https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=J7KNGUryVII
Welcome everyone to another voices with for Vicky. This is the ongoing series I’m doing with layman Pascal and Brendan Graham Dempsey on the artful scaling of the religion that’s not a religion. And if you haven’t seen the previous episodes, I strongly recommend you go back and see episodes one, two and three, or this one, I don’t believe will make too much sense to you. There will be links in all of the videos. I’ll put a link in this one to the previous three. And what we’re doing is circulating these videos between our respective channels, because what we’re doing is trying to explore and try to perhaps even explicate some of the potential in the medium. And that’s where we were tacking last time. I’ll just briefly introduce an overall gestalt and then I’ll let layman and Brendan introduce themselves and their take on where we’re at. And then we’ll launch into it. So last time was we got into a very, I think, very flowing deal logos about the possibilities of dynamic and collective generation of sacred imagery, both visual and auditory. And that would be unfolding in kind of a dynamic wiki fashion. People could extract particular symbols and put them in the book, as layman put it at one point, but there would be this ongoing participation in the ongoing evolution of potentially sacred imagery. And again, visual auditory, perhaps multi-sensory as the technology emerges. And then the possibility also of that unfolding, having resonances and structural parallels with the unfolding that happens within the logos. And so you’re getting a multi-dimensional kind of resonance and mutual unfolding, explication, affording constraint, self-correction. And this was launching us into the topic of ways in which the emerging technologies, both cyber technologies and psycho technologies, might afford a new and perhaps also a renewed apprehension of the sacred in a way that is viable in our current world. So that’s, I think, my take on where we at least ended up and what we want to explore this more in depth. I know that this particular point was taken up by interest by quite a few people, especially the group of people that I wanted to take it up, which are artists and people trying to create emerging communities of practice. It came up in my monthly Q&A, for example. So I’ll stop talking though, and I’ll now turn things over to layman. Okay. I’m layman Pascal, a simple gadfly caught in the liminal web. Happy to be back with two friends and colleagues in this trial on the social technologies that might amplify the efficacy of the ecology of practices associated with the concept of the religion that is not a religion. Last time we started out thinking about the overlaps between viable moments of religious history and the kinds of layered adaptive self-correcting cognitive machinery that we think underlies the human mind. And all of that altogether hints at a possible institutional pattern that we might think of as trans-religious consulting firms or a living cathedral of being or knowing. And I’ve pointed out that that might have some similarities to Western esoteric and occult societies of ostensible scientific luminists on the one hand, and on the other hand, certain similarities to a benevolent version of the incorporative adaptive catholicity we find in the Vedic, Brahmanic super mythology of India. And where we left off at the end of last time, as John said, was talking about plausible ways that new distributed collective and collaborative technologies could provide access to both, I think, multiple styles of wisdom teaching, but also to a process of up regulating sticky wisdom means that might turn out to be dynamic pieces of a shared ethos that’s capable of performing the functions we associate with the narrative and mythic aspect of religion. So I’m looking forward to thinking that through in more detail. And also, I’m looking forward to bringing in some more direct considerations of myth and where it’s sourced from and how we use it effectively. Brandon. Thanks. I think that laid the groundwork pretty well, so I won’t really add much more onto that. Just as a brief introduction, my name is Brendan Graham Dempsey. Also in that liminal web fluttering about and doing work exploring the possibilities of what I think of as a distinctly or characteristically metamodern spirituality, passionate about the religion that’s not a religion and the different ways that art can unfold and implement some of the ideas and the practices in efficacious and edifying ways for people. But to go much further into that would be to repeat much of what has already been said. So I’m here and looking to ride the the DIA Logos roller coaster with you. I wonder what the price of admission is. So I guess what I’d like to do is propose some topics and potentially converging them. One is getting clear as layman mentioned about these sort of the actualizing distributed psycho and cyber technologies for the apprehension of sacred. And then I want to get a little bit more clear about what does that mean about, as Liam playman said, but I want to do too. What does that mean for mythos? What does that mean for logos? Specifically, what does it mean for how human beings access and accentuate the imaginal capacities? And let me just briefly, I’m using this in Corban sense. The imaginary is when you use images to move away from perception and engagement with the world. The imaginal is imagination for the sake of perception, for enhancing. And it lines up very nicely with the way imagination is understood within current predictive processing and deep learning. But if you also want an older thing, there’s Goethe’s way of seeing. I think it’s Bortoff in his book, taking appearance seriously. I think I’m getting his name slightly wrong. I’m reading the book right now. I think I’d call it idetic adduction. And so what does the emerging, I’ll just use this broad term, dynamic art. How does it relate to that? But also, as I said, I’m concerned with how does it relate to logos, theologos, and then through that, the logos that emerges individually within ecologies and practices. I am sort of asking, what’s its structural fit, the dynamic art, to these? And what’s its normative or stabius relationship to them? So those are sort of two questions I’d like to address. And whoever would like to go first, initial thoughts about that. I think, Laman, that touches on a lot of what you want to talk about and at least get us some bridging ground going. Yeah, what comes up for me is the relationship, particularly the cognitive and social relationships between religion and art. They seem to have co-emerged and co-evolved. It seems like the great religious moments of history are fusions of at least those two things. It’s hard to imagine the high Catholic period in Christian history without also imagining the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. And so there’s a very good argument, I think, that what we see contemporary art doing is also something that contemporary religion should be doing because they’re using many of the same, I think, faculties of imaginal augmentation, which sort of, I would argue, maybe comes in two broad categories. One is visionary, subtle, psychedelic, things that you, patterns that you perceive that don’t appear to belong to the space that you’re seeing. And the other one is a kind of looking more deeply into the patterns of symbolism and perception that are present in our everyday lives, to really see the tree, so to speak. Yeah, yeah. So to imaginally probe things. And I think art does both and religion does both. And the technologies we see today that leading-edge artists are availing themselves of should be things that we ask ourselves whether or not those can be transferred into religion because they are so closely evolving, I think. Yeah, I would even potentially go further than that and to say beyond just that there’s sort of a parallelism between these two. I’m tempted to call them magisteria, but something like that, these domains. I think that what I’m seeing or what I’m wondering, I’m intuiting, and this could be problematized, but to the degree to which these might be fused in what is emerging in this kind of new religion that’s not a religion domain, in the sense that if you consider how, yes, I think that there is a primacy in some way, or at least the perceived primacy in the past of say the symbolism, the tradition, the narrative, and then art is sort of a handmaiden to that or something. It sort of serves that. Whereas I think here what we’ve started to explore, especially in depth in our last dialogos, was the idea that in some ways these are almost different versions of the same thing, is that as the ideas themselves develop, they are working in tandem and being