In this episode of the Intentional Evolution Podcast, host Vision Battlesword welcomes Michael Porcelli for an in-depth exploration of the nature and dynamics of relationship. Their conversation begins with personal introductions and reflections on the “magic” of Austin, then quickly dives into questioning the definition of relationships—even referencing the Oxford English Dictionary, which they find lacking.

Vision Battlesword and Michael Porcelli unpack relationship as both a central aspect of human existence and an abstract, living system. They discuss concepts from physics (like quantum entanglement) to internal psychology (parts work, internal family systems), highlighting that relationships exist both between and within people. Integral theory is invoked to distinguish interior and exterior self-awareness.

Key insights include the importance of seeing relationship as an active process (“relating”) rather than a static possession, the pitfalls of over-identifying with relational roles, and how dynamics like humility and dignity create healthier interactions. They warn against treating relationships as transactional or solely identity-based, referencing codependency and even political utopianism as examples of unhealthy fixation.

Meta relating is defined as the skill and practice of communicating about the relationship itself, which inherently alters its nature—akin to the quantum observer effect. Practical relational advice is shared: embrace curiosity, honor both personal perspective and the experience of others, and allow relationships (and one’s concepts about them) to remain flexible and evolving.

The dialogue closes with mutual appreciation, resources for learning more about their respective frameworks, and anticipation for future conversations.

Show Notes

Chapters

• 00:00— Welcome to Austin & Opening Reflections
• 01:00— Who is Michael Porcelli? Identity, Connection, and Central Themes
• 02:14— Beyond Surface: Defining Relationships & Relational Clarity
• 05:12— Relationship: State, Process, or Identity?
• 07:06— The Living System: Relationship as Game, Dance, or Emergent Entity
• 10:16— Math, Information, and the Relational Fabric of Reality
• 13:36— Vibe, Nature, and the Externalization of Relationship
• 16:19— Color, Perception, and Relationships as Relational Properties
• 24:10— Attributes: Essential or Always Relational? Eastern & Western Views
• 27:30— Groundlessness, Spirituality, and Practical Living
• 32:00— Humility and Dignity: Meta Relating’s Relational Axis
• 34:42— Internal & External Self-Awareness: Quadrants, Conflict, and Communication
• 38:10— Intent & Impact: Curiosity and the Interpersonal Gap
• 41:06— Intentional Evolution: Imagination, Intention, and Guidance Systems
• 44:44— Relationship Defined: Oxford, Experience, and the Challenge of Clarity
• 47:56— Shared Experience, Interactivity, and Relationship Subtypes
• 53:00— First Impressions: Patterns, Bias, and Energy Sensitivity
• 56:02— Sensing, Skepticism, Intuition, and the Limits of Knowing
• 1:01:04— Overconfidence, Empathy, and Relational Curiosity
• 1:06:42— Language, “Have” vs “In,” Identity, and Attachment
• 1:13:00— Roles, Identification, and Dynamics of Relational Dysfunction
• 1:22:31— Polarity, Games, and Mutual Creation of Relationship
• 1:25:28— “Relating” as a Verb: Needs, Agreements, and Dynamic Evolution
• 1:29:12— The Myth of End-State Relationships
• 1:32:55— Meta Relating Defined: Relational Conversation, Status, and Meta-Skill
• 1:35:12— Quantum Parallels: Observer Effect in Relationship
• 1:37:21— Wisdom Takeaways: Dynamic Evolution & Living Systems
• 1:41:50— Learn More: Meta Relating, Intentional Autonomous Relating, & Next Steps
• 1:43:37— Episode Close & Future Conversations

[00:00:00] Vision Battlesword: Hello, welcome to the Intentional Evolution Podcast. I am your host, Vision Battlesword, integral consultant and founder of iEvolve Life, a personal and professional development practice based on the philosophy of intentional evolution. This podcast is an ongoing conversation to explore that philosophy as well as to serve as a resource, a showcase, and a catalyst for ongoing growth toward the Human Singularity.

That is to say. Mass awakening of new consciousness, super intelligence and radical creative flourishing. Each episode, I'll feature a world class transformational facilitator, co-creator or friend, to reveal cutting edge psychospiritual technology, unpack our deepest wisdom, and evolve our awareness. This series is based on value for value.

So whatever value you receive from these transmissions, please return some value back in the form of a donation, directly supporting our contributors, or offering your own time and talent as a producer. Thanks for joining me in this journey. And now here's our episode,

Michael Porchelli. Welcome to Austin. How has your trip been so far?

[00:01:14] Michael Porcelli: This trip has been pretty great. Yeah, a little bit of like a magic carpet ride. You know, jumping from a lily pad to lily pad of like friends and people haven't seen in years. So yeah, Austin has a magic to it that I like when I'm here.

[00:01:26] Vision Battlesword: Well, I'm really glad you made me one of your lily pads.

[00:01:29] Michael Porcelli: Yeah.

[00:01:30] Vision Battlesword: To drop in on this time. Yeah. This is the first time we've actually met each other in person. We've been connecting and talking for however many, however long it's been, several months, maybe over a year, I can't remember now, but really, really good to drop in with you finally.

We had that super stimulating conversation just a couple of days ago that mm-hmm. Really made me just want to talk with you more and unpack a big idea with you that we're both very passionate about Indeed, as you know. Yep. Before I jump into that though, I always like to ask kind of a starting question, just so that we can get to know each other and our audience can get to know you a little bit.

The question is just, who are you, Michael Porchelli, or shall I call you Porch?

[00:02:10] Michael Porcelli: That is a nickname that I keep getting called no matter who, which group of friends it is or what era of my life. But you can call me porch if you want. Yeah. Okay. Or Michael Porchelli. Who am I? Ah, man. I'm the oldest of three.

I'm a son. I'm a man. I'm a entrepreneur. I'm a facilitator. I'm a former engineer. I like thinking and I like talking. I'm very social and sociable. I love to share with people. Being with people and creating rewarding experiences with others is like really central. The, I mean, it's connected to our theme for today.

It's like a central thing about me. You know? There's more I, but that's a little brief overview of me.

[00:02:55] Vision Battlesword: Nice. I like to ask that question in that way because it's sort of like a pattern interrupt, you know what I mean? Yeah. People, people aren't quite expecting to. I like interrupting people's scripted responses to how they share their biography.

And I, 'cause I want to get a little deeper, like that's kind of the whole point of this show and this mission, this exploration that we do is to go several layers, I think, deeper than the surface level that we might usually approach. Any concepts, even ones that we use every day it seems like, or all throughout our lives.

And so to that point, you know, this is one of those concepts. I was actually really, I started getting really excited about this talk this morning, realizing like how many times I have used this particular word, especially in the work that I do and the work that we both do because I'm the creator of intentional autonomous relating as you know, and you are the creator of something called Meta Relating.

Yeah. So the word relationship or relationships and I'm sure all of the adjacent associated words to that, like relating and all of the other ones, we use these constantly. And yet I realized that I don't actually feel 100% crystal clear in this moment what, how precisely I would even define what a relationship is.

And so that's why I'm just so excited to kind of kick this off with you in particular being such an expert on the topic that you are. And you have a very long and storied background and the entire relationship, uh, well we called it an industry the other day, but what we call it the domain Yeah. Of expertise and relating and everything.

So I'm just really excited to explore that with you. Are you still excited to unpack the whole concept of relationship?

[00:04:50] Michael Porcelli: Yeah, I mean, I'm very interested in seeing where this will go. 'cause I think it actually goes. Very deep. Exactly. Like you might even say all the way down to like the fabric of reality deep, you know?

Yeah. Maybe. Yeah.

[00:05:03] Vision Battlesword: Well, I guess it, well we're, if we're going there, like right off the bat, the theory of relativity Yes. Is a sort of a theory of reality. Yeah. Which is relational. Yes. Never really even thought of it in those terms, or how it, how that relates. No pun intended to Yeah. Our human relationships, but Yeah.

Is that where you want to go or do you wanna step somewhere

[00:05:23] Michael Porcelli: else? Well, one thing I'll say sometimes is like, you know, to exist is to be in relationship. Interesting. And I do think it is kind of that way. I mean, if we were to kind of be at the, at the human level, I mean, I sometimes have wondered like, okay, am I in some kind of relationship with like every other person that has been alive?

On earth at the same time as me. I mean, maybe am I in a relationship with the Earth? Am I in a relationship with? I mean, it definitely feels like I've had pets that I've been in a relationship with. Okay. So it doesn't have to be with humans. I mean, the, the word can expand pretty far. You know, if you, if you want it to, I don't know if I can give you kind of a dictionary definition without it starting to feel incredibly abstract.

Right? It's like the thing that exists between two or more entities that helps define what those entities actually are to each other. Something like that. I mean, that's a great start. Yeah. How would you say it? I mean, that's, uh, that's my initial take.

[00:06:28] Vision Battlesword: Well, where I wanna start is with the languaging that I was just listening to as you were talking, because that reminds me of that little interchange that we had via text Uhhuh, about listening to you using the word to be a lot.

Mm-hmm. To be in, we are in, there's an identity component to it. Mm-hmm. And that's been something that in my work with intentional autonomous relating, I've sort of intentionally tried to deconstruct or tried to break down that, or rather maybe not break down or deconstruct, but more disassociate our identity, our personal individual identity from that of the relationship.

So, and then we, we kind of aligned on this word have. Right. Although we use it in slightly different ways. Yes. But we both agree that that's, that's an interesting word or maybe a helpful word. And so yeah, I've, in IARI have encouraged people to reframe languaging and there, and therefore the thought process from a relationship is something that I am or I am in versus a relationship is something that I have or it's something that I do.

So it kind of reframes it from an identity into a verb. It, it becomes active, it becomes a process. Yes. And I know that part of it you fully align with from Meta Relating. Yes. Which we haven't actually explained or defined what that is. Sure. And I'm sure we will shortly, but for now, just to say that it seems like you and I are at least in agreement.

That a good way to think of relationship is as a process or as something that is not static. Yes. It's something that's in a state of change.

[00:08:16] Michael Porcelli: Yes. It's a, it's a living system. Like what a relationship I love is. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you could even say like within a person, you know, people who have done parts work, internal family systems or other kinds of parts work internally.

You know, there's this, we're multicellular organisms, but even in our psyche we can think of like, oh, the, the inner child or the inner parent or these other, you know, parts, you know, the psychological models like the super ego and the it and whatever your model of choice is, it kind of decomposes something that seems like just an individual or a person into internal parts and there's like a dynamic interplay of those parts.

