Pre-Tragic, Tragic & Post-Tragic Part 1 w/ Gafni

[Music] Ladies and gentlemen, tragically I am again speaking with Mark Gaffing or perhaps post tragically. Hi, that's the rub and welcome back everyone to the inter-stage expanded university, ISEU where we've been exploring the backstory of Mark's work on world religion and cosmorotic humanism through the trail of ideas he's left in his wake. Today we're doing part one of an anticipated two-part dive into the pre-tragic, the plain old tragic and the potentially post-tragic. And even though trans-tragic might be technically more accurate, post-tragic has made moving to it. So if you love tripartite in predatory and conceptual architecture, or if you simply like saying the words tripartite in predatory and you're in for a treat, folks. Now the underlying insights of this three-phase or three-station framing have sources and resonances in numerous wisdom traditions and philosophers. Lately it's become one of those free-floating concepts that operates as part of the high-ve conversation in the overlapping developmental transformational and regenerative souls of the liminal community. It's an attractive framing because it helps these communities go beyond naive optimism, social fragility and pessimism at a forms of confidence and presence that nonetheless takes seriously the real horrors of the world in ourselves. It's a vision that Mark has been the primary driver, creator and clarifier of, and it shows up in a number of his written works. But, of course, regular listeners will know that this framing and phrasing was invented spontaneously by me after being kicked in the head by an alpaca when I was seven years old, and then subsequently stolen from me by Gaffney and his cronies, but who can blame them? So here to ward off my petty, proprietary lawsuit, big-mife forgiveness and help us to enrich our clarity on the relationship between naive certainty, depressive confusion and transformed embrace is the OG-MG, Mark Gaffney. Hey, Mark. Oh my God. Oh my God. I think the major question at stake here at Lehman is, is your new clothing, which we're not sure how long this new line of clothing is going to last, but is this pre-tragic? There is an argument I got to tell you to be made that it's tragic, but it could be post-tragic. This could be a post-tragic kind of emergent, you know, pascalion laying of the man. So oh my God. Oh my God. It's good to see you, my friend. So let's see. Let's see. And the real reason, there are many reasons to do this series to kind of try and understand the underlying architectures, interior architectures, philosophical, spiritual, existential, of cosmetic humanism that, you know, together with Zach Stein and Ken Wilber were articulating this new story of value, but actually the real reason I do these dialogues is actually to hear your introduction. I'm not just, you know, that's just the real, you know, motivational architectures. Now that we're in the dialogue, that we have to say something. So let's dive in. And I'm crazy excited to be in this particular conversation because it's so helpful, right? It's helpful, right? It helps us clarify, you know, where we are. And I've been teaching some version of this, you know, for a couple of decades since maybe 2002 was kind of a first version of an early book called Mystery of Love. And then, you know, kind of a, and what are they called, an audiobook or whatever it's called called The O'Roddick and the Holy, but it's clarified over the years. And we put out a book on, I think, the summer called She Comes in Threes, which I know we send over to you. And, you know, pre-tragic, tragic and post-tragic, I think the subtitle of another oral essays book, but there's a complete version of all of this coming out as pre-tragic, tragic and post-tragic as the title in a few weeks. It's also the introductory essay to return to Eros. And it's a major frame in radical Kabbalah. So I'm saying it's, this is not by way of anyone remembering that. And I'm just trying to share that this is not incidental. It's not like clever. It's very deep rooted structure of reality. The name I give to is Tri-Electics. I call it Tri-Electics. It's a tri-electical study of reality. And, you know, if we can be kind of trinitarian and tri-partate and then kind of testulate to the tri-electic, we'll be good. Okay, there we go. So, let's see if we can just kind of lay it out right in a kind of simple way. And by a simple way, that itself will kind of take us into the conversation because what do we mean by simple? We don't mean first simplicity, first simplicity, right? We mean not complexity. We mean something else which we might call second simplicity. So we just did it right there. First simplicity, complexity, second simplicity. That's a three. And it's a very, very important three, right? Because what it says is there's a first simplicity which is clarity. It's clear. There's simplicity. Pre-tragic, it's a parallel line, simplicity line and tragic line. Pre-tragic, it's demarcating characteristic is clarity. Right? There's this like, it's clear. It's clear. So, for example, a kind of fierce fundamentalism, a religious fundamentalism, is pretragic. It's clear. You know why people get hurt, why people suffer what, you know, how sinners are punished, you understand exactly what's going to happen. And, you know, in the afterlife and that there's going to be one of a particular nature. But paradoxically, a dogmatic atheism is also clear. So if you read, although he was a more complex figure, but, you know, Bertrand Russell has a famous passage about kind of accepting the critiques of modernity and actually being willing to live in the despair. Right? Or, you know, one of my most formative books, you know, when I was, you know, in my teenage years was Sartre, right? Being in nothingness and I, existentialism was going to, you know, I was going to actually go and become one of my early, unlived careers was to become a, you know, a professor of philosophy and existentialism was my field. And I remember reading Walter Kaufman's, you know, famous, you know, book on, you know, existentialism, you know, from, you know, really from, from Nietzsche all the way through. And it's clarity, right? And when you read Sartre, it's like, it's clear, right? You know, responsibility means you're utterly clear that there is nothing that you can rely on. There are no frameworks. There's nothing inherent. It is all, that's what Sartre is saying. You're, that's how he defines responsibility. Anything that you're actually saying, there's something else happening other than that which is self-generated through your random existence, which you are ascribing meaning to in your self-generated way, but it's not rooted in anything. It's not just responsibility and anything less is not taking responsibility and that enormous effect, Irving Lone, in his book, existentialism and psychotherapy, one of those big tombs that, you know, I got in my 20s or something like that, I dove into it. I remember reading it. He's doing Sartre completely. I mean, it's very, he's the, you know, reigning neoliberal, you know, kind of, so it's, it's clarity. And so it's a first simplicity. It's pretragic because it's all clear, right? You know, I know we're moving across domains and we'll go and teach you these more clearly, but even something like sex negative, kind of the classical church position, you know, Ephesians, what is it? It's 522 or Corinthians, you know, 7.9, right? You know, at first one, it would be good that man not touch a woman or something like that or they cannot contain, let them marry for it's better to marry than to burn. That's clear. We got that. That's clear. This stuff is bad. It gets you in trouble. It's of the devil. It's actually a more sophisticated position, but it's clear paradoxically sex positive is also clear or or Kinsey's sex neutral. It's clear. It's sex neutral. Kinsey, it's, you know, like having lunch, right? It's like biological acts like having lunch. He's rebelling against his dad. It was a big sex negative guy, right? Fundamentalist preacher, but even the kind of kind of modern modernity sex positive, right? Right? Right. It's clear. Right? But it doesn't enter the tortured complexity, right? Of the shutter of desire beneath the shutter of appearances and how that right avoids that. So it's always the first level, first simplicity, pre-tragic clear, then you get to the complexity, right? You get to the tragic. Now, the second I want to just kind of set up the rules of this tri-electics. So the first level is always clarity, right? So the first level might be just to add on to our, you know, we're kind of drawing a diagram together, but in our minds, thank God we're not relying. We've got to use our minds to kind of see patterns of in reality. So we might also say innocence, innocence, pre-tragic first simplicity is very, very no. Innocence, right? I'm born, you know, trailing clouds of glory, right? You know, right? The romantic poet says, right? Right? Then I get to like guilty feet have got no rhythm guilty. It's like guilty, right? It's like, I'm in the garden. I was innocent. Now I'm guilty, right? In the last verse of chapter two of Genesis, where you stand, Avonim, Veloid, Vosushu, they were naked and not ashamed, right? Pre-tragic simplicity, innocence. Chapter three, verse one, van nachasya yaharum, and then nachas, the snake was also naked, or clever or beguiling a complex word in Hebrew. And now we're in the tragic. And so how does the garden get us to the post-tragic? We'll, we'll skip that for now, but you can't really understand that story without reading the garden of Edenstory as the pre-tragic, tragic and post-tragic. So it's, it's innocent. We're in the garden. We're guilty. And one reading of the story, and the fundamentals reading of the story, we're guilty. There's a fall, desire is a condition of reality. That condition is fallen. Guilty, right? Complexity. Complex choices, joy. Be with the snake or not be with the snake. Do I listen? Do I not listen? All right. Do I engage? Do I not engage? Right? Let me give one to my husband. This, this apple was really good, or fig or