Best Synoptic Overview of the Meaning Crisis & my Work w⧸ Eric Brown - Voices with Vervaeke (Qccd1ndk1W0)

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All right, everybody, welcome back. I’ve got a very exciting episode in store for you today. I’m sitting here with Dr. John Vervecky. John, thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Eric, for inviting me. So you have been on my radar for a while after I was introduced through Twitter to the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series and subsequently inhaled all of that at a very rapid pace because it was a synthesis of quite frankly, A, so much, but B, synthesized so well and so clearly that I really feel it should be somewhere in the high school curriculum to look at. With that, I think part of the reason I really wanted to have this conversation today is A, just introduce more people to you, to your ideas and to your thinking because it gives, I think most importantly, it gives mental frameworks and it gives shared language so you can start digging in instead of just saying, I notice a lot of people in this space saying, things are wrong either inside or outside and I kind of don’t know why, but I know it’s, I know it’s off a little bit and having this language now just gives you such strong tools to approach it. So before we dive in, because we have a fair list to cover, could you just give a bit of your background, how you got to doing what you’re doing today? Oh, sure. First of all, Eric, thank you for what you just said. I want you to know that and your listeners to know that it means a great deal to me. I aspire to truly mean what I’m about to say, which is above and beyond being right about any particular claim or any particular theory, providing people with conceptual vocabulary and a theoretical grammar so that they can articulate and express and reflect and communicate. That is my primary goal in everything I’m doing, in everything I’m doing. So thank you for saying that. It’s much appreciated. About me, I don’t know where would be the appropriate thing to begin. I was brought up in a religious framework, fundamentalist Christianity, that with only over a period of about 25 years have I come into what I consider a properly ambivalent attitude towards it. Initially, of course, my attitude was, because it was a very traumatizing kind of religious framework, my attitude towards it was very antagonistic, aggressive, atheistic rejection, because of course it had hurt me. But your mother religion is like your mother tongue. You may learn another language, but you won’t live in it the way you live in your mother tongue. It’s woven into the very fabric of your coming into being. So that left in me, especially in the figure of Jesus of Nazareth, it left in me a kind of hunger for the depth, or at least what I perceive to be, a depth of life and a depth of connectivity and a depth of meaning that I would properly say I didn’t experience in that religion, but that had been portended for me. So I carried that hunger around and it sort of led me, as I said, to atheism and a deep kind of nihilism, which is where in my sort of early adulthood, I encountered in a very inarticulate way, and I’m sure lots of people have this kind of encounter, perhaps that’s some of their resonance with my work, but I encountered what you might call the meeting crisis individually in a very intense but co-hate and searing but almost inexpressible manner. And so I was wrestling with that and I was reading some Jung. I was introduced to Jung by the fiction of Robertson Davies, and I was reading some Hermann Hesse. I’d been introduced to Buddhism that way, and then I got into university and I met Plato and the figure of Socrates, and this had just a titanic effect on me because it gave me the sense of a palpable sense of moving towards that kind of connection and meaning that I had felt portended in my religious heritage but had actually not met. And I saw in the figure of Socrates an individual that, of course, I didn’t associate with that trauma because it was a new figure for me. So I immediately took up this project of the cultivation of wisdom, you know, in the sloppy way you do when you’re an undergraduate, and that’s not a criticism. That’s how it should be done, and that’s how it’s inevitably done. But what happened to me is very quickly that the figure of Socrates, the aspiration to transcendence and to depth of meaning and the cultivation of wisdom fall off the academic table, and you don’t talk about that anymore. You get all worried about epistemology and skepticism and all this very technical and argumentation. And I came to value academic philosophy for its own sake because I found the tools it was affording me and the stance of the meta-scientific critique and the meta-cultural critique and the meta-historical critique, I found that all very valuable. But because of the way I’d gotten into it, I also was deeply dissatisfied. And so I undertook to try and find another avenue for the cultivation of wisdom and deep connection and deep meaning. And so I took up a bunch of, you know, I guess sort of inspired by Hermann Hesse, you know, I got involved with Eastern wisdom practices, and I was very fortunate to be taught an ecology of practices. I was taught the past of meditation, medic contemplation, Tai Chi, Chuan, Chi Kung, as this integrated ecology. That’s the birthplace of the idea of an ecology of practices. And I just found the dynamics of that powerful and transformative in ways I wasn’t recognizing. I had powerful moments when other people were recognizing changes in me before I recognized it, and I saw this. And so two sort of streams were then going on in my life, this academic stream, and like, and I got, I finished my MA in philosophy, and then I was just, the dissatisfaction just got too great. And by that time, a new discipline that opened up that incorporated philosophy, but also did lots of psychology and artificial intelligence and linguistics and anthropology, and that was cognitive science. So I went back and did a specialist degree in cognitive science to get into that while continuing on in all of these, you know, embodiment practices that within the ecology of practices. And then what about the time I was done, my cognitive science degree, I started teaching now because I had already done philosophy, I didn’t have to do any philosophy for my cog sci degree. So I ended up doing more psychology than people do for their psychology degree. Awesome. It was I was fully trained for doing psychology as well. So I started teaching some psychology courses and an introductory cog sci course. And at about that time, cog sci had come to a place in psychology where you could start talking about some of the things that were right, like wisdom and mindfulness and self transcendence and mystical experience. And suddenly these two things that have been separate came together for me. And then a good friend and colleague of mine and somebody whose work I highly recommend, Evan Thompson was supposed to teach a course on Buddhism and cogsci and then he couldn’t do it. And so he recommended me to teach it. And I saw that I could bring these two streams together to because that’s what the course was about Buddhism and cogsci bringing, you know, these two streams together. And then I thought I could bring those together to address this problem that I’ve been wrestling on personally, this meeting crisis. And so I did the course and then that eventually evolved over time into the series. And so this ongoing dialogue between these three figures within my psyche, Socrates, and ultimately the way of the Deologos, which hopefully we’ll talk about a bit today, the Buddha and the way of mindfulness, you know, mystical experience, self transcendence. And then I was able through them to return back to Jesus and also the importance of Deologos because he has, he is also a midwife of others. And there again, the return to agape as a fundamental way of life. And that I could see that because I could understand it from the Buddhist notion of compassion. And so all these things came together with me with this new emerging and increasingly powerful form of cognitive science. And so that’s how I got where I am. That’s how I am the person I am. And that is why I’m engaged in the project that I’m engaged in. Wow. So if that wasn’t enough of a trailer to start watching the meeting crisis, I don’t know what is because that is fantastic. I was actually talking to a someone last week who came into kind of Eastern philosophy and Buddhism from physics. And it seems that there seems to be a natural gravity, gravity there, whether you’re studying psychology in the mind or physics and reality, there always seems to be this drift in those who study it deeply towards Buddhism and Eastern philosophy. Again, there’s something just about the understanding and right relationship of what is fully that just seems to happen quite naturally. And to have you articulate some of those concepts was just beautiful. And it’s actually, I think one of the places we’re going to start here. We spoke earlier about the fact that when I was thinking of what I wanted to give people with this, it was mostly three things. One, I wanted to give them something they could walk out with right after listening to this basically changed or something they could put into practice or at least see differently. The second was some increased language, a new vocabulary that they can orient themselves with. And the third is that I really want to elucidate and dig into the religion that’s not a religion here, the stealing the culture and what moving forward with that actually looks like in practice. But to give an example, one of the things, this was a strange, this is actually something you speak about in the series where there are some things that come into your life that just jump out at you. They shine differently. For me, this was almost like an alarm. It was like, this is extremely important, dig into this more. And it was one of your lectures on dukkha, the Buddhist concept of dukkha and how that leads into what is known as reciprocal narrowing. That is, I think, those two concepts, I think is one thing we could give people that would shift their life dramatically right now. I don’t know if you need much more of a foundation than that, but could we start there? A, talking about what that is and what reciprocal narrowing implies? Sure. Do you want me to talk a bit about the general background of dukkha and then use that as a way of articulating? Because I see reciprocal narrowing as a component of dukkha. Maybe if I gave that framework, that would be helpful overall. Yeah, that would be ideal. Okay, great. Thank you. So the Buddhist notion of dukkha is often translated as suffering. And we tend to hear this incorrectly. We tend to hear this almost as a synonym for pain. And that’s similar to the way the word mad now for us has become a synonym for angry. Whereas, of course, mad means insanity. And one of the things that can make you insane, right, is anger, right? So in a similar way, we should see suffering. And the way you can know this is the case, by the way, by paying attention to the metaphors that the Buddha uses to describe dukkha. There are largely metaphors of imprisonment, entrapment, not being able to move forward, stuckness. And so you should see suffering more as a loss of agency, rather than simply pain. Now, pain can rob you of agency, but many other things can rob you of agency. So you have to really broaden your notion of dukkha. And what we want to ask is, what are the general principles by which people lose agency? The Buddha said, he said like the ocean, no matter where you dip into it, you’ll taste salt. No matter where you dip into his teaching, you’ll taste freedom, which is the restoration of agency. So how do we lose agency? Well, the idea of dukkha is, for me, what the Buddha is doing is he’s articulating a kind of perennial problem that human beings fall prey to, which is the very machinery that makes us intelligently adaptive, makes us perpetually susceptible to self deceptive, self destructive behavior. And as a cognitive scientist, I study this deeply. And so I’m deeply convinced of the truth of this fundamental claim. That’s dukkha. Dukkha isn’t sort of like an external thing, like a devil that sort of sometimes corrupts you. It’s that the very machinery that you depend upon for your agency is also the same machinery that can subject you to a loss of agency through self deceptive, self destructive behavior. And so what happens in dukkha is that the adaptive machinery, see, you have to understand that this adaptive machinery works in a dynamical fashion. It’s not just, it’s not a, so when you’re coming into a scene, your attention is self organizing, right? You can zoom into details, you can zoom out to the whole picture, you can step back into your own mind, you can move forward to try and get to the depths of my mind. And you’re, while you’re doing this tweaking that, because it’s largely a very complex self organizing process, right? Now, what that means is the, that self organizational nature, the way your cognition dynamically feeds by itself, also means that you can get into what I call parasitic processing, in which some event happens to you, and then that self organizing process, people will know immediately what I’m talking about. We even have this language, we talk about things like I get into an anxiety spiral, right? The self, I start to ruminate, or my mind starts to race, or I find that I’m getting, right? And so your mind, this parasitic processing, the self organizing nature of your adaptive cognition can also capture you like a parasite. And the fact that it’s adaptive means it’s really hard for you to try and get rid of it. Because as you try and intervene and stop, when you’re ruminating, well, I shouldn’t be thinking that way. That doesn’t do anything because it just reorganizes. Okay, so if you have that, I’m going to try and put three pieces together. So please be patient with me. So you’ve got this parasitic processing. The other thing people can do is they can be sort of deeply