Pre-Tragic, Tragic & Post-Tragic Pt 2 w/ Gafni

[Music] Ladies and gentlemen, it's a wonderful thing to say, but quickly it is followed by the tragic recognition that most folks don't live up to those terms and what's more, the simple implied binary cannot hope to include everyone fairly. But then, post tragically, maybe we can somehow mean all of that and bring back the cheery, invocational quality of simplicity and welcomeness by sincerely ironically using the same term again. And gentlemen, welcome. Welcome to the integral stage, expanded universe for part two of an important discussion between myself and the winner of a 2015 Richard Lewis look like competition Mark Gaffney. But if you're not as familiar with Jewish comedians as I am, perhaps you will be more familiar with the triple notion of, "creaconventional conventional and post-conventional" is the minimum frame for developmental thinking. And what happens if we start using a similar frame to describe basic existential stances relative to the tragedy of the world? Well, we get something like pre-tragic, tragic and post-tragic sensibilities that reveal important distinctions often concealed even within developmental transformational and healing oriented philosophies. In part one of this discussion, Dr. Professor Rabbi Admiral Gaffney and I discuss the nature of the pre-tragic and the tragic, the difference between post-tragic sentiments and post-tragic metaphysical phrasing and the utility of having communities of explorers and theorists to take up and extend these ideas. Today we're going to focus on the passage from the tragic to the post-tragic and explore some particular thematic zones in which these three modes might further our explanatory clarity. And to quote Tommy Wazoo from a scene in the infamous cult classic film The Room, which Mr. Gaffney probably hasn't seen. Oh, hey, Mark. So, let's start if you're up for it with a little bit of a geeky thing. Okay, geeky is spelled for those interested GEKEY. You need the E not just the Y. I just want to share that. So, there's a, you know, back in the day, you know, whenever that day was, I wrote a book called The Mystery of Love, maybe 2002 or something like that. And then a couple years later, a kind of audiobook called On the Arotic and the Holy. But when Mystery of Love was written, there was a magazine. I don't know if this is one that you're familiar with. It was a kind of premier in electoral magazine for maybe 30, 40 years run by a guy named Michael Learner called Tekun magazine. And they did a kind of cover, you know, essay of mine called On the Arotic and the Ethical, which was kind of in between Mystery of Love and the Arotic and the Holy. It's between those two books I did this essay called On the Arotic and the Ethical. You know, my later to be dear friend Ken Wilber, that article made it to him. And you know, someone brought us together kind of to discuss that article. We're now 2002 or three. And in The Arotic and the Ethical, I tried to talk about, you know, kind of a Ross, level one, ethics, you know, level two, a Ross and ethics together, level three. You know, some version of that, what the relationship was between the Arotic and the Ethical, which is, you know, a critical issue that they're not actually contradictory. And I was trying to articulate an idea that I'm still, you know, deepening now together with Zach and Ken, which is that all failures in ethics are based on a prior collapse of a Ross. So that was the frame. So in Mystery of Love, I talked about something like a kind of, that when you have three levels, you have a kind of level one, level three confusion. And Ken shared with me, Ken, whose work I didn't, I didn't know well, but I was aware of. I had read, I think, no boundary or something like that or a social well God. Ken shared with me his, his notion of the pretranspallacy, you know, which she had drawn from a number of places, which is, you know, this notion that you just referred to, you know, you kind of have pre-conventional, conventional post-conventional. But the pretranspallacy would be to confuse pre-conventional and post-conventional. So I want to kind of slow down and distinguish with that. And I don't want to lump that in with pre-tragic, tragic, tragic, tragic, explain why I kind of make the distinction and then see where we can get. So, you know, the classical distinction of, let's say, that Ken was trying to formulate, which is, oh, you're at Burning Man, you know, you're convinced that you're post-conventional. You might be, but you also might be pre-conventional. Right? So you could be in a drumming circle, which is utterly pre-conventional or you could be post-conventional. They look the same. And of course, the goal of Burning Man, like Burning Man ethos, its desire was actually to be post-conventional. Right? That Burning Man wasn't trying to create, you know, a city, you know, on the, you know, apply, which was pre-conventional, was like, can we actually engage in what appears to be, you know, kind of a lot of pre-conventionality. But actually, it's not pre-conventional, it's post-conventional. And in certain ways, Burning Man achieved that. In certain ways, it didn't, right? You know, that's, but that's the pre-, you know, the pre-transfallacy. So pre-trastic, tragic and post-trastic are somewhat different. And these are what, and you were, you said you wanted to talk about this last time, but didn't get to, this is a good place to get there. So I tried to formulate a new category, which is that these are not three levels in the sense of developmental levels, right, or stages, using those as being intertwined, right? But these are three stations. And this is very, very important, right? There's three stations, and I wrote this up together with, you know, a young, you know, really clint fuse, and Ken, you know, but I wrote it up for the, for an event that we called "Inembrose Virtual Experience" was a beautiful event in 2011, which was based on this notion that I called them the three stations of love, right? And the notion is that it's not a developmental level. You can actually go through the three stations of love, or through pre-trastic, tragic and post-trastic, or through virtually any of the other 50 applications of that that appear in the book that we talked about last time, my friend, she comes in threes. Any of those tri-electical patterns, you can go through at any level of consciousness, right? And so it's not a developmental level, right? But it's rather, you know, a station that you go through, which is a station of lived life, right? It comes from life as practice. You deepen in lived life, and you move from, wow, I'm, I fell in love. Station two, wow, we fell out of love, but now we're in the power struggle, we're doing the work. Okay, instead of kind of going back and trying to find another relationship at station one, can we break through station three, which is this whole other way of being, right? Which is where there's got to be something, some new noses we talked about last time, which breaks you through from station three to state, from station two to station three. So just for example, there are, there are in the avatar movies, there are about 10 major love stories. And in all 10 of the love stories, there are ICU scenes, which is kind of the, the major frame of avatar. And in in Cosmetic Immunism and art, the story of value that we're telling at, at the think tank, right, love is understood to be not merely an emotion, but a perception. So that's very obviously resonant with kind of, camera on intuition of ICU. But the ICU scenes all happen, right? In this moment where you go from tragic to post tragic. So what happens in each one of the vectors is there's some new knowing, there's some new realization, you know, so spider, right? And as spider's father is, what's his name? The Colonel on what's his name? Oh God, help me out. What's the Colonel's name? I only remember him as the Colonel. The Colonel but he was a maravable in response to those films. Yeah, yeah. All of the avatars, the complex conversation. Absolutely. But in any case, so the Colonel is his father, right? Who is a villain figure, but there's this moment in which his father rides this e-crime, right? This kind of, you know, mountain banshee and this very complex way. And he sees something about his father that he wasn't able to see before and his father's father, I see you, right? So there's a moment in which there's a new notion that takes you from, you know, station to station three. So pre tragic, tragic and post tragic, these are stations of life. They're not, now they are developmental. They are developmental stations, but they don't happen, right? And according to the classical developmental structure, right? In others, it's not like, oh, I'm like, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm, I can't move. And now I'm crawling and now I'm standing and now I'm walking and now I'm running. Now I'm skipping and now I'm doing gymnastics, right? No, it's actually, you move up and down these three stations, but they're based on very deep new realizations that come from lived life, right? And so, so in pre tragic, tragic and post tragic, there is a pre and post, there's a pre post confusion, right? And the pre post confusion is, well, you fall in love, you fall out of love, you fall back in love. So let's say the fall back in love is not your, you haven't reverted to pre tragic, you haven't just fallen back into pre tragic. You've actually realized something more profound, right? You've become a new person, let's say unique self, right? You understand that love is not just ordinary love, a human sentiment, but love is the heart of existence itself, outrageous love. You understand, for example, that love is not merely an emotion, love is a perception. So any one of those three, for example, is a new noses that takes you from two to three. So it's a, it's a, these are stations. And Ken and I got very excited about this because it actually, it adds something very important to, you know, integral theory, right? Because integral theory is mapping, you know, quadrants and it's mapping, you know, lines and it's mapping, you know, levels and it's mapping types, et cetera, right? You know, and it's very important to map stations. It doesn't work without stations. It gets very, right? It actually gets very scaffolding, very kind of outside, right? The thickness of life happens at the stations. And that's really just, that's a big deal. So these three stations of love, they're not formal developmental lines. Now, this is where we live. Wow, it's pre tragic. It's tragic, it's post tragic. And without stations, you can't really articulate your own experience of life in a very, very serious way. So I'm excited with you today, you know, I think your plan was that we could actually begin to apply pre tragic, tragic and post tragic to a bunch of new areas, right? And so I'll just throw an idea, but you, you might have 10 ways you want to go. But some place along the way, I think it would be great to talk about power. I think power is, it's important to be able