https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=JF1DERVUc1M
Welcome everyone to a very special voices with Verveki. This is our seventh and for now last episode of the philosophy of meditation that goes in conjunction with the amazing book that the remarkable Rick Rapetti put together, the philosophy of meditation handbook, a gem if you’re interested in getting a deeper understanding of mindfulness practices. I recommend this is the first book you take a look at if you want to get into the best philosophy, cognitive science, psychology around that. And now, as always, I’m going to welcome our guest and then turn things over to the remarkable Rick Rapetti to lead us through this. So first of all, welcome to Mark Miller. And then as always, Rick, wonderful to see you. Likewise, John. And it’s great to meet you, Mark. Finally, I’ve heard a lot about you. Mark is a philosopher and cognitive scientist doing work on consciousness and contemplative studies. He’s a former student of John’s and a co-author with John and Brett Anderson on predictive processing and relevance realization. His research explores what cognitive science can tell us about happiness and well-being and what it means to live in our increasingly technologically mediated world. That’s really important. Mark’s also the senior research fellow at Monash University Center for Consciousness and Contemplative Studies in Australia. And he’s also affiliated with the University of Toronto, where John is, and Hokkaido University in Japan. In this series, we like to always mention connections with previous or future guests. This is episode seven, but it’s probably the last one in this co-hosted series, although I intend to continue interviewing people doing work in this new discipline, the philosophy of meditation on my own channel, on my own and or occasionally with John, perhaps whenever a specific guest captures his interest enough to pull him away from his many other incredibly valuable projects, which I appreciate him being here today at all. So to recap our previous six episodes, in episode one, John and I introduced a series, and John wore two hats, co-host and first guest, where we focused on his work that’s relevant to the philosophy of meditation, what John might describe as integrating four-recog-sci with Western and Eastern contemplative philosophy. In episode two, we interviewed Pierre Grimes, one of the first contemporary Western philosophers to try to bridge Western philosophy, particularly neoplatonism with Buddhism, as well as the first philosopher in the U.S. to develop a philosophical counseling practice, what he calls philosophical midwifery or midwifery, as John would pronounce it. I wonder, is that a Canadian thing? In episode three, we interviewed Lou Marinoff, whose work similarly bridges Western and Buddhist philosophies. Lou’s also a leader in the philosophical counseling movement. In episode four, we interviewed Thomas Metzinger, whose work integrates analytic philosophy, four-recog-sci and meditation as a key tool in the exploration of consciousness. In episode five, we had Evan Thompson here, who does similar work renowned as a trailblazer in bringing into existence four-recog-sci and bringing it to the attention of philosophers. And in episode six, we interviewed Massimo Piliucci, yet another philosophical counselor, but who is more renowned as a popularizer of Stoicism and more generally of philosophical practice. Philosophy as a way of life, or as John likes to put it, phylia Sophia, as opposed to strictly academic philosophy. Given Mark’s philosophical and cognitive science research on contemplative studies and human flourishing, I think it’s fair to say he shares with all our previous guests an interest in the links between philosophy, meditation, the nature of consciousness, conceptions of the self, phylia Sophia, and the attempt to integrate meditation and cognitive science and philosophical analysis. We’re delighted to have you here today, Mark. Before we begin with our list of canned questions that we ask all our guests about, which we may go off script, since you and John are both friends and collaborators, I’d like to ask John if you’d like to say anything else or otherwise, we’ll just begin with some questions. John? Well, I am, and I always mean this in a non-condescending manner, and Mark takes it this way. I’m extremely proud of Mark. Mark was originally an undergraduate student of mine in the cognitive science program at the University of Toronto. He went on to do amazing work, and then he reached out to me. We’ve reconnected. He’s got a Shirk grant that he’s doing at the University of Toronto. He is leading the Consciousness and Wisdom Studies Lab. As you mentioned, Rick, Mark and I are collaborating. We have a lot of other collaborations on the way. We’re starting to speak, show up frequently at conferences together. A little bit of a nice little fun. Yeah, a little bit of a dynamic duo. And it’s always, there’s been, we all as teachers look for the students that are clearly surpassing us and taking our work and taking it further and farther. And Mark does that. And he is one of also one of the nicest, best people I’ve ever met. And so that’s what I, that’s all I have to say. But I’m so happy to end at least this chunk of this series, the continuous version of it with Mark. So welcome, Mark. Thanks so much. Why I feel all those things about you too. How lovely. How lovely when that’s reciprocated. I feel exactly all those things. I’m so thrilled to be here. So this is great. Thanks for inviting me. Well, that’s that’s a beautiful thing to hear from both of you. All right, Mark. So tell us about yourself in your own words. We already mentioned some of it, but what are you working on? What else should the audience know about you? Yeah, you’ve said all my affiliations, which takes ages. I seem to be overworked right now. What else? Maybe something interesting that you’re not going to just find on my website or strictly through my research papers as my orientation towards some of these ideas. I laugh that my job feels more like my hobby and my meditative practice feels like the real work that I’m interested in. So even though I’m doing all of this research, both in the philosophy and science of contemplative development, I really do feel like developing my contemplative life is really the primary thing. Developing virtue and becoming a good human and supporting my network and becoming a good servant and serving others. That’s really the heart of the thing. And then I kind of feel like research is the hobby, which is lovely when your job ends up being your hobby rather than a major stress in your life. So that’s sort of my orientation. And I think we’ll get into it. But one of the lovely things about doing, especially the kind of research that I’m interested in doing in the contemplative science end of my research is that you get this wonderful closed circuit where my own contemplative program is fueling the kinds of things I’m interested in and also fueling my own orientation. Within that research neighborhood. And then the research is if it’s good research, and I hope it is, I think it should always flow back rather than taking sort of Buddhist meditation as a jumping point for science. I think it’s cooler or at least equally cool when the science that you do filters back into