https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=KyHGpQ96EjQ
Welcome to Meditating with John Vervicki. This is an unusual setup, but we’re trying to deal with transitional times. We livestream every weekday morning at 9.30 a.m. That’s Eastern time. Mondays, we alternate between Adharma Day, in which I teach a new lesson. On the Epi days, we alternate between the ecology practices from the Eastern tradition and then practicing the Course on Wisdom, the Wisdom of Hypatia from the Western tradition. If you’re joining us for the first time, don’t be put off by this odd setup. Please go to the description. You’ll find links to previous sits, when I’m sitting and there’s meditation and contemplation practices going on there. I recommend that you go and do the first lesson immediately and try and do one or two lessons per week. Keep meeting with us and you will quickly integrate and catch up. I would ask you all to please help me to reach as many people as possible by liking this YouTube video stream and raising its visibility in the YouTube algorithm. At the end of the session today, there will be, well, at the end of every session, in fact, there is a Q&A. Please limit the questions at that time to anything from the entire ecology of practices. We give priority on Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays to questions from the Western tradition, because it’s the one we’re doing more recently, and Tuesdays and Thursdays are from the Eastern tradition. If you have more general questions, please join us on our live stream, general Q&A on YouTube. Every third Friday of the month, we just had one last Friday, it was excellent. Every third Friday of the month at 3 p.m. Eastern time. I think that’s everything right now that we need in order to start. I will make an effort to write neater. We’re much more tightly focused on the board. So hopefully for all of that, we’ll get everything working well. OK, so we were taking a look at the Epicurean. And up until now, we’ve been concentrating on one of the two poles of Epicureanism, which is dealing with our desires, dealing with pleasure. Now we want to move from the discussion of desire to the discussion of fear. Of course, the two are related because fear is usually a sense that something that we desire is under threat. So they’re not completely separate, but we are moving to a different emphasis. Now, I am very much in the same mind with McLennan on this. He doesn’t regard Epicureanism as sufficient. He regards it as a necessary and powerful first stage. I like to think of Epicureanism as primary school, Stoicism as high school and Neoplatonism as university. I think it’s important to remember that, especially with the topics that we’re going to wrestle with today. Now, while I find with McLennan and others that the Epicurean cures or solutions that we’re going to talk about today are not sufficient, I nevertheless acknowledge that many people throughout the ancient world, many people found them sufficient. And that means that they are at least should be recognized as powerful and therefore worthy of respect and that they can at least be extremely helpful, if not ultimate in their ability to afford us to deal with some of the ultimate issues we’re going to talk about today. All right. So the dealing with fear. So there’s a kind of fear that’s being talked about here. It’s important. It’s not so much instinctive fear that we get as biological entities, the kind of fear that we share with cats and dogs and things like that. Because, of course, being instinctive, there’s not too much we can do about that. What the Epicureans, though, are talking about is the way in which we self-terrify ourselves because of our undisciplined imaginations. So let me say that again. We self-terrify. Because of undisciplined. Imagination. Okay, so let’s take a quick look at this. We can help Epicurus out by following his model of using the best science at the time. What is our best account of what imagination is? And here I’m talking about what’s called the imaginary, like mental imagery, not what Corbin calls the imaginal. We’ll come back to the imaginal much later. So the best idea and the best way to deal with that is to use your imagination. The best idea, and because I’ve given you some background on this, I can make use of it, is that imagination is basically the predictive prehension function. So if you remember when we talked about savoring, there’s perception, which is the bottom-up, opening up of new information from the world. And the prehension is the act of looking for patterns, finding patterns, seeking patterns. And the idea of what’s called predictive processing is that what your brain does is it tries to predict the patterns it’s going to encounter before it encounters them, because that’s way more adaptive. And then what imagination is, is when you run this predictive prehension of patterns, independent of getting new information from the world. That’s why we often close our eyes, in order to imagine better. So all you’re getting is the top-down prediction of patterns that are going to be grasped in the world, and you’re actually cutting off all the flow of incoming information. Now the problem with that is perception gives you the data that corrects when these predictions are wrong. So when we move to imagination, we are engaging in something that’s very powerful, very needed for us. I’m not a Calvinist. I don’t hate the imagination. But we have to remember that imagination on its own is very, very lopsided. Because it is prediction without data, it is a place that is very susceptible to cognitive bias. Because without that incoming data, our theorizing, if you’ll