https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=08s8bCG2Mjs
Welcome everyone to our live monthly Q&A. It’s a great pleasure to be here as always. Our format is we will, we’re taking questions that have already been sent in by patron. We will do that for about 45 minutes and then if we have time, we’ll also take some questions from patrons that are on the live chat. So welcome everyone. It’s a great pleasure to be here and as always, Madeline is in the background running everything and making everything work. And so I’m going to take the opportunity right now to thank her for that and I’ll thank her again at the end. All right. So let’s get started with our first question. The question is from Scott Rowan. Scott says, I loved your conversation with Guy Sendstock in which you explained in detail about your neoplatonic contemplation practice. Thank you, Scott. Still working on that. It’s part of the overall pedagogy, pedagogical program that starts with a basic Vipassana meditation, does a neoplatonic contemplation practice. And then we go into philosophical fellowship practice and then we do the dialectic and the dialogos. But I also practice the neoplatonic contemplation practice on its own. Sorry, I practice it, sorry, I mean, separate from that pedagogical program, I practice it within my morning ecology practices as well. I’m learning a lot right now about the connections between contemplation and dialectic. And so I’m really pleased with the opportunity of focusing on this aspect. And that leads me to the second part of Scott’s question, which I think is really, really, really, really helpful. You also mentioned you have a learned or learned, as I like to call it, ignorance practice. Could you please explain how that works? Thanks for everything you’re doing warm regards, Scott. So first of all, learned and learned, you have they’re spelled the same way. And it’s really important to play on that words. So learned meaning it’s something that you acquire through learning and learned in that which connotes a sense of wisdom. But it’s ignorance. And you can see, and this is going to be a theme running through the After Socrates project, which, by the way, I’m pleased to announce we’re going to start filming in August. Got somebody lined up to do the work. And so I’m very excited about that. But running through the whole Socratic tradition, you start with Socrates and his his great powerful insight that his wisdom consisted in that he knew what he did not know. This is learned learned ignorance. And then you can follow this through the Platonic tradition and you can follow it all the way through into John Scott as a Regina. And then you have a Dianesis, Meister Eckhart, and of course, Nicholas of Cusa, who famously wrote a treatise on learned ignorance. And the idea here is that this is a practice that is designed to start you in the Socratic beginning with that realization that Socrates had, which is not a biographical realization or a factual realization. It’s a direct online awareness of in what way you do not know that is also a realization of the ways in which you’re pretending to know or bullshitting yourself about knowing. So you’re right on that cusp. It’s the cusp of wonder. And as he also famously said, wisdom begins in wonder. And then the end of that at the end of this, these kind of doing this practice, what you want to do is you want to bring that into the summit of the Neo-Platonic contemplation. So you’re going like I won’t review the Neo-Platonic contemplation practice, but you move through the stages in which you’re moving deeper and deeper towards the one, the ultimate grounding, no-thingness principle of all of intelligibility and being. So I’m going to describe to you how you do the learned ignorance practice. But then I want I want to then describe how you bring it back at the end of the Neo-Platonic contemplative practice. Okay, so the learned ignorance practice, I generally pick up an item that has spiritual significance to me. So for me, it’s my frog, the frog. I carry the fog around in my pocket and the frog represents the Neo-Platonic tradition because the frog starts out in one world like like like a fish. And then it moves on to land. And so it rises above it moves to another world, takes on a new existence. So the frog represents the self-transcendence that’s at the heart of the Neo-Platonic tradition. So then you take the and however you want to do it for me, I put it between my hands like this. Other people, you can hold it like this. Sometimes I do set it in front of me between my legs. But then what I do is I first of all make this stand for all objects. So it’s taking on a symbolic status for me. Make the stand for all objects. And then I repeat to myself, there is much that I do not know about this. When I say this, I can feel it. Right. So it’s not an abstract idea, but the actual presence, there’s much I do not know about this. And I can review all the things I don’t know about it. I can. I don’t know its atomic weight. I don’t know the elements it’s made of. I don’t know its exact age. I don’t know. Right. It’s electromagnetic structure. I don’t know how many times humans other than I have touched this or looked at it. And then you realize, oh, right. And then all the different and I also realize there’s all these different aspects of it. And I actually can’t ever see all of what the frog is. Some of you realize that’s connected to the idea that conduction work. And so I’m reviewing all of that. There is much that I do not know about this. Then there is much I shall not know about this. Shall in the sense that I’m finite. I’m going to die. I’m going to pass away. Maybe science will discover 10,000 new things about matter and energy that are unbeknownst to me. But I’ll never know them because I’m bound. I’m bound to a finite existence in time and space and causation. So there’s much I shall not know about this or I shall never know about this. Then I move to from knowing to seeing to make it even more directly online. There’s much that I refuse to see about this. This is me trying to pick up on how I’m turning away the willful ignorance, the self-deception, the way I’m bullshitting myself. And trying not to just acknowledge it, but to deeply acknowledge