Virginia Vigliar (advaya): Hello, everyone. Welcome, welcome. My name is Virginia. I'm Head of Content at advaya. I'm really happy to welcome you to this webinar called The Transformative Power of Play with the amazing Dr Andreas Weber. We'll explore play and the profound implications of integrating it into our daily routines, and how it is a revolutionary force in this world. So just to let you know, the webinar is going to run for 60 minutes. It consists of a live conversation between Andreas and I, and we'll delve into play and love and ecology and lots of really beautiful topics. Of course, this webinar sits within a much bigger conversation of the on the advaya platform around exploring love, joy, enchantment, interconnectedness from an ecological and non anthropocentric perspective. I'm going to hand over to my colleague Grace to present a little bit about advaya. So for a few minutes, just to let you know, if you stay until the end, there will be a chapter from Andreas book, Matter and Desire and Erotic Ecology, and the chapter is a Play of Freedom.
Grace (advaya): Hey everyone, thank you for joining today. So as Virginia said, my name is Grace, a work alongside Virginia advaya, and super excited to be hosting this webinar today, along with the amazing a much loved Andreas Weber, and yeah, they can see some familiar names, but in case you are new to advaya, we thought we would just give you a bit of an overview. So established in 2015 by sisters Ruby and Christabel Reid. Advaya is a leading transformative educational platform with an interconnected relational approach to how we reimagine our worlds. Our mission is to re-enchant people with life so they can heal relationships with themselves, each other, the sacred and the natural living world. So advayas global faculty brings together leading visionaries, scientists, spiritual teachers, artists, authors, activists, philosophers and storytellers. Our program center on the sacred, establish relational consciousness, celebrate nature, create community, build resilience, heal division, cultivate clarity of mind and orient members towards transformation in every area of their lives. Our main offering is our live and on demand courses. And to date, we have about 20 of these on the advaya website, so with about 5000 hours of video content spanning topics such as ecology, spirituality, the body, AI and beyond. So this webinar is just the tip of the iceberg. And yeah, it's really amazing. We've got some amazing teachers. There's a picture of Aisha here, and I saw that she's joined. So she's she's in the room. And, yeah, but now we will wanna we've missed something. We'll go in today's webinar topic, but I'd love to stay in touch. And here is some contact information. So if you'd like to get in touch about a webinar or a course, then it's best to contact our founder, Ruby, and her email address is here. And then for more kind of content or marketing collaborations, it's best to contact our head of marketing, Edit, and also, just to say we're giving a unique summer opportunity to upgrade to thrive membership, which is the access or membership where you get access to all of our courses, community events on demand and upcoming so we're giving people 25% off Thrive membership. So you can use this Summer of Love discount code, and it ends on the 20th of August, which is in two weeks time. And yeah. So moving on to today's webinar, so inspired by week three of ecology of love, which is on the advaya platform with Andreas, which looks at love from an ecological perspective, and Weber stills more into his incredible work around aliveness love and play with special attention to his book, matter and desire. And again, just to say, you can access ecology of love by becoming a member of advaya, along with many other incredible courses. So back to Virginia, and yeah, just again to say, Welcome everyone.
Virginia Vigliar (advaya): I think I would start with introducing you, even though a lot of people here already know you. But Andreas is a biologist, philosopher and nature writer who focuses on a reevaluation of our understanding of the living. He proposes to view and treat all organisms as subjects, and hence the biosphere as a meaning creating and poetic reality. Andreas is visiting professor at the UNISG polenso, Italy, and teaches at the University of the Arts in Berlin. He has published more than 15 books in English language, most recently, Enlivenment, a Poetics for the Anthropocene and Sharing Life the Eco Politics of Reciprocity. Andreas is also the teacher of our incredible course and ecology of love, which Grace just introduced, that looks at love from from an ecological perspective. This is how I translate it, because it's actually the first course I took with advaya. And what made me fall in love with advaya in general, perhaps to kind of get us all onto the same page and as to why we're here. Why play and why aliveness? What is so special about them, and why do you think they're important today?
