with Socrates the sense in which he's ahead of us even though he's behind us in the past what do I mean by that this is a developmental sense Socrates has in many ways gone further than us there's an ancient adage and was often used in reference to Socrates as the child is to the adult the adult is the sage you have developed more than a child you have a kind of maturity and I think John Russon is Right maturity has these two poles of it improved self-knowledge and an improved capacity to face up to and deal with reality and all of its real challenges we're going to try and develop the way Socrates did by following his way we want to see how Socrates inspired people afforded their them to Aspire to being better than they currently found themselves in a way that has rumbled and continuously through literally millennia now what about this way of Socrates this developmental pathway the Socrates have a method am I going to teach you a method oh we live in the Eon the era of the method so Descartes discourse on method the Prototype the prototypical document this is how you do it this is the method this is the algorithm this is the sequence of instructions this is this is how you do it this is the recipe and method is powerful and being methodical is important when it's appropriate I'm going to argue and many people will be arguing with me in the sense of along with me there'll be a convergence of many people proposing Socrates does not have a method in fact there's a sense in which he will constantly draw people in to assuming that there's a method for becoming wise for having self-knowledge for aspiring to the good only to undermine it only to sort of break it up from within this way he's kind of like his questions are kind of like Zen cohens designed to break up what we normally take for granted we can grasp and are questioning whether like The Parables of Jesus of Nazareth where there's what looks like a narrative and we oh I know how narrative works and how story works and we take that on and then the parable breaks the narrative up and realize and makes you realize oh wait that narrative framing is not appropriate here there's something fun more fundamental going on here there's something there's something more startling and surprising and demanding and challenging but also for those very reasons more satisfying and more profound in meaning instead I want to propose to you the following and I thought a long time about this and I'm like ah Socrates doesn't have a method he has a spirituality centered on the love of wisdom that's his way and I'm trying to use that word and I'm going to use two non-socratic traditions hopefully respectfully to zero in I'm using way in this the way in no way it's used in Taoism the Dao the way that can be spoken of is not the way there where it means this path but also you know an orientation and a cultivation and an identification and a movement of self-transcendence but it isn't a method if you think there's a method to taoism you have fundamentally misunderstooded spirituality I'm also using this sense of Socrates having a way that's similar to how the early Christians were not called Christians even in the Bible this is no we insult to Christianity because in the Bible the earliest Christians are not called Christians they're called followers of the way it's often capitalized in Translation to try and give you some sense that there's a special meaning here they are followers of the way of Jesus of Nazareth and he's somehow identified with that way but it's a way they can follow they can be disciples disciple means to follow that discipline means to follow in this sense they are somehow going to become more and more like him and this is integral to following his way now I fear I may have offended some people here and that's not my intent am I putting Socrates into competition with taoism or Christianity or Buddhism no that is not my intent at all I am putting Socrates into conversation deep conversation and this exemplifies the socratic Spirit I'm putting Socrates into conversation deep dialogue with taoism Christianity Buddhism and along the way cynicism stoicism neoplatonism notice what I just said by the way by the way along the way this word is so pregnant with so many dimensions beyond what we capture with the word method the way there is a way here that is what I have found and that is what many people have found both existentially as they try to live a Socratic life and scholastically have they have been respect as they have been reflecting on what was Socrates doing so Stephen Fowler has written the book The Art of spiritual Midwifery Dia logos and I like the way he uh he spells theologos he he actually capitalizes uh logos via logos theologos and dialectic in the classical tradition now first of all note the terms Dia logos and dialectic here's another book that uses both of these terms by Guru Hansen helscog I hope I pronounced that correctly called philosophizing the dialoguego's way towards wisdom in education theologus is here and then within the book he talks about dialectic so God dialectic theologos and we also have this notion of being a midwife what's going on here well first of all I want to make it clear Paul is a Christian in fact he's an official chaplain and he is a pastoral education supervisor so this is not somebody who's just theorizing or doing philosophy he's putting his Christianity into direct dialogical practice and dialectical practice with people okay so what's what's he doing in that book and how is that relevant to what I was just talking about what he does is he is repeatedly comparing the way of Socrates and the way of Jesus of Nazareth and he's explicitly not putting them into competition he's putting them into deep dialogue with each other he's really interested in comparing Socrates socrates's self-description of being a midwife Socrates