https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=QJGhI07ANgY
Welcome everyone to our monthly Q&A. It’s a great pleasure to be here. Before I forget, I’d like to wish happy holidays to all of those of you who celebrate in some manner. And for those of you who don’t celebrate at this time, I hope you have a restful respite of the world. So I hope everyone gets some kind of break in some fashion from what we’ve all been through and we’re going through another wave of it. But let’s all hang on and hang on to each other and hopefully we will get an opening at the beginning of the new year. So we’re going to do the Q&A. I will take first of all the Q&A’s that have already been sent in and arranged for about the first 45 minutes. And then the last bit will take some questions from patrons that have been sent via the chat. So the first one is from Carol. And the question is, what’s happening with After Socrates? Are you going to return to the lecture format in the future series? Conversations are valuable, but there’s a distinct educational quality to your prepared lecture that I found especially compelling. Yes. So After Socrates is definitely going to be in a lecture format, but it’s not going to be just pure lecture. So the design of After Socrates is going to be 40 to 45 minutes of a lecture, very much like Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, and then 15 to 20 minutes in which I will be taking you through a course of skill training, giving you an introduction to an ecology of practices drawn from the wisdom tradition. Some of you will recognize some of that if you went through not the meditation series, but especially the Cultivation, Cultivating Wisdom series with me last year. So After Socrates will have both lecture and then skill and virtue and psychotech cultivation, and they will run parallel to each other and mutually reinforce each other. So you’ll be able to practice the theory and see how the theory goes into practice. And so I’m very excited about this and looking forward to it. Now, about when. So we were going to start some filming soon while I was going to reconnect to the person that I had set up before COVID. And then as many of you know, of course, Omicron is hit and the university is being shut down and other things are happening. And it looks like there’s going to be delay until mid-February. Mid-February, I won’t be able to do the filming because I’m going to be going to London, England and doing a lecture tour at Oxford and Cambridge and such. Looking forward to that. Sounds very exciting. So I foresee that I’ll probably start the filming of After Socrates sometime in March, COVID willing. And then we’ll start releasing some of the videos April or May. I’m sorry for this delay. And of course, much of it is beyond my control. What I can say to you is in some ways I’m deeply grateful for this delay. I do feel that it has given me the chance to deepen the education I need to do justice to the topic that I’m going to be pursuing in After Socrates. For those of you who are unaware of it, After Socrates is the next big video series, probably 20 video long, not 50. I don’t think I’ll ever do 50 again. And what it’s going to do is going to take a look at the whole dialectic, dialogical tradition stemming from Socrates and going up to modern people like Boomer, et cetera. And then put that into conversation with some of the emerging ecologies and practices around authentic relating, circling. What I would, Chris and I and Guy put together, Guy Sandstark, Christopher Mastofietro, called Dialectic into the Logos. Some of the things I’ve been exemplifying in some of the series when I’ve been trying to integrate a theoretical argumentative approach with a dialogical approach, the series that I did, especially with the help of my good friend and colleague Greg Enriquez, but the ones like Untangling the World Knot, the Illusive Eye, and Towards a Meta-Psychology that is Tudor Transformation. So I’m very, very happy about all of this, and I want to try and bring all of that extra education and experience to bear on after Socrates. And it’s amazing. There’s certain individuals, and I guess right now, whether or not you’re Christian, reflecting on Jesus of Nazareth is perhaps an important thing to do right now. Again, I’m not proselytizing at all. I was trying to draw an analogy. The same thing, and I don’t mean any disrespect to people who are Christian, has been going on for me right now for Socrates. These individuals that seem to have discovered a depth of humanity and opened the horizon of humanity so that things are natural to us that were not before. I’ve been, I just want, this is all of me just saying again, I’ve been grateful for the extra opportunity because I feel that both the person, Socrates, and the phenomena, the reemergence of dialogos as a response to the meeting crisis deserve such in-depth effort on my part. So that’s an answer to Carol’s question. The next question is from Ken Lorry. The analysis of agape was hugely helpful for me. I’m glad to hear that, Ken. I’ve been thinking about tying agape to attention. Oh, let’s savor that. That’s very juicy. Could you comment and possibly elucidate upon agape as being the optimal orientation of attention? I’m not sure if I can do that. I’m not sure if I could elucidate upon agape as being the optimal orientation of attention, such that the conformity, transform, action of attention actualizes the highest potential. Yeah, yes, deeply. And so one of the people I got to read in conjunction with the extra education and discover was D.C. Schindler, my friend in the book. We both agreed that we’ve ever read on Plato. It was on Plato’s Republic, Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason. And then I went into D.C. Schindler’s book, Love and the Postmodern Predicament. Brilliant. Can’t recommend his work enough. And then I’m right now reading The Catholicity of Reason, which isn’t about Catholicism, at least not per se. He’s talking about how reason is oriented towards the whole, and not only meant towards the whole. And so that work has deepened my appreciation for the role of love in conformity and in attention. So let’s first mention Iris Murdoch and the gem of a book that everybody should read, even if you’re not philosophically