Andreas Weber: Yeah, thank you. I'll try to answer. But before, I want to do a little move of inclusion. I want to invite all the beings, all the other than human beings, which are with us, here and around us here, into this, into this little talk, into this little conversation. I just rescued a Daddy Longleg before, before you guys came in and and there's the wonderful mountain river vada just outside the door, which, or who, I should say, plays with the pebbles, rearranges them to mandalas, and in it the fish play, the young fish, and all these beings in the air and the clouds which connect us, which connect us all. I mean, I saw it's so moving. You know, you're there. There are people from a and Uruguay and DC Metro. I love this, and Toronto, and even Berlin. So Virginia, forgive me for this, for this, but it's, it's important that we, we don't do it as humans alone, that we really ask for to sit, to be allowed to sit with all life, yeah. And so you, you ask, why aliveness, and why? What place has play in aliveness, more or less, I think so. I mean, of course, aliveness is the elephant in the room of our, of our of the dominant scientific culture. Let's call it like this. My daughter, who studies philosophy and cultural sciences talk, taught me that that's that term which I like the dominant scientific culture, because enlightenment isn't really contained in it. It's something we don't normally theorize about. We normally don't, let's say we don't community really communicate about we. Of course, we feel it, we and we experience it because we are, of course, alive, and the world, reality is alive. The world is alive. So that's the most important thing in our existence, but it doesn't really have a place in our self understanding. So this, this needs to change and and that's why I'm so so obsessed about this. And I mean, of course, this is also a door into seeing the world we are in and the world we are, the world we are part of as not only a world of things and processes, but also a world of inner experience, which aliveness is. I mean, aliveness is so many things. It is, it is mutual transformation. It is life and death, and it is an experience. And we know this because we're alive. So that's, that's my big duty to to somehow try to remind that this is important, and what relationship does this have to play? Well, I mean, in the in the days before the session, I consciously and unconsciously was thinking, okay, so now, when you ask me for a definition of play, what will I say? And I will I would say, play is creation without fear of death. And actually a life itself is also creation without fear of death. Only that we forget it all the time. We were so afraid that something bad can happen the river, my river mentor here, and the the trees and the flowers and even the Daddy Long Legs are much better at at not paying so much attention to this fear and play brings us back into this on a sort of cosmic level, I would say, on par with reality, and so this is, this is why this is so incredibly important to all beings. Can that work as a first approach, first answer? Yes. I mean, I when you were asking, I mean, I would never ask for a definition of play, but I also feel that somehow, because we're alive, we know what it is. I don't know. I yeah, maybe not.
I know. Actually, I even knew that you wouldn't ask for a definition. But I was thinking, I was thinking about it so hard, and, no, actually, I didn't think about it at all. It just came to my mind right now, and I wanted to drop it here. The interesting thing is, actually, there is no play. There's no life without play, and on some level. And that's what I try to say with this sort of definition. It was just some, some short shot, shot from my hip, that life is an an unfolding of reality or, or a carrying on, a bringing forth of reality and and play is that is just that thing. Play is just that, but with a with a certain vector or with a certain label. And this label is freedom, without fear, without constraints, without some bully sitting, sitting there and watching you and telling you, judging you, you know you made a wrong move. And so it's a sort of essence of aliveness, in a way. And we need to go back to this. Actually, everybody does, always in order to keep alive. And it's very interesting that if you withdrew play from children, which it's already very difficult to do, but if you if children can't play, they they will die, they will get sick, they will get mentally ill. So that's that's in a way, play is as important as the satisfaction of our basic needs for food and air and the warmth, let's say, and shelter and and, and for our basic needs of being in relationship. And then there's play and humans are, of course, not the only beings who play. I mean, I already somewhat suggested that that I sit with my river and watch the river play, of course. So, so for me, that's, that's, that's what water mainly does. Sometimes the play of water doesn't give the nicest results for human, let's say for what humans intend, it can be, it can be devastating, as we know but, but we know that all animals play, even the animals you wouldn't, you will not expect. I mean, you would know, you would think, okay, dogs play, or little lions play, and but then we understand that even ants play, like insects play. You know, you only have to look at them with a tender, patient eye, and some days ago, a friend of mine, a philosopher colleague, sent me a sequence of photos of a bean shoot in her room, and she sent me a sequence of photos which showed that this bean shoot was actually moving through the air. You know, you don't see it, because plants are a little bit slower, but the photos showed it. It was moving. And then there was another plant in the vicinity, and it somehow moved into this direction. And I told her, Hey, why don't you move this other plant a little bit closer? Because it seems like the bean would like to somehow, I didn't say, play with it, but somehow it's somewhat curious. And then she moved it closer, and then the Bean looked, looked at this other plant, and then it moved away again, you know. But so you could say, Why? Why shouldn't you say that this was a sort of playful, you know, playful interaction, a little dance. So play is part of life, and it is also part of life in terms of being without any purpose. So I'm really a strict critic of this, of those fashions, which there are, of course, and in biology, that's the dominant opinion - that play is somehow a way to train survival behavior. Not at all. I think it's too basic. It's far too basic. It's not training anything. It's just a manifestation of a life.