compared himself to a midwife and that he helped people to give birth to themselves he uses that metaphor will have to be really careful about these precious gems where Socrates uses these metaphors to give us some understanding of how he understood and experienced himself and his practice his way so father takes that what Socrates says I'm a midwife and I have people to give birth to themselves and he Compares it very fruitfully to in the Gospel of John when Jesus says to Nicodemus I tell you you must be born again and then Nicodemus is all confused and then Jesus is trying to say no no no I'm talking about being a born again in the spirit this is a spiritual rebirth now can we can we remember it's it's like it's hard right it's hard but can we remember can we somehow go back and maybe we can use Socrates to help us here maybe you can use Jesus to help us understand Socrates better but can we go back to the radicalness of that what does it mean I mean I hesitate to say this what does it mean to be born again but notice step off what we usually focus on we focus on the person being born again my father does this really cool thing he says no no no Jesus is a midwife he's offering to help people to become born again there's something deep are they the same are they saying the same thing no but we can understand more of what I'm trying to get at with this notion of a Socratic way a spirituality by comparing it to these other ways foreign we're going to spend some significant time in this deep dialogue between Socrates and Christianity I'll talk about this more in detail towards the end of this episode but what's going to happen is at one point it's not going to be a monologue Christopher Master Pietro and I are going to be in here are going to be here together and we're going to dialogue we're going to exemplify Socrates we're not just going to talk about dialogue we're going to actually exemplify it for you but not just randomly we're going to do this we're going to talk about the profound relationship between Socrates and one of the founders of existentialism and profound thinkers within Christianity Soren kirkegaard cook a guard is a follower of Jesus he's a Christian but Socrates was his teacher and how does that work and what can we gain how can we use each to look more deeply into the other that's going to be a defining feature of theologos we're not going to try and get Socrates and Jesus or Socrates and kirkegaard to agree no no in dilocus what happens is both people move they emerge they give birth to themselves they have insight and transformation they both get to a place they couldn't get to on their own how did I get here except by this dialogue let's go back to the title because I'm still not done with it after Socrates what has come after Socrates what has been inspired in spiritus spirituality what has been inspired by him what has afforded people to Aspire because of him how does this path people inspired to Aspire because of Socrates how does that reflect back on him how does it help us to understand him again not just inferentially but also imaginally how does it help we're going to enter into reciprocal reinterpretation reciprocal reinterpretation does that mean on the one hand we have historical interpretation but on the other we have existential inspiration and those aren't the same those aren't the same one is trying to get at what's the historical fact about Socrates the other is how is Socrates living within me such that I am becoming a better self so we have these two and why do I call it reciprocal reinterpretation because they influence and change each other the historic when as we know more about Socrates sort of historically that changes how he existentially inspires people but also as people are existentially inspired by Socrates and we'll see whole Traditions around this like stoicism that reflects back on the historical interpretation and you might say oh this is going to be messy and it's like like in one sense you're right but in another sense you need to step back right from the very beginning and what do I mean by that I mean with Plato socrates's greatest disciple the person who wrote the dialogues and given us the most information about Socrates right from the beginning with Plato it's impossible to pull apart the historical facts and the existential interpretation because in Plato they are reciprocally opening to each other reciprocally constraining and affording each other you can't really separate these two poles we can emphasize we'll talk more about this the historical we can talk more about the existential but in the end you can't really pull them apart ultimately I am not going to try to do so I'm not going to try to do so I think it's a quick Sonic project I'm not saying people should not do historical analysis I'm not saying that but insofar as we're after Socrates we should take seriously what Plato ends up saying in his seventh letter which is by most people now regarded as authentic Plato says he has made Socrates more beautiful in his work in his writings what because he goes on about how beautiful Socrates is not physically Socrates was physically ugly but this this other kind of beauty and we'll come to that what does Plato mean what is he saying what Plato's saying is he's not being totally faithful to the historical facts but for good reason because he wants to be even more faithful to the spirit of Socrates this is the same for me I will enter into this reciprocal reinterpretation another word that's good here is the Latin word inventio which means both the discoverer and to create I will both be discovering Socrates and in a sense creating myself in the image of Socrates I'm going to do this for three reasons first this entering into the reciprocal reconstruction the reciprocal reinterpretation really captures the pre the three previous senses that we've