sort of infused by, informed by, with the feedback cycle loop that goes on with the artistic so that the narrative isn’t sort of driving the symbolism, but the symbolism and the narrative are sort of co-evolving, co-emerging in the sense that basically the artistic endeavor in this context is itself a mythopoetic and thus sort of conceptually rich endeavor. But it’s creative. It’s not translational only. It’s actually dynamic and emerging with these materials at the same time. And so if that’s true, it poses problems, it challenges, let’s say. It also is an intriguing notion of maybe thinking about this in the way that sort of the separation, the differentiation that occurred in modernity with art and science and whatnot, is now kind of maybe coming back together in interesting ways where art and the religious impulse are now directly fused in a way that I don’t think, say like in the medieval Catholic tradition, would have been deemed, I don’t know, sort of an orthodox expression of sort of art following behind the narrative and giving it form, if that makes sense. So I don’t know if that deepens anything there, but I think that that’s an important kind of… Yeah, Brandon, I feel like you’re drawing a really important distinction there because there’s a there’s an idea in the analysis of art in terms of whether we think of it as passively for the recipient or actively for the people creating art. Right? Nietzsche made this criticism of some of his predecessors, including Schopenhauer, and their way of defining the purpose of art was its effect on the viewer of the art. And Nietzsche wanted to think more about the artist themselves and the significance to the artist and the dynamic process that was involved. And now we have these technologies and these cultural attitudes that want to distribute that dynamic creative process to many people. And we should be thinking about that as something that can also be applied to religion, right? That religion is not fundamentally for passive recipients of a story sitting in the pews. It’s a more distributed collaborative process, as we’re seeing with the arts as well. And that underlying dynamic is something where it’s not like that art was following or art’s going to lead now. It’s that both of them have to shift more from their receptive mode to their active mode to distribute this ongoing generative capacity, I think. I’d like to pick up on that and take it further because we brought up the idea last time about the new emerging cyber and psycho technologies, especially how they are now blurring the distinctions that used to exist. So right now we’re blurring the distinction between the private and the public. We’re blurring the distinction between speech and writing because we’re talking online, but this is recorded for posterity. And we started to talk about in the Wikiworks of art, right, the boundary between the makers of art and the receivers of art was also breaking down in an important way. What I’m suggesting is that we have in the educated and tutored ability to play with the liminality that the new technology is providing us, we can perhaps better conform to and adapt people to the liminality of the cultural space that we’re in and that this is going to be more of a central feature. And I want to suggest that it’s not just religion and art that are undergoing this, I don’t know what to call it, synergy or something like that, because there’s a third that overlaps with them, which is culture, cultists cultivate, and meaning systems. And if you look at the upper Paleolithic transition where you get the first predictions of art, you can’t, like we now call them art, but that’s really anachronistic. There is much religious as their art as cultural. There’s no clean line between them. Now I’m not making the genetic fallacy and I’m not saying we can return to that, but I’m saying that there’s, for example, there’s good cognitive scientific theory that a lot of things that we now radically distinguish may have had a common ancestry and therefore have a belongingness together that we have forgotten, but we can recapture. So there’s, for example, there’s a proposal for what’s called Musa language that music and language have a common ancestor and that’s why we find it so natural for music and language to go together. When if you look at it abstractly, there’s no reason why they should go together anymore than music and I don’t know tying your shoes or your shoelaces, right? But we, oh no, they just like, you’ll get the words, don’t the words fit the music so well and doesn’t the music and like what’s going on there? That’s really bizarre, right? And then you also got the deep interaction between language and gesture and also between music and gesture, that’s dance, and language and gesture, and the gestures can be taken up within the language, within poetry, where we have movement, we use all these movement metaphors and we know a lot now about the connections. So it’s possible that the technology can allow us to participate, which is neither to create or receive but to transcend, to participate in the liminality in a way that adapts us to it by, if you’ll allow me, exacting the fact that a lot of our cognition has this common ancestry machinery we can tap into and draw it. So we can reach back into the, wow, this is grandiose, we can reach back into the upper Paleolithic ancestry and we can reach forward into the emerging potentials of the new technologies and this to me seems like a very serious new feature of the religion that’s not a religion, sort of consciously and explicitly with both the best science and the best art trying to get to say, let’s go to the common ancestry of religion, culture, and art, but let’s exact that into the most dynamic liminality that is occurring right now. Let’s put those into an explicit developmental relationship. That’s a proposal and I’d like to hear what you two think of that. That raises some really interesting thoughts to me which are coming up, bubbling up, so let me see if I can try to weave some of this together. So because the main point I would want to explore is whether or not the degree to which this is actually a reintegration rather than a blurring, right? There’s something really meaningful that happened with the differentiation that occurred with modernity. I think this is sort of Habermas’s point, I think, Habermas talks about, you know, right? So it also connects back to John, what you wanted to talk about with the transcendentals, right? And how beauty and because in some ways you can see what happens with that differentiation in modernity is sort of the good, the true, and the beautiful kind of separate and go there on separate ways, right? And so that’s why like in medieval contexts, a Madonna is a religious icon, but you enter into the Renaissance and now it’s a work of art in a way that something never was before. We have a new category that sort of, you know, and at first is sort of initially still playing a very religious role but then differentiates more and more so that it’s about individual expression and individuation and expression of feeling and emotion, etc. And so what I’m intrigued by here is a sort of way that if we are seeing art and that kind of religious impulse, let’s just say coming back together or fusing in some way again, it’s not as though it’s just sort of been reshaped. It’s an idea of art or the beautiful that still carries with it all the new things that have been developed into the new notion of art since modernity, but now coming, it’s like the good, it’s like the true and the beautiful are sort of reintegrating potentially, right? At least that could be an idea. And there’s an element in which the true is in there as well because it’s understood that these are individually creative or collaboratively generated forms and so it avoids that reification problem we’ve been speaking of. So there’s, I’m really intrigued by how these things are coming back together in a new way but in like a higher order synthesis where the true, the good, and the beautiful are all sort of reserving each other in a dynamic way again through this. Yeah, something like that. I would say a complexification then. That’s the sort of term I would want to use. And what’s interesting is I guess what’s implicit in my proposal is that the kind of, I’ll use some lingo here, the kind of compression we’re trying to get between dynamic compression we’re trying to get between the true and the good and the beautiful is precisely because of that history. It’s multi-dimensional in a way, just sort of talking about it in a working memory probably can’t manage it. We’re going to need distributed cognition. We’re going to need the cyber technologies in order to afford that kind of reunion because we’re not going to be able to do it at the