confused about that dynamic relationship between them and the environment, right? So what do I mean by that? This is a notion from Eric Fromm. This is the notion that we have existential modes. I mean, that’s a broader notion from existentialism. That means whenever I come into any situation, and this is a part of that adaptive machinery I was just talking about, right? That self organizing adaptive machinery, in a dynamical fashion, when I come into any situation, I assume a particular identity and I assign a bunch of identities. So right now, I am the professor and you are, right, the interviewer, which of course, you’re much more than that. And I hope I’m much more than just a professor, but I’m assuming an identity, I’m assigning an identity, and I’m doing that to sculpt the space that I’m working in. Is that okay? Does that make sense? Okay. Now what Fromm talked about is when we do that process of co-identification, we can do it around different kinds of needs. We can organize that mode around the having needs. These are needs that are met by having things like having water, having oxygen, having food. And what I want there is I want to assign, I want to assume the role of a manipulator and a controller. So I need to control the manipulate water or I’m dead. And I need to assign categorical identities. Oh, that’s water. Oh, that’s also water. Right? So things have their categorical identity so that I can easily manipulate them. I can easily replace them. I can’t use that water. Oh, that water over there will do. Right? And so the having mode is great. It’s this control and manipulation in terms of things, categorical identity. Ruber calls it an I-it relationship. And again, there’s nothing wrong with that. But you also have needs that are met not by having and controlling. These are needs that are met by becoming, by developing. Fromm calls them your being needs because they’re met by you being a certain way. Like I need to be mature. I need to be wiser. I need to be in love. And there I’m not trying to control and manipulate things. I’m trying to do something else. I’m trying to enter into right relationship with things. Right relationship. And so when I am with this woman who I’m deeply in love with, I don’t relate to her categorically in a manipulative fashion. I don’t say I’m with you because you remind me of all other women and therefore you’re easily replaceable if I need to replace you. And I can control and manipulate you and consume you as I will. Now that’s a disaster. And I’m never going to be in love. To be in love means to not approach this person I-it but approach them I-thou. Now what we can do is we can get modally confused. We can get modally confused. And what do I mean by that? We can try to satisfy our being needs but within the having modes. So instead of being mature we have a car. Instead of being in love we have sex. Right? Instead of being wise we have lots of nifty propositions we can assert. And that mode of confusion will keep us forever spiritually hungry. We will be frustrated because we’re not meeting the being needs. Okay so let’s say we’re modally confused and then within- and notice how that’s a form of parasitic processing. It’s adaptive self-organization that’s coupling me to the world in a-in a-in a way that is deeply self-deceptive self-destructive but I’m not aware of. So I’m caught up in this. That leads me to the third component, reciprocal narrowing. What’s happening in reciprocal narrowing is like the parasitic processing and the modal confusion I’m assigning and assuming identities in a way that the following thing is occurring. And this is a notion taken from Mark Lewis’s ideas of what’s happening in addiction. So let’s talk about addiction first. Let’s say I take the alcohol and the alcohol removes some of the suffering and distress. Right? And so it’s it’s temporarily alleviating but it’s actually it’s very it’s a very self-deceptive thing to do because it actually is impairing me. Right? And so my cognitive flexibility goes down. I can’t solve as many problems and so the options for me in the world goes down. The world narrows and then that’s more threatening to me. Right? Notice my freedom is going away. Notice my freedom is going away. The world is threatening to me and oh no so now I’m distressed so I rely on the alcohol a little bit more and I get narrowed a little bit more. Right? And that’s alleviating because I don’t notice oh but now the world is narrower and you see what’s happening? The world and my agency are reciprocally narrowing until eventually the world can be no other than it is and I can be no other than I am and that is addiction and that is the complete loss of freedom. So if you have like parasitic processing working within mode of confusion that brings about a reciprocal narrowing that sucks away and robs all of your life, that’s dukkha. And this is not because of some strange or bizarre influence. It’s because your cognition is inherently self-organizing. The very processes that are making you adaptively intelligent are also subjecting you to self-deception. They are subjecting you to modal confusion and they are subjecting you to reciprocal narrowing and you get locked into dukkha. But here’s the point and I said this to Mark in person because he’s a friend of mine, good friend actually, good colleague. If reciprocal narrowing is possible then so is reciprocal opening and if I can be modally confused, I can be modally awake. I can wake up and remember how to be in the being mode as I reciprocally open my identity and the identity of the world and as I do that I can become more and more aware of my parasitic processing. I can create a more active dynamical system that can counteract all of that machinery and reorient it towards a more life-enhancing way of being. That’s wisdom and that’s the ecology of practices I was talking about earlier. And so wisdom and a deeper connectedness to oneself and the world and each other, it’s possible. And that wisdom could be comprehensive enough that one was reliably no longer modally confused, reliably capable of dealing with parasitic processing, reliably capable of getting into a flowing connection with the world and other people. That would be enlightenment I would argue. At least that’s one way of understanding enlightenment. Yeah, yeah I’ve also actually recently I just heard you use basically extended flow state also as a label you could use for reciprocal opening. Yes. Yeah that is just it’s so extremely powerful because for a few things there are a number of ways that’s extremely powerful. One is that it seems like in common culture we most people know the term downward spiral if you set it to them and almost everyone has some sort of addict in their head when they hear that. But if you then propose upward spiral that term is very rarely spoken and it’s like well one implies the other. If it’s possible to get stuck on a roller coaster going down it’s possible to get stuck on one going up as well. And the thing is our culture I mean I agree with Arthur Verst Lewis whose work I recommend that the the cultural grammar of spirituality in the west is neoplatonism. And neoplatonism took had a turn for this which it took from Plato which is Anagagic right. This is the ascent out of the cave and this was a pervasive notion within our wisdom tradition. You know the journey of the mind to God in Saint Bonaventure the neoplatonic Christianity had it as well. But with the loss of that tradition and I am not doing some sort of you know crypto proselytizing for Christianity here that is not what I am doing. I’m going to say that again that’s not what I’m doing. I’m also not trying to dismiss Christianity. I hope that I’m dialogically in right relationship with people who are cultivating wisdom and enlightenment in Christianity. I want to throw no obstacle in their way but I am not doing that. What I’m saying is when we lost that when we lost that tradition that wisdom tradition and those wisdom institutions we don’t carry around in our mind the model of the monk the way as you said we carry around the model of the Adam and our culture doesn’t give us that except to see literature right. So there you go. Yeah yeah it’s it’s extremely important again just having these frames can shift can shift so much and it’s also why you know I think a very unfair criticism that’s often brought up for addicts is there’s often this offhand like oh yeah well why don’t they just do it differently. Yeah and it’s like it’s not that simple to your point. It’s not static. It’s not this like bug in the system. It’s as much as you can work against it it can work against you and that becomes the hardest literally like the hardest thing to do. Like you see this in in some movies or cartoons where the the hero has to face the dark duplicate of themselves who is matched in all the skills. It’s basically like that. It’s like as strong as you are it is against you and so it’s not as simple it’s like yeah well you should just snap your fingers and again even even that frame I think if we could take that culturally and approach that to individuals with mental illness or addiction or anything like that even that shifts the momentum in such a way that makes it extremely That’s why I think Mark’s work is so important. Yeah that’s why I think Mark’s work is so important. The way he’s reframing the notion of addiction not as a disease but as an embodied embedded inactive cycle of learning that is I think really centrally important. I can’t recommend his work enough. I think that’s really important. I think Mark has done so much good work but if he’s remembered for anything and this happens at the culmination of his career so that’s good for him but if he’s remembered for anything I hope I hope people remember him for that and that and take note of that. Here’s the thing I want to say to you all right I mean so what people like Socrates and the Buddha are saying to us is the difference between us and the addict is only one of degree not of time. We are also entrapped in multiple ways and I’m including myself I have no privileged position here. We are also entrapped in ways that we are not aware of only we’re only indirectly aware of them in how we suffer and this will allow me to circle back that pervasive sense you have in the meaning crisis that things something is just not right and it’s gnawing away at everything that’s your indication that you’re in something deeply analogous to like the the world the reciprocal self-world narrowing of the addict. Yeah and then you know this is why the first noble truth is all life is suffering right it’s like you are constantly threatened by this it it lurks it lurks in each moment waiting for the cascade to begin and I’m glad I’m glad to yeah go ahead I just want to say one thing the comprehensiveness of this that you put your finger on is really important I just want to flag this for people because there is a tendency in our culture to try to respond to this in a way that seems correct it seems and it seems even spiritual to people but it’s deeply misleading right and this is the idea that there is some aspect of their psyche that is the safe place from Dukkha oh well but my gut or my intuition no no my heart no no my will no no my my intellect no no my acts and if you write any attempt to deify any aspect of the psyche as the place that is the safe harbor from all of the tempest of Dukkha is a fundamental mistake right it is only like that’s why the eightfold path is offered or where you get all of the the whole project around Socrates and the neo-platonic tradition you have that’s why and this is to give you a foreshadowing segue that’s why you need something as comprehensive as a religion to deal with this yeah yeah that was a what would you call that was an underhand pitch that was a setup right there and we are certainly building up to uh to knock that out of the park but there there there’s some other foundations i want to lay as we lead up to this because again i think we are going to make the i’m just going off camera for a sec because i realize i’m my power is not plugged in good catch well like there we this leads quite nicely into the next the next um kind of term i wanted to bring up for people because it seems like dukkha is one of these which is you use the term perennial problems that humans face a lot and i i notice this in my own life where you know sometimes my friends and i will talk and you know it’s just like well and we’ll give an answer to a problem that someone’s facing and it’s like well why are we just discovering this now you know why did it take me into my late 20s to figure this out and it’s like well it shouldn’t have people wrote this down a long time ago we’ve just lost the we’ve just lost the practices we’ve lost the ideas we’ve lost the scripture that actually afforded those answers much earlier but so can we give a can we give an overview of um and i i would argue maybe maybe you would say something differently that that dukkha and reciprocal narrowing are one of the perennial problems faced by humanity are there any uh can you list some others or just yeah i think you’re in the notion of the scriptures i mean one way of um recapturing i mean and jordan peterson brought i mean i have a lot i have i have a very complex relation with jordan peterson he’s a colleague and a friendly colleague and he supports my work and i think there’s a lot of insight in him but i also have criticisms of his work but i do think one of the things he did that was of great value was to reawaken people uh by a young um he should have also done corban as well but by a young uh to the importance of myth because i think one of the things that myth does for us is it gives us a dramatic and and for reasons we’ll talk about later we need a dramatic and not a merely propositional presentation of these perennial problems um and so for example for every good hero myth which you know is the perennial problem of you know self-transcendence and going through uh having to face very serious frame breaking and loss in order to afford that kind of growth there’s also a counterbalancing myth of hubris and what wait remember that you’re