https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=6JuaQnbdNlk
Welcome everyone to our monthly Q&A. We’ve had a bit of disruption, but this disruption has been sometimes for not very good reasons, but also for some very good reasons. I’ve been privileged to do a lot of travel this summer that has been extremely relevant to all of this work. Of course, I’ve been recently filming after Socrates. Madeline has been very busy also at the same time. We really appreciate your patience and allowing us to move things around. I assure you that that has afforded the work that I believe you are interested in, the work that I’m doing. I really appreciate your patience. Today will be one hour and 15 minutes and we will not have a live Q&A portion. We’re trying to make up for the backlog of questions. Next Saturday, we’ll have another Q&A, which will be back to the normal format. As I said before, thank you very much for your patience and changing the scheduling of the Q&As for August and September. We will also be having two Q&As in October as well. Hopefully, we will be back on track then. I’m looking forward to today’s Q&A considerably. The first one is from Matt Wilkinson. I have two questions. First, you mentioned you’re working on a new set of talks a while back. What is the latest on this? Second, I’ve noticed you refer quite a lot to the good, the true, and the beautiful. I struggle to understand these related concepts and their significance. Are you likely to cover these in any series? If not, can you point to other material that would help with these that you know of? Thanks and keep up the great work. In answer to the first question, it is the new series, After Socrates. We have filmed 17 episodes so far. We have a few more ready to go, but we’re going to be able to release probably, there’s still editing and a bunch of other work to be done, but we’ll probably be releasing October, November. I’m very, very excited about this, the work that Black and White Media has done with me. I’m very, very pleased with it. In there, I will talk quite a bit about the true, the good, and the beautiful, Matt. I would also point to the recent discussion I had with Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Pageau when we went into great detail. I’ll try and supplement both of those, one which is coming, After Socrates, and one that was recently released, I think about a month ago. I talked between the three of us, and in which the true, the good, and the beautiful came up a lot. One of the hallmarks of the Enlightenment with its emphasis on autonomy, and you can see this in Kant and his famous critiques, is that we tended to divide these three domains and regard them as autonomous, not needing justification or integration with the other domains. What’s the first domain? This is the domain of the knowledge of fact, and what we want most in that domain is what is true, the true. Then there is the domain of good action, ethical behavior, and as you just heard, that’s the domain of the good. We’re pursuing the good life for human beings. Then the third domain is the domain of the beautiful. We want experiences that we regard as beautiful, and of course there’s a lot of discussion about what that is, but we think we call that aesthetics, we call the domain of good action ethics, and then we call the domain of knowledge epistemics, if we’re talking about the phenomena or epistemology, if we’re talking about the study of it. And we have regarded these as largely independent, and we have tended also to orient, we tend to prioritize the true, although right now the true and the good are sort of doing this in our culture, and then the beautiful has often been sort of a distant and poor third cousin. What I am arguing for is the idea that we should, and many other people are, not just me, that we should seriously question these dichotomies and the idea that these three domains are completely autonomous with each other. So for example, Hillary Putnam has significantly challenged the fact value distinction. The fact value distinction is how we can distinguish the truth from the truth. The fact value distinction is how we keep the true and the good separate from each other, and the idea is the true tells us what is, and the good tells us what ought to be, and you can’t go from is to ought. As Case Sphere has argued very well in natural ethical facts, the arguments that we took to have sort of guaranteed that distinction, Hume’s argument, Hume’s argument is actually not valid unless you integrate it with Moore’s argument that we can’t give any definition for the good, and then Moore’s argument depends on the analytic synthetic distinction which has broken down, and then Putnam makes similar arguments about the fact value distinction if, for example, if you didn’t have relevance realization, you couldn’t gather any truths, and we don’t typically care about truths that aren’t also relevant to us, etc. And so many people are seeing the true and the good, that boundary blur. Why would you pursue the truth if it isn’t good? Do you want good lives that aren’t real, that aren’t true? Well no, right, and then the beautiful. Is that the case that appearances are always distracting or distorting or deceptive about reality? Well, how would that be the case? In order to say that this is an illusion, I have to say that this is real, and in that circumstance the real is a situation in which the appearances are disclosing the reality, and an ancient proposal which I think we should bring back or at least take very seriously is that’s what we should mean by beauty, when appearances disclose underlying reality and when they do so in depth, so even something terrifying and scary can be beautiful if it has that quality to it, and then soon as I say that we have a connection to the true, and if we want the beautiful also to be that which we enjoy, not just have pleasure, but enjoy, then we’re also integrating it with the good. So, and this lines up with the fact that it doesn’t look like when we’re making judgments about truth, goodness, and beauty that we’re using significantly different brain areas. The brain seems to be treating them all as instances of normative judgments, where normativity means that the genus to which those three belong, and I think that’s an important thing to consider. I think we should try and find the through line, as I’ve been talking a lot about in the work I’ve been doing on a dedic induction, and I’ll talk a lot about in After Socrates, between the true, the good, and the beautiful, and ask what it is that binds them all together in their interrelated fashion, and I think that brings back older questions and good ones that inverts our epistemological orientation. In our epistemological orientation, we typically start with Descartes, we start from how do I know what’s the world like, but now we should maybe consider what is the world like such that it is intelligible to