it, to almost see it happening if I can. And then there is much I am unable to see because of the limitations of my cognition, my consciousness, my perception, my action. So first that. Then this, meaning this mind, body, person, self, living organism, this. Again, there is much I do not know about this. The ignorance, as soon as you start to, I don’t know how my consciousness emerged. I don’t know how my memory works. I don’t even know how, right? Like in some sense, how long my molecules are. Like there’s so much that’s making me that I do not know. There’s so much I shall never know about. I will die before all of the secrets of the mind and consciousness and memory and body are disclosed. There is much I refuse to see about this. I refuse to see about my body. I refuse to see about my mind. The willful ignorance, the self-deception, the turning away, the over-trivialization, the self-deception, the self-deception, the self-deception. The over-trivialization, the over-salience to some things. There’s much I’m unable to know because of the limitations of my cognition, my language, my consciousness, my character, my action, my perception. And then you alternate. As you inhale, there’s much I do not see. And your attention is going outward. And then as you exhale, there’s much I do not see within. Out. As I inhale, there’s much I do not see. Do this five times. Then come to a rest. And try and have your awareness both out and in. And both positive. There’s so much I do not see. The wonder. There’s so much I do not see. The humility. So I’m trying to see this way, in and out simultaneously. And it feels both the expanse and the uplift of wonder. And the contraction. And the downward movement of humility. That’s the state of learned ignorance. Now, as you develop the taste for that, you do that as a separate practice. And then F, once you’re done also doing the neoplatonic practice, the contemplation practice where you contemplate Fuses and then Suke and then Noesis. And then you move into Henosis and then to Theosis. And for those of you who are unfamiliar, please, there’s videos describing this elsewhere. I won’t go into detail. But once I’m in that state where I’m relating to the ungraspability of the One, the fount of all principles, the inexhaustible source of all intelligibility, I reintegrate that fullness with the opening of learned ignorance. Learned ignorance. I bring that back in and I let those two tastes mingle. The continual self-transcendence, epixtasis, into the One and the continual realization of learned ignorance. And I can’t tell you how or why other than this is what all the masters of the neoplatonic tradition say. They wed together. They become one without losing their distinction. The learned ignorance and the fullness, the superlative no-thingness of the One. They intersect. They interpenetrate. They inter-afford. And that’s the two ways in which you practice the learned ignorance practice. The first is the very Socratic orientation, but you see how it then carries in all the way through to the learned ignorance, the learned ignorance of Nicholas of Cusa, et cetera. So thank you very much for that question, Scott. Excellent question. So the next question is from Jill M. Welcome, Jill. It’s a long question. I’m going to read parts of it and try and answer it in part. Eager to hear from any poets in your orbit who connect the metaphor immersion experience to your consolation of ideas. Poem making has remained the centerpiece of my homespun ecology of practice throughout the past three decades. So I’ve said this before, but this gives me a really wonderful opportunity to both thank Jill and to say thank you to all of you who have been with us today. I want to thank Jill to say the practice of poesis of making poetry is the companion practice to Lectio Divina. When you say I’m not a very good poet, that’s irrelevant, right? That’s irrelevant. If you’re doing this poetry as a spiritual exercise, as an ascesis, as a way of cultivating the imaginal capacity within you. And for those of you who are a little bit unfamiliar with the distinction between the imaginary and the imaginal, I’ll post in this again the link to my the lecture, the invited lecture I gave at Cambridge where I talked a lot about the imaginal. And so I won’t go into that in detail here. I’ve talked about it quite a bit. But poetry, poesis is where you actually get the skill of the imaginal to work. And so practicing some kind of poetic construction. And you say, but I don’t know how to do it. Okay, read poetry, start reading it and then just play with it. Notice throughout the day how much poetry you’re enacting. I’m doing it right now with my fingers doing this. Notice it in the metaphors that fill your language, filling your language, by the way, is a metaphor. Language isn’t a container, but we treat it like a container. And notice I’m using a container metaphor and then I’m placing my hands as if I’m putting something into a pantomime container here. Notice the poetry throughout your day. Notice it. Savor it. When you catch yourself using a visual metaphor. Like when you say, oh, I just don’t see what you’re saying. Stop and savor it for a minute. What are you doing when you’re doing that? And notice what am I doing with this? Okay, so you’re enacting poesis. So first of all, just savor and remember and note how you’re enacting poesis. And then start to just try, read poetry and try to feel that activated sense of your everyday poesis. Try to use that. And you’re starting out, right, if you haven’t done this before. And it takes practice like everything else. If you sat down and thought you could just play the piano just immediately. Oh, I can’t play it immediately. What’s the use of this? You’d be acting foolishly. Same thing. But, you know, use that sense that inborn already implicit enacting poesis. Use that to read some poetry. Right. I recommend. Take a look at the enlightened heart translated by Stephen Mitchell, put together by Stephen Mitchell. It’s excellent. I also recommend that for people to use for Alexio Divina. Read some poetry, write some poetry and then do some poesis in companionship with your Alexio Divina. It’s I’ve been writing poetry for since I think I was like 17 or something like that. And, you