Well, you could even say there's internal relations between your parts, right. That are continually evolving and then when you're. In a relationship with somebody, there's a way that the two of you are participating in. You could even think of it like as a game or a dance or a, something that exists as a, almost like an emergent, it's somewhat immaterial in a way.

I mean, it, it is built out of the, what you say and what you do like with each other, but it doesn't have like a, a body, right? Or like a, like a rock or a tree. Right. Or even you or me in our flesh and bones. Right? It sort of exists in a space that is like shared between us. I mean, one way you can think about, it's like in our minds, right?

Like my relationship with you, vision and my even. Internal representation of you and our connection and our little story that we've shared together. Like you said, these past few months, you could say that is like an aspect of what our relationship is like from my point of view. And you have that also.

And in a way to be like a little computer nerdy about it, you could say it's like a distributed informational object or a hyper object that is sort of like, it doesn't have a simple location. Yeah. It actually is spread across our body and mind.

[00:10:23] Vision Battlesword: Yeah. I love that you used the word information 'cause that's, uh, my mind was going directly there as well.

When you're starting to describe the entity, the relational entity, which is somehow intangible, entirely insubstantial, and yet undeniably has existence. But how exactly do you define that? And one of the places my mind went was back to, you know, where we originally started with this idea of like, are we going all the way down to the underlying fabric of reality?

At some point here, I just started thinking about like, okay, what's a very simple relationship that I could conceive? And I'm starting to think of sort of planetary bodies in motion. Yes. In a phy physics Yes. Sense. So it's like two planetary bodies are orbiting each other. Mm-hmm. The orbit, the math of that is one way of describing the relationship, the gravitational, the spatial relationship between those two objects.

And yet. What is math or what is any description? Yes. It's information. Yes. It's, it's inherently informational. Yes, totally. And then you use the word attribute at some point. And that was, again, my mind then jumped where yours did to sort of computer analogies. Starting to think of, is a relationship like attributes, tags, metadata, or data essentially?

Yeah. Yeah. That we hold? Is it, is our relationship, mine and yours, a set of data that we each hold for and with and about each other?

[00:12:00] Michael Porcelli: Yes. I, I think that it is, right? Yeah. In, in a weird way. You know, there are aspects of our existence that, you know, feel a little bit more under our agency, like voluntary control, like choices we make about our career or our life.

And then there, there are just basic things that are involuntary, like bodily functions. It is like, okay, we don't really have total control over what's going on, but like there's. Ways that our minds work that really are not totally under our control. So like I could imagine that I could like make up whatever the heck I want about our relationship or something.

But like the truth is our interactions, this conversation we're having now or if we're just present in the same space and we're just observing each other, whether we're talking or not talking or something like our brains are kind of just like updating that relational data structure or whatever that is like uhhuh, almost involuntarily.

I could even almost like ask it or ask myself or something, right? Inquire query that. Like what is the nature of my relationship with vision? And it would be like, okay, some answers would come more readily than others and that would be a real like readout you could say of something, an emergent, like right now I say, Hey, what is my relationship with vision like?

I'm like. Almost on an unconscious like computation or something, in my mind is kind of going like, okay, right. Like you're reading data, like

[00:13:31] Vision Battlesword: you're like, you're going to the records in the database of, okay, what tags, what attributes have I stored about that, that describe that dynamic? I guess that so, so dynamic is a word that hasn't come up yet.

I'm sure we're gonna explore. You used a word a moment ago, which is nature that I thought was really interesting. You said, what is the nature of my relationship with vision? So that makes me think of, so relationships have a nature to them or. What does that word mean in that context?

[00:14:03] Michael Porcelli: Yeah, like, um, I mean you could say, I've heard it say like relationships.

They have personalities. Uhhuh not just like Pete. Individuals have personalities where they have, um, we have a vibe. Mm-hmm. Right. Hey, when we get together, there's a kind of a vibe that is like our vibe. You know? I think when you get scale that up to like culture, you sort of see it, but even in like intermediate sizes, like, especially like a, like a family of origin, right?

If you think about, I don't know if you have siblings or something, but like when you have a group of people, parents and kids or something, it's like the home, especially when nobody else is there, kind of has a vibe. Mm-hmm. Which you could say is like what our family system feels like or what it is sort of kinda like to be a part of it, right?

Yeah. That's what I think of as the nature of the relationship in a way.

[00:14:46] Vision Battlesword: Right. And the way you describe that now also. Reminds me of the word culture, like that's kind of a way of describing what a culture is within a society, group or community. So there's a sense in which you could say our relationship is our shared culture, just between the two of us.

[00:15:07] Michael Porcelli: Mm-hmm.

[00:15:07] Vision Battlesword: But when you bring up the word nature, I think that's really interesting because to me, the nature of something, the way we, we would normally use that word, there's some, there's some connotation of that. That's like the innate essence of it as if it has a life of its own. Mm-hmm. Like what you were describing before when you called it an emergent entity.

But that, yeah, there's, there's something interesting to me about the idea that there's an underlying form or there's an underlying character, there are underlying characteristics that are attributes of the relationship itself. Not merely attributes that we carry about it. That's where the word nature was leading me.

I don't know if that's where your mind was going as well.

[00:15:56] Michael Porcelli: Yeah, I mean, there's, there, it, it does feel like it has, I mean, whether it feels like it has agency or not, it does feel like a force of, we talk about magnetism or gravity, like in a metaphorical way about our relationships.

[00:16:11] Vision Battlesword: This is the point I'm trying to make is, is that there's a sense, there's a feeling of externalization.

Yeah. When you, when you use that word or when you make that analogy to Yeah. Something like a force of nature. Now suddenly we've moved subject into object uhhuh, and the relationship now is its own object Yes. Of something, right. Of information, of energy, of

[00:16:33] Michael Porcelli: math. I don't know. Yeah. Well I that you, you brought up math a couple times.

Yeah. That there's an interesting, perhaps a little bit of a detour here, but like Uhhuh, that's what we do. So like, there is, um, I can't remember his name, but he, he has kind of this mathematical universe hypothesis, and there's a, there is a school of thought, you know, Stephen Wolfram is one of these folks that, and a few of these other folks are kinda like, is the math like a description of the stuff?

Mm-hmm. Or is it actually the stuff? The stuff, yeah. Right. Uhhuh and uh, you know, if you kind of take this like informational or mathematical nature of the universe into account or look at it from that point of view. What is a mathematical equation, whether it's like, you know, e equals mc squared or one of these kind of famous physics equations.

Well, that is a definition of a kind of relationship. Yes, you're right between these values, right? You're right. But, but you kinda go like, well, what is the thing? And you're kind of like, in a certain way it doesn't matter. I mean, we do kind of correlate observation, you know, experimental processes or practices that you would do to kind of get these values from like devices and stuff like that.

So, but even there, there's a relationship and one of my favorite examples of this is color vision. So were talking, I telling you a little bit earlier, like, I worked at Hewlett Packard in my engineering career and I worked building color printers. So there's a whole kind of internal curriculum that they taught us at HP of like color science.

Hmm. And, well let me ask you this. Have you ever thought of like, why is it that the primary colors. The primary colors, like why is it red, red, yellow, and blue, red, yellow and blue uhhuh? Like why is it that, oh, you just mix these together and you can get any other color? Like that is pretty wild. What is special about those colors?

You tell me. What is it? Well, it's our eyeball. No? Yes. Really? Yes. It's not out there. We have three different, I believe it's the cones. Yeah, the rods do the black and white and the cones do the colors. I think that's right. And they, they each sort of have like a responsiveness distribution mm-hmm. To two certain frequencies of light mm-hmm.

That are kind of centered around the kind of place where they're the most sensitive. So what a color is, it's not just intrinsic to the frequency of the light. It's the frequency of the like plus the frequency response of the eyeball that is seeing it. So you know, in humans there's kind of colorblindness or sometimes they talk about some, there's sometimes people, there's four cone type people or other animals, you know?

And when you look at physics, it's like, look at the visible light is just this tiny little bandwidth. But like different creatures can see different spreads of those wavelengths, right? And then within them they can make differentiations that are different than ours. But the differentiations have to do with the evolution, the evolution of those species within their evolutionary niche, which is a kind of a relationship over a very long like evolutionary period of time.

So like for us, we pick out red very strongly and especially in contrast to green, right? But that's not because. Somehow the frequency of red and green are just super different, like intrinsically. It's because differentiating red and green was very valuable for the evolution of humans. Wow. So color is an actual relational property.

It is not a property of objects. That makes sense. Like there, there's something that's contextual and specific Yeah. To the relationship between the the species or the eyeball of the species. Mm Oh yeah. And the outside world. I see that part of it too. That is not just sort of like, oh, just colors are just colors right out there.

[00:20:32] Vision Battlesword: They're not out there. If we had a, if we had evolved in a wildly different environment where different things were relevant, we could potentially have adapted a wildly different Yes. Visual yes. System. Yes. And our quote unquote perception of color or our subjective experience of it would be wildly different.

And we might. Whatever it is that we call red, yellow, and blue now versus purple, green and orange. We might be based on purple, green and orange

[00:21:01] Michael Porcelli: instead. Right, right. And you know, biologists know enough about other species to know that like, oh, they do have different sensitivities in different senses. Like the dog whistle.

Right. The dog, it's like we can't hear, but the dogs definitely can. It's like, oh that's interesting. It's like, so it sort of seems like it's not real from our point of view. But you wouldn't say there isn't a sound there. Right. It's just like we can't hear it. Right. So you're like, oh. So I guess sound even that is not exactly just out there.

That's an interesting point though

[00:21:29] Vision Battlesword: to, to say that there is a sound, there is a weird statement to make. 'cause what is a sound except something that we actually perceive experience. Yes. So we're actually at, at a point we have to be projecting our consciousness into some other creature. To assume that they have an experience analogous to what we experience as sound, and then we say, well, there must be a sound there, but it's not one that we can perceive.

A more accurate thing to say might be there is a frequency there. Yes, there is a, a sound, there's a wave, a compression wave

[00:22:12] Michael Porcelli: in the air.

[00:22:13] Vision Battlesword: Yes. Of a certain cycles per second

[00:22:16] Michael Porcelli: Yes.

[00:22:16] Vision Battlesword: Would maybe be a more precise or accurate description versus sound, because sound like color or like any quality is entirely subjective.

Right. This is a fascinating tangent Yes. That we're on and because we're here and because I'm so fascinated with it, I want to call attention to the fact that you, you talked about red, yellow, and blue being our so-called primary colors. Yes. But it occurs to me that printers are actually not precisely based on a red, yellow, and blue.

