Transmuting Life’s Tragedies: Embracing a Post-Tragic Perspective

0:00Welcome to Deep Transformations, profound conversation with Alexander Love, the highly respected adult development expert and coach. In this episode, we explore the crushing personal story what happened to his father and Alexander as a result. We will move through his framework of pre-tragic, tragic, and post-tragic levels of development and experience. What happens when we accept the tragedy, the pain, and the darkness, and continue to move through it? You'll find it's very powerful and ultimately inspiring. Welcome to Deep Transformation, South Society Spirit, life-enhancing, paradigm-ravelling conversations with cutting-edge thinkers, contemplatives, and activists with Dr. Roger Walsh and John DuPuy. I'm Roger Walsh and our co-host is John DuPuy. And today, our guest is an expert on a topic of enormous importance for each of us individually and for our culture and

1:02society and even civilization at large. That topic is adult development, the ways in which we can mature and grow throughout adulthood. Our guest's name is Alexander Love and Alexander is a man of many talents and facets, which include being an acupuncturist and expert in Chinese medicine in addition to the expert adult development. He's also a coach and teacher, lecturer, and particularly at the Newfield Network, and he's the founder of EOS, an organization for Deep Transformation, and so perfect guest for us. And he's also just working on and completing a book, the Evolutionary Gestures trilogy. And I want to say that I have listened to some of Alexander's talks on adult development, not once, but three times. And I don't know anything else, but listen to three times. So I have learned a lot and you will too. I'm sure. So Alexander,

2:04you've basically devoted your life to the whole topic of healing and well-being and development. How did you come to Orange your life to this? Well, so glad to be here with all of you. And you know, it began in my 20s. I thought that I was going to be a guitar player, musician. My dream was to start a traveling musical circus. And then something devastating happened when I was 20 years old. My father was murdered. And in that moment, the direction of my life shifted dramatically. And so it went from, you know, sort of being in a state of perpetual innocence and just learning music and having fun to having to really lean into some much deeper questions. And as a part of that, I began exploring transformation and healing. And that's where that journey opened. That's a pretty dramatic transformation. And you have incorporated that into your work.

3:04You dealt with how we relate to suffering and how suffering is a catalyst for adult development and for maturation can be a catalyst for maturation and healing. And what was it that specifically brought you to this incredibly important topic of adult development? And I wanted to say, this topic is so important and so little known in our culture. The fact that we as humans can continue to grow and mature throughout our lives. We don't need to have to stop maturing psychologically and spiritually when our body stops growing around body. Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, one of the things that occurs to me is that human beings we have this unique, this unique gift. I like to call it the sacred gap. And the sacred gap is the space between the nowhere and the known. It's the reason why we can reflect. Because I can look at the

4:08stars and I can say, what is that? I can look at myself and I can say, what am I? And for me, being a human being along with the rest of us and walking through that sacred gap, you know, in my early 20s, I just started asking a lot of questions trying to understand, who are we? Who am I? What the heck is going on here? This place is not what I expected. It's not what I thought it was. So what is going on? And, you know, while holding those questions, I came across integral theory and the work of Ken Wilbur. And I became fascinated with this idea that we grow up and that we change as we unfold through time. And it started to, it gave me a way of attempting to understand myself and my pain and understanding others. And why would somebody murder an innocent man? You know, all of these things, all of those kinds of questions come up when we look at development. Because development, one aspect of it is an exploration of how do we make

5:14meaning? And how does that meaning change as we change? Okay, those are the big questions. And while several directions we could go here, but just to emphasize the importance of what you just said, that you started asking questions. That is so transformative. I've decided that as a motto, I can trust people who have questions. I'm wary of people who have answers, and I flee people who have the answer. So you have questions, which is beautiful. And what I feel and use are kind of openness to the unknown and the curiosity. Does that feel, is that resonate for you? Yeah, it does. My experience among other things is that we're in a profound mystery. And that our challenges, our experience of chaos, our pain losses, the tragedies, that this is an

6:16invitation to lean further into the mystery. There's a sense of all of the things that we could encounter as human beings, the pain and the ecstasy and everything in between. They're like really deep potentials inside all of those things, like seeds of possibility. And you know, there's times in my life when I really clung to certainty because the alternative seems like chaos. But what I've discovered over time is that the alternative is dropping into an emergent mystery. There may be chaos along with that, but that's workable. And that there's something beautiful in leaning into that delicate unknown. Yeah. And a lot of your work, I've been sitting last week, has been great deals with trauma and pain. And I brought questions. First of all, what happens when you don't deal with your trauma and pain? What if you just said, I, dad got murdered? That's it. No, I'm not going to do that one. So how would that affect you

7:22practically in day-to-day lives if you don't deal with this stuff? Well, you know, my sense is, you know, working with clients and in my own experience that turning away from pain, turning away from the traumas in our lives, it deepens our experience of separation. Because whatever I'm walling off in myself, I'm going to have to wall off any of those things if I see them and other people too. And so whatever, you know, the man who murdered my father, his name is Herbert, whatever Herbert represents, whatever his violence represents in my own being, if I wall myself off from that, I'm going to have no tolerance for it in other human being. And so as a practical example, I have noticed for many years, I have a, I've had a certain kind of allergy, you could say, or reactivity to any form of violence that I notice in anyone. It doesn't have to be physical violence. And if that goes unchecked, then what I can do is become subtly

8:27aggressive to try to get rid of their aggressive, you know, their subtle aggression. And so that's just one example of how turning away from pain, it ends up meaning we're turning away from each other because we're human beings are all, we all share a degree of pain. And then conversely, if I learn how to be with my own agony or grief, loss, pain, whatever we want to call it, the love that I'm able to bring to that translates as the ability to bring that love to others. So that's what opens the possibility to sit down and have a conversation with Herbert or someone like Herbert or a neighbor who votes differently than I do. All of those people now become something I can lean into and have dialogue with, have interaction with, and maybe even bring some, bring some love. And that's a direct extension of the love that I'm bringing to all of those places in my self-fed