me, such that it can be true, good, and beautiful, and I think that’s a question we should bring back to the fore when we seriously get into understanding the true, the good, and the beautiful, and the through line between them and within them. Thank you very much for that question. Dominic Molinaro, can self be regarded as the final frame that needs breaking in order to properly enter into emptiness? So that’s an interesting question because the, and if you take a look at the series, the elusive eye that I did with Greg and Chris, of course the word self has multiple meanings, like everything else, especially when it’s an important concept. One thing you can mean by self is what we typically mean by self, something like a Cartesian soul, there is a unified single substance in me, perhaps it has something like free will, it can act like, sort of create action ex nihilo, perhaps not, and I think that that notion of self is largely false, and for reasons that we go into in great depth. If you think of the self, and you’re moving more towards that, Dominic, as our most fundamental way of framing how we bind, sorry about this, hopefully it’ll land soon, how we bind various agent-agent relationships together. So you have a whole bunch of agent, you have a whole bunch of agent arena, let’s call them roles, and you have that and there’s a line running through it, and that’s something like yourself, and it has to do with your fundamental framing, your fundamental way in which you orient to how you’re oriented, your fundamental sort of meta-optimal gridding on the world, and in that sense, it has a lot to do with the fundamental level, the primordial level at which you’re doing recursive relevance realization. Now do you think, and this is something that’s come to me recently when I was actually in Vermont at the Monastic Academy discussing some of my work with some of the monks, I do think it’s, it is possible that we can do this, and I think that’s a great way to do it, and I think that’s a great This would have to be a domain in which combinatorial explosion is not an issue, and what would be, and I think would be when we are trying to relate to being as such, being as a person, or a person, as a teacher, or as a person, when we are trying to be a person, And I think the B when we are trying to relate to being as such, being the capital B, not this being or that being or all the relations between all the beings, but the one, the ground from which all of this emerges and to which all of it is bound. And of course, there are various ways in which that can be given a philosophical or a religious slant. It could be the Tao, right? It could be Shunyata. It could be the godhood of God. It could be the one, the Neoplatonic tradition. And I think in that situation, relevance realization can have an act of fundamental transframing in which it realizes that it is not relevant to the relationship to being as such. And in that sense, insofar as that realization take hold, the recursive relevance realization that is the fundamental functionality of the self would go into quiescence. It would quiet. And that would open you up. You wouldn’t even be a you anymore. It would just be the self realization of reality for its own sake, which is interestingly the definition of religion given by Nishatani. So I think in that sense, it is the final frame. I don’t think we break it in the way recursive relevance realization is breaking frame and making frame. I think if it’s trying to do that, we’re still in the relevance realization, and then we’ll just hit combinatorial explosion. But I think we release from it. And I think that’s like I said, I came into that insight talking to the monks and then talking with Steve March and Zachary Stein. And so I am grateful to all of those discussions. So that’s my answer to your excellent question. Thank you very much for that question. Well, now moving on to Laura. Hi, John, thank you for your work and all that you do. You’re welcome. Thank you for saying that, Laura. It’s always helpful for me to hear that. It’s always encouraging. I’ve been following your YouTube meditation course for several months now, and I find that I can rarely get through the core for unless I switch gears briefly and have a dialogue with my parts. I’ve heard you mention I have asked before and this is the framework my therapist uses. Yes, I will be talking a lot in one episode about internal family systems theories in one episode of after Socrates. I find I have parts that want to immediately jump in once I close my eyes. Yes, that makes sense to me. Before I continue with rooting, I find it helps to pay attention to them. I find it helps to pay attention to them. I find it helps to pay attention to them. I find it helps to pay attention to them. Ask them what they need and empathize with their feelings before gently asking them to step aside. What are your thoughts on mixing modalities like this? Is this something I could do separately before starting to meditate? Thank you and see you in Thunder Bay. Oh, great. You’re coming to Thunder Bay, Laura. For those of you who haven’t heard, not this, not next weekend, but the weekend thereafter, the weekend of the 17th and the 18th, the 16th, 17th and 18th, I will be in Thunder Bay. Paul VanderKlay will be in Thunder Bay and Jonathan Pajot will be in Thunder Bay and we will all be there in person and we’re going to be talking about consciousness and conscience. Please come. Please come. Laura, my answer to you is yes. Do this. Do what you’re doing. I think it’s an excellent thing. And one of the things I would like to do and this is something I hope to work with Steve March on because he does, he integrates mindfulness work with parts practice in his al-Athiya coaching. Yeah, especially if you’re doing this with a therapist so you know how to do it, you’re practicing it properly. I think mixing your modalities like this is an excellent idea. Yes, please, please, please keep doing so. And hopefully we can talk about that in Thunder Bay a bit. So thank you very much for that excellent question. So we’ll now move on to the question from Marty. How do I learn to trust again, take people seriously when I have a history of believing and trusting people, organizations, churches that did not deserve my trust? How do I trust myself to trust again? How do I avoid handing out my trust too easily? Excellent question. I really identify with this question, Marty. And I really think we shouldn’t listen to people talk about trust who have not experienced betrayal. Because betrayal and grief and they overlap a lot. Betrayal almost always causes deep grief. These are these are profound transformative experiences that people suffer through and endure. And we have to be deeply responsible to that. How do I learn to trust again? Suppose it. Has to do with what you mean by it. And if I mean, if you mean, I don’t think you do. So they just want to I’m just making