know, it’s a great help to me in being able to practice Alexio Divina. It allows me to express things to my partner that I could not otherwise express. So, yeah. So eager to hear the second part. Eager to hear discussion with a lucid dreaming expert familiar with their ideas. A lucid dreaming practice is another branch of my ecological system. I would I’d like to find somebody who is maybe I’ll track down Wagner and see if I can have a discussion with him. I’ve tried I was able to do a lot of lucid dreaming in my 20s. But I’m older now and it’s not as easy for me. I still get some lucid dreams. I’ve had one that was a spiritual experience for me and powerful. I’m glad that you can make it part of your ecology. If usually if you practice poetry, poesis at least, and you do mindfulness practices that enhances lucid dreaming. But lucid dreaming, even with all of the best techniques, it varies considerably between the two. Number three, wondering if you’re familiar with Costan Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, Poetics of Reverie and other writings touching upon the fields of poetry, dreams, imagination, psychology have deeply influenced my worldview over the years. Curious what you think. I have one of Bachelard’s book. I think it’s the Psychoanalysis of Fire and I have not read it and I should. So I know of Bachelard and I know why he would matter so much to you. And thank you for the reminder because I’m doing a lot of work right now on the imaginal and Bachelard would be very relevant. So I will. My book is at the office. So I’ll go find it and start reading. So thank you for that, Joe. Fourth part, I have felt burst open with gratitude for you many times. Thank you, Joe. That’s a very powerful thing to say. You have inspired a joke in my house. Well, that’s good. When my family sees me puttering around with earbuds, they tease listening to another 50 hours of John Verveke, Mom. Yeah. Thank you for adding immeasurable depth to my life. You are most welcome, Joe. And thank you for your wonderful comments and your excellent questions. Thank you very much. Peter Roesefist, when you increase the ease of how information is processed, you come to believe it more real. Basically, it’s a little bit more than ease. It’s about, I would argue, not everybody would agree, but I think I could make a good argument that what fluency is measuring, the psychological construct of fluency, what it’s measuring is how easily ill-defined situations are being translated into well-defined situations. So I think it’s a little bit more precise than ease because simple, easy things that do not come without, that just come as very easy to do, like if I just say the same word over and again, like cat, cat, cat, cat, cat, cat, cat, you don’t actually find that fluent. You don’t like it. So it’s not just ease. I think it’s a more specific ease. I think it’s an ease by which we’re translating potentially ill-defined situations into well-defined. And I think when that happens, we regard them, what we’re processing as more real. I think this is a version of procedural knowing where when we can apply a skill and we feel that the sensory motor loop is flowing smoothly, we get a sense of realness, a sense of because of our sense of empowerment. And as you said, this is called fluency. You then went to ask, is the mere exposure effect the phenomena where people tend to develop a preference for things or people they are more familiar to them than others a part of this? It’s probably there. Yes, there is a degree to which encountering people is usually an ill somewhat ill-defined thing. And if we know them, it rapidly translates into more well-defined. So it would fit that. Also, when people when things become more familiar to us, that means we’ve picked up a model of them that makes a lot of training. And that also means we tend to prioritize them. This is part of predictive processing. We tend to give weight to prediction patterns that are both reliable and relevant to us. So that’s sort of a long way. But I hope helpful way, Peter, of saying the answer to your question is basically yes. So thank you very much for that. So now we have a question from Rachel Hayden. Wonderful to talk to Rachel. Rachel and I are going to be doing a Voices with Reveke again soon, and I’m looking forward to that. So here’s Rachel’s question. Hello. Related to my previous questions about mood, I have curiosity about a recurring experience. I have a question about mood. I have curiosity about a recurring experience. I have a curiosity about a recurring experience. I have a curiosity about a recurring experience. I have a curiosity about a recurring experience. I have a curiosity about a recurring experience. I have a curiosity about a recurring experience. I have a curiosity about a recurring experience. I have a curiosity about a recurring experience. I have a curiosity about a recurring experience. I have a curiosity about a recurring experience. I have a curiosity about a recurring experience. I have a curiosity about a recurring experience. I have a curiosity about a recurring experience. I have a curiosity about a recurring experience. I have a curiosity about a recurring experience. I have a curiosity about a recurring experience. I have a curiosity about a recurring experience. I have a curiosity about a recurring experience. I have a curiosity about a recurring experience. I have a curiosity about a recurring experience. I have a curiosity about a recurring experience. I have a curiosity about a recurring experience. I have a curiosity about a recurring experience. I have a curiosity about a recurring experience. I have a curiosity about a recurring experience. I have a curiosity about a recurring experience. I have a curiosity about a recurring experience. I have a curiosity about a recurring experience. It’s the trans world. So what do I mean by the trans world? This is a term I’ve coined from Tolkien, This is a term I’ve coined from Tolkien, which Rachel refers to Tolkien’s recovery theory. which Rachel refers to Tolkien’s recovery theory. I think this is one way in which imaginal augmentation of perception works. And so the Tolkien’s idea is, And so the Tolkien’s idea is, and this goes back to an older distinction between