https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=F2mChU7w3Io
We’re going to have John Vervecky speak to us now. He is the founder of the Vervecky Foundation and the director of cognitive science at the University of Toronto. He’s the creator of the acclaimed Awakening from the Meaning Crisis and After Socrates series. Thank you. So I have a choice here. I can give my talk or answer all of John’s questions. Alright, so I’m changing this title slightly from in the program, the cognitive science of home belonging to the home range orienting from the home base and growing up around the Hearth Hospital. I chose the last one solely because it had H’s in it. It actually captured better what I wanted to talk about. So what I want to do is I want to make use of John A. Allen’s, there’s going to be two Allen’s mentioned so I’ll try to keep them clear separate for you. John A. Allen’s book, Home, How Habitat Made Us Human. And I want to trace out the evolution of home in three stages towards answering the question, why do we long for home? So those three stages is not a ladder but a nesting and of course nesting is a kind of home. But the three stages are the home range, the home base and the Hearth Hospital. And I’m going to show how each is a stage in the shaping of cognition within 4E cognitive science. And then I want to talk about how that cognition is I hope plausibly exacted up into our spirituality and then talk about domicide and quest in that context. So even before we were recognizably human, we were biological, our ancestors were biological organisms. And there’s been a revolution in biology around this that gives us an important aspect of the first stage of the evolution of home. This is called niche construction. The old model, which is a sort of Victorian capitalist model, is you have the individual organism and they happen to mutate and that’s it. And then there’s the harsh environment of competition that kills them off or they survive. And it’s just that. That’s the model. So the model is changing and it’s part of the revolution. The science where science is happening right now is not physics. Physics has been stalled for 40 years. The science where science is happening is biology. And it’s niche construction is the idea. And the idea is this. Organisms are not passive. They are active shapers of their environment. And then that shaped environment in turn shaped them. They shape the environment, the environment shapes them and it loops like this. And you notice I do this a lot when I talk about 4E cog-sci. It’s that loop. It’s niche construction. It’s a mutual shaping so that they fit together in an important way. There’s a conformity between the organism and the environment. They belong together. Now that belonging together is, I’m going to argue, well I’m arguing right now, is what Kellyanne Allen, this is the second Allen, first is John A, second is Kellyanne, in her work calls belonging, the sense of belonging. And please remember the assonance between longing and belonging. What is belonging? Belonging is a sense of quote, deep connection with social groups, physical places, and collective experiences. That’s from the paper in 2021. And then there’s the book in 2021 as well. I think that deep connection is, and the sense of belonging that she’s talking about is deeply convergent with the work I do on relevance realization and religio and meaning in life as a fundamental connectedness of yourself to other people and to the world. And as is often the case in psychology, we have these two literatures, meaning in life literature and the belonging literature talking about basically the same thing and not talking to each other because psychology is in a mess right now. And see the work of my good friend Greg Enriquez on how we can fix that problem. Right now I’ll take it as a point of convergence. Kellyanne Allen goes on, it is quote, a fundamental need that predicts, notice the language here, psychologists are usually deeply cautious. It seems to us after the evidence that perhaps it is suggested that, that’s how it’s usually written. Okay? But here it’s, listen to the language, like it is a fundamental need, this is like a summative paper, that predicts numerous mental, physical, social, economic, and behavioral outcomes. In short, the evidence is overwhelming, this is why when people say, I don’t know what he means about the meaning crisis. In short, if you do not have a sense of belonging, you are in serious trouble. Mentally, physically, economically, behaviorally, socially. It’s powerfully predictive of that. Next to knowing your IQ, I want to know if you have a sense of belonging. I want to know if you have a sense of meaning in life. And this is how you, there’s two questions you can ask to get at do you have meaning in life. What do you want to exist even if you don’t? And how connected, how much of a difference do you make to it? So there’s actually two sides. There’s the result, which is belonging, and then there’s the process, fitting in. This is the, and we’ve been using this language probably your whole life, fitting in. I want to fit in. I want to fit in. I don’t fit in. I want to fit in. I don’t fit in. I do this. Right? Okay. So there’s a language fitting in, like this deep, connected belonging conformity participating in. And I think this has a lot to do as I, I’ll only do this a couple more times. I think this has a lot to do with recursive relevance realization. Okay. But how is that niche construction, organism shaping the environment, environment shaping the organism? They belong together. There’s a sense of belonging fit in. I think that gets taken up into the cognitive and therefore on the cusp of the