Description
Jonathan takes us on the shared experience journey.
Web links:
The Virtue of Shared Experience | Issue 118 | Philosophy Now
Remerciements à/many thanks to:
Find me / trouvez-moi:
Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.
Transcription
From Montreal, de Montréal, introducing people, je vous présente des gens, met on a, rencontré sur un, dance floor, pour parler de, to talk about, dance. Okay, so this is episode 5 and today I'm talking with someone who is very special to me. He's my fifth guest, but really I was thinking about it this morning, actually, and I was thinking about the fact that before we actually met or that time where my brain kind of registered his presence on the dance floor, it's not the right timing. He should have been at the very beginning of this list because I think we met much earlier on. I think it was in 2019 that we met, that summer dancing. But I think that that summer in 2019, we didn't have conversations. We just like nodded heads or, you know, said hi to each other from far.
Two ships passing in the daytime.
I think that was it. So we're talking with Jonathan. So thank you for being here and doing this with me today.
It's been my pleasure. I wouldn't be anywhere else. Absolutely.
And honestly, this whole project is about dance. And I think that you're one of the human beings on this planet with whom I've had the most interesting conversations about dance, like throughout the years that we've known each other now and that we've communicated with each other. I think that you've always had a lot of... things and impressions and feelings about what dance brings to you and what dance is to you. So I'm very honored to have this conversation with you. I think it's a very precious opportunity.
Your listeners need to know who it is that I'm being asked to speak with. And I would say the reflection back is almost the same and that to those listening um um that's the way I remember Lu is a with what you call a beacon you don't actually necessarily have to speak to you it's just a signal you know so i i i regard Lu and that's you Lu so i don't know who i'm speaking to here but there really are um what i call presences that we don't necessarily speak with but um feel and communicate with under the surface you know and so so the actual verbal connection didn't happen till later
Yeah but we danced together and we we saw each other we recognized each other for our love for dance i think because that's what we do
And i think it's fair enough to say that a tiger knows its stripes you know and you can see a stripe from a far away no and and i think that's also the the beautiful value that happens where there's unspoken truths
It's beautiful so okay we're episode five so if people have been listening so far or if this is your first time listening to an episode the way we do things in this uh podcast project is that I have questions for my guests and I don't know the question that I took out of the hat because they're all in a hat and so we're going to read it together now if you're okay with that Jonathan
Ready.
But honestly I knew that with you question or no, we would go really far and have a beautiful conversation so it already started. Okay, so let's read the question officially.
Okay.
So here it is. What do you take away from the dance floor experience with you after a session?
That's it. So what do I take from the dance floor after a session?
Yeah.
Okay, well, you know, that's like writing a book right there. So let's begin. It's interesting because there's several stages to an event. There's the anticipatory, the anticipation and the anxiety and the excitement. Then there's the actual curtain raising. The lights are on. We're now in it. No turning back. Then there really is such a thing as the ending. And what you want to happen at the end is, in the best case scenario, is to have a witness with you to do a debriefing.
Yes, I totally agree.
And it's also totally okay to go home alone as well.
Yes, it is.
So 50-50, go home alone, filled with whatever's just happened. But a debriefing with someone who was there is the touchstone that really sows it up because you are actually suspending your reality for a few hours. And it's helpful to have someone give you the right frame to confirm that what you did witness is true, you know?
That what you witnessed was real and what you perceive was on the same wavelength. as someone else who was there, right?
It's kind of like you're both flying through the air. I can't talk to you until we both come down. And we land the jump. Having done that, to be able to, I guess the word is exchange with someone else, the shared experience is the ultimate goal. And so there it is. So I've introduced the term, which I think is where I started my intellectual investigation into why this thing matters so much to me. And when I first entered the dance scene as a teenager, early 20s, in my early 20s is the time when we were gaining our identity and trying to figure out our place in the world. And one of the things I noticed that was an intellectual snobbery to people who are caught up in youth culture entertainment amusement like watching football or dance and as a youngster I noticed there's an intellectual divide of you know I would say judgment towards that and what excited me when i first started reading literature around the same time was that there are intellectuals at the highest level of emotional I guess we might call high-functioning emotional adults discussing this phenomenon, which we call dance or we call amusing ourselves, self-amusement.
Entertaining ourselves, yes.
It's our responsibility to enjoy ourselves. It's not just turning on a television set and having a script stimulate us. There's a responsibility on our side to, I guess the word is, bring something to the table. You know, it's not just a bunch of people staring at the screen or what have you.
Yeah, we're not passive. Like, we're in this, we're getting, we're receiving and we're also giving back, right?
Well, there you go. And what I wanted to say is that, well, there is already a literature out there that describes this and explains it to us. And so that's where I learned for the first time. the importance of shared experience and that as I was growing up and people were talking about their identities and say a political persuasion or let's just talk about rights issues and the less fortunate and and the kind of conversation that goes on where we want to help someone over there or we don't have enough compassion for those people over there. This whole conversation about caring about strangers or caring about another clan or a tribe that we don't have anything to do with and why just caring about it doesn't solve the issue for example let's just say there's an oppressed people in our society and we're having a conversation about helping them or not helping them because we do not want to help them one of the things you notice is the line of compassion or the line of wanting to do something can only occur if you've had shared experience, and that's bigotry and closed-mindedness is very easy to develop if you don't have any shared experience with, let's just say, an ice fisherman. So why would I care about an ice fisherman if I've never even spent time with them? And so I was frosily telling anyone who would listen, look, you're doing it wrong. You're trying to build a shoe and put it on a foot you haven't seen. What you need is to bring the feet to where you are so we can see what shoes we've got. And the way to bring shared experience across tribes and across clans to people who don't even know each other or even can speak a common verbal language is through the fundamentals of food, which... feeds the need and has a cultural distinction, and dance, which is universal and immediately accessible to participate in without translation or without any understudy. You just throw yourself in the ocean. And it also shows us how accepting people are to the other. For example, certain languages are difficult to learn because the speakers of it don't have any patience for teaching you you know where some of them are easier to learn because they love that you want to learn this language of ours for example I've been told it's quite easy to pick up Mandarin if you move to China you know you catch street Mandarin within a month because they love that you like to to learn it but if you go to Poland they don't have patience to teach you Polish they're just going to switch to English or French. Here we have no shared experience happening between Polish people because they just don't want to bother. And a lot of shared experience between, say, Asian people are so happy that you want to learn my language that suddenly we have what we call a compassionate link. OK, fair enough. We don't have time for that. Let's have a drumbeat and let's start dancing. And I have never been in any more diverse concentration of human density than A, at a football match and B on a dance floor. Now, the problem with a football match is there's too much what we call adversarial binary competition to occur for that to be a safe place to explore the shared experience unless you're supporting the same team. Now, I experienced that as a football fan, where to lose one's ego is to be transported by something outside of yourself that you don't have any control over in the analytical mind. So when your analytical mind is let go by something outside of yourself and you start jumping up and down uncontrollably, hugging a stranger, black, white, you know, anything, but you're hugging this stranger, the impulse that just happened on the pitch, this is you losing your ego, this is shared experience, so that the next day when someone's saying something, let's just say detrimental to the kind of person you hugged yesterday anonymously, you have first-hand experience of their fundamental human needs you know or if you've gone to Nairobi and had a kenyan dinner with a bunch of people from Nairobi well you know what it's like for them to be hungry and sniff and laugh and cry and and you've had this shared experience that now extends into your own I guess hopefulness that others can also see that and so as a as a mechanism that people are searching the world to try and what we want to do to make the world a better place, and I'm not the first person to say this, by the way, this is a lift from literature. And Carl Jung and Herman Hesse love talking about music the most. And so, excuse me if it sounds like I've been stuck in their heads too long, but we have a magic rectangle. We have a magic rectangle that has the answer to all our prayers right there. And it's free. And it's waiting for us and as you and I've discussed, Lu, this thing about dancing, we both like exercise and we both know that exercise brings us what you might call a bodily, I want to use the word high, you know, there's definitely an elevated mood swing that occurs during exercise, but there's also this thing as not wanting to be bothered to do exercise, whereas I know that if you and I dance in front of people standing still, they will start moving. Right?