telling you how to practice. Right. Can it update some of the ways? I mean, you know, the Buddha didn’t think that that was the end of the program, you know, when his disciple came to him and said, you know, have you told us everything there is to know? And the Buddha said, well, what’s bigger? The dirt under my fingernails are all over the earth. And he says, well, obviously all of the earth. He goes, yeah, that’s how much more there is to know after I’m done. There’s that much more. It’s a wonderful thing to think that our science can be supporting our development. And I think really I feel like my research does that. That’s fantastic. The first part of what you said about your orientation, certainly, I’m sure John and I resonate with that kind of primary. That’s a wonderful thing. That’s that that’s proof of the philia Sophia. But what’s great about what you just said is the total integration of academic philosophies, cognitive science, you know, the analytic and the mystical, all that stuff. That’s really beautiful. And that’s why that’s why this series is here. So we can talk about these connections. That’s one stuff. So, all right, a little earlier bio. How did you get here? Like, how did you come to meditation, philosophy and perhaps their union? Well, that’s so easy. I met John. I mean, that’s sort of started the thing. John Jones has been a massive influence on me for more than 20 years. I was a returning student. I went out and worked for a while and got into some trouble and all the things you do when you’re young. And then I came back. I came back as a seeker, a seeker of wisdom. So I came back to university already with the orientation that I wanted to enter the university experience my undergraduate because I came back to an undergraduate in my 20s. I already came back with the impetus to like figure out who the hell am I and what the hell is this all about? And what should I do about who I am and what this is about? And I started looking for that specifically. So, of course, I gravitated towards the philosophy department. And but quickly, the thing that I was most interested in was philosophy of self, philosophy of consciousness, wisdom, wisdom and its intersection with who we are and what consciousness is all about. So, of course, John was is the shining light at the University of Toronto on these topics. And we ask, I mean, we seem to be saying this a lot. Like, where do you learn about wisdom? Like, it’s a big problem. It is a big problem, you know, in the world today that we have lots of informational opportunities at the university level, but not very many transformational opportunities. But that’s just not the case at the University of Toronto. I mean, you think like, where do we find it? You think like you find it at U of T. There’s all sorts of opportunities at University of Toronto for real wisdom teachers. And John’s one of those. So I came on board there. There’s a longer story that’s probably not interesting in this format. I got really sick and then I got better and it like shook me out of a style of being in the world. I was making a lot of money. I was in sales and I got shook out of that. And the shake was strong enough that I started taking self-reflection and self-development really seriously. And so then I did the almost cliche thing of I went east. So I spent from about 23 years old. Wow. Yeah, at 23, I spent 15 years away. Spent years practicing in Thailand, years in India and Nepal. And I would dip out to the east and do long-term retreats, sit with good teachers. And then I would come back to U of T. U of T has this wonderful program where you can leave for as long as you want. And then you can just sign up for classes when you come back. It started in World War II. I think you don’t have to even tell them you’re leaving. You don’t have to sign a form or anything. You just you can just bounce and then show up again and sign up for classes. And so I did that for about 10 years. I just went and came back and studied more and then went and came back. Fascinating. Yeah. Wow. So maybe just one more. I don’t want to take up all the air space, but one more nice thing is it’s great to see I’ve been a little bit of a Dharma bum most of my life and doing philosophy on the side. And it’s wonderful to see that my career and my spiritual life have really mixed up together. Yakapui offered me a job with the Consciousness and Contemplative Studies Center at Monash University, which is now hailed as one of the probably one of the most important contemplative science programs in the world. And he just scooped me right out of another job and said, we have a wonderful center that we’re opening. We have 12 million dollars. And how would you like to just spend your time doing science of meditation and then enthusiastically turning that into programs and improving your community? And I thought, who gets this kind of job? I mean, so yeah, so that’s why I’m here now. That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Yeah, I just wanted to add one little thing about me because I started college when I was about 26 also personally. Very similar trajectory there. Yeah. And I took three years off between my undergraduate, my master’s three years off between my master’s and my PhD. Yeah, I took a year. I took one year off between bachelor and grad school. I didn’t do a master’s. I went straight for the PhD, but I took off a couple of years during my PhD program because of life and you know, whatever. Yeah, I just want to Mark is more than making up for the lost time. He is incredibly prolific. He is incredibly prolific. What did you tell me you published like 15 papers last year? Yes, something like that. Just incredible. He’s an amazing scholar and a great scientist. Really great. Wow. All right. So now to some of our standard more standard questions about the topic. You know, this series is based on or inspired by the Rutledge handbook on the philosophy of meditation. John contributed to that. That’s how I met John. But yeah, thank you. Three major questions that I raised there and I tried to encourage all the contributors to address were, you know, can meditation contribute to philosophy? Is there can there be or ought there to be a philosophy of meditation? That’s like really three questions. And then is meditation itself a form of philosophy? And by now I have to come up with some new term because John has impressed it upon me that I need to mention contemplation and meditation as not necessarily the same thing. So maybe the broader category, whatever that is that includes both of them. So any one of those questions you can, you know, if you want me to read them again or read one of them again. Okay. No, that’s good. I have three things to say maybe right from the hip. So, yeah, I think there’s a role for philosophers to think deeply about contemplative programs. I think that’s for sure the case. I mean, the weakest, I feel like the weakest and shallowest access point there is philosophers are really good at conceptual analysis. That’s not a not that’s not a not addition to a team. Contemplative programs like all programs suffer from lack of clarity in conceptual understanding. I mean, for instance, look at the debate today about non-conceptual experiences, you know, like what does it mean? What does it mean to say, oh, now have a non-conceptual experience? I mean, is