spiritual with the work that myself and Christopher Massapietro and Philip Misovick covered in the book Zombies in Western Culture, 21st Century Crisis. We talked about worldview attunement, which is this idea. I think that that’s basically a religio niche construction. You have a view of the world that supports your view of how you view, how you know, how you connect. And you have a theory of connection that helps to support and substantiate your view of the world and they mutually support each other. And we had that with the Aristotelian worldview and then we broke it and smashed it and we haven’t had worldview attunement ever since. And they, you know, a clear indicator of that is, and you’ve probably heard me make this argument before, the pervasive worldview, the scientific worldview is a worldview in which we do not belong, in which we do. Our existence as cognitive personal moral agents doesn’t belong. So if we don’t belong in the worldview, it’s not doing worldview attunement for us. So when we have worldview attunement, we get a network of affordances. Just a reminder, what an affordance is, affordance is a living possibility, a real possibility. It’s not created by the environment, it’s not created by the organism, it’s created by how they mutually shape each other. This affords me walking. I and this have been mutually shaped by physics, by chemistry. This and I have both been shaped by culture to fit each other. So walking is available to me, there’s an affordance. There’s all kinds of affordances now set out for me because of that co-shaping, fitting together, belonging together. Once you have this first stage, you’re into an organism having a home range. This is areas where the it is shaping the environment, the environment is shaping it, a network of affordances is opening up, it’s belonging, they’re fitting together, and space gets transformed into places connected by paths. When you are looking out at the world and seeing places and paths and you’re saying that’s just the way it is, there are no places and paths in physics. There’s trajectories, there’s locations. In fact, this is so deep in us, in how we’ve been shaped, try to talk for five minutes without doing places and paths. John has just started his lecture, soon he’ll be halfway through his lecture and then he’ll be at his end. The marriage isn’t going well, we seem to be floundering, we’re off course. Paths and places, look out around you, it’s happening right now. You’re already starting to home this space. When you get that, when you get that home range, paths and places, the landscape courses, I’m using the word course and you’re allowed to by the way, it’s in the dictionary, I’m not sure. You can use course as a verb, the landscape courses, it flows. We talk about the hills rolling, they’re not rolling, if they were rolling we’d be absolutely terrified. I’m reading the great Gatsby, long time ago, in high school, galaxy far, far away. I’m reading this book and why are they making me read this book? It’s this silly story, Daisy, Daisy, Nick, Gratt, Gatsby, and then I get, if you’ve read the book, spoiler if you haven’t, and then you get to the last three pages and you go, wow, this whole book has been about the American dream. And you go, and it first hit me when he’s talking about it and the author, well Nick, but Fitzgerald, pulls back from the tight closure of the story and he talks about the rolling hills of the Republic. I got this tremendous sense of, wait, there’s a bigger thing going on here, there’s this whole landscape, there’s this whole history and its paths and places and affordances and it’s all alive. And he was trying to invoke that and he was actually trying to symbolize it in this rather trite love story. It was one of those first great moments in my life when I realized how stupid I could be because I totally missed it. And it opened it up for me. This is a home range. And what’s really unique about human beings is their home range is quite variable. And that’s an advantage and a disadvantage. See, the advantage for the gazelle, here’s a gazelle, here’s a baby gazelle, it fits right in. And gazelles don’t have existential, how can I be a good gazelle? I’m failing, they’re right in. Your heritage gave you the capacity for home range like any other organism, but it’s a movable home range. Because you know what culture is? Culture is niche construction on methamphetamines. That’s what culture is. Culture is, I’m going to go into this environment and I’m going to shape it and shape you so you belong there. That’s what culture is. And that’s a great power, but it’s also a great uprooting. Because there’s no place you naturally belong. And science fiction regularly reminds us about this. So organisms are doing this, and at some point our ancestors evolved so that they’re becoming hunter-gatherers. I’m not clear about when, probably Homo erectus, probably around 800,000 years ago. I’ve held an 800,000 year old Acheulean hand axe. And what is the next stage? The next stage is the home base. The home base is a fixed point within the home range in which everybody goes out from it, they do stuff and they come back to it. Which seems natural to you. They go out and they come back. And then what they do is they share the butchering of the animals, the preparation of food initially. But something that’s really important happening here, when they come back, they’re checking the food, they’re checking the food, they’re checking the food. And they’re checking the food. And that’s how they come back together. Because that system of distributed labor requires you to all come back together. Not only for the legitimate reasons of we have to coordinate our labor, we’ve got