oriented, you need to read Iris Murdoch’s book, Sovereignty of the Good, where she says, you know, giving things their due attention, I was mentioning it a few minutes ago about Socrates and Jesus of Nazareth, right? Giving things their due attention is the epicenter origin of all of our ethical and moral behavior. It’s the fundamental orientation. In that sense, it’s a primary virtue. So she says, OK, so that’s where attention’s right there, right? And then she says this other thing, and then I’ll come back to Schindler in a sec. She says, you know, love is when you acknowledge the reality of something other than yourself, when you really acknowledge the reality of another. And I thought, wow, because that she’s trying to get at your attending to a moment when you not in theory, not in words, and we do that so easily, right? But actually in attention, in your orientation, that fundamental orientation to reality, you step outside of egocentrism. And so Schindler was talking about, and there’s been this new reading of Aquinas I was unaware of. Again, I’m just learning so much right now. I hope I can do it justice. But there’s been, in the last 20, 30 years, people like Clark and Morello and Schindler, there’s been a reinterpretation of Aquinas, right? Not as primarily an Aristotelian, but as a Neoplatonist who uses Aristotle, very much like Plotinus. And anyways, the reason about that is that Schindler uses this Neoplatonic reading of Aquinas to talk about, you know, to talk about how conformity is actually union in love. And then what we love, when we love someone, and this is where, you know, Marle Ponti and Apolline come in, there’s mutual indwelling. If I really love someone and I’m acknowledging them and others as their reality, I indwell that. In the same way that the blind person indwells the cane when they’re feeling the floor. Like another person is a doorway to the universe that is otherwise inaccessible to you. That is why when you lose a person and you experience grief, you don’t just lose a person, you lose a doorway to a dimension of reality that is closed when that person is lost. And that’s why you grieve not just them, but that doorway to the world that closes when their life closes. And so you’re indwelling them, but you also allow them to indwell you. You internalize them, like Vygotsky said. They become, you internalize their perspective on you. So the way you take, the way you are aware of your own consciousness embodies the way they are aware of your mind. And so you internalize them. And you see the conformity, you’re indwelling them, they’re indwelling you. This is a matter of attention and mind sight and orientation to what is most real. And that’s where you get attention and agape coming in. Because agape is to give, right? And this is again where Schindler is really good. You give, you only give when you give, you’re only giving when you give completely. And you give completely when you give something its autonomy, right? And so you indwell, not like you might in Eros to consume, but you indwell agapically so as to afford the other. So all of this is, all of this will be in After Socrates because this is at the epicenter and the horizon of my thinking right now. And so I really appreciated that question. I hope I gave you some indication of how I will proceed to try and answer it more in depth in future work, especially in After Socrates. Okay. So I have a question from, sorry, I’m drying up. I’m going to get a drink of water. I got a little too enthusiastic there. Okay, so I have a question from Rachel Hayden. Rachel, of course, is not just a patron. Rachel is a collaborator with me. I highly recommend the two voices with Raviky that I’ve done with Rachel. I’m currently working with a bunch of people to try and build a network of the existing and emerging communities of practice where people are trying to put into practice and into existence ecologies of practices for the cultivation of wisdom and responding to the meaning crisis. And there’s a lot of music communities emerging and Rachel is doing one of these. And so I recommend watching the two videos. Now Rachel has a long question. I’m going to read it at length and I’ll try and comment on it as best I can. Hello. Following up on your answer last month about mood and transjectivity, I’m considering how mood and art combined with ambiguity might enhance one’s transjective capacity for meaning making. I just want to pause there and put a pin in the idea of ambiguity because I was talking with Bruce Alderman and Laman Pascal. It’s a video that’s going to come out on integral stage about ambiguity within spirituality. I was talking when I was talking with the… Who was I talking? I’m trying to remember. I think Paul was there. I think it was with the two Pauls. I’m not sure. Sorry, I just had a whole bunch of amazing conversations and they all are relevant to each other. And so my poor homo erectus brain is trying to keep them all distinct. But I was talking about the four L’s that we need to return to the four L’s. I think it was with the two Pauls. And I call it talking about God before we’re talking about God. These are the four L’s that are at the core of our phenomenology and our cognitive agency. But they are the four that have been identified with God. So love, obviously God is agape, light, logos, and life. And really trying to unpack them. And I was talking also about when I was talking with Bruce and Laman about if you really pay attention, if we’re really honest and careful and full of care and wonderful, full of wonder about these phenomena, we realize something really important about them, which is their profound ambiguity. I won’t go into this step, but let me just give you a digist of what I’m talking about. So if you ask people what contributes most to meaning in life, they’ll tell you their love relationships, romantic and otherwise. And then when you ask them what causes the most suffering in their life, they’ll tell you their love relationships. Now that’s a pretty strong account of the ambiguity of love. And life will have that and so will light understood as intelligibility and so will logos. And part of why I was on about that was I was pointing out the sort of the sort of the second reading of non-theism. The first reading of