that a thing at all? And that’s a current hot debate. And Evan Thompson is his work on this is wonderful. Personally, you know, I’m looking asterisk this if you want to talk about it after, but I don’t think there is any such thing as non-conceptual experience. There’s only thinly conceptual or something. So there’s one way I think philosophers access. I think it’s the weakest way because I think philosophers do a lot more than just conceptual analysis. Sometimes scientists, I think, think what we do is just conceptual analysis, but that’s not the case. So that’s that’s the shallowest. Middle of the pool. I think philosophy meditation philosophy is just contemplative. Traditionally, I think you’re right. Like you asked, is philosophy just a kind of meditation or is meditation just a kind of philosophy? Philosophy is just a way I think traditionally done done well is a use of our attention and our awareness and our introspection in order to figure out who we are and sort of what this is all about so that we get better. So I think I think philosophy done right should be done contemplatively. I think that’s that’s more robust than just conceptual analysis. And and I think meditation is philosophy as well. I’m sort of in its truest sense, you know, at its root. It’s not about relaxing. It’s not just about relaxing, you know, let we get that idea today. And it’s certainly not about just creating weird psychedelic states so that we can blow our minds and talk about it. That’s for sure what it’s not. I mean, per se, I mean, there are maybe some bang on effects of that. But again, meditation is a way of knowing ourselves and knowing our situation and then flourishing through that special knowing. I mean, in that sense, meditation just is philosophy. I think if what you mean by philosophy is know yourself and and figure out what it is to live a good life. Can I just say one more quick thing? You can tell me where you want to orient. That’s the weakest. That’s the middle. I think the deepest would be what I’m most interested in, which is my jumping off point, which is the relationship between what you might call synthetic philosophy and these contemplative programs. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that term synthetic philosophy or synthetic philosophers. No, it’s a it’s a relatively new term. John’s definitely a synthetic philosopher in this sense. Synthetic philosophers. They are sort of polymaths polymaths who are interested in a variety of neighboring fields and as theoreticians, they take a lot of that information. They develop new frameworks for thinking about how special sciences move forward. It’s a role that philosophers are playing nowadays. So rather than just going to a lab and looking at neurons, you also need somebody who is familiar with neuroscience biology, anthropology, linguistics, potentially, you know, the true cognitive scientist in order to think about what’s the framework under which we’re doing these individual experiments and what does that experiment actually tell us? That’s meaningful. You need a framework for that and philosophers are especially set up synthetic philosophers philosophers who have that orientation are especially good at this. I think it’s part of our training to figure out how things work. So Dan, that it’s a good example of that. Evan Thompson’s a good example of that. Of course, John’s a wonderful example of that. And I’d like to think that that’s where I find my home in philosophy as well. It’s not as sort of a traditional philosopher, but as a I’m looking at theoretical neurobiology and some proper cognitive science and then thinking about what do these new frameworks tell us about what it is to be awake to be conscious to be a self to be well? And of course, as these new frameworks are being developed, they’re opening these wonderful new opportunities for thinking about contemplative training programs, the skills and the states and the traits in new ways. And like I said, at the beginning of the talk, I’m also interested in how the contemplative program is actually one of the branches that synthetic philosophers in this in this work can be utilizing as part of their research. I don’t know the pattern of things that they’re bringing to creating these frameworks, for instance, like neuro phenomenology is a good example of of one such program where you’re looking to bring experience, especially well-trained experience and neuroscience, you know, into the same room so that you’re getting the best of both when you’re looking at complex topics like what is it to be a self or what is experience all about? So that’s my jumping off point is I’m really interested in thinking of new ways of thinking about the brain. I mean, if I took my cards, I’m really interested in predictive processing today, which is thinking about the brain as a prediction engine and then thinking about, well, if the brain is a prediction engine, if I’m a if a big part of what I’m doing as an organism is anticipating what happens next. What does that mean for how I understand the contemplative programs? And what is it about special about those contemplative programs that are good for taking care of the kind of predictive system that I am? That’s that’s my big interest, actually, from from that from that jumping off point. Thank you for watching this YouTube and podcast series is by the Verveky Foundation, which in addition to supporting my work, also offers courses, practices, workshops and other projects dedicated to responding to the meaning of the word. If you would like to support this work, please consider joining our Patreon. You can find the link in the show notes. I just want to mention that just just a connecting point for people watching another one of those synthetic philosophers who Mark also studied with is Andy Clark. And Andy Clark is one of the strongest proponents of this new framework, the predictive processing framework, just to give him some credit where it’s due as well. Yeah, gosh. If anybody’s listening to this and you don’t know Andy Clark, that’s your that’s your homework this week. Go go read one of Andy’s books. So, Mark, it sounds to me like you already answered a question that’s very similar to the one that I answered. And like it might be that the answer is obvious when I asked you the new version, but it sounds like you answered the question. Is there can there be an author to be a synthetic philosophy of contemplation? And your answer was yes. So the larger question is for philosophy, like Evan had some resistance to the idea of a philosophy of meditation. He compared it with things like philosophy of sport. And of course, you could have a philosophy of ham sandwiches or of anything that you put your mind to. So so the question is, I want to pressure you a little more about just even without an answer to the question, I want to ask you a question. I want to press you a little more about just even without I mean, I get that it’s almost more like a cognitive science of meditation the way you were speaking. But what about the philosophy of meditation? I don’t know if I have such a hard line in my experience between those if we if what we if what we mean is like is the truest sense of cognitive science, the truest sense of traditional philosophy. I don’t know if there’s a hard this is especially hard line there. I’d like to think the