the synergy of coordinated communication, but also in order to do cheater detection. the benefits, then something needs to change. And if you don’t think that’s very… give your three-year-old, this three-year-old and that three-year-old, give that one a bigger piece of chocolate cake. Human beings care so much about this that they will do the following. If I sit you in a room and I give you 5, I go, great! There’s more to the science. Now what you do is you bring in two people, and they say, I’ll give you 10. And then guess what they do? No! I don’t want it. They’re still getting $5 for free, but they don’t want it because that has been broken down. See, what we start to get into is a new normative space. We’re starting to think about the justice of our actions as opposed to just the efficacy of our actions. So we’ve got distributed labour. Now that requires something really… So, so far we’ve got this, right? Concern for justice, looking for cheating, but looking for honouring, because the opposite of catching a cheater is honouring somebody who’s followed, played the rules. Distributed labour. You’re going out there, I’m going out there, and we can’t talk to each other. Imagine if you had to run back every five minutes and… Now we forget this. See, I grew… I don’t know how old John Van Dyke is, I’m pretty old too. So I grew up in this dark time in which your phone was in one place. LAUGHTER And you had to leave your phone behind, and you had to rely on other things to coordinate your behaviour with other human beings. It’s funny, we still call it a phone, but if you actually call somebody on it, they freak out. Why are you calling me? Why are you calling me? OK, so think about what we had to rely on. And here’s a way of getting this a little bit closer. So imagine a married couple that has been married for a long time because they love each other, not because they hate each other. Sometimes people stay together in marriage because they hate each other, because that’s the greatest way to torture another human being. That was my parents. LAUGHTER So… But I had the opposite. And this… My aunt and uncle and my aunt, this aunt, she was like a second mother to me. They had been married, well, longer than I was alive. And when she came in the room, his eyes sparkled. And there was like a telepathy between them. He could just… Eyes sparkle and… Like, they almost didn’t have to talk, and it’s like, what’s going on? Well, what’s going on is… You have two human beings, and they’re not always consulting each other. They’ve internalised each other. She has a model of him, he has a model of her, so he can be over here, out of range of her, and coordinate his behaviour with her by consulting the model. But he has to let her live inside him. Some of you have said something sort of a little bit freaky to me, but I’ve tried to take it in good heart. You say things to me like, John Vervicki, you’re in my head all day. That’s a little bit weird for me. But, like, you see what you’re doing? You’re internalising. Now, the thing is, you can’t internalise forever. So what you have to do is you have to periodically all come together at the nexus point, and make sure the models all match, that they haven’t got out of sync. So the ability to go out and do distributed labour, which is how we build this, requires that we come together and have a common point, a common unity, a community, in which we correct how the models get out of sync with each other. And that’s what Paul, I think, and Jonathan are often talking about. Church can be a pretty shitty place. Because you have all these… Oh, that’s not how it is. Now, what’s really interesting is your brain actually works this way. So your brain faces a problem. It’s actually not one machine. It’s a machine of machines that can make itself into a new kind of machine, which is unlike anything we have right now, yet. Right? And these can… Well, we all know, they can work at cross purposes. They can be antagonistic to each other. And so the way we deal with that problem of things working at cross purposes is we have them communicate. That improves efficiency. So we can improve efficiency by having parts of the brain talk to each other all the time. There’s a problem with that. Two problems is when the brain is talking a lot to itself, it’s not paying much attention to the world. Secondly, when all that energy is being… It’s expended. It’s very expensive. So this is what the brain does. It actually does… Has different areas of the brain. They model each other. They mutually model each other. And then the brain cycles. It cycles between… You’re focused on the world. Right? And all the parts are relying on the model of each other to coordinate without talking to each other very much. So all of that energy can be challenged. And then it goes to another time when you’re basically not focused on the world and all the parts are talking to each other. And your attention is trying to do it right now. Because part of your attention is task-focused. What is he going to say next? He’s so weird. And then there’s another part of you that is trying to mind wander. Mind wandering is when you disconnect from the world and the parts are basically talking to each other. For what purpose? Like… Mind wandering. It seems like the most useless thing and you spend so much time in mind wandering because this is when the models all connect and make sure they’re tracking each other. And you cycle back and forth. And your attention is trying to do it right now. And then you get an advantage out of that. The mind wandering opens up variations of things and perspectives that are relevant to you. Because you’re always the hero of your mind wandering. You