non-theism is that the shared set of presuppositions held by both the common theist and the atheist are rejected in non-theism. And talked about that already. But then there’s the second reading, the second series of non-theism, which is the second reading of non-theism. And part of why I was on about that was I was pointing out the shared set of presuppositions held by both the common theist and the atheist are rejected in non-theism. And talked about that already. But then there’s the second reading, the second sailing. I’m sort of copying Plato here. I’m not sure if that’s a clearly Kantian formulation of it, but John Hicks’ argument that if you take a look at the irresolvable debate between the religious and the non-religious, which is right now cashed out, or maybe the secular, I don’t know what you say, but it was right now cashed out as the debate between the theists and the atheist. So that these debates are interminable. They’re irresolvable. We can’t come to any conclusion about them. So rather than thinking about evidence for or against the existence of God, John Hick does this brilliant move of moving up and saying, what we have evidence for is about the quality of the evidence. What’s non-controversial is the evidence that we have, right, is best described this way. The universe is spiritually ambiguous. The universe is spiritually ambiguous. And non-theism tries to resist a deeper presupposition, the presupposition that goes back even to ancient Egypt, right, and civilization here and the desert on the core, which is to equate the sacred with order and then, right, to regard and to put towards the periphery the indeterminate, the disordered. And one of the hallmarks of postmodernism, especially Derrida, is a critique of exactly the futility of that attempt to try to marginalize the ambiguous and the indeterminate and try to claim that we could get a complete perfection of intelligibility. And so non-theism takes that, rejects that, and says, no, no, what we should conclude is the spiritual ambiguity of the universe and that we need right relationship to that by having an appropriate place for ambiguity within our spiritual practice. Why did I say all that? Because of what Rachel now goes on to say. One of the hallmarks of great art is often a sense of ambiguity regarding the interpretation of the art and not only of great art, great figures. And I don’t mean this as an insult. I hope this is now clear. I find, and this is what was said of Socrates, he was atypos. There’s a profound ambiguity, but not an ambiguity in the sense of just vague homogenous unclarity, but a multifacetedness so that you can’t settle on any one complete or finalized interpretation. So that sense of ambiguity regarding the interpretation of the art, sort of a positive analog to equivocation, which rather than creating bullshit allows for the developmental play of thoughts, emotion, et cetera. Exactly. Exactly. So people have been for millennia drawing from the well of Socrates, drawing from the well of Jesus, drawing from the well of Muhammad, and it doesn’t run dry. But they have not been merely repeating themselves. And there’s something about these figures and great works of art and great sacred symbols that is acknowledging that the deepest, the deepest facets of our conformity to the depths of reality, love, light, logos, and life have ambiguity sewn within them. And that we should stop trying to marginalize that and instead orient upon it. And I think that’s really important. So to continue on with Rachel’s excellent question. So, for instance, one could focus on the process of creating a musical move which promotes a sensibility of transjective meaning. For an extraordinary example, the mysterious enchantment of Debussy’s Clare de Lune, combined with lyrics that maintain a sense of ambiguous but devoted questing rather than only finished propositions. This is a fantastic proposal. I mean, this is why you need to pay attention to Rachel. This is brilliant. It goes towards the discussion I was having with Lehman and Brendan Graham Dempsey about stopping. We now have the technology. I sound like an advertisement for the $6 million man. For those of you who are old enough, you’ll know what the reference is. For the rest of you, look it up, right? That we have the technology where we can create art collectively and dynamically. And so and have visual and auditory art and then overlapping with the kind of unfoldment that happens in D’Alogo’s and we can get this multi-dimensionality of resonance. We are at the place where we cannot just make new sacred art. We can make new kinds of art. We can make new kinds of art. We are at the place where we cannot just make new sacred art. We can make new kinds of sacred art. And we need to realize that that we need to realize that potential as profoundly as we can. Keep going. This could be one version of the art that would fit into a scalable religion of no religion. Yes. Focusing on process rather than an artistic statement or expression. Exactly. Exactly, Rachel. I can’t do this. I have no musical talent. The only art I have, I have any sort of experience and expertise. I’ve been writing poetry for about three decades. The people I allow to read it say it’s good. It’s good. So that’s not just that’s the one place where I have a sense of art and how it affords a conversation with the depths of the psyche and the depths of the world. But like we need I’m calling to the artists that we need to pick up this potential and we need to turn it like a metanoia. We need to turn it towards the deepest possible addressing of the meaning crisis. After listening to your trilogy with Brendan Graham Dempsey and Laman Pascal, which I just referred to, which was very helpful. I also think that such a contextualized presentation of ambiguity could promote symbolic variations in a way that is safely rooted in participatory knowing. I could not have said it any better. I could not have said it any better. That is fantastic. I’m going to say it again. A contextualized presentation of ambiguity could promote symbolic variation and in a way that is safely rooted in participatory knowing. We would get to like there isn’t a fifth P of knowing, but there is a fifth P. It’s not a form of knowing. It’s a dwelling. This is the