https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=eoau-x02n0w
Welcome, everyone, to our monthly Q&A. Sorry, we weren’t able to do one last month, but we’re back doing this regularly. But there is a change. We’re switching to patron-only Q&As. We’re doing that in order to try and fit more patron questions in. And we’ve also noticed, and we need to recognize that there’s a difference in the caliber of questions from the patrons and the general public. So we wanted to create a forum for these deeper questions that can be answered more at length. The Q&A will be publicly available on your YouTube page after it streams. We’ll answer the questions that have already been sent in. And if there’s some time at the end, we’ll see if there are some questions from the chat. Okay. So just broadly, sorry. I want to thank everybody for their ongoing and continual support, both financially and then many of you send me emails and texts and make comments. That much appreciated. So the first question is from Claudia. What’s your view on the perennial philosophy? In what ways do you think it relates to the neoplatonic idea of gathering things up for the great return? So we have to be careful in answering that question, Claudia. That’s a good question. Because the standard referent for the perennial philosophy is, of course, the book written by Aldous Huxley. And this has given foundation or it’s the origin of what’s become known as perennialism, which is the idea that all the great religious traditions share a core, often a mystical And they’re all just different ways of talking about these the same perennial truths about reality and Huxley. I’ve read the perennial philosophy and Huxley isn’t as simplistic or as ham-fisted as that sounds, but nevertheless, he does make an argument for something along those lines. And that notion of perennialism has come under very significant and intense criticism. There’s an ongoing debate within the philosophy and psychology of mysticism between people who argue that there are perennial states. The most prominent right now is Foreman and his argument for the pure consciousness event that because it’s sub-conceptual, sub-representational, can’t be due to cultural variation. And people like Katz who argue that all experience is ultimately interpreted in nature. That’s one meaning and I tend to think that there’s some truth to what Foreman is saying, that there are certain states, transformative states, awakening states, flow states that are perennially available to people. But I think Katz is also right to try and argue that, for example, which is a perennialist argument that all the world religions are at the core the same is to oversimplify them and to inappropriately denigrate the significant differences between them. So generally, I split the difference between universalist perennialism and a relativist cultural relativism. And I argue for what’s called pluralism. And pluralism is the idea that there are universal processes, but those universal processes act to actually adapt people’s cognition and consciousness to their particular historical, cultural, and environmental context. And that leads to a lot of variation. Again, analogous to how evolution, the principles of evolution are universal, but that doesn’t mean all the creatures are the same. The same principles of evolution produce culturally, sorry, environmentally specific adaptations. Now, that’s one meaning of perennialism. And I sort of put that aside. The second half of your question points to another meaning that I think goes to another book written with that title in it, Perennial Philosophy, and it’s written by Arthur Versluis, who is a current researcher, somebody I have a very high regard for. He’s at the University of Michigan. And he argues that, at least in the case of whatever we mean by Western civilization, and that is a family resemblance term, and it’s amorphous, and it’s built around a prototype and things like that. It’s not definitional. Nevertheless, what he argues is that the spiritual grammar of Western civilization is neoplatonism and some of the close attendants like Gnosticism and Hermeticism, but the core is neoplatonism. And so most of Christian spirituality, at least for a very long time, was deeply informed by and transformed by neoplatonism. And I think that’s the same thing with aspects of Judaism, with aspects of Islam and Sufism. And in that, that particular historical thesis of perennialism, I think is correct. I think that neoplatonism has the same status as a wisdom tradition as Taoism and Buddhism do. It has had that status for Western civilization. Now that, of course, might step on some Christian toes, but I can’t go into that right now. As not many of you know, I’ve tried to engage in an ongoing and good faith dialogue with people from various Christian traditions, Jonathan Pageau, Paul VanderKlay, JP Morgan, Mary Cohen. And so that, I think, has been very, we have all agreed that has been very fruitful on both sides. And I’m trying to side that issue right now. So I don’t think that the idea that all of these traditions are going to be gathered back together, sort of in an Aldous Huxley form, is going to happen. Because like I said, I don’t think that form of perennialism is historically defensible. What I do think is that by recovering neoplatonism and having the kind of global contact is now available to us with Taoism and Buddhism and Sufism and bridging thinkers like Korban or the Kyoto School, we have a better resource for getting a genuinely pluralistic, and remember I distinguish pluralism from both universalism and relativism. We have the opportunity, the kairos, to recover, but it’s not even recovering, that’s the wrong word. Like, I want to use that word inventio, to discover and to make a genuine pluralistic spirituality which I think is going to be indispensable for us going forward. So that’s how I would answer that question, Claudia. So thank you for that. Great question. So Rachel Hayden, thank you for your support. So long question, so I’ll read it through and then I’ll respond. I recently read, although I’ll probably interject along the way because I get excited by what you people say to me, what you folks say to me. I recently read Agnes Callard’s Aspiration, wow, it’s per your recommendation, great book. Quite dense and compelling for this philosophical newbie, I couldn’t put it down. Yeah, it’s a brilliant book. Brilliant book. LA Paul’s Transformative Experience and Agnes Callard’s Aspiration are the two books that people should read if they want to see how philosophy can reconnect to the spiritual life and I think in a profound way. From what I understand, it has a lot to say about perspectival knowing, yes, especially in the sections regarding