 And I think it's recording now, although we didn't hear the usual female voice that says that it's recording, but welcome, Mass. Hey, Mark. Thank you. It's great to have this conversation about you because while we share the same deep interest for what we could call generically philosophical health, right? How do people get a more coherent and more, you know, have a better sense of the possible and sense of purpose through philosophizing. You have this particular attachment to something that I've always felt important, although I'm not like your specialist, which is mythos, the myth in all its aspects. Am I right in saying that you see life as an epic? You could say so, perhaps, yeah. I think so, and I think I've come to the conclusion that I cannot not think mythically to some extent. And it has been a both a passion and a frustration actually for many years that I had these or so it would seem these two poles that I tried to navigate in between. It would be logos and mythos or philosophy and mythology and they never seem to be quite the same. Sometimes they approach each other, sometimes they're way apart and I had trouble to separate them from each other until I found out that maybe that wasn't my project. Maybe the project was living in this pole voltage space between mythos and logos. Right. Yeah, and that's interesting because very often people think that embracing a purpose in life is something that you choose. You go to the supermarket and you say, okay, oh, this is cool. Yeah, the environment, it's trending. But no, it's something that is calling you. It's deeply intertwined with your own person or perhaps I would you say soul? Perhaps yes. And it's interesting like last year, about a year ago now we had a conference on philosophical practice in Copenhagen. And a professor from Denmark, he was actually one of the founders of the Danish Society for Philosophical Practice actually. It was in a small pause. He said, it's interesting that you have thrown yourself upon this mythophilosophical thing. And I said, I actually feel it's like the other way around that it's thrown itself upon me. So I definitely get what you're saying. It's not necessarily something that we choose. It's something that is there for us and we try to discover. Right. At the same time, there is something very interesting at metal level in what we are saying now, which is the following. We all have our moment where we get in touch with the epic or mythic dimension of life, right? For example, I often have that when I go to a forest in Sweden. For me, those trees are whispering beautiful tales and grandiose narratives. And yet not all of us embrace that worldview fully. And that's the case for all types of worldview. So I think there are two things here. One is the intellectual curiosity, poetic curiosity that one might have for different worldviews, right? And the other is the embracing of a concept. So what makes it important to embrace one worldview? And I understood that you didn't really choose it, but you could choose to be a dilettante rather than have that as your perspective, right? Yes. So what makes it important? So I think it's sometimes when you talk about philosophical practice or lived philosophy, living philosophy, it's something that takes off with lived experience. And to me, it's important because it seems to be something that I cannot get rid of. So it seems to be part of me. So that could be one explanation or one answer as to why it's important. But I think I've found that this thing over the years and I think maybe it has to do with with us being something that comes or something that speaks both from and with and to a sort of pre-reflective being in the world. Not that we have to be non-reflective at all, but in order to reflect, you have to have something to reflect upon. And that is something that always precedes the reflection process or the reflecting process. And I think Riesau addresses this pre-reflective cogito or what you call it of being in the world and with the world and being the world also. I think that could be like a sensitive answer, perhaps. Right. And yet it's not the only approach that emphasizes the fact that, of course, being philosophically healthy is not just being a logical machine. For example, if we think of Spinoza, the philosopher, he had this idea that joy is the core emotion that is the source of all other emotions. And this is very embodied, right? Because we could say, well, what's the essence of a healthy body? Probably joy, right? The joy of being alive. Phenomenology emphasizes also embodiment as pre-reflective. And there are other approaches. I mean, I myself, through Creolectics, I emphasize the myth in a way of the Creole, this creative source of life that has been called many ways in different creation narratives. And which is something that, you know, like the key in Oriental traditions or Tao, it's felt, right? It's an energy that you feel. And then you might elaborate upon. So I would say that I understand your answer, but it's perhaps not enough, right? Okay, we have one element. But since it's common to other approaches, you would have to give more arguments to narrow the choice, right? Exactly. And you're right. There is definitely some commonalities with embodiment of theory of phenomenology and so on. And you could say that something like art or other things could as well address this pre-reflective being in the world. I think the thing about myth is that, so when we think about our own stories, our own like the epic of our lives, which can be like, they can be sometimes dull, they can be grand, they can be epic, they can be tragic. Even a comic tale sometimes. Myth is like the myth and narrative. It's where you, if you reflect your lived life in mythos, you anchor yourself in something that is way bigger than yourself. So for me it's also a way of trying to avoid like relapsing into some form of