https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Gos-K8Lstbk
Welcome everyone to Voices with Raveki. This is the special series on the philosophy of meditation. I’m here with my co-host, the remarkable Rick Rapetti. We have a really important guest. This is a friend and former colleague of mine, somebody many of you have heard me speak of many times in many contexts on many of my videos and talks, and that’s Evan Thompson, one of the foremost 4E cognitive scientists in the world today. And he’s also done a lot of work on mindfulness. He’s done a lot of work on Buddhism. He has famously declared why he is not a Buddhist, but we’ll get into all of that. So just quick welcome to you, Evan. And then I’m going to turn things over to Rick. Take it away, Rick. Okay. So like John, of course, Evan is a philosopher, cognitive scientist, and author of a number of important influential works. But I met Evan when I was accepted into a two-week NEH summer institute on investigating consciousness, Buddhist and contemporary philosophical perspectives at the College of Charleston in South Carolina back in 2011, organized and led by Evan, along with Jay Garfield and Christian Kosaru. I’ve been significantly influenced by his work in 4E cognitive science, especially his books, Mind and Life, Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, which helped me resist reductionism. Waking, Dreaming, and Being, Self and Consciousness, and Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy, which I take to be significantly doing work in the philosophy of meditation. And his latest book, although there’s one forthcoming, Why I Am Not a Buddhist, with which I deeply resonate, having had a similar upbringing along with certain transformative experiences connected with Evan’s father, William’s spiritual community, the Lindisfarne Association. That’s another story. In this series, we like to mention connections with previous or future guests. This is episode five. In episode one, John and I introduced the series, and we also focused on John’s work that’s relevant to it, what John might describe as integrating 4E cong-sci with Eastern and Western contemplative philosophy. In episode two, we interviewed Pierre Grimes, one of the first contemporary Western philosophers to try to bridge Western philosophy, particularly Neoplatonism with Buddhism. In episode three, we interviewed Lou Marinoff, whose work similarly bridges Western and Buddhist philosophies. In the previous episode, episode four, we interviewed Tomas Metzinger, whose work integrates analytic philosophy, 4E cong-sci, and meditation as a key tool in the exploration of consciousness, among other things. So far, we’ve all been interested in the links between philosophy, meditation, the nature of consciousness, and conceptions of the self, and we share attempts to integrate meditation with cognitive science and philosophical analysis. Evan’s work contributed significantly to the development of 4E cong-sci, and thus significantly impacted John, as John just mentioned, and they worked alongside each other when Evan was at the University of Toronto. For that reason, I’d like John to finish the intro here, if he has anything else to say, but if not, then Evan, we can just move on and start asking questions of Evan. Well, I do, and this is a bit of an anecdote. Some of you might have heard this before. So there used to be a course called Buddhism and Cognitive Science, and they had asked Evan to teach it, but his schedule was such that he couldn’t teach it, and he recommended me as the person to teach that course in his place, and of course, that eventually developed in conjunction with the Psychology of Wisdom course that developed into my series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, which got a lot of us going. So I actually owe a lot of the initial impetus to Evan getting me to teach that course and start this whole broad integration process and trying to connect the cognitive science to more existential and spiritual concerns. So this is my chance to thank Evan virtually face to face. So thank you for that. Thank you. That’s nice to hear. Thanks a lot. Interesting. Yeah, I didn’t know that. That’s a nice story. You played a pivotal role in all of this. All right. So Evan, let’s start with some questions. Tell us about yourself in your own words. What are you working on these days, and is there anything else you’d like to forefront about yourself to our audience? Yeah. Well, first of all, thanks for inviting me to talk to you. So I think of myself as first and foremost a philosopher, a philosopher of mind, who works very much on cognitive science and in collaboration with cognitive scientists. And it’s in that context, or that’s one of the contexts in which I’m interested in meditation. Not the only one, but that is one of the main contexts. What I’m working on now, I’m actually writing a book about dying and death now. It’s in the early stages of writing, and it’s really about contemplative perspectives, meditative perspectives on dying and trying to… It’s an outgrowth really of the chapter on dying in my book, Waking, Dreaming, Being. And so it tries to combine what we know about the dying process from the neuroscience of consciousness and biomedicine with contemplative perspectives on what happens in dying and bring those two together in a way that helps deal with this kind of schizoid situation in our culture where we’ve never known more about dying from a biomedical perspective, but we’ve never been more sort of existentially removed from the dying process. So the book’s in the early stages, but that’s kind of the rationale and purpose of the book. So that’s what I’m working on right now. Yeah. Sounds great. No tentative title yet? The working title is Dying Our Ultimate Transformation. Okay. Could I ask you, having a question around that? Because there’s been sort of the nascent sort of experiment, and I tried to… Igor Grossman and I tried to get it sort of up and then COVID hit and blah, blah, blah. And now I’m sure you’re familiar with this literature, but I’ll pose the question and see if you… The question the experiment would seek to address. So first of all, context, before we talk about the relationship to the confrontation with death, Igor Grossman has quite a bit of research around what’s called the Solomon effect. You ask people to describe a problem, a personal problem, they inevitably of course describe it from the first person perspective. You then ask them to re-describe it from the third person perspective, and they usually get an insight, they do better. And this lines up with other words by Bolton Stoninger, if you imagine talking to somebody, it improves your performance. So that’s, I think, a pretty robust finding. So it looks like you go from first to third person perspective, and this facilitates cognition, and this lines up with McNamara and all the stuff about decentering, et cetera. But you take a look at two bodies of literature, and I’ll put aside the fact that I have some methodological concerns for both. Let’s just take them at face value. The first is mortality salience. You give people a list of words to read, and if there’s things related with death in it, like skeleton, coffin, you get this reaction, cognitive rigidity, they identify more strongly with their worldview, they become sort of more argumentative about any challenges, et cetera, et cetera. But if you put people into death reflection, and Mark actually took us, when I was at the workshop, Mark Miller took us through a Buddhist practice, it was very similar to this. You imagine you’re dying, you imagine all your loved ones are around you, what’s important to you, what matters, what would you say? And what you get is the opposite. People become very open, they become very compassionate. I mean, on average, these are psychological findings, right? And that’s weird, because what it looked like was, oh, people get better, they get more sort of reflective and opened in their cognition when they move from first person to third person. But it seemed like the opposite in deaths, confronting death, when they’re just given sort of third person in personal markers of mortality, they lock down, they become cognitively rigid. But when they go to the first person, they seem to gain a tremendous amount of cognitive flexibility and even affective openness, et cetera. And we were trying to get at like, what’s going on there? Why does it seems the opposite of the Solomon effect? And why would moving to the first person perspective be so facilitating to people? And I wonder, I