level of sort of simple propositional logic or something like that. So that would be sort of a cogsci spin on what I was saying earlier as a response to what you just said. We’re going to really see and then again that’s us tapping into and this is dangerous but it’s unavoidable. So perhaps one of the jobs of the religion of religion is to tap into our ancestral capacity as cyborgs. As far as like probably as far back as Australopithecus, we are cyborgs and we are meshed with our technology. We can tap into that, you know what Clark says we’re the natural born cyborgs. We can tap into that evolutionary heritage but hopefully we can exact it again into distributed cognition and cyber cognition and distributed psycho and cyber cognition trying to give the processing platform for that complexification, that reunification of the true, the good, and the beautiful. Yes, very much. You see Habermas struggling with it because he realizes that the autonomy of each one of these domains of the normative was both a necessary development but also a very disturbing development. It has really fractured our attempts to pursue the good life and he was kind of trying to seek a way and you can see some similarity between his proposal for universal pragmatics that’s supposed to underlie both language and politics and all kinds of communicative acts and the kind of proposal I’m making here too. There’s definitely that influence and so but instead of it again I think this is ultimately something that is going to depend on, I’ll put it the other way around, I don’t think individual cognition has the processing capacity to do this what we’re talking about. That’s and so I don’t think it’s going to be resolved in somebody presenting an argument or a theory but instead there’s going to have to be the kind of stuff we’re talking about and this I like I said I keep coming back to this idea that I don’t think it’s a coincidence that liminality is emerging right now as both the problem and potentially the solution, the adapted fittedness to the problem. I think it’s a theme in our previous three dialogues actually. There’s a very meaningful pattern here right of of a deep ancient pre-differentiated root of value and then a contemporary differentiation of these value spheres and then the possibility of a new integration doesn’t cancel the functions of the differentiation. It’s a very Wilberian, that’s the fractal move of development generally. I think there’s I mean people could argue against the tidiness of that pattern but I think there is a lot of truth to it and I think that the level at which we would have to accomplish this integration is very much like you’re saying John so complex that it can’t be handled by individuals or at least can’t be handled by the rational conscious agent let’s say because I think there’s going to be a need for collaborative intelligence, amplifications of subconscious intelligence and the utility of cybernetic and artificial intelligences to handle this and they all move outside the domain of what the individual rational agent is able to do and there’s a need then to look back and see where did we already do something like that because anciently there was a lot of complexity and they were in a way crowd sourcing it. If we think about how Nietzsche describes the origins of both Western religion and Western art and theater in these Dynissian festivals which originally didn’t have very much structure, we might even think of them as jam sessions. People were coming together in collaborative pseudo improvisation to throw up the forms that eventually congealed into the mythologies that became the plays that became the artistic history so there’s definitely things that our ancestors have to tell us about how we handle that range of complexity because they were sometimes very successful and we need to be able to harvest those successes and match them up with the new needs and the new affordances of the current understanding of technological non-conscious and cybernetic collaborative ways of approaching this because I do agree that it’s beyond the competence of any waking rational individual to figure out how to work all this. Yeah well and that’s where trying to implement these frameworks, these ideas, these theories into workable at least experiments where this could happen is I think for me one of the most important next steps or a continuing ongoing step that needs to I think continually accompany this dialogus which is yeah in some ways sort of a meta artistical endeavor of trying to create the places in which the meta artists can be functional integrators between all these materials and ideas. Lema what you’re saying so that the symbol that I frequently go back to is the idea of cathedral building which is sort of when I think about an analog model from the past that would be insightful for how to pursue something like what we’re talking about. You’ve got a vast collaborative cultural project that’s bigger than any person, bigger than any generation and a sort of shared ethos that’s committed to ideals beyond simple pecuniary or kind of materialist concerns but actually a sort of collective dedication and commitment to spiritual aspirations of some kind and any kind of grand project that’s sort of unifying and orienting. Of course the challenge is precisely there right is where because we’re in such new territory the exact way of applying you know an example or a model from history into the new circumstances is what’s sort of the most difficult and challenging thing to do right. So where could we get you know where could we get something like that ethos that could play out in these in a distributed cognition sense map using these technologies. How would we do that in a way that could actually draw upon people’s collective passions and labors and efforts to do this sort of thing together that’s been I think the challenge. So I’ve been kind of experimenting with some of these. I made a kind of a proof of concept sort of thing this wiki to try to see if this could work essentially and it’s been interesting. There’s been some there’s definitely been some contribution and some engagement but it’s also interesting to see what still remain maybe some of the hangups for why an idea like this is still you know still very nascent and inchoate. It needs to it I think it needs to bring in a few other additional factors that ways of more effectively galvanizing general participation and then I think a big part of that is sort of certain conceptual blocks that I think are still there. We are still such at a liminal point where I think a lot of the prevailing conceptions of yesteryear are still very much sort of looming over people’s minds and so the idea of collaboratively generating sacred imagery I think is maybe it’s potentially as needed and warranted as it is it might still potentially be a bit too radical or a bit kind of hard to to figure out well wait a second and so I think maybe that is a role for where some of the dialogos you know needs to do additional work is trying to frame that map that out better so that so that it can help generate more of that participation. We might need to do intervening things. Yeah I think so I was on it was a Q&A at Rebel Wisdom and as I was answering questions there was an artist drawing imagery as the as it was unfolding and then when they’re done the image is presented to everybody and I thought that was particularly powerful. I forget what it’s called living script or something like that as a practice and then there’s also meaning wave like the cure of the dawn and others where people take the logos and they put music together and I think it would be a very short step to having instead of one person doing meaning wave a band doing meaning wave and then you know not just one person doing living script but a couple of people doing living script and so we might need intermediate steps like that where people get the idea of this sort of collaborative generation because the dialogos is going on and the images are being created right or the dialogos is running and the music and all the technological interventions of reverb and all kinds of stuff is going on and then like I say we could start with the you know with the the romantic ideal that still has us in a in a thrall which is the individual artist producing the work right but they’re producing it but they’re not producing it individually anymore they’re producing it collaboratively resonantly with another art that is unfolding and then open that up to a band doing meaning wave and a band doing living script and how that would be cool where you’re playing off each other and start to right so what I’m saying is we might need to do steps where we open the model up to layers of dynamic distributed cognition and since those two are already in existence