solid system, but definitely of connecting to something that was there way before me historically. And something that is maybe also there way before me existential. There's kind of like, this is not something I can prove. I don't have like evidence, but I had this maybe idea that myth is something that it precedes philosophy historically, but maybe also existential. It's something, it comes from a world that is like pre-reflective again. So I think, I think it's this thing that is, it anchors us on something in like asial narratives that are old, yet they are forever young. It's like when you look into like, if you look at like, at like myths, you have a lot of commonalities regarding symbols. One thing would be the symbol of the well, and you can find the well in like Arthurian legend, nor Babylonian sources, Norse itters, and so on. And that symbol always seems to be something connecting us to something that predates us, something that precedes us. It seems old, and yet something leaps out of there from way back when and seems forever young, which is very interesting for me. It's interesting about feeling alive, the joy, and that's what comes to me when I work with myths. It's the feeling of being alive and that it lives in you. And then again, this could just be me. This could just be my, you know, individual experience. I'm not sure I can say if this would be for everyone. But I think it is for many though. Right. I mean, history shows that you're not the first right so you're not, you can't be a cause of solipsism. I like your sort of Misona theme of the well, because it's in a way here I think the we see how you articulate myth and philosophy, right, because you have this story of course of the fountain of youth. If you if you see that philosophically, it's the capacity to see things as ciphers, right. Therefore, their capacity to to encompass new or refreshed meanings. This time, actually, I suppose that there is this dialectic in what you do that I suppose you're not telling people heavily, oh, this is the symbol for this this is right. It's it's there. I think there's more creativity in in that in the capacity for for things to whisper beyond themselves. Yes. Yes, one thing that I'm usually a bit like hesitant about is to narrow down symbols to some category to say that, oh, you have the well it's the symbol of this or that. That would be the way we treat like a concept relating to a thing. It's like the usual. A modern way of relating to semantic so you have, if you said, mass, can you turn up your volume of your microphone, then we're referring to something that I can instrumentally use. And it's, it's quite obvious that it's refers to this microphone and nothing else, whereas the simple is much more open. So, so again, perhaps we need to have like dictionary of symbols, but I'm kind of skeptical of them, precisely for the reason that you mentioned, right. Yes, and also because it's sort of participating the analytic view of the world, right. According to which the world is just a sort of a gigantic machine with power parts that could be defined. And, and so I think that one thing that we share in common is is a sympathy for the idea of process the idea of reality as a as a flow, which leads me to discussing something that is rather to me, I don't know if it's interesting for the others, but, you know, it's, it's the idea. So, I call creel with a so it's the real with a C this primal prime mover, which is basically a flow of infinite possibility right and and this is shared by many process philosophers like white head, Bergson or Delos. But in short, I was writing this novel many years ago in French, which was translated in English about the metaverse, and the characters that could access a dimension, which was not the digital dimension of course, which was rather the virus they were introducing to bring back people to authenticity. And in the beginning in the novel I call it the real real, right, very platonic. But I found that there was something wrong about that and in the way I felt it was something was really intuitive, right. It sounded a little bit like you're trying to start a car that doesn't start real real right. And then I remembered how Delos in his book about Nietzsche differentiates the active human from the reactive one, right, the important of action. And let me to just put a scenes in front of the real the sea of creation so it's it's actually a creel. It's not a reified it's not a thing, right. Real. So, later, I decided to take this seriously so he started as a narrative started in sort of a fiction text in sort of a contemporary myth or micro myth if you want and, and I decided to take it seriously. So, slowly, I philosophize it. Nevertheless, there are moments where my, you know, my mythical mind compares it with the with a grail. And actually the the sound is not so far right creel grail. And I would like to discuss that because you probably know more about this than me. But isn't isn't that a very good example of how the grail, which can be defining dictionaries as this cop and but in fact is a symbol for the for life for the capacity of life to constantly recreate infinitely regenerate. The grail is a very interesting topic and it's some. It definitely has this quality of something that is very hard to get a grip of. Like just if you look at like the different legends, it's hard to find it. But it's, it's also hard to conceive it seems to change also throughout the different stories. And it's related both to something that is kind of fleeting. So it was introduced in the Arthurian legends by by kai-chan the twa. So around 11, the end of the 11 hundreds. And he never finished his story about Percival, the original grail night. He died before he could finish it. And that actually resulted in a very interesting story where you didn't get all the there's a lot of like openings and open ended answers or questions. And