mean, I don’t mean to put you on the spot. I’m just wondering if you have any thoughts around that? Because to me, it’s at least a provocative question. Like we have all this other research of this particular perspectival shift, enhancing cognitive flexibility, but we seem to be getting the opposite when people are confronting their mortality. Yeah, yeah. No, that’s a very interesting question. So again, I have methodological concerns about all of those studies, but let’s just bracket that. Or let’s partially bracket it, because I think it does depend a lot on exactly the kind of scripts people are given, either for the third person or for the first person. And I would say in a way, second person, because in the way that you just described it, it’s one thing to try to imagine a dying person in the first person point of view, if you were not supported by that extended community and the setting of loved ones, or if you’re a religious person in a rich, symbolic religious context, that provides a kind of meaning and social support that really facilitates a kind of intersubjectively embedded first person perspective. And that’s what I think would be significant. Whereas often the third person perspective, especially as it’s implemented in various kinds of guided psychological scripts and questionnaires, is a very distant, alienated, it’s not decentered in the practice of metacognitive reframing that you see in certain types of meditation practice. It’s this kind of alienated relationship to self. It’s as if you’re kind of an outside spectator on your own death. And that’s in a way terrifying, actually. To be an outside spectator on your own death. Actually, there’s some really interesting writing. This is a philosopher I do not mention very often, but there’s some really interesting writings on this by Derrida of all people, where he has this discussion where we think, oh, what would be terrifying in death is annihilation or loss of self. And Derrida has this very interesting observation coming out of Freud that, no, what’s actually terrifying in a way is that you live on as a spectator. You’re sort of hovering over the scene and seeing your funeral or seeing your ashes scattered. And that kind of outside view on yourself is a terrifying alienated view where you live on as a spectator, but you live on in a world that goes on without you and forgets about you. And so you feel this deprivation in this outside third person perspective. So I think that does induce a lot of fear, a lot of terror. And a lot of the terror management theory is based around that particular way of implementing the third person perspective. Whereas the perspective in which you kind of reenact as a dying person, dying process, because I’ve done some of those meditations too. And in fact, when I did them, it was in a whole community of other people practicing them right then and there with a teacher in a beautiful setting in a zendo. And you have this whole kind of scaffolding and support that makes you feel not alone. There’s the expression, everyone dies alone. And in a sense, of course, that’s true. There’s a loneliness that’s inevitable in dying. But when you have a meaning framework with people enacting it with you, then that makes a huge, huge difference. So that’s actually what I would point to there. Dr. Kahn I think that’s excellent. I was having similar thoughts because I was thinking it’s the connectedness and meaning in life, meaning in life as that connectedness. Because when I was in that practice, you get the typical people don’t talk about what mattered as their possessions or their power, or at least most people don’t. But there was like 40 or 50 of us there and everybody was saying, my connections to, most people said to my loved ones, some people said to their home, a place. It’s all the connectedness that’s so central in meaning in life that seems to be the important mediating value. And I hear you saying something very convergent with that. Am I getting you? Yeah, definitely. It’s actually illustrated. So I think one of the most profound meditations on dying is Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Yes, yes. And this is what happens to Ivan Ilyich in his sort of penultimate moment of transformation is he completely reorients from his, you might say, self-centered, egocentric perspective, obsessed with whether he’s lived a good life, realizing he hasn’t lived a good life. And then the breakthrough for him is he feels pity, he feels compassion and love for his wife and son there. He feels that he’s causing them suffering and that he has to make their suffering go away. And that facilitates an inner transformation that allows him to die in a different way. So it’s that connection to others in the immediate setting, even others that, particularly in the case of Ivan Ilyich’s wife, that he actually has come to really kind of despise and dislike because he feels they’ve participated and supported this kind of meaningless false life that he’s had. So he breaks through that, connects with them just in a moment of feeling sympathy, feeling love, and that facilitates this inner transformation that makes dying be a different kind of experience for him. So I think that connection of a framework of meaning in dying that is still part of living, if you will, can make a huge difference. Yeah. Because I see what happens in Ilyich is, there’s two transitions to my, the first is like Ivan Ilyich had always known he was going to die the way you know that two plus two equals four, and then he knew he was going to die. So he takes on the first person, but like you say, he’s very self-centered. And then he goes to the second transformation. And I’m going to actually try and bridge into meditation with this. So give me a moment. And what happens is he then goes into this thing where although he has not abandoned that first person perspective, so although he’s now still involving all of himself, he’s no longer self-involved, if I could make sort of a turn or phrase. And so that sort of hits, you know, an issue that comes up. And of course, Slingerlin made this sort of prominent in his book, Trying Not To Try this weird, and when we were at, I was at a workshop in Bergerac in France, we were doing a lot of, with a lot of people who are leaders in dialogical communities. But we got to this thing about how do you get the self, how do you involve all of the self without being self-involved and this very tricky trying not to try. And to me, that’s very crucial because it seems to also be the state you need to get into, or at least something analogous or convergent, perhaps better, in order to facilitate insight. You can’t, like if you try to have an insight, that’s not, but if you do nothing, right? And so it says trying not to try. And I wonder if you could, if you could perhaps, maybe we could start into talking about, do you think mindfulness has anything to do with getting into that? You might not like that phrase, but you know what I’m talking about, that trying not to try, that you’re neither passive or active, but you’re, it’s kind of a full participation or maybe like I said before, you’re trying to involve as much of the self without being self-involved. What do you think about that? Yeah, yeah. So I think different meditative traditions, well, let me say first that, let’s say particularly in the context of Buddhism, but not just Buddhism, other traditions as well, there’s a recognition of this issue as like a core issue. And then different traditions, different practice traditions, different philosophical traditions, different communities take different approaches to this problem, right? So some give you an approach that’s extremely scripted and scaffolded and gives you stages, normative conceptualized stages and instructions on exactly what you’re supposed to be doing. And the idea is that you need that kind of like step-by-step ladder to eventually land in something that enables you in a way to kick away the ladder, if you use sort of a Wittgenstein image. Other traditions descript you. They just throw you into the physical posture of sitting and they thwart any attempt to do anything. So you might start with something minimal like counting your breath just to kind of quiet your mind and calm yourself down and give the mind something to do. But then you drop that and then you just sit in the Zen expression and you don’t try to do anything. But of course, you’re in this predicament of trying not to do anything, which inevitably brings you into a confrontation with this kind of problem. And there the expression, I think