and just starting to be used right now and also the potential to put those two together is right there it’s right there we could have people one person doing meaning wave while another person’s doing living script or a band doing meaning wave and a man doing living script while a bunch of people are doing dia logos and that could provide us with other paradigms and I mean that in platonic sense other paradigms for this collaborative production that aren’t so far like we could take we could basically take people sort of step by step away from the isolated genius artist towards the collaborative practice with existing practices and technology so I’m not proposing something that has to wait we could start doing those intermediary things right now and start educating and tutoring ourselves towards a taste for the aesthetic value because we’ve we I mean one of the things that progressively happen is and you know this and this has as much to do with capitalism and commodification but we bound these things to individuals and right often their expression of their own idiosyncratic way in the world and that doesn’t have to go away I’m not saying we I don’t think we’re proposing a replacement we’re not saying stop doing all of that we’re saying in addition to all of that let’s do this and I foresee that we could get people you know getting a taste for that like for me it’s like the move that rock and roll made when it went from Elvis Presley to the Beatles right there was this move there was this shift and it really shifted people’s sense right of involvement just because there was four as opposed to one and they were all very you know different but they collaborated that’s just meant as a rough analogy but it we could move people out Brendan we could move people out with existing practices or practices that are right there to be made to generate right now. There’s something I think there’s something very beautiful and something already sacred about these about the instantiated moment of people doing these practices together yeah and I think there’s something there Brendan that brings in a dimension that can solve the reluctance you were talking about because I think live jamming with people if some of them are doing interior practices and some of them are doing dialogue and some of them are live creating visuals and some of them are accepting it into music right and then obviously all of that needs to then be filtered through other layers of can someone else take something useful out of that and it moves along to the point where it could be a sort of self-sustaining mythological chunk of some kind but in the moment I think there’s something that the immediacy of the collaboration gives that the individual contributor to a wiki can’t quite get at this moment and their reluctance might be that they’re not they’re not feeling the collaborative invitation and then the overtone that’s created beyond themselves. One thing that popped into my mind was the classic Tibetan monks creating a sand mandala yeah yeah right because they’re doing practice they’re meditating they’re chanting they’re doing it with each other and they’re creating something partly by a set of rules and partly by the spirit of what they’re doing and it’s beautiful and it exemplifies the religious ethos that they’re working on and sends a signal to other people as well but also is a passing and temporary phenomenon so that’s a I think a great classic example of the kind of thing we’re talking about but we’re taking it to the next level by taking advantage of new understandings of collaborative intelligence and new technologies. Yeah no I think you’re right I think there’s a couple points here one is for me and we’ve touched on this a couple times now but the art is a is a practice it’s not just a means to express ideas it’s also the yeah so that’s important I think you’re right I think that there are I think it’s a great point that there’s something missing in sort of a collaborative wiki environment that that is sort of maybe a bit sterile and lacks that kind of thing and I wonder I don’t know maybe as the metaverse comes online or VR or things like that and you can be immersive in context where you could also be manipulating digital content maybe that would be a potential you know way that this this could kind of maybe maybe some of these ideas are sort of speaking of liminality they’re sort of just right between where enough of the technology exists to actually be able to implement some of this I think it’s a huge problem throughout the design challenges of this because you know so so I yeah I that all that all rings very true another thing I wanted to throw out and John I think it’s a good idea which is that sort of you know there’s maybe a stepwise kind of introduction to these sorts of things that people don’t have to be thrown into the deep end of the pool as it were but there can be sort of a a kind of a graded approach to what sorts of engagement what sorts of creative productions people would be doing that sort of a thing which actually in some ways is an interesting tie-in potentially with how these environments of co-creation could be specifically tailored to some of the demographics that we were sort of trying to put our finger on in a couple of our conversations too in terms of you know different people are going to be engaging in different ways and and so anyway all that’s all that’s there for me another thing I wanted to to to bring into this I guess was well yeah I guess and this is actually rather crucial really because even if something worked technically and from a design standpoint all this material was being generated it doesn’t necessarily mean much unless there’s that genuine transformative spiritual depth that is coming from it and meaning and connection and truth and all that so one of the things why I see a lot of potential in things like the meaning waves and the living script and whatnot there’s also a desire for me to also be doing that creative and co-creative work with even like more kind of what’s the word I mean John you were talking about the paleolithic and going all the way back to you know people were engaging with symbols and whatnot and you know when I think of like a I don’t know a Greek Orthodox icon right or a you know some or a zen sand garden or certain things like that that are highly evocative but at a symbolic and a spiritual level not just an aesthetic level with ideas attached to it and that’s sort of the thing that I’m interested to see and I think that’s probably where the greatest reticence lies is people feeling sort of given permission to engage creatively and inventively with those sorts of materials there’s sort of this mental blockage I think of like oh well a symbol needs to be handed down from you know on high or it needs to come from some revelation or something the notion of co-creating symbols of that sort I think is probably the hardest nut to crack conceptually for folks is my intuition and it’s also the area that I find potentially most efficacious and edifying and rich so yeah. I think that’s a I think that’s a very astute observation now again that is not natural even though it seems natural to us because if you look at different societies different cultures both across context and across history that notion that the sacred has to come down from the Mount Sinai kind of thing I’m sorry that was not meant to be in any way anti-semitic I’m just getting that that you know that goes all the way back to you know the Iron Age or even the Bronze Age I should say the right the sacred comes down from that which is tablets coming down right yeah very very very superior now you know if you take a look for example in the indigenous practices both cross-culturally and historically you know obviously there’d be a figure like the shaman but the shaman isn’t the shaman isn’t like the the shaman is more like you know the especially talented jazz player amongst a bunch of other jazz players rather than somebody who is pronouncing the sacred to others right the the the shaman is more a virtuoso conductor of a shared concert than as a performer before a silent audience that’s wrapped in reverential attention and it doesn’t mean the numinous isn’t present you better believe the numinous is present but of course with the agrarian revolution the buildup of civilization and you know we get pretty clear examples of this untouched by our history in the Mayans about how the shamans become the kings and then there’s the pyramids and right and all of that sort of stuff and so the point i’m trying to make is both i agree that i think this is a profound constraint that is written into our understanding of the sacred that we need to challenge in fact it is being deeply challenged but i think you’re right it’s still there and it’s