gone through here about being after Socrates you can't really be after Socrates in the way we've been talking about if you don't enter into the reciprocal reinterpretation secondly much more than the facts Socratic spirituality is needed in our times in fact the need is so pronounced in both senses of the word like pronouncing a word but how something is pronounced projecting outward and the emergence of all of these communities that are so Socratic not and then that they're trying to capture the historical facts about Socrates but they are definitely following the way of Socratic spirituality the whole movement around authentic dialogue you know circling authentic relating empathy circling even things outside of the socratic tradition like Buddhist Insight dialogue on and on and we'll talk about these these are all attempts get at what Socrates was doing with his practice and the way that he was affording for people third as I've already said this entering into the reciprocal reinterpretation this is how I aspire to live my life I'm not offering an argument by Authority John bravecu does this and therefore you should that's ridiculous that's crap what am I offering what I'm offering is because I actually aspire to live this way I can also explore this way from the inside and that's the way I need to most present it to you if it's going to become relevant to you such that you will consider internalizing Socrates and taking up his way so what will you be doing then we will we will be asking how people in the past participated in the constant renewal and revisioning of the socratic way and how people are doing this right now deep connection between participation in the past and the creation in the present this means that in addition to a lecture like I've just given every episode we'll do recommended points points for you to reflect on not because I'm making an argument because they can help help scaffold you into the socratic path even more so I will each episode take you on a pedagogical program I'm going to teach you an Ecology of practices built step by step Episode by episode so just as I'm building an argument lecture by lecture I'm going to be giving you a tutorial Episode by episode so you can build an Ecology of practices to enter into the stream if you wish of those who are following Socrates before we do that before we move to points and practices I want to make a few final points within the lecture a question that's probably coming to mind for most people is how does this series relate to Awakening from the meeting crisis you talked about Socrates in Plato already what are you doing now you're going to be talking you've talked a lot about wisdom what are you doing now Awakening from the meaning crisis was extensive very broad scope and very expository I was trying to teach to you after Socrates will be much more intensive we'll be covering quite a bit of time but that's not but I'm not trying to do the big picture right I'm not trying to give you the world view although we'll get to people who do do that I'm trying to help you follow a pathway it'll be intensive and instead of being expository a lot of time it will be exploratory trying to figure out together with you I'm I'm not I'm not I'm not Socrates I mean that sounds like such a treatable thing to say but try and hear that like deeply I'm trying to learn as much as you are I'm hoping that I can be helpful to you I got into a bind as I was working on this series because I kept reading more and more book look at all the books I brought here Socrates and dialectic and dialogos and I've been doing all these practices and I'm going to share them with you and I've been doing all this participant observation and then circling and I've done some authentic relating and nice empathy dialogue and Buddhist insight and you know what I really have to thank Peter Lindberg for all the help he's provided in connecting me to these practices and more and more doing participant experimentation with with guy and Chris trying to build a workshop for people so they can really taste this and sense its transformative momentum doing all of that and then this is what happened to me there's still so much more there's so many more books there's so many more practices there's so many more ways we can try and put this together I got into a bind how could I possibly because you can't just speak about Socrates you have to exemplify Socrates we somehow have to try and make Socrates be here we have to figure out how to be Socrates to each other if this is going to mean anything if it's going to make any difference then I remembered my supervisor Jack Stevenson when I was working on my PhD and I got into a bind and he came to me and he said stuff like this he would say you're already way more of an expert in what you're writing about than I am that's not my job I'm wondering okay well then look and then he grabs me by the shoulder and he almost shakes me and he says John your thesis is not your masterpiece stop trying to make it your Masterpiece you will only maybe do that at the end of your career and that was immensely liberating and I went on to write the naturalistic imperative in cognitive science and start the beginning of the development of the theory of relevance realization and I'm still working that out now he was so wise he was so prescient that's what I'm doing here this is not going to be my final work on the socratic way it is not going to be a masterpiece instead together we are going to try to construct a portal and a platform into and onto the socratic way that's what this is about and that's what I'm going to try my best to do with you and for you I had to make a choice when I thought about this a long time and talked to people about it should I assume that people have not seen Awakening from the meaning crisis or should I assume they have each one is