Suzuki Roshi maybe was the first one to use this expression is the idea that awakening or transformation is an accident and meditation makes you accident prone. So you just you can’t plan it out, but you fall into it. And that’s a different sort of approach from one that really tries to script you. So I think it it really depends on the tradition that you’re working with. And I suspect, so there are deeper sort of philosophical reasons for why these different approaches would be taken. But I also suspect that they’re just going to be temperamental differences in people. Some people are going to be particularly suited to a very scripted kind of practice and other people just need to be thrown into it. And I mean, this is something I’m sure, you know, John, you know, through, through, through Tai Chi practice, right? So both, you know, both you and I have have practiced Tai Chi Chuan for many, many years. And this is like an ongoing practice for me. I work very closely with a teacher here in Vancouver, do a lot of standing meditation, we do a lot of push hands, we do a lot of Tai Chi. And I’ve always found the very sort of structured scripted approach like necessary for me. It’s like I, you know, I’m like a westerner, I want to know what I’m doing, I want to know why I’m doing it. And I want to see that it makes a difference. And if you just sort of throw me into something with no guidance, I find it very difficult and very frustrating. But sometimes you need to, you need to just kind of drop what you’ve, what you’ve learned in a, in a, in a instructional procedural way, and just see what happens. And that is facilitative of insight and transformation. So I see them as kind of like a back and forth, like dialectical. Two things I’d like to interject when you’re done, Evan. Yeah, no, go ahead. Go ahead. So one is I had a Zen teacher once come to CUNY, we had a mindfulness lecture series, I forget his name, but he used the analogy between these two things, saying that the methods are like training wheels for a bicycle. Another thing I wanted to share, which I got from layman Pascal on the integral stage podcast, was a story that he related was that Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of Transcendental Meditation and Osho, Bhagwan Rajneesh, they were having a debate about method versus no method. And of course, the TM guy advocates method and Rajneesh was more like a hippie yogi kind of guy. And Maharishi said to him something like, you know, you know, method guys all forget that you started out with methods, and then you got really good and you didn’t need them anymore. So but it might be that I think the difference might be this temperamental thing that you said, Evan. I think it was William James who said, what kind of philosopher you are, whether you’re an empiricist or rationalist, that’s matter. It’s mostly a matter of temperament also. I think it has a lot to do with all this stuff. Yeah, I think it does. And, you know, people are just different. And some people are, if you take them at face value, what they say, they’re just exceptional. So you know, you read about Shri Aurobindo, you know, about Shri Aurobindo being imprisoned. And he says, like, in one night, you know, he had this, he had this realization, this, this, you know, yogic realization that led to his different conception of, you know, of yoga from a kind of classical conception. And, you know, okay, so this is a report, and it’s, you know, obviously got a whole kind of rhetorical context in it. So, yeah, you know, as, as academics, we’re going to sort of apply our critical, you know, skeptical apparatus fair. But even so, you just want to, you just want to say, okay, come on, dude, like most of us are not like that. I mean, you know, give me a break. So, yeah, there it is. All right, so good. So we’re, oh, go ahead, John. Oh, I was just going to say, I like the final point you made, Evan, the sort of dialectical relation. I think something analogous happens, obviously, in the Christian Neoplatonic tradition, the constant to and fro between the cataphatic and the apophatic approaches. And then you see some of the most important thinkers, Dionysus and Maximus, and others like that, actually toing and froing between these as they’re trying to recommend how to practice to their students. I think they do different things. And I think they, I think they address different kinds of cognitive processes. I totally agree that the motivating factor might be temperamental or personality, maybe something with conscientiousness versus openness or something, which can be quite powerful. But I also think they can facilitate insight or transformation along different ways, because we’re sort of, the psychology of insight is coming to the conclusion, not fully conclusion, but moving towards it, that insight is facilitated in multiple different ways, often ways that are kind of opponent to each other in powerful ways. So I thought I’d just make that connection. Sounds good to me. All right. So first question directly about meditation, your latest book, Why I’m Not a Buddhist, probably answers this question, but for the audience and for us, can you tell us how you came into meditation and philosophy and perhaps the philosophy of meditation? Okay, so let’s see where to start that answer. I was introduced to meditation actually, when I was about seven or eight years old by my dad. My dad, so this was like in the 1960s, I was a really little kid. My dad was, he was raised, he’s from like an Irish Catholic American family, was raised very heavily in Catholicism, which in his case meant being at the age of, I think seven, sent away to Catholic military boarding school and just having like this intense Catholic experience. And as a result, he left the church when he was 13. And then, so this is in California in the 1950s. And then, he kind of journeyed and searched for things. And he eventually encountered the Self-Realization Fellowship, Paramahansa Yogananda’s ashram. So Paramahansa Yogananda was really one of the first Indian gurus or teachers to bring yoga to the West. And so my dad practiced that for many, many, many years. And he taught me a basic breath mantra meditation when I was about seven or eight years old. And like a typical sort of little kid, you want to do what your dad does. And so my dad every night would go upstairs and meditate. And so I said, well, can I do that too? And so he would take me and teach me how to do it. And I probably could sit still for maybe five minutes at that point. But it was just, it was something that very much appealed to me. I was like a quiet kid, very kind of innerly absorbed, daydreamy type of kid. So that kind of quieting of the mind and the idea that you could attain a kind of inner stillness was absolutely fascinating to me and extremely appealing. So even though I wouldn’t say that I was a dedicated meditation practitioner when I was a kid or when I was a teenager, or even when I was an undergraduate, it was always there in the background of my life as something that I knew that I could kind of reconnect with or fall back on. And then growing up in the community that my father, the institute community that my father eventually founded with my mother, I was just exposed to a lot of different kinds of meditation teachers. So we had resident teachers who were Zen Buddhists, who were Sufis, who were Christian contemplatives, Hindu yoga meditation teachers and practitioners. And I was really drawn to the different philosophies and the different worldviews and just found that fascinating. And so as a result, I guess from a very young age, I was familiar with the idea that there was this other side to, let’s say, religion, which was contemplative spirituality. And I found that just endlessly appealing and fascinating really. And then I got into philosophy sort of in the reverse way in that I started with an interest in Asian philosophy and then moved over to studying Western philosophy. So I think I would have been like 12 or 13 at this point. Again, my dad gave me the Dao De Jing to read and I just stayed up all night reading it. I thought it was like the most amazing thing I’d ever seen and ever read. And as a result of that, I wanted to study Asian philosophy and in particular Chinese. So then when I went away to university, I studied Chinese language and Chinese history and Asian philosophy. And then when I was trying to decide, do I want to go on in grad school and like religious studies or Asian studies or philosophy, I realized it was really philosophy that interested me. I had taken a bunch of