Yes.
We haven't said, look, you guys are lazy, you need to get to work. We haven't said, hey, what do you do for your life? You know, what have you done today? We haven't called in any of that. And so we know that there are going to be people who move. And we also know as well, because we've been through it, that there's a reluctance as well and a resistance to do so. And that is an absolute phenomenon to those of us who love it. And... Seeing birds that don't fly is very strange to birds who do fly. And that's why they're called chickens or whatever. But we know they can. When you're asking me, what do I take away from the dance floor?
Yes.
I'm being honest to you, okay?
It's the shared experience.
Are you ready? My favorite thing when I go home. I'm sure my voice has changed over the course of this. I'm sure I'm a different tone than when I started.
You're OK, your voice is...
That guy I was at the beginning. One of my favorite things is, and it has to happen, and that's what's the beautiful thing about it, it doesn't happen every time. It's similar to surfing. A surfer has a philosophy of going to the beach without expectation, and patience to wait for the wave that might come and the wisdom to say it didn't happen today and then they go home because they're surfers they understand the magic rhythm of waves coming to the shore from the movement of planets. Dancers are similar we know that a dance floor is like the day at the beach there's never two the same but the ones that we do love are you ready
Go!
When you, me, whoever we're there, and you see these people arrive who have never seen anything like it before in their lives. And you see in their eyes this absolute revelation of the way I felt when I was five years old on the steps of some place in San Francisco, watching my eldest sister dance with what I now know to be kind of similar people to what we... to hang out with today as adults. But the freestyling dancers were in a public park and I saw my sister join them and this instant access she had to them. And not only that, the instant access she brought me to them through the, we hadn't done anything, and now we were suddenly, we weren't just tourists that passed through. We were sharing the same soup. You know, we were dipping our feet in the same bathtub. And this to me was magic. And I didn't know, I didn't really know what it was, but I know that what my eyes looked like when I first saw it was a little boy seeing stars for the first time. And this isn't pop culture, iconic cult personality. This is the opposite, you know.
Yeah. And it's the inner child, you know, like it's that's it. And it's that's the eternity. That's the universal fact of joy itself.
Hey, well, that's the kind of meat of what I was going to say there. So there you go. So there it is. And again, that's what I think about at the end of the day. The review that I have in the debriefing is the people that we set fire to. And I'll just close by saying we all have a light inside of us, you know, and there's people who want to snuff it out because they don't think they have one. But it's our responsibility to ensure that they do. And that once they do, well, then now we have a shared experience.
You're such a poet in everything you say. And honestly, coming back to the very beginning of this conversation, it's such an honor. I'm so happy that everything just unfold as it just did, because it's absolutely perfect.
I have a bunch of notes. None of it's been mentioned. So who cares?
Who cares about notes? You've been living dance for all your life.
It's some philoophing boredom...
Oh no, you're all the opposite of boring. So thank you.
We're off the record now, right? Is that it?
No, no,no, we're not off the record. I want to say bye officially. So thank you. I want to thank you officially, Jonathan. Thank you.
My pleasure. Thank you. Absolutely.
Jonathan said that the line of compassion, which can be described as the invisible boundary between helping others without becoming consumed by empathy fatigue, can only occur if you've had shared experiences. He goes on saying that bigotry and close-mindedness are very easy to develop if you don't have any shared experiences. And the way to bring shared experience across tribes and across clans to people that don't even know each other or can't even speak a common verbal language is through the fundamentals of food which feeds the inclusion need and has a cultural distinction and dance which is universal is that food immediately accessible through participating without translation or without understudy. Human beings are gregarious meaning that we are meant to live you with each other, not alone and isolated. AI says that this sociability stems from our evolutionary history, where relying on a group was essential for survival, reproduction, and shared development. It adds that the neurological rewards obtained by the brain releases feel-good chemicals like oxytocin, dopamine, and endorphins. during positive social interactions reinforces our desire to connect and that emotional health coming from meaningful relationships, a sense of belonging are fundamental to human psychology, directly reducing stress and improving longevity. Dance is definitely a positive social interaction and it definitely reinforces our desire to connect and generates that emotional health. coming from meaningful relationships, because it is something that is a shared experience. Of course, everyone can dance in their kitchen while cooking, but what Jonathan describes is that means of communicating above words confined by languages. It's what our bodies communicate to each other by sharing the joy birthed by beats in a group setting, a social setting, to beat with someone. or close to someone, and to be able to go back to that shared experience afterwards by then using words, if we have that possibility, is what gives us a confirmation that what we lived and felt was real. Here is what we can read in an article titled The Virtue of Shared Experience in the Philosophy Now magazine. Quote, So what's so great about shared experiences? Besides being some of our most memorable moments and also amplifying our experiences, shared experiences have the virtue that they continue to be shared. For one thing, sharing allows the experience to be relived more vividly through mutual recollection and the telling of anecdotes. And for someone like myself, whose memory leaves a little something to be desired, It also serves the function of actual recollection. Sharing an experience affirms the reality of what is being witnessed. If I've had an experience but no one was there to share it, did it happen? The character of the experience, its sweetness or bitterness, is validated by another's similar perception, as an event is recollected over time. The totality of a shared experience can be distinguished from the initial experience. Bitter chocolate might taste more bitter when shared, but the lasting impression is sweeter by having been through it with someone else. As such, a shared experience need not only be viewed in terms of circumscribed moments in time, but may also be viewed more broadly. Together with the select few. or special someone who accompany us through life. There is a sense that more than you alone are bearing witness to your existence. By sharing our experiences, there is someone other than ourselves who is aware of the sum total of our journey. This temporal dimension of shared experiences also has the virtue of being one of the few ways we can become immortal. Because a shared experience doesn't belong to us alone. It has the quality of living on once we are gone. By living on in the memories of those we leave behind, we do not get a new lease on life, but in a certain sense, the lease on life we have had gets extended." Jonathan mentioned that Carl Jung and Hermann Esse both wrote proficiously about the power of music. To honor my guest, here is a quote from the latter. Where words fell, But once we let ourselves experience music through translating by dancing, may we all get to share that moving experience with humans we lived it through with, to make it live on through our most respectful and dedicated words. Music is a universal language, and we are all potential vectors of its fundamental food that feeds our need to belong and celebrate.
