https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=yaymVGaJAeQ
Welcome everyone to another voices with Reveki. I’m joined with one of my frequent and favorite interlocutors Jordan Hall, and we’re going to take up a topic that has emerged from the private conversations we’ve been having that we thought we want to develop in a more shareable format. So hence what we’re doing right now. So welcome Jordan. It’s always great to be here with you. Yeah, it’s always great. So the topic that we were going to explore and we’ll sort of recover in exploring the topic, why we got to it, is this idea of trying to exemplify or maybe even participate in some things that have been recommended from some of the wisdom traditions. Just to give one example among many that are possible, or maybe two from the Christian tradition, because it’s the one people are most likely to be familiar with, you have Jesus recommending, and I like this particular translation, Jesus recommending that we be passersby. And this is caught up in but not exactly equivalent to Paul’s recommendations, St. Paul, that we be in the world but not of the world. And of course that also has lurking behind it, the Nietzschean criticism of Christianity being a kind of platonic hatred of the body and the world, bringing in that critique Christianity close to some forms of Gnosticism. So all of that at work, there’s tension and there’s criticism around it, which means it needs dialogos, but there’s also a provocation there, it’s like why this recommendation, and how does it connect to the fact that we seem to be recovering in cyberspace what we were for 99.9% of our time in environmental space, namely a kind of being nomads, we seem to be nomads, we pick up and move and we pick up and move and we pick up and move, and there’s no place that’s our final finished home, but instead we are constantly opening up the world. For me, this is very relevant to stuff that I’ve been doing, some with Jordan about eidetic deduction and the dialogos projects. And so all of this is, and this is why we’re coming together, all of this is both salient, it’s catchy, it’s exciting, but it’s also incoherent, and it’s also something that needs explanation and articulation, and hopefully clarify why this recommendation, and what does it mean, and how do we steer away, how do we attempt to fulfill it without falling into that Platonism that longs for disembodied perfection or completion? Right, right, so if we take, it’s funny, I’ll just allow it to be, I don’t actually think this is what Nietzsche was saying, but I’ll allow it to be presented as such. We take that critique seriously, we take the notion that a full removal or rejection action, not removal, but rejection of the world, is on one side of where we’re going, we don’t want to go there, and then we take this notion of what’s actually being pointed out as the other side, like what’s the other boundary that we’re trying to avoid, and therefore allowing that to define the space in the middle. I think that feels right to me, just as an orienting basis, there’s something about that being the sort of the natural appropriate place. There’s a lot of really interesting things to explore. Give me, sorry, one moment. All right, you’re still there? Okay, let’s see. Sorry. I was noticing that for me, as you might imagine, part of what I was considering was, or not considering, endeavoring was actually to step into being in that way. We can learn a lot more about the invocation by actually simply following it and becoming passersby, or in the language of this book that I’ve mentioned that in our conversation, sojourners. Strangers into strange land, that whole sensibility. So even that, the question, what does it even mean to be in that way, in the world? The stranger in a strange land, of course, is evoking the mythology of the Exodus and of Moses, and what does that mean? Zachary Stein famously and aptly describes us in a time between two worlds, which is an Exodus, he’s invoking the Exodus mythology. We’re moving, right? And that’s the nomad element. We’re moving between, we sense ourselves. Sorry, I’ve turned my thing off, but I’m not sure why it’s keep dinging. And so that to me is a very interesting thing. So let’s zero in, and let’s zero in on, there’s that experience, and it could be confused with another experience. So there’s the sense of Exodus, which carries with it, a sense of moving towards, right? There’s a directionality to it, there’s an orientation to it. There’s a liberation, a freeing from and a freeing to. So let’s remember that. It’s different from this, although it feels similar. When you’re just a stranger in a strange land, when you’ve traveled to Borneo and you just feel out of place, and you’re just experiencing culture shock, and you have that sense of disorientation and lostness. And so I’m trying to get the difference between the sense of Exodus and the sense of culture shock. They overlap in the sense of, I don’t completely belong here, but there’s also a fundamental difference. And I think Jesus in what I quoted, speaking on behalf of Jesus is always a worrying thing. Okay, got it. Yeah. So if you think of the construction, I think a letter from the church sojourning in place X, new church sojourning in place Y. The orienting of course is first towards church, so something about the notion of church that speaks to the beingness that is in this space. And what I would say is something like the precisely the constitution of the beingness of the kingdom of heaven as being the location to be in. So I should say, hey guys, be in the kingdom of heaven, which is a place. Now I don’t mean like Borneo, but it’s a place where one can be, is a location that being can occupy. Very difficult to communicate that, isn’t it? And it has a relationship with other kinds of place. I mean, to me immediately it just pops up the very simple distinction between the existence and being, right? Or in some sense it said, hey, orient towards right relationship with essence, and which implies in right relationship with existence. That’s almost like find out what be be discover what is right relationship between existence and essence, and then orient towards that. And I think that’s maybe even like the way of invoking it. That’s very cool because that you’re invoking the distinction the way I see Tillich invoking it, when he invokes the relationship between our existential self and our essential self. And that our journey in life is to try and get our existential self in more proper alignment to our essential self. It’s an aspirational Socratic model. Okay, so that’s very helpful. And so there’s a sense in which the Exodus is to the promised land, to the kingdom of God, is very much the aspirational move between being how we exist and how we could exist in a way that more fully discloses our the nature of our being, where that doesn’t mean something just inside me, but also something between me and other people. So the kingdom of God is within you, but it also can be translated as the kingdom of God is between you. And then of course, in the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus famously says, the kingdom of God is spread upon the world, but men see it not. So it’s not really another place. It’s another way of being in this place. It’s like Milton’s, when Satan says, the mind is its own place. It can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven, that kind of thing. Okay, so we’re getting a lot of stuff resonating here, which I think is really cool. I like the tie in to the aspirational self. And then the question arises, why is this so important? Oh, wow, that’s a good question. Can I not get there just yet? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Because there’s a few that popped up that I felt were fun to throw into the… Yeah, let’s enrich the phenomenology. Into the crucible, not the fire, melting it, we’re not burning it into the ash. One was the very, to my mind, it’s a beautifully banal and even profane metaphor of just the simple notion of a radio. Yeah, okay. Kingdom of 99.5 is at hand, but nobody’s been into it. The way of thinking about the way of being in relationship with something that is somehow called like invisible or not yet currently part of your experience, but part of the potential of your experience. That’s the point, right? It is what may not yet exist. Yes, yes, yes. Simple as that, right? The transition between is-ness and existence is this middle zone of something like relationality, proper relationality, harmonic relationality, attunement, something like that. And to find a way to achieve attunement, to be in relationship with being such that being exists or being itself now connected to existence is another way of saying it. The other phrase that came up, which may properly belong to Nietzsche, but I don’t know, is, and I would say it’s sort of a very similar construction, is to become an artist of life. And again, in my personal way of saying this, it’s to make a very clean distinction between the art and the artifact, right? The artifact lives already at the level of the exists, right? The painting exists. And we can look at the painting’s existence as the dead correlation of pigments and molecules in some sort of stochastic relationship, right? If we look at the art in the way that a bear looks at the painting, right? That ain’t art. It’s actually the continuity, the connection, something of the manifestation of the logos, but it’s the connectedness. The whole point is the connectedness that gives rise to the presencing of this existence as art in the first place. That’s good. That’s good. That’s good. I like the second one better than the first one because I find it more directly accessible. But the notion of attunement from the first one is also helpful. So we put a draw on both of those. So I like that idea that there’s an inherent connection between aspiration in the intellect sense of bringing the existential into attunement with the essential so that the essential is more and more disclosed. And you linking that to the attunement that discloses the art within the artifact that allows those intelligibility to come forth. And where I see those two coming together, if I can just put quick labels on them, the existential and the aesthetic is in Jesus’s use of parable to reveal the kingdom of God. Because the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, right? And you get all these things. And what they do, if I’m mapping what you’re saying into them correctly, is they reach me in my existence, but they call me to my essence. They’re in the world, but they’re not of the world in that sense. And the Coen does the same thing. It reaches into my categorization by means of which I make sense of the world, but it calls me beyond that. And this is a proper property of all symbols. This is what some of Tillich’s work on a symbol. They have a particular aesthetic to them because they have to be able to reach deeply into our existence, our current everyday framing, and simultaneously call us deeply beyond it to what we could be in our aspirational essence, call us to our second self and be called by the second self. So there’s something here also about there’s a deep connection between parables and being sort of epistemic existential nomads, if I can put it that way, epistemic existential aesthetic nomads in a certain way. There’s also, I don’t think it’s time for this yet. Okay, well, I’ll hold that for maybe when it’s more appropriate. Why is it so very important? Yes. So let’s use this word like, you know, the kingdom of God is a parable, right? And the Exodus is a parable, right? In that sense. Why is living in parables so important? Artfully, living artfully. Yeah, well, I’m including that in the definition of the parable. Yeah, I’m not getting confused. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that goes on there. But I would say that the first path is just, I apologize. The reason why I oftentimes find myself not citing people is because I just can’t remember names at all. You mentioned his name earlier. What’s the guy’s name who wrote the book that you recommended to me? The defragmenting modernity? Defragmenting modernity is Paul Tyson. Paul Tyson, right? Okay, so Paul Tyson, very plainly, like he just puts it up front and center, like, look, here’s the problem. We have this category called unanswerable questions. They’re not unanswerable in the broadest sense. They’re unanswerable in the framework that we’re currently operating under. So we find ourselves confronted with unanswerable questions, the appropriate response is to inquire what’s the problem with our framework. Yes. The one piece of the story is we’ve got a bunch of unanswerable questions sitting in front of us. The meaning crisis, and also the meta crisis, which I’m not going to mess them on top of each other, are currently precisely unanswerable in the environment that we live in. Right. The proposition is that this, exactly this, is the way we constitute a way of responding to these crises at all. We can’t do it. The whole point of proposition is we literally cannot do it in the frame that we live in now, and that this space that we’re discussing is the way, it’s the place. Oh, it’s the way. And that then makes it, one cannot, I would propose, it is impossible in principle to articulate anything that could ever, in a new way, be more important. It defines the, it’s the very essence of the meaning of the concept of importance, is the meaning crisis and the meta crisis. That’s good. That’s a really good answer. And then that brings us back to the Exodus aspect of this. Freeing from this world, freeing from Egypt and free to move into the promised land. We’re on, we’re in a place of existential entrapment. So the idea is the parable is the way in which we can call people out of existential entrapment. It’s a way in which we can, yeah, I’m just going to use metaphors, but it’s the metaphor that’s used is waking people up. Because when you wake people up, you’re able to do something that reaches them in their sleep and then calls them into consciousness. Right? That’s what the awakening of Buddhism, right? That’s one of the advantages the awakening metaphor has over the enlightenment metaphor. The enlightenment metaphors, I just turn on the light, but the waking metaphors, no, I do something that can reach you in your sleep, in your unconscious and call you into consciousness. So it’s interesting then that the parable has a relationship not only of, as I previously argued, of integrating sort of the four P’s, it has a way of calling from within a frame to a beyond the frame. Is that right? Yeah. I’m sorry. I was just giggling at the degree to which the invention of the electric light bulb really screwed the enlightenment metaphor. Yes, it does. The electric light bulb enlightenment was a whole different notion, right? Like basically the sun comes up, like that’s how you get enlightened is the sense. But now with the electric light bulb, you’re like, wait, why can’t I just take some at it? Can’t I be enlightened? No. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. All right. Sorry, this gets no, no, that I appreciate when you do this, you add a resonant texture to the phenomenology when you do these. I frequently find it actually affording rather than distracting. Because like, again, like one of the things that comes out of the Exodus mythology that might go towards answering the awakening and why this is so important is, and I always found this even weird as a kid when I was reading the story, right? And this is meant as no kind of crypto antisemitism or any bullshit like that. But the fact that the Israelites keep forgetting, they keep forgetting that they were called out of Egypt and all of this stuff happened, right? And even, and I’m not taking that as a historical event, I’m just saying, but within the myth. Just be a human right now. We all constantly seem to be forgetting, like it’s crazy. Forgetful we are. Yes. Yes. It’s not, you know, clearly it’s not just the Jews in Exodus who are pulling it off. That was just a realistic depiction of how human beings happen to be. Exactly. And that that’s in that way. It’s a proper myth. It’s not some unbelievable story about the past. It’s a very plausible account of ongoing pertinent perennial problems. Yes. You can just imagine it’s like, wait, guys, look, we saw a complete straight up miracle like a weekend ago. Yeah, totally. People would absolutely just completely. Okay, so this is interesting. This speaks to something. So hold on. It’s like, oh, levity. Nietzsche named it quite nicely. Yeah. Right. There’s a moment where we are governed by gravity. Yes. And we have a Sisyphean task when we are governed by gravity. We’re constantly having to put effort into pushing the rock up the hill. Yeah. The fundamental characteristic of the world we live in is when where the rock rolls down the hill. Yes. There is a different world governed by levity. Mm hmm. This is the challenge, right? Not be good at lifting rocks uphill. We know that story, the Greeks, right? We have Atlas, we have all those kinds of stories. It’s not considered to be an awesome thing. It may be a needful thing, but it’s not an awesome thing. But to become governed by levity, to be fundamentally living in a world where levity is the nature of reality. Yes. That’s a very different sensibility. Come to me, all ye who are heavy laden, and I will give you rest for my burden is light. Right? Right. This is the notion because there’s that paradox in Christianity of, you know, you’re following Jesus unto death, but nevertheless, he’s offering the lightest yoke of all in some way. Yeah. Yeah. I get what you’re saying. So it’s interesting. Switch. Go ahead. Go ahead. Okay. I just said you did an interesting, you did a, you proposed a third dimension out of Camus, right? Because Camus says you’re trapped in the world of gravity, right? And all you can do is bring, right? A kind of, and you know, and it’s a beautiful passage, by the way, I don’t mean any disparagement. The myth of Sisyphus is, I think, one of the great philosophical essays, and what Camus is doing there. And he’s basically advocating a profound kind of existential stoicism, like, you know, Sisyphus becomes happy because he, he, he, he, he appropriates the fact that he defines the meaning of the event, not the event. And that is the, that is the great response. So he’s perpetually bound to the task of rolling the rock, but he is free, and he has lucidity in realizing that he is the source of the meaning, right? And it’s, it’s a very much, right, that kind of existential project, but you offered something different. You pointed to a different thing, which is, no, no, that that’s all great. And at times we do, we have to, and the stoic response to the heavy rock is better than the nihilistic response. Yes. But then you said, but Nietzsche says, no, no, but what if I could just turn off the gravitational constant, right? And we moved into a different world. And so I think that, that, that is a very provocative thing to say, because there’s a sense in which the kingdom of God is supposed to be exactly that, right? It’s supposed to be that kind of change rather than, you know what, let’s be really heroic at pulling up all the rocks on all the hills of reality, right? Right. But instead, right, no, no, no, no, we can’t, there’s something else in which we’ve fundamentally changed, right? The, the, the, the, the defining constants and parameters of our, of reality for us, something like that. Am I getting at what you’re saying? Absolutely. Yeah. And so there’s a third of the way step there. So to shift into a different narrative, a different frame, a different story into the, into the Buddhist story, right? We can do the whole enlightenment in the, in the, in the context of alleviation from suffering. Yes. Right. So I’ve had this experience a lot. So this is very first person. I, I, and I’ll be able to describe it in a very simple way. Like there’s a, a line and kind of like a below and above. And when you’re below the line, you’re in suffering, which is that you’re in a world governed by the gravity of reality. Yes. And you can be heroic, but you’re in the world of suffering. And I mean this from a first person experience. Yes. Yes. And there’s a way I’ve experienced this again, countless times of being above that line. And when you’re above the line, you’re not in the world of suffering. And what that means is that every event that occurs does not leave suffering, right? It’s not like things are cool. It’s not like you’re living in sort of happy fun lands. You’re not living in Disneyland. You’re living in the same exact reality, but what’s happening in your experience is now coming from a completely different location. And therefore it leaves no mark, right? You are in fact moving smoothly or fluidly through life. Right. Yeah. So the point of this, of this particular story is that’s the thing. Like you can be, you can, you can, you can be in this place that is above or, or, or not in the realm of suffering. And it has the characteristic, the feeling of levity. Now, the experience I’ve had, as I’ve said, obviously is I don’t live up there all the time, even most of the time. Yeah. Some of the time, enough of the time to know that it’s there and to be really curious and then frustrated and suffered by the fact that I’m not there all the time, which is a really complex problem. Yes. Which is why you have to approach it through paradoxes and Coen’s and stuff like that, because you can’t involute the Sisyphean task, right? It can’t be the way you get above the line. It should become really Sisyphean about getting above the line. Like that’s very, very bad. That’s a really rough spot. That’s very well said. Okay. So that was that, like I said, that’s like a third of the path. I feel like that’s only, that’s only like