don’t mind wander… Hey, I’m going to mind wander about Pete Seeger or somebody else. It’s always you. It’s you. How are things relevant to me? In fact, what’s happening is, you know, John Verheke’s, it’s not really relevant to me. Here’s a bunch of stuff that’s relevant to me. That’s mind wandering. And then what you do is you open up the possibilities of how things are relevant. You open up variation on what you can pay attention to. And then you kill most of it off when you come back to focusing on me. But some of it stays and you make connections that are relevant to you. You evolve your attentional fit. Variation with the mind wandering, selection with the task focus. And you do this, and you’re evolving your connectedness. We figured out, with home range and home base, how to do that with collective intelligence. We all go out with our mutual models and then we come back into common unity, the community, and we do all this stuff that seems relatively useless. And then the whole community evolves its grip on the world. So this interaction between home range and home base starts to evolve and develop collective intelligence, the intelligence of distributed cognition. And then of course what happens is individual cognition and collective cognition start to bootstrap each other. If I internalize her and she internalizes me, she can actually take my perspective on her perspective. That’s what she’s doing when she’s doing that coordinated base. But then she can just do that when she needs to. Not just when she’s coordinating with me. Not just when she’s coordinating with me. Wait, I can…what would Jonathan… What would Paul… Oh! Your metacognitive capacities expand dramatically. Your ability to be aware of how you’re aware, to know how you’re knowing, to learn how to learn, all goes up significantly. This is all enmeshed with home range and home base. But how is the home base chosen? Well, think about campfire. How do you choose it? So there’s a theory, we’ve got to modify the theory because the empirical record for the initial presentation of the theory has made it been modified. The usual theory is prospect and refuge. Prospect and refuge says you’re always looking for places where you have significant prospect so you can see a lot, but there’s refuge for you. Originally they thought that was I want to be able to see a lot, but I want to be able to hide a lot. And that turns out to be wrong. Because it makes predictions. You show people pictures of here’s all this expanse you can see, but you’re also sort of in a jungle and people are like, I don’t want to be there. Because here’s the thing, if you could hide in it, so could someone else. So could a predator. So you don’t want to be there. So lots of hiding places. So it’s more like what I want in refuge is I want a place where I can defend myself or escape. Reliably escape. So when I say refuge I want you to hear that, okay? Now think about this, because I’ve been thinking about this in what Paul was saying about rest and how it’s not just lastitude. And I was thinking, what went through my head was this phrase, a refuge without prospect is a prison. And prospect without refuge is wilderness. You don’t want either of those. You don’t want either of those. So this might surprise you that I would make this move. You’re seeking for an optimal grip between that trade off relationship. And so you’re trying to pick a place, so you’ve got all this affordance network, you want a place that gives you this sort of optimal grip between prospect and refuge. It’s a nexus point. It gives you easy access to many different courses of action you can undertake. Now I want you to think about what a way of thinking about that. I’m going to use a martial arts analogy. I think I used it in Thunder Bay, but I’m going to use it again. It’s a slightly different one. Okay? So the reason I’m using this is because I’m going to really play on optimal gripping. Like there’s things when you’re doing, when you’re grappling with somebody, and you need to get the optimal grip, literally the optimal grip on them to throw them. Like you don’t want to lean too far forward because then they could, you know, you got to do this thing. So there’s all these different things you’re doing that are optimal grips on your opponent. But you don’t start out that way. You start out, you take your stance. Now this doesn’t do anything. You don’t use this for anything. What’s the point of a stance? So think about all the optimal grippings I can have. The stance puts me in an optimal place to get to any of those optimal gripping. Do you understand? The stance allows me, oh, if I’m here, I can quickly, if I’m here, I can quickly step back if I need to. I can come over. There’s all these things I can do from this stance. You have a stance. It’s your meta optimal grip. And I have to have a few metas or you wouldn’t believe it was me giving the talk. Right? It’s your meta optimal grip point. And it’s at the point that gives you the best optimal relationship between prospect and refuge. And then you have this point. It’s the point that is your entry into the affordance network. It’s giving you meta optimal grip. It’s an origin point for all of the journeys that you’re going to take and you’re going to come back to. It allows you to navigate your home range and to share that with other people because we can all mutually model the origin point so that we can easily coordinate our behavior. So that you get the ability to undertake what’s called orientation. This is the work of Stegmeier, 2019, his astonishing book on orientation, the philosophy of orientation. And he talks about how orient the ability. Okay. So if you were to ask many people today how