a clarification by distinction. I don’t think you mean be able to prove to yourself that somebody won’t betray you. Because if you’re looking for that certainty, you’ll never find it. You won’t even find it in yourself. You know, oh, well, I’ll never let myself down. That’s bullshit. Yes, you will. Yes, well, and if you if you have so bent and twisted your self-awareness that you can’t acknowledge that you’ve ever let yourself down, I think you’re heading down a very dangerous pathway. So certainty. Is it appropriate? So what do we mean by trust? So for me, what I mean by trust is that I have bound my identity to somebody and I have good reason to believe they have bound theirs to mine in a way in which we are mutually reciprocally opening to each other. So that’s an argument that I’m making that basically the kind of trust we’re talking about is not possible without love. Now, it doesn’t have to be romantic love. It can be friendship. Love. It can be fellowship. Love. And then how do you know when a love is going to be deeply enduring? You let you know that’s and this is this is the difficult thing when it has been tested. When the friendship or the romantic relationship or the family relationship or the fellowship has been put under stress. This is why we have this phrase indeed. A friend in need is a friend indeed. Right. Kind of thing. When it’s been stressed. And it was put into criticality. There was a chance it could have it could have collapsed. But instead, it reorganizes the criticality allows it to restructure itself and grow deeper. I think you should not extend deep trust to relationships that have not gone through that. I think you should place more trust. Significant more trust in a relationship that has gone through that, because what that shows you is there’s something of deep adaptivity in the relationship that is worthy of trust. And so what does that mean? I don’t try and lock down the relationship. Instead, I try to maintain continuity of contact with the other person and afford them having that with me so that that ability to restructure and adapt as the relationship is put under stress can show itself. So. Don’t trust deeply. Until that has happened. Now, everybody deserves the benefit, as we say, the benefit of the doubt, which is a shallow kind of trust that allows people to work together. But. If you have a basic relationship with somebody and it’s put under some degree of stress, maybe at work, and instead of it driving you apart, that stress actually causes it to restructure and deepen. Take that as a sign for extending more trust. Now, is that a guarantee? I can’t give you a guarantee. I told you that already. I mean, you know, it would be nice if it was impossible for people that we placed our trust into never betray us. We can’t take that from them because they will always be mysterious and we will always be mysterious to them. We’re just too incredibly dynamically complex. But I think when you have. Pushed a relationship and it shows the capacity to go through criticality and instead of collapsing reorganize itself, self organizing criticality and make itself capable of a richer, more complex structure that is adaptive and it’s continuing to enhance both of. The partners quality of life, then extend more trust into that relationship, and it’s like dancing or sparring. You work your way into it, and I can’t give you a head of the head, a plan or a rule. But this is the best advice I can give you, Marty. I hope you find it helpful. Thank you for the excellent question. So Chris Magnum Magnum in episode 12 of your meeting crisis, he spoke about avoiding the pitfalls of going it alone as someone who has spent so long independently learning and contemplating. I feel more and more the need to reach out and learn from others. What are options for someone late to mindfulness in the meeting community? There’s there’s various there’s various options. There’s various communities that are emerging. There’s a discord community associated with my work. It’s associated with my work. I don’t run it and I don’t take full responsibility for it or anything like that. There’s that there’s if if you are looking for something with a more religious dimension to it, but nevertheless not committing yourself to Christianity. Paul VanderKlay does a lot of the estuary and he has people helping him with that. There’s various communities and estuary. You know, that’s where the salt water and the freshwater mix. It’s for people, right? It’s people who are sort of in between the secular world and the religious world. And they’re wanting to talk and reflect and be in community. There are many emerging communities. I don’t know where you live. There’s typically you can do some very careful research and find places that are doing mindfulness practices. There are a lot of emerging communities that are integrating mindfulness and meaning. So they’re they’re doing, you know, authentic relating, but they may be doing mindfulness practices. So there’s quite a bit out there. I recommend looking for a group that’s been in existence for some time, at least 10 years. And when you talk or investigate the group, you don’t hear the leaders name every third sentence. And the leader is not dependent on that community for their income, or at least not solely dependent on it. That there’s a rich ecology of practices that people are not promising you a panacea practice that will make it will solve all of your problems. But there’s a rich ecology. Every practice is limited. They counterbalance each other. There’s dynamics that they care about being responsible to the scientific world, especially cognitive science, things like that. So that’s what I would recommend. There’s a lot out there. I’ve given you some guidance and how you can look a couple of places to which you can look. And when you’re looking for these communities, look for them the way you’d look for a friend. Don’t join. Don’t just fall into the first one. Even if one seems good, explore at least three more before you make your decision. This is like a device I give people for dating. When you’re dating and you meet somebody you like, try and meet at least two or three more people you like. Before you decide to focus exclusively on somebody, you want to make sure you’re making a choice based on the merits of the person or the community rather than on the hunger you’re bringing to it. So thank you very much for that. Excellent question, Chris. Next question is from Varun. What does for you, cognitive science have to say about dreams? Next question is from Varun. What does for you, cognitive science have to say about dreams? Why do we experience the waking world as real and dreams as any less real? Excellent. Is the generative process involved in dreams related to the generous processes that produce thoughts in the waking state? So let’s take these excellent questions. What would for you, cognitive science say about