pomegranate or pear, unclear. It wasn't a pear, but the other two come up in the sources, right? Or tragic. And tragic means it's not clear, right? It's complex. It's confusing. It's contradictory, right? It's, you know, it's agonizing, right? It's, you know, it's like, huh, right? It's like, huh, you know, and it's like, and that is, that, that's, you know, that's, that's the, it emerges in the tragic, you know, it's, it's 2017 and we're in the middle of me too. Steve, and I can never pronounce his last name. I apologize, Stephen, M-A-R-C-H-E, right? writes in editorial and, you know, the New York Times and he says, you know, male desire is inherently brutal. Well, okay. And there we go. Right? Tragic, right? We're now at the tragic, right? We're no longer at the male guilty tragic. Minimally it's complicated because what do you do with it if you're a man, right? And, you know, as, um, so, and clarity's lost. That's the key. Clarity's lost. We lose, there's a loss of clarity. The simplest application before we get to post tragic would be, let's just add one node would be a relationship. Pre-tragic. Oh my God, we're in love. Right? And it's the ultimate beauty, right? It's called in the, in the Zohar and the book of Radiance, which, you know, is kind of this grounding document of the Solomon lineage, which gets regrounded in the 13th century. Right? It's called Ha-na-a submission. And submission means it's clear, right? In other words, there's nothing, there's nothing to argue. I'm submitted. I'm in. Right? I'm all the way in. I'm madly in love with you. Right? Because I've got a good job there. Sure. Let's move to Alaska. We're not going to be an anchorage. We're going to be like 200 miles outside of Anchorage. Not a problem. 200 miles outside of Anchorage, as long as we're together. Right? It's very clear. It's very beautiful. Right? It's just insanely beautiful. Right? And then there I am, 200 miles out of Anchorage. Right? And you keep putting the toilet seat down. Right? And just I can't fucking believe that you did another fucking dime. Right? You have this huge fight, right? And you're killing each other 200 miles out of Anchorage, Alaska. And like, what am I doing here? And you can't find your way and you're devastated. There's a, that's called, "Havda La Separation." But you're not separating. Enough, you're actually separating. But there's alienation again. It's complicated. Guilty. Right? Innocence lost. Right? I'm in the tragic. I can't, there's a power struggle. Havda La Separation. This alienation. But again, what's critical, my friend, is I don't leave. I'm in, but we're alienated. So now in all of these, in all of these vectors, and we've just, we're just throwing these, we threw kind of four examples of this tri-electical pattern of, she comes in threes. Right? I can either go back to one or I can up level to three. So let's just say simple. Let's go for the relational structure. The three stations. And we'll talk later about, but the three stations of Aros, the three stations of love, right? I can either get out because it's so painful and go look for another level one, another station one, love relationship, which is ecstatic. And then I, eventually I'll get to two. And here I'll just stay in two in the debtness of it, or in the pain of it, or in the power struggle of it, or with occasional pre-tragic moments. So I'll live in the tragic, which is where most people live. And it'll be occasionally we'll have little forays, you know, kind of on good days there to the pre-tragic. Or we'll leave the relationship and try and do it again and be in this kind of, you know, one, two, two steps, you know, back and forth, back and forth, you know, we move back and forth in time, right? You know, symmetrical time, we're going back and forth. Or we can break through. If there's this way to break through to the third level. But to break through to the third level requires something. And this is the key. In order to get from two to three. So three is called in the Balshamtov, in the lineage in the Solomon, it's three is called humtaka sweetness. But it's not a saccharine sweetness, right? It's a sweetness in which, so let's track what we're going. Now we're just going to slow down and then we'll finish up this first. It's a sweetness which has depth. It's a sweetness in which I'm re-grounded in reality again. It's a sweetness in which there's glimmers of clarity, but not pre-tragic clarity, right? So it, on the outside, it looks like level one, right? In other words, this third station or this third level or this post-tragic, it looks like the tragic, we're in love again, right? Level one, falling in love, level two, falling out of love, but we're staying. Level three, fell in love again. So it looks like the pre-tragic, but it's not. It has a completely different interior quality. So I don't regain pre-tragic clarity, but I do regain a level of clarity, right? A level of ground. I've moved to the post-tragic. I've thrown out the kind of depressive remorse, right? I'm grounded in something new, so it's innocence, guilt, second innocence. There's a second innocence, right? It's simplicity, complexity, second simplicity, right? We begin to kind of, there's something else happening here, which is very beautiful. And it was Yates, who always, Yates always said it best, you know, he captured this, you know? He said, "When such as I cast out remorse." So great, a sweetness. Hamsaka, sweetness, the third level. So great, a sweetness fills my breast. We can dance and we can sing. We are blessed by everything, and everything we look upon is blessed, right? It's post-tragic, right? And I begin to, in that place, both reclaim a joy about my life, but I also reclaim the joy of being in my life. It's not, it's happening is about my life. It's all that happened is I'm in my life, right? We're blessed by everything. That's not about my life, that's in my life, right? Which is a good distinction, right? I'm in my life. It's the joy of being in my life, not it's not the joy of about my life. And everything we look upon is blessed, we're the source of blessing. So this, this tri-electric structure applies, my friend, Laman, literally to every dimension of life. In other words, in other words, I had this, you know, temptation moment to just take off like three years and just try and do just this huge encyclopedia of she comes in three and I have hundreds of pages of notes on it. And I said, you know what? So we put out she comes in three and we'll put out something, you know, a little larger now on pre-tragic, tragic and post-tragic. But it's so important, right? Because we need a kind of post-tragic clarity. So here's the last piece and then done with the opening, which is a word in the middle, which is how do you get from two to three? It's like what? And maybe that's our next conversation. So you can only get from two to three if there's something new in the space. You don't get from, we think we got from two to three. I go to therapy, we did some practices, you know, I have a colleague who, you know, teaches all these practices about, you know, Eras, you know, she's a well-known teacher and you go to a hotel room and, you know, to a, to a hotel lobby, you pretend you don't know each other, right? And, you know, and that's okay. Those were all great practices. But they're all deck chairs on the Titanic, right? In other words, they're all, they're strategies. They don't, that doesn't actually take you to the third level. The third level is you have a new noses, right? There's a new knowing, either a knowing about reality. So you have, you have a kind of a model that, oh, I can see how it fits together. You have a new noses about yourself. You've chained, you know, yates, when such as I cast out remorse, you've, you've sent my cast out remorse, but you, you're able to reconfigure the puzzle. You're able, you have, you have a new insight. You're, you're looking at the same person, but you're looking with fresh eyes, right? And you have new eye, you have new eyes. And that's what's critical that in, in each of these, you know, 40 or 50 vectors of tri-electics, these tri-electical vectors, right? There's, there's something that moves you from two to three and over the last. You know, since really 2000, 2002, since I've been kind of sharing and teaching this, right? You know, really developing what's the particular vector that moves you from two to three. is the act that is that he'll suffer, because how do you get them two to three? So that's we can hold there. Just I think we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we. Yeah, it's interesting to me, I'm usually more of a tetrad guy than a threes guy because I think the system in which the three things are related should be presence as a primordial, but you need at least three things to tell a story and it's super useful for human brains to think in terms of three. So I mean, I like that this framing around clarity on clarity and then a new clarity is independent of or orthogonal to how sophisticated we are or what valence we're bringing to it could be positive could be negative. I appreciate all of that. A lot of my own practices are leaning into conflict and contradiction and a struggle between forces with the idea that there's a there's another harmonization on the other side of that rather than retreating to a harmony that excludes that. But where I'd like to go is sort of a dive into each of these three stations and I'd like to I'd like to provoke them with something that comes up for me around each one. So something that comes up for me and something that I find in conversations with other people who bring up the pre-tragic is that a lot of them talk in terms of young children, right? Innocence is intact and they're freely utilizing their enchanting mythic beliefs. They feel at home in a world they can trust. I hear I hear this from a number of people and part of that description is strikes me as being anchored in the privilege of the modern childhood and maybe the fetishistic projections of boomers and post boomers upon their children. It might not look that same way to kids raised in the ancient Amazonian