to address power. So I just wanted to get the three stations. Fantastic. Yeah, I'm going to say a list of things I'd like to dive into. Power is one of them. This, this issue that you bring up though, I think is really important because structurally, maybe for a lot of people, practically, there's both a distinction to be made and an ambiguity to be recognized about level like phenomenon and station like phenomenon. I was looking at some remarks earlier today. So there was a theater theorist in the 60s named William Oliver. He had a couple of essays on the post tragic and the absurd. And he was trying to clarify. He uses the word, he uses the word. He uses the word. Yeah, a couple of times, not too much. He mentions that the post tragic can't be thought without the assimilation of the absurd, but he also mentions very specifically that he doesn't view the absurd as a historical phenomenon. Right. The absurdity in theater is not a post-monored condition or the result of pluralistic intercontextual consciousness, but according to Oliver, it's a standard mode available to human beings throughout history. And that touches on what we're saying here. If we think of the pre-tragic and the tragic and the post tragic as not dependent upon historical phases and not dependent upon developmental stages, even though some of those might make it easier than others to take the post tragic on board. So I'm curious how you view the relationship of these stations or modes or orientations to the concept of levels, like what changes for the three stations at different socio-cognitive complexities, and is there an advantage to showing up at those levels in the post tragic modality? Say it again. I want to get the, so yeah, there's a couple of questions we'll be in there together. I mean, I think the main one is, what do the three stations, how do they look differently at different levels? Right. And then also, as a side note, is there an advantage in terms of level development to being in the post-tragic station? Three tragic, tragic and post tragic show up one way or the other at every developmental level. However, the subtlety, the nuance, the quality of them are different at every developmental level. So let's see if we can take a couple of examples. So let's take power. And let's step into power and let's look at power, perhaps generally, from the pre-tragic, tragic post-tragic formulation, which I first expressed it this way, God, 20 years ago, but this actual, this triadic structure, and we were looking then, I was concerned then, there originally with eros and love, but it quickly moved to power. So in the pre-tragic notion, we have power. I'm a little kid. I'm in the terrible twos. And what I want, so my will is strong. My will clashes with my caretakers and my mother particular, it's why they're called terrible twos. And at some point, I'm taught to give up power. I'm taught to share. And sometimes I understand sharing and other times I understand, no, I'm just giving up the desire to fulfill my will. And in the best scenario, because I've been taught to love, that's the deepest way that happens, that actually power and love meet each other. But often that's not the way it happens. I'm being taught that the rules are you should share. The rules are it's not good just to have your will spilling over everything and everyone in order to be a good person, whatever that means, if you have to constrain your will. So you give up power. And in some sense, the entire process of living is from one perspective, a willingness to give up power and to give up power in the sense of power over or the power as the assertion of will, and to begin to participate in this field of love, in this field of mutuality, in this field of mutuality is a recognition and mutuality is a pathos and mutuality is a value, mutuality is a purpose, et cetera. And so I go to the, in some sense, the tragic is what Freud describes in one vector is the giving up of will, the giving up of that expansiveness of self. The kind of the limiting of self, right? The, the, the, the kind of tempering of self will. But then when I get to station three, I actually claim power again. But this time, right, my power which comes from my will is not the self willing of the separate self. It comes from the ontic identity of wills between the human being and the field of will, the field of the divine, the field of ethos, right, the field of eros, right? In other words, my desire now is the divine desire, right? And that's close to what Nietzsche was alluding to and his uber bench on his best days, right? Because we know that Nietzsche had good days and bad days and he had days and the sister was involved in not involved, right? There's a comp, you know, you know, better than I do. There's a complicated Nietzsche story. But Nietzsche had his best, his best version of the uber bench was talking about some sort of, you know, where my music, you know, Nietzsche loved music as you know, right? And you know, and I think he says something, you know, like without music life wouldn't make sense. He's got a couple of, you know, a few places he talks like that, right? But where my music just becomes obviously identified with the music of reality, but I'm not split from, right? There's an ontic identity of wills. And in the solemn lineage, that's called metatron. Metatron means where my will and the divine will have emerged. There's an ontic identity of wills and of course there's a fear of self-delusion. Obviously, right? That's a, right? Let's watch out for delusion. And so the most important process of the lineage is bearer, B-E-R-U-R, which is clarify. Are you, are you delusional? And is that, is that God's voice or the plumber, right? You know, in other words. So the process of bearers is enormously important. It's the most important ethical process is to engage in bearer and it's in really self-clarification to disambiguate the divine will and disambiguate, right? The false voices and the uninclarified voices. But in the end, what emerges in the end is what's called tukufot. And tukufot, t-e-k-u-f-o-t, tukufot, right? You know, means, you know, it means it's this, it's this very, let me give you the exact meaning. It means audacious power of the aggressive will. It's kind of like something like that. But it's not aggression, which is moving against. It's an aggression that's moving towards and it's filled with audacity. But the audacity is utterly lined with humility, right? Because it's this realization that the, the will of all that is, the clarified will is moving through me. So now at station three, my will is all of a sudden central again, the will that I had put aside, and in my will is filled with power to kufot's a power word. I'm filled with power. And I'm filled with this dynamic energy. I'm filled with this sense of confidence and the sense of delight and unimaginable humility. Right? Unimaginable humility at the same time. So, so there's this moment in which audacity and humility become one, right? And you're now in the post tragic, right? So the pre tragic and you're filled with power. You're defined by you're demarcated by the sense of power, right? And power means you've marshalled and crystallized all the resources in yourself. You're utterly resourced, right? All the resources are moving through you. And now you're impacting in devotion for the sake of the whole. I'm like, oh, right, power, right? That's the, and you know, again, Nietzsche and his best day would allude to that in the Uber match, right? You know, I mean, again, lots of bad days. But in the lineage of Solomon, that's called the Jew, and in the radical couple, we call that the Jew to Arctea. That's Metatron. That's Solomon. But it's that sense of post tragic reclaiming of power. The pre tragic, right? Power, child, right? Unfiltered, unrefined, needs to meet the tragic, right? The boundary on self, the boundary on self will, right? The stepping back, right? You know, and that's where a lot of the shame happens. Right? If I live, right? One of the conundrums of shame is if I live, I die. Right? If I live, I die. If I'm in my self-willing, all of these are self-destructed or die, right? Because I'll get killed. Right? So if I live, I die, right? Which is one of the core sources of shame. But no, but you can clarify your will until your will is no longer the will of your self itself. It's no longer merely the general will, right? Right? Of the true self. Right? It's actually the irreducible will of the irreducible unique self, which is the clarified evolutionary impulse, which is the evolutionary unique self, which is the will that allows you to take up your instrument in the unique self symphony, in which literally you're well in the will of the divine. There's an antichydinity of wills, right? Which is, which fills you with humility, which fills you with devotion, which fills you with commitment, and that's the quality of the hero. The quality of the hero is exactly that quality. Here's devoted anodacious, right? The hero is filled with with with a genuine humility and with a radical audacity, right? The hero is filled with power and yet and yet the true hero, the power, participates. It's not a kill, he's grandstanding, right? It's a different kind of power. So something like that that kind of begins to know, let's look at that at different levels. So let's say you're at red. Let's let's use kind of the old colors, you know, let's go back to the old color scheme of graves and later Beck and Cowan. So let's say you're at red, which is kind of this, which is all about power, right? So it's a very interesting question. Let's just think about this together, right? So what would the post-tragic be at red? So let's say the pre-tragic would be, in this case, the pre-tragic would be, you know, a lot of the, how would we let, let's go slow? Let's go slow. Right. So let's say that, let's say you start at the pre-tragic, you're filled with power, right? And then the tragic is the checks on your power kind of through the tribe and, you know, the alliances and the obligations, et cetera. And if you really emerge to the post-tragic and that, it's when your will can fully emerge, right? But can you, in that, actually experience a kind of, the defeated self that Rolke talks about? Can you be defeated and then claim a different quality of power? Right? It's a good question, right? You know, I don't know. And it's like, does the ethos of red allow for, you know, this, this antichydendate with the clarified divine? Right? It's just probably does. It probably does. It probably is. There probably is a sense like that, you know, the question is how good, the, how good is the bearer, how good is the clarification? Right? So if you're at red, you know, you know, which is generally ethnocentric of some form, you know, in tribal or kind of, you know, self-referential at some form, right? You're definitely not in a cosmic centric phase. You don't, you definitely don't have an existential sense of being defeated, right? And then, you know, finding your power, you know, in a purely interior way, you don't really have that available