dreams? Well, there’s going to be a lot, but the kind of for you, especially stuff that’s using relevance realization and predictive processing, by the way, the paper integrating recursive relevance realization and predictive processing has been published by the Journal of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. So, So what what that says is the dreams are part of the deep learning process in which neural neural networks when they’re learning. You want to do two things with them. You want to throw noise into them or else they’ll overfit. They’ll get to they’ll pick up on too many patterns in their sampling that don’t generalize to the population of real real world patterns. So you want to throw in noise to break up that overfitting. You also want to introduce variation. Try out new things. And it looks like and that’s actually so deep learning. What you do is the system takes in patterns. It does data compression and then it runs variations on them. And then they are sort of used to explore the world and see if the variations grab the world or not. If they don’t, they die. If they do, then the system complexifies its model. And like I said, with neural networks, you want to throw in noise to prevent overfitting. And so a plausible hypothesis of dreams is that they’re a combination of those things. You’re throwing in noise to prevent overfitting to the data and you’re trying out variations, hence the bizarreness. And and, you know, only a few of those variations will survive, but that’s how evolution works. And so dreams are basically constantly helping to evolve your fitness to the world. That’s why we have good evidence that, you know, other organisms dream. They’re largely going through some kind of memory consolidation, but they’re also trying out lots of problem solving. That’s why a lot of your dreams involve problem solving, which is why dreams are frequently more negatively toned than positively toned because problems are sort of negative. And often the dreams are getting you to explore very odd places within the search space, plausibly because and this is where it starts to overlap with psychodynamic theories of dreams, plausibly because you have a pattern of confronting these dreams, sorry, these patterns, these problems. You have a pattern of confronting these problems and not solving them well. And so and it might be that the dreams not only help you, but reflecting on your dreams in dream work might help you take what the dreams are trying to provoke and bring it into a full blown insight that helps you solve those persistent and pervasive problems in your life. Why do we experience dreams as less real? Precisely because they do not cohere with the ways in which we assess the intelligibility and the realness of things. Dreams don’t fit together very well. They’re obviously often causally incoherent. And the memories we have in dreams don’t fit into the larger memories we have of our life. They, right, we have dreams that we have relaxed because we shut off areas of the frontal cortex, relaxed our judgment about how real they are, which is part of the functionality of dreams. But when we ramp that judgment of realness back up in order to deal with the coherent causal structure of the world, then the dreams fail to meet the threshold standards. Finally, is the generative process involved in dreams related to the generous processes that produces thoughts in the waking state? Yes, in that even moment by moment, you are like most of your perception is top down imaginal, like most of what you think you’re seeing, you’re actually imagining. Now, once again, that doesn’t mean it’s an illusion. It’s not an illusion. A true prediction is true. It’s real. It just means that it’s prediction rather than detection. And so most of your cognition is already imaginal, most of your perception, and it is always doing that explore variation and select your attention, and then you put selective pressure on it and you only keep a small number of what you saw in your wandering to go into the next moment of your cognition. So thank you for that excellent question. Now we have an anonymous question. What do you think of the Jewish notion of tikkun? So I’m ignorant of it. So I’ll really hesitate about replying to this. I’ll reply where I can that we must assist God to complete and continue creation. Yes, this I didn’t know it by that name, and I don’t know how deep that goes. And so I do not want to in any way insult the Jewish tradition. But I understand this as one of I talked about this in awakening from the meaning crisis. This is one of the great ideas that we got from the Hebrew Jewish culture. The idea of the open future and that our actions can shape the future and we can morally shape the future. And in that sense, we are participating in God’s creation of the world. And I think that is a very powerful, as you said, that God needs us and our participation in order to become whole and repaired. Yeah, so that’s where there’s variation, as you can imagine, within Judaism, Christianity, Islam about degree to the degree to which God needs us. You can you can take the idea that God needs us and you can come you can really even to a significant degree secularize this and you get something like Hegel or Marx. Or you can have a notion in which, you know, it’s a synergistic thing. We are working together and there’s things that only God can do. And he has gave us stewardship for things that he that he or she only wants us to do. And then there’s models in which God has to act to redeem us first. There’s a certain versions of Protestantism before we are capable of working with him or her. So there’s a lot of variation in that. I think the idea that we are participating in an open future is a powerful one, but it’s problematic, too. It’s problematic for two reasons. Many people are concerned about the notion of free will metaphysically. I have I am and like with Rick with the amazing Rick Repetti, I’m trying to work out of both the determinism and free will models. Some kind of a profound and deep more than compatible is almost beyond compatible ism. But that’s where my previous position was. But he’s moved my thinking significantly. And for example, does that mean that we’re working with God and there’s a narrative running throughout the universe that, of course, could be problematic? So I think the notion is powerful. I think it’s been significant to our civilization. I think we’re in a position now where we are trying to see if we can still make sense of it. And your last sentence, I cannot imagine a more ethical and powerful participatory cosmology and metaphysics. It can be. It can also lead to the exact opposite. So this notion has often it doesn’t have to, but it is often led to utopian ism that there’s a utopia and we can make it working with God. Working with God, we can make heaven on earth. We can make a utopia. And the problem with utopian ism is it has actually