A convergence of spiritualities w⧸ Tim Freke - Voices with Vervaeke (y0ISps8ZMMI)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=y0ISps8ZMMI

Hello, how are you? Can you hear me? I can hear you well. Good. Good. Nice to meet you. Very nice to meet you too. Thank you so much for being willing to have this conversation. My pleasure. Looking forward to it. So by way of kind of introduction, I think we have a few things in common which I hope will be interesting for us both. You’re obviously well known now for your work on the meaning crisis. My last book came in through the idea of a soul crisis and I think essentially we’re talking about the same thing. You’re interested in alternative states, I think both experientially and theoretically. That’s how I spent my life, teaching meditation, even teaching Tai Chi, which I believe you do both. Yes. And you have a real interest in dialogue, this dialogue and what I’m doing with this series is really my attempt to do that to show that you can have a constructive, there was a phrase I heard you use on something I was listening to yesterday where you talked about that kind of the search for a victory versus the kind of search for wisdom. Ah, follow Nikea versus follow Sophia. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that’s very, that’s really resonated deeply with me and part of what I’m hoping to kind of explore and show with this kind of series of conversations, it just happened by accident really, is to get together with people I find interesting and explore ideas where we can agree and disagree and just like move around a space and at the end hopefully end up feeling a bit wiser and and anyone who wants to be a voyeur on that process can also make me feel the same. That’s the intention. Excellent, excellent, well said. And my way in to just start us off and see where we go, because it’s my nature really, is to just start with the impossibly big question which is, you like me, you’re getting older, life is short and wonderful, what do you think it is that we’re been experiencing for all these decades and what have you made of it? You mean what do I make of life as an experience? The whole thing really, it’s like what a whole thing. As before getting into ideas maybe or no as including theoretical philosophical ideas, it’s just like as a as John on this journey, what do you think this is? So for me it’s been, I guess how I’ve predominantly experienced my life is as this unfolding process, this will sound, I mean it’s going to sound trite because all the words are going to be inadequate, right? But this process of understanding which has been, I’ve been realizing how much of a dialogical process that is. So over time I want to understand that seems to be a very powerful thing for me, very high need for cognition. But what’s happened to my understanding of understanding, see I’m already getting meta, my understanding of understanding is that it’s gone more and more to see how much understanding is dependent on this inexhaustible fount of intelligibility that I’m constantly like confronted with. And so where it used to be that, right, I’m always going to be like, where it used to be that, right, understanding is more there’s a world out there and I want to sort of get an intellectual net around it. Both scientifically with the work I do on relevance realization and existentially I’ve come to that my understanding of understanding has profoundly changed and that it was more the change in the manner of my understanding that has been satisfying longings in me than necessarily the accumulated content of understanding, if that makes any sense. It was more that, it’s more that, you know, I’m still going to be a scientist. I’m not going to stop being a scientist. I’m going to still, you know, generate theory, gather data, do all of that. But as I move to this more, I don’t know, I often call it a more neoplatonic way of understanding, understanding. That manner of understanding has done much more to touch that longing that we have. I think I share with other people, but I know I have for a kind of inner peace that’s not, it’s not an empty piece. It’s the piece of fullness and then a sense of that being coupled to and responsible to and afforded by a sense of realness. And like I said, it’s more in the manner of my understanding than in the content. The content is not irrelevant. That’s ridiculous, but that’s what I’ve come to see. And that’s why, although I will still, I mean, again, I will still make arguments. I will still generate theories. I’ve become much more interested, again, going back to an individual who really symbolically captures that fount of inexhaustible intelligibility, Socrates, that I’ve moved more into this dialogical way of interacting with people and increasingly with the world as a way of trying to taste more deeply the sweetness of that manner of understanding. Yeah, I needed to say more. So what is the difference? What’s the, do you mean it’s more experiential understanding or is it, it’s just interactive? Yeah, well, interactive is more dialogical. It’s more the sense of a mutual generated connectedness rather than, look at some of the metaphors we have, grasping, right? Instead of grasping or getting, we use these for understanding. Did you grasp it? Did you get it? Did you see it? Right? It’s much more, it has much, I mean, I’m not, I’m not, I’m trying not to be too projective here, but it has much more of the tenor of love, you know, how love is that, you know, that, you know, that accelerating mutual disclosure between you and the beloved. And so it feels, it feels more like that to me. And so that’s also helped me to get a deeper understanding of what, you know, how the love of wisdom and the love of what’s most real actually are two different aspects of the same thing. So does that, is that similar? Let me describe something which I’ve had and then you say whether it’s similar or not. So for me, quite early on, I made a shift from trying to understand it through ideas, which I’ve done it through studying philosophy and blah, blah, blah. But there’d been this recurrence of states in which I felt a notice. I just felt like I know something. And so what I, so, you know, when I came, the reason I moved away from the academic thing for me was I just went into a year of meditation to just generate that. What I need, it felt like, was not to understand things conceptually, but to generate this state in which I seem to interact with myself and the universe in an utterly different way. And then for me, it’s gone the other way because the last 10 years has been about, oh, damn it, I need to understand this conceptually as well now. And I need to come back down and kind of try and get a handle on this through. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, that, I’m completely constant with that. So, I mean, for me, the journey was I actually got into philosophy via the figure of Socrates and the cultivation of wisdom was where I found a spiritual home. And then in academic philosophy, wisdom for a very long time just falls off the table. You never talk about it again. And so I took up the meditative and Tai Chi practices and I, like you just mentioned, and this has been a recurring thing through my life fairly frequently, I have quite profound experiences of at one minute. Sometimes it’s in sort of an enhanced low state within Tai Chi Chuan. Sometimes it’s more like a mystical experience, like the at one minute. And like you, for a while, my academic work was over here. And then, and these practices of wisdom cultivation were over here. But then two things happened. I sort of, I’ve encountered for e-cognitive science in which these things are taken much more seriously from really good, I think, cutting edge cognitive science. And on the other hand, I started to encounter, well, the figure of Plotinus really made a huge impact on me because I saw the capacity for, like when you’re reading Plotinus, it’s like you’re reading this argument sort of on one hand, and on the other hand, he’s taking you through what Hado calls a spiritual exercise. And you’re doing these two things. And I saw, and when I saw that, I was like, oh, that, and I aspire to that in my work now. So it sounds very, very similar. So a good way I would put it in response is that dialogic is not only between me and the world, that manner I’m talking about, it’s also between these different ways. I had talked about four kinds of knowing and things like that as a way of trying to articulate the dialogue. And I’ve come to see that there’s not only are there forms of understanding within each kind of knowing, there’s a deeper kind of understanding between the kinds of knowing. And yeah. What do you mean by that? Oh, well, so what I mean by that is, so based on my own work and the work of other people in 4E cognitive science, I talk about four kinds of knowing. I’ll just quickly mention them and then I’ll talk about. Correct. Okay. So the one we’re most familiar with in our culture, because it’s also most associated with language and the kind of scientific world we have is propositional knowing. This is the knowing that’s carried in proposition. It’s about believing that. It comes with a sense of conviction. Then there’s procedural knowing, which is knowing how to do something like catch a ball. And it’s not carried in propositions. It’s carried in sensory motor patterns. The result isn’t a theory or a belief. It’s a skill. It doesn’t give you a sense of truth or conviction of truth. It gives you a sense of power. So each expresses realness to you in different axes. And then there’s prospectable knowing. You and I are engaged there right now. We have a salient landscape. Things are foregrounded, backgrounded. We have this interpenetrating state of mind and situational awareness, which tells me what it’s like to be me here now. And so I’m sober. I’m in a certain mood. And this situation is a dialogic situation. All of that. And we have this metaphor perspective because we’re trying to capture something. And what people seek in there is the normative thing isn’t truth or power. It’s when we know this now because of VR work, virtual reality. People seek a sense of presence. This is the thing they call it. So in VR, a game is really good if you’re really in the game, if you’re there. I’ve also studied