Description
Jonathan takes us on the shared experience journey.
Web links:
The Virtue of Shared Experience | Issue 118 | Philosophy Now
Remerciements à/many thanks to:
Find me / trouvez-moi:
Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.
Transcription
From Montreal, de Montréal, introducing people, je vous présente des gens, met on a, rencontré sur un, dance floor, pour parler de, to talk about, dance. Okay, so this is episode 5 and today I'm talking with someone who is very special to me. He's my fifth guest, but really I was thinking about it this morning, actually, and I was thinking about the fact that before we actually met or that time where my brain kind of registered his presence on the dance floor, it's not the right timing. He should have been at the very beginning of this list because I think we met much earlier on. I think it was in 2019 that we met, that summer dancing. But I think that that summer in 2019, we didn't have conversations. We just like nodded heads or, you know, said hi to each other from far.
Two ships passing in the daytime.
I think that was it. So we're talking with Jonathan. So thank you for being here and doing this with me today.
It's been my pleasure. I wouldn't be anywhere else. Absolutely.
And honestly, this whole project is about dance. And I think that you're one of the human beings on this planet with whom I've had the most interesting conversations about dance, like throughout the years that we've known each other now and that we've communicated with each other. I think that you've always had a lot of... things and impressions and feelings about what dance brings to you and what dance is to you. So I'm very honored to have this conversation with you. I think it's a very precious opportunity.
Your listeners need to know who it is that I'm being asked to speak with. And I would say the reflection back is almost the same and that to those listening um um that's the way I remember Lu is a with what you call a beacon you don't actually necessarily have to speak to you it's just a signal you know so i i i regard Lu and that's you Lu so i don't know who i'm speaking to here but there really are um what i call presences that we don't necessarily speak with but um feel and communicate with under the surface you know and so so the actual verbal connection didn't happen till later
Yeah but we danced together and we we saw each other we recognized each other for our love for dance i think because that's what we do
And i think it's fair enough to say that a tiger knows its stripes you know and you can see a stripe from a far away no and and i think that's also the the beautiful value that happens where there's unspoken truths
It's beautiful so okay we're episode five so if people have been listening so far or if this is your first time listening to an episode the way we do things in this uh podcast project is that I have questions for my guests and I don't know the question that I took out of the hat because they're all in a hat and so we're going to read it together now if you're okay with that Jonathan
Ready.
But honestly I knew that with you question or no, we would go really far and have a beautiful conversation so it already started. Okay, so let's read the question officially.
Okay.
So here it is. What do you take away from the dance floor experience with you after a session?
That's it. So what do I take from the dance floor after a session?
Yeah.
Okay, well, you know, that's like writing a book right there. So let's begin. It's interesting because there's several stages to an event. There's the anticipatory, the anticipation and the anxiety and the excitement. Then there's the actual curtain raising. The lights are on. We're now in it. No turning back. Then there really is such a thing as the ending. And what you want to happen at the end is, in the best case scenario, is to have a witness with you to do a debriefing.
Yes, I totally agree.
And it's also totally okay to go home alone as well.
Yes, it is.
So 50-50, go home alone, filled with whatever's just happened. But a debriefing with someone who was there is the touchstone that really sows it up because you are actually suspending your reality for a few hours. And it's helpful to have someone give you the right frame to confirm that what you did witness is true, you know?
That what you witnessed was real and what you perceive was on the same wavelength. as someone else who was there, right?
It's kind of like you're both flying through the air. I can't talk to you until we both come down. And we land the jump. Having done that, to be able to, I guess the word is exchange with someone else, the shared experience is the ultimate goal. And so there it is. So I've introduced the term, which I think is where I started my intellectual investigation into why this thing matters so much to me. And when I first entered the dance scene as a teenager, early 20s, in my early 20s is the time when we were gaining our identity and trying to figure out our place in the world. And one of the things I noticed that was an intellectual snobbery to people who are caught up in youth culture entertainment amusement like watching football or dance and as a youngster I noticed there's an intellectual divide of you know I would say judgment towards that and what excited me when i first started reading literature around the same time was that there are intellectuals at the highest level of emotional I guess we might call high-functioning emotional adults discussing this phenomenon, which we call dance or we call amusing ourselves, self-amusement.
Entertaining ourselves, yes.
It's our responsibility to enjoy ourselves. It's not just turning on a television set and having a script stimulate us. There's a responsibility on our side to, I guess the word is, bring something to the table. You know, it's not just a bunch of people staring at the screen or what have you.
Yeah, we're not passive. Like, we're in this, we're getting, we're receiving and we're also giving back, right?
Well, there you go. And what I wanted to say is that, well, there is already a literature out there that describes this and explains it to us. And so that's where I learned for the first time. the importance of shared experience and that as I was growing up and people were talking about their identities and say a political persuasion or let's just talk about rights issues and the less fortunate and and the kind of conversation that goes on where we want to help someone over there or we don't have enough compassion for those people over there. This whole conversation about caring about strangers or caring about another clan or a tribe that we don't have anything to do with and why just caring about it doesn't solve the issue for example let's just say there's an oppressed people in our society and we're having a conversation about helping them or not helping them because we do not want to help them one of the things you notice is the line of compassion or the line of wanting to do something can only occur if you've had shared experience, and that's bigotry and closed-mindedness is very easy to develop if you don't have any shared experience with, let's just say, an ice fisherman. So why would I care about an ice fisherman if I've never even spent time with them? And so I was frosily telling anyone who would listen, look, you're doing it wrong. You're trying to build a shoe and put it on a foot you haven't seen. What you need is to bring the feet to where you are so we can see what shoes we've got. And the way to bring shared experience across tribes and across clans to people who don't even know each other or even can speak a common verbal language is through the fundamentals of food, which... feeds the need and has a cultural distinction, and dance, which is universal and immediately accessible to participate in without translation or without any understudy. You just throw yourself in the ocean. And it also shows us how accepting people are to the other. For example, certain languages are difficult to learn because the speakers of it don't have any patience for teaching you you know where some of them are easier to learn because they love that you want to learn this language of ours for example I've been told it's quite easy to pick up Mandarin if you move to China you know you catch street Mandarin within a month because they love that you like to to learn it but if you go to Poland they don't have patience to teach you Polish they're just going to switch to English or French. Here we have no shared experience happening between Polish people because they just don't want to bother. And a lot of shared experience between, say, Asian people are so happy that you want to learn my language that suddenly we have what we call a compassionate link. OK, fair enough. We don't have time for that. Let's have a drumbeat and let's start dancing. And I have never been in any more diverse concentration of human density than A, at a football match and B on a dance floor. Now, the problem with a football match is there's too much what we call adversarial binary competition to occur for that to be a safe place to explore the shared experience unless you're supporting the same team. Now, I experienced that as a football fan, where to lose one's ego is to be transported by something outside of yourself that you don't have any control over in the analytical mind. So when your analytical mind is let go by something outside of yourself and you start jumping up and down uncontrollably, hugging a stranger, black, white, you know, anything, but you're hugging this stranger, the impulse that just happened on the pitch, this is you losing your ego, this is shared experience, so that the next day when someone's saying something, let's just say detrimental to the kind of person you hugged yesterday anonymously, you have first-hand experience of their fundamental human needs you know or if you've gone to Nairobi and had a kenyan dinner with a bunch of people from Nairobi well you know what it's like for them to be hungry and sniff and laugh and cry and and you've had this shared experience that now extends into your own I guess hopefulness that others can also see that and so as a as a mechanism that people are searching the world to try and what we want to do to make the world a better place, and I'm not the first person to say this, by the way, this is a lift from literature. And Carl Jung and Herman Hesse love talking about music the most. And so, excuse me if it sounds like I've been stuck in their heads too long, but we have a magic rectangle. We have a magic rectangle that has the answer to all our prayers right there. And it's free. And it's waiting for us and as you and I've discussed, Lu, this thing about dancing, we both like exercise and we both know that exercise brings us what you might call a bodily, I want to use the word high, you know, there's definitely an elevated mood swing that occurs during exercise, but there's also this thing as not wanting to be bothered to do exercise, whereas I know that if you and I dance in front of people standing still, they will start moving. Right?