generated some of the most unethical. Action in history, we have killed and harmed and tortured. Millions of people because of our utopic visions. So again, I agree with you, but it’s power. I’m concerned about the idea that it’s necessarily ethical. I think it can be, but I think it can also be disastrously. More than even unethical evil. And so I think we need to bring this. So I’m actually thank you for your question. We need to bring this into deep discussion. And can we regain a sense of deep participation without falling into either nostalgia or utopia? And that is that’s in a sentence of my work. Can we regain a real? Pawsibly real sense of deep participation without giving in to the dangers of nostalgia or utopia. So thank you very much for that. Excellent question. I knew I John first. Thank you for the life changing work you have done as we are collectively wiser because of it all. Thank you for saying that. Thank you for saying that, Hanoi. It’s always helpful and encouraging to me. I’m a music teacher. You’re lucky and father of two. I’ve been trying to frame the discipline of music, music, music, you. So museum ship is I haven’t actually heard that. It’s an interesting term in a way so that it is nurturing us towards the primordial virtues. Ah, this is important. This is right. This is a deep. This is an ancient concern. You see it in Confucianism. You see it in Platonism. You know, what’s the relationship between music and the cultivation of the virtues? It’s it’s it’s a shame that we don’t think about this anymore, even though we understand the deep connections between music and putting people into the experience of sacredness for affording transformative experience. And it goes on. This is important for me in order to avoid parasitic processing. Do you have any thoughts? I’ll just read the last question, then come back to the first one. What do you think about the enlarged corpus callosum in musicians? It seems like neuroscientifically playing music is a very unique activity. I think playing music is a clear example of serious play with our salient landscape and therefore our recursive relevance realization machinery for its own sake. And that music and math are the two ways in which we play with intelligibility in order to enhance our capacity to get an optimal grip on reality. And that’s why there’s deep connections, deep, deep connections between music and mathematics. And of course, Pythagoras is the pivotal ancient figure around this. I. One of the great regrets of my life is that I’ve never cultivated any musical ability. I do Tai Chi Chuan, which is regarded as playing music with your body. I write. I’ve been writing and continue to write regularly a poetry, which is very close to music. But I bought a flute and I was going to take it up and then during covid, but that turned out to not work. I’m hoping that it is something I was going to take it up this summer. And then this was my Thunderbolt summer in which I went to Rafe Kelly’s astonishing return to the source. And then I went to the amazing Symbosium on Embodiment in Tuscany. And then I went to the Respond retreat, working with the other community leaders in Vermont. And it’s just and and then I’ve been working on after Socrates, so it didn’t happen. I’m really hoping I can take up the flute. I am convinced. That. A reliable way. Of becoming a better person. Is to cultivate the kind of cognitive and sensory motor virtuosity that music affords and that that virtuosity platforms. It isn’t identical to, but it affords and makes powerful the cultivation of virtue. So I guess my thoughts about. The cultivation of musicality is what are you doing for virtue? What are you doing? So here’s a question I ask about all ritual and ritual is not. An insult term for me. Ritual is a compliment term for me and though you’ll see a lot about ritual in after Socrates, you saw my talk on Cambridge. You know what I mean by that and take a look at the brilliant anthology, thinking through ritual edited by Shobrick. Any what we should ask of any ritual and this is this is exactly what Jennings talks about when he talks about ritual knowing. How broadly and deeply does it transfer? I would add a third thing, but let’s just talk about so I look for how broadly and deeply does my Tai Chi Chuan transfer in my life? And and not just my own value, my own judgment, but what other people tell me and I have continued this ritual because of how both broadly how many domains it transfers to and how deeply how well it helps me. Adjust adapt zero in on what’s most relevant appropriately fit myself to it. It has been life changing the virtuosity apprise broadly and deeply. Third thing. Does it apply broadly and deeply and does it afford self correction? Does it afford transferring not only insight into situations, but reciprocal insight about you so that you’re simultaneously restructuring the situation and restructuring yourself. If your music and the virtuosity that you’re the undeniable and primordial virtuosity that you are cultivating in your music transfers broadly and deeply and affords trans framing, then you know how you should be doing it. If it is taking you away, building a wall around you, not transferring very broadly or deeply, not affording trans framing, then I put it to you that the way you are practicing your music is not relevant towards the primordial virtues. But I think insofar as we transfer broadly and deeply and afford trans framing so that we get better at realizing what’s true and good and beautiful, then you have your guide about how virtuosity affords virtue. Thank you for that excellent question, honey. We’ll now move to the excellent question. I know I just know it will be because his questions are always excellent. Rob Gray. Rob is a long time. Rob’s more than a supporter. Rob, I, you know, I’m going to be talking to Rob. I’m going to be talking to him about the question that he asked me. I’m going to be talking to him about the question that he asked me. Rob’s work, you know, on his channel, go and watch his channel. We’ll watch his YouTube videos, the meditating philosopher. He’s talking to amazing people like Rick Rapetti. He’s one of the best interpreters of my work. He’s one of the best people for trans people. He’s one of the best interpreters of my work. He’s one of the best interpreters of my work. He’s one of the best interpreters of my work. He’s one of the best interpreters of my work. He’s one of the best interpreters of my work. He’s one of the best interpreters of my work. He’s one of the best people for translating it into community practice. See the stuff he does on philosophical fellowship. You want to get better at a lot of what I’m talking about. Turn to the work that Rob is doing. And the thing about it is he’s just a fundamentally decent and good person. So, please note that. Let other people know. His channel should have way more viewers. There should be more people engaging