https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=lE5ElWrLb5c
I’m really appreciative of you taking the time, John. I know you’re doing a lot of these conversations and I don’t know what your academic work and teaching course load looks like in the middle of a pandemic. It’s heavy. I’m teaching, I’m doing research, I’m also the director of the Cognitive Science Program. So I’m quite busy. I’m quite busy. Yeah, I can imagine. Well, I have no intention of just flattering you in the duration of our conversation together, but I have been so blown away by, as I mentioned, even in the questions that I presented in advance, the level of synthesis that you do in your work is absolutely astounding. I wish, you know, I went to seminary and divinity school and have an academic track. So though I’m in vocational ministry, my initial course was to pursue more of the academic side of theology. But anyways, in that, I look back on that experience and wish that a course like Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, if that was a course, was afforded and presented at every seminary and divinity school because of the level of synthesis. But also too, one thing I just want to express appreciation of right from the outset is your commitment to nuanced dialogue with people across a diverse spectrum of religious commitments. And I, as a kid that grew up in the evangelical culture war, and so completely exhausted by those sorts of polemics, constant polemics, I am appreciative of dialogue partners like yourself that I think are pursuing a different way. And I’m very thankful for that. Well, thank you for saying that, Paul. One of the great gifts of doing the series and then the follow-up series and the ongoing Voices with Reveki is precisely that I get to enter into these kinds of dialogues that have the potential to rise into what I call dialogos. And that’s been happening more and more. And since that is one of the central concerns of, it’s not even my work, if you don’t mind, I don’t mean to be insulting, but I consider it my vocation as well. I feel called to this and to try and revivify that whole Socratic Platonic tradition and then have it integrate, do another kind of grand synthesis with all the emerging discourse, dialogue, communicative practices that are emerging ever more frequently and ever more pervasively. So the culture is trying to respond to something. The political arena and the economic market are just oblivious, as far as I can tell, to what’s happening. But the culture, culture always will, is beginning to really generate significant responses to the meaning crisis. So I feel very grateful that things have worked out for me, almost like a Kairos, that I get to practice in a developmental learning fashion with people, dialogos, so that I can tap into huge distributed cognition and bring that to bear on this project of really trying to help facilitate the emergence of what I think is a very powerful and important response to the meaning crisis. Well, what I’d like to do to start is to even do a bit of an introduction to you for those that exclusively listen to my podcast. And though I’ve found myself mentioning you more and more over the last few months, there could be a good segment of the people that listen to my podcast are unfamiliar with your work, unfamiliar with the terminology, though I don’t want that to restrict the use of your language in any way, shape or form. Maybe just to say that with some of the inside baseball lingo, that perhaps there could be explanations afforded as much as possible without, you know, there’s no way of condensing all of your work into our conversation today. But what I’d like to perhaps start with is even just a little autobiographical background. Anybody that I see hosting the sorts of conversations that you’re hosting, doing the sort of work that you’re doing. And again, my introduction to it was via Paul VanderKlay, you know, a shared friend. Good friend of mine, yeah. Yeah. And I think for years, even when I was teaching in the classroom, the meaning crisis, which is a term I inadvertently stole from you. I didn’t know that you had coined it. I’d actually heard Paul say it in passing and I was like, oh, you know, I’ve always just in the past framed it as perhaps the path to nihilism, you know, the historical, theological, the philosophical framing of that journey, very much kind of in the Nietzschean sort of framework. So I apologize for inadvertently stealing that. I will give you all the royalties that have come in, which thus far are zero. I’m really curious when I see somebody that has in, you know, to borrow some of the language of Charles Taylor, has maybe broken through the general sense of malaise that so many in our secular age feel. And they are willing to confront, I’m a big Kierkegaard fan, they’re willing to confront the absurd with knowing all the risks that sort of journey entails on our mind, our heart, even to reject the sort of easy, tribalistic allegiances. When I see that in somebody, I go, what in the world in their past put them on this sort of trajectory? So I’m curious for you, John, even just personally, what have been some of the more formative moments or maybe mentors in your life that have shaped you to pursue questions of meaning with so much of your energy and vigor? So I was in grad school, a good friend, he was in psychology and I was in cognitive science, but I was doing a lot of psych courses. And he said, people often study what they feel most lacking in their lives. And so asking the autobiographical question, I think is completely pertinent and relevant. I have normally been a little bit reticent about talking about this because your question is honestly asked, and I’ll try to answer it honestly, but I want to sort of state a have a bit of reserve around it because I don’t want… This medium can get people to focus too much on the person. I’m happy to do what you requested as long as people don’t sort of get latched onto that as the key or the center thing. Because that is… Cult of celebrity are a problem in our culture right now, and we’re sort of seeing that in a major way. And so we need… I just want to state that. So please, your question, I get its relevance and I get how it’s pertinent, but I just want to put that sort of framing around it. So, yeah, why this willingness to confront the absurd, why this hunger for meaning in life? So let’s talk just one sort of nuance before I answer the question to make clear what the object of the question is. When I talk about meaning, I’m not talking about like semantic meaning, like the meaning of a proposition. We use that as a metaphor for something else we’re trying to express, which in the literature is called meaning in life, which is not semantic meaning. And although I’m interested as a cognitive scientist in semantic meaning and how we do it, but that’s not what people are suffering a lack of. We’re not suffering a lack of semantic meaning. That’s all over the place. That’s not what people are starving for. They’re starving for what’s called meaning in life. This sense of connectedness to yourself, to others, and the world that gives you a sense of a fullness of being and a contact with what’s sort of most real to your best appraisal and understanding and appreciation. And I think that’s what people are talking about when they talk about it, because they’ll often use words like emptiness, which means the fullness is lacking, or it doesn’t feel real or superficial or femoral. So that’s what I’m talking about. So the place to look for that is to look for the kinds of aspects, I suppose, in a person’s upbringing, I guess, and I’m the example right now, that might make that more apparent. I think the hunger for meaning in life is universal. The degree to which people become reflectively aware of it is probably significantly due to their particular upbringing and development. And so I was brought up in a quite stringent, fundamentalist Christianity, not just my family, but my extended family. And the thing about, I sometimes use this analogy, the first religion or meaning system, again, in the way I meant meaning in life system that you encounter is like your mother tongue. You learn that differently than you learn all other languages. You use your mother tongue to learn all the other languages. The mother tongue has a primordiality to you. And even if you, let’s say I was brought up in English, and once I get hit 16 or something, I never speak English again, it doesn’t matter. English has deeply informed me. It’s the same way. So that’s a world, I have to be really careful here. So I am going to speak for how I experienced this and how I saw other people in my family and my extended family experiencing this and how I see it in some people in the popular media. I’m not claiming that all people in this, right? I understand. Yeah. Okay. You don’t have to worry about, similar to Paul, the other Paul, you don’t have to worry about offending. And the people that listen to this podcast are not in a mode of being concerned with relevant and important questions that cause them to reflect on their own faith or ultimate narrative that they follow. So feel free to speak from your experiences. Thank you. I also want to be careful not to overgeneralize. Yeah, yeah. I appreciate that. So that world is, I mean, and of course I didn’t realize that at the time because that’s the nature of trauma. I didn’t realize how traumatizing that was. And it was only literally more than a decade after leaving it that I started to get a sense of how much that had traumatized me. Now the thing about it is it’s a world filled with guilt and fear. It was for me at least, a world filled with guilt and fear. Some very traumatic experiences. They might not sound traumatic on telling, but if you’re in that world and it’s deeply magnetically powerful, I remember going home from school one day, I was about 10. And usually there was always somebody in my house. It was a small house. I had three sisters, my mom and my dad, right? And there was nobody there. It was a shock to me. And I was absolutely convinced that the rapture had occurred and I’d be left behind. And the minions of the Antichrist were going to be knocking on the door. I don’t mean to laugh, but I can relate. And that was a genuinely terrifying experience. I had another experience, just to epitomize this, where I read the Bible very devotedly and I appreciate that. There’s lots of things from this background that I deeply appreciate. Like I said, I appreciate being exposed to religion, if that’s the right, like the way you’re exposed to your mother tongue, right? And I appreciate that. I read the Bible very diligently for, like I read it seven times. I was reading it on a daily basis and studying it and reflecting on it. And although I was studying in a particular framework that I rejected, that content is still there and it resonates with me. The Bible is a wonderful and terrible book. But I had been reading a lot and I read the passage, I forget where it is, in one of Paul’s epistles, I believe, and he talks about the unforgivable sin, sort of blaspheming the Holy Spirit. And I didn’t know what this was or what it meant. And I was convinced, how do I know if I’ve done it? Because once I’ve done it, I’m damned for all of eternity. And then it was like, it was like almost like, you know, obsessive compulsive disorder. Like the thought was just eating away at me. And my mother could tell I was deeply distressed. She took me to see the pastor of the church and he gave me an absolutely unhelpful answer. You just know, faith will guide you. And it’s like, it didn’t help me at all. And that also just really, and these things were both unresolved. Like, and these are not isolated instances. I’m bringing them just up as exemplars of how sort of punishing on me this was. And then, of course, as I started to get into puberty, the third thing was the punishing, punishing attitude towards sexuality and my sexuality. Now, some of that had to do also with my mother’s own particular hang ups around sexuality and stuff like that. She could reinforce that and magnify that with this fundamentalist framework. And all of that was just sort of ripping me apart. Interestingly, and I can say this with all honesty, and I think you could see it even in my work today. The degree to which I internalized and appreciated Jesus of Nazareth was really not touched by this. All of this. There was something different there for me. And that’s, I mean, Paul, you know, he commented, like when I gave the lecture on Agape, like, many people was, but he’s not a Christian. No, I’m not. But like, so that was kind of a bifurcation for me in an important way. So in midst of puberty, I was reading science fiction. I was a fan. You can tell I was already attracted, right, to mythos outside of the Christian framework. And I read a book by one of the premier figures of what’s called New Wave science fiction, Rogers Alasni. And I’ve done a couple of videos, one with Damien Walters and one with Rafe Kelly on speculative and science fiction and the role it’s taking in our culture, the unrecognized role. But it’s not that important. Really, look around. Really look around. Right. And so that book exposed me to Hindu mythology and Buddhist philosophy. And it was like, I couldn’t like, and at the same time, I read a book by a Canadian author. He’s still pretty internationally famous by Roberts and Davies called Fifth Business, would introduce me to Jung. Same time. Boom. Right. And also, very shortly thereafter, I read Siddhartha by Herman Assa. These three books just… And I realized there was other myth in the positive sense of the word. There was other myth and there was other philosophy. And people were in that going through profound transformation and profound contact with reality and transformative states of consciousness. And it just blew me open in a powerful way. So then I found myself in a very liminal place. And see, I think that’s part of why I have this hunger to understand. Because in the lim… Like, like, Zach Stein has written a wonderful book on education in a time between two worlds. Right. A lot of people are talking about the fact that we feel like we’re in a liminal. We’re leaving a worldview that gave us meaning in life and we don’t yet have one that’s giving a meaning in life. And so I experienced sort of a personal version of that. A profound liminal period where I was… I had left Christianity, but I wasn’t becoming a