inner conflicts and acrasia. However, in the section where Callard presents her innovation of the standard of normativity being housed in the aspirant’s future self, which I map onto Stang’s The Divine Double, I agree with that. I get an intuitive sense that it is plunged still deeper into the level of participatory knowing. I totally agree. I think that’s exactly right. I think that’s totally right. I think at the level of what she calls appreciation where you’re basically going through this process of transforming your salience landscape so that you come to appreciate, like in her example, classical music. I think that’s very much participatory, sorry, perspectival knowing. As you say, that relationship between the current self and the future self and the way it has a normative demand on you, that’s totally participatory knowing. That’s totally participatory knowing. That tells me, Rachel, if you want some feedback, you’re really getting her book. I think you’re really getting it. I think you’re understanding the existential, the sapiential, the spiritual import of the work. Yeah, totally. I’m not exactly sure why I feel this way. Perhaps it’s because there is a tenor of opening up towards the unknown, more reminiscent of Socratic wonder than rich, disdainful curiosity. Yeah, that strikes me as a plausible explanation because of the way wonder is, Socratic wonder calls the self and its world into question, often in a state of aporia. Perhaps it is the communal nature of the aspirants project requiring the help of others who are farther along to participate in the process. Yes, I think that’s true too. And that’s, again, the importance of us belonging to a sapiential tradition and community. Perhaps the juxtaposition between temporal and normative causation causes me to feel a sense of transcendence of the ego. Totally. I mean, you get into this interesting relationship where you are mastering to your future self, which is something beyond your current ego, in order to afford self-transcendence. So that makes perfect sense to me. I think all of these are right. I hope you’re not asking me to choose between them because, I mean, it’s probably multifactorial. Perhaps because there’s an anagogic process of one’s self, one’s values being drawn into a new being along with one’s world. Totally. I think the way you get out of existential inertia and afford appreciation and aspiration is through entering into an anagogy. The serious play, which often means the ritually serious play of anagogy, is how you afford aspiration rather than making decisions from a fixed vantage point and in standard decision theory. That’s totally right. You can’t infer your way through this. I think that the way you overcome existential inertia and existential ignorance is with anagogy and with serious play. I think those are the two ways in which we afford self-transcendence. At any rate, I was hoping you can help me unpack this for a minute because I have a hunch that it will reveal something to me, both of Callard’s ideas and a participatory knowing. Thank you. Well, I sort of tried to do that along the way. There’s deep connections between Socratic wonder and the affordance of anagogy, the movement between the causal, the causation from the existing self and the normative constraint, the shaping of possibility from the future self, I think also puts you into the kind of dynamical self-organization that is required for going through aspiration. I think that… I think how I see it, as I see L.A. Paul as framing the problem as a problem, and I said this in front of Laurie and she’s in agreement, framing the problem of bringing about a perspectival transformation and participatory transformation, it maps onto her, I think what she calls epistemic and personal transformative experience. So I think she sets the problem, but Callard really opens up some of the features that are needed in this process of appreciation and aspiration. And then I agree with what you’re doing because that’s what I’ve argued. I think you need to supplement them with… There’s still some gaps in Callard. You need the anagogy. You need the serious play in order to understand how we actually afford this transformation, this process of aspiration. And I’m also sort of reflecting on how we relate to the future self as iconic rather than as an idol. How do we see it as something that is sacred to us, not so much in itself, but that it is an icon through which we get a sense of, I guess I’ll say it this way, the sacred depths of reality that will be disclosed to us when we have gone through that stage of aspiration and become a place where we have actualized and internalized that future self. And so that’s something that still needs some more thinking. I think it’s intuitively the case why they’re not the same, but how is the aspirant’s relationship to their future self different from the self-promotional behavior of the textbook narcissist? And what does that mean? What does that mean experientially? How can we sense the difference? What does it mean existentially? How can we reflect and rationally distinguish and discern between them? So that’s a little bit more work that needs to be done. And so it is something I’m working on. So I hope that answers your question, Rachel. Thank you very much. So the next question is from Camden Caps. Thank you very much. Does the rise in multilevel marketing schemes worry you? Could we see a Hitler-type leader emerge from these and gain power in the United States? So you put your finger on a lacuna in the work that Chris, Master Pietro, and I have done about the pseudo-religious communities that have emerged to try and fill in the gap from the demise. Sorry, that was way too strong and pretentious and arrogantly insulting. Christianity has not demised. I meant the decline of Christianity as the shared worldview. I wanted to speak more carefully. But let’s not mitigate it either. Nietzsche is right to call that the death of God. Jordan Hall and I are going to release a video where we talk about the fact that the West has not properly gone through the grief of the death of God. And that like somebody who has not properly grieved the end of a new relationship, the West is not yet ready in some ways for a new relationship to the sacred because it has not properly grieved its old relationship to the sacred. So I guess what I want to say is I’ve lost the question here. I wanted to make sure I got it. But I lost the thread of the question in my answer because I wanted to bring up that point about multi-level marketing. I got it now. Sorry. Sorry for that. So multi-level marketing, just like a lot of things are what the connection was I was trying to make is they are these earthsats religions that have come in to take the place