in his practices. The ones he does on philosophical fellowship are really important. So please, it’s very important you hear me on this. I don’t want everybody just listening to me. And there are people that have been, and I’m very, very grateful for this, people who have been deeply influenced by my work and are putting it into life and giving it a new kind of life that I didn’t give it. And Rob’s one of those. Okay, so I’m going to read all of Rob’s question because I think it’s integrated. What’s the relationship between rapport, plausibility, and beauty? I was right. Excellent question. And I’ve given a talk about this quite a while ago when I talked about Skari’s work. In Elaine Skari’s book, there we are, she talks about teaching and appreciation, opening up people to unnoticed beauty. And she also argues that that prepares us for truth and it prepares us for justice. So she’s trying to connect beauty, the beautiful, to the true and the good because justice is, of course, one of the primary virtues. Also, all societies seem to find Socrates beautiful, but never makes the leap to finding virtue itself beautiful when Socrates isn’t around. Yes. And that seems to be because he can’t break out of a modal confusion around beauty. He thinks of beauty ultimately as something to be consumed. And what he bumps up again, and you can sense his frustration around it, is that he can’t relate to Socrates’ beauty that way, but he can’t get out of that modal confusion. Also, is there a contrast between aesthetic judgments of beauty and judgments of utility? So I’m going to answer these one by one. If I think something, say religion, is ugly or neutral, lacks value or relevance, or has narrow or no utility, how can rapport or beauty be open to the power and vitality of such things? Great. How can one start to go from Heidegger’s notion of world as standing reserved to feeling enchanted by the world like Plotinus, Socrates, or T.S. Eliot? P.S. John, your work and your work are beautiful. You and your work are beautiful. Thank you. Okay. So rapport. Rapport I take to be that sense of connectedness that is affording some degree of reciprocal opening. Plausibility I take to be the judgment that we have a lot of converging evidence for a particular frame we are in, and we have an insightful intimation of its promise, its elegance for us, and there’s a balance between the promise and the evidence so that we are not just caught up in the promise when something is far-fetched without deep convergent trustworthiness, or we’re not just finding something that’s incredibly trustworthy but trivial. So that’s plausibility. I think when we find our relationship to something plausible, we’ve come to it, the relation, the framing is trustworthy, and it is affording reciprocal opening, right? The plausibility, the intimation, the insightful intimation of promise is what affords the reciprocal opening. So there’s a deep connection between rapport and plausibility. What’s the connection to beauty? And this is an argument I made a while ago when I talked about Scari’s work. I think beauty is those two things. Let me try to explain what I mean. Scari says when I see the beautiful tree, it’s like all the previous trees I’ve ever seen come into that because it’s somehow a paragon, a paradigmatic thing, like a prototype of what, or an archetype of what a tree can be. So it’s like, my gosh, all the trees have somehow come to fruition because I didn’t realize trees could be like this. So what it is is it’s trust brings all your tree experience in, converges. It’s trustworthy. You’re not like, oh, it’s like, oh, but I didn’t realize trees could be like this. So you have an insightful intimation of a whole new way of looking at trees. And that means you are now afforded the possibility of rapport of that reciprocal opening with them. When reciprocal opening with them like that starts to flow, then appearances are affording the disclosure of a deeper reality. Appearances are wedded to alifaya. And that’s what I think how truth and beauty come together. I think these are different than our judgments of utility because this has to do with when I’m using something, I am typically not reciprocally opening from it. I do not have an I-thou relationship with it. That’s the relationship that affords reciprocal opening. I have an I-it. Now, remember Bubur’s point and Fromm’s point. The I in the I-it is different than the I in the I-thou. And part of what that means is I hold myself stable in order to manipulate or use this thing. And I’m only concerned with how it is relevant to me. I am not concerned with how I am relevant to it. And so I think beauty is fundamentally different from judgments of utility. If you think something is ugly or has no utility, how can beauty or rapport open me to the power and vitality of such things? Because beauty should strike you as I had not realized religion could be like this. I’m using your example of say religion. I’ve not realized religion was capable of this. So it’s not this is not a religion. It right. It conforms from all the converging experiences you have. You still say this is a religion, but I didn’t realize religions could be like this. That opens up the elegance. It’s the insightful intimation of new possibilities. And the sense of real possibilities affords you to also open up correspondingly, resonantly, reciprocally new possibilities within yourself. And then reciprocal opening can occur. And I think that is what we need to move out of the world as standing reserved. Standing reserved is to hold the whole world within the having mode and eye it relationship. To feel the world is enchanted is to be able to move into the being mode and give us a framework that allows us to beautify things. Makes makes that makes that experience plausible to us and makes the rapport that should be the proper response to beauty. Just like reverence is the proper response to all possible for us. So that’s my answer to your excellent question, Rob. Thank you so much. And one more time, everybody. Check out Rob’s work. Check out his channel on YouTube channel, The Meditating Philosopher. Check out the videos he does on Philosophical Fellowship. Strongly recommend it. Strongly recommend it. And he’s a good person. Next question is from Chris Flynn. Dear John, have you ever heard of the professor Michael Segrou? No, I haven’t. A lot of these questions are showing the vast ocean of ignorance. I’m very I mean, I this has always been the case. You know, I learned so much from my students and I hope that never stops. It would only stop because of me. I hope I never get. Hardened by hubris or dishonesty. He was a professor at Princeton, John Hopkins, Columbia. Holy crowd. Oh, so that’s kind of a I want to just drop that from my language. And that’s why I stumbled, because that’s actually an insult to Hindu people. Wow. Let’s just say, wow, wow. That’s that’s an amazing resume and various