They're based on a different cyan, magenta. Yeah. And yellow. And that computer screens are not based on red, yellow, and blue at all. They're based on a red, green, and blue. And yet they somehow are also able to mix those colors to produce whatever, everything that we can perceive within our visual spectrum.

[00:23:12] Michael Porcelli: Yes.

[00:23:13] Vision Battlesword: That's interesting.

[00:23:14] Michael Porcelli: Yes. These, those two bottles. And I'm, I'm going a little outta over my skis here 'cause I don't remember the science exactly, but there's, there's essentially like an additive versus a subtractive model. And when the light is bouncing off of a thing, like a piece of paper, it's the subtractive model versus when it's, I, when it's being projected.

It's like the additive model, but they are essentially like two sides of the same coin. Right. But both sides of that coin. Are calibrated to our eyeballs. Yeah. Yeah. It's actually called meta or meta meric match. So like the color spectrum, we, you could print a flower on a printer and be like, okay, let me look at the flower itself and let me look at the print out of that photograph of that flower.

And you'd be like, yeah, that looks the same. Right? But if you showed those, like say to like an insect that has just a completely different visual system. Oh yeah. They would look totally different. Right. It's just sort of like when you take this ink and filter it through our eyeball, this pie, it looks just like that flower going through this eyeball that is so relational.

You're right. It's called the tism. Yes. It is totally

[00:24:17] Vision Battlesword: relational. Fascinating. Yes. Fascinating. So yeah, the relationship is. The way that we specifically calibrate our environment, or rather the way that we configure our environment. Yes. Based on the calibration of our sense systems.

[00:24:36] Michael Porcelli: Yes.

[00:24:36] Vision Battlesword: And we can do the same thing with LEDs, red, green, and blue LEDs, which that was, to my mind, that was presumably the explanation for why computer screens are based on that is just simply because that's what we have available.

We, we can make LEDs that emit red, green, and blue specifically. And so we figured out a way to mix those.

[00:25:00] Michael Porcelli: No,

[00:25:00] Vision Battlesword: no, that's not it.

[00:25:01] Michael Porcelli: We could make, we could make LEDs, thatit, all kinds of different colors. It's just like, oh. The, the simplest way we can make all of the colors that that would essentially be equivalent to all the colors that we can see in the non-screen world.

Uhhuh is those three. Wow. Fascinating. Yeah, it's like a color model is what it's kind of called. So this is kind of fun 'cause it's sort of like recent science, but you can go way back to like ancient philosophers. And one of the debates that they would have both in eastern and western philosophy is what is essential to what a thing is versus like what is kind of relational.

And there would be kind of like, okay, you can have attributes, maybe some attributes are sort of like intrinsic, right? They're built into the thing itself. And other attributes sort of only exist in relation to other things. But there are some schools of thought that are like non-essentials or anti-essentialist, which sort of subtract away.

They're like, no, all attributes. Are relational, and in Buddhism they have a thing, it's called like dependent origination. There's like a weird Sanskrit word for this, but this, it correlates to the idea there is no self, the anata idea or like the emptiness idea that like no things have intrinsic attributes at all.

Yeah, I'm familiar. So this is relational, right? This is essentially the relational philosophy, which is like there aren't attributes of things that are built into their essence because there aren't any essences. Mm-hmm. It's just, this is where I kind of was way back in the beginning of our conversation to exist is to be in relationship.

Everything you think is sort of like you, right? I could put it to you this way. Okay. Vision. I want you to imagine who you are. Then I want you to subtract every part of that that has to do with your genetic lineage. Then I want you to also subtract every part of that that has to do with all of your life experiences.

Okay. What's left matter?

[00:27:04] Vision Battlesword: Pure matter? Pure, pure energy. Maybe a thought process, existing moment to moment to moment.

[00:27:10] Michael Porcelli: Maybe something like that. But I mean, you wouldn't have much of a, like my claim is when I think about like who, Michael who, when you dissolve my identity, I think is what you've done. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. Exactly, exactly. Uhhuh, right? And I, so I'm like, oh, okay. So we, we have a certain, especially in Western civilization, a certain way of thinking about like agency and individuality and free will or sovereignty. And this is me and this is not me. And, and I'm not saying this, that it's like just totally nonsense, right?

I mean, I think there are like biological reasons to track. Your body is tracking sort of like what's on the inside of you and what's on the outside of you. But there is this additional. Concept, right, that we have that is like, it's behind our economics or even our political science of like, you know, one person, one vote, free exchange, voluntary exchange, right?

It's kinda like, there's like an intrinsic to those ideas is this idea, like a person is sort of like a, a primary force, but a relational point of view would be like, eh, no matter how many layers back you go, so where did that come from? Where did that come from? Where did that come from? You would just be like at some point, like what appears to be like a personality or a self or even agency or intention, like wanting something to happen is only real in its relations to everything else, right?

It's not just out of nothing. See what I'm saying? This is the, and yet somehow it is

[00:28:39] Vision Battlesword: exactly out of nothing. Sure. This conversation has been getting very meta and that feels very appropriate for some reason. But when you say that, when you're talking about that the individual primary force of the individual, of the person as a component of society, economy, all of these different dynamics.

Relational,

[00:29:03] Michael Porcelli: yeah.

[00:29:03] Vision Battlesword: Dynamics, genetic history,

[00:29:04] Michael Porcelli: biological history

[00:29:05] Vision Battlesword: too. I could take it as I frequently do. Back to physics once again. Mm-hmm. And start thinking, which is, this is where my mind starts going. Well, surely there is a bottom. Surely like how far do we need to go? Do we need to go to the proton? Oh shoot, we got quarks.

Okay, so what's inside Quarks? Okay, we don't necessarily know, but at a certain point it sure seems to be the case that you just get to a field of energy, you get to a vibration, you get to a vibrational frequency that the disturbances of which, or the, the wars or aggregations of which gives rise spontaneously to these structures, which we then can attach to as whatever it is that we call matter or whatever it is that a thing we call form a thing.

Yeah, a thing emerges, but if you unpack that thing far enough, you get to know thing. Somehow, yes, apparently that's the best understanding or awareness of the universe that we have now. But is there a place that we can stand on? Literally? Can we find ground at a particle perhaps or something? I agree with you philosophically speaking, and this comes back to spirituality, which is also a main topic of intentional evolution overall and consciousness and a lot of, you know, more abstract or esoteric concepts, I think that are still nonetheless extremely relevant to our lived experience.

So yeah, I'm just trying to see where do we ground ourselves in this conversation to start to talk about relationship or relationship of things.

[00:30:49] Michael Porcelli: Yes.

[00:30:50] Vision Battlesword: How meta do we want to get? Sure. And finally, my question, what is Meta Relating?

[00:30:56] Michael Porcelli: Cool. Well, let me bookmark and get to Meta Relating in a minute. Okay. I, you know, I think you, you wanna respond to my physics?

Yeah. I mean, I, I think it is fun and it's fun to kind of go down this, you know, you know, one of the things about philosophy is you can kind of go there, but then it's like, okay, then you, then you gotta like do stuff like, I don't know, sleep and eat and take care of yourself or everyday life kind of takes over and thinking about like, the emptiness of all things or the groundlessness of reality or something just feels like, okay, like practically speaking it is like those things that condense or become thing unified or something.

And then we just act as if that's just the way it is. And so, practical, everyday living. Yes. That we do do that and we kind of need to do that. I mean, I maybe, maybe some enlightened masters or people who go into sort of temporary, elevated spiritual states really are cruising around. I definitely have had periods of time where it sort of, I felt like I was moving through my life with some emptiness of all things, but that did not last very long and it was incredibly weird.

Right. And I wasn't exactly like that effective in the world, you know, when I Exactly was feeling

[00:32:06] Vision Battlesword: that about to say. Yeah. I think those concepts are really, really helpful. I think there's very deep truth to it. I think. It can inform our lives. I think it can help us to find peace. It can help us to find truth, understanding of the world, deeper understanding of ourselves, all that good stuff.

And when we're having a relational conversation with someone, it might not be the most useful when we're having a conflict over whose turn it is to do the dishes. Right. Well, I mean, is there really anyone here actually to do the dishes? Yeah. What is a dish? What is a dish? A dish is really just a relationship of,

[00:32:47] Michael Porcelli: you know,

[00:32:47] Vision Battlesword: energy, vibrations, energy and math.

Right. So

[00:32:51] Michael Porcelli: totally. Well, okay, let me see if I can connect it like there is, it's interesting, sometimes it will spontaneously connect to different parts. So like one of the, one of the parts of Meta Relating, which I have yet to define, but um, you know, this is not original stuff. It's kind of my own. Way of talking about what I think is intrinsic to relationships.

I call it like a humility and dignity, both kind of as a place to hold yourself, your individual self in relationship to like another person. So we're like, okay, let's get another physics. We're just with each other, right? Like, and I would be like, all right, so, so the, the dignity would be, I have ideas about what I want.

I have ideas about what I think of you. I have ideas about what I think about our relationship or where this could go, right? Like, I have my interpretations of the world around us, or what I think is real and true, and those things I've worked hard to get here. They're like, they're valid. They're valid, they're important.

So you might say, my my point of view and my desires are a valid and important part of the world, but also of our relationship. Like that's my me feeling, my own dignity, right? But my humility would be something like. I definitely don't know everything. Right. Uh, there's definitely things about our relationship that you probably perceive differently than I do.

There's probably stuff about me that you perceive perhaps even more accurately than I can like for me to assume. Well, when it comes to US vision, I am the expert that would be like me lacking some amount of humility. Are you

[00:34:32] Vision Battlesword: saying you're the expert on you or are you saying you're the expert on us? Us, yeah.

Yes. That would be lacking humility. I agree. Totally.

[00:34:40] Michael Porcelli: I, I mean, even for me to say, I mean this gets a little bit weird for me to say. Even I'm the expert on me is also lacking some humility as well. I mean, this is like, if you have a spiritual view of kind of like your relationship with God or something like that, that is humility in the eyes of the, the universe is kind of like, right.

My best knowledge and understanding and response to life is. Sometimes lacking or you know, I can imagine ways it could have gone better or like maybe someone or something else out there can like provide some information or wisdom that's outside of my perceptual window, right? My ability to grasp it's in a blind spot.

You know what I

[00:35:22] Vision Battlesword: mean? There's, there's something super juicy and interesting that you're bringing up here to me right now, which causes me to recall a previous conversation I had with Olivia McDonald on consciousness, where she brought up this framework of internal self-awareness and external self-awareness.