of the world as surrogates but not completely satisfying surrogates for a genuine meta-meaning system that we had within a religious philosophical framework. And so all of these are worrying to me. And the fact that they are starting to connect each other in weird ways, like so what Jules Evans brilliantly calls, he brilliantly calls conspirituality, conspirituality. So you get MLM things being integrated with like sort of conspiratorial narratives. I’ve seen some MLM people and they have, not all of them, but I’ve seen what you’re worrying about in your question. I’ve seen them tend towards a sort of narrative about people who don’t get it or don’t understand. It’s sort of an us-them. Sometimes there’s language that it’s sometimes cryptic and not so cryptic between the pure and the impure. I see this around MLMs that have to do with sort of supplements and dieting and health things. And there’s a pseudo-religious tinge to them. As you indicate with the Hitler-type question, could we see a Hitler-type leader emerge from these in the United States? You’ve got this Iron Age rigid sort of hierarchy in which service is flowing upward. And like I said, the MLM things are starting to integrate with sort of the QAnon things. And if you watch some of the QAnon sessions, you watch some of the documentaries, they’re church services. If you think they’re anything other than church services, I don’t know what I could do to convince you. People go in, they sing songs, they tell this overarching myth. There’s something like a sermon with PowerPoint. Then there’s social time, they talk, they provide daycare and support. It’s just like, wow. And so the thing that concerns me is that all of these things are starting to get connected by the enormously stupid but tremendously powerful glue that is the internet. And so they’re all getting stuck together and finding each other and clumping together really at sort of unconscious levels of association and activation. So the MLM on its own doesn’t worry me because I’ve seen it from being a kid, Avon calling and all that stuff. The fact that it is getting more powerful and it’s starting to intersect and integrate with all these other species of conspirituality, yeah, that’s worrying. That’s worrying. So I think for me, the solution to that, which was the solution that was not pursued in the Weimar Republic as Hitler was rising, was to create a wisdom culture. And now, in fact, what Hitler, the Nazis tapped into was they tapped into the underground world of the occult, the pseudo-Gnostic, the return to nature movements and things like that. And the people defending the democracy did not do that. And dare I say it, I am afraid that that sort of thing is happening right now. I think that the response that needs to be made to conspirituality is authentic spirituality. And if we don’t start to make that at least an important cultural project, which many people are doing, by the way, then that’s where I get worried. That’s where I get worried. So that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing. That’s one of the many reasons, one of the many interconnecting reasons why I’m doing this. I think we’re involved in a couple races. There’s the race to save the planet, and there’s the race to somehow ameliorate the way the socioeconomic divide is ripping the world apart. And there’s the race to get ahead of authoritarianism, pseudo-religious, totalitarian ideologies as surrogates, as dangerous spiritual junk food that will empower individuals and have empowered individuals already to undermine the self-corrective and interlocking self-corrective processes of science and democracy that need to be regrounded in a self-correcting spirituality as, I think, a response to how we could go about trying to solve the problems that need to be solved. So that was a bit of a long answer, Camden, but I hope you found it helpful. Jax is asking a question, and thank you for your patronage, Jax. I really enjoyed watching Psych 370. Okay, well, I hadn’t made that public, so you just went on the channel. I have an updated version of that that I’m going to work with Amar to clean up a bit and then release on the Cognitive Science channel. I have an updated version of a course on the nature and the function of the self. That, instead of just putting that on as sort of a cleaned up thing, what I’ve done is I did what I did with Untangling the World Knot. We’ve started recording it. If some of you have seen it in Untangling the World Knot, I presented my theoretical arguments around consciousness and then had wonderful, like, genuine dialogos with a good friend, Greg Enriquez. We were integrating my work with his work, his really, really important work. And then there was synergistic sparks between us. And we’re doing the same thing on a new series that’s called The Elusive Eye. We’ve started recording it. This time, however, it’s going to be a triologue, a triologos, maybe that’s what I want to say. It’s going to be myself and Greg Enriquez again, but we’re going to be joined by Christopher Master Pietro. And I hope some of you have gotten to see, got to see, sorry about that, some of the dialogs with Chris. And the lyrical profundity of his spiritual existentialism, it’s already just contributing greatly to this. So keep your eye open for that. The nature, the elusive self, the nature and function, sorry, the elusive eye, capital I, the nature and function of the self. We’re going to probably do some other online courses. Amar and I are talking about doing a version of an introduction to cognitive science. There’s, I’ve also got a version of psychology of higher cognitive processes. So there’s a bunch of stuff that’s in the can and we’re working on and the new series is going to come out. So, and like I said, there’s a more recent version of 370 I’d like to make available. There’s lots, there’s lots. So the fact that you’d be willing to pay for them on Patreon, that’s great. But I’ll keep that in mind. Yeah, I think there are some, that’s a possibility. Amar has suggested doing something like that down the road and I’m always going to listen to what Amar has to say to me. So hopefully we can talk about that again. Cassia Howell, who’s a patron, thank you for your patronage. Would you consider hosting moderating coaching, a show for debating modern divisive problems using Socratic method? Yeah, I might. I might. I mean, my time is very spread, stretched very thin. Sorry, I’m going to sneeze. I think I’m going to sneeze. Guess not. So I’m reminded of that scene in The Lord of the Rings when Bilbo has had the ring too long. And he says he feels like butter that is spread too thinly over a toast. And so I have to be very careful of my time right now, but that’s something I want to do. There’s