allow me to use that as a metaphor, is unconstrained, and our worst biases come to the fore. And so an undisciplined imagination is an imagination that is especially rife with cognitive biasing. And the problem in our culture is we’ve had two traditions around the imagination. One I’ve just mentioned, Calvin. It’s a puritanical thing that says, you know, the imagination is a permanent factory for the production of idols. The idol hands are the devil’s workshop. And then we’ve had the romantics who said that imagination is the root to God, et cetera. And both of these, as they were at war with themselves in their extremism, both of them ignore the proper education of the imagination, and not just repressing it like the Calvinists and not just expressing it like the romantics. So we need one way of understanding the Epicureans is that they had a method for trying to educate the imagination. Because unconstrained, the imagination is a place that is beset with cognitive bias, but properly educated. And think about this. This is the befriending. There’s no enemy worse than your own mind and body, or there’s no friend that’s greater. But an educated imagination is one of our most powerful allies. OK, so let’s think of it that way. So there they have what they call the fourfold cure. For fear. Where fear, again, isn’t that instinctive, taking your hand away from the fire, but the way in which we sort of terrify ourselves with our imagination. So the fourfold cure is a set of maxims. And so you’re supposed to use it in maximization. And what we’re going to learn today is the practice of reflective explication. OK, so a maxim has a lot of ideas compressed, so it’s easy to transport around and remember. But you have to remember that a maxim is just a remembered doorway. And the point of a maxim is always to make explicit. That’s what explicate means. Explicate is not a synonym for imagine. Explicate means to make explicit what is implicit. OK, we want to explicate the maxim and we want to do this reflectively. OK, so reflective explication. OK, so let’s take a look at these maxims and go through them and explicate them. We’re going to explicate them reflectively. What are we reflecting on? We’re reflecting on how we can educate our moments of imagination. So what I’m teaching here is something that you bring into practice when you start to imagine. When you start to imagine. OK, so the first of the fourfold cures is a very famous one. And we’ve got to do some work on it because its relevancy has changed, I think, because we’re not in the same situation. The gods or God are not to be feared. OK, so let’s put this into the first of the historical situation. There’s a multiplicity of gods in the ancient world. They’re very capricious. They don’t act according to moral principles. And then what Epicurus basically argues is those kinds of gods don’t exist. The only kinds of gods that could exist are ones that are sages that have wisdom and therefore they would have no reason to be capricious or act immorally towards us, etc. And that sort of aspect of it has largely been taken care of by a couple of millennia of Christianity in which we have been taught that God is good or, and, you know, and I’m not advocating for the existence of God. I mean, I’m going to put that problem aside. I’m going to talk about it in the series of The God Beyond God. What I think we can draw from this are two different fears that were present behind this mythological representation in the ancient world that are still relevant to us today. The first is the fear of fate, where fate doesn’t necessarily mean destiny. Fate means the how things are beyond our control, beyond our understanding. And a book I recommend about how this was one of the central issues in the ancient world is a book called Beyond Fate by Margaret Visser, Beyond Fate. And notice the title, Beyond Fate. What was going on in the ancient world was a way of trying to find a way of living that was beyond fate. Notice that we get this word out of it. Fatality. Fatality didn’t originally mean having to do with death. Fatality meant when something struck us that was beyond our control, beyond our understanding, beyond the narrative structure of our lives. Right? Death, of course, is a primary example of being struck by something beyond our control and outside the narrative control of our life. But many things, many things, relationships, careers, many things are subject to fatality in that sense. So please remember that. Please remember that. We’re going to need to know that, especially when we talk about stoicism. Okay. So what this turns, what you can see in here is this is a fear of two facts about us, our finitude, that we are finite, and our fallibility. That we will always be making mistakes. Okay. And the basic answer, and that comes from Visser’s title that the ancient world came up with, Beyond Fate, was a recognition that although human beings are subject to finitude and fallibility, they are also capable of transcendence. They are capable of transcendence and virtue. So virtuous transcendence, right, was the main idea. And you may say, well, that doesn’t protect me. It doesn’t protect you from the events. And here’s where stoicism is going to be much more helpful than Epicureanism. But it protects you to a large degree from a meaning, from the meaning of the events. Remember, we’re not talking about, you know, events that we have an instinctive reactance to. We’re talking about the meaning of events when we imagine about them or project our projects or concerns onto them. So the idea that we are capable of finite transcendence, however, isn’t really that well discussed in Epicureanism. So