jungle where children are encountering death and danger and jungle deception from day to day. So how do you tease apart the essence of the pre-tragic from people's more clumsy assumptions about it or between things that are like really good examples of the pre-tragic from the things we as adults like to project innocence onto? That's a great inquiry. I'm trying to figure out which I have delayed going to the to the obstacle person for the last like two years because I can't it's not close here. So I'd have to give up three hours of time which I can't quite rationalize but now I can't forget which glasses to wear because none of them quite work. So I don't matter if that that might be tragic but so it's a very very important question. So how do we distinguish between the kind of pseudo pre-tragic? It looks like it's pre-tragic and obviously contemporary psychology pointed us strongly to the violence, the sexuality that lives in our early stages of life and that it's not a kind of innocence the way we might have thought about the trailing clouds of glory which is what you're pointing to importantly. So I think the the most important part is really clarity. See that's the thing. So and I don't think that I don't think it's it's based chronologically. I think there's I dimensioned you know if you look at Ericsson I think Ericsson was was a norant Milton Ericsson particularly was enormously important. You know the Ericsson's in general were important but you know in terms of station stages of life right this kind of these life stations over time are very very very helpful and and quite important developmentally but at each stage of life there's pre-tragic tragic and post-tragic. So if you go through kind of that you know this this arc of stages there's always pre-tragic, tragic, tragic, post-tragic in in childhood in early adolescence right you know in early adulthood in later in middle adulthood you know old age you know and you know the cronestates there's always all three always exist but I think the the essence is like clarity that that has to be the door. So clarity means I'm in the experience and I'm not in a constant you know dialectical you know pull agonizing you know desperate confusion you know I may be afraid I know I have fear I may feel angry I may feel rage I may feel polymorphously perverse right and as I have many things going on but those are all within a framework of even if I have contradictory emotions I'm okay in the contradiction right in other words and as though this is my emotion now now this is my other emotion right and so there's a sense of I'm grounded in my experience my experiences has this pre-tragic clarity to it right and whether whether that that doesn't mean that it's idyllic I think that's the distinction I would make pre-tragic doesn't mean idyllic right pre-tragic means clear right right and that those are quite quite different you know it is you know the tree of life in one passage in the Zor right the tree of knowing good and evil in the tree of life which are are they two trees or they one tree we're not going to have that conversation now but it's called in in one passage in the Zor in the book of radiance it's called Ilana de Sveka right the tree of uncertainty tree of uncertainty right so in other words in other words the pre-tragic right of the garden of Eden is not that it's all idyllic we think of the already as idyllic is that it's clear we haven't eaten from the tree right we're living in a set of certainties that ground us and that orient us and those are important those are important so I want I want also just to be clear the pre-tragic tragic and post-tragic are not in terms of they're not classical developmental stages you know of the kind that you know that's act my friends act would describe right who's our you know our resident developmentalist in which you know okay now I'm crawling and now I'm standing you know it's in motor development I'm now I'm walking and and one actually transcends and the other one's gone right I don't go back to only being able to crawl no pre-tragic tragic and post-tragic are both a a profound developmental arc which is genuine there's a genuine developmental arc and yet I move between them right and so kind of you know the the kind of you know the the kind of spatial mood that the linear movement of time the developmental arc is real and yet I move I move between them so on a given day right I might have a pre-tragic tragic and post-tragic moment and then I've got to begin to ground in the post-tragic so so but it's always about not idyllic right but about clarity and and even innocence is not necessarily idyllic it's it's clear right we we confuse the innocent we confuse right the the pre-tragic right with with the idyllic right no no clarity so I I think that's that's that's helpful and important I mean perhaps just one example you know which is the you know my my my brother may his memory be blessed you know who was killed in a car accident 11 years ago and his wife Miriam who was Miriam was my my associate director of a kind of outreach kind of missionary organization I started within the Jewish context you know to bring people to Jewish Orthodoxy in my early 20s and my brother married Miriam my my associate director they have ten kids and you know and they're great people really really just really really fabulous people and so David dies in a in a car crash and you know I loved him dearly but he he went very profoundly fundamentalist right that is to say right he he always knew why anything went wrong right and if he was here he would explain why he was killed in a car crash as well and it would not be a problem and right and and everyone around him right actually had this fundamental sense oh if tragedy happens it's because there's a very clear map of the world now wasn't idyllic right it was tragic right when not tragic I'm gonna use the word tragic that's not our word it was pre-tragic but it was it was painful right it was agonizing right but but there was a a way of retaining a dimension of control right through the clarity by having a a very clear map of the world right and an assumption that the map indeed was the territory right and so therefore we are always located we are we we are never dislocated right so in other words in a certain sense we're always in the promised land right and exile means the experience of exile is the experience of the tragic and the experience of exile and it actually it brings church to my eyes just even to to to move to talk about the exile is you you feel the dislocation there's a fundamental dislocation right and there's a fundamental things are out of whack right that the center can't hold right there's a right we need something new surely some revelation is at hand right right is is this this movement of the put reaching for the the tragic to the post-tragic right because the center right the center can hold so so I think that's that's a big part of it um I'll just give you one last example you know modernity worked very hard to hold on to the the pre-tragic you know so the the pre-modern right traditional you know pre-tragic right expresses itself as we just alluded to in terms of theodicy right that is to say we know why suffering happens we know that God is good we know that God is all knowing right omniscient and God is all powerful omnipotent and God is all good omnipotent and the fact that those two seem to contradict each other how does the good God allow for abject suffering we resolve through a series of moves reincarnation the world to come you know soul-making theodicy right there's about ten moves that religion makes to allow us to remain in the pre-tragic so that's a pre-modern version of the pre-tragic in modernity right you know modernity of course adopted its own myth of progress and in the myth of progress was itself a form of the pre-tragic it's all clear there's good people value is real we don't know where it's from but we hold these truths to be self-evident and we're going to forget the fact that Jefferson is reading too much of pecurus and then we's talking to John Adams John Adams actually believes in this shit and Jefferson doesn't but well we'll just we'll just say we hold these truths to be self-evident and it's all good and we're going to live in this this modern you know world you know there's that do you remember that show when we were kids layman which was a very very long time ago but it was in the mid-90s it was called the west wing remember that with Aaron Sorkin who's kind of Aaron Sorkin was the great neoliberal writer of television shows which reflect to the neoliberal order at the end of the 20th century was called the west wing and I think Martin Sheen played the president you know and there's this cast of characters of these people that you're just like fuck I love these people I mean in other words they're just you know they're they're they're they have all the normal you and but this this the staff in the White House and they make mistakes and they're but they're just great people right you know what I mean they're just you're like wow but these are just and you just you just love them I you know I I I I would cry whenever I watched and in case I'll watch you're here and I'll cry through the whole thing right because it's just so beautiful and they're in the field of value before before postmodernity rips off right the the veneer right of the field of value and even though before postmodernity there's like a hundred years of movement towards pre-modernity you know from logical positive and through existentialism etc etc right you know it doesn't really get fully ripped off it remains kind of you know fringe and academic until postmodernity says no no we're gonna call in the the loan of social capital that modernity did from pre-modernity that assumes that value is real we're gonna rip it off it's all made up right that's the move from the pre-tragic to the tragic that's that move right another it's so all of modernity was in the pre-tragic and you get to open up west wing and they never address the source of ethics the source of value no issues are ever addressed that are actually the real issues