the grail is something that appears at a castle of the so-called Fisher King. And Percival kept comes in there and he sits with the Lord as a castle. And then like in this grail, great hall, lighted with candles you have. So first you have some, I think it's some young boys. They come in carrying some candles. I'm not quite sure just from my memory. It tricks me now. I think that's what comes first is the candles that are carried through the room. There's also a spear that drips plot. Like it comes out of the end of the spear, the spearhead. And it's carried past them and then disappears. And then it comes to this dish. So written as the grail is like a dish. And it's carried like when you can almost sense it when you read it like it comes through it like in slow motion. And he watches it as it passes them. So it comes from out one open door, it closes, passes by them. It goes into another room and the door closes. And there is one thing he's desperate to ask. Whom does it serve? Whom does this grail serve? But he doesn't. But he should have. We learn that later on. He should have asked that question. The King, the Fisher King, who is actually mostly wounded, would have been healed. He would have been able to reign his country in a good way. Instead, now everything falls apart because he didn't ask the question. So there you have also the philosophical aspect. But this thing, this fleeting thing that goes into the other room. And then the next morning he goes to bed. Ah, well, I'm going to ask everybody when I wake up, what was it? What was that grail? And then they're all gone. And there was no one to ask. So he misses the chyrus. Yeah, he didn't grab it by the hair, right? Exactly. No, that's a beautiful story. At the same time, when I hear you, I was thinking, well, is it philosophical to ask a question that you've been asked to ask? That's interesting. And he actually doesn't know that he needs to ask it. He only finds out later. OK. It actually starts out with him being a very young boy who is definitely supposed to not be a knight because his mother is afraid of that because I think he lost some relatives during knighthood. And he sees some knighthoods and he doesn't know what they are. I think they are demons at first. And then, oh, you're angels. Oh, you're God. And these knights want to ask him something and he just can't listen to what they're saying. He keeps asking questions, but he's not listening. And then later on, he starts listening, but he stops asking. It's very interesting. There is very interesting development. And then all of a sudden, the author dies. He doesn't complete the story. And you have the whole European knighthood watching like, what? This can't be the ending. And then within like 25 years, you have like hundreds of continuations and so on. And that's interesting because you can almost witness historically this myth of philosophical process, philosophical like explosion of poesies, of creative power that you see in this, in the great legend. Right. Yeah. And we could talk about the importance of deep listening and philosophical help. But here I want to genuinely point another aspect which you was in your narrative. There is so the womb does it serve. This is very interesting because if you, if you accept at least for, for a while, my analogy with, between the creel and the grail. And so the idea that, that the universe is continuous creation. Right. We can play in many myths. Okay. And in fact, very often I'm not the first one to ask this question is like, well, if the core of the universe is this creative explosion in all directions, whom does it serve? Right. It seems to be totally random and even Darwin say, well, it's sort of you get to be lucky sometimes. But another people more serious, like the alchemists, for example, they feel or even more new age versions of it today. They feel, well, there must be a way to dialogue with this creative flow such that it can help us. Yes. So that question. I think this is how I interpreted. I don't know what you would like to say about that. Yeah. I think there's so much to say about this. It's like, you know, this complex of, complex of symbols and ideas. And I definitely see a parallel with the, with the crealis as, as you can see with it. And it's interesting. You have this explosion of creative force or power in all directions, which of course makes it difficult to get an answer to whom does it serve, or in which direction does it go? And can we really know that? So one angle from which we could look at it would be to say, maybe the question is the interesting part and not the answer. Not that the answer is relevant, but that might be something that is always like moving further into horizons. You get something, you get closer to something, but not quite there. And it's really an interesting, if you take like the Grail Lake, and so you have Crescent Detroit, late 11th century. And then you have like a big compilation by a British knight, Sir Thomas Mallory, in the end of the 14th century, the Mort d'Attur, he's actually writing it in English, but he's giving it like a French title, Death of Arthur. And there you have two knights who are also brothers. They're sleeping and they're dreaming that because they are not worthy, they will never attain the Grail. Whereupon they both wake up and they look at each other and then they say, go we seek that we shall not find. That is, let us go and search for the thing that we shall not find. So they know they're going to find it, but they're still going to search for it, which I think is just beautiful. And there is something there. And even like a sort of also a rebel, that you don't try to grab it, but you keep a sort of distance that actually makes you come closer to reality about the Grail. And again, a typical trope relating to the Grail, I think especially it's the German knight, Wolfgang von Ischenbach, who writes