Riding a Bike, Indwelling and Empathy with Esther Meek and Ryan Lewis

so just just to make sure i'm i'm getting this like modernity gets us focusing on all of the the details and the specifics and then we're just kind of looking at all of them all the time instead of uh just participating through it i don't i don't have words for it this is part of

it well what here's the process when you're like when my father taught me to ride a bike He took me to the top of the grassy hill at the back of our yard and put me on a bike that was too big for me.

I was entirely a skeptical person and he pushed me and he yelled, balance, which meant nothing to me either.

And the whole thing was just whatever.

And I'm sure he felt like, Once I got to the bottom of the hill, I'd be riding.

And I can't remember the bottom of the hill, but I can ride a bike.

But what happens at the top of the hill, I call this point A in Lovington now, is I'm looking at the bike.

It's totally meaningless, opaque, contraption.

I'm sure nothing can balance on two points.

His words mean nothing to me.

They might as well be another language.

And then my body is not working out for me either.

So my body feels very opaque too.

So at the beginning of this, you are focusing on what somehow you've got to somehow climb inside, give yourself to, to look or attend from to the farther pattern.

Just like you have to get yourself down behind the telescope if you're going to see

Jupiter,

right? So I somehow, even though I didn't understand his words, I had to trust him.

And, and somehow I, you know, I was praying for a miracle, but that's what happens.

So what you need to do, like, you know, about empathy is like this.

If you're gonna understand a person, you gotta get inside them and see the world from them.

That's subsidiary vocal integration.

Right.

And empathy is not the highest form.

It's the, the first form of all knowing is empathy.

So you've got to end well.

Any sort of clue? words and uh even this thing that you do not yet understand somehow you've got to get inside that too so it's that's the subs in dwell is another word for subsidiary and the word subsidiary is that because uh you actually really only kind of know the subsidiary as subsidiary to the focal pattern the integrative pattern that you come up with so if i in my penmanship you know Like if I write your name here, you know, what I'm doing with my hands and my pen and the paper, get, garner their meaning from the focal pattern of writing your name.

So with a skill, it's the performance, the performance of bike riding, that's the focal pattern and it's dynamic and it's unfolding.

And then the world has come into you.

in, in bike paths, you know, there's all these possibilities of places that you can go once you, you and the body, you and the bike and your dad's words, you know, have all integrated and become that at that point, then they're the subsidiary.

So it goes from focal particulars at the top of the hill to, uh, more and more pregnant clues to becoming subsidiary parts of the focal pattern when you, when you achieve the performance.