Hindu or a Buddhist or even a Jungian. But I was just starting to read voraciously. And then, you know, that was two or three years. And then I went into university, because, of course, I was very now interested in the life of the mind. And I happened… I wasn’t intending to go into philosophy, but I took an introduction to philosophy course. And the very first thing we read was Plato’s Republic. And I met Socrates. And Socrates touched something in me that was beside, if you’ll allow me, a spatial metaphor, where Jesus of Nazareth was still sitting in me. Jesus of Nazareth… So I’ll call… I will call to him and no disrespect, man. I’ll call him Jesus of Nazareth as distinct from Jesus Christ, because that’s the Jesus of Christianity. There was this, right? There was this internalized sage figure, but he was sort of dormant because he didn’t have a venue by which I could… I’ll speak metaphorically, but which I could hear his voice, right? Socrates went deep and Socrates continues to be deep. I mean, I aspire to be as much as I can like Socrates. My next series, my next big series, sort of equivalent in scope to awakening from the meeting crisis is going to be called After Socrates, the Pursuit of Virtue. About all of… Right. And this is where, of course, the current interest in dialectic and dialogos was born. And in the philosophical vision, he’s not… The kind of philosophy that Socrates was on about isn’t academic philosophy. Academic philosophy is fine. I’ll talk about it in a sec. But there was what Perodot called philosophy as a way of life, this deeply… This way of living that is deeply transformative. So you more and more love wisdom and that… And not in a pretentious sense, but in the sense of you are engaged in the project of trying to get that. And that’s why I was introduced to it in Plato’s Republic, that inner fullness, that outer connectedness to reality, and then being in a deep mutual resonance with each other. I talk about this later as reciprocal opening, anagoga, things like that. And that just… So I found like, oh, this is where all this stuff can come together. Right. And I started to feel like I was moving out of the liminal. And it was just… And then I hit another huge disappointment because after you’re in your first year of philosophy, the topic of wisdom falls off the table. You’ll never hear it even… Philosophia, right? You won’t ever hear it mentioned again in an academic philosophy course. You will nowadays because the topic of wisdom has come back, but not when I was… And it was like, where did that go? Where did that go? So I had a taste, and it was almost tantalizing, of a path that could start to help give me the vocabulary to articulate this hunger that I was feeling. And a path to cultivate it. But it wasn’t very well developed. So I decided I was living in a place and down the street, there was a place that Tai Chi, Vipassana meditation, Metta contemplation. And I decided I’m going to… I’d read these Eastern traditions. I’d been reading them in literature. Right. So I started doing… I started taking up an ecology of practices. That’s where I got that idea from. They were teaching in an integrated fashion Tai Chi, Chuan, Vipassana and Metta. And it was like, oh, this, this, really. And so I had sort of these three tracks. There was this latent relationship to Jesus of Nazareth. There was this profound relationship to Socrates, and I was trying to find a way to develop that. And then I had this ecology of practices, which was starting to deeply transform me in ways that I wasn’t even aware of. And so what happened is, and I kept experimenting sort of with Christianity. I went back into more and more liberal forms of Christianity. And for a while I would get… But then I started to realize that what was attracting me in Christianity was the Neoplatonism that I found in it. And so I started to get attracted to Neoplatonism as I get… And I started to see some connections between the Neoplatonic tradition, the Socratic tradition and the Buddhist tradition. And this was starting to form. Now, about that time I had done my MA in philosophy and I was just so disillusioned, I left university for a year. So again, I was in another luminal period. I keep going through a lot of these. And yeah, that was an odd year for me. I was really, again, I was trying to on my own, and this is where my criticism of being an autodidact comes from. I was trying on my own to somehow fit these all together. And I was having not that much success. The work of Paul Tillich, I encountered that and that started to be helpful to me in many ways. But then about that time, I discovered there was this new technology called Neoplatonism. And then about that time, I discovered there was this new discipline, cognitive science. And so I went into it and I did like a specialist degree in cognitive science. I think that’s in America, that would be like an honors degree. And because I’d already done philosophy, I didn’t have to take any philosophy courses. So I ended up doing more psychology courses than you would for a psychology degree while getting my cog sci degree. So I started teaching psych courses while I was a graduate student in cog sci, and it started to be very successful. And at that time, cognitive, as I’m getting into that cognitive science was starting to talk about wisdom and psychology was starting to talk about wisdom. Sternberg publishes the first anthology in 1990 and that whole topic, and I start teaching a course on it. And this all opens up and mindful, I start being able to teach about mindful and all. And I see cognitive science moving towards the work of a colleague and friend of mine at U of T, Evan Thompson, the four E cognitive science notions of being embodied. We can talk about that later, embedded and active. And all of this and the Buddhism and the Taoism, it’s all like they were all coming together. And then the Neoplatonism, right. And then the Neoplatonic interpretation of Socrates. And then the Socratic literature just opened up also. And then there was this amazing Kairos. So I went back and got my PhD in cognitive science. I had to do it in the philosophy department, but I was in it was in cognitive science. And I started teaching psychology courses and cognitive science courses. And Evan Thompson came to me and he said, they want me to teach this course Buddhism and cognitive science, but I can’t do it. Could you do it? And I started teaching that course in the first year I was starting to play. And the course made all of this go like this. All this stuff, all these threads that were coming together, they just coalesced. And the idea of, you know, meaning and meaning making and meaning in life and a cognitive scientific understanding of the function of religious cognition and behavior. And most importantly, the meaning crisis. And as I started to share with my students, how I had to my mind, awoken from the meet, they were like more, more, more. And so that started to, and then the course evolved into awakening from the meaning crisis. That’s, that’s how I got there. I hope that was helpful. It was incredibly helpful. And I want to, if I can, I want to take a pastoral moment for listeners right now to help them sort through maybe something that they might be experiencing that you’re probably well familiar with, given your background, John. The reason why I ask a question like this of John is not to do this game that we can be often programmed to interact with others and the world and their story. As many of us who have grown up in a particular, often evangelical tradition where it’s like we need to figure out where someone is situated and where their tribe is in order for us to ascertain whether or not we’re going to continue. To listen to them or not. And that is not my intention with the question. And I would want to call those of you listening right now who experienced that and you’re hearing things about John’s story and you’re hearing these points in which you go, I understand. And I maybe even experienced that, but are maybe frustrated with, and I don’t think this is the case for many of you, but if you’re experiencing it right now, a sense of well, why, why continue to have a conversation with somebody who doesn’t affirm these basic sets of propositions like I do. And I just want to, if you don’t mind for a second, John, just to pastorally address that to the listeners that will eventually listen to this and say, don’t allow that feeling to shut you down from listening to what I think are incredible insights that John affords. And I want you to be able to hear in someone’s story, a story that I deeply resonate with because on many of these same points, I have these same experiences. I know that exact passage and it’s actually what makes it even more challenging is in the Gospels. It’s Jesus’s words about the unforgivable sin and wrestling with that stuff and sitting in purity lectures about sexual purity and these things that felt they broke down at a certain point. And we’re going to talk about this together in a little bit. In our search for coherence, which is fundamental in our quest for meaning, I experienced in many of the same ways that John has a lack of coherence in some of the narrative that was presented to me. And it’s not that John and I had the same exact experiences, but there’s some overlapping trends. And I know some of you listening, many of you listening have had many of those same moments of going, this doesn’t seem coherent. And because John right now is not like, hey, I’m doubling down on my Christian faith. I just want to say there is much to be afforded in the wisdom of John’s pursuits. And I think for those of you like me who continue to remain within a Christian framework, I would tell you this. That the more you get into church history and you study people like Justin Martyr, for example, Justin Martyr had no problem. Justin Martyr had this concept called the seeds of the logos, right? Where for Justin Martyr, he was fine with this notion of, and I’m not saying John believes this or that you believe this, John, but I’m saying I have no problem consuming the wisdom that John brings to bear from his studies. Please do. Certainly, there’s points, I know there would be points of disagreement, and we come from different conventional locations. But for a guy like Justin Martyr, the Christ was… Somebody knocking at my door. Oh, yeah. This is horrible. Please hold your thought for one second. Yeah, okay, I will. I apologize for that interruption. No, no problem at all. So continue please with Justin Martyr. Yeah, Justin Martyr had this concept that he called the seeds of the logos, where for Justin Martyr, he saw even in the work of the Greek philosophers like Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, the activity in presence of the revelation of Christ as the logos. And he even said it was what God had done in Israel in the law was similar to the activity that God had done in Socrates and Plato and Aristotle. I’m not asking you to agree with that statement, John, but I’m presenting it to listeners of this podcast to go. So there’s a framework that I believe is a deep part of the historic Christian tradition, which affirms the unity of truth, goodness and beauty, and affirms the honest pursuit of it, and also affirms that we have nothing to fear in pursuing truth, goodness and beauty. Very platonic thing to say. It is, and it is like to be able to separate that and say that’s a Christian affirmation and to separate it from neo-Platonism is impossible. Yeah, I agree. I agree. And on the other side, I’m not asking anybody to do it the other way. Right, I appreciate that. I mean, I think one of the things, maybe a little bit more to assure your listeners where I’m coming from. I think if they were to see some of the discussions I’ve had with many Christians, Paul Van der Kley, JP Marceau, Mary Cohen, Jonathan Pageot, they will see my attitude towards anybody who’s willing to enter into discussions about meaning in life in good faith. I will reciprocate in kind and with kindness and respect and affection. And all of these people have consistently said that they come out of these dialogues, even the logos, and there’s the logos. They come out of this and they feel that they have gained from, they got to a place that they couldn’t get to, and I did too. So as long as people understand that I’m not here, I’m not doing some kind of cryptic sub-diffuge. That’s not my intent. I’m going to now say things with as much honesty and integrity. If people can take what I’m doing and they can use it to really revivify the cultivation of wisdom and meaning in life, in their life, within their religious framework, great. Honestly, great. That would make me happy. My concern is that, as to my best judgment, that’s not a path available to me. And there are many people, the nones, the N-O-N-E-S, which is the fastest growing group in at least North America and Europe. That doesn’t seem to be a viable option for them right now. I’m not making any foreclosures about what the future might bring. I have enough respect for some of the points that Jonathan and Paul make to say, right, but what is this right now? And so I’m concerned if I can help people who want to feel at home in a religious faith to deepen, great. But I also want to be able to speak in a way that help all those people where that just in all honesty does not seem like a viable option for them right now. And so that’s where I am. And that’s where I’m coming from. And I so sincerely appreciate that. And I can tell people that there’s been fewer things that I have consumed in the past year or so that has produced more insights and actually has deepened, even though this might not have been your particular intention, has actually deepened my appreciation for the Christian story. And so I commend that to people. And this is the reason why I’m bringing you on for this conversation, Jon, is to bring those things to bear. As part of that Christian framework, we confess the imminence of God and the transcendence of God. And as part of being on the way of Jesus, we confess that we are both, we are aware of Christ’s work imminently in the world, but we also have to confess the existence of transcendence. And so there’s always a, there’s something beyond us and beyond where we are at. And repentance, metanoia, presupposes that there is truth that is still beyond where we can see. I mean, that’s a deep part of the Eastern tradition with theosis. We can even frame