other colleges. And back in 1992 was part of the Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition series. Was that was like that a video series or was it a series like a TV show series or great courses series or like what what medium was it found for the teaching company? I don’t know what the teaching company is. I’m just learning much, which span over 37 hours. He has three videos covering the Republic, which are incredible. I hope they’re available on YouTube. His daughter runs a podcast channel of his called The Ideal World. His channel is called the idea store cool, which has tons of his class lectures and such. But the reason I bring them up is because other than you is the only person I’ve ever heard talk about Plato and Socrates in such a loving, deep and profound way. He even mentioned in a lecture that he’s something like fluent in Platonism. That’s really touching. There are other people. I think Lloyd Geerson at the University of Toronto is in love with Platonism and Neoplatonism. But I know what you mean. I know what you mean, Chris. I think that if you were to have him on Voices with Reveki discussing Plato and Socrates and Agape, some monumental ground will have been traversed. I implore you to at least ruminate on it. Love and salutations, Chris Flynn. I’m going to more than ruminate on it. I’m going to ask Madeline to see if we can find this out. Find him out. Reach out to his daughter. I would love to talk to Michelle or Michael Sugru. Michael, I should say. Michael Sugru. Yeah, I will do my best to make that happen. But talking deeply with somebody who deeply reflects upon and loves Platonism would be a sheer joy for me. And being able to share that with other people would be wonderful. So thank you very much for your excellent question. Brian Rivera. Good to hear from you again, Brian. Do you see the concept of the good grounded or expressed in biology? How do you see it manifest in the way biological life evolves? I see the good expressed in everything. So I need to address that because, of course, your question isn’t asking me at that level, at a deeper ontological level. You’re asking me, and fairly so, at the biological level. But I see the good expressed in everything insofar as the good is, to my mind, the promise of the realness of things, that the well of intelligibility will never run dry, that the through line going through all of the multispectuality that is not itself any aspect of the Eidos will never fail. Insofar as that’s the case, I think biological entities also demonstrate it. I think the question, though, is asking, and if I’m misreading you or reading into you inappropriately, let me know. Like send another comment or text, right? And I promise to reply to that. But I think you’re trying to say something like, is evolution trying to find a better form of life? And do I see the good in teleological sense? So as I just said, I don’t think I or this is the argument, I’ll make the argument in even more detail in After Socrates, which is coming very soon now, that I don’t think of the good as a teleological notion in that sense. I respect people. I’ve had many conversations with Sam and Paul and JP, both Paul’s actually, about this. Do I see evolution, the way John Stewart argues, moving towards increasing cooperation? Yes, not not teleologically, but as what’s called gradient descent. When systems happen upon through evolution, better cooperation, they tend to beat out systems that are in less cooperation. But that beating out is not a ladder. What do you mean, John? Well, multi-dimensional cooperation is not a ladder. We can interact with the world in just so much more of a complex manner because we are billions of single celled organisms working in profound cooperation. We’ve gone what John Stewart calls entification. I’m pointing to myself and all myself. We are one. I sound like the board. But there’s still bacteria around. I think it’s still the case that by mass, we’re still one. We’re still one. We’re still one. We’re still one. But there’s still bacteria around. I think it’s still the case that by mass, they still outweigh us on the planet. Certainly the case for insects. I don’t think it’s a ladder. I think there is a through line through everything. I’ve already said what I think that is. I think there’s a gradient in evolution in that evolution will tend towards not teleologically but causally towards increased cooperation, entification. I think in that sense, we can speed things up to the degree to which we figure out how to properly coordinate individual cognition within the distributed cognition and move it towards something like entification. And that’s all my work on dialectic and the logos I’m doing with Christopher Master Pietro, Guy Sendstock, the help of other people like Taylor Barrett, Peter Limburg, just how to do that. I’m probably missing other people. Oh, the work with Johannes Niederhäuser, Daniel Zaruba. So I don’t think evolution is moving toward I don’t think there’s a final form of life. I think that’s to misunderstand life. Just like I don’t think there’s a final form of relevance. I think that’s to misunderstand how relevance realization works. Does relevant realization drive towards complexification in order to deal with the complexity of the world? Yes. Does it push towards increasing cooperation? Yes. And so systems that can reflectively appropriate and integrate complexification and cooperation will do better. Yes, I believe that. Will they do better at disclosing the good? Disclosing the through line? Yes. But I don’t think that there’s a I don’t think there’s a finish line that’s going to be crossed or even that that’s the correct way to think about it. I hope you found that answer responsible to your question. Thank you. Thank you. This is a question from Bumbu. There are a lot of personas that could be classified as sage. Maybe you mean a lot of persons. Maybe you’re using persona differently than I would. I’ll take it to the demeanor. You mean there’s a lot of personages we could point to and say that’s sage. What criteria would you recommend using for choosing sage images that can help with wisdom cultivation? What are examples of such sages in literature one can read for internalizing the sage? Thanks. I think this is a really paramount question. I think we need sages. That can be richly imaginal for us. Remember the imaginal is imagination for the sake of perception and cognition. So we need sages that have a rich and complex mythos wrapped around them. And that could be produced by others or they could have contributed to its production. Of course, so, you know, Jesus and Socrates and Siddhartha easily meet that. Those sages should have not only rich mythos around them, but the colleges of practices with which they are deeply associated and in which some important sense they exemplify. I think that’s the case of Socrates in the stoic, the platonic and the neoplatonic traditions. It’s