other undergrad courses in philosophy, but I wasn’t a philosophy major. I was an Asian studies major. But I realized at that point, it was really philosophy that interested me. And so then I started as a graduate student in philosophy. And it was at that point that I started working closely with Francisco Varela, the neuroscientist who kind of pioneered the cognitive science Buddhism conversation. And that was because I had met Varela at the Lindisfarne Association, the institute my father had founded. And he at that point, so this is in the 1980s, he at that point was, he had some transcripts of lectures he had given on Buddhism and cognitive science, and he wanted to turn them into a book. And he knew that I had studied Buddhist philosophy as an undergrad and I was now working in philosophy. And I had gotten interested in cognitive science because, you know, John will know this, that like in that period, cognitive science was this sort of, at least within philosophy, was this sort of newly emergent thing that was really exciting. So sort of the period of classical works by people like, Fodor and Dennett. And I had gone into philosophy thinking, oh, I’ll write on Heidegger. And I very quickly realized I did not want to write on Heidegger, that I didn’t want to work on sort of, if you’ll excuse the way of putting it, dead German philosophy, especially of philosopher at that point whose involvement in Nazism and antisemitism was really becoming more well known in the English speaking world. And I was like, I don’t really want to work in that field. So I was kind of casting about and philosophy of mind and cog-sci grabbed me as really new, really exciting, but very deep philosophically. So I was, you know, working in that area. And so Varela knew that I was interested in, you know, both Buddhist philosophy, Asian philosophy and cognitive science. And so he brought me over to be a research assistant. And that’s eventually what led to the book, The Embodied Mind, also with Eleanor Rauch. So that’s sort of a, yeah, quick summary of the story. Thank you for watching. This YouTube and podcast series is by the Verveki Foundation, which in addition to supporting my work, also offers courses, practices, workshops, and other projects dedicated to responding to the meaning crisis. If you would like to support this work, please consider joining our Patreon. You can find the link in the show notes. Great, great story. I took courses with Jerry Fodor at the CUNY grad center when I was doing my PhD. Yeah. Yeah. He came to Toronto when I was a grad student and gave some talks. And I went up afterwards and asked him some questions. And I have to say he was really, really nice. I was just this like unknown, like grad student who probably didn’t know what he was talking about, asking these questions. He was very, very nice and generous. So I always felt good about that. Yeah. Well, I took a summer course on, basically it turned out to be at CUNY, it turned out to be a workshop with many of the main figures in the Symbolist Connectionist debate that was raging at that time. And he and Smolensky were there together. And so I got to see a very intense version of Jerry Fodor. Yeah. So this would have been in Toronto in like 1987 or 88. There was this big conference with Zen Intelligent, Jeff Hinton, Paul Smolensky, and I think David Kischt. And it was just, yeah, I mean, it was really intense argument. And I just sat and listened to it and thought, this is really amazing. This is really cool. Yeah. Every week at the grad center, they’d have colloquia where they would invite somebody in and Fodor and Jerry Katz and all these other big shots would be in the audience. I always felt sorry for the people possessed there, because the criticism, the objections, the counter examples, it was really intense. I’ll just also mention, since we’re sort of reminiscing about these things. So when I finished my PhD, and when we were just finalizing the Embodied Mind, I did a postdoc with Dan Dennett. And that was fantastic, because Dennett and I don’t, in the end of the day, agree on very much. But he was a wonderful mentor for a postdoc. He didn’t have grad students. He didn’t have PhD students. He had MA students, because Tufts doesn’t have a PhD program in philosophy. So he put a lot of time into his postdocs. He was really, really generous and wonderful. So that was a really great experience, too. Right. So in the book that John contributed to, which you know about, that you would have if you had more time, the Rutledge Handbook on the Phylloxedrae meditation, that’s what pretty much started this series here. And that book had maybe three major themes or hypotheses or whatever. And so I have some questions that come out of that, that we ask all the guests if we get around to them. One is, can meditation contribute to philosophy? And maybe a better way of asking you that is, how can it? The second one is, is there, can there or ought there to be a philosophy of meditation? I think your book on waking, dreaming and being and your work is pretty much an answer in the affirmative. But then the third question is the more tricky one, is meditation itself a form of philosophy? So the first one, how can it contribute? And then is it itself a form of philosophy? We can skip the second one because the answer is yes from you. Right. So sorry, give me the first and second again, because they were connected. Okay. Yeah. So can and how can meditation contribute to philosophy? The second one was, is there, can there be or ought there to be a philosophy of meditation? Your work is an affirmative answer to that question. That’s why I said you could skip that one. The third one is, is meditation itself a form of philosophy? Right. Can it contribute to philosophy? Is it a form of philosophy? Yeah. So I want to say something about all three. So I think that I’m a little worried about, let’s say, taking the word meditation and decontextualizing it. So meditation means a whole bunch of different things. There’s this way in which meditation actually has come to mean in contemporary English what the word contemplation really used to mean in the Western tradition, which is to say that when we use the word meditation in the way that you just asked the question, we’re thinking of things like quieting the mind, observing thoughts, maybe dropping into or attuning to something that has a feeling of transcendence, at least of the ordinary mind. And that’s not what meditation used to mean. Meditation used to mean a kind of discursive, sustained intellectual reflection on a topic, as in like Descartes meditations. Whereas contemplation meant something like, well, it comes from the Greek theoria, so it really has to do with watching or beholding. And in neoplatonism and in Christianity, it really is watching and beholding the divine or God in a way that leads to a kind of, at least for mystical traditions, a kind of mystical oneness or unity or absorption. So there’s this funny way these words have undergone a transformation, which is just to say that when we use the word meditation, we really need to make more precise exactly what we’re talking about. Even in the sense- So quick interrupt, quick interrupt, Evan. You’re answering, you are already answering the next question, which is how do you differentiate between meditation and contemplation, which is good. Okay, okay. Good. All right. So well, that’s good to hear. So yeah, so anyway, it’s just to say that meditation means a lot of different things. And for me, it’s always in a social context. It’s whether it’s secular or whether it’s in a religious context of one or another form. So can it contribute to philosophy? Well, certainly. But one of the things I think that history and philosophy are really important for is to reacquaint ourselves with the full contextual embedding of the practice when we philosophize about it. So there’s lots of different ways it can contribute in that sense. It can contribute to thinking about goal self-cultivation. It can contribute to thinking this is, of course, of particular interest to me, the nature of the self and the nature of consciousness. But I want to emphasize that it not be thought of kind of as an isolated thing that you could just export and then apply to something. So that would be, I guess, the caveat I would want to answer to that. Similarly, although I do philosophize about meditation, I’m a little hesitant to affirm the idea that there is a philosophy of meditation. I think there’s a philosophy of mind, there’s a philosophy of self, there’s metaphysics and epistemology and