fantasy and the imaginal. between fantasy and the imaginal. You find it, for example, within medieval alchemy. You find it, for example, within medieval alchemy. which was an imaginal practice, at least I followed that sort of young and post-young interpretation of alchemy. young and post-young interpretation of alchemy. To see more on that, Just take a look at the work of Anderson Todd. He’s going to be doing a whole course on alchemy at the University of Toronto. So the distinction the alchemist made So the distinction the alchemist made was between, and this is like the distinction between the imaginal and imaginary, fantasy, you’re making mental pictures and the idea is to escape from reality. to escape from reality. Tolkien was deeply opposed to that. Tolkien was deeply opposed to that. He proposed the recovery theory, He proposed the recovery theory, which is, he says, think of the Middle Earth, his world, his alternative world, and think about it as if you’re an anthropologist traveling to that world. And you go into that world and you unculturate. And this is what anthropologists do, right? They go to the other world, and they have to go through a very difficult process of enculturation, learning the procedural skills, the perspectival states of mind, the participatory identities for agent arena relationships so that they actually belong to that culture. And then they come back to western culture, and they see it differently. They cover it, because they’re looking at it now through different cultural lenses. because they’re looking at it now through different cultural lenses. So the lenses that were previously transparent to them because they were in western culture, they’ve taken those glasses off because they’ve had to put on other glasses while they’re in that other culture. And then they come back with those glasses, those different set of procedural skills, states of mind, identities and roles, and they see this world, this culture anew. You do that exactly with Middle Earth. You go to Middle Earth, you get enculturated like the anthropologist going to another culture, and then you come back to your everyday world, and you see it anew. You recover it. You see it in depth, and in ways you hadn’t seen before. So if that experience you’re having, if you’re getting that experience of like the floodgates, and it sounds to me like you’re getting, Rachel, and many people have to cultivate this, and you’re blessed that this is happening more spontaneously for you, you’re getting the imaginal, you’re getting the imaginal augmentation of perception, and perhaps also the imaginal augmentation of your sense of self. If that is reliably helping you to recover the depths of the world, real patterns without, and real patterns within, such that anagoga, reciprocal opening is being afforded, then I think that’s exactly how you can best transform your gift into the virtue of reverence that is needed in order to carry out an imaginal practice and not fall prey to either depression, because your fantasies will never come true, you never have like lightning bolts coming out of your hand, or falling prey to inflation, and thinking you’re a god-like being, right? Reverence keeps you away from both of those, and if you can transform your gift of imaginal augmentation into imaginally augmented recovery, because the recovery theory is an imaginal strategy of augmenting perception, if you can integrate those together like you’re proposing, I think that will transform your gift into a proper virtue. So thank you very much for that excellent question, Rachel. This is a question from Sam. I practice vinyasa yoga for the last six months and see immense potential in cultivating wisdom through movement-based practices. I’m looking to experiment with another movement practice and would love to get your recommendation from a beginner like myself. P.S. I just finished Hado’s book, What is Ancient Philosophy? I envy you! What a great… Being able to read that for the first time, it’s like the first time you kissed somebody. What an amazing book. Anyways, I just finished Hado’s book, What is Ancient Philosophy? I’m incredibly grateful that you recommended this book. Oh, you’re more than welcome. I wouldn’t have come across it if it weren’t for you. Thank you, John. I hope you realize the significance of the work you’re doing. Thank you for saying that, Sam. I hope I aspire to the responsibility to that and responsiveness to the significance that you’re indicating. So, to your question, movement practices, I’m biased, but the bias is born from 30 years of deep practice. I believe very deeply in Tai Chi Chuan as a movement practice that is powerful for the cultivation of wisdom, for flow and balance and the complexification of coordination, increased introsceptive, proprioceptive kinesthetic awareness, and how that can… and training in the acceptation of that out of physical movement into navigating conceptual space, navigating relationship space. Like, I find I’m almost constantly doing Tai Chi, at least symbolically. No, that’s not even right. Ah! I’m constantly doing Tai Chi imaginally, even if I’m not doing it literally. And so, for me, I… I’ve tasted… Is this fair? I’ve been doing it for 31 years, and doing it religiously. I’ve tasted the depth of this. I’m not claiming to be a master or anything like that, but I’ve tasted the depths of this, and in the sense that I have a direct understanding and realization of its transformative and sapiential potential. So, I really heartily recommend Tai Chi Chuan. I also recommend you take a look at some of the videos I did with Seth Dillinger. He is… He does Feldenkris, and he does these practices of awareness training through movement. I do not know much about this. I only know what I know from talking to Seth. I bought a book he recommended, which I’m going to read shortly. Take a look at those videos, and then take a look at his channel. I think you might find that very valuable. Something that bridges between Feldenkris and Tai Chi Chuan is our Qigong practices, which I also recommend. So, that’s… If you have to pick one bias, pick Tai Chi Chuan. If you want to pick a set, I think Tai Chi Chuan, Qigong, and the stuff that Seth is doing would make an excellent set of movement-based