that in more Protestant language of sanctification, the renewing of the mind. And so if we close ourselves down to that entirely and say, where I’m at right now, I’m going to remain, my view of the world, the narrative that gives me a sense of meaning in this moment, if I close myself down to it, I’ve also closed myself down to repentance and metanoia. That’s very well said, Paul. I would like to add to that, see if you agree with that. Yeah. As you’ve said, I resist tribalism as a response to the meaning crisis. Part of that’s because of my background and part of it is I’m a cognitive scientist, so I work in terms of synoptic integration across differences of language and ontology and things like that. Sorry, there’s doing some repair here. And so there’s a potential, I want to speak very carefully and respectfully here, there’s a potential for people who are adherents. And notice that word, adherents, stuck to, right? There’s a potential dark side to that, which is to project a stance of tribalism, which will only encourage a counteractive tribalism. And I think our culture is suffering from too much tribalism, not an insufficiency right now. And so, again, trying to get people to be able to, and I don’t mean just in sort of I’m a Canadian, the Canadian sense of tolerance, but to deeply respect and understand and even come to appreciate what somebody else, what some other is saying to you. That’s one of the functions of dialogus. And that’s, again, I think really importantly needed. Now, again, I have had many good faith discussions with people who have I’ve experienced that in them and they’ve experienced that in me. And that they didn’t feel that that ultimately undermined their commitment to Christianity or to Islam or to Buddhism. Right. And so, again, this is why this is a very comprehensively important thing for me. I’m kind of glad we’re spending a lot of time on this issue of the stance we’re taking because there’s lots of depth to this stance, because there’s a lot about responding. That’s why I even use the word awakening. I’m hearkening to awakening. That’s what the Buddha means, the awakened one. But I’m hearkening to, you know, metanoia, right? Awakening. Right. It’s not primarily about getting a new theory or a new set of beliefs or even adopting a bunch of rules. That you’re going to live by. It’s much more deeply about, like I said, your fundamental stance, your fundamental orientation. And so the stance from within which we are talking, and this is something you see in Plato’s dialogues. It’s why he wrote dialogues and didn’t just list arguments. The stance from within which you are engaging in the dialogus is as much a part of the dialogus as any of the spoken content. Definitely. Getting very, very clear about this and getting people to think about what is your stance. And not just don’t tell, sorry, I’m getting a little bit strident here. Don’t just tell me what you believe. That’s not what I’m asking when I ask you what your stance is. I’m talking about what we’re trying. And our language isn’t very good for it, but we’re trying to articulate what this means, because that’s the level that hopefully we’ll get into that, that sub propositional level where most of the meaning in life is actually being made. And if I could refer to a theological concept, right? There’s this deeply profound idea in the biblical literature in particular in Paul’s writings that if I speak with the tongue of men and angels, but have not love, it profits me nothing. Right. A resounding glass or a clanging symbol. And what is the nature of that sort of love? For the Christian, it’s the, and I’m not saying this is exclusive to the Christian narrative. There are other narratives that aim in this direction as well. But for the Christian, that’s an other centeredness. Right? Yes. And so, I can, and we’ll get to some of this terminology from your work in a little bit, but I can perhaps state certain propositions, propositional claims that might have a degree of adherence with reality as it is. But do that in a way in which it is not other centered love. It’s not seeking the benefit of the other. And in that way, I’m not acting in accordance with what I would believe is the fundamental goal, one of the fundamental goals that humanity is called to as part of their vocation as human beings. And that’s one of my favorite passages. Paul’s great hymn to Agape, and how he prefaces it by saying, and now I will show you the most excellent way. He doesn’t say, and now I will show you the most excellent beliefs. Now I will show you the most excellent theory. Now I will show you the most excellent, he doesn’t do any of that. He says, I’ll show you a way. And then he ends it with another metaphor. He says, you know, when I was a child, I spoke as a child, I thought as a child. And so he’s talking about this, when I talk about stance, I’m talking about how as an app, this is what Paul is saying. This is what at least I hear him saying. I have this stance towards reality and myself and others as an adult that I didn’t have as a child. And I’m going to, and so as a child is to the adult, the adult is to the sage. Right. And so I’m supposed to be going through that kind of ongoing transformation. Again, I don’t want to push on any doctrinal ideas, but the idea of maturity is a virtue. You know that he’s invoking, right. And it is incorrect to think of virtue as a goal. John Keeks makes a distinction between a goal and ideal. A goal is a state that you get to that brings you to completion. So you can say, I have achieved X. You can say it is finished. I had a goal to get a BA. I did. It’s done. I have a BA. Right. It is wrong to say I’m complete in my journey of maturity. I’m complete in my journey of wisdom. And that would not respect it as an excellent way, which is I think what Paul is pointing to. And so for me, that way of our fundamental stance and orientation that’s in perpetual, fundamental metanoia and transformation, that’s what we have to find. That’s not even the right word. I’ll use a word I’d like better. We have to realize in both senses of the word, become aware of and make real. We have to realize that if we’re going to awaken from the meeting crisis. So I actually, like I said, I deeply appreciate both in the sense of gratitude and understanding what we’re trying to put our finger on here now. And I’m hoping it’s enough of a common ground also with many of your readers that they can appreciate what I’m trying to get people to realize in their lives. Yeah, I think that’s the case. And I appreciate the amount of time we are taking on an initial conversation, though we’ve only had email exchanges to do that in hopes that, if you saw this as beneficial, that we could have ongoing dialogues in the future. I’m already liking how this is going and liking where you’re coming from. I’m not claiming expertise, but I’ve been doing this a lot so I can get a sense of where theologos is probably going to emerge. So I’ll commit right now to talking with you again. That’s great. I’m there with you. So I think that sort of foundation, the relational connection and the building of trust is important in the beginning of a dialogue, right? So I’d really love to, one of my aims and goals is to maybe help people have a better sense from your work as a behavioral scientist, but someone who is also very adept in synthesizing behavioral science with the other meaning-making endeavors, to touch on some of these subjects and terms and ideas in your work to help them see points of connection in their own quest for meaning and part of my own ongoing quest for meaning. I’d love to start with maybe even something that came up as part of your autobiographical journey there and something that I can relate to. And I think probably most people who listen to this podcast can relate to. Last year, I did a lecture on the Book of Ecclesiastes, which is part of the corpus of wisdom literature in the Old Testament. And while doing some of my due diligence to prepare for that lecture, I came across a paper from behavioral scientists, Frank Martella and Michael Steger. Oh, important paper, very important paper. Yeah. And those that have listened to this podcast for a while are familiar because I constantly refer to this framework. They argue that meaning, our sense of meaning, right? The sense of meaning that you’re referring to and I’m referring to is undergirded by these three pillars. Coherence. So we search for coherence. Is there a repeatable, discernible pattern in reality? Purpose. So is there an overarching goal, not individual purpose, but an overarching goal that the coherence maybe points to? Like a goal for life, an aim, a proper telos for it? And then significance. Significance would be what sort of role do I individually play in life’s overarching purpose? And so in Ecclesiastes, Ecclesiastes is situated in this book of wisdom literature. You have a book like Proverbs, which much of Proverbs says there’s coherence, there’s a coherent pattern. If you do A, you will get this result. And that’s very much in keeping with an ancient Near Eastern perspective. We even see maybe similar ideas in the Hindu tradition, in karma. There’s a reaping and sowing. If you do this, and so that’s maybe the normative pattern, right? That there is wisdom to be found in seeing these patterns of coherence. But then when you see, you take a look at books like Job and Ecclesiastes, they’re like the asterisk that says, hang on, we may see these repeating patterns, but that is not completely descriptive of all of our experience of reality. So, you know, guys like John Walton, Trimper Longman, the third biblical scholars call it the retribution principle. So much of the ancient Near Eastern world operated under this retribution principle. You have this interaction with the gods. If you do things for the gods, you will get something returned to you in kind. And it’s a way of maybe describing all of reality. And here you have in the teacher of Ecclesiastes, him go hang on, pump the brakes. I’ve searched high and low. I’ve experienced everything, you know, metaphorically, someone could experience in life. And that doesn’t explain all of it. In fact, there’s a degree in which if that is my rubric, it breaks down and life seems meaningless. So, I’d love to talk a little bit about this concept of, you know, coherence. Because there seems to be something universal, even if you are not a Jew that would adhere to the Torah or see Ecclesiastes as inspired literature, a Christian that would see it as some form of inspired literature, there does seem to be something universal. I mean, the teacher, you could put him into the 20th century and have a dialogue with Camus and they would probably be in agreement on a lot of points. So, I’m curious from the behavioral science side, what is it about the biological and maybe even the neurological structure of humans as a species that make us so driven to search for those coherent patterns in reality? Yeah, that’s a big question. So, yeah, I think, you know, the coherence maps on to the nomological. I think the purpose is then maps onto the narrative order that I talk about. And then the normative is maps onto the significance, because I think significance is about getting to the depths or rising to the heights. Those are the metaphors people use. So, I want to talk about all of those. I think zeroing in on the coherence is exactly the place to start. I’m trying to get up an experiment published that I did in my lab that’s directly about this and says something very important about it. And I actually had a time, I actually got to meet and talk with Samantha Heinzelman, who’s done some of the most important work on coherence, because there’s also some challenges to her work. And so, this is very nuanced and complex, a very interesting way. So, there’s why the universal need for coherence. And I will give what the connection I make and the argument I make, and then that will help me explain a little bit more how I think we need to nuance coherence. And I want to also note that since the paper, the 2016 paper, there’s been a lot of work, good work, really good work showing there’s a fourth one. And it’s probably, in fact, more important than purpose, which is mattering. Mattering is the sense of being connected to something beyond yourself. It’s back to that othering that we were talking about earlier. And why this is so important is this lines up deeply, almost one-to-one, with the argument that Susan Wolf made in her really important book, Meaning in Life and Why it Matters. Because she says the fundamental thing there is people want to feel connected to something beyond themselves, something bigger than themselves beyond themselves. So, would mattering be perhaps a bridge between coherence and purpose? Well, I think coherence and purpose, I’m working on a paper right now with a couple of my colleagues. I think purpose and coherence actually fold together. I hope to show that. And significance and mattering also fold together. We fundamentally need to make sense of the world. And then, and second, I’ll show you why these are deeply intertwined. We need to make sense of the world and care about it. And we also want some part of the world to care about us, if I were to break it down. So, let me try and show you how I think we can put this all together and what’s at the center of my work. And it actually ties into things that seem so disconnected to many people’s mind from meaning in life, like what’s going on in artificial intelligence right now. It’s like, what? How can those merciless robots tell us anything about the spiritual life? But give me a chance. Give me a chance. So, here’s what is the core of my scientific work. But as I’ve tried to argue, and I argue extensively in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, I think it has deep existential and even spiritual, and I think properly called spiritual significance or ramifications. And that’s this work on what I call relevance realization. So, here’s the core idea. And it’s an idea that to some degree we have an inkling of, but as often it really only became explicit as an idea with the advent of artificial intelligence. We have artificial intelligence to thank for revealing this fundamental fact about human cognition that we were largely oblivious to. And this is the point. When I look out into the world, and now that we have the internet, you’re getting a bit of sense of how this is the case, but the internet’s only one instance