it's just we're in the field of value it's good so that's pre-tragic it's there's there's a clarity between them and and it's this pre-tragic is when you watch the west wing filled with disasters filled with agony filled with just you know just horrific stuff happening but it's pre-tragic it's like we're doing our best right the world's good we can't write quite but we know we're in the field of value as long as there's a field of value there's a dimension of the pre-tragic as long as we haven't taken the critique of the field of value seriously when we take the critique of the field of value seriously we then enter the tragic and most of the world 99.9999999999% that was a lot of 9s right have stayed in the tragic right we tried to incoherent humanism is all value of the theory actually can we go to the post tragic okay so that was just to address your first inquiry i love their inquiry that was very very helpful to clarify that yeah that's great i think this clarity versus idyllic is a really useful conceptual tool on this i am curious about you know if the pre-tragic experiences disasters to what degree do pre-tragic people outsource the problematic quality like they they don't experience the tragic because they place it onto the other but that's not where i want to go i want to go into what is the tragic i will follow you sir yeah i was thinking that people like myself sort of educated at the end of the 20th century in the ruins of the old book system what were we taught about tragic we were taught that tragedy is a form of drama where a character flaw inevitably dooms a protagonist despite their other characteristics and i think we were taught that the modern american entertainment culture was weak and can't tolerate the pathos of tragedy that they always need an upbeat ending to sell blue jeans and cokola and fighter jets so the impression i got in school was that of this double feeling that tragedy is being understood as a very specific form of storytelling and also that we live in a world that is not good at maturely grappling with the tragic dimensions of life i'm curious what you would add to that in terms of defining the tragic like you've you've talked about unclarity you've talked about like experiencing the problematic alienation exiled dislocation homelessness maybe value being ripped off but like what is for you what is the tragic so so no beautiful beautiful my friend red so the tragedy begins with them let's just start with clarity right right the tragedy begins with the sense of exile i'm not home anymore right you know i i remember as a kid right driving on you know family trips from columbus Ohio to the catholic home mountains and we would just sing again and again home home on the range you know and i won't i won't afflict anyone by actually singing it you know but on me but it was so great it just i just remember the feeling home on the range right and even though it was like we're home america the beautiful right you know the the sense of of pre-tragic is the first it's level one bite and bite is home when i'm home right i'm i'm in my macomb ma k o m i'm in my place and i'm not displaced i'm not dislocated and in in my place i have clarity of multiple forms i might have you know theological because theo is a form of lot theological clarity i might have existential clarity right i might have you know you know religious clarity i might have intellectual clarity but the exile from home right the the exploding of the clarity right that is the experience of the tragic now when when the pre-tragic person which is what you're pointing towards right experiences something that's tragic right so either they don't have the fullness of the experience of the tragic because they blunt that experience or mitigated right with a pre-tragic vision of the world so so mommy just died but she's with god right you know my my beloved just died but she's with god right she closed rise and she's with god now i happen to trust that she did close rise and she's with god and so i don't think that's wrong but that doesn't mean there's not an experience of the tragic right and other because because death itself is tragic and even if even if i have this experience of she closed rise and she's with god right reality deliberately obfuscated that experience right i don't have access to it right you know my friend Sally kempton you know was here right and and i would reach to talk to her about a thousand things and then she passed right in 2023 and i reached to talk to her a thousand times right and and and there's there's emptiness in the wind right right and if only we can have five more minutes right you know she used to pick me up at the airport in san azale and we would drive from san azale to carmel valley and it would be an hour and a half drive right in the world of the pre-tragic no matter what we're talking about because reality was good right and so and then that drive will never happen again and and however in whatever context i will i'll meet Sally again she probably won't be Sally it'll be different it'll be something else right so so even though i i can get to a post-tragic of knowing that there's a larger coherence i have to be willing to experience that that dislocation right that that shattering right that shattering of the vessels that's what's called in in the salam alaytad right shvirata ke elim right now there's there's a shattering of the vessels the vessels themselves explode right and then the broken vessels are strewn all over the world right so in the the first stage of emanation right in the zohar and more explicit and laryana kabbalah all of the light goes into the vessel and the vessel holds the light and there's a right relationship between vessel and light pre-tragic the vessels explode right the whole thing explodes right how could the whole thing explode this was the divine intention this is the divine emanation but it explodes that's tragic there's some tragic and then the entire world is filled with broken vessels and broken hearts and broken bodies and broken dreams and broken narratives and broken stories and broken truths right and broken pre-tragic clarities and then right the the new human as you know i called the new human homo amore but whatever the name you want to give to the new human the new right right the post-tragic human right moves in their world and finds the broken vessels right and realizes that there's still a spark of light in the broken vessel that most of the light returned on high and loria's picture but some of the light sparks of light remains in the broken vessel and i go to liberate the spark of light from the broken vessel i'm beginning to move towards the post-tragic and then i go the next step and i actually realize as one master's an rezalman of la d'y the him you know him and kirk augur was a kind of the two great thinkers of the of the 19th century you know he says the the thickness of the vessel is higher than the light i then realized not only is there a spark of light in the vessel but i realized oh oh the distinction between the vessel and light itself was not quite accurate actually is a much more and not now i'm moving towards the post-tragic so that great lorianic pictures about these three these three tri-electical emergencies but it's this it's this shattering right it's this dislocation it's this it's this refusal to stay inside the law right and by the law i mean the precedent right we mean that the clear vessel that contains reality right it's it's the stepping into the wild we've gone from the settlement to the wild and the wild is is we don't have explanations and we're we're just we're we're we're profoundly broken it's a world it's the world of broken vessels but it's it's that world of broken hearts so that's that's very much the tragic yeah there's a there's a movie about the life of Darwin starring Paul Bettany and he he's at his desk and he's got one of those beautiful old clear glass speakers it's got some creatures and butterflies in it he falls asleep on his desk and he has this dream and in the dream all the things in the clear glass vessel come to life and they shake it and they explode and he wakes and terror because the transparent vessel the law has been destroyed it's still the same organic architecture but now it's free range there is no assumption of the law yeah it's beautiful right beautiful i mean and that you know was it Bob Dillon who said when you live outside the law you have to be honest i think it was right right and he's pointing us to the post tragic right that's that right in other words that which is beyond the law and as you know Lehmann we've done a whole bunch of dialogues you know at a certain point on I go to the restroom for a second which i'm about to do but i want to just take to because your your image of of Darwin it's such a beautiful image i mean Darwin really moves from the pre-tragic to the tragic you know in origins right but early Darwin you know and later Darwin in descent you know in descent he talks about beauty and virtually every other page right um David Lloyd pointed out to me you know David and Reanne were wonderful reannaisler we we spend a beautiful Passover center together on a whole bunch of wonderful evenings and you know David you know was an early you know you know you know an early kind of deep in the you know evolutionary structure he was him and urban were actually very good friends urban lasla and and David pointed out to me so i want to credit him and he's passed you know that that love not as much as beauty but love is all over descent right and so Darwin in descent is reaching for the post tragic that's exactly what he's doing right and you know and as certain sense the great argument about who Darwin really was you know there's the kind of the orthodox neo-Darwinism and there's kind of you know starting with Karpatkin you know the kind of the the prince the Russian prince and you know in his mutual aid book and then going to James Mark Baldwin and then going to Charles Sanders person then you know from there to you know whitehead in that particular heterodox lineage is about the post tragic Darwin and as they're all interested