practices. The other things to consider, of course, is to take a look at some of the work that Rafe Kelly does in Evolve, Move, Play. A lot there about certain movement practices. He leads a retreat at the end of July. I’ll be going there, participating in it, and teaching a bit. They do lots of different movement practices, the capstone practice, or the core practices, parkour. But anyways, those are just… So you can take a look at, right, Tai Chi Chuan and Qigong. Take a look at Seth Dillinger’s work, the videos I did with him. Take a look at his channel. Take a look at Rafe Kelly’s Evolve, Move, Play. And there’s a lot there. I released a channel… Sorry, I released a video on my channel with Rafe called The Transformative Power of Serious Play. It’s about a lot of these movement practices that Rafe does. So that would be my recommendation, Sam. Thank you very much for your question. Question from the wonderful Rob Gray. Rob is a continual member of the circle of people that for me are doing so much to well, help people awaken from the meaning crisis. Rob’s a wonderful person. Check out his channel. I think it’s called The Meditating Philosopher. Chris Master Pietro has been on there. I just saw one with Rick Rapetti. He’s been on there. Excellent. So Rob, and Rob is leading several practices. I know he does a regular philosophical fellowship practice. I think he also serves some dialectic into dialogos. So get to know Rob. He is a good soul doing good work. So Rob is saying, I’m reading a book right now called Dancing in the Streets, a history of collective joy. I’m wondering if you ever looked at dance, singing or other enacted forms of relating through these modes of expression to self other world. It mentions drumming in inviting people to dance, distracting the propositional mind and disrupting ordinary time. For example, is elements more or less common to transformative or sacred dancing rituals? Right. So distracting the propositional mind and disrupting ordinary time. Are there any good analogies or examples in Plato, Neoplatonism, 4E, that might support this? Most importantly, do you like to dance? Or when’s the last time you danced other than your verbal dances with Guy Sendstock, et cetera? So dancing. I’m socially phobic, so dance is like really, really challenging for me. But I’ve been in situations with my partner and she dances. She’s Persian. And so she, and I found that if I did sort of Tai Chi Chuan moves to music and also sort of imitated what was doing around me, that I could do that style of dancing. And that was really, really cool for me. It was really, really fun. Oh, she’s such an amazing woman. My life is infinitely better with her in it. So I have a little bit of experience with that. I’ve had, when I was doing my Shiatsu training, there was, we were getting taught by a Sufi master, and we did a Sufi chant with the drumming. And so I’ve had a bit of experience with that. I also do chanting. You know that, Rob, I taught that in the Meditating and Cultivating Wisdom with John Ravecki course. So I chant. I chant both when I’m just doing as a practice, a standalone practice within my ecology of practices, but I also chant as a part of doing Lexio Divina and, as you know, Rob, Philosophical Fellowship. So there’s that. I do the poetry. So I mean, I did a bit of training with Tantra, and there was this interesting kind of dance thing you do that’s very much like jazz movement. I should pick that practice up again. I left that practice off because at one point my ear got bad and that practice was a little too challenging for my ear. My ears are a little bit more stable, and so I want to first of all thank you, Rob, for bringing that up. I think I’ll go back and bring that practice back in. But the main point of your question is all the versions I do of that outside of Philosophical Fellowship and outside the dancing I’ve done with my partner and with her family, yeah, I’m doing them in solitary and I really get your point, get your point, that doing this collectively could be very, very powerful. I mean, that goes back to shamanism and the communal chanting and drumming and dancing as powerful ways. I don’t know of anybody who’s done work on the practice of it, but Mithran and others, so get the book, The Singing Neanderthals, and then get by Mithran and then get Arby’s book on the origin of language. Arby basically argues for gesture and pantomime being the thing that bridged between animal communication systems and full-blown language, so that’s why gesture’s still with us. And then Mithran talks about a proposal of Musa language, that music and language have a common ancestry, and then, and this is what I’ve proposed, by the way, you can put those together, you can put the sort of ancestry of gesture, the deep cognitive ancestry of gesture, and to keep the deep cognitive ancestry of Musa language together, and you get song and dance out of that. And so I recommend taking a look at that. So thank you very much for your excellent question, Rob. So, Lazele. Hi, Lazele. It’s as great as always to have a question from you. Lazele says, Hi, John. I hope you’re well. I am. I hope you are well, too, Lazele. I was invited to present a workshop at a Jungian event in September. Excellent. Great. I want to do something platonic, but I need some blocks to build, play with. Could you kindly speak a bit on the Jung as the Plato of the Psyche idea? I’ve heard you mention, yes. So the idea of the archetypes, the tipos, the patterns from the origin, that’s actually from Plato. The term is from Plato. And Jung is well aware of this. The idea that the Psyche is divided and has different realms that operate according to different principles. This is straight out of the Republic by Plato. The idea that there needs to be an inner harmony or justice within the Psyche. That’s Plato. The idea of the self in Jung, this comes from Proclus, who is a neoplatonist. Proclus talked about the one within us that allows us to conform to the one of reality. So just like all of reality has this you can’t speak of the one, but the one is the source of all intelligibility. It is the non-principle that is the source of all principles. It is the mother of forms, if you want to speak more poetically. And then Proclus