they’re wrestling with things, they will use metaphors or they will even use the word, I feel disoriented. I feel disoriented. I don’t know which way is up or down. I don’t know which way to go. And it’s all metaphorical. They’re talking about this fundamental ability of orientation. I want to coin a word. I don’t know if it’s a word. I want to talk about co-orientation like the way we talk about coordination. We have co-orientation when we have the home base. And we take that up into our worldview and we can navigate the worldview. We can co-orient in that worldview and move around in that space so that we can coordinate our distributed cognition, access that collective intelligence. That’s what orientation does for you. Shared orientation. We even do it. We even do it temporally. We’ve been talking about this. Right? We have retrospective. Right? We have this retrospective we want remember I didn’t mean rest. Sorry, I didn’t mean hiding. The path should provide some kind of refuge for us now. It should have, it should, all of these things should have converged so that we have a trustworthy home base that then gives us prospect for the future. We feel so that we can properly do this. We can, we, there’s a common unity that gives us a common law of the precedent that has been vouchsafed to us from the past. And then it, it encourages us to be prospectively responsible and try and set precedent for the people in the future. And this of course is Brandon’s work on reason and philosophy, his new interpretation of Hegel. In that what we’re trying to do is constantly find ourselves in that stream, in that course of the common law of distributed cognition. Right? We can draw from the past and we can prospect to the future and then we are oriented. Then we are oriented. So, we’ve got the home base and it’s within the home range and then all of this is within the horizon. But with the home base and the home range, we have this sort of resonance field in which the land flows. We belong to it. And then on top of it, we have this ability to orient and to co-orient and to form community and access not only the community here and now, but the community of the past and the community of future. And I take it that Christians represent that with, you know, the community of the saints and things like that. Or at least some branch of Christians. I have to be honest, sometimes I can’t keep all of you straight. And I say that affectionately. So, what happens with this orientation is, remember the first thing, space became places linked by paths. Now, the paths and the places are transformed into maps. Cognitive maps. And a map is a powerful thing. And then what Descartes did, by the way, is he figured out how to take our mapping ability and our orienting ability and turn it into a graph. Because that’s all it is. It’s a mapping from an origin point. That’s why it’s called the origin point, by the way. On a Cartesian graph. See, what a map does is it reduces your cognitive load. You don’t have to remember all the idiosyncratic paths and pathways. You don’t have to, by the way, in the dark times, you didn’t have Siri, we would go to the glove box. And we would retrieve the parchment. We called them maps. And we would open the map. And I had never trod this path or been in that place. But I could find my way. I didn’t have to. See, once you have a map, you don’t have to hold all the paths and places. Imagine if your environment was the way you treat your house. You had to memorize it. So your range gets limited when you don’t have cognitive maps. When you have cognitive maps, you can go to all kinds of places you haven’t been before. With confidence. They encourage you to interpolate, extrapolate, to go into the unknown with a kind of confidence. It charges that space. Sorry, that’s not even right. It charges that relationship between the home base, the home range, and the horizon. It charges it. It becomes a resonance field. It’s resonant with possibilities for you. Because you won’t be overwhelmed because you have the map. So now you see the belonging and the co-orienting are actually, they’re not being left behind. They’re mutually nested within each other, growing each other. Now we move to the third, which is the hearth and hospital. Now I need you to hear something. The word hospital. Hear it the way it originally was meant. In the word hospitality. So sometime after we started home basing, our ancestors get fire. And they start to reliably use it. And there’s a lot of dispute about how ancient that is. But it’s, reliably we’ve got evidence for 500,000 years. There’s some older sites maybe we don’t know. And we don’t know, like if, we don’t quite know if the home basing is first and the fire comes along, or the fire is going to be a little bit different, and the fire comes along, or the fire and the home basing come together. We don’t know. I’m just giving you, so I’m talking more about stages than perhaps the actual historical sequence. What happens around the hearth in the hospital? Healing. We start to, really start to heal each other when we’re sick. When we’re wounded. And that again seems as the natural thing to do for you. It’s not. For most organisms. Of course, we have now the nursery. And think about how the nursery and the healing overlap. We talk about nurses. They’re not raising children. They’re healing the sick. We see a relationship between those. We’re rearing the child. Now what’s happening when you have the home base and the hearth is you’ve got the extension of agapic love. From the mother and the child to the extended family. That is a huge, huge advantage. That’s a huge advantage. This is why for many people, people who don’t have houses like