that the Grail cannot be fought for. You can win it by fighting. And you can choose it or choose to find it. It chooses you if you are worth it, which I think is various. And then the question is, how do you become worthy? So there is something active that you are co-creating, but maybe not the way we usually think about ourselves. So I go about it. I'm this individual who does this. Maybe it's the process of reality doing things. And I'm like an actor, but I'm not the movie. I'm not sure if I'm sidetracking here, but you've got to carry it away. No, but that's, I mean, in a way, it's almost the definition of purpose, right? Let us search for this only this that we cannot find. Because if we can, if we can find, then it's not absolute. Yeah, exactly. I wanted to digress a bit to a Greek mythology. Yes. But I think there is another important bridge between philosophy and myth and even philosophical health. So in the sense that the Greek concept of Theoria and Theosis or Apotheosis. So that's another thing that I'm interested in is this idea that the Greeks had before the Greek Orthodox, the Christian Orthodox, that it was possible through in our lives to become like God, to become divine, right? Yes. And that was, it's actually came, I mean, perhaps previously it had other cultural origins, but the philosophers were from Plato and Plotinus. And so then the Greek Orthodox called it Theosis and this idea that, well, we don't have to wait for a realm beyond death to achieve divine perfection. And so how does that resonate in the myth? And I think, isn't this what the quest for the Grail also encompasses it, right? It's not, as is sometimes defined, a tale of greed, right? But rather a tale of trying to get as closer as possible to the divine while being embodied. And I think that's why it becomes later connected with Jesus Christ, because Jesus Christ is this idea of a God, a human made God, right? Yes. Or God made human, whatever you want to take it. So how does that relate to Greek mythology or to, what were in other ways, I mean, you can react on what I just said, but like another question in that is the relationship for the Asian grids between mythology and philosophy. Yeah, so it's definitely true that I think actually, if you look like at Greek Orthodoxy and then there is this Epithosis and Theosis concept, there is something kind of like that, I believe in Catholicism. But I guess it's more pronounced in Orthodoxy, the little that I know about it though. But it's true that you have a lot of like ancient Neoplasmism and so on, like spilling over into Orthodoxy and also of course early Catholicism. And if you look at like Neoplasmism, then today, when we think back on Greek philosophy, we tend to think, and also I did that when I had my, during my campus years, I thought of Aristotle and Plato and Plotinus and so on as people had like a theory in a more like modern sense about the world. And then you can go about and look at their writings and see if they contradict themselves and so on. Maybe that's not an entirely justified reading of them. I think it was Pierre Hadoe, so the historian of philosophy did quite deeply into this question and said that, well, that wasn't really what philosophy was like in the world. It was mostly a practice then accompanied by a theory that was kind of like a support, but not something that was conceived as something that was to be, to stand on its own, which is often how we treat it, which is quite interesting. And if you look at them, they live kind of like in these philosophical communities that were actually kind of like the model for the later monasteries, Christian monasteries where they had spiritual exercises, like meditations and so on, philosophical walking talks and whatnot. And so it is something that had to do with the transformation of humans in this life. But also, of course, maybe preparing for a death that of course famously is a definition from the phyto by Socrates. He defines philosophy as militant tannertale as preparing for death or death contemplation upon death or death's meditation, something like that. And then again, you could ask, so what is death? If like the deepest level of reality is like this flux, then that means that something is created and disappears all the time. So there's death all the time. So if we are transformed, we kind of die and are reborn. So in that way, I definitely see that as something like a... That's why I think of that. I came up with this idea that maybe this working in the cross group between Mithas and Lokas is kind of like a... Or could be maybe like a transformative Talmud turkey. So like where we are brought back to the wonder that is the world which transforms us. And there, of course, speaking of Greek philosophy and mythology. So again, both historically and maybe also existentially there is actually a link between philosophy and mythology that is mentioned both by Plato and Aristotle. So famously, and now you mentioned the Whitehead earlier on, he has a famous saying from, I think it's loads of thought where he says and he's elaborating on Plato and Aristotle here where he says, philosophy begins in wonder. And at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains. There's something like the Grail remains untouched and what he's alluding to is, I guess, mostly it's the dialogue to Aitutus but Plato where they try to get to this idea what is knowledge and how do we know that we have and the metaphysics of Aristotle where they both claim that the philosophy and not like a philosophy but the act of philosophizing begins in wonder or the state of wonder which in Greek is Thomasine. And that concept has a great history in the Homeric literature. So with the Eliot, the Odyssey and all the Homeric hymns so the hymns to Apollo, Dionysus and Demetra and so on. And it usually has to do with the encounter of humans with the other. It could be the