problematic I chose the second I chose to assume that they did hopefully not out of egocentric arrogance but for the good reasons that I can't possibly review the whole argument from Awakening from The Mating crisis I can't do it and the more I do that review the more the people who have watched it I'll just be suffering under repetition instead I will refer to specific episodes in Awakening for the meaning crisis that might be necessary or at least helpful to people okay let's move into some points these are not intended to be summary points these are tended to be things that you reflect upon in order to begin the Ecology of practices the way is deeply enmeshed self-knowledge but a kind of self-knowledge Socratic self-knowledge and again this is not your autobiography this is more like your operation manual how does your mind how does your bodied mind the Socrates was a soldier and Plato was a wrestler how do they actually work how does yourself work what kind of thing is it how how could your mind body and self malfunction go off the path to wisdom we will need many different practices within our Ecology of practices for Socratic self-knowledge but we need to start somewhere and I want to start somewhere that's really relevant and provocative the kind of knowing that I'm talking about is a kind of knowing that is trained in mindfulness practices like meditation and contemplation and we'll see especially we get into the neoplatonic that these are deeply intermeshed so you're going to say oh but Socrates doesn't meditate well slow down maybe not in the formal way within Buddhism but Socrates was reported it's reported in the dialogues had this capacity he would stand for 24 or even 48 Hours fixed and placed looking deep within his mind trance found absorption and the Anthropologist Lerman in her work as proposed and there's some already empirical work supporting this that this capacity for absorption is predictive of a capacity for tremendous spiritual existential sapiential self-transcendence so Socrates was capable of entering into profound states of inner awareness so the first thing I want you to do if you wish is practice round biological reflection you can do it as a daily practice you could do it perhaps before or after the meditation practice I'm going to teach you so here's a couple of books and you can alternate between them one is Socrates quotes and facts by blago keroff I'm probably mispronouncing that since I've never seen that name before in my life Plato quotes 365 quotes by Plato by B I should do each one of these this is good because it gives you some facts about Socrates and then it has quotes what you need to do is the following read one of the quotes perhaps from Socrates and Plato and sometimes they'll overlap but they'll almost always be from slightly different perspectives and that's important that's why the alternation read a quote and then engage in dialogical reflection Socrates what are you trying to get me to see that I'm not seeing resist the easy first interpretation if you've read anything about Socrates you know he's going to come in and challenge the easy first interpretation and then challenge your secret interpretation challenge the third try to get to at least three and then ask yourself after you've been dialoguing with Socrates or Plato what does this mean for me how could I put it into practice how can I try it out to see if it changes things other practice you do on a regular basis is imaginal and you know what imaginal means now imaginal engagement here's a little book called the allegory of the cave by Plato it's one of the most famous passages many of you are familiar with it what you want to do in this is you want to read a section of it there's natural breaks in there and then try to imagine yourself in the situation what am I seeing how am I feeling about myself what what would it be mean to be chained so I've only seen shadows and hearing Echoes and I never can turn around and look at the real I can never Orient myself and that's important I can never Orient myself in the right way what would it mean if I got free and realized that everything I thought was real was much less real in that sense illusory imagine yourself imaginal engagement imaginal enactment but just read it don't just picture it put yourself into it put yourself into the perspective participate in the identity of the people that are in the cave or coming out of the cave section by section you're going to do it again and again this is a myth in the proper sense of the word you need to engage with it profoundly and there's study I'm picking books that are easy to get and there are cheap in order to start this is a Dover Thrift which doesn't mean it's the absolute best translation but that's not that important at this stage this is six great dialogues by Plato the apology The Credo the Fato the phaedrus the Symposium and the Republic start reading this but read it to study it so just read it try and learn what you can about it try to ask yourself not just the historical interpretation what what was Plato talking about what was Socrates on about but ask yourself the existential inspiration and start asking yourself some interesting questions why is Plato writing dialogues why doesn't he just give the core arguments and why is Plato almost absent from these dialogues and what's socrates's role in the dialogue is he just Plato's mouthpiece we'll come back to this so you want to be doing the dialogical reflection the imaginal engagement and inaction you also want to study now you don't have to do all of those if you don't want to but the more you're willing to do to all of them even just a little the first two practices will maybe take you 10 15 minutes the third one you could do it another time read but read like as if you're going to study it somebody was going to ask you about this later and you want to