immortal you’ll never be a god and that doesn’t mean that you you won’t you’ll keep progressing towards it no you’ll always be in your very bones immortal you’ll always be threatened by duke etc so i think myth is an important thing to remember so if you look at myth and you look at your sacred scriptures you can see a lot of perennial problems that come up a lot and so let’s take let’s take a myth that and people won’t even recognize it as a myth but it is and it’s myth in the sense i’m using it shakespeare’s hamlet uh like why why do people keep reading about this danish guy right from from like you know the 17th century like who the who cares well because this is a perennial problem human beings are beset with they’re they’re gifted by and beset by being self-conscious and that means we right if you look at hamlet he towers above the people around him and and shakespeare is using him as an exemplar of this human capacity or we can rise above our impulses unlike many other animals we are not merely what frankfurt calls wantons we don’t just like because i just give into every impulse my impulses are contradictory right they are they’re they undermine each other but i want it i want to look good and be sexually attractive but i want the chocolate cake and all that sort of impulsivity right and so we can and this is bellman’s point i can i have this capacity of of of you know and it’s the capacity that mindfulness trains right i can step back and look at my own perspective and we’ll talk about later why that require notice how that’s already another kind of knowing respectable knowing and we’ll come into that i hope but i can step back and look at my perspective and you could say well i’m not i don’t want to and i can actually this has to do with the logistics of the psyche i won’t give much of my resources and my energy to this impulse right now and i’ll try and redirect towards this impulse and we can do all that and and you know thank god we can because we would be sort of monstrous if we could but the problem with that with that self-consciousness that ability to step back and reflect is it disconnects us from that machinery because like when i’m thirsty and i’m thirsty kind of impulsively i don’t i’m not aware of my thirst i’m aware through my thirst of everything right as things i’ve seen the world thirstily but when i step back and look at my thirst the perspective from which i’m looking at my thirst is not one of thirst it’s perhaps one of curiosity or perhaps one of frustration right but it’s a different motivation and so i’m now actually disconnected from the motivational energy of thirst i’m no longer seeking for water like you know what i can do with that curiosity i can step back and look at that and now i’m no longer curious about my thirst right and i can right so i i could get caught up right in this perspective that completely disconnects me from my motivational machinery so this and this is hamlet’s tragedy right he keeps thinking and reflecting and reflecting on his reflecting and acting about and people are dying around him and going insane around him and there’s this tragedy building around him right and so our self-consciousness and and and there’s a perennial problem of how do we deal with that and you know and that interacts with other acts like i mentioned it you know we are self we are self-conscious of our death in our mortality in a way that other animals aren’t how do we deal with that there’s perennial problems around absurdity my ability to self-transcend means i can rise above myself till i get to this cosmic perspective and now it seems like from that cosmic perspective all of the minutiae of my own motivation and concern seems so insignificant so trivial life seems absurd and this of course is something developed very well um in the work of camu i’m reading the plague right now because of covid and and reacquainting with camu so we face perennial problems of absurdity we face perennial problems of the reflectiveness gap caused by our self-consciousness we reflect because we are perspectival we we face perennial problems of egocentrism and narcissism because we face perennial problems like you said around duca around self-deceptive self-destructive behavior modal confusion reciprocal narrowing we face perennial problems of of how do i want to say it there’s a family of problems loneliness or culture shock or future shock in which we feel like even again in hamlet like the time is out of joint we feel in the in the bones of our psyche we feel that we don’t belong we don’t fit in we’re not we’re not at one we with the environment we feel homeless and that’s a perennial problem a sense of a sort of spiritual domicile this is not an exhaustive list but does this give you a good sense of what i’m talking about yeah absolutely yeah that’s how myth is a place to look like hamlet for where these perennial problems are being played out yeah well i think uh the way the way it’s come up for me is due to your human nature due to the fact that you are a self-aware human there’s a host and when when you just went off on that list to me it was like a hydra it was just like holy shit like i can address one and three others come up and yes yes it was uh it seems fundamentally um that the the problems concern your right relationship to yourself to others into the world exactly exactly right and again we get to this is why it loops back to myth and this is why i think jordan peterson has grown a little bit which is that is for the most part outside of the domain of science it doesn’t matter that i know you exist that tells me nothing about how i should relate to you and whether i should feel threatened should i feel happy like all that and when that’s taken when that confusion of how to relate to something applies to yourself other people and everything around you you end up in no man’s land you end up in just this void of what the fuck is going on like and it creates this that’s why i think you get things like the rise in mental health crisis you get the rise in nihilism you just get this one on earth and i think to the crux of some of your work is when these perennial problems reach a critical mass because we’re we’ve lost the the ways of knowing the actual practices that address them we end up in something like the meaning crisis yes exactly that was beautifully said you should have done some of my series that was really well i mean what you just said eric is exactly the case that for historical reasons and and forces that are still at work we have we have lost the practices the ecology of practices the communities for wisdom because that’s the name i would give to that that knowing how and knowing through a transformation how to get into right relationship with yourself with each other in the world we’ve lost that in a profound way and that means that we we don’t even have a a like like you said we don’t know where we are we don’t have a world view that homes that pursuit of wisdom and legitimates it and valorizes it and and justifies it to us and inspires us to aspire to it we don’t have a world view that does any of that for us so when we are beset by the perennial problems and we turn for wisdom we have nowhere to turn so when the perennial problems are basically unleashed because we have no homing world view that homes an ecology of practices that will allow us to deal with that monster then that is the meeting crisis yeah yeah and as as almost responses or actually i would say something like tools in your tool belt that you can use i think two things come up one is the four ways of knowing and one and the other is psycho technologies can we touch both of those yeah so part of the historical forgetting that has cut us off from wisdom is a is a is a historical process in which our cultural cognitive grammar what i mean by that by cultural cognitive grammar are sort of the fundamental patterns by of intelligibility the fundamental sort of the fundamental and both individually and culturally habitual ways in which we formulate our problems and think about things and conceive of them and try to remember that conceive originally meant to give birth so one of the fundamental forgettings that has happened is we have forgotten the kinds of knowing that makes sense of with of this notion of wisdom so the kind of knowing that we have reduced knowing to what i call propositional knowing all right and this is the kind of knowing that is our grasping of facts that we assert in propositions that we believe like i know that cats are mammals there we go there’s a fact and i’m asserting the belief and then of course we’ve developed and and i’m a scientist so i think this is a very very good thing by the way we have developed is of dealing with how self-deception creeps into the inferential processes by which we manipulate propositions and generate good theory good belief that’s what the scientific and historical methods are and i have training in both mostly in science but in some history as well right and so and so i believe in science in that sense i think that science is a great way of knowing propositionally but as you alluded to earlier the problem with that is that inferential propositional knowing is not it’s not identical with all of our ways of knowing and it’s and what’s really significant is that propositional knowing and we know this theoretically it’s a little bit of irony there we know this because of the ongoing science of meaning in life we know that those kinds of beliefs do very very little to make your life meaningful right precisely because they don’t empower you to deal with these perennial problems and they don’t empower you well with you know deepening the connections to yourself to each other in the world so let’s go through the other kinds of knowing that actually have to do with that so propositions are good when they’re true and that’s great but notice what we didn’t have power oh the power well but power matters because you have another kind of knowing that is it that doesn’t come to fruition in in truth it comes it sense of realness is power and this is knowing how this is your procedural knowing this is knowing how to do things knowing how to row a boat knowing how to walk knowing how to talk right above and beyond any proposition you utter you need to know how to talk it empowers you and if you didn’t if you didn’t have the power of speech think about how disconnected from reality you would become in so many ways so right you this is your procedural knowing this is and it doesn’t result in theories it results in skills when you know when you have good know-how you have powerful skills and that’s expertise right and part more meaningful people for people is if they have some sense of that kind of fulfillment of procedural knowing in having some kind of power that they can they have reliable skills for interacting with themselves with each other and with the world and some of those reliable skills have to specifically be skills of dealing with perennial problems okay but whenever i’m am i using all my skills right now i’m a tai chi player right i i have so much but i’m not using my tai chi skills right now well maybe in some general license many of my skills i know i’m not bringing to bear well how do i know which skills to apply and which skills to acquire well that’s well that’s based on your situational awareness well what kind of knowing is that well that’s your perspectival knowing that’s knowing that that’s your salience landscaping that’s how that’s how things that’s your knowing through your particular state of consciousness this is the difference between knowing your room when you’re drunk and knowing your room when you’re sober or knowing your room when you’re happy and knowing your room when you’re sad right it’s what stands out for you what’s salient what’s foregrounded what’s background it’s your sense of here now here now here nowness connectedness and so that doesn’t come to fulfillment in a sense of truth or a sense of power it comes into fulfillment in a sense of presence that’s what we’re trying to get in video games we’re trying to get that sense of presence because that means right my my my perspectival knowing i i have the i’ve got i’ve got situational awareness that is allowing me to apply and acquire the skills i need so you see how the propositional knowing depends on the procedural knowing all the propositions depend on me knowing how to speak right but knowing how to speak and how to apply my other skills depends on my perspectival knowing my situational awareness well what does that depend on well that depends on my participatory knowing that depends on the fact that i’m ultimately coupled to the world in the right way that that i that agent arena relationship that i was talking about earlier in reciprocal narrowing and opening that it is taking place that’s not something i can make think about it all right think about loneliness when you’re lonely well what i’m just i’m not going to be lonely now like you can try and sort of but what’s what’s what’s wrong there is that there isn’t a proper like mutual fittedness between you and the world because you need another person so participatory knowing is well think about this it’s about how your biology this is called niche construction in biology how your biological evolution has co-shaped your environment and you so that there are these relationships of belonging they’re called affordances in kagasai in gibson so like um like you have a category i assume food right so there’s an apple and it affords nourishment to you you see it as food right because evolution has shaped you and that environment you you right you have niche construction and you can grasp the apple and eat it it so it’s food for you does it is that okay yeah now also notice notice how culture has shaped you and your environment you’re in a nice room and you’re speaking english did you make english did you make the room you’re in no how about the technology you’re using none of it so your biology shapes you to the world and the world to you your culture shapes you to the world and you and and and right the world to you and now your brain your embodied brain in that