with Dan Chiappi, the scientists who moved the rovers around on Mars, and they look for people who can be on Mars, not just have the technical skills or the theory, but can get to that place where they feel like they’re on Mars, through the rover, that sense of presence. And you know that. You can even sense that when you’re with people. You can be talking to somebody, the propositions can be smooth, and the conversational skills are there, but you can tell they’re just not. They’re not really fully present with you. So there’s that sense of presence, which is really important. Hard to articulate, but really central. And then below it, and making possible all the other ones, is what I call participatory knowing. This is the knowing that doesn’t result in belief or skills or a sense of presence. It results in affordances. It’s the way in which biology and culture and the own dynamics of my cognition mutually shape the world, either physically or psychologically, and me, so I get what I call an agent arena relationship. So here’s right, you know, biology shaped my hand, so certain things of a certain size were graspable. Graspability isn’t the property of the cup. It’s a relationship. They mutually shape, right, and then culture has shaped it. It’s a tool for carrying liquids, and I’ve been taught how to drink with the cup. You have to teach kids how to do that, so we’re mutually shaped. And then my ongoing cognition right now is I need a drink, and so I can tap into all these affordances, make this salient to myself, and well, take a drink. And so those are all the kinds of knowing. Now, one more point to make is there’s a distinction that’s growing in the literature, by the way, especially the philosophy of science literature, between knowledge and understanding. It’s not meant to be like a black and white divide, right, but a shade of continuum. But the idea here, and this is something very dear to my heart, is that what understanding is, is understanding is grasping the significance of what you know, which isn’t… So you can know… So think about knowing a particular fact, and under different contexts, you grasp its significance in different ways. And sometimes that significance is a belief, an implication. Sometimes that significance is you do something, a skill. Sometimes that significance is you have an insight, and your salience landscape shifts. And sometimes that can be… That grasping that significance can be at the level of your identity, the participatory knowing. So those are all the understandings within each kind of knowing. But then there’s the understanding of how is my perspectival knowing significant to my procedural, or my participatory, or my propositional? So how are… Not how pieces of knowledge significant. It’s how is each kind of the knowing significant, grasping the significance of one kind of knowing to another kind. So think about when you deeply love someone, right? You don’t just have beliefs about them. You don’t just have skills about them. You don’t just have shared states of mind. You do something more, of course. You bind your identities, but you do something more than that. The binding of the identities has an impact on how you share experience, on how you shape skills for each other. Like, do you see what I’m getting? And how… Yeah, I do. I do. So not only do you grab the significance of your beliefs, and your skills, and your states of mind and situation, and your states of self and identity, you grasp the significance of each to all of the rest. There’s what’s called a positive manifold between all of those. And I think that’s the deepest kind of understanding. And I think that’s an integral part of wisdom. I think wisdom has important aspects of insight, understanding, self-regulation, and character cultivation to it. And I think that profound understanding. Yeah. So insight, understanding, self-regulation, and the cultivation of character. Insight being… When you realize how you frame something at the aha moment. You realize that your way of finding things relevant and significant was actually rewarding you in solving a problem or achieving a goal. And what you have to do is you have to do that reframing, that restructuring. And now insights can vary both in their depth. You can have sort of a shallow insight about, oh, right, you can think about this that way. You can have a more profound propositional insight like Einstein. Oh, wait, gravity and acceleration are two different aspects of the same thing. Same thing with procedural. So it’s like a more emergent idea that can create some novelty that’s bang, ah, as a reason for… Yeah. And it reconnects you. But you can do that procedurally. You know this in Tai Chi, right? You’re sparring. And you go, wow, where did that come from? And you get a new way of moving and seeing. And you and I, we both gain those kinds of insights that are not insights in consciousness, but insights of consciousness. When you go, whoa, that’s a way of being conscious that I had not realized was possible. Before you get that kind of profound insight. And of course we get the insights into our identity with we get what are called existential insights. And I think… Go ahead. No, no, no, you say. Well, what I was going to say is those insights, they’re still born, right? If there isn’t that deep understanding available to house them and home them and nurture them, right? And then that also requires… That should be done virtuously. That should be done with an eye towards what is true and good and beautiful. And that’s the cultivation of character. And so that’s kind of what… That’s what I was trying to allude to about the deeper kinds of understanding and how it sits within a sapiential framework. I really love that, John. I’m going to have to think about all of that later because it’s just like it’s rich. So how in that or when we were talking earlier about these states of awakening, for want of a better word, these knowings, and how does that fit into that understanding for you? Oh, very much. I mean, so I mean, I’ve spent… I mean, the Greeks have all these different words, right? They have episteme for that propositional, right? And they have techne, and then they have noesis for the perspectival, and then they have gnosis for that deep participatory level. And I thought a lot about… Dyckman, I read something by Dyckman very early on in my career, like my path on this, I don’t like call it career. That sounds like a that sounds wrong. Course, course or something, I don’t know what to call it. But it really, it sunk deep in my heart. And he said, you know, ultimately, it’s not about altered states of consciousness. It’s about altered traits of character. I love that. That’s right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And for me, the way you just did that, like, because that, and I appreciate it, by the way, in both senses of the word, like gratitude for it, I understand it. Like, I appreciate that when I see that in people, when they go, yes, that’s right. That for me, that’s a way of sort of distinguishing the kind of conversations I can, because the people who say, no, I really love the altered states, like, okay. And that’s one kind of conversation. And I’m not trying to be dismissive, but I’m more interested in being and talking with the people who go, yes, yes, because that to me is the crucial thing is, right. And so what I’m trying to get at is I think gnosis is that kind of participatory knowing that does that bridging between altered states and altered traits. So I see this as within an aspirational framework. This is based on the brilliant work of Agnes Kellard. She talks about the fact, and it’s also the brilliant work of LA Paul and transformative experiences, but literally wrote the book on transformative experience. Beautiful. I know Lori, she’s brilliant thinker. And so the way to get at this is to maybe first confront the problem, because I want to capture something of what the Gnostics saw in Gnosis, which it was a solution to some profound kind of problem. I’m not espousing necessarily all the Gnostic metaphysics, but I want to get into the problem, right. So if you’ll allow me, I’m trying to do what Hans Jonas did. I’m trying to pick up on sort of the existential, phenomenological, cognitive aspects of it. So let’s go back to LA Paul and Agnes Kellard. So LA Paul says she does a thought experiment. That’s what philosophers are good at, right. Thought experiments to make you realize something, she says. So your friends come to you and they give you indisputable evidence that they can do the following. They can turn you into a vampire. So do you do it? And she says, notice the problem that you’re facing, because you really don’t know, remember perspectival knowing what it’s like to be a vampire. And you know that once you become a vampire, your character is going to change and your values are going to change. And so you can’t judge what the vampire, because you’re not going to have the same character, right. So there’s not going to, right. So notice that what’s changing is she says what you’re lacking is a kind of perspectival knowing. I don’t know what it’s like to be a vampire and participatory knowing. I don’t have the identity of a vampire. And she says, and so you’re in complete ignorance. And so you face this problem. You don’t know what you’re going to lose if you do it. And you don’t know what you’re going to miss if you don’t do it. You don’t. And so you get what I call existential inertia. You’re stuck, right. And you go, who cares about this thought problem, vampires? Wow. Like, and then she says, but most of the big decisions in your life are those kinds of decisions. Like, should I have a child? Should I commit to a long term relationship with this person? Should I be friends with this person? Should I undertake this career? And then that’s the problem as Laurie poses it. And then Agnes Keller adds another aspect to it that was, the point that L.A. Paul makes is given that I lack these two kinds of knowing, I can’t infer my way through it. I can’t. I can’t. Well, what I’ll do is I’ll weigh the probabilities and the utilities, but the probabilities, the probabilities are unknown to me and the utilities are all going to change. I can’t use inference. I can’t infer my way through it. Right. I’ll tell you what I think people do in a sec, but I want to add one more dimension from Agnes Keller, which is, but notice Agnes Keller calls this when you’re relating to your future self across these divides, she calls that aspiration. And she, and the argument goes like this. This is really clever. Even though it’s not inferential, it has to count as a kind of rationality. And you go, what? Wait, wait, right. Well, just hang on. She says, look, because if I say to you, you should be wiser or you should be more rational, that’s one of these transformative experiences. You don’t know what it’s going to be like. This is one of Socrates’ problems, right? I don’t know what it’s going to be like, right? When I’m there, I don’t know how to find it in Mino’s paradox, right? But she says, so if the process of rationality is itself aspirational, right? If I say to you, you should become more rational and then you identify rationality with logic, you’re in a bind. Because what I’m saying to you is, well, I want you to be more rational, but the process by which you do it isn’t itself rational. You get into a contradiction. Is that making sense? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what she says is, in addition to like an inferential, calculative kind of rationality, there’s what she calls proleptic rationality. There’s this aspirational kind of rationality. And so, and that’s good. And philosophers like to sort of get things at an abstract conceptual and, oh, this is all resolved. Well, it’s resolved, but it’s not resolved, like, like, practically, like, what do people do to what is it people are doing? I’m getting close, right? I’m getting close to your question, because it’s a deep question. I spent a lot of time thinking about it. The journey’s been a good one. So I’m up for it. Okay. And so I thought another context in which you can see people facing that existential inertia, right? And they’re really bound is the therapeutic context, the therapeutic context, because people often have the propositional knowledge. They know, they can state what’s wrong, right? But they don’t know how to get there in the sense of they don’t know what it will be like to be that person. And they don’t know how to identify with that future self. And therapy is a lot about trying to get people there. And so I get that it’s the aspirational rationality. I don’t think I quite got. Yeah. So the aspirational rationality is that this process by which we try to overcome existential inertia and aspire to, for example, being more rational or more wise has to itself be a wise or rational process, or we’re engaged in a performative contradiction. We’re telling people, yeah, be really irrational, so you become more rational. If I in order to recommend something to you rationally, it has to itself be a rational process. But the point what I’m trying to get you to see, I suppose, sorry, that sounds condescending. I don’t know. It’s not at all. Not at all. Okay, good. What I’m trying to get when I’m trying to convey is that there are there’s a sense of rationality that’s at the perspectival and the participatory level. That’s not the same thing as the logical procedures by which we regulate proposition. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so there’s a way in which in that. So I think of rationality as any practice, or I often say an ecology of practice that reliably, systematically and systemically helps you overcome self-deception. And so in that sense, the therapeutic process is supposed to be reliable and systemic for helping people overcome self-deception. There are other practices. And of course, and I’ve written on how mindfulness helps us overcome the self-deception that’s at work in our perspectival knowing, right? For example, overcome egocentrism, things like that. Okay, so let’s say that there’s this kind of rationality that’s at work in making people, helping people to undergo transformative experience at the perspectival and the participatory level, also usually at the procedural level. So then I asked myself, what does it look like? What does it actually look like? And so I went back to some of L.A. Paul’s examples. And then I talked to her about this. I said, well, what do people do when they’re contemplating having a kid? And I’m looking around, I’ve had kids myself, and this is what they do. They get a pet often. They get a pet. They get a dog, right? And what do you do when you’re considering having a romantic commitment? Well, your friends will often give you this advice, and it’s not bad advice. It doesn’t work right now because of COVID, but go on a journey with the person. Like spend three or four weeks on a journey with the person, right? And you go, well, what are people doing here? And then I thought, well, what are they also doing in therapy? I came up with this notion of serious play, which is an enacted symbol, a symbol on joins two things together, right? So what’s a pet? Well, a pet, you know, it lets you dip your foot in the world. It’s a link between where you are, where you’re. Yeah. You play in this space, right? Stepping space. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And you play there and you get a taste of what it would be like and who you would be like. And then that’s the place that gives you the wherewithal to make the decision. So just tell me back in here. So I’ve really got that and it’s fascinating. A minute ago, back there, we were the Gnostics. Yeah. So the Gnostics. They’re kind of just because you probably don’t know, but that the my most successful work 20 years ago was books on Gnosticism. So I looked at that. I’m not, you know, they’re not my thing now, particularly, but that was my background. Yeah. So yeah, so not to tell you about gnosis and where. Yeah. So gnosis at least, but the one aspect I’m trying to get from the Gnostics is the sense of existential entrapment. And what I’m doing is I think that’s more universal and it doesn’t necessarily require a universal conspiracy and a demiurge. Like when you’re just sort of trapped, right? Like when you go into therapy or where you’re sort of like, should I have a child or not? Or should I stay in this relationship? Right. We get that. We get that. And what I think of Gnosis is, is Gnosis is the serious play we do with our perspectival and our participatory knowing so that we can transform it, transformative experience, so that we can come into conformity with an identity and a way of seeing and being that we don’t yet have, we can aspire. So it’s an aspirational conformity and that’s what Gnosis is. So say that one more time, John. So I absolutely I’ve got what you’re saying. Say it again. Well, I’ll try and show you how I think it plays out. And at least not all of Gnosis is because Gnosis is, you know, this, it’s a heterogeneous thing. Crazy, crazy, mad play. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But one sort of theme that wasn’t even specific to Gnosis, but here’s the idea. It’s that Gnosis is that serious play, the kind of play that affords development, the kind of play we see in children and we see in therapy and we see when people are playing in art or when they’re playing in eschesis, serious spiritual practice, or when you go into a church, ritual is serious play. And I mean that adjective, serious play. You get that with, completely get that with ritual. Completely. Right. Okay. So we engage in serious play so that we can do that symbol on, so we can taste, right? We can start to play with perspectival and participatory transformation so that we can start to transform so that we can come more and more into conformity. We can, we cannot just have ideas about what it would be like to not be neurotic like this anymore, but we can come to actually have the perspectival awareness of it. And we can come to have the sense of self that we’re aspiring to and we don’t yet fully understand. And so that’s what Gnosis is. So you saw that big shift, what feels like a big shift always. Yeah. Where you called it at one moment. Yes. Yeah. Where you’re no longer the isolated skin bag, but you’re the whole thing. That really captures it for me, that kind of where your perspectival knowing is completely woofed and your sense of yourself is just wow. And well, let me try this on you because the other thing I definitely want to mention to you is this word tranjective, which I told you when I was emailing you, I’ve been using, I didn’t know. Someone told me later and I thought, yeah, that’s where I got it from listening to you. And I can’t remember how you actually used it and I might have been misusing it and who knows. But the, you know, I’ll try and do it as quickly as I can, but the vision which I’ve been exploring is the narrative I’ve been exploring is an emergent evolutionary narrative, which bring, which has spirituality within it instead of exiled from it. So that a big aha moment for me a while back was losing the idea it’s all one and gaining the idea it’s the one in relationship with itself. Right. Right. Which allowed me and just in passing, I see that relationship with itself as tranjective, but it’s a subject object, but they don’t exist independently. Everything then becomes relationship, everything on the physical level, time, space, energy, everything. But also that, so what’s emerging through these 14 billion years of evolution is all is relationships between information or information systems or intelligence systems really. And that’s, and the ground of that, when I think, well, if that process, the fundamental, I guess the fundamental hypothesis, philosophical hypothesis, if you like, that I’m exploring is this moment looks like it’s a constant process of one thing following another based on the past. Right. If the whole thing is that, then everything is evolutionary. There’s nothing which is not evolutionary. Can we put everything within that evolutionary one story of emergence of novelty based on the past with the past in forms of what’s coming. So that all the qualities of existence come down, are emergent. And then I go, well, okay, so what’s the most, what’s the most, this is quite neoplatonic in a way, what’s the most, what’s the simplest quality? What’s the one quality that everything has? And it’s my, the word that comes to mind for me is being. Yeah. Everything is being. So you’ve got a quality of being, which is going to arise as subjective and objective