be able to explain not only explain it to them but try and attract them to it that's how you need to read it and you'll probably get it sort of wrong we all have read these books multiple times and read multiple books from other people offering interpretations and every time I go back and see differently what was what's happening in each one of these this is how this work could be sacred to me it's in it's an inexhaustible Fountain ever renewing my my my ability to make sense of myself and the world and how to best pursue a good life therein foreign someone who said they were a Christian did not go to church did not study the Bible did not try and be like Jesus are they Christian have they if they really understood it can they really be any kind of guide for you I challenge you in love I challenge you to take this up you really won't understand the lectures unless you're pondering the points and taking up the practices both the ones I'll do with you and the ones I recommend you do on your own if you just attend the lectures you're just reading the Kamasutra and never making love to anyone would you want to do that would you really want to understand what it is to make love with somebody we'll see that that's actually a powerful metaphor a very good metaphor for understanding Socrates because there's a profound relationship a reciprocal reinterpretation between Socrates and Eros between Socrates and the erotic okay now we're going to move to our first joint practice I'm going to teach you the basics of getting into a mindfulness meditation so the first practice I want to walk you through is a core practice for beginning mindfulness meditation we'll do a few more along the mindfulness meditation and contemplation pathway but let's this is a really good place to start meditation is about finding your Center this is how it's so crucial to the socratic project of knowing yourself knowing how you function how you form now this three Center has this Center has three dimensions to it one is I'm going to teach you first how to find your Center in a way that improves the communication between mind and body Socrates was a soldier Plato was a wrestler in fact Plato is his nickname it means broad shoulders because he was a wrestler we want to improve the relationship between mind and body so it is it has that kind of finesse it has that kind of fluency and fluidity of the soldier or the wrestler the martial artist we know that a lot of the time mind and body are undermining each other we're antagonistic I'm all spun out and I'm stressing my body and filling it with cortisol or you can be really hungry or really tired and that slows down my attempt to think to understand we've also had times when they're in sync when they're a offending each other and we know that those are the times when we are most likely to learn most likely to make progress then I'll teach you how to center your attention you probably think well I know how to do that give me a chance and then I'm going to teach you how to center your attitude [Music] let's begin first by centering our posture now what you might do is you might stiffen yourself and do sort of this oh I know what that is stiff let that go I'm trying to calculate your Center what I want you to do is feel find because learning to feel and find and I wish we had a word that sort of was the two of them together maybe that's what the tracking is how to track your Center crucial so don't start doing it yet I'm going to explain it to you and then I will talk you through it I'm going to ask you to close your eyes then I'm gonna You're Gonna Move off center and you're going to feel off-centered you have in your middle ear a mechanism that's been put through 400 million years of evolution that really makes this apparent to you and then you move off center backwards field offset oh this is and then each time I'll move a little less back and forth until I get centered then side to side same thing off center off center back and forth until I feel centered and then once my body feels centered I'll do the same thing with my head front to back side to side why headed separately John when people first begin meditation they very very frequently let their head roll forward like this first of all that really cuts off your Air Supply so you start doing really shallow chest breathing which is conducive to anxiety and rumination you don't want that secondly you're starving yourself of oxygen you're putting a strain on these muscles that can lead to headaches which will make you stop doing the practice also perhaps most importantly this is a signal that you're falling asleep this is a signal to your brain I'm going to sleep now part of finding your Center is to find a place between two places that your brain is very familiar with oh John's closing his eyes ah daydreaming mind wandering nope oh John's closing his eyes we're going to sleep no you're trying to find what at first is a very narrow Place between them centered between them and grow it and expand it and grow into it once you are centered torso and head I'll ask you to relax your chest that means let it open see what my shoulders are doing this is anxiety stress tension anger this is I'm open to learn and my shoulders are down not up open and down and I'm going to place my hands and you can experiment you can place your hands in your legs you could do a classic you know pedanta kind of practice or mudra you can do something more often found in Zen the point here is to place your hands such that it helps you to keep your chest open your shoulders down and add to your sense of stability then relax your abdomen not so complementary I know look at John's stomach so what Let It Go this is conducive to Baby breathing the way babies naturally breathe they don't do shallow breathing in their chest they do deep abdominal breathing to expand their abdomen when