proposed that not only does reality have that, the macrocosm, but the microcosm has a one that is an organizing principle. And this is Jung’s notion of the self. And that there’s this, the one within is God, but it also, for Proclus, right, it can put us into resonance with the one of reality. So there’s a good book on Proclus. I can’t remember the name. We’ll get the link and we’ll put it, we’ll put the note in. If you want to learn about that, you can also just look up probably in Google Scholar, Proclus and the one within. This was one of his ideas, and of course, deeply prescient of Jung. Then it’s really important to take a look at the work of Corbin, C-O-R-B-I-N. I would recommend first, or maybe mostly, taking a look at Thomas Cheetham’s work. A world turned inside out, imaginal love, all the world is an icon. And Cheetham, I’ve talked to Tom a couple times, is well aware and brings out, because Corbin was, Corbin was very upfront about the fact that he was a Neoplatonist. And some of the Sufi philosophers that he makes use of, and he comments on, were Neoplatonists. So Corbin, C-O-R-B-I-N, I’m mispronouncing the French, I apologize, is also, right, a really good source. I don’t recommend reading Corbin initially, I recommend picking up Thomas Cheetham’s A World Turned Inside Out and Imaginal Love as a way of bringing that out. So those are some sort of core ideas, and some core recommendations. I hope that’s helpful to you, Liesel. Thank you for your excellent question. So, Andre Aizaza, Aizaza, I’m sorry if I’m mispronouncing your last name, Andre. It’s hard to do this just from text and not hearing a person actually introduce themselves. How is contemplation different from regular daydreaming, from introspection, from being lazy, simply recovering from trying to be idle or meditating? While all have their benefits and caveats, how would you rank them in terms of benefits for spiraling out into a sharper and richer mind? So, daydreaming, contemplation is very different from daydreaming. Daydreaming is very free-flowing. Contemplation is very directed and disciplined. Contemplation is trying to do something opposite to daydreaming. Daydreaming is regularly and reliably, because we are studying it scientifically, egocentric. And contemplation is designed to get you out of your egocentric, it’s called the default mode network, out of your default mode processing. So, there’s a significant difference. And overcoming egocentrism, I think is I think it’s more, and Spinoza would agree with me, Spinoza, the most logical of all of the rationalist philosophers. But he admitted that the capacity to love something outside of oneself, and that’s what Iris Murdoch talked about, right? She said, love is when you recognize, when you really recognize that something other than you is real. So, that ability to overcome egocentrism and my side bias, and confirmation bias. So, there’s a lot of growing evidence that all of these things are actually just different aspects of the same thing. The egocentrism, the my side bias, the confirmation bias, the fundamental attribution error, they’re all versions of the and you see what I’m doing here. And this is all running off the, what what Sui and Humphrey called the glue of cognition and perception, self-relevant. How are things relevant to me? And like everything else that is a source of distress, it is also in existence because it is so massively adaptive. In contemplation, so when you’re daydreaming, that relevance to me, the default mode network, all that egocentrism is all playing. Right? And that has important values. It helps different parts of the brain to, that are modeling each other, I would argue, coordinate and correct each other. It slightly distracts me from tasks that I’m engaging in, which can help provide insight. So again, that mind wandering is there for a reason. But you need practices that are not escapist. They’re not about going into mental and away from reality. But are imaginal that are using imagination for the sake of perception and trying to move you out of egocentrism? Like the view from above or the neoplatonic contemplative practice, contemplating the three marks of existence in Buddhism or doing meta-contemplation in which you are trying to turn the arrow of relevance around. Instead of having the arrow focused on the super salience of the self in egocentrism, you’re trying to turn it to, how am I relevant to? How am I relevant to this? That’s what contemplation does for me. It’s very different from introspection because it’s directed outward. And it’s not about just sort of letting your mind drift. It’s about, in fact, constantly dealing with when you’re distracted away from the practice, bringing it back and disciplining it going forward. Remember, to discipline means to follow. You’re trying to get your mind to follow a course of developmental self-transcendence. So, I hope that answers your question, Andre. Okay. Marty. Any suggesting for maintaining traditions in a secular mindset? This is new to me. Do you think that it’s an effort worth engaging in? Are the traditions you find meaningful? I sometimes feel like the bye-bye-bye part of the tradition survived without participating with an organized religion, but I feel there’s a level of deepness that has been harder to replicate. Yeah. Traditions. So, the way I try to sort of reverse engineer what I mean by that. Well, what was this tradition doing? Maybe I can’t do that tradition, but then I could try and get, well, how is it disciplining the mind? How is it cultivating wisdom? How is it training virtuosity and virtue? How is it affording self-transcendence? How is it helping me overcome egocentrism? How is it helping me to find reciprocal opening? How is it helping me to connect deeply to myself, to other people in the world? And then, and note, you know, what are the components of it? Is there a mindfulness component? Is there an imaginal? Is there a ritual where you’re combining the imaginal with enacted gesture? Can you first try something that does all of that? Find a set of practices outside of your tradition that do something similar. Just hang on, please. Right? So, for me, you know, I left a whole Christian thing, and then I went into Buddhism and Daoism and found what I was