getting you to a place where, okay, hmm, like almost like the best way to go there is not off, but hmm, because this is other stuff. It’s like the part of it is this we at the church sojourning. Yes. There’s something about the notion of church. There’s something about the notion of more us helping, holding like a way of holding a space or a field or a sensibility that there’s a content to, ah, oh, shit. Can I just say this one thing at all? Yeah, go. Okay. This is awesome. Hmm. Well, okay. Accepted as an axiom that it’s awesome. I can’t, not sure I can convey the awesomeness of it. There’s a problem that has existed for a very long time that has to do with the difference between something that is maintained by means of a container and versus something is maintained by means of its interior relations. I think I encountered it in Deloitte’s most fundamentally. It’s also a mathematical problem. Like there’s a, a sort of a shifting from my came and what the exact term is, but it’s a geometric transform. It’s like a conjugate relationship between two phenomena. Right? So you’ve got one world where the, the, the beingness of the thing is maintained by something that literally is a constraint. Yeah. Container. The cell membrane. Yeah. There’s a another world or another way of looking at the world where the being is the thing is maintained by the relationality. We could say like a cell membrane versus a star, right? A star is held together by the force of gravity, which is not a containing, but rather has to do with the, the probabilistic likelihood that a given, uh, atom will head away from or towards. Okay. This is really sparking for me. Yeah. Because this goes back to something we talked about, right? There’s a difference between objects and hyper objects. Objects are contained. Hyper objects are not contained. They are distributed and they can only, and this is the Ecclesia, the church, they can only be held by distributed cognition. It’s kind of like there’s a, right? You need something that can be non-localized in space and time in order to come into right relationship to things that are held together, like the way the hyper object is by its internal relation, its self-organization rather than any kind of containment. And the kingdom of God is that in that sense, uh, there’s a kind of hyper object, if I can put it this way, that we’re not realizing. Yeah. And, and, and, and mindset endeavors to respond to it, to relate to it in the mode of containment. Then you can’t do it. Always can’t do it. This, this is, this is the core of this book, um, by Eric Sande, a study of Plato’s, uh, a study of dialectic and Plato’s parmenides. I’m reading it as part of the whole after Socrates, the nature of dialectic and the dialogos. And his main argument is that we’ve, we, you know, we’ve, we’ve neglected the core of dialectic. The core of dialectic is not logic. The core of dialectic is getting you to think in a non-thingly way. Yeah. So that you can see, you can see the forms. The forms are not abstract objects, uh, of symbolic representation. They are ways of seeing and being once you’ve gone through a process of being able to not being able to realize things in a non-thingly way, a non-containment way. All right. I want to, I want to, I want to juxtapose, compose and juxtapose two things that are like super don’t belong together. Um, what was, what was the first? Yeah. Wow. Yeah. The way you said, ah, ah, okay, check. This is good. Ah, so good. Hmm. Ah, the meaning, the reality of the eternal. There we go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We have a, the, the kind of mind, the kind of way of, of relating to reality that projects Kantian, right? Imagines in a Kronos sensibility, um, has a real trouble with the Sisyphean task. Right. Cause that means it’s like forever pushing the rock up the hill. Heavy forever. It’s not like a light river. It’s a city ass. Oh my God. I got this job for like a real long time. Plus, plus like that’s the notion. Yeah. Everlastingness. Everlasting. But yeah, everlasting. Exactly. But not fun. Like it’s not a fun everlasting. It’s a bogus, like super number line going on forever and just constantly adding one at the end and just getting super bored of the whole thing. Oh my God, what the hell am I? Did I get myself into that? Yeah. But then there’s eternity. Yes. Right. And to use like a, what I’m sure is not a great example, but not terrible is like the distinction between classical physics and quantum physics, right? There’s something that happens where the, the, there’s when we move into space time, right? When we, when we collapse the wave form into phenomenal experience, it happens in space time. So it happens in a way of timeliness that can be measured in discrete stuff, right? Time has a plank constant of its own. Yeah. But before we’re doing that, what the heck just happened? Well, yeah. I don’t know how to block it. Yeah, I find the same thing. I, but let’s just keep going. It’s like a, almost like a Monarch Python skit. Yeah. Let’s see. Okay. The point is the notion of timelessness needs to be grasped as, as literally not lots of time. Eternalism doesn’t mean like the timeline just go. It means that the, the, the, the reality, the aspect of reality for which the notion of time isn’t a relevant way of discussing it. Yes. Yes. Right. Or the way of thinking about time in this Cronus seconds, metricized, semantic sense, at least it’s not appropriate, right? So there’s another quality now. Okay. So now that, right. So there’s just, there’s a bunch of stuff that happens there, but what I want to do is I want to enter into that realm. Yeah. The point is that realm, which I’m just going to name the transcendent realm, just to give it a nice, yeah. Okay. Right. The, it’s that realm has a way of its own. This is a big thing, right? We’re not like saying here’s, here’s a way where order is over here, where I can sort of define numbers and time and space and measure and do physics. And here’s something over here, which is completely bogus. Who knows what’s going on. It’s impossible. No. The thing is here’s one way where order shows up. Here’s another way. Yes. There are different ways, but they’re not, it’s not like chaos and order. It’s actually like, no, no, it’s different, completely different modes of order. Like you said, you can see the forms. Yes. Not by virtue of the, of the existence. It’s by virtue of a different mode of perception. All right. Yeah. Now I’m going to, now I’m going to yoke this other thing in. Right. All right. Well, we’ll do it this way. There’s this thing going on right now, which is super coming from a, from existence. It’s not governed by it. Web three and in web three. And I tweeted this the other day and the response came back indicating that I was in the right space. The word vibes is a term. Yeah. You mentioned this to me before. Yeah. Please go on. And what they, what they’re discovering in this world and by the, in this world also, I think just includes Gen Z in general, not just web three is that vibing is a thing and it’s a way it’s a mode, it’s a mode of relating. And the way I’m vibing with vibing is it’s the properly aesthetic mode. How do you know that a particular note is the appropriate note to follow a given note? If you don’t have musical notation to tell