in reclaiming Darwin and actually saying that actually no no you misread Darwin i think they're right by the way right and as the Darwin actually he didn't get he wasn't stuck in a tragic moment that that he wakes up from that dream and after the terror there's actually he he begins to he begins to repiece together reality but when you repiece together reality it's with bubblegum right and other try to i i remember it being um it was 2006 and uh a a a a a friend of mine at the time a guy named Dennis Merzel maybe he'll be listening gimp o rochie which is gonna or is his public name you know and we had been in a couple of events together and we liked each other and we had exchanged name tags and he was wearing rabbi mark often and i was wearing you know gimp o rochie and then we're in this pre-tragic moment and then there's this tragic moment you know in 2006 and you know we find each other you know we find each other i'm insult like city and it's a very different moment in time and we're taking a walk and he says you know and he he describes a moment of shattering in his life you know kind of a moment of the emergence you know that the the the the the explosion of the tragic and he said to me he said you know and i put it back together but but but after I put it together it's all but it's put together through bubblegum right and i remember the you know i didn't have the right now that and i mean there's a there's a deep post tragic it's profound but it's a different kind of clarity and we really have to talk about what is the difference between hey how do you get from two to three and what and what happens in culture is right as we as modernity exploded into the tragic right you know when it when it kind of when a modernity at the end of modernities you know myth of progress pre-scheduled stage as it explodes into the tragic you have this resurgence of fundamentalism all over the world that no one expected and the resurgence of fundamentalism is a move a regressive move to the pre-tragic and it's it's precisely what we're describing it's the exact same structure of i'm madly in love right then it explodes right now i'm in the tragic so what do i do right i go back to be madly in love again i go back to station one right i try and go back to the pre-tragic we always try and go back to the pre-tragic right you know this way or that way and we you can't get there that that is why there are you know in genesis three four there are snake rooven there are two cherubs who are outside the garden of Eden who are holding a lahat khaira mitha pechat right a sword that is a flaming sword that is moving in circles that burns anyone who tries to get back to the garden to the pre-tragic that's what those angels do and others and to get to those cherubs were in the temple above the ark and the lineage of solemn the two trump cherubs above the ark you've got to get to the post tragic you can't there's no you know that's mark vanagan kirk sun's book you know Eden express where he talks about addiction as this attempt to get back to the pre-tragic right the Eden express right i want to get back to Eden all right and you get burned by those angels and so we need to know okay so how do we and this is not i'm in you and i are not engaged here in an intellectual cognitive question although it's also that but it's a feeling question it's a how do we actually move beyond suffering it's how do we as a world not revert to two forms of the pre-tragic right a scanarian form which basically augurs for the death of our humanity and it basically says there is no meaning and there's no free will and values not real and you know and that's the uval haraari mouthpiece paraded position right but but what we can control the whole thing because you know we're actually going to create a silicon maze and and zack stein and i are about to publish two volumes called exit the silicon maze right which are i don't know you know long zack is pointed out to me a little longer than there but they're they're we tried to kind of to kind of definitive volume and how do we exit the silicon maze but the silicon maze is generated by the my team media lab bi Alex pentland who's uh you know a student of skinner directly and and built the lab around scanarian principles although he pretends never to afford a skinner like you know lock pretends that never to afford a pubs but that's not true and we're at a whole book kind of detailing the so that's pre-tragic like we're gonna we're gonna create a we're gonna turn the world into a skinner's box and we're going to be able to control and shape desire right and to solve nick boss drums you know vulnerability hypothesis 2019 article by by controlling it so we're gonna get back to this kind of imposed clarity right and that's also totalitarianism it's more of work form we can't rely on people to work this out right we we need to control the system right or if room 101 will help us control the system it's worth it right aka 1984 so it's like oh right there's there's no move back right to the pre-tragic the pre-tragic the moves to the pre-tragic are very powerful in the world today and if we can't show away to the post-tragic then either we're gonna die in the tragic we'll suicide because that's what the tragic leads we suicide or we'll revert that what's what so the tragic will be the death of humanity or we'll revert to the death of our humanity right by some form of regression right to the pre-tragic you know either through a skinnarian you know pentlandian MIT media labian you know if you will you know and I said to uh just casually to to Jamie Will at some point in a quick conversation I said you're you're kind of you and cutler you're kind of you're kind of wanting the MIT media lab like what are you guys doing I mean this is this is this is not good this is death of our humanity we all got very excited about it and we got very excited about this this techno utopian promise but the techno utopian promises a pre-tragic move it's techno utopian it to return to Eden it it so we we can only in it this is this is my job this is your job this is our job together this is we need to show the way to the post-tragic so this is not just uh oh what what a wonderful conversation what a wonderful structure of thought everything depends right on our ability to actually show a cogent coherent way to the post-tragic and I would say I would say if I can before I I duck out for a second um I would say if I can in the responsible years when I get back because I would it you know I take one of the most important distinctions between let's say how Zach and I are approaching the world and how layman is is how we understand the post-tragic because when I look at your work I clearly see the beauty of you're trying to hold it all you know and this what you call it shamanic way and it's a clear move to the post-tragic you're clearly reaching it's very beautiful and your work is very beautiful in that sense right the question is right kit can you go to the post-tragic without having any clear you need certainties right in other words you need certain things in the post-tragic for it to be sufficiently both compelling for it to hold psychologically emotionally and also for it to create a vessel for world culture so that's uh for that clarify something of it give us as a frame to to kind of have that conversation wow ten seconds sir thank you sure yeah part of me wants to talk about where I think Nietzsche's notion of the tragic prefigures the post-tragic the way we talk about it now but you know responding to your last prompt I think there is a little bit of a difference in styles you know between some of the different approaches to this and what I find myself oriented most towards is something like the return of certainty in the form of the uncertainty and I think that might be a sensibility uh that inhabits the let's say the eco-cosmic humanists surround the amount of modern hubs and things like that and it brings me to an interest in question around this like we can touch on any of it but what I've noticed is a lot of the people who want to talk about the post-tragic at least with me they focus a lot on the um the circumstantial and emotional aspects of tragedy terrible things happen the greater holocaust of the world or the brutal ruptures inflicted on our personal lives by accidents and madness and evil and that seems like a pretty classic and straightforward way to think about it we have to recover our uh divine humor in the face of bombinations and break our hearts open and voluntarily attuned to the essence of reality despite intolerable violations I think a lot of people get that part but the thing that stands out to me which is maybe a little bit less obvious is how does it look in terms of the way we form thought in language how do we make a metaphysics around this so in a lot of my work I'm thinking about metaphysics of adjacency or the not-quiteness of being in the absence of totalities but trying to think them specifically in a way where they uh do the work of what we looked to certainties and totalities to do if we say that you know 99% is the real 100% we're also saying that the thing we wanted to get from the 100% we're actually getting from the 99 it's still there it's real it's the most important thing but there's something about the incompleteness in the relativity and the ambiguity and uncertainty and non completeness of the phrasing which for me and some of the people that I deal with uh that's the way we want to say the new certainty we want to say not that we're past the uncertainty back to a new certainty we want to say that the uncertainty people were correct but that the what they're actually doing is specifying the structure of a certainty that is the building block for the new metaphysics yeah yeah how do you feel about that that's great that's great that's great so so let me see if we can clarify this and and and create some distinction so let's look at you know when I first formulated you know the the pre-tragic tragic and post-tragic I did it in terms of certainty that was the original impetus um and I you know you and I did our first I believe our first conversation