they're inhaling and Contracting but they're not forcing it they're not forcing it they're following their breath this simultaneously relaxes you and gets a lot of oxygen in your blood which is important for practice then relax your legs you're probably putting all kinds of effort into them make sure that your feet aren't crossed your feet are touching the floor relax your legs then relax your face try to sink in really sink in in two senses of the word sink Ing s-i-n-k and sinking in that's why and Z like getting synchronized and dropping into it again like a martial artist about right to fight and I'll I'll ask you try to notice what it tastes like I'm using this metaphorically what does it feel like in your mind and body to be centered like this what effects does it have on your mind and body what effects does it have on how you're oriented towards yourself oriented towards the world why am I doing this because you need to create a felt memory of what this is like what it is like to be you in a centered state so that you can find your way back to this again and again and again and again okay so let's do that practice together you can close your eyes completely some of you might want to open your eyes slightly unfortunately I have been years in my left ear it actually messes up that middle ear so I probably have to keep my eyes open just a little bit you don't have to do that do what works for you getting more into this practice I was able to do it for decades before I contracted many years but now I've got to keep my eyes slightly open you don't have to do that that's peculiar to me you probably the most novices want to keep your eyes completely closed okay so let's do it let's close your eyes just take a a nice deep cleansing breath just like you're sort of washing the insides of your mind and body then slowly move forward off center Front feel that you know you're off center you don't have to calculate it move backwards oh I can I'm off center yeah there it is there it is a little less forward a little less back and forth slowly slowly zeroing in on where you feel see how you're tracking where you feel centered front to back now side to side same thing oh I'm off center yeah oh I'm off center oh yeah okay back and forth a little less each time to write until I slowly find my way oh there we are now it's to my head front words off oh yeah that's off center oh yeah right right there a little less each time then side to side now you're centered in head and torso relax your chest open your chest shoulders down place your hands that adds to that stabilizes it and relax your abdomen no forcing your breath following your breath doing baby breathing as naturally as you can now relax your legs now relax your face what does it feel like to be centered this way how does a taste in your mind and body immerse yourself into a creative felt memory so you can find your way back again okay slowly open your eyes so that's centering the mind-body relationship now we want to Center our attention for most people that means just sort of focusing much more than that I'm going to use an analogy some of you have seen this from Awakening from the meaning crisis or from a meditation course but it's still helpful your mind is always framing reality it's always paying attention to this foregrounding it backgrounding this and ignoring all of that you're always framing and that's always sizing up the world creating a particular salience landscape a flowing landscape of how things are standing out to you grabbing your attention arousing you metabolically generating particular affective States in you that mental framing is like your glasses if you wear them I do now notice my glasses enable me to see but they also limit I'm looking through them in two senses I'm looking Beyond them by means of them Beyond them and by means of them they're both enabling me and limiting me that's how they function that's how your attention your arousal and your affect function all the time Moment by moment there's a problem with framing porting a lensing what's that problem well this this these lenses could actually be rose-colored as we say rose-colored glasses he or she is not seeing the world as it is because the glasses are tinted or maybe there's dirt on them or they're distorting what do I need to do what do I need to do how do I self-correct I need to step back and look at my glasses they're no longer transparent to me they're opaque I'm looking at them I'm looking and seeing are they rose-colored are they tinted is there Gunk on them are they distorting that's what you're doing when you're finding your attentional Center you're stepping back and looking at the normally transparent way you have been looking through to the world okay nice analogy perhaps but abstract like what does that mean concretely John what that means is what do you normally looking through in order to make sense there's a clue in that phrase of the world you're looking through your Sensations you don't look at them you look through them you're always looking through at the world what you want to do in this practice is you want to step back and look at them well which Sensations good question so we're going to pick Sensations for practical purpose Sensations that line up with that baby breathing that we got in centering our posture and that as first we'll see how deep spiritual significance this is the breath following the sensations in the abdomen being generated by the breath so as I inhale my abdomen expands and I can feel that I'm going to gently say to myself in I'm not paying attention to the end I'm using the end to track to track and Trace to follow those Sensations as they unfold as I'm inhaling and then as I exhale out and I follow the sensations looking at the sensations tracking them in and out in and out and what will happen pretty fast as your mind will leap away