9:29are uncomfortable. Yes, and not only did you lean into the trauma of your murdered father, but you, well, I watched a video of you reading a chapter from your book called The Room. And first of all, let me say you are a writer, brother. That was some beautiful, poetic prose. I was just like, man, I'm in the hands of a master here, very compressed and moved. And you said, so you met with the man that murdered your father. And why did you do that? And how was it? Yeah. So I met with Herbert about 27, 28 years after my father died. That's a lot of time to interact with my own inner, you know, painful experiences. By the time

10:30that I realized I could meet with Herbert, there was a good degree of forgiveness that had already taken place. One of the main reasons why I went was not to get, to not feel forgiveness because that was already there. It was because I wanted to show all of us, because I'm just a person like anybody else. I wanted to show all of us that these kinds of conversations can happen. And that the degree to which forgiveness is possible is perhaps infinite. And that there is, I figure that if I can meet with the person who killed my dad, then any of us can meet with our neighbor that we had a disagreement over and decided to stop talking. And I wanted to show that it was possible. And of course, I hoped it was possible.

11:30You know, it was also a hope. I hoped because it could have been any kind of conversation. Well, what it turns out, and I think this is this gets one of the the beauties of being human, is that on the one hand, Herbert is a man who murdered my dad. And on the other hand, Herbert is a good man, deeply good man. He showed up with respect, with care, with humility, with the desire to invoke healing. And the first conversation was three hours. My experience was that it was a deeply moving conversation where I got to explore what's it like to learn where someone has been coming from. So in the context of development, we're all coming from somewhere. We're all an unfolding growing gesture. We're all in a process of becoming. And so the man that's in front of me now has the

12:321819 year old Herbert, who did the thing, but there's also 27 years of a human being who's been growing and can reflect on that younger version of himself. So there's an opportunity to get to know what shaped Herbert, what leads someone to murder someone else. And so of course, I mean, there's a lot that could be said in response to your question, but that's just some initial initial musings around it. What is forgiveness? And what is not forgiveness? I mean, how does that work? Well, I mean, I can share my understanding of it. Sure. That's why you're here. I think there's a lot of ways that we could we could explore that. But to me, when I am not forgiving someone, I've taken our shared history and I'm putting it in between us. So when I look at you, I don't really see you. I see what you did or I see whatever aspects of our shared history that had felt like they've caused me harm or whatever. It's caused that that's somehow in between us.

13:37And so I don't actually see you. And forgiveness, as I experience it, is the process of leaning into that history and feeling all of the complexity and the conflict and the unresolved stuff and working it out one way or another. We can work it out in ourselves. It doesn't we don't the other person isn't required. Sometimes they're not available, which is good that it's not required. But sometimes it is also available. And so in one way or another, we we work out, we untangle these knots of our shared historical pain so that it's no longer between us. It doesn't mean I forget. Forgiven forget that personally doesn't make sense that phrase doesn't make sense to me. It's remember deeply. Become so intimate with what happened, feel every aspect of it and let it be transformed by love. And then now that when I'm with Herbert, I'm not like, oh, you're the guy

14:42who did this and you're the guy who did that. And I have all these stories about who you are. Instead, I'm with someone who's in front of me, just like I'm with the two of you right now. And we can discover who we are in this moment. While also having making contact with yes, we have a shared tragedy, both Herbert and I share a tragedy in our history, but that doesn't have to filter my lens so that I don't actually see that there's a good man here. And did that forgiveness, the level of forgiveness that took you to talk with this man, meet with his men multiple times, was that the work of years? Yeah. Or did you just have a moment where I just went poof and it was gone? You know, it's interesting. I sort of assumed that Herbert's childhood was terrible. It turns out that it was true. It was very violent. Like, beyond what I think many of us could imagine. He said his father has hands like shovels just to put some of his language to it.

15:50And so somehow there was a sense of understanding early on, although I think there was understanding without having embraced a lot of the pain. But I actually don't remember feeling like angry, which is strange. But I don't remember feeling angry. I've mostly experienced grief and a sense of, wow, this man's life must have been so horrible that he could do something like that. I don't know that that occurred from anything that I did, but the ability to show up with Herbert. And bring love. I think came from years of facing my own pain and learning how to love that. And also working with clients for many, many years and understanding how human beings work, how we function, what's going on in our inner landscape. I think that those things all helped.

16:51And it seems like the willingness to be with pain is such a crucial part of healing and maturation. And it seems like whatever we have in our mind that we're unwilling to experience, sticks around until we are willing to experience it. And whatever we're unwilling to experience runs our life. Basically, you can spend your life. I had a patient who was a needle phobic who all the friends were heading off overseas and she was stuck in home because she couldn't get immunized. And it only took a couple of sessions of first year old, bring your needle into the room, move your toes to her, et cetera. And her being willing to experience what she had spent a lifetime avoiding for the fear to dissolve. And that's a relatively small example. But it sounds like you did that in a much larger and more extended way, even to the point of coming to

17:57to be able to care deeply for this other forward human being as we all are, to some extent. Yeah. Well, you know, for me, it comes back to the sacred gap is that, you know, if I'm needle phobic, it's because I can anticipate a sensation and then reflect that I don't want that. And that same gap is what creates revelation and epiphany and insight, but it also creates suffering because we can then take a perspective. It's in that gap between the knower and the known, that I can take a perspective on pain, on joy, on my neighbor's voting tendencies. And so this opens up both the possibility for incredible insight and wonder. But it also creates suffering. And the suffering gives us the opportunity

18:58to start turning our witness, turning our awareness towards what we're scared of, or what we reject, just like you described. So then we can practice getting a little closer. And of course, the how do we get closer to pain? There's a whole, you know, vast set of technologies that we can explore that, you know, there's ways that I like to do it. There's a million ways that helpers have devised so that we learn how to move towards the things that scare us or that we reject so that maybe those hidden seeds of potential start to blossom, start to grow. And we've zeroed in here on the topic of our relationship to pain and suffering and sorrow, partly because it's such a central part of being a human being, and also a significant part because it's been such a central catalyst for your own growth. And staying with that theme,