still constraining but i want to sort of say that doesn’t mean that we fall into kind of a post-modern nihilism when we say oh we’ve given up the constraint then we just lose it because there are alternative ways in our history and across cultures that say no no no we can have the sacred with its you know electrifying polarity between the numinous and the homing within the cosmos without that hierarchical understanding and of course the hierarchical understanding goes back to what we said before about the hierarchical institutions and we were proposing more remember the dynamic overlap between the the university and the church and the monastery right i think that that institutional change will help afford the change in the conceptuality of the sacred and again i think we can tap into our ancestry you know our ancestral abilities to have a more participatory conception of the sacred and so i agree that this is challenging but i’m making an argument that if we if we simultaneously get people to remember in platos sense remember their their ancestral capacity and point them to a new emerging social organizations right the dynamic overlap small world dynamic recreating small world network between the church and the university and the monastery we can i think you never convince people with an argument you convince people with a beautiful way of life that they are attracted to and then once they’re in it they use the argument to give themselves bearing right and so i’m saying the arguments have an important purpose but the thing we have to do first is to make the argument in scare quotes for this alternative way of life and if we were doing all of these things in a coordinated fashion i think that would be the way to address this very difficult constraint right get people to remember the sacred doesn’t have to i don’t know disclose itself that way that’s just not true we have we clearly have evidence that there are deeply alternative rich ways other than that and if those are meshed with these dynamic productions and the dynamic organization of the institutions i think that’s how we would have to address the constraint that that that constraint it has to be challenged at sort of a in a multi-dimensional way you know in parallel many things have to be sort of pushed on at the same time i don’t know i mean the degree to which like like we can create like even here we have like we’re like we’re still being held back a bit by the technology but but that’s going to change this is going to get more immersive more co-present and we’re at the edge and you can see people playing with this you have people like in a zoom room and then they have like a short shared whiteboard and they’re doing stuff right and so that would help to give them being present to each other not just present in the product of the work right and then right so we have i think we we can i think it is rational to propose that we can address that constraint and then i think there’s technology that’s close by that might help anyways layman i cut you off i think you wanted to say something oh um yeah this you know the cosmic hierarchical descent of the religious symbols in the iron age model seems like it has two sources and one is in the the world view of the people involved who are assuming a top-down pyramid model and of course the people who have a vested interest in receiving privileges by promoting that view exactly and then on the other hand simply the fact that a lot of the actual sources are historically informationally opaque to us we weren’t there to see it happen and so it exists in a kind of netherworld i don’t know if you guys saw melbrook’s history of the world part one but he has a routine where he’s moses and he comes down from the mountain he’s got three tablets each with five commandments he says i have here these 15 and he drops one it shatters 10 10 commandments right so there’s a lot that we just didn’t see and today we we see the sausage getting made when we were involved in it and so we have to have i think good faith in each other and trust that the process works and some of this meta-modern spirit of sincere irony in order to challenge that element and also the political savvy to be aware of the limitations of the top-down model i think there’s something interesting though about our right because that’s the social side of it there’s something interesting about it the imaginal tendency to avail itself of an eternalized naturalized version of the source of the symbols yes and that might be necessary and so we might need to develop the distributed shamanic skill set whereby we can really encounter eternity or hyper time and a sense of a transhuman intelligence with those symbols and if we can do that then that can supplement the effect that we were getting from the eternalization and top-down storytelling aspect of it but we may need to make contact with with an aspect of it that is analogous to that right where we’re not looking at the at the human sourcing anymore that we’re seeing it as ingressing from some trans temporal dimension in some way right and trust we have to trust each other and the process to such a degree that we can say with a good conscience and a rational mind that this could be what that is and we’re comfortable treating it that way well just some thoughts come up real quick i i one i think well something that’s coming up for me is that there isn’t um say a a specific way that this general endeavor uh has to unfold i mean that sounds obvious in some ways but what i mean by that is that that that this can occur for different folks in different ways yes part of the challenge will be in some ways to whatever degree folks are involved in sort of shaping the environments in which this is occurring creating enough space for those different uh modes of engagement in a way that is invitational and and allows for the diversity to to be operating in those spaces so there you need to avoid a sort of one size fits all this is how this is set up sort of a thing hopefully as these sorts of ideas get picked up explored developed different kinds of modes of of interaction and development get get developed so that the there can be sort of an ecology of these different uh environments to to do these sorts of endeavors and there would be sort of an evolutionary you know a way that some of these would be sort of rise more to the top as as people find like this fits what i’m interested in and in the way that i work a lot better and so there’s that sort of dynamic that could play out here um but one of the things too that i’m thinking of is sort of layman what you were talking about um you know there’s a there’s a whole kind of uh i don’t know what you’d call it sort of a movement i guess around visionary art i don’t know if if you’re familiar with visionary art and it’s the genre of art but it’s also um sort of a community of people it’s um particularly who comes to mind is alex gray he’s a painter who’s sort of a at the forefront of this but the idea is sort of um to when one has a sort of entheogenic experience whether that’s through psychedelic use or what other kind people paint these things and they they give them expression it’s a sort of individualistic of this was my experience but then that’s brought into community of other people having similar experiences or you know similarly uh representing their experiences so that something highly communal develops out of something rather idiosyncratic um and so and what’s interesting about that model is that i think you can very much participate in that with the the the sense of um forget how you framed it layman but but the the kind of ontological descent of truth or something like that that you can you can engage that kind of creation that sort of participatory uh project even whilst thinking and holding the the framework of this is coming sort of from the source you know coming from within that i’m representing so there are different sort of ontologies that can map onto these different kinds of of production um i guess is and and i’m some of this is yeah so this is very helpful to kind of clarify the diversity that is sort of wrapped up in this project both in terms of means but also in terms of sort of ontological frameworks and presuppositions about how this goes on and so the best thing i think that could happen would be these different modes and these different frameworks are loosely held together by something that is a kind of still a deeply kind of communal project that also represents the differences i didn’t know about that at all i’d like to know more about the visionary art especially its capacity to move between individual and community one of the one of the criticisms that’s made of the psychedelic movement not not in its therapeutic aspects or its scientific aspects about revealing