https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=P7MscQ3T_Rc
Thank you. Welcome back everyone to another voices with Reveke I’m very excited. This is my second time to talk at length and in depth with rich Blundell there was such a fantastic response to our last deal logos, because I believe we actually got into that. I wanted, I wanted Rick to come back. And thankfully he wanted to come back. And so we’re going to pick up the conversation. And I think what’s important to remember is that rich rich and I are both coming into this right very open ended, very exploratory, and we’re welcoming you welcoming you to come along on that journey, and I think that’s very exciting so rich to have you back. It’s really great to have you here again. Thanks john. Thanks a lot. Appreciate it. Yeah, I thought maybe we could start because ever since our talk last time I’ve been giving a lot of thought to like why, why are we talking. I feel a little bit like an anomaly, because I follow your other conversations across the whole spectrum. I know Jordan Hall, Jonathan Pedro, and doing a lot of like catching up on it but then you get into these amazing conversations with your colleagues in cognitive science, and I find those incredibly exciting for some reason, I think I know why I think I know why I find them so exciting I mean, I think we’re on multiple levels, but I thought, you know, maybe we could just spend a little bit of time trying to figure out like why, because I don’t really fall into the category of a colleague to you like I’m not doing any research I’m not doing science I’m certainly not doing science. I just was hoping maybe we could maybe explore that a little bit like why why why have. There’s a lot of reasons for me to want to talk to you, I am curious why you’re willing to talk to me, and I don’t want to put you on the spot to explain that, but that’s that’s that’s what I thought maybe we could start with that because that’s something I’d like to know. I mean there’s lots of reasons that I want to talk to you I mean first of all, I do try to talk to people. I don’t have to quite write down for it but that, like, the problem with the word practice and practical is it has taken on such a market meaning, and it means cutting to the bottom line and profitable and instrumentally useful. I want something that’s almost like the ancient Greek word as thesis, which is like spiritual practice transformation. And so I also want to talk to people who are addressing the meaning crisis in a way that is powerful, that is both intellectually and in a way that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is both, that is what I 9 I feel, and so the socratic ideal that I aspire to is not a purely theoretical or a purely rhetorical endeavor. And so the socratic ideal that I aspire to is not a purely theoretical or a purely rhetorical endeavor. And so the socratic ideal that I aspire to is not a purely theoretical or a purely rhetorical endeavor. It is about something that transcends both of those. And so I like to talk to people who will talk to me in good faith and in depth, you have, about how they are envisioning things and how that envisioning is allowing them to reduce how they are envisioning things and how that envisioning is allowing them to enact a way of life that could make a difference. So for me, I mean, and I’m asking you to take this seriously. I want to talk to people that are embodying that Socratic ideal. I’m not saying you’re Socrates. I’m not trying to put you into that place. But right that you are living and I mean this again in the Socratic sense, you’re living a provocative way of life. You’re trying to live in a way that will provoke other people to live in convergent manner in a way that will try and well, not to put it too grandly, but save the planet, both save the meaning of it and save the actual materiality of it. And that seems to me to be worthy of both deep recognition and deep dialogue. So that’s from my end why I’m talking to you. That makes a lot of sense. And it’s, it’s very much the same reason I want to talk to you. You know, I, perhaps it’s appropriate here to dive a little bit into, you know, my research, a little bit. Yeah, I guess I’m not really a researcher but in order to fulfill the requirements of the PhD I had to do some research and the research that I chose was to understand my experience of the world. I know that’s sort of, that’s not quite legit in academia to pursue a research question that is, that is, you know, fundamentally relevant to one’s own lived experience. For some reason I think that might be frowned upon it sort of crosses the objectivity line in some ways, but that is, that is what I did. And in fact, that’s the whole that’s the driving motivation behind my entire academic career, which is to say, you know, to put it, to put it mildly it’s it’s it’s unconventional, you know, I had this experience with a with a 800 pound bluefin tuna that sort of awakened something within me after I killed it. And I want, and the premise is that I wanted to understand what that transformation was about like how this something was communicated. And that sparked in me a desire to know to want to know how something like that could happen and what it could mean. Anyway, it turned out uncovering a lot of deeper things that were, you know, part of my growing up part of my formative years that I was sort of revisiting in some way. So anyway, the way that that also culminated was in research in understanding how engaging with the story of the universe, the scientific narrative that the scientific narrative that’s been revealed through science of how the universe has evolved from the Big Bang until the present day. So that’s, which I guess is, you know, where you end up if you, if you want to understand it all, you sort of have to understand it all. And that’s what that was about. And so my research was about coming up with a way to empirically test or empirically explore literally how engaging with the story of the universe, the story of nature as a whole, could be transformative to people like what were the elements of that transformation? Right, right, right. Could they be qualified and quantified in some way? And again, this was really so that I could understand it so that I can understand. So could I can understand like what the lived experience of that was. And so, you know, without getting into the details, you know, I basically took a reductionist approach qualitative reductionist approach and identify. So I taught this course in cosmic evolution where I told the whole story from the Big Bang all the way through to today and then surveyed the students who were in this course over the course of my whole, you know, this is a three year study and got them to answer, you know, in in plain language. First, I had to quant first, I had to quantify whether or not a transformative experience happened. And that’s something that you can get a handle on by asking people basically three questions. The three questions that I used as criteria for transformative experience were motivated use, which means did you learn something in this course that you then called upon in an in a context outside of the course where you’re not expected. So it’s not like a test where you’re being expected to recall it, but you recalled it when you were just living your life. Right. That is an indication of transformation because it’s something that came to you from the course you integrated into your life. In other words, it transformed you. And then the two others were expansion of perception, whether or not this course expanded your perception, which is a pretty, you know, if it’s a cosmic, if it’s a course in cosmic evolution, it stands a good chance of expanding your perception. Right. So that was the third, second question. The third one was about, did it have experiential value to you? So these are, you know, these are subjective questions. But if you answered