being just, which is actually the relationship that everything is both interacting with each other on this journey. And then by the time you get to us, we’ve developed this psyche and this ability to process the information conceptually. And with all those different levels, which have all built on each other of psychic processing, it seems that we have more and more of us gradually from some early pioneers have started to develop the ability to process it in such a way that you suddenly go, oh, there’s one being. And I am that in relationship to itself. I’m still Tim. I’m still this intelligence system. I’m still this person. I’m completely individual. I’m never going to be John. But John is also me. And suddenly there’s that no sense. And the love that you mentioned, this massive love of just like everything goes, and you’re in that. And it becomes then this fruition of the universe coming to know itself. And the thing which I love about that is it feels when you say, I want to understand. And of course I’m the same. I want to experience it more fully. And I want to understand it more fully. And some people don’t, but it feels like, oh, well, that’s what this one thing wants to do through Tim. It wants to understand itself. And I can feel that. Other people got different things. That was beautiful, Tim. I’m in a lot of agreement with that. In fact, one thing I would say is part of why I was making the argument I was making is I was trying to show a deep continuity between our most mystical states of gnosis and the kind of gnosis that’s engaged in when you enter into a friendship or you take up a practice. There’s a continuum. And then what I think I hear you saying is I see this continuum as extending in both directions. And so the deep continuity hypothesis of Evan Thompson, my friend and colleague, he was my colleague at U of T, he’s now at UBC, University of British Columbia. This idea that there’s deep continuity between our conscious states, the principles that work there, and then our unconscious states, and then there’s deep continuity between our cognitive states, both conscious and unconscious, and our biological processes, and then there’s deep continuity between our biological processes and those of self-organizing systems in the world. And then you can also see distributed cognition up and systems and ecologies, et cetera. And so, yeah, and like you, I see that as a rebirth of a neoplatonic vision. I, yeah, and so even the subjectivity objectivity, for me, that is a particular expression, at sort of the level of consciousness of the fact that, like the way you said it, the oneness that the Neoplatonists talk about is not just the unity of all and not just the uniqueness of each, but that which binds the unity of all to the uniqueness of each, right? And so, for me, the emanation downward, we have to use these spatial metaphors, and I know you’ll be charitable with me about them, but the emanation downward, right, to, so how things become, like Pearl talks about it when he talks about his book on Dionysus, he talks about this process of determination, how things become, you know, and the Buddhists have a great term for this, the suchness, right, the suchness of a thing, its unique determination, the data about it that cannot be captured by any of the categories it enters into, right? And then the other way, which is, you know, the connectedness, the relationship to everything else. And so, I see the subjective part of us as a higher expression of that, the uniqueness pool of things, and, right, objectivity is when we’re trying to point to all the relations between things, and then transjectivity is to remember that those two things are ultimately grounded in what makes the relationship between them possible, and that they ultimately are dependent on that. And so, for me, at the level of cognition and how it enters into consciousness, our most prominent, at times, profound experience of transjectivity is this phenomenon called relevance realization, that we are constantly, so there is a combinatorial explosive ocean, oceans eat too small of a word, of information available to you right now that you could be paying attention to. There’s equally combinatorially explosive amount of information in your long-term memory, and then if you think of all the possible sequences of behavior you could generate right now, combinatorially explosive, and yet, you did it. You just did it right now. You’re focusing on this, you’re gathering this from memory, and you’re doing, you’re nodding, you’re stroking, like everything’s appropriate. And this is not what your brain is doing, this is what AI helps, like AI, this is sort of a, people will get up, so when I say, but this is a spiritual implication of AI. AI has made us realize that this is, that you can’t, this is not what the machine does. The machine can’t check all the information and determine, no, that’s not relevant, that’s not relevant. It has to, and this sounds like a Zen Cohen, and has to, it’s intelligent by ignoring most of that information, and by ignoring most of this information, and by ignoring most of the patterns of behavior you could now generate, and you do it like that, and like that, and trying to get machines to do that, that’s the hardest thing. But you do it, and it’s like, and it’s, and it makes, like, things are obvious to you, they’re relevant to you. So, one of the big shifts in my thinking that I’ve been exploring, and this is relatively recent for me really, was because, I mean, my route has been through a lot of Eastern spirituality, as well as Western, and a kind of a more consciousness, everything is consciousness route, which I’ve ended up abandoning, and taking this other route around being, and seeing consciousness as emergent, because it seems like it definitely is. So, what I’m exploring, just to enlarge on that previous thing, would be the one in relationship to itself, so that is, if I use the word information, as what defines any difference, then you’ve got the, information is the relationship, and then you’ve got these information systems which are processing each other, and at every level, so that’s why for me, I’ve been using your word for every level of emergence, it feels like, look, it’s happening on the very most basic physical level, then at the biological level, and at every level, it’s just not conscious, it’s just still this relationship, and I really want to push it and go, look, the relationship is, there is, you can’t even say what the information system is, apart from the perspective of another one, and so it’s only in relationship that you can say what anything is, and that’s this, the ability of the molecule to read that molecule, or this plant to read this animal, or the, every information or intelligence system is reading every other one, and then, yeah, that’s like platinus, everything’s been contemplating everything else, yes, I mean, that’s, so maybe this is the language, this is the language I use, and it sounds like it’s the same, it’s to bring back the idea of real relations, so to basically overturn the nominalism of Occam and others, and say that relations aren’t real, they’re just mental projections, and say no, relations are actually real, and the degree to which physicists are now seriously considering making information a fundamental thing, that’s to acknowledge that relations are real, and we knew relations had to be real, because laws are relations, relativity is a relation, so relations are real, now that’s not the same thing as saying all relations are real, but that we have to acknowledge that there are real relations, and so… Yeah, I mean, I think, I don’t want to push it too hard, but, you know, my sense would be, you might even push it and go, they’re all that’s real, actually, that it’s always a relationship, because each subject of an object can only be defined in relationship, so it’s only when there’s the relationship with, you know, me to you, you exist as this, as perceived by me, but for the fly that’s flying around your head, you’re something else completely. So, I mean, yeah, well, let me finish one point. Okay, sorry. No, no, no, no, don’t apologize. I’ve got two things I want to try out on you now. Yeah, yeah, I was trying to bring out something, I was trying to give people a phenomenological feel for it, right, and what I was trying to say is, to find, see, we, like I said, we can’t grasp all information, so we zero in on relevant information, and something that’s being relevant is not a property of it, or a subjective state of view, because what’s relevant to you one second is not relevant the next, right, and, but to say that the object is just relevant in and of itself makes no sense, so that’s what I mean by relevance is something that, right, right, that it depends on the affordances, the grasp, this cup is relevant to me because it’s graspable, right, and the affordance, remember I said the affordance isn’t in the cup, or in me, it’s between us, and similarly, the relevance isn’t in the cup, it’s between me, so relevance is the primary way, so what I’m trying to argue is, it is absolutely central to your cognitive agency, that’s its deep functionality, because you’re not an intelligent being if you can’t do that, you can’t do relevance realization, but at the same time, it is phenomenologically your most primordial access to transjectivity, because relevance is an inherently transjective thing, so for me, this, for me, and why this is important for me, in terms of the meaning crisis, is that double nature gives me a way of talking about a deep bridge between science and spirituality, because the science can understand, oh wait, this is the functionality, but the spirituality can say, oh wow, I can appreciate that, because relevance, yeah, because when you really care, that’s you finding things, like you can, it gives you phenomenological access to transjectivity, you go, oh that’s what, that’s what, that’s what, that’s the beginning of giving people a way of appreciating both the power, the functionality, and the presence of, you know, those real relations, and therefore doing something like what Heidegger wanted to do, which like is to reground, right, their ontology in a new way, in a transformative way for them, so one thing I wanted to, the second thing I wanted to say, so you were