20:00one of the things you've done is, I don't know if you introduced it, you're certainly one of the more articulate spokesmen for it that I'm aware of, about the way we mature in our can mature in our relationship to suffering. And you point out you draw three phases of what you call pre-tragic worldview, a tragic and a post-tragic. And as I looked into what you were saying, it felt like, yeah, you've really encapsulated something here that these are really distinct stages and make sense of a lot of what I knew from, say, well, the way a lot of us relate to pain, we have so-called fear worlds, Indrom thinking that the world should be fair, and if I eat my veggies and do my exercise, they should live in perfect health, etc. But anyway, that's a very, that's a kind of quite example, but please, could you lay out this, this first of pre-tragic worldview and then

21:04the trajectory of possibility for us? Yeah. And what it looks like in daily life, too. I mean, how does that really manifest? Yeah, absolutely. Well, so to begin with, the notion of pre-tragic innocence and tragic disillusionment and the post-tragic possibility, these are not, these are not something that I've created that, you know, this triad is something that we find in every wisdom tradition. They don't use that language, but every wisdom tradition, every well-written story, you know, looking at the hero's journey, for example, right? There's the innocent beginning. And then at some point, there's a fracture and there's a call to go on a journey as a result of that fracture. And then there's the opportunity to the hero or the hero. And in some stories, there's the opportunity to return home, but they're changed. So this is something that human beings have been living for a long time. But when we look at the notion specifically of

22:08post-tragic, it comes from theater. And for example, in 1961, Oscar Mandel, he wrote a book defining tragedy. And the very last chapter in the book, he calls the post-tragic episodes. And he says, the post-tragic episodes have a place in this inquiry because they may carry us back to the tragedy itself and make the final emotional or philosophical commentary on the action. It is here rather than the tragic action itself that we may on occasion find an uplift or reconciliation or on the other side a final push into the abyss. And so he's introducing this notion of post-tragic in the context of exploring in theater. What happens after the tragedy? And of course, we know some Shakespearean plays, the tragedy, that's the end, that's the final

23:10chapter. Everybody dies. That's it. Romeo and Juliet, you know? That's right. It's over. And the post-tragic episodes are the chapters that are looking at, well, okay, well, if that wasn't the final chapter. You know, like, for instance, my father being murdered was in many ways the beginning of something. It was one of the earlier chapters of decades of exploration. So, and then later, there's a woman named Judy Chavrine. And in 2013, she wrote a paper, it's called Shakespeare's Symboline and the Mystical Particular. And she said, after innocence, then comes tragic dusolutionment. But at what for a pathomus, which is the protagonist, is a turning point, he begins to inhabit a world that is post-tragic. So you see here that she is introducing this, again, this triad that has been with us as long as we've been telling stories.

24:14But she's defining it now using this theater language, post-tragic. So if we sort of take a brief survey, pre-tragic innocence, you know, for many of us, it starts in childhood. You know, if our parents were able to protect us from the tragedies of the world, it doesn't mean there aren't tragedies around us. But if we were sufficiently protected, there's a kind of innocence. Everything is okay. It's a beautiful world. In Waldorf education, part of the invitation for parents is to preserve this kind of innocent, good world at the early phases of human development. That's quite brilliant, by the way. That's really cool. Yeah, right. Because we then we internalize that sense of fundamental goodness, that becomes a root and anchor from which as we grow, we can interact with more complexity. But also we'll notice that some adults will inhabit pre-tragic innocence. And often what occurs here

25:20is I will outsource to a higher authority, which helps explain away the tragic experiences in my life. It'll all be okay when you die. Sometimes religions will do this. If you follow this tradition, then when you die, everything will be fine. Maybe it's a boss or someone we look up to, or like a politician that we look up to, a cult leader. However, we go about doing it, we sort of outsource the tragedy and the explanation of it to an authority that is beyond us, that sort of helps us maintain this sort of idemic innocence. Then, at some point, our experience of tragedy it breaks through that predictability. Pre-tragic innocence, there's predictability, there's order, there's structure, there's more of the knowns are clear. Then comes tragic dissolutionment. And something shatters. We enter into what I know many of us

26:23experience today, we enter into a meaning crisis. We now don't have the answers like we used to. And there's a sting in our heart. Something gets in and it shatters our experience of what makes sense, meaning itself is brought into questions sometimes. And so this brings us into this tragic territory. Now, we may start to see that everything in the world is seen now through the lens of tragedy. So we see, oh, there's this war and there's the climate crisis and there's poverty and there's this thing and that thing and everything is now translated through the lens of crisis and tragedy. And one of the beautiful things that comes from this is empathy. We start to feel more intensely the pain of others. Another gift of the tragic view is activism. It may propel us into making change, but what can also occur is loss of heart.

27:30Because we attempt to make a change, but then there's multiple crises going on all at once. And as soon as we take care of this, then there's this other thing and then we try to work on the climate crisis and it just feels completely we get crushed by it all. We get crushed by it all. And that becomes a burden on the heart. It weighs us down and it becomes a difficult place from which to be a leader and a difficult place from which to make change because there's often this oscillation between the spirit of activism. But then also this then the sense of loss of heart, can I really make a difference? Can I really do anything little old me? I'm only getting, you know, it's like we have this world where people are paying to get, you know, millions of views. So we think that if we, you know, it's like, it starts to set up this dynamic where we feel if we're not some sort of like a politician or a leader that's like on TV all the time, could I really make a difference? Now the third one is the post. What do you go there, Alexander? One thing you've

28:31drawn out in other places, but I didn't hear so much here is that in the tragic world view, you implied, but didn't quite say that there's this loss of innocence, not only in the fact that Oh hell, they really is suffering, but that it's an avoidable or predictable or preventable, we can't control it, we can't avoid it. This is part of life. And as maybe as expressed, for example, you mentioned the theater in Greek tragedy, some of the great Shakespearean plays in existentialism, this whole philosophy which centers on these extreme challenges of life of being a human being, of having a body which fails and folders and dies, et cetera. And then of course, philosophical pessimism, the whole philosophical perspective, which questions raises a fundamental question is, yeah, it's life really worth living. That's right. And out of this extreme,