of what I’m going to talk about, because this is always the case. When I look out into the world, the amount of information that’s there in the technical, mathematical sense of information, not something that’s important particularly to me, but the amount of information that I could potentially turn into something meaningful, a meaningful signal to myself. The amount that’s out there in the environment is combinatorially explosive. The number of… I love that term. I use it with my wife all the time right now. She’d be telling me too much and I’ll go, that’s combinatorial explosion I’m experiencing right now. Exactly. Exactly. And so it’s overwhelming. Now, think about what you have to do. You have to connect that up with information in your long-term memory. Now, how much information do you think you have there? And how much are all the possible combinations from all this? Have you ever met anybody that said, nope, don’t tell me anything, I’m full? Hard drive. Nope, nope. And so there’s a vast amount. And then think about all the ways in which you can connect them. And think about all the stuff that is not connected yet, because you haven’t drawn an analogy between it. Like, hey, maybe the atom is like a solar system. What? Yes. And we do that all the time. Okay, that’s combinatorially explosive. Now you think, what about my behavior? Well, think about all the possible options you have. Let me give you a concrete example just to show you. So when we’re talking about solving a problem, which is what we usually we’re doing when we’re behaving, we’re not currently in a place we want to be in and we have to do things to get there. That’s what we mean by solving a problem. The way you do it is you think about, well, I have some initial state that I’m in, I have some goal state I want to be in, and then I have a bunch of actions that will take me into different states. And then there’s actions after the initial actions. And you get this thing that branches all out. And some of those pathways connect the initial state to the goal state. Does that make sense? That’s an idea. Totally. I’m tracking. So you can calculate, and this is what happens when you start doing AI, you can calculate all the number of pathways, the number of all the pathways you have to consider when you’re going to undertake an action. So let’s take a, this is an again sample from Holyoke, Keith Holyoke. You want to play a game of chess. Okay. So the number, the way you calculate the number of pathways is a formula called F to the D where F is the number of options available to you at any stage and D is the number of stages. So on average, at every turn in a game of chess, you have about 30 legal moves available to you. And there’s on average about 60 turns. So that’s the number of options you have to consider is 30 to the power of 60, which is greater than the number of atomic particles in the universe. That’s why I’m bad at chess. And even our greatest chess machines don’t explore that entire space. They can’t, they have developed, and this is the task of making them intelligent is getting them. And this is, this sounds paradoxical is getting them to ignore most of that space in a way that reliably gets them to their goal. It’s the restriction of possibilities. It’s the constraining of constraints. Okay. So now look, you’ve got, you have to have some constraint on all that information out there. You have to have some constraint on all that information in there. And as you try to put that information, those two things together, relate them together, right? You have to constrain your action, your problem solving and intelligence is doing all of that right now. And it’s doing it right now in such a way that it’s obvious to you that you should be like focusing your attention on my face, not paying attention right now to how the contact that your left foot is making to the floor. Although you’re probably doing it right now because I just said it, but you could, it could instantly become relevant. So what you somehow do is out of all of that, and what you can’t do, you can’t check it all to determine if it’s important to you. That’s not how we can do it. This was the problem we realized in artificial intelligence. If I get, if I try to get the machine to check all that, that will take more than the time of the rest of the universe. Somehow what you do is you zero in on the relevant information. This is why I call it relevance realization. You are becoming aware of it, but it’s also how reality is disclosing itself to you. Relevance realization. Now here’s the thing you got to know right away about that. It’s not cold calculation. As in just pure purely rational. Or purely logical because I’ll make a distinction later between logic and, but it’s not, yeah, it’s not purely computational in a purely logical mathematical manipulation sense. It’s not the thing we fear in robots, right? Oh, they’re soulless machines. They don’t, okay. So Reed Montague in his excellent book on, Your Brain is Almost Perfect, he’s a neuroscientist. He says the difference between us and computers is the computers don’t care about the information they’re processing because they don’t have to take care of themselves. I mean, you are, I will use a technical term here, you’re an autopoetic thing. You’re not just self organizing like a tornado. You’re a living being. You are self organized to seek out the conditions that will help keep you self organized. A tornado will just go into land that will destroy it, but a paramecium will swim towards their sugar and swim away from where there’s, right? So for the paramecium already at that level, it’s having to do relevance realization. It’s having to ignore. Now a lot of the relevance realization is just done for it because it’s really stupid, right? So it can’t even consider a lot of things. But the problem is as you get more and more flexible in your behavior, you need to be more and more intelligent. You need to be better and better at ignoring information. But even at the level of the paramecium, there’s caring. Even in the most primitive forms of relevance realization, it’s caring. Things are important to it. Listen to the word import. It has to import this chemical as food and avoid that chemical as poison. The chemicals in the language of physics and chemistry aren’t food or poison. Food is a way in which a chemical is important or relevant to a living thing. It’s a description. Poison. Yeah, it’s a description, but it’s a way in which a living thing cares about that information because it is taking care of itself. So whenever you’re doing relevance realization, you’re caring. Now what do you want to do? What do you want to, how do you want to do this relevance realization? Well, first of all, you can’t do it in a static fashion because what’s relevant will change moment to moment. You and I were talking, and then there was a knock on the door, and then all of a sudden my door becomes relevant to me and it wasn’t relevant a second ago. Not only is it not a cold calculation, it’s not a static calculation. So how do we have to think about this? Yeah. So how did you organize your decision matrix to go, I need to answer this door instead of staying here? What drives you to do that? Is there an underlying sense in which maybe if I don’t answer this door, the person there will be more upset with me? Are there these evolutionary motives for what could be really quickly, and we can’t even perceive how quickly these unctions are driving what’s relevant to us? Exactly. And so the problem with doing that is if you try to think about it this way, what I do is I form a representation and then I do some inferences on it, you’re already too high up in the machinery because what’s this? Well, it’s a jar, right? Well, are those all of its properties? No. Have I picked out all of the ways it interacts with the world? No. Have I picked out all the ways I can interact with it? No. I could use it to represent a man in a play. Did you think of that? But I could. So the point is whenever I’m representing something, I’m already doing a ton of relevance realization. Whenever I choose to make an inference, okay, so once I represent it, I can draw implications from it. But you know how many implications there are from any represent… Again, combinatorial explosives. So I have to do relevance realization. What inference does, it’s an act of choosing from all the implications, the ones that matter to me, and that’s what an inference is. What I’m trying to show you is at the level of the propositions, at the level of representations, concepts, categories, when I categorize things, right, any two objects I can put into a category, I have to… Again, I’m confronting combinatorial explosion whenever I categorize anything. What I’m trying to show you is at the level of propositions, concepts, categories, inferences, so much relevance realization has already been done. Same thing with your consciousness. You look out on the world and you’re getting a salience landscape. So it’s obvious. And think about how the consciousness and the cognition are interacting. Well, it’s obvious to me that that’s a screen on my computer, on my TV. But when you’re doing AI, when you’re doing cognitive science, you can’t rely on obviousness to explain things because what you have to explain is how your brain makes things obvious. And that turns out to be this massively complex recursive relevance realization. Okay. So can I interject a question here at this point? Please, please. So let’s say… This may not be true, but if I were to play with this thought a little bit, and let’s say what becomes relevant to us are driven by these… The evolutionary programming that we have. Let’s say it’s what I’ve had to adapt, humans have had to adapt these certain mechanisms to figure out what’s most relevant based on if I make the wrong calculation in the wrong situation, I will die. I won’t survive. So my survival instinct, there’s also the drive for sexual selection to be able to be accepted into a social group. So the question and concern that might pop in someone’s mind like my mind is, let’s say we have these base drives that make us zero in on particular things that are relevant. How could we ever say as we try to assess what is the coherent pattern in reality that we aren’t just doing what would be evolutionary advantageous to us, but not actually in accordance with if there is an objective truth to the coherent pattern of reality. How can we ever say for certain that, well, this pattern is true? Is it just because other people see the pattern too? Okay. So I think what you’re saying is true, but I’m going to invoke a word that you invoked much earlier. It’s much more nuanced because the problem, and I’m not attributing this to you, but the way it could be misleading is when you say that it sounds like, well, there’s four or five or six basic principles and they’re like go-yard walls determining our behavior. And that’s actually not, I mean, that might be the case at the level of the paramecium, but we’re not paramecium. We share important principles with the paramecium, but we’re not because, I mean, there is this phenomena of intelligence and what intelligence seems to give us is a tremendous capacity for flexibility in how we’re making sense and how we’re acting in terms of how we’re making sense. And so the relevance realization is not just motivated. I mean, everything is, I would argue as a behavioral scientist, ultimately grounds out in two things though, and you have to remember both of them, our biology and our culture. And our survivability has depended as much on us being cultural creatures as it does us being biological creatures. And we seem to be at this interesting place where we’re between our biology and our culture, and they act as checks and balances on each other so that we’re not tyrannized by either, or we have the potential to be what Spinoza would call relatively free because we can play these two determinants off against each other in a significant way. I don’t think we have metaphysical free will, I’m not arguing for that, but you see what I’m saying? We have to put this into a more complex matrix. So let’s talk about evolution and then let’s talk about its connection to intelligence. But before we do, I just want to point to a couple of things. Notice that when we’re talking about relevance realization, that gives us a way of understanding what we mean by coherence. We don’t really mean logical coherence. We mean that pattern by which that salience landscaping, that way in which everything hangs together and makes sense together. There’s patterns of what’s obvious. I see affordances for action. I feel connected to the world in a way that makes my actions make sense to me. That’s what’s meant by coherence. And part of the problem, I think, with Samantha Heinzelman’s work is she, because what’s happened is she’s getting mixed replication of her results. Sometimes it’s replicating and sometimes it’s not. That usually means your variable is confounded. It’s confused with something else to some degree. Because I don’t think it’s just, I think meaning in life has to do not with just finding automatic coherence. I think it has to do with more of feeling like we are participating in the act of making sense and it’s functioning. The reason why I say that is the following. We just run an experiment in my lab where we wanted to see if there was a correlation, a predictive correlation between people having mystical experiences and finding more meaning in life. You think somebody would have done that work by now, but it hadn’t been done. And we did that and we found that, yeah, if you have more mystical experiences, you find your life more meaningful. And what was interesting about that is when we took a look at some of the nuts and bolts in their data, it looks like what’s doing most of the heavy lifting and making that happen is not that people are just passively, oh yes, I see. Instead, they’re having this profound insight of the emergence of new relevance, of new connection, of new connectedness. And of course, that’s often expressed by these profound statements of oneness and unity and integration. And so I think what we’re actually measuring when we’re measuring coherence is we’re measuring much more how well we’re making sense of a situation and the degree to which we feel like it’s fluent or insightful to us. So I want to do a follow-up experiment once COVID is over, in which we take what she did was she would just