to two out of three of those in the affirmative, I sort of assumed that this was a transformative experience for you. Right. Right. Right. Right. Then of that subset, I then asked deeper questions to draw out, well, what was the nature of that of that transformative experience? Right. And then just put, you know, really just took the language apart, analyzed it, interpreted it, reinterpreted it, you know, went through the, the, you know, the, the process of validating external ability, internal, did all that, and basically came up with a series of qualities of transformation that you could use to do what you wanted to do. And basically came up with a series of qualities of transformative experience that are inherent in engaging with the story of nature. Sure. Those turned out to be largely things like understanding causal relationships, how one thing leads to another, or things like narrative awareness, like what when you engage with the story of the universe, and it’s new, it tends to disrupt or perturb or ask, invite you to adapt your narratives about the way the world is. So narrative, you know, narrative surfaced as this really important aspect of transformation. Other things like expressions of gratitude showed up like these really like, which were surprising in some way, but not surprising. You know that, yeah, when you when you see the big picture of who we are and how we came to be the way we are in the context of the cosmos. It has a tendency to elicit feelings of gratitude and appreciation. So things like that. And others, there was another one that I thought was really interesting that there’s this process of insignificance people will feel. Yeah, yeah. And then but then often that insignificance feeling would, over time, if the if the student would really engage with the content would actually flip into a feeling of significance. Yeah, so if you stuck with it long enough, you went from this feeling of insignificance to like, well, wait a minute. You know, we actually represent this story right here right now, which is a pretty significant position to to inhabit. So that’s the nature of, you know, as far as my research goes, that’s really what I sought to understand. And then what I tried to do was to take all of that and then reverse engineer curriculum that would then, you know, take all of these ideas and these conceptual changes and actually convert them into experiences that one can have in the world. So the idea was to go from these conceptual understandings of of these elements and and and build experiences that if you can recreate those experiences in a more informal learning setting, then you could actually get the transformative experience more widely distributed. I don’t know why the question and this is where I think one of the one of the ways or one of the areas where what I’m doing and what you’re doing sort of find each other. That. What is the what is the point of that transformative experience like what is the nature of it and what is what value or what function could it serve in the way we sort of live our lives individually individually personally and then also collectively. How would the collective expression of living a life that’s cognizant and aware and feels a sense of participation in this cosmos in the natural world. Yes. How would that intersect with the, the, the meaning crisis, basically. I used the term the Anthropocene as my sort of catch all because I’m in the environmental sciences and the Anthropocene you know you can. It’s this, it’s this idea that the humans have this impact on the planet. You know this just global scale impact. And I looked at the science of all that and the way that it’s divided up how what scientists do is to divide all of these domains into, you know, into disciplines basically. How is, how is the, how is humanity affecting the planet. Well we are pumping, you know nutrients phosphates nitrates into the environment and that’s having a consequence we are pumping co2 into the atmosphere and that’s having a consequence. We’re using land and soils in a way that’s unsustainable and that’s having a consequences. We are. There’s all kinds of socio economic aspects of the Anthropocene. But what I realized when I looked at it is that nowhere in the model of the Anthropocene, as far as the scientists are concerned, is the actual Anthropos part. Yes, yes, yes. They, they’re not, they science doesn’t study the Anthropos in that way, you know, maybe it starts to in the social sciences and things like that but, but there’s there’s no real acknowledgement of the deep fundamental ways of living, and the beliefs behind those ways of living that contributes to the Anthropocene. So, so we’re, so what we end up with is this system where we treat symptoms, the symptoms of that deeper thinking as and not the deeper thinking that causes those symptoms. Yeah, yeah, I’m in agreement with them. Yeah, so there’s this sort of whack a mole approach that we see all these symptoms like pollution and, you know, economic injustice and xenophobia, and these are just symptoms of some deeper, some deeper pathology that that we’re not really equipped or prepared or ready to, to explore until it gets to the point where it’s existential which is where we are now. So now it’s like well, we need to get serious about asking well how did we get here, how, what are the habits of thinking, and the habits of organizing ourselves that brought us to this point and so this is where I think that it intersects with the meaning crisis. So yeah. Does that give you any fodder to. Very much so I mean I think I think the. So much what you said. But first of all, no no don’t apologize. Don’t ever apologize for giving a lot of thought that should never be something we should apologize for. So, that idea. I’ll start here I was looking for where to start to try and thread. Right. The idea that a lot of this is symptomatic and there and we’re not looking at the deeper cause. I profoundly agree with that, and I’ve been trying to understand what that deeper cause is and I think it. A big part of it was something you put your finger on it in that the Anthropos is not in the science. And I don’t think that’s just in practice. I think that’s right now in principle. We have this scientific worldview in which we have no proper place or home. We do not belong in it. And I think, I think when we say we’re in now we’re in an existential crisis I think I want to invoke both meanings of that word, where they in the sense that distance might disappear but also in the sense in which, you know, Heidegger and Kierkegaard would use the word existential that our fundamental self understanding and our capacity for orienting towards trying to realize who and what we are, and how we are connected to our society in a way that matters to us socratically, like I was saying at the beginning, and not just in terms of a checklist of propositions that we have gathered together is true, but that really make the difference to people’s life. And that translates down into, or translates out. I don’t I want to use the right metaphor into a couple of very specific dimensions. One dimension is that to the degree to which people are impoverished. They lack that sense of a self transcending connectedness to themselves to others in the world. And to which they’re in a scarcity mentality about that. They get locked into a kind. Well, what all scarcity mentality does it locks you into a kind of cognitive inflexibility you get ossified. You get very self protective. And that mindset, I think is particularly deleterious, not just for us, existentially which it is, but also in the other sense of existential, it actually significantly hampers our ability to bring wisdom to bear on the problems we’re facing. So we, we are lacking that way. And I think there’s a connection to that, which is, I think it’s highly probable and plausible probable meaning there’s, you know, evidence pointing towards it as having a