interesting thing for me. So the interesting thing for me would be is is can is it valuable to is it valuable to think deeply both about contemplative skills states and traits using a variety of modalities, especially in cognitive science and traditional like the truest sense of cognitive scientists where you have an interdisciplinary tool set and then is the reflection on those valuable in return for the way that we’re thinking about cognitive frameworks. And I think that’s just is just an obvious yes. Now, if that’s not what other people are thinking about when they’re thinking about philosophy of meditation, then I can see why they might pick a bone. You know, Evan has a special view on his book, Why I’m Not a Buddhist lays it out, you know, where he thinks maybe it’s because of the way that we think about it. I think that’s just an obvious yes. I think that’s just an obvious yes. I think that’s just an obvious yes. I think that’s just an obvious yes. I think that’s just an obvious yes. I think that’s just an obvious yes. I think that’s just an obvious yes. I think that’s just an obvious yes. I think that’s just an obvious yes. I think that’s just an obvious yes. I think that’s just an obvious yes. I think that’s just an obvious yes. I think that’s just an obvious yes. I think that’s just an obvious yes. I think that’s just an obvious yes. I think that’s just an obvious yes. I think that’s just an obvious yes. I think that’s just an obvious yes. I think that’s just an obvious yes. I think that’s just an obvious yes. I think his arguments are sound and I think it’s something we should definitely consider. I think his arguments are sound and I think it’s something we should definitely consider. I think his arguments are sound and I think it’s something we should definitely consider. I think his arguments are sound and I think it’s something we should definitely consider. I think his arguments are sound and I think it’s something we should definitely consider. I think his arguments are sound and I think it’s something we should definitely consider. I think his arguments are sound and I think it’s something we should definitely consider. I think his arguments are sound and I think it’s something we should definitely consider. I think his arguments are sound and I think it’s something we should definitely consider. I think his arguments are sound and I think it’s something we should definitely consider. I think his arguments are sound and I think it’s something we should definitely consider. I’m thinking there’s lots of confusion about what these contemplative skills are and what they’re leading to and why they lead to that. I think especially in interdisciplinary cognitive science is especially well poised to look under the hood. If you want an example, a really good example from one of my first forays into this was thinking about the difference between euphoric and dysphoric selfless experiences. This is a wonderful job. This is a great test case for what I’m trying to say. We know that there are selfless experiences that are horrible. Depersonalization, derealization, these can be really scary. Almost everybody has them at some point in time in their life, but they can be a bit sticky and they can stick around for a little while and they can be really, really scary. We have selfless experiences that are self-reported to be completely kick ass that make your life worth living, that make the world inherently meaningful and that we should really be striving and aiming towards. Here’s the mystery. Okay, Rick, this is so cool, right? I’ll give you a mystery and then we think, well, how do we solve the mystery? I think the answer is this synthetic philosophy of cognitive science is sort of the answer. When you get these two different people to give you a report on their experience, this is so cool about science. You get them to report on their experience, they give you the same reports. This is what’s so amazing. You go to a liberated being and you say, tell me about what it’s like to be you. They’ll say things like, well, I’ll tell you a little bit about it. I realized early on that I’m non-identical to the body. I’m non-identical to the mind. Of course, I am importantly the body and the mind, but the body and mind don’t exhaust the kind of thing I am. So the body does its own thing. The mind does its own thing and I’m perfectly well. And one of the things that happens is the world becomes very light, it becomes very thin. I start noticing it’s more like a play than a real thing. It’s more dreamlike. It’s more. And also, I’m starting to notice how much I bring to it, how much I create it. And that’s completely liberative for me. OK, that’s one story. And then you talk to somebody with depersonalization and they say, I’m not the body. I’m not this body. This body just walks around. The mind just does its own thing. The world feels hallucinatory to me. It feels like a dream. I think everybody’s a robot. I mean, those are really similar first personal accounts, except for one is euphoric and one is dysphoric. So you get these weird Reddit threads where people are like, the Buddha was depersonalized and then he’s taught a program of depersonalization as a way of escape is he’s actually just trying to fire off this brain airbag that happens in depersonalization. And that’s all it is. The Buddha is just sort of a disassociative teacher teaching a path of disassociation. And you say, well, that sounds ridiculous to me because my program is lending to all these benefits. But then you just kick back without the signs, just kick back and say, yeah, but look at the reports. Look at the phenomenological reports. They’re identical. They have so much in common. And now here’s the cool thing. So then the answer to that puzzle is you’ve got to look under the hood. You’ve got to actually take a glimpse of, OK, well, what’s the what’s the possible computational underpinnings? And do we have any do we have any neurobiological backing for those computational underpinnings that tell you is is there any remarkable difference between these two? And our very first project showed that actually they’re opposite. They’re opposites computationally. Disassociation and liberation are opposites in terms of what’s happening in the brain, opposites in terms of neurobiology. And yet the phenomenological report is identical. Fascinating example, because if you didn’t have the science, if you weren’t looking under the hood, if you didn’t have the framework for making sense of the phenomenology plus the neurobiological story, then you can make a lot of confusions here. You can make a lot of mistakes. So there’s just one right. And of course, that has bang on effects because then you learn you learn things like what leads you to depersonalization rather than liberation. What are their actual relationships in terms of their nature and their structure, which helps you, I hope, helps us as practitioners better navigate some of those dangers? I just want to say a couple of things to that. First of all, that’s an amazing example. And part of it, I think, is where you can then branch off to things like insight, where the description of the problem, the semantic content is the same. But after the insight, the relevance patterns have have shifted and you make those kinds of connections. And Mark and I and Brett, I’ve been trying to and