meditation practices can be extremely relevant to those. But it’s a bit like philosophy of sport. It’s like, yeah, there is philosophy of sport. People do that. I mean, I don’t want to put anyone down who works on philosophy of sport, but it’s never really grabbed me. I occasionally read articles and I think, oh, that’s an interesting article. But the idea that there’s like, you go to the American Philosophical Association and there’s the association that works on philosophy of sport, like, fine, people should do whatever they want to do. But that’s not how I would want to be interested in it. I would want to be working on kind of like fundamental philosophical issues in which, say, sport or meditation, and they’re both these very general words, right, is relevant to particular philosophical concerns and questions. So I wouldn’t describe what I do as philosophy of meditation if that’s what we understand the meaning of the phrase to be. I would describe it as philosophy of mind, cognitive science, informed by meditation. I mean, if you think of philosophy of mind traditionally, and when people talk about consciousness and experience, it’s like this pathetic minimalist diet of examples of seeing blue and tasting sourness. And it’s like, yeah, I mean, sure, that is part of conscious experience, but conscious experience is always situated. And there’s always something that people are doing. And meditation is one of the very interesting things that people do that’s generative of all sorts of experiences. And then that becomes relevant to philosophical work on consciousness. So that’s how I prefer to think about it, actually. So, Evan, you invoked a social context, and I want to invoke sort of a cultural historical. When you answered that question, you were conceiving a philosophy in a very sort of Western academic frame. But of course, philosophy and other traditions are much more like what Hedeau talked about, ancient philosophy is this cultivation of wisdom that you see in stoicism and Neo-Platonism, for example. So what do you think about reframing that? I’m giving the question back to you, is the relationship between mindfulness practices and philosophy in the phylosophia sense of the word? Yeah. Okay, good. Right. So that’s a different kind of perspective where, you know, if we’re thinking about philosophy in the ancient world, so, you know, Greece and Rome, Hellenistic philosophy, or, you know, Warring States China, or the formative, you know, period of Indian philosophy, they’re certainly practices of mental training and self-cultivation are integral to the very idea of what philosophy is, spiritual exercises in Hedeau’s sense. Now, that gets progressively lost in Western philosophy. You still see it in Montaigne, you see it in Descartes, but more minimally, by the time you get to Kant, that’s gone. And, you know, it surfaces maybe in existentialism in places, but not so much really. So if we’re thinking of philosophy in a way that would be trying to revitalize that, and actually that connects back to our discussion of death, of course, right? Because, you know, philosophy is the practice of dying or the preparation for death in, you know, in Plato and onwards into, you know, into stoicism, then in that sense, you could say that meditation or contemplation or spiritual exercises are certainly integral to philosophy. But that’s not, for the most part, what philosophy in the academy is anymore, for better or for worse, right? Yeah. But would you say it’s- So this is the next question. Well, I was just- The next question. I’m sorry, John, I just want to point out, because the question’s already being answered again, how would you differentiate between academic philosophy and practical philosophy? But you were already talking about that. Right, so, and this is- You know, we’re- Yeah, yeah. And so this is also connected to your third question, which is, is meditation philosophy or A philosophy? Yeah, form of philosophy. So I would say, I would say no, if we just take the question like baldly like that, because meditation is so many things, it can be philosophical, it can be a way of doing philosophy, but it certainly isn’t in all contexts. And the idea that it would be in any given historical period, I think, you know, probably not. It would really depend on context to answer that. But then, yeah, so the difference between philosophy as something that’s academic philosophy, that is defined in terms of the university structure of departments and training and socialization and all those things, versus philosophy as a reflective cultivation of wisdom as a path of life. You know, there is an intersection in those two Venn diagram circles, but it’s pretty small, you know, alas, I would say. Philosophy came to model itself on science in the Anglophone analytic tradition anyway, and it became a project of technical questioning and analysis. And even in non-analytic traditions, it’s a project of theoretical reason, for the most part, without a practical dimension to it. Yeah. So those things split apart in the history of philosophy. Sean, you were about to ask Evan a question. I just wondered if, Evan, you don’t have to answer this, if you’re not. But and the question is, of course, if you have any proper modesty, you’ll be put off slightly by the question. But like, do you think, and so with that caveat in place, and we know each other, right? Would you say that, you know, I know you practice your mindfulness practices, both seated and moving Tai Chi Chuan, I know you do some Chi Kung and other related things, we do overlapping. Would you say that they are practices that have led to or enabled the cultivation of wisdom in you? I’m not asking you to claim that you’re wise or anything like that. But maybe the more, the more less or the less pretentious question, do you think it is reasonable to conclude that they have made you wiser? Yeah, so I’m not going to use the word wisdom just because, yeah, I don’t feel I can sort of self-describe that word. I mean, I feel from my own subjective perspective immersed in my life, that they have made my life go better, both, you might say, hedonically and also cognitively. I think that those practices, I mean, I’ve done them for so long, you know, I wouldn’t claim to be like an accomplished, you know, meditator, whatever that means. You know, I’ve done them in largely, you know, the context of a, you know, well, entirely in the context of, you know, a secular life, working in the world. It’s not something I’ve like made, you know, the prime thing in my life, but it has played a significant role in my life. And so from my own perspective, they have been very important for, you know, mental balance, equanimity, new insights, for me, new insights into, you know, self and consciousness and so on that I try to, you know, articulate as a philosopher. If I were a novelist, I would probably try to articulate in the form of a novelist, that’s not what I do. So, yes, certainly in that sense. Yeah. Because one of the things that, here’s one of my anecdotes I had been doing, I was only about, for like, 50 years or so into my Tai Chi Chuan practices while I was in grad school, but I was doing it very religiously. And what I mean by that, I was doing it like four or five hours a day and going to the dojo three or four times a week, that kind of thing. And I was having, you know, all those experiences you can have where you get as hot as fire and cold as ice and all that, all the wonderful woo that makes you think you’re on the cusp of enlightenment and all that sort of crap. Right. And of course I was fixated on that phenomenology, but I’m, my, my, my, my friends and my, some of my fellow students were starting, they came up to me and they said, what? They didn’t know about any of this, because, you know, grad school and everybody’s walking around with imposter syndrome, of course. And so I, but they came up to me and they said, you know, what’s happening? You’re changing, there’s something new about you. And I go, what do you mean? And they said, well, you’re much, you’re sort of more flexible in your approach. And of course they’re speaking metaphorically and, and, and, you know, and you’re, and you’re much more sort of adaptive and you’re much sort of open. And, and it really sort of occurred to me that there was ways in which my practice was sort of percolating through my psyche and transferring to different domains of my life that I wasn’t really fully and properly aware of. And this has led me into, this is going to be an odd question, but I’m trying to frame it because there’s a lot of