hungering for, and then I came back, and I came back into Neoplatonism that has allowed me to appreciate a lot of the Christian traditions that I’ve left behind. And some of my practices now are drawn from Christian Platonism. I don’t see myself becoming a Christian for a very complex set of reasons. So what I’m suggesting is reverse engineer. What was the tradition doing? What if I find something that was analogous to it, but outside of the tradition, a set of practices, rituals? Really sink your teeth into them. Get a sense of that. And then the recovery theory. The recovery theory. Then go back to your tradition and recover it from outside of its historical dominance. That’s what I’m recommending. So I went out, I went away, and I went out, and I I enculturated in other traditions and practices. And then when I came back, I was able to recover them within a secular framework. Now, that doesn’t mean I could recover all of them. And some of them are difficult. Like, you know, it’s Easter right now. What does that mean if you’re not a Christian? And is there any way in which that can be profoundly meaningful to me? And so I recommend you do, like I said, you do this version of the recovery strategy as a way. If you try to just make it work within or just do the same thing just within a secular mindset, you’re probably finding it. It doesn’t take. It doesn’t work. At least that’s what I’ve seen in others, and that’s what I’ve deeply seen in myself. But if I leave it behind, and I’m willing to leave it behind, and then find, and then reverse engineer it. What was it trying to do? Find something outside of that tradition that’s doing that. Taste that. Really learn that. And then you get new eyes, new ways, and then you can come back and recover the tradition. You’ll also learn to discern which traditions you want to recover and which ones now you no longer miss. So, Marty, I hope that was helpful. And thank you for your question. And that was the last question. We’re now moving to the live questions from the chat. I want to, at this point, before I forget, I want to thank all the Patreon subscribers and everyone watching right now. And your work is really, really crucial to continue to produce the videos that I do, the series that I do. We’re doing, you know, doing a series right now with Greg Enriquez, Gary Omenesian on psychopathology and well-being. I’m going to be doing a series very soon with Christopher Master Pietro on Socrates and Kierkegaard. And, of course, the big thing for this summer is After Socrates. So thank you so much. Okay, so here’s a question from the live chat from Jack Harris. I have a question about the relationship between words and practice. Are we setting parameters by labeling the practices of words? Are we doing something else? Yeah, that’s, I argued something similar in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. It has to do with signal detection theory. The idea is we’re always trying to find the relevant patterns, that’s called signal, and we’re trying to distinguish it and ignore the irrelevant patterns that are called noise. The problem is the two graphs, the signal graph and the noise graph, they overlap. There’s information that is ambiguous. So, oh, perimeter. Well, perimeter is good too. Sorry, Madeline. Perimeter works even better for this than parameter. Yeah, perimeter actually fits very well. Sorry for my misread, but it was fortuitous. So, let’s do the classic example of signal detection. You’re a gazelle, there’s a noise in the bush. It could be a leopard, that signal that you want to find. It could be the wind in the bush that’s irrelevant, that doesn’t matter to you, you want to ignore it. And there’s two things you can do. You can mistake, right, the wind for a leopard and run away. That’s metabolically costly and the other gazelles will laugh at you, but that’s not too costly. Or you could miss the leopard, and then, because you think it’s only the wind, and then of course you’ve got a hungry leopard on your back, which is very bad. Now, there’s other situations where it completely reverses. It’s not always the case that misses are worse than mistakes. There’s other situations in which mistakes are worse than misses. So, there’s no algorithm for doing this. There’s no perfect way of doing this, because it’s very context dependent. You’re always doing what’s called setting the criterion. You’re always deciding how much of the ambiguity you’re going to count as signal and how much of the ambiguity you’re going to count as noise. We do this, and you think, what is he talking about? We do this all the time. How do we distinguish somebody who’s like saying something really outside of the box brilliant from somebody who’s saying something outside of the box insane? And it’s tricky, and it’s difficult, and even some of the most profound insight do things that look really, really insane, like Newton, titanic intellect, all these insights, but he writes all this horrible stuff about alchemy in a really twisted way that’s incomprehensible, and he tries to calculate from the letters of the Bible when Christ is going to return, and he thinks his theology, which is really badly argued, is way more important than his physics. So we’re always, always trying to determine signal from noise, and it’s always, always a gamble. We have to set the criterion. And what we do with our sort of paradigmatic pictures, our paradigmatic propositions, our paradigmatic creeds, what we’re doing with credo is we’re setting the criterion. We’re putting the boundary, the perimeter around what is signal, and always at the edges we are gambling. We are gambling. And so we have to constantly be, we’ve got to be constantly willing to let the credo be revised because it is contextually dependent. Now here’s the really tricky problem that religions face. How do you know that person’s a saint? How do you know that person’s a saint? How do you know that person’s insane? I’m using that just, and I’m using that across the board. I happen to use a Christian term saint, but you know the problem I’m pointing to. And so we set, right, and how do you know that person, right, is passionate versus that person’s a heretic or destroying the religion? How do you determine the difference between the