give people pictures and some of them sort of made sense as a scene, a narrative scene, and some of them were kind of weird. I want to compare that to giving people insight problems and they solve insight. And then what she did is she had them do this and then how meaningful is your life? And that’s where she got the idea of coherence from. That people had made sense in a bunch of pictures, they were liable to rate their lives as more meaningful. If the pictures didn’t make much sense to them, they weren’t. But again, there’s too much variation in that kind of stimulus. But there’s a lot less variation when you have an insight experience. That’s the same for everybody. And I want to see if after people have an insight experience, do they reliably have? Because that would track with the mystical experience. Why am I saying all of that? Because what I’m trying to show you is that relevance realization isn’t just about coherence as just sort of a logical pattern. It’s about this deep, caring, connectedness at oneness. It even affords a sense of self-transcendence of being connected to something more real and beyond yourself. That’s a universal feature of these mystical experiences. People say, this is more real than my everyday experience. And I think it’s that movement towards more realness, where we get the caring part of relevance realization more prominent in our awareness. I doubt if people really cared about these pictures they were looking at in the Heinzelman experiment. But when you have an insight experience, you’re on the continuum towards the mystical experience. Because we call it an insight, and there’s a flash, and there’s an opening, and we feel it’s more real. It’s not just an awareness of a potential causal pattern. An insight might be that it triggers and connects you to a sense of purpose, significance, and mattering as well. Because just to see a pattern doesn’t instantly mean that, you know, I did this, I got asked to come and talk at my, give a little guest talk at my son’s middle school. And we talked a little bit about seeing coherent philosophical and theological patterns in stories and in film. And one of the things that we did is a little experiment, is I had them do, I put up on the screen for them, you know, one of these little pattern tests that they had to take as kindergartners. Right? And it’s like, you know, red circle, green square, blue triangle, and you have to figure out what comes next. Right? So just being able to pick up on a pattern doesn’t automatically make that connection to the pattern having purpose, or you experience a sense of mattering or significance in the pattern. So I think one of the things I’m most interested in is it’s obvious that it seems to be fundamental to the human experience. We can’t conceive of a human experience that isn’t one that’s searching for coherence, or some sort of pattern. Our conversation doesn’t make sense unless there’s a coherent pattern to dialogue. The whole premise, the foundation by which behavioral science is built upon is built on this idea that there is some coherent pattern we can discern in the scientific process, right? Math is built on coherent patterns. Totally. And what I’m trying to propose to you is this is a dynamic process. Yes. And it’s not just the same thing as doing math. It’s not just doing science. There’s different modes of engagement that we can experience connection to coherent patterns. Yes. And the coherence that impacts on meaning in life is a coherence of this relevance realization. Because relevance realization goes to the very guts of being not only a mental being, but think of the paramecium. It goes to the guts, and notice the metaphor I’m using, of being a living being. If you’re not doing relevance realization, you’re not a living thing. And if you’re not doing massively recursive complex relevance realization, you’re not a cognitive agent. And so this is fundamental to us. And the caring, which I’ve tried to argue, is bound up with it. And the fact that it’s dynamic, it has a life of its own. It’s unfolding before, it’s unfolding underneath us. It’s unfolding from the depths of our biology up through the heights of our culture. And the caring is integral to it. So what I’m trying to show is that this is inescapably spiritual for you. That’s what I’m trying to say. Because just think of what I said earlier, this relevance realization, it’s going on at a level below your concepts, your categories, your propositions. So I talk about four kinds of knowing, and maybe this is a helpful place to introduce them. Yes, let’s do it. It’s a I want to deepen this notion of coherence and mattering by deepening our understanding of knowing in connection with relevance realization. So propositional knowing, this is what we’re very familiar with. This is the kind of knowing that I can relate to you or represent in a proposition, and I can evaluate for it being true or false, like cats or mammals. And so the relationship I have to that is a relationship of belief. I believe that cats are mammals, and I can tell if that’s true or false. And I do want to come back to your truth question, but we need to do a lot more work. Let’s do it. I need to do this first, and then I want to come right back to the truth question. Okay, but the thing about that is all my ability to use propositional intelligence and to find logical relations between propositions, because that’s what logic is. It’s a relationship between propositions, and propositions are logical relations between concepts, etc., or at least syntactic relations between concepts. All of that depends on a deeper kind of knowing, because I have to be able to do it at least, but much, much more with the paramecium does. I have to know how to move around in the world. I have to know how to do things. Knowing how to do something is different from believing it. Knowing how doesn’t give me a belief. It gives me a skill. I know how to do Tai Chi. I know how to swim. I know how to catch a ball. And skills aren’t true or false. Skills don’t connect us to reality, or at least realness, by giving us a sense of conviction and belief. They give us a sense that our skills are powerful. We get a sense of how powerful, like, oh, wow, I can really do this with this skill. I can really intervene in the world. And this is, I’m starting to, you can see, I’m starting to build an answer to your question. Because my sense of realness is not just the conviction of my beliefs. It’s the conviction of my beliefs. It’s also a sense of the power of my skills. But let’s keep going. That’s called procedural knowing. But do I apply all my skills all the time, everywhere? Of course not. I have to know where, when, and what degree, and in what possible combinations to apply my skills. Well, what guides me in doing that? Well, this is what’s called your perspectival knowing. This is your situational awareness. This is your awareness. That’s why we even use the term perspective. Because think of how a perspective grades what’s salient. There’s what’s focal, foregrounded in a perspective. It’s very salient to you. Things shade off in salience or importance, relevance. And so my situation is a perspective that is doing salience landscaping for me. It’s giving me my sense of here now-ness and my state of mind. I’m sober and awake. I could be tired and drunk. I don’t drink, but right. And that would change my salience. So I have this situational awareness, that is this deep integration given to me by my consciousness. There’s two poles of it, my state of mind and my awareness of the situation. And they are deeply co-defining. That’s my perspectival awareness and my situational awareness tells me which skills to use or which skills to acquire. We know what we care about with that. Because again of artificial intelligence and virtual reality. Because when we create virtual worlds, we can see what matters to people. And what matters to them is what’s called a sense of presence. That they really feel that they’re here and now in the game. And that’s their sense of realness. The game doesn’t have to be a propositional thing about how much of fantasy. It doesn’t have to even be a sensor. The game doesn’t have to have veridicality. So people will get a tremendous sense of presence in the game Tetris. And the world doesn’t look like Tetris. That’s bizarre. But what they have is they have the interaction, the perspectival knowing that makes them feel like they’re in the game. That here and now in a sense of presence. That’s a different sense of realness. And you get it with people. You know somebody can be talking to you. They can be exercising the right social skills. They can be saying the right propositions. And you know they’re not there. They’re just not there. They’re feigning it. Yeah right. They’re just not there. You know when intimacy clicks with somebody, that sense of presence comes in dramatically. This is another sense of realness we have. So the problem with our culture is we have fixated on the conviction of belief and the assertion of truth as our only sense of realness. I’m not saying it’s not an important sense. But truth has a proposition. That’s a limited. And this is something, if I can just for a moment, because I know there’s one more P to explore here, is this is something that your work has just unlocked profound insights in my own assessment of theological history. Because when we saw the shift in the Protestant Reformation, in the liturgy that happened in worship services, these are spiritual formation practices. And I talk about this with fellow pastors all the time who are really, really frustrated at the lack of wisdom that they’ve seen, especially in this past year among Christians. And I will be very specific to my own ilk among evangelical Christians, going how is it that people can sit in our churches week in and week out? They hear these sermons. So they hear the propositions. They even, and much of our church membership is based on agreement with propositions. So it’s very common for, if you’re searching for a new church, one of the things you do is you go on their website. And what do you look for? You look for, now some people might look for small groups and what sort of programming there is for kids, but a lot of people go first, what, to the here’s what we believe, an affirmation of propositions. And this shift happened really during the Protestant Reformation, where the liturgical climax of the worship service moved away from a participation in communion, which that was the pinnacle, to the proclamation of the spoken word. And I am not a Roman Catholic, so I’m not giving an apologetic for that or for Eastern Orthodoxy. I’m still situated in a tradition that still focuses in large part on the spoken word. But that liturgical shift, we could say is another term from you, we probably should talk about at some point, is a psychotechnology, right? Yes, yes, yes. It is that shift to make agreement with propositional statements, the litmus test of Orthodoxy, it’s the litmus test of whether or not you are properly participating in Christ. So when people then go into talking, having conversations about is someone in Christ or not, the framing of it is usually boiled down to, well, do they agree to these sets of doctrines? And each denomination has their own set of doctrines that they’re looking for propositional agreement with. And then in Western civilization, because of this like marrying so much of the Christian theological history and Western civilization coming together, we also see this across our culture in pockets where people even still may claim to be secular. And what they’re looking for constantly is, well, the litmus test is whether or not you agree with the proposition and it misses out on all these different ways. Like you’re saying, being in love, you can’t, obviously you could make a set of propositions and we do this in marital vows often where we state certain things and we say these are commitments that we have, but you couldn’t boil down the entirety of your marriage to those propositional vows. You couldn’t boil it all down even to the event or the procedure of the wedding. There are these other ways of knowing which are really difficult to describe, but I’m so, I mean, this work, I just want to affirm on these, this terminology alone, even if that was the only thing I ever took out of your lectures has been transformative. It really has. And there’s that final dimension, the participatory dimension, which I’m really interested in. After you maybe explain it a little bit, I’d love to do a point of connection into my own and I think a lot of listeners experience in a certain strand of the Christian tradition, but I’d like you to maybe go back in and sorry if I took too long and interrupt you. No, no, no, I love that. Just talk about that fourth piece. So it’s not just, you know, that there’s propositional truth, which there is, there’s not just the procedural, there’s not just the perspectival, but there’s a final category of knowing that’s really, really important. Yeah. So the participatory. So notice that each one of these has a different sense of realness that matters to us. Your example of the relationship, if you’re, I sometimes, I’ll use this example with people, you know, you’re, I’ll use it with my students, you’re 20, you’re still living with your parents, right? And then they say to you, come here, come here. You’re 20, you’ve just got past your 20th birthday and we have to show you something that we’re obligated to show you for legal reasons. They take the person, it’s a thought experiment down the hallway, they sort of press a spot on the wall that they’d never noticed and the door opens and there’s this room, there’s all these screens and charts and graphs. And they said, we were hired by the government 21 years ago to have you. We were given scripts to practice how to talk to you and say to you. So, and we’ve been doing that all the way through and we’re doing it for the sake of science and because the government is paying us. So, you know, we really don’t care about you, but we’re still going to keep saying all the things we’ve said to you and we’re going to, you know, we’re going to keep acting all the way we’ve acted to you. You can forget all about this and, you know, and let’s go just go back to the way things were and see you later at dinner. Love you. And I asked my students, how do you feel now? And they feel that they say it’s horrible. And I said, but nothing has changed. Right. Well, I