Yes.
We haven't said, look, you guys are lazy, you need to get to work. We haven't said, hey, what do you do for your life? You know, what have you done today? We haven't called in any of that. And so we know that there are going to be people who move. And we also know as well, because we've been through it, that there's a reluctance as well and a resistance to do so. And that is an absolute phenomenon to those of us who love it. And... Seeing birds that don't fly is very strange to birds who do fly. And that's why they're called chickens or whatever. But we know they can. When you're asking me, what do I take away from the dance floor?
Yes.
I'm being honest to you, okay?
It's the shared experience.
Are you ready? My favorite thing when I go home. I'm sure my voice has changed over the course of this. I'm sure I'm a different tone than when I started.
You're OK, your voice is...
That guy I was at the beginning. One of my favorite things is, and it has to happen, and that's what's the beautiful thing about it, it doesn't happen every time. It's similar to surfing. A surfer has a philosophy of going to the beach without expectation, and patience to wait for the wave that might come and the wisdom to say it didn't happen today and then they go home because they're surfers they understand the magic rhythm of waves coming to the shore from the movement of planets. Dancers are similar we know that a dance floor is like the day at the beach there's never two the same but the ones that we do love are you ready
Go!
When you, me, whoever we're there, and you see these people arrive who have never seen anything like it before in their lives. And you see in their eyes this absolute revelation of the way I felt when I was five years old on the steps of some place in San Francisco, watching my eldest sister dance with what I now know to be kind of similar people to what we... to hang out with today as adults. But the freestyling dancers were in a public park and I saw my sister join them and this instant access she had to them. And not only that, the instant access she brought me to them through the, we hadn't done anything, and now we were suddenly, we weren't just tourists that passed through. We were sharing the same soup. You know, we were dipping our feet in the same bathtub. And this to me was magic. And I didn't know, I didn't really know what it was, but I know that what my eyes looked like when I first saw it was a little boy seeing stars for the first time. And this isn't pop culture, iconic cult personality. This is the opposite, you know.
Yeah. And it's the inner child, you know, like it's that's it. And it's that's the eternity. That's the universal fact of joy itself.
Hey, well, that's the kind of meat of what I was going to say there. So there you go. So there it is. And again, that's what I think about at the end of the day. The review that I have in the debriefing is the people that we set fire to. And I'll just close by saying we all have a light inside of us, you know, and there's people who want to snuff it out because they don't think they have one. But it's our responsibility to ensure that they do. And that once they do, well, then now we have a shared experience.
You're such a poet in everything you say. And honestly, coming back to the very beginning of this conversation, it's such an honor. I'm so happy that everything just unfold as it just did, because it's absolutely perfect.
I have a bunch of notes. None of it's been mentioned. So who cares?
Who cares about notes? You've been living dance for all your life.
It's some philoophing boredom...
Oh no, you're all the opposite of boring. So thank you.
We're off the record now, right? Is that it?
No, no,no, we're not off the record. I want to say bye officially. So thank you. I want to thank you officially, Jonathan. Thank you.
My pleasure. Thank you. Absolutely.
Jonathan said that the line of compassion, which can be described as the invisible boundary between helping others without becoming consumed by empathy fatigue, can only occur if you've had shared experiences. He goes on saying that bigotry and close-mindedness are very easy to develop if you don't have any shared experiences. And the way to bring shared experience across tribes and across clans to people that don't even know each other or can't even speak a common verbal language is through the fundamentals of food which feeds the inclusion need and has a cultural distinction and dance which is universal is that food immediately accessible through participating without translation or without understudy. Human beings are gregarious meaning that we are meant to live you with each other, not alone and isolated. AI says that this sociability stems from our evolutionary history, where relying on a group was essential for survival, reproduction, and shared development. It adds that the neurological rewards obtained by the brain releases feel-good chemicals like oxytocin, dopamine, and endorphins. during positive social interactions reinforces our desire to connect and that emotional health coming from meaningful relationships, a sense of belonging are fundamental to human psychology, directly reducing stress and improving longevity. Dance is definitely a positive social interaction and it definitely reinforces our desire to connect and generates that emotional health. coming from meaningful relationships, because it is something that is a shared experience. Of course, everyone can dance in their kitchen while cooking, but what Jonathan describes is that means of communicating above words confined by languages. It's what our bodies communicate to each other by sharing the joy birthed by beats in a group setting, a social setting, to beat with someone. or close to someone, and to be able to go back to that shared experience afterwards by then using words, if we have that possibility, is what gives us a confirmation that what we lived and felt was real. Here is what we can read in an article titled The Virtue of Shared Experience in the Philosophy Now magazine. Quote, So what's so great about shared experiences? Besides being some of our most memorable moments and also amplifying our experiences, shared experiences have the virtue that they continue to be shared. For one thing, sharing allows the experience to be relived more vividly through mutual recollection and the telling of anecdotes. And for someone like myself, whose memory leaves a little something to be desired, It also serves the function of actual recollection. Sharing an experience affirms the reality of what is being witnessed. If I've had an experience but no one was there to share it, did it happen? The character of the experience, its sweetness or bitterness, is validated by another's similar perception, as an event is recollected over time. The totality of a shared experience can be distinguished from the initial experience. Bitter chocolate might taste more bitter when shared, but the lasting impression is sweeter by having been through it with someone else. As such, a shared experience need not only be viewed in terms of circumscribed moments in time, but may also be viewed more broadly. Together with the select few. or special someone who accompany us through life. There is a sense that more than you alone are bearing witness to your existence. By sharing our experiences, there is someone other than ourselves who is aware of the sum total of our journey. This temporal dimension of shared experiences also has the virtue of being one of the few ways we can become immortal. Because a shared experience doesn't belong to us alone. It has the quality of living on once we are gone. By living on in the memories of those we leave behind, we do not get a new lease on life, but in a certain sense, the lease on life we have had gets extended." Jonathan mentioned that Carl Jung and Hermann Esse both wrote proficiously about the power of music. To honor my guest, here is a quote from the latter. Where words fell, But once we let ourselves experience music through translating by dancing, may we all get to share that moving experience with humans we lived it through with, to make it live on through our most respectful and dedicated words. Music is a universal language, and we are all potential vectors of its fundamental food that feeds our need to belong and celebrate.