work on the anthropology of ritual and ritual, knowing Jenning and others, that this is one of the ways in which you sort of evaluate how good a ritual is. How much does it translate sort of between levels of the psyche and into different domains of one’s life? And, and then people get fussy about, we should use the word practice for individuals and rituals for groups. And I, I’m not concerned about that right now, but for me, I’ve, I, because other people had noted in it, I’ve been trying to sort of ask that question. Almost something that could be open to empirical investigation is can we, we certainly, you know, because of transfer appropriate processing ideas about cognition, we could certainly ask that question, does this transfer this way? And we could use all kinds of tests other than self-report for that. We could even use other report and things like that. And now, do you think that should be, so I, I don’t think there’s much in question that there could be an empirical investigation. Do you think that should be also something that Jennings proposes? Should that be a normative standard we’re using when we’re looking at these practices or rituals, the degree to which we can get some evidence for that transfer between levels of the psyche and into many different domains in people’s life, other than the domain of explicit practice? Do you think that should, Jennings actually proposes that as a normative standard. He’s sort of says that’s how you can judge how good it is. Yeah. I want to interject one thing before you answer, Evan. This calls to mind Jake Davis, a mutual friend of ours, who also contributed to the philosophy of meditation book. Although like you, he even went a step further saying this title, philosophy of education, I only accept it like kicking and screaming. Like he had all the same kind of objections that you have. But, oh, and I lost, I lost my train of thought. Oh yeah. So Jake, in the paper that he put in the anthology, he argues for a kind of global attentiveness norm that you can get out of meditative practice. So there’s an interesting overlap there. Just thought I’d mention that to you. Yeah. So I would say that if our frame of interest is, let’s call it the scientific investigation of meditation practices for lack of a better putting it. I would say that the, including, I hate this expression, but I’m going to use it anyway, including pro-social effects and transformative pro-social effects. I can’t believe I’m using that expression, but anyway, I’m using it. Pro-social raises the question of like according to, yeah, yeah, yeah. But anyway, then I would say that the social perspective and the understanding of ritual is absolutely crucial. And I think this has been a real shortcoming for the most part in the cognitive science of contemplative practices is that it started out in a largely individualistic neuroimaging frame. And from the perspective of anthropology, this is incredibly naive that these practices are always embedded. And indeed, so this is something I’d actually be interested to know what you both think of this, but this is something that I argue why I’m not a Buddhist is that meditation understood as a practice that involves meta awareness and meta cognitive monitoring is an internalized form of social cognition. So the idea that you would divorce it from the context of ritual and particularly rituals where you actually have to mentally alternate your perspective. So like in Confucian rituals, the son takes on the role of the father of the father. And there’s this alternation of perspectives where you put yourself in somebody else’s perspectives and you enact this kind of virtual ritual environment that gives you a completely different cognitive frame. So meta cognition in a way is an internalization of that where you can you can de-center, you can relate to thoughts just as thoughts rather than in terms of their like representational content. So the idea that you could somehow study meditation as this thing that goes on in the head that you’re going to understand in terms of neuro activation patterns. And that’s going to tell you what it is seems to me just incredibly naive. And the way that ritual is transformative of individual behavior and of cognitive function I think is extremely important. And the field is catching up to this now. But it’s taken a while. By the field I mean the cognitive science of meditation or the cognitive science of contemplative practice. If you’d asked an anthropologist this they would have said well of course that’s kind of where you should start. So I think that’s extremely important. And from a normative stance I think it doesn’t make much sense to me to think about individual transformation apart from a normative context that’s social. I mean norms are about sociality. So like how could it be otherwise right? Well I mean I agree with you but it has been otherwise because it has been largely folded into sort of the self-help framework and feeling a better about yourself kind of normativity has been dominant I think in the culture. That’s why I brought up that question. Yeah no exactly that’s right. That has been the dominant. But that normativity we get from late-stage capitalism basically. And it’s immediately in tension with let’s say a perspective on the role of contemplation in say Christianity or of meditation in Buddhism or Hinduism. I mean those agendas are not about individual self-help in a consumerist context. They’re about transforming the psyche and the community to be an embodiment either of the Buddha Sangha or the mystical body of Christ if you want to talk about it in Christian terms. So there’s some pretty big differences there. So given that it sounds like you would be largely because there’s a debate around the mick mindfulness debate right? The idea that the West has turned mindfulness like you said it’s taken it’s taken often a single practice out of an entire ecology of practices where there’s all these ritual dimensions and then it’s transformed it into a single individualistic standalone technique that you do and sort of so that you’ll be satisfied being a corporate drone or something like that. And that’s sort of the mick mindfulness critique. Now there’s a debate around this and I’m wondering and I think Rick and I might be a little bit on opposite sides. I think some people I won’t say which Rick is I’ll say what I think. He can speak for himself. Yeah I think that I’m coming close to the opinion that mick mindfulness is worse than no practice precisely because it’s such a distortion and it is you know the hum thing you get evil by pursuing a lesser good at the expense of a greater good kind of thing and and it’s so full of bullshit and the Frankfurt sense of the word is right it’s making the wrong thing salient. Other people say well this is better than no practice because it could sort of gateway people into something deeper and since we’re talking about the normative social dimension I think this is a fair question to ask. Where would you land on that debate? Yeah that’s an interesting question. So first of all I would say that I would want to distinguish between say mindfulness based stress reduction and mindfulness based cognitive therapy as secular frameworks of meaning that give people actually by my lights that give people not just practices but rituals. I would want to just which I think are very beneficial I think have helped a lot of people. I would want to distinguish between that which I think you know is positive and important. I’d want to distinguish that from the consumerist mick mindfulness appropriation of them you know in the context of a corporation or the way they’re embedded in you know the say the medical system and the you know the insurance private insurance structure in the United States. I’d want to make a distinction between those things. So I do think that again it’s kind of context so I do think that the appropriation of certain practices of mindfulness in a you know in an exploitative work context is actually worse than nothing. But I do think at the same time that mindfulness based you know cognitive therapy and mindfulness based stress reduction you know dealing for things like you know risk of depression relapse or chronic pain. I think those are really important and really have benefited a lot of people. And so I’m not you know to the extent that in the critique of mick mindfulness that MBSR, MBCT becomes a target as such in itself then I then I’m not sympathetic to it. Yeah. Excellent answer. Thank you. Yeah well I see a value in both of your answers both you know