another thing we’ve filmed a few episodes of, but we had to put it aside for COVID, where it’s myself and a couple of good friends of mine, co-workers, sort of looking at issues around meaning and meaning-making and philosophy in popular media. So that’s also a possibility. I would like, in order to do that, I would like to take people through a bit of the program, like take them through, you know, let’s do some empathy circling and then let’s move into, you know, the anti-debate, let’s do some basic circling, and then let’s go into some dialectic. And then after doing that, let’s come into this problem and try and have all of those skills activated and in play as we try to wrestle with divisive problems. So that’s what I, like I said, the conditions would have to be right for me because, well, as I just said, I’m spread very thin. And although that’s challenging, I’m grateful for the fact that there’s so much, I’m very grateful, I don’t want to come across as complaining, that’s what I’m trying to address. I’m very grateful for all the interest in my work. It’s extremely encouraging, it’s extremely motivating, and I feel appreciated in a way that matters to me, so thank you very much. So Rob, great, hey Rob, I was just talking to Rob earlier today. He’s at one of the levels where he gets to talk to me regularly, and as always, it’s a fantastic conversation. Rob’s question is, could you briefly talk about how signs and signifiers work in thinking and communication? What’s cool about semiotics that would motivate someone to go deeper and inquire in this area? Is there anything that major semiotic thinkers do that’s really exciting or a big mistake in their perspectives or conjectures? Anything about this topic would be great. Thanks, John and Amar. So, yeah, I mean, so the person that you should be talking to is the person I talked about a minute ago, who is Christopher Massapietro. Chris got his degree in semiotics, and so that is one of the reasons why he is my partner in crime, as I sometimes joke, in many of the projects that we’re working on now, because he has that knowledge that I don’t have. So I know some of semiotics from PERS, and I also know some of semiotics from aspects of SOSUR, the structuralist, and especially the post-structuralist like Derrida. So for me, I don’t know Lacan, and I don’t know his stuff about the real signifier or stuff like that. So I hesitate to say too much, because I think my slicing into it is very biased, because of it being sort of insufficient. I do think Derrida’s arguments about difference and about the constant deferring and differing between signs, and one that indicates about our ability to make a difference and one that indicates about our ability to relate to the signifier, I think that’s an important argument. And again, one of the things I dislike about people who just sort of slag postmodernism as a homogenous group of crypto-cultural Marxists that are just relativistically wanting to undermine Western civilization, that is really unfair to the work of Derrida, and I would also say to Foucault, those are the two who I’ve read and I’ve studied somewhat, Derrida the most. I would say this, and I’ve made this argument to people who sort of know my work and are familiar with this, I would say that Derrida’s argument for difference bears important similarities to the arguments I make about relevance realization, and actually, and this was very strange bedfellows indeed, similar arguments that Fodor makes about how relevance is not a property of any proposition or any syntactic structure are very similar to what Derrida has to say about difference, which means two things. I simultaneously have respect for what Derrida is talking about, but because of the relevant similarity between difference and relevance realization, that also affords me I think a legitimate place from which to make I think significant criticisms, oh that was a pun, significant, significant criticisms of Derrida’s theory of difference. So, I think the connections that semiotics makes for me come out, Rob, in the work I do on relevance realization and especially the work I do on how signs become symbols in the anthropological, spiritual, religious sense, and that work there, of course, is influenced by the pragmatism that came out of Peirce, and that work is to some degree influenced by postmodern theologians like John Caputo and Mark Taylor, and so I can’t comment too much on semiotics per se, I would invite you to maybe ask a question of Chris, I could put you in touch with him about that, but the work that you’re pointing to has influenced work that has deeply influenced the work I’ve been talking about here, the work on relevance realization and the work on the nature of the symbol. I think that’s all I can say right now, Rob, but I hope you found that helpful. Okay, so, Cosman, thank you for your patronage. Cosman writes, thank you very much for all your work and for the excellent discussions you make available to us. I’ve been greatly influenced by your work and I’m extremely grateful for this. Thank you for what you just said, I’m very grateful for that, and I’m glad that you find my work helpful. I was wondering if you have any thoughts on the idea of relative deprivation. I’m a PhD student within the field of criminology, and this concept is centrally based on the idea of relative deprivation. I’m a PhD student within the field of criminology, and this concept is central to my current research. However, since I have come across your work, I’ve been trying to make sense of relative deprivation from the perspective of agent-arranger relationship and would be extremely interested in hearing your take on this. Thank you very much and I wish you all the best. So, unfortunately, I don’t know very much about relative deprivation. I get that it’s the idea that it’s sort of a comparative sense of deprivation rather than an absolute deprivation relative to sort of, you know, constitutive biological needs. So, the most I could say would be a very general thing about that the agent… What relative deprivation might be pointing to? I’ve got to be really cautious here because I’m pretty much ignorant. I just have that one basic idea, but one potential connection, and that’s all I really feel comfortable offering, is relative deprivation points to the fact that relative deprivation is a relative deprivation that is not necessarily a relative deprivation that is not necessarily a relative deprivation that is not necessarily a relative deprivation to the fact that the agent arena relationship to the fact that the agent arena relationship is a layered relationship. It’s not just sort of one thing. And I try to convey that with the idea that, you know, there’s a biological level, there’s