at red. But what you could have available is, okay, you could have a variable, let's take the samurai. Right? So the samurai, right, who, who commits harry-carry, right, is one who has been defeated, right? And yet is honored with this other form of power, right? You know, they've met the tragic end to classical power, but then they have this post-tragic last possibility, right, of kind of, of kind of this, you know, ennobled moment, maybe. But it's a good question. I haven't, I haven't actually worked it out. I haven't, I haven't worked it out. Yeah, I can't, it comes up for me around this example. Well, actually a couple of things. But one of the ways, did you see the movie Fight Club? No, I didn't, I've been aware of it. It's a long time, it's, yeah. Really well done, interesting version of this intriguing novel that was made. But anyway, they start these underground fight clubs, right? So they kind of start in a tragic situation where their, their red power is completely suppressed in a system. And then they start these underground clubs where they get together to physically, men, physically battle each other. And that's going on for a while. And they're using the basement underneath the bar and the gangster who owns the bar comes down and wants them out of there. And the main character, the Brad Pitt character, allows this guy to just beat the crap out of him. And he just, you know, very kind of Christ like it away. But he just allows himself to be beaten to the point that this guy submits and gives in and lets them have this basement permanently to do their fight clubs. So he in a red sense defeats this guy by allowing himself to be defeated, but mostly in a red frequency. Yeah, interesting. Yeah, so there's a, so there's, and I love that. That's a beautiful example, right? In other words, within red, there's a way in which, you know, power itself takes on more subtle disguises, right? In other words, the pre-tragic is your field of power. The tragic is you lose power. So you're filled with power fight club number one. You're doing fight club. The tragic stop. You can't do it. Your power has been defeated. You don't own the bar, right? You don't own the premises. You're not allowed to do that post-tragic. So then you find another source of power, which allows you to actually regain your power in a different way, which achieves a different kind of victory, right? A different kind of flavor of victory post-tragic. So it would be, so kind of the, the establishment of fight club would be kind of pre-tragic. You're kind of, and of course it goes all the way down. So kind of before the pre-tragic, you can have a tragic. So there, then this tragic mode, they go to this exalted, beautiful mode, this kind of pre-tragic. They start fight club. They get stopped. They realize they're not so powerful. They thought they were really powerful. They're not. Right? You know, tragic. But then they find a way, this other, this new noses, you know, that pit has that, oh, you know, actually, there's something, there's another way to have power other than fighting, which is allowing myself, right, this, this Christlike moment, which then achieves the victory that they wanted to achieve. Yeah, it's interesting. So let's say, let's say a green, let's say kind of the, you know, graves level six. Let's play it out for a second. So let's say graves level six. So it's interesting, right? So let's just think for a second. So the pre-tragic at graves level six would be, you know, this egalitarian no one's assuming power, right? Then power's bad. The tragic is power. Right? Right? You're now, now you're at the tragic is power. So then, right? And then anyone who has power is bad, right? That's right. That's the point of the tragic. You know, we, we, we indict anyone who has power. So the post tragic would be how would green reclaim power in a way that was post tragic? Right? In other words, so is, is there a way to reclaim power, right? At a post tragic level at greens, the answer is there is, right? So I'd green you facilitate, I'd green you organize, right? In other words, there's, there's, there's, there's these forms of power, which are, which are not the individual acting and individuating. It's this other form of power, which comes from organizing, which comes from the group, which comes from the collective, which comes from the facilitation, right? But the ultimate, that would be kind of like the beginning, that would be the beginning of a post tragic move, but a much deeper post tragic move would be something closer to this gentleman. I had a few conversations with like in 2000 and four or five Bill Isaacs, who is running a company called Dialogos, which is one of those early companies, you know, in Cambridge and in in in your Boston, right? Which we're doing kind of this, this development or facilitation of collective intelligence of the group. And the collective intelligence of the group, right? And the generation of this collective wisdom and appropriation, right? Which is becomes a kind of a force. So that would be kind of a post tragically, the the facilitate of power to generate, right? That would be kind of some sort of post tragic reclaiming of power. But, but in that, in that, you know, the individual has to find a way, right? And as we demonized at green the power of the individual, so in order for green to move to post tragic, it would have to find a way to allow the individual to actually have power without being demonized. And I'm just thinking about this out loud with you now, which might necessitate a move to yellow. In that, right? In other words, in other words, I'm not sure that they're the full post tragic could actually and it could be that the way you would have to look at it would be something more like, I'm not sure that it can always be done within the developmental line, meaning a more accurate view there. And this might be way too geeky for anyone listening, but let's geek for a second. It could be that the pre-stragic would be orange, in which actually power is very clearly, you know, kind of, you know, assumed and kind of sprout dynamics orange meritocracy. You know, power is very, very clear. It's very obvious what it is. And then green is tragic, right? No, power is actually tragic. And then second tier would go to post tragic, right? The ability for the individual to reclaim power, right? Not at the orange level, not at the demonizing of power, right? Of kind of the green level, but a place we can actually reclaim power, for example, as a function of your unique self. So when Don Beck was a wild, beautiful man, you know, when Don Beck read unique, who was kind of the, for those who are not familiar, Don was a student of Claire Graves. I mean, Lame, you obviously know this, a student of Claire Graves who kind of formulated a lot of the contemporary, sparrow dynamics work and wrote a lot of it. So when Don read unique self, my book, you're unique self, he called me, he was very, very sweet. And he said, this is the Bible of yellow. And I was as you know, right, it was very sweet, right? But in other words, so unique self means I'm reclaiming power as an individual, but not at a separate self level, but actually, right, that it's pouring through me, you know, the beginning, right? And then as you go up the levels of consciousness and second tier, you get closer and closer to individuated levels of power that are actually completely congruent with the larger collective, where the split, where it's no longer this kind of power over, right? So this integrated power in which everyone is woven into the same mesh and fabric of this larger vision, larger vision, larger devotion. So there you would have orange terms of power pre-chagic, you know, green, the tragic view of power. And then second tier, the post-chagic view of power doesn't work as clearly. I mean, we're working, this is fun to work out. The image that I'm getting is something like I'm imagining the stations next to each other. The pre-chagic as emphasizing the look back at the prior level and the post-chagic as attuned to the possibilities of the next one, right? Not necessarily going to the next one, but attuned to it. So when I try to think it through it, green, like initially green might have, or in one of its modes, it's got a lot of clarity on the power problems at orange, right? It's seeing these difficulties. And then if it takes that on to itself, it undergoes its own tragedy, you get something like late Foucault, where he really problematizes the revolutionary efforts. And he's like, yeah, we're still, we're all trapped in the same complicated bio power politics as everyone else. And he kind of like runs around there and hopes maybe Delus is going to help him out of that. But then there's this other possibility of green to be, I think, maybe aligned with the powerment drives that it sees throughout ecological systems, right? Which it might or might not follow through into something like yellow, but it's certainly easier to get from, I think, post-tragic green to yellow. So maybe, I don't know if this is a general pattern where the post-tragic tends to look up toward the next level and pre-tragic tends to look down, but I think it probably holds pretty well at green. Yeah, nothing. I think the poster, yes, I think that's right. There's a fragrance, right? Of the new possibility. Okay, so we can, we can step out of our stations, but this is a good exercise and it'd be, it'd be very interesting to look at each developmental level and then to look at how pre-tragic, tragic and post-tragic would show up in terms of power, in terms of everything, actually, in terms of everything, right? The, you know, the ability to, you know, I mean, let's say, let's create another possibility. So let's say we're looking at certainty and uncertainty, right? And so you have kind of certainty is pre-tragic. You're clear. I remember though that the marketing characteristic we talked about last time, a pre-tragic, right? In our previous dialogue is clarity. So then, tragic is uncertainty. It's a pre-tragic is, I'm a good Christian, right? I'm a good Jew. I'm a good, you know, Shiite. I'm a good Republican, right? You know what I mean? I'm a good MAGA person, you know, in the United States, if you're listening to the United States, I'm a good, you know, neoliberal, etc. You know, tragic is, you know, I now challenge those positions, right? I know challenge those positions. So for example, I'm thinking of one young man who I knew who went to Exeter Academy, right? Which is, of course, the, the bastion of neoliberalism. So he grew up kind of profoundly liberal, right? He gets older and he begins to realize, oh, right? You know, all the holes in that position. And he kind of goes pretty, you know, kind of very successful and goes pretty MAGA, you know, kind of like, you know, of course, to his parents, you know, horrific dismay, right? Having, you know, put him through the entire, you know, liberal system, right? And then, and, you know, when he's at the MAGA level, he kind of abandons, you know, kind of all of his liberal ideas and his devotions, etc. And