place where knowing and not knowing interpenetrate. It is the place of the paradox. It’s where ambiguity becomes paradox and opens us into what is transpropositional. What is the deepest transformation possible within participatory knowing? And this is what Rachel is talking about. And I think we should continue doing that. I’m just trying to get a little bit farther down on the question here. The whole question is actually on my screen. So maybe we go down a bit. I don’t know. Yeah. Oh, I guess that’s it. I guess that’s it. I think what Rachel is proposing, I thought there was a bit more. I saw it. I think is I wanted to spend so much time on it. It’s a profound question. It’s a profound proposal. And I don’t mean this in any kind of irreligious or sacrilegious way. It’s prophetic. This is what we need to be doing. This is not something I can do. All I can do is call out to the people who can and could do it. And so I wanted to thank Rachel for that. I think that was really important. And now Rob Gray, one of my oldest patrons, and I know you’re a fan of his. I’m a patron. And I know Rob before Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. And I’m looking forward to be talking again soon with Rob and doing some further work with him. Yeah, if Rob reaches out to you, listen to him, please. Rob is really authentic. And his integrity is exemplary. And he is trying to innovate, practice and understanding in a deeply coordinated manner. And so I really appreciate Rob and all three senses of appreciate. Here’s his question. Could you describe or define what you mean by idetic adduction and talk about why it’s interestingly related to the rest of your work? Is it all related to Husserl’s idetic reduction, which some describe as the bracketing in more modern therapeutic language? Thanks. Yes, Rob. It’s based very much on an intersection of Marleau-Ponty with Plato and helped by Polanyi. But the basic difference between idetic adduction and idetic reduction is so the reduction in Hegel is supposed to get you to the essence of something and where the essence is a completed thing. You get the essence and then you can just you can note the variations in contrast to it. As Low argues in his book on Marleau-Ponty, Marleau-Ponty doesn’t believe we can complete the reduction. So first of all, what is reduction and then what’s the adduction? The idea in Husserl is you do variations on the object. So here’s the bottle and then you can see it in different ways. And then you can also play with your attention upon it and your conception upon it. And you can open up the multi-spectrality of the object. And then what you try to see is what is constant throughout all the variations. And then you draw that out as the essence. And then Marleau-Ponty makes a move on this, which I think gets us closer to a more phenomenological, meaning a more more experiential engagement with Plato’s theories of the Forum. He’s Plato’s fundamental theory of patterns of intelligibility. So for Marleau-Ponty, I can’t. Let me use some of my language. Marleau-Ponty realizes that the multi-spectrality is combinatorially explosive. Now notice two things about this. You can never actually even just see all of the bottle. And you say, well, at least I can conceive of all of the bottle. Can you? Can you conceive of all of its relations? All of the potential things it could do, all the potential ways it could be named, all the potential ways it could be meaningful for a person. So if you if you don’t just stick to right sort of a common sense attitude, you realize that you actually never see or conceive the whole thing. But here’s stay with me on this. But you still have a sense of the whole. And this is something that D.C. Schindler talks about. You have a sense of the whole. So for Marleau-Ponty, it’s not that you get the essence, which you can delimit. Like here are the set of essential features instead. And this is why I use a different term. I never use the term essence. What you notice is in all of those aspects unfolded perceptually, imaginally and conceptually, they don’t come out. They don’t come at you ad hoc, incoherent, disconnected. They all somehow fit together into a hole that is not ever totally available to you. There is a and so I use this metaphor. There is a through line that runs through it. So I’m not reducing to get the idos. And here’s the play dough. The idos is right. The form, the structural functional organization. But here’s what I need you to see. Like so previously when I talked about the structural functional organization, I was talking more about the structural functional organization of all the features into the Gestalt. Now what I need you to understand is a structural functional organization that’s not just parts and whole, but of all of those aspects, all of that aspect. So I’m inducing, not reducing to, but drawing out that through line that runs through all of them, that sense of the whole thing that I can nevertheless never complete. That’s the idos. It’s a structural functional organization, not just of the parts into the whole, but of all of the aspects into the whole. And here’s the thing you need to get. The idos is not another aspect. And by that I mean a perceptual aspect, an imaginal aspect, or a conceptual aspect. It is not another aspect. It is a non-aspect through line that runs through all of them and binds them together. This is what I believe Plato was getting at. Why do I say this? Do you know what the original translation of idos is? The look of something. It’s aspect. And Plato was trying to get at something that was like what I was talking about here, that somehow captures all of the intelligibility, but is not itself a part of the whole. A property of any aspect itself. I know this is kind of abstract, but you do this. You do this with people that you’re deeply in love with. First of all, you know that they are multifaceted. And yet you have the sense that they’re not just those, right? And there’s so much more to them. You have a sense of their whole, but that doesn’t mean that you’ve plumbed the depths of their mystery. I sense how, you know, I got a sense of the depth of Jason, my son, but that doesn’t mean that I can disclose all. No, he’s combinatorial explosive in the depths of what he is. But there’s a through