29:33there's an anti-natalism of philosophy, it's like the best thing we could do is not give birth to anyone. That's right. Yeah. Everything you're describing is coming from that tragic perspective. I just wanted to say I've been following your, well, we've known each other for a while, we participate in a group called Soul Tank or Entrical Psychotherapy group that we have these discussions and later it gets posted on, Intricle Life or iLight.com. And about 30 years ago, my older brother, when I grew up like this, committed suicide in my living room when I was out. And that set me on a trajectory right into the tragic. And I just left home and for two years, I just wandered about on my pickup truck. And I don't remember a lot of it, you know. And it took me a long time to get over and at one point I just, I was saying to a friend and I just blew apart. So it's sobbing bodies. I was like, oh, the stuff I'd, before I'd been sad, but numb, you know. And

30:35then it just started breaking apart. And that was kind of a turnaround for me. And there were people that were culpable in my brother's suicide that drove him to it. And I was very angry at that. Yeah. And it seems to have taken years of work to get through that. And I found out that if I didn't forgive myself, I couldn't forgive these other people. So it was a two-way street. And that was maybe even harder for me to some of the mistakes I've made, the stuff. So it, it became a, you know, a major theme in my life. And I just want to say, you're not alone, brother. You know, I hear you so. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. And I think, you know, many of us experience the tragic sort of orientation all that like, you know, a lot of the time. You know, we're living in very divisive times. And there's a lot going on all at once. And, you know, I think I appreciate

31:37you saying, you know, I'm not alone. And I think that most of us are not alone in this. That we, many of us experience repeated stings, repeated crushing blows, whether it's our personal lives or whether it comes from witnessing what's happening in the larger, larger world. And one of the gifts of the tragic orientation is that it in some ways forces us into a kind of intimacy with the painful realities of being human. And the choices that we make, pre-schragic innocence can find ways to sort of buffer that and kind of keep it a distance. If it seems like something that's too intense, I can find ways to say, well, that's not real or that doesn't really matter because the teachings say this other thing really matters. But tragedy, it cuts through that. And it opens up a whole possibility. We don't get to a post-tragic possibility without tragedy,

32:40sort of breaking down all of our structures of certainty. So maybe you could say something now. Give us a taste of what this post-tragic stage or possibility looks like. Yeah, we've just suffered through the tragic zone. Come on, Alexander. That's what I want to have the ending. We want to have the ending. Brought up on my trauma. My life's here. Yeah, so a couple sort of things just to say here that I think are important about this. One, I would encourage all of us listening to connect with how the pre-schragic innocence and the tragic dissolutionment are inside of all of us. We're not describing, I'm not describing types of people. I'm describing the ways that all human beings, what we all have access to. Similarly, as we explore what the post-tragic landscape might be, the point for me is not that,

33:44oh, we should let the tragic and the pre-tragic go in place of this other thing that's better. That's not actually how I'm understanding it. It's more like rather than climbing stairs or something like that. It's more like chords on a piano. We have these notes. We might go through one in one day. We might have pre-tragic innocence arise. We might have tragic dissolutionment arise. We might have post-tragic. With that said, remembering back to Mandel and what he said is that post-tragic is a return to the tragic. It's stepping into a domain of wholeness, an unbroken dimension of being, but then returning to tragedy. It's not about leaving tragedy behind, quite the contrary. It's dropping into a place within us that has a number of different attributes.

34:49One we already touched on, embracing the mystery. One aspect of a post-tragic orientation is there's access to our experience as being human, as a deep mystery that is filled with potential. That invokes curiosity. Now, instead of saying the world is collapsing, everything is terrible. I need to hide under my blanket or fight until I, you know, to the point of exhaustion. Or buy guns and lock yourself up in your fort. A lot of that went on in the country. Exactly. Instead, there's dropping into a dimension of being that is able to interface with tragedy in a new way. Because the post-tragic chapters of our lives, it's not where we just leave it all behind. We have to grapple with that tragic moment and bring it forward into new light.

35:52So the post-tragic territory, there's a number of elements that are within this landscape, but I've said a lot of words, so I'll just sort of start with where we've already touched, which is that deep curiosity and vastness. Everything is potential. Beautiful. Does it have anything to do with what we were talking about early sources for forgiveness? Is it have to do with facing your own trauma and the trauma of the world and somehow being able to open your heart to that and feel it? And instead of being crushed by it, be expanded by it? Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Because as I'm understanding post-tragic, we're turning towards things like pain or trauma tragedy from a place in our being that isn't divided. So there's no problem with excruciating pain. It doesn't mean it's not excruciating. It doesn't mean our nervous system doesn't respond. It's not like, you know, I'm not talking about a

36:54bypass where it's like, it's all good, man, like whatever, we're feeling it strongly, intensely. You know, we may be weeping. There's a viscerality to our experience. But the place from which we're coming from, the vantage point from which we're coming from is unbroken. It's deeply luminous. So you still have it, let's look out to an expanded context like, I don't know, something floating in a huge ocean. And by comparison, it's just a little thing. And I mean, it's a real thing, but it's compared to the vastness of our true nature or however you want to put that. It, it just it's a different perspective. That's right. And so I want to just offer a couple things in there. We can orient to tragedy from an unbroken dimension of being and witness it. But then the next step, which I find to be essential for transformation is after the witnessing it, noticing it,

37:56oh, there's deep grief, there's deep anger, whatever the thing is, there's deep pain. After differentiation, I notice it, it's there. The next step is relationship. So if I bring contact, what I mean by this is if I'm touching into, let's say, a deep sense of love, unbroken dimension of love. If I'm making contact with the grief in myself, with that love, there's contact, there's relationship, there's a bond. That's where the pain itself starts to transmute. It's an alchemy, it's it's alchemy. It's an alchemyizing process. It's just like if a little kid is crying, you can be aware that they're crying. But if you just stop there, that's not going to take care of it. You have to pick them up or hold their hand or put your hand on their back. And that's where there's even a deeper intimacy that's developed with the tragedies in our lives.

