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Iain McGilchrist Λ John Vervaeke on God, Meaning, Consciousness, and Being
September 26, 2022
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The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science, they analyze culture, they analyze finance, economics, business, international affairs across every region.
I'm particularly liking their new insider feature was just launched this month it gives you gives me a front row access to the economist internal editorial debates where senior editors argue through the news with world leaders and policy makers and twice weekly long format shows basically an extremely high quality podcast whether it's scientific innovation or shifting global politics the economist provides comprehensive coverage beyond headlines.
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Ian McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, a writer, and a former Oxford literary scholar who came to prominence with his work The Master and His Emissary, subtitled The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. We've spoken last year regarding that very topic and the link is in the description. His new book, The Matter with Things, Our Brains, Our Delusions, and The Unmaking of the World, and the links to both books are in the description.
John Vervecky is a professor of cognitive science at the University of Toronto, my former home, who's one of the few scholars taking an extensive and meticulous cognitive scientific approach to wisdom, Buddhism and consciousness. John and I have also spoken several times on this podcast and you can see the thumbnails here and the links to each will be in the description as well. It's that latter topic, consciousness, that
In more ways than one binds us here today. As usual, click on the timestamp in the description to skip this intro. My name is Kurt Jaimungal. I'm a Torontonian filmmaker with a background in mathematical physics and this channel is dedicated to the explication of the variegated terrain of theories of everything.
That is, primarily from a theoretical physics perspective, but as well as understanding the role consciousness has to play to the fundamental laws provided these laws exist at all in a form knowable to us.
Firstly, there's a physics and consciousness contest on this channel. The link to which will be in the description as well as the thumbnail is over here. Essentially, it's the physics version of the 3Blue1Brown math contest, except ours is for physics and consciousness as well. If you have an idea for some explainer of an advanced physics or consciousness concept, then think about creating a video for this and submitting. As you have the chance to win $1,000, Brilliant has come in to give $5,000 among the top five, so that's $1,000 for each.
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Patreon may decide to shut you down for whatever reason they like. There are also a variety of benefits that come with being a member on the Toh website. For instance, you get an ad free version of the shows that are coming out, an audio ad free version. That is to say you get a private link to the RSS feed to download the audio versions and they come out about 12 to 48 hours, sometimes even one week prior to you seeing them here on YouTube.
just so you know the way that it works is that I finish editing and then I have to do another run through and go through timestamps and catalog references and so on that takes time and what it means is that I put it out on YouTube and then I have a lag so that I can build up some hype and some audience prior to the premiere but then that means that I've actually finished the episode a couple days before so what I'll do is I'll upload simultaneously for the members an audio version ads free and then later it premieres on YouTube
For you as the YouTube audience, nothing changes. This is the way I've always done it. It's just that I have here an audio version for a little while prior, which I'm going to release to the toe members as a thank you. And it's going to be ads free. So that's one of the benefits from this point forward. There may be mid rolls that is ads in the middle of a podcast. And that's just part and parcel of the toe members of the toe audience. You are sponsoring toe and then the sponsors also sponsor toe. So thank you for your support. Those won't be there in the audio ads free version for the toe members.
Second benefit is that you get discounts to any live events when we do have them. For instance, I'd like to do Carl Friston in London live in front of an audience. Same with E. McGilchrist and John Vervecky at some point. Another benefit is that there will be exclusive merch offered to the Toe members. Another benefit is that there's a number to text me. Again, if that's what you're into, we're testing this out for about a month. And yes, this is something where I am texting you back.
Throughout much of this, you can see that the artwork here is exquisite on the website, and that's because it's been done by Boris Martinez-Castello. A link to his Instagram is in the description as well. Thank you, Boris. Thank you so much. As for today's sponsor, it's Brilliant, Brilliant.org. Now Brilliant has been with Toe since near the beginning. I recommend you check out Brilliant.org slash Toe if you're interested in learning math and physics and science.
So brilliant is a place that you go to learn about STEM subjects in an interactive manner. They have these bite sized courses. It's extremely easy. You may think that special relativity is beyond you. No, it's not. It's something that someone can understand in elementary school, the way that brilliant breaks down these
extremely advanced concepts is elementary. At some point, I'll be doing an introduction to information theory. In particular, there's David Deutsch and Chiara Marletto's constructor theory. And because I'd like to learn that I decided let me brush up on the fundamentals of information theory.
We'll start this by asking each of you what is the meaning crisis and what are its causes. And we'll start with Ian if you don't mind.
Well, what I understand by it is the fact that people have lost any sense, that things really speak to them from somewhere beyond what they've made up in their own minds. The experience of something great, possibly transcendent, certainly of existential importance, is harder now because we live in a world of reductive materialism.
in which everything is supposed to be explained as the dead movements of mechanical pieces. I think this is not only incredibly unhealthy and causes mental illness, which is not just my opinion, but the statistics speak for themselves, but is a huge mistake in its conception.
because I don't believe that meaning is something we make up. I believe it's something we find. And we have to put ourselves in the way of finding it. And that would mean putting a certain degree of vulnerability of opening oneself to something in case one finds there's something there. And if one doesn't open oneself to it, one won't find that at all. I think it applies to spiritual life, to religion in as much as that is part of it for many people.
And it also applies to experiences of art and experiences of one another and what it is to be a human being. We've degraded ourselves and then find ourselves in an nihilistic universe where nothing makes sense and nothing has meaning. And that's a very dangerous place to be for a number of reasons for the course of civilization and also for each of us as individuals.
Yes, it's a very important element in the position we find ourselves in. As you know, one of the things I believe has happened is that gradually over the course of recent Western civilization, and particularly after the Enlightenment, we overreached ourselves. We were not content with the idea that
thinking rationally helps banish many unnecessary woes and mistakes and and so on but that we actually could understand everything and once you think you can understand everything your chances of understanding anything are remote and this has been taken to hubristic extremes during our lifetimes and I associate this with the rise of a certain way of thinking about the world
that i believe is the way in which the left hemisphere operates it it has evolved the way it has because it helps us grab stuff and get stuff but it has outsourced the business of meaning and understanding to the right hemisphere or to put it another way the right hemisphere has outsourced grabbing and getting stuff to the left hemisphere and remained able to understand and that would bring a different
relationship between ourselves and the world. Indeed, I think this idea of relationship and encounters with reality is a very important one, which no doubt we'll come back to. I argue in my latest book, The Matter with Things, that in fact, relations are what everything is built out of, and that relations are even prior to relata. So that would be my first attempt to give some idea of what I think about that huge question.
Well, and I suppose that's one of the reasons why we're talking. My answer is going to be, I find, at least to my mind, quite convergent with what Ian said. So, but I'll start from a different place, but I think I'll end up in the same, or very close to where he ended up. I think the very processes that make us intelligently adaptive, make us perennially susceptible to self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior, and that across time and culture,
People have come up
We want to feel that we are connected to something that has a value and a reality other than our own egocentric preferences and existence.
So I'll often ask people, what do you mean by meaning in life? And I'll say, well, tell me what you would want to keep continue existing, even if you weren't here. And they'll tell me and I'll tell and I'll say, that's what matters to you. That's what you want. That's what you want to be connected to beyond your egocentric preferences and your egocentric existence. I think the capacity to ameliorate that self deceptive, self destructive foolishness,
And to enhance the sense of connectedness is what people, what cultures have called wisdom. And I think what we're facing today is a two pronged problem. People don't know where to go for wisdom. They overwhelmingly know where to go for information. But like T.S. Eliot said, we have lost
wisdom and the knowledge and the knowledge and the information so they precisely lack the discernment as to what they should pay attention to what they should take seriously what really matters so they're overwhelmed with information what counts as knowledge is now significantly in question in our culture and of course when i ask people where they go for wisdom i either get a deafening silence or i get some autodidactic religion of me that the person gives me typically um
And so the fastest growing group in our culture are the nuns, N-O-N-E-S. They have no official religious affiliation. That does not mean they are overwhelmingly atheist. They are by and large, they describe themselves by this phrase that is very popular to exactly the degree to which I find it vapid. They're spiritual, but not religious. And it's very hard to determine what that actually means other than they have some intuitive sense that they should be seeking wisdom.
should be seeking connectedness, but they distrust any of the institutionalized sources. The problem is the what was supposed to offer, so religions have been the home for these ecologies of practices, and the Enlightenment offered to free us from the tyranny of religion and give us an alternative home, and it gave us the scientific worldview, a scientific worldview which explains everything except how we generate science,
and the meaning that makes truth possible and how science itself could possibly exist as a real entity within the ontology of that worldview. And so we and our science actually have no proper home in that worldview. And so the science can't provide the home for the ecology of practices. The religions are now largely regarded as obsolete or irrelevant.
And so the perennial problems now go largely unabated or ameliorated at best by autodidactic systems that have a strong proclivity for enhancing personal bias or group echo chambering. And of course social media has just exacerbated both of these tendencies tremendously. And so we starve for meaning in the midst of a wisdom famine
we can't ignore a scientific worldview, but that worldview does not properly place us. So what it does is it gives a tremendous emphasis on propositional knowing at the expense of all the non-propositional kinds of knowing, procedural, perspectival, and participatory. So we live in a propositional tyranny that prevents us from accessing those ways of knowing that would are properly the most powerful vehicles
by which we can cultivate wisdom and a sense of connectedness. And I think that is the meaning crisis, and that is the situation we are in. And it's getting worse and worse. People experience it as a kind of domicide, a loss of home, even though they have shelter. And COVID made it much, much worse. And we are seeing the mental health tsunami and the political ramifications of the acceleration of the meaning crisis right now. That would be my take on it. And one more thing.
Because it's conversion with what Ian said.
We've lost, aletheia, we've lost the sense of truth as what I call transjectivity, the deeper thing that binds subjectivity and objectivity together, the thing that is being given prominence by 4e cognitive science, and meaning is such a real transjective relation. It's not arbitrarily subjective, it's not merely objectively measurable, it is a proper real relation. That's why I use the term connectedness.
That's what I would say there. Ian, is there anything there that you would like to respond to? I would broadly accept what John has said. I mean, he's put really the same points I was trying to make, but just in a slightly different way, perhaps from a different perspective. I think we both see the importance of something
the calls to us we can't we feel ourselves attracted towards something and we've lost the confidence to go there because technology and information have substituted for deep knowledge and wisdom which is really what John was saying and I think the dangers in
I mean the technology problem is the genius out of the box and it can't be put back in but one of the difficulties about it is all it does it doesn't answer any questions of course all it does is enlarge our powers to alter things and that's only as good as our wisdom about what needs altering and in what way and to what end and I don't believe we have that wisdom at all we have more power than we've ever had
In the history of humanity and the least wisdom we've ever had, I believe, and I think that this what John was calling the rise of propositional knowledge is very important when it comes to look at things like belief in the nature of
God or the world, because I think they are dispositional forms of knowing, not propositional forms of knowing. And unfortunately, in recent history, they've been presented to us as propositions that we either assent to or fail to assent to. Whereas in fact, it's a matter of how we attend to the world, because attention is absolutely at the root of all of this problem we see.
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That's drinktrade.com slash everything for $30 off. Do you use the word rationality and belief differently than John? I don't know. I have no idea whether we do or not. I mean, I tend to make a distinction, which is not one that's hard and fast in the English language, but is one I make for the purposes of being clear about what I'm talking about or clearer.
And that is to make a distinction between rationality and reason. Rationality is a more technical thing, but reason is the whole of one's ability to understand the world, bringing together everything one has learned from experience, one's ability to, yes, reason using logic, one's ability to attend to one's intuitions. It's the power that a good judge in the old days, a wise judge, as we would have thought of him, usually it would have been,
him brought to bear on a human situation so that's rationality i think it's terribly important i think in our i don't want to knock it at all it's just that it's a certain very diminished form of it i.e. the most mechanical rationalizations has taken over from that deep
reason that deep wisdom which which was much admired in the renaissance was thought to be the the sign of a of a fully educated and and well-read person so I I think reasons interact in danger in our time and also neither do I have anything to say against science science is hugely important and I'm very worried by the attacks on science for purely political reasons science is
Once we lose our anchors in reason and science, we're totally lost. But also if we only have reason and science, we're lost. They need to be mixed with properly what we can learn from intuition and imagination.
So, um, uh, I tend to use the word belief to mean the assertion of a proposition, but I acknowledge it has an older meaning. Belaben, which is to give your heart, to give your heart to. Um, and, uh, but I've given up the battle of trying to get people to use belief to mean that. Um, so I'll say you can keep it for the assertion of propositions. I want to talk about something else that Belaben used to, uh, point to, um,
I think I use rationality the way Ian uses reason, and I'll give you my reasons, which is I go back to the word that translated logos, and when I talk about rationality, I'm talking about what the ancient Greeks meant by logos, which is much more comprehensive.
the self-organizing of intelligibility such that the world can be real to us. I think that's sort of the best understanding. And the Latin for that was ratio, which means a proper proportioning.
And if you take a look at, like, for example, the use in the Stoics or in Plato, it means the proper proportioning, as Ian said, of attention. It means the proper proportioning of your character traits. Think about Aristotle's golden mean. You want to get the proper proportion between being cowardly and being foolhardy. So Ratio is the proper proportioning of your consciousness, your cognition, and your character.
such that virtue and virtuosity are possible. And I think that's the ancient meaning of Ratio, and that's why I use rationality. I reserve reason for the act of deliberation, but nothing much hangs on this distinction. I think Ian and I are both pointing to something similar, which is I talked about the truncation and the reduction of rationality to logicality and computation since the advent of the Enlightenment, and we have lost all those other aspects of
of rationality, the proper proportioning, like I say, of attention, of consciousness, of character, that is needed for virtue. And I take virtue to not mean acting according to a moral rule, like Kant might, but in the ancient sense of being deeply connected to what is most real. So I think the person, for example, who demonstrates courage is able to see through the distractions and distortions
of fear and connect to not just see but properly connect to what is most real and what most matters in a situation and therefore has the affordance to act best in that situation. That's what I mean by virtue connecting us to reality. So for me rationality is exactly that capacity. It's interesting that the word virtual now means precisely not being real in the sense you
I'm aware of that. I don't think we're really disagreeing here. I think it's just a matter of which words we choose to use.
I like it because I talk about Ratio Religio, the proper proportioning of how we are bound to things, how we are connected to things. And in that sense, the distinction between what we have since the Enlightenment called rationality and what we used to call religion is diminished, because religion is about, again, appropriately
finding ourselves religio to what is most real, the sacred, then ratio religio and religion are no longer oppositional. They have the potential to enter into real discourse with each other, which I think is part of what is needed right now. And I think I hear you saying that too.
I hear you saying, I agree with you, I'm a scientist, I love science, and I think people who don't practice science should not recommend its eradication. I think that that is a ridiculous proposal, and it's even contradictory to their own claim that you have to have a lived experience of something in order to really understand it.
So I agree with you that that proposal is ridiculous, but I think the enlightenment proposal that everything that people were trying to encompass in what was broadly called religion, which includes a lot of what we now pulled out as art and ritual and ceremony, that that was also part of Ratio Religio, that was a way in which we properly educated
Yes, certainly. In
in the new book of mine which came out last year
In part two of that, I specifically look at the various ways in which we can come to something we could call truth about the world. In brief, I conclude that we need each of science, reason, intuition, and imagination, not just one or two of these,
And if possible, in most situations, we should try to bring as many of these as possible to bear, are appropriate to whatever it is we're looking at. I don't think this is what we're currently doing. There's a sort of naive war between scientism, people who've never really thought very much, but just imagine that whatever it is they've fallen into believing about a mechanical universe must be right.
We've got a war on between them and other people who reject science and reject reason and I don't wish to encourage either party.
Yeah, I agree. And I noticed in the second book, because I have, I didn't just put it on the shelf, I have looked at it. But it's like, I got to say this, I didn't, this was a thunderbolt summer for me, I was traveling so much and talking in so many places. But you also, I did note in the second, you also talked about the sacred and recovering the sacred in the second part of the book as well. So that's why I was supposing that that
Yes, undoubtedly yes.
And actually, just to clarify for viewers, what John has just referred to is not the part two that I was talking about, it's part three, which confusingly is volume two. And the difference is that part two is epistemology and part three is metaphysics. So I'm looking at what is time, motion, space, matter, consciousness, what are values, what is purpose, what is the meaning of the
I'd like to talk to you about that, but first I do want to talk to you about the previous thing you said, because some of my most recent work has been around something that overlaps with that.
I've published on flow and intuition, and we could perhaps talk about that, but I've been doing recent work. I gave an invited lecture at Cambridge about the imaginal and its relationship to rationality.
what I mean by rationality. And I'm filming my next series after Socrates and there's a whole section where I'm talking about how the Neo-Platonists try to integrate the imaginal back into sort of the depths of philosophy.
So I don't know if you're aware of the distinction that Corban makes between the imaginary and the imaginal. Would it be worthwhile for me to quickly say what that is? I've got an idea, but I could be wrong. So if you like to unpack what you mean there. Sure, sure, sure. And I'll ground it in a concrete thing. And then I'll try and show just one quick point about how you can not
you know, not exhaustive, but exemplary of how you could see how it functions necessarily within what I'm calling rationality. So for many a distinction with the imaginary is when you picture things in your head and you're and it's not for the sake of perception, and you're in some sense escaping from the limitations of reality. That's the imaginary. Okay. And it sort of maps on to what Tolkien meant by escapist fantasy.
and then the imaginal is imagination for the sake of enhancing perception and the given deep learning and predictive processing this now makes tremendous sense right most of perception is imaginal in this sense
Yeah, go ahead. So if I may just comment there, this is precisely the distinction I make between what I call imagination and fancy, following words with encourage, the greatest writers in the English language on this particular topic. And what they meant was the distinction exactly between fantasy that takes us away from reality and imagination, which is our only chance to enter into reality. Right. And there's a connection, I believe,
I know Coleridge has a huge influence on Barfield and I believe there's some, I don't know if it's directly between Barfield and Corbem, but I think they both influence Hillman and others. So I'm aware there's connections between those two bodies. And importantly, Coleridge wasn't the beginning of this because he learned a great deal from Schelling.
and more or less lifted some of it out of shedding. So it goes down the line from there to in our time or more recent time anyway Owen Balfield and so on. And I think Wartoff is right that it actually goes back, you can see it in Goethe and when Goethe is trying to get the herb plant he's inventing the imaginal act of perception.
Yes that's a very good point and he also makes distinctions which are remarkably apt about the difference between the world provided by the right and the world provided by the left hand incidentally there we are anyway.
So the point I was making, and so for example, when I'm teaching, but thank you for that enrichment. Kurt, you wanted to say something, should I continue or? I want to see if this is correct. So the imaginary versus imaginal, the difference is one of intent. The reason why is like if one plays video games, they're escaping or they can be, but yet they still acquire skills that they can use in the real world.
Under the right circumstances, right? But it's also what the phenomenology of the act. So let me let me try and say, so usually the imaginary involves picturing in your mind. Like if I ask you right now, imagine a sailboat, are the sails up or not down? And you can say they're up or down, you can tell me that.
Whereas if a child is imagining being Zoro, they are not picturing anything. They are picking up a stick, tying a blanket around them, and they're taking on the salient landscaping of Zoro, getting a taste of what it would be like to have Zoro's perspective, to have Zoro's identity, and see what that feels like for them in terms of skills they might want to cultivate, identities and roles they might want to enter into. It overlaps with developmental play. And so the phenomenology is also very fundamentally different.
I use it when I'm teaching Tai Chi, when I'm telling people to stand, I say I want you to imagine that you're standing in a river and from your knees to your feet are sinking into the mud.
you're trying to get that feeling of rootedness and then from your knees to around your navel just like flowing water because that's how you want that area of your body and from here up is like air you want to give it very little attention and it dissipating and that and that helps people get into the proper way of inhabiting their body in order to optimize it for you know Tai Chi Chuan for sparring now
That, for example, that's one example of how the imaginal helps ratio. But in Hirschfield and others, you go into people, the academics, who are supposed to be the best, right? And you give them clear argument and evidence that they should start saving for the retirement. You make sure they understand. You allow them to voice any disputes. You get agreement from them all. You come back in six months, none of them are saving for the retirement.
Then you do the following and of course you have control groups and everything. I'm just giving that the experimental group. You ask them to imagine their future self as somebody that they love and care about. That somebody that they have a relationship and a responsibility to, a member of their family. You come back in six months and you'll find two things. They are now saving and the people that more vividly imagined that future self
We're able to save even more. And you say, so what? The ability to aspire to your future self, and this is Agnes Kellard's argument, is central to rationality. Rationality is ultimately about self-correcting. It's about aspiring to become more rational, wiser than you are. And therefore, the ability to properly aspire is dependent on the imaginal, yet it is central to rationality. And therefore, they are inseparably bound together.
This is something I think Plato deeply deeply understood because he'll give an argument and then he'll give the and that he'll give the parable of the cave and he'll put the two side by side so you're what right the imaginal and the rational are interwoven together and like Ian said we have we have now set them into this weird opposition which doesn't actually make very much sense. I suppose it could be because of the prevalence of entertainment
in which the imaginary or the sensible is taking priority over places in which people properly enact the imaginal. And I propose to you that those places traditionally have been ritual, the serious play of the imaginal, in order to enhance people's sense of connectedness, especially to the future self. Of course, there's an enormous amount that could be said about the imagination and its qualities.