That there are sort of two different dimensions to this. And that of course makes me think of, and I know that you're familiar with this integral theory, so interior, exterior, I, we quadrants, right? Yes. Yes. And so what you're saying now is really fascinating to me. I love this framework too, of dignity versus humility as different dimensions, like a, a different axis that we can.

Sort of explore, and I think it's super valid and relevant to relationship dynamics. And so what it makes me think of is sometimes I've been in tense, even maybe conflict, feeling situations with someone with, I did want to assert my dignity. I felt it felt very necessary for me to assert my dignity about being the expert, the, the soul, really the, the one and only person who can fully adjudicate my own internal state.

Let's just say, sure. You know, let me tell you what I'm feeling please. Right? Rather than you telling me what I'm feeling, I'm feeling. Totally. So, but on the other hand, what you're bringing up in this dimension of humility, which makes so much sense to me, is actually there's a sense in which you are the expert.

On my external presentation. Yeah. In a way. Yeah. Right.

[00:37:01] Michael Porcelli: Yeah.

[00:37:01] Vision Battlesword: Like only I can truly tell you, and this comes back to this whole conversation we had about Qualia. Only I can truly tell you what is happening for me subjectively, but I am actually not a very good witness of how I'm actually being received externally.

Right. I need you to tell me that, and then like between the two of us, if we both have enough humility and enough dignity, yes. We can get a complete picture of each other and hopefully the relationship

[00:37:33] Michael Porcelli: Oh yeah. This, um, this corresponds almost directly to, um, it is a thing called, uh, the interpersonal gap, which was, which was named by a psychologist and way back in the seventies named Wallin.

And it's the difference between intent and impact. Like you said, your interiority and your intention, you're kind of the expert on and like the impact and how you're received. You know, you're not, other people are, right? And whatever that calculus is of that delta between the intent and the impact, even that is a sort of like the color.

It's an emergent thing from the interaction. It's not fixed. However, being as much as we can responsible for both things, if I'm gonna be like, Hey, I want to be a responsible participant in my relationships, okay, so for me to do that, I need to be somewhat actively curious and interested in the impact that I'm actually having on people.

What are you getting about what I'm saying? Okay. And if the person's like, this is what I got and this is what I didn't get, and then I'll be like, can I for a minute put myself in their perspective, like trying to kind of see myself from the outside as much as I can, or even if I completely flip it around.

I'm trying to be a responsible listener. I might be like, okay, let me just check to see if I'm getting you. I'll sometimes do this with people, did you mean this? Or I'll paraphrase. Is this kind of the essence of what you mean? Or did you mean something else? Right. Like, and that to me is like that right balance between humility and dignity, and it's that weaving back and forth that kind of allows the relationship itself to like have a life between us.

It's a process, right? It's not finished. It's like, you know, you can pin the butterfly on the wall, but it's dead at that point. But we can ride this wave together and allow our dignity of our own perspective and our humility that is always and forever only partial to like inform how we experience the relationship.

And then it feels like we're on a ride together. Right? Or like a, you know. In a boat on a, you know, on the waves together, right? It's not totally under either of our control.

[00:39:55] Vision Battlesword: Curiosity is the medicine for so many things. What you think about me is likely to be relevant information if we're having a relationship.

Maybe sometimes it could be unhelpful depending on the sort of relationship that we're having, but that's how I unpack that. And the word curiosity was coming up for me, you know, as you were expanding that and then you invoked it as well. And that's sort of really solidified for me, just the recognition that curiosity is, it's just such a medicine, an antidote.

A salve for so much relational confusion and. The tension and the drama and the suffering and the bad feelings that can come from that. 'cause as you're describing that, like you're modeling that role play of two people who are engaging in sincere inquiry and insight or offering of this is my experience and before I go on for too much longer, are you tracking with what I'm saying and what are you picking up from what I'm putting down?

And I just wanna make sure that I'm hearing you correctly. Let me paraphrase that back to you to make sure that I truly understand. Okay, great. Yeah, I think we're on the same page now. Where do we go from here? As you're modeling that, I'm just recognizing that curiosity is the process more or less in that sincere, you know, sincere curiosity and so much of what we do when we're in that intent impact.

The interpersonal gap, is that what you called it? Yes. Interpersonal gap. When we're in that gap, I think so much of what we're doing is just being lazy with our curiosity, meaning we'd, we'd rather, or it's, it just, maybe it seems like an easier path in the short term to fill in the blanks, to just let our stories overflow onto each other than to do the inquiry to get clear on what exactly is actually going on here.

What do I actually even think or feel about this? Or what am I actually needing in this situation? Much less what do you think you can feel? What are you needing in this situation? And because you invoked the word intent so many times, I must now ask you a super important question, which is, what does intentional evolution mean to you?

My guess is that that phrase. Has some relationship to all the work that you do and all the work that you've done and that you may have some interesting thought process on it.

[00:42:43] Michael Porcelli: Yeah. To me it's, it's almost like just a fascinating attribute of being human. I mean, we don't really know if animals have something like intention, but there definitely is a way humans can experience an intentional perspective on their own experience, which is something like, well, we can remember the past, we can dream when we sleep.

We can imagine the future, the process of imagining that can give me a feeling, right? That is like, Ooh, I like that. I want that. I'm excited about that, and if I can envision that regularly. It's like guiding my behavior. Like it's, you know, it's, it's how I am choosing to shine the spotlight of my attention on the world.

And it's something that is kind of a factor in decision making that gets kind of added. I think that's sort of how intention ends up kind of caching out in our kind of how we move through the world or operationalize or something. You know, like our behaviors and our choices. The intention is like a guidance system.

It's like a compass. Or you could say like, um, like a sailboat, right? It's like you don't just go in a straight line, Uhhuh, you're kinda like, we're going in this direction, but the wind is going this direction, so we have to kinda do this thing called tacking. You know, it's like, right, flip the sail this way.

Okay. We're kind of approximately going mostly in the direction we want. Okay, now we gotta flip the sails the other way and kind of me, me, me, me. You know what I mean? Like, so

[00:44:21] Vision Battlesword: a sailboat without a rudder or without anyone tacking the sail would just be in a state of evolution. At the intention of nature, at the intention of the environment of the wind, whichever direction it happens to blow.

So what you're saying is that to you, intentional evolution means an evolutionary process with a guidance system.

[00:44:44] Michael Porcelli: Yeah,

[00:44:44] Vision Battlesword: I like that. And I want to come back to intentional evolution as it pertains to relationship. And I also wanna come back to what is Meta Relating.

[00:44:53] Michael Porcelli: Fair enough.

[00:44:54] Vision Battlesword: And real quick, I just want to close this kind of like first chapter of exploration of what is relationship just by getting a check and balance from the Oxford English dictionary.

Right? We've ex, we've explored it a lot, you know, with our own internal experience and and perspective. The OED says, for relationship, this is one of the few times I've been truly disappointed. By the OED, the state of being related, a condition or character based upon this kinship and affair asexual relationship.

That's all we get. That's all

[00:45:36] Michael Porcelli: we

[00:45:36] Vision Battlesword: get. I think we're on our own porch relation. The action of relating,

a particular instance of relating the book has no idea what relationship is that is interesting in and of itself. Me, it is.

[00:45:58] Michael Porcelli: Interesting.

[00:45:59] Vision Battlesword: Well, we're on our own man. What is relationship? How can we sum it up in a few words? Is that even possible?

[00:46:07] Michael Porcelli: Hmm. I mean, it's, it's like a, a state that two or more entities are participating in together.

[00:46:22] Vision Battlesword: It's a state of affairs that describes,

[00:46:28] Michael Porcelli: it's hard. It is. It's a pretty abstract concept. It's not really concrete like rock. Right.

[00:46:35] Vision Battlesword: And yet, like you said, or like we've been saying this whole time, it's everywhere. Everything all the time. I know. That's partly why it's hard to Yeah.

[00:46:43] Michael Porcelli: Make it concrete. Yeah.

[00:46:45] Vision Battlesword: Huh.

Alright, well let's try to at least get something that we can hold onto. Sure. What is relationship among

[00:46:54] Michael Porcelli: humans? I'll share with you a little bit of how I make sense of it, and then maybe we can get to a definition of it. I, I think somehow an encounter is the beginning of some kind. Like somebody that I never met and never will meet.

Then it's like, okay, well some person in China that is born and lives and dies and I never see them, encounter them, talk to them in the same space as them. Okay. I don't have a, but I would say like. From my first encounter, even if it's like sitting in, standing in the grocery store waiting to check out my groceries, that to me is like the genesis moment of a relationship, right?

Like I have two people encounter each other and everything else that happens after that, I guess is the relationship between them. When you use

[00:47:42] Vision Battlesword: the example of a person who's born in another part of the world and you never have any contact with them, you each have completely separate lives from beginning to end.

It makes me think that there's something inherent to the idea of relationship, which is shared experience.

[00:48:01] Michael Porcelli: Mm, I like that. So maybe

[00:48:03] Vision Battlesword: relationship is a state of affairs in which two or more objects or entities share experience in some way or are, yes. The other word that was coming up is entangled. Like, I'm thinking of particles entanglement in quantum physics, like mm-hmm.

There's an energy that is somehow mixed or linked or there's something share. It's a sharing. That's, that seems to be the core of relationship to me. What do you think?

[00:48:37] Michael Porcelli: Yeah, I like it. It, I think there is a little bit of, um, perhaps a distinction in the couple of senses of the word shared. If the person that I've never met has seen my favorite movie and I've seen my favorite movie, but I've never interacted with that person, you could say in one sense we have had a shared experience.

We both like that movie, but in another sense we haven't. That's a good point. 'cause we have not interacted, participated together or interacted or encountered one another. I

[00:49:07] Vision Battlesword: think there's some, there's something about interactivity. There's something about interaction.

[00:49:10] Michael Porcelli: Yes. Yes. To relationship. Right. In that sense of the word shared, if you're getting, if you're getting clear about what you mean by shared.

It's actually not just something you that that is in common, but it is something that is like done together.

[00:49:24] Vision Battlesword: But then there's that other sense that we explored earlier, which is as a description of something, meaning like there could be two different objects. They are not interacting with each other, they're not sharing anything at all.

And yet we can say that the one is in such and such relation to the other spatially or in time, or there's a description that can still yet be made of their relationship.

[00:49:55] Michael Porcelli: Yes.

[00:49:56] Vision Battlesword: Even though they don't have one from the point of view of their own internal experience. Yes. As in like the person who's born on the other side of the world.

We could still say that your relationship to that person is such and such distance, such and such culture. Right? Such and such, whatever. That's fascinating.