significant chance of being the case and plausible and that it makes very good sense that we are going to have to change and probably reduce our standard of living, the way it’s currently measured and understood the way it confuses meaning with subjective well being and subjective well being with wealth. We’re going to have to pull all those apart we’re going to have to write change. I think people will not take a hit to their subjective well being, unless you do something for them. And the evidence is dramatic and you it comes out in the, you know, when people have a child, because having a child. I use this example because it’s so available to everybody. Your finances go down your health goes down, your sleep goes down your foot, your feeding goes down your relationship to your significant other is significant. Everything goes down. Well, why in the world would you do it. Well, because it’s, it’s meaningful, because people feel connected to something that has a reality and value beyond their own egocentric framework. That’s that connectedness to something bigger. So, not only is the, that lack of meaning that lack of proper participation and I like that word very much. And so, in terms of seriously hampering the cognitive flexibility and insight and discernment and self direction we need to solve these problems. It’s also demotivating, because people will only take significant change to their subjective well being their contentedness. And you can actually promise them you demonia, if you can promise them an enriched meaning in their life and so in these two mutually viciously reinforcing ways, the meaning crisis is particularly preventing us from doing what we need to do and so I see it is in that meta problem that needs to be addressed. Along with all of our other methods and practices and attempts to address as you put it, the symptoms. Yeah, okay so there’s a lot there. So, and this is also, I think, why I get really excited when I listen to you talk with your cognitive science colleagues because you’re talking about reciprocal narrow ring and reciprocal opening and it’s like these things actually make a lot of sense to me. I don’t, you know, I’m sure there might be some risk of confirmation bias in like, but but something about what you’re saying feels so right. And so like, actually, that is what’s going on this whole idea of relevance realization that I’m scanning, looking for relationships the ones to be in, you know, and creating a silence landscape, and all of that and then that that gets embodied in some way. All of that makes perfect sense, like, like, not only not only to me like as like someone who experiences the world but when I look at the story of the cosmos, and I see how from the very beginning, from when it was a very simple universe when it was not a lot of complexity. And, you know, those dynamics of relation, relational dynamics like they are written right into the blueprint that are in the DNA of the, of the cosmos of nature. Yeah, I agree. I agree. I agree. Right, so, so that they would then later be expressed in the cognitive infrastructure and the mechanics of human thought, and, and, you know, process makes perfect sense like there’s no, there’s no controversy as to why our cognition, our inner dialogue, our way of making sense of the world would have this thing reflected in the actual fabric of the cosmos. And that that okay is like, you know, I don’t know if that’s if I know that that is a common experience throughout the ages that people have had an insight into that that that that the tacit knowing or the sort of the, the intuitive understanding of that. But it turns out it’s actually borne out by the science by the physics by the ecological dynamics. So I think there’s something powerful in there. There’s something like if we can recover that link to the cosmos to nature, then it would act as a kind of salve to the things these negative processing routines that worse that you that you that you identify as being stuck in. Yes, there’s an opportunity there it seems. I think that’s right. I think that’s right. I was recently talking with john russon about this. And we brought up Ursula Gooden I brought up Ursula goodness idea about trying to get back a sense of transcendence but not nostalgic, not to go back. No, right. Right. But to this idea of transcendence into the point of transcendence is to enhance the sense of the depth of participation that one is one one finds oneself within. Yeah, yeah. And, and, and I see that showing up in like the symbolic world, for example, I don’t. I’m not here to like, criticize anything other than to say like, if, if you seek that kind of meaning and that kind of connection in the world that we refer to now as the symbolic world, then it will be as big as the symbolic world is. But if you can somehow find that sense of transcendence and that sense of deep fundamental belonging in something that actually is bigger than because the symbolic world is but a feature of the cosmos. Right. So if you can then, and I see this, I see it playing out, you know, in, it’s frustrating actually just to hear learned, thoughtful, sincere seekers, you know, going only so far as the humanities or the, yes, yes, you know, mythic structures that that that arose in medieval times or. Yes, yes. And then we seek everything within that. And then you’ve got this whole cosmos of nature that that brought about that that that whole dimension that whole domain, but it somehow is like profane, you know, that it’s. So this is I’m reading, I’m reading, I forget the author of the book Masters of Learned Ignorance and I’m reading. I’m reading this book by a Regina, somebody who has had a huge influence and increasing influence. And I’m sorry I forget the author of the book. But the author is talking about how a Regina takes very, very, very deeply. There’s the scriptures, but there’s also what he calls the book of nature and their equivalent for him books and idea there is equivalent as like side by side like that or equivalent as in they are actually continuous in some way they have, they have continuity, or are they just two different domains. So the I’m going to see the second and I’m trying to think of if there’s an important difference that’s picked up by the first point I don’t think so, but very sorry the mail is being delivered. Yeah, yeah. So for him there’s, this is what the author is arguing there. In fact, the point is, you, there is a deep continuity between them, such that you don’t limit symbolism to human artifact. You see all of. So you have to remember he belongs to a platonic epistemology, in which you are participating. You are in, you are. You are a father fit there’s a finity between that you and that which you know in a profound way. And so within that what he is arguing that Regina argued for is that. We see everything as we see both human symbol creation. Now for him he wouldn’t say it was human he’d say that the scriptures were divinely origin but I’ll put that aside. Right. He’d say that. I don’t mean to put it aside dismissively I’m just putting it aside so I can make a point. Right, that that that process, at least our response to the scriptures, which you could say is the symbolic world. And what we are coming into contact with reality they both point to a deeper shared common source. Right. So for Regina, that’s what I mean by like stereoscopic. I was trying to say like you you look through the scriptures, and I’ll take that to stand for the symbolic world, and then you look through the cosmos but remember this looking isn’t. It’s not human looking, it’s platonic looking, and you look through them, and you’re trying to find God as the ultimate source for both of them, and so they have to be constantly read together, the two books have to be constantly read together. That was what was being proposed in a Regina. Okay got it like and and all of that sounds, you know, doable to me like, I look, I look at it, you know, as a sort of not linearly but I do take time, seriously, you know, in the way we understand it now until some better understanding comes along. I think that’s a good point. I think that’s a good point. I think that’s a good point. I think that’s a good point. I think that’s a good point. I think that’s a good point. I think that’s a good point. I think that’s a good point. I think that’s a good point. I think that’s a good point. I think that’s a good point. I think that’s a good point. I think that’s a good point. I think that’s a good point. I think that’s a good point. 