you, right. You’re vibing. It has a feeling of rightness. The same thing with an artist. I’ve talked to many artists about even just like watching my wife create art. Like how, how do you know that that’s the next move of the nib of the pen? Yeah. And I can assure you it has nothing to do with computation. And it’s, it’s a vibe. It’s a feeling, right? The point is a revalorization of quality, a revalorization of feeling, revalorization of the aesthetic. In fact, I would put it precisely that to bring narrative in service to aesthetic rather than the other way around. Clockwise and anti-clockwise, reciprocal closing, closing. That the appropriate relationship is that the first basis is vibing, which is to say orienting towards the qualitative and the intrinsically infinitesimal, which is we say the eternal being. And the modality of being is the aesthetic, the artistry, artist art. Yeah. A skillfulness, right? The whole point is you can build a competence and a skillfulness to actually relating to that well. There’s just a difference between being good and bad at it. It’s not, it’s not, it’s not like a random. There’s a normativity there. There’s a normativity. Yeah. Massive. Like obviously and massively. And we can then, then we bring that and that’s like, that is our sort of basis. Now we’re perceiving the forms we’re operating in the order of being, and then we can bring semantic, we can bring the narrative. Yes. What’s happening right now in service of that to clothe it into fashion that makes it more realizable and more shareable to other embodied beings in the shared space of reality. Now we’re doing something, right? Now everything is in the proper order and we can begin to step into this new place well. And that making narrative in service of the transcendent, that’s the parable then. That’s what you’re, that’s what the parable is exactly doing. You bring a narrative in and you, but you make a narrative that undermines narrative tropes in order to try and I see, I think I’m following you, I think well. So I want to, I like this idea of vibing and I like the idea of beauty. There’s a huge rediscovery. DC Schindler’s book, I keep recommending it, Love and the Postmodern Predictment, astonishing stuff on love and beauty, just astonishing. And I want to pick up on that because that there’s a connection between beauty and levity that we need to unpack. There’s a deep community, there’s a deep communing, even community between beauty and levity. So there’s one thing, so that’s one thing I want to resonate with you. And then the other is I get, there’s something in vibing that’s implicit, right? That goes back to the one side of the chasm or maybe the chasms on both sides of the causeway, right? Which is, there has been a strand, a historical strand of interpreting seeing the forms as a longing again for disembodied perfection, right? For that kind, the thing that Nietzsche called hating the earth, right? And so the, so I’m posing a question, it’s a compound question, because it feels to me like these two are related. How do we vibe with the transcendent? And I take it, I agree with you, Plato is that group of philosophers that discovered the distinction between eternity and immortality. And they realized that their gods were merely immortal. And therefore, right, they, that’s this huge move. And that’s another Exodus, when we move from the longing for immortality into the realization of eternity. I mean, this is Spinoza’s great answer in the ethics. The problem with, he said, the basic thing is stop seeking immortality. You cannot have it. You are immortal, you’re a mode of God, but you can realize eternity. And that is the proper alleviation, right? Because immortality, and this is the myth of Sisyphus, is actually a curse. You don’t want immortality, you long for eternity. So I take all of that is well said in what you’ve just done, but the problem still remains. How do we rock that? How do we vibe with that? And this has something to do with beauty and levity being together, that is not the longing for disembodied perfectionism, which I take the Nietzschean critique. This is the part of one of the parts of Platonism that I deeply reject. And that’s where Nietzsche’s critique against Plato, I think, actually lands. And so I know that’s a very compound question. But to me, to my mind, we’re getting to a place where those two issues are somehow related. So my experience of Nietzsche’s critique… Ah, okay. So the first thing I would say is that my sense of it is that if you are properly in the place where you are in fact vibing with being, the notion that the who show up as a rejection of life is actually confusing before it’s even amusing. And then it’s amusing. That notion of that kind of agnostic rejection isn’t what’s up, quite the opposite, exactly the opposite. And I’ll make pause there a little bit about beauty and levity, which is as you mentioned it, and I contemplated on it, it’s like, okay, one of the things I definitely notice is a really beautiful relationality where when I personally am above the line, beauty is everywhere. Yeah, yeah. You are no longer immersed in the world as suffering, but you are immersed in the world, you notice beauty. And beautifully, you notice the capacity to continually engage in the world in service of beauty. Meaning, you can simultaneously, it’s a beautiful cone, you can simultaneously perceive everything is perfect and be driven or motivated to make things more perfect. Right? Therein lies the beauty of beauty. And I think there’s a really wonderful relation that that’s the notion of like levity is not an instantaneous release, right? This is the opposite of the agnostic rejection. It’s not an instantaneous release from a shitty ass world into a moment, a point of perfection. It’s rather how being in relationship with the eternal allows one to have a levity, meaning, yes, it is beautiful. And it is there’s a way of moving into the world that is in service to the eternal, in service to the creative principle, that is rightness no longer needing to explain itself. Right? That’s the point. You don’t need to have justifications and rationalizations and kind of good reasons. It’s just what’s supposed to be done. And just the exact answer of how do you answer? Why is this note the note that follows? If you’re listening closely, it’s kind of obvious. It’s just, it’s obviously the thing that’s supposed to be happening. If you’re vibing well, right? And there’s a way and then people will be kind of like, you know, if everybody’s sort of vibing together, not going to get basic, make it kind of the classic jazz band story that we use, there’s a shared felt sense of, yeah, uh-huh, yeah, that’s more beautiful. And where we were before was perfect. And now we’re perfect too, but more purple. Okay. And then pausing back. So the Nietzsche thing is, my experience of the Nietzsche thing is, is there’s always a double move that’s involved in this problem. Right? It’s like, there’s something in the heart. There’s something in the soul, right? There’s something in the, in the, the one who seeks to escape first, and rather than truly entering into grace, right? I guess that’s the word you use, or it would be used and truly entering into a realization of the eternal. What they do is they produce a simulation of the