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Description
Jonathan takes us on the shared experience journey.
Web links:
The Virtue of Shared Experience | Issue 118 | Philosophy Now
Remerciements à/many thanks to:
Find me / trouvez-moi:
Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.
Transcription
From Montreal, de Montréal, introducing people, je vous présente des gens, met on a, rencontré sur un, dance floor, pour parler de, to talk about, dance. Okay, so this is episode 5 and today I'm talking with someone who is very special to me. He's my fifth guest, but really I was thinking about it this morning, actually, and I was thinking about the fact that before we actually met or that time where my brain kind of registered his presence on the dance floor, it's not the right timing. He should have been at the very beginning of this list because I think we met much earlier on. I think it was in 2019 that we met, that summer dancing. But I think that that summer in 2019, we didn't have conversations. We just like nodded heads or, you know, said hi to each other from far.
Two ships passing in the daytime.
I think that was it. So we're talking with Jonathan. So thank you for being here and doing this with me today.
It's been my pleasure. I wouldn't be anywhere else. Absolutely.
And honestly, this whole project is about dance. And I think that you're one of the human beings on this planet with whom I've had the most interesting conversations about dance, like throughout the years that we've known each other now and that we've communicated with each other. I think that you've always had a lot of... things and impressions and feelings about what dance brings to you and what dance is to you. So I'm very honored to have this conversation with you. I think it's a very precious opportunity.
Your listeners need to know who it is that I'm being asked to speak with. And I would say the reflection back is almost the same and that to those listening um um that's the way I remember Lu is a with what you call a beacon you don't actually necessarily have to speak to you it's just a signal you know so i i i regard Lu and that's you Lu so i don't know who i'm speaking to here but there really are um what i call presences that we don't necessarily speak with but um feel and communicate with under the surface you know and so so the actual verbal connection didn't happen till later
Yeah but we danced together and we we saw each other we recognized each other for our love for dance i think because that's what we do
And i think it's fair enough to say that a tiger knows its stripes you know and you can see a stripe from a far away no and and i think that's also the the beautiful value that happens where there's unspoken truths
It's beautiful so okay we're episode five so if people have been listening so far or if this is your first time listening to an episode the way we do things in this uh podcast project is that I have questions for my guests and I don't know the question that I took out of the hat because they're all in a hat and so we're going to read it together now if you're okay with that Jonathan
Ready.
But honestly I knew that with you question or no, we would go really far and have a beautiful conversation so it already started. Okay, so let's read the question officially.
Okay.
So here it is. What do you take away from the dance floor experience with you after a session?
That's it. So what do I take from the dance floor after a session?
Yeah.
Okay, well, you know, that's like writing a book right there. So let's begin. It's interesting because there's several stages to an event. There's the anticipatory, the anticipation and the anxiety and the excitement. Then there's the actual curtain raising. The lights are on. We're now in it. No turning back. Then there really is such a thing as the ending. And what you want to happen at the end is, in the best case scenario, is to have a witness with you to do a debriefing.
Yes, I totally agree.
And it's also totally okay to go home alone as well.
Yes, it is.
So 50-50, go home alone, filled with whatever's just happened. But a debriefing with someone who was there is the touchstone that really sows it up because you are actually suspending your reality for a few hours. And it's helpful to have someone give you the right frame to confirm that what you did witness is true, you know?
That what you witnessed was real and what you perceive was on the same wavelength. as someone else who was there, right?
It's kind of like you're both flying through the air. I can't talk to you until we both come down. And we land the jump. Having done that, to be able to, I guess the word is exchange with someone else, the shared experience is the ultimate goal. And so there it is. So I've introduced the term, which I think is where I started my intellectual investigation into why this thing matters so much to me. And when I first entered the dance scene as a teenager, early 20s, in my early 20s is the time when we were gaining our identity and trying to figure out our place in the world. And one of the things I noticed that was an intellectual snobbery to people who are caught up in youth culture entertainment amusement like watching football or dance and as a youngster I noticed there's an intellectual divide of you know I would say judgment towards that and what excited me when i first started reading literature around the same time was that there are intellectuals at the highest level of emotional I guess we might call high-functioning emotional adults discussing this phenomenon, which we call dance or we call amusing ourselves, self-amusement.
Entertaining ourselves, yes.
It's our responsibility to enjoy ourselves. It's not just turning on a television set and having a script stimulate us. There's a responsibility on our side to, I guess the word is, bring something to the table. You know, it's not just a bunch of people staring at the screen or what have you.
Yeah, we're not passive. Like, we're in this, we're getting, we're receiving and we're also giving back, right?
Well, there you go. And what I wanted to say is that, well, there is already a literature out there that describes this and explains it to us. And so that's where I learned for the first time. the importance of shared experience and that as I was growing up and people were talking about their identities and say a political persuasion or let's just talk about rights issues and the less fortunate and and the kind of conversation that goes on where we want to help someone over there or we don't have enough compassion for those people over there. This whole conversation about caring about strangers or caring about another clan or a tribe that we don't have anything to do with and why just caring about it doesn't solve the issue for example let's just say there's an oppressed people in our society and we're having a conversation about helping them or not helping them because we do not want to help them one of the things you notice is the line of compassion or the line of wanting to do something can only occur if you've had shared experience, and that's bigotry and closed-mindedness is very easy to develop if you don't have any shared experience with, let's just say, an ice fisherman. So why would I care about an ice fisherman if I've never even spent time with them? And so I was frosily telling anyone who would listen, look, you're doing it wrong. You're trying to build a shoe and put it on a foot you haven't seen. What you need is to bring the feet to where you are so we can see what shoes we've got. And the way to bring shared experience across tribes and across clans to people who don't even know each other or even can speak a common verbal language is through the fundamentals of food, which... feeds the need and has a cultural distinction, and dance, which is universal and immediately accessible to participate in without translation or without any understudy. You just throw yourself in the ocean. And it also shows us how accepting people are to the other. For example, certain languages are difficult to learn because the speakers of it don't have any patience for teaching you you know where some of them are easier to learn because they love that you want to learn this language of ours for example I've been told it's quite easy to pick up Mandarin if you move to China you know you catch street Mandarin within a month because they love that you like to to learn it but if you go to Poland they don't have patience to teach you Polish they're just going to switch to English or French. Here we have no shared experience happening between Polish people because they just don't want to bother. And a lot of shared experience between, say, Asian people are so happy that you want to learn my language that suddenly we have what we call a compassionate link. OK, fair enough. We don't have time for that. Let's have a drumbeat and let's start dancing. And I have never been in any more diverse concentration of human density than A, at a football match and B on a dance floor. Now, the problem with a football match is there's too much what we call adversarial binary competition to occur for that to be a safe place to explore the shared experience unless you're supporting the same team. Now, I experienced that as a football fan, where to lose one's ego is to be transported by something outside of yourself that you don't have any control over in the analytical mind. So when your analytical mind is let go by something outside of yourself and you start jumping up and down uncontrollably, hugging a stranger, black, white, you know, anything, but you're hugging this stranger, the impulse that just happened on the pitch, this is you losing your ego, this is shared experience, so that the next day when someone's saying something, let's just say detrimental to the kind of person you hugged yesterday anonymously, you have first-hand experience of their fundamental human needs you know or if you've gone to Nairobi and had a kenyan dinner with a bunch of people from Nairobi well you know what it's like for them to be hungry and sniff and laugh and cry and and you've had this shared experience that now extends into your own I guess hopefulness that others can also see that and so as a as a mechanism that people are searching the world to try and what we want to do to make the world a better place, and I'm not the first person to say this, by the way, this is a lift from literature. And Carl Jung and Herman Hesse love talking about music the most. And so, excuse me if it sounds like I've been stuck in their heads too long, but we have a magic rectangle. We have a magic rectangle that has the answer to all our prayers right there. And it's free. And it's waiting for us and as you and I've discussed, Lu, this thing about dancing, we both like exercise and we both know that exercise brings us what you might call a bodily, I want to use the word high, you know, there's definitely an elevated mood swing that occurs during exercise, but there's also this thing as not wanting to be bothered to do exercise, whereas I know that if you and I dance in front of people standing still, they will start moving. Right?