don’t believe it anymore. Well, they’re still going to utter all the propositions, right? Why don’t you believe it? They’re still doing all the things they used to do. Right. And you’re like, what’s changing? And what’s going on is this deeper sense of belonging, right? Belonging. And so, that takes us into the participatory, right? This is the deepest level because it’s where relevance realization first really gets started and that therefore all the other things depend on it. So, here’s the idea and the term, of course, is taken from play. Also, been used by people like, who’s the guy who wrote the participatory term? Jose Ferrer? And was that the actor? I sometimes get the names confused. I apologize if I got that name wrong. Anyways, there’s a bunch of people that have influenced me and have I got it right? Plato being the most important. Here’s the idea. We sometimes think of one thing participating in another, but a better way to think of it as like a triangle is that this and this participate in the same form. Where form is in shape, form is structural functional organization. And so, one way of thinking about it that’s a helpful analogy is here’s an event and I can use force equals mass times acceleration to describe that event, right? Maybe my book falling off a shelf. And here’s another event, right, of a balloon rising to the ceiling. They look like very different events, but they’re both participating in force equals mass times acceleration because they’re both, that’s a structural functional organization, a series of constraints that’s informing them both and actually giving information for me about how to understand them. Did that help? Yes. Okay. So, what we have to see is that there’s processes in the world and processes in us that have this participatory relation that we share in the same form. And therefore, we can be identified together. A way of thinking about it, another analogy, but a neoplatonic one is where there are two things are equal siblings of the same parent, right? And maybe that’s nice biblical language for you as well. And so, the idea from a scientific view is that biology and culture, and then I want to do a little bit on why my ongoing cognition are constantly doing this thing of shaping me and shaping the world, co-shaping them so they participate in the same form, so they belong together. So, what opens up between me and the environment are what Gibson, the ecological psychologist called an affordance. So, let me use one of my favorite examples. So, evolution shaped my hand, and my hand can actually shape this object, but I can also just find objects that are graspable for me. Now, let’s just do it like, let’s take a natural object so there’s no conflation here. Here’s a stone. I carry two things around in my pockets because they help me to remember, this is a frog for the neoplatonic tradition and this is a stone for the Zen tradition, so they help me to remember. So, this is graspable by me, but notice it’s, right? Not everything is graspable by me. I can’t grasp the wall. I can touch the wall, but I can’t grasp it. And the graspability, and not everything can grasp this. An ant can’t grasp it. So, the graspability is not in the rock, it’s not in my hand. It’s the way in which the environment has shaped things and the environment has, through evolution, shaped me so that this is graspable. My hand and the stone belong together. They fit together. They go together. Is that okay so far? Definitely. Okay, so that’s that work. That’s the biological evolution. Now, there’s cultural. Culture is constantly shaping us to the environment and shaping the environment to us. That’s what a culture is. It’s that co-shaping of you. So, this is a tool. It’s a cup for those that are listening. A mug for those that are listening only. It’s a mug. Sorry. Yeah, right. And so, this, right, culture has shaped this so that I can use it to carry liquids around. Okay, so biology, right, the environment through my biology and through the natural forces of the environment is shaping the environment to me and me to the environment. That’s creating biological affordances. The stone is graspable. Culture is shaping the environment to me and me to the environment. Look around you. Other than your naked body and the atmosphere, everything else around you is culture. Yes. And you are shaping yourself to it all the time, identifying with it. So, a biological identity is shaping for me because of the biological affordances. A cultural identity is shaping for me because of the cultural affordances. And now, my ongoing cognition is doing something. How is my cognition shaping the world and shaping me? It’s doing relevance realization. Relevance is not a property of the thing or me. It’s a property between me. When I find this relevant, I’m shaping it. Not physically, but I’m picking one of its aspects out of all of its possible aspects. So, I’m shaping it as a container, and then I shape myself as an agent that can use it biologically. I can grasp it. I can use it culturally. It can contain sanitizer, and I’m going to participate in trying to deal with the pandemic. But see, what my cognition is constantly doing is it’s constantly aspectualizing the world in relevance realization, moment by moment. What’s standing out for you right now? My hand clapped. That came to the center. My hands weren’t relevant to you a moment ago. So, moment by moment, you are shaping your relevance. The relevance realization isn’t in your head. It’s between your head and the world. So, mutual. Mutual co-shaping. I’m aspectualizing the world, and I’m making myself into a particular agent. And relevance opens up between that agent arena relationship and a particular identity, a biological, a cultural cognitive identity, and a particular layering of the environment. A biological, cultural, cognitive layering is emerging together, and that’s the complex process of co-identification. So, I feel radically connected in an ongoing, flowing manner. So, what I get from participatory knowing aren’t beliefs, aren’t skills, aren’t even situational situations. What I get are affordances, and the sense of realness is that sense of belongingness together, which isn’t quite the right word, but I don’t have a good word for it. I sometimes want to use a biblical word, and I don’t mean anything insulting by this. And I got this idea from Cynthia Bourgeau, who’s a Christian in the Episcopal tradition, and she talks about the wisdom way of knowing and the wisdom of Jesus. Two really good books, by the way. She talks about the Hebrew term, the af, which is used in the Bible. According to her, and other people said this seems to be the case, it originally means sort of sexual intercourse. And- Yeah, to know in that metaphor sense. Yeah. Yeah, right. And I remember the King James version, and Adam knew his wife. And as a kid, I was like, what? What does that mean? I don’t get that. But notice in intercourse, what you’re trying to pick up on is all of those layers of mutual co-shaping, and that they’re getting more and more dynamically connected to each other. So, the sense of belongingness and fitting togetherness, you’re getting a massive intensification of connectedness and relevance realization, which is why we find that is a powerful field within which we can find tremendous meaning in life. We can find love. Love is one of the most primary expressions coming into awareness of participatory knowing. And that’s why it’s such a profound metaphor throughout the biblical narrative to have this marriage, this sexual union, be an icon of an even higher, I think that’s probably an okay word, a higher reality, right? Where we see throughout the biblical literature, the naming of God as a groom, and God’s people, the bride. We see this not just in the Old Testament prophets, it’s in Revelation, Jesus uses it. He’s the bridegroom. John the Baptist calls himself the friend of the bridegroom. And it’s really interesting when you frame it in that light, because you could even in a way, maybe for those that aren’t comfortable with, you know, a strict adherence to, you know, the Christian frame, maybe they’re in even a mythological level of comfort with it. To say that our goal then would be some sort of consummation with ultimate reality, that we’re in a process that is trying to get to that level of intimate knowing and adherence and conformity. I think that’s a profound, I think that’s a good way of saying it. I often say what I’m after, and like all sort of single statements, it’s going to be oversimplified. But what I’m after is helping people deeply realize, in both senses of the word, in an ongoing maturing fashion, the excellent way, a place to realize falling in love with reality again. That’s what it means to awaken from the mean crisis. And the hunger we have for it, as you said, and you invoked it, and I think it’s correct. I think it starts earlier than, I think the Protestant Reformation accelerated it. I think, you know, the move we see with Occam’s nominalism really gets starts to emphasize the propositional knowing at the expense of all the other knowings. I think what we really want, again, and this goes back to that fullness of being and the connectedness, we want to align the four kinds of knowing so that this is a very platonic vision, right? So they’re as mutually affording, mutually supporting as possible in a way that is also mutually affording with coming into the most intimate relationship with what is most deep in reality. We want to get to the depth of ourselves, to our world, to other individuals, to groups, et cetera. And that’s my answer as to how do we tell which patterns are the most real? We don’t, we do the best inferential things we can do. We have to talk about rationality at some point here, because all four kinds of knowing have their own particular kind of rationality. We have to do our best to remove self-deception from the inferential practices that give us our propositional beliefs. We have to do the best we can to train our procedural knowing so that we can get as often as possible into the flow state. Being in the flow state is predictive of how meaningful you’re finding your experience of your life. Yeah. Can you give a quick definition of the flow state? I’m familiar with the concept, but people that listen. Yeah, it comes from Chicksat Mahai and then I published a paper in 2018 with Leo Ferraro and Erin Harra Bennett, in which we tried to give what are the underlying cognitive processes. The flow state, a good place to do it, you find it is in martial arts, rock climbing. In fact, being in the flow state is the only thing that explains the otherwise absurd behavior of rock climbing. A poetry, generating poetry, doing jazz, dance, and in a different and important but problematic way, video games. Okay, so when you’re in the flow state, the environment is very demanding. Think about how close demand is to call, vocation. That’s right. The environment is very demanding such that you have to give it your attention. You have to give it your attention. You have to bring all your skills and not statically. Your skills have to be dynamically coupled to the environment and evolving with the flowing, changing situations. When I did this move, I’m sorry, I’m making gestures that people can’t see, but like say I do this thing with my arm to deflect a punch in martial arts. I’m not done. I now have to change that into the next move. It’s a dynamic evolution of this fittedness. So what happens is because the environment is so demanding, you’re putting yourself at the limit. It’s taking all of your attention, taking all of your effort, but something does this and it becomes paradoxical. Although at one level you know you’re putting in all this effort and all this attention, it takes on a life of its own. Here we come back to what I was talking about. It becomes this self-organizing process in which I argue with my collaborators that what you’re getting is an insight cascade, one insight after another, and you’re really ramping up on your ability to pick up on implicit patterns in the environment. So what people experience, and think about their belongingness, the connectedness, they experience being radically at one. So let’s use the martial art example. There’s a strike coming towards me and I just find that my hand is going. If you’ll allow me, and I mean this respectfully, it’s graceful. It’s full of grace. It feels like it’s being gifted to me. So time seems to pass very differently. I feel radically at one. And the environment, and here’s where the perspectival stuff comes in, the environment is radically salient to me. I have this ongoing sense of discovery. That’s why it’s like this extended aha. People feel that this is optimal. This is good in both senses. This is one of the most rewarding experiences they can have in their life. And also this is the best they can be, or at least making them at that time be the best they can be. And so people will seek out flow. And a lot of culture is about activities that generate the flow state. Generate the flow state. And the reason for that is because in the flow state, you’re setting up conditions in which you’re training your capacity for insight. You’re training your capacity for implicit learning. What you’re doing is you’re really honing. You’re really refining. It’s almost like tempering a blade. You’re really enhancing your relevance realization machinery at the procedural level, the perspectival and down at the participatory. How are you doing on time, John? Because I have a couple hanging observations and questions that if you have the ability to afford a little more time, I’d love to make them before they just trail off into our next conversation whenever we can establish one of those. Because as you talk about the flow state, there’s two things that experiences that come to mind. One is maybe a helpful point for others that have played sports. Basketball was my primary sport growing up. And there were several occasions that you call it being on fire in basketball. You’re in the zone. And there were two distinct ones that I will never forget. And it was like the closest thing that I can compare it to, which I want to spend a little more time exploring, is what in my charismatic and Pentecostal tradition, we called being in the presence of God. And so one of those instances was like my freshman year of high school. I’m playing on the varsity. So basketball was a big deal to me. So I’m playing on varsity as a freshman. And