Yes.
children's books in which there are animals and the pages are divided into three from top to bottom and you can turn over as many as you want of each part and you get the head of a goat and the body of a seal and the tail of a lion or something and and that's that's fantasy that's just putting together stuff that doesn't really exercise our imagination but Wordsworth famously was
the person vickenstein said we all should be that for heaven's sake don't stop being foolish what he did was he looked at a very bleak looking cliff or rock and in his contemplation of it it became something
more real than yes when we just look it's easy for us now at this stage in life and this is what words were wrote about in his own on intimations of immortality that as we grow up we cease to be an immediate contact with things because we're in contact of our images of those things we have a category we go to a picturesque scene and instead of being completely blown away by the beauty of it we
We're already categorizing picturesque scene, mountains, that's right, a lake and so on. And it's this process of getting beyond words and getting beyond categorical thought towards the very experience that we're having that is so important. So, no, I think that's right. And for me,
I'm not here to criticize Boosworth or my favorite poet, Rilke, who does something very similar. Favorite poet of mine as well, by the way, he is. Yeah, yeah. But I guess for me, part of the question becomes when I'm trying, because I not only am a scientist, I'm also a person who's in
involved with a lot of these emerging communities in which people are trying individually and collectively to build the colleges of practices for responding to the meeting crisis and doing it in good faith. I'm not talking about the charlatans, I'm not talking about the exploiters, I'm not talking about the gurus, I'm talking about people like Ray Kelly and others and you know and I met recently with them in Vermont. We're trying to organize things together. What
what i what i why i bring that up is to me that the question becomes how do we reverse engineer and recommend practices for people individually and collectively such that this is recoverable to them not only in thought but in actual conscious engagement with themselves other people in the world
The first is that I don't think that practices in themselves will ever achieve what needs to happen because they can still go on without the mind and heart of the person having fundamentally shifted. And in a way the reason that religions have rituals and practices
is that if you think your way into feeling those things eventually eventually and live them in your life then things will begin to change but i'm worried that recommending practices to people like if you do so much meditation per day and if you you know spend so long in nature and you spend so long listening to music there's nothing wrong with any of these things but the trouble is that
As Einstein said, we can't get out of the particular mess we've produced with the same thinking that got us into it in the first place. And so we need to shift entirely what we are meaning by meaning. And another point that occurs to me is these people that you mentioned that are not charlatans and have
something wise to say, I think it's an enormous load to place on any one individual that their ideas, their practices, their set of whatever it is, can really reach wisdom in the way that a tradition that has absorbed and evolved with and changed in the process
ideas of many many people wise people who live before us that is more likely in the end to distill wisdom which is why i think that i don't think it's necessarily very easy to do this not impossible but to do it without some sort of a tradition it doesn't have to be christianity of course it might be none of the monotheistic religions good as they are it might be daoism or buddhism and so on with their history with their teachings with their parables with their practice
I'm a little more cautious about the idea that either you or I, however bright we are, can sort of really take it upon ourselves to recommend to people how they can acquire wisdom. In fact, one of the points about wisdom is it can't be acquired according to any process.
Okay, this sounds like a great point of disagreement, as much as there are agreements, because I know you have non-theism, which sounds like, well, why don't you explain what non-theism is, or if you want to respond to that, John? Well, I do want to respond to it. First of all, I wasn't proposing practices in place of also fundamental philosophy.
I was practicing, I was proposing something very much like what we see in Stoicism in which or in Buddhism or in Neoplatonism you have both a fundamental philosophy and a set of practices that are integrated together and I also think whatever that integration is also has to be in deep and good faith dialogue with science especially the cognitive sciences because those are what I would call cognitive science because those are the ones directed towards
I'm trying and this is how.
A lot of these people are taking these practices up. They're not taking them up as just panacea practices. They're taking it up as, no, no, no, we need to be doing a lot of attentional sensory motor, a lot of stuff, and a lot of philosophical reflection, and a lot of dialogue if we're going to get something and properly enter into dialogue with the existing wisdom traditions.
So that's part of what I meant by how these communities are working. For example, I was at this conference that's being held at the Maple Monastic Academy, which comes out of the Zen tradition, is deeply influenced by it, but wants to talk to some of these emerging communities that have come out of other traditions. Secondly, I do think that
We are in a place that might be like the place where some of these, and this is a somewhat preposterous proposal, but it's a historical, I think we're in a kairos, I think we're at a pivot point in our civilization because I think the meaning crisis weakens us
disables us in the face of addressing the meta-crisis in many powerful ways and then the meta-crisis feeds back and makes the world seem bleak and inhospitable for people wrestling with meaning. So I think they're interlocked and so I think we're in a kairos because I do think ex-risk is real and accelerating and I do think the capacity for social media to misdirect us is real and accelerating.
So my point is, when we're in a kairos, we may need to give birth to something new. All of these other great traditions did start somewhere, you know, Socrates and the neoplatonic tradition, Jesus and the Christian tradition, Muhammad and the Islamic tradition, Siddhartha. I'm not claiming to be any of these figures, and I will not accept any attempt of job description of that for me. Nor do I think that any of these, I know Ray Ferry
For example, Rafe as part of his practice makes sure that he steps out of the leadership role, other people, he also does not see him. None of the people I'm talking to see themselves. What they do think is that something is emerging right now and because of the urgency of the situation, we should try to interact with it as best we can to try and see if we can steer it to becoming something
Yes.
Well, I wouldn't really disagree with that. Thank you for your clarification, which really just confirms what I hoped that you might say about it. It was really more a clarification because I think it's easy for people to think. I'm often asked, you know, after lecturing, so what do we do right away? You know, what do we do now? Yes. And it's like the left hemisphere's job is to solve an immediate problem and it wants eight bullet points. And if we can do all of those,
We can carry on business as usual but my message is we cannot conceivably carry on business as usual and I'm not talking about anything that can be summed up as a series of steps that we should take. There are steps that we should take that are very practical. We must stop poisoning
The oceans, we must stop destroying the forest. We must stop extinguishing the ways of life of indigenous peoples. There's many, many things we should do. We should stop actually attacking and destroying all that's best actually out of our own civilization. There are many things that we need to do rather urgently, but that's not really what I'm saying. I'm saying we need to think about the business of thinking.
and what we mean by meaning and that these need to be reconceived and the way that I like to reconceive them is by
Unfurling over a long stretch as we both acknowledge and I apologize for the length of what I write, but over a long stretch. But you're a good writer, so I mean, I don't want people to be put off by that. I mean, so I just wanted to, sorry for interrupting, but I know we both, yeah, it's a long book, but you're a good writer, so I don't want people to be put off by that.
Any time you want to interject a compliment of course. What i'm saying is that i think it's a question of the beginning of the book i say in a very short note to the reader which is only a page and a half long i think of it as taking somebody on a journey from which they can see something from different perspectives and that that will itself bring about a kind of a moment wow this is how it looks from here.
And it's not because I've explained something and asked you to assent to a proposition. It's because I have suggested I have indicated I've taken places. I mean, I go over a vast array of things from literature, from art, from philosophy, from, you know, all the rest. But I think it's that process of actually guiding people towards a different position that I think is key.
I agree and for me that's where we're getting into perspectival and participatory knowing as opposed to propositional ascent. Absolutely. And thank you for agreeing with my clarification. I just want to reciprocate. I definitely did not mean a bullet point. I think DC Schindler
He indicates that that is one of the, in his Plato's Critique of Impure Reason, he indicates that's one of the markers of misology, the hatred of the Logos, which is a kind of intellectual impatience, a profound kind of... No, I'm talking about that the only thing that will resolve the meeting crisis is a way of life.
Exactly, exactly.
the sets of practices, transformations and community relations that afford them entering into a new way of life. That's for me the pressing question and that's what I'm trying to and as I see people trying to create ways of life within communities and
a reconciliation with the scientific worldview such that they can be properly, cosmically homed, and that's what grabs my interest. That's what I want to try and support. Yes, and if I may, I'd like to emphasize the idea of a way
as never completed and always being newly undertaken so it is a process i happen to believe that all the things we call things are in fact in process and that is therefore very important to see that process because
When we talk about a way and needing a way, and of course, Taoism is named after that way, which is a practice that needs to be lived. And when Christ said, I am the way, the truth and the life, he didn't mean once you believe in me, you've got it. He meant there is a way which you can enter into through
through belief in what he was teaching and in what he showed by his example that would take one where one wishes to be able to go. I deeply agree with that so much so that I have said please carve on my tombstone neither nostalgia nor utopia. I do not think anything that claims to have a total grip and a resolution. In fact, and perhaps this will slide into the topic, I think we need to think of the sacred as an inexhaustible source of intelligibility
I just wanted to say, for me, that's exactly what I see exemplified.
People talk about the Socratic method. There's no such thing. There is a Socratic way. There's a Socratic way of life. And Socrates was so faithful to that way of life that he was willing to die for it. But he undermines all attempts to replace what he's doing with a method or any sort of totalizing vision. And so for me, and again, I practice
Like I don't consider myself a Taoist, but I've been practicing Tai Chi Chuan and Chi Kung Or for close to three decades and towards a point I was making earlier. I don't let me say it this way I don't think you should do Tai Chi Chuan without really the Tao Teh Chen But I also think you shouldn't do Tao Teh read the Tao Teh Chen without doing Tai Chi Chuan Because for me that's like reading the Kama Sutra and never making love you you really aren't you really aren't getting and putting the two together and
And so I'm interested then if you agree with me that, by the way, having a process view of reality, you probably also influenced by Whitehead as I am. And the idea that part of what is needed, and this is part of what's the third wave scholarship around,
Absolutely.
well that's why my latest book is called the matter with things it's a pun on a whole range of things to do with oh i didn't get i didn't get that second part i got our obsession with matter and our obsession with things and the matter with things now so it tries to bring together a number of elements but i just wanted to also throw into the mix and see if you agree with me here
That a lot of what we've been talking about is predicated typically for the Western mind on the idea that there are things, good things that we can do. And I always think that we need to be careful of thinking that it's doing that causes change. It may be
receiving and there is something that I choose to term active passivity which is not just a kind of let it all hang out thing but actually a disciplined attention to the world. I always come back to attention because I believe it's a moral act and changes the world and changes
us who do the attending so it's a very very important thing and in that open attending we come to hear things and we can crowd them out i sometimes give the image of a you know a gardener not actually being able to make a plant of course can't possibly but what a gardener can do is allow the plant to be stifled or remove things that would get in the way of the plants thriving and that's really what a gardener is and we are like that
Truths and spiritual depth and meaning and wisdom come to us and we either drive them out with our noisy logicizing and rationalizing and what they call monkey mind as you know in oriental traditions and instead we should cultivate silence really. It's one of the things I like about where I
I live on sky as it's in a palpably silent. So in the analogy with the plants, the gardener is doing something though, you're making an analogy about attention. So is there another analogy where it doesn't require doing because you're trying to show the act itself is not what we should be pursuing? You're very good to pick that up. And I was hoping that you wouldn't. It is it is like being well, I think actually,
You know, teaching is a responsive business. So partly you are saying things, but partly you are also receiving things and there's an exchange. And I think that a proper gardener attends to what the gardener is looking at, but doesn't rush in there kind of, I mean, pulling it up to see whether its root system is working properly according to the science is not a good way to improve the life of a plant.
There's a certain degree of standing off, I think, is the way I would put it, of holding back, of being careful to observe rather than rushing in. Well, I want to answer, and I wanted to, oh, sorry, did I cut you off again? Sorry. No, I was just going to say that it's something that rings a bell for me as a doctor, because in my chaining, I was constantly told, I mean, although doctors are always doing things,
that first of all one shouldn't rush in and apply things but also that in making a diagnosis the first thing to do is to stand back and look
and allow things to come to observe things. And only then do you even lay a finger on a patient. And only as a last resort, do you send for an investigation to confirm or disconfirm the conclusion you've received. So even somebody as interventional as a doctor, if they're going to be good, has to be able to receive things. And as a psychiatrist, of course, which is what I ended up as, that's doubly true.
Okay, I want to respond because I do think cultivation is actually an excellent metaphor. And if you'll notice, I always say the cultivation of wisdom. I'm very careful about that for precisely that reason.
And so, first of all, you know, conversions across very different cultures at the heart of Neoplatonism is this idea of cultivating a profound receptivity. Daoism, you have Wu Wei, which is the profound receptivity, being like the uncarved block. It's Ed Slingerlin's book, Trying Not to Try, and that's what I would say to you, Kurt. The doing is a doing that undermines itself as doing.
Which sounds like a paradox, but when you want to get into the flow state, and if you keep trying to get into the flow state, you will never get into the flow state. It doesn't mean being limply passive. You have to do in a way that undermines it as a doing so that you find yourself caught up.
in the flow state. And then you flow, which is not something you do, it is something you participate in. And I think getting that what Stegmeier calls that proper orientation, which is I think what ratio religio is, is the key thing. And that's what Iris Murdoch in the sovereignty of the good speaking from the neoplatonic tradition, right, that the most important moral act, the core moral act is how giving things their proper attention,
uh and she makes that argument as the key to ethics and how it had been largely ignored by the analytic ethical tradition that had been growing up right in the 20th century and and i think that is fundamentally right i think uh and i think that in virtue ethics i think is moving towards that that and because murdoch also said you know love is when you when you finally acknowledge that something other than yourself is real and and and right and so it's this
this ability to get oneself into a receptivity to flow such that one is properly evolving one's attention to conform in the Aristotelian sense to the ligaments of reality. I think that's the ultimate thing that I'm trying to talk about a lot when I'm talking about relevance realization and etc etc.
Yeah, I just like to add a little rider to all of this, which is that there is Wu Wei is puzzling to Westerners initially because it means not doing basically. And there is a not doing which is quite different from passively not doing something that is the other side of doing.
Just as there's an unknowing, which is not ignorance that comes before knowing, but the unknowing that comes after knowledge. Sure. And there's an innocence that is not the same as the innocence of a child, but an innocence that can only come after deep experience of life and is what one recognizes in truly deep, wise spiritual figures.
I agree, and I argue that, you know, Socrates is claiming that he knows that he does not know comes to fruition in Nicholas of Cusa's learned ignorance. Yes. Right. Exactly that. And yes, it's a profound way. And for me, it's a profound way of being able to exercise this discernment. Plotinus talks about the nothingness that is a privation.
and then the no-thingness that is a superlative, the really real and that you need a certain proper kind of educating of your sensibility and receptivity to be able to discern nothingness from no-thingness and when you can do that that leads to a very
Well, one of the most profound kinds of connectedness there can possibly be. And that emptiness that is famously sought through Buddhist practices is, as you say, is not an emptiness in the sense of just nothing positive. It's the
The word in Sanskrit, shunyata, has the root svi which relates to a seed that is swelling and its interior and life is coming forth or a womb, the emptiness of a womb that will be the fertile space. Exactly, exactly. And the root word for compassion
in the Hebrew tradition is being womb-like for exactly the same reason. So yeah, that's exactly it. But the point I was making is, to your point about Westerners, like you have to develop, this isn't quite the right word, but if you'll allow me to pour a lot through conveyance into the word, you have to develop the taste for that difference. And it's like, it's not a thought, it's more of that, I mean, it requires thought.
but it's more but like for me I could not understand Wu Wei until I've been practicing Tai Chi Chuan for like over six years because when I said oh that's it that's it there and what's amazing is that's what comes out when you're sparring if you try to spar you'll lose
But if you Wu Wei into sparring, you'll do a great job. Wu Wei means be in the full state? Well, it means that pregnant emptiness that Ian's talking about that gives birth to what is needed appropriately at the moment. OK, and that's called no-thing-ness. I'm not a sinologist, but I think that Wu Wei means
non-action it means it means not doing not doing exactly but the metaphors are still the metaphors of pregnant emptiness they give birth and when i was proposing they line up with uh very much the learned ignorance and the no-thingness of the neoplatonic tradition nicholas of kusa platinus etc
I'm not a perennialist, I'm not claiming that they're all saying exactly the same thing, but I'm saying there's deep convergence from very different traditions and histories that makes plausible the place they get to. Well the concept of the perennial philosophy can be on the one hand exaggerated and on the other under-respected. There is a great deal in common between the traditions, they're of course not exactly the same.
and that's the wonderful thing about people's different traditions and different perspectives looking at something that is recognizably the same but from each perspective something new will be added to our understanding of what it is.
In fact, that's my idea of what objectivity is. It's not a rather peculiar state in which one denies the humanness of the observer who is the only one who knows all this stuff that one's calling objective. That would be a very, very strange way of looking at the world, not necessarily revealing of truth. But what seems important is not to be
and as it were solely indebted to one perspective but to be able to see a number of perspectives and to allow them to complement one another and that in that sense one of them will be this one in which one is trying to eliminate
forcibly one's own person in the encounter with whatever it is. It's a strange thing to do, but it's worth doing. But it doesn't in the end, as modern physics tells us, it doesn't in the end work out as the best way to understand the material or immaterial world. Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly with that. I think I'm deeply influenced by Nagle on this. The attempt to understand
the view from nowhere but but in the absurd the essay of the absurd he basically argues that the view from nowhere also generates the absurd right as the perspective of a clash and so there's something there's something paradoxical if our our fundamental guiding metaphor of objectivity is the same one that gets us into finding reality absurd because science is depending on the intelligibility of reality and i just want to gloss what i said because it's very very important that i'm not misunderstood
i don't think that the term objectivity has no job to do i think it's a very important term and what it means is arriving at the most rich most true perception of what it is one's looking at and that means not allowing oneself to be swayed by some completely extraordinary biased way of looking at the world so i'm i'm equally opposed to that and just because
The clinically detached, impossible view of the non-person is not possible. Doesn't mean that it's free for all for any point of view. Not at all. Some points of view are dreadful, noxious, not only untrue but damaging. Other points of view may be rich, welcoming and unfolding of life and vitality and creativity.
Yeah, and again I'm in agreement with you because I was not proposing a rejection of the notion of objectivity. I was proposing to reject a particular model that has held captive. You know, Wittgenstein's idea about a picture holding us captive.
No, I knew you weren't saying that. I just wanted for everyone's sake to make clear that neither of us were really putting down that particular rabbit hole of postmodernism in which every point of view is equally valid. Absolutely not. At some points of view, utterly absurd. Others are extraordinarily deep.
So my view, my view on this is deeply influenced by confluence of sort of the third wave of Platonic scholarship and Marlo Conti and the idea. First of all, so here's a thing. And first of all, realize that you can never see the whole thing.
you can never see the whole thing no matter where you look at it right there are multiple aspects and they're not only multiple aspects in terms of its visibility there's multiple tactile aspects there's multiple auditory there's multiple uses of this and then what you start to realize is that there is multi-s sexuality and then not only is there multi-s sexuality within a person there is multi there are multiple perspectives on any one thing this is why dialogical reason
Is so important and then for me what you're trying to do and this is marlo ponti's sort of critique of husserl you're trying to find the through line because what you realize is that right the These this doesn't come off as a cacophonous, you know cubist painting
There's a melody here, and it's not this is not logically identical to this or this or that. But nevertheless, there is a through line of intelligibility, which John Rusev calls a musicality to it. And for me, and it's inexhaustible. It's inexhaustible.
That links to the idea of the person as continuous. We've got this mistaken idea that our lives are made up of moments, like time slices, but they're not. They are like a melody, as Henri Bergson said, that one's personality has this nature of a melody which is always unfolding, and that's a very important insight, I think.
thank you because that's the point i want what for me objectivity is when i have this melody as you put it in sync with that melody there's a continuity of contact so that i can i can within my finite transcendence as how as hyland puts it i can disclose as much of that inexhaustible multi-s factuality and multi multiple perspectives as i possibly can within a integrated intelligibility
That's the proposal that's coming out of people like Marla Ponty, how we should re-understand, and I think it's actually Plato's proposal. I think Gonzales and Hyland and Kirkland and all of the third wave are right on about that, and I think that is how we should, and that's a non-thingy way of thinking, because the through line is not any aspect.
it is not any perspective precisely because it is that which binds all the aspects and all the all the perspectives together and for me one needs all those perspectives those what um who are so called adumbrations of a thing one needs to see it from as many exactly exactly exactly exactly but without uh as i say this ridiculous idea that anything goes and did you know the uh the japanese zen garden ryanji
It's a very beautiful garden. It has 15 rocks set out in the sand. And from wherever you stand in the garden, the most you can ever see is 14 of them. Okay, so I love that. Nicholas of Cusa, when he writes The Vision of God and he sends it to the monastery, he sends a painting
and no matter where you stand in the room it looks like the painting is looking at you and then he says first everybody do that and then do the following one monk stands in one place and another monk stands in the farthest other place and they both claim that the picture is looking at them and then he says go ahead no that's just true of any painting where you exactly it's nothing special it's just this phenomenon near oh the eyes are following no they're not it's just that wherever you look you think the face is looking at you
So he, well I think that's the point, because then he says, now try to, what would it be like to be able to realize this all at once? And of course you can't, but he says that's what it is to have the vision of God. It's not to see God, it's to see the way God sees, right? It's to see that through line that you can't actually see because it makes all seeing possible, right?
and so this is again the non-thingness that is not privation but is the inexhaustible fount with which from which intelligibility flows and flows and I think for me that has been
That has been my fundamental, phenomenologically rich and reflective experience of the sacred to exactly find that. And for me, Gupta is talking about that when he's looking at the plants, and I see the same thing when you're in the Platonic dialogues, you have this quest, right, to find the virtue, but you never get to the answer, but you get the through line running and all that sort of thing. For me,
And like you said, that's when I find the sacred in another person. When I realize that they're multi-aspected, multi-faceted, but there's a through line and I can hear it and taste it and follow it, but I can never complete it or grasp it totally. And if I say that to her, I've destroyed the relationship. So that would be the most foolish thing to do. But as you said, everything is like that.
and that means we can fall in love with being again it's not like for me that's a real possibility for people i'm sorry that that that that's for me what i i i think is if we could enable people to read through a way of life to fall in love with being again i think that would be a deep way of responding to the main crisis
certainly a rather nice way of expressing it I agree and love is probably going to be part of how one achieves that and you touched on that idea of the not just the way God sees but of the way we see God and I'm trying to think who it was now was it I'm not sure it was Eckhart it might have been
on a venture or somebody who said you know the eye with which i see god is the same eye with which god sees me exactly but anyway yes that's a good point but how on earth are we to if our if the subject we're talking about is how to bring this about how do we how do we help bring it about or perhaps that isn't the question or perhaps it's not even a good question
Well, I think whether or not it's a well-formed question or not, I think it's probative. One of the books that's had the most profound influence on me is Religion and Nothingness by Nishatani, and it's a masterpiece, and it's rightly regarded so. It's a follow-up to his earlier book, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, and to give you a flavor of it, there's another book very similar to Eckhart's, which was uttered by Nietzsche,
If you stare long enough into the abyss, it begins to stare back into you. Nietzsche came upon something, but he gets to the edge of it, but it doesn't, it doesn't flip over for him. And what, what Nishikani proposes is, he proposes that, and I'm interested, because you might have a really interesting take on, Nietzsche doesn't doubt deeply enough.
It's almost like the left hemisphere is capable of this profound doubt, but it can never doubt its own authority or its own preeminence or something like that. Yes, very much so, yes. And he proposes that one of the points of Zen is to get the great doubt that drops you beneath, and then that profound resonance, at least the propositional tyranny, gets disclosed to people. And I think that's
part of what needs to happen right now.
We live in the hermeneutics of suspicion where we doubt everything except we doubt the perspective, the stance from which that happens. And I've been trying to figure out the semantic philosophical jujitsu moves, right, in order to get that doubt to actually turn onto itself in a profoundly transformative way without, of course, destroying people's sanity or lives or putting them into a psychotic break or anything ridiculous like that.
no of course but one of the things that can break us out of that doubting of everything is the experience the transcendent experience of something very real and in a way that comes as part of
Yes.