I’ve been doing this more this year, in fact, trying to integrate relevance, realization, predictive processing together, link it up with phenomena like insight and flow. So all of that. And this is stuff Mark and I are working towards. The other thing I wanted to say more and in general and philosophical, and I think it I think it’s an amplification rather than orthogonal or challenging what Mark said. But in response to Evan, I was thinking that, you know, I think there needs to be a philosophy of meditation because meditation and contemplation challenge an underlying epistemological and often ontological presupposition that is very Eurocentric or ethnocentric, which is mono the idea of monophasic consciousness, that there is one phase of consciousness and one alone that gives you access to reality. And I think what these cross historical and cross cultural traditions say is they challenge that presupposition and they open us up to, right, dropping that and saying, well, from other states of consciousness, do we gain kinds of knowing or do we get access to dimensions of being that are otherwise not accessible to us in our monophasic? And then that, of course, brings in developmental aspects. And I think that is a significant philosophical move. And I don’t think it’s something you can do by its very nature, just propositionally. You have to actually undergo it in order to be able to speak about it and develop theory on it. So I think there’s a point at that where the meditation and the philosophical enterprise, even professional sort of epistemology and ontology actually come together in a powerful way. I just wanted to put that argument out there. Love it. Yeah, yeah, I couldn’t help but also thinking while I was listening to you, Mark, that what it’s almost inevitable that the way that you’re going to answer the question about philosophy of meditation is going to talk about how useful cognitive science is in that enterprise. But I think everything that you said really makes it so obvious, particularly with that example about depersonalization versus enlightenment, that these are philosophical questions and they really matter to people who are practicing and who want to understand the nature of the self, of the mind and all that. I mean, these are deeply philosophical questions and these are possible ways of getting at some answers. And it’s practical philosophy, I think, in the way that you mean as well, because this is philosophy that matters. It’s not just conceptual analysis. It’s not just getting clear on it. This is in a way, Vipassana is what we’re talking about. It’s special knowing. It’s a way of special knowing because you’re getting you are by reflecting deeply at multiple layers or multiple levels. You are getting clear. You’re getting clear on some really important terrain and territory that you’re going to have to navigate if you’re a contemplative. And that’s extremely valuable. I mean, that’s just one example. But I mean, it’s a profoundly important example to be able to know the difference theoretically between disassociative disorders and euphoric liberation states and then to look computationally at what their different markers are and why they come about. I mean, like just one example of the import. I know we’re slightly drifting away from what we might mean by traditional philosophy, but I’m a synthetic philosopher, which means I’m allowed to grab anything from cognitive science to do my work. That’s sort of the idea, right? Here’s just one example. One of the things that came out of that research was a red flag got flown about the idea that meditation should always be an opportunity to turn towards the most difficult stimuli in your experience, which I think if you have an unskillful meditation teacher or you have an immature meditation teacher, sometimes you can get those things said without the proper caveat. You can be like, oh, yeah, you should turn into the problem. You should. Meditation is an opportunity to look deeply at the issue. And lo and behold, one of the things that causes depersonalization, one of the reasons why we might actually see a relationship between meditation and depersonalization, because there is an increasingly obvious relationship between people who are meditating and people who have depersonalization. So there is a special relationship that needs to be uncovered. That’s a fact. And mostly that’s because people are practicing incorrectly, I think, with incorrect instruction. Here’s one of those things that you might not… It’s not obvious until you lift the hood, is that depersonalization is caused by lots of volatility in the system, which can be caused by reflecting on traumatic or yet destabilizing experiences. So one, you’ve got a bunch of error in the system. You’ve got a bunch of volatility in a system that’s built, if the framework is right, to reduce volatility, to reduce error, a ton of wild volatility, and you are not able to get away from it. So you have a lot of volatility that you find is important. It’s important volatility that needs to be resolved. You need to get some grip on what’s going on and you’re not able to get away from it. Well, lo and behold, when you sit in meditation and you stop moving, you have now restricted yourself from fleeing. And now you’re getting the directive from somebody you trust, which has a really powerful impact on how your attention gets modulated. You modulate attention from the outside, especially with trust. This is why you go to teachers. It’s why gurus have such a powerful import. It’s why our instructors and our professors also are able to mold our cognitive system by powerfully entraining our attention. So you’re not moving and you have a powerful attention on a traumatic experience. Now you have unbridled volatility that you can’t get away from. That’s exactly the condition you’d expect to create DPD. So right away, what that does is it opens a dialogue to make sure that we are looking back at the traditional teachings and making sure that we draw out the important nuances and put them forward. Like if you’re a personality that tends to avoid, then looking closer is helpful. If you’re a personality that tends to be neurotic and only look at the dark, then actually avoidant strategies are real strategies for you. So you hear things here. Teachers like Ajay and Chuck Jack Kornfield teacher. I love this teaching. He’s such a wonderful teacher. You know, he goes, I’m he goes, I’m a sort of stupid teacher. He says that, right? He’s like, I’m very humble because I only know two. I only know two directions. I tell my good friends if they go too far right, I go left, left, left. And if they go too far left, I go right, right, right. Those are the only things I know about practice. You think there it is. If you if you are fascinated, you have to relax. If you’re avoidant, you need to tune in. But that complexification is needed. But if we didn’t look under the hood and we didn’t see that overlooking. So here’s the philosophy comes back in. But overlooking that point, then we’re practicing inappropriately. So there’s an example where a proper cognitive science and interdisciplinary approach to these things can make relevant, can make obvious aspects of the teaching that were always there, but we might overlook them. So that brings up a whole bunch of things for me. One is, of course, the