Virginiar Vigliar (advaya): No, don't worry. I mean, they're all kind of intertwined. But I was going to say something that really fascinates me about your work is how you framed play as something that helps us understand each other. And you know, I feel that in a world that tends to isolate us and to think of things in silos and that divides us, this is such a powerful force. So I wanted to to have you maybe expand on, on interconnectedness and play.
Andreas Weber: I mean, I would, I would actually look at this today. I would look at this in the way that when you play your true and when you're true, you're able to connect with other. When you're not true or not real, you cannot really connect. I mean, you can fake connection, but you cannot connect. And there's this wonderful sentence about play by Joseph Campbell, by the myth researcher, the mythologist, the US myth researcher, the Hero's Quest. You know, this probably in the from he was active in the 50s and 60s, I think, and 70s. And there's the sentence quoted by by Marcia Rosenberg, the psychologist who invented nonviolent communication. And I adore him very much. And and he quotes, I mean, I only know the quote, so it might be slightly off, but that's the quote. He says, Do do everything you do as play. Because if it is play, you will be meeting your needs. Isn't that a fascinating sentence? And I mean, do everything you do refers, of course, to behavior in terms of others, relationship behavior. Because much, much of what we do is not as alone, but in connection, or in wishing connection or trying connection to other beings, humans, or other than humans, and I mean, this is a very radical suggestion - to do everything you do as play. So from now on, stop not playing. And I really love this. I really love this, because I profoundly think it's right, and it's also so radical that you can immediately start to test it. You can go and go to the grocer and do your grocery shopping and play and let's see what comes up. And normally, people will be very happy to have a playful person around. They will smile, they will laugh, they will also play a little bit. And it's very interesting. I mean, it's somehow this, this sentence, clicked with me like immediately when I heard it more than a decade ago now, when I watched this, this beautiful San Francisco workshop on YouTube. It's still there. I think it was a David Marshall Rosenberg in San Francisco. I can just recommend it to everyone, to anyone, everyone and anyone and and it really immediately I somehow, I took it for me, and I said, that's so right. But I wasn't sure you know how to understand it. Why is play so much related with needs? But you know when you when you forget your fear, then you will do what is true about you. You know, then you're yourself. So when I said this definition play is create without peering. Then we're there. And I think, I mean, the great thing is, you can just start and practice. It's so lovely. Just practice. Fool around with the people you bump into. The next people you bump into.
Virginia Vigliar (advaya): Actually, that phrase the Joseph Campbell is on the chapter that we're going to gift people at the end. And it also stayed with me last week because I wrote a newsletter on play where you were actually the teacher spotlight, by the way. I'll send it to you. But today, I was reading that chapter, and at one point, well, it's from the book Matter and Desire, which you we refer to a lot in Ecology of Love, you write: "Play is an instance of expression, and thereby one of the most important manifestation of erotic ecology". I wanted us to expand on on the idea of erotic ecology and and play, and then move on to freedom, which I also think is super important.