[00:50:14] Michael Porcelli: Yeah. I mean, yeah, at this point it's, you know, you can kind of nerd out and be like, oh, like, oh, well who is that? Is it my cohort? Like everyone who's been alive on this planet at the same time as me?

I feel like, okay, there's something more substantial about my relationship with them than maybe like people who lived on Earth but are long dead before I got here or something like this. Right.

[00:50:34] Vision Battlesword: Yeah. Or I can even think of times where I've felt I've had a relationship with an author Yes. That I've read who's not even alive anymore, or someone that I've only interacted with passively, let's say, and yet I still feel that to use the one maybe useful word of the book kinship, I still feel some form of kinship, or I still feel some form of.

Shared experience or mutual identification or mm-hmm. Something. So it's almost like I can have an internal relationship. And you brought that up at the very beginning of the conversation. The ways that we can have internal relationship with ourself or with parts of our different, parts of our ourself can have relationship.

Mm-hmm. But even inside myself, I can have a relationship with someone else who doesn't even know I exist. Right.

[00:51:31] Michael Porcelli: That's weird. It's weird. I mean, at this point it maybe is worth kind of like. Characterizing subtypes of relationships, perhaps like the author. Author, right? It's like, okay, they're, they're dead.

They were dead before you were born, Uhhuh. But somehow they were through the words on the page, able to transmit something to me. Okay. So there, it's like, okay, that's a unidirectional, it's not bidirectional uhhuh, right? There's an impact that flows one way, but not the other way. Mm-hmm. It's like, okay, so maybe that's just the, maybe that's sort of like, if we're kind of cataloging the types of relationships, if we, if we expand the definition very broadly, like Yeah, like we've done earlier in this conversation, then maybe it's kind of like that.

Okay. Like you have a relationship with your ancestors that is kind of, unidirectional is similarly right? But it's not necessarily like, like I could be like, oh, I dig Socrates or Jesus, or something like, Jesus still has an impact on me in some way or whatever. Or like, I don't know. I have an ancestor, I don't even know who they were or where they lived or what their name was, but like.

There is an impact on me also just because they're in my bloodline somewhere. So there's like a genetic relationship? Relationship,

[00:52:41] Vision Battlesword: yeah. Wow. I, I expected it to be interesting. I didn't expect it to almost go into like quantum weirdness of like something you just have to accept. You can't quite wrap your mind around it.

It's gonna be mysterious and yet two, two

[00:52:58] Michael Porcelli: exists is to be in relationship. Yeah.

[00:53:01] Vision Battlesword: That's fascinating. Well, I think I would like to really explore interpersonal relationship with you for a while. So maybe we can zero in on that. Yeah. And just get to, you know, just a general working definition of. A relationship being to people who are interacting and shared experience of some type.

[00:53:25] Michael Porcelli: Yep. Does that sound fair?

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. If we're gonna subtype it to here, that's a great place to go. Right? Okay. It's like there is some bidirectional, interactive, something that can go all the way back to that moment of like a first impression. Something about that person was sort of like signaling to me.

I acknowledge that you're there. That's the starting point of our category. Right? Okay. Right. All the way up to we lived together, we started a business together, we, we got married and we had kids together. You know what I'm saying? Like these ones that get very entangled, right. Like over many, many years.

Right. Like, that's the category we're talking about.

[00:54:03] Vision Battlesword: What's an impression when you say we have a first impression of each other? What is that? What is that?

[00:54:10] Michael Porcelli: Yeah,

I, I think there's something about. The way that our brains, our minds work, where we are constantly trying to pattern match and we're pattern matching.

You know, you could say it's like weights, probabilistic weights in like a neural network. This idea of like a, the Bayesian brain or something. What are your priors? Like this kind of a thing. I think we just have some way of like trying to even unconsciously, not entirely consciously, like make some guesses or predictions as to like what this person would be like or what could potentially happen between you and that other person and those things.

I think they're largely automatic. They are largely based on our past experiences, but they're also based on things like cultural programming. I mean in the sense that cultural programming is part of our past experiences, right? Like that's part of it. And they can be just really infected with like biases and prejudices.

But they aren't always really what's in there is like I want to be careful to not be too rigid about my own biases about people. Then I'm like, cool, but you know what I think, I think it's actually very important to be aware of what they are and to basically hold them. This is the humility part, right?

Like my impression of you has a lot to do with my past and it also has some to do with you. You're a guy and your name is Vision Battlesword, and I'm like, okay, I have some biases about that. You're getting an impression. I'm getting an impression. Right. Okay. Like, or you're a white guy or you live in Austin or like whatever.

You know what I mean? Like long hair, short hair, somebody with a lot of tattoos or not a lot of tattoos, or do you believe in energy? I guess like in what sense? Do you mean it in this

[00:56:01] Vision Battlesword: context? I mean, do you believe that we as humans create an energetic field? That we can also be sensitive to the energetic fields of other humans.

[00:56:13] Michael Porcelli: Yeah, I mean I think maybe that's another linguistic way of talking about the same thing I'm talking about perhaps. I'm not

[00:56:21] Vision Battlesword: sure. Yeah, I'm not sure. 'cause what I'm hearing you talking about sounds 100% psychological and I'm curious if you believe that part of an impression, that thing that we get when we first encounter, when we first interact, share experience.

I'm wondering if you think that any part of that impression can be, you're, you're talking about lots of different ways that information comes to us through our senses. I see you, I hear your name, all of these other different ways that I sense you, and I'm curious if part of that impression in your framework can have anything to do with the energetic.

Impression or the energetic sense. Do you believe that people can actually sense each other energetically, or do you think it's all just coming through the five, let's say, typical senses?

[00:57:11] Michael Porcelli: Hmm. I get what you're getting at. Here's a place where I feel somewhat tactically agnostic about some of these things.

Okay. Like, I've kind of gotten into real debates with my fellow integral theory people like, okay, are subtle energies actual, like distinct energy things from just like the totality of our embodied sensory experience of each other. Right. I'm like, I don't know. I do know enough to know that. Like I can't tell how much data is coming through my census.

Well, it's a lot. Yeah. Like it is a lot. And like I can't, and like the amount that my, like conceptual mind can identify all the parts of those. Just raw sensory inputs is limited. Right? So if you wanna say like there's a delta between like the total amount that I'm sensing and like what the cognitive part of my mind can describe or fit into a rational model or whatever it is.

Like there's definitely a huge delta there. And maybe that's just what subtle energies are, you know what I'm saying? Maybe that's what it is. Or maybe there's an additional channel or something. Or maybe there's something that's happening like at a quantum level. But even if it was at a quantum level, I mean it's still physical.

So are we talking about like maybe it's more than even the physical, it's some other dimension. I have a strong skeptical streak, but I don't need to be Right or like feel totally certain about that to me. I'm like, this is why I said, maybe it's just two different ways of talking about it and you're like, maybe it's not, and I'm like, maybe you're right.

That's my view. I don't think

[00:58:50] Vision Battlesword: it's two different ways of talking about the same thing personally, I think. I gotcha. I think there's two different frames, and I'm just calibrating to which frame you're coming at things from. Mm-hmm. And I also am not sure which frame I'm actually coming at things from.

Sure. This whole subtle energies thing is, I'd say relatively new to me, you know, within the last five years and really exploring it in a more grounded way, meaning truly starting to consider the possibility of these energetic electromagnetic fields being quote unquote real. Mm-hmm. Is new to me within the last two or three years that I've really been like attaching to the possibility of that and then seeing what shows up in my experience.

Yeah. While running that model. And it's really hard, like you said, it's really, really hard, especially for a skeptical person or person with let's say a healthy skepticism to, to sort that out, to distinguish like, did I really feel something outside of the five senses or, and you rolled your eyes, or is an internal experience manifesting for me that is 100% congruent with the information that I'm receiving from my environment in combination with all of my memories and experiences in this library and archive that can be activated or triggered.

Mm-hmm. In combination with this amazing imagination, virtual reality system. That I have within my consciousness. Yep, yep. It could be that. Yes, it could absolutely be that. Totally. And it could be this other thing too. And so that's why I just wanted to check in with you to see where you stand with that.

And it for the continuation of our conversation, I don't think, well, I think we can continue to have a perfectly good conversation. Totally. And not answer that question

[01:00:45] Michael Porcelli: well. Let, let me, let me just take one more beat on this. 'cause I think there's an interesting thing here that I've seen in certain subcultures, let's say, where I'm like, okay, well first I wanna say like, yes, I have had very super weird things happen where I can be in groups facilitating or just be experiencing like a, a situation with people where it really starts to feel like I am actually reading people's minds.

Hmm. Yeah. And I'm actually like, okay, now this person is gonna talk and they're gonna say something along these lines and then that's exactly what happens, right? And I'm like, where's that coming from? I don't know. Like I can't, I definitely cannot reflect and come up with. Something like they said this and their body language did that and my mind did this and you know what I'm saying?

I can't tell you, I can't trace it. I can't like stop the computer program and look at like all the steps like that got me from here to there. It just did.

[01:01:41] Vision Battlesword: But there's a, but there's a valid model that we might call the scientific materialist frame that would say whether you can quantify it or not. What happened was your brain consciously and subconsciously picked up on all kind of cues that were happening in the environment.

Legitimate, valid sense data coming into your eyes, ears, nose through your skin and everywhere else and processed that information and provided you with a result. Right. You know, a computational

[01:02:14] Michael Porcelli: result it, and it processed it through a very, I would say for me at this point, a very nuanced and highly developed sort of.

Relational module just because of how many thousands of hours I've done in these types of situations. It's like, oh, my inner model is actually much sharper than the average person's at making like little subtle predictions. So all of that said back to the, I would say it's almost like a note of caution.

Like, I think it is very important to embody the humility of like realizing like words like intuition or energy, right? Some people that love saying these things like, okay, I think, I think I'm getting this about you, I think I'm picking up on this. It's like, cool, you know what, you can have an intuition that's based on a very refined perception, and your hit rate might be far higher than average.

I knew, I, I knew I got, you know, like I knew I got, I got that person, you know, but then that can actually feed into like, uh, almost a kind of overconfidence. An identity, a narcissism, an ego, a facilitator, ego, a an intuitive ego, I'm an empath, or whatever this is and like, and then suddenly the ability to differentiate even when you're right, your intuition about that person and who they actually are are still two different things.

And once you start to collapse those two things together, you're losing some kind of requisite degree of humility about your experience. And I think that this actually in, in the circles that do this kind of language game with each other, like I see people get actually really bad at relating with each other.