And are so so bound up in verbal noise and discussion about you know all the things we're talking about one of the things that troubles me actually about where this conversation is going is that the wise person stops talking at this point because really we're entering the territory where you cannot talk about it so but we drown out the possibility of being there for
I agree with you and I mean I do think what there is an intermediary
which is to try and
It's an experience in which one has many of the features of a mystical experience, the oneness, the here-ness, the now-ness, the altogether-ness, the depth of realness, but it's ultimately ineffable, but it carries with it all the markers of being real such that people do the following.
they will they'll do something weird normally when we have an aberrant state of consciousness that doesn't fit into our everyday consciousness we use that to say it's not real like a dream or being drunk but they do the opposite they have these experiences and they say that was really real and all of this is an illusion and they then they say i think the must is not
a compulsive must, it's what I call awful normativity that I need, I profoundly need to change who I am and how I relate to the world, maybe my occupation, my career, they will profoundly change their lives because they want to be closer to that really real, they want to conform more to it and Yaden's work shows by many objective measures
Extraordinary how common these
experiences of um well they even can be described as encounters with god actually by a lot of people even though they don't necessarily believe in god at all but they call them encounters with god or with the cosmos with the ultimate truth or whatever it is and they're surprisingly common
and they are not predicted by any kind of mental disorder and neither do they generate any kind of mental disorder. No, the very important point you've already made which is that when people have hallucinations and delusions, when they are better they count them as unreal and they see that they're better off without them. But after these experiences they don't, they think this was the reality.
And it often has long-term changing effects on their lives exactly as you say. So it's something that needs to be taken seriously and there is research and some of it you've probably been mentioning which shows how very real and important this is. So we discount this because we're told that clever people, bright people, intelligent people don't think like this. It's just some ill effect of something misbehaving in one's brain but it's not an adequate account.
You know, and I go over both, I've given talks on this at conferences, I go over it in awakening for the meeting crisis on higher states of consciousness. I've talked about it at Yale, etc. You can make a very good case for this is actually a justifiable claim by people. I don't hang too much on the propositions they come back with, because the propositions vary all over the place.
but that sense i've done an experiment in my lab where we like what's the relationship nobody did this which we thought i thought was astonishing is there a correlation between having mystical experiences and how meaningful you find your life you would have thought somebody had bothered to test that it shows you the ignorance of our orientation that that has not never even been tested we tested it a huge m turk study it is predictive it's coral it's correlative
Right and but it's not the particular phenomenology of phenomenological content. It's the insight machinery. It's it's very much in a continue. Think about when you have an insight, right? And you all and then you know why you were wrong before, but you can't know that until you go through it, right? It's that it's that kind of thing. It's like it's like a it's like a systemic
insight and a systematic insight and what's interesting is that the area in which we have our moments the right superior temporal gyrus and sulcus is very close to the area that has been repeatedly found to be associated with transformative religious experience exactly the right temporal parietal junction effectively so i mean that's interesting at every level
But I feel, Kurt, you need to help us reorientate because we're talking about things that have been difficult to talk about. I just wanted to follow up, though, because if we agree that this is a real phenomena and if we agree that it's not hallucinatory or something that we can dismiss, then, and then if we can also find, you know, first of all, if we can support that culturally and also
Watch people unfolding exemplary lives. This is sort of the Socratic proposal. Here's a beautiful life.
I agree and in a way you've
You've given a description of what I aim to do in my work, which is to take people where they see this is a beautiful vision of life, and it makes much more sense. Okay, so here's what an atheist may say or an extremely staunched materialist may say that sure, you had an experience of something real, but your experiences can be misleading. And just because you had potentially some psychedelic and you feel like so and so is real, well, that can be triggered, let's say with
Transcranial stimulation and other methods so I can make you feel like something's real when it's not so why attribute realness to it? Just say it was interesting. So here's an example Sam Harris said that he took an extreme amount of mushrooms I'm not saying anything that he hasn't said publicly and then blindfolded himself went into a room and he said he felt like he was encountering something else and
But then during and afterward, he said, well, I was saying, well, this is just me on drugs. And so I allowed it to take me whatever it was, some tiger or some other being, I allowed it to take me from realm to realm, but I didn't ascribe any realness to it. That also reminded me of this quote, I believe, Ian, you mentioned it the last time you and John spoke on the rebel podcast.
from karst someone who heidegger said was the most important philosopher i don't know if i'm pronouncing the name correctly well james karst i didn't know that heidegger knew karst i i think it's a different person okay okay you said that heidegger spoke at his funeral john you said heidegger spoke at his funeral oh no that's that's max shaler okay that's shalers then it was heidegger spoke at max shaler's funeral and said that that max shaler was the greatest european philosopher of his generation
Which was uncharacteristically humble of Heidegger. I think the connection was reconstructed memory. I had mentioned that Kars had just recently died, I believe. Oh, okay. And that's your memory put them together in that fashion. Okay, so my two points are then Schuyler perhaps said, I think it's Schuyler that
You need to open yourself up to knowledge rather than having knowledge change you. Something like that. And it made me think, okay, is it that someone like Sam Harris is so closed to the divine that even if he encounters it, he wouldn't see it and he discounts it? Well, that was just one thought that came through my head. And then the next one was we're focusing so much on the nourishing effects of these mystical experiences.
But there is such a thing as totalizing fear, terror and horror, bad trips, for example, whether or not they're even trips. And so then what's happening there where one feels like, yes, what I've encountered is real and I'm terrified and I don't want that. Those are two separate points that I just wanted to lay out there as potential jumping off. I think they're related, but I'll let Ian go first. I think they are related points. Yeah, maybe they are. And I think on the first point, I would say
Yes, of course, things that one's mind brings before one may be deceptive, but then often they're also real and it's not enough to say, well, we just dismissed it, because sometimes it's going to produce something very important and sometimes it isn't. The same is true of every way of arriving at knowledge. Reason can lead you down blind alleys or
what I call rationality. Leading one's life by pure logic reduces it to a meaningless mess as Demasio's description of a patient called Elliot. He had to work everything out from first principles, he had no understanding of life whatever. So reason, but I wouldn't say well in that case I'm not going to use reason.
and i i have the same view about intuition you know psychologists are amused by developing very clever little scenarios in which one's normally extremely helpful intuition is deceived there are going to be such things i can show you optical illusions that are completely unbelievable are those two squares
I've never heard anyone after seeing a very good optical illusion say, well that does it, I'm not going to open my eyes then from now forwards because they might be wrong. So the mode in which something comes to one doesn't say either it's got to be right or it's got to be wrong. We need to examine the experience, see what its effects on us are, and what I'm suggesting is that experiences that have long-lasting benign effects on somebody
are not nothing and they are good which is what the person believes they are because what we're going to say is the definition of this good experience it's not that it leads to good consequences so it's easy to dismiss things but that's the lazy way you have to actually say well some things no doubt deserve to be dismissed some things don't anyway
Well, I want to buttress that. First of all, yeah, I was not purporting to give an argument from the authority of a particular kind of experience. I think our culture is beset by trying to find the magical faculty that will give us certainty. This is a Cartesian wet dream that we should abandon once and for all.
And also the other project, which is just the flip side of it, finding the part, the faculty that we should demonize and scapegoat for all of our failures. I think we should give up both of those projects. They don't comport well with how cognition works or intelligence works or consciousness works. And I'm not saying you're saying that, Kurt, I'm just responding to your proposed
Secondly, I said I am suspicious of the claims, the propositional claims that come out of the content of these experience precisely because they vary in the way you say. What I make an argument for is we have good reason to believe that these experiences are actually on a continuum with insight experiences, flow experiences,
experiences by which we are optimally sort of getting a meta-optimal grip on the world, where we are engaging in a kind of direct sensory motor feedback with the world, etc. Yes, Harris is right, there probably is no tiger in the room, but he doesn't bother to ask what might have been happening.
He just says, well, here's the proposition that I came up with. It's false. Therefore, everything was wrong. Well, how do we know? How do we know what like why doesn't he bother to ask? Why is a tiger being thrown up in my altered perception of the room?
Yeah, there's no tiger there. But what if you were to say, what if what's that the very act of coming up with the tiger was connecting areas of cognition that if he bothered to explore, could give him some more fundamental insight into how he is perceiving or framing things. That's how many people within these wisdom traditions would respond to him. They would say, well, why did you stop there?
Why did you stop there? Why did you, why, why didn't you talk to other people? And I mean, when you, when you're, when you're trying to determine if anything else is real, you stop after one moment of thought or do you do, do you do a lot of science? Firstly, just to clarify for the record, I don't know if what he's encountered was a tiger, but it was some other creature or being, and I don't want to spread misinformation, but that's that. And then third, and then secondly, you mentioned, why didn't you talk to other people? Okay.
Interesting. I was speaking to Diana Pasolka, who's a professor of religion, and she was saying, Kurt, something that's missing in all of these modern forms of religion, which are spiritual but not religious, is sangha, so a community. Yes, totally, totally. That's what I mean by autodidactic. She said that that's even the answer to Plato's cave.
Then I asked her, well, is that in Plato's case? She said, no, it's in the Republic. And she gave me some explanation. But regardless, from my understanding of the non-theist position, or neo-Platonism, I think Peugeot says you can't simply resurrect a religion from reading books. How is it that we become neo-Platonists? Is it truly a religion that you're enacting? Well, first of all, I want to first of all pick up on the first point.
yeah i don't mean to be misspeaking if i'm incorrectly no no no no no no no no no no i mean uh this is this is all this is at the core of the whole dialectic into theologos project that i've engaged in the after socrates the which is convergent from with all of this increasing information
that when people are that reason i'll use ian's word then is uh evolved to be carried out dialogically not monologically multi-perspectivally not model perspectival right that we do not have a monadic self we have a fluid etc etc etc what's some of that evidence okay you are you're familiar with the ways in selection tasks bright people smart educated people you give them a very simple
reasoning experiment and only ten percent of them get it right reliably no replication prices on this robustly take the exact same thing let there be four people and they're allowed to talk to each other the success rate goes reliably from ten percent to eighty percent yeah reliably that is a and that is not exhaustive read uh... the enigma of reason by mercer and spurber others this just overwhelming evidence that we have we have this mona and that's my point to to
Harris never questions, at least the Harris of your example, maybe it's not the actual Harris, but that's the name I'm going to use. He doesn't question the monological frame from which he is giving an answer, and the point is, well, that's not how reason evolved to work.
Reason should be carried out, and this is, I think, the core Socratic claim, dialogically. No, there's dialogos with other people, but you also have to practice the dialogos within the psyche. This is, again, a proper Platonic idea, and those two dialogues, those two forms of dialogos, they have to be resonant with each other in a profound way. And for me, that is
Most properly how to try and be as reasonable as I possibly can. Will it give me certainty? No. But as Ian said, nothing does.
right if your criteria is well that could fail therefore i reject it then you are an absolute soul of cystic skeptic and then if you and if i ask you okay what do you do to well i talk to other people i reflect them i ask questions i like but do that with these experiences too nobody's telling you take the experience and then just accept it take these experiences
Put them in this framework, make sure independent of this frame of these experience that this framework is working profoundly to help you self correct, catch your bias, catch your flaws, and then integrate the two together. And for me, that would make it much more like a religion than just a belief system in the modern enlightenment sense of a belief system. Did that answer your question, Kurt? Generally, it takes me days of reflection to realize if something answered my question.
Fair enough. That's exactly right. That's exactly the right answer.
Well, first of all, I think that it cannot be overstated how important that point of community is at the core of religion. And it's what is one of the roots of what we started by talking about the meaning crisis. Meaning is held by communities that have common histories, common narratives, common myths, and a sense of belonging, which is, you know, you talked, I think, about, John, about the
I don't know what you called it, de-domiciled or something, but I mean, we no longer have a home. We no longer feel we belong somewhere and that sense of belonging is part of meaning and one gets it from belonging to a functional family and belonging to a functional society. There is no such thing as an atomistic individual. We emerge from society and we give back to society and we are in constant communion with society
and what a religion does is to strengthen those bonds and the feelings of empathy which lead to extraordinary effects on cognition on emotion on well-being including physical well-being and mental well-being obviously and the evidence about this is so strong and it's not widely known but i give it in the very last part of um
of the matter with things so i think that's a very good point i think another point is that we we shouldn't overemphasize the importance of you know mystical moments we may or may not have them i mean a very important thing is that many spiritual people have never experienced these things but are deeply good and wise
so there are many people who have achieved that state say you know if you have a some sort of a you know a vision or something that's great but really forget about it and go back to getting on with religion so it's a kind of icing on the cake it's the in a way it's slightly too much of a lure for people nowadays oh you know i want some sensational experience but it's not really about the sensational experience
the
In fact, most aberrant versions or peculiar versions, unusual versions of reality in the sense of hallucination to do things anyway, come from the left hemisphere, something I go into the very first part of the matter with things.
but i think what happens is that the frontal lobes are relatively shut down and i think there's imaging evidence that this is the case so this lower circulation in the frontal lobe and of course what the frontal lobes are above all is a filter
And when you stop filtering what the brain is privy to, then you get good and bad. You may be lucky and have a good experience. You may have a terrible experience. And in fact, I believe that terribly, although the literature tends to stress the good experiences, terrible experiences, bad trips under
Reported in the sense that they're not talked about but they're very real and they happen an awful lot. So I just wanted to make a few points that we're getting off too much onto emphasizing the very unusual and to go back to this idea of imagination in which you see into things that you thought you knew and then realize that you know them for the very first time and that experience is a sacred experience.
I want to pick up on two things that Ian said. That's what I meant when I said I wasn't holding these experiences up as authoritative, and I'm also not saying everybody should have them. What I'm saying is we need to have ways of life that properly home them and that are beautified by them. I don't think everybody has to have them, but
Yes.
What do you have to do? You have to do drop out, turn off half the nodes or you have to throw noise in or Stefan and Dixon. People are impassing on an insight problem and you literally put visual static into it and they get the insight or the mild mind wandering that helps people have an insight. You have to throw some noise and the noise isn't
noise is noise it's destructive it's frame breaking that's horrific that's why the the the sacred always has a terrific or horrific aspect to it awe is connected to awful for good reason right but throw but you you know the reverse if you don't ever throw any noise into the neural network what happens it overfits to the data it doesn't generalize it fixates it gets locked into a local minima as opposed to the woodward and other people do that we have we have
you know, we can have psychedelic experiences or meditative experiences or sensory motor experiences that do that massive frame breaking. But it's not just the frame breaking. I don't think people should just have these experiences. In fact, I'm arguing the exact opposite. We need to have a proper
like a sapiential sacred community around them so that that frame breaking is compensated with a lot of resources for frame making. That's what I'm trying to propose. That's what I'm trying to propose. I just wanted to comment briefly on, I agree with all that you said, that the idea of putting interference in is not that
i just want to distinguish between two possibilities one i believe is wrong and that is the idea that somehow distraction is what is good going on there what is good there is that you at last i'm not sure that you know so we're constantly going familiar familiar familiar i get it i know what it is and that's a very uncreative state that is what the left hemisphere
yes exactly
exactly that's exactly that's exactly what i'm saying yeah i knew it was yeah i don't want i don't want i don't want eliot's distracted from distraction by distraction what i meant is like that that you disidentify from the framing enough that it can break up you put criticality exactly so it can self-organize anew that's what i would say completely agree yeah where does faith enter into this
When I hear much about unknowing, I was reading about Nicholas of Cusa and someone said, either commentary on him or he said, you must strive upward unknowingly. Where does faith enter into this? I know you have a partner. If I ask you, are you going to be faithful to her? And I'm not asking you to divulge privacy. Are you talking to me?
I'm talking to you. I mean, if you love somebody, there is a call to faithfulness. Does that mean you have a complete account of them?
no that's ridiculous does it mean you have an absolute certainty about them no they're going to surprise you again and again again meet people that have been married 25 years deeply in love and they'll say man my partner can surprise me again and again i never it's never done it's never done this is my this is my experience right so faithfulness faith doesn't mean i have certainty it doesn't mean that i have a completion of you that i grasp you that i can manipulate you at will in fact it means
It doesn't mean any of those. It means that I have bound myself to you so that I understand that there are truths about you that will not be disclosed to me unless I'm willing to undergo transformation in relationship to you and allow you to do the same with me. These are transformative truths that are disclosed by maintaining a continuity of contact and an understanding that we are going to reciprocally open with each other.
Learned ignorance is the place at which you are most able to do that with the ground of being.
You are reciprocally opening to its inexhaustible-ness, and you are being reciprocally transformed by that opening again and again. It's not that you come to some conclusive statement that you can make. It is the same kind of sense you have of the depth of connectedness you have to somebody you have been faithful to, and it grows the longer you've been faithful, the language that we've been together.
We should give up the idea of faith as the assertion of things without evidence. There's all kinds of evidence in your relationship. But if I was to say, could you deduce or induce or abuse that you should stay with your partner because of this evidence? You'd say, no, that's ridiculous. It's way more than that. And that's exactly the faithfulness element. Ian, this reciprocal opening, the way that I imagine or the way that one generally imagines God is that, yes, you can open up to God, but it's not as if
God is changing because of you. Now, I know that that means that there's a static view of God and perhaps we should move away from that. Yeah, but we don't know that. I actually believe with Whitehead that the world by which he meant the whole experiential cosmos and God are coming into being together reciprocally and that we therefore have a part to play, a very important part. So it actually matters how we respond to the world.
what we make of it what we see in it and what we give back to it i'm just going to go and put a light on i didn't want to do it well john oh yes because it seems a bit rude but i'm just going to
Not sure that doesn't make any difference, but night is falling here. You're kind of film noir-ish now, Ian. I'm trying to what? You're kind of film noir-ish. You're lit on one side. No, that's absolutely fine. Yes, I like asymmetry, as you probably know. So yes, where were we? We were talking about
You were talking about right-head and the reciprocal opening between God and the world. Yes, the reciprocal opening. So I think that is a very important idea. And I think that another thing that is worth saying while talking about faith is there is a similar duality in the idea of belief. So, for example, I can say, I believe in a certain person. You know, I really believe in him. It means I put my trust in him.
What is the responsibility on me to respond?
the the the
This concept of faith as blind needs to be put to bed once and for all. If I am forwarding a stream and my companion has gone ahead across the stream and as I get near the bank I need a hand and he or she holds out a hand to me, it's not a random hand, it's not like blind to trust this hand, I have to step and I have to take the hand.
and that's that's the way i see it that you see something that is calling to you and saying if you understand this it will radically change the way you think about the world and there is no one right way to know so just to say well i think i've already got it and i'm not going to try this at all i'm not going to put myself in the way of something happening that's really what i'm saying it has to be experiential as john and i agree
but what that means is that you do have a responsibility to put yourself in the way of something happening and you know if you sit at home saying i want to marry but i'll never i'll never meet anybody you never ever leave the home you will never get married if you want to you you don't know who you will marry it's entirely unpredictable it may be chance what happens but nonetheless you have to open yourself to the possibility otherwise it won't happen and the same i think is true of our relationship with
with the cosmos at large which i believe is a living organismic entity a conscious entity or god depending on what it is that you be i don't want to rule anybody's attempt to make this encounter out just because of a word i wanted to pick up on the you know the connections between you know trust troth
truth, we talk about being betrothed to somebody, we talk about being true to somebody, there's deep connections between these. And we've come up with a notion of faith that is so disconnected from that interconnecting set, you know, truth and troth and trust, that's just a fundamental mistake. We need a sense of, that's why I propose the notion of faithfulness, because many people hear something different in faithfulness than they do to faith, because it connects with that.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,
An estimated over precise estimate of the amount of stuff that our brain is processing is that only 0.6% of it is stuff that we are aware of being aware of.
So our self-conscious, self-aware awareness is the accompaniment to almost all of our life. It doesn't mean it's not happening to us. It doesn't mean it's not changing us. It doesn't mean that we're not partaking in it. It just means that that bit of us in which we stand back and consciously say, I've been in this state or I am in this state. Well, first of all, doing that in the state would interrupt it. And it's again, to quote Whitehead, he says that operations of thought are like cavalry charges in battle.
They need to be very rare they require fresh horses and then not a solution to the way in which one carries out a campaign so you know you. The fact that you're not aware but I wanted just to talk about time because.
there's a sense in which time is passing in which we're outside the flow objectively and we're watching things happening and we have this image of something moving past us but there's another kind of being in the flow of time where we're not standing on the bank of the river with a
a clipboard and a stopwatch measuring things but we are actually in the flow we are literally swimming with the river and as far as we're concerned the river is not really moving we're moving with the river so relative to us as it were time is still but in fact nonetheless the flow is happening time is passing we are part of it it just depends on whether we're apart from it and imagining ourselves to be stationary or taking part in it
Yeah, I don't have much to add to that other than sort of a Bergsonian idea that when we start reflecting on time, and I'm not saying we shouldn't, but we lose time in. I mean, this is the way to distract, this is the way to, it's a sneaky way to win when you're sparring with somebody, compliment what they just did.
because they're
So yeah, I mean, I'm not advising doing that. I have done it. I have seen that. Well, maybe more than once, but not a lot of times. But just to make, but the point I'm making aside from whether or not I fell into a vice is that I hope you know I'm joking. Well, that's why I'm laughing. So yeah. Yeah, I, I think there's a sense
Augustine said it famously, I know what time is until somebody asks me, and I don't want to get too much into the philosophy of time, but I hope this doesn't come off as a ridiculous pseudo postmodern pun. There are times when timing matters, and there's times when the future matters.
I think giving the advice to always stay in the present moment is like, that's not true. I mean, we need a present moment that is bound ratio religio to our future self.
We have to pursue long-term goals. Meyersitz and Fischbach talk about, you know, you have two different things. You have to do things inside a frame where you have to be able to self-regulate, delay gratification. That's in the present moment and mindfulness practices are power, meditative practices are powerful for that. But you also need to do frame widening because you need to see if what's happening in your present state is concurrent, not concurrent, consonant with
your long-term future goals and your future self. Remember the people who don't save for their retirement. You need to balance properly between them and I think that's what contemplative practices do. Contemplative practices are often designed not to get us immersed in the present moment in that sense. They're designed to remind us about the comprehensive big picture in powerful and deep ways and
Simplistic models, I do not think give us what is conducive to a good human life.
We don't want to be a wanted, we don't want to be a creature of pure impulse because then we'll just be destroyed, this is Delman's point, our agency will just be destroyed. I think that's absolutely not what
many exponents of the idea that we should remain in the present are meaning not that we should be thoughtless and never reflect and not that we should be impulsive above all but that we should be able in fact by us kind of standing back to be more present to the whole. I think
I mean, I don't disagree with your essential point. I often think, you know, it's all very well, but we are the creature that looks before and behind, you know, and that is our nature. We are beings who reflect towards the past and the future. So, yeah. I agree deeply. What I meant was... I know. I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just saying that's the way to think of it. I agree. I'm agreeing with how you're agreeing with me.