cognition but as a response to let’s say the meaning crisis um is that it’s it’s rapidly individualistic you you’re in you have your own little trip and you’re off there and yours is very idiosyncratic and it it doesn’t really right uh doesn’t really bind you to other people um in a profound way and i take that criticism very very seriously but it sounds like what people are using with the visionary art is a a medium that mediates and allows them to commune together about these experiences what’s interesting to me about well first of all that’s just an inherently interesting thing because it addresses that criticism that art may actually act as a powerful mediator and medium in that way and that’s very very cool i’d like to know more about that and then if again to add to the plausibility of our proposal if we take you know that it’s sort of you know 30 to 40 percent of the population have experiences that are you know broadly construed mystical they can be visionary they can be at one minute they can be a sense of a profound sense of connectedness um some of them become transformative experiences many mystical experiences are not transformative experiences we should not use those terms interchangeably when the mystical experience empowers and encourages someone to transform their lives and their identity in a comprehensive and sustained manner that’s a transformative experience and right but people also have transformative experiences independent of mystical experience the book badly titled book quantum change is about that and then if you add to that the universality not meaning everybody experiences it but most people have and everyone can is the flow experience especially particularly intense flow experiences which border on the mystical it can often be triggered in these communal activities right what i’m saying is right if something like the visionary art can be integrated what we’re talking about we can also tap into the fact i agree with layman we’d have to distribute skills but we have to understand right that there’s already a lot of people having these experiences and our culture right now tells them to shut up and keep quiet or go really crazy and narcissistic and idiosyncratic about them and those are the two sort of accepted modes purely private or ridiculously public i guess is what i right and trying to give people right i think one of the problems we face in the meaning crisis is we do not give people a community and the culture grammar to metabolize these experiences and so that they do not get properly honed and that means all kinds of distortions and pathologies can emerge one of the things i’m saying in conjunction with both of you is you know we already have a i don’t know what to call it a mystical potential than people right well much larger than we are led to believe like i’ve heard pretty reliable figures around 30 to 40 percent when you broaden the notion this way right and that’s a tremendous potential within a population and that so we don’t need to rely on people for example necessarily taking substance not excluding them either but we don’t have to rely on that given the natural frequency of these phenomena it wouldn’t take that much to create spaces where they can create a shared co-intelligibility of these experiences so that they are not kept private or they are not projected at narcissistically into the the public sphere so i’m saying i think if we again if we take a look at our potential and and then i think we could put what what you said layman and what you said brendan together again i mean again this is not that far away this is not this is very adjacent possible this is not oh you know we have to go well we have to have the revolution first or something like that that’s not what what what what has to happen right now so i found that what you just said very exciting because it addresses a concern and also i think given the existing potential and propensity i think layman it it would be quite feasible to to to disseminate the shamanic skill set if you want to call it that at least it has three s’s which is nice right but keep it from becoming individualized in a dangerous fashion so i find all of that just very exciting because it makes it again much closer than we might initially think i think new information exchange technologies and new insights into collaborative intelligence will mitigate against the individuality of the psychedelic and mystic experience but i also think that individuality is especially in the psychedelic case it’s partly an artifact of social suppression of the yes yes yeah the people haven’t had time to get together in the open and deal with it yeah something that brendan was talking about that sort of initiated the discussion about you know the symbols being on high or collaborative which i think we haven’t quite addressed is at what point what threshold is crossed at which people evaluate something that’s been produced as being functionally sacred and dynamic and not just a work of art right and there’s different ways to address that where one person in a more shamanic mode i’d say they have a greater imaginal capacity to take something that might seem to be colloquial in terms of the aura that it has and really perceive that as religiously vital and someone else might not have as much of that skill and require much more from the symbol itself yes and from the collective validation of that symbol to get them to that place and i’m imagine i’m actually just was thinking about you know we can evolve skill sets that actually interfere with each other as long as they don’t inhibit the overall replication of the lineage yeah so if we evolve the capacity to um imaginally and appreciatively really get into things and we also evolve the useful capacity to superficially duplicate each other then you’re going to get some people really appreciating say a mythic symbol and a lot of people superficially duplicating that and not realizing that they’re not doing it and so that differential and capacity needs to be teased apart because like on the one hand we have a certain subset of the population that’s notably good at encountering that spiritual dimension of things and then on the other hand a bunch of the population that isn’t and the first thing they would have to do is understand that they may not really be doing it right they might be going around saying i love krishna but they might not be doing the thing that the people who were promoting that originally were doing they may just assume they’re doing it so there has to be some kind of critical epistemic humility involved in those people yes and then also a sense of what is required from the symbols and the memes in order to bridge that so that they can get on to an authentic wavelength about that and what bubble into my head a few minutes ago it’s almost perverse but you know the captcha thing where you’re like how many of these images have buses in them that kind of yeah right that’s used to help us teach the ai’s what buses are right but what if it was how many of these images strike you as wholly right and it could be a random assortment of images but if hundreds of thousands of people were having these brief interactions you could have an automated system slowly compiling a very reliable sense of what human beings are likely to experience as sacred out of given visual configurations yes so you could semi-automate this because we’ve been talking a lot about the collaborative intelligence aspect but i think the the cybernetic intelligence aspect is also going to play a big role very much very much like i said i don’t think we’ll be able to do the compression creation variation without it i really don’t i don’t think we can i think it’s too much of a hyper object we’re trying to grok here and we’re going to need distributed cognition and distributed computation just like no individual can grok global warming like you need you need hundreds of thousands of scientists and hundreds of thousands of machines both computational measurement to just get this entity into human awareness right and and notice that the struggles we’re having because we have we have that ability to to let to to to grok the hyper object but many people can’t believe in it because and this is towards your point layman because they they haven’t gone through the education that is needed it right you though there’s a way of thinking and seeing and being that you have to have in order to be get a cognitive apprehension of certain kinds of entities so yeah i i think that i think you’re right oh go ahead brendan well i just so a couple things one is um i’m not sure if um well i guess i’ll say up front i find the idea of sort of automated ai sacred symbol generation disconcerting um but certainly you know a fascinating concept and and how that could or