line. He isn’t just a hodgepodge of disconnected parts. He’s not just a bundle of properties like Hume would say. There’s a through line. Whenever he develops or grows, it’s like music. There’s a new note. I don’t recall the previous notes, but it belongs. It fits in. There’s a melody running through him, John Roussin’s language, that melody, that through line, that melody that sings into the mystery, right? That’s the idos of Jason, right? If I could put it that way. Now, there’s a level higher, which is you have not only the idos of things, you have the idos of categories of things. And then you have the idos of systems of categories of things and so on until you get a very complex picture. I won’t get go into that in detail right now. Why do I care about all of this? Because for me, that is not. Spinoza said that God doesn’t have abstract thoughts. We have to we have to pursue this stuff abstractly in order to see it clearly, but in a way that feeds directly down into my experience. I don’t mean anything grand grandiose or preposterous about this, but I’m learning to see the world this way. And I think it’s and other people have said this. My good friend, Guy Sandstock, has said to me, this sounds very similar to how Goethe described his ability to see the Ur phenomena or the Ur plant to see and experience things this way. And again, this is not foreign to you. You see this way when you are like when you love somebody, it’s the conformity, the knowing by loving the union of love. And remember, union isn’t isn’t consumption. It isn’t subsumption. And there’s a way in which you can optimally grip so that you get your sorry. This sounds like a hallmark, Carden, ridiculous. But like I want to answer the first question, your attention is it’s justly and lovingly disposed to things. So you’re getting that eidetic induction. And this is not only to make sense. One of the big projects we’re talking about now, the sense making, but is also to fall in love with being. But not up there right here in the guts of your attention and your perception and your being in the world. That’s why it’s very, very important to me. That’s why it’s very, very important to me. OK, so we’re going to take two more questions from the list and then we’ll have a bit of time left for some of the questions that are being submitted by the chat. So Matt Wilkinson asks, when you speak about gaining the optimal grip by zooming in and out, which also seems very similar to the prajna exercise of meditation contemplation, presumably not by coincidence. That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. Let me just let me just comment on that. So the optimal grip, which is relevant to everything I’ve just said, comes from both, by the way, Marlo Ponti and planning independently. I’m reading a brilliant book by Meek. She wrote an earlier book called Longing to Know. And then this book, it’s called Contact with Reality about Plain. But what she does in the book is she puts Palenyi. She integrates Palenyi and Marlo Ponti together in a really, really profound way. So but the idea of optimal grip comes primarily from Marlo Ponti. And I’ve done it many times with you. You like I’m always trading between these facets. So when I was talking about multi aspect reality, I don’t just think of it unfolding sort of in a homogenous space. It’s dynamic. There’s tonus. There’s tension in the various facets and the relationship to each other. An optimal grip is to try to place yourself right where you get the best overall trade off between these different facets for the task at hand. Right. So the idea is when we’re doing the prajna practice, which is in the course that’s online that I did on, you know, meditating with John Vervecki, Basically what you’re doing, and this is an example, by the way, prajna of how you layer practices on each other. So you learn Vipassana in which you’re stepping back. Right. You’re stepping back and looking at your thoughts and that breaks up any inappropriate frames. And then you’re doing metta or or maybe the view from above. I contemplate a practice where you’re doing the same thing. You’re doing the same thing. You’re doing the same thing. You’re doing the same thing. You’re doing the same thing. You’re doing the same thing. And so what you’re doing is like you in prajna, you inhale and for most people that works on the inhale and you do a contemplative movement outward, Fioria. And then as you exhale, you do a meditative movement outward. And then as you exhale, you do a meditative movement outward. And then as you exhale, you do a meditative movement outward. And then as you exhale, you do a meditative movement outward. And then as you exhale, you do a meditative movement outward. And then as you exhale, you do a meditative movement outward. And then as you exhale, you do a meditative movement inward like the past. And then you flow between them with your breath. So you’re doing three things right. There’s the there’s the meditative frame breaking the contemplative frame making and then getting the dynamic flow between them. And you’re layering flow and meditation and contemplation on each other. But what you’re doing is exactly training because what happens right is first it’s just it’s just this. And then with practice, they’re in parallel. And then sorry for the gesture, but it’s the only way I can do it. And then you get all at once as in as it can possibly be and as out as you could possibly be completely interpenetrating. And again, I don’t mean this disrespectfully, but I mean, that’s the way I mean it respectfully. But the way, you know, you know, God is simultaneously more imminent that more right than than you are to yourself and more transcendent than your highest capacities to transcendent. And at once, God is a an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere is another way of putting it. You get that sphere in prajna. And what that’s doing, which is what is Matt what Matt is saying is, is this not training you to get the kind of optimal optimal grip or to get an optimal grip on your optimal gripping? Yeah. Yeah. And that’s why I know this sounds abstract and vervekey and blah, blah, blah. But this is meta optimal gripping to get an optimal grip on your capacity to do optimal gripping by introducing, you know, a