Andreas Weber: Yeah, so why erotic ecology? I mean, you're, I already talked a little bit about about life as being inherent, inherently about bringing forth more of itself, which is actually interesting. I mean, we are, we are alive. We're part of life, you know, and we have this inherent desire to bring forth more of this, which is us, and if we manage to do this, we're happy. I would posit this as a hypothesis here and it's, you see, we are. And every life does it. Every being does that. All beings do it. And one manifestation of bringing forth more life, of course, is procreation, getting having kids, having offspring. One fly, creating 10,000 new flyers in your garbage, which you forgot before you went to holidays. Then you see, you see a you experience a profound instance of erotic ecology, the desire to create more life and and this desire is, you see, I described it. It's on one hand. You can observe it. You can see it in the world. If this world is so I mean, at the moment, it has some problems. Life has some problems in this, in this world of the late, the late scientific culture we are in, but the default state is that this world is just all to the rim of life, bringing forth life. I mean, that's, that's what's so fascinating. When you go into a summer meadow, then you're in the middle of this, and you will have, you will see this. You can understand it as a biologist. You can say a lot about it, but you will also have a feeling. And probably, if you're with someone you have a you have a good relationship too. Then this will this, you will share this. There will be joy between you. And if you're with a lover, you will probably have some impulse just to lie down, to become part of the summer meadow and to kiss. I mean, I remember, well, I have the tendency to do this. And I had this girlfriend for a long time, and she had this terrible hay fever. So the range of erotic ecology was severely hampered. But what I want to say is that this Eros is something factual, and it's also something experiential. So we, again, we're on these, on these two levels that we are part of this world. And again, we are also the experience of this world. And, and that's what I call erotic ecology. So in our in our basic inner experience, we are very, very close to the core of the ecosystems. And and I would really propose to use this to to enhance, to deepen our erotic understanding, to our ecological understanding, also our erotic understanding, of course, and and when we look at it from a more, again, from a more, let's say, analytical, structural side, we see that this, this profound drive to bring forth life is always about meeting other and then and then mutually transforming each other, which is which is very deep, because that means also that when you meet another, you will lose something. You will not stay intact. You will you will somehow be become not only naked, but even pierced by other. But that's that's how life works, and that's what, that's what our deepest desire is actually in in in wanting to bring forth life. And you see again, if we, if we're too afraid to have this transformation happen, then we will not be able to meet other. Because it is, this is really meeting other, is always transformation. I mean, it really meeting other is already, I'm already talking about something as simple as breathing. You know, when I'm when I'm I'm meeting the tree at my river, I'm meeting the the willow at my river. And we're meeting because the oxygen the tree has separated from its body, goes into my body and becomes my body, and the carbon, which is my body, becomes the tree. So that's profoundly erotic ecology, because we are, we are bringing forth life and and we're changing our bodies in this. This is really about, I mean, it's, it's really about flesh and really about touch and really about inter penetration. It's very profound. And we have a feeling we sit there, we sit under the willow, and we have the feeling how beautiful it is to sit under the willow, which is the the inside of this whole process of erotic play with one another. So when we're talking about Eros, we are, of course, everybody of you guys thinks of Plato and the symposium, the famous dialog, and the very interesting dialog, because Plato pulls out of his philosophical magician's head Diotima, and she gives The definition of love of Eros. You know, it's, it's not Plato himself, of course, it's not Socrates. Socrates says, No, I can't really, everything I know, I know from this lady. And this lady is a shaman, and she says, "The Eros is to beget, in beauty, to procreate in beauty". That's Eros. So you see that's that's what I try to somehow, to explain, and we desire to bring forth life, and it works by begetting in beauty, by procreating in beauty. But can you also see that procreating in beauty is also a definition of play. That's what you do. Like, I mean, remember, eventually, you remember your childhood when you were in free play and you were just building or creating something, or painting something, or or you were at the river and working, playing with mud. Or maybe, I mean, you all play in your in your in your adult life, of course, you create. So let's also be getting in beauty. So we're very much in the center, so that somehow, when the erotic and the playful pretty much overlap.
Virginia Vigliar (advaya): I have to, because my work and how much of a lighthouse she was, she is, I have to bring Audre Lorde into the into and her uses of the erotic as also pleasure and and freedom, freedom and liberation as like erotic practices that not necessarily having to do with with sex or procreation, but also having to do with self-love and and pleasure and sensuous things. But a lot of it has to do with freedom, also in Lord's work. And I know that you talk a lot about play and freedom, yes, as correlated. And if you want to expand on that queerness.