the way you’ve framed your position on it John and Evans. I’m a little more optimistic about but I agree that in certain contexts and certainly things that can be worse than nothing. It depends on the context it all depends just like philosophy. I mean you know there’s all sorts of forms of philosophy that could be you know like the philosophy of Nazism. Let’s just say it depends you know that’s a broad sweep. Like we said what is philosophy mean? What does meditation mean? It depends though. Backing up a little Evan about the thing the distinction between let’s say academic philosophy and practical philosophy on the one hand and meditation and philosophy on the other. You made a lot of kind of differentiations that were all very quite well said and everything. I’m just curious about what do you think about another mutual friend of ours Christian Kosaru who thinks phenomenology and the Indian meditative traditions have a lot in common and meditation is a kind of bridge there. I would say that you know the phenomenological tradition as a philosophical tradition is very interesting to think about in relationship to certain lines of thought that develop in Indian philosophy both in you know Buddhism and in Hinduism. I wouldn’t center it necessarily on meditation because I think that you know the historical scholarship suggests that meditation in say you know Buddhism or Hinduism in the context of those philosophical texts doesn’t play the role that we might naively in terms of the way we think about meditation today think that it plays. It’s not as if they were you know sitting and meditating and then kind of writing out phenomenological descriptions and reports of their meditation and that’s what Yogachara texts are. I mean there certainly is philosophical analysis and reflection on various kinds of states of non-conceptuality that you know would be that would be brought about through practice but the idea that meditation is the point of convergence particularly in the case of you know phenomenological philosophy where meditation is not really for the most part there are exceptions but for the most part is not playing that kind of role. So I would orient it around actually theoretical discourses about consciousness in which you know in the context of Buddhism and Hinduism meditation is certainly something meditation in the sense of sort of mental training mental self-cultivation that’s certainly part of the framework of meaning for them but I wouldn’t center it specifically on that. Yeah I don’t think Christian really does either actually I think Christian you know for him it’s about relating different discourses about consciousness different you know theoretical philosophical discourses about consciousness. So could just to stop here and open up on that and allow you to expand on a point you made earlier because we caught up on another thread but I wanted to come back to it. You talked about how you know a lot of current philosophy of mind has pretty thin gruel in terms of what it talks about in terms of states of consciousness and traits of consciousness and etc etc and I believe I heard you saying something like well one of the things that mindfulness practices can do is to rapidly increase our experiential or significant maybe not rapidly that’s the wrong word significantly increase the repertoire our experiential repertoire of states. Could you say it first of all did I get you right and yeah yeah that’s right okay okay so could you say a little bit more about that because you know I also think you know we’ve been locked into a monological monophasic model of the mind what you said earlier by the way about you know metacognition and you know social interaction distributed cognition are interpenetrating you know the Vygotskyan idea and it’s and so I think there’s there should be important connections between mindfulness practices and dialogical practices for example for that reason trying to do work on that but do you do you think that maybe not even just mindfulness practices but like maybe mindfulness practices dialogical rituals things like that do you think and how do you think and how do you think they do like can you give some clear examples I agree with you but for the audience like what like what are the kind of things that are opened up of philosophical significance I mean a famous one of course was you know Foreman’s pure consciousness event and that that’s you know that put a lot of people in to talk about content of consciousness and stuff like that but can you you know what I’m asking for does yeah sure yeah yeah so I think there’s a bunch of different things you know one is a much richer phenomenological understanding of what attention is and how attention works and how attention is related to awareness of awareness meta-meta-awareness how you know mindfulness is actually really from a from a kind of cognitive science perspective a kind of metacognitive attention because you’re or certain kinds of mindfulness are because you are if you’re working with say the classic idea of mindfulness as as holding something in mind without the mind you know wobbling away from it you’re really talking about your ability to orient your attention to you know inhibit distraction or to you know to drop distractors to to keep track of of of where attention is which is it which is a metacognitive process so to have a phenomenological appreciation of just what that involves you know from moment to moment you know that’s something that philosophers have really only just begun to talk about in the past five ten years so that would be one example I would say you know in other examples and so this is something I’ve written about a lot that interests me you know personally quite a bit is the relationship of consciousness and sleep and dreaming so the way you know consciousness and sense of self shift across you know absorbed alert waking perception mind-wandering daydreaming sleep onset different kinds of dream states lucid dreaming dreamless sleep and the possibility of a certain kind of of let’s call it non-conceptual meta awareness in in in dreamless sleep states you know these are things that that immediately through through various kinds of meditation practices become quite you know quite salient experientially or can for certain people and again philosophers have only really within the past 15 years or so started talking about these they’re very rich in the history of Indian philosophy there’s you know centuries of discussions of this debates about whether consciousness persistent dreamless sleep or whether dreamless sleep is a blackout state you know there’s a little bit in western philosophy between Locke and Leibniz on this issue and then you know there’s really not much further discussion of it but in Indian philosophy it’s a it’s a huge it’s a huge issue and um and so there I think for anyone who’s interested in their own you know dream life sleep life that that becomes experientially quite rich and philosophically quite rich so those are those are a couple examples that I would I would point to I’d also say you know connected to so this isn’t really so much seated meditation but you know connects to other things we’re interested in um various kinds of practices that work with with awareness in the context of movement and in the context of say standing and and uh let’s call it you know it’s a woo word but let’s just use it anyway you know energy energy work uh I think those are very um those are very rich experientially for thinking about things phenomenologists have been interested in you know the lived body our our being as bodily subjects the nature of skill the nature of you know attunement to different sensory fields things like that and and that’s way richer than talking about qualia in the way that people persist in talking about quality I mean the whole debate you’re gonna get me on a rant here sorry but I’m gonna go with it the whole debate about you know the contemporary version of panpsychism versus physicalism is all centered on this this idea that there would be this kind of minimal intrinsic qualitative character that would be you know you know part of the fundamental nature the in the inner as it were nature of you know physical reality that’s such a constructed intellectualist minimalist conception of consciousness that’s framing this whole debate you know between panpsychism and physicalism and um yeah so I think uh I think the the contemplative perspective just brings in a much much richer understanding of experience even if you’re a panpsychist I mean panpsychism has been around for a