I propose that many people are using the slogan of being the present moment
for gratification, for not long-term planning, for being reckless, for justifying going for the gusto and all other of the... We have a whole constellation of memes around this, right, which is of course designed to keep us buying stuff and perpetually dissatisfied. And that was the sense I wanted to challenge. Okay, so let me see if I can tie a few threads together and weave it back to the beginning.
Ian, when you said- yeah, there's a misinterpretation of what it means to be in the present moment.
This is interesting because much of the advice that I read in the comment section, not on told videos, well on told videos, but on other people's videos and advice that I hear from quote unquote gurus and so on. I'm interpreting it in a certain way because I grew up in the West and the way that they're interpreting something in from an English text, which was already translated and perhaps they have a misinterpretation, then I'm misinterpreting what they're saying. So when some people say, well, I am God or so on, so on, people say, yeah, I feel that. Well, you don't know if what you
If what they mean is what you feel, and then when I hear about, we were talking earlier about practices and rituals, and they're important, you hear, well, we should do, we should be mindful more and this feature list, as you call them, john, this bullet point list of what we should do. It's not entirely clear, like I believe in, I used to believe in all that, let's say two years, one,
My adult life until one year ago, because I'm such a liberal person in the sense that I want everyone to be correct, like every culture is correct in their way. And everyone's touching a certain part of the elephant. It's just a different part and and no one's wrong. So let me just let me take the good and and put in different pieces into me. However, I feel it's as if trying to install Mac software on a Windows computer
like we're Windows. And if you force an EXE on a Mac, not firstly won't load, but if you force it, it will corrupt it. And so I think so much of what's gone incorrect with me and perhaps with others, because as I talk about certain, let's say episodes of mine, publicly, people say, Oh, my gosh, I've gone through something similar. And I haven't heard almost anyone else talk about it. And here's what I've gone through. I feel like what's happening is that we're being told so many lessons from so many different places.
They're not unified and we're trying to apply them to ourselves. So Ian, you used this word marrying earlier that you need to open yourself up to marriage. And earlier you talked about traditional religion and Kurt, his entire adult life and his entire teenage life, just an inexorable atheist and uncompromising one, one that's condescending to anything that is remotely superstitious or what I would classify as superstitious would say, no, there's nothing in traditional religion that needs saving. And if we're going to formulate something that's
A new religion has to be religion without religion in John's words, though I'm using those words now. I wouldn't have said that before, but I see that there's something to marrying a religion. And what I mean by that is when it comes to my wife, it's not like I evaluated every woman on the planet and said this was the best one. There's going to be flaws with each one. So it's as if I had to decide that she's the right one or create the right one together with her. And I wonder if the same is true with religion, that part of this is that we simply need to decide a religion and then make it
Right for us and it's not going to be right there's gonna be so much that they say that's incorrect so that i'm just like no there's like adam and eve didn't it's not literal and why are you excoriating evolution constantly like this is not how it is and and i disbelieve that and so on and so on there's so much that i disbelieve but there's so much that i gain from it there's so much that i gain from having this community that's ensconced in a tradition
So anyway, those are some thoughts that I'm laying out in a sense to tie what we talked about in the beginning together with some of the threads that were left open throughout. What are your thoughts on that? John, do you want to start? Well, you're addressing them to Ian. I thought he should respond first. Ian, please. Well, I don't know which bit to respond to, but
I mean first of all I think that there's a huge problem in taking something that is clearly a myth as literal truth. I think that's a very modern idea that you know we're so used to talking only literal terms mean anything and are true.
that a myth, I mean the very word suggests that it's false, but now we only started using the word in the 19th century and in fact of course mythos was anciently for the Greeks the superior way of arriving at truth. Logos was a secondary kind of truth which over time took over from it but it was through mythos that one actually reached these deeper realities that I think you're describing
as possibly being experienced by people in religion. The idea of marrying, yes I mean of course I'm not talking, well I don't know if I mentioned that, I mean I was just using it as an example, but I think that the point there is that it brings up the idea of something that is fitting
Carpenters still talk about two surfaces that meet perfectly as marrying, they're fitting, and it's this sense of something that is a correspondence that is attention or something that is resolved in a new union. That something is what we're describing as the meaningful encounter, the faithful encounter, where something about the two surfaces
produce something completely new that neither surface on their own could even conceive or never mind achieve? Yes, I mean the way I would put that is what you're doing in religion is continuous with
What you're doing in all of your cognition, which is relevance realization, which is about trying to fit your framing to the world. And it is not given by you nor received by the world, but transjective. It is made by the two fitting together, just like biological adaptivity.
You know, Kurt, that's how I use that as a metaphor for the relevance realization that I think is at the core of our cognition. And so what are you doing with a myth? I think you're doing a kind of relevance realization. Myths aren't false stories about the paths. They're imaginal stories to enable us to see pertinent
and profound and pervasive problems and patterns that we are not paying attention to. Myth in that sense is bound up with the proper sense of prophecy. Prophecy isn't telling the future, it's telling forth what needs to be seen right now, deeply.
And so for me, like, if you are getting a lot out of it, ask yourself, kid, and you know, the fact that whoever is giving you the really silly sermon about, you know, the book of Genesis disproves Darwin or something ridiculous than that. I mean, like, if you can, if the myth comes alive for you, what's it doing? I mean, the best the best myths
Make us aware of the fact that we're bound up in mythos, that we're bound up in relevance realization, that we're bound to the world, that we're connected to it, we're connected to each other. And this connectedness, we don't make it, nor do we merely receive it, we participate in it, we cultivate it, and we have a deep and profound responsibility to it because of how much we belong to it and participate in it. And I think that's what
when religion is functioning well, it uses its mythos to do that. Can religion malfunction? Of course it can. Everything can malfunction. Science can malfunction. Math was on this crazy thing where they, you know, this whole project we thought we could give a logical foundation for math, you know, a century of this crazy, and it turned out just to be an impossible project. We can go, everything, even math can go down rabbit holes. We've got to stop, again,
like hoping that we'll find perfection as the mark of the sacred, with meeting that in which we should trust, right? God we trust, right? We've got to get more to this sense of fecundity, richness. When I do my neoplatonic practices, the virtues that I cultivate in them transfer very well to my experience and to my mind, to my practices as a scientist, and vice versa.
And a lot of people, this is now becoming a viable philosophical position, virtue epistemology, that actually what we're doing in all of our domains is trying to cultivate a set of virtues that we can apply across these many domains. And so for me, if it's doing that, if the mythos allows you to cultivate virtues that percolate through your psyche and permeate through your life, what more could you want? What more could you want?
That's what you want when you marry someone. And I think we've got to give up, I keep saying this, we've got to give up the hunger for completion, for certainty, for comprehensive grasp. We've got to stop that. And it's so endemic and insidious in our thinking. It takes a lot of effort personally and collectively to address that.
Should we give up on all of certainty or should we say, oh, I like so-and-so because it's more certain. I don't have the idea that I'll ever be 100% certain, but this gives me more groundedness, more certainty. When we call anything certain, we can only mean certain up to a point. There is no such thing as total certainty. And in different areas, certainty means different kinds of thing, really.
I think I agree entirely with John that giving up on the idea of certainty is hugely important and it's the belief that either science or reason will lead us to the same infallible conclusion all of us and will reveal the truth about things is naive, dangerous, deluded. But not that we should honor science and reason, we should. We should also honor
Intuition and imagination and you know just perhaps the last thing I shall say the greatest myth for me is the myth that is about myth which is the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. So Orpheus was a demi-god and he could with his music move
stones he could move people obviously he could even change the course of a river so he had some magical power of his music that nobody could resist and he got married to a princess Eurydice and after the wedding Eurydice with her bridesmaids was walking in a meadow and she was bitten on the heel by a viper and she died and Orpheus was completely grief-struck and he thought I'm going to go down into the underworld and plead for her
And something that nobody had ever been able to succeed at doing or able to go there at all, never mind to succeed. So he went to the underworld and he played for the gods of the underworld and they were so moved that they said, yes, okay, we will give you back your bride on one condition that you walk out of the underworld and you don't look back at her until you are completely both clear of the underworld.
and at the end of his journey out he couldn't resist taking a look at his loved one and he was so overwhelmed he reached towards her and she shrunk away back into the underworld never to be seen again. What that seems to me to be about is the power of the not looked at, the implicit, the thing that has to remain
outside our diminishing consciousness, our world of words, because it simply is too great for it and can only be conveyed through imagination in myths, imagination in a religious faith or a spiritual realm anyway.
Well, thank you all. Thank you all for coming out. I think it's apt that you said this may be the last thing I say and then talk about how speaking itself is besmirching whatever you're talking about. Yes, exactly. That's been the problem. Yeah, yeah. I have these intimations when I do this podcast and I study these different theories. I have these intimations that what I'm doing is a sin in a sense as sin is maybe an incorrect word, but it's not progressing forward is progressing backward.
I got very excited at times because
We've only spoken once before. Finding a mind as deep and a heart as deep and sharp and insightful as Ian after writing a truly impressive work often converging, and this is in no way trying to take any credit away from Ian, but finding it often converging with my work. I find deeply
encouraging. Independent lines of research are valued in science because the chances that they have been produced by bias, independent lines that converge
chance that they've been produced by bias is reduced by that very convergence and the fact that e coming from something they're very different and we often found ourselves in very significant agreement i hope it was still entertaining for people watching but for me i just wanted to express the gratitude and if i got over enthusiastic at some points i apologize but i was i'm just i find it deeply encouraging and i mean that word very
almost literally very encouraging that this kind of convergence has occurred because for me it raises the plausibility of my own work and also helps me of course deeply appreciate Ian's work but I want to thank Ian.
For me, it's powerful. I find it a very powerful experience. I hope this is not meant in any way like a true peer, you know what I mean? And playing with the words, we're peering at the same thing. And I just thank you.
Thank you very much. Well, I can only respond in kind, John. I feel the same thing. It's so rare to find minds that are so fully in sync, really. We found things that we could slightly gloss for one another, but effectively, we're really talking about the same things. And I have only gratitude for your kindness and your warmth and the feeling of fellowship. So thank you very much indeed.
Okay, all right. Thank you. Thank you for sticking around for two and a half hours. And I appreciate that. I hope that it was enjoyable to you. Again, there's the website theories of everything.org. That's a place that you can go to support toe if you're interested in that. Like I mentioned in the intro, there are several benefits you can add free audio version, you get that
sometimes 12 to 48 hours to a few days prior to premiering on YouTube. You get discounts to the live events when we finally do have them. Sometimes those tickets may even be free. So for instance, I'm looking into doing something with John Vervecky and Ian McGilchrist in person. This is all extremely tentative right now, but this is a plan to do in the future. Carl Friston in London live in front of an audience is another example. There will be exclusive merch and so on. There's
quite a few benefits you can text me if you like there's a number at least we're testing that for about one week or one month or so again that's theoriesofeverything.org thank you all for watching it's great to see you in the live chat i appreciate all of the love thank you thank you so much
▶ View Full JSON Data (Word-Level Timestamps)
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"text": " The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science, they analyze culture, they analyze finance, economics, business, international affairs across every region."
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"text": " Ian McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, a writer, and a former Oxford literary scholar who came to prominence with his work The Master and His Emissary, subtitled The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. We've spoken last year regarding that very topic and the link is in the description. His new book, The Matter with Things, Our Brains, Our Delusions, and The Unmaking of the World, and the links to both books are in the description."
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"text": " John Vervecky is a professor of cognitive science at the University of Toronto, my former home, who's one of the few scholars taking an extensive and meticulous cognitive scientific approach to wisdom, Buddhism and consciousness. John and I have also spoken several times on this podcast and you can see the thumbnails here and the links to each will be in the description as well. It's that latter topic, consciousness, that"
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"text": " In more ways than one binds us here today. As usual, click on the timestamp in the description to skip this intro. My name is Kurt Jaimungal. I'm a Torontonian filmmaker with a background in mathematical physics and this channel is dedicated to the explication of the variegated terrain of theories of everything."
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"text": " That is, primarily from a theoretical physics perspective, but as well as understanding the role consciousness has to play to the fundamental laws provided these laws exist at all in a form knowable to us."
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"text": " Firstly, there's a physics and consciousness contest on this channel. The link to which will be in the description as well as the thumbnail is over here. Essentially, it's the physics version of the 3Blue1Brown math contest, except ours is for physics and consciousness as well. If you have an idea for some explainer of an advanced physics or consciousness concept, then think about creating a video for this and submitting. As you have the chance to win $1,000, Brilliant has come in to give $5,000 among the top five, so that's $1,000 for each."
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"text": " The second announcement is that there's a new theories of everything dot org website. This is a website where you can support toe slash Kurt, which is me instead of on Patreon because Patreon takes a huge cut as well as PayPal takes a cut. There's many different places that take their share and as a creator, you don't have control over your donations. So for instance,"
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"text": " Patreon may decide to shut you down for whatever reason they like. There are also a variety of benefits that come with being a member on the Toh website. For instance, you get an ad free version of the shows that are coming out, an audio ad free version. That is to say you get a private link to the RSS feed to download the audio versions and they come out about 12 to 48 hours, sometimes even one week prior to you seeing them here on YouTube."
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"text": " just so you know the way that it works is that I finish editing and then I have to do another run through and go through timestamps and catalog references and so on that takes time and what it means is that I put it out on YouTube and then I have a lag so that I can build up some hype and some audience prior to the premiere but then that means that I've actually finished the episode a couple days before so what I'll do is I'll upload simultaneously for the members an audio version ads free and then later it premieres on YouTube"
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"text": " For you as the YouTube audience, nothing changes. This is the way I've always done it. It's just that I have here an audio version for a little while prior, which I'm going to release to the toe members as a thank you. And it's going to be ads free. So that's one of the benefits from this point forward. There may be mid rolls that is ads in the middle of a podcast. And that's just part and parcel of the toe members of the toe audience. You are sponsoring toe and then the sponsors also sponsor toe. So thank you for your support. Those won't be there in the audio ads free version for the toe members."
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"text": " Second benefit is that you get discounts to any live events when we do have them. For instance, I'd like to do Carl Friston in London live in front of an audience. Same with E. McGilchrist and John Vervecky at some point. Another benefit is that there will be exclusive merch offered to the Toe members. Another benefit is that there's a number to text me. Again, if that's what you're into, we're testing this out for about a month. And yes, this is something where I am texting you back."
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"text": " Throughout much of this, you can see that the artwork here is exquisite on the website, and that's because it's been done by Boris Martinez-Castello. A link to his Instagram is in the description as well. Thank you, Boris. Thank you so much. As for today's sponsor, it's Brilliant, Brilliant.org. Now Brilliant has been with Toe since near the beginning. I recommend you check out Brilliant.org slash Toe if you're interested in learning math and physics and science."
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"text": " So brilliant is a place that you go to learn about STEM subjects in an interactive manner. They have these bite sized courses. It's extremely easy. You may think that special relativity is beyond you. No, it's not. It's something that someone can understand in elementary school, the way that brilliant breaks down these"
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"text": " extremely advanced concepts is elementary. At some point, I'll be doing an introduction to information theory. In particular, there's David Deutsch and Chiara Marletto's constructor theory. And because I'd like to learn that I decided let me brush up on the fundamentals of information theory."
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"text": " We'll start this by asking each of you what is the meaning crisis and what are its causes. And we'll start with Ian if you don't mind."
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"text": " Well, what I understand by it is the fact that people have lost any sense, that things really speak to them from somewhere beyond what they've made up in their own minds. The experience of something great, possibly transcendent, certainly of existential importance, is harder now because we live in a world of reductive materialism."
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"text": " in which everything is supposed to be explained as the dead movements of mechanical pieces. I think this is not only incredibly unhealthy and causes mental illness, which is not just my opinion, but the statistics speak for themselves, but is a huge mistake in its conception."
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"text": " because I don't believe that meaning is something we make up. I believe it's something we find. And we have to put ourselves in the way of finding it. And that would mean putting a certain degree of vulnerability of opening oneself to something in case one finds there's something there. And if one doesn't open oneself to it, one won't find that at all. I think it applies to spiritual life, to religion in as much as that is part of it for many people."
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"text": " And it also applies to experiences of art and experiences of one another and what it is to be a human being. We've degraded ourselves and then find ourselves in an nihilistic universe where nothing makes sense and nothing has meaning. And that's a very dangerous place to be for a number of reasons for the course of civilization and also for each of us as individuals."
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"text": " Yes, it's a very important element in the position we find ourselves in. As you know, one of the things I believe has happened is that gradually over the course of recent Western civilization, and particularly after the Enlightenment, we overreached ourselves. We were not content with the idea that"
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"text": " thinking rationally helps banish many unnecessary woes and mistakes and and so on but that we actually could understand everything and once you think you can understand everything your chances of understanding anything are remote and this has been taken to hubristic extremes during our lifetimes and I associate this with the rise of a certain way of thinking about the world"
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"text": " that i believe is the way in which the left hemisphere operates it it has evolved the way it has because it helps us grab stuff and get stuff but it has outsourced the business of meaning and understanding to the right hemisphere or to put it another way the right hemisphere has outsourced grabbing and getting stuff to the left hemisphere and remained able to understand and that would bring a different"
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"text": " relationship between ourselves and the world. Indeed, I think this idea of relationship and encounters with reality is a very important one, which no doubt we'll come back to. I argue in my latest book, The Matter with Things, that in fact, relations are what everything is built out of, and that relations are even prior to relata. So that would be my first attempt to give some idea of what I think about that huge question."
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"text": " Well, and I suppose that's one of the reasons why we're talking. My answer is going to be, I find, at least to my mind, quite convergent with what Ian said. So, but I'll start from a different place, but I think I'll end up in the same, or very close to where he ended up. I think the very processes that make us intelligently adaptive, make us perennially susceptible to self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior, and that across time and culture,"
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"text": " People have come up"
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"start_time": 680.862,
"text": " We want to feel that we are connected to something that has a value and a reality other than our own egocentric preferences and existence."
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"text": " So I'll often ask people, what do you mean by meaning in life? And I'll say, well, tell me what you would want to keep continue existing, even if you weren't here. And they'll tell me and I'll tell and I'll say, that's what matters to you. That's what you want. That's what you want to be connected to beyond your egocentric preferences and your egocentric existence. I think the capacity to ameliorate that self deceptive, self destructive foolishness,"
},
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"text": " And to enhance the sense of connectedness is what people, what cultures have called wisdom. And I think what we're facing today is a two pronged problem. People don't know where to go for wisdom. They overwhelmingly know where to go for information. But like T.S. Eliot said, we have lost"
},
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"text": " wisdom and the knowledge and the knowledge and the information so they precisely lack the discernment as to what they should pay attention to what they should take seriously what really matters so they're overwhelmed with information what counts as knowledge is now significantly in question in our culture and of course when i ask people where they go for wisdom i either get a deafening silence or i get some autodidactic religion of me that the person gives me typically um"
},
{
"end_time": 797.295,
"index": 32,
"start_time": 770.981,
"text": " And so the fastest growing group in our culture are the nuns, N-O-N-E-S. They have no official religious affiliation. That does not mean they are overwhelmingly atheist. They are by and large, they describe themselves by this phrase that is very popular to exactly the degree to which I find it vapid. They're spiritual, but not religious. And it's very hard to determine what that actually means other than they have some intuitive sense that they should be seeking wisdom."
},
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"end_time": 827.654,
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"start_time": 797.722,
"text": " should be seeking connectedness, but they distrust any of the institutionalized sources. The problem is the what was supposed to offer, so religions have been the home for these ecologies of practices, and the Enlightenment offered to free us from the tyranny of religion and give us an alternative home, and it gave us the scientific worldview, a scientific worldview which explains everything except how we generate science,"
},
{
"end_time": 851.8,
"index": 34,
"start_time": 827.91,
"text": " and the meaning that makes truth possible and how science itself could possibly exist as a real entity within the ontology of that worldview. And so we and our science actually have no proper home in that worldview. And so the science can't provide the home for the ecology of practices. The religions are now largely regarded as obsolete or irrelevant."
},
{
"end_time": 881.732,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 852.21,
"text": " And so the perennial problems now go largely unabated or ameliorated at best by autodidactic systems that have a strong proclivity for enhancing personal bias or group echo chambering. And of course social media has just exacerbated both of these tendencies tremendously. And so we starve for meaning in the midst of a wisdom famine"
},
{
"end_time": 909.275,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 882.363,
"text": " we can't ignore a scientific worldview, but that worldview does not properly place us. So what it does is it gives a tremendous emphasis on propositional knowing at the expense of all the non-propositional kinds of knowing, procedural, perspectival, and participatory. So we live in a propositional tyranny that prevents us from accessing those ways of knowing that would are properly the most powerful vehicles"
},
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"text": " by which we can cultivate wisdom and a sense of connectedness. And I think that is the meaning crisis, and that is the situation we are in. And it's getting worse and worse. People experience it as a kind of domicide, a loss of home, even though they have shelter. And COVID made it much, much worse. And we are seeing the mental health tsunami and the political ramifications of the acceleration of the meaning crisis right now. That would be my take on it. And one more thing."
},
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"end_time": 942.654,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 940.998,
"text": " Because it's conversion with what Ian said."
},
{
"end_time": 971.288,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 943.473,
"text": " We've lost, aletheia, we've lost the sense of truth as what I call transjectivity, the deeper thing that binds subjectivity and objectivity together, the thing that is being given prominence by 4e cognitive science, and meaning is such a real transjective relation. It's not arbitrarily subjective, it's not merely objectively measurable, it is a proper real relation. That's why I use the term connectedness."
},
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"end_time": 997.176,
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"start_time": 973.012,
"text": " That's what I would say there. Ian, is there anything there that you would like to respond to? I would broadly accept what John has said. I mean, he's put really the same points I was trying to make, but just in a slightly different way, perhaps from a different perspective. I think we both see the importance of something"
},
{
"end_time": 1021.852,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 997.858,
"text": " the calls to us we can't we feel ourselves attracted towards something and we've lost the confidence to go there because technology and information have substituted for deep knowledge and wisdom which is really what John was saying and I think the dangers in"
},
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"end_time": 1049.121,
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"start_time": 1022.568,
"text": " I mean the technology problem is the genius out of the box and it can't be put back in but one of the difficulties about it is all it does it doesn't answer any questions of course all it does is enlarge our powers to alter things and that's only as good as our wisdom about what needs altering and in what way and to what end and I don't believe we have that wisdom at all we have more power than we've ever had"
},
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"end_time": 1068.831,
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"start_time": 1050.128,
"text": " In the history of humanity and the least wisdom we've ever had, I believe, and I think that this what John was calling the rise of propositional knowledge is very important when it comes to look at things like belief in the nature of"
},
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"end_time": 1096.049,
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"start_time": 1069.514,
"text": " God or the world, because I think they are dispositional forms of knowing, not propositional forms of knowing. And unfortunately, in recent history, they've been presented to us as propositions that we either assent to or fail to assent to. Whereas in fact, it's a matter of how we attend to the world, because attention is absolutely at the root of all of this problem we see."