a cultural level, right, there’s a cognitive level, maybe I should have done those in a different order, but biological level, cognitive level, cultural level in which the agent arena relationship is occurring and that those different levels are not causally distinct from each other. They are interpenetrating and intercausal with each other, which is why we need something like cognitive science to try to integrate the various ways in which the agent arena relationship is unfolding and the way those different levels interpenetrate and causally constrain and inform and transform each other. So, that’s all I can really say about that, but I think, I feel that I got more of this than you did, so I apologize for that. I’m going to go ahead and move on to the next question that I’m going to ask you about because I think that’s a very good question, and I apologize. I hope that’s perhaps helpful. What you afforded me was an opportunity to make very clear to people that the agent arena relationship is not a static single layer phenomena. It is a dynamic, right, it’s not only self-organizing between the agent and arena this way, it’s self-organizing in a recursive manner between different levels or layers of agent arena relationships. So, thank you for giving me the opportunity to say that. I’m sorry I can’t say more to you, but I hope you found that at least a little bit helpful. Okay, so, a long question from Matt Gumbly, and thank you very much, Matt, for your support, and you have to make comments that are deeply appreciated. Are you able to discuss what you think the relationship is between perspectival knowing and insight, especially novel insight? Yes, yes I am. I’ll do that in a moment, but I’ll read the rest of your question. In the last weeks, in the context of this quote, I came across, that is I think a terrific example of perspectival knowing. Skateboarding is not a hobby and it’s not a sport. Skateboarding is a way of learning how to redefine the world around you, yes, it’s a way of getting out of the house, connecting with other people and looking at the world through different sets of eyes. Very much, you’re getting that this is a perspectival knowing. Let’s write it, let’s see what the transition is like at the bottom. So notice what you’re doing here, Matt. You’re saying that the procedural level, the ability to apply particular skills, skateboarding skills, for example, changes your perspectival knowing. It changes your situational awareness so that what is salient to you, the way things are aspectualized to you, the different aspects of things is radically transformed because procedural knowing, the acquisition and application of skills depends on the situational awareness afforded by perspectival knowing and often, as we’re acquiring new skills, that grounds out in a transformation of our perspectival knowing. But I thought, let’s write it, let’s see what the transition is like at the bottom. When they saw a street, they would think about driving on it, I think about the texture. See how the salience landscape, one becomes a connoisseur, right? Think about what that means in French. It’s a connoisseur, it’s a connoisseur, it’s a connoisseur of the French, that sense of connetre as opposed to savoir. You become a connoisseur of your own salience landscaping. It’s almost like you can taste it, touch it, it’s yummy. I slowly developed an ability, I think, to look at the world through totally different means. Yeah, I had a whole other idea of what was happening. Weather played a very different role in my life at that time. If it rained like today would be a miserable day for me, so I became a skateboarder. Notice, notice, notice what’s happening here. The procedural is grounding out in a radical transformation of the perspectival knowing, which is ultimately grounding out in a new participatory knowing, a new agent arena process of co-identification. This person is getting a new self, a new capacity for role, affordance, and attachment. I became a skateboarder. That is such a fantastic quote. I’m going to ask Amartic to save that. Amartic, if you could at some point let us know where you got that from. You can just see all the kinds of knowing other than the propositional, just lining up perfectly here. I am fascinated in the context of your work with how the author is able to use their perspective as a skateboarder to see a transition where others saw a swimming pool, and I think about textures where others saw a street, and I wonder if you believe it is credible to think that new perspectives and identities may be employed to agenda novel insight to help alleviate the concrete. Matt, that is exactly what I have been talking about. Sorry, that might have sounded dismissive. I don’t mean it to be. I apologize. What I mean is I am excited. Total convergence. As I was saying earlier, about aspiration and self-transcendence and transformation, these kinds of insights that are not just one… So, you can think of like… I talked about this in the series, like when children are going through a developmental change in the stage of their development, they go from having a single insight. All of us, we have single insights throughout the day. Oh, that is what Mary meant. Oh, right, I am looking at this like this and I should be looking at it like that. We have that. But there are times when we get a systemic insight, an insight that is not an insight within our perspectival knowing, but an insight of our perspectival knowing. Of course, the most powerful versions of those are altered states of consciousness. But insight, especially when it is more systemic and not just a single instance, it is like the way flow is at least a systemic sequence of insights. You can start to see how it starts to transform your sense of self. What I am trying to say is when you get an insight not in a perspective, within perspectival knowing, but a transformation of the whole system of your perspectival knowing, that I think will almost always reverberate down and reverberate back from a transformation at the level of participatory knowing. You get these kinds of insights that are more like altered states of consciousness rather than just a singular insight. Then what you can get is you get existential insight. You come to realize in both senses of the term a different way of being in the world, a different self. I think transformative experiences can be set into a sapiential context especially one that has done a lot of work on the cultivation of wisdom and the ameliorating of self-deception. Those transformative experiences can bring people into what is called an awakening experience, a much more comprehensive transformation at the perspectival and participatory level. You are right about it being recursive. As