38:57And there's that process of transmutation where they start to transform. And then we learn our nervous system learns. It's actually better when I embrace the pain than when I avoid it, because there's something that happens on the other side of that transformative process. Alexander, you were refining an important principle. You've been talking about the importance of opening to painful experiences instead of either repressing, suppressing, pushing them out of awareness. And I've long operated out of the belief which was beautifully articulated by a founder of Gestalt Therapy, Rich Pills, who said, and quote, awareness in and of itself is curative, which I thought is beautiful. But you're refining that because you're pointing out that it's it has to be an awareness which allows a real contact with rather than a detached observation from. And I hadn't seen that refinement. So thank you very much.

40:00Well, yeah, I mean, you know, I'm aware of this beautiful quote that you're mentioning that, you know, awareness is curative. And I might offer that awareness is essential in the transformative process. But I'm sure many of us have experienced we have a lot of awareness about a lot of things. But we still eat the whole bag of potato chips when we didn't want to, or we are still bark, you know, we still get into arguments where we get triggered when we thought we got over that. And I notice over the years many of the folks I've worked with, they come in with a lot of awareness about a lot of patterns. They know themselves inside and out. And yet they're still miserable. And often that's because the next phase, what I like to call the arc of transformation, the next phase of transformation requires from that distance. Now I can see it. I can see my shadow. It came into light, but now I have to embrace it.

41:03Yeah, you have to embody it. Otherwise, you don't get there. Yeah. Yeah. I would want to nuance a question here for you, Alexander. And that is, you know, you say, you know, people, some of your clients can come in with a lot of awareness. But is that a kind of intellectual awareness understanding or is it a deep visceral familiarity feeling? I think it's a mixture of both. I think that, you know, many of the folks that may like to listen to this podcast, you know, for example, have done a lot of inner exploration and taken a lot of courses and had a lot of teachers and coaches and therapists and people that have helped them discover things. And I do sense that sometimes it can be an intellectual understanding. And in other times, it's a true epiphany. I discovered something that was hidden, but maybe I didn't go

42:04the next step and interact with it from an unbroken dimension of being, which becomes the special sauce. It becomes the kind of transformative agent that can really resolve the pattern or liberate that pattern. And sometimes it works differently that at first you get the embodiment, you're feeling this and like, I don't know what this is. And you're still okay, teacher. What am I supposed to be learning? And then it's like, oh my God, that's why I don't remember before six years old in my life, you know, and these things come out. And so it's the embodiment first and then the intellectual part comes and then what is that transmutation? How does that work? Well, I think in the example you just gave, it's a beautiful example of the first three phases of transformation, the first is fusion, where I'm fused with it. I don't know. Maybe I have an inkling, there's something I don't know. That's the beginning of differentiation, but I still don't know.

43:04And then I heard you describe going in, making contact, and then there's a little epiphany. Oh, it's this. As soon as I say, oh, it's this, that's the sacred gap doing its work. There's now a distance between my observer, my witness, and the pattern, the thing, the part of the self, whatever it is. That's the second phase. So the first is fusion, then comes differentiation, and then the third phase is relationship. Then I get to be with that. I might have an intellectual aspect to it, but I also can viscerally be with it. And if I bring in loving presence or some other dimension of wholeness, it's in that relationship that then something else starts to unfold. So the pathology becomes potential? Yes. Okay. As far as I can see, since so many cases, the difference between a symptom and a growth opportunity is whether we contract and avoid

44:13or whether we open to and learn from. Now, Alexander, you gave us a lot on each of these phases, and you post-traumatic, now the post-tragedic world view, and I want to see if I can distill some of this and pull out some of the main points. You emphasized that there's a recognition of universality at this stage that suffering is just a part of, you know, this is a part of our shared existence, and that comes in, you said, at the tragic, but it also held at this post-tragedic. And that leads to a kind of an empathy, the potential for empathy and mutuality. You also emphasized how pain can be such a catalyst for growth, but it really depends on how we relate to it. And there's a lot of implications here, and you handed it, you know, this can lead to a way of growth and the way that the perspective that this reminds me most of is the Japanese

45:17perspective of what aesthetic of Wabi Sabi, the idea that Wabi Sabi as I understand it is a central theme of Japanese art, aesthetics, and understanding life, that life and it draws specifically from the Buddhist recognition that all that our experiences tinged with unsatisfactoriness, with transitoryness and imperfection. And so for Japanese Wabi Sabi perspective, there's an appreciation, a kind of wistful gratitude for life and a kind of heightened appreciation because it's in perfect, and it's leading, so live for the, you know, grab this beautiful moment now. I'd love to hear you speak to that. Yeah, so you're speaking to another one of what I like to call the post-tragedic architecture,

46:18that there's sort of some fundamental aspects of the post-tragedic possibility, and we spoke about the mystery and the potential. What I hear you speaking about here is this other territory that relates to this notion of sacred beauty, sacred world. It's a different quality, whereas the mystery and potential, it's like water, it's like under the ocean, it's like deep and vast, or taking in the whole night sky. This, there's more, there's like an elegance and a quality of sacredness. And as this starts to imbue the post-traged view, as we walk out into the world, everything is seen in its intrinsic beauty. And I think this is one of the things that art is so wonderful at opening for us because an artist may take a subject matter that we find grotesque, or dark, scary, ugly, whatever it may be, and the artist is able to

47:26access the essence and depict it in prose or in paint or charcoal or clay so that we're so compelled by the beauty that we're willing to look at something that if we might think it was ugly or the person has contorted or the image of the person has contorted or something, but because it's rendered in such a way that we're compelled to look, it invites us to look through the initial rejection or reaction and see that there might be something sacred in it. In each stroke there's something else that's being conveyed. And when this occurs, there's every interaction is considered like a sacred teacher or a sacred teaching. And the world itself is experienced as holy, but that's not bypassing the agony. It might sound like, oh, we're going over to this place where everything is great. There might still be garbage