couldn’t be be used in a really uh helpful positive way is an interesting thing to explore but i also want to i want to challenge maybe the idea that what we need to do is is sort of create some sort of um aggritized archetype because to go back to what we were saying about that sort of you know neolithic past of ours like these things are archetypal at a at a very profound deep level i think we can grok like what what feels holy or or or has symbolic power um without needing to rely on particularly advanced technology to mediate that and so um i would be i mean of course there’s also the way in which um doing this in an automated fashion loses something really precious about the individual and idiosyncratic forms that different symbols can take on um and that sort of thing get would seem to be sort of lost in the aggregation um and so but i think the question though is a crucial one which is you know what separates a a a functionally kind of sacralized image from just something that is cool or looks symmetrical or something like that right there they are functionally different and we we shouldn’t be focusing so much on just what the technology will be successful in sort of conveying and disseminating we also really need to think a lot about what what’s going on there in in say you know like the image of a of a cross or or a crescent or or or a mandala or something that that isn’t going on in like a in a brand logo or something right because there’s actually a lot of functional overlap even between those sorts of things and yet one is engaged very differently so i think that potentially as a as a where this conversation could go next at some point would be really interesting to interrogate that because i think it’s sort of a it needs to be incorporated into whatever environments for co-collect you know co-creation come to come to be so and then i lastly i would say that i also think that we don’t need to look too far for these sorts of things i mean yes certainly more foundational um symbol like imagery is sort of anonymous and it came up with the tradition but other things you can point to like dante’s divine comedy you know that work for me is a profound scripture like text and yet i know the author and i know you know his life and that sort of a thing and yet i can i engage with that in a in a way that is analogous to you know a sacred text and i think we could probably come up with a bunch of other examples whether it’s kirkgaard or nichi or whatever walt whitman different different different authors thinkers feelers mystics people who have done this sort of thing but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s given some kind of authoritative canonical status as a scriptural text but um but but i can engage with it in that way and i feel like there’s something that we can learn from that and maybe a model there that could be useful for thinking about some of these co-creative symbols and sacred imagery well yeah there’s a teamwork uh story john um between these things right like i don’t think we could um totally switch to an automated production of the sacred or even an automated evaluation of the sacred but that could play a role just like collaborative could play a role just like the individual training of capacities for people to find what they personally can work with and resonate with plays a role right and that’s going to differ from person to person both in their inborn ability to get sacred value out of something that they encounter and also their training to do that and that needs to be uh you know whatever the collective is it has to partially distribute those skill sets and those encouragements for the existing skill sets and experiences that people have but it also has to afford us some kind of interpersonal uh evaluation style and you know a way to get together on things so that we feel like we have something in common and that’s partly you know that’s partly from the art we create we’re going to get those things that’s partly maybe from what a machine could create it’s partly going to come out of our visions i haven’t talked about it much but i think a lot of it comes out of the ability to resonate with things that are colloquial like i think there’s a lot of concepts and terminology in regular language that when we hear it from the past we think it describes an exotic sacred function and it really did but it would have hit their ear as an ordinary form of speaking when they talk like like we would say the spirit of art right and they talk about the spirit of art too but we think of them worshiping a spirit of art right and so we’re not viscerally connecting with it in the same way but i think there is a lot of colloquial sourcing of this material in things we’re already saying to each other most of the time and not activating our resonance mode and then this is just totally random which is this week i saw because it’s not just words and images it’s also concepts there was a meme going around about how it was scientifically proven that elephants engage in moon worship because they know the cycles and they they sway some sticks toward the moon and you look at you go i don’t believe that for a second and i don’t care that i don’t believe it because it makes me want to be religious right now just hearing about that evokes a mode in me and so it’s deviating from fact and it’s not a subtle word or an image it’s just a concept it’s a beautiful concept that touches on something about how i want to be religious in the world yeah i want to reinforce what layman said brendan i wasn’t proposing a cybernetic overlord of the sacred i was in fact i was i kept saying i think it’s a cyborg thing we will cyborg with the technology and what i could see it doing is augmenting and this goes towards the question because i have like i’ve made an argument of proposal as to what i think differentiates the at least some of the dimensionality the dimensional differences between the brand and the symbol one and this is this one the the ai and the automation could help us considerably one is how generalizable is it right like if if you propose a symbol and it doesn’t take with other people it dies that’s just that’s just it so there’s a dimension there of generalizability and and that’s a function of compression and right and so the ai can pick that up and perhaps propose and get us to look for ways modify the symbol this way and it will generalize more i could see the ai helping us in that tremendously but that would also to some degree work for the brand and see what a symbol has that the brand doesn’t have it’s not only has generalizability it has inexhaustibility right it has to be it has to be as i said and this is you know this is ultimately from polanyi this is one of our fundamental sense of real as opposed to some some some outcome you know something that’s just a right not real it has an inexhaustibility to it this is why we’re trying to build multi-dimensional inexhaustibility into our virtual worlds because we know that sense of the inexhaustibility really conveys realness to us right and so the symbols may be ancestrally archetypal yes but they but but but they also have to be inexhaustibly innovative right right if we just got the wise old there’s a there’s a wise old man just there again like right but think about you know you get the variation in gandalf which is different than yoda but nevertheless there but right and there’s so and right there’s an inexhaustibility to it it has to constantly afford a developmental arc for people and that’s what a brand doesn’t do see a brand exactly fails on that dimension because what it does is it promises an identity and identity is an inherently developmental thing but the last thing the brand owners want you to do is develop because you might develop a taste for something other than them right so it’s it’s a it’s a grand act of pretense it’s like let’s all wear this stuff to show how individual we are right we’ll all wear it because that’s how we show our individuality there’s a lot of remember we talked about this at the beginning there’s a lot of way in which this machinery gets hijacked and there’s people who don’t want this project to succeed precisely because they want the brands to predominate the attention space and not the symbols because the symbols have the potential to grow people up right and to clear their space of thought and of interaction in the way brands typically don’t i’m not saying this is the complete dimensionality but i’m saying you know generalizability maybe like on a horizontal axis and then like inexhaustibility this i’ve talked about it in terms of reciprocal opening right the reciprocal opening the inexhaustible reciprocal opening the depths of the psyche calling to the depths of reality that call to the depths of the psyche and of course