dynamic complexification into your capacity for optimal gripping. So that’s exactly right. It’s not by coincidence. It is by design. And it’s designed to move you into that higher form of optimal gripping. And I’ve argued, and many of you know this because of the series, that that’s actually what’s happening in a mystical experience that can be can be taken up as a transformative experience. Remember, mystical experiences are not are not identical transformative experiences. They also have to be taken up by a sapiential framework, by wisdom cultivation in order to become something like a transformative experience. There’s a second half to Matt’s question, but we’re running out of time. So I’m just going to move on to Alan’s question. Maybe, Matt, I can answer the second half of your question another time. So, Alan, Alan, come on. I hope I didn’t mispronounce your last name. Welcome, Alan. You’re a new patron. You tell me this. I’m a new patron. I was fortunate enough to have a friend share your awakening series. And six minutes into the introduction, you totally described at least seven features of this awakening process that I can relate to in the last few years. I’m a photographer and a textile art rug maker. And the last 12 or so years, I’ve started noticing patterns in the nature. I bet you, I bet you Alan is getting something like what I was talking about when I was talking about this identity conduction and the new way of seeing Goethe. Oh, what’s the book? Taking appearance seriously. I can’t remember the author. It starts with a B. I recommend the dynamic way of seeing. I recommend that book. So in the last 12 years or so, I’ve started noticing patterns in nature. I’ve started seeing patterns, shapes, and clouds, rocks, trees, ice, snow, smoke, and just about everywhere else in my environment. Right. So if the patterns just aren’t sort of like projective, but if they start to get you like I’ll speak politically, they start getting you to sing into the melody of whatever it is. And so and also affording that melody to echo into the chambers of your heart and the corridors of your mind, then you’re doing identity conduction. Salvador Dali. Here we go. OK. Yes. Salvador Dali. Right. I got to see the Dali Gallery in of all places. What was it Toledo or in Florida? Yeah. Oh, it’s poor. Anyways, Salvador Dali describes this phenomena as part of his process. The paranoia critical method. Yeah, he had this very bizarre way of sort of introducing. A lot of noise into his cognition and making more sort of permeable the barrier between the conscious and the unconscious. Hypnagogic imagery, enhancement of the imaginal. Yeah. And so, yeah, very much. So Da Vinci also used and described this method of recognition perception. It is has been described in all forms of divination. It’s a very good book on divination that takes it out of the woo woo new age. I can talk to your grandmother by looking at the astral projections of dolphins or something like that. There’s an actual there’s a good book that argues that what was being talked about. I can’t remember. I think it’s by the author Stark. Divination in the ancient world. And that because most of the philosophers look down on a lot of the world’s most important elements. They look down on a lot of the magical practices, but they treat divination with respect. Notice the word divine in there, by the way, right, to divine something. Because if you pay attention very carefully, what they’re talking about is a kind of imaginal intuition. It’s it’s and I mean this now in a way that I think is completely understandable in cognitive scientific terms. We talked about Hogarth’s work and that intuition is the result of complex implicit learning and that we can improve it by getting that kind of learning happening within flow states. And then we get insight in the creativity and all of that can be organized and integrated with this identity deduction. Right. So the divination was people were just noticing that certain people were just really good in situations in which you couldn’t propose a method like you would. And you know who should do who should, you know, be at the forefront of the battle right now. Paul should be. And that person would often give good advice and they couldn’t tell you how. And it seems magical and, you know, in the pejorative sense of the word. But the argument, I believe it’s Stark is making is that no, no, this is all very, very tractable for us now and makes a lot of sense. And for me, part of what’s going on in identity deduction is exactly kind of a flow state enhancement of the implicit learning that is taking place within all of perception. This goes from what are called predictive processing models in predictive processing. There’s no deep difference between perception and imagination. Perception is bottom up. Right. Imagination is so bottom up error signal and and imagination is top down prediction signal and they’re completely interwoven, very much emergent emanation. Right. And so when you can, there’s implicit learning going on at the guts of your perception and it’s got a huge imaginal component. So the imaginary is when we use images to take us away from perception. The imaginal is when we use images for the sake of perception to enhance perception, as I sometimes put it, to augment our perception of reality. You see how this lines up with identity deduction really, really powerfully. OK, so it has been described in all forms of divination and recently the term parrot, the whole Olya and Apple, Phenia. Yes, Apple, Phenia, I’m familiar with. I’m not familiar with the other term. I’ll have to look it up. And we used to give the psychological component of this phenomena a scientific definition. Yeah, they do. But they’re more descriptive terms. The Apple, Phenia, the ones I’m familiar with. I’m trying to get at a description, more of a description. I’m trying to get at a scientific explanation of the underlying mechanism. I feel it has been helpful as a form of meditation and actually in helping me spend more time in the real world. Yes, yes, yes. This will be part of after Socrates. These practices that you would do while you’re walking around in the world, not when you’re just sitting at home in your meditative room with your eyes closed. Jordan Peterson states