you know, gets very, very involved in, you know, business and building his portfolio and, you know, doing things that you do, right? And then, you know, goes post-tragicky begins to reclaim his notion of social responsibility, of building a better world, you know, of, you know, kind of this, this kind of, of, of, you know, a larger egalitarian view, a view that's larger than make America great again. It begins to realize, oh, oh, these tariffs are a little crazy, right? And it's actually one world, it's global, it's, it's interconnected. And he begins to reclaim his original liberal ideas, but in a way, which integrates, you know, you know, some very profound sets of conservative ideas. And he comes out of the post-tragicky's now a post-tragicky liberal, not a pre-tragicky liberal, because he's gone through his tragic MAGA base, right? So, so that's a, you know, so he's now at this level three, he's now reclaimed certainty again. So another, his uncertainty was level two, he's challenged all everything he learned as a kid. But now at level three, he reclaimed certainty, which is a certainty of purpose, certainty of commitment, a certainty of principle, right? A certainty of sacrifice, a certainty of devotion. So that, you know, you know, uncertainty, excuse me, certainty, uncertainty, certainty, is a really, really, really, really important, you know, expression of pre-tragicky, tragic and post-tragicky. Pre-tragicky is, I'm clear. Tragicky is fuck, I thought it was clear, uncertainty, right? Then post-tragicky is you reclaimed certainty, right? And certainly it might, it's not that it is true, but it's that I am true. And then from I am sure I'd be into more carefully selectively choose my it is truths and validate them. So I think that's one of the most important things, right? The ability to move between certainty and uncertainty. And of course, we could tell the story the other way where you start with uncertainty, pre-tragic, you're like, wow, you just, you know, it's a pre-tragicky, you just, you just don't know what you don't know. You realize you have a limited knowledge base. You don't know, you're not, it's not a problem, but you just don't know, you're, you're ignorant, right? And then, right, you, you go from uncertainty to certainty, right? And the, the tragic of certainty is this is very deep. Tragic of certainty is you actually close down because you're not open. Now you've got it all worked out. You think it's great, but actually it's kind of tragic. You've actually shut down your, you're operating within this very small realm of this new set of certainties that you've established. And then you have to shatter those to open up again to uncertainty, right? But your new uncertainties is of a higher, more sophisticated, more beautiful level, right? So, for example, it could be in religion, you're uncertain. Then you go to, you know, you go to, you get your, you go to, you go to theological school, you know, you become a rabbi, a priest, a minister, and now you've got it all worked out. But there's something very tragic, you're closed, you're not open, you're in this very, very narrow sector, then you break out of that back into this larger uncertainty. But it's this much higher level of, I don't know. So level one, I don't know, level two, I know, something tragic about that knowing. And level three, I don't know again, but my level three, I don't know, it's not the same as my level one, I don't know. They're utterly and completely different, something like that. Yeah, that's really intriguing because you can run through it as a, as a knowing to unknowing to knowing or as an unknowing to unknowing. So that's an interesting flexibility to keep in mind for this. One thing that stands out to me is time, like on the one hand, like the process of reading, for example, sometimes mediates between the tragic and the post-tragic, right? But it has to actually unfold. And when you're telling the story of this guy taking a mega detour from his, a home life, neoliberalism, I got this image of, you're going along with the pre-tragic thing that you've inherited, right? And then you start to run into the tragedy of it, and you can either spend a bunch of time with that tragedy or you can deviate to someone else's pre-tragic mode. Right. You just go, I'm going to go over and be in the mega pre-tragic. Right. And this guy's lucky if he comes out into the post-tragic liberalism, but there's a sense in which I think a lot of people, as they approach the tragic and don't know what to do about it, deviate to a different pre-tragic rather than taking the amount of time it would take to get to the post-tragic. Yes. Yes. And time here is important. Right. In other words, time is very important. I'm so, so glad that you brought it to the table. Right. And time is not just chronometry. It's not just a chronometric measure. Right. And it was one of, you know, Einstein's more frustrated and, and, and, fallacious moments. You know, when he says to Berkson in 1922, when they have their great debate, I believe in Paris, when he says, you know, the, the, the time of the physicist is the only time, right, all the rest, the philosopher's time is just nonsense. Right. And if you actually read Berkson on time, it will blow your mind. Berkson on time will just, I mean, you got to read it line by line, right? You know, time and free will. And, you know, Berkson, of course, A, Einstein turned out to be wrong in much of his conception of time because, you know, Einstein regia, he kind of argues for a block universe, right, in which there is no past, present and future. Right. Whitehead, of course, is a much better mathematician than Einstein. Einstein's mathematics are, you know, it was actually his weak suit. His, his first wife does a lot of his math, you know, in the papers, the four papers Einstein publishes and in 2005, which is kind of Einstein's great year, you know, the photoelectric effect, relativity, Brownian, you know, motion, et cetera, those four papers, you know, mass and energy, right? You know, she does the math on them. You know, whitehead, just parentheses, by contrast, whitehead is, of course, right, principle of Mathematica with Pertrude Russell. He teaches, you know, math for, I think, 30 years of Trinity College. They were supposed to do, by the way, four volumes. The fourth volume apparently was processing reality, which he did 15 years later. Whitehead is this crazy brilliant math guy and he's written his own version of relativity. So whitehead points out that Einstein kind of sneaks in metaphysics to his physics, right? And that actually his dismissal of time is actually what he calls the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. It's actually a, a misunderstanding of reality that at, in fact, there is this very deep and profound sense of, you know, past, present and future that we live in and that there's actually genuine novelty. And whitehead does that. He explicitly is defending Berkson in Vox Berkson. So when you read Berkson, you read Berkson, you know, layman, it's, it's, it's a, it's a, a, to really read him is like listening to an incredibly good piece of classical music. You know, line by line Berkson anticipates, you know, 40 years before kind of quantum mechanics anticipates the problems that are going to be in relativity and quantum mechanics demands, of course, a, according to most of its classical theorists, you know, a kind of a progression of time. And time has, and this is what you were pointing to, I think intuitively, time is thick. There's a thickness to time. There's a, a leavening in time, right? Time is not just the measuring of points on a line, a thin version of, you know, of, you know, of geometric time. There's a reason why this is a cane, the elder, right, is pose in the best scenarios, the wise one, because they've been around for a while, right? You know, and of course, we all know that there's many wise, you know, you know, wise young people and many old fools, right? So we understand that it's not a given, but in the, in the best version of reality, something happens as you get older. Right? And you know, when you move pre-tragic to tragic to post-tragic, although there are, there are, there are moments of noces and revelation when you see something new. But generally it's a, it's a, it's a longer process. It's about being in life as practicing, you're listening and you're, you're, you're kind of accessing and you're like, you're, you're kind of earlier clarity. Start to get challenged and you deflect the challenge and slowly. If you're open and they build up, you begin to have these new knowing. It's like, oh, oh. Oh, and it's a more gradual process and it's an appropriate human process. That's the point. This is not and it's the pre-tragic tragic and post-tragic is not a tragedy. It's post tragic, right? In other words, it's the way we're supposed to live. Right? We're supposed to start a pre-tragic. Fuck, it's awesome. We need that energy. We fell in love. Right? It's a rousal from above. We're like, "Oh my god. This is right?" Then like gradually, we're challenged. We hit the tragic. And we can either bear ourselves in depression or anxiety or we can kind of stay in and stay open and then gradually see our way to the post-tragic. You know, and that's, that is really the movement of life. The movement of life is just that you get to that, you know, and I think it's why we grow old, my friend. Right? And I don't think we get to the post-tragic easily without agent. And again, let me say it again, you can have pre-tragic, tragic and post-tragic at 19. Clearly. It's not age-related. But there also is, as an erud, there is a kind of over-life. You get to the post-tragic. I mean, as I'm getting older, the Dharma, Cosmerechumanism, in some senses, getting clearer and clearer and more and more stunning. And I'm getting more and more ignorant at the same time. Right? In other words, I feel like in a certain, I know more and more every month as I study and write more and more and I know less and less at the same time. And I'm okay with it. Right? And as I have more and more certainty, but at the same time, more and more uncertainty. Right? But the uncertainty is no longer, there's a kind of, there's a, there's a, a depth to the uncertainty. Right? There's a, there's a, a centered to it. Right? There's a, a richness to it. Rich is not quite the white word. It's too simple of a word. There's a thickness to it, perhaps. Right? There's a, a yearning. But the quality of, the quality of desperation changes. Right? There's a, there's a kind of embrace of life and there's an embrace of, of the certainties. So it's a, this is what it means to be alive. And it's, it's in the post tragic is the willingness to write it. It's the willingness to hold the uncertainties together with the certainties. Right? If you're remembering Kashmir Shibism, there's kind of, there's kind of duality, non duality, then duality non duality at level three. So it's like, you know, again, the, the third way of telling the story would be certainty, uncertainty. And then the third level is both. The level