48:29and poverty and all kinds of stuff, but there's a willingness to look closer, just like we would with a beautiful piece of art that's depicting something horrible. We can't look away, so we have to look closer and then we find that there's beauty in it and the beauty doesn't sanitize the horror. Alexander, I play the blues. Yes, and that takes just the mundane, everyday ache of being a human being and makes it into something that is compelling and cathartic. That's right. I think exactly what you're talking about. It's exactly it. So then those of us that have a predisposition or are predisposed in some way to turn away from the blues, if it's a good song, we don't turn away and then we listen and then maybe it cracks open our heart a little bit and then we go into the tragic, the gifts of the tragic orientation and where we get a little closer to pain and then maybe we feel our own pain, reflect on our own lives, the blues

49:33and our own experience and then it helps again, it gets us deeper and deeper where at some point the post-tragic might start to open. What's it? Alexander, I'm struck as you describe this post-tragic and thank you so much. This is very rich and I really haven't heard a discussion like this about it, so I think you really are pioneering if not completely you territory or certainly filling it out with your own psychological and developmental perspectives in a way that I just haven't seen before. So thank you very much and as you're pointing to this possibility of coming to what you call a post-tragic perspective, I am struck by the fact that in some spiritual traditions and I think the one I in which it stands out most clearly I think is Tibetan Buddhism, there is a practices somewhat advanced of what's called primordial purity and that is of looking from

50:37its perspective and from that perspective there's a way of seeing the world in which I never I can't get intellectually but I know it experientially, one can look at the entirety of the world with all its tragedies and pains and yet somehow there's no canus to it, I know that sounds crazy but it's like somehow the whole is greater than some of the suffering. There's almost imperfection and the radical imperfection of the whole mess. There's that, I can't intellectually explain it but I think I've tapped into that at times. Yeah, and that's still kind of, you know, what I read the news today or everything, I still have this kind impression that there's something here that's bigger than that and this holds somehow and redeems it in a sense. That's right, it reminds me of a I believe it's Latin concordia discourse sometimes

51:43is the harmony of disharmonies and you know the key with you know there's a lot of these qualities of the mystery and sacred beauty and all that kind of stuff that we can embody in a pre-tragic innocence, right? You do enough meditation, you can discover you know sacred beauty in the world and you can discover the vast depth and the mystery and all that. It's but once there has been the tragic fracturing of meaning and then we step beyond that there's room to begin to embody these qualities but having after after having gone through some of that tragic fracture and it invites a possibility where the world becomes more diaphanus, diaphanus meaning it's something that light can pass through, right? And so we're able to it's more transparent and so we can start to see the tragedies of the world but then look through them as if the light of our awareness is seen through

52:43the tragedy to see that everything is one great gesture. In fact Mahamudra means great gesture or can mean great gestures one way it's translated that everything is one great gesture. There's one flourish of becoming and it includes the ecstasy's, the insights, the innocence, the tragedies, all of it. It's just not torn apart from each other it's one thing and that's where we can get into this place where it's sort of a paradox. How can this be deeply okay and beautiful while also recognizing that there are things happening in this world that are deeply not okay and need our attention to reduce suffering now and that both of those can exist in the same place. As I listen to you, Alexander, it feels like you know this is everything you've said and there's so much in what you've said but a lot in this ladder segment has been under the rubric of

53:47post-tragedic but I'm feeling like there are probably stages within the post-tragedic you're pointing to or maybe a post-tragedic or a trans-tragedic. Yeah, post-post-tragedic. Well you know what comes up for me here is I consider the post-tragedic possibility to be a depth dimension. So we talked about development and development is often understood as a process of growing up it's sort of the vertical or the the the altitude axis. We're growing up maybe we grow down too but then we also have the depth dimension and the depth dimension is something that most human beings can make contact with with some children wherever you're at you can make contact with this depth dimension. That's right so that means that if we've encountered tragedy enough that it breaks down the walls of certainty the architecture of certainty and predictability

54:50if that's occurred and we've experienced tragedy in that way we can cultivate a depth dimension where there's an unbroken aspect of being without having a super complex developmental capacity. We see this all the time and I love this because then it means that the post-tragedic possibility is not reserved for maybe a group of people that we deem sort of developmentally advanced. But it's actually available you know for example there's a teacher at my daughter's school my daughter is Sophia she's very focused and she has her mind that if she she wants to get straight A's no matter what and most of her life if she puts everything into something she will get the thing that she wants she'll get the A's well she was taking this advanced math class and no matter how much she put into it she was not getting the A that she wanted. I took the same class by the way. Right no matter how hard she worked and we had a regular parent teacher meeting and the

55:54teacher was like he doesn't know us that we would be receptive to this but he was like you know this might sound weird but I actually think that this is a good thing because the fact that she's not getting the grade that she wants it's going to help her see all these other aspects of how she doesn't all these things she needs to see about herself that the lower grade is actually positive. Now this was a post-tragedic perspective but it wasn't you know it's basically like hey when to achieve something you didn't get what you wanted to achieve and that quote unquote failure is going to be the the gift that's going to teach you the next thing you need to learn. That's not the most developmentally advanced perspective it's a perspective that most of us have right at least most of us could have access to but he was looking at it from a post-tragedic depth which meant he saw the the possibility in the tension in the friction in the so-called failure and that there was something else that could emerge from that. So in this way development

56:58is its own exploration and the post-tragedic possibility is a depth domain which means that many many many more of us can cultivate that through our own developmental set of perspectives. And I have a question I've been wanting to ask since I've letting your stuff. Is it possible to have you know reach these what we call second tier in interval speak these higher levels of development that we have to work through all to get there and still be at a pre-tragedic say. Yeah pre-tragedic and tragic. Okay. Absolutely because all these things these potentials are in all of us and you know we see folks that would be considered you know very advanced developmentally but they see everything through the world of tragedy or they still use whatever traditions they have as a way to kind of buffer it's all good the teachings say it's all good now I have an incredible amount of complexity to let you know that I understand that the teachings say it's all good. That's what I think the important principle I take away here from what you're saying Alexander is