eternal. They then clothe themselves in it so as to avoid taking responsibility for the thing that’s happening in them. Yeah. Yeah. The theory of resentment. The theory of resentment. Yeah, precisely. And it’s all too easy, right? It’s all as, as intuitive and it’s exactly, it is, it is precise this moment of the relationship between clockwise and anti-clockwise, right? It is just all too easy to participate in the forgetfulness, grasp the art at the artifact, and then become skillful at producing the artifact and presenting that as being art. Yes. And this is then the reciprocal closing, right? That’s, that’s, this is sort of the game that we constantly find ourselves in, is that, that point. Yes. So I noticed myself contemplating, why isn’t it easier? Like what’s, what’s exactly happening? Because, you know, as they say, it’s, it’s at hand. And for a very long time, there’s been a lot of people saying more or less the same thing about this thing. And yet here we are. So I have a partial answer to that. And it has to do with confusion. And I’m really relying on the etymological origin of the word fused together. So one of the things that Schindler argues, both in the Plato’s critique of impure reasoning and love in the postmodern predicament, and it lines up with some of the stuff I’m reading now about the, this new movement of reinterpreting Aquinas, especially Aquinas, about beauty, all of this stuff. And beauty is one of the transcendentals. It’s really synchronistic that we’re talking about this, right? Is Schindler says, and this goes back to one way in which Plato, I think, was read or potentially misread, is we set up a dichotomy between appearance and reality, because we are sometimes deceived, misled. We suffer from illusion and deception. So that is a very adaptive and useful thing to do. The problem is, once you open up the dichotomy, you’re not going to be able to see the world. The problem is, once you open up the dichotomy, you’re now in the hell of that chasm. Right? And so what, what, what, and this picks up with Marleau-Ponty. Marleau-Ponty said something really, and it’s one of those things you keep coming back to, because the pebble is dropping deeper and deeper into the pond as the ripples spread farther and farther out, which he says, you know, you only realize one thing is an illusion by another experience that discloses the illusion. You’re never leaping out of the world to go, ah, look at that illusion. You’re always within the world pointing to another part of the world. Right? And so, and what DC Schindler is picking up on, he’s saying, but what we have to realize and what Plato seems to be arguing in the Republic is, it’s not the absolute versus the appearance. It’s that the notion of the absolute actually includes both. What he means by that is that there are appearances that disclose themselves as appearances of reality. And that is the experience of beauty. Oh, nice. Yeah. Wow. So we take something that’s adaptive, right? We have to do this. We have to separate that. The bent stick in the water isn’t really bent. We separate the appearance, but then we’re trapped and we confuse that as being the exhausted and only way in which they are in relation, when in fact they can be in this relation where the appearance is the appearance of the real to us as an appearance, which as I take it, what Marlo Ponti is actually saying, we only overwrite one appearance with another appearance. I’ve never had this experience. You know, that was an illusion because I’ve seen the face of God. That never happens. Right. I know that’s an illusion because this appearance fits in better, right? Makes more sense, et cetera. Right. And so I’m taking it that what you’re saying in the mode of levity is you are sort of optimally gripping the relation between appearance and reality so that reality is always shining through the appearance, but the appearance is always reminding us that reality withdraws beyond how we currently grasp it. That’s beauty. That moment of simultaneously shining and withdrawing that realigns appearance and reality back together for us. What do you think about that? How do I say? Thinking. Yeah. Don’t know how to think about that. Try not to. That’s how I think about that. Rather, I would like to perceive it. Like it feels like the right way to be in relationship to that is to recognize the necessity of the gift of beauty to neutrify our soul in this journey so that we can continue to navigate this relationship. Like it has two characteristics to it. One characteristic is an orienting basis. Ah, yes, that’s the way. Beauty tells us which way to go. If you’re perceiving things in the direction of beauty, yes, there’s no no to that. Yes, go that way. And in the sensibility of nutrition, it actually provides right. It’s the notion of levity itself. The idea of levity is like there’s an uplift, it’s an upwelling, right? Yes. Be in connection with beauty. You are both oriented in the right direction and provided the capacity to continue on that journey. Seems like that’s a very good thing to do. So what do you think of the proposal that the I mean, this sounds like a hallmark card, and I sort of cringe at saying it, but basically, we’re forgetting beauty. And we’re forgetting beauty because we overextend the usefulness of the appearance reality distinction. And then Nietzsche’s critique is all about trying to get beyond the appearance reality distinction. And for me, Jordan, that’s the guts of trying to overcome the two worlds mythology. Right? That’s the final place where it sits. We need the distinction. The distinction is a useful heuristic. But when we reify it into a metaphysical category, that causes us to perpetually fall into that chasm and forget and forget. Yeah. So the thing that’s coming up for me right now, yeah, I think there’s some interesting ways these tie together is, let’s see. I think first a caveat, because what I’m about to say has a lot of kind of brimstone, I suppose, to it. But the caveat is, I sense that there’s a point to what’s been going on for the past 50,000 years. Yes. It is not my sense that this entire journey has been a whoops, like, I can’t believe we did that. I think I don’t that’s not my sense. And I may just be hopeful or whatever. Motivated reasoning, but whatever. Okay, second part. The part of the part of the challenge we deal with is the utter catastrophe of civilization. Mm hmm. In innumerable ways, not the least of which is becoming a person, a human, in the context of civilization, and what an absurdly radically distracting, confusing, discombobulating, defragmenting, or fragmenting experience becoming a human in civilization is. Yes, yes. We are constantly, that which should be giving us the highest quality signal is constantly jamming us with wrong signal. Now I’ll get case in point. Yeah, right there. Yeah. And this is an ordinary, like, small child girl princess ring. Right, yes. This is soul toxin. Yeah. A super salient object which jacks the sense making apparatus of a toddler and orients it in a direction which is perfectly meaningless. Yes, yes. And I have it. It’s in my hand. It’s part of the part of the environment that I have produced for my child contains this, despite my greatest efforts. And, you know, I certainly don’t have vaguely the wisdom to avoid catastrophe