dynamical coupling right it’s shaping the world and you to the world it’s creating a particular configuring particular configuring of agency and it’s calling out particular things as relevant and important to you but this is what wittgenstein meant when he said that even if lions could talk i wouldn’t i couldn’t understand them because they have a different biology they don’t have culture they don’t have language but right so that’s participatory knowing the participatory knowing makes all the niches makes all the affordances and then the prospectable knowing turns those affordances into a situation of which you are aware that situational awareness trains and affords you applying skills in your procedural knowing so you are empowered and then finally in your empowerment you can utter particular propositions and undertake to justify and defend them in your propositional knowing but if you if you think that all of that what you are and all that you know is your propositional knowing and that all i have to do to transform you is change your belief which is the fundamental lie of i of ideology right then you are not only being lied to you are being cut off from all of this machinery and think about how that perspec that procedural empowerment that perspectival presence and that participatory belonging think about how belonging presence and power are so central to your sense of meaningful existence and if you’re cut off from them you’re cut off from the wisdom that affords that kind of meaning yeah and the wow a there was a lot there again this is why this is why i want i want this grammar introduced to the world because it it orients you in such a beautiful way a we see this come up in a lot there are a lot of i feel like common cliches that address this at some level you know the classic one like talk is cheap like dude i like all the armchair sports commentators oh i could do that i could do that simply because i know that he needs to dribble the ball and go up and dunk it that in no way means you you know it deeply enough to actually do it that’s right that’s a that’s a huge disconnect there’s also um it’s the same reason why you know you should eat healthy and don’t right knowledge is in no way enough for that um um and then it it feels to me in a way and i may be incorrect on this but it feels like essentially the resurgence of perennial problems the growing force of the meaning crisis is almost a natural result of the fact that you could say western material science is so propositional it’s almost solely abstract right and all these four ways of knowing are almost on a spectrum of conceptual to fully embodied right and if you if your whole culture if your whole understanding and approach to the world is entirely theoretical you’re lost in a world of abstraction and you’re disconnected from the the here and now and that’s why even in in movies right when the the main character is going off what it takes is being slapped in the face right it’s like right here like get back here and something i wanted to ask you about this because hey i don’t even know if that that spectrum is fair but it definitely feels that way that it goes from conceptual to deeply embodied and it feels absolutely fair i think that’s absolutely beautiful and yes they are they are all essential i’m not going to discount any of them but what i wanted to bring up is it seems like it seems like eastern culture and western culture have picked to set up camp at the opposing poles it seems like western culture is up in the propositional procedural and eastern philosophy has chosen to set up camp almost solely at perspectival and participatory the example coming up for me very directly is zen zen is almost mercilessly in the here and now like just stop conceptualizing stop abstracting right here right now you know the wind is blowing through the trees and that is all you need to know that’s right is that fair does that land i think that’s fair i mean insofar as i mean i i think that’s a prototypical representation of eastern philosophy i do not know how much asian and south asian cultures are now oriented that way because of globalization the the what you just said are the culture’s emphasis on propositional knowing and techne a kind of a kind of perceival knowing technological knowing has greatly of course empowered the west whatever the west is and to do i mean a worldwide kind of imperialism and so whether or not that’s actually the case because what and i’m not trying to say this because i’m not trying to make a political point here or at least that’s not my focal intent my intent is that i think versions of the meaning crisis are now are now becoming important in japan in china etc so i doubt that any sort of comprehensive journey to the east for example uh i’m not accusing you of being overly romantic i’m just i’m just saying that um i think the meaning crisis is now becoming a global issue that being said so that’s an important caveat i think your central insight is exactly correct so i was not trying to put it aside i was trying to just situate it within a proper context of understanding i think the uh for historical reasons uh that have to go back to change in the way we read and the rise of nominalism and a whole bunch of stuff i talk about too uh towards belief and ideology and assertion um and that the only all that really mattered was the competition uh you know the political competition between ideologies and and and and and the sort of the political competition between ideologies to see who got most access to the power that science and technology was putting uh in our hands um and so i think yeah the west has gotten oriented that way these eastern philosophies do put a tremendous emphasis on as you said transformation of the respectable and participatory reciprocal narrowing is a strangling of participatory knowing so that respectable knowing loses all of its capacity for insight right so trying to you’re trying to give people that non-ideological transformative capacity to respectable and participatory knowing was definitely emphasized the price that was paid for that emphasis of course was that the the potential opening of the world that is provided by the scientific framework was also not important so i you know i i love zen uh i know people who practice it and in some ways i’m prototypical zen because in my life i integrate a daoist tai chi with a with a teravaitan papasana which is sort of proto at least proto-chan right um but i also don’t want to give up the way uh you know what science has afforded us because look at what just happened and look look who the people were yeah the people who and i did it i taught meditation i continued doing during covid and giving people transformative ability right to deal with you know the perennial problems that are being exacerbated by the covid crisis and the way it’s making the meaning crisis like uh definitely but who was also out there really making a huge difference it’s the scientists they’re the people who are actually giving us the tools that we need to deal with covid so again uh you weren’t saying this and i’m not attributing it to it but i you know a kind of crypto-orientalism in which the east is you know you know is is is right and pure and we are just you know a horrible horrible what i think that is we should give up all we should give that up that’s that’s analogous to trying to find the one part of you that is free from duke right we need to read what we need and so sorry i’m trying to make a really simple point for me and i don’t need to be going on we need something that properly and deeply integrates science and spirituality together that’s why i’m making this little speech right now yeah yeah and it’s definitely worth that that level of underscore because it is far too common far too common in some spaces right now and uh yeah the the the easiest offhand like mantra that’s come up for me is and this is by no means my creation um both and right if you’re ever in a situation where you’re viewing something as either or it’s definitely not it’s probably both and like you need you need the compliments of both uh and science and spirituality is arguably one of the most powerful instances of that thank you for saying that because i think the challenge facing us this is the way of sort of sharpening the issue of the meaning places we’ve said like together i appreciate your help on this we’ve said you know historical forces have disarmed us in our ability to respond to perennial problems but any attempt to address the meeting crisis has to be what we were also just talking about i would argue it has to reintegrate science and spirituality together in order to give us what we need to respond to the meeting crisis our deepest all of our knowings have to be put into right relationship with each other yeah yeah and like look like it’s also it’s also just historically true that early christianity was responsible for the dissemination and exploration of a lot of science right there’s a the this is again another kind of trope that misses the mark a little bit which is you know science is the process of cutting things up and kind of deadens the world and makes it all not as beautiful but actually it’s not true at all like it makes it more beautiful the deeper you like this is what sports is a good example i guess like it’s great to watch professional athletes do their thing it’s even better to have tried it yourself to see how difficult and how nuanced it is and to know what moves they’re actually doing and then to watch them do with that level of grace it actually improves it and it’s like well that applies to all of this happening here as well right like it doesn’t get more beautiful knowing just how nuanced atoms and molecules and nonsense and quantum physics is it actually is more amazing it enchants the world rather than uh dead i i think thank you for saying that i mean the scientific worldview doesn’t give us right the what we need for wisdom but it also doesn’t do it like i like what you said i would i would strengthen it and perhaps be a little bit more aggressive than you would which is unusual because i’m usually not in that position i would say it’s a bit it’s unfair here let me use an analogy i think would be unfair to criticize a particular religion if you and i think many people do criticize it unfairly if you didn’t make some real good faith after no pun intended to experience it from the inside like the way an anthropologist goes and does participant notice the word participant observation notice for two participant observation prospectile or participatory knowing right of another culture if you don’t do deep participant observation of a religion you don’t really and don’t get some sense i’m not saying be converted don’t get some sense of what it is from the inside and just criticizing it from the outside is really unfair because you missed it it’s like it’s like you you know when you criticize a couple’s relationship and you are you don’t know what it’s like from the inside for them right in a typical in a sorry in a not a typical in an in an analogous way people who criticize science and haven’t practiced it at least done some significant good faith participant observation in it and make all these pronouncements about that’s unfair it’s just fundamentally unfair i i i practice science and i you’ve heard me in our discussion criticize its deep inadequacies but simply demonizing it i agree with you i think that is a fundamental mistake and so we need to we need to put science and spirituality into deep conversation but that goes that goes both ways you just said it you know we need to acknowledge how much of the scientific world is dependent not only the scientific world the secular world is dependent on christianity paul van der klee has done just a whole bunch of video work you know building on the work of many other people tom hall and others trying to show you know how much of what we consider secular and scientific was given birth conceived by christianity and so uh we need to you know again a foreshadowing we need to have a deep dialogue between uh science and spirituality yeah yeah and so uh actually one point that came up was it’s almost hard to judge something unless you participate in the practices that came from it uh i think this is like a lot of people criticize christianity but have you ever tried like real prayer like actually seeing what that does to your body and how you and how you feel and perhaps even how it ripples into your life same thing with uh you know a meditation practice going to halls of worship like unless you’ve done the practices that stem from these ideas like yeah the ground to criticize it is very weak and very frail yeah and it reverberates backwards too like i think i didn’t really get the taotai chen until i had been practicing tai chi for a very long time yeah perfect example perfect example of it um i’m actually going to float this to you uh there are two ways we can go right now um one is i want to dig into the meat right both steal the culture and the religion that’s not a religion do you feel that it’s necessary to load in psychotechs and the ecology of practices before we do that well i mean i could do a very quick riff because we’ve alluded to it more many times on the ecology of practices and psychotech doesn’t won’t take me that long to try okay so the ecology of practices um you’ve heard me so let’s go back and maybe do a bit of a let’s go back and maybe do a bit of a narrative biography because that gets people an access point i was taught an ecology of practices um and so i was taught that i was taught a meditative practice and in meditation it’s a mindfulness practice in which you’re stepping back and looking at your framing i often use the example of like my glasses my glasses the way my glasses frame my vision i look through them in the sense of by means of them and beyond them uh right i also have a mental framing that i’m always looking through and by means of and what i can do when my glasses are dirty is i can step back and look at them to see if there’s any gunk on them that’s what you’re doing in meditation you’re stepping back and looking at