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So in other words, they’re actually not two bodies of knowledge, they’re just one continuum of increasing complexity, which then comes into self reflectiveness, and then starts to create the symbolic world. But it’s really, you know, it’s, and then, lo and behold, there’s still God, you know, like, you don’t, you do not have to forfeit God in any way, you know, not even semantically, you don’t have to forfeit God in this. Yeah, I agree. I agree. So let that and I share your aspirational hope, I do want to put in a note that Regina was driven away as a heretic for proposing that. And we have to ask why that’s the case, because I’m sure that there are some Christians listening to that, to what I just said, and they’re saying, of course, yes, but then I and again, I’m not. Why is that so heretical to say something as simple as the creation is the creator, or the creator is the creation? I mean, I remember having a conversation like that with somebody who was really devout, and it was just something that I could, he was adamant, you know, and it was like, you know, so part of it is a historical answer. And I’ll try to be as respectfully fair as I can. So Christianity is right, trying to capture the ancient world, and the main competitor is paganism broadly construed. Yeah. Now, when we think of paganism, we think of some something from the Simpsons, like blood for ball and like really prim, like, we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about a really, you know, a paganism that had gone through a lot of changes through in the hands of epicureanism, stoicism, neoplatonism. So it’s a very powerful framework. And so much so that Christianity adopted a lot of that into it. But Christianity also needed to powerfully distinguish itself from the pagan world. Now, some of that was through the really prophetic, in the sense of telling forth of agape, that was powerful and important. But also Christianity made very clear that it saw itself as saying more clearly something that had been discovered within that philosophical tradition within Platonism, which was the distinction between immortality and eternity. So the gods are immortal, but they’re not eternal. They do not reflect the ultimate principles of reality. Right. And you can see this discovery in Plato, where he’s pulling them apart. And so Christianity said, aha, and where we can see that very clearly is in the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, which is the idea that unlike the gods, who emerge and are immortal, but are bound by a higher order domain of eternity, this god, the god, the Abrahamic god, the claim is actually speaks from eternity. And is therefore not limited to the principles of the cosmos. And so we can challenge that. I’m just trying to offer an explanation, first of all. And so part of what is the fear is, and it’s not usually legitimate, and I think it was unfairly given to Regina, I think it was unfairly given to Spinoza, there’s a fear of pantheism, as it’s typically called. And so it’s not a very clear, which is all that we’re talking about is we’re talking about something that is emergent within the cosmos, but doesn’t explain the eternal dimensions. This was Plato’s great concern, too. So the Christians aren’t just pointing in the dark. It’s like, and I mean, and this is a problem that goes still into the heart of the philosophy of science. Why should math, why should math tell us about the fundamental nature of reality? The thing about what a weird thing math is, how abstract it is, how timeless and spaceless it is. And yet it tells us about how things unfold in time and space. This is an old problem. And I’m not asking you to solve that problem. I’m just trying to explain that Christianity saw itself as inheriting a criticism within paganism of paganism, that it saw itself as properly aligning and fulfilling, aligning to and fulfilling. Sorry, I’m trying to make something very complex as short as I possibly can. No, I get it that there is this, it is a morass of inherited politics is what I mean, I don’t mean to say that, you know, in a disparaging way, but that’s kind of what it strikes me as is that there’s a lot of jostling, there’s a lot of power dynamics, there is good faith faith, trying to feel that deep and abiding sense of connectedness, which I think is also part of it. But at the same time, it sounds like a lot, especially given what we now know about the way the world has come to be, prior to any of this arguing prior to any of this conflict. I think that’s right. So I’m reading Religion After Science by Sellingbeck, who’s in Nova Scotia, which is a province in Canada. So whenever I can, Canada, yay. Go Canada. And he’s talking about that we have not yet, and this goes with what I was talking with Jordan about, we’re talking with layman and Bruce about layman Pascal Bruce Alderman, you know, we haven’t properly grieved the death of God. And part of what I mean by that is we are aware of big time. Right. And this is selling Becks point, we’re aware of deep time, not only backwards, but forwards. And yet we have not taken it into our existential narrative. And he says, the most plausible conclusion we should draw about ourselves is that the ultimate questions are the ones that will take the most time and require the biggest time scale to understand. And we don’t have those. So he actually proposes, and I think, I mean, I want this to be taken careful. He proposes a hypothesis of spiritual immaturity, that it’s very much the case that we are at the beginning of trying to answer the ultimate questions, not the end, but at the beginning, and that we need to take an appropriate attitude towards ultimate reality that takes into account big time and engenders in us a profound acknowledgement and appreciation that we are extremely spiritually immature, rather than we have got the completed answer. And he says, like, like, it’s strange that we think that the most profound questions are the ones that have received the complete answer and less profound question. Like, you’ll ask people, how long do you think it’ll take us to really figure out something, some scientific phenomenon, they’ll say, hundreds, thousands of years. But the same people, if you ask, and he did this, right, if you ask them in another context, like, what’s the ultimate nature of reality? And they think, you know, well, we sort of have the answers for that. Yeah, right. Either give us they either give a confidence theism or same thing, a confidence atheism and say, Nope, the question’s answered, it’s solved. And it’s like, but don’t don’t don’t don’t we see this as a fractal expressed in every teenager in every? I mean, it’s not like it’s it’s not like it’s hard to see. I mean, all the evidence suggests that we are in that sort of. And what it takes to mature is to be able to get outside of that a little bit and take, you know, accept a little humility about, about, you know, sort of pontificating about everything, just saying, well, we don’t know. Like, imagine if you talk to somebody in the Bronze Age about religion, and could they have foreseen what was going to come in the actual revolution, they can’t afford it couldn’t have foreseen that. And then, right. And then this is this, this is the end of illusion history, we, we do it as individuals. This is how it comes rich right