on a continuous basis with every human being I interact with. And because, in this case scenario, we’re sitting at the tail end of some very long journey of just trauma after trauma after trauma after trauma. Even the simplest thing, you know, when your newborn child first opens her eyes, her eyes lay, um, begin to formulate pattern recognition in the in the visual cortex on the basis of what is almost always going to be truly shitty architecture. Yes, and bad lighting. Not beautiful. Yeah, not beauty. The first experience. And then for thereafter, almost continuously, not even the richness of the ordinary developmental environment of homo sapiens sapiens, right, not even trees and leaves and plants, but 80 90% of the time, arbitrary straight lines, bad colors, bad lighting, bad air, concentrated toxins, you know, fill in the blank, right, the amount of it’s actually an incredible thing. Schmackenberger and I talked about this a lot about five years ago. It’s utterly miraculous. The resilience of the human body, given the amount of toxicity that civilization is concentrated into our environment. If you just take a blood serum of the average pregnant woman, the amount of toxic chemicals that just is because of the world we live in, compared to what is an ordinary natural environment is, I mean, it makes you nauseated. And yet we still aren’t completely extinguished. So it’s actually, you know, in some sense, if we could just sort of, well, this is the thing. So here’s the other piece. Exodus is not a metaphor. Sad to say. The likelihood that you and I make it to the promised land is pretty close to zero, other than the fact that the promised land is always here, which is a good, you know, a good thing to keep in mind. But to cultivate and constitute a felt sense, like we are, there’s a Sisyphean task in front of us for a while, to create a context whereby the governance of the levity is the case, will be embodied in our grandchildren or great grandchildren to the degree to which we consciously cultivate a developmental environment that is so fully in alignment with the natural best case for humans that we begin to give rise to humans who are just vastly more capable of easily being above that line that I talked about. And I suspect that’s not like, you know, I hate to say it. That’s a really good point. Yeah. I mean, that’s, that’s good ballast to our sales. Yeah, exactly. It’s good ballast to our sales. Yeah, I think that’s deeply right. Now, I don’t know the story well enough. Did Moses like share that with the Israelites? Like I got good news and bad news. Good news. We’re getting out of Egypt. Bad news. We’re kind of all going to be dead of old age and have we wandering through the desert for our entire lifetime and constantly forgetting? Yeah, he does. He does. So because, I think it’s because of the making of the golden calf, I can’t remember. But a whole generation, yeah, I know it’s really appropriate to what we’re talking about here, especially with your daughter’s princess ring. The princess ring is just another instantiation of the golden calf. And the golden calf also, by the way, represents returning back to the Bronze Age world, going back before the Axial Revolution. Right. So it’s not just an idol in, not just, I don’t mean to be dismissive. It’s not just an idol in the ordinary sense. It’s also, no, no, no, no, no, Axial Revolution. Right. Let’s go back to Egypt. Egypt, remember, is the premier Bronze Age empire. It represents all of the Bronze Age, the best the Bronze Age had to offer, the flesh pots of Egypt, as the Bible provocatively puts it. Right. There’s all of that. Right. But Moses, because they make the golden calf, Moses basically tells them they have to wander in the desert until that entire generation dies off. I think except for Caleb and Joshua, because they go and sort of scout out the promised land and they say, let’s go. And everybody says no. And there’s all this stuff. I can’t remember. I’m probably mixing two stories, but maybe there’s two different reasons given because the Bible will often give two competing reasons for why something happens. But yeah, there is a condemnation that, and it is made explicit that they are not going to see the promised land. Their children will see the promised land because they are cursed by either their idolatry or their lack of vision, or both, because mythologically both can go together. And I take it that that’s been a mythological motif of the work that you and I share because part of what, part of where our work overlaps is the idea that the meaning crisis prevents us from making the shift into the levity mode that is needed in order to get us into the place where we are capable of addressing the meta crisis. We’re starved and cursed in that way. We have the mark of Cain on us in that way. All the biblical mythograms are coming up right now. Yeah, the book was made in that book was, if you’re stuck in a frame where you have an insoluble problem, one of the things that you notice is that all the efforts that you put to trying to solve the problem may get worse. Yes, that is the defining feature. Yes. And that is very, and I would put, that’s the objective, that’s Tyson’s describing sort of the objective feature. The subjective correlate is a sense of addiction, a sense of addiction, because the reciprocal narrowing, there’s a sense of I’m losing, the world is losing possibilities and variations. I’m losing variations on my agency and everything. So I’m getting addicted. I’m getting addicted to the means that are actually making things worse. Yeah, there you go. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, precisely. So let’s drop in for a little bit. I was intrigued by the feeling of being in that first generation and the reference to the fleshpots of Egypt and the retro to the Bronze Age. And like being there in the Axial Age, which is not even a little bit very Mad Max, right? It’s super exactly very Mad Max. Yeah, there’s like, they’re sitting around campfires in the wilderness, because the cities have either completely decayed or are non-survivable, like too hazardous to be in. Yeah. And old people who were living in the cities are like telling stories to the young people, you know, more or less like this, like that was super bad. Like, you have no idea, man. That was like so crazy shitty. Let me talk to you about what my best sense is like, wow, we fucked something up massively. Yeah. How do I share with you the degree to which we fucked something up so we don’t do that again? I think that’s basically welcome to the Axial Age, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Big waking up the next morning after it was a massive hangover going on. Jesus, you’re going to get that reference in a couple of thousand years, but let me tell you. Wow. And you know, you can imagine the same exact thing was going on in the fall of Rome. Right? Yeah. Oh, man. Wow. Whoa. Looks like Augustine, the city of God, the city of man. That’s Augustine’s attempt to make sense of that. Yes. Yeah. And this is that addiction metaphor is pretty strong. Like I’m actually using, you know, hangover metaphors, but it’s that, right? Yeah. Yeah. You break an addiction. There’s that sudden ability to kind of release from it. Wow. Wow. Holy cow. That was just really bad