E42| Awakening The World Teacher, with Nora Bateson & John Vervaeke

How can we gather together in learning? What does it mean to be authentic? How can we awaken into deeper understanding, together?

What if there are ways of being with each other— practices we can enact with our loved ones, our neighbours, and those in the marketplace—that could help us cultivate the capacity to come into closer contact with what’s worth caring about, as we reveal the landscape of what is?

This dialogue doesn’t claim to answer these questions with anything approximating definitiveness. But I think it moves in the right direction. And perhaps there is one knot undone: what if reality isn’t about completeness—the final answer— but engaging more fully in a mutual process of loving transformation?

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Conversation waypoints

1. Opening prompt – The relationship between authentic expression, a context of care, growth, and trauma.
2. What do we mean by authenticity, what do we mean by dialogue?
3. The paradox of the self – what is truly mine? How can we tell the difference?
4. If I am shaped and formed by the structures I live within, who am I when those structures are gone?
5. Questioning the relationship between authenticity and a true and stable cartesian subjectivity. Reference to Heidegger.
6. Cracks in relationships revealing resonance and dissonance in authenticity
7. Socrates as exemplary of inducing others to wonder in dialogue, which could enable the seeing of self as something that is aspired to rather than something that is already possessed.
8. Inducing the cracks that let wonder shine in, drawing us into deeper realisation of self and world. The socratic model of self is aspirational. It’s not something you achieve in completion. It’s realised on an ongoing basis through a mutual process of transformation.
9. What can we learn from Socrates in this time. What can we learn about modes of dialogues which help us connect more deeply with what we need to in this time.
10. Warm data labs – an accelerated interdependency insight maker.
11. Learning more about this process. Convergence between Nora’s practice and John’s exploration of various psychotechnologies, informed by cognitive science.
12. Mutual learning moments and abduction
13. How do we show up to these moments of learning? What are the modes of orientation, these phenomenological dispositions we can utilise to respond to the moment upon us?
14. Understanding trauma through a transcontextual lens.
15. “How do we begin to create the conditions for people to integrate together into a way of seeing and responding to this time?” – Nora
16. The importance of going off script, and how to do it
17. Scripts have a set of signalling and receiving possibilities in relationships. In other relationships you can still signal, but they can become duds. This is relevant to the question about authenticity.
18. The finesse of going off script
19. What could constitute a covenant to go off-script?
20. The importance of commitment and rigour.
21. You can’t just do complexity intellectually. It has to be worked through with stories and music and movement and more.
22. The importance of virtue and its cultivation. Wisdom as a meta-virtue.

John Vervaeke PhD is an award-winning lecturer at the University of Toronto in the departments of psychology, cognitive science and Buddhist psychology. He has published articles on relevance realization, general intelligence, mindfulness, metaphor, and wisdom. His abiding passion is to address the meaning crisis that besets western culture.

John’s remarkable and deeply educational YouTube series ‘Awakening From The Meaning Crisis’ can be found here.
https://www.youtu.be/54l8_ewcOlY 

Nora Bateson is an award-winning filmmaker, writer and educator, as well as President of the International Bateson Institute, based in Sweden. Her work asks the question, “How we can improve our perception of the complexity we live within, so we may improve our interaction with the world?” An international lecturer, researcher and writer, Nora wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary, An Ecology of Mind, a portrait of her father, Gregory Bateson. Her work brings the fields of biology, cognition, art, anthropology, psychology, and information technology together into a study of the patterns in ecology of living systems. Her book, Small Arcs of Larger Circles, is a revolutionary personal approach to the study of systems and complexity.

Learn more about Nora, the International Bateson Institute, and Warm Data Labs @ https://batesoninstitute.org/

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