divine, often times it's the divine which is often like veiled or in disguise so we tend to not see it. It can be the recognition of someone that we know but have forgotten or haven't seen for a long time like Odysseus returning to Ithaca and being recognized because he has like a full I think it's a small scar on his ankle and he's getting recognized and it's described as a megatoma and megasema that means a great symbol, a great wonder. So you have this combination actually you have this idea of Thomasine and the trauma of wonder as something that connects philosophy and mythology and again in the Titus so Plato always, it structures actually of course in the dialogue he says to this young fellow that he is dialoguing with Titus after whom the dialogue is named and he tries to calm him down a bit because he's getting frustrated because now he thinks they've found the definition of knowledge and then struggles that chairs at all the policies and he says well I'm not really sure that holds that's watertight either and then Titus says well we are like in Eporea again so in this bewilderment and we're just back to Thomasine and now I don't know where we are and then Socrates says well you shouldn't be so sad about that because that's where philosophy begins and then he says and that's why probably that the guy who said that that Thomas had Iris as a daughter wasn't far off and then he goes back to the poet Hesiod who famously wrote the Theogon, the Genesis of the Gods where Thomas is the god actually it's a god of the sea his name is derived from Thomas meaning wonder and he has one daughter which is Iris and that's speaking of like the bridge that you mentioned there's a rainbow bridge between heaven and earth and he's also the father of the harpids which are fearsome female bird-like demons that cherish a lot of your reality interesting that it's a god of the sea right here we have the biggest flaw I'm going to sort of because we got a lot of wonderful information here I just want a bit of comic relief but about that idea of wonder I'm just going to share a very short video with you just had a, just kind of weird just had that little feeling kind of funny little that kind of feeling that you know, not deja vu, this is this is the strange feeling that somehow none of this has ever happened before and then it's gone, you know Right, so that was George Collins here but it's interesting because it comes back this idea of wonder for Descartes the core emotion was admiration and indeed this capacity to to see the sublime not only when it manifests of course as something radically other but in what is also familiar and of course the myth that's why some people might find it difficult to transcribe into our everyday life because the myth often talks about the other and they're a non-familiar guy it's the monster, the dragon what have you and then with philosophy perhaps sometimes philosophy is considered sobering but in fact they're even more intoxicated because they want to get this glass of water and be like oh my god this is this is probably out of the expected so people might wonder then how do we practice how does myth and I like your idea by the way of the constant dialectic between the analysis and the symbol or the metaphor and in a way that was practiced by all religious schools I mean the scholastics medieval scholastics or there are some hinduist texts that are extremely analytic but people might wonder okay how can it help me with my dilemma that for example I was talking with a councilor not so long ago and she started as an entrepreneur to help people but she is horrified by the idea of having to advertise because it's not beautiful okay how could myth help her in particular or all the people who feel that they have very domestic dilemmas yeah and I think so you're onto something how does this build into practice in our everyday lives and also since myth seems to be something quite out there you need extraordinary instances and here we are with our ordinary lives how do those two things relate to each other and I think actually maybe the art of it is that perhaps the ordinary as we think that is meeting up with my wife and she telling me something about her day at work might seem quite ordinary but is it really, is it really am I listening to what she's really saying she may be talking about some frustration something that was interesting exciting but one thing is what she's saying what does it mean and where does it come from so what speaks through her that is interesting and I think if you start to listen to reality in that way then you start to see the mythical part of it but if you have to be very specific or practical then what I have been doing for the past couple of years is I have conducted a couple of series of myth or philosophical practical sessions for smaller groups and we've done so online together with a partner of mine and what we do they usually take two hours in total and we'll have like a concept of the day so it could be something like trust or friendship but it could be this year it's been the four cardinal virtues so you know this prudence, fortitude and so on and what we do is we start with a myth so we pick a mythical narrative or maybe a couple of them and then we dive into it usually just on part of it we read through it and we look for in part things that seem to have to do with the concept that we're discussing so one thing would be if we say like friendship so in relation to that we use the old Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh it was like a king, a very bad king at least at first who then met some beastly being from out in the wild who is supposed to be his opponent and then becomes his friend and then we go very slowly through it so we storytell it and then we take throughout and we look for examples of friendship and like attack on this and so on but also we look for things that just seems