into us. So if you ask people, how much have you changed in the last 10 years, they’ll say, Oh, I’ve tried change tremendously. And you say, how much will you change in the next 10 years? Oh, I won’t change very much at all. And you can, and they’ll say this every 10 years, by the way. Okay, everybody believes they’re complete, even though the evidence is overwhelming that they’re not. I’m willing to cut people a break, you know, we’re all children at this. And you know, we’re all sort of find ourselves cast into this thing. And we’re just all trying to figure it out. So I’m not really I’m really not interested in, you know, I’m not saying you are either, but just not interested in sort of complaining and holding anyone to blame. However, we do we are backs are up against the wall. And we do need something profoundly different, some profoundly different way of relating to the world. Because we are on this terminal, you know, we’re in. And again, I know you’ve said this many times, and I say it over and over, I’m not a utopianist. And I’m not, you know, but I’m seeing how what the corner with that we’ve packed ourselves into here is now ecological, you know, it’s no, it’s not just some ideological thing that risks a lot of, you know, local suffering. Granted, we do now have, you know, mutually assert destruction looming. And so I’m not trying to dismiss that. But but once we do, hopefully get beyond this sort of this, this present medieval brutality that’s surfaced, we can now focus on, you know, what is our what is the issue that is really putting all of us at stake everything the whole history of us at stake, which is ecological, you know, collapse, it’s it’s runaway climate change of some form or another, and or just the ecological, you know, the local ecological collapses that are going to happen. You know, we’ve got to get this is why you know, I’m sort of adamant about saying, you know, we have to do this in the framework of nature, we’ve got to do this in Alliance, we’ve got to include the natural world as part of our future. Because if we don’t get that one, right, it really doesn’t matter how, you know, how woke you are, if if if you don’t have a habitable planet. And so, yeah, and I also the good news here, I think also is that those those, those more socially confined problems will tend to resolve themselves if we get the deeper alignment, the deeper identification with the planet. I think that’s right. I do. I guess I was not here to beat up on anybody. I was trying to answer your question. How do we get into this sort of thing? And I think I agree with you, we we we need to bring back like Tillich, we need the God beyond God, the God of theism in this current situation. He was talking about that in the 50s. And he was talking just about the meaning crisis. But I think that’s even more the case now. And that’s something that Jordan Hall has been arguing for. We need the God beyond the God of theism, which is not the God of pantheism either. Right? We we have to take seriously our spiritual immaturity, and the spiritual ambiguity of the universe. We have to take those seriously. And we have to you. We have to embody them. We have to actually, yes, yes, yes, we need to take take them on as our ours ours. Yes, as how we participate. Exactly. And and we have to take them on, not in a nihilistic fashion, like but but but in a way that opens the eyes of wonder engagement. I guess it depends on what kind of future you want. If you want a nihilistic future, then take it on as a nihilistic pursuit. But if you want it to be a creative process, which it has been up until now for us, it’s you know, we have been on this extended creative role, do we want to make choices that can further extend the creative role that we’re on? Or do we want to be the participants in the one that, you know, brings at least this experiment to an end? I mean, I don’t see it’s not a big hard question to answer. You know, do you want to agree with beauty and creativity? Or do you want do you want more ugliness? I just don’t think it’s really even I don’t even want to waste time asking the question, you know, like, yeah, I mean, I do. Like, first of all, I agree with what you said, but I do meet people that I don’t know how to put it. They’ve been exhausted. They’re burnt out to use Hans language, they’ve been burnt out by the nihilistic thread within the culture. And they okay, so let’s how about we’re just tired of it? Well, if you’re tired of it, yes, try something else. Try something else. Try identifying with something more fulfilling, something more gratifying, something more beautiful, you know, because it’s there too. I don’t think this is a question of sacrifice and compromise, and a lowered quality of life. I actually think the opposite that that that the secret of, you know, the hidden gem here is that there’s something profoundly more beautiful to be had in this process. I agree. I agree everywhere. I but let’s take on this challenge together and not posing it as something you’re responsible for, because it’s something but there’s people that are beyond tired. There are people that despair. This is a Kierkegaardian point. And despair is a very self fulfilling, self maintaining mindset, right? It locks you in and it self perpetuates, and it defends itself against. And so part of the issue and you know, and one of the things that’s interesting about Kierkegaard on one side and Nishitani on the other is their answer is, well, and I’m asking what you think of it. They say, well, you haven’t followed the despair all the way down. That’s Nishitani’s critique of Nietzsche. Like, you know, don’t live it on the surface. Take it. Take it all the way down. Like really open your really take it on. Just hang on a sec. Yeah, because you’re responding in a very, very, I think, predictable and responsible manner. What they say is when you do that, if you are willing to follow it all the way through, it opens you out to something beyond all the frameworks that bound you into the despair and you weren’t aware of how they bound you into the despair. And I this is what I properly mean by, we haven’t grieved the death of God. So Nietzsche’s critique, right, was that we set the axial age gave us the two world mythology and that was wonderful and beautiful and helped us talk about transcendence and the power of creativity and participation. But then what happens is this world progressively became instrumental for the upper world, the lower world becomes instrumental. And then when the upper world for historical scientific reasons becomes absurd to us, then we are only left with a lower world that we have been inculturated to regard as purely instrumental in value. And so you say, well, don’t don’t treat the world instrumental. Yeah, but you know what you need to do? You need to go back and unravel that axial age grammar, that two worlds mythology, that two worlds way of thinking of transcendence and participation so that people can recover that. That’s what I mean. Like if we don’t do that, people are locked, like you’ll meet, I don’t know if you meet people, I meet people say like, well, we’re just meat machines. And it’s like, well, you don’t really live that way. But I understand what you like, they there’s a whole, this is Nietzsche’s idea of right, and Heidegger picks it up, that we have a framework of seeing this world, which I believe and you believe are the only world as only instrumental value. But if there’s nothing that it’s instrumental for, then it has no value. This is what I mean about just this is why Nietzsche proclaims the madman proclaims the death of God, not to the believers in the marketplace, but to the atheists. And he says to them, you haven’t realized what you’ve done. You’ve taken a sponge and you’ve wiped away the sky, we are forever falling. Right? That’s, that’s what I’m trying to get at. Like, how do we Sorry, I’m talking too much. No, no, I just I just but I feel like, okay, well, we