work of Willoughby Barton and right, of course, and and showing Britain, Britain, sorry, Willoughby Britain. Sorry. Thank you for that, Rick. And the work that she did showing all these deleterious effects that can come out of mindfulness practice. And I was at one of her talks. And sorry, this will sound a little bit self aggrandizing. It’s not intended to be. And I put up my hand and I said, well, before I start teaching, I forewarn my students about all these possibilities and give them sort of tools and things to do and framing. And like you don’t don’t get fascinated by if you get that shock running up and down your spine. Don’t get fascinated by it. Right. If you hear your name shouted, don’t get fast like like and try to forewarn people. And I say if stuff comes up that has these features, you’re experiencing trauma. Stop the practice and get in some therapy. I like and then I said and and I asked her straight out, I said, you did this huge survey of all these teachers. How many teachers forewarned their students? And she said none of them did. And I went, what? That’s shocking. Yeah, that’s shocking. Well, this is why I don’t I don’t I don’t take teachers. I don’t take students on because I also teach meditation. I don’t take on students if they don’t have sleep, good sleep habits, good, good nutrition habits, if they don’t have good exercise habits, if they’re lacking even any of the cornerstones. We say, well, those things need to be in play before we start fiddling around with the cognitive system because it’s very delicate. Yeah, wow. So and a couple of other things came up and like it reminded me, we might want to think about this, the depersonalization versus the euphoric liberation, the differences between sort of rumination and journaling and how one is very deleterious and the other seems to although the semantic content is the same because you’re journaling, it turns into this very positive therapeutic practice. So we want to think about that. There’s something about that. Yeah, there’s something about the framing. And then you did a basically Aristotelian move about the cultivation of virtue by seeking the golden mean. And I thought, wow, Lou Marinoff would just have loved what you just did there. Right. It was so it was so right. But the thing I want to I think I want to all of those are vibrant. We could go on to all of them. But one of them, you said that I really like and it’s where Evan and I have some similar concerns. You talked about, you know, we we sometimes we sometimes a lot the West has lifted these practices out of an entire ecology of practices. We’ve taken meditation out of the eightfold path and the eightfold path is also situated with, you know, a framework of teaching that give nuance and complexification and take into account individual differences. And then what we do is we abstract it, homogenize it and then turn it into a technique that we market. And I’m very critical of that in my published work. Me too. Yeah. And I just wanted to know what you think about that. Maybe give you a chance. Now, this is something where Rick and I have a little bit of a difference. So I’m stacking the deck fairly against my good friend. And I’ll give him a chance to I give him a chance to respond. But I also want to hear what you have to say about this, because I’m more curious to hear what Mark has to say about this. Yeah, fair enough. And I think at least Rick and I agree that this is an important question that needs to be discussed and reflected upon. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. OK. Well, here’s one thing that I’ve been thinking a lot about recently that comes again out of the framework that we’re thinking through these things. So one of the new sort of popular one of the new popular ways of thinking about contemplative development is by thinking about entropy in neural systems. I don’t know if you’ve heard this. Yeah, I was at the end of the myth. We were both there. Right. Yeah, exactly. Rick wasn’t there, though, just you. Right. No, I’m just just advertising for it. We went to the mystical entropy, mystical entropy workshop. Yeah, exactly. So the idea there is that, you know, it’s coming up. It was really foregrounded by Robin Carhartt, Harrison, psychedelics research and the benefits of psychedelics. And one of the benefits he puts forward and it’s using the same anticipatory framework that I mentioned, anticipatory cognitive framework, is that psychedelics heat up, they heat up the system, they increase the entropy or the volatility of the networks. You might think, well, why is that valuable to like make high level, high level models in the brain and the cognitive system get gooey and flexible? One of the reasons is because lots of pathologies are typified by rigidities, by a stickiness. So depression is typified by rumination on one idea. I’m a loser. The world doesn’t work. And that comes back again and again. And if you look at that, if you look at that as a as a map, you can really see these local minima and they make these quite those wonderful 3D maps of this today. And you can actually look where neuro dynamics have this this pit in people who have major depression, because literally the dynamic keeps coming back to the same roost over and over and over again. Now, if that’s the case, one one thing you might do is you might heat the system up. They call it a neolieus, same as a heating up metal. Let it let it regain a more abstract shape, which is why you have. Is this my hand? Is it your hand? Whose hand is it? What is a hand? That’s weird, OK, because the higher level system is starting to not know how to grip well. OK, value is, is when it cools down again, it actually cools down into a better shape. That’s what the research is showing. So where you have these great big canyons before you’ve got little you’ve got little hills now, which means the neural system has now gained, regained some fluidity, some flexibility, some flow. OK. Contemplative skills and training looks like they do similar things. So that’s pretty interesting. We can use these trainings to heat up, especially non-dual practices, close inspection, Vipassana looks like it’s it’s heating the system up. You’re starting to ask, who am I? Is that true? Am I the body? Well, what is a body? Am I by pain? What is my pain? What actually is pain? That’s all increasing uncertainty in these networks because you’re taking something you thought you were sure about and you’re starting to blow it up. OK, right. So and we are fascinated in the West with especially, especially, I think, the rocket ship practices, which is, I think, very, very dangerous. We’re not doing proper preliminaries and we’re not getting these contextualized in the right way. So we’re taking rocket fuel and we’re just heating our system up because it gives us weird, weird feedback impacts. Like, oh, man, then I saw things and I wasn’t myself and I was all wobbly and I cut my own head off. And you get these sort of stories today. The other half of the story that’s not being told and is being underappreciated is that traditionally, yes, these are heating up practices, but they are in the context of a lot of cooling down practices that we’re not hearing much about. Think about the monastic lifestyles. It is very, very specific, rigorous, habitual, routine ceremony. That’s creating a really