the indigenous people in Australia, they don’t have houses. They have kinship systems. That’s how they feel at home. And they’re really, like, it’s hard to figure out. It’s so complex, even convoluted and sophisticated the way the kinship systems work. And the way you name people so that, like, you’re my mother-in-law. What? Well, because it’s bizarre. I’m struggling to understand it from the outside but all I know is it’s impressive. Of course, food sharing. We still do that. We just did it. Until we had phones in the dark time, eating up, you’d go to a restaurant and you ate by yourself, it was awful. Or that’s, so there’s the looker, or there’s the ignorer. Now what we do is we pretend that we’re important and we’re obviously involved with something like my phone. The president’s talking to me. Right? And of course, as I said, there’s social bonding. But think about what’s also going on in the hearth. There’s the fire. And what I want, what I said to really pick up on what Jonathan was saying, think about what fire is. Fire shines and it withdraws at the same time. You can follow it but you can’t grab it. It’s about, so you’re in this place where all these transformations are happening. The kitchen is a transformation, the food, the child rearing, the healing, all this, and then you’ve got this incarnation of transformation, elusively present there. And Matt Rossano has talked about that being around campfires probably affected in the niche construction manner, the evolution of our intelligence. Because fire is hypnotic. It’s amazing. Human beings, you light a fire and they’re like, hmm. Right? And part of the problem with the video world is it generates the campfire effect but there’s no campfire. Pause on that. See, when I’m in a campfire, your face is lit and only your face and I don’t see the rest of you, like a video screen, which is lit and I don’t see the rest of you. You’re very close. You’re closer than you normally are with somebody at a campfire. Same with the video screen. But we don’t have a common origin. We don’t have the fire. We don’t have the fire reminding us of the reality of how being shines forth, but always also withdraws. It’s no wonder that Heraclitus, who brought the notion of the logos into philosophical and then ultimately religious use, chose the fire as the symbol of the logos. And we talk about conversations that catch fire. Because fire has this ability to catch and organize and grow. It shines and it withdraws. It appears and it disappears. And this is reality. And what we can do with the fire, because it’s hypnotic, is we can get into symbolic resonance with it. It can make us aware of the transformation that’s happening in us. And then we can see more in the fire than just its superficial presence. We start to see more deeply into it. And it starts to disclose something more deeply into us. And we symbolically resonance. And we start to get ontological depth perception happening. And then we also start doing that with each other around the campfire. I open myself up so you can see into me. And you open yourself up so you can see into me. And we do this. And we reciprocally open. And we get ontological depth perception. So what’s happening is we start to do things that the kids are already doing around the hearth. Symbolically resonant serious play. Called ritual. Imaginally augmented perception and conception. The serious play designed not for any goal, but for transformation itself. And we, there’s a process there. We don’t, like rituals have a rationality to them. It’s not the rationality of propositions. A ritual is rational, ratio, properly proportioned if it transfers broadly and deeply outside of the context in which the ritual is practiced. The point isn’t in the ritual. It is, but it isn’t. What I mean is, if the ritual just stays in the ritual, Kierkegaard has this wonderful parable about this. There’s a bunch of geese. They walk into a church and they all sing about flying. And then they walk out. And he said that’s a lot of Christianity today. And he’s a Christian. Fire walking. Fire. Fire walking is a ritual around the world. Why? It seems so bizarre and strange. What’s going on? Well here’s what’s going on. When I’m walking on coals, they’re actually slow conductors of heat. So if I walk fast enough, I won’t get burned. But if I walk too fast, I’ll kick up the coals and I’ll get burned. So I have to get my timing just right. So I have all of this mindfulness about I get right. I’m very mindful of a situation so I get the timing just right. Now do you think that ability transfers broadly and deeply in your life? You better believe it. So fire walking. Fire. We get that in the hearth. So what’s happening here? Well at that origin point that’s been horizontal, the map, we now get the vertical intersecting it. We discover spaces below and spaces above and how to navigate those spaces and return to the origin point. And this is ancient. We’ve got clear evidence of at least 15,000 years ago of shamans and the three tiered cosmos. There’s the underworld, this world, and the overworld. Ontological depth perception. Navigating it. We’re taking all of these other skills from the home range and the home base and we’re taking them up into the ritualization and the transformation around the hearth and the hospital and we’re getting the vertical dimension and where the vertical dimension intersects the origin point you have the axis mundi. And as Jonathan is frequently pointing out to you, that’s what the cross and the tree represent. If I understand him correctly. And you nod when those symbols come out. But try to be abstract for a moment and step outside of it. It’s like me coming up to you and saying