do have now we have a new mythos that can actually restore that it’s not down there. And up there, what you’re looking for up there is actually down there. It’s like that in the mud, it’s the mat, the divine is this world. And it is. And this is what the this is what the science is telling us not that science is the only way of knowing I’m not, I’m not making an argument that science is the true and better way of knowing and that the indigenous and that the other spiritual traditions are useless. I’m not saying that what I’m saying is that all these things now agree that that immature way that you just described that, that it’s just mistaken. And it’s the problem, I think, though, is that now it takes a lot of bandwidth to, to deconstruct and, you know, to do what is the word D reify all of those things that and, and bring in something install something that’s bigger and, and more complex and more real, more relevant to the world that we as we actually now know how it that we live in. So I don’t see I see how it can be done. I don’t think it’s like, hard in theory to do. It’s hard in practice, because because we’ve backed ourselves into this corner. Yeah, of nihilism or complaint. So we have it now like we I remember Jim Rutt asked you once, you know, what’s the mythos? And you were very sort of careful to answer his question by saying that you are not the prophet, which I fully, you know, can appreciate that sense that you know, that take but but but you didn’t give an answer about the mythos like, and and and I guess what I would have I would love for someone to ask me that question one day, not right now, but that what we do have a mythos, we have a mythos worthy of a new credo, you know, we have this. I agree. So I guess for me, what you and what you find exciting in the in the 40 cogs I is the point about the mythos, right is it has to be a mythos that engages your religion. It can’t be it can’t be a story out there. It has to be a story simultaneously out there and in here. Right. Right. It has to be transjective in an important way. And for me, and perhaps that’s why you’re finding the 40 cogs I talk so exciting is because 40 cognitive science is building a way of talking about biology and cognition that and its deep embeddedness and dependence on a dynamic environment, right as a way that fits into a larger story, a sort of a meta modern story of complexity. So, I mean, you know, Brendan Graham Dempsey did a great thing on the story talks about, you know, you have the traditional model, which is the classic two worlds, and then you have the sort of the optimism of modernity, and it is offering right sort of this, it sort of emphasizes utility and power. And then you have postmodernism, which emphasizes diversity, and then the sort of defining ethos of meta modernism is complexity. And the idea of understanding how important complexity is. So another way I would put it is that not only do the traditional religions not really grapple well with deep time, both forward and back, the way selling back argues selling back argues, but they also don’t, they’re not set up to deal with dynamic complexity as a fundamental aspect of their ontology. And, and I think that is that’s why there’s this growing, and again, I’m not happy with this word, but just sort of this meta modern spirituality, like, you know, it’s trying to be responsive and responsible to these deep facts, I’m going to use that really, you know, controversial term, but these deep facts about deep time in both directions, and deep complexity, right, we need a spirituality that is mature, or at least trying to become mature, right. And here’s why I turned to john russon again, he said, you know, never finished maturity, and let’s take it that we are spiritually immature. But what does it mean to decide, I’m going to become more spiritually mature, it means to face up to fundamental facts of reality. And we need a religious vision. And this is why I’m talking to you that allows us to face up to the deep facts of deep time, both directions, and deep complexity from the bottom up, and the top down, because the complexity goes both ways. Yes. And I’m here to tell you that we do have that. When I listened to the russon conversation, he talked a lot about maturing into, you know, the political and the economic realities that we inherit. But but but what I didn’t hear was a reference to the natural ecological realities that we are living into as well, because it’s in those, it’s in that story, the story of nature, is that thing that you’re looking for, we do have a really fine grained story of facts, that when strung together in a meaningful way that that that that brings that continuity of what my personal identity to the natural to the world, the cosmos, we have that now, like, so it’s, and it will have, it will extend its tendrils of impact into these other domains that we are just habitually drawing on, like, like, Jungian mythologies, which I’m sure are, you know, amazing, but they are human. They are humanistic, you know, they are. Yes, they are. Maybe maybe he was a cosmologist, I don’t know. But with the but what we now know about the evolution of the cosmos is so much more fine grained, and getting more and more fine grained every day into eternity, because that’s, I’m not saying that there is a, I’m not putting a boundary on what it is we can know because, because now that if we can identify with the cosmos itself, we don’t know its trajectory, it could be infinite, in which case, so will our growth with it, so will our evolution into it, if we can get through this current bottleneck, yes, you know, which we are trying to do, I think, and there’s so, yeah, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to like, but, oh, no, that was great. I’m not sure. Yeah. And I mean, so, I mean, the talk with Jonathan, with John Roosam was amazing, John has had a huge impact on me. And his idea of trying to, I find so much convergence with my work of trying to be play dough and phenomenology back together. But you notice the one place where we were a little bit sort of, not friction, but there was a little bit of distance was when I was pressing him on sort of issues around transcendence and that aspect, and trying to take this more into an ontological depth, the way I see people like B.C. Schindler and other people doing and saying, at some point, we need to, right, and I think John would actually be open to this, what I’ve read, you know, we need, and I’ll use Erogena’s language, we need, we do need to reflect deeply on the logos of the Anthropos, how logo shows up in human beings and in human being, but we also need to put that into relationship with the logos of ontology, of the ontos, of being. So, right, those and that, I see that as a properly platonic project. So, people talk about the two things that are being talked about in the Republic, there’s the psyche and the state. Well, there’s actually three that are being talked about in the Republic. There’s the psyche and the state and the analogy between them, but the analogy between the psyche and the state and reality, there’s the divided line and the cave, and so there’s actually three that are in the platonic triangle, not just the two, and I’m going to talk to John again about that and I’ll bring it up with him, but I did agree with what, he did agree with the proposal of transcendence into as to, as different from transcendence beyond, as part of what’s needed, and I don’t know if you’ve read good enough, but she talks in a way very similar to the way you do about finding- I’m friends with Ursula. Of course you are, of course you are. So, I’m sorry, I’m speaking to somebody who knows much better than I do, but that notion of finding in the depths of nature a real transcendence that allows people to transcend out of egocentrism and leave the cave, I think that’s very, very, very important. I think, I wish that notion was more broadly understood. I think that distinction is very important, and of course you know her. So- I actually interviewed pretty much every big historian that was around at the time when I was doing my research. I went and spoke with everybody I could find to figure this out, and her story and her narrative, her trajectory is a good one, I think. She had a religious background and found all that she found in religion she could also find in nature. Yes. It was really no controversy, no big conflict. It just opened up her ideas of spirituality in a way that only nature can do. Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead, sorry. No, please. Well, I just like the sacred depths of nature, and I mean, you even, I think it’s Kusa who talks about this, you know, God is within but not enclosed. God is beyond but not excluded. And if you think about, yeah, right. That’s right. Well, yeah, it’s nothing inconsistent. Right, yeah, exactly. So yeah, can I have, am I entitled to have that even though I maintain a scientific worldview? Yes. Or would someone seek to deprive me of that? I don’t know. I’m not asking you. I’m just saying like, how come I can’t have that relationship to God too, just because I revere the creation, you know? You can actually, it turns out. I think so. And I’m very interested in how the logos that shows up in Dio Logos translates into relationship between the human logos and the ontologos and how that should ramify into our relationship to the world, to nature. And again, nature doesn’t mean wilderness. That’s part of the problem that people, that’s also something that has to be understood. The language is just, the language fails us in that way. It’s a constant struggle to, you know, I think you were telling me about Spinoza using nature or God interchangeably. Yes, exactly. I wish we had a better language that could really capture the relationship that’s inherent there. I think we need to read more Spinoza. Spinoza is in the midst of the scientific revolution. He is maybe one of the most profound first readers of Descartes. I think he’s the person that translates Descartes initially. So he gets what’s going on. And yet he sees the project is not going to go well if the spiritual, the ethical, the existential are left out of the equation. And so that’s what he tries to do in the ethics. He tries to correct that at the very beginning. And the language he used, of course, he has also declared a heretic. He’s dismissed as a pantheist. And a lot of things. And now what’s happened recently is he’s been going through a revival and many people are saying these labels that you’ve applied to him are ways of actually misapprehending him. And so he can dismiss rather than wrestling with the new way of thinking that he’s trying to get you to see. And I agree. So I strongly recommend Carlisle’s book Spinoza’s Religion. That book really, really opens up what Spinoza is doing in a way that is deeply relevant to what we’re talking about here now. Well, here’s the thing, John, I think I might be living Spinoza’s religion. This is the I need to actually, I actually need to make a confession. You know, you, you’re really great at rattling off, you know, researchers and books and things like that. And I have to confess, like, I don’t, that is not where I’m coming from. I literally just come in off the trail. Like I was just on the Appalachian Trail to come in and have this conversation. That’s why I’m talking to you. But that’s why I’m talking. And it’s like, it just feels like, you know, someone has to come in and speak for the earth. And I don’t mean that in a, you know, I’m not saying that in a way, I’m not saying that I speak for the earth. I’m saying somebody has to, somebody has to come into this and speak directly for because and it’s interesting that when I listen to your, you know, your deep conversations with lots of people, I don’t find myself referring back to something that someone has written. I refer back to something that I’ve either witnessed or experienced or something in the way an animal moves or just the way an animal carries itself or the way that light bounces off of things or the way that the rivers meander, you know, that kind of thing. I’m, I’m, I’m seeing this stuff out there in nature, which I think, I think there’s something useful there to bring that perspective to this conversation. I think it’s more than useful. I think it’s necessary. Absolutely. You said it last time you said something like, you know, you think that these these these ecology of practices that, you know, you’re doing could benefit from, you know, having more sort of time spent in nature, contemplating nature. Actually, I think it’s more more than useful. I think it’s like be passed to do that. Yes. Because it’s through that relationship first with planet, then with cosmos, if you if you dare to go. But the point is that we’ve got this planetary thing that needs to be healed. We’ve got a relationship with this planet that needs to be healed before we can make our way to the stars. You know, we’re not going to get to the stars at the price of this planet. It’s just not we’re going to get there by tapping into the creative impulse of nature. And until we sort of drop the hubris and and do that, you know, in a serious way, then the universe is off limits, you know, to our the galaxy doesn’t need another parasitic species coming out and claiming colonial rights to the place. You know, it’s like, I think that it’s going to take a different, different ideology of not an ideology, but a different mindset to get there. Yes. I agree totally with the way you are. I mean, that where we’ve almost circled back to the first question, why am I talking to you? I’m talking to you precisely because to use some of Rusin’s language, you bear witness to epiphany. That’s the title of one of his books, you bear witness to epiphany. I cannot deny that. I cannot deny that. Right. And we need that. And that’s the part of, you know, and Rusin’s point, the brilliant point is that it’s not only that we need it because of the exigent situation we’re in, but we also need it because it’s a fundamental need to bear witness to epiphany. It’s a fun, it’s, I mean, I think bearing witness to epiphany, one of John Rusin’s books is a masterpiece. I’ve read it twice. I’ve studied it with Chappie in depth and that proposal that bearing witness to epiphany is fundamental to us as human beings. Right. I think that’s exactly right. So I want to talk to you because you’re doing that. You’re bearing witness to epiphany. I bring these things in not because I’m trying to point out or place a demand on you. I’m trying to, I’m just trying to bring in a convergence and say there, like there’s as many, if we can bring as many voices together with, you know, different degrees of expertise and background and converge on saying the same thing, the more plausible and attractive it becomes as a proposal. That’s what I’m trying to do. I agree. And I see that. I would say that I think it’s actually beyond convergence and more in the realm of conciliance. In other words, that these are disparate lines of inquiry that are coming together on an insight. That insight then deserves some kind of privileged examination, a privileged analysis. It deserves. And it’s precisely because we’re coming at it from disparate directions, whether that’s spiritual or permaculture or, you know, any one of the other, you know, traditions. It’s, yeah. And I think nature is down there just kind of waiting to fulfill its role in this process. We just have to take it seriously. Yes. I think nature’s down there. I think nature, well, here I want to say something even different. I hope it lands well with you. I want to replace nature’s down there or up there with just. Oh, absolutely. Nature’s just around, it’s encompassing, right? Because nature’s also. It infuses us. Yes, it’s also beyond us. Again, the deep time and the deep complexity, right? And the combinatorial explosive nature