to to get into our minds something that seems important even though we might not know why so there might be some thing in the background that seems interesting and then what we do next is we try to relate how we if there's something here we can see or find or have experienced in our own lives we take a small break then with one hour through we go into the second part and we go at it in a more philosophical way so now we talk concepts so what is friendship, what does it mean what is the etymology of the word, what is the opposite of what would be famous occasions of friendship what can be difficulties of friendship and so on so in that way you actually you start with something that is with the myth and the symbolic narrative language and then you make it impact you not just as an individual but as a small group and you find out how is this important so I'm mentioning this because sometimes it's hard to say like in theory how do we do it but when you do it in practice then you start to see how it works and I think like in my own individuals I've probably been doing this for years but it is something else doing it with other people yeah Right indeed the singular right and this is in a way what the quest is about the singularity not in the transhumanist sense but in the sense of uniqueness and yet because the opposites are always there together when we find that uniqueness of who we are or the other person is then we realize the oneness that we are all speaking you said about the conversation with the wife what is speaking through her the clamor of the one and the multiple because I think that's the original myth the dance of the one and the multiple and that dance being generated by the fact that they are actually the same because pure multiplicity has to one point it's one there are no two pure multiplicities and so there is inner tension from the multiple towards the one and at the same time the one is constituted by that diversity and therefore aspires to it and that is I think the original myth which therefore I think it's very philosophical in a way so we could reverse provocatively what you said before myth there is philosophy through that myth of the one and the multiple and then it can take many forms but I agree with you that what is beautiful in the process of helping people self innovate is whether it's through philosophical counseling or through myth of philosophy which is very close to a different perspective but I think what we're trying to to allow them is not to be an object right? Yes and you were talking about the everyday life and I was looking at my glass and I was just imagining a new myth that exists but I was seeing this glass and then this box for glasses and I was saying we usually see objects as inert neutral without emotions but in fact it could be that they are suffering so much beyond everything that we could imagine because they are made, they are interrupted in what to use a technical term being a thing and we in our lives, capitalists sometimes very normative rigid bureaucratic lives we're constantly there is constantly an attempt to make us things and we do it to ourselves too and we suffer because it's like being petrified there's a lot of myth of petrification so what the metaphor and what I think also the connection with the creative for all this tries to reconnect us with this holy grail which is simply the fact that we are becoming yes I think you definitely onto something there and there is something about this process of philosophical dialogue that kind of frees up something that feels like it's trapped or imprisoned or something like that and it's some so there is this interesting thing about I think it was Martin Buber, the Austrian Jewish philosopher who talked about the difference from either like other phenomena could be people, could be things as that or as thou and what he says is that well yeah you might not care about that because so I can approach something as that or as a thou, what's different is that to me well he says the I that approaches something as a thou but the same I or the same type of I that approaches something as a that so when we objectify things or other people we actually do it to ourselves in the process so this imprisoning of objects and people like in rigid fossil petrified objects is also an imprisonment of ourselves and when we start this philosophical dialogue maybe at least it doesn't have to make use of myth I just think it's because I can't let the myth be or it won't leave me alone when we use them and I think you're definitely right it's kind of like a dialectical process of going back and forth between the mythos and the locus part then you get this at the same time you get more obscurity but in a good way and more clarity so obscurity in a way not where you get a concept that is just merged together you can't find out if it's salt or pepper and so on but you get back to this creative flow where and I think if I remember correctly the word rhythm refers back to something like the wave in Greek so rhythm and the wave is something different than the beat so it starts here and it stops here you have this beat and you have this beat you could look at waves the same way like two waves so there are two waves but where do they separate you can't say so you get this connectedness or this flow feeling which would be maybe obscurity a very analytical philosophical way of looking at things at the same time you get this clarity as to what is actually going on with me as a person what happens if I approach the world and the people around me in a different way that I'm used to it actually doesn't just do something for them it does something for me and then famously just one more simple you mentioned this thing about things being petrified or entrapped and you also mentioned alchemy at one point and then going back to the Grail so a Wolfram Foundation by the German Knight of the 