your mental framing but if all i ever did think about it if all i ever did was step back and look at my glasses look at the gunk and whoa look whoa well how do i know if i actually have corrected my glasses i have to put them on and then look out and see if i can see more deeply and more clearly into the world that’s contemplation right that contemplation at the work the center of it is temple to look out to look into the heavens originally what i meant or um it’s it’s contemplatio is the latin word for the greek word theoria which means to look deeply into things not theory by the way that the word theory is a derivative from this more perspectival ability right so notice how those are in a complementary relationship one gets me to step back and look at so that i can see distortion one gets me to right to step through and look beyond and that allows me to learn and to see what i couldn’t see before and i need both for transformation notice that we put these together without thinking of it in a word that we’ve inherited from ekart breakthrough i have to break the bad framing through into something beyond right breakthrough and so notice what i’m trying to get in is that practices have respective strengths and weaknesses and they need to be put into a complementary relationship the problem with those two practices for example they’re both very heavy practices they’re taking place in your head as you’re still so you know what you need to complement them with a moving practice a mindfulness practice like tai chi chuan that also teaches you more about the flow state and see that practice though if i’m just moving it’s hard for me to develop mindfulness in it you see what i’m trying to show you they have sets of strengths and weaknesses and what you want to do is like an ecology you want to put them into a dynamical system where they’re constraining informing and right affording each other in powerful ways and you also need practices that bridge you right between different kinds of knowing so i teach lectio divina which is a way of reading sacred reading that helps you to bridge between the propositional and the perspectival and the participatory or chanting which helps to bridge from the participatory right and the perspectival into the propositional right so you want you also want bridging practices you also layer practices on top of each other so meta looking out and the passion looking in can be layered onto each other the way my left and right visual fields could be layered onto each other so i can see into depth and when i layer them onto each other i what can emerge is prajna this non-dual awareness that is simultaneously deeply out and deeply in so what i’m trying to do is i’m trying to put practices together into a complement relationships of complementarity relationships that link between the kinds of knowing and relationships that layer the practices developmentally onto each other so i have this self-correcting self-transforming ecology of practices that’s an equality of practices is that okay yeah and and just a quick bookmark you’ll notice how the end description of that sounded exactly like duke and reciprocal narrowing but in a good way right that’s also that’s also a foreshadow there um yeah that was perfect and then i think if we can get uh psycho technologies sure so the idea is and this is this is i think andy clark has said this profoundly andy clark is an example of a really important cognitive scientist and somebody who’s associated with what it’s called core e cognitive science i really respect his work i’ve criticized him as a scientist but i recommend people reading his work but he has a book called natural born cyborgs that because we’re inherently cultural beings we have evolved across species to fit the world to us and us to the world remember i was talking about that that mutual fitness participatory knowing well what’s an example of fitting the world to us and us to the world tools tools like my phone like my watch like this mug like this glass it fits my hand right so that the world can better fit my hand water i can carry around the liquid so we have evolved our brains have evolved to merge with tools that’s what a cyborg is right now the examples i gave were physical tools they are designed to fit our body and extend it into the world and also extend the world into the body to fit the world and the body better together but there are also psycho technologies that are designed to fit the way our minds work so that right we can extend our mind into the world and also extend the world into the mind a classic example of this is literacy so a psycho technology isn’t a skill because it is socially creative you didn’t make literacy i didn’t make literacy right it is a socially standardized this is the important of distributed cognition but most of our thinking is done in concert with other people right so literacy is a socially standardized way of formatting information processing the manipulation storage and transmission of information such that it fits my cognition well and compensates for it empowers it so with literacy i can now store information outside of my own memory i can reflect on my own cognition outside of my own consciousness i can link my mind to yours i can link my current mind to my future mind by writing things down i can massively empower myself so a psycho technology is a socially generated standardized way of formatting communicating transmitting information that is the socially designed to fit cognition well fit it generally so that it’s widely disseminable about amongst the population unlike particular skills for example and afford a comprehensive and reliable empowerment of cognition in some way literacy is an example numeracy is an example graphing is an example mindfulness is an example by the way yeah so those are psycho technologies yeah mindfulness and graph paper were the ones that just flipped the entire switch for me it was like oh this had to be invented like we actually created this it didn’t just get pulled from the ether and that’s right yeah so let’s i think we have built a very good foundation let’s see where our arc has taken us right so we have as a human you have perennial problems that basically lurk under the surface like some beast in the ocean always threatening you um i really like the analogy of the hydra because as you address one it it reorients new ones come up and when enough heads arise you get something like the meaning crisis the meaning crisis left unattended can basically serve an existential threat for a tribe or for humanity at large right it could be people just offing themselves it could be war it could be anything right not good not good to let continue over time so people recognize this and they were like okay we need to do something about this um from that right we had the ecology of practices that grew and different communities would would develop different ecologies practices they develop different psychotechs all all done to help would you what would you call it make an agreement between the four ways of knowing and how they show up in relationships to themselves to others in the world and through that and to your point about the ecology it was dynamic and self-organizing enough and it had a feedback loop that as the threats dynamically reorganized it could dynamically reorganize in response to that the first thing i want to say is notice how absolutely necessary that is for you as an individual and any community at large like that’s non-negotiable if you want to stay alive and stay sane while you’re alive so it’s absolutely necessary and so what happens when a group of people who have recognized the need for this are trying to carry it out come together you know a some people give some good answers some people share some good ideas and then some people are like hey that’s really good idea you should write that down or like do you want to meet next week to talk about this and you can see already that you have the basis of something that looks like religion yes you have an organized community carrying out a set of practices that help put them in relationship with themselves others in the world awesome right so and i think i think we’ve both we’ve both tipped a hat to i think this is something that jordan peterson has brought up to the surface quite well that there is that there is a need there is a individual psychological and a collective institutional need for something like a religion it might not have to be any of the current instantiations of it but you really don’t want to go without it because you can argue we live in a global world that is largely without it right now right we’ve moved the nuns the the people who have no real religion are a i think the largest group and be the largest growing group and we are smack dab in the middle of a meaning crisis almost all of our crises jordan hall’s causes the meta crisis right we just have a crisis of crises and we’re bouncing around through it and so it’s like we now we have a very visceral example of what happens when we move away from that so it’s like okay that that experiment’s probably not great one thing i would would like to speak to a little bit here is so if we do have a need for something that looks like a religion and actually maybe i’ll bookmark this as separate from just an individual spiritual practice because you just you know you can learn you can learn from your elders way faster than you can make all the mistakes yourself so there there’s a there’s a place for religion why then are we looking to reinvent a new one rather than what is wrong with the ones already in existence that have sustained for several thousand years like why not why not religion 1.0 why why now is there a almost an inadequacy in them yeah that’s really good so that that’s that’s that should be the culminating question because that’s going to take a lot so i mean i’ve been exploring with my my dear friend and colleague who i should have mentioned earlier uh just a professor he’s very much my partner and a lot of this and i owe a lot of this after first uh the work we do together and also the work that i’ve done with leo ferraro on wisdom so i just want to make sure the people are aware of that but chris and i are being been exploring uh with andrew sweney a notion i got from a carry in his book on augustin this latin term inventio is becoming central to me sorry i’m on the edge of sneezing that’s why i have this on my face so the the he wrote this book and he was trying to talk about how augustin afforded sort of the the current sense we have of an inner self and augustin basically takes sort of flotritus at paul st paul and does this really interesting thing with his own personal sense of autobiography he makes the autobiographical inner self which we all now take to be natural uh but what again it’s a historical phenomenon but that’s the point i want to make because we’re inherently cultural biological beings we need a term that that sits on on both of those so the word inventio means both to make and to discover it’s both something you’re making and so the word invention is you just make it and the word is discovery you just find it but inventio is you’re making it but you’re also discovering it and so in a sense what i’m trying to do is do we the reinventio of religion so that sense of connectedness that we’ve been talking about about connectedness to yourself to each other to the world in depth i actually use a word religio to talk about that that is one of the one i think it’s the preferred potential etymological origins for the word religion itself a sense of binding and connectedness so i think and and this has been deeply influenced by the work of james paris and others i think that the the function of religions and and so i gotta do this carefully i i argue that the function of religion is to give us an ecology of practices and well and well-vetted psychotech that will address the perennial problems and enhance religion yeah but notice that no religion actually says it that way and and and instead and again i’ve been careful to note that i’ve been careful to note that i don’t use this word for joy religiously religions have what i would call a mythological a way of trying to activate that functionality right yeah and that mythos has it depends like all mythos on a worldview that properly situates it and connects it to a wisdom tradition is that okay yeah perfect this a set of revolutions right in the past and i mean cultural cognitive cultural cognitive revolutions not so much political revolutions you know like the renaissance the reformation the scientific revolution have sundered that mythos that we inherited from the actual age the mythos of the two worlds and this world being less real and the way that got solidified and i would even argue ossified in the west into this this categorical difference between the natural and the supernatural and between and a categorical disconnect between them and a categorical disconnection between faith and spirituality and reason and science is something that are deeply opposed to each other because one is the doorway to the supernatural and the other is the doorway to the natural whether or not this is actually how all christians practice or believe i think that’s a very open question i meet many christians paul vanderkley jp morso kerry cohen jonathan pageau that are in some significant way trying to i think reformulate that grammar in a powerful way but regardless that history of that mythos and it’s disconnect from the scientific world view because it’s written into the grammar of that mythos is it’s disconnected its opposition and the way science has developed a counteractive mythos right that’s antagonistic towards religion you know it politically tolerates it because that’s polite but it’s ultimately antagonistic right and so we’ve got this profoundly grotesquely stupid separation sorry i don’t usually have this problem but this is the part that really bothers me between knowledge right and wisdom which is like the ancient greeks would go what what is going on there right i think that the existing religions are so bound up and especially christianity but i