you get these insights and you move to this new way of seeing and this new way of being, you will then also have more of these individual insights as you move around in the world. There will be a lot of novel connections, a lot of novel ontological depth perceptions seen more deeply into things in sight. You are putting your finger on with an excellent text, by the way, exactly the core of what it is I think we need to do in order to awaken people from the meaning crisis as opposed to argue with them and lecture them about the meaning crisis. So totally, totally. I hope that was helpful to you, Matt. Thank you for that wonderful question. And I really want to save that text. That’s beautiful. It’s so juicy. It’s so tasty. Thank you. Okay, waiting for the next question to come up. And here it is. This is from Kelly. Kelly Myers. Thank you, Kelly. It’s good to hear from you again. Are you familiar with Forrest Landry’s imminent metaphysics, specifically his framework of formal triples? I suspect there may be some useful insights in his work that overlap with some of your arguments or that could potentially bolster your convergence argument for RR. One that comes to mind is his idea that the relationship between subject and object is fundamental as opposed to object or subject being fundamental. Yes. Forrest and I have had two conversations on voice craft with Tim Adelin. And so there’s been and there’s a lot of convergence between his work and mine. I read a bit of his metaphysics, but not enough that I feel comfortable to comment on it. But I found the two conversations, especially the second one, which I believe Tim is going to make available in some limited fashion, I found them really rich and resonant. That’s what I want to say. They were really rich and resonant. Yeah, I think he and I are both committed to transjectivity. If you’re familiar with the transjectivity, I’d be curious whether discoveries have clarified or reframed any aspects of your work related to RR. So he gave me one of his papers that made a huge impact on me about how some of his ontology translated into getting the relationship between consensus, democracy and meritocracy. And those connections between, I don’t know what to call it, the philosophical ontological and the socio-political are areas of weakness in my thought. And I thought his connection, and I said it to him at the time, I thought his connection there was really brilliant. I thought that was really good. Now, he says he’s beyond that. And there’s some stuff he’s talking about that I don’t quite grasp, largely because I think he’s a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, he’s very concerned, he’s not, he’s not proprietary. He’s very careful because he doesn’t want these ideas to be misused or misrepresented. So he’s very careful in both senses of the word to disclose them. So because some of that therefore, I’m not sure I quite rocked what he was saying, But some of the stuff I got, like the connections to transit, transjectivity, and like I said, his work on the proper way of trying to sociopolitically organize in terms of the functionality, the appropriate, like basically something analogous to an ecology of practices, how you get the relative strengths and weaknesses of consensus, democracy, and meritocracy to check and balance each other. I thought that was brilliant work. So that part really, really impressed me. I need to get more deeply into his metaphysics. And Jordan Hall has sometimes talked, and when Jordan Hall sort of invokes aspect of Forrest, Jordan and I often get something flowing between us. So I think Tim and Forrest and I are supposed to talk again at some point in the future. And I look forward to that. So one, at least one, to my mind, two significant connections, the one that you already mentioned, and then one like I’ve discussed. So I hope that’s a helpful answer to your question. And like I said, I expect that Tim and Forrest and I will interact again. Oystein Syverstyn, thank you for your patronage. A good friend of mine has five years of experience with meditation, but recently had to take a year off due to troubling dizziness as a result of the practice. Part of what I would need to know is if the dizziness is occurring in the practice or outside the practice. So because sometimes people misattribute things to the meditation. I’m not saying that’s the case. I just don’t know because the information is a little bit ambiguous. He described it as a rocking swaying sensation. So some people get that. Okay, so one thing that happens with people when they’re in that state, the orientation association area shuts off and so you lose track. Your brain loses track of where you are sort of in space, your ability to orient and locate. That’s why people often feel themselves merging. But that can be disorienting. And some people are very powerful introspectors, not introspectors, their ability to intercept what’s happening in their body is powerful and they actually are picking up on the standing wave, the pulse in the spinal cord and in the heart that’s sort of moving up and down their body. Because there is a swaying sensation. I know this because I suffer from manures and when I’m sitting and I can’t get something behind me and I go and I get to that place where the orientation association area is down regulating, the sway starts to trigger vertigo in me. So it’s like something you would feel on a small boat. Exactly. It became a problem for him when the dizziness occurred outside meditation as well. Right. This started after practicing transcendental meditation for a few months. He went back to normal after taking a long break but is now experiencing the same symptoms after starting to participate in the practices you teach in the introductory part of meditating with Reveke, although to a lesser degree. So he really, if he wants to continue, he really needs to increase the length in the time that he’s spending on the centering and the rooting. And he also needs to do the moving mindfulness practices that are taught later and leap ahead to them. He needs to do something like yoga or I would recommend even better Tai Chi Chuan because it has the movement aspect so that his brain gets the handle on integrating mindfulness with body awareness, with movement and with physical balance. So those are the things he can do. Really, really, really deepen, like savor to the depth centering and rooting and that sense of contact with the world. Don’t put as much time into the flow. Let the flow, maybe even leave it out for a bit. Okay? Center and root. Go into the practice. But you’ve got to, your friend needs to supplement this with the moving practices that emphasize posture, like standing posture that emphasize balance, coordinated