1200s I already mentioned so he makes his own he does it all called Parsifal, German much more detailed than the original story he does something to it, he does something to the Grail then instead of a dish he makes it into a stone actually called lapsid exilis, it sounds like Latin but it isn't which you probably knew and I think that was definitely something he did on purpose so you can there's like multiple layers of ways you could interpret that name, maybe something like a stone falling from heaven or something like that but the interesting thing is the way he describes this grail stone is that it is where all the knights get their food all the beverages so it's kind of like it is something that generates life it is also said that the grail or the grail stone is that power by which the phoenix periodically flames and envies us again and if you look closely at his concept of this grail stone it seems very close to the philosophical stone of alchemy which is actually not a stone but a liquid or a powder substance so you have the grail which means a dish or a cup that's not a dish but a stone that possibly alludes to something that's not a stone but something fluid and then you break to the grail and it's interesting here that you have this generative and regenerative force in the grail which is very important and so what I hear also is something that I might have shared with you before the idea that of course we're not advocating a renunciation of the analytic form of thinking I think the tale of Hansel and Gretel are very interesting to show that there are three forms of intelligence I shared an article I wrote about that but for those who are listening very shortly we can say that well let's assume that everybody knows the story or otherwise you can read it first Hansel and Gretel and in the first when the parents abandoned them first they come up with this idea of leaving white stones pebbles behind them such that they can go back home and that's analytic thinking you separate the world into parts and each part you know, these two parts you know and the thing is that they go back home they don't solve their problem at all because the parents are still poor and in the mess and a little bit evil so they get abandoned again so analytic thinking only solves locally the problem but not realistically and so then they are abandoned again they couldn't get the stone so they get bread crumbs we were talking about food interestingly and of course here we are in dialectic intelligence because for them those bread crumbs were little stones but for the birds it's food and the wind and dialectic fight for meaning and it's by eating the bread crumbs so they can't come back home which sort of saves them and then they embrace instead of you know going trying to go back home they say okay let's explore the forest and then I think they enter into Creoleactic Intelligence which is let's face the sublime which scares us but at the same time there is a possibility there when other possibilities have been tried and then of course they find the house of abundance with the oven in the middle so that's the creole that's the oven from which every form of life originates and of course all that abundance and richness but there is a witch the last obstacle but that witch is only their fear it's only their fear of well that very infinite power that might also consume them and by throwing the the witch into the oven and basically they throw their fear into the oven then they can really get back home and then they solve their problem because they I think they bring gold or whatever I don't know the exact detail but and so I think this balance between analytic dialectic and creoleactic thinking is a key that today that's why I like your approach because today we are heavily disbalanced after 200 years of heavy emphasis or more than 200 on analytic intelligence which we shouldn't throw away completely of course it's very useful but these three forms of intelligence they take another coloration they take if they are combined perhaps to conclude and I will let you conclude I don't want to conclude myself but I think that there is a there is a possibility for people to hear in the myth the possibility for themselves to interpret their own life with more courage going back to epic that's the first word I used and I want to finish with that at least with me is that we gain so much from letting our fear aside at least a bit and seeing the epic the grandiose dimension of life which is not always reassuring but at the end of the day there is a reward for the responsibility of embracing the sublime yes yes I definitely follow that and also yes I would definitely not suggest I don't think it's possible either that we like regress to a bronze age homeric type of approaching the world I don't think that's possible because we are approaching like the homeric literature from our own like within our own logic circle but it is something not going back in that way but it is something like going underneath existence through myth and then at the same time like elevating ourselves above and having this view from above that abstraction allows us to have an abstraction it could be something and has often been something that is kind of like leaves the world and then it does the world it tends to destroy the world if we abstract ourselves from it become like strange from it and we act upon a world and ourselves and our life is something that is like an object to be used I think like reintegrating the more abstract way of thinking or locus in with us at least to me is perhaps the way to go at least for me I see a lot of value in that and this just pauses our conversation and doesn't end it I think I really want to follow what you do and we might collaborate I think you're more into collective workshops so we might one day discuss something thank you very much I am going to pause the recording now