of certainty and uncertainty. It's mystery and noces. We're able to hold that, to hold that, right? The, this quality of paradox, which is the post tragic where it's, it's, it's just, it's just fucking agonizing. And it's okay. Right? And, and we can kind of hold both of those at the same time. Something like that. So you mentioned a little bit about your experience of your self over life and over time. I think we probably don't want to try to do the game of like what's like up communities, pre tragic, tragic and post tragic view of Mark Gaffney. There's something about community here that's of interest to me, try to formulate it. So like there are these loosely overlapping transformational developmental and regenerative networks of people. They don't agree on a lot of stuff. They're at all different levels of maturation and competencies. They all have some similar sensibilities. They all feel like they're facing a transformational crisis at this moment of history. So there's this partially emerged ethos. But what's your impression of like pre tragic tragic and post ways of existing as a participant in these half emerged wisdom and transformation cultures that are on the planet. I'm going to say something a little bit tender and a little bit fierce, my friend. So we are not surprised by corruption in the Catholic Church. So by we, I mean, you know, the people who don't live within Catholicism, we're not profoundly devoted right to the kind of the, you know, the infallibility of the papal and cyclicals right and a kind of a wear of the tragedies, the enormous tragedies and horrors. Right, inflicted by the Catholic Church over the years and who know people history and know, you know, kind of, you know, the, the often murderous, you know, and kind of corruption of the church, but doesn't surprise us. And it doesn't surprise us because it's them. Of course, but it wouldn't occur to us that in the realm of us, right, there is corruption, right, you know, and not where it seems to be right, there is ignorance, right, there is, you know, you know, base power moves, right, there are, you know, there are, you know what Scott, pick appropriately called, you know, and I, what I think was his best book in the seventies, people of the line. It's a hard word, people of the lie, right, meaning, meaning, you know, who are saying all the right things, but are actually, you know, motivated by. By all the bad stuff, right, you know, although it's it's dressed up in pretty costumes, we don't acknowledge that so I think that actually in the communities that you're describing, there's an enormous amount of. The tragic right that's unacknowledged, you know, the ego is split off right the, the, the heinous, the heinous nature of certain behaviors are ignored, you know, the simplicity of good ethics, just simple good ethics are recontextualized, you know, with, with, with pretty words. And so I think in those communities, my experience of them, right, has been in many ways they're profoundly tragic because they lack both the religious devotional impulse on the one hand, because they're kind of filled with their own sense of intellect, but they also lack the kind of simplicity of common sense. Right, the simplicity of common sense, right, and so I think those communities are actually important because they're, they often have people who are really trying to. To break the old paradigms and construct new ones that's there, that's the good news, right, that there's a, there's a creativity, there's an intellectual creativity. But I think that the reason they have such a little effect is because there's not a strange attractor of purity of sincerity, right, of transmission of goodness of kindness. I remember I was, I was in a Zach and I were studying back and like, got 2010 2009 something like that. And we were talking about something about the inner world, right, and I think Ken's done a beautiful, beautiful job in integral theory. That's really a wonderful contribution. And this one I'm about to say now, Ken and I have talked about, you know, and, you know, in, you know, in resident understanding. But as I said to Zach, I said, you know, but in the inner world, there's not a great value to kindness. It's just not even the discussion. And it's like you're kind of like you're like, what kind of like what is, what does that have to do with anything. Actually being kind is a very big deal, right, and being kind, right, just. There's not a big value on truth. It's just not right. It's very select on information gathering, checking, you know, there's not a, you know, in other, so there's, there's these very elemental pieces missing. Which people feel. Right, you can feel it, right, there's not a, right, there needs to be a purity in this space and the purity doesn't mean it's perfect. But it means that, you know, a man's reached exceeded his grasp or what's happened for, but we're aspiring to be a certain kind of kindness, you know, a goodness, say, a sensitivity, but not a feign sensitivity. We can feel each other, we can feel each other's pain, right, we, we, we information gathering good ways we speak face to face, right, you know, so kind of the communities you describe as they have interfaced with the liminal web. Feels like they've become actually more corrupt, right, more broken, because no one actually sees each other even. There's not even a, there's not even a face to face meeting and you and I have tried to break some of those structures and have people gather on, on porches of different kinds and, and see each other and meet each other. I mean, but it's enormously important. So, so I am personally, you know, kind of on the one hand, kind of deeply in love with people across the communities right lots of great people. You know, just deeply, you know, in devotion just to just I'm in devotion to many, many, many people across these communities where just fabulous and gorgeous and stunning human beings as individuals, but the community structures of these kind of communities that you're describing. I think are quite lost in the tragic, right, they're quite they haven't moved to the post tragic because they just haven't reclaimed their own kind of elemental integrity. Which is a big deal, which is a big deal. So that's at least, you know, you know, just to answer a question, I've experienced it. Maybe we can pivot a little more toward sexuality. You've got, you've got some writings on a post tragic sexual narrative. We could go a number of different ways with that, but I'll tell you where my mind tends to go on this. Yeah. I think a lot about the about how libido gets channeled into productive civilizations. Right. So you've got let's say a pre-tragic modality where the genetic role of sexuality is symbolically reinforced as the social norm and people just believe in it. It becomes their ideal to participate in that process. And then you've got this liberal or sometimes liberty and this more complex social thing that's occurred at various times throughout history where it's not just for that, right. There's diverse forms of sexuality and sexual identity and lifestyle choices and it has all these functions. But part of that is the recognition that there is a deeply tragic element in that prior way of holding sexuality that those people are not experiencing. Right. There's something of scene and excessive about the enforcement of a breeding culture. But then the question becomes is there some way to get the collective function of libido back in a post tragic way, like not just to rejoin the sort of tantric sacredness of sexual activity, which is itself an important thing, but to collectively set up practices whereby that energy also is constrained to regenerate the system in which we are embedded. Yeah, it's beautiful. So let's let's talk about it. I mean, sexuality is obviously an insanely important topic. Right. Sexuality is, at some point becomes the model of aeros in the world. There are 12 billion years of aeros before sex, right. But then sex appears and then sex becomes a particular instantiation, but this unimaginably powerful instantiation of the evolution of aeros. The deeros comes to a, right, to a, to a, you know, to a kind of meandering, complicated kind of stop. I can't quite get any further, right. In terms of novelty and certain depths of complexity and, you know, originality. And then we begin, you know, we go from asexual to sexual reproduction. It's this, this unimaginably important moment. And of course uniqueness emerges not right in a huge moment. Uniqueness starts with, uniqueness goes back all the way to the first pressure waves. But, but there's this moment is the leap in uniqueness, which happens with sexuality, right. And sexuality is itself, right, the gateway to an intensification of uniqueness and exponential intensification of uniqueness. That's actually how biology works. But, but let's stay focused on the core. So, you and I have talked briefly, I think even last time, where you have kind of a sex positive, a sex negative and a sex neutral narrative. And I call those narratives of desire. We talk about them in that book, a return to aeros in which all of those are pre-tragic because they're all clear. Sex is lunch, sex neutral, Kinsey clear, sex negative gets in lots of trouble, dangerous of the devil clear sex positive, lovely, affiliative, panacea clear, right. Sex sacred, tantric sacred that you described also pretty clear, right. You know, it's pretty clear. So, those are all forms of the pre-tragic, right. The tragic is when we realize that those don't work, right. Means we don't have a story of sexing, which is equal to our experience of the sexual. That's tragic when so they they disappear. So, now we need to go post tragic, which is what you're pointing to. Is there a post tragic narrative of desire. And I would call that sex erotic. It's when sex and aeros rejoin when they reconvene and we actually begin to understand that that the experience of desire itself generates homeless generates goodness. The experience of desire, it's not just the dignity of desire, it's the divinity of desire, right. That actually, you know, the entire that that actually does, you know, the in the classical interpretation of the Garden of Eden, the realization is that desire is a condition of reality that condition is falling. Classical interpretation, interpretation one liberal humanist kind of, you know, liberal Protestant, you know, kind of occasional kind of creative he break text, you know, second interpretation of the Garden of Eden is desire is a decision. Right, you have to decide right how you're going to work your desire that's the emergence of choice desires a decision. The third read of the Garden, which is the post tragic read perhaps we might call it also in this case, the post conventional read is actually desire is a condition of reality. Yes, post tragic just like it's just right. But that condition is the ultimate condition and that actually the snake is God and God is the snake right that actually, and if you notice the snake gets never never gets thrown out of the Garden. Right, God says sort of