here’s one area where I think it’s inadequate. I think Epicureanism provides us a place where we can start to experience it, like in Ataraxia, but it wasn’t very well discussed. When we get to Neoplatonism, stoicism, and then Neoplatonism, we’ll see that there is a very good way of addressing finite transcendence. But for those of you who have been through the course already, you already have a lot of that empowered in you from the Eastern tradition, because that’s exactly what meditation and contemplation bring about. They have you accept your finitude while affording your capacity for virtuous transcendence. Neoplatonism says that what we are actually looking for as a response to fate is to come into contact with what is most real, what is most real. And that’s, of course, what transcendence is. It’s a longing to come into right relationship with what is ultimately real. And so the degree to which we can cultivate a right relationship with what is ultimately real, we can address this side. So there’s a little bit here in Epicureanism, but I think this is where we will need Neoplatonism, stoicism and Neoplatonism, to really give us a more comprehensive answer. Now, here is one where the Epicureans did do a lot. And this is about the afterlife. And so this is a very, of course, fraught issue for a lot of people. And I’ll try and speak on the Epicureans behalf, but I make my own view. I can’t keep my own view completely separate from this, but I’m trying its best to mediate Epicurus to you. A reminder, by the way, that Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays are longer classes. We’re not going to get through all of this lesson today. We’re going to have this week is going to be a three Dharma day. Monday, Wednesday and Friday will all be Dharma days. So the afterlife. OK, so we can make use of Epicurus here. And. Scientifically improbable. OK. So the idea that something of me can survive the undeniable death of my brain and body is coming increasingly improbable as our knowledge of the brain and the mind’s relationship to the brain grows. It’s coming to the end. So and this is something taken very seriously by 40 Cognitive Science. We are deeply embodied. The idea that our cognition could in any way exist or function separately from our embodied brain is becoming really deeply, deeply questionable. So there’s that. But you say, well, it’s not based on science. And that’s right. And I got acknowledged. And then that’s where we have to acknowledge that we are using imagination. We’re thinking mythically, which doesn’t mean we’re necessarily thinking falsely. But then the Epicureans, right, did a lot to try and sort of critique the mythology of the afterlife in their world. What can we do about ours? Well, for me, this is what I do. You may find it helpful. And here’s where I go outside Epicurus. The Eastern traditions have a very different view of immortality than the West. Life after death. It is viewed with horror. It is viewed with horror. It is viewed with horror. It is viewed with horror. It is viewed with horror. It is viewed with horror. It is viewed with horror. Personal immortality is not thought to be a good thing. It is thought to be a fundamentally horrific thing because we are we are we are finite and we’re fallible. And extending that forever and ever would be horrible. But this is why the thing of Vedanta, the thing you seek is moksha. You seek release from reincarnation. You seek release from immortality or Nirvana. To blow out. You seek release from personal immortality. Because if you think about it, what would you want? Well, I want to just keep doing all the things that I do. But forever? And would you want to do them? Would you want to watch your friends die? Well, I need my friends to all keep living forever. And then you’re going to be living with them forever. Can you even live with anybody more than one or two people for a lifetime? Think about how hard it is to be married. And then but my friends are going to need their friends and family and their friends and family and their friends and family. And then the world. So what you want is the world to freeze. But would that forever? Would that be a good thing? Do you really want that? See, this is what I mean. You have to if you’re going to imagine, imagine in a disciplined, rational, fuller manner, open up, really follow out the implications of your imagery. Don’t get fixated on the image. Expand it out. And that’s what the Epicureans keep getting us to do. Now, I’m drawing from the Eastern tradition, but the practice of disciplining the imagination and really expanding it out is very, very helpful. It comes from Epicurus. So. Now, what you may say here is, OK. What’s really going on here, right? So not only is it scientifically improbable. You want to you want to transform the myth. I’m just writing this poorly. Open it up to many alternative mythologies in which immortality is imagined in a fuller, richer way and revealed to be something potentially quite horrific. OK, so you say that’s all fine and good. And that’s not what was really going on. What’s really going on in immortality is the fear of death. So what we’re really trying to do is avoid our mortality. That’s what’s and now this is where the Epicureans are terrifically helpful. Once again, we must make a distinction that, you know, a version of the distinction I’ve already made. We must distinguish between our fear of death as an instinctive thing, like avoiding the fire, which we share with all animals, and our fear of our mortality. Animals are not aware of their mortality. They fear they instinctively avoid threats to their biological life, but they do not have