and you'll start looking at the world again I'm listening to something I'm planning on doing my laundry I'm wondering if Roger still loves me what do we do then we step back and label the distracting process we don't get involved with the content because we're stepping back and looking at we label the process with an ing word imagining complaining planning listening and then we return our attention to following the sensations of our breath hmm now it's very important to frame this the right way there's that framing again if you think it's going to be so noisy in there I won't be able to follow one or two I know my mind is going to wander all over the place you're right oh well that means that I won't ever meditate Because unless my mind goes calm and still and wide open like a Canadian Tundra then I'm not meditating I've failed you're exactly wrong there's a Buddhist metaphor for this it's like you've got a glass of dirty water and what you're doing is you're using your spoon and you're trying to push the dirt down and you're only making it worse instead of thinking of that when you go off and you catch yourself I want you to take this to Heart catching yourself in distraction and coming back is the core of the practice that's what will transfer to your life think of that going out and coming back as like doing reps building the muscle of mindfulness that is meditation that is meditation you'll have to do so many reps well if you wanted to build actual physiological muscle well one two three reps I'm done no you have to do thousands in a lifelong practice you've spent all of this time building up habits of mind and body and you're trying to enter into capacity to transform them Socratic self-knowledge and aspiration and you're putting this much time of meditation against it you have to be tremendously patient and frame this the right way now that helps me move to the third thing centering your attitude being oriented in the right way so that part of your mind that jumps around in the Buddhist tradition it's called monkey mind it's like a monkey jumping from Branch to Branch your mind jumps and Chatters or as it goes from thought to thought suppose you're trying to get that monkey to stay still Jack cornfield has a great analogy for this he doesn't use a monkey he uses a puppy because people are more familiar with dogs so let's just use his analogy as is you're trying to change you're trying to train a puppy dog to stay okay so you put the puppy dog down stay and put beep dog wanders away your mind wanders away if you oh stay if you're fighting the puppy you're training it to fear you and fight you let that Rumble around a bit in your mind if you fight it if you're frustrated with it you will train it to fight and fear you and things will get worse oh so I know meditation's about just letting things be letting go letting it flow stay puppy dog oh it went over there oh well oh now it's over there ah now it's over there will you train the puppy dog no you're just feeding its misbehavior you're just indulging it you want to be centered in your attitude between fighting your monkey mind and feeding it you're trying to befriend yourself and that is so so resonant with the socratic project so oh okay stay again and again and again befriending yourself okay so let's review when you start this practice on your own you're going to Center your posture the way I guided you through it you're going to Center your attention tracking the sensations of your breath in out when your mind wanders you label the distracting process you don't get involved with its content and you if you label it with an ing word and then you return your attention to the breath and you frame it the right way that is meditation that's building the muscle of mindfulness and as you return to your breath you Center your attitude I'm learning to not either fight nor feed my monkey mind which is like learning to find the place between ruminating and mind wandering and falling asleep there's all you're finding all these centers that's why Buddhism called it the middle path you're going to see that Socrates is doing something very deeply analogous to this there's a couple things to help you when you start to practice this on your own how do you know you might be saying John how do I know when I'm distracted or not good question think of your mind as a stage this is actually part of a current important Theory Of Consciousness called the global workspace in your mind as a stage and there's a mic on it in the spotlight if the majority of your mind the spotlight is on your breath and it's got the mic of your mind there's stuff going off on the periphery marbling remember you are still following your breath don't turn your attention to distractions it's only when they have turned you and the majority of the spotlight the and the mic are no longer on your breath they're on something else you want you're planning on doing or remembering or regretting or whatever that's when you step back and label the i n label the distracting process with an ing word how precise do I need to be with that don't worry about getting it absolutely right or wrong well if I have said regretting or or maybe I was just remembering like what first comes to mind try to use different labels of course that's important it helps you to start to differentiate all of this incohate happening but don't pretend a kind of precision that you can't actually have um remembering imagining that's good enough when you're doing this practice initially this will be another Demand on you this will be hard you have to plan for it I recommend doing 20 minutes in the morning 20 minutes at night not right before you're going to sleep in between dinner and sleep Midway plan for it if you say I'll fit it in in my day no you won't I've been doing this for three decades and been teaching it for two decades you won't