funny things don't eat from trees that make you live, don't eat from trees that allow you to discern between good and evil so the God voice there is complex who's who's the God voice here. And the snake is called by the hidden lineage of the Messiah. So Nakhashkama tree of Mashiach, Nakhash the word snake. And each letter has a numerical valuation in Hebrew. So the numerical value, the equation of the word Nakhash snake is the same as Mashiach Messiah 358 or both 358. So that's a way of saying that's a code word. It's not a trick. It's a code word of saying, oh, then the Nakhash the snake. The snake is actually the is actually the voice of God here and the voice of the snake is saying, oh, actually the experience of desire itself when clarified is the condition of the divine. Right, right, actually when you actually experience desire and you clarified desire, you will then have eaten of the tree which can discern between good and evil because you're clarified desire is a desire for value aka whitehead and a petition for value. Right and desire itself is the experience of eternity you live forever this experience of profound eternity. So this is very beautiful. It's very subtle. It's quite dangerous. Right, if it's if it's doesn't demand practice and discipline. But actually, I mean, again, tenderly, you know, layman, one of the things I've tried to remain faithful to and it's, you know, and it's not an easy thing to remain faithful to because it demands everything is faithful to the dignity of desire. It's really, you know, desire is important and the experience of shame either at the ones quality of desire or ones lack of desire right or right is so overwhelming that a person has an experience not just I did something wrong that I am wrong. And they're not making that part anymore right and it generates a planet drenched in shame. Right, you know, other collapse of ours. So being able to reclaim tenderly. But also fiercely and audaciously the dignity of desire is the post tragic move and it's sex erotic. This new sexual narrative, this new story of desire is this realization that the name of God is a desire. Remember when I was right, I remember when I moved in you the holy dove was moving to and you know and from our lips, she drew the hallelujah, Leonard Cohen, the holy dub is moving to means that experience of desire now. Right, you never tell me what's going on below right how the rest of that that stands, it goes in and coins how Loya. And the experience of the other irreducible dignity of desire right where you have kind of human rights and human dignity encrypted in the body sacred. Right, and we actually really we understand that in this very profound not in this kind of neo-tuntric way, not in a way which is permissive and a kind of, you know, you know, kind of cheap or sloppy way right right not in a way which allows God forbid for any violation of integrity and mutuality and boundary of course not that's again. But actually this very, very deep container in which we've dignified desire because when a person has and this is the post tragic point and it's very hard to say right right. You know, a child let's do a child for a polymorphic sleep reverse right you know, fill the desire right tragic right the crushing of the sublimators desires if I live I die some version of. The post tragic is no I who am I I am a unique configuration of desire it's actually who I am desire drives everything it's not you can remove desire is the appetite of cosmos as it lives in me and all desires ultimately a desire for value like huh that's post tragic it's subtle it's profound but it's true and any any. Any refusal to actually own my capacity to to clarify my desire and therefore trust my desire a opens the doors to tall to totalitarianism second you can't trust your desire they got you right you have to be able to trust the dignity of your desire and I mean there's a reason why 1984 all of big brother you know the orwellian you know matrix of totalitarianism comes to crush the desire between Winston and Julia right that there's this this great sexual love affair the very core of 1984 that all big brother comes to crush it's the crushing of that desire which is the goal of room 101 you know in 1984. So it's because because because the story of love desire right that story that's a story of value that can't be on by anyone it's not totalitarian value you experience value in your body in trends goodness of life right you're not it's not happiness about your life it's a joy in your life right and that is only available in the fullness of desire when I say the fullness of desire it doesn't it's not about some classical character of sexuality right to be clear it could be the simplicity of holding hands with someone right the simplicity of just a hand on your shoulder right we just feel handy you just feel the presence of someone who's holding your shoulder right it can be in the simplicity of an embrace right it can be in hand you know the shaking of a hand but in a deep way not enough right and it can be in you know I I've spoken to to to many couples over the years who kind of were very beautiful people have caricatures of what desire supposed to look like and I would say just you know as recently as yesterday just kiss your partner's shoulder for a year you know for you know five minutes a day you're fine right can you imagine that someone's actually kisses your shoulder for five minutes a day with full sincerity and devotion right and it doesn't it doesn't look like something right and that you have to actually but but we have a right to be desired we have a right to desire and it's a fundamental human right is to experience ourselves as being desired that someone wants us they want to embrace us they want to love us they want to adore us and we have a right to be desired and we have a right to desire we don't have a right to impose our desire on anyone you know and what's her name her name escapes me I'm a srinaban I apologize miss srinaban I don't remember her first name at Oxford who wrote a book mocking desire called the right to sex a couple of years ago maybe three four or five years ago and she's kind of she kind of mocked this notion that be a right desire as you know suddenly comes out of in sell manifestos right and she kind of recapitulated kind of the classical anti sexual position of second wave feminism amia srinivasan the right to sex and of course she character the right to sex like of some kind of weird male prerogative which is obviously she's completely right if that's what the right to sex meant that would be vile you know illegal and immoral in every possible way but that's not what the right to desire means right to desire means I have I have a right to desire goodness and greatness I have a right to to to experience the joy of your desire you know the creativity with a beloved or desiring the embrace of a beloved and I have a right to feel desired. It's a fundamental right that every being has which is why the pornographic culture so tragic the pornographic culture destroys the right to be desired and basically it basically exiles or or commodifies the right to be desired and assigns it to this very small sector of people whose bodies you know match a particular culture at a particular moment in a way which is grotesque right we don't want to photograph a culture we want to run a culture which bodies come in all shapes and sizes right and desires come you know in this wide you know talent right of colors and we actually begin to desire each other in a sense where we begin to be aroused by love by kind of you know a body part right we're aroused by the joy of desiring right the post tragic desire right to that you know that that bring you know it's an enormously important I'm so in a certain sense I it's so important like we we talked about stations the beginning and we played around with you know but you know and that's important we should do that but this is where it lives right and there's a person who doesn't have an experience of being desired lives an unbearable pain which is not filled by anything and again by desire I'm not limiting it to sexual desire I'm really the full experience of desire and being desired is what the solemn lineage would call to what it means to incarnate the name of God as the name of God is maybe the last sense the name of God is the four letter name of God you say hey love hey right yeah right then you know law right we don't pronounce it as once we don't pronounce the name but this you had hey love hey is the you had enters the hey yeah as in hallelujah the you had enters the hey so the the line penetrates the circle the circle receives the line and then the third letter the vav is a you had pulled down right kind of phallic in its nature it then again it penetrates the hey or the hey kind of lowers itself right to receive the vav so the vav enters the hey so the four letter name of God is erotic union is desire literally the name of God literally is desire and that is the nature of cosmos and if you read by the way that's this is the interior sciences of solemn but if you read per se or you know whitehead that's a sense of white it you know it's essentially what he's saying he won't use the word desire using game bridge you know and it's you know it's in whatever year it is eternity college who talks about appetite appetite you talk about desire right and that that is it's the beginning and end of everything right it's what it's what um berks was talking about in the laundry tal it wasn't talking about he got dismissed as he's making up like it's like the other he's making up some new force and quick kind of mocks Berkson in this kind of absurd way someone Berkson's talking about Berkson you read Berkson carefully don't don't hear how people describe Berkson which has some of those communities that you were describing they hear how things are described instead of actually doing the the deep work Berkson's talking about you laundry tells him about eros the eros that moves us so that's everything right and then it may be and as I know we're drawing towards a close we begin with this notion of the erotic and the ethical that the collapse of ethics right is always rooted in a prior break down of eros so eros at its core is eros contact eros desire eros desire for contact which leads to more wholeness it's everything intellectual spiritual existential emotional you know psychological everything revolve around desire and so we've tried to do just in response to your beautiful inquiry has to just sketch a little bit canonatively gently humbly you know a kind of phenomenology of post tragic desire about people who've undergone existential mutations of some kind and there's like an outside and inside to thinking about that so Andrew Cohen and I talked a bunch about this problem of you know old cultures where there was extreme verticality of like this person is now enlightened and you will all be some ordinated as part of the teaching mechanism versus these new systems that are very horizontally dominant where you sort of take away that notion of illumination everybody's