},
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"text": " Coffee helps me work, it helps me fast from carbs, it's become one of the best parts of my day consistently. That's why I'm delighted that we're collaborating with Trade Coffee. They partner with top independent roasters to freshly roast and send the finest coffee in the country directly to your home on your preferred schedule. This matters to me as I work from home."
},
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"text": " Their team of experts do all the work testing hundreds of disparate coffees to land on a final curated collection of 450 exceptional coffees. I chose these three and the team at Trade Coffee worked to create a special lineup for theories of everything for the Toh audience based on some questions they asked me such as"
},
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"text": " how much caffeine do I enjoy and what's the bitterness ratio etc you can get that line up or if that's not let's say your cup of coffee then you can take your own quiz on their website to find a set that matches your specific profile if you'd like to support small businesses and brew the best cup of coffee you've ever made at home then it's time to try trade coffee right now trade is offering our listeners thirty dollars off your first order plus free shipping at drink trade dot com slash everything"
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"text": " That's drinktrade.com slash everything for $30 off. Do you use the word rationality and belief differently than John? I don't know. I have no idea whether we do or not. I mean, I tend to make a distinction, which is not one that's hard and fast in the English language, but is one I make for the purposes of being clear about what I'm talking about or clearer."
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"text": " And that is to make a distinction between rationality and reason. Rationality is a more technical thing, but reason is the whole of one's ability to understand the world, bringing together everything one has learned from experience, one's ability to, yes, reason using logic, one's ability to attend to one's intuitions. It's the power that a good judge in the old days, a wise judge, as we would have thought of him, usually it would have been,"
},
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"end_time": 1241.254,
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"text": " him brought to bear on a human situation so that's rationality i think it's terribly important i think in our i don't want to knock it at all it's just that it's a certain very diminished form of it i.e. the most mechanical rationalizations has taken over from that deep"
},
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"text": " reason that deep wisdom which which was much admired in the renaissance was thought to be the the sign of a of a fully educated and and well-read person so I I think reasons interact in danger in our time and also neither do I have anything to say against science science is hugely important and I'm very worried by the attacks on science for purely political reasons science is"
},
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"end_time": 1281.323,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1267.483,
"text": " Once we lose our anchors in reason and science, we're totally lost. But also if we only have reason and science, we're lost. They need to be mixed with properly what we can learn from intuition and imagination."
},
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"end_time": 1310.708,
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"text": " So, um, uh, I tend to use the word belief to mean the assertion of a proposition, but I acknowledge it has an older meaning. Belaben, which is to give your heart, to give your heart to. Um, and, uh, but I've given up the battle of trying to get people to use belief to mean that. Um, so I'll say you can keep it for the assertion of propositions. I want to talk about something else that Belaben used to, uh, point to, um,"
},
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"text": " I think I use rationality the way Ian uses reason, and I'll give you my reasons, which is I go back to the word that translated logos, and when I talk about rationality, I'm talking about what the ancient Greeks meant by logos, which is much more comprehensive."
},
{
"end_time": 1342.466,
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"start_time": 1332.039,
"text": " the self-organizing of intelligibility such that the world can be real to us. I think that's sort of the best understanding. And the Latin for that was ratio, which means a proper proportioning."
},
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"end_time": 1370.179,
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"text": " And if you take a look at, like, for example, the use in the Stoics or in Plato, it means the proper proportioning, as Ian said, of attention. It means the proper proportioning of your character traits. Think about Aristotle's golden mean. You want to get the proper proportion between being cowardly and being foolhardy. So Ratio is the proper proportioning of your consciousness, your cognition, and your character."
},
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"end_time": 1399.855,
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"text": " such that virtue and virtuosity are possible. And I think that's the ancient meaning of Ratio, and that's why I use rationality. I reserve reason for the act of deliberation, but nothing much hangs on this distinction. I think Ian and I are both pointing to something similar, which is I talked about the truncation and the reduction of rationality to logicality and computation since the advent of the Enlightenment, and we have lost all those other aspects of"
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"index": 58,
"start_time": 1400.384,
"text": " of rationality, the proper proportioning, like I say, of attention, of consciousness, of character, that is needed for virtue. And I take virtue to not mean acting according to a moral rule, like Kant might, but in the ancient sense of being deeply connected to what is most real. So I think the person, for example, who demonstrates courage is able to see through the distractions and distortions"
},
{
"end_time": 1456.698,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1428.456,
"text": " of fear and connect to not just see but properly connect to what is most real and what most matters in a situation and therefore has the affordance to act best in that situation. That's what I mean by virtue connecting us to reality. So for me rationality is exactly that capacity. It's interesting that the word virtual now means precisely not being real in the sense you"
},
{
"end_time": 1476.152,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1457.022,
"text": " I'm aware of that. I don't think we're really disagreeing here. I think it's just a matter of which words we choose to use."
},
{
"end_time": 1501.288,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1476.152,
"text": " I like it because I talk about Ratio Religio, the proper proportioning of how we are bound to things, how we are connected to things. And in that sense, the distinction between what we have since the Enlightenment called rationality and what we used to call religion is diminished, because religion is about, again, appropriately"
},
{
"end_time": 1517.705,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1501.715,
"text": " finding ourselves religio to what is most real, the sacred, then ratio religio and religion are no longer oppositional. They have the potential to enter into real discourse with each other, which I think is part of what is needed right now. And I think I hear you saying that too."
},
{
"end_time": 1537.329,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1517.705,
"text": " I hear you saying, I agree with you, I'm a scientist, I love science, and I think people who don't practice science should not recommend its eradication. I think that that is a ridiculous proposal, and it's even contradictory to their own claim that you have to have a lived experience of something in order to really understand it."
},
{
"end_time": 1559.65,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1537.329,
"text": " So I agree with you that that proposal is ridiculous, but I think the enlightenment proposal that everything that people were trying to encompass in what was broadly called religion, which includes a lot of what we now pulled out as art and ritual and ceremony, that that was also part of Ratio Religio, that was a way in which we properly educated"
},
{
"end_time": 1585.776,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1559.65,
"text": " Yes, certainly. In"
},
{
"end_time": 1599.275,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1587.09,
"text": " in the new book of mine which came out last year"
},
{
"end_time": 1628.592,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1599.974,
"text": " In part two of that, I specifically look at the various ways in which we can come to something we could call truth about the world. In brief, I conclude that we need each of science, reason, intuition, and imagination, not just one or two of these,"
},
{
"end_time": 1651.578,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1629.019,
"text": " And if possible, in most situations, we should try to bring as many of these as possible to bear, are appropriate to whatever it is we're looking at. I don't think this is what we're currently doing. There's a sort of naive war between scientism, people who've never really thought very much, but just imagine that whatever it is they've fallen into believing about a mechanical universe must be right."
},
{
"end_time": 1660.776,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1651.578,
"text": " We've got a war on between them and other people who reject science and reject reason and I don't wish to encourage either party."
},
{
"end_time": 1687.056,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1661.715,
"text": " Yeah, I agree. And I noticed in the second book, because I have, I didn't just put it on the shelf, I have looked at it. But it's like, I got to say this, I didn't, this was a thunderbolt summer for me, I was traveling so much and talking in so many places. But you also, I did note in the second, you also talked about the sacred and recovering the sacred in the second part of the book as well. So that's why I was supposing that that"
},
{
"end_time": 1705.589,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1687.056,
"text": " Yes, undoubtedly yes."
},
{
"end_time": 1735.418,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1705.589,
"text": " And actually, just to clarify for viewers, what John has just referred to is not the part two that I was talking about, it's part three, which confusingly is volume two. And the difference is that part two is epistemology and part three is metaphysics. So I'm looking at what is time, motion, space, matter, consciousness, what are values, what is purpose, what is the meaning of the"
},
{
"end_time": 1752.688,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1735.964,
"text": " I'd like to talk to you about that, but first I do want to talk to you about the previous thing you said, because some of my most recent work has been around something that overlaps with that."
},
{
"end_time": 1769.923,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1753.046,
"text": " I've published on flow and intuition, and we could perhaps talk about that, but I've been doing recent work. I gave an invited lecture at Cambridge about the imaginal and its relationship to rationality."
},
{
"end_time": 1786.169,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1769.923,
"text": " what I mean by rationality. And I'm filming my next series after Socrates and there's a whole section where I'm talking about how the Neo-Platonists try to integrate the imaginal back into sort of the depths of philosophy."
},
{
"end_time": 1811.169,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1786.732,
"text": " So I don't know if you're aware of the distinction that Corban makes between the imaginary and the imaginal. Would it be worthwhile for me to quickly say what that is? I've got an idea, but I could be wrong. So if you like to unpack what you mean there. Sure, sure, sure. And I'll ground it in a concrete thing. And then I'll try and show just one quick point about how you can not"
},
{
"end_time": 1836.527,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1811.169,
"text": " you know, not exhaustive, but exemplary of how you could see how it functions necessarily within what I'm calling rationality. So for many a distinction with the imaginary is when you picture things in your head and you're and it's not for the sake of perception, and you're in some sense escaping from the limitations of reality. That's the imaginary. Okay. And it sort of maps on to what Tolkien meant by escapist fantasy."
},
{
"end_time": 1850.606,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 1836.886,
"text": " and then the imaginal is imagination for the sake of enhancing perception and the given deep learning and predictive processing this now makes tremendous sense right most of perception is imaginal in this sense"
},
{
"end_time": 1880.145,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 1850.845,
"text": " Yeah, go ahead. So if I may just comment there, this is precisely the distinction I make between what I call imagination and fancy, following words with encourage, the greatest writers in the English language on this particular topic. And what they meant was the distinction exactly between fantasy that takes us away from reality and imagination, which is our only chance to enter into reality. Right. And there's a connection, I believe,"
},
{
"end_time": 1901.954,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 1880.93,
"text": " I know Coleridge has a huge influence on Barfield and I believe there's some, I don't know if it's directly between Barfield and Corbem, but I think they both influence Hillman and others. So I'm aware there's connections between those two bodies. And importantly, Coleridge wasn't the beginning of this because he learned a great deal from Schelling."
},
{
"end_time": 1925.196,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 1902.398,
"text": " and more or less lifted some of it out of shedding. So it goes down the line from there to in our time or more recent time anyway Owen Balfield and so on. And I think Wartoff is right that it actually goes back, you can see it in Goethe and when Goethe is trying to get the herb plant he's inventing the imaginal act of perception."
},
{
"end_time": 1937.807,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 1925.196,
"text": " Yes that's a very good point and he also makes distinctions which are remarkably apt about the difference between the world provided by the right and the world provided by the left hand incidentally there we are anyway."
},
{
"end_time": 1957.756,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 1938.2,
"text": " So the point I was making, and so for example, when I'm teaching, but thank you for that enrichment. Kurt, you wanted to say something, should I continue or? I want to see if this is correct. So the imaginary versus imaginal, the difference is one of intent. The reason why is like if one plays video games, they're escaping or they can be, but yet they still acquire skills that they can use in the real world."
},
{
"end_time": 1976.817,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 1958.148,
"text": " Under the right circumstances, right? But it's also what the phenomenology of the act. So let me let me try and say, so usually the imaginary involves picturing in your mind. Like if I ask you right now, imagine a sailboat, are the sails up or not down? And you can say they're up or down, you can tell me that."
},
{
"end_time": 2007.142,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 1977.142,
"text": " Whereas if a child is imagining being Zoro, they are not picturing anything. They are picking up a stick, tying a blanket around them, and they're taking on the salient landscaping of Zoro, getting a taste of what it would be like to have Zoro's perspective, to have Zoro's identity, and see what that feels like for them in terms of skills they might want to cultivate, identities and roles they might want to enter into. It overlaps with developmental play. And so the phenomenology is also very fundamentally different."
},
{
"end_time": 2018.592,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2007.142,
"text": " I use it when I'm teaching Tai Chi, when I'm telling people to stand, I say I want you to imagine that you're standing in a river and from your knees to your feet are sinking into the mud."
},
{
"end_time": 2042.176,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2019.292,
"text": " you're trying to get that feeling of rootedness and then from your knees to around your navel just like flowing water because that's how you want that area of your body and from here up is like air you want to give it very little attention and it dissipating and that and that helps people get into the proper way of inhabiting their body in order to optimize it for you know Tai Chi Chuan for sparring now"
},
{
"end_time": 2070.435,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2042.551,
"text": " That, for example, that's one example of how the imaginal helps ratio. But in Hirschfield and others, you go into people, the academics, who are supposed to be the best, right? And you give them clear argument and evidence that they should start saving for the retirement. You make sure they understand. You allow them to voice any disputes. You get agreement from them all. You come back in six months, none of them are saving for the retirement."
},
{
"end_time": 2099.445,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2071.817,
"text": " Then you do the following and of course you have control groups and everything. I'm just giving that the experimental group. You ask them to imagine their future self as somebody that they love and care about. That somebody that they have a relationship and a responsibility to, a member of their family. You come back in six months and you'll find two things. They are now saving and the people that more vividly imagined that future self"
},
{
"end_time": 2129.889,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2099.906,
"text": " We're able to save even more. And you say, so what? The ability to aspire to your future self, and this is Agnes Kellard's argument, is central to rationality. Rationality is ultimately about self-correcting. It's about aspiring to become more rational, wiser than you are. And therefore, the ability to properly aspire is dependent on the imaginal, yet it is central to rationality. And therefore, they are inseparably bound together."
},
{
"end_time": 2156.937,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2130.128,
"text": " This is something I think Plato deeply deeply understood because he'll give an argument and then he'll give the and that he'll give the parable of the cave and he'll put the two side by side so you're what right the imaginal and the rational are interwoven together and like Ian said we have we have now set them into this weird opposition which doesn't actually make very much sense. I suppose it could be because of the prevalence of entertainment"
},
{
"end_time": 2186.271,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2157.193,
"text": " in which the imaginary or the sensible is taking priority over places in which people properly enact the imaginal. And I propose to you that those places traditionally have been ritual, the serious play of the imaginal, in order to enhance people's sense of connectedness, especially to the future self. Of course, there's an enormous amount that could be said about the imagination and its qualities."
},
{
"end_time": 2202.483,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2186.903,
"text": " Yes."
},
{
"end_time": 2231.084,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2202.824,
"text": " children's books in which there are animals and the pages are divided into three from top to bottom and you can turn over as many as you want of each part and you get the head of a goat and the body of a seal and the tail of a lion or something and and that's that's fantasy that's just putting together stuff that doesn't really exercise our imagination but Wordsworth famously was"
},
{
"end_time": 2247.466,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2231.561,
"text": " the person vickenstein said we all should be that for heaven's sake don't stop being foolish what he did was he looked at a very bleak looking cliff or rock and in his contemplation of it it became something"
},
{
"end_time": 2272.585,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2247.892,
"text": " more real than yes when we just look it's easy for us now at this stage in life and this is what words were wrote about in his own on intimations of immortality that as we grow up we cease to be an immediate contact with things because we're in contact of our images of those things we have a category we go to a picturesque scene and instead of being completely blown away by the beauty of it we"
},
{
"end_time": 2296.34,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2272.585,
"text": " We're already categorizing picturesque scene, mountains, that's right, a lake and so on. And it's this process of getting beyond words and getting beyond categorical thought towards the very experience that we're having that is so important. So, no, I think that's right. And for me,"
},
{
"end_time": 2320.06,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2298.439,
"text": " I'm not here to criticize Boosworth or my favorite poet, Rilke, who does something very similar. Favorite poet of mine as well, by the way, he is. Yeah, yeah. But I guess for me, part of the question becomes when I'm trying, because I not only am a scientist, I'm also a person who's in"
},
{
"end_time": 2346.015,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2320.367,
"text": " involved with a lot of these emerging communities in which people are trying individually and collectively to build the colleges of practices for responding to the meeting crisis and doing it in good faith. I'm not talking about the charlatans, I'm not talking about the exploiters, I'm not talking about the gurus, I'm talking about people like Ray Kelly and others and you know and I met recently with them in Vermont. We're trying to organize things together. What"
},
{
"end_time": 2375.93,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2346.578,
"text": " what i what i why i bring that up is to me that the question becomes how do we reverse engineer and recommend practices for people individually and collectively such that this is recoverable to them not only in thought but in actual conscious engagement with themselves other people in the world"
},
{
"end_time": 2404.855,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2376.34,
"text": " The first is that I don't think that practices in themselves will ever achieve what needs to happen because they can still go on without the mind and heart of the person having fundamentally shifted. And in a way the reason that religions have rituals and practices"
},
{
"end_time": 2428.899,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2405.265,
"text": " is that if you think your way into feeling those things eventually eventually and live them in your life then things will begin to change but i'm worried that recommending practices to people like if you do so much meditation per day and if you you know spend so long in nature and you spend so long listening to music there's nothing wrong with any of these things but the trouble is that"
},
{
"end_time": 2451.101,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2429.377,
"text": " As Einstein said, we can't get out of the particular mess we've produced with the same thinking that got us into it in the first place. And so we need to shift entirely what we are meaning by meaning. And another point that occurs to me is these people that you mentioned that are not charlatans and have"
},
{
"end_time": 2477.807,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2451.288,
"text": " something wise to say, I think it's an enormous load to place on any one individual that their ideas, their practices, their set of whatever it is, can really reach wisdom in the way that a tradition that has absorbed and evolved with and changed in the process"
},
{
"end_time": 2508.08,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2478.234,
"text": " ideas of many many people wise people who live before us that is more likely in the end to distill wisdom which is why i think that i don't think it's necessarily very easy to do this not impossible but to do it without some sort of a tradition it doesn't have to be christianity of course it might be none of the monotheistic religions good as they are it might be daoism or buddhism and so on with their history with their teachings with their parables with their practice"
},
{
"end_time": 2524.224,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2508.507,
"text": " I'm a little more cautious about the idea that either you or I, however bright we are, can sort of really take it upon ourselves to recommend to people how they can acquire wisdom. In fact, one of the points about wisdom is it can't be acquired according to any process."
},
{
"end_time": 2541.135,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2525.606,
"text": " Okay, this sounds like a great point of disagreement, as much as there are agreements, because I know you have non-theism, which sounds like, well, why don't you explain what non-theism is, or if you want to respond to that, John? Well, I do want to respond to it. First of all, I wasn't proposing practices in place of also fundamental philosophy."
},
{
"end_time": 2569.821,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2541.459,
"text": " I was practicing, I was proposing something very much like what we see in Stoicism in which or in Buddhism or in Neoplatonism you have both a fundamental philosophy and a set of practices that are integrated together and I also think whatever that integration is also has to be in deep and good faith dialogue with science especially the cognitive sciences because those are what I would call cognitive science because those are the ones directed towards"
},
{
"end_time": 2581.698,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2569.991,
"text": " I'm trying and this is how."
},
{
"end_time": 2609.633,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2582.073,
"text": " A lot of these people are taking these practices up. They're not taking them up as just panacea practices. They're taking it up as, no, no, no, we need to be doing a lot of attentional sensory motor, a lot of stuff, and a lot of philosophical reflection, and a lot of dialogue if we're going to get something and properly enter into dialogue with the existing wisdom traditions."
},
{
"end_time": 2638.285,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2609.633,
"text": " So that's part of what I meant by how these communities are working. For example, I was at this conference that's being held at the Maple Monastic Academy, which comes out of the Zen tradition, is deeply influenced by it, but wants to talk to some of these emerging communities that have come out of other traditions. Secondly, I do think that"
},
{
"end_time": 2661.749,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2638.49,
"text": " We are in a place that might be like the place where some of these, and this is a somewhat preposterous proposal, but it's a historical, I think we're in a kairos, I think we're at a pivot point in our civilization because I think the meaning crisis weakens us"
},
{
"end_time": 2686.92,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2662.176,
"text": " disables us in the face of addressing the meta-crisis in many powerful ways and then the meta-crisis feeds back and makes the world seem bleak and inhospitable for people wrestling with meaning. So I think they're interlocked and so I think we're in a kairos because I do think ex-risk is real and accelerating and I do think the capacity for social media to misdirect us is real and accelerating."
},
{
"end_time": 2717.09,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2687.602,
"text": " So my point is, when we're in a kairos, we may need to give birth to something new. All of these other great traditions did start somewhere, you know, Socrates and the neoplatonic tradition, Jesus and the Christian tradition, Muhammad and the Islamic tradition, Siddhartha. I'm not claiming to be any of these figures, and I will not accept any attempt of job description of that for me. Nor do I think that any of these, I know Ray Ferry"
},
{
"end_time": 2746.561,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 2717.09,
"text": " For example, Rafe as part of his practice makes sure that he steps out of the leadership role, other people, he also does not see him. None of the people I'm talking to see themselves. What they do think is that something is emerging right now and because of the urgency of the situation, we should try to interact with it as best we can to try and see if we can steer it to becoming something"
},
{
"end_time": 2761.561,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 2746.988,
"text": " Yes."
},
{
"end_time": 2791.442,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 2762.517,
"text": " Well, I wouldn't really disagree with that. Thank you for your clarification, which really just confirms what I hoped that you might say about it. It was really more a clarification because I think it's easy for people to think. I'm often asked, you know, after lecturing, so what do we do right away? You know, what do we do now? Yes. And it's like the left hemisphere's job is to solve an immediate problem and it wants eight bullet points. And if we can do all of those,"
},
{
"end_time": 2811.323,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 2792.09,
"text": " We can carry on business as usual but my message is we cannot conceivably carry on business as usual and I'm not talking about anything that can be summed up as a series of steps that we should take. There are steps that we should take that are very practical. We must stop poisoning"
},
{
"end_time": 2837.79,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 2811.766,
"text": " The oceans, we must stop destroying the forest. We must stop extinguishing the ways of life of indigenous peoples. There's many, many things we should do. We should stop actually attacking and destroying all that's best actually out of our own civilization. There are many things that we need to do rather urgently, but that's not really what I'm saying. I'm saying we need to think about the business of thinking."
},
{
"end_time": 2845.845,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 2838.2,
"text": " and what we mean by meaning and that these need to be reconceived and the way that I like to reconceive them is by"
},
{
"end_time": 2874.462,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 2846.578,
"text": " Unfurling over a long stretch as we both acknowledge and I apologize for the length of what I write, but over a long stretch. But you're a good writer, so I mean, I don't want people to be put off by that. I mean, so I just wanted to, sorry for interrupting, but I know we both, yeah, it's a long book, but you're a good writer, so I don't want people to be put off by that."