the capacity to fall into despair about their mortality. And that’s what we’re talking about here, the despair about your mortality. So there’s two things that need to be separated here, which the Epicureans do. One is the fear of non-existence and the other is the fear of dying. And the other is the fear of dying. OK, so the Epicureans say the fear of non-existence and what they’re going to try and do is they’re going to try and say, you’re actually. Imagining in a self-contradictory manner. First of all, they say, you don’t fear non-existence. The thought of non-existence isn’t itself terrifying. And what they do is they say, what I want you to do is imagine all of the time before you existed. You weren’t there. Just imagine it. The terrifying to you. Most people say, no, I just I wasn’t there. Doesn’t matter. Right. So you say, but it’s the fear of me being non-existent, not just that. Well, you were non-existent before you were born. So there’s something else mixed up there. Right. There’s something else confused in the image. They bring in another one. They say, well, your non-existence is not something you can ever experience. Epicurus famously said, where death is, I am not where I am. Death is not. Namely, if I’m in non-existence, I can never know it. It is not something I can ever experience. So I should never be afraid of it. And as long as I’m experiencing, that means I still exist. And therefore I shouldn’t be afraid of non-existence. And you might feel like that’s just a sort of a logical trick. But what it’s getting you to do is to say, what is it you’re actually imagining? Is it you’re actually imagining that’s at the core of your fear of non-existence? Now, I think what’s happening here is that our death is something that is mysterious to us. And I mean precisely that. Not in that it’s just something we don’t know. A mystery is, and that’s the basis of the word mystical, is something that we cannot directly comprehend. Now, we have to be careful. I can comprehend my non-existence propositionally. I can say, I didn’t exist in the year 1888. I won’t exist in the year 4054. That’s no problem. But what I can’t do is experientially, I can’t experience, even in my imagination, my own non-existence because whenever I try to imagine it, I’m actually there, experience it. And therefore, I fall into self-contradiction. And so there is something ungraspable, not conceptually, but experientially about my own death. So literally, this is what I’m proposing to you. Non-existence is something that’s unimaginable. And what’s actually happening, I suggest to you, and this is what the Epicureans are saying, is your imagination machinery is panicking because it can’t predict this, because it’s not imaginable. It’s not imaginable. And so it turns it into some unpredictable thing when in fact, that’s a mistake. How could we respond to that experience? Because your imagination confronting something that is a mystery to it, something that is actually a black hole in your imagination. And this is again where I think Neoplatonism is going to come into play. We need more practice in the positive experience of mystery, of that which exceeds our imagination, which has a no-thingness to us. So the cultivation of awe gives us an education of, right, that reduces the panic that our imagination comes into when it confronts something that is mysterious to us. What also happens, and that’s very helpful here, is again to remember that continued, you know, forever immortal existence is also horrific. And that is something you can imagine to some degree. But when you start to extend it towards infinity and your imagination starts to balk, everything of value, because given an infinite amount of time, you are going to be going through so many changes that you will be completely different from the person you are. All the relationships you have, could they survive? All of infinity? We are mortal, and our meaning is the meaning of mortals. And the line from Melville comes to me right here from what we did. What is man that he should seek out to live out the lifetime of his God? Right? Okay, so we’re about halfway through the fourfold cure. It sounds like what? You’ve got sort of one and a half. On Wednesday, we’re going to talk about the fear of dying, which is not the same thing as the fear of non-existence. The fear of dying is something you can experience. You can go through the process of loss. What I’m going to show you is this is precisely the place where our imagination runs wild, and we can address the fear of dying by getting, bringing a better, by bringing some of the best cognitive science we have to bear on educating our imagination around the future of us dying. Okay? And then we will continue on with, and that will lead us into the two other aspects of the fourfold cure, right? Your fear of loss of pleasure, your fear of increase in pain, and that will actually come out of the fear of dying. And so we’re halfway through, but what you can do right now is you can start to catalog the kinds of imaginings you have, the imaginings that are bringing about self-terrifying. When there’s imaginings about fate, think about the capacity for transcendence and coming into right relationship with what is most real, because that seems to allay that fear. For the fear of the afterlife, think about its scientific improbability, and think about, well, nevertheless, you may have a mythic, and I remember for me, that’s not an insult word, you may have a mythic imagination of it, but then remember that maybe you should extend and more fully develop with the help of the Eastern traditions what that mythic imagination is really like, and do you really