long time and connects to different mystical traditions but the conception of of of experience or mind noose you know is is very different from the from the the kind of current intellectualized versions that come out of the tradition of thinking about qualia as what basically makes up experience I I agree very wholeheartedly with that argument I’ve made I’ve made a similar argument in other places um the way that we we’ve allowed ourselves to be hijacked by you know these the the adjectival qualia um missing all the other different aspects of consciousness I agree very deeply with that um so given that I agree with that you know that my question is not a hostile question of course the issue comes up well one explanation for why we had the thin gruel is because you have lowest common denominators nobody doubts that these experiences are the case if I can put it that way just because we all can say yeah I’ve had that whereas many of these experiences you’re talking about often are only the result of very special specialized you know practice they and they happen within particular cultural hormonal frameworks and that makes them at least scientifically difficult to track um and so I I you I’ve you’ve already heard me say I agree that the thin gruel is just causing all kinds of conceptual mistakes uh uh but there seems to be a challenge around yeah but if if this is a state that you know one in ten thousand people are getting and we can’t even know if the person who’s getting it in a hindu context is getting the same state as somebody who’s doing it in zen etc etc like you like you you’re you have the problem of no n no number right um kind of thing yeah yeah yeah okay so there’s a lot to say about that so first of all I would say that um I would I I don’t think necessarily that you were that you were posing the question this way but just for the sake of clarity if the idea would be that somehow you know these qualia like you know tasting sourness or seeing blue or are sort of fundamental and and shared that that would be the premise of the question whereas these other states aren’t I would actually want to reject that in the way that philosophers you know think of seeing blue or tasting you know tasting sourness because they um they intellectualize that experience in such a way that it involves taking up a kind of like abstract attitude that isolates equality from its context and then you know constructs it as a as a theoretical notion and then reads it back into ordinary experience so I kind of think that like being a humane spectator I’m just yeah exactly disembodied like toads would say and I’m just looking at it for kind of thing okay yeah right exactly so I I would say no though that’s not how ordinary experience is at all so they are you know I’m on board with like phenomenologists like you know Melo Ponti who just say that that’s way of thinking about qualia is is a is a product of a certain uh reflective abstract intellectual method and it’s just a mistake to read that back into ordinary experience okay so that still doesn’t leave answer though the the substance of your question which is you know these um these various kinds of states that come about through different forms of transformative um practice you know if they’re if they’re esoteric in some sense why should we uh why should we you know give them so much value theoretically uh so so one it’s an empirical claim that they’re esoteric I’m not so sure that they’re that esoteric when when framed properly and here the anthropological perspective on on community and ritual again becomes very important right excellent excellent yeah so that would be point number one point number two I would say is um well even if they are esoteric uh and I’m sliding across you know the constructivist perennialist debate which I’m happy to talk about but let’s just like slide across that for the moment even if there are these esoteric states you know the ability of a ballerina to do what you know they do is esoteric in the same sense but if I want to understand um you know the possibilities of human movement again embedded in a social context of you know history and art and ritual then the expert mover who’s you know sculpted and trained their body according to certain norms you know they become an extremely important study case particularly their reports about what they’re able to do that becomes extremely important and the idea that I would just study movement in a way that doesn’t have that you know developmental cultural perspective is you know is very impoverished so I see it the same way I see that um there are certain you know traditions of of attention metacognition consciousness training that are analogous to so skill becomes kind of the overarching concept that are analogous to you know skill for performance in athletics or in dance or in you know or in art and so I think we need to see it that way or in juggling concepts like qualia which is esoteric also right that’s true that’s a very small community of people who do that yeah yeah that’s that’s very true yeah that was an excellent answer then you know with the with the perennialist constructionist thing I think so so just for you know just for the sake of listeners you know that’s the debate about whether there is a kind of culturally invariant pure awareness experience or whether um you know there isn’t such a thing because the the context of the culture the language and the say religious philosophical tradition gives people certain expectations that prime them to have certain kinds of experience um I think that that’s uh actually a question that’s open and that requires an empirical cognitive science perspective I think you know I think for example you know Tomas Metzinger probably talked about this with you on his podcast you know his book that’s coming out the elephant in the blind that has you know it’s exactly about this question exactly it has all these reports you know admittedly for the most part probably from um from uh you know computer savvy westerners right um but nonetheless you know there’s an analysis of different you know reports of pure awareness and a you know a very sophisticated on the part of Tomas theoretical discussion of them there hasn’t been anything like this since William James’s work and I think that you know this kind of research particularly when it’s brought into play with the anthropology of ritual I think that’s the kind of work that we really need to kind of kind of get beneath and beyond the perennialist versus constructivist constructionist debate excellent excellent answer I just want to take this opportunity to uh to say it’s been wonderful to see you again Evan and of course you did not disappoint your ex your answers were excellent careful thank you clear well argued well articulated as I’ve come to expect from you so thank you very much thanks very much it’s great to talk with you again hopefully we’ll be able to you know do it more and do it do it again soon yes we always like to let our guests end with anything you want to plug a forthcoming book projects whatever you want to share your contact information or and last thoughts it’s completely open and up to you yeah so I have a book coming out in March of 2024 that’s co-written with two physicists and um Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser and it’s called the blind spot why science cannot ignore human experience and it’s not about meditation though meditation pops up here and there in the book um but it’s really about um how how our understanding of science has involved eliding or hiding the the lived experience behind science and how this has led to intellectual crises in science itself into a kind of larger cultural meaning crisis so so that book might be of interest to to listeners well you already know that I’m I’m very much in agreement with that argument as I made it an awakening from the meaning crisis so yeah right of course yeah yeah yeah it’s just been truly wonderful and everybody uh you’ve heard me recommend the work of Evan Thompson multiple times before um I his work is vitally important I think it’s the it’s exemplary of foree cogs I and about how 40 cogs I could be brought onto philosophical and I’ll use this sort of what we would but also spiritual uh concerns in a in a helpful clarifying and at times even edifying manner so it’s just been wonderful I recommend his work very very strongly and as always Rick I wanted to thank you for today and our ongoing partnership in this wonderful project so thank you everyone thank you so much John thank you Evan it was great thank you