Andreas Weber: I see there, there's a little germ of a debate here, when I was talking about procreation. But I mean, as I do it in a very, very general sense, you know, I do it in the sense that life desires to give more life. I mean, that doesn't mean kids, like in pre terms, but every, every act you do, if you really love it, it has some fertility to it. It is, it is adding life to life. That's I would hold this and and so you see, we also see that there's nothing shallow about life, about really being alive. Because if this is our deep wish, then everything we do should be about this and and that's truly my that's really my idea that actually everything is about this. And when we have the profoundly satisfied feeling that this day was okay, then there was, then we, we, we managed to do it. And when we have the feeling we're just in a treadmill, and actually, it doesn't make any sense, then we can't do it. We somehow cannot do it for for many reasons. I mean, mostly, I would say for the reasons that our our dominant scientific culture, has developed into a way where, where humans actually do not really have the chance to do this, you know. And also, if we don't have the chance, it's very traumatizing, and then we're so traumatized that we forgot how to do it. And there was, there was a question in the chat before, how can I play when I'm too depressed or too afraid? And I mean, then I would say, I when I'm too traumatized to be able to go there, then I somehow need to heal, to find this source, which of course, is in myself, because we're all alive, and as we are alive, we all have this source, and it's findable, but it can be a hard work. But now I come back and again, when you say, hey, what about freedom? Then again, the interesting thing is that freedom has to do with, how can I put it? Freedom is in this interesting tension with what is our personal essence, or what is our essence as living beings? And it is actually the way to to express or to realize or to live or to procreate. Bring forth this essence in a in a unique way, and in a way which I decide because I play and nobody orders me how I do it and that's also freedom. Or there's my biological teacher, Francisco Varela, used the term "autonomy" is also something which is somehow underused in terms of understanding life, but I would say that life always is searching for this freedom. So this freedom is a basic dimension of life, and at the same time life, of course, is always constrained to the conditions of life. So we have a we have a wonderful dialectic gap opening between what the German philosophers of the 18th and 19th century would call freedom and necessity and play is to bring freedom and necessity into a beautiful tension. So play is actually and that is, that is Schiller. He's more a writer and a playwright than a philosopher, but he was also a philosopher. Friedrich Schiller, the German, famous German writer and friend of Goethe, who said that, "if necessity is expressed in freedom, that is beauty". And you know, I still get gooseflesh when I when I'm talking about this, when I'm thinking about this, you know, so you see, he didn't say, be completely free. Do whatever you can, to be totally detached from anything and then do it self-defied. He said, Do that which is necessary in freedom. Do it totally free. And that means, among others, do it without fear. And that's beauty, and that's very important, I think. And I don't know, I somehow lost Audrey Lord a little bit along the way, maybe. I pull you back.
Continuously talking about all these things, I realized that that our big work, our big hard work is to not to, to not indulge. No, that's not the right word, to not succumb to fear. You know, we need this. We need to allow ourselves the freedom to to be beautiful. And that means we have to take this freedom. We cannot be too fearful to say, No, I can't do this. That's, that's the huge quest, actually, is to to do something, although you're totally afraid, I'm afraid of many things. I know this. It's a daily quest. But to to take this, take this beautiful this, this offering of our liveness, and to say I will do it with my existence, which is the necessity of why I'm here. I'm certain. I will do this with the freedom it needs in order to beget in beauty. I mean, that's the quest. It's tough, but it's also beautiful.
Virginia Vigliar (advaya): You know what I love? And this, I even put it as a question, but now I'm noticing it even more in our conversation, that I love that in your work, but I think also in mine and in a lot of people's work, a lot of words tend to kind of interchange each other. So for example, play, eroticism, beauty, aliveness, are kind of as if each was somehow a form of the other, and are totally related to each other. I mean, now you you didn't know this, but you use beauty instead of play. And like freedom, it was just very interesting thing to do with words. But to get back to to our conversation and to love, which I think is such a big part of your work as well. And of the course, for me, a book that was kind of mindset shifting for for my personal work was all about love by Bell Hooks, which has its problems, but is also just an incredible piece of work. And when, and I actually was reading it just before I attended your course, and then I read your book and attended your course and it was really beautiful, too. So, you know, for me as a feminist writer and a woman in a patriarchal society, was it was really interesting to kind of learn what love had meant for me and deconstruct that. And so that's also I was in that journey when I took your course, and I wanted to know how you see like the concepts of love and aliveness and play intersect, but also how you see your work intersect with the work of Bell Hooks and how significant these conceptual connections have been for you.