Yes.
We haven't said, look, you guys are lazy, you need to get to work. We haven't said, hey, what do you do for your life? You know, what have you done today? We haven't called in any of that. And so we know that there are going to be people who move. And we also know as well, because we've been through it, that there's a reluctance as well and a resistance to do so. And that is an absolute phenomenon to those of us who love it. And... Seeing birds that don't fly is very strange to birds who do fly. And that's why they're called chickens or whatever. But we know they can. When you're asking me, what do I take away from the dance floor?
Yes.
I'm being honest to you, okay?
It's the shared experience.
Are you ready? My favorite thing when I go home. I'm sure my voice has changed over the course of this. I'm sure I'm a different tone than when I started.
You're OK, your voice is...
That guy I was at the beginning. One of my favorite things is, and it has to happen, and that's what's the beautiful thing about it, it doesn't happen every time. It's similar to surfing. A surfer has a philosophy of going to the beach without expectation, and patience to wait for the wave that might come and the wisdom to say it didn't happen today and then they go home because they're surfers they understand the magic rhythm of waves coming to the shore from the movement of planets. Dancers are similar we know that a dance floor is like the day at the beach there's never two the same but the ones that we do love are you ready
Go!
When you, me, whoever we're there, and you see these people arrive who have never seen anything like it before in their lives. And you see in their eyes this absolute revelation of the way I felt when I was five years old on the steps of some place in San Francisco, watching my eldest sister dance with what I now know to be kind of similar people to what we... to hang out with today as adults. But the freestyling dancers were in a public park and I saw my sister join them and this instant access she had to them. And not only that, the instant access she brought me to them through the, we hadn't done anything, and now we were suddenly, we weren't just tourists that passed through. We were sharing the same soup. You know, we were dipping our feet in the same bathtub. And this to me was magic. And I didn't know, I didn't really know what it was, but I know that what my eyes looked like when I first saw it was a little boy seeing stars for the first time. And this isn't pop culture, iconic cult personality. This is the opposite, you know.
Yeah. And it's the inner child, you know, like it's that's it. And it's that's the eternity. That's the universal fact of joy itself.
Hey, well, that's the kind of meat of what I was going to say there. So there you go. So there it is. And again, that's what I think about at the end of the day. The review that I have in the debriefing is the people that we set fire to. And I'll just close by saying we all have a light inside of us, you know, and there's people who want to snuff it out because they don't think they have one. But it's our responsibility to ensure that they do. And that once they do, well, then now we have a shared experience.
You're such a poet in everything you say. And honestly, coming back to the very beginning of this conversation, it's such an honor. I'm so happy that everything just unfold as it just did, because it's absolutely perfect.
I have a bunch of notes. None of it's been mentioned. So who cares?
Who cares about notes? You've been living dance for all your life.
It's some philoophing boredom...
Oh no, you're all the opposite of boring. So thank you.
We're off the record now, right? Is that it?
No, no,no, we're not off the record. I want to say bye officially. So thank you. I want to thank you officially, Jonathan. Thank you.
My pleasure. Thank you. Absolutely.
Jonathan said that the line of compassion, which can be described as the invisible boundary between helping others without becoming consumed by empathy fatigue, can only occur if you've had shared experiences. He goes on saying that bigotry and close-mindedness are very easy to develop if you don't have any shared experiences. And the way to bring shared experience across tribes and across clans to people that don't even know each other or can't even speak a common verbal language is through the fundamentals of food which feeds the inclusion need and has a cultural distinction and dance which is universal is that food immediately accessible through participating without translation or without understudy. Human beings are gregarious meaning that we are meant to live you with each other, not alone and isolated. AI says that this sociability stems from our evolutionary history, where relying on a group was essential for survival, reproduction, and shared development. It adds that the neurological rewards obtained by the brain releases feel-good chemicals like oxytocin, dopamine, and endorphins. during positive social interactions reinforces our desire to connect and that emotional health coming from meaningful relationships, a sense of belonging are fundamental to human psychology, directly reducing stress and improving longevity. Dance is definitely a positive social interaction and it definitely reinforces our desire to connect and generates that emotional health. coming from meaningful relationships, because it is something that is a shared experience. Of course, everyone can dance in their kitchen while cooking, but what Jonathan describes is that means of communicating above words confined by languages. It's what our bodies communicate to each other by sharing the joy birthed by beats in a group setting, a social setting, to beat with someone. or close to someone, and to be able to go back to that shared experience afterwards by then using words, if we have that possibility, is what gives us a confirmation that what we lived and felt was real. Here is what we can read in an article titled The Virtue of Shared Experience in the Philosophy Now magazine. Quote, So what's so great about shared experiences? Besides being some of our most memorable moments and also amplifying our experiences, shared experiences have the virtue that they continue to be shared. For one thing, sharing allows the experience to be relived more vividly through mutual recollection and the telling of anecdotes. And for someone like myself, whose memory leaves a little something to be desired, It also serves the function of actual recollection. Sharing an experience affirms the reality of what is being witnessed. If I've had an experience but no one was there to share it, did it happen? The character of the experience, its sweetness or bitterness, is validated by another's similar perception, as an event is recollected over time. The totality of a shared experience can be distinguished from the initial experience. Bitter chocolate might taste more bitter when shared, but the lasting impression is sweeter by having been through it with someone else. As such, a shared experience need not only be viewed in terms of circumscribed moments in time, but may also be viewed more broadly. Together with the select few. or special someone who accompany us through life. There is a sense that more than you alone are bearing witness to your existence. By sharing our experiences, there is someone other than ourselves who is aware of the sum total of our journey. This temporal dimension of shared experiences also has the virtue of being one of the few ways we can become immortal. Because a shared experience doesn't belong to us alone. It has the quality of living on once we are gone. By living on in the memories of those we leave behind, we do not get a new lease on life, but in a certain sense, the lease on life we have had gets extended." Jonathan mentioned that Carl Jung and Hermann Esse both wrote proficiously about the power of music. To honor my guest, here is a quote from the latter. Where words fell, But once we let ourselves experience music through translating by dancing, may we all get to share that moving experience with humans we lived it through with, to make it live on through our most respectful and dedicated words. Music is a universal language, and we are all potential vectors of its fundamental food that feeds our need to belong and celebrate.