in some of his lectures that it’s possible to find meaning in those things that manifest themselves to us. You bet. That’s what I was talking about. I think it provokes a state of flow. Yes. I feel as though you have spoke of this experience process in other ways during your lectures. You feel correctly. And of course, you’re using the word feel as an interesting metaphor because remember feel was about touch with sensitivity. It’s about a contact epistemology, about being in touch with things in contact, loving conformity, conformity through the union of loving. That’s the core of participatory knowing. What are your thoughts? If you have any on this phenomena? I think I’ve given you a lot of them as I’ve been going through. Do you think this was a necessary psychotechnology preaxial age? I think it’s a necessary psychotechnology now. Was it going on in ancient religion? The imaginal is certainly there. I think this is definitely going on in shamanism. I’ve made the argument. But of course, we can’t return to a preaxial world any more than we can return to a pre-scientific world. We have to learn as much as we can from these periods, but we have to give up the nostalgic longing to live in them. They had their time and this is a different time. So this is again, I put it on my gravestone. Neither nostalgia nor utopia. And so to the degree to which we can recover, and I’m trying to do that right now in answering your question, Alan, the degree to which we can recover and exact that machinery for us here now, perhaps in conjunction with what Rachel proposes for the generation of art that we experience as sacredness and as putting us into right relationship with the sacred. This is what we have to do right now. This is our project right now. OK, are we I think we’re going to move. Are we going to move to taking any questions from the chat or am I just continuing? Just waiting here. Well, I’ll answer another question while that’s getting sorted out. So this is from Mike. Does artificial intelligence have a role in our awakening? So that’s that’s an excellent question for which I don’t think anybody can or should pretend to give a definitive answer. I think insofar as artificial intelligence is a scientific project and not just a social technological project. Right. So I make a distinction. John so made a distinction between weak AI and strong AI. I make a distinction between. I make a distinction between. Artificial intelligence that’s just to get machines to do things that human beings used to do, and that is important. And that’s the dominant form of AI right now. And then AGI artificial general intelligence, which is the scientific project of trying to create intelligence so that we can better and more deeply understand it. And of course, that has terrific moral requirements and moral implications that are not being adequately enough addressed. I’ll keep talking about that throughout the remainder of my lifetime or until the robots kill me. So that scientific project has a terrific in both senses of the word potential to help us address the meaning crisis by giving us a more profound understanding of intelligence and ultimately consciousness. Because if you I would argue because if you follow my work, I think intelligence, consciousness and rationality are all bound up together. This is one of the great philosophical myopic short sightedness of the current AGI project for many people. Not for all is not realizing the deep connections between intelligence and the world. And the relation of all of those two embodiment, which is just also profound. But this is what I’m talking about. The degree to which artificial intelligence is provoking these kinds of questions, and the degree to which artificial intelligence is provoking these kinds of questions is not just for the sake of the intelligence. It’s for the sake of the intelligence. And that’s why I’m talking about artificial intelligence. I think artificial intelligence has the potential to play a significant role. That potential will always be a key element in the process of understanding the meaning of intelligence. And I think that’s what I’m talking about. I think that’s what I’m talking about. I think that’s what I’m talking about. I think that’s what I’m talking about. I think that’s what I’m talking about. I think that’s what I’m talking about. I think that’s what I’m talking about. I think that’s what I’m talking about. I think that’s what I’m talking about. I think that’s what I’m talking about. I think that’s what I’m talking about. I think that’s what I’m talking about. I think that’s what I’m talking about. I think that’s what I’m talking about. I think that’s what I’m talking about. I think artificial intelligence has the potential to play a significant role. That potential will always be actualized by some people. I will always try to actualize it. I think people like Evan Thompson will always try to actualize it. There’s just a whole host of people that are doing that. And so that’s the best answer I think I can give to the question. So now we are going to move to live questions from the chat. I want to thank the Patreon subscribers and everyone watching right now. A reminder, your support is crucial to continue to produce these videos and to support the science we’re doing to try and find solutions to the meeting crisis. So the first question from the chat is from James, the Patreon. What’s the simplest, most realizable way of discerning BS, narrativizing self-deception from the sacred and reality? And how can we practically use embodiedly thinking, physical or movement to discern these and aid our thinking? Yeah, so I had a recent video with Rafe Kelly. It’s out on Rafe’s channel where I go into this at length, James. So for a deeper, perhaps more satisfying answer, I point you to that video. So because of time purposes, what I’ll have to say will seem somewhat cursory. But you have to cultivate a sense for the real. You have to pay attention to moments of realization and note what that is like. What’s the taste, touchstone? You start to notice, right? And you have to practice the eidetic induction. You have to practice drawing it out, reflecting, looking at the structures. And so there isn’t a simple rule or method. There is a way of cultivating a skill