in the fourth quarter of a close game, I lost it. I mean, I entered into a flow state. I scored 26 points in a quarter. And everything I threw up went in. It was like, I couldn’t do anything wrong. And you see that sometimes, a guy in the NBA, like a Steph Curry, he gets into these zones and it’s like magic. It is. It’s like magic. And there’s two other points of reference that I can compare that to. And one is specific to my charismatic and Pentecostal stream. And I don’t know how much familiarity you have with those particular streams within the Christian tradition. I had an aunt and uncle that were in that tradition. Okay. So I’m going to use some language that I think fits the language of behavioral science, even though people in that stream might not use the same sort of language. We certainly didn’t at the time. The liturgy of the charismatic church is aimed towards altered states of consciousness. That’s the primary goal of worship in the meeting. Again, we don’t say it like that. We would say things like, we’re going after the presence of God. We’re going after, there’s another, again, weird term that I think only charismatics and Pentecostals use. And I use that affectionately weird. And people that know my history know that I don’t have hostility towards it. Weird terms like anointing, which is an interesting callback to the feeling of oil being poured on someone’s head. So we use these terms because that’s what we’re going after. So the liturgy of an average charismatic, and I was in some really, really deep, I mean, John, there’s some things I’ve experienced and seen that I still don’t really have good explanation for. Even while affirming, I would affirm there are, I don’t like the term supernatural. I prefer not to use that term. But there are things that go beyond a easily discernible causal pattern that I’ve seen and experienced. And in those states, so the entire liturgy goes like this, right? We use music, sometimes contemplative, sometimes loud. We use chanting, beating of drums, dancing, to get into the state of mind that we don’t normally operate in. And I’ve been in that state. In fact, for years, one of my primary ministry roles was I was, and I still am, a worship pastor. So I lead the liturgy. We didn’t call it liturgy in charismatic settings. That felt too religious. My goal in those states was I was considered a prophetic worship leader, which meant my goal is to get us beyond the page of singing the lyrics that are up on the ProPresenter PowerPoint screen, or what would be in traditional settings, a hymnal. And we’re going to get off the page and get everybody spontaneously participating in this thing. So this is really strange for even a lot of Christians. It was very normative in those arenas when I was leading people in that experience, where we would go for two hours without singing a pre-written song. And that’s foreign to most Christians. It’d be foreign in my current church setting. I could never imagine doing that. And I remember being in that experience, euphoria, insights. It feels like everything in the brain is connected. There’s these new, and now I have the language for it, these new neural networks that are being connected. I’m getting insights. I’m having my appetites and affections and desires change towards the world and the way I treat my life. All these beautiful things that are happening. In fact, it was those experiences that led me on a journey towards pursuing the more academic side of theology and philosophy. That’s usually the way it is, by the way. It’s usually bottom up. Yes, because it was that experience I came out of that going, I want to know everything there is to know about this God that I believe I’m encountering in all the available channels. So if that’s math or science, I want to be competent in that. If it’s in theology, if it’s in these other domains, in all my quests, all the meaning-making endeavors that there are. The thing I’m most curious about, though, John, is I’ve been through so many of these experiences. I know you’ve done a lot of work in studying flow states and altered states of consciousness. I come out in ways that I would say, and I think people around me would say, I was positively transformed, which means there’s a telos in mind that people are agreeing on, at least in some extent. Yet I’ve also seen people have those same experiences, and especially in this past year, it’s really been heightened. And instead of coming out with, maybe I’m going to go home and be in less arguments with my wife, and I’m going to love my children more deeply, and I actually want to start picking up physics textbooks and studying behavioral science, they enter into like QAnon conspiracy world. Yep, yep. Or they get deep into these nationalistic mindsets. And we’ve seen a lot of that. I don’t mean to be political, but I’ve had really good conversations with other pastors where we’ve been reflecting and going, are there practices and things that are being taught in our church which would lead people to believe that they should go storm the Capitol? And if there is, we want to repent of that. So I don’t mean to enter into that political sphere, but the thing that I’ve always found curious, because you speak very positively about the flow state, altered states of consciousness. And I know other people anecdotally, I’m not a behavioral scientist, that have spent a lot of time with psychedelics as well, some of which have produced similar results to my religious experiences and others. And there’s literature that supports that. And others that, the deeper that they went into those altered states of consciousness, they report a darkness to. So I guess my question for you, John, is like, what is it about getting into the flow state that could produce in one person a new ability and insight to see causal patterns and in somebody else to see correlative patterns that they think are causal, and then they end up in foolishness? That’s a heavy question. And it’s actually still germane to the argument I was making, which is, I was making an argument, you want to align propositional knowing with procedural knowing, and the procedural knowing with perspectival with the participatory. And the flow state is touching about that. But yes, I do speak positively about these altered states, but going back to shamanism, and I don’t mean this as an insult, and you shouldn’t take it as that. I think with the kind of things you were doing, the chanting and the drumming, the invocation of spirits, and the shaman is even manipulating participatory knowing because they’re assuming the identities of animals. And typically there’s a dramatic element to what you’re doing. You’re often assuming a metaphorical or symbolic identity within, I would say. And that’s why Pentecostal charismatic streams are much more popular in places of the world that already have a deep sense of spiritualism. There might be shamanistic practices. For four years, I was worship pastor at a very, very charismatic church that was probably 35% Nigerian immigrant. And for them, it’s like the world is, they’re not stuck in the imminent frame, to use Charles Taylor’s language. The world’s already haunted. It’s full of transcendence, maybe to the point where there could be too much superstition attached, but there is definitely an appropriate connection point there. But that’s a good thing. And so let me try and use something a little less ominous, but something I alluded to as a caution. Because although I speak positively about flow and about psychedelics and mystical experiences and altered states of consciousness, I also speak very cautiously about them. And I’ve been consistent about that. So I’ll often say things that will frustrate people who have a particular political bent on this. I’ll say things like, I don’t think psychedelics should be prohibited. We have so much evidence that it does nothing to prohibit it. And all it does is it finances organized crime. And they’ll go, yay, what a liberal. And then I’ll say, and I think that people should have to go through a significant course and be certified, like they have to do in Canada. I don’t know if it’s the same in the States, before they can get a driver’s license. There’s a probationary period. And they have to go through all of that training and certification before they’re allowed to take psychedelics. And they go, what? What’s wrong with you? Because the good is there. But the worst things come from the best things turned bad. And so we have to be really, really cautious. There’s a tremendous power. It’s a very powerful tool, these altered states. That’s Plato and Augustine, right? Yeah. I mean, that’s Augustine reinterpreting and reframing Plato. Yes, exactly. Exactly. And you shouldn’t play with tools. Like, if you play with knives or chainsaws, there’s something wrong with you. You have to enter into them with the proper respect, how you look at the thing, how you conceive and understand it. And so talking about this is very important. So I think that what these states do is, as you said, they open up new neural networks. They make new connections. So within, without, as I make new connections within, I’m making new connections without. And as I’m making new connections without, I’m making new connections within. And it’s doing this. Now think about video games. Video games are so intoxicating. The World Health Organization now, it’s a bona fide addiction, video games. Because first of all, notice what they’re giving us. They’re giving us a story in which we play a role. There’s the narrative purpose. They’re giving us a really rule structured environment. And we know the rules. There’s that normal logical coherence, right? They’re giving us a normative order. We can self transcend, we can level up. So all of those needs first are being met. And then the video game is designed to put you into the flow state. What happens is the environment is constantly demanding. And as your skills build, it ratchets up with you. And it just keeps, so you’re getting the flow state in this fictional world that’s feeding your need for coherence and purpose. And so it’s addictive. And the thing is you get really good in that world. But that world, now this isn’t the case for all video games, but for very many games, the ones that become addictive, that doesn’t transfer to the real world. That doesn’t transfer so I’m going to say something and I hope you take it again as a compliment. I think a lot of religious ritual are sort of, they’re like, you know what augmented reality is when you have a video game and it’s projected around the world? I think it’s their augmented reality that transfers. It’s the opposite of the video game. The video game, it’s so deceptive because it looks like it’s giving you all of this stuff that normally helps us find fullness of being and track the world. And then it does it in a way that doesn’t transfer to the world. But there are places where we go into, and again, let mythological at least, right? A mythological game in the Vic Constinien sense. And we’re playing that. Maybe that’s, and I’m trying to use neutral language. It’s not intended to be pejorative, but you’re going into that charismatic situation and you’re doing this augmented reality game, right? But the thing is it’s unlike the video game because it transfers to the real world. That’s what you did when you took it home. Yes, but why for me, exactly why does the transfer happen and for others it leads to foolishness? So why doesn’t it transfer first the video game? And what’s happening in the situation isn’t sufficient to make sure the transfer occurs. That’s why I brought up the video games. In fact, we can put ourselves in situations where we’re doing all this and what we’re doing is we’re getting wound into something that doesn’t transfer. So you have to ask yourself, what are we doing? Because what we’re doing is we’re manipulating people’s salience landscape. We’re manipulating their sense of self. We’re manipulating their identity. And yes, if we make sure the transfer works, those manipulations can lead to metanoia. But if we don’t, they can lead to paranoia. And so what’s the difference? The difference is those have to be set into a sapiential context. This has been my consistent message. Outside of those altered states, you have to be involved in a huge ecology of practices that is working at multiple levels to help you track the ways in which you’re self-deceptive at the propositional level, at the procedural level, at the perspectival level, at the participatory level. You have to be cultivating wisdom. That’s why I tell people, don’t tell me what you believe. Tell me what you practice. Because if I know you have an ecology of practices, I have good reason to believe that you will transfer in metanoia rather than transferring in paranoia. You could be a preacher, John. I want to say amen after that. Even just that dichotomy of—because paranoia seems to be the most appropriate word anecdotally, based on my experiences coming out of those, because it seems like there’s a bifurcation that happens with people that go through those repetitive practices that are just aimed really at altered states of consciousness, is that they either lead towards metanoia or they lead towards paranoia. That’s profound. That’s going to stick with me forever. I often wonder, too, whether if the practices are always aimed towards altered states of consciousness and people don’t experience disruption or suffering, if they can continually get locked into a confirmation bias cycle. Yes, totally. That’s what I mean. That’s an example of, if you don’t have a sapiential framework that’s looking for bias, that’s looking for addictive patterns—addictive patterns is how self-deception comes in, a participatory knowing—if you don’t look for egocentrism, that’s a kind of self-deception at the perspectival level. All of these things that we’re talking about, if you don’t look—because it’s at multiple levels and there’s multiple biases at each level, a single sapiential practice is not enough. You need a bunch of them working at different levels in an evolving manner to keep up with the way your cognition is evolving as it’s going through these important transformative processes. If you’ll allow me, it’s given an affection. One of my concerns, though—and I made this in the Meeting Crisis series—is the degree to which the Protestant tradition has neglected, criticized, and often abandoned a sapiential framework. The shutting down of the