want that more developed, imagined afterlife? Then that will actually take you to, okay, what’s actually at work here is not the quest for immortality, it’s the fear of mortality, and I’m sorry, I’m going to leave you sort of halfway through, and I apologize for that. I can’t teach everything at once, and I’m finite and fallible, and we have limited time. But you have to break up your fear of death into two things, the fear of non-existence, which is actually absurd. It’s not something, it’s not, what’s actually happening is not anything you imagine, it’s your imagination is encountering something that is mysterious to it, something that is ungraspable, unpredictable, and that is panicking. Our brain does not like what it cannot predict. But it’s not unpredictable because it’s an uncertain event in the future. That’s a mistake. It’s unpredictable because our imaginative faculty can’t grasp it. Then what do you, then what’s the response? Then you say to yourself, I need to get better at confronting mystery. I need to, and we have an emotional experience, awe, that allows us to encounter mystery in a much more positive and transformative manner. And you’ve already been practicing some of that in the Eastern practices. So as I said, I’m sorry to leave, it’s about halfway through the four-fold cure. I’ll quickly review this on Wednesday, what we’ve done so far, I’ll finish it up. And then you notice, I’m indicating throughout that I don’t think the epicureans are sufficient. We need more. I try to indicate where that’s going to come in. But I want to finish the epicureans, the four-fold cure on Wednesday, and then I want to get to, where do we actually go to get the courage to be? Where do we go to practice this kind of reflection? And that’s in philosophical contemplative companionships, in philosophical friendship, which is at the core of the epicurean practices, where we learn to savor. We learn to savor each other. I wanted to say that, and then I stopped because it sounded so trite, it sounds like a hallmark card. But savoring each other in a way that brings about profound ataraxia and joy is something distinct from happiness, the kind of happiness we pursue in our culture. So we’re going to talk about that on Friday and how to practice it. And so again, Wednesday and Friday, also going to be long classes. So I’m going to sit now. We’re going to do a very, very brief meditative sit. We won’t be able to take, I think, any questions today. We will try and take extra questions tomorrow and on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Again, I ask for your patience. Teaching you the wisdom of hypatia is not as compressible as teaching you what I taught you from the Buddhist and Taoist traditions. So I’m going to sit down now here. Jason’s going to adjust the camera. We’ll have a quick sit. Together and then we will end for today. So please get yourself comfortable. Set your phones on do not disturb. I’m sort of looking up to you. That’s good. There are rituals where the teacher is supposed to periodically sit below the feet of the students because it reminds him or her of the true nature of their existence. So this is helpful. OK, so we’ll have a short chant and then we’ll go into a short silent sit and then we’ll come out of it together. And like I said, unfortunately, we won’t be able to take a lot of questions today. Your questions will not be lost. I promise they will be addressed throughout the week. OK, so set your phones and do not disturb. We will begin when I say begin. Begin. Om. One. Om. One. Om. One. Om. 1… you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you slowly come out of your practice, trying as best what you cultivated in your practice to integrate it with your everyday consciousness and cognition, character and communities perhaps by reciting the five promises to yourself you you you so as I said, we’ve already run quite long, but I have forewarned you that Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays when it’s Dharma will tend to be longer as we pursue the wisdom of Vipassaya thank you all for joining I want to remind everyone if they can to join, subscribe to this video channel you’ll find links to the lecture series Awakening from the Meeting Crisis to the Dialogue of the Series, Voices with Verveki you’ll be notified of updates if it’s not against your principles, I ask you to please consider following me on Twitter so you can know about talks and events and changes to any of these streams that might come out last minute please join the Discord server you’ll find people practicing the movement practices, doing extra meditation, discussing all this series and having people in there that are from the Voices with Verveki Dialogo series there is going to be a home there for the group practices that we’re going to start engaging in we’re going to start learning about this week so I please ask you to join the Discord server so that you’ll find a welcoming home for the group practices that are so central to the wisdom of Vipassaya so remember that continuity of practice is more important than sheer quantity of practice don’t hold yourself to a harsh standard of perfectionism but to a standard that recognizes your mortality a standard of virtuous friendship friendship, the kind of friendship that’s at the heart of epicureanism remembering, especially with respect to the imagination that we talked about today there’s no enemy worse than your own mind and body but there’s no friend, no ally, no true companion on the path greater than your own mind and body relapse into yourselves and to each other take good care everyone we’ll get to some of your questions tomorrow I promise