reformer and the destroyer? And so we set out the creeds, credo, in which we set the boundaries. We’re trying to set the criterion. Now the credo has to be fairly stable, or there’s no point in setting it. But if it gets too stable, it actually starts to strangle off the religio, that deep connectedness that’s at the heart, I would argue, of spiritual practices. And so we’re using words to set a perimeter. We have to do that. It’s a part of relevance realization within signal detection. But we have to always remember that what we’re doing is defeasible, fallible, and constantly in need of revision. And then you’ll want to ask me, what’s the rule for how we revise? And now you’re just getting into an infinite regress. There is no rule for how we revise that itself won’t fall prey to this problem. In the end, we have to rely on individual and distributed wisdom as the best evolving, self-correcting source for how we set the criterion of credo. I hope that answers your question, Jack. Thank you very much for that excellent question. Brian Rivera, according to predictive processing, we generate internal models of the world based on our previous experience. These models can be better or worse depending on how they help us solve problems. Yes. Do you see a conflict between the need for developing models that solve perennial problems like models that lead to wisdom and claims of truth being socially constructed or power underlying most aspects of reality? Also, what is your favorite sci-fi book that he has said was influencing his thinking? Oh, what’s my favorite science fiction book? Okay. So, do I see a conflict between the arguments made by predictive processing around perennial problems and the idea that truth is socially constructed or power underlying most aspects of reality? First of all, I just reject that. The second thing, that truth is being socially constructed. I mean, this is von Herter’s proposal and I find the proposal incomprehensible. It’s sad. I find it only sounds intelligible by equivocating. The idea is everything is relative to our cultural frame. We understand everything through our cultural frame. And then there are many alternative cultures. How do you do both of those? If you can only understand something from within your cultural frame, how can you by definition understand the existence or meaning of something that is by definition not within your social frame? How do you acquire your social frame, your culture, in the first place? Certainly, you can’t do it by being socially constructed because you have to firstly be socialized and inculturated. How do people like the anthropologists move from one culture to another if everything is just socially constructed? What is going on in between the two social constructions, the two social frames, when their cognition is moving from one to the other? Are they insane? Are they losing cognition? Are they disconnected from the truth? The problem with this viewpoint is it relies on there being aspects of our cognition that are corrected by the world as opposed to our social peers and our social systems. Do I think there’s aspects of our cognition that are socially constructed? Of course I do. Take a look at my series. I talk about our cultural cognitive grammar and, for example, how much we are locked in Cartesian thinking and how difficult it is to break it out. And we think it’s natural when we forget that it is historically and socially constructed. So I think there is great truth in this. But I think like everything that takes itself to be an ultimate, which is an idol, something that’s trying to be God and can’t be God, the claim that all of truth is socially constructed makes no sense to me. Our models are corrected not only by others, but by the world. And so do I think that predictive processing, especially the predictive processing that we’ve developed to deal with brain-ail problems, is due to processes that are not socially constructed? Yes. So, trying to get a paper published, and the first set of reviews are really good, integrating predictive processing and relevance realization. You cannot learn relevance realization, and therefore it cannot be socially constructed, because all learning, all problem solving, all consciousness, all memory, watch my series, read some of my papers, depends on relevance realization. Can it be modified? Of course. That’s what culture does. It modifies individual relevance realization and the collective relevance realization of distributed cognition in a complex, dynamical fashion. But it can’t generate or create relevance realization. And since I take it that there are many non-social organisms that are highly intelligent that do not have our sociocultural framing, don’t have culture, dogs are a clear example, although we can socialize them to a degree, I think it’s really, really important to recognize that there’s a huge domain of our cognition that frameworks like predictive processing, like 4E cognition, and like predictive processing, say, are being generated by the world, not just the sociocultural environment, but by the world. We are embedded in a social world, but that social world is embedded in an ecological world. And surely with the virus and with global warming and with environmental collapse, we understand the independent way in which reality is realizing itself, unfolding itself. What is my favorite sci-fi book? The book that opened me up to philosophy, to mythology, to the imaginal, to Buddhism, Hinduism, Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light. It’s considered a masterpiece of third-way cognitive science. So thank you for that excellent question, Brian. Thank you. Thank you for that excellent question, Brian. I want again to thank everybody for joining me in this Q&A. We do this every third Sunday at the month at 3 p.m. Eastern Time. The video of this will be available publicly on YouTube channel. The one from last month will be uploaded. We just had a couple technical problems. This one will also be uploaded. I want to again thank you for your support. I want to thank Madeline for everything that she’s been doing behind the scenes as always, making it run so smoothly. And I’ll see you all next month. Take good care, everyone. Thank you for your time and attention.