equal and Andrew is very concerned about how we create or think about and set up some third option that would be beyond that and all of that sort of from the outside from the social protocol element of it I'm curious how you think about the internal element of it and are you are you how much time are you comfortable with can you go another half hour sure sure I'm good to set all right so individuals who undergo some kind of existential mutation in their self phenomenology right and they something seems like it's healed there's a satisfying quality and a thoughtless quality and a strangeness and a permeability to their experience of themselves there might be a pre tragic way of talking about that where they just say oh this match is what I've heard about in the traditions I'm now one of the enlightened ones and then you can say well there's a tragic way of expressing that which is like well these things happen to me maybe they're just a function of my nervous system who knows what's going on here I have no right or need necessarily to believe and perhaps I've just gone Matt for all I know and then there's a possibility of a post tragic way of somehow holding both of those things in a new form what's your sense of a post tragic articulation self confession of people who've had shifts in their experience of what it is to be themselves yeah it's a beautiful inquiry you know you know somewhat by intention you know vague which allows for many doors but let's let's try and look at it in a pre tragic perspective let's say you know terms like enlightenment or realization or right you know you know the avatar right the there's this kind of a wow that that's the avatar she's the avatar he's in line she's in landed it's very clear and there there's not a lot of and again clarity is the marketing characteristic of the pre tragic and there's not a lot of inquiry either on the part of let's say the teacher who's claiming or or self experiences you know in a genuine way that enlightenment or the students who receive it and receive the guidance both you know the great blessing that the guidance might be and you know the the the complex demands that it might make you know and then you hit the tragic and you can hit that tragic on both sides of the street right teacher can say like fuck this is this is like right I I actually realize I'm so flawed in this way or that way the other way and how was I ever claiming that right and then the student right can see the clay feet of the teacher for example right and then you have a kind of tragic collapse right and now then that can be either accurate or can be contrived right so that can be an accurate collapse or it can be a socially engineered collapse for you know for other purposes other than you know that the public is stated ones right but ignoring that issue which is not our topic now it remains if it remains simply right oh it's collapse now we thought it was true now it's not true that's the tragic right we can't actually get to the post tragic and until we just collapse the teaching function the story ends so we have to be able to go to the post tragic which is is there a way to experience attainment you know is there a way to experience you know you know a true depth of attainment you know without being abusive number one you know with with a post-stemic and personal humility you're number two you know can you milling your audacity genuinely live together you know number three you know can there be dual relationships which is one of the things that actually maintain humility right you know in another words in other words when when we're actually able to enter into the vulnerability of dual relationships right that actually becomes a door to humility right that we're not actually just entering we're actually human and vulnerable and in open and you know and loving you know and you know fallible right so so the question is is there a kind of post tragic attainment where we can actually maintain you know what my my my dear friends we can actually maintain teachers with outward called teacherly authority we can actually maintain teacherly authority without overreach right now that's not a minor issue because actually if we destroy the teaching function we've destroyed one of the fundamental humanity right in other words in other words one of the reasons why chatbots right and you know what Zach and I are calling you know this proliferation of the personhood conferral problem we're actually referring personhood on chatbots right and we're we're turning chatbots into our parent into our AI tutor into our teacher into our confidant into our beloved right is because you know let's focus on teacher for a second because we've lost the sense of what the teaching function is and we've lost that very profound intimate human to human contact in which love and transmission right you know live you know together and love is transmission transmission is love and there's this mad love between the teacher and student which the teachers mad love meaning the teachers utterly committed to the development and the depth of the student cares enormously right this enormous caring none of which is replicable by an AI chatbot but if we don't actually get those teaching function then I we create these other oracular functions in society which actually a face the transmission between the generations right and because if teaching becomes informational there's actually no way to compete with the chatbot right on an informational level we actually destroy right that which is most intimate most precious and which act and we actually move towards you know what what we're doing is and we actually move towards you know what what what I've called many times the death of our humanity right quite literally so it's a it's a suicidal event so it's not just it's not a casual question it's like the capacity to have a you know post egoic attainment attainment you know a higher individual should be on the go but it's critical and yes Andrew you know did you know you invoke the enders I don't want to ignore that I want to honor that you know when I knew Andrew you know with some you know limited degree of depth you know before I was falsely attacking 2006 you know we had done a a teaching event together in Israel right and he invited me to his place I think it was in Fox Hollow and I'd written an article or two or whatever it was for at least one for his magazine which was then called I think in late next or or some such and you know him and can and I had done a number of conversations and so he was but Andrew was in a very very very you know kind of a way in which as as Andrew would say he couldn't see clearly right and then he kind of experienced a very profound crash and it was in that from crash that we began to be in touch because you know he essentially was shunned you know you know for those first two three years and I actually began to call him in India then so we began a set of conversations which were real now they were real they were about as real as as you get and you know we kind of reestablished a friendship from a different place and a series of public dialogues you know any number of my board members said don't do that right you're controversial and Andrew's controversial and people put one and one together and assume you know and you know and of course that would be a wrong assumption as I said to Andrew I said you know I I think you're fundamentally wrong and you're strong I think I was fundamentally right in other words they're not the same sure and we laugh you know but in other words I think Andrew was out of bounds in his community in a serious way and I think Andrew would say that right which is different than false complaints but of course in the confusion of the so as everyone told me not to do these public talks with Andrew but you know I kind of said fuck it right in other words there's a it's actually wrong it's ethically wrong he you know he worked very very hard to self transform it worked very very hard to you know look carefully right and we had made a mistake since his students were adults and powerful adults you know many of them you know using and deploying as teaching you know in the world and everyone gets a second and a third and a fourth chance right so I did a you know a maybe probably to 15 20 public dialogues and Andrew was wrestling very profoundly with this issue actually right of kind of how do you how do you you know both whole detainment as something that's serious and real and should be aspired to you know and at the same time you know hold this very very profound empowerment now what I said to Andrew in the early days was right you know and I wrote a book right this isn't this is not I wrote a book called self two models of two models of self and integral of literary mysticism which was it was 2011 no earlier it was in 2010 and it was then you know quite powerful because he was running the magazine everyone you know as Andrew said to me was courting favor because they wanted articles in the magazine and I just said to him I said your system of authentic self and the way you teach it is just a recipe for abuse right and and I said I'm going to write a book and I'm going to kind of you know devastated in every way that I can and honor you fully but it just it's wrong and and so I sent in the book and you know he was you know we we remained in touch it was it was an appropriate dorma combat you know the way it should be it wasn't personal and he you know called me you know several years you know after the that collapse and as he was and we had talked in India as I shared but there's a certain moment he called me says that he says like wow unique self was right you know I get it I think it was probably a recorded conversation and the point was that if you don't have irreducible uniqueness you can't have a check on the group right I mean now there's as long as you're operating in the realm of the in-personal whether the in-personal is true self or Andrew's authentic self which overlaid the evolutionary impulse on the true self nonetheless you're still in the realm of the in-personal and so therefore the teacher can always claim to have so much more entainment than the student that they assert an inappropriate authority which almost always becomes a be a certain some way it's just it's too much of a claim and so once you're you're in the realm of unique self and Andrew and then came together and a shared vision you know of unique self and and I think that had enormous influence in Andrew by the way as he also had on me and a number of places where she was insightful you know Andrew was an very insightful he had he was very insightful in two major areas his his lived sense of the evolutionary impulse was real and sacred I think and his sense of what he called inner subjective non-duality right the we space that he had tried to cultivate in his community was also profound and deep and real and so Andrew did arrest what that we we talked about it quite a bit in these both in these public dialogues and these private conversations and and it's good to invoke him here right because