nodding largely with that first thing, so I’ll let you respond to it, I just wanted to say something about the point you’re making about it all being relationships, so I agree with that in the sense that I would say that intelligibility is that, and there’s a difference between our intelligence and the intelligibility of things, but the thing I guess I want to hear what you would say on is, you know, and I see this in, you know, in both the mystical traditions and in some cutting-edge philosophical schools like speculative realism and object oriented ontology, and you see it in Heidegger, and I see it especially in Demasius and Dionysus, the idea that, right, logos and intelligibility, as it shines and makes intelligible, as being shines in to relationships, it’s always, always also withdrawing beyond our grasp, right, so that there, so I, for me, the ultimate non-duality is between phenomena, the shining of intelligibility and no-thingness, that which, right, because I do think what I was just saying, I think reality is combinatorially explosive, that we’re always only in relationship to something that is perpetually incomplete for us. So I would agree completely with that, and for me, what I love about the idea of the literally the ground of being is that it has no qualities, and that’s the formulas, that’s the way it is, and I think that’s the way it is, and I think that’s the way it is, and I think is that it has no qualities, and that’s the formulas, that’s formless, timeless, and when you go into that deep Samadhi state, which, you know, like, they said a bit, you get, it’s like, it’s empty, and it’s wonderful, because it’s like it’s before everything, and then you come into the immanent, and it is everything, and that’s where the samsara is nirvana, it’s, ah, that emptiness is all of this, and it’s me, but my being on this deepest level is the same with the being of everything, and it’s always more because that ground is obviously the potential for everything that’s come from it, I’m not saying it’s full of little potentials or anything, but it, we can retrospectively say it must be, the potential for every damn thing that’s ever happened, and it’s totally novel, it’s always new. Exactly, that’s what I meant when I used the phrase the inexhaustible fount of intelligibility, right, it itself is not intelligible, but it’s always inexhaustible. Okay, so that’s one of the things I wanted to try out on you, there’s two things from what you said earlier, but this one, I’ll try this first, which is, because you, the stuff you were saying about wisdom, and yeah, because it, that’s how I see it too, it’s like, I don’t see the the ground of being as another, you know, it’s called really, you know, it really, you know, it’s very intelligent, it wants to know itself, and all sorts of mythic things, it’s like, no, I can’t make that work anymore, but that this process has led to this, so that for me, it’s not so much that it is intelligent, it’s that it’s become intelligent, and that the universe is constantly learning, that I love, I love ideas, for instance, like, I think it’s Perce is the first person who explores it, but I’ve got it through Sheldrake and Lee Smolin also, this idea that the habits of nature, or you know, the algorithms, I think is a good metaphor today, that the past doesn’t go on anywhere, it’s implicit in the moment, that the information is accumulating, the past is not passing, it’s accumulating, there’s more and more information, it forms into patterns, the patterns create the habits or the algorithms which govern everything, from me having to do this with my hands, which I see you have to too, and add to the way my voice is English and yours isn’t, and all of that, all of everything that’s going on around it, so everything is those, so it’s literally learning, like an AI shows us that this can happen without there being consciousness or anything, yeah, so the whole thing is in this, and then the process that we’ve been discussing, when we’ve talked about wisdom at the end of that, feels like, oh well that’s just the latest, most emergent version of the fundamental nature of the universe. Yeah, and so I mean, I agree with that, the person who’s helped me, the two people that have helped me see that vision you articulated are Spinoza and Whitehead, yeah, especially, for me, Whitehead has been important, I don’t know Spinoza so well to be honest. So the thing about the ethics is people, remember when we talked about the beginning, and not just the content but the manner, yeah, not just the propositions, but the gnosis, because he has gnosis in his epistemology, his skintia intuitiva, right, and so the thing is when you’re reading the ethics, it’s very much, it’s like reading Proclus, but, and I think Proclus, right, so you’re reading this logical argument, but like Plotinus, it’s doing this thing and you’re trying to hold it because he’s so like rigorous, and then what you do is you keep, and you have to read the ethics like the way you might read the Bible, like you read a proposition, you reflect on it, because the point of it is not to come to a conclusion, it’s to realize the blessed life, and the thing about it is you read this argument, to realize the, what do you say, what he called the life of the blessed, a blessed life, right, and so you read this and you’re doing this and then you get this thing that happens, and the thing that happens is more important than all, it’s not independent of, but it’s more important than all the propositional conceptual content, you get this moment where you see the whole argument in each premise, in each premise, in the whole of the argument, and you go like that, and it’s been an argument about, like, sort of the intelligibility, and what happens is you get this experience of that, and it’s not, because of the way the argument has worked, it’s not an argument, it’s not just that you get this, you realize that is an example, an exemplification of the very thing he’s talking about in the, in his metaphysics, so it’s not just you have an insight about the metaphysics, the insight has this recursive thing to it, you go, aha, I see all the parts, right, in the whole, in the whole, in every part, and that’s actually what he’s talking about, right, you find yourself exemplifying it, and what you see then is you see, like you just said, you see, right, that underneath, for Espinoza, what underneath it, very similar to Whitehead, is this sort of, what he calls God or nature, is this pure activity of, like, of giving birth to being, right, and like you said, you see that, like the way all the premises have led to the conclusion of an argument, but how the, but also how the conclusion was pregnant in all the premises, you see reality that way, and it’s a very profound experience, and it’s missed by, I think, sorry, that’s on the lead us, and I don’t mean to be, I fear that many people miss it because they read Espinoza only at the level of his argumentation, and they don’t read him, and they forget that the title of the book is The Ethics, he’s trying to bring about a profound transformation in the person, not just trying to convince them of a truth. You’ve inspired me to go back and have another go. But, so I deeply agree with you, and like I said, it was also Whitehead and his notion, of the many are gathered into the one that then makes a new thing, right, that all of the universe comes into every moment, but every moment then adds to the overall life of the universe, that vision very much. So for me, to go back to the point about the wisdom is, so I could make an argument, but I’ll just sort of gesture. I’m really interested not just in semantic meaning, the relationship between propositions, I’m interested in meaning in life, where we’re using meaning as a metaphor, and what seems to be some of the biggest things that, like both the psychology and the philosophy, Susan’s Wolf’s book on meaning in life and why it matters, and then all the work, and I’m doing work also on meaning in life and experiments, like what makes people feel that their lives are more meaningful, right, and it’s this connectedness. People need to, they need to feel that there is an intelligibility, and this is the really important thing, right, they need to feel that they matter, which means they are connected to something, they often use the metaphor of bigger or larger than themselves, but it’s a metaphor. What they mean is they want to be connected to something that has a reality, a depth, a significance, independent of their egocentric concerns, and this neoplatonic metaphysics, we’re talking about, the ontology, the degree to which it can be put into practice through that deep continuity, what I see that meaning is that metaphysics can actually be transformed, and I mean this in a complementary way, into something like constraints on our practices of transformation so that we get more and more connected to ourselves, to each other, and the world. That’s- I think what you’re exploring is very similar actually to what I’ve been doing for the last 20 years, which is where I’m at right now is, you know, the way I would put that slightly differently, but it’s the same really, is that I’m, the first part for me previously was about what practices, what things can I do with people to generate this thing which I go, this is the most important thing that ever happens to me, how can other people have this, and finding ways, much to my surprise, that I could, nearly all around connection, not just, but that was the boat, the biggest one was deeply connecting people, just bang, magic, and then the last period, okay, well what’s the narrative, what’s the understanding, and that’s where for me the soul crisis came, because it was like, what I saw was people, the growth in my own lifetime of a what gets called scientism, that kind of reductionist, narrow, you know, you’re just alive for a moment on a crazy planet, you’re gone, it’s like, there’s no significance. That was growing and growing and growing, so that on the one hand, there were people experiencing all this, but on the other hand, their understanding was going in the opposite direction, and so wanting to create a narrative which was intellectually robust enough to counter that, and go, no, those things that spiritualities have been exploring all this time, there’s a