Description
Jonathan takes us on the shared experience journey.
Web links:
The Virtue of Shared Experience | Issue 118 | Philosophy Now
Remerciements à/many thanks to:
Find me / trouvez-moi:
Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.
Transcription
From Montreal, de Montréal, introducing people, je vous présente des gens, met on a, rencontré sur un, dance floor, pour parler de, to talk about, dance. Okay, so this is episode 5 and today I'm talking with someone who is very special to me. He's my fifth guest, but really I was thinking about it this morning, actually, and I was thinking about the fact that before we actually met or that time where my brain kind of registered his presence on the dance floor, it's not the right timing. He should have been at the very beginning of this list because I think we met much earlier on. I think it was in 2019 that we met, that summer dancing. But I think that that summer in 2019, we didn't have conversations. We just like nodded heads or, you know, said hi to each other from far.
Two ships passing in the daytime.
I think that was it. So we're talking with Jonathan. So thank you for being here and doing this with me today.
It's been my pleasure. I wouldn't be anywhere else. Absolutely.
And honestly, this whole project is about dance. And I think that you're one of the human beings on this planet with whom I've had the most interesting conversations about dance, like throughout the years that we've known each other now and that we've communicated with each other. I think that you've always had a lot of... things and impressions and feelings about what dance brings to you and what dance is to you. So I'm very honored to have this conversation with you. I think it's a very precious opportunity.
Your listeners need to know who it is that I'm being asked to speak with. And I would say the reflection back is almost the same and that to those listening um um that's the way I remember Lu is a with what you call a beacon you don't actually necessarily have to speak to you it's just a signal you know so i i i regard Lu and that's you Lu so i don't know who i'm speaking to here but there really are um what i call presences that we don't necessarily speak with but um feel and communicate with under the surface you know and so so the actual verbal connection didn't happen till later
Yeah but we danced together and we we saw each other we recognized each other for our love for dance i think because that's what we do
And i think it's fair enough to say that a tiger knows its stripes you know and you can see a stripe from a far away no and and i think that's also the the beautiful value that happens where there's unspoken truths
It's beautiful so okay we're episode five so if people have been listening so far or if this is your first time listening to an episode the way we do things in this uh podcast project is that I have questions for my guests and I don't know the question that I took out of the hat because they're all in a hat and so we're going to read it together now if you're okay with that Jonathan
Ready.
But honestly I knew that with you question or no, we would go really far and have a beautiful conversation so it already started. Okay, so let's read the question officially.
Okay.
So here it is. What do you take away from the dance floor experience with you after a session?
That's it. So what do I take from the dance floor after a session?
Yeah.
Okay, well, you know, that's like writing a book right there. So let's begin. It's interesting because there's several stages to an event. There's the anticipatory, the anticipation and the anxiety and the excitement. Then there's the actual curtain raising. The lights are on. We're now in it. No turning back. Then there really is such a thing as the ending. And what you want to happen at the end is, in the best case scenario, is to have a witness with you to do a debriefing.
Yes, I totally agree.
And it's also totally okay to go home alone as well.
Yes, it is.
So 50-50, go home alone, filled with whatever's just happened. But a debriefing with someone who was there is the touchstone that really sows it up because you are actually suspending your reality for a few hours. And it's helpful to have someone give you the right frame to confirm that what you did witness is true, you know?
That what you witnessed was real and what you perceive was on the same wavelength. as someone else who was there, right?
It's kind of like you're both flying through the air. I can't talk to you until we both come down. And we land the jump. Having done that, to be able to, I guess the word is exchange with someone else, the shared experience is the ultimate goal. And so there it is. So I've introduced the term, which I think is where I started my intellectual investigation into why this thing matters so much to me. And when I first entered the dance scene as a teenager, early 20s, in my early 20s is the time when we were gaining our identity and trying to figure out our place in the world. And one of the things I noticed that was an intellectual snobbery to people who are caught up in youth culture entertainment amusement like watching football or dance and as a youngster I noticed there's an intellectual divide of you know I would say judgment towards that and what excited me when i first started reading literature around the same time was that there are intellectuals at the highest level of emotional I guess we might call high-functioning emotional adults discussing this phenomenon, which we call dance or we call amusing ourselves, self-amusement.
Entertaining ourselves, yes.
It's our responsibility to enjoy ourselves. It's not just turning on a television set and having a script stimulate us. There's a responsibility on our side to, I guess the word is, bring something to the table. You know, it's not just a bunch of people staring at the screen or what have you.
Yeah, we're not passive. Like, we're in this, we're getting, we're receiving and we're also giving back, right?
Well, there you go. And what I wanted to say is that, well, there is already a literature out there that describes this and explains it to us. And so that's where I learned for the first time. the importance of shared experience and that as I was growing up and people were talking about their identities and say a political persuasion or let's just talk about rights issues and the less fortunate and and the kind of conversation that goes on where we want to help someone over there or we don't have enough compassion for those people over there. This whole conversation about caring about strangers or caring about another clan or a tribe that we don't have anything to do with and why just caring about it doesn't solve the issue for example let's just say there's an oppressed people in our society and we're having a conversation about helping them or not helping them because we do not want to help them one of the things you notice is the line of compassion or the line of wanting to do something can only occur if you've had shared experience, and that's bigotry and closed-mindedness is very easy to develop if you don't have any shared experience with, let's just say, an ice fisherman. So why would I care about an ice fisherman if I've never even spent time with them? And so I was frosily telling anyone who would listen, look, you're doing it wrong. You're trying to build a shoe and put it on a foot you haven't seen. What you need is to bring the feet to where you are so we can see what shoes we've got. And the way to bring shared experience across tribes and across clans to people who don't even know each other or even can speak a common verbal language is through the fundamentals of food, which... feeds the need and has a cultural distinction, and dance, which is universal and immediately accessible to participate in without translation or without any understudy. You just throw yourself in the ocean. And it also shows us how accepting people are to the other. For example, certain languages are difficult to learn because the speakers of it don't have any patience for teaching you you know where some of them are easier to learn because they love that you want to learn this language of ours for example I've been told it's quite easy to pick up Mandarin if you move to China you know you catch street Mandarin within a month because they love that you like to to learn it but if you go to Poland they don't have patience to teach you Polish they're just going to switch to English or French. Here we have no shared experience happening between Polish people because they just don't want to bother. And a lot of shared experience between, say, Asian people are so happy that you want to learn my language that suddenly we have what we call a compassionate link. OK, fair enough. We don't have time for that. Let's have a drumbeat and let's start dancing. And I have never been in any more diverse concentration of human density than A, at a football match and B on a dance floor. Now, the problem with a football match is there's too much what we call adversarial binary competition to occur for that to be a safe place to explore the shared experience unless you're supporting the same team. Now, I experienced that as a football fan, where to lose one's ego is to be transported by something outside of yourself that you don't have any control over in the analytical mind. So when your analytical mind is let go by something outside of yourself and you start jumping up and down uncontrollably, hugging a stranger, black, white, you know, anything, but you're hugging this stranger, the impulse that just happened on the pitch, this is you losing your ego, this is shared experience, so that the next day when someone's saying something, let's just say detrimental to the kind of person you hugged yesterday anonymously, you have first-hand experience of their fundamental human needs you know or if you've gone to Nairobi and had a kenyan dinner with a bunch of people from Nairobi well you know what it's like for them to be hungry and sniff and laugh and cry and and you've had this shared experience that now extends into your own I guess hopefulness that others can also see that and so as a as a mechanism that people are searching the world to try and what we want to do to make the world a better place, and I'm not the first person to say this, by the way, this is a lift from literature. And Carl Jung and Herman Hesse love talking about music the most. And so, excuse me if it sounds like I've been stuck in their heads too long, but we have a magic rectangle. We have a magic rectangle that has the answer to all our prayers right there. And it's free. And it's waiting for us and as you and I've discussed, Lu, this thing about dancing, we both like exercise and we both know that exercise brings us what you might call a bodily, I want to use the word high, you know, there's definitely an elevated mood swing that occurs during exercise, but there's also this thing as not wanting to be bothered to do exercise, whereas I know that if you and I dance in front of people standing still, they will start moving. Right?