news. What do we do? Like, how do we, how do we not do that? Like, how do we avoid that? And we can build up this big infrastructure to get out of it, to avoid it. And of course, as history has told us, we have a really interesting habit of getting right back on the sauce. Yes. Yes. But here we are. Right. And here’s the thing, right? Here, now, like 20, whatever day is December 8th. Oh, wow. Yesterday, December 7th, 2021. Yeah. We’ve talked about this even in our very first conversations, like we’re in a unique location in the history of history. Yes. We really do have to like get off the cycle. Yeah. It’s the Bronze Age was really rough, but it was super localized. And at the end of the day, not that bad. 80% population decline around a particular ring of humanity. Yeah. You know, super shitty for sure, particularly if you’re part of that 80% or close to it. But for humanity, you know, a powerful learning experience. My sense of it is that that’s not where we are. We’re in a situation where everybody’s on a single big old boat. And the magnitude of what we can do, if things go that direction, we don’t really have a way of describing it. You know, the best efforts of John probably didn’t come close, like we’d be happy to see triple headed dogs made out of fire. So that’s like, you know, this is kind of one of these things where you’d like to be. And I don’t know if I have any belief in this, but you’d like to be in a place where there’s a way of being able to preemptively look at it and go, Whoa, you know, we’d like not to go there, as opposed to being on the other side of it going, how can we avoid doing that again? It’s more of a can we not go there? Can we steer clear of that? Can we preemptively like recognize that is a super not good place to go? And big enough that all the petty bullshit that we distract ourselves with day to day, we can actually step beyond it and step aside it and actually deal with it. The phrase that’s coming to my mind is, can we have the axial revolution before the bronze age collapse? Yeah, exactly. Okay, so here’s the thing, right? This is, this is, ah, wow. This is in web three, they called the flippening, which is a very banal thing, but it turns out to be quite profound. This is just consciousness. This is the involution of evolutionary process as a form of intelligence and conscious process of a form of intelligence. Both are part of reality. Conscious processes in relationship with the transcendent evolutionary processes in relation with the existence. Evolutionary process has this characteristic of learning the fucking hard way. You just do things a whole lot and the things that didn’t get extinguished continue. That’s it. Yeah. Yeah. Conscious process is you get the actual age before you get the bronze age collapse. And we invented that for a reason. Humans have that. It’s a big basis of what we are. The notion of intelligibility refers to the proposition that we can run simulations in virtuality, not therefore have to go through constantly extinguishing actual embodiment. Oh, wait, wait, wait. That’s brilliant. Okay. Part of the way in which civilization is further toxic and further opening up the hell chasm between appearance and reality is the virtual layering that we’re now putting on top. But there is a possibility of using the virtual to disclose the promised land. And that would be the beautification of the virtual. Yes, exactly. You got it. That is it. And if you pay attention, that’s where we are. Again, I’ll constantly make these references to things that are very ordinary, or not ordinary, but kind of banal. Are you familiar with this story, the thing that’s being called sometimes the metaverse? I think so. I’m actually going to use a very simpler term. There’s something called virtual reality. Yes. That’s been around for a while. We have a basic sensitive. And Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, did the somewhat profound thing of radically completely rebranding this entire giant thing that’s been around forever. Not forever, for a very brief period of time, but a lot of people are connected with it with a whole new brand. So Facebook has been rebranded, meta something. Yes. And it’s around the thesis that virtual reality, maybe more, maybe artificial reality or augmented reality are going to be a super big thing. Let’s just put it that way. Okay. Yeah, that’s probably in the next few years, we’ll be starting to see that. Yes. And if you have a feeling in your body that that’s super bad news dangerous, you couldn’t possibly be more right. And all we have to do is take Tristan Harris’s late awareness and then call it panicked effort to convey to the people how super bad Facebook was. Yeah. And just multiply that by infinity. I felt super bad, you know, what Mark has in mind for us on the next iteration of this catastrophe. And it’s actually it’s funny, it’s exactly what we’ve been talking about. The bad version of the thing virtual metaverse, I don’t like that way of using it, but I’ll use it that way now is the Nietzschean critique. Yeah. Hey, let’s make a completely simulated world crawl into it and die. That’s all it is. And as you say, the addiction piece, every step we take in that direction, we become less capable of operating in reality, individually and collectively. Yes. And more dependent upon the thing. In this case, the virtual. But the beautification. Yes. Here I also lies the possibility of our salvation. Now I have to re valorize. I don’t mean Mark Zuckerberg version of virtual reality. I categorically identify that as bad should be extinguished by whatever means necessary. What I do mean is this thing that I call the metaverse. I’ve said it, everything from language up is the metaverse. Yes. And it’s this thing that humanity has as a capability of operating in some level of seeing the forms, being in relationship with being itself, intelligibility as a phenomenon in reality, and using that to steward better choices. That’s the thing. That’s that side of it. Right. So the fork is can we hold that? And can we be a we that is strong enough to steer this thing in that direction so that this evolutionary process, the unconscious habitus of the algorithmic mind operating outside of an awareness, that’s that path. And in that direction leads for certain doom or chemistry in this direction. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So web three, which includes that you are holding the future in your hands. The religion that’s not a religion is perfectly linked with this thing. Yeah. I don’t know how to evangelize that properly, but that’s a big maybe D thing, but it’s certainly a big piece of the thing. I agree. I agree. This feels like a good place to end. Yeah. That was really good. It was really good to seriously play with you again. Yeah, that was serious play. Wow. I’d like to come back at some point, not now. I’d like to come back and unpack the phenomenology of the difference between your daughter’s princess ring, right, which is a version of the one ring. And like, what’s the difference between sensei pleasure, pleasure in salience, and beauty, because those are confused. Yeah. So we can come back and follow up on that. Okay, I’m gonna end the recording, and I want to thank everybody for watching, and I want to thank you, my good friend. All right.