he you know he he he he he had this very very strong pre-tragic phase you know of kind of teaching right he was hit with a very strong tragic you know kind of collapse and he he struggled very valiantly right to kind of create a next post-tragic you know kind of phase of transmission and teaching something that's it's a good example and again I can't speak for all the people who kind of make this with that claim I don't know that I've never adjudicated it I don't I don't know the history what I do know is as I said to Andrew you know I said you know his approach to the individual was disastrous right structurally and I think he got that and he he worked hard at least in my conversation for them you know in trying to get it and I want to just actually you know on him for that in a deep way you know on poplars it may be a fuck that but I'm thinking over different things that might mediate between or assist the transition between the tragic and the post-tragic and one of the ones that struck me during this conversation was because it is sort of juicy in a way self-harm so you've got somebody and they you know they have an innocence they have an intactness they have a simplicity in a certain in their life and then their abuse or something happens they are harmed in some way and then this thing goes on that if you're if you're a if they're one of your loved ones you can be very concerned about self-harm but then the therapist will say well this could be a good sign because they are trying to take ownership of the harm right it's not a solution it's not a full post-tragic resolution of what's happened but it seems like it occupies an odd space between the tragic and the post-tragic the tragedy has occurred they're living in the tragedy and they're trying to do something to it which is to at least make it be their own action they're trying to take ownership of the tragedy within the tragedy where does that situate them relative to the post-tragic? Well, no that's that's a a very intense and in beautiful and you know agonizing you know agonizing question and you know if you know I have you know a a couple of dear friends who have you know self-harmed at different moments and you know I have never self-harmed in that classical way I have never had a genuine ideation of suicide or had a genuine suicidal ideation but there were moments in 2006 and 2007 where it kind of a step before like I understood oh this is when a person has a suicidal ideation I should have been it's like oh oh oh they write if I was if I was constructed slightly differently this is where I write and where where you have this you know experience you know of having kind of you know raised a baby having had the baby murdered and then you're forced to excuse accused of murdering your own baby if I could kind of summarize it briefly in that way um you know and in the the the righteous accusers right and you just don't even know what to do with it and you actually have this experience of and I had it maybe three times where you actually have an actual experience of the life going out of your body when it's not a you actually can feel it I can I can remember one of them right in this exact moment I remember where I was in Salt Lake City when I was having you know that experience and you know and I said to myself then you know and and it kind of you know you know kind of self-justing way you know you know in that kind of rise self-mocking way you know I said oh this is when people think about it now I get it and I was like you know and I wasn't suicidal but I got it you know I like oh that that's what it feels like that you know and and that that that gives me at least a a window I don't presume more than a window right it gives me that you know a cloudy window right you know a you know a semi-opic window into the experience of pain that causes self-harm right but but it's a real experience right and you know I I have another close friend who is very committed to tattooing the process tattoo and the way she describes it the experience of her experience of of getting you know these kind of massive you know full-body tattoos right is a kind of sacred form of self-harm self-decorating you know self you know kind of demonstrating all together where there's that you know where you know she described it to me the kind of the intense pain actually of the process at the choosing of the pain right as a as a kind of transfiguration right and and you really can't understand the tattoo world without this according to at least three or four people that I know that are deep in that world I can I don't have direct experience and so and when it's listening that does wants to press delete on anything I'm saying is nonsense please feel free to do so but I'm I'm sharing the the first chance experiences as it's been related to me you know there there there there is this sense of we take power over our pain by self-inflicting it which is essentially what the self-flagulating monk is doing right although it's not it's not suicidal harm right it's not cutting but it's a form of religious cutting right who's you know I'm I'm graduating right that you know that that scene and and so so I I think there's enormous help there's enormous goodness in your description right which is that you know I'm I'm claiming a measure of power by being the inflictor of the flagulation but but I'm doing it right because I'm reaching for some level of power and some level of purification right now how do I move to to post-dragic right which was your inquiry so I want to be very you know tender and and fear some this and I don't want to speak in this is not my field not my professional field on one of my colleagues and you know beloved friend Lori Galcoran is one of the leading clinicians you know in these areas and in the country and we we we spent at least five years you know talking you know virtually daily we were we were talking not about any of her individual cases because you couldn't do that would be illegal but just about typologies of cases so I spend you know about five years very very deep in trying to understand this world you know in a devotional way and part of the conclusion we came to was that you can only get to the post-dragic this was exactly our inquiry you can only get to the post-dragic if you have a direct experience of being needed right if you have a direct experience that actually reality needs you there's some unique gift that you have to give to reality meaning you're called by a memory of your future in which you're needed now it's as long as you're focused on organizing and recovering the memories of the past and somehow reliving and re-experiencing them as important as that is and you're doing exposure to your in Gostalton you know expressive art therapy and these are all very important but as long as it's rooted in yesterday it's necessary but insufficient the move into the depth of the present right so you move from the past to the present is important sometimes necessary but insufficient but you actually can't seal without a dimension of unique self-recovery you have to recover the experience of being uniquely needed and without that you actually can't be at home in the universe I don't think you can go to the post-dragic without that and and part of the and I've thought about this a lot you know layman and with I mean these are these are the realms of agonies right but but part of the the explanatory explanatory function of the enormous recidivism right you know that that demarcates mental health which of course no one talks about because there is no oversight for therapists right there's no right how do you how do you evaluate whether that was effective or not effective therapy etc but part of the the ideology of the recidivism is that it's about reorganizing yesterday it simply doesn't work right and all of psychology turns to yesterday for good reason because you know Freud, Breuer etc they all realized oh yesterday's not just a spatial moment on a on a timeline right yesterday's a quality right and that quality is present and you can go back and find a liberating key in yesterday's that was a very very important understanding but then what happened is there was this enormous turning only to the past and a turning away right a turning away from the future right and as there was some turning kind of in Buddhist psychologists to the present and the trans-personal psychologists to the present there's very little turning to the future right and and it's critical you cannot become whole unless you access a memory of the future the member of the future has to have at its very poor a future in which you are needed something like that okay we're coming near the end let's see if we can do one last really quick question that might be useful to people listening to this something like okay assume there's a handful of young wise competent people out there who like the tripartite structure they really feel there's something important about pre-tragic tragic and post-tragic and they want to know what they can do to carry that understanding carry that inquiry forward what are the areas to explore in the future of the experiments that need to be done maybe Mark Gaffney guys tomorrow in a plane crash god forbid I haven't had anyone if you were if you were just giving one second I'm getting on a plane I'm getting on a plane tomorrow so let's have this for me have my thoughts all right Mark Gaffney dies in a boat accident tomorrow god forbid how about no no no no no no no no no no no I'm not gonna I want to kind of words matter so I want to kind of undo the dying let's say I died yesterday because because then then we're kind of so so let's let's let's say that that they want to go and engage this and we're all what's where can they pick up where how can they move this ball forward Mark it's a great question and I apologize for the introduction I just come from a lineage in which words matter so I want to I don't want to curse you yeah I I sure do appreciate that um so um it's a beautiful question my friend and I would say the first thing to do is to identify pre-tragic tragic and post-trashic in your individual life in your own most personal what I would call sacred autobiography and then I would say in every discipline there's a pre-tragic tragic and post-trashic and you know just simply begin to apply the construct everywhere you can because what it does is it softens something and invites something it creates possibility it creates a set of distinctions we can make that actually allows us to find our way we're not lost in kind of these false antitimies between certainty and uncertainty between masculine and feminine you know between you know autonomy and communion no no we actually have this and so there's pre-tragic you know level one tragic level two post-trashic and it it's one of those just clarifying prisms that allows us to find our way and to map right together a new story of value we can actually find a place for everything and and I would just encourage everyone to to engage it to write about it right to speak about it to you know and to let's unpack this together