that can be graduated to wherever a person’s at just like layman was saying it doesn’t have to be that everybody’s doing einstein it could just be that somebody get oh i now i really i understand more deeply how i love my partner that’s what it could mean for them but but if that symbol generalizes across many people and many people are saying oh i understand how i love better how to love my partner that’s when something i think becomes a viable candidate for being symbolic and then when people start when that when they get a sense of like i said that this isn’t going to stay limited or localized then it starts to become sacred to them i would propose to you i think there’s other dimensions that i would like to talk to them but i just want to put in that and and like i say i can see the ai helping like gather the data about this i don’t see it at least for a while hopefully being the generative source but what it can do is it can filter out a lot of the noise especially when we’re trying to see how well we can get something to generalize like what do we do now we just try it and see but what you can do now is right on the edge you can sample do a compression better than any human being and say i bet you this will get picked up a lot better and if you don’t think corporations are already doing this right of course they are right but that could be turned towards good purpose and then the other dimension of the inexhaustibility can be brought in and now that’s where i think things like the dia logos the participation in the ongoing emergence of new symbols the reason why i i thought that was important was not just because of the participation in the liminality but precisely because of the exemplification of inexhaustibility see one of the dangers with the static symbols is people can forget the inexhaustible and then they go for the total instead this is complete and finished whereas i think what we what we and again meek’s book contact with reality on palanis is exactly this right for me that has been the consistent mark of the sacred those two dimensions if i talk about something in playdo and people pick it up right and if and if in playdo every time my life turns right i can go back to playdo and see something new and then go into my life and i get the reciprocal opening that for me is when i feel like i’m tasting the sacred again i’m not proposing this as a definition i’m just trying to answer the question of what are some distinguishing differential criteria that distinguish the sacred symbol from the brand i think there’s a you know you mentioned love and i one of the things we have to think about is not just what’s required for something to be a symbol beyond a brand but also what do we want it to be right there’s a different kind of symbols which symbols do we want because you could plausibly get a brand that functioned as a symbol with a certain inexhaustibility you know maybe coke is it you like and everybody encounters that as the relationship between the universal and the particular and there’s no end to all the things it can be right but associating it with this toxic sugar sludge is not how we want our symbols to come to us because we also want them to be a hyper compressed overflowing embodiment of what we generate well-being for beings like us so we want to we’re not looking for every kind of symbol we’re looking for a certain kind of symbol that takes us in a certain direction yeah i was trying to put my finger on that with like the inexhaustibility has a trajectory of development right the reciprocal opening the development the moving towards being you know greater being within greater being kind of thing very much that and again that’s that’s both an ancient trope you know play-doh coming out of the cave etc but it’s also something that is now i think people have a sense it’s growing within the last 10 years well this is i propose this of like the complexity the dynamic complexity and inexhaustible amount of information available is now unavoidably the case it was always true by the way the environment was always such but we could pretend very readily that it wasn’t we can’t pretend that way anymore the virtual world has just put the lie to that and so yeah i i i agree we we do need to we do need to harness that to a developmental arc yeah that would be important normative dimension of of the symbol what what is it leading us towards and is it a plausible model of kinds of good life i don’t think there’s one single good life of kinds of good life yes very much and that’s something that the art should help figure for us it should help present to us like i said the ultimate arguments are propositions they’re ways of life that people find beautiful and are attracted into and they ultimately will pass on to their children because they found it to be a good way of life yeah it’s it’s interesting how um so one of the instances that we already discussed was the idea of the headless god there’s a way that we need symbols to capture this idea of how symbols work which is their reciprocal opening and their inexhaustibility um you kind of meta symbolic um images or something things that that capture the right uh way of participating with symbols in symbolic form something like that but then also needing symbols somehow to speak to these various forms of the good life um which is uh i mean that’s sort of a daunting but compelling and necessary task as well um i mean yeah a lot of things are coming up but um you know not sure how much time we’d have to get to any of them but but there are a couple of things one is also the duty of the one is also the degree to which existing symbols can can be a part of all of this right the the to what degree um could something say like the cross that already has incredible impact for many people come into this sort of space is there a way that that this space is somehow exclusionary to pre-existing symbols and things like that or is this so uh uh you know are those sorts of materials the kinds of materials that can be engaged with and i think that that’s an important question it might even get to some of the um concerns that uh jonathan peugeot and paul vanderclay have maybe uh spoken to about about this whole endeavor in terms of you know whether there’s something new or whether there’s a way that we can sort of continue with pre-existing traditions in ways that are just enlivening or or reforming or something like that but i think that whole element of how this interacts with pre-existing tradition um and and symbolic imaginaries is an important one too but uh yeah i propose that we make that the topic of our next discussion then i think that’s incredibly rich um and uh it will be in a you know and i think it will properly circle back to layman’s original proposal about that you know discussing the role of mythology properly broadly like properly construed and and deeply understood not just the way it’s pejoratively used um in everyday discourse so i i propose we we we wrap it here uh i think we made tremendous progress again i’m always so i guess please i’m not delighted yes that’s a better word i’m delighted about how these how these well true dialogos they go in places i do not foresee and i started thinking we’re going to talk about this and we end up over here talking about that and i’m glad we ended up there because that sounds so much better than this right i just i’d love that about this process and so i wanted to thank both of you for that um i’ll put links to the previous videos um i think it will keep in sequence we go on brendan’s channel uh for this discussion about um yeah what do we what’s the relation between the old symbols and the new symbols um and and we kept touching on that and so i think that also captures a lot of resonance and it goes back also layman to your proposal about can we get something like what was going on in the bettick system but what would that lap look like for us now um so i propose that we meet next at uh on brendan’s channel for taking up that question um and then i want to thank both of you for coming on voices with revaki this wonderful journey and i want to give each one of you sort of the chance for the last word perhaps we’ll start with layman yeah well um that’s a fantastic idea for the next discussion which will be after the holidays so happy holidays to both of you uh yes i want to not only thank both of you but i want to thank whatever other thing has been operating between and around us yeah yeah yeah happy winter light everyone yes uh shared gratitude and appreciation this is a delight i think that’s the word that comes to mind for me too so just thank you so much for this and i’m deeply enjoying it and looking forward to all the additionally new unexpected places this will go so happy holidays and thanks happy holidays everyone