monasteries is just a clear and obvious historical example. The removal—I mean, the Spartan nature of Protestant sanctuaries, the fear of iconography, the elimination of beauty—I shouldn’t say elimination, but serious constriction on exposure to beauty. I think beauty—I mean, beauty is one of the primary ways in which we practice, like the way you practice martial art, we practice for truth and we practice for goodness. Beauty is the arena in which beauty is—and this is the platonic argument—beauty is the place, it’s the dojo where we practice so that we can get better at realizing goodness and truth. That deeply impacts the capacity for Protestant denominations—is that the right word? Yeah, that’s fine. To properly curate and cultivate these altered states of consciousness. That’s why they’re often—and many denominations they’re often seriously frowned upon and deeply suspicious. I remember the denomination of Christianity I belonged to, to my mom’s, right? She was deeply, deeply critical of the Pentecostal, all that altered state of consciousness. Even dancing was just not only for a sexual connotation, but precisely because it can all—just the fear, the fear of the altered state. The way that became pervasive in American culture, by the way. There’s research done where you say to people, here’s this drug and we can give it to people and it will improve their performance. It doesn’t have any effect, but people say, yeah, that’s okay. Then you say, oh, here’s this drug and it’ll do all these things. Also, people will fill you for you. Overwhelmingly, people say, no, no, that should be made illegal because they don’t want these unmanaged, unearned altered states of consciousness. That puritanical thing has spread out throughout the culture. That’s why we had the prohibitions on psychedelics, which were really misplaced. Because of the tremendous therapeutic potential, a lot of people suffered unnecessarily for decades because of those prohibitions. We’re now getting lots of research increasingly showing that if you pair these psychedelics in a wise fashion with therapy in which people are dealing with self-deceptive processing, you can get a synergistic effect and you can get effect on a lot of disorders, addictions and depression that have been resisted to treatment. Yeah, I have no problem with that. I can’t make any, don’t put myself in position to make any sort of political commitments to things in my vocation here. Maybe in one final point of connection, John, thank you for all this time. It’s been just really wonderful. As I reflect on maybe some of the things personally that I’m so grateful for that I think helped me get out of being stuck in the liturgical pattern of seek euphoria, seek altered states of consciousness, have what you already believe continually affirmed, do it again, do it again. I see a a distinct role in what experiences of suffering did to help me get out of that loop. I’ve wondered too about certainly the flow state is so transformative in producing insights and helping us see things like the nine dot problem to see outside of the box. But I also thought as I look back and there were certain things that would happen where I’m in this particular context 10, 12 years ago and we’re doing these meetings and worship practices in which we’re actually looking for people to experience physical healing to their bodies. Another weird thing to actually a lot of Christian denominations but not weird and charismatic. I see many of these profound things, deaf ears open, blind eyes. I’ve seen these things with my own eyes and yet at home my own son was struggling with a condition that we couldn’t get any alleviation for. There’s this cognitive dissonance that I was experiencing in my narrative which was like if I, and this even goes back to my own childhood in a word of faith prosperity gospel context which was like you hit a certain minimal threshold of faith and once you hit that threshold the kingdom will come right now and everything will be set right. It is, it is. But in hindsight though I would never wish my son to have experienced suffering at all. I see, I can reinterpret that as a blessing because it actually created disruption in these sorts of connections that I was seeing that were not in accordance with the reality. It wasn’t, the consummation of heaven and earth was not actually happening because I was not in consummation with a complete picture and I’m not saying I am now but there were distortions in my perceptions of reality, severe ones and probably someone would tell me you still have them now, Paul, but that’s okay. And so I’m just really curious to get your thoughts on, I know I don’t want to put you in a mode of making an apologetic for a Christian narrative, that certainly isn’t my intent, but just to pick your brain even with your comfort level on a maybe mythological side of this deep sense in historic Christian theology of participating in Christ’s sufferings, being the gateway to, as Peter says, participating in the divine nature. And so especially in the Christian message of voluntary suffering, that we would actually put ourselves in positions where we’re going to be at odds with the principalities and powers, with the hyper-objects. We could talk more about that sometime. But where you’re in conflict, you actually, for Kierkegaard, you experience despair. You need to actually experience that despair in order for you to transcend it. The role of voluntary suffering, especially other-centered, where you are experiencing a constriction of possibilities, right? A constriction of possibilities means the potentiality that you can’t bring about or realize some set of paths for your life. And you constrict that range of possibilities for the sake of another. You experience the loss of maybe the losing of some of those possibilities, but you may actually even come into conflict with things in your culture that cause strain and suffering. This is why Jesus was crucified, from a historical sense, right? Beyond the theological, the historical sense is he came into conflict with a culture that had a different idea on what reality should look like. He presented a different one and they killed him for it. Socrates. Socrates too, yes, very much. Socrates too. So could you maybe speak to, as we maybe try to land the plane in our conversation for today, what sorts of connections you see to the role of voluntary suffering for the sake of especially another in getting us out of dark patterns, right? Dark, destructive ways of being in the world. And maybe even just what you think of this concept of even communion that we, for most of Christian history, the pinnacle of worship was you take this meal together in which you are, it’s really odd, you’re eating bread and drinking wine, which is an intoxicant, unless you’re in a Baptist church, or you just have the grape juice, which could produce an altered state of consciousness if you consume enough of it, right? You’re doing this meal where you’re consuming someone who says, this is like my suffering. In doing that, say you’re participating without getting into transubstantiation, consubstantiation, all those debates, you know, very real way, whatever we want to say real is, you’re saying I am taking in Christ’s suffering and I am being called to participate in it in the world. Do you see any value in that narrative? Just again, I’m not asking you to affirm its historical veracity. But even if people latched on to that concept, do you see there being a coherence with your own work in behavioral science? I do, I do. Because, so I’m hesitant because you know, as well as I do, that this kind of stuff has also been subject to horrendous abuse, self-gladulation, all kinds of stuff. The woman being abused by her husband. So we have to exercise great care, we’re back to caring again, and really try and hone in on what’s relevant here and not get distracted from what’s real and realizable. So with that important framing in place, I want to say that, first of all, I don’t understand suffering as pain. I think pain is one of the things we can suffer. We can also literally suffer joy. Suffer is a loss of agency. And as I was talking about earlier, pain is indicating to you, at a physiological level, you’re losing agency, but there’s other ways in which you can lose agency. And generally, that’s a dangerous thing. If we lose agency, that’s very dangerous for us. But here’s the problem for us. The problem for us is we’re deeply cultural beings. I’m going to use my language. We’re not just biological beings. So when I’m a biological being, if I’m just a biological being, all that matter is how things matter. Listen to matter, eating. Matter, eating, is how things matter to me. How I import them. But when I’m a cultural being, the arrow doesn’t just go into me. I don’t just import. Because if I’m a cultural being, I need to matter to you. It’s not only that I need to see how things are relevant to me, I need to see and realize how I can be relevant to others and to the situations that I share with others. And so that’s the mattering that I was talking about earlier. It’s interesting because what we’re doing is we’re flipping it. And I think what the ritual of communion is doing is it’s, I mean, Eckhart said this, physical food we eat and it becomes us, but spiritual food we eat and we become what it points to. So the point about communion to invoke that primitive, like paramecium mattering and then flip us out to, no, no, the project here is how do you matter to something beyond yourself? Because here’s the defining feature of mattering insofar as it contributes to meaning in life. I want to matter to something that has a value beyond my egocentric concerns or values. That’s what people mean when they say it’s bigger than me. They don’t literally mean like, if I change you to a mountain, you do, oh, now I’m connected to something bigger than myself, I’m happy. Right? That’s what they mean is they want to be connected. They want to matter to something independent of how it matters to them. Did that make sense as an idea? Oh, totally. Yes. And that’s culture. And you can see how the communion practice is flipping us. Now, the thing about that is those two poles, they pull against each other. You can think of somebody where the egocentric pole is just consumed, listen to language, consumed the allocentric pole, the outrageous narcissist. And I use that as a pretty relevant example right now. And we can see how destructive, not only of others, but even of the individual that is. And this is the great idea I get from Tillich. Tillich’s great idea of the tonos. We are always in tension. And this is the relevance realization again, we’re always in tension between the egocentric pole of individuation and the allocentric pole of participation. We’re always, and that was the core of his theology. And that there’s no resolution to that. If anybody comes and says they have resolved that, don’t listen to them. Because remember, he’s the first non-Jewish academic to be kicked out and persecuted by the Nazis because he saw right away they were claiming a final solution, a final resolution. And his point, and this is what I think winds up, there is no final goal of relevance realization. So I think that voluntary suffering, where we’re giving up agency set in the proper context, and I’m going to remind people again that I’m invoking that, is a way to counterbalance an individualistic, especially our egocentrism, especially an egocentrism that is accelerated by a highly individualistic culture. These things can counteract, they can act as a, they can make the pole of mattering to others more attractive to us. They can draw us, induce education, induce, they can draw us beyond and therefore they can more properly calibrate, equilibrate our relevance realization so it is much more likely to fit us and the world properly together. And without that proper fitting, there’s dysfunction, right? And in a sense, we experience a judgment that comes with that dysfunction. Totally, totally. And so, I mean, if there’s too much participation, you’re going to get the anxiety of the drive for individuation. It’s back to Plato again, that Young is just Plato in the psyche, right? That drive for individuation is basically the drive to get that fullness within, to get the culture of the psyche, all the component parts in alignment. We talked about aligning the four kinds of knowing, for example. So if I just participate, that fullness of being is lost. But if I just individuate the contact, the sense of mattering to something beyond myself, the sense of developing my cultural existence to its fullest capacity of putting me into contact with real patterns in the world, that’s being starved. That’s being starved. And so you have the hell of the narcissist or the hell of the obsequiate sycophant, right? The minion. You can be in a hell of narcissism and you can be in the hell of being a minion. And we’ve seen both right now. And the weird thing is they seek each other out, because narcissists love minions and minions are looking for narcissistic gods that they can worship. And that’s like playing out for us right now in a lot of ways. And voluntary suffering put within this ongoing evolving tonos, creative tension between individuation and participation can help to rebalance that when it gets out of whack and the egocentric pole, the biological aspect of us becomes too predominant. That would be my answer. That’s a good answer, John. Thank you. This was an absolute blast. I’ve been doing these sorts of conversations for almost three years now, two and a half years. And with no disrespect to any other guests I’ve had on, this has been one of my favorites. And this has been so immensely enjoyable for me. I’m thankful. You’ve been really gracious with your time. I usually maybe only do an hour or 15 minutes with somebody and I appreciate because I didn’t want to leave some of these connections dangling for another time because I know other people may be thinking of them too. So to get a little extra time to explore it has been for me personally immensely beneficial. And I know for others who listen to it, they’re going to find it beneficial as well. So thank you so much, John. Well, it’s been a great pleasure, Paul. Maybe at some point, I mean, release it on your podcast. First, maybe you can send the files and I can release it on my channel as well. That sounds great. I thought I agree with you. I think this conversation was extremely valuable.