Yes.
We haven't said, look, you guys are lazy, you need to get to work. We haven't said, hey, what do you do for your life? You know, what have you done today? We haven't called in any of that. And so we know that there are going to be people who move. And we also know as well, because we've been through it, that there's a reluctance as well and a resistance to do so. And that is an absolute phenomenon to those of us who love it. And... Seeing birds that don't fly is very strange to birds who do fly. And that's why they're called chickens or whatever. But we know they can. When you're asking me, what do I take away from the dance floor?
Yes.
I'm being honest to you, okay?
It's the shared experience.
Are you ready? My favorite thing when I go home. I'm sure my voice has changed over the course of this. I'm sure I'm a different tone than when I started.
You're OK, your voice is...
That guy I was at the beginning. One of my favorite things is, and it has to happen, and that's what's the beautiful thing about it, it doesn't happen every time. It's similar to surfing. A surfer has a philosophy of going to the beach without expectation, and patience to wait for the wave that might come and the wisdom to say it didn't happen today and then they go home because they're surfers they understand the magic rhythm of waves coming to the shore from the movement of planets. Dancers are similar we know that a dance floor is like the day at the beach there's never two the same but the ones that we do love are you ready
Go!
When you, me, whoever we're there, and you see these people arrive who have never seen anything like it before in their lives. And you see in their eyes this absolute revelation of the way I felt when I was five years old on the steps of some place in San Francisco, watching my eldest sister dance with what I now know to be kind of similar people to what we... to hang out with today as adults. But the freestyling dancers were in a public park and I saw my sister join them and this instant access she had to them. And not only that, the instant access she brought me to them through the, we hadn't done anything, and now we were suddenly, we weren't just tourists that passed through. We were sharing the same soup. You know, we were dipping our feet in the same bathtub. And this to me was magic. And I didn't know, I didn't really know what it was, but I know that what my eyes looked like when I first saw it was a little boy seeing stars for the first time. And this isn't pop culture, iconic cult personality. This is the opposite, you know.
Yeah. And it's the inner child, you know, like it's that's it. And it's that's the eternity. That's the universal fact of joy itself.
Hey, well, that's the kind of meat of what I was going to say there. So there you go. So there it is. And again, that's what I think about at the end of the day. The review that I have in the debriefing is the people that we set fire to. And I'll just close by saying we all have a light inside of us, you know, and there's people who want to snuff it out because they don't think they have one. But it's our responsibility to ensure that they do. And that once they do, well, then now we have a shared experience.
You're such a poet in everything you say. And honestly, coming back to the very beginning of this conversation, it's such an honor. I'm so happy that everything just unfold as it just did, because it's absolutely perfect.
I have a bunch of notes. None of it's been mentioned. So who cares?
Who cares about notes? You've been living dance for all your life.
It's some philoophing boredom...
Oh no, you're all the opposite of boring. So thank you.
We're off the record now, right? Is that it?
No, no,no, we're not off the record. I want to say bye officially. So thank you. I want to thank you officially, Jonathan. Thank you.
My pleasure. Thank you. Absolutely.
Jonathan said that the line of compassion, which can be described as the invisible boundary between helping others without becoming consumed by empathy fatigue, can only occur if you've had shared experiences. He goes on saying that bigotry and close-mindedness are very easy to develop if you don't have any shared experiences. And the way to bring shared experience across tribes and across clans to people that don't even know each other or can't even speak a common verbal language is through the fundamentals of food which feeds the inclusion need and has a cultural distinction and dance which is universal is that food immediately accessible through participating without translation or without understudy. Human beings are gregarious meaning that we are meant to live you with each other, not alone and isolated. AI says that this sociability stems from our evolutionary history, where relying on a group was essential for survival, reproduction, and shared development. It adds that the neurological rewards obtained by the brain releases feel-good chemicals like oxytocin, dopamine, and endorphins. during positive social interactions reinforces our desire to connect and that emotional health coming from meaningful relationships, a sense of belonging are fundamental to human psychology, directly reducing stress and improving longevity. Dance is definitely a positive social interaction and it definitely reinforces our desire to connect and generates that emotional health. coming from meaningful relationships, because it is something that is a shared experience. Of course, everyone can dance in their kitchen while cooking, but what Jonathan describes is that means of communicating above words confined by languages. It's what our bodies communicate to each other by sharing the joy birthed by beats in a group setting, a social setting, to beat with someone. or close to someone, and to be able to go back to that shared experience afterwards by then using words, if we have that possibility, is what gives us a confirmation that what we lived and felt was real. Here is what we can read in an article titled The Virtue of Shared Experience in the Philosophy Now magazine. Quote, So what's so great about shared experiences? Besides being some of our most memorable moments and also amplifying our experiences, shared experiences have the virtue that they continue to be shared. For one thing, sharing allows the experience to be relived more vividly through mutual recollection and the telling of anecdotes. And for someone like myself, whose memory leaves a little something to be desired, It also serves the function of actual recollection. Sharing an experience affirms the reality of what is being witnessed. If I've had an experience but no one was there to share it, did it happen? The character of the experience, its sweetness or bitterness, is validated by another's similar perception, as an event is recollected over time. The totality of a shared experience can be distinguished from the initial experience. Bitter chocolate might taste more bitter when shared, but the lasting impression is sweeter by having been through it with someone else. As such, a shared experience need not only be viewed in terms of circumscribed moments in time, but may also be viewed more broadly. Together with the select few. or special someone who accompany us through life. There is a sense that more than you alone are bearing witness to your existence. By sharing our experiences, there is someone other than ourselves who is aware of the sum total of our journey. This temporal dimension of shared experiences also has the virtue of being one of the few ways we can become immortal. Because a shared experience doesn't belong to us alone. It has the quality of living on once we are gone. By living on in the memories of those we leave behind, we do not get a new lease on life, but in a certain sense, the lease on life we have had gets extended." Jonathan mentioned that Carl Jung and Hermann Esse both wrote proficiously about the power of music. To honor my guest, here is a quote from the latter. Where words fell, But once we let ourselves experience music through translating by dancing, may we all get to share that moving experience with humans we lived it through with, to make it live on through our most respectful and dedicated words. Music is a universal language, and we are all potential vectors of its fundamental food that feeds our need to belong and celebrate.
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