Andreas Weber: Yeah, wonderful. I found Bell Hooks relatively late, so much later than when I had already written my book on love and life, my Matter and Desire. So I found it relatively late. And I actually admit that I, I think I bought it three or four times, and I gave it away very quickly, always. So I still haven't really completely reading it, because it always vanishes. The first one I gave to my daughter, and then it just somewhat disappears. And I would say there are actually some overlaps or similarities. And there are, of course, there are also very different perspectives. So we have a Venn diagram, in a way. And I mean, now it's a decade that I wrote Matter and Desire, and in a way, I have even more moved into, into understanding, trying to embrace love as a profound principle. As the profound principle of reality, which then becomes also something which is not only intellectual and not even only poetic. I mean, I wouldn't say when I wrote about love as as actually the the defining essence of life, that it was just an intellectual exercise, but I still, I still talked about it, but I have really moved into a direction where I try to experience love as a sort of basic layer of reality, which can reveal itself to us as an experience. So it's very interesting to to see what is this love, actually. It is vastly more than just the feeling we have when we think we love someone or we love something. So let's, it's, it's much more. It's, it's also a power, and it's also a state. It's also a state of being that's very interesting. And everybody who, whoever falls or is is pulled or is gifted with this state of being, will be so intoxicated that they will, they will forever search to get into the state again. So that's, that's the mystical journey. Then, you know, that's the journey of the Sufis is to stay in in the state of love, which is nowhere and everywhere, and which is timeless, and which is which doesn't have any space, but then is somehow in everything and behind everything. And if, if we come from this, and the interesting thing is, if you fall into This state, like, like, like, let's say like, like, you fall into a huge pot of honey. Then there comes one desire, and this desire is to do something beautiful, to give beauty, to create something beautiful. So that's very interesting. So this, this state, is very much about making your desire to give life. You know, artists, the artists among us here, they will recognize this. You know, when you're creating an artwork, you because that's that's because some spark has lit you up. So you have received some, some act of love, or so you have some, received, some gift of life. And then what does it do to you? Does it makes you desire to give as well? So love is also the profound desire to give life. And and this profound desire to give life can be a state of our experience, of our whole being, but it is, at the same time an action. And if we are in this state, then we desire to become this action. And I find this absolutely amazing. And then you see as life, biological life, organic life, ecological life is one continuous passing on of the gift of life. It is even an expression. And this, again, is why we fall on our knees or on our on our backs in the in the summer meadow or the spring meadow, because we we see this, we see this in front of us. It's absolutely amazing. And so, you see, I really, I really find that love is the center of what is, what is happening in life, but it's, I wouldn't say love and life is the same thing. Love is the moving principle of that what what we what we see as life. And there's one definition of a humanist psychologist i much adore very, very famous one who is one of the few persons who tried to define love. You know, the important concepts in our lives, they few people try to define them. There are also very few definitions of life. Actually, my teacher tried to do, to do one, to give one. But So Ellis form who he gives a very simple definition. And I find it, I find it super helpful and super useful. Love is the active interest in the aliveness of the other. Love is the active interest in the aliveness of the other. And that's also a nice scale to measure your the actual love relationships you're in, you can see how much actual active aliveness in the life of the active interest in the aliveness of the other is there. But this active interest is also the active interest of the life giving source of reality itself. There's an active interest to give life.
Virginia Vigliar (advaya): So just to this morning, well, there's, there was a question about this, but this morning, I was looking at people at the beach playing, and there was, like a kid playing, and there was this couple playing, and at the same time I was scrolling on my Instagram, and there was this news of us going towards a seven degree world by 2075 and all about the climate crisis, and it was nine and it was already like 35 degrees. I feel like the summer really here, at least really reminds you of joy. And my question was, how do you hold the nuance, and how do you access play and joy and aliveness within, within the crisis, or within, some people like to call it the apocalypse. I like the fact that it's called apocalypse, because it means a revelation, actually the word. But what are some practices, for example, you can tell us about, or how do we access that within the sadness, not ignoring the sadness or ignoring the despair, but, you know, incorporating play in it.