},
{
"end_time": 2902.517,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 2874.462,
"text": " Any time you want to interject a compliment of course. What i'm saying is that i think it's a question of the beginning of the book i say in a very short note to the reader which is only a page and a half long i think of it as taking somebody on a journey from which they can see something from different perspectives and that that will itself bring about a kind of a moment wow this is how it looks from here."
},
{
"end_time": 2926.51,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 2902.961,
"text": " And it's not because I've explained something and asked you to assent to a proposition. It's because I have suggested I have indicated I've taken places. I mean, I go over a vast array of things from literature, from art, from philosophy, from, you know, all the rest. But I think it's that process of actually guiding people towards a different position that I think is key."
},
{
"end_time": 2944.957,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 2927.91,
"text": " I agree and for me that's where we're getting into perspectival and participatory knowing as opposed to propositional ascent. Absolutely. And thank you for agreeing with my clarification. I just want to reciprocate. I definitely did not mean a bullet point. I think DC Schindler"
},
{
"end_time": 2966.135,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 2944.957,
"text": " He indicates that that is one of the, in his Plato's Critique of Impure Reason, he indicates that's one of the markers of misology, the hatred of the Logos, which is a kind of intellectual impatience, a profound kind of... No, I'm talking about that the only thing that will resolve the meeting crisis is a way of life."
},
{
"end_time": 2978.524,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 2966.493,
"text": " Exactly, exactly."
},
{
"end_time": 2998.422,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 2978.968,
"text": " the sets of practices, transformations and community relations that afford them entering into a new way of life. That's for me the pressing question and that's what I'm trying to and as I see people trying to create ways of life within communities and"
},
{
"end_time": 3013.848,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 2998.797,
"text": " a reconciliation with the scientific worldview such that they can be properly, cosmically homed, and that's what grabs my interest. That's what I want to try and support. Yes, and if I may, I'd like to emphasize the idea of a way"
},
{
"end_time": 3032.585,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3014.36,
"text": " as never completed and always being newly undertaken so it is a process i happen to believe that all the things we call things are in fact in process and that is therefore very important to see that process because"
},
{
"end_time": 3052.534,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3033.114,
"text": " When we talk about a way and needing a way, and of course, Taoism is named after that way, which is a practice that needs to be lived. And when Christ said, I am the way, the truth and the life, he didn't mean once you believe in me, you've got it. He meant there is a way which you can enter into through"
},
{
"end_time": 3082.671,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3053.387,
"text": " through belief in what he was teaching and in what he showed by his example that would take one where one wishes to be able to go. I deeply agree with that so much so that I have said please carve on my tombstone neither nostalgia nor utopia. I do not think anything that claims to have a total grip and a resolution. In fact, and perhaps this will slide into the topic, I think we need to think of the sacred as an inexhaustible source of intelligibility"
},
{
"end_time": 3100.64,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3082.671,
"text": " I just wanted to say, for me, that's exactly what I see exemplified."
},
{
"end_time": 3125.623,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3101.049,
"text": " People talk about the Socratic method. There's no such thing. There is a Socratic way. There's a Socratic way of life. And Socrates was so faithful to that way of life that he was willing to die for it. But he undermines all attempts to replace what he's doing with a method or any sort of totalizing vision. And so for me, and again, I practice"
},
{
"end_time": 3154.957,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3125.623,
"text": " Like I don't consider myself a Taoist, but I've been practicing Tai Chi Chuan and Chi Kung Or for close to three decades and towards a point I was making earlier. I don't let me say it this way I don't think you should do Tai Chi Chuan without really the Tao Teh Chen But I also think you shouldn't do Tao Teh read the Tao Teh Chen without doing Tai Chi Chuan Because for me that's like reading the Kama Sutra and never making love you you really aren't you really aren't getting and putting the two together and"
},
{
"end_time": 3183.882,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3155.418,
"text": " And so I'm interested then if you agree with me that, by the way, having a process view of reality, you probably also influenced by Whitehead as I am. And the idea that part of what is needed, and this is part of what's the third wave scholarship around,"
},
{
"end_time": 3192.363,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3184.377,
"text": " Absolutely."
},
{
"end_time": 3216.118,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3192.722,
"text": " well that's why my latest book is called the matter with things it's a pun on a whole range of things to do with oh i didn't get i didn't get that second part i got our obsession with matter and our obsession with things and the matter with things now so it tries to bring together a number of elements but i just wanted to also throw into the mix and see if you agree with me here"
},
{
"end_time": 3240.572,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3216.681,
"text": " That a lot of what we've been talking about is predicated typically for the Western mind on the idea that there are things, good things that we can do. And I always think that we need to be careful of thinking that it's doing that causes change. It may be"
},
{
"end_time": 3262.073,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3241.186,
"text": " receiving and there is something that I choose to term active passivity which is not just a kind of let it all hang out thing but actually a disciplined attention to the world. I always come back to attention because I believe it's a moral act and changes the world and changes"
},
{
"end_time": 3290.418,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3262.739,
"text": " us who do the attending so it's a very very important thing and in that open attending we come to hear things and we can crowd them out i sometimes give the image of a you know a gardener not actually being able to make a plant of course can't possibly but what a gardener can do is allow the plant to be stifled or remove things that would get in the way of the plants thriving and that's really what a gardener is and we are like that"
},
{
"end_time": 3316.408,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3290.572,
"text": " Truths and spiritual depth and meaning and wisdom come to us and we either drive them out with our noisy logicizing and rationalizing and what they call monkey mind as you know in oriental traditions and instead we should cultivate silence really. It's one of the things I like about where I"
},
{
"end_time": 3346.561,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3316.852,
"text": " I live on sky as it's in a palpably silent. So in the analogy with the plants, the gardener is doing something though, you're making an analogy about attention. So is there another analogy where it doesn't require doing because you're trying to show the act itself is not what we should be pursuing? You're very good to pick that up. And I was hoping that you wouldn't. It is it is like being well, I think actually,"
},
{
"end_time": 3376.118,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3346.834,
"text": " You know, teaching is a responsive business. So partly you are saying things, but partly you are also receiving things and there's an exchange. And I think that a proper gardener attends to what the gardener is looking at, but doesn't rush in there kind of, I mean, pulling it up to see whether its root system is working properly according to the science is not a good way to improve the life of a plant."
},
{
"end_time": 3404.565,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3376.118,
"text": " There's a certain degree of standing off, I think, is the way I would put it, of holding back, of being careful to observe rather than rushing in. Well, I want to answer, and I wanted to, oh, sorry, did I cut you off again? Sorry. No, I was just going to say that it's something that rings a bell for me as a doctor, because in my chaining, I was constantly told, I mean, although doctors are always doing things,"
},
{
"end_time": 3414.821,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3404.923,
"text": " that first of all one shouldn't rush in and apply things but also that in making a diagnosis the first thing to do is to stand back and look"
},
{
"end_time": 3443.097,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3415.691,
"text": " and allow things to come to observe things. And only then do you even lay a finger on a patient. And only as a last resort, do you send for an investigation to confirm or disconfirm the conclusion you've received. So even somebody as interventional as a doctor, if they're going to be good, has to be able to receive things. And as a psychiatrist, of course, which is what I ended up as, that's doubly true."
},
{
"end_time": 3457.227,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3444.138,
"text": " Okay, I want to respond because I do think cultivation is actually an excellent metaphor. And if you'll notice, I always say the cultivation of wisdom. I'm very careful about that for precisely that reason."
},
{
"end_time": 3484.889,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3458.029,
"text": " And so, first of all, you know, conversions across very different cultures at the heart of Neoplatonism is this idea of cultivating a profound receptivity. Daoism, you have Wu Wei, which is the profound receptivity, being like the uncarved block. It's Ed Slingerlin's book, Trying Not to Try, and that's what I would say to you, Kurt. The doing is a doing that undermines itself as doing."
},
{
"end_time": 3503.848,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3484.889,
"text": " Which sounds like a paradox, but when you want to get into the flow state, and if you keep trying to get into the flow state, you will never get into the flow state. It doesn't mean being limply passive. You have to do in a way that undermines it as a doing so that you find yourself caught up."
},
{
"end_time": 3530.179,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3503.848,
"text": " in the flow state. And then you flow, which is not something you do, it is something you participate in. And I think getting that what Stegmeier calls that proper orientation, which is I think what ratio religio is, is the key thing. And that's what Iris Murdoch in the sovereignty of the good speaking from the neoplatonic tradition, right, that the most important moral act, the core moral act is how giving things their proper attention,"
},
{
"end_time": 3557.227,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3530.555,
"text": " uh and she makes that argument as the key to ethics and how it had been largely ignored by the analytic ethical tradition that had been growing up right in the 20th century and and i think that is fundamentally right i think uh and i think that in virtue ethics i think is moving towards that that and because murdoch also said you know love is when you when you finally acknowledge that something other than yourself is real and and and right and so it's this"
},
{
"end_time": 3584.974,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3557.483,
"text": " this ability to get oneself into a receptivity to flow such that one is properly evolving one's attention to conform in the Aristotelian sense to the ligaments of reality. I think that's the ultimate thing that I'm trying to talk about a lot when I'm talking about relevance realization and etc etc."
},
{
"end_time": 3606.391,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 3585.776,
"text": " Yeah, I just like to add a little rider to all of this, which is that there is Wu Wei is puzzling to Westerners initially because it means not doing basically. And there is a not doing which is quite different from passively not doing something that is the other side of doing."
},
{
"end_time": 3627.056,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 3606.391,
"text": " Just as there's an unknowing, which is not ignorance that comes before knowing, but the unknowing that comes after knowledge. Sure. And there's an innocence that is not the same as the innocence of a child, but an innocence that can only come after deep experience of life and is what one recognizes in truly deep, wise spiritual figures."
},
{
"end_time": 3653.78,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 3627.056,
"text": " I agree, and I argue that, you know, Socrates is claiming that he knows that he does not know comes to fruition in Nicholas of Cusa's learned ignorance. Yes. Right. Exactly that. And yes, it's a profound way. And for me, it's a profound way of being able to exercise this discernment. Plotinus talks about the nothingness that is a privation."
},
{
"end_time": 3673.677,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 3654.258,
"text": " and then the no-thingness that is a superlative, the really real and that you need a certain proper kind of educating of your sensibility and receptivity to be able to discern nothingness from no-thingness and when you can do that that leads to a very"
},
{
"end_time": 3694.07,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 3674.48,
"text": " Well, one of the most profound kinds of connectedness there can possibly be. And that emptiness that is famously sought through Buddhist practices is, as you say, is not an emptiness in the sense of just nothing positive. It's the"
},
{
"end_time": 3713.831,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 3694.07,
"text": " The word in Sanskrit, shunyata, has the root svi which relates to a seed that is swelling and its interior and life is coming forth or a womb, the emptiness of a womb that will be the fertile space. Exactly, exactly. And the root word for compassion"
},
{
"end_time": 3740.913,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 3713.831,
"text": " in the Hebrew tradition is being womb-like for exactly the same reason. So yeah, that's exactly it. But the point I was making is, to your point about Westerners, like you have to develop, this isn't quite the right word, but if you'll allow me to pour a lot through conveyance into the word, you have to develop the taste for that difference. And it's like, it's not a thought, it's more of that, I mean, it requires thought."
},
{
"end_time": 3761.476,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 3740.913,
"text": " but it's more but like for me I could not understand Wu Wei until I've been practicing Tai Chi Chuan for like over six years because when I said oh that's it that's it there and what's amazing is that's what comes out when you're sparring if you try to spar you'll lose"
},
{
"end_time": 3786.561,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 3762.039,
"text": " But if you Wu Wei into sparring, you'll do a great job. Wu Wei means be in the full state? Well, it means that pregnant emptiness that Ian's talking about that gives birth to what is needed appropriately at the moment. OK, and that's called no-thing-ness. I'm not a sinologist, but I think that Wu Wei means"
},
{
"end_time": 3808.712,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 3787.108,
"text": " non-action it means it means not doing not doing exactly but the metaphors are still the metaphors of pregnant emptiness they give birth and when i was proposing they line up with uh very much the learned ignorance and the no-thingness of the neoplatonic tradition nicholas of kusa platinus etc"
},
{
"end_time": 3832.227,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 3808.712,
"text": " I'm not a perennialist, I'm not claiming that they're all saying exactly the same thing, but I'm saying there's deep convergence from very different traditions and histories that makes plausible the place they get to. Well the concept of the perennial philosophy can be on the one hand exaggerated and on the other under-respected. There is a great deal in common between the traditions, they're of course not exactly the same."
},
{
"end_time": 3845.282,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 3832.654,
"text": " and that's the wonderful thing about people's different traditions and different perspectives looking at something that is recognizably the same but from each perspective something new will be added to our understanding of what it is."
},
{
"end_time": 3868.319,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 3845.879,
"text": " In fact, that's my idea of what objectivity is. It's not a rather peculiar state in which one denies the humanness of the observer who is the only one who knows all this stuff that one's calling objective. That would be a very, very strange way of looking at the world, not necessarily revealing of truth. But what seems important is not to be"
},
{
"end_time": 3884.48,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 3868.746,
"text": " and as it were solely indebted to one perspective but to be able to see a number of perspectives and to allow them to complement one another and that in that sense one of them will be this one in which one is trying to eliminate"
},
{
"end_time": 3912.773,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 3884.48,
"text": " forcibly one's own person in the encounter with whatever it is. It's a strange thing to do, but it's worth doing. But it doesn't in the end, as modern physics tells us, it doesn't in the end work out as the best way to understand the material or immaterial world. Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly with that. I think I'm deeply influenced by Nagle on this. The attempt to understand"
},
{
"end_time": 3942.483,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 3913.097,
"text": " the view from nowhere but but in the absurd the essay of the absurd he basically argues that the view from nowhere also generates the absurd right as the perspective of a clash and so there's something there's something paradoxical if our our fundamental guiding metaphor of objectivity is the same one that gets us into finding reality absurd because science is depending on the intelligibility of reality and i just want to gloss what i said because it's very very important that i'm not misunderstood"
},
{
"end_time": 3967.671,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 3942.483,
"text": " i don't think that the term objectivity has no job to do i think it's a very important term and what it means is arriving at the most rich most true perception of what it is one's looking at and that means not allowing oneself to be swayed by some completely extraordinary biased way of looking at the world so i'm i'm equally opposed to that and just because"
},
{
"end_time": 3989.172,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 3967.671,
"text": " The clinically detached, impossible view of the non-person is not possible. Doesn't mean that it's free for all for any point of view. Not at all. Some points of view are dreadful, noxious, not only untrue but damaging. Other points of view may be rich, welcoming and unfolding of life and vitality and creativity."
},
{
"end_time": 4007.79,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 3989.548,
"text": " Yeah, and again I'm in agreement with you because I was not proposing a rejection of the notion of objectivity. I was proposing to reject a particular model that has held captive. You know, Wittgenstein's idea about a picture holding us captive."
},
{
"end_time": 4024.974,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4007.79,
"text": " No, I knew you weren't saying that. I just wanted for everyone's sake to make clear that neither of us were really putting down that particular rabbit hole of postmodernism in which every point of view is equally valid. Absolutely not. At some points of view, utterly absurd. Others are extraordinarily deep."
},
{
"end_time": 4044.48,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4025.486,
"text": " So my view, my view on this is deeply influenced by confluence of sort of the third wave of Platonic scholarship and Marlo Conti and the idea. First of all, so here's a thing. And first of all, realize that you can never see the whole thing."
},
{
"end_time": 4074.804,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4045.367,
"text": " you can never see the whole thing no matter where you look at it right there are multiple aspects and they're not only multiple aspects in terms of its visibility there's multiple tactile aspects there's multiple auditory there's multiple uses of this and then what you start to realize is that there is multi-s sexuality and then not only is there multi-s sexuality within a person there is multi there are multiple perspectives on any one thing this is why dialogical reason"
},
{
"end_time": 4092.568,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4074.804,
"text": " Is so important and then for me what you're trying to do and this is marlo ponti's sort of critique of husserl you're trying to find the through line because what you realize is that right the These this doesn't come off as a cacophonous, you know cubist painting"
},
{
"end_time": 4110.384,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4093.302,
"text": " There's a melody here, and it's not this is not logically identical to this or this or that. But nevertheless, there is a through line of intelligibility, which John Rusev calls a musicality to it. And for me, and it's inexhaustible. It's inexhaustible."
},
{
"end_time": 4134.548,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4110.589,
"text": " That links to the idea of the person as continuous. We've got this mistaken idea that our lives are made up of moments, like time slices, but they're not. They are like a melody, as Henri Bergson said, that one's personality has this nature of a melody which is always unfolding, and that's a very important insight, I think."
},
{
"end_time": 4164.411,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4134.548,
"text": " thank you because that's the point i want what for me objectivity is when i have this melody as you put it in sync with that melody there's a continuity of contact so that i can i can within my finite transcendence as how as hyland puts it i can disclose as much of that inexhaustible multi-s factuality and multi multiple perspectives as i possibly can within a integrated intelligibility"
},
{
"end_time": 4188.302,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4164.411,
"text": " That's the proposal that's coming out of people like Marla Ponty, how we should re-understand, and I think it's actually Plato's proposal. I think Gonzales and Hyland and Kirkland and all of the third wave are right on about that, and I think that is how we should, and that's a non-thingy way of thinking, because the through line is not any aspect."
},
{
"end_time": 4215.896,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4188.302,
"text": " it is not any perspective precisely because it is that which binds all the aspects and all the all the perspectives together and for me one needs all those perspectives those what um who are so called adumbrations of a thing one needs to see it from as many exactly exactly exactly exactly but without uh as i say this ridiculous idea that anything goes and did you know the uh the japanese zen garden ryanji"
},
{
"end_time": 4238.797,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4216.749,
"text": " It's a very beautiful garden. It has 15 rocks set out in the sand. And from wherever you stand in the garden, the most you can ever see is 14 of them. Okay, so I love that. Nicholas of Cusa, when he writes The Vision of God and he sends it to the monastery, he sends a painting"
},
{
"end_time": 4269.343,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4239.753,
"text": " and no matter where you stand in the room it looks like the painting is looking at you and then he says first everybody do that and then do the following one monk stands in one place and another monk stands in the farthest other place and they both claim that the picture is looking at them and then he says go ahead no that's just true of any painting where you exactly it's nothing special it's just this phenomenon near oh the eyes are following no they're not it's just that wherever you look you think the face is looking at you"
},
{
"end_time": 4297.039,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4269.838,
"text": " So he, well I think that's the point, because then he says, now try to, what would it be like to be able to realize this all at once? And of course you can't, but he says that's what it is to have the vision of God. It's not to see God, it's to see the way God sees, right? It's to see that through line that you can't actually see because it makes all seeing possible, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 4312.278,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4297.739,
"text": " and so this is again the non-thingness that is not privation but is the inexhaustible fount with which from which intelligibility flows and flows and I think for me that has been"
},
{
"end_time": 4336.971,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4312.466,
"text": " That has been my fundamental, phenomenologically rich and reflective experience of the sacred to exactly find that. And for me, Gupta is talking about that when he's looking at the plants, and I see the same thing when you're in the Platonic dialogues, you have this quest, right, to find the virtue, but you never get to the answer, but you get the through line running and all that sort of thing. For me,"
},
{
"end_time": 4359.787,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4336.971,
"text": " And like you said, that's when I find the sacred in another person. When I realize that they're multi-aspected, multi-faceted, but there's a through line and I can hear it and taste it and follow it, but I can never complete it or grasp it totally. And if I say that to her, I've destroyed the relationship. So that would be the most foolish thing to do. But as you said, everything is like that."
},
{
"end_time": 4384.309,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4359.787,
"text": " and that means we can fall in love with being again it's not like for me that's a real possibility for people i'm sorry that that that that's for me what i i i think is if we could enable people to read through a way of life to fall in love with being again i think that would be a deep way of responding to the main crisis"
},
{
"end_time": 4408.626,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 4387.619,
"text": " certainly a rather nice way of expressing it I agree and love is probably going to be part of how one achieves that and you touched on that idea of the not just the way God sees but of the way we see God and I'm trying to think who it was now was it I'm not sure it was Eckhart it might have been"
},
{
"end_time": 4434.787,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 4409.599,
"text": " on a venture or somebody who said you know the eye with which i see god is the same eye with which god sees me exactly but anyway yes that's a good point but how on earth are we to if our if the subject we're talking about is how to bring this about how do we how do we help bring it about or perhaps that isn't the question or perhaps it's not even a good question"
},
{
"end_time": 4457.995,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 4435.111,
"text": " Well, I think whether or not it's a well-formed question or not, I think it's probative. One of the books that's had the most profound influence on me is Religion and Nothingness by Nishatani, and it's a masterpiece, and it's rightly regarded so. It's a follow-up to his earlier book, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, and to give you a flavor of it, there's another book very similar to Eckhart's, which was uttered by Nietzsche,"
},
{
"end_time": 4483.114,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 4458.473,
"text": " If you stare long enough into the abyss, it begins to stare back into you. Nietzsche came upon something, but he gets to the edge of it, but it doesn't, it doesn't flip over for him. And what, what Nishikani proposes is, he proposes that, and I'm interested, because you might have a really interesting take on, Nietzsche doesn't doubt deeply enough."
},
{
"end_time": 4509.616,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 4484.189,
"text": " It's almost like the left hemisphere is capable of this profound doubt, but it can never doubt its own authority or its own preeminence or something like that. Yes, very much so, yes. And he proposes that one of the points of Zen is to get the great doubt that drops you beneath, and then that profound resonance, at least the propositional tyranny, gets disclosed to people. And I think that's"
},
{
"end_time": 4520.845,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 4510.401,
"text": " part of what needs to happen right now."
},
{
"end_time": 4548.797,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 4521.749,
"text": " We live in the hermeneutics of suspicion where we doubt everything except we doubt the perspective, the stance from which that happens. And I've been trying to figure out the semantic philosophical jujitsu moves, right, in order to get that doubt to actually turn onto itself in a profoundly transformative way without, of course, destroying people's sanity or lives or putting them into a psychotic break or anything ridiculous like that."
},
{
"end_time": 4564.991,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 4548.797,
"text": " no of course but one of the things that can break us out of that doubting of everything is the experience the transcendent experience of something very real and in a way that comes as part of"
},
{
"end_time": 4582.125,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 4565.691,
"text": " Yes."