Yeah. Because it's like, I'm reading you, oh yeah, I'm reading you. Oh yeah. Well, I'm normally right about this, you know? Well, I'm normally right about this. Like my intuition says that you're this and my intuition says that you're that. Well, that just, it just

[01:04:10] Vision Battlesword: circles right back around to what we were talking about earlier about.

Lack of curiosity. That's just a, it's just a different variant. Right. It's like the new age

[01:04:18] Michael Porcelli: version of that. Yeah.

[01:04:19] Vision Battlesword: Yeah. Totally. Yeah. I, I love what you said there, that I have fallen victim to that trap. I have personally become so confident in my perception, intuition, intelligence, pattern recognition, or whatever else it may be that I have locked onto.

No, really, I am sure that you are do and gone down that lack of humility trap. Yeah. Let's say, let's say overconfidence, let's say self-aggrandizement, self importance, really? Mm-hmm. I've gone down that trap myself, and I've seen it happen many times. I think, I think it is one of actually the most common pitfalls.

In relationship dynamics, frankly. Yeah. It, it, it, it many times circles back around at the same thing, which is, I'm just not curious enough about what you know, that I don't know, especially about you.

[01:05:15] Michael Porcelli: Yes, yes.

[01:05:16] Vision Battlesword: But at the same point, I can say that I, and more so than I, although I have experienced it, but I know other people who have experienced something, I believe them, to be honest, I believe they have experienced something, whatever it may be, that really does not feel to them to conform to the scientific materialist frame.

Especially in spaces where we may explore altered states of consciousness, we may explore peak experiences. Lots of different ways that we can get there, where we have these legitimate internal experiences of something. That is uncanny, that is totally that, that, that causes us to question the nature of our reality.

Or maybe there's more to this world than meets the eye, literally. And so yeah. I just want to make sure that, that that viewpoint is presence in full awareness of the slippery slope that you, that you just talked about, which I 100% agree. Yes. I think it can be really helpful to just acknowledge that people do have senses, people do have intuitions.

Mm-hmm. They do receive perceive information that comes to them in a lot of different ways that can look like sensations in the body, that can look like pictures in the mind that could even look like Yes. Words or, or voices or messages. Yes. That somehow come into their awareness. Yes. Wherever it is that that comes from.

Right. Is not really the point. Exactly. Yeah. But the fact that that happens is valid and it still could be treated like any other type of information, which is to say it's something I perceived, but it's not everything that can be perceived. Right. It's not, not the whole,

[01:07:16] Michael Porcelli: it's always partial. Yes, totally.

Yeah. Yeah. That's what I'm getting at. Yeah. That kind of like, um, valid but partial thing that Ken Wilber talks about. Right. Integral theory is a very, it's like the, is the relational application is totally true. Like the dignity is the validity of my perception and my desires. And the partial is like our relational entity, the vision porch relational entity, like neither one of us has the full understanding of it.

It's bigger than either one of us is in that sense, we're sort of inside of it. You know, it's kind of interesting that living system that we're inside

[01:07:52] Vision Battlesword: of since you invoked that. I wanna come back to this language piece 'cause I think there's something really valuable, especially between the two of us in exploring this question of in versus have.

'cause you just invoked it again. Yes. And so I'm gonna bring it up so it is something that we are inside of. And then I would say I would perhaps offer a playful counterpoint to that or counter counter perspective to that, which is, it's actually not something we are inside of. It's actually something that we are doing with each other.

Yes. It's an ongoing process. What do you think about that? What do you, what do you think about, what is the relationship between. In and have as it pertains to relationship?

[01:08:33] Michael Porcelli: Well, I mean, there's another word do. Yeah. So I'm like, I'm a little more friendly to the do than to the ha I mean, I think have, is like a sneaky do for me actually.

Interesting. Yeah. I think the like, in a way kind of doesn't matter. I mean, we can get like, you know, try to be persnickety and whatever, lawyerly about words and what they mean, and that can be valuable up to a certain point. But in a, in a way you could also just say like, okay, well maybe we're just sort of like using different senses of the word or different connotations of the word.

And when I kind of say something like, A relationship is not like something you have like a possession. Right, right. I am really kind of getting at that flavor of have that I think is actually fairly common, especially in consumerist, capitalist, materialist culture. It's like I'm going out to shop for a relationship that I want to have.

When I get it, it's gonna give me what I'm looking for.

[01:09:34] Vision Battlesword: Yeah. We're on the same page with that. The, I think the crux of that is attachment. Interesting. Do you think, say, say more. So if it's something that I have, you used the word possess. It's like it's a possession, it's like now it's starts to become like Smeal in Lord of the Rings.

It's my precious. Mm-hmm. I have to have it. It fulfills some kind of, th this is where I think you and I are completely aligned on how we think about relationship is that there's another real slippery slope or a dangerous trap in perceiving the relationship as substituting for something that we lack intrinsically, internally.

Mm-hmm. And so when you use the word have in that way, whereas I use it as. I use have almost in the sense of are having, which is just another way of saying do, doing, doing. Yes. But when you say have as in it's something I attach to, it's something that I possess, it's something that there's a slippery slope to dysfunction in that.

Totally,

[01:10:34] Michael Porcelli: yeah. I mean, other aspects of it too are like, of just appropriating, like I'm trying to appropriate you to meet my emotional needs, and then you can kind of get almost into this kind of like transactional thing. Now be, I wanna be clear, some aspect of transacting is fine for a relationship, right?

But if we, if you were like, let's get out the books and like, let me just kind of track who's done more for me, or have I done more for you or have you done more for me lately? Then you're kinda like, ew, right? That's like almost imposing a kind of like a marketplace norm on a relationship and there's something that just doesn't really feel good there.

There's actually a typology of relationships that kind of has these different formats and one is kind of a market based one, and one is sort of a family or an interpersonal based one. The norms don't translate between them. But if we're kind of on the interpersonal type, I, I suppose if you took this to an extreme, it's like a thought experiment, right?

Like the ultimate form of appropriating a relationship is having a slave, no, you belong to I own you, right? Like, you do what I want. That's the nature of our relationship. And it's like, it sort of extinguishes the person's agency, or at least it says that one person's agency completely does not matter.

And you could, you could actually go to something that's maybe more contemporary, which ISIS and artificial intimacy, it's like, well, do you, like, do you want a chatbot to be like, I mean, some of these folks who fall in love with their chatbots will say these types of things. They'll be like, it's great. My chatbot listens to me way better than any boyfriend I've ever had or something, right?

Like, or. Yeah, I use my chat bot as a therapist and it's great. It's just like having a really great listener, a really good therapist on call 24 7. And I'm like, strangely, like even if the quality of the therapy was as good as a truly good therapist, which I, I doubt that it is, but even if it was, I would say structurally it's a problem to have a therapist that you could talk to 24 7.

'cause that's not a real person. There is no real person that could, you could sit down and go like, cool, all night long, man. I've been here since like last night at 9:00 PM and it's like the sun is rising and I'm like, I'm making so much progress or something, you know what I mean? I'm like, that's not a, there is no person that would sit down with you for 12 hours and give you therapy and have their attention just be on you.

And that is not good. Right. That's not healthy because that's sort of, that's a little bit more of that kind. Relationship as a possession, the relationship exists to serve me. Right? And I'm like, no. Like, I mean, that's not, to me a healthy relationship. I mean, people have had, it's

[01:13:22] Vision Battlesword: not mutual. There's, it's not mutual.

Yeah. Right.

[01:13:24] Michael Porcelli: But as soon as you're like, Hey, I want this to be consensual and mutual and voluntary and all these kind of things that we, you know, liberty and freedom, you know, we want those things for each other. Well, as soon as you say that, that's it. Then this is where my mind starts to use like the word in.

Right? We're in it. Once you put those ingredients in, like voluntary, mutual, and consensual, then it's like, okay, neither of us owns this thing, right. We're just kinda, you know, or it's like a ship, like a relat ship. It's like a boat. We're in the boat. There's a way that we're kind of held within the boat when we're both inside of it.

Okay.

[01:14:01] Vision Battlesword: And what I'm starting to see is that there's a couple of different aspects of relational dysfunction that each of us. Is identifying, and I agree with yours, I agree with if to say we have a relationship is to imply that a relationship is a possession or is property or is something that we become attached to in a an un an unhealthy way, then I agree with you and when you, when you switch that languaging, I, I think I'm also agreeing with you that it's not so much the semantic game of what word that we use.

I don't think that's the point of any cognitive reframe or neurolinguistic. Reframe or anything like, it's not the point of switching the word. The point is switching the concept or switching the, yes. I'll use a word that I'm sure will trigger you the energy. Yes. Switching the energy of Yes, no, totally.

The, or whatever that is. The, the, the, the cognitive pattern, whatever. Yeah. The connotation, the connotation, the concept, whatever it is. So what I'm identify, uh, I'm gonna use the word. So when you use the phraseology, our in or to be in, I think once again, the word that is triggering me is actually not the, in part, the word that's triggering to me is the verb to be uhhuh.

Because where you're detecting possession or attachment, I'm detecting identity. Yes. And that's the part that worries me. Oh, yes. Are you seeing that? Yes.

[01:15:37] Michael Porcelli: Oh yeah. What do you think about that? Oh, man. This uhhuh like, I mean identity, let me just check. Are, are you saying kind of like. It's almost like I'm losing my sense of myself because now, like I only define myself as like almost in a codependent way.

Yeah. Like, oh, well I'm, I'm just a husband. Right. That's all of who I am,

[01:15:59] Vision Battlesword: and I think it's actually two sides of the same issue. Ultimately, Uhhuh, what're what we're both seeing. It's somehow it all comes back to scarcity, or it all comes back to lack, or it all comes back to I am not enough. I am not complete.

Yes, I am in this relationship and that completes me, or I have this relationship and that completes me. Yes. I think that's, I think we're both getting to that root ultimately.

[01:16:24] Michael Porcelli: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I'm gonna throw in another thing which is, I think is related to this. So one of the facets of this thing I call the relational paradigm that we, is kind of in the background here.

We're talking about the relational entity and this thing that we're inside of the, at least that's my terminology. One of the principles is like each person plays roles. Within the relationship. And those roles can be like ancient biological ones, like parent and child. They can be part of like made up games like, hey, you know, we're doing some ballroom dancing and this person is the lead role and this person is the follow role.

Those are very distinct things. You do the dance from the point of view of each role, which is different. Or like football, you're like, this is the quarterback and this is the receiver. And it's like if you had two quarterbacks and no receiver, it wouldn't work. Or two receivers and no quarterback, it wouldn't work.