it’s all about the squirrel and the wash basin. What? But if I say it’s all about this axis mundi, this tree that grows to the depths and to the heights. And of course trees are also the source of wood which provides fire. Okay. So, all of this is being lost. You might have heard me talk about this. We’re all experiencing domicide. So, Kelly and Alan who does work on belonging, belonging is declining massively and quickly with horrible consequences. Undeniable empirical evidence. One sure measure, how many close friends do you have reliably going down? No matter how connected we are, how many close friends do you have reliably going down? How much of your days are lonely, reliably going up? Just one measure. There’s many other measures. Just to give you a clear example of that. You know, and I’ve said this before, this is like something out of Orwell. The United Kingdom has set up a ministry of loneliness. Because they figured out that if they don’t fix this problem, they’re in a lot of trouble. Of course, I think the United States will do such a thing. And Canada isn’t doing anything right now. All that religio, meaning in life, belongingness, worldview attunement, that’s all going away. The loss of our awareness and appreciation of the non-propositional knowing so that we can rightly and deeply participate in ritual. Notice how the word ritual, post-Freud, has become the way of talking about an obsessive pathology. That’s how far we’ve come. Of course, as Brian Walsh said, home is where we take the symbols that are like right there, pregnant, like the path, that’s right there. That’s how I think about intentionality. The symbol is right there, ready to be birthed. And then we have to set it into a ritual community. And that is what we do to make a home. A home is a machine in which symbol and ritual come together. And if you don’t think that’s what a home is, skip Christmas next time. And see how everybody reacts around it. No, we’re just not going to do Christmas this year. We’re not going to decorate, we’re not going to do this. Skip it. People will hate you in a way you’ve never been hated before. We’ve lost co-orientation, origin point, the vertical, we’ve been reduced to the horizontal, we’ve lost the axis mundi. But as I’ve tried to show, all of those things are part of who and what we are. So as they have come into question, we have come into question. We are in question in a way, and Heidegger is the prophet of this, he says we are the beings whose being is in question. And the fact that we lack an ability to wander in that fashion is precisely what he says is one of the origins of nihilism for us. So when we wonder, we call ourself and the world into question, but we also wander. Wandering is when we’re disoriented and we don’t know where to go. So we’re wandering and wandering as we’re in question, as we’re seeking orientation, as we’re trying to find the origin that will put us into right relationship to the horizon, and that is exactly what a quest is. The word quest and question are related for a deep reason. In a quest, you are what’s in question. You’re wondering as you’re wandering. There is no answer to the question without the transformation that is brought about by undergoing the quest. We need a reciprocal reconstruction of our world view. We need to bring back the reinventio of co-orientation. We need the reinventio of symbolic resonance and ritual. We need to do this in a coordinated fashion. We started not on time. How much time do I have left? Pardon me? Nine minutes. That’s perfect. Nine’s good. I’m happy. Okay. So, part of what has to do, and I really had this in my notes before Jonathan gave his talk, part of it has to do with a relationship. We have to get back to this fundamental orientation point in our meta-optimal gripping. We have to get all the way back there because that’s how deep the problem is. Attempting to solve the problem anywhere that’s more shallow than that won’t give us the transformation of the ontological depth perception that we need. We have to get back to that orientation, which we’re so badly lacking. The problem is, when you lack orientation, you don’t know which way to go to get it. You can see the 20th, well, you can see actually all the centuries since the Enlightenment, there’s us thrashing around trying to, first of all, what we’ll do is we’ll get an absolute foundation in science and math and that will be our origin, and that fell apart. What we’ll do is we’ll actually, we’ll take into our hands technology and we’ll build the utopia. Oh, no. In fact, and I don’t want to talk about this too much, well, if you want to talk about it, I’ll talk about it, I don’t want to talk about it right now. But the advent of AGI, which is now on the horizon, and if you hear one thing I say to you, it’s don’t pretend that’s not the case. Don’t pretend that’s not the case. We need the very best from all of us right now. And pretending it’s not the case is not helping. It is harming. So, what do we need to do? We have to get to this ability where we can reorient because the advent of AGI has said to us the promise of the enlightenment, not the promise of enlightenment, that’s a different thing. The promise of the enlightenment. The Promethean promise. We have discovered that history is not about God or being or the true or the good or the beautiful. History is about us. We are the authors of history. We are the telos. We are the point of history. The point of history is to bring us to completion as free agents in the world. What’s freedom? Don’t ask that. Freedom. Freedom. And there’s a lot of good. I don’t want to live in a world before the enlightenment. But we paid this price because we started down a