58:03that we have very multi-dimensional beings and we can flourish or not on multiple dimensions and they're not necessarily connected or they tend to you but not necessarily. Right I like to think that you know and this is probably another conversation for another time but that developmental sort of the process of growing up and the process of growing deep can be independent and or interdependent and that in of itself is a whole sort of realm of inquiry yeah that's fascinating thank you. Yeah Alexander continuing that we seem to be on the steam strategy post-tragy which is very very rich so let's continue one crucial capacity which you haven't you've pointed to but you have a name and I want to bring it in through to ask you discuss it is the the possibility that the tragic and post-tragic perspectives can cultivate compassion yeah absolutely absolutely to me I hear

59:11the word compassion used in a lot of different ways sometimes almost it can be used as a synonym for kindness like I need to be more compassionate towards myself so we have sort of that way of defining the word and the way that I define compassion is experiencing the suffering of someone else or myself as if it was my own and embracing that suffering with a quality of loving presence that transmutes transmutes that suffering and so at some point no longer is anybody else suffering outside of me any suffering is my suffering if we look at one of the Chinese characters that's used for compassion there's the character for the heart and in this case it's kind of like a bowl right it's a receptacle that can receive love awareness and then above that there's the character for silk and in addition to the character for silk is the character for vegetation and what it's

1:00:19describing is a kind of silky quality there's a silky quality that that is pouring through the heart a quality of love that has the ability to receive any degree of suffering and there's an embrace of that suffering with no differentiation between that person and this person and then that suffering is transmuted the same time the because I'm there's absolutely no allergic reaction to this other person suffering if I'm in relationship to someone then that love is instantly extended to them that's a really important point that you said if there's no allergy to the suffering and others if in other words if there's no reactivity and avoidance and I know for me that I spent decades misunderstanding compassion

1:01:23who was had a talk by Joseph Goldstein who a wonderful meditation Buddhist meditation teacher who was on as guest on that podcast and remember he says as a talk he said there's no aversion in compassion hey I was like what so I actually went up to him afterwards he said are you sure there's no he said why don't you try the practice so actually went into retreat for a month and started doing compassion practice full-time and you know from moment you wake up to the moment you fall asleep may you be free of pain and sorrow and may all beings be prepared pains are it's like within a couple of hours this thought arose I've spent my entire life misunderstanding compassion I thought it was based on and it was a aversion and this kind of almost compulsive need to do something and get rid of it and instead it just when there was this recognition that it's more like

1:02:25a warm constant your term silky gentle loving wish that people be free of pain sorrow that's right exactly it's uh I'll you know go ahead there's a say Francis of the CC's big hero of mine and in his journey the thing he really hated and despised and the massive aversion were lepers which there were a lot these people just their bodies were falling apart and you know they're just kept away from people and that was really getting him it's way of doing what he wanted to do he wanted to love God and so the story goes he went out and kissed the leper and it was just this big thing happened to him and the rest of his life he was always serving among others but he was always serving the lepers and I thank him I thank him he's he's from a rich founding his cloak and kissed this leper just like wow and that that that was transmitted into becoming an amazing simpler of what it is to love God and others

1:03:33well that's that's exactly it I mean it's a beautiful symbol also in that story of you know the the metaphor of the leper of whatever it is that we want to move as far away from as possible that there's the cultivation or the experience of an unbounded love that digest the reactivity in us liberates that and then allows that to extend towards another until we see into them so deeply that all that's there is this one great gesture this one presence of experience and this comes back to how can you meet the man that murdered your father that's how this man is me and it's kissing the leper yeah right and and we you know we often see each other as like sort of these two-dimensional cardboard cutout kind of you know everybody has depth and history

1:04:36and they've had a whole life of unfolding and getting that close invites us to see that and through that to how we are one another and Alexander one of the themes that has come up repeatedly during this conversation is the is the recognition of mystery you've emphasized that as kind of the container or context or so much of psychological healing, maturation, movement into post-traged could you speak more about that well to me the mystery is sort of the first possibility in existence it's like if you can imagine wherever you put the wherever you if you have a beginning of when everything started or it goes on forever but if we have this imagined

1:05:36and cosmic everything seed the sort of the the beginning of potentiality and fullness that by definition is a mystery you look at a bunch of seeds you look at an avocado seed a sesame seed you look at a newborn baby it's all the same gesture it's the beginning of something and it hasn't differentiated yet you know like even when a plant is first growing from a seed it has the little cut of lead and leaves they're called and unless you're really well trained it's hard to tell what this thing is right it's like at what point do you discover that you're a tomato plant and when you're a tomato seed you probably don't know that you're a tomato plant it's an unborn potential and so to me it's not the only thing mystery and potential isn't the only thing in the post-tragedic domain but it's the it's the first aspect of it it's the first aspect of it

1:06:38and you also talked about that it's not just trauma that's in the shadow the painful things the world what happens to you my brother killing himself your father being murdered all this sort of stuff there's also the presence of potential essential gifts that you've been given as a individual and when we ignore that it has bad effects just as we push that away it's the same thing it's pushing away the pain and the tragedy did you speak to that a bit absolutely well I think this brings in you know how we're using our gift of being able to witness and observe you know it's something that we teach a lot at you know in the new field programs where we put a lot of emphasis on we are an observer that is making meaning and as long as we're fused with that observer then we're basically we don't have that much choice but if we're able to step back and take

1:07:41a look at the landscape of how we're making meaning there's now a new gap and in that gap we have new possibilities and so in the context of this post-tragic possibility the invitation is that if we explore stepping back into a dimension of being that is already curious compassionate loving interested it's its natural disposition then when we turn towards anything in life be it pain be it a great day with a friend be it simply just cooking a meal for the you know a new recipe for the first time when we're rooted in that deeper place instantly it's automatic that those aspects of life are seen as possibilities we don't post-tragic view is not like a set of intellectual ideas