lot, there’s something for real there, and if you don’t see them, you’re just missing part of reality, but it must now be trans-scientific, it must be coherent with the knowledge we found, not the philosophy that people think underpins it, but the knowledge, because, and the problem with spirituality, as I’m sure you’re aware, is just a lot of it’s just completely bonkers, and so somehow it needs to mature, it needs to evolve, and that’s why, you know, we need a 21st century version. Wow, that’s deep consonance, deep convergence, because one of the things I articulate in, so the awakening for the meeting crisis is divided into the two parts, a historical argument and a scientific argument, and so the part of the historical argument is to exactly what you talked about, about people, it is, people face perennial problems, they face perennial problems of, the very processes that make us, these dynamic processes that couple us to the environment, and set us in continual dynamical development, the very processes that get us to ignore information, are the same processes that make us subjective, subjected to self-deception, like they’re two sides of the same coin, and so, right, this is what I tell people, you know, intelligence is what you use to solve your problems, but rationality is what you use when you’re trying to deal with the self-deception that arises from using your intelligence, right, and so, right, and then wisdom is how to get all of the rationalities of each of the knowing, so they mutually understand each other as best as possible, mutually coordinate, but that idea that, so what I’m suggesting is people are perennially beset by self-destructive, self-deceptive patterns that reduce that sense of connectedness, right, to themselves, to each other in the world, reduce a sense of meaning in life, and also, right, will often, I don’t want to be harsh, but will often make them pursue that meaning in a kind of wonky fashion, right, and so what we develop, and what you see this cross-culturally, and, you know, and I’ve published on it, and I’ve published with other people on, you know, basically the scientific study of wisdom, what you see is people coming up with ecologies of practices, sets of practices that are dynamically self-organizing, they have checks and balances, strengths and weaknesses, in order to try and ameliorate that self-deception and to enhance, re-enhance, recover and enhance that connectedness, but as you said, if you just have the practices over here, you can’t get the wisdom in them, because wisdom ultimately requires deep understanding, that’s what I was arguing earlier, and understanding is to grasp the significance of what you know, and if you have your practices over here, and they’re not helping you to grasp the significance of what you know, then your practices are going to swing free from your knowledge and your science and the scientific worldview, and for historical reasons, that’s the mess we have got ourselves into, we need the practices, but we don’t have a worldview that homes them, right, and so part of what that means is, first of all, trying to help people recover the practices in a non-autodidactic fashion, because autodidactic stuff is very problematic as a learning strategy, people need community, most people need community. What do you mean by that John, because I heard you say that on again, I’ve been listening to yesterday or something, what do you mean by that? I mean, I look at myself and I think, well, that’s probably what I am, isn’t it, actually? Well, I mean, so I’m not making a universal claim about autodidactism, I want to be really clear about that, I said most people, and you know, so there are exceptions, but there are also people on the other end, there are some of the worst people who were famously autodidacted, like Hitler, right, I just broke that rule where you’re not supposed to invoke Hitler, right, but he’s one of my primary examples, right? He’s everyone’s primary example of something. Yeah, so the point, so autodidactism is when you pursue your knowing from a, not just in a solitary fashion, because even when you’re not autodidactic, you’re often engaged in solitary learning, it’s the combination of your learning is solitary, and it’s completely within an egocentric framework in a way that those two reinforce each other. So what you do is you’re, you don’t have anybody seriously challenging the way you’re all these very powerful and pervasive biases are affecting how you’re choosing. So do you mean by literally that you’re not got any reference point outside yourself, that you’re not, you don’t mean necessarily in a tradition or those sort of- Well, I do want to mean a tradition, I do want to mean, I mean, I get it, there are figures like Socrates and Freud that, you know, cut out new traditions, and Freud, I mean, Freud’s, Freud in fact is really powerful because he famously argued that self-therapy was impossible, and then argued that he came to his conclusion via self-therapy, right, it’s like, both of those, that’s like, that’s a value, he’s really pointing to something, his genius is pointing to something for us there. What I mean is that you don’t have people, you don’t have people, those people can be in books, right? Okay, okay. Right, but they should, they should upset you, they should challenge you, they should bring you to a aporia, they should challenge your confirmation bias, they, right, they should provoke you to have thoughts you couldn’t have on your own, and let’s take sort of the kind of autodidactism that is becoming prevalent now, the way people just swim through, right, the internet, and just do basically kind of like confirmation pornography, and they just echo chamber themselves. Confirmation pornography, that’s right. That’s my friend Leo, Leo Farrar’s term, right, and you just do, right, and you get that very profound part of that. Okay, so there’s a kind of, okay, so that’s, I’m glad you clarified that, because, you know, for the, what I have kind of found, I think, is that I have not, I’ve traveled with people, I mean, some I’ve traveled with now for 40 years, who are incredibly straight with me, and I with they, but I ended up not, I’ve been in many traditions, I’ve done lots of stuff with different, I’ve studied and written books on just about them all, but what I’ve ended up with is feeling like, oh no, that my tradition is all of it, it’s like, it’s human, it’s all mine, hurrah, how lucky am I to live in this time when I have it all here, and that from that will come something new, which I’m engaged with, rather than a kind of more conservative, well, you need a thing which is like well and truly established and… Yes, yes, and so the thing that I’m criticizing is the, that, well, let me use maybe a good analogy. You should never start a martial art on your own, you’re not going to learn it well, you’re going to have all of these mistakes that you can’t see, but once you know it, then you should go on, on your own, yeah, yeah, that’s what I’m talking about, that’s what I’m trying to put my, I’m trying to use that as, right, that we, you have to get, you have people, other people can see things in you, then you can’t see yourself, that’s essentially what I’m saying, you then you can’t see yourself, that’s the essential insight that I’m hearing, yeah, yeah, yes, that one you just said there, yes, that feels like the insight to me, yes, I think it is, I think it is, and so in that respect, I mean, that’s something which I feel, which applies in this, but it’s also like, you know, what you’re looking for in your life partner, or your dearest friend, very much, I think Phyla is not just directed at Sophia, I think we’re seeking Phyla for many good reasons in many, in many places, yeah, so yeah, I think that what we have right now is people, like we said, you know, there’s this gulf between science and spirituality, and I’m hoping that the kind of work that I’m discussing with you, the way it’s Jane has faced, the way it points into practice and into experience, transformative experience, and the way it points into cutting-edge cognitive science, right, can help put those back together so that we can rehome, we can recover and exact the practices, the ecologies of practices from the past, and rehome them in a world view, that’s such a lovely way of putting it, right, and that’s what I’m trying to do, and if we can rehome them so that people can, let me put it this way, rather than in tradition, and I’m putting an emphasis on the word communion and not just communication, that people can in community, can in community cultivate wisdom, that’s what I think we need right now, that’s what I’m trying to bring about. I completely could not agree with you more, I love that, I think that’s beautiful, so have you got time for me to just ask me one more thing? Please, please, I’m sorry, there’s some track outside, I hope it’s not causing too much noise. It’s absolutely fine, I can hear you, I can hear you loud and clear. I just wanted to check in with you with this phrase, which has become associated with you that I’ve picked up a couple of times, which is the idea of religion without religion, or the religion without religion, and I’m guessing that what you’re talking about relates to that vision, so I felt like I’d like to just sort of pick up on that before we… Right, so, so my idea is, part of what we’re doing in that recovery and exaptation, exaptation is when something evolved for one purpose, and then it gives another one, yeah, well yeah, like we’re using our tongue to speak, but tongues didn’t evolve for speech, right, yeah, yeah, and Michael Anderson has a like really powerful emerging framework theory, that that’s what the brain is constantly doing, it creates little like little machines, little, right, and then they get exapted for other things, and then they get exapted, so the brain is sort of a self-exapting organ, which is… That’s fantastic, I love that. He has a book called After Phrenology that brings this all out, because he basically says that a lot of our neuroscience up until now has been basically like phrenology, that this is located here, and this is located here, and like, I don’t, he of course is much more subtle and nuanced, I’m just presenting… That makes so much sense, I mean, it’s such a good vision of how the emergent psyche