clearly the case of Siddhartha in the branches of Buddhism. It’s clearly the case of Jesus in Christianity. I think a sage should be such an individual that they demonstrate in concert. I’m trying to use my words very carefully here in concert with their obvious sagacity. That’s the property of being a sage, a profound humility. So that as we internalize them. We are protected from hubris and inflation. They should always exemplify to my mind what through Highland and I’ll talk a lot about this and after Socrates after Socrates is on my mind as it should be. I’m working on it right now. What drew Highland calls finite transcendence. Finite transcendence is to realize the depth of humanity. We are we are beings trapped in the finitary predicament. We are trapped in the infinite. We are trapped in the infinite. We are trapped in the infinite. Finite transcendence is to realize the depth of humanity. We are we are beings trapped in the finitary predicament, but we are capable of self transcendence of aspiration of transforming of fundamentally transforming our identities as we try to conform to reality. That’s what maturation and virtue ultimately are. If we just have transcendence. Then we are tempted to to claim that we are gods. If we just have finitude, then we are tempted to despair that we are just the playthings of the gods. And we are neither. And we are neither. We are neither. And so look for those characteristics in the sage. Thank you for your excellent question. And we have one more question. This is from Antonio. Barbalo. It seems to me at this moment that Zazen is what the neoplatonic contemplation that ended as the arrow prayer was meant to be silent contemplation aimed at oneness removing all divisions. First of all, I’ll stop there and comment. There are deep. I’m sort of proto Zen in some ways because I practice Taoism and Theravada Buddhism and, you know, and been integrating them together. And that’s sort of the recipe for Chan Buddhism. And then, of course, you take it to Japan and it becomes Zen. I’ve been deeply influenced by Zen a lot and deeply influenced by other people that have also been influenced by Zen. The Kyoto school, T.T. Suzuki, Nishida Nishitani, Tanabe Maso Abe. And T.T. Suzuki makes exactly that move. He completely compares, you know, Zazen, sorry, compares not Zazen. He compares like a moments of Satori in Zen to neoplatonic realization. So other people have noted these deep resonances. We don’t want to give into an easy perennialism and say, oh, because all of these traditions are always all about the same thing. No. But we can also say to the degree to which they are all enhancing, developing and perhaps, like I said, developing, developing and developing. All enhancing, developing and perhaps, like I said earlier in the answer to one question, transcending relevance realization. There’s there are universal aspects to the process upon which they can converge. I have toyed with trying to put the work into laying, I guess you’d call it the philosophical foundations for more deeply integrating these in a way that’s consonant with how the ecology of practices is already integrating. Like in my work and in the work of other people related to my work, I’ve toyed with the idea of sort of Zen neoplatonism, because of course you can be as Zen Buddhist or Zen Christian. And why not Zen neoplatonism? So I’m just saying that because what you said is like resonates really deeply with me to this end in opening the hand of thought by Kosho, I think, is the most important thing. To this end in opening the hand of thought by Kosho, Yuchi Yama, they strongly emphasize the removal of any thoughts such as I was thinking about acts that create the observer, observed division instead of instead of instead of letting everything be one. Yes. And there’s a book on Plotinus and I can’t remember the name of the name of it. That makes exactly this. Hang on. I’m going to quickly grab it. So there’s a book by, I don’t know, I’ll probably mispronounce this name, Pao Shen Ho, P-A-O-S-H-E-N Ho, Plotinus’s Mystical Teaching of Henosis and Interpretation in the Light of the Metaphysics of the One, in which he makes exactly this argument that you’re making. However, in the past the meta, there is plenty of that. There is, but I don’t teach just Vipassana Meta. I teach integrating them in Prajna and then Prajna should eventually release itself into non-duality and non-thought, non-conceptuality. That’s my fundamental understanding of it. And so that’s how I think it does converge. They have a lot in common, removing egocentrism, becoming one with all beings, but they also, they’re also very different. I think Vipassana and Meta are, I don’t think Prajna has to be, and I definitely think the Neoplatonic contemplative practice I teach is very much in line with what you’re talking about. So I was curious how one should choose one or the other and why. And since it would, since it would fit so well with Neoplatonism, I’m curious whether one could replace Prajna with Zazen, with supplementing the practices from the Wisdom of Vipassana. Totally, totally. I’d like to talk to you at some point about Prajna, because for me Prajna ends in something that I think that is similar to Skantia Intuitiva, similar to what I was talking about earlier, where you get to a place where relevance realization and framing realizes its own fundamental irrelevance as you come before the oneness of the ground of being, which I take to be what we’re talking about here. But I don’t have any, other than a lot of the little nuances in my response, I think what you’re proposing I’m deeply consonant with. I would like there, and I was just at the Monastic Academy, I got to talk to some of the people there, especially the head Roshi of the Academy, and he’s coming from a Zen perspective and found a lot of convergence. And I would like it if there was a more ongoing deep discussion between Zen and Neoplatonism, especially post-nominalist Neoplatonism. Finally, you said thank you for everything you’re teaching and practices have been life-saving for me. Thank you, Antonio. I’m really happy to hear that. I hope you could hear in my voice and see in my manner that I’m actually deeply resonating with what you’re proposing and talking about. I think it’s really important. I hope I get to meet you at some point. So we’re coming to an end. I want to thank you all for joining me for this Q&A. The questions were fantastic. And any questions that were not answered will be slotted in next Saturday’s Q&A. Our next Q&A will be next Saturday and we’ll be back to the normal format with the last 15 minutes as a live Q&A. And as always, I want to thank all of you for your support at Patreon. It keeps a lot of this work going. And I hope that many of you will find new learning and new nourishment from the forthcoming series after Socrates. Thank you for your time, attention, and commitment. Take care, everyone.