But what they're doing is very different from each other. But then there is like the identification with the role, or even when you talk about personal growth and transformation, they talk about like there's the choice and then there's a habit. And then there's an identity, right? Like I'm just not a person who smokes.

Right? I am. There's the, the verb that you're kind of reacting to, it's like, right, but in a wi, in a weird way, like identity has power. It can be a shortcut. Right? Kind of like, I just don't do that. 'cause that's just not the kind of person I am. Okay. That's not right. There's not like a, I am not a smoker etched in stone inside your heart or so, you know what I mean?

It's right. It's right. It's just kind of actually like that. That's a choice that I basically never make or something like this, or I learned to never make it. Or I used to, but I don't anymore. So to me, identity and dis identity or identification and disidentification to me are actually two important things in relationship, right?

For me to go like, okay, we might be husband and wife, but husband and wife is not the totality of who we are. Right? They are like a role. And once you kind of see a role, like it's like it can be like a costume. I mean, I think there are reasons why. You know, the baristas wear the barista outfit or the cops wear the cop outfit or the football players wear the football player outfit.

Right. There is like the clothing as both just a metaphor, but even as an actual real world way of doing.

Yeah.

I, when I put on my uniform and go to work, I'm a nurse and when I come home and take the uniform off, like I say, like my job is a nurse or, so, you know what I'm saying? Like there's a way that, I don't know if I'm quite getting at your thing you're saying, but like I do think people can get into a fixed sense of what a relationship is and what their role in the relationship is.

That then will feel like they have to somehow just be that all the time or be the perfect version of that, or the very meaning of their life or who they are is sort of wrapped up in that role.

[01:19:26] Vision Battlesword: Exactly. You know, when I've spoken to people about this, there can be a sense of entrapment.

[01:19:32] Michael Porcelli: Yes.

[01:19:32] Vision Battlesword: And I think what you've hit at, you've hit at a couple of really interesting things that actually are helping me a lot to get clear on this.

One of them is that identity is essentially like a really, really foundational level of our belief system. It's like the deeper we want to encode a belief, eventually we might get to the point where we actually encode it as ourself a part of our identity. Yes. I am not a smoker, or rather I am a person who chooses not to smoke is like just, it's a really, really powerful, it's a powerful encoding Yeah.

Of a belief of a, of a choice, of an intention when we take it into our identity like that. So I think that is what I'm detecting and what's, what you're helping me get clear on is that. That's not inherently wrong or bad or dysfunctional or harmful. It's a matter of, it can be

[01:20:33] Michael Porcelli: yes,

[01:20:34] Vision Battlesword: meaning whatever it is, that if we're choosing to encode a dysfunctional relationship as part of our identity, that could be come a problem because Oh yeah.

Now we're literally not just in it. We're of it. We are it. Yeah. And so I think that's, that's what I've seen in that codependency pattern, like what you're talking about, that I think I've noticed that languaging being a part of it and that reframing that language can actually be helpful to breaking that pattern or helping people to find themself back as an individual in a dynamic or as a part of a dynamic having a relationship.

And so I think we're. More or less, I think we're saying the same thing, or maybe seeing two different facets of it, or maybe mm-hmm. We're just using different languaging to identify the same concept, but I think it's similar in both ways. And what we're both agreeing is that the relationship itself is an entity separate from each of us.

It's also a process, it's an activity. It's something that we do together. Mm-hmm. But there is a sense in which, and I use this word in my work, like it's one of the foundational words in intentional autonomous relating container. It is a thing that we share and there's a sense in which it's a thing that is a meta mm-hmm.

Layer, yeah. Of

[01:22:06] Michael Porcelli: our experience. Yeah. It's the game that we're choosing to play, or it's the dance that we're choosing to dance and there's a lot of choices. One of the things I wanna say that's valuable about, and just to kind of go with the roles version of identity is kind of like a, that's how things get really fun.

You know? I think especially like BDSM people can really get into like top and bottom role or something like this. And it's like these people like to consensually really amplify a power differential. Like for the duration of our game, we're gonna like, mm, right? Like I'm really dominating, right? And you're really submitting, right?

And then you kind of end the game and you go like, woo, that was fun. That was spicy. Or like, that's a game I like, you know? And like, and some people really don't like power dynamic games like that. And some people really like one or the other role. And then some people like switchy people and who knows, right?

Like cool, as long as that's like not becoming your identity like fixed forever, which I think in unhealthy versions of it, it can be. But to actually get the pleasure and the enjoyment of that game, it's like I actually have to relinquish trying to do the other role. Like this kind of comes up in like masculine, feminine polarity dynamics.

It's like if we wanna enjoy the kind of like the spiciness of the masculine and feminine, at least some of the forms that it takes, like I may as a sensitive, whatever relational guide be. Yeah, my inner feminines pretty good. I don't know, I can sense people's energies or I have a good intuition, or I'm a really good listener.

I'm really kind of caring and compassionate. I would say like, okay, by any kind of measure. I think a lot of people would say porch has developed his inner feminine pretty well relative to many men out there. Your average dude. Okay. That's cool. However, if I'm in a relationship with a woman and I keep trying to like do the feminine things, then I'm taking up the space in the dynamic that she could be occupying, and that if we both want the hotness of the masculine feminine, I actually have to stop doing that and like let her do it and vice versa, right?

She might be like one of these business women who can just get out there and like, make stuff happen and like really embody a kind of masculine energy in a certain context. And if she's like, yeah, but I really want to have a, like a yummy, sensual thing with my man, you gotta stop trying to like doing that here at home with me.

Because if you're going to, then you're taking up the space that I need to be occupying in order for us to get that game. So context is super important. Being like, okay. We're playing this game in this time space location, and for that game to happen, we actually have to like put on the outfit the costume and be those roles together in order for it to be everything that it can be.

Like if you tried to do ballroom dancing and both people tried to lead, it's gonna suck. You're not gonna do the ballroom dancing very well at all, you know?

[01:25:18] Vision Battlesword: Hmm. I love that. I love the concept of roles. I think that's very useful. I love the concept of thinking about the relationship as a dynamic as something that is between us, something that we share together as opposed to, as opposed to over attaching or over identifying with it, like mm-hmm.

The first, kind of, the first piece of this, I think that you surfaced, I'm just sort of touching on all the little points of insight that we've made along the way and that there's a lot of different ways of languaging. The thing, obviously, and some of them may be more or less useful depending on the situation or mm-hmm.

How a, how a particular person is thinking about it. A particular reframe may be very helpful for a person to detach from a dysfunctional concept or relationship with the dynamic. Mm-hmm. And maybe it's not, that's not the point for a different person, and it's more about just how they feel about it or how they're thinking about things.

That's more important. And I want to bring up the word relating because you use it. IU we both use it. Yeah. Yeah. I call my system intentional, autonomous, relating. Mm-hmm. You call yours Meta Relating, which I still want you to tell me what that is. Yes. And there's authentic relating the, the word relating has come to be in vogue.

Yeah. As a way, as a new, modern way of talking about. Relationship. I notice that it is an active verb and that appeals to me. That's one of the reasons why it felt, um, it just felt congruent to my approach to relating, which is very, very much based on needs and agreements and clarity about the things that we would like to do together.

Yes. What are the, what are the things that we would like to do together that are in mutually enjoyable and allow us mutually to flourish, which is to say, to get our needs met in abundance. Mm-hmm. That's kind of in a shortest possible nutshell, what intentional autonomous relating is all about. So what do you think about that, given that you selected that word as representative of your system, what do you think about that reframe from relationship?

Object to relating active verb.

[01:27:41] Michael Porcelli: I think it really captures the dynamic. Kind of ever evolving aspect of like what a relationship is. And I think I actually value both of them. I think the, the word relationship sort of captures that kind of relational entity thing a little bit more. Yeah. Um, but the relating, you know, the, it's in the brand Meta Relating, kind of captures the kind of like dynamic and interactive aspect of it, which is foundational, right?

It's like, even if it is a relationship, it's still a living system. Like stuff that worked today may not work tomorrow. Or maybe you have new ideas about how you want to think something might be really fresh and you're like, and the relationship needed that at this time. And you could be like, that agreement has gone stale.

Can we just like, let that one go? Or maybe we need a new one. You know, like you don't really know right. Until you're there. And part of it is each person is growing and evolving through life for a lot of reasons. Some of which have to do with this relationship and some of which have to do with. Other relationships or other things that are going on.

And as each person changes in a way for that relationship to to live on and to thrive, it needs to kind of change, you know? And sometimes that might actually be more of something, and sometimes it could be less of something, right? Hey, we tried that out being like really upping each other's business, right?

It's like we ran a business and we had an intimate relationship and we lived together and we operated our business out of the home. And then it's kinda like, that was super awesome for a while, and it's like, okay, let's subtract one or more of these contexts back out in order to have something else, right?

It's like you're getting to a place where, and this is like a life lesson in general, beyond just relating and relationships where it's like, okay, it's like that weird, funny thing like when I finally, whatever, get it all together and figure it all out and everything is in its proper place, then. I don't know, what is it?

Like life just goes on cruise control or I will have arrived or then everything will be great indefinitely. And it's like, I don't know. That's not real. And you know, to me, I sort of associate that with like a, a less mature or a younger version of me kind of thinking in this way. Like, I'm working really hard to get to the point where then I can truly start living.

And it's like, uh, it never works that way. And like to me, this is the what the relating that active verb brings into relationships, right? It isn't like, okay, we're gonna, we're gonna like get all the things right. We're gonna get the, the money and the careers and the home and the kids and the whatever, and the bedroom and the decorations and then, and then we can just cruise control until we're dead or whatever.

You know? It's like, no, it never, it's never been that way for anybody. I think a lot of

[01:30:22] Vision Battlesword: people think of it that way though. I think people have an idea in their mind that there is an ideal state. A so-called relationship. This is another language problem that I have, which is where people say, well, are you in a relationship?

It's like, uh, I, in lots of them, quite, quite a few. What are you talking about? Like would you like to be more specific? I don't, I, yeah, I react to that, but at any rate that there is some, some relationship that is the relationship that we might call a life partnership or a romantic partnership or whatever it is that we might call it that's described as the relationship that can reach some sort of ideal state.

Where it is perfect. Where it is done, it is complete, yes. Fully baked, and I, I don't personally believe in that.

[01:31:13] Michael Porcelli: No, no. I mean, I do think that is a funny thing that our minds do in many domains. Like this idea that there's a real thing that's there, which is like, well, there are things that are better and worse.