},
{
"end_time": 4605.93,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 4582.125,
"text": " And are so so bound up in verbal noise and discussion about you know all the things we're talking about one of the things that troubles me actually about where this conversation is going is that the wise person stops talking at this point because really we're entering the territory where you cannot talk about it so but we drown out the possibility of being there for"
},
{
"end_time": 4631.118,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 4606.51,
"text": " I agree with you and I mean I do think what there is an intermediary"
},
{
"end_time": 4661.493,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 4631.988,
"text": " which is to try and"
},
{
"end_time": 4689.872,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 4662.022,
"text": " It's an experience in which one has many of the features of a mystical experience, the oneness, the here-ness, the now-ness, the altogether-ness, the depth of realness, but it's ultimately ineffable, but it carries with it all the markers of being real such that people do the following."
},
{
"end_time": 4714.087,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 4690.486,
"text": " they will they'll do something weird normally when we have an aberrant state of consciousness that doesn't fit into our everyday consciousness we use that to say it's not real like a dream or being drunk but they do the opposite they have these experiences and they say that was really real and all of this is an illusion and they then they say i think the must is not"
},
{
"end_time": 4736.954,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 4715.026,
"text": " a compulsive must, it's what I call awful normativity that I need, I profoundly need to change who I am and how I relate to the world, maybe my occupation, my career, they will profoundly change their lives because they want to be closer to that really real, they want to conform more to it and Yaden's work shows by many objective measures"
},
{
"end_time": 4755.282,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 4736.954,
"text": " Extraordinary how common these"
},
{
"end_time": 4772.705,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 4755.845,
"text": " experiences of um well they even can be described as encounters with god actually by a lot of people even though they don't necessarily believe in god at all but they call them encounters with god or with the cosmos with the ultimate truth or whatever it is and they're surprisingly common"
},
{
"end_time": 4799.224,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 4773.439,
"text": " and they are not predicted by any kind of mental disorder and neither do they generate any kind of mental disorder. No, the very important point you've already made which is that when people have hallucinations and delusions, when they are better they count them as unreal and they see that they're better off without them. But after these experiences they don't, they think this was the reality."
},
{
"end_time": 4828.49,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 4799.224,
"text": " And it often has long-term changing effects on their lives exactly as you say. So it's something that needs to be taken seriously and there is research and some of it you've probably been mentioning which shows how very real and important this is. So we discount this because we're told that clever people, bright people, intelligent people don't think like this. It's just some ill effect of something misbehaving in one's brain but it's not an adequate account."
},
{
"end_time": 4853.387,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 4828.985,
"text": " You know, and I go over both, I've given talks on this at conferences, I go over it in awakening for the meeting crisis on higher states of consciousness. I've talked about it at Yale, etc. You can make a very good case for this is actually a justifiable claim by people. I don't hang too much on the propositions they come back with, because the propositions vary all over the place."
},
{
"end_time": 4878.217,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 4853.387,
"text": " but that sense i've done an experiment in my lab where we like what's the relationship nobody did this which we thought i thought was astonishing is there a correlation between having mystical experiences and how meaningful you find your life you would have thought somebody had bothered to test that it shows you the ignorance of our orientation that that has not never even been tested we tested it a huge m turk study it is predictive it's coral it's correlative"
},
{
"end_time": 4901.118,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 4878.217,
"text": " Right and but it's not the particular phenomenology of phenomenological content. It's the insight machinery. It's it's very much in a continue. Think about when you have an insight, right? And you all and then you know why you were wrong before, but you can't know that until you go through it, right? It's that it's that kind of thing. It's like it's like a it's like a systemic"
},
{
"end_time": 4926.766,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 4901.664,
"text": " insight and a systematic insight and what's interesting is that the area in which we have our moments the right superior temporal gyrus and sulcus is very close to the area that has been repeatedly found to be associated with transformative religious experience exactly the right temporal parietal junction effectively so i mean that's interesting at every level"
},
{
"end_time": 4952.005,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 4927.09,
"text": " But I feel, Kurt, you need to help us reorientate because we're talking about things that have been difficult to talk about. I just wanted to follow up, though, because if we agree that this is a real phenomena and if we agree that it's not hallucinatory or something that we can dismiss, then, and then if we can also find, you know, first of all, if we can support that culturally and also"
},
{
"end_time": 4960.094,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 4952.005,
"text": " Watch people unfolding exemplary lives. This is sort of the Socratic proposal. Here's a beautiful life."
},
{
"end_time": 4984.991,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 4960.435,
"text": " I agree and in a way you've"
},
{
"end_time": 5009.582,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 4985.452,
"text": " You've given a description of what I aim to do in my work, which is to take people where they see this is a beautiful vision of life, and it makes much more sense. Okay, so here's what an atheist may say or an extremely staunched materialist may say that sure, you had an experience of something real, but your experiences can be misleading. And just because you had potentially some psychedelic and you feel like so and so is real, well, that can be triggered, let's say with"
},
{
"end_time": 5030.742,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5010.179,
"text": " Transcranial stimulation and other methods so I can make you feel like something's real when it's not so why attribute realness to it? Just say it was interesting. So here's an example Sam Harris said that he took an extreme amount of mushrooms I'm not saying anything that he hasn't said publicly and then blindfolded himself went into a room and he said he felt like he was encountering something else and"
},
{
"end_time": 5054.36,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5031.169,
"text": " But then during and afterward, he said, well, I was saying, well, this is just me on drugs. And so I allowed it to take me whatever it was, some tiger or some other being, I allowed it to take me from realm to realm, but I didn't ascribe any realness to it. That also reminded me of this quote, I believe, Ian, you mentioned it the last time you and John spoke on the rebel podcast."
},
{
"end_time": 5083.916,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 5055.162,
"text": " from karst someone who heidegger said was the most important philosopher i don't know if i'm pronouncing the name correctly well james karst i didn't know that heidegger knew karst i i think it's a different person okay okay you said that heidegger spoke at his funeral john you said heidegger spoke at his funeral oh no that's that's max shaler okay that's shalers then it was heidegger spoke at max shaler's funeral and said that that max shaler was the greatest european philosopher of his generation"
},
{
"end_time": 5108.063,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 5084.292,
"text": " Which was uncharacteristically humble of Heidegger. I think the connection was reconstructed memory. I had mentioned that Kars had just recently died, I believe. Oh, okay. And that's your memory put them together in that fashion. Okay, so my two points are then Schuyler perhaps said, I think it's Schuyler that"
},
{
"end_time": 5130.213,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 5108.063,
"text": " You need to open yourself up to knowledge rather than having knowledge change you. Something like that. And it made me think, okay, is it that someone like Sam Harris is so closed to the divine that even if he encounters it, he wouldn't see it and he discounts it? Well, that was just one thought that came through my head. And then the next one was we're focusing so much on the nourishing effects of these mystical experiences."
},
{
"end_time": 5158.626,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 5130.213,
"text": " But there is such a thing as totalizing fear, terror and horror, bad trips, for example, whether or not they're even trips. And so then what's happening there where one feels like, yes, what I've encountered is real and I'm terrified and I don't want that. Those are two separate points that I just wanted to lay out there as potential jumping off. I think they're related, but I'll let Ian go first. I think they are related points. Yeah, maybe they are. And I think on the first point, I would say"
},
{
"end_time": 5188.2,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 5158.626,
"text": " Yes, of course, things that one's mind brings before one may be deceptive, but then often they're also real and it's not enough to say, well, we just dismissed it, because sometimes it's going to produce something very important and sometimes it isn't. The same is true of every way of arriving at knowledge. Reason can lead you down blind alleys or"
},
{
"end_time": 5209.582,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 5188.2,
"text": " what I call rationality. Leading one's life by pure logic reduces it to a meaningless mess as Demasio's description of a patient called Elliot. He had to work everything out from first principles, he had no understanding of life whatever. So reason, but I wouldn't say well in that case I'm not going to use reason."
},
{
"end_time": 5228.012,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 5209.582,
"text": " and i i have the same view about intuition you know psychologists are amused by developing very clever little scenarios in which one's normally extremely helpful intuition is deceived there are going to be such things i can show you optical illusions that are completely unbelievable are those two squares"
},
{
"end_time": 5258.029,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 5232.841,
"text": " I've never heard anyone after seeing a very good optical illusion say, well that does it, I'm not going to open my eyes then from now forwards because they might be wrong. So the mode in which something comes to one doesn't say either it's got to be right or it's got to be wrong. We need to examine the experience, see what its effects on us are, and what I'm suggesting is that experiences that have long-lasting benign effects on somebody"
},
{
"end_time": 5284.65,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 5259.275,
"text": " are not nothing and they are good which is what the person believes they are because what we're going to say is the definition of this good experience it's not that it leads to good consequences so it's easy to dismiss things but that's the lazy way you have to actually say well some things no doubt deserve to be dismissed some things don't anyway"
},
{
"end_time": 5306.442,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 5284.906,
"text": " Well, I want to buttress that. First of all, yeah, I was not purporting to give an argument from the authority of a particular kind of experience. I think our culture is beset by trying to find the magical faculty that will give us certainty. This is a Cartesian wet dream that we should abandon once and for all."
},
{
"end_time": 5326.357,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 5306.442,
"text": " And also the other project, which is just the flip side of it, finding the part, the faculty that we should demonize and scapegoat for all of our failures. I think we should give up both of those projects. They don't comport well with how cognition works or intelligence works or consciousness works. And I'm not saying you're saying that, Kurt, I'm just responding to your proposed"
},
{
"end_time": 5353.558,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 5326.357,
"text": " Secondly, I said I am suspicious of the claims, the propositional claims that come out of the content of these experience precisely because they vary in the way you say. What I make an argument for is we have good reason to believe that these experiences are actually on a continuum with insight experiences, flow experiences,"
},
{
"end_time": 5376.118,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 5353.729,
"text": " experiences by which we are optimally sort of getting a meta-optimal grip on the world, where we are engaging in a kind of direct sensory motor feedback with the world, etc. Yes, Harris is right, there probably is no tiger in the room, but he doesn't bother to ask what might have been happening."
},
{
"end_time": 5392.108,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 5377.261,
"text": " He just says, well, here's the proposition that I came up with. It's false. Therefore, everything was wrong. Well, how do we know? How do we know what like why doesn't he bother to ask? Why is a tiger being thrown up in my altered perception of the room?"
},
{
"end_time": 5417.927,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 5393.695,
"text": " Yeah, there's no tiger there. But what if you were to say, what if what's that the very act of coming up with the tiger was connecting areas of cognition that if he bothered to explore, could give him some more fundamental insight into how he is perceiving or framing things. That's how many people within these wisdom traditions would respond to him. They would say, well, why did you stop there?"
},
{
"end_time": 5444.394,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 5418.302,
"text": " Why did you stop there? Why did you, why, why didn't you talk to other people? And I mean, when you, when you're, when you're trying to determine if anything else is real, you stop after one moment of thought or do you do, do you do a lot of science? Firstly, just to clarify for the record, I don't know if what he's encountered was a tiger, but it was some other creature or being, and I don't want to spread misinformation, but that's that. And then third, and then secondly, you mentioned, why didn't you talk to other people? Okay."
},
{
"end_time": 5467.807,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 5444.974,
"text": " Interesting. I was speaking to Diana Pasolka, who's a professor of religion, and she was saying, Kurt, something that's missing in all of these modern forms of religion, which are spiritual but not religious, is sangha, so a community. Yes, totally, totally. That's what I mean by autodidactic. She said that that's even the answer to Plato's cave."
},
{
"end_time": 5489.582,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 5468.473,
"text": " Then I asked her, well, is that in Plato's case? She said, no, it's in the Republic. And she gave me some explanation. But regardless, from my understanding of the non-theist position, or neo-Platonism, I think Peugeot says you can't simply resurrect a religion from reading books. How is it that we become neo-Platonists? Is it truly a religion that you're enacting? Well, first of all, I want to first of all pick up on the first point."
},
{
"end_time": 5505.964,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 5489.889,
"text": " yeah i don't mean to be misspeaking if i'm incorrectly no no no no no no no no no no i mean uh this is this is all this is at the core of the whole dialectic into theologos project that i've engaged in the after socrates the which is convergent from with all of this increasing information"
},
{
"end_time": 5534.309,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 5505.964,
"text": " that when people are that reason i'll use ian's word then is uh evolved to be carried out dialogically not monologically multi-perspectivally not model perspectival right that we do not have a monadic self we have a fluid etc etc etc what's some of that evidence okay you are you're familiar with the ways in selection tasks bright people smart educated people you give them a very simple"
},
{
"end_time": 5562.125,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 5534.906,
"text": " reasoning experiment and only ten percent of them get it right reliably no replication prices on this robustly take the exact same thing let there be four people and they're allowed to talk to each other the success rate goes reliably from ten percent to eighty percent yeah reliably that is a and that is not exhaustive read uh... the enigma of reason by mercer and spurber others this just overwhelming evidence that we have we have this mona and that's my point to to"
},
{
"end_time": 5583.899,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 5562.125,
"text": " Harris never questions, at least the Harris of your example, maybe it's not the actual Harris, but that's the name I'm going to use. He doesn't question the monological frame from which he is giving an answer, and the point is, well, that's not how reason evolved to work."
},
{
"end_time": 5610.401,
"index": 239,
"start_time": 5584.343,
"text": " Reason should be carried out, and this is, I think, the core Socratic claim, dialogically. No, there's dialogos with other people, but you also have to practice the dialogos within the psyche. This is, again, a proper Platonic idea, and those two dialogues, those two forms of dialogos, they have to be resonant with each other in a profound way. And for me, that is"
},
{
"end_time": 5620.998,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 5610.691,
"text": " Most properly how to try and be as reasonable as I possibly can. Will it give me certainty? No. But as Ian said, nothing does."
},
{
"end_time": 5641.664,
"index": 241,
"start_time": 5621.544,
"text": " right if your criteria is well that could fail therefore i reject it then you are an absolute soul of cystic skeptic and then if you and if i ask you okay what do you do to well i talk to other people i reflect them i ask questions i like but do that with these experiences too nobody's telling you take the experience and then just accept it take these experiences"
},
{
"end_time": 5669.65,
"index": 242,
"start_time": 5641.664,
"text": " Put them in this framework, make sure independent of this frame of these experience that this framework is working profoundly to help you self correct, catch your bias, catch your flaws, and then integrate the two together. And for me, that would make it much more like a religion than just a belief system in the modern enlightenment sense of a belief system. Did that answer your question, Kurt? Generally, it takes me days of reflection to realize if something answered my question."
},
{
"end_time": 5678.097,
"index": 243,
"start_time": 5670.265,
"text": " Fair enough. That's exactly right. That's exactly the right answer."
},
{
"end_time": 5707.363,
"index": 244,
"start_time": 5678.37,
"text": " Well, first of all, I think that it cannot be overstated how important that point of community is at the core of religion. And it's what is one of the roots of what we started by talking about the meaning crisis. Meaning is held by communities that have common histories, common narratives, common myths, and a sense of belonging, which is, you know, you talked, I think, about, John, about the"
},
{
"end_time": 5735.623,
"index": 245,
"start_time": 5708.234,
"text": " I don't know what you called it, de-domiciled or something, but I mean, we no longer have a home. We no longer feel we belong somewhere and that sense of belonging is part of meaning and one gets it from belonging to a functional family and belonging to a functional society. There is no such thing as an atomistic individual. We emerge from society and we give back to society and we are in constant communion with society"
},
{
"end_time": 5756.715,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 5735.623,
"text": " and what a religion does is to strengthen those bonds and the feelings of empathy which lead to extraordinary effects on cognition on emotion on well-being including physical well-being and mental well-being obviously and the evidence about this is so strong and it's not widely known but i give it in the very last part of um"
},
{
"end_time": 5776.323,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 5756.715,
"text": " of the matter with things so i think that's a very good point i think another point is that we we shouldn't overemphasize the importance of you know mystical moments we may or may not have them i mean a very important thing is that many spiritual people have never experienced these things but are deeply good and wise"
},
{
"end_time": 5801.834,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 5776.323,
"text": " so there are many people who have achieved that state say you know if you have a some sort of a you know a vision or something that's great but really forget about it and go back to getting on with religion so it's a kind of icing on the cake it's the in a way it's slightly too much of a lure for people nowadays oh you know i want some sensational experience but it's not really about the sensational experience"
},
{
"end_time": 5818.626,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 5802.415,
"text": " the"
},
{
"end_time": 5835.23,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 5818.626,
"text": " In fact, most aberrant versions or peculiar versions, unusual versions of reality in the sense of hallucination to do things anyway, come from the left hemisphere, something I go into the very first part of the matter with things."
},
{
"end_time": 5852.585,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 5835.606,
"text": " but i think what happens is that the frontal lobes are relatively shut down and i think there's imaging evidence that this is the case so this lower circulation in the frontal lobe and of course what the frontal lobes are above all is a filter"
},
{
"end_time": 5872.415,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 5852.585,
"text": " And when you stop filtering what the brain is privy to, then you get good and bad. You may be lucky and have a good experience. You may have a terrible experience. And in fact, I believe that terribly, although the literature tends to stress the good experiences, terrible experiences, bad trips under"
},
{
"end_time": 5899.053,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 5872.415,
"text": " Reported in the sense that they're not talked about but they're very real and they happen an awful lot. So I just wanted to make a few points that we're getting off too much onto emphasizing the very unusual and to go back to this idea of imagination in which you see into things that you thought you knew and then realize that you know them for the very first time and that experience is a sacred experience."
},
{
"end_time": 5927.483,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 5900.452,
"text": " I want to pick up on two things that Ian said. That's what I meant when I said I wasn't holding these experiences up as authoritative, and I'm also not saying everybody should have them. What I'm saying is we need to have ways of life that properly home them and that are beautified by them. I don't think everybody has to have them, but"
},
{
"end_time": 5943.831,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 5927.483,
"text": " Yes."
},
{
"end_time": 5968.609,
"index": 256,
"start_time": 5944.206,
"text": " What do you have to do? You have to do drop out, turn off half the nodes or you have to throw noise in or Stefan and Dixon. People are impassing on an insight problem and you literally put visual static into it and they get the insight or the mild mind wandering that helps people have an insight. You have to throw some noise and the noise isn't"
},
{
"end_time": 5998.882,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 5969.343,
"text": " noise is noise it's destructive it's frame breaking that's horrific that's why the the the sacred always has a terrific or horrific aspect to it awe is connected to awful for good reason right but throw but you you know the reverse if you don't ever throw any noise into the neural network what happens it overfits to the data it doesn't generalize it fixates it gets locked into a local minima as opposed to the woodward and other people do that we have we have"
},
{
"end_time": 6018.524,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 5999.292,
"text": " you know, we can have psychedelic experiences or meditative experiences or sensory motor experiences that do that massive frame breaking. But it's not just the frame breaking. I don't think people should just have these experiences. In fact, I'm arguing the exact opposite. We need to have a proper"
},
{
"end_time": 6044.292,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 6018.524,
"text": " like a sapiential sacred community around them so that that frame breaking is compensated with a lot of resources for frame making. That's what I'm trying to propose. That's what I'm trying to propose. I just wanted to comment briefly on, I agree with all that you said, that the idea of putting interference in is not that"
},
{
"end_time": 6070.145,
"index": 260,
"start_time": 6044.667,
"text": " i just want to distinguish between two possibilities one i believe is wrong and that is the idea that somehow distraction is what is good going on there what is good there is that you at last i'm not sure that you know so we're constantly going familiar familiar familiar i get it i know what it is and that's a very uncreative state that is what the left hemisphere"
},
{
"end_time": 6088.387,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 6070.145,
"text": " yes exactly"
},
{
"end_time": 6112.671,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 6088.387,
"text": " exactly that's exactly that's exactly what i'm saying yeah i knew it was yeah i don't want i don't want i don't want eliot's distracted from distraction by distraction what i meant is like that that you disidentify from the framing enough that it can break up you put criticality exactly so it can self-organize anew that's what i would say completely agree yeah where does faith enter into this"
},
{
"end_time": 6138.968,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 6113.387,
"text": " When I hear much about unknowing, I was reading about Nicholas of Cusa and someone said, either commentary on him or he said, you must strive upward unknowingly. Where does faith enter into this? I know you have a partner. If I ask you, are you going to be faithful to her? And I'm not asking you to divulge privacy. Are you talking to me?"
},
{
"end_time": 6145.862,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 6139.343,
"text": " I'm talking to you. I mean, if you love somebody, there is a call to faithfulness. Does that mean you have a complete account of them?"
},
{
"end_time": 6176.459,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 6147.585,
"text": " no that's ridiculous does it mean you have an absolute certainty about them no they're going to surprise you again and again again meet people that have been married 25 years deeply in love and they'll say man my partner can surprise me again and again i never it's never done it's never done this is my this is my experience right so faithfulness faith doesn't mean i have certainty it doesn't mean that i have a completion of you that i grasp you that i can manipulate you at will in fact it means"
},
{
"end_time": 6205.657,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 6176.459,
"text": " It doesn't mean any of those. It means that I have bound myself to you so that I understand that there are truths about you that will not be disclosed to me unless I'm willing to undergo transformation in relationship to you and allow you to do the same with me. These are transformative truths that are disclosed by maintaining a continuity of contact and an understanding that we are going to reciprocally open with each other."
},
{
"end_time": 6211.578,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 6206.254,
"text": " Learned ignorance is the place at which you are most able to do that with the ground of being."
},
{
"end_time": 6240.162,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 6212.108,
"text": " You are reciprocally opening to its inexhaustible-ness, and you are being reciprocally transformed by that opening again and again. It's not that you come to some conclusive statement that you can make. It is the same kind of sense you have of the depth of connectedness you have to somebody you have been faithful to, and it grows the longer you've been faithful, the language that we've been together."
},
{
"end_time": 6269.155,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 6240.794,
"text": " We should give up the idea of faith as the assertion of things without evidence. There's all kinds of evidence in your relationship. But if I was to say, could you deduce or induce or abuse that you should stay with your partner because of this evidence? You'd say, no, that's ridiculous. It's way more than that. And that's exactly the faithfulness element. Ian, this reciprocal opening, the way that I imagine or the way that one generally imagines God is that, yes, you can open up to God, but it's not as if"
},
{
"end_time": 6299.48,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 6269.565,
"text": " God is changing because of you. Now, I know that that means that there's a static view of God and perhaps we should move away from that. Yeah, but we don't know that. I actually believe with Whitehead that the world by which he meant the whole experiential cosmos and God are coming into being together reciprocally and that we therefore have a part to play, a very important part. So it actually matters how we respond to the world."