think buddhism especially western buddhism because it has a two world mythos and and there are definitely versions of that i encounter them that are anti-scientific anti-intellectual in a profound way as if that again is the way to liberation right i don’t think the existing religions have the capacity to bridge between science and spirituality in a within a pluralistic dynamically complexifying world in a way that is needed right now to address the meeting places they were crafted in a different time within a different history within a different mythos and like christianity did not grow up in pluralism it did not grow up right in in a scientific worldview that is massively successful right i can go on and on and i do in the series what i’m trying to say is that though the religions that we have and i have done participatory observation in at least three of them deeply christianity buddhism daoism and i they are like my family i owe much to them and i am respectful and i have a loving attitude towards them or even neoplatonism within the west same thing deeply family deeply in love with it but ultimately none of those are have the framework that is needed for bringing about the deep integration between science and spirituality within a pluralistic massively dynamically complexifying world and this is jordan hall’s point right we are facing not only complexity but a accelerating complexification of complexity right i don’t think the existing religions have what it takes and i say that with love and respect for them and i recommend that people and i have tried to reinvent you as much instead of salvage which i used to do which sounds like they’re broken in some way they ever but i try to reinvent you from the existing religions not just me myself but other all these people all these communities of practices like rave kelly and all these other people that i’m meeting right and you’ve alluded to all these communities that are taking shape all around the world i think that we can reinvent you a new ecology of practices new psychotech and new myth with us that’s a more of an artistic project that will reintegrate science and spirituality within within a pluralistic complex dynamically complexifying world such that we can now adjust the data process that’s what i’m building up now here’s what i want to say and i say this and i say this in dialogue with people of of the existing faiths that is not a foreclosure argument it’s not a deductive argument that’s a that’s where i’m placing my bets kind of argument it’s almost like a paskelyan wager with all due respect to paskelle right it’s possible that christianity or buddhism because they’ve done it before it could reorganize themselves like you know buddhism integrated with taoism to become chan right and then it integrated with shinto to become zen right and you know neoplatonism and christianity were able to integrate and it was able to integrate aristotelian science maybe christianity or maybe buddhism or maybe some right religion may be able to reformulate itself in such a way that it can do what i’m proposing but i just don’t see it happening collectively i see it happening in individuals but i don’t see it happening collectively in the religions as systems of distributed cognition so i place my bet on the religion that’s not a religion meaning by that it is a religion that tries to be other than a religion based on a two worlds mythology and is committed to new ecologies of practices but also the reinvential of old ecologies of practices better said the reinvential of ecologies of practices both the recovering of the old and the discovering of the new right that’s what i mean by the religion that’s not a religion the reinventio of those ecology of practices with with with the best we can draw from our scientific historic our scientific historical and political understanding of the world wow that was a masterpiece wow that was a masterpiece there’s a lot there’s a lot there one thing one thing i want to also weave into this because i think it’s i think it’s necessary you know and this is this is this is still formulating in me but the importance is becoming more and more clear as i was writing that article we spoke about and even preparing for this actually in one year it seems like this is necessary and you’ve mentioned it several times in this conversation the profound importance culture has on the collective and on the individual and it’s actually that you know culture is the culture is the technology that humans wield right it’s this massive sword that the giant of humanity does stuff with yeah so it is it is extreme i’ve written that in a different article so that wasn’t off the cuff but yeah like it is a it’s a tool basically it’s a tool that the collective has and that whether we whether we recognize it or not we can actually wield it it’s not just some snowball falling down a mountain like we it’s it’s a feedback loop and so you know what’s really important here is that culture is being shaped and that and for a a long time throughout history and arguably still now religion was a vehicle for the transformation of culture right so it’s all of them though it’s yeah i think what you’ve just done is beautiful it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s the means by which we can transform culture and the distributed cognition that culture runs on but also individual cognition but also you know individual character but also shared the shared community past between individuals and the group that affords distributed cognition like it transforms all of those like and i and i don’t know of any other as i sort of talked over and i apologize for it i would call culture like a tool of tools it’s kind of a meta tool yeah and it’s a dynamically self-organizing adaptive meta tool that creates all the other tools by which we adapt chris and i make use of gilson’s idea idea that culture is ultimately a like religion in so far as it wields culture is ultimately a meta meeting system it’s the thing that allows us to generate all the other individual meeting systems and so i don’t see anything other than religion being and thank you for bringing this point up because it was a lacuna in my presentation and it’s very astute of you to point to that i i don’t see anything other than religion giving us what we need in order to bring about the transformation that will be as comprehensive and as profound that is needed to deal with the meaning crisis and how the meaning crisis interacts and exacerbates the meta crisis they’re just we we don’t have that that is the tool of tools for doing that like i said i don’t think the even though i really want to be complementary even though i think a lot of the existing religions are very good tools i don’t think they’re the right tool for this job and that’s why we need the religion that’s our religion that’s why i often say i i don’t i’m not advocating for the french revolution i’m not i’m not advocating primarily for a political attempt to reorganize the system of governance and sort of the distribution of goods within society i mean people can vary in what they mean by the word political that’s what i take to be the meaning of a political revolution i know there are other people like that people have a more profound reading of political but that’s how i’m using it i don’t want something like the french revolution i want something like the axial revolution i want something like what we had when we had the three r’s of the renaissance the reformation and the scientific revolution that you know radically comprehensively transform culture cognition character and community tasks in a deeply reciprocal and profound way yeah that’s what we need right now something like that yeah yeah and this actually leads into something i appreciate that’s coming more and more out of both you and and jordan hall and some of the thinkers in this space the idea of stealing the culture yeah and that’s a very it’s a very important term because i think there are two things worth worth looping in here um one is that a recognition that kind of global or western culture as it stands right now is not going in a good direction for two reasons one you should just listen to anything daniel schmoktenberger and jordan hall say about the meta crisis and how you know culture has downstreamed that to to come into being and also you know we spoke earlier that like we are living in a meaning crisis and that that has come out of a culture this culture and it’s like okay so that’s probably not ideal the other very sneaky thing is that all the perennial problems all the meaning crisis stuff it’s hard enough to deal with by yourself and as a community but it can also be hijacked it can also be weaponized against you totally and that is happening in so many ways right all the hypernormal stimuli all the kind of unsubstantiated unsubstantial food right and just like it can all those things difficult enough when you have a fighting chance extremely difficult when it gets weaponized against you for power and status games right and so it’s there is this the current culture which in for many good reasons we can argue is inadequate to what we need to face also has a momentum carrying it forward and people who want to play that game to basically weaponize it against you that the appropriate thing seems to become if anyone cares about self others in world and the betterment of all of them you actually have to steal the culture bottom up right you actually have to straight up just create a gravity towards you that is like this is approachable enough i’m flourishing enough it others are flourishing enough we have community our world is getting better so much so that they’re like i just like that more like i’m going i’m going over there and there’s a you know i’m certainly in some some more spiritual circles now and there’s always this hesitancy in and people in this space to basically accumulate status or power or wealth right they view them as inherently evil and it’s like guys like you are the people that should have this right or not should but like i would like to give it more to you than anyone else and yet you don’t even want to enter the game at all but it’s like and what i’ve appreciated most i’ve actually seen it in you a lot jordan hall has always been kind of subversive but this this warrior energy of like yo we are about to do battle we are going to steal the culture we are going to rise up and do this because we need to i need to do it for myself my own just existential peace and i need to do it for the world because that’s what’s being called so actually if i can ramble one more second on that please this is beautiful i think something that doesn’t get spoken enough about as well is this angry activist archetype you know something something like the climate change activists change activists are a good example with a lot of anger a lot of justified anger things are things are bad but it’s always a yelling at what you don’t want the world to be like and if you only exist in a space of not this not this if you actually get your way you end up in a void because you haven’t you haven’t actually advocated for anything you’re just advocating against stuff and so this also why i’m so excited about the religion that’s not a religion or you also call it the post-religious faith which i really like and this notion of steal the culture is that it’s act it actually gives people an orient a way to orient where they’re for something yeah and they can actually bring that it’s tangible it’s not just like you’re doing it wrong you suck go away it’s actually like well let’s do this and you can come up with points and frameworks and things and that seems that has by its very nature more ground to stand on it’s actually substantial i think it has more ground to stand on thank you for what you just said i thought that was very well said by the way i think it’s actually also a better understanding of what freedom is which is you know again go back to break through you you know the advocate you’re right well at least a particular version of advocacy uh advocacy can degenerate so i’ll call it a degenerative form where as you said the person who’s just angry and what they want is they want freedom from x and that’s right but there is no freedom from without freedom to the reverse is also the case there’s no freedom to without freedom from right you have to you have to break the frame but you also have to make the new frame right and so if people get locked into anger and then they get locked into outrage they have to be careful about that because that’s a lopsided understanding and appreciation of liberation it’s only freedom from it’s our freedom too and secondly they have to be careful that although they’re that they’re getting locked into just the propositional they’re getting locked into what they’re saying and not paying attention to how they’re saying it because they should understand that the way modal confusion is weaponized in our culture especially on the internet is by making people trying to create narratives of adversary adversarial narratives of conflict because if i can get people into deeply opposing groups where they’re deeply angry to each other that will make them salient like in a very superficial and fast way they can very click baity and very sound bitey and so but you know a lot of social media the algorithms i don’t think they’re i’m not doing a conspiracy they’re not designed in this sense there’s not a social there’s not a cabal of people in the room smoking cigars planning things but they they they’re they’re designed to enhance sales by basically making people very impulsive and oppositional and very superficial in their appraisal so if i can make you like get you outraged that is a powerful machine to benefit the way in which i can use you to sell my products and to use you to sell my ideas so one of the concerns i have i i share with you the concern that advocacy when it is reduced to anger is a lopsided understanding of liberation and it is also a truncated fixation on what is being said rather than how it is being said and people can fail to realize that in the very the very speaking of of