has arisen, I mean, and you can just see it in your own life, can’t you? It’s happening all the time. Anyway, so yes. Yeah, I think of intelligence itself as just an exaptation into life, of the very process of evolution. Life went from evolving to being able to evolve its evolvability, and so that’s… So what, yeah, what… That’s a few thoughts you just skipped over there, which I really love, but let’s try and stick with the religion, with that religion, otherwise we’ll never get there. Right, so like everything else, even our way… Let’s say that it’s fair, that my argument’s at least fair, and I’ve talked to many people in many different traditions and religions, and they find it fair, that at least at the core of what we’re talking about is this deep connection between these notions of wisdom and meaning in life, right? And the culture… And notice that for many places, and still for many cultures, there’s no clean distinction between religion and the cultivation of wisdom and meaning in life, they’re all intermeshed together, and that’s not coincidence, I think there’s deep functional reasons why that’s the case. But like everything else, the notion of wisdom, it also needs to go through, right, something of an exaptation, so that we can reunite our knowledge and our practices together in deep understanding, in deep mutual understanding and mutual affordance. And the problem I have with many of the ways in which the traditional existing world religions… And I can only talk for the ones I’ve studied, so I’m sure there’ll be people out there that said, but you don’t know my religion, and I don’t, okay, admitting that, but I’m also seeing that the fastest growing demographic group in the West are the nones, the N-O-N-E-S, those people who have no allegiance to any religion, and yet that doesn’t mean they’re new atheists, they’re all actually very spiritually hungry and export without religion, yeah, right, okay, so spiritual without religious, which can very easily become that autodidactic thing that… Yeah, right, so what I’m concerned about is the fact that for many people, the practices of aspiring to wisdom cannot be homed within the existing religions, and that… Now, a lot of that has to do with the history of these religions and how they’ve hurt people and done things both, like, both culturally and individually, but also for something that you and I have put our fingers on a couple times in this discussion. These religions, all right, they were born in a particular time, the Axial Revolution, and the Axial Revolution, and whether or not you think it’s a world thing like Yaspers or all civilizations, whether it’s an age or a stage, I don’t really care about. There was something happening in Greece and Israel that came together for us, and that’s, I think, pretty indisputable, and then Persia’s behind it doing really important things, and we don’t acknowledge that enough, but that’s another talk for another time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so there’s a change in how… This is where Charles Taylor really has a deep influence on me. There’s a change in the notion of wisdom, and people, right, so while wisdom is perennial, the way people envision it, and I’m trying to get a word that captures both understand it and practice it, the way people envision wisdom, went through a fundamental change, and it was corresponding with a change in the worldview. So in the Bronze Age, you have what is called the, like, what Taylor calls a continuous cosmos. You have a sense of a deep continuity between, like, the natural world, the cultural world, the gods, and so the relationship between them is very much a difference of degree. That’s why the gods, for example, are not moral exemplars, because morality is a difference in kind, right, and human beings can become gods, and that’s not a… It’s not just a symbolic thing, and it’s not a preposterous thing, it’s just a… It’s a literal thing for people, etc., right, and then you have the Bronze Age collapse, which is the biggest collapse of civilization ever, ever, like, ever, and so for me, that’s analogous to the asteroid hitting the earth, and, right, you get a mass extinction, right, and so all the dinosaur empires die off, and all these little mammal kingdoms can now speciate and experiment with all these new ideas, and they develop new psychotechnologies, new tools for the mind, new tools for enhancing your general capacity for processing information, like alphabetic literacy. Alphabetic… Think about… If I took literacy from you, your ability to process information, store it, even information about yourself, right, it’s collapsed. So are you seeing there with that… I just want to pick up on that, because that’s so interesting. So with that collapse, are you suggesting that that might be the root of this anti-world vision, where to get away from here, this is… Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let’s get out. So that’s the negative side of it. That you don’t see in the ancient shamanic cultures and all of that. Yes, exactly. So that’s… Yeah, you have this collapse, and that, like, sears itself into the cultural cognitive grammar of people. Interesting thought. Right, so there’s that, and then there, right, and then it looks like it’s also bound up with a cultural revolution of some kind, because the people are burning their own palaces, and, like, there’s stuff going on that we don’t quite understand. But anyways, but there’s also the speciation, like the mammals, new things are invented. So what you have, you have literacy in the Bronze Age, but it’s cuneiform, it’s hieroglyphics, it’s very hard to learn, and your job could be to be a literate person, you’re a scribe, and that’s a great job, right? You don’t meet anybody today. What’s your job? Well, I can read and write. Oh, no. Right? And alphabetical literacy makes that possible, and the Greeks also add vowels, and they standardize the reading direction, and so what happens is, like I said, think about how much your problem-solving depends on literacy. So you get this massive empowerment, and notice what I can also do. I can put my thoughts down and then come back to them and look at them again. So it’s not only the amount of information improves, the quality of my understanding of it, my reflective grasp of it, ratchets up. You get the advantage of coinage, and coinage trains people to think in abstract, symbolic, rule-governed ways. And so what you get is people suddenly have these new ways of thinking for really prosaic reasons. Writing is invented for business. Money is invented for business and war, right? But once you’ve internalized these psychotechnologies, these changes are there, and you become critically reflectively more aware of your own cognition. Exactly. Yes, and you start to realize, crap, I’m deceiving myself a lot. And that’s why you get these books like the Dhammapada. It all begins with the mind. There’s this realization that a lot of the suffering and the chaos is part of the natural order. It’s because of our mind, right? And so you get this idea that’s the exact opposite of the Bronze Age. And you’re right, the Bronze Age collapse has made us, ugh, right? I don’t want to fit into the everyday world. The everyday world is the world of all this suffering and violence. And I know how to rise above myself now because I have, right? So you take, you exact the shamanic practices, and you can even see that happening in ancient Greece coming through figures like Pythagoras, right? You can see the shamanic, and then you can see these Axial Age psychotechnologies, and then you get this new thing, which is the two-worlds mythology, which is I don’t want to be in this decadent, fallen or illusory world. I want to go to the real world where I’m free from illusion, and I see things as they are, and there’ll be no more suffering and be no more violence. And then you get the two-worlds mythology, and it is so, and then it becomes so sewn into our ways of understanding, of envisioning wisdom and meaning. It’s like, it’s so natural to us. It’s obvious to think of spirituality that way. The problem is that two-worlds mythology has been completely undermined by science, like as a way of trying, because science is much more, science, it’s not the same, but science is returning us to a deep continuity, a continuous cosmic. You were doing it earlier, the deep continuity from information all the way up. Yeah. And so we’re suddenly in a different world in science, which is a continuous cosmos, and yet we’re still practicing our spirituality within a two-worlds mythology. And I see the religions as, I want to be very careful. I really respect people who find, I do, and I enter into good faith dialogue with them regularly and reliably, and I learn from them, and they say they learn from me. And I don’t want to besmirch that at all, but they also know I make this criticism. I see the existing religions as still bound into that cultural cognitive grammar of the two-worlds mythology, and what we have to do is somehow get wisdom out. Can I try this on you then, John? Yeah. That was absolutely stunning. I really enjoyed that so much. I can’t tell you. There’s so many good ideas there I want to think about. And relevant to me, because a lot of what I’ve been doing with people and trying again to do it in a respectful way is going, look, we have a spirituality which one way or another seems to be based on a mythology of the fall. You’re already perfect, you’ve forgotten. God himself, or itself, has fallen into a dream and got lost. It was perfect, and now it’s fucked, and you can get out, but you have to get, and the price of getting out is you’re not an individual, you’re not really, separateness is an illusion, everything’s an illusion, and there’s that kind of negation of the world, that negative gnosis to get back, and that’s not what I experience. What I’m experiencing at this stage in the journey is the opposite of that, like this huge evolutionary current leading to gnosis, and what I’ve ended up trying to articulate philosophically is that the two worlds thing, to me, comes, I kind of root myself in a kind of phenomenological examination of the moment always, so when I look at the moment I see I am always experiencing two worlds. I’m always experiencing a world of sensation and a world of imagination, that’s