on our journey to cosmopolitanic humanism was about certainty and uncertainty and it was about that book which I I believe that I send you and you you in your your indefatibly perspicacious way um you know plummed you know some of its depth and we had a beautiful conversation about it so let's let's see if we can kind of just unpack this for a second was it's insanely important so there's two ways to look at the move from pre-tragic tragic post-tragic in terms of the certainty uncertainty nexus and as I shared with you then you went out when I was in my you know late 20s I wrote two books which are a a a set one was blue and one was red and one was called but die which essentially certainty and then there was the other one was called suffake which was uncertainty but the point is they were a set and what I was trying to say was is that the in one vector let's tell the story this way level one right station one you know pre-tragic certainty tragic you know the way the story is usually told is that tragic is uncertainty right and then we kind of go back to certainty and when I said was no you can't that's that's the wrong way to tell the story which is what you're pointing to is right that actually I go to certainty I start with some level of certainty that certainty is then shattered I get to uncertainty but then I don't leave the uncertainty behind I get to level three I get to the post-tragic and the post-tragic it's uncertainty and certainty lived together they're in a dialectical dance right and other I'm in that I'm returned to the Garden of Eden but the Garden of Eden in this new return is not paradise but paradox right and so I'm in this place of paradox and paradox is the demarcating characteristic of the post-tragic the demarcating characteristic of the post-tragic is always paradox and I think there's a a dialogue online I had a beautiful conversation with with with Ken Ken Wilver who we we got we had a wonderful conversation in 2014 at the loft on paradox on this this topic and and the quality of paradox right is embraced by laughter right laughter embraces paradox right and in the in the vision of the Solomon lineage for example all the holy days right says the midrash right one form of kind of hermetic tradition the midrash and I think in Proverbs I think in chapter 9 says all of the holidays will be nullified except for Purim right you know so in the Eschaton and the future world are in the new emergence right only Purim will remain in Purim PURIM as you and I have discussed is the the Mardi Gras holiday right it's the holiday of revelry it's the holiday where the the phrase in the air america is chai of Adam le vissume but puria ad la yada bin aura haman lavarach mordachai a person is obligated right to get so wildly intoxicated that they can't tell the distinction they can't distinguish between the blessed mordachai and the cursed haman right so it's this place where we've moved beyond the clear distinctions and yet we're still in the field and we're in Purim and in yom kippur right they have atomenas understood by byluria and his school as yom kippur kippur means like yom kippur is like Purim but it's not as high it's not it's not it's not right to the highest of the high the deepest of the deep the holy of the holies is this place of Purim and the quality Purim's laughter revelry right you know I think you were engaged in some process of doing roasts right so a roast at its best a roast can also not make it do its best but a roast at its best is Purim right so so in the seminary tradition of the lineage they would roast the head of the seminary every Purim and there'd be a Purim spiel a Purim play which is essentially saturday night live right and it's like the most serious seminary would put on some version of saturday night live and roast you know that the deen or the head of the seminary and it was done in a way which was laughter and it was laughter it was right and so laughter holds paradox so the post tragic gets to this place where I'm holding uncertainty but here in that nesteros me for seconds so let's let's look for example at you know the unbearable issue of theodyssey that we talked about earlier suffering so when I ask the question why do people suffer or if we say how can I put together theodyssey right and you know a god that's omniscient and you know and omnipinant all powerful and unknowing with the god who's omnipinant who's good right don't we need to get rid of one of those and Harold Kushner famously wrote a reconstructions book saying yeah those don't fit together you can't hold those and he called it you know when bad things happen to good people but he was repeating basically the kind of liberal Protestant theology in Jewish form right of his teacher Mordech Kaplan right the Jewish theological seminary kind of in the early or mid you know early early to mid 19th century a little later right to know no no actually what we're actually saying is something deeper we're saying let's see if we can find this we're saying all of the answers right see see Kaplan was right Kushner was right you can't fit those together you can't make the theological work and all of the theodysses are a desire to stay in the pretragic we have to actually realize the uncertainty is real and that actually you cannot answer the question of why they're suffering in the world and to attempt to answer that question is obscene there's an obscenity right right to the Odyssey right you have to actually stay in the radical uncertainty right but then you realize that you can't answer the question but the question itself is the response if not the answer that is to say the question makes no sense unless I'm living in an intimate universe unless there's a field of integrity unless there's a field of value so the fact that would be Pakistanis or future Pakistanis and Indians between 1946 and 47 you know take each other's babies and smash them against walls right on that border why is that a problem these are you know apes fighting right we know that you smash the kids of the other you know the other ape you know kind of you know Haram you kill the you kill the children and you kill the women this is what happens why is that even a problem right so it's only a problem when you realize oh that's evil right why is that evil it's evil because right at the human level of consciousness we have access to a level of a field of goodness truth and beauty that we participate in and that we can actually cultivate right our sense of ethos and aeros in a way that we realize that you're not allowed to smash babies heads against walls and when you do that that's fucking tragic right it's horrible it's a horror but the only way I can call it a horror is if there's a field of value so I can't answer the question of why right no theodis he stands in the face of burning children right any theodis you attempt to offer right you know with the stench of burning children which which violates the the kind of the good fragrance of the sacrifice described in Leviticus no you can no theodis he holds any theodis right any theology that denns our sensitivity right to the the depth of pain right is obscene and yet paradoxically right I couldn't live in a world layman where I couldn't cry out against ingestus right in other words right if there was no ground for the protest right then then then we truly live in a place which is a tale told by an idiot full of sounds and fury signifying nothing and we should expect nothing else from it and so the post-tragic is where it's not that it is true it's not that the dogma is true it's that I am true right and and so this deep realization sets in right in which I can actually a post-tragic for example reclaim the field of value and even though all the values you know between all the different systems right having yet you know kind of created a shared coherent story I know the field of value is true and I know that underneath our polarization there's a shared field of value right and that we all are value before we are any specific values and that I live in an intimate universe and that evil is a violation of the intimate universe and and why does the force of good right the the the infinity of power right allow that to happen I don't know it's right right but and that's why we call last sentence and to you my friend you know in Cosmotic Humanism as you know we call the name that we call out to God we call God the infinite intimate God's the infinite intimate so so so but but it's not an infinity of indifference and it's not an intimacy of impotence and yet right we don't allow ourselves to revert to kind of theological banalities right we hold the goodness of reality and and we hold the great questions and we respond to them but we don't pretend to answer them something like that my friend yeah it's these are such intricate things that determining whether or not we're in agreement becomes extremely elusive and not so important right yeah it's not so important but I think the uh um but we're close here convergent proximal alternative phrasing highlight the structures that we're trying to articulate here is when I hear that please in general I go yeah yeah basically but then what's the other little bit where I'm reticent around the basically uh or where I have a an innate preference around the basic let's say right so I think about it like you know does one plus one equal to and I want to say no it almost does it does more than anything else does but it never gets to it really does because I can never get to that place right I can never get to um complete trust in value I can never get to I am really true even if it isn't but I'll tell you but the fact that I can get closer puts me on a gradient which tells me where value is greater and where value is lesser so I can determine what's more good what's more evil right so the value the field of value strikes me as something where you can be 99% about it but the fact that you can't be 100% is itself an articulation of what I think you're describing as the field of value yes so though I go like I can 100% say I have even if I can't be true to it I have to act as if I am true and the as if adds a little