of reality. These are facts we can no longer deny. In fact, they are facts that we have to, as you said, we have to make central sacred to make centered to center it and to center our attention to it. That’s what we they have to become sacred facts to us. For many people, they’re barely propositional facts. And for many people, they are not sacred facts, I would argue. Yeah, I think I couldn’t agree more. And all I can do is to say again, that everything that we know scientifically about the way the universe has unfolded, every new discovery, every bit of insight that science manages to agree upon, it is sort of a consensus operation. But the point is that the best science we have is consistent. And it brings all of these questions together in a way that solves many, many problems at once. Not all of them. Again, this isn’t about the end of inquiry or the end of suffering. It’s just that we’re ready for this other way of imagining ourselves in the world. And we haven’t even had a chance to talk about all these things that I wanted to ask you about, about some of the other papers that you’re publishing and your conversations on predictive processing with Mark. That stuff is so relevant. It’s so relevant. I don’t know if you got a chance to see the talk I gave at Cambridge about rationality. Oh, I did. I’ve been quoting it left and right about how imaginatively augmented cognition and perception to discern real patterns in the world. That is OEKA practice to me. That’s what I call OEKA practice. I did want to ask you, maybe if I could put you on the spot here a little bit, on the point about the NASA astronauts sort of enacting a problem with the rover in their own biology. Are you saying that they experienced these faults or whatever you want to call it, these problems prior to learning that the rover had an analogous issue? Or are you just saying that, I mean, because what is the claim there? I mean, the scientist in me is asking this question. I’m not clear about which claim, the claim that they would enact it or the claim that they felt a sympathetic identity with the rover. Well, the fact that they would feel a sympathetic identity isn’t really surprising to me at all. But the fact that they might feel it prior to it, prior to their knowledge of it. So I think it’s very, if I understand you correctly, it was not, it was something that emerged intuitively bottom up and not even individually, but collectively. And only, I think when the ethnographers were there was where they actually bringing any reflective awareness on this whole process. They were very focused. They’re very focused on producing the propositional scientific reports as they should be. I mean, that’s, that’s, there’s NASA scientists. I’m not criticizing them, but the work of the ethnographers was to say, yeah, and that’s what the work that Dan and I were doing in the publications. Yeah. But doing that, this is a brilliant case study because of its strangeness, because of its displacement in time and space and topography. We can, it can, it can bring things out that are normally happening so fast and so implicitly and intuitively that we don’t see them. And that the ethnographers go in and see, right. And then Dan and I go and take the ethnop, so you’re watching this process of recursive reflection that is explicating. So by the time Dan and I get, and by, and then, and then I take that, by the way, Dan approved of it, right. He really thought the talk I gave at Cambridge was great, but then I took that and then develop it further. So you’re getting, you’re getting several orders of explication of something that was densely implicit in situ. Sure. No, that makes perfect sense. And that, that, that’s a kind of a claim that I would say, well, yeah, you know, like that makes perfect sense. It’s just that idea of that they would, that they would, that they would lodge a complaint about, you know, a stiff shoulder. And then, and then two days later, you know, the engineers would, would report that, oh, by the way, the- It was often the same day. The same day. They’d say I was doing this in the garden in the morning and then they got to the lab and spirits right wheel was stuck. They would talk. I don’t have, like, I would, I would, I don’t have like an explanation, like, obviously in terms of like, if you, I’ll have to say to that, if you say so, you know, like, like that, that’s anecdotal. I know, let’s be very careful what I’m not claiming. I’m not claiming clairvoyance or anything like that. What I’m claiming is they, right, are implicitly identifying with the rover in ways that facilitate them interacting with the rovers that they have- Which is profound, which is, that’s not, I don’t want to, you know, dismiss that. That’s, that is a profound description of reality that actually is consistent with everything that I, you know, know about in activism. So, yeah, I was just a little, I just wanted clarification on that one thing about, you know, because if the claim is being made, that’s all. Yeah, yeah. So some people have tried to say, oh, well, you’re talking, you know, the clairvoyance. The thing that I would say, I’m not claiming that Dan and I are not claiming that. We’re claiming what I just said to you. And one other thing, the one other thing is these scientists are having an experience that is powerful and functional for them, but they don’t have a language other than the language of magic to talk about it. And that’s part of the meaning crisis. That’s another thing. Yeah, I totally agree. And, and I don’t think you need to call it magic. I think it’s all magic. I mean, the fact that you and I having this conversation, the fact that, you know, I’m here is magic, but the point is that I don’t think you really need, it’s magical, but I don’t think it’s necessarily magic. Do you know what I mean? I agree. I agree. And I think trying, I mean, so I want to be very careful. I’m not criticizing them. I’m trying to say they are struggling to find a language to articulate this. They do not have one. And so they resort to a kind of mythological way of explaining it, but they are trying to that, that experience is pointing to a profound, a profound set of individual and shared cognitive processes and ways in which, well, as I make the argument, the ways in which procedural, respectable and participatory knowing are doing the heavy work for making sense. And so that the science is possible. I think that’s the profound point that they’re struggling, that their experience is sort of bringing into their awareness, but in a way that they can’t bring a conceptual. It’s like, it’s like, it’s like tacit. No, I mean, it’s kind of on use tacit knowledge in a sophisticated way. Yeah, it is. It’s Polanyian through and through very much. Very, very much. Very good. Well, I, you know, there’s just so much, John, that I want to talk to you about. So, I mean, just like the function of art and like where art comes from and how that like, let’s do that next. Let’s do that. Let’s have enough. I mean, let’s do another one where we can come in and we can talk about the imaginal. We can talk about art. We can talk about ritual and follow up on everything we’ve talked about today. So let’s just set that up and make that happen. Perfect. Rich, is there anything more you’d like to say before I stop recording? No, not, not, not, not again. I mean, if I said it last time, just that I think that we are the kind of things that are going on in the world right now make perfect sense given what we’re going through collectively, you know, that these events and this moment, this time is is pivotal. And it’s it’s it’s part of it’s part of a much bigger trajectory of development. I don’t mean to like make any profound claims on that other than just to say this is what transformation feels like. This is what paradigm shift feels like. And so try to enjoy the ride, try to participate in it. I guess that’s it. Thank you so much, Rich. Thank you, John.