},
{
"end_time": 6309.428,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 6299.991,
"text": " what we make of it what we see in it and what we give back to it i'm just going to go and put a light on i didn't want to do it well john oh yes because it seems a bit rude but i'm just going to"
},
{
"end_time": 6340.111,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 6315.691,
"text": " Not sure that doesn't make any difference, but night is falling here. You're kind of film noir-ish now, Ian. I'm trying to what? You're kind of film noir-ish. You're lit on one side. No, that's absolutely fine. Yes, I like asymmetry, as you probably know. So yes, where were we? We were talking about"
},
{
"end_time": 6364.36,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 6340.247,
"text": " You were talking about right-head and the reciprocal opening between God and the world. Yes, the reciprocal opening. So I think that is a very important idea. And I think that another thing that is worth saying while talking about faith is there is a similar duality in the idea of belief. So, for example, I can say, I believe in a certain person. You know, I really believe in him. It means I put my trust in him."
},
{
"end_time": 6373.968,
"index": 274,
"start_time": 6364.77,
"text": " What is the responsibility on me to respond?"
},
{
"end_time": 6397.073,
"index": 275,
"start_time": 6374.343,
"text": " the the the"
},
{
"end_time": 6423.643,
"index": 276,
"start_time": 6397.449,
"text": " This concept of faith as blind needs to be put to bed once and for all. If I am forwarding a stream and my companion has gone ahead across the stream and as I get near the bank I need a hand and he or she holds out a hand to me, it's not a random hand, it's not like blind to trust this hand, I have to step and I have to take the hand."
},
{
"end_time": 6447.722,
"index": 277,
"start_time": 6423.848,
"text": " and that's that's the way i see it that you see something that is calling to you and saying if you understand this it will radically change the way you think about the world and there is no one right way to know so just to say well i think i've already got it and i'm not going to try this at all i'm not going to put myself in the way of something happening that's really what i'm saying it has to be experiential as john and i agree"
},
{
"end_time": 6474.241,
"index": 278,
"start_time": 6447.995,
"text": " but what that means is that you do have a responsibility to put yourself in the way of something happening and you know if you sit at home saying i want to marry but i'll never i'll never meet anybody you never ever leave the home you will never get married if you want to you you don't know who you will marry it's entirely unpredictable it may be chance what happens but nonetheless you have to open yourself to the possibility otherwise it won't happen and the same i think is true of our relationship with"
},
{
"end_time": 6501.391,
"index": 279,
"start_time": 6475.145,
"text": " with the cosmos at large which i believe is a living organismic entity a conscious entity or god depending on what it is that you be i don't want to rule anybody's attempt to make this encounter out just because of a word i wanted to pick up on the you know the connections between you know trust troth"
},
{
"end_time": 6529.77,
"index": 280,
"start_time": 6502.073,
"text": " truth, we talk about being betrothed to somebody, we talk about being true to somebody, there's deep connections between these. And we've come up with a notion of faith that is so disconnected from that interconnecting set, you know, truth and troth and trust, that's just a fundamental mistake. We need a sense of, that's why I propose the notion of faithfulness, because many people hear something different in faithfulness than they do to faith, because it connects with that."
},
{
"end_time": 6558.712,
"index": 281,
"start_time": 6529.77,
"text": " Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,"
},
{
"end_time": 6588.78,
"index": 282,
"start_time": 6559.104,
"text": " An estimated over precise estimate of the amount of stuff that our brain is processing is that only 0.6% of it is stuff that we are aware of being aware of."
},
{
"end_time": 6619.753,
"index": 283,
"start_time": 6589.872,
"text": " So our self-conscious, self-aware awareness is the accompaniment to almost all of our life. It doesn't mean it's not happening to us. It doesn't mean it's not changing us. It doesn't mean that we're not partaking in it. It just means that that bit of us in which we stand back and consciously say, I've been in this state or I am in this state. Well, first of all, doing that in the state would interrupt it. And it's again, to quote Whitehead, he says that operations of thought are like cavalry charges in battle."
},
{
"end_time": 6636.152,
"index": 284,
"start_time": 6619.753,
"text": " They need to be very rare they require fresh horses and then not a solution to the way in which one carries out a campaign so you know you. The fact that you're not aware but I wanted just to talk about time because."
},
{
"end_time": 6653.66,
"index": 285,
"start_time": 6636.647,
"text": " there's a sense in which time is passing in which we're outside the flow objectively and we're watching things happening and we have this image of something moving past us but there's another kind of being in the flow of time where we're not standing on the bank of the river with a"
},
{
"end_time": 6681.288,
"index": 286,
"start_time": 6653.66,
"text": " a clipboard and a stopwatch measuring things but we are actually in the flow we are literally swimming with the river and as far as we're concerned the river is not really moving we're moving with the river so relative to us as it were time is still but in fact nonetheless the flow is happening time is passing we are part of it it just depends on whether we're apart from it and imagining ourselves to be stationary or taking part in it"
},
{
"end_time": 6703.968,
"index": 287,
"start_time": 6682.227,
"text": " Yeah, I don't have much to add to that other than sort of a Bergsonian idea that when we start reflecting on time, and I'm not saying we shouldn't, but we lose time in. I mean, this is the way to distract, this is the way to, it's a sneaky way to win when you're sparring with somebody, compliment what they just did."
},
{
"end_time": 6724.292,
"index": 288,
"start_time": 6704.855,
"text": " because they're"
},
{
"end_time": 6754.019,
"index": 289,
"start_time": 6724.292,
"text": " So yeah, I mean, I'm not advising doing that. I have done it. I have seen that. Well, maybe more than once, but not a lot of times. But just to make, but the point I'm making aside from whether or not I fell into a vice is that I hope you know I'm joking. Well, that's why I'm laughing. So yeah. Yeah, I, I think there's a sense"
},
{
"end_time": 6774.326,
"index": 290,
"start_time": 6754.65,
"text": " Augustine said it famously, I know what time is until somebody asks me, and I don't want to get too much into the philosophy of time, but I hope this doesn't come off as a ridiculous pseudo postmodern pun. There are times when timing matters, and there's times when the future matters."
},
{
"end_time": 6791.664,
"index": 291,
"start_time": 6775.009,
"text": " I think giving the advice to always stay in the present moment is like, that's not true. I mean, we need a present moment that is bound ratio religio to our future self."
},
{
"end_time": 6818.08,
"index": 292,
"start_time": 6791.664,
"text": " We have to pursue long-term goals. Meyersitz and Fischbach talk about, you know, you have two different things. You have to do things inside a frame where you have to be able to self-regulate, delay gratification. That's in the present moment and mindfulness practices are power, meditative practices are powerful for that. But you also need to do frame widening because you need to see if what's happening in your present state is concurrent, not concurrent, consonant with"
},
{
"end_time": 6839.206,
"index": 293,
"start_time": 6818.541,
"text": " your long-term future goals and your future self. Remember the people who don't save for their retirement. You need to balance properly between them and I think that's what contemplative practices do. Contemplative practices are often designed not to get us immersed in the present moment in that sense. They're designed to remind us about the comprehensive big picture in powerful and deep ways and"
},
{
"end_time": 6864.275,
"index": 294,
"start_time": 6839.206,
"text": " Simplistic models, I do not think give us what is conducive to a good human life."
},
{
"end_time": 6876.596,
"index": 295,
"start_time": 6865.265,
"text": " We don't want to be a wanted, we don't want to be a creature of pure impulse because then we'll just be destroyed, this is Delman's point, our agency will just be destroyed. I think that's absolutely not what"
},
{
"end_time": 6896.118,
"index": 296,
"start_time": 6876.92,
"text": " many exponents of the idea that we should remain in the present are meaning not that we should be thoughtless and never reflect and not that we should be impulsive above all but that we should be able in fact by us kind of standing back to be more present to the whole. I think"
},
{
"end_time": 6925.896,
"index": 297,
"start_time": 6896.118,
"text": " I mean, I don't disagree with your essential point. I often think, you know, it's all very well, but we are the creature that looks before and behind, you know, and that is our nature. We are beings who reflect towards the past and the future. So, yeah. I agree deeply. What I meant was... I know. I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just saying that's the way to think of it. I agree. I'm agreeing with how you're agreeing with me."
},
{
"end_time": 6945.111,
"index": 298,
"start_time": 6927.602,
"text": " I propose that many people are using the slogan of being the present moment"
},
{
"end_time": 6971.459,
"index": 299,
"start_time": 6945.64,
"text": " for gratification, for not long-term planning, for being reckless, for justifying going for the gusto and all other of the... We have a whole constellation of memes around this, right, which is of course designed to keep us buying stuff and perpetually dissatisfied. And that was the sense I wanted to challenge. Okay, so let me see if I can tie a few threads together and weave it back to the beginning."
},
{
"end_time": 6975.947,
"index": 300,
"start_time": 6972.073,
"text": " Ian, when you said- yeah, there's a misinterpretation of what it means to be in the present moment."
},
{
"end_time": 7006.476,
"index": 301,
"start_time": 6976.886,
"text": " This is interesting because much of the advice that I read in the comment section, not on told videos, well on told videos, but on other people's videos and advice that I hear from quote unquote gurus and so on. I'm interpreting it in a certain way because I grew up in the West and the way that they're interpreting something in from an English text, which was already translated and perhaps they have a misinterpretation, then I'm misinterpreting what they're saying. So when some people say, well, I am God or so on, so on, people say, yeah, I feel that. Well, you don't know if what you"
},
{
"end_time": 7029.241,
"index": 302,
"start_time": 7007.193,
"text": " If what they mean is what you feel, and then when I hear about, we were talking earlier about practices and rituals, and they're important, you hear, well, we should do, we should be mindful more and this feature list, as you call them, john, this bullet point list of what we should do. It's not entirely clear, like I believe in, I used to believe in all that, let's say two years, one,"
},
{
"end_time": 7054.684,
"index": 303,
"start_time": 7030.043,
"text": " My adult life until one year ago, because I'm such a liberal person in the sense that I want everyone to be correct, like every culture is correct in their way. And everyone's touching a certain part of the elephant. It's just a different part and and no one's wrong. So let me just let me take the good and and put in different pieces into me. However, I feel it's as if trying to install Mac software on a Windows computer"
},
{
"end_time": 7083.677,
"index": 304,
"start_time": 7054.906,
"text": " like we're Windows. And if you force an EXE on a Mac, not firstly won't load, but if you force it, it will corrupt it. And so I think so much of what's gone incorrect with me and perhaps with others, because as I talk about certain, let's say episodes of mine, publicly, people say, Oh, my gosh, I've gone through something similar. And I haven't heard almost anyone else talk about it. And here's what I've gone through. I feel like what's happening is that we're being told so many lessons from so many different places."
},
{
"end_time": 7112.142,
"index": 305,
"start_time": 7083.916,
"text": " They're not unified and we're trying to apply them to ourselves. So Ian, you used this word marrying earlier that you need to open yourself up to marriage. And earlier you talked about traditional religion and Kurt, his entire adult life and his entire teenage life, just an inexorable atheist and uncompromising one, one that's condescending to anything that is remotely superstitious or what I would classify as superstitious would say, no, there's nothing in traditional religion that needs saving. And if we're going to formulate something that's"
},
{
"end_time": 7140.52,
"index": 306,
"start_time": 7112.142,
"text": " A new religion has to be religion without religion in John's words, though I'm using those words now. I wouldn't have said that before, but I see that there's something to marrying a religion. And what I mean by that is when it comes to my wife, it's not like I evaluated every woman on the planet and said this was the best one. There's going to be flaws with each one. So it's as if I had to decide that she's the right one or create the right one together with her. And I wonder if the same is true with religion, that part of this is that we simply need to decide a religion and then make it"
},
{
"end_time": 7162.602,
"index": 307,
"start_time": 7140.52,
"text": " Right for us and it's not going to be right there's gonna be so much that they say that's incorrect so that i'm just like no there's like adam and eve didn't it's not literal and why are you excoriating evolution constantly like this is not how it is and and i disbelieve that and so on and so on there's so much that i disbelieve but there's so much that i gain from it there's so much that i gain from having this community that's ensconced in a tradition"
},
{
"end_time": 7186.135,
"index": 308,
"start_time": 7164.036,
"text": " So anyway, those are some thoughts that I'm laying out in a sense to tie what we talked about in the beginning together with some of the threads that were left open throughout. What are your thoughts on that? John, do you want to start? Well, you're addressing them to Ian. I thought he should respond first. Ian, please. Well, I don't know which bit to respond to, but"
},
{
"end_time": 7205.23,
"index": 309,
"start_time": 7187.176,
"text": " I mean first of all I think that there's a huge problem in taking something that is clearly a myth as literal truth. I think that's a very modern idea that you know we're so used to talking only literal terms mean anything and are true."
},
{
"end_time": 7231.305,
"index": 310,
"start_time": 7205.23,
"text": " that a myth, I mean the very word suggests that it's false, but now we only started using the word in the 19th century and in fact of course mythos was anciently for the Greeks the superior way of arriving at truth. Logos was a secondary kind of truth which over time took over from it but it was through mythos that one actually reached these deeper realities that I think you're describing"
},
{
"end_time": 7251.63,
"index": 311,
"start_time": 7231.749,
"text": " as possibly being experienced by people in religion. The idea of marrying, yes I mean of course I'm not talking, well I don't know if I mentioned that, I mean I was just using it as an example, but I think that the point there is that it brings up the idea of something that is fitting"
},
{
"end_time": 7278.575,
"index": 312,
"start_time": 7251.63,
"text": " Carpenters still talk about two surfaces that meet perfectly as marrying, they're fitting, and it's this sense of something that is a correspondence that is attention or something that is resolved in a new union. That something is what we're describing as the meaningful encounter, the faithful encounter, where something about the two surfaces"
},
{
"end_time": 7299.428,
"index": 313,
"start_time": 7279.445,
"text": " produce something completely new that neither surface on their own could even conceive or never mind achieve? Yes, I mean the way I would put that is what you're doing in religion is continuous with"
},
{
"end_time": 7318.456,
"index": 314,
"start_time": 7300.009,
"text": " What you're doing in all of your cognition, which is relevance realization, which is about trying to fit your framing to the world. And it is not given by you nor received by the world, but transjective. It is made by the two fitting together, just like biological adaptivity."
},
{
"end_time": 7341.442,
"index": 315,
"start_time": 7318.456,
"text": " You know, Kurt, that's how I use that as a metaphor for the relevance realization that I think is at the core of our cognition. And so what are you doing with a myth? I think you're doing a kind of relevance realization. Myths aren't false stories about the paths. They're imaginal stories to enable us to see pertinent"
},
{
"end_time": 7358.882,
"index": 316,
"start_time": 7341.63,
"text": " and profound and pervasive problems and patterns that we are not paying attention to. Myth in that sense is bound up with the proper sense of prophecy. Prophecy isn't telling the future, it's telling forth what needs to be seen right now, deeply."
},
{
"end_time": 7384.804,
"index": 317,
"start_time": 7359.411,
"text": " And so for me, like, if you are getting a lot out of it, ask yourself, kid, and you know, the fact that whoever is giving you the really silly sermon about, you know, the book of Genesis disproves Darwin or something ridiculous than that. I mean, like, if you can, if the myth comes alive for you, what's it doing? I mean, the best the best myths"
},
{
"end_time": 7412.125,
"index": 318,
"start_time": 7385.862,
"text": " Make us aware of the fact that we're bound up in mythos, that we're bound up in relevance realization, that we're bound to the world, that we're connected to it, we're connected to each other. And this connectedness, we don't make it, nor do we merely receive it, we participate in it, we cultivate it, and we have a deep and profound responsibility to it because of how much we belong to it and participate in it. And I think that's what"
},
{
"end_time": 7439.002,
"index": 319,
"start_time": 7412.858,
"text": " when religion is functioning well, it uses its mythos to do that. Can religion malfunction? Of course it can. Everything can malfunction. Science can malfunction. Math was on this crazy thing where they, you know, this whole project we thought we could give a logical foundation for math, you know, a century of this crazy, and it turned out just to be an impossible project. We can go, everything, even math can go down rabbit holes. We've got to stop, again,"
},
{
"end_time": 7469.531,
"index": 320,
"start_time": 7439.599,
"text": " like hoping that we'll find perfection as the mark of the sacred, with meeting that in which we should trust, right? God we trust, right? We've got to get more to this sense of fecundity, richness. When I do my neoplatonic practices, the virtues that I cultivate in them transfer very well to my experience and to my mind, to my practices as a scientist, and vice versa."
},
{
"end_time": 7499.753,
"index": 321,
"start_time": 7471.135,
"text": " And a lot of people, this is now becoming a viable philosophical position, virtue epistemology, that actually what we're doing in all of our domains is trying to cultivate a set of virtues that we can apply across these many domains. And so for me, if it's doing that, if the mythos allows you to cultivate virtues that percolate through your psyche and permeate through your life, what more could you want? What more could you want?"
},
{
"end_time": 7525.418,
"index": 322,
"start_time": 7500.179,
"text": " That's what you want when you marry someone. And I think we've got to give up, I keep saying this, we've got to give up the hunger for completion, for certainty, for comprehensive grasp. We've got to stop that. And it's so endemic and insidious in our thinking. It takes a lot of effort personally and collectively to address that."
},
{
"end_time": 7550.555,
"index": 323,
"start_time": 7526.63,
"text": " Should we give up on all of certainty or should we say, oh, I like so-and-so because it's more certain. I don't have the idea that I'll ever be 100% certain, but this gives me more groundedness, more certainty. When we call anything certain, we can only mean certain up to a point. There is no such thing as total certainty. And in different areas, certainty means different kinds of thing, really."
},
{
"end_time": 7579.821,
"index": 324,
"start_time": 7550.913,
"text": " I think I agree entirely with John that giving up on the idea of certainty is hugely important and it's the belief that either science or reason will lead us to the same infallible conclusion all of us and will reveal the truth about things is naive, dangerous, deluded. But not that we should honor science and reason, we should. We should also honor"
},
{
"end_time": 7601.988,
"index": 325,
"start_time": 7580.435,
"text": " Intuition and imagination and you know just perhaps the last thing I shall say the greatest myth for me is the myth that is about myth which is the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. So Orpheus was a demi-god and he could with his music move"
},
{
"end_time": 7632.108,
"index": 326,
"start_time": 7602.363,
"text": " stones he could move people obviously he could even change the course of a river so he had some magical power of his music that nobody could resist and he got married to a princess Eurydice and after the wedding Eurydice with her bridesmaids was walking in a meadow and she was bitten on the heel by a viper and she died and Orpheus was completely grief-struck and he thought I'm going to go down into the underworld and plead for her"
},
{
"end_time": 7662.517,
"index": 327,
"start_time": 7633.097,
"text": " And something that nobody had ever been able to succeed at doing or able to go there at all, never mind to succeed. So he went to the underworld and he played for the gods of the underworld and they were so moved that they said, yes, okay, we will give you back your bride on one condition that you walk out of the underworld and you don't look back at her until you are completely both clear of the underworld."
},
{
"end_time": 7686.101,
"index": 328,
"start_time": 7662.978,
"text": " and at the end of his journey out he couldn't resist taking a look at his loved one and he was so overwhelmed he reached towards her and she shrunk away back into the underworld never to be seen again. What that seems to me to be about is the power of the not looked at, the implicit, the thing that has to remain"
},
{
"end_time": 7703.831,
"index": 329,
"start_time": 7686.834,
"text": " outside our diminishing consciousness, our world of words, because it simply is too great for it and can only be conveyed through imagination in myths, imagination in a religious faith or a spiritual realm anyway."
},
{
"end_time": 7733.285,
"index": 330,
"start_time": 7706.169,
"text": " Well, thank you all. Thank you all for coming out. I think it's apt that you said this may be the last thing I say and then talk about how speaking itself is besmirching whatever you're talking about. Yes, exactly. That's been the problem. Yeah, yeah. I have these intimations when I do this podcast and I study these different theories. I have these intimations that what I'm doing is a sin in a sense as sin is maybe an incorrect word, but it's not progressing forward is progressing backward."
},
{
"end_time": 7761.34,
"index": 331,
"start_time": 7733.626,
"text": " I got very excited at times because"
},
{
"end_time": 7791.613,
"index": 332,
"start_time": 7762.073,
"text": " We've only spoken once before. Finding a mind as deep and a heart as deep and sharp and insightful as Ian after writing a truly impressive work often converging, and this is in no way trying to take any credit away from Ian, but finding it often converging with my work. I find deeply"
},
{
"end_time": 7800.913,
"index": 333,
"start_time": 7791.903,
"text": " encouraging. Independent lines of research are valued in science because the chances that they have been produced by bias, independent lines that converge"
},
{
"end_time": 7826.067,
"index": 334,
"start_time": 7802.261,
"text": " chance that they've been produced by bias is reduced by that very convergence and the fact that e coming from something they're very different and we often found ourselves in very significant agreement i hope it was still entertaining for people watching but for me i just wanted to express the gratitude and if i got over enthusiastic at some points i apologize but i was i'm just i find it deeply encouraging and i mean that word very"
},
{
"end_time": 7842.722,
"index": 335,
"start_time": 7826.886,
"text": " almost literally very encouraging that this kind of convergence has occurred because for me it raises the plausibility of my own work and also helps me of course deeply appreciate Ian's work but I want to thank Ian."
},
{
"end_time": 7872.329,
"index": 336,
"start_time": 7842.858,
"text": " For me, it's powerful. I find it a very powerful experience. I hope this is not meant in any way like a true peer, you know what I mean? And playing with the words, we're peering at the same thing. And I just thank you."
},
{
"end_time": 7901.22,
"index": 337,
"start_time": 7872.329,
"text": " Thank you very much. Well, I can only respond in kind, John. I feel the same thing. It's so rare to find minds that are so fully in sync, really. We found things that we could slightly gloss for one another, but effectively, we're really talking about the same things. And I have only gratitude for your kindness and your warmth and the feeling of fellowship. So thank you very much indeed."
},
{
"end_time": 7931.067,
"index": 338,
"start_time": 7901.903,
"text": " Okay, all right. Thank you. Thank you for sticking around for two and a half hours. And I appreciate that. I hope that it was enjoyable to you. Again, there's the website theories of everything.org. That's a place that you can go to support toe if you're interested in that. Like I mentioned in the intro, there are several benefits you can add free audio version, you get that"
},
{
"end_time": 7956.408,
"index": 339,
"start_time": 7931.476,
"text": " sometimes 12 to 48 hours to a few days prior to premiering on YouTube. You get discounts to the live events when we finally do have them. Sometimes those tickets may even be free. So for instance, I'm looking into doing something with John Vervecky and Ian McGilchrist in person. This is all extremely tentative right now, but this is a plan to do in the future. Carl Friston in London live in front of an audience is another example. There will be exclusive merch and so on. There's"
},
{
"end_time": 7971.015,
"index": 340,
"start_time": 7956.408,
"text": " quite a few benefits you can text me if you like there's a number at least we're testing that for about one week or one month or so again that's theoriesofeverything.org thank you all for watching it's great to see you in the live chat i appreciate all of the love thank you thank you so much"
}
]
}No transcript available.