Right. There are things that are more preferable than others. There are things that are more functional than other things. And you might go like, yeah, well, like this wasn't working and then we figured it out and now it is working. And so the way that it is now, at least along this dimension, is better.

Right? And it's like, yes, that's real. That's totally real. And then it's, it's almost like, um, people who imagine like utopia or something, it's very similar. It's like, oh, okay, so let's just like in our brains, in our inner simulator, just like fast forward to the end where everything is then perfect, right?

'cause we're gonna just, we, wherever it's not, we're gonna improve it. Right? And then people start creating these weird abstract, they almost like, seem dystopian. You know what I'm saying? Like, it's kinda like, oh, but there isn't one. Or like, anytime a political movement kind of gets into this idea that we're gonna like, okay, you know, the end justifies the means.

Right? Our perfect end point. We'll justify any kind of brutality we wanna do in the meantime because we're going for the perfect. And it's like that's somehow something that is real. Like there are relative better and worse got turned almost like upside down in a way, or inside out. And it's like very harmful.

[01:32:43] Vision Battlesword: I think that's another, there's a good analogy to what you just said about the sort of political bargain, the Faustian bargain of certain kind of politics, which is this end justifies the means no matter what we do in the meantime, it's all justified by this state we're trying to achieve. I think people fall into that same kind of mindset with relationships too.

Yes. Or rather, I know I've fallen victim to it. I think many people have can relate to this experience, which is that you sort of start to get into an a never ending trap. Of attempting to fix or attempting to save, or in other words, I think, and that to me comes back to the sense of identity that I've detected in myself and others, which is, if this is gone, let me rephrase that.

The pursuit is of maintaining the state of relationship itself rather than any particular qualities of that relationship or experience or benefits. The relationship itself becomes the end rather than the means yes to the end, which is us getting our needs met and enjoying each other and flourishing and having fun and blah, blah, blah, whatever.

[01:34:03] Michael Porcelli: Yes.

[01:34:05] Vision Battlesword: What

[01:34:05] Michael Porcelli: is Meta Relating? What is Meta Relating? So Meta Relating is based on this idea, like what our relationship is, this ongoing process that we're participating in. Is created in part by how we communicate about it. I mean, to kind of make it more everyday concrete for people. It's like sooner or later you're gonna talk about your relationships with people.

It's kind of unavoidable, and it's actually part of normal life. Like if somebody goes like, you're hired, right? We changed the status of our relationship from like you were applying to a job, to now you have the job or you're fired, you changed the status of the relationship. Let's talk about your performance on this job.

That's also talking about your relationship, having a conflict, negotiating the terms of a deal, right? Like in intimate relationships, often it's like the talk or whatever, you know, the DTR or the define the relationship talk. It's like, okay, what are we to each other? Are we, are we still okay sleeping with other people?

Or was we exclusive now sexually? Are we getting married or not? Are we engaged or not? All the conversations. That lead to some kind of change in the status or the label or the nature of the dynamic are relational conversations large and small. Like they can even be down to these, almost these conversational meta-communication.

The kind of stuff like, Hey, I just wanna pause and make sure that I am getting you so far. Like even that is me kind of popping out of the content of what we've been talking about and talking about the conversation briefly, there's,

[01:35:44] Vision Battlesword: there's actually something very quantum about this. Have you ever thought of that before?

Say what you mean. Like the nature of the, or the relationship of the observer to the experiment. Yes. In quantum physics. Yes. That's what you're describing. Yes. But for the relationship, yes. Like the relationship is this state of uncertainty. Mm-hmm. And then by communicating about it, and now I, I'm understanding what Meta Relating truly means in this moment for the first time.

Like, I'm really getting it by communicating about the relationship itself. We inherently are altering it. Altering it.

[01:36:22] Michael Porcelli: A hundred percent. Yes. That's cool. Yes, totally. Totally. You're kind of getting, I mean, there are many, there, there are several concrete ways when I'm like, Hey, why meta porch? I'm like, okay.

So one thing you can do is basically be like, you can just pop outta the conversation and talk about what's going on. Like anytime anybody says like, Hey, I'm enjoying how our connection has been growing. Right. I'm saying something about our relationship, right? Like, or even just like I like you, you know that you're saying something about the relationship.

So that can be something like talking about it sort of over time or even kind of like in the moment like we seem to really be getting a little heated. Like maybe I'm, I'm feeling some tension. You seem like you maybe are feeling more tension. I would like to pause or something like that. Kind of in calling out the moment there, there's another sense in which too I think of it as a, a meta skill.

You know, the meta skill idea where it's like you're developing a certain kind of skill, which when you join that up with any other skill enhances your ability to accomplish that other skill even more, right? It's sort of like, oh, it's, so that's another sense in which Meta Relating is meta. Oh, if you get good at this part, like switch the relational channel, right?

That's what I call it. The relational mode. Switch to relational mode. Do a little debugging and then like get back in the game. Like, I sometimes think about it as like, um, like a basketball team, right? It's like, time out, let's huddle up on the side of the court. Okay. And they all huddle and they talk and they, what are we doing out there?

And this is working and this is not working. Okay. Back in the game. Right? Like that they're Meta Relating or you could say, right, I got you. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I think another part of it too is to have something like metacognition about a lot of the things that we did today. What is the role and what is the dynamic to have almost like a mental model or a framework for like how relationships happen and then how the communicating about them interplays with them.

That's sort of like a metacognition. Yeah. That is like a relational metacognition. So these are why, these are reasons why I chose that word. And there's sort of different senses of meta.

[01:38:31] Vision Battlesword: I love it. And my sense is that we have just set the stage for. A sequel to this conversation. Cool. 'cause I want to dive deep into that whole concept and both relate and reflect with you in just how, how much synergy there is between Meta Relating and intentional autonomous relating and just like kind of compare notes.

Compare and contrast. Yeah. Different stuff now that I really understand your system a lot better than I did before. That's super cool. What would you say is one, if there's like one nugget of wisdom from this whole conversation that feels really rich or alive for you right now, what would you take away from this conversation that helps you to inform your relationships or a different way you're thinking about things or just one kind of like practical takeaway?

[01:39:26] Michael Porcelli: I, I kind of liked something about like, it, it's almost like, um. A failure mode of like my relational entity concept. Some of the things that you were pointing out like, oh, like if you actually become too identified with this kind of role that you play in the relationship such that it becomes to like, define you at an identity level, then you might be sort of like, no, I'm, I'm Meta Relating, but you're actually stuck or trapped.

I mean, I, I do think that is important to point out that like a lot of these distinctions that we're making or these like clarification of definitions or mental models that we're using, they're always partial, they're always incomplete. And then if you kind of get fixed about it, like I, I suppose I, as a developer of this whole kind of communication framework, this relational communication framework, and I, I've had to deal with this, like it's important for me to not be.

To identify it even with my own system. Well, I think that people should like, learn it this way or I think that like they should think about it that way or use the words the way that I want them. So like the dignity is like, I've thought about this a lot folks, I've got some richness to share with you, which is kind of cool.

Some goodies, porch goodies over here. But then also, like if I, if I myself get stuck in the educator trainer role and then like my identity starts getting wrapped up in like getting you to see relationships my way, then I'm like, I'm actually committing kind of the error that you're pointing to this.

Kinda like, okay, the, the relationship becomes more of a fixed definition and then I'm actually starting to limit what's possible. Only know, I would say, you know, this conversation has kind of put into a certain point of view or into my awareness this. Need even for me to have like a living relationship with my work that I allow to grow and change through encounters like our conversation today.

[01:41:39] Vision Battlesword: Nice. Yeah. And from my side now understanding Meta Relating and having like this newfound meta awareness of the interaction of the communication about the relationship and the relationship itself.

[01:41:54] Michael Porcelli: Yes.

[01:41:54] Vision Battlesword: I have a new appreciation for now in my system, intentional autonomous relating, which is all about just like yours, all about communication, about the relationship.

But it has very much a focus on the getting clear part. The getting clear about what is this relationship actually and helping people to exit. From this universe of ambiguity or universe of vagueness or like, almost like we're, we're playing, you used the games analogy a few times, almost like we're playing poker with each other, like a bluffing game.

I'm not gonna show you all my cards.

[01:42:32] Michael Porcelli: Yeah.

[01:42:32] Vision Battlesword: You're not gonna show me all your cards. We're both kind of trying to get the hand that we want, et cetera. And I'm just sort of like, IAR is just sort of suggest like, let's just put all of our cards on the table. Yeah. And just make the best hand that we can out of it.

You know, sort of like Texas hold them, but with, you know, no card, you know, no cards hidden. Right. Yeah. Something like that. But now I'm seeing how I still believe in that and that's still proven to have great results for me and other people. And I have a newfound appreciation for how having that rel having that conversation mm-hmm.

About the relationship itself. I'm appreciating more the significance of. The impact that, that intention to use, the languaging that we start at the beginning of the conversation mm-hmm. Has on the, the actual evolution of the relationship. Yeah. Like that's very intentional evolution. Yes. And so, yeah, it's, I I, I have even more of an appreciation for that and I want to really think about that, you know, how that can help inform improvement as I'm always, of course, like you I'm sure.

Seeking to improve my systems.

[01:43:44] Michael Porcelli: Yeah.

[01:43:45] Vision Battlesword: How can people find out about you and about Meta Relating if they wanted to learn more?

[01:43:51] Michael Porcelli: Uh, the simplest ways is go to metarelating.com. It's just all one word. You can sign up for my newsletter. You can download an ebook that's free there. Check out the blog and videos and podcast episodes that are in the media section on there.

If you wanna get more of this stuff, get more of me. My work, it'd be great. Love to see you there. Nice.

[01:44:13] Vision Battlesword: Well, whatever other, if there's anything else you want me to put in the show notes as far as links or references, I'll love to do that. If you send those to me after we get done, and if anybody would like to learn more about intentional autonomous relating, which is part of my iEvolve Life portfolio, I'd love it.

If you go to, ievolve.life/iar. And with that, uh, just cannot wait for the second part, or third, fourth, fifth, however long it is that we want to continue this conversation. 'cause this was like super, super fun and interesting for me. I hope you enjoyed it as well, porch.

[01:44:47] Michael Porcelli: I did. Thanks. Appreciate you having me.

[01:44:49] Vision Battlesword: Thanks again. Thanks for joining me for Intentional Evolution. If you'd like to support the show, there's a couple of ways that you can do that. One is to connect with me directly. I'd love to start a conversation with you. If you're interested in any of my offers or if you'd like to be a guest on this podcast visit, iEvolve.life (LIFE) and drop me a note or book a call with me to connect.

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Thanks again and I'll see you in the singularity.