service, virtue, loving kindness, empathic joy, compassion, ecology, practices. Yeah. Yes. Prayer singing. I mean, that is giving you a structure of solidity of which you are then bumping out your ticket. You’re going up the mountain to to wobble the high level networks. But as soon as they cool down, you’re cooling back down into a valuable shape, which I mean, we hear it all the time. We all know it as practitioners. Wisdom and compassion are two wings. And we go, oh, yeah, they’re two wings, two wings of the same bird, two wings of the same bird. But I’ll tell you, OK, I do a lot of coaching. And when I sit with people and I do a lot of coaching with people who are going through dark nights, it’s one of the things that sort of emerged in my in my coaching practice life. I ask, how is your loving kindness practice? How is your compassion training? Are you out at your edge? And you know what I hear? Ninety nine point nine percent of the time. Oh, no, I don’t do any of those practices. I’m just doing deep, deep Vipassana on the smallest possible data I can find. And then and then crowbarring myself out. And then when was the last time you did loving kindness? So sometimes I do it on my mom. You just think like, oh, my God, oh, my God. It is a whole training that goes deep. And it’s not just, may you be well, may you be well. It’s not that it is the Buddha called it immeasurable. These are the houses of God. They’re the Brahma Vaharas, and they are they are deep upon a magic like past imagination deep. They’re real training programs. And those training programs would have been, I think. You heat up into not knowing, and then you cool down into the shape of the bodhisattva. You cool down into the shape of somebody who gives a shit. Who is who is reckless in their love, who is built for service and for betterment. I mean, you cool down into a lamp that’s actually useful in the world. So in the heating up shouldn’t be the primary aim. The heating up is only the thing you do on the way to becoming something that’s actually useful in the world. But if you only have the heating up story, then what you’re doing is you’re you’re you’re propelling yourself towards depersonalization, because do you know, Rick, just make a guess. What do you think happens if the system is too wobbly? If it’s too gooey and too hot, can you imagine? Can you imagine what what typifies that? Well, I know I was there as a young man, so the type E gets a type E is typified by that kind of gooey, high level network insolidity. You don’t know how to grip the world anymore, which is why you shouldn’t be doing psychedelics if you have, you know, family members who have psychosis, because you may already have gooey, high level networks. What you want is cooling practices, not heating practices. Yeah. Wow. Well, that was incredibly rich. That we were in the enthusiasm, Mark, while you were speaking. Is it contagious? Oh, no, no. If I’m yelling at you. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That was fantastic. I mean, you know, the that of course, I I think of compassion and origami as much more broadly than they’re sort of understood the way. And this is where Christian neoplatonism has been helpful. It’s it’s an it’s an overarching orientation towards virtue and virtuosity in the world. And I yeah, I I mean, Robin Carreras, other people, Eric Hall, have suggested that dreaming is also that entropy to to prevent us from getting locked into overfitting. And you wouldn’t want to spend your whole existence dreaming. That’s a nightmare. You dream so that you wake up better. Right. That’s right. And and and so. Yeah, that was a beautiful speech, Mark. And I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense of a speech. It was a great speech. It was fair. It’s like you wouldn’t want to be stuck in those experience machine. And super important. I think it’s I think it’s an important message for people to know that there’s another whole half of these trainings that need to be taken seriously. And there’s there’s just an example where the science is lending credence to that. Yes. You might have overlooked it in the suit does. But you just look at, OK, well, look, one of the benefits is, is you can heat up the system that produces opportunities for insight. That sounds right. But what happens when it’s too heated up? Schizotypy. You just look right under the hood and say, look, that’s the problem with that methodology. So, Mark, I’ve been thinking about this, too. I mean, we we we tend to have a horizontal metaphor of optimal gripping, but there’s an there’s a vertical optimal gripping axis that we need to also be sort of articulating more in some of this theorizing. And what’s the I love what’s the relationship between the horizontal that’s between the organism and the world. Right. And then what’s the optimal gripping? And that overlaps with Velman’s work about you don’t want to be down at the level of impulsivity, but you don’t want to be at the level of Hamlet. Right. And you’re trying to get get the at the reflectiveness gap. And I think that’s deeply right, too. And I think, again, a lot of the way in which this stuff has been imported in the West is leaving out that those that important dimensionality. But I agree with you. I think the thing that is powering people or at least challenging them to open up that dimensionality is the cognitive science of mindfulness. I agree. I think that’s I think that’s really important. I keep interrupting. I was really sorry. Oh, no, no, I was really I was really hoping this was going to come up. Can I grab a flag there and we can maybe. Absolutely. I was hoping this was going to come up. One thing I’m really interested in, I think it is relevant to the philosophical conversation as well. And you bring it up there, John, is thinking about not only, like you said, not only horizontal gripping, but vertical gripping. One way I hear that is thinking about the kind of deep level belief structures that make us that make us skillful, that make us skillful in how we understand and reframe and engage with life. So not only thinking about how we grip in an environment, but also thinking about the kinds of the axioms that we have installed. This is a really interesting part of a project that’s just starting to blossom for me, where I’m not only thinking about the meditative processes, which seems to take the lion’s share of research, like attentional processes, awareness processes, metacognitive processes. But what about the contents that comes that comes a lot more out of the traditions? And we don’t it doesn’t get much play. Like, for instance, what are you meditating on or about? What kinds of things would you like to get installed high up in in the hierarchy? So, for instance, for a system that where where pathology is often produced by unbridled uncertainty, the question would be what kinds of high level belief networks might we install or might we take seriously that would be capable of digesting that uncertainty, even quite high level uncertainty. So I’ll give you an example of and it turns out, I think, that a lot of our spiritual and religious, especially contemplative beliefs that come as part of these original packages, they are actually the ones that look if you look under the hood, they’re the most protective of this unbridled uncertainty. So I’ll give you an example. I was