movement, get to do some Tai Chi Chuan. You really need to do that in order to compensate for that falling into vertigo. And it’s really important if he is doing the sitting, I would recommend maybe just centering and rooting and not doing a very long meditative practice and then immediately getting up and doing the moving practices. Especially something like Tai Chi Chuan. So I hope that’s helpful to you. So Ian, thank you for your patronage. After writing a multitude of amorphous and somewhat ephemeral questions, I’ve come up with this one. Are there any questions that you, John, would like answers to? And what are they? Can you share some of them? Thank you for all your work. So one question, and I’ve mentioned this before, is the one from Tauru in Albert County. So I’m going to ask you the question, is the one from Tauru in Albert Camus, the plague. I want to know how to be a saint without God. That’s the entire problem I’m up against these days. I don’t know, I think it’s hubristic for me to claim that I’ve answered that question. And it’s fair that I should try to answer it because I, in some ways, am posing it to myself. Yeah, that question I would like a question, I would like an answer beyond the answer that I’ve come up with. Significantly beyond the answer that I’ve come up with. And in some ways, you can think of all of my work as trying to answer that question. But yeah, I want an answer that would help me more than what I’ve done to grieve the death of God so that I can come into a new loving relationship with the sacred. And you, some of you may say, well that’s just going to be God again. I don’t know about that. I really don’t. And I try to stay open about that. And so that’s a related question. Is what’s emerging in the inventio of the sacred, is it going to be like the axial revolution with respect to Bronze Age religion? Is it going to be really different in kind? Or is there going to be deep continuity between that and the long theistic history we’ve had? I’d like an answer to that question. That’s sort of a, how’s the future going to turn out? And because I think if we could answer that question, we could really help ameliorate ways in which we might go into pseudo-religious ideologies, etc. I really, really would like to know how to integrate psychodynamic work with cognitive science in a much more comprehensive manner. It’s a big lacuna in my work. On my fridge I have two finger puppets, Plato and Jung. They’re two thinkers that I was first introduced to that really blew me open. And you know, Jung is basically in some ways the Plato of the psyche, the archetypes of the forms, right? And he’s got the self, which is Plato’s the one or the good. I mean it’s Plato, Plato, Plato, Plato, Plato. And then of course it’s also something very close to Platonism, which is Gnosticism, and there’s all this Gnostic stuff. And then what you do is you put it in a Kantian framework and you get a lot of Jung. That’s one, I mean that’s one, it’s not the only reason. I’m really interested in Neoplatonism because of the way it can reach into cognitive science and even into science. A lot of people are making that connection these days and into psychodynamics. So I’ve been doing this sort of hunch-like, intuitive bridging, but the deeper integration, like when you’re in the depths of psychotherapeutic practice, like how do the psychodynamic techniques for overcoming self-deception and affording aspirations, how do they integrate with all this stuff about cognitive bias? Is there a rationality to psychodynamic processes? And can we integrate cognitive processes for overcoming self-deception? And that’s definitely what CBT is, with psychodynamics. Is there, I feel like there’s a theoretical integration begging to be made that I would personally find very valuable and that I think many people would find very valuable. So those are some questions that are really, really pressing to me right now, Ian. I probably have more, but those are the three that could come readily to mind, and not just because of ease of access. They are prominent and pervasive in my life and in my thought. So I think this will be our last question, or no, maybe not, maybe a couple more. This is from Sev, thank you for your patronage. I had two questions. I will write them in the priority of importance to me. In your paper, Relevance, Meaning, and the Cognitive Science of Wisdom, you talk about a dimension of relevance that is basically the need to belong with others. You call this the dimension of relevance transcendence. Yeah, I would update that now. If you watch some parts of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, because I present the argument from that paper that was written by myself and my good friend Leo Ferraro, I also have lots of criticisms of the relevance, meaning, and cognitive science of wisdom. Transformative experience is missing from that model, and relatedly, aspiration is missing from that model. An account of understanding is missing from that model. And the deeper connections to the existing meaning in life literature, which I’ve been working a lot on, is missing from that model. And one of those, it goes directly towards this, this need to belong to others, I think, can be readily mapped theoretically onto the current meaning in life literature, where one of the factors that’s really maybe the most important factor for sense of meaning in life is what’s called mattering, which is what we talked about in the relevance meaning in cognitive science. It’s a reversal in the arrow of relevance. Instead of how are things relevant to you, which is the arrow of egocentrism, the arrow of mattering, of transcendence, is how am I relevant to something that has an existence and a value independent from me? And we take that to be an existence, I’m pointing to a more comprehensive reality, a more significant reality, and it has some kind of intrinsic value. Any and all human beings should recognize it, or maybe any and all cognitive agents should recognize it as valuable. So, yeah, that’s the transcendent dimension. That got me wondering about the relation between alienation, the lack of belonging, and experiencing the self-transcendence phenomena. Could you please talk about it and suggest any relevant readings? So one of the things you need to read, I think, right away is the seminal work, and I talked about it in the series, but you need to read it. The seminal work, both there’s an article called The Absurd by Nagel and then The View from Nowhere, where he talks about this, and then related work by Vellman, V-E-L-L-M-A-N, called The Way of the Wanted, W-A-N-T-O-N, because they both make similar points. They both make similar points about our very capacity for self-transcendence, if not