liberation they can actually be embodying processes that are entrapping them and ensnaring them so to give you a concrete example people confuse speaking about a diversity of beliefs with having a belief in diversity right like like you know saying that we should have diversity is not the same thing as enacting diversity right um it’s it’s and so you have it like and you have to be careful because one doesn’t automatically guarantee the other in fact one can actually subvert the other everybody’s got to believe this okay but right um so again i’m not talking i’m not trying to paint all of protest with the same brush or anything stupid like that trying to pick up on a particular criticism you made and i think it’s a it’s an important one we need to bring back right freedom from something that’s giving us a new frame as opposed to the one we want to break and we need to realize that anger is a very short-term response to violation but it doesn’t it’s not constructive you need you and i’m sorry this will sound hackneyed but you need love you need you need love you need love is the creative you need love because love is what for fridgeson’s argued you need the positive emotions the negative emotions like anger and hate this is like this is some cogs eye they engender reciprocal narrowing they remove cognitive flexibility but love engenders insight and reciprocal opening and if you only have this you only have a reciprocal narrowing of frame breaking and the having of propositions you’re never going to get the reciprocal opening and the being free and so i like i think we need something my model is the model of early christianity and buddhism or stoicism three examples or neoplatonism there’s four those are four i know of deeply right and what you have is think about christianity because people you know you get paul and you get all of these communities and what we have now all of these communities with occultities of practices and they start to network together and they create a new way of love agape and a new way and it’s not and it’s not just in the head they they go out and they create the first real welfare and the first real you know hospitalization and carrying up like that agape actually translates and what they do is and then the roman empire is up here doing it’s all it’s crap and what they do is they they create all these new occultities of practices these new psycho technologies these new ways of being and they steal the culture they steal the culture same thing with buddhism same thing with stoicism to a degree that’s will work that’s a cultural revolution that will work and that is what we need right now that’s what’s that it’s it’s not just something i’m talking about like pointing out this is already happening all of these communities of practice they’re all they’re emerging all over the place all of these gatherings ecclesia that’s what the church meant ecclesia gatherings all of these gatherings it’s all happening right now it’s already happening all i want to do is lend whatever talented skill i have to creating a vocabulary right to creating a grammar to exemplifying ecologies of practices to teaching people what i can to giving people access to the cod side so that that stealing of the culture will take on a life of its own that’s the religion it’s not a religion yeah yeah that’s what we’re being called to do right now and i just got to point out it was amazing that completely spontaneously and offhand you proved that dukkha and reciprocal narrowing is always lurking because even the people who are fighting for good good reasons through anger are still that can come up that was that was actually amazing do you have a few more minutes we’re coming up on time i’m enjoying this i do i would i want to say one thing now before we pass over this topic because i was privileged and that’s the right word although it’s a contended word right now but i don’t mean in the in the social justice sense i was privileged to have met akira the dawn and he’s a kiss right because why am i talking about this because i’m talking about the reinvential of myth and what he’s doing what akira did with the meaning way of you know steal the culture is he’s in a proper sense that i can’t do this but he can and we and he and i got to have an excellent discussion about this creating a new mythos around this language this way of thinking this way of being i mean that the meaning way was just wonderful it’s going to reach people in a way that all of my lecturing won’t and it’s going to give them imagery and and embodied rhythm and music and right and and that can be shared also collectively that will give them a mythos for this in a way i can’t so i want to i want to just take this opportunity to once again thank akira for doing that i’d be grateful for that because it exemplifies a potential that i said needs to be actualized and he’s actualizing it he’s doing a really good job of it yeah shout out to kira the dawn he is certainly no stranger to these parts he’s been on the podcast and he actually came to do a meeting we’ve set for our uh we hosted a digital retreat right at the beginning of covid to kind of give some people some space and he came to to mix for us and yeah just in case that wasn’t clear one of akira’s latest songs is steal the culture from our man johnny v right here and it is it is stunning it is stunning and yeah actually funny enough that was a perfect segue because i wanted to lead into the fact that you know this has been a pretty serious conversation right i think justifiably so like this is important but that doesn’t mean that the doing of it itself has to be strenuous and disappointing and annoying because actually i think there’s a case to make where if done properly or the most effective way you could do this and design these things and discover these practices is through things like serious play flow state and insight cascades and something like circling and dialogos yes so that’s kind of the progression i want to go through you give a brilliant definition of play that i think should be way more known and and just a reframing of play itself and the value of it can you speak to that um so i mean this this is ultimately drawn it’s run from a bunch of words it’s run from sort of the black ski and vinnikot and after the point about this is a hard argument i’ve got a talk out there called why you know psychological growth impossible has to do with the idea of aspiration and transformation i’m deeply influenced i got to meet her she’s a wonderful thinker and person la paul’s she literally wrote the book transformative experience and i recommend her work always and get to know lori’s work more but also i have not met her but her agnes collard’s book aspiration where so like the idea of aspiration and and and and and so play well now that we’ve got this idea of uh kinds of knowing let’s go back to an instance again of where people are caught uh therapy people go into therapy with the propositional knowledge of what they need to do right they need they they they they they often know what the problem is propositional they can state it right but but they don’t they’re stuck they they can’t get to the self and that and that agent arena relationship that they need to be in in order to be alleviated from the loss of agency right that they’re suffering that’s why they go into therapy and so well what what does the therapist do for them why is it problematic well this goes to la la paul’s work and she gives a wonderful um sort of godonkin experiments to get you and understand the difficulties here um she says imagine your friends come to you and they give you just undeniable evidence that they could do the following they can turn you into a vampire and then she asked should you do it so how would you do it well how would you think about it well here’s the problem you could you have all kinds of propositional knowledge but notice that that’s not the knowledge you want you want to know what it’s like to be a vampire you want to know the perspectival knowing right and you want to know what’s it like what’s the identity like the agent arena participatory knowing because your biology and your character and everything’s going to be transformed and and you can’t know that until you go through that transformation the problem is if you go through that transformation you’re no longer going to be a human being right so you’re ignorant you’re ignorant because this is not about propositions and probabilities it’s about perspectives and participation in identities right you can’t you’re ignorant you don’t know what it will be like you don’t know what you’re missing if you don’t become a vampire but here’s the other thing you don’t know what you’re going to lose when you become a vampire so you’re caught and this is zach spines idea right you’re caught between two worlds yeah right it’s in the title of his book you know education between two worlds right you’re caught between two worlds so what do you do well lori lori is really sort of interested in hammering out that problem and making people realize that you can’t infer your way through it right it’s not it’s not something you can infer your way through and if people want a more technical presentation of that argument look at look to that talk i referred to right but so what do we do well what do you do in therapy well you you might say to me well wait wait this is ridiculous i’m not going to be a vampire yeah but you know what you might become that you’re not right now you might become a parent and right now you’re not a parent and all your propositional knowledge about being a parent isn’t the perspectival and participatory knowing of being a parent and being a kid does not give you the perspectival and participatory knowledge of being a parent sorry doesn’t work that way well i’ll just become a parent then well you don’t know what you’re going to lose yeah and you say well then i won’t do it ah but then you don’t know what you’re missing so what do you do well what do people do so this is where this is now sort of my work and this is what’s influenced by winnicott well people get a dog and then they take family pictures with the dog and they name the dog like a person and they let the dog sleep with them and they often get the dog as a puppy and they have to raise it and they what are they doing well they’re actually enacting a symbol the word symbol on means to join two things together they’re finding something that’s that’s similar enough to a child that they’re getting a perspectival and participatory taste but it’s not fully a child and so they can you know they’re not they’re not over committed they’re not they haven’t passed the point of no return right because it’s a dog and you know you can give your dog away and people don’t think you’re an immoral person but if you say you know what this isn’t working with my kid at my kid they know what’s wrong with you right so that’s an example of play we’ve reduced play to the sense of frivolousness but many people developmental psychologists developmental biologists right point out that what play does is it allows us to enact symbolically and i mean symbol in a deep sense the perspectival and participatory aspects of the future self in the future world without having stepped out of and so now i can actually compare them in play and i and this is serious play this is not frivolous play this is the serious play that i engage in that’s what you do in therapy in therapy you seriously play the therapist often takes on the role right all the roles you need analogous to the pet right so you need perhaps to engage with serious play with your mom but perhaps your mom’s dead that’s my case what do i do well the therapist can take on the role for you and you can seriously play with that so that something that wasn’t possible for you while your mom was alive but now might be possible you might be able to go through a process of transformation through this serious play so that you can move to another self another world that is other than how you are currently having currently internalized your mother and see the world in those terms that is might be harming you serious play is where you enact a symbol and you bring about an agagio a reciprocal opening that can draw you in that’s what it means education to drive can draw you into that other world and so serious play requires that we get into what actor calls the paratelic mode the metamote motivational modes we have different ways of framing our level of arousal so when i when i’m doing something for the sake of an external purpose and i’m highly aroused that means i’m frustrated i’m not getting my i’m not getting my goal ah and so more and more arousal is bad and then when i get my goal oh i relax i’ve achieved my goal and that’s that wonderful relaxing content but notice and i’m not trying to be graphic here that’s not sort of your attitude when you’re having like when you’re like you know i’ll say it this when you’re making love with somebody yeah like the arousal is really good right the excitement well you don’t want it to go on forever i’m not saying that but now the point isn’t to get to the goal state and relax afterwards the point is you’re doing something for its own sake and therefore the arousal isn’t a frustration at not reaching your goal the arousal now means an intensification of your involvement in the process so that’s why love making is also serious playing because what i’m not i right we can either do an activity for the sake of a goal or we can set up an end state just for the sake of creating a play space where we can do something for its own sake so when i’m playing i’m doing something for its own sake what does that have to do with what i previously said when i’m in the peritelic state of playing i’m trying to not have a goal i’m trying to become a different person i’m in the being mode and i want to be intensely involved with the process of becoming itself and so it’s a it’s a disservice to play that our culture has reduced it to frivolous entertainment and not to think about how we we keep the heritage in words of what play how play used to be serious speak you know you play music or you go to see