1:08:41it's a disposition of the heart and by looking at our how we're making meaning what is our current vantage point and then what can we do in terms of practice to step a little deeper and then it's automatic that things are we're curious and the mystery feels compelling and compassion is an obvious sort of practice in being with others but to acknowledge Alexander you're talking now about a pretty advanced degree of psychological maturity I mean it's to be have the recognition that at base we are all these things you've mentioned you know compassionate caring etc that's a big shift from where most people start of being just basically not trusting themselves well I think you know I think there's a spectrum you know I've seen eight-year-olds show

1:09:41kindness and show sort of the earliest emergence or the beginnings of empathy that one of the characters for beginning it shows like a plant that has roots and then there's just a little a little bit of the plan is coming up and so as like for example in Chinese wisdom Chinese medicine you know we wouldn't say that an eight-year-old expresses virtue but they can express a depth of wholeness and that wholeness even though it's not technically considered virtue because that requires living and cultivation it's the beginning it's this little sprout it has roots in our sort of true nature or a deeper dimension of being but then there's just a little a little teeny bit is coming out and so I find that you know we could be someone could experience just a little curiosity towards their

1:10:43pain that's it I'm just a little more curious which is different than I'm embodying the vast mystery of all potentiality there's a spectrum there and for me it's important to acknowledge that spectrum because again it means that more people can be supported in discovering oh I can handle just being a little more curious maybe there's a practice I can explore that'll help me access that curiosity okay we're not in the unfathomable mystery but we're just in the beginning of it that seems very important to see it's so and so vital or healing for example for people to recognize what you're saying that I have a okay I don't have to be completely willing to look at my pain but I have I can have a little willing that's all it takes it for beginning and I think you're pointing to something really important here oh that's right because we all have nervous

1:11:46systems you know like feeling feeling everything all at once ends up you know going against our nervous systems can't usually handle that and so you're absolutely right I mean I've been embracing and projecting and in conflict with things related to my father dying for 30 years we can't do it all at once but connecting to a dimension of being even if it's just the beginnings of it that is automatically curious automatically there's a little bit of love there I see people showing the ability to do that all the time and at the cultivation yeah beautiful yeah Alexander you've given us a beautiful overview of the possibility of of working with deep pain and suffering and you've modeled that in your own life and you've

1:12:47also given us a framework for understanding the stages which we go through as or can go through as part of a human being who inevitably faces suffering and tragedy in life so this has been just very rich in both the heart and mind a beautiful you know you've really beautifully expressed from the heart this whole process and you've given us a framework as we come towards the end here is there anything more you'd like to say I have one thing before we get ready yet all right I want to know about your book I know you've been working on it for years and I read I listen on YouTube you reading a chapter out of it called the room and this is writing at a very high degree so I would like to know is it kind of a building from on German said you know the growing story is it autobiographical or just tell us about it yeah so it's called evolutionary gestures it's a trilogy

1:13:47the first one is finished it's gone to the copy editor it it should be out in seven months from from this moment that we're speaking here seven or eight months and the book is a number of things one thing is that it's a it's a story that unfolds there's a series of short stories like the one that you're describing the room there's a series of short stories that are placed throughout throughout the book and in between those stories there's an exploration of evolution's engine which is the primordial impulse behind all becoming and we look into what are called the five evolutionary gestures and how those gestures shape development we explored I didn't use the language today because we were already exploring a lot of things but we explored how the first evolutionary gesture gives rise to mystery and potential we explored how the fourth evolutionary

1:14:49gesture gives rise to beauty in the sacred world I just didn't use that language because it would have required setting up a whole bunch of other things in our conversation was going beautifully in a different way but essentially we're looking at how these five evolutionary gestures unfold through the sacred gap and how as this occurs these gestures they are the primary shape makers of everything I mean it's one way of looking at it I don't mean to totalize you know it's a way of looking at it but through this perspective we'll see how each of these gestures helped give rise to different waves of development and how we make meaning and that is interspersed with a story and also my wife Veronica her artwork and Chinese calligraphy and some other illustrations too because I'm trying to invite us into an exploration of development an exploration of depth and the post-tradiac possibility from a place that is not just academic and not just intellectual

1:15:51but that our our souls are moved our hearts are opened and we're we're learning in a not always in a linear way and somehow these stories they go in in a different way because it's art and so that's the job of art. I'm looking forward to this yeah. Well, Alexander thank you so much it's been a real gift you've given us a lot both hard and line so thank you very much thank you for the work you do and yeah we can maybe in the future we'll take off an Indian number of the topics we could have touched on. Beautiful. Yeah, yes, and I don't tell you before you go I wouldn't embarrass you I think when we were discussing having you on the podcast then I think Robert brought the opposite. Yeah, I know him and blah blah and Rodgers me what can you tell me about it? I said, well he's he's saintly and you have it disappointed. We have a just a general ness but it's not soft. I mean it's very present but there's definitely a transmission of you know

1:16:56in my mind as he's saintliness so that's quite a grace and I appreciate you brother. Well thank you thank you both so much and it's been a gift to be here with you and yeah I hope this is some bit benefit to everyone listening and you know one thing I'll just say in closing is that you know to me we've been writing a great story as human beings for thousands of years. And it might be that we need a new chapter. It might be that the current ways that we're making meaning are not sufficient to address the complexity and the horrors of this time that we're in together and I believe that part of the new chapters we can write includes this post-tragic possibility that we might return to tragedy but in a new way and perhaps there's something new that we see when we do this together so I just want to invite everybody into that as a possibility that we're all exploring that we can all explore together. Well thank you very much.

1:18:00Yeah thank you. Thank you very much for being a part of this conversation. We hope that you were moved as we are moved being part of ourselves. We'd also like to say that this is being funded by Roger myself it comes out of our pockets so if you would like to help us to mainly to get this podcast out to more people because the bigger audience have which is steadily growing but the more people we can reach in the more marketing we can do the more positive effect we can have on the world so we've done a couple of ways but we'd like you to buy us a cup of coffee very simple and I do that with podcasts that I support and I found it's very satisfying. So thank you for your help. Thank you for your presence and thank you for all you are and all you do. We love you.