that… Here, I want to put it differently. There’s a way of cultivating a virtue and a virtuosity that once you have it, can be applied simply. Just like you took years to be able to get a joke. Remember that. Try telling a joke to a three-year-old, a four-year-old, and even a five-year-old. And they haven’t groped, they haven’t gestalted the narrative and the attentional and the personal and the meta-perspectival so that they can do humor. You have, I bet. And notice how humor opens things up in a way that nothing else can. And now you can do it like that. In fact, it just seems to happen to you. It seems like magic, right? You just utter words and then people, they shake their body and they do all this weird stuff. In the same way, you can cultivate the taste for realization, the taste for genuine reciprocal opening. But you always are training that taste. Please, please. You’re always training that taste, not primarily from the inside out first person. You’re training it that way, but you’re getting any feedback from other people in the world. It’s like science. So if you are undertaking a transformation, you’ll note, oh, I’m changing, I’m changing, I’m changing. You probably aren’t. But when other people start noting it, that means you’re tracking it. Pay attention to those. Pay attention to those. So you’re training this taste, this touchstone taste in moments of realization. And then you are, right, tracking that training by the degree to which it’s being recognized by other people, multi-domains, many different domains and many different units. You find it operating helpfully, problem solving in many different domains of your life. Then when you have the taste, is it perfect? No. Tell me any other virtue or virtuosity that’s perfect. Have you ever gone to a perfect doctor? Is there a perfect engineer anywhere? No. Well, does that mean that it doesn’t matter? Does it matter? Just anybody can be your doctor. Anybody can be your engineer. That’s bullshit. You know the difference. There’s a real difference. I’m making a platonic argument. The fact that there isn’t perfection doesn’t mean that all the alternatives are equal. You can get very good at discernment, at tasting the real. And then once you have that, then you can apply it as you requested simply, directly. But I can’t give you the recipe. I can’t give you. Do these three things. You have to do, you have to train virtue. That’s what I mean. Discernment is a virtue and a virtuosity. You have to train it. Just like any other virtue or virtuosity. In fact, more so because it’s so foundational. I hope that was helpful. Yeah, I’m going to pass on to one more question, but please take a look at the video I did with Rafe Kelly recently. So here’s a question from David Svedlo. Good to hear from you again, David. More regarding agape and attention. If the optimal grip of awareness is dynamically, contextually, and mutually optimal, not in relation to an absolute context frame, does teleology approach the Tao? Yeah. Yeah. The sense of acting on purpose towards a goal and the sense of acting in the moment, in the flow of the Tao, doing it for its own sake, or was it Angelus Helidius or Rilke? The rose blooms without a Y, which is the Tao, right? The difference between them disappears. In my experience and in my reflection, my theoretical reflection upon that experience. I know that there’s people here that will disagree with me. Some of the people that I deeply respect and have great affection for who want to talk about teleology. I also want to say that there’s two teleologies right now in public discussion. There’s the traditional teleology that goes all the way back, in which there’s a plan and everything is working towards that final state. And I think I have concluded, and I’m still in this conclusion, that the scientific revolution destroyed that for us. And that if we try to get back to that, we are pursuing a quixotic nostalgia that will actually eventually lead to the harming of people’s lives. There’s a new sense of teleology about that’s being especially driven by my colleague Dennis Walsh at the University of Toronto, at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science, where teleology is about the idea that there are forms of explanation in which we’re not talking about things pushing events, but having to do with constraints and conduction and functionality. And I think that, I think the work that Dennis is doing is brilliant and the work that’s coming into the philosophy of biology with other people of that ilk. But in general, what most people still mean is the older version, I guess what you might call the Aristotelian version of teleology. I don’t think that exists except for like minded, sentient beings who can act on purpose. But I think there is another sense of the way reality conduces and affords us being able to do things, including living things. And I think we can touch the depths of that, as you said, when we get that place of agape and attention, the meta optimal gripping, because then the line between acting on purpose, acting, and then just co-emerging with things as they flow completely disappears. The line between being active and being passive, giving and receiving, all of these disappear in the deep conformity of deep participatory interaction. All right, everyone, that was fantastic. Thank you for joining me for this Q&A. We’re going to be doing these again. I’m happy to say that, well, Amar is getting better, but also we have a new person on our team, Madeline and Shana. She’s amazing. And she’s helping me in many different dimensions. And I want to thank her and Amar and, of course, Jason, who’s always here helping me for all of the great work they’ve done today. And because of all of that, we’ll be going back as we’ve been doing these every third Sunday of the month at 3 p.m. Eastern time. These videos will be made public available on YouTube channel. Afterwards, if you can give it, you know, like it, make a comment just so the YouTube algorithm will tend to find it and other people can have access to this community. And thank you all for your support. And I’ll see you next month. And like I said, happy holidays for those who celebrate and restful respite from the grinding wheels of the world. For those who do not. Take care, everyone.