working at the Dalai Lama’s hospital in Dharamsala in India, and there were monks who had just escaped a Chinese internment camp and had had made their way into India. And they were at the hospital for a series of surgeries. And one of the young monks was getting surgery on his wrist because he was hung for a number of months from his wrists. OK, so he had to go through a number of surgeries to correct the wrists. And I was in the fortunate position where I got to talk with him. And there were translators, there were people who spoke both languages on site. So we were actually able to have a few meaningful conversations. And I was struck just by how joyous and buoyant he was. OK, so this isn’t he’s not coming out of this showing any outward PTSD, which is what you would expect from a lot of humans who were put through this kind of position. He was really buoyant and lovely and shining and happy and didn’t look like it was heavy in an important way. And so I I probed that a little. And the response I got was, I’m so grateful. I’m so grateful for this opportunity, because because I had practiced I practiced compassion and loving kindness in the monastery for all of these years since I was since he was a little child. But he had never had an enemy. He had never had an enemy to practice with. He had never had the opportunity to have somebody whose job it was, was to hurt him to actually do the work. So here’s an example of a belief network installed sufficiently high in the network that is completely protective of the volatility you might experience in your life, which is if the first thing you care about is becoming maximally compassionate and loving. If virtue is the belief, that’s the drive at the top of the network, then everything else can be digested because everything else is in service of that. If you have the right skill orientation towards it, this was an opportunity for his skill development. That’s the way he saw it. And so talk about post-traumatic growth. He was only like, then I really got to practice and now I really know a thing. And that’s what I’m about in this life. That reminds me a little bit of it was either Alexander Solzhenitsyn or Frankl, who said that the Christians who showed up at the internment camps, whether it was the Gulag or Auschwitz, I can’t remember which, but he said the Christians that showed up, the devotional Christians that showed up, they got stronger. They tended to get stronger in the internment camp. And he said, I had a friend who put on weight. He got he put on muscle and he put on weight from chopping wood. And he got he got healthier in the internment camp. And when when he reflected with him on that, he was like, this is bringing me closer to Christ. This is my path now. This suffering is so close to holiness that I’m I’m finally able to practice as a good Christian. And so he began to flourish under those conditions because of that high level network. And there’s James Bond Stockdale, right? And Hanoi Hilton, and he uses stoicism. And he has the same thing where he comes out. So this this makes me think of what you’re you’re speaking to. And I’m doing a lot of work on the the cognitive science of ritual. You have to build a framework around a practice so it transfers broadly and deeply. And of course, when you’re trying to transfer broadly and deeply, you’re going from I’m using a little bit of technical language, you’re going from a small, well-defined world to a large world in which there’s lots of novelty, messiness, ill-defined. It’s it’s it’s a world of increased uncertainty. And so you have to build a framework that affords the transfer and helps you deal with the increase in uncertainty as you try to broaden the the scope of scope and depth of the application of your practice. And when and this, again, is to call out another trend that I’m critical of, which is the idea of the practice as a completely self-enclosed thing. And you’re doing it just because of how you feel in the practice. I mean, one of the things of a foundation is about and Rick is in service to this, right, is to try and get people to do these practices, but make them rituals in the proper sense of what are you doing to transfer this broadly and deeply throughout your life, broadly and deeply throughout the levels of the psyche. And and so this is, again, where I think the practice and philosophy as that kind of framework just need each other profoundly, they just need each other profoundly. Yeah, I love that. And just as a final tale, I mean, here’s an entry point, I think, to some really powerful philosophy that’s contemplatively and cognitive science driven cognitive science. Great adverb. You know, is that now we can look back at the traditional philosophical views of virtue, what makes a good life and look at look at the structure that we’ve just come up with in this talk for rethinking some of those things, because I think when we look back at the virtues that were suggested, the reason why we intuited that they were valuable, the reason why they produce flourishing is going to be explainable using some of these computational frameworks. For instance, they’re going to be the kinds of beliefs that allow us to flourish under extreme duress. And that’s going to help us get clear, I think, on why are the virtues virtuous? Why are they valuable for our kind of system? Or you you kind of touched on answers to all my other questions. And I know that we have to end now. So we always like to let the guests have the last word. You could plug anything or just have any final parting thoughts, anything you didn’t get to say that you want to. Nice, fantastic, by the way. Thanks, Rick and John. Really, this is it’s always a delight speaking with speaking on these topics and with you guys. I’m the host of a podcast called The Contemplative Science podcast. Maybe you could give a link. That’s cool. Where we do a lot of this stuff. Rick, I don’t know, maybe we should talk also about maybe doing a mini series just on anticipatory dynamics and the philosophy of meditation. I think this would be a great series. And we could we could I probably loop John straight into it. Yes, you would. You have these topics, too. But like in addition to those like those plugs, I think if I was going to leave just a word, it is don’t underappreciate the value of love for your training if you’re listening to this and you’re contemplative and you’re you’re tuning in now to help your practice. Don’t overlook it. It’s valuable in the middle and at the beginning in the middle in the end, even a small amount of loving kindness and kindness practice now is going to make all the difference. And just if you’re not already aware, it’s not only valuable to help open the mind up for insight, but post insight. When this whole when this whole contemplative program is at its end, what’s left is being kind to each other. And so we can we can start that right now. And it’s protective. You can check out our papers if you want to see why it’s protective. But loving kindness really is a bulletproof vest for these practices. Incredibly well said and beautiful. Thank you so much, Mark. It was great having you here today. Great to finally meet you. And I look forward to that project that you just suggested. Let’s talk offline. Really, I think it’s a great idea. Cool. Thank you so much, Mark. Really wonderful. All right.