always there, at all times, well not, no it’s not actually, when I dream I only have the imagination, so that’s closer to me than this is really, but those are the two worlds, and so I presume that that’s been true of all human beings since the psyche developed, and that when I see the early shamanic cultures, the animistic cultures, the magical cultures, it feels like, well they’re not really just magical cultures, they’re busy inventing practical things, tools, it’s all very practical, but they also have a different form of tool, which is to use symbols and resonance to affect things in magical ways, and art, and so they’re dealing with these two worlds the whole way through, and then the transition which you’ve just beautifully laid out in a way that in ways I hadn’t seen as clearly before, is that suddenly this is the real one, and this is the fallen one, and that we need to get back to this one, and you get then the ideas of emanation, it’s all fallen down, platinus, all those things, cabala, you know, it’s all, it’s worked, it’s where the Gnostics as well, it’s the Syzygies, it’s all come down from this perfect thing, which was already there, into this kind of, and how did we get here, well it was the demiurge or something, and now we have to get back, to get away from here, and then it feels to me like, is there a way of articulating it, where, which takes that other world seriously, not just as an experience we’re having, but possibly like the bardos, like the things which are described, when you, the shamanic places you can go to, when psychedelics, it’s a realm, it exists, but it itself has evolved, so that you take the evolutionary current, and you don’t stop at biology, and then this psychology, which is a kind of byproduct, but I actually know a whole non-material domain of existence has arisen, it’s information, but on a completely different level, just as we experience it to be, and that is, that is a, and there’s a continuity, which has actually led to that other world, not as primary, but as the most emergent, the thing it’s been moving towards. That’s, that’s beautiful, so one, two things I would say about that is, like, one of the things that the scientific world has done, and it’s accelerated, especially in the last, since Einstein, right, is, it’s, it’s reawakened us to bottom-up emergence, as being as important as top-down emanation, and so I’m wrestling with that, what we’re talking about right now, and somebody who’s actually had a lot of influence on my thinking, well, there’s two people, there’s Nishitani from the Kyoto School, and then there’s John Scottis-Erajina, because for me, and here, oh, there’s so much, but, right, so his notion is, it’s a dialectic, that what you see is, and I have to talk about them in sequence, because that’s what language makes me do, but they’re not in sequence, they are not in sequence, they are not in sequence, but there is, the emergence up and the emanation down are completely interpenetrating each other, and you can even see this in sciences trying, even within physics, they’re trying to get, how does the quantum up emergence interact with the relativistic emanation down, like, how does the cosmological big come into, right, of these, of relativity, come into the microcosm of the quantum, and then how does the microcosm of the quantum emerge up, like, and they’re really stymied, because I think part of the problem is that we don’t have the right cognitive grammar. So, John, when you’re talking about the emanation down there, I thought where you were going with it was sounds like somewhere different than you did, and I really like what I think you ended up, because I’ve ended up having been very involved in the whole, you know, it’s just emanation ideas. No, that’s, I’m rejecting that. To, yeah, to, but what I liked about what you said there was it felt like what you were talking about was, or the way I would interpret it, is that the most emergent, that all the levels of emergence are affecting each other all the time, and therefore the most emergent level is emanating back down the whole time as it emerges to bring the next thing into example. That’s definitely what I’m saying. I’m saying there’s the interpenetration. I’m also pointing to, yeah, that’s what I was really trying to emphasize, what they’re not in sequence. Yeah, they’re happening together. Yeah, yeah, so, but, but, part of what Nishitani is saying, at least I understand him, is part of what we have to do is we have to recover, like, I don’t want to sound too metaphysical, but, right, the West has prioritized actuality over possibility, and so we, in fact, will use the word actuality as a synonym for reality. We’ll say it’s actually this to mean it’s really that, and the problem with that is that doesn’t even sit well with our science, because many, because actuality is acting, that’s an event, and many of the things that science even points us to are not events. E equals MC squared is not an event. It doesn’t make sense to talk about it as an event. What is it? It’s a real constraint on how possibility exists for us. That’s what, like, you said, that’s what it is, right? So, right, and so what you can see, and so this is a big part of current cognitive science, is in addition to causes in which things are being actualized, there are constraints in which possibility, so actuality is shaping how things happen, right, but constraints are shaping how things are possible for us. So I would see, going back to our previous conversation, that the constraint and the possibility, that what makes, is that is the very build-up of information, that what’s arisen allows what can arise and limits what can arise, like this moment now must include the moment before, but I could say anything, but it must include that, and I can’t say anything, actually. I can only say thoughts that Tim could think, and they’re limited on my previous terms. Well, so, I mean, so Whitehead talks about the, like, he does that, that the emergence, but he also talks about, it has to be that possibility is also itself structured, or else we wouldn’t have the continuity of emergence that we have. So the idea is that I’m trying to, see, the other dichotomy I’m trying to break down, and I don’t want to give up anything of what you’re saying, so that’s why I’m hesitating, right, is I’m also trying to break down the two-worlds dichotomy between eternity and between time, right, and I want to see things, I don’t, right, so what I want to get past is, you know, things emanate eternally and they emerge temporally. I want, so let me give you an example, right, so there’s chemical interactions in the leaf and they, and what they do is they, right, sorry, in the tree, and they create the branches, and the trees branch out like this. Well, why does the tree have the structure like that? Well, this tree has the structure that does, because that increases the probability that a photon will hit a chlorophyll atom, right, and, right, and so the events cause a structure and then the structure constrains the events that can happen, right, and so I think what I’m saying is I think there are not only laws of causation and how things emerge, I think there are laws of structuring and how things emanate. Yes, I love it, got it, yes, I think that’s completely coherent with what I’m exploring as well, actually, but just another insight on top of it, which is really beautiful. So, and I see that vision in Erigina from the West and clearly in Erigina from the West, and that’s why he was a heretic and that’s why he, like, he was basically almost ex, I think he was excommunicated. I don’t know his work at all. Yeah, he’s really, and I think there’s a lineage through probably to people like Eckhart and others, but it’s all, it’s not, it’s not there, yeah, it’s probably indirect, but, right, so, and Nishitani very much in the Kyoto school, and so I think there is a new, and I see many people, you, you’re an example of what I’m going to talk about. I see this increasing convergence to this post-two worlds mythology, and they’re trying, we’re trying to articulate an ontology that is much more dialectic in nature, and then for me, that’s really important because I think the most, one of the most important emerging practices and community of practices are practices of dialectic and dialogue that are emerging between people, and so, and in Erogena, you get that wisdom is most cultivated when people are doing dialogos with each other because not only does that connect us to each other, and, right, it actually helps us to instantiate and exemplify the way reality is unfolding, so I think I’m trying to argue that out of deep continuity and what we’re getting with these ideas of a dialectic, non-sequential dialectic between emanation and emergence, we can hone these dialogical practices that are just popping up, I’m doing all this participant observation, they’re just popping up all over the place, and that’s not a coincidence because people want to get past debate, they want to get past phylo-Nikea, they want to get back past debunking and destroying the zero-sum game, they want to get back to communing and together co-creating something that transcends both of them, and so if we have an ontology that homes that, for me, that’s a powerful thing, a powerful possibility that I’m trying to help actualize right now. That has to be the thought that I, that’s so too perfect, the conversation could go on probably for months for me, because this has been a wonderful example of exactly that, it’s just been to do that, just been really such a delight and so much to think about, and I hope we get the chance to further it again at some point. Well, I would love to talk with you again, so if you invite me I’ll come, so I’ll commit to that right now, I really enjoyed this. You’re going to release this on your channel, if you could send me the files and I’ll release it on my voices with Ravechia, I would love that as well. I will do that for sure, I will definitely do that, and yeah, thank you, let’s stay in touch, and I think your work is amazing, but it’s been even more amazing to connect with you. I’ve really enjoyed this, this has been really, really fluent, really fluid, really, just wonderful, I just enjoyed it, thank you so much. All right, until the next time, thank you John, take good care Tim.