the play amlet right that’s that’s not a those are you know i’m talking about when you play music seriously you’re doing it for its own sake or you’re seeing the play for its own sake because it’s a symbol odd an enacted participatory perspective i will symbol odd that can bridge you between worlds that’s also the verb in chinese for tai chi you don’t do chi chi you don’t make tai chi you play tai chi so that’s what serious play is and serious play has to be the fundamental mode for the religion that’s not a religion yeah that was a beautiful tie together i’m glad your comment about tai chi playing came up i was going to bring that up yeah the you know going to a symphony is a beautiful example of that it’s you know the thing is done for its own sake yes alan watz has a nice distinction he’s like it’s not serious it’s sincere yes because it’s it’s it’s not in jest but it’s it’s not getting anywhere yes you know the the greatest example being if it was if the goal of music was to get to the end of the song eventually people would just produce the final symbols at the end yeah and it’s like well obviously that’s not true and then the goal is to get back to silence yeah honestly yeah honestly stay with your silence well i do it in the first place and and that driving force is also expanded on very beautifully in finite and infinite games oh i was going to mention cars yes cars yeah yeah beautiful book highly recommended i think yeah uh part of my criticism of the axiolage mythos and this is a criticism of of play dough who i love deeply and profoundly is the understanding of right relationship and sacredness in terms of perfection which are these ideas of completion and closure and i think i’ve met james and we were at a conference together we both loved each other’s talks i hope i’m hoping to talk with him again perhaps on voices with revaki and and so i think james given what i’ve read in the religious case against belief and finite and infinite games seeing his presentation i think he would regard that that ethos of perfection and closure and completion and rest somehow the book of you know resting is resting in it you know in immortality or something like that i think this is to just massively miss frame i think it’s the having mode as opposed to the being mode i think it’s trying to turn the infinite game of religio into a finite game of sort of metaphysical transportation or something and and and even the notion of you know protection and immortality immortality is just really i get that we’re wired to avoid death because we’re auto poetic beings but the idea of an infinity of my existence it strikes me as horrific um because you know it if i was immortal i would have to be invulnerable i’d have to be invulnerable and you know the one one of the things that you know that guy sensback has made really clear is you know genuine dialogos genuine growth it’s inseparably bound up with vulnerability you know the breaking the you have to break the frame if you’re going to make the new frame and so if i was invulnerable i i would i would be completely self-enclosed i would not be like then to extend that to extend that disconnection for infinity that’s hell i don’t want that right i don’t want that but well you say well i’ll make you invulnerable i’ll make you vulnerable for for an infinite amount of time well that’s horrible too because now i have an infinite amount of sadness and disappointment right and pain like i don’t want you know i think what i have and this is a buddhist notion of we’re in the right the best place for enlightenment right we have better than the gods or the or the people in the underworld i think what i have is exactly mortality allows me vulnerability which affords real openness and connection but it is made livable by the fact that it’s finite in length and so i think all we’ve got to get and karst emphasizes how much infinite games require vulnerability and how they’re different from finite games that are trying to bring about safety and closure and again see the having those one of the things you have to have is safety but it’s modal confusion to bring that pursuit of safety into right relationship with the sacred because and by turning it into the notion of the perfect because that’s exactly a deep kind of modal confusion so i agree i agree and it’s it’s beautiful because like the these all these all come together right the the notion of the infinite game is basically making and playing a game that the maximum number of people can play for as long as possible yes and it’s also a game in which the playing of the game rewrites the rules by which the game is played yeah which sounds exactly like designing a dynamic self-organizing post-religious faith right those things are those things are basically synonymous to me yes i think that’s exactly right that’s why i want to talk to james again yeah i think that’s i think that’s exactly right and then i think i think the last the last points i want to bring up here is so to actually do this to to design as it goes you need a way of surfacing insights and you need a way of doing that in a group right because this is this is communal and this leads to basically flow state which is essentially i think i first heard it in in your talk that it’s basically an insight cascade yeah use the example of a rock climber and then something that looks like and i’ve been separate separate from your discussion of dia logos i’ve also been watching circling and gai sing stock very closely because that feels that feels on the level of like a meta psychotech where it’s i can discover and identify the tools that are needed to it’s the system that builds a system yeah it’s an infinite game exactly right it’s a meta psychotech the idea that i got from grateful for it from my friend because you need you need a meta psychotech to to coordinate and curate your and to create uh your your ecology of practices and again that’s not something you’re going to do individually you have to do it in distributed cognition very much um so yeah the the the things like circling are because i do i do participant observation in it as well and i’ve gotten into um you know well he’s a good friend of mine guy and and talking to him about it so i got i got to talk to the creator in depth and i’ve got to participate in it um thanks especially to people like data barons and others um and so i think it’s a way of creating a low state within distributed cognition yeah in which we come to recover the serious play of perspectival and participatory intimacy i think that’s important but i thought and so i think circling is definitely part of this but and and and i love him for this guy was receptive this guy was ultimately trying to enact how to do his philosophy right he was receptive to a criticism a constructive criticism and i said because i want to bring and he does too and i woke this in him i want to bring philosophia the cultivation of wisdom into circling i want to get what i see in the platonic dialogue i see not only philia that if that perspectival of participatory right intimacy between the players of the socratic dialectic the socratic dialogue but i also want the sophia i want that that that intimacy awakens in them and a finding sense of an intimacy with what makes all such dialogues possible the ground of intelligibility the ground of virtue right and so what i’ve been doing with the work uh with guy and with chris and with jordan both exemplifying and then writing chris and i are putting together an anthology right now getting a lot of these people to contribute chapters on inner and outer dialogues and you know and peter limberg’s help and peter i think we’re doing another one tonight at the stowa beginning to sort of practice this you know i’m trying to come up with a psychotep which i call dialectic which is a way of scaffolding people into this process of theologos which is where you get the philia of circling integrated with the aspiration to sophia and you get philia sophia and that’s where you get the individual and collective transformative love for wisdom that then gives you the place from which and it’s a self-correcting dynamic that gives you the place from which right you can get guidance in how to curate create and coordinate an ecology of practice and the ecology of practice and the dialectic theologos are inseparably religio together they need each other if i if i try to do just the dialogue the dialectic up here without the ecology it’s going to degenerate into into just conversation right having a conversation is a good thing but it’s not going to be good but if i just have the ecology and i don’t have the meta right psychotep again my capacity for having you know situating that ecology into a a a developmental directory growth and self-correction is also going to be seriously truncated but if i put the two together i get something better than i get i get a good stult that is greater than the sum of the parts and so that’s what dialectic and theologos are theologos is a family is a term for a family of practices there’s there’s there’s what the uh the emerge people thomas and elizabeth are doing in europe there’s what there’s stuff that taylor is doing where he’s doing circling and then he’s trying to drop a topic in this circle like so theologos refers to a family of these practices in which you engender flow within distributed cognition but right but like i say the interpersonal intimacy affords it becomes a lens with which you then try to realize an intra-ontological intimacy a transformational intimacy a serious play with the logos of being itself and the logos of intelligibility so i i think i’m offering dialectic as something that’s trying to make use of the socratic template uh mostly the socratic template a little bit also from the way jesus uses dialogue uh to to help to be a midwife to help people give birth to themselves i tell you this you must be born again and socrates says he’s also a midwife that helps people give birth to themselves so i’m trying to take a template from those two sages and reinvestio dialectic both the interpersonal and the intrapersonal aspects of it that’s that’s what it is that’s what i’m trying to do and i think it is the the place where we do the most important serious play that is the dynamical ground for the ecology of practices yeah and it becomes at least it in my head it is so important because it also affords the reciprocal opening that we’ve touched on right in in disclosing myself and my truth to a group it gets digested and reflected back to me which opens me up and together we and again this has to be a communal thing right and together we we ride the spiral upward because that always that always engenders love by the way remember we talked about not just anger but love yeah reciprocal opening this is erin’s work erin’s the last name you know so sort of mutually accelerating disclosure is how you fall in love not just romantic love but also friendship love right that’s how that’s how you fall in love with something and what what i want people to do is of course to fall in love with each other again by leah but i want them also to fall in love with being and you know to fall in love with with with with sophia again as well because that’s what they need to overcome the meeting crisis yeah beautifully said beautifully said well that was quite the the arc we took together is there anything you want to leave people with any asks that you have anything you’d like to point anyone towards um so i mean well obviously i think people should take a look at awakening for the meeting crisis i think they should take a look at voices with verveki where i’m doing i’m doing the participant observation and the reinventio of dialectic and dialogos with as many people of good faith as i can um look for the new series that’s going to basically take this whole arc and you know and right after socrates and do this what does that what does it mean to bring back dialectic and dialogos in the cultivation of wisdom and how can we take that ancient practice of dialectic and put it into fruitful dialogue with all these emerging communities of practice like circling and you know other things like that so keep your eye open for after socrates i’m hoping that that will come out later this year covid put a wrench in production um and also look for the book that chris and i are editing um the book which is the inner and outer dialogues which is about all that stuff you and i were just talking about or and also look for the book that uh daniel greg and i are writing uh on called the cognitive continuum from insight to enlightenment about how you you know when you get an insight cascade you get flow that when flow is put deeply into perspectival and participatory transformation you get higher states of consciousness and when those higher states of consciousness are put into an ecology of practices for addressing the plenty of problems you can get enlightenment and we can go from these being terms that are wrapped in mystique and obscurity to being a realizable continuum that we can start engaging in right now right right here right now so take keep your eye open for all of those things beautiful yeah and i’ll have links for a lot of what came up here any of the videos or series that we mentioned because again the same way i started it off like that was um that was an extremely pivotal series for me very important and i think again very important for humans like just period right if you are a human we’ve addressed that you are always up against the perennial problems and john’s work does a great deal to help give you the cognitive scaffolding to address that and build a foundation for yourself so with all of that thank you so much john this was absolutely beautiful well thank you so much i i really i found that this was uh true uh the logos i mean if you get to a place with another person where both people can get to a place where they couldn’t get to on the road and so that a deeper religio opens up between them then that is we have played the infinite game the logo as well so thank you very much that happened for me so thank you very much for that as did it for me yeah thank you