bit of wiggle room which I think is something like the residue of the tragic within the post-tragic structure yes yes no that's beautifully said let me see if I can with your permission my friend clarify it so when I when I enter when I reclaim the field of value at a higher level of noces I don't like the word consciousness as you know how a level of noces I actually begin to articulate right individuated first principles and first values that emerge from the field of value so in cosmoronic humanism in this book first principles and first values right there's a list of first principles and first values and there's first order first principles and first values and second order so in the first order list there is mystery and noces or certainty and uncertainty right however you phrase it meaning meaning uncertainty itself now there's that 99 to 100% that gap itself is a value of cosmos right and whether it's one of the values of cosmos itself is uncertainty so uncertainty is not an epistemological error right uncertainty is an ontological value and that allows the whole thing that wow right right that that that shifts the whole conversations beautiful right and that's that's the shift that's the shift in it it's a it's a big deal because then all of the sudden I'm asked you know this is what room he meant when he said I'm opening the door from the inside right now it's all of the sudden I'm inside so when Abraham challenges God right he doesn't challenge oh I read something in the dog I know fucking God is talking to him the book of Genesis and God says hey the people of Sodom and Gomorrah these guys are not good they are not this is a problem they need to be taken out how do I know because I'm God right and I'm I'm I'm I'm Nishiant and I'm I'm Neb the benevolent I'm I'm God I'm goodness I'm love right I'm also I'm Nippon and sorry I've got the means right and I this is the right thing to do and I've got all the information available so Abraham should say well okay he doesn't he says he says what the fuck God says well you tell me what the fuck man your Abraham I'm God stop it right and he says no I'm not gonna stop it and he says and you've got this long argument you know you know a a a a text of the biblical canon which majors in understatement which you have like a half a phrase or two words right to kind of you know unpack worlds here you've got like 10 verses right long you know you know complex right and meaning it gives enormous dignity and Abraham says in the end to the divine a shoved color a ritzle a semi-spat will the judge of the whole world not do mispat justice and then three verses later is what's called the election of Abraham and Abraham is elected as it were because he's the one who incarnates he had that he will demonstrate it so that but now that beto a harabla so it's the car and the spot he incarnates me spot justice why does he incarnate justice because he just challenged God that's what he did he just challenged God he just said to God you can't do this you got to do justice so that causes the election meaning Abraham becomes post-trantic right another identity but but he's in the conversation he's turning to the divine right it's like huh and that's the post-trantic moment you know there's uh you know layman there's uh kind of yiddish joke that kind of makes you know the rounds and yiddish jokes are sometimes terrible but sometimes they capture something of the kind of you know ethos of the lineage sometimes songs are like that you know the the the post-trantic song is Leonard Cohen's hallelujah Leonard Cohen's hallelujah is precisely the post-trantic right you know even though it all went wrong I stand before the Lord of Song with nothing on my tongue but hallelujah so hallelujah is the field of value which is underneath the tragic that's always there there's a blaze of light in every word and it doesn't matter which you heard the holy or the broken hallelujah right and the word hallelujah itself is means hallel pristine clear praise utter clarity and holy loot drunken broken intoxication so the word both of them are hallel are yeah are the breath so and the reason people I mean there are more covers that song which began in the velvet underground they did the first cover of in like 1985-87 then Jeff Buckley does another one in like 93 then Jeff Buckley tragically dies swept away on the Mississippi River then after Jeff Buckley dies his cover of hallelujah kind of takes but it takes you know takes takes the song almost almost 15 years to kind of find a toy because it's it's post-trantic the entire Cohen is post-trantic Cohen is the post-trantic figure and and people don't understand that no one's listening to him because he's got a good voice right right not they're not listening to because he's like he's not doing Michael that right what's he doing right and and I remember I don't if you remember the story tragedy in his life he his assistant kind of essentially cleaned him out financially and he remember he had to go back on tour and and he's wearing these three piece suits that I kind of grew up on these three pieces with his hat you know and I remember he's in London he's singing "I'm Your Man" right which is the song about kind of you know this kind of the the I'm I I am gonna satisfy your desire the man says to the woman in whatever form I'm your doctor I'm your you know he does this whole thing so you got the 75 year old doing "I'm Your Man" in a three-piece suit you know with his hat and it's post-trantic right and that's he's cutting through everything and they're doing hallelujah right and and and there's the sense the entire place rises in the middle of London and they're all singing hallelujah but hallelujah is not a move back to the hallelujah of the pre-tragic right it's the hallelujah of the post-tragic or let me say let me say a little better let me say a little better in the world of the pre-tragic hallelujah held already the the residents of the post-tragic so for example if you read the book of Psalms the book of Psalms moves between the pre-tragic and the post-tragic it's hallelujah is the word in Psalms and David is alternatively furious with the divine right and you know and he screams my god my god why have you forsaken me pretty post-tragic as Jesus said on the cross or forgive them father pre-tragic it's clear right right or or we'll just stay in the tragic so so there's this this this this way of stepping into the post-tragic so the joke right we we divergent to hallelujah as the post-tragic song but the joke is about this man who's wildly righteous and he dies and you know he's so righteous that you know the angels say he gets you know an audience with the god and wow so he comes to the audience with the god angels of course they check you know they pre-interview him what do you want to talk to god about and he says can't tell you right he says no no you got it you got to tell us good god can't be like right surprised and he said no no can't tell you right they ask God what to do God says a good sentiment so he comes and says god I want to tell you a joke right and he's got wow you get like five minutes you can tell a joke okay it's your time you know so the guy tells God a Holocaust joke it's just terrible Holocaust joke and God says I don't get it the guy says you have to be there right so so but in the joke is the post-tragic right it's on the one hand it's complete tragic he's refusing all theodices and yet he's talking to God he's in the conversation the angels don't get it right so he's there with God in this conversation challenging God right in this reality right of of lived experience and he's telling a joke because only a joke holds the paradox of the post tragic so you kind of in that kind of you to show you you can feel the whole thing and Leonard Collins and Luey in that joke both are good resonances of that post tragic moment that Yates is describing right so we're coming back to a clarity but it's not the clarity of the pre-tragic right it's the clarity of the post-tragic that I experience as I begin to be able to hold paradox right which is part of the noses right of the of the post-tragic right I mean I'm going to maybe last example in more but let's it let it just for a moment let's go back to our relationship moment right so we're a pre-tragic tragic it's now we got a post-tragic right so I think I once told you or maybe I didn't but I don't remember but the post-tragic relationship means it's not an examiner just trying to describe what do I need to go from two to three it's not that I developed you know I took my course with my colleague Esther Perl and she told me how to be in the hotel you know lobby and pretend like we're strangers it's not a bunch of methodologies although those are that's important work and it should be done of course but that's not what it is it's it's I can reclaim intimacy because there's a new emergence on the table there's something that we're holding together so for example to move from the tragic relationship to the post-tragic I have to move from soulmate to homemade right I'm not just we're not just looking deeply in each other's eyes we're looking at a shared horizon right and then from that shared horizon we're looking back at each other huh right and that's that's a whole other conversation we'll get to that book eventually but that's one of the core structures of cosmetic humanism that we move from role-mate to soulmate to homemade relationships and as a whole mate we're both looking at the whole but I'm also no longer a separate self in conflict I've now actually had an experience of true self of of the field that I'm living inside of that lives in me and the field is not just awareness the field is awareness and allurement it's the field of our own value and then I I individuate from that field as a unique self it's now we're two unique selves meeting and now we're evolutionary unique selves and the four selves of cosmetic we're evolutionary unique selves playing our instruments unique self symphony we're in devotion to each others unique it we're just a unique incarnation and so that's something entirely different and that's not two separate selves in a