course of action that has got us to the I work with Jeffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto. He is the godfather of artificial intelligence. He quit his job so that he could speak freely about the serious danger we’re in right now. The enlightenment promised all of this and then we get to this place where we told, oh by the way, you weren’t what this was all about and you are no longer the authors of history. And you actually aren’t going to matter very soon. We tried that. And then we tried the vacillation between various utopias and nostalgias and we fight bloody Titanic wars over it and it’s all for bloody nothing. Jonathan spoke of a sacrifice. We need to make a profound sacrifice to get back to the point where reorientation is possible so that co-orientation is possible so that real community is possible. We have to get to a kind See, I want to talk about something but I don’t want you to hear a particular state. I want you to hear the possibility for the transformation of character that’s in this. So this goes to some of my scientific work. I was at a Buddhist monastery. Just to keep things even, I’m going to a Christian monastery after I’m here. All balanced. And it’s an Eastern Orthodox one. But I was in a Buddhist monastery and I was talking about all the relevance realizations and I got talking to them and there was this sort of creative tension and I had a bunch of insights and it was in dialogue with other people, Steve March and Zach Stein. And then I realized something that had always been sort of like what is the proper stance, orientation towards being and the grounded being? We don’t ask that question. We presuppose we have answers but we don’t have answers anymore and we got to get back to that. What is the proper stance? What are all these places that people are getting to in their mind and spirit? I don’t care which entity you posit at being in right now. And then I realized something and it helped me make sense of what I was reading in the Taotei-Chen, what I’m reading in Dojin, and actually also what I’m reading in Maximus. I hope that doesn’t offend anybody because I mean it with affection. Relevance realization is about our optimal gripping on things. We even have a meta-optimal grip. We have to get past that. We have to start, that’s what Jonathan was arguing, we have to stop grasping. Paul was doing it too about the restless resting. Relevance realization can come to the realization that it itself is irrelevant. That what is not needed anymore is what relevance realization does. Which is optimally grip. Because relevance realization is how I get into relationship to this being, to this being, to this being, to this being, to all of these beings. But when I want to be in relationship to the ground of being, I have to give up relevance realization. I have to get to a state where I give up that most fundamental human need to grasp. And it’s hard for us to think of it, think, this metaphor is the metaphor, this is the metaphor for getting it, for understanding. But I won’t understand, I can’t, right. But then you get what you really want. You get the place where you have the stance towards being, towards the ground of being, towards the no-thingness behind and within. Maximus has this great thing, right, I really love it. Where he says, God is inside of everything but not enclosed. God is beyond everything but not excluded. You can’t get that with a graspy mind. You can’t get that with a graspy mind, it doesn’t make any sense. Look, it’s inside. Oh, I don’t have it. It’s outside. Sorry, this is exciting to me. You’re all just sort of like, oh, no, no. But look, like, this is like, when I did Lexio on it, so it just sort of, blrr, trilling. It’s like, God is inside everything but not enclosed, not imprisoned. God is beyond everything but not excluded. And I kept going, how do I get there with a grasping mind? You can’t. You can’t. When you give up all your graspings, you give up the nexus center point of all the graspings, you get opened up. I think it’s a kind of deep death. Like Jonathan was talking about, with the possibility of a resurrection. Because if we have the stance to the ground of being, such that we can really live with, be along with, how it shines in and withdraws, then we have the possibility of a fundamental reorientation and a new existential stance in the world, which is badly needed right now. Because all of the Cartesian things that we’ve gloried in, well, look at how much I can calculate and look at how I can paint and I can write and that is all going to be challenged very soon. But this, this ability to enter into that apsis mundi stance towards the ground of being that liberates me from the grasping so that I am in this deep right ratio, ratio religio. That is always available to you no matter what. You long for home because we are woven with the nesting of the home range, the home base and the hearth, with the fire logos at the center, the hearth and hospital. We long for that. We long for it. But we’re in a place where we need to recognize what we’re actually seeking. We’re seeking to belong, to orient and to transcend. And the right relationship with the ground of being will give you those functions in a way that doesn’t bind you into that perpetual oscillation between trying to find it retrospectively in the past, trying to find it prospectively in the future, but finding the common law, the through line that binds them all together. Thank you very much for your time and attention. Thank you, John. We’re actually going to move quickly into our discussion. We have half an hour left before dinner. So just take two minutes, get a drink, use the washroom and we’ll get up, sit up.