your head will be hitting the pillow and you won't have meditated you have to schedule it in you have like you you're like you're meeting a friend you're befriending yourself Socrates and we'll see this he he would say to people why do you spend so much time on your hair and your clothing and so little time on your soul schedule this try and do at the same time the same place at least for the first five or six weeks it's really important that regularity it helps to build a a deep habit at the core of virtue and we'll talk about virtue is habit but don't oh habits no no no inhabit monks War habits we inhabit a place think about it that way think about habit that way it's a good idea to ring a bell perhaps light some incense this helps the the conditioning of the Habit that you're trying to acquire don't try to meditate right after having a forceful conversation with somebody you'll just play the tapes in your head you won't be able to get get any sort of significant centering going don't practice right after listening to music or watching a movie you'll just play the tapes in your head don't practice right after eating you'll just listen to your stomach why can't I practice right before going to sleep because one of two things will happen you'll fall asleep and then you're teaching your brain that the point of meditation is to fall asleep and that is not the point of meditation meditation is not a vacation it is an education you are trying to build habits skills virtues state of states of mind that transfer to your life percolate through your psyche permeate the domains in which you are engaging in your most important endeavors or you'll do the practice correctly and you'll wake up and then you won't be able to fall asleep don't practice right before going to sleep when you're practicing weird stuff can happen you can be sitting there and you can feel like an electric shock just went through your body you can know that you're sitting but you feel like you're floating towards the ceiling or that you're sinking into the floor or you're Twisted even though you're not twisted you may this has happened to me it's happened to many people who meditate you're alone and you hear as clear as a bell your name called out John and there's nobody around foreign none of these things mean you're a Buddha or on the cusp of enlightenment let both of those go treat any of these like another distraction label it with an ing word return to following your breath one important thing one important caveat if there's two important things if something comes up that is clearly indicative of trauma that you've experienced psychological sexual violence Etc stop this practice this practice has shown you that you need professional therapeutic help under those conditions stop this practice if you're already in therapy for whatever reasons tell your therapist you are undertaking this practice in fact tell them all the practices you're undertaking finally get well two things is related get a timer you have a phone these are very easy nowadays don't sit with like a watch or I'll sit for 10 minutes and I know in 10 minutes will have passed but I know when 15 minutes will pass no you won't you'll sit me you'll be like dead sure yeah that's been 15 minutes and you'll open it in your eyes and seven minutes will have gone by you sense of the flow of time while you're in meditation is distorted for a very long time I can do it now but I've been meditating since 1991. okay now listen very very carefully how you come out of your sitting is part of your practice when the timer goes off don't just okay I'm done slowly open your eyes try to notice how it is what's it feel like to come into yourself and come into the world what does it feel like to come into yourself and into the world and try as best as you can to integrate what you cultivated in your practice with your everyday Consciousness and cognition meditation is not a vacation it is an education you're building a bridge between your practice and your life you want what you're doing in your practice to go in your life and you want what's happening in your life to come into your practice not the content but the processes the habits that are triggered Etc slowly come out of the practice tasting what it's like to come into yourself and into the world again your everyday self in the everyday world and try as best you can to integrate with your cultivated in your practice with that everyday Consciousness cognition and sense of self okay that is the first practice that we were going we have to learn together I recommend if you really want to start on the path of Socratic self-knowledge that you start doing this practice and the other practices that I explained to you and as always thank you so very much for your time and attention it's important to realize that Socrates is being just as surprised by the way the conversation the dialogue is going he's just as much surprised by the DIA by way of by means of logos the DIA logos as anyone else participating and you'll see how much he comes to deeply value this he's not experiencing this just as a rough you know back and forth adversarial thing there's a deeper thing going on and you'll see this and what he says about this practice

Channel: John Vervaeke

Views: 104,638

Keywords: after socrates, john vervaeke after socrates, john vervaeke, john vervaeke jordan peterson, john vervaeke jonathan pageau, socratic method, john vervaeke awakening from the meaning crisis, john vervaeke meditation, john vervaeke neoplatonism, john vervaeke agape, john vervaeke bernardo kastrup, john vervaeke mindfulness, john vervaeke lex fridman, jordan peterson, western philosophy, ancient greek, philosophy (field of study), Ancient greek philosophy, mental health awareness

Id: bIJuIN6kUcU

Length: 85min 40sec (5140 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 09 2023