properly tutored by appropriate virtues, like reverence, because this is one of the main functions of reverence, I would argue. Reverence is the virtue for how we deal with awe, and how we, the experience of awe, and the process of self-transcendence. That’s what reverence is, because reverence is the sense of being connected to something bigger than yourself that has an importance beyond you, right? And that virtue, as Wodra said, it’s a missing virtue in our culture. It is so telling that our culture regards irreverence as something positive. It’s like, I don’t want to live in a world without wonder and awe. Why do you? Why is that such a good world? Why are you recommending that world? Other than a defeated cynicism, why are you recommending this to me? Other than a defeated cynicism, why are you recommending this to me? Why are you recommending this to me? So, without that virtue of reverence, though, what Nagel and Bellman point out, Bellman calls it the reflectiveness gap, related, they’re not exactly similar, but related phenomena, Nagel calls it the absurd, our capacity for self-transcendence can alienate us from the agent arena relationship in which we causally are homed and in which our action must occur. That arena is layered, as I said, but it is nevertheless limited by the human scale of our perception and the reach of our socio, sensory, I wanted to not say socio, sensory motor interaction with the world. So, and Bellman gives the example, of course, of Hamlet. Hamlet keeps rising up and looking down at his previous perspective until he is so far removed from being in an agent arena relationship that affords interacting with the world that well, he becomes Hamlet and he becomes alienated from the people around him. Of course, most importantly, his mother and Ophelia, and they both suffer because of that, he becomes alienated from his friends, and of course, importantly he becomes alienated from himself. So it’s very important that the capacity for self-transcendence be regulated by the virtue, the virtual engine, I would say, of reverence. So I recommend reading Nagel and reading Bellman on that self-transcendence is what gives us our capacity for self-correction, but it also alienates us from the phenomenological world, which of course is part of what drove the two worlds mythology, because part of what the two worlds mythology was doing was trying to get that sense of alienation from this world in which we can bound up. Now the opposite, and this is what Bellman says, is to be a wanton. A wanton is somebody who has no capacity for self-transcendence and just engages in wanton behavior, is completely impulsive. So while they’re deeply immersed in the phenomenological world, it is chaotic, self-deceptive, and self-destructive. And so, and you knew I was going to say this, part of what reverence does is help us get an optimal grip on self-transcendence so that we can steer between self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior and alienation and absurdity. So I recommend reading the Nagel book, reading the Bellman article, and then reading Woodruff’s book, reverence, right? The book on reverence. I think it’s called a neglected virtue is the subtitle. I strongly recommend that. I’m going to, Sev, I’m only going to answer your first question, so we can get to one more question, which is Stian’s question. How do you do, sir? How do you do, Stian? Hope you and you, yours are fine. We are, thank you. We’ve been fortunate in that nobody’s gotten COVID. Like everybody else, me and mine, we’re suffering. We’re undergoing loss of agency, loss of connection, damage to relationships from COVID. And of course, that means more repair and care have to be engaged in. And that is, of course, draining, because we’re already drained by the isolation and the cognitive load of being online so much. So that all being said, I want to be honest about my situation. I want to paint things as accurately as possible so that there’s potential sharing with others. But within all of that context, myself and my loved ones are doing as well as could be expected, I think. Could you update me on the progress with the anthology? The anthology, Internet of Dialogues, is at the publishers’ open book. It is under review. They have emailed us recently and said they need more time. There’s been a delay. So I’m expecting that we’ll hear back from them in a month or so. And if everything is going according to plan, that the anthology should be published sometime this summer. The book with Daniel Greg is also nearing completion. That should be done this year. The next big series for the Cognitive Science Show, The Elusive Eye, The Nature and Function of the Self, we started filming that. That should come out this year. I am working always on After Socrates. The funding is there for it. A lot of the work. But I keep revising it and extending it and I think improving it. That’s COVID dependent, COVID willing. We’ll start to film that towards the end of this year, I’m hoping. But I don’t want to make any promises about that. So those are some of the newest projects that come to mind. You said, can you also give some info on the new projects I figured you’d mention that you’re involved in? So that’s the most significant one right now. The Elusive Eye, The Nature and Function of the Self, the three-way dialogos between myself, Greg Enriquez, and Christopher Master Pietro. Yeah, I think that’s it. There’s stuff going on on the scientific side. I’m involved with experiments, theoretical writing stuff with people. Trying to generate, working with Mark Miller and Fred Anderson to try and integrate Relevance Realization Theory with embodied versions of Predictive Processing Theory. Working with Effie Il-Yun to finish a version of the Theory of Consciousness. Working with Gary Hov and Hennison on trying to integrate Big Five Personality Theory with Relevance Realization. That’s under revision right now. So that’s sort of the stuff that’s on my mind right now. After trying to finish a paper with Jin Sung, Jin Sung Kim, on a naturalistic account of Chi and a paper with him and Philip Rutowich and Thalia Brancidus on an integrated account of Meaning in Life. So that’s it. I think that’s all my projects and there’s a lot happening and a lot for which I’m grateful and a lot that is afforded to me by this wonderful community. So thank you for joining me in this Q&A. We’ll be doing this every third Friday of the month at 3 p.m. Eastern Time. This video will be available publicly on YouTube afterwards. And as always, thank you everyone for your support. I want to thank my Technomage and dear friend Amar for being here and managing everything as always. And I hope to see all of you next month. Take good care everyone. Bye bye.