Andreas Weber: Thank you. That's, that's actually that takes up the question I referred to already before, which came pretty much early in the chat, actually, what can I do? How can I play when I'm when I'm too sad to play? And, yeah, I mean, that's a challenge, and that will be our company for the time to come now, so that's a big challenge. And, you know, sometimes I don't know, and then I'm sitting in the corner and weep, and I just don't know. And, but then again, I mean, there are actually several things to this. So one thing is that, with which will I start? One thing is that, as play somehow, is to to bring creation into being. So, you know, to add to life, to add to the aliveness. So it's, it's always a also a loving act. And you know, loving acts are directed towards other. Loving acts are not directed to yourself. They're directed towards other. You are going to give life to someone. So you're playful. You know, you're playful by giving someone the occasion to feel a little bit lighter. So, you know, it's other directed. And the great thing is that even if you're if you feel miserable, you can still treat others nicely. So that's my first. My first answer is, actually, even if you're inside you feel like hollow, you can still be playful. You can do it because it's not about you, it's about it's about life itself. It's about the life in everyone. So that's that's something which is possible, and it might be a stretch. And then you have to somehow kick yourself to, Hey, try to be playful. But it works. And the interesting thing is, then, you know, this play, this playfulness, will mirror back to you, on you, and then you actually, you will be surrounded by playful people, and then you will feel a little bit better. I think it works. I mean, I know it works. But, you know, sometimes, sometimes it's hard to get there, but it's the interesting thing about love is so love, englobing, the idea of play. Of course, the interesting thing about love is that you can produce it. You know, you don't have to wait for it, because it's just this fleeting feeling. And when you feel it, you can do it. And when you don't feel it, you're helpless. You can produce it, because love is about other. That's the wonderful thing. And I mean, you see already this, this bitter lesson we which will be taught to us for the next centuries to come, can teach us to direct towards other, you know. And we all have this. We all have the we are suffering from the narcissistic pest, and it can help us to turn towards others. So that was one thing, and the other thing is that the source which desires life to be, which desires to give life, is something we can connect to, and caring about others. Turning towards others helps us to connect to it, but we can connect to it anyway. You know, there's a source which desires to give life, which will be there regardless, whatever will come. This source is there, and we can tap into it, and we can make ourselves, it's servants and and this makes you feel right again, personal experience. It, works. It's, it's, you know, it's not, that's not the hedonistic path, but that's the path of reality. I would say it's very it's, it's very light footed, but it's, it's also very serious at the same time.
Virginia Vigliar (advaya): Something I do that is just like a really silly exercise is that I go in front of the mirror and I just start making, like, silly faces. And that's when I'm really sad and I cannot access play in any way, and I just don't want to go out or do things or see anyone, so I just sit in the mirror and go make silly faces. I almost always end up laughing.
Andreas Weber: So you know, my problem is that I, even if I don't even explicitly make a silly face, and I pass along the mirror, I already see a silly face there.
Virginia Vigliar (advaya): To perceive yourself a silly.
Andreas Weber: I mean, I mean, there's so many little things. And, you know, for some people I'm actually a very silly person, you know, I always love I really like to do silly things. And what I love about silly things, you know, some people love about only, about intelligent, humorous, hilarious thing I love about stupid, hilarious things. So, you know, it is so easy. It's so easy to make silly things. You know, go to Ikea with your with your partner du jour and make silly things. That's actually the perfect place. It's climatized, you know, you can, you don't sweat. It's actually great. You know, if you feel, if you feel climate disaster depressed, go to Ikea with your date and start to make silly things. I mean, I mean, you know, put a put a plush octopus on your head or whatever.
Virginia Vigliar (advaya): I love that, yeah. Well, anyways, we're almost at the end. I'm going to put your chapter in the chat. And thank you so much. This was so fun. I feel like we could talk about, I mean, everyone's questioning, what is freedom? What is love? So clearly, we need to have a one day symposium on trying to find definitions for things that cannot be defined. But, and I think like actually, maybe we don't need to define one thing for one concept. They're too big. Maybe they have many definitions, and I kind of love to hold that as well. But yeah, thank you so much, Andreas for for coming here in a hot day and for everyone here who stayed until the end.