pre-tragic moment now we're in post-tragic this third station of love and and all of the holy or broken halluars are there but our identities have changed we're no longer separate selves right we're now unique selves or we're now unique incarnations and configurations of desire that are expressions of the inherent field of value whose inherent value is the quality of desire and so our unique expressions incarnations right of the irreducible trajectories of divine desire that lived through us okay we can hold that that's why layman I always talk about outrageous love not ordinary love ordinary love cannot hold the tragic only outrageous love can hold the tragic because outrageous love means there's a field of outrageous love right it's not mere human sentiment it's the heart of existence itself it's infinite it's the infinite intimate that that that is the field so so I when I change my experience of self and I change my model I evolve my experience of self I evolve my model of relationship now I can go to the post-tragic that's what I always have to do and as I can only go from the tragic to the post-tragic it if I actually deepen my noses in some profound way so wow so that's the post-tragic we we we we we got we lay down a lot today right we got we got through all three that's good yeah wow you know I last night I watched Judd Apatow's new documentary about male Brooks it's called the 99 year old man but that's the voice I heard in my head with your guy delivering his Holocaust joke to God because of his classic Holocaust humor so next time I'm gonna ask one more question but next time we're gonna focus on this movement from the second to the third station and also some of the interesting extensions of this sort of three days wonderful but the last thing I'd like to bring up is sort of you know how we hold this concept and concepts in general and make use of them in community space like when I think about pretty tragic tragic post-tragic it seems like something that I I vaguely began to assimilate you know from things that could said maybe from a conversation I had with Schmackenberger from some things Jonathan Rousen said at Perspectiva sort of the congealer then after that I find like also marks been working on this for years right and for a lot of people actually I mean I was able to share it with Zach and with Daniel early on who then Zach then shared it with Jonathan yeah exactly and so it's moving around it's got sources but it's also moving around for a lot of people it's like other things it just comes into their sphere somehow like this place is where all sodas are referred to as coaks or you know Aspern means any painkiller it doesn't just mean the Aspern Corporation anymore so there's this shift and usually if you have a good phrasing it makes it more likely that people are going to pick it up and use it and be kind of indifferent to what its sources are so I'm curious how you feel about that but more so I'm curious about where you think it could go and what's the gift of the larger community exploring and developing this phrasing as a collective like what's the value of that and what would you recommend to networks and people who aren't necessarily concerned about where it came from but they would like to assimilate it and take it further as part of the community of explorers so so I'm going to bracket maybe we'll let me explain why I'm bracket I'm going to answer the second question not the first the first one requires more time but the first one is about is it important to have teachers right it's a more it's a more essential question of are there lineages are there teachers how does transmission happen how does teaching happen right is it is is the integrity of the description of sources eat any go-ok play or it's thing far more important right right at play right in the relationship of the teacher and student and when I say the teacher and student I don't mean the infantilized student obviously right so Zach has started with me for many years right Zach is certainly not infantilized right you know I've done deep dives with you know many of the people you know that that you know who are each of them you know radiant powerful and gorgeous beings right so so I'm not talking about teachers student in a kind of an infantilized way we've lost right how does the transmission between generations happen right and when you basically you know instead of actually having sources and lineages and teachers you basically take material and you know some you know a colleague a mutual colleague of ours said I repackage it right now you're very close to AI right and otherwise so just put it into you know chat GPT-4 right just put it into groc right just gets a bunch of information out no no there's actually one of the things that you know the the movement of AI forces us to do is reclaim what it means to be human and what's part of what's essential to humanity right it means to the very art of writing or great library what does it mean to create a great library or what does it mean to write right in a world in which chat GPT or or groc or Gemini right or you know or Claude or don't end the topic can produce 50 books in a week a day what do I mean a week right a day an hour right so in other words in other words the human to human transmission and chains of transmission and chains of integrity right and you know kind of you know embodied communities right all of that is unimaginably important and that goes to the question of kind of you know the you know and the way you know when I originated this kind of structure pre-tragic tragic and post-tragic you know which came from a particular moment were actually someone you know through a word one of those three words at me just in a casual passing sentence you know 25 years ago and I said huh that's a good word you know and then I tried to and then you know the rest was history but that matters because the pre-tragic tragic and post-tragic are part of and that's what we kind of did today they're part of this much deeper field right in other words they're not just a ploy they're not just a strategy it's like when you read Nietzsche which I know you do deeply and we owe each other a Nietzsche conversation which we're which is an art you know but but Nietzsche's a field it's a thick field it's not just a quick structure you you know when people cite God is dead from Nietzsche like he meant something entirely different right you've got to be so deep in that field right and so cosmotic humanism it's a field now I don't think I think we need to kind of create larger vehicles of transmission which are not just an individual person which is why we created David J Temple which is which is not Mark Gaffney although I initiated it with Zach and with Ken but it's a larger figure so so I want to put that aside for a second let me talk about them the more important not the more important but the one that can be addressed in this space so I think it's insanely crucial that we actually come together and articulate shared post-traged frameworks right and that you know and I and a few other people but I think Brendan was the other key interlocutor at that table you know here at the house at the at the center you know we talked about together all of us in our own you know key about the need for a at this at this moment of metacrisis you know about the need for a a shared conversation which is based on profound trust so for example in Harari's book Nexus his basic theme is conversation and his basic you know trying to vault we would say yet it's just basic cry right is the breakdown of trust right which then undermines conversation now that's actually correct that's a but of course what Harari just and just one of those just unimaginably opaque postmodern moments doesn't understand you know and when you look through the book if you trace Nexus there's about six passages and I apologize for being a text person that's how I think there's about six passages where he kind of obliquely kind of talks about how trust is created which are all quite vague but trust is created in actually a very simple way trust is created from shared value right we trust each other when we when we live in shared value right if we don't have shared value between us we can't trust each other you know which is you know the the classical problem right you know when you negotiate with someone who believes that you know the profit said you sign a treaty and break it and kill the other people afterwards because that's what a treaty is but for you a treaty is a binding commitment forever well that hard to hard to create trust there right so trust is based in shared value and conversations based in shared value and more important than anyone's individual project is our capacity to respond to a world in you know what Zach and I call and I call it a time between stories that calls it a time between worlds in this time in between there's this desperate need there's a desperation for a shared story of value that we can all live in and and and I believe that the pre-tragic tragic and post-tragic in all the iterations that we can all develop in and all and everyone will enrich it and make it better and more and way beyond anything I ever thought about I'm sure it will evolve and enrich and broaden but it gives us a framework we can live there it's one of those rare and try-electics in general and I don't think we can do the reason I wrote that book she comes in threes and the reason pre-tragic tragic and post-tragic is so important to me is not in a kind of let me do this you go grab hey guys this is mine more like no we desperately need this we can't we can't move without it because other we're just so it's just too confusing right it's just you can't well why is that a pre-tragic comment are we in the tragic right how do we get nor we in the post-tragic right and again the pre-tragic and the post-tragic they look the same but actually they're in tears very different that they have this profound certainty and uncertainty both within the field of value that allows us we can breathe I'm going to talk about just being able to breathe I we can't breathe without it something like that