https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=C6Ys-00whiI
worked. Welcome everyone to another of our monthly Q&A’s. We’re having two this month to make up from some of the ones that were missed. Today we’re having our normal format. We’re going from three to four, 45 minutes of questions submitted by Patreon and then 15 minutes of live chat. As always, I’d like to thank the help of my producer and executive assistant, Madeline. Alright, so the first question is from Galad. Hello Dr. Varecki. First off, I would like to thank you for your work on Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series and your meditation course. I found both immensely enlightening. I found them practically helpful not only in my personal life but also in my work as a physicist and as a musician. So once again, thank you for that. I’m very, I don’t know what to say, gratified, impressed, grateful that my work can help you both as a physicist and as a musician. I’m currently finishing my Master of Science in Physics and considering my options going forward. I was deeply influenced by your work and other works you presented in your series and I feel like perhaps I could harness my skills and experience to contribute something in the field of cognitive science as well. So my question is, where do I start? It’s such a multidisciplinary field and I have no idea how to get a full hold in it. So I hope you could send some light on the matter, giving your experience and familiarity. Thank you very much. Thanks again, Gelad or Gelad. So the difficulty facing answering your question is whether or not you are contemplating getting formal education, in which case, you know, I would recommend certain undergraduate programs in cognitive science. Bias aside, I think the undergraduate program in cognitive science at the University of Toronto was premier. And I would recommend that. Maybe you could do it part time. Maybe that’s too far away. There are other, if I knew where you were located, I could perhaps give you more specific advice. There are several places where good places where you could do graduate work in cognitive science. One is at Carleton University in Ottawa, also in Canada. There are good programs at Edinburgh, Indiana, other places. I forget where Andy Clark is now, going where Andy Clark is. You find an excellent graduate program where Sean Gallagher is. There’s an excellent graduate program. Evan Thompson is at an excellent undergrad and graduate program at the University of British Columbia. If you were not talking about taking up at least pursuing an undergraduate or graduate degree, then I recommend you start with some very powerful handbooks. There’s the Cambridge Handbook in Cognitive Science. And then I believe it’s the Oxford Handbook in 4E Cognitive Science. I recommend reading through those anthologies, and then you can take a look at their bibliographies and so forth. And that will start you into the literature immediately. And of course, I recommended a whole bunch of books, especially in the second half of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. So I hope that’s helpful to you, Galat. Thank you so much for your question. So our next question is from Joe Pickens. Hi, John. In your Awakening from the Meaning Crisis episode on insight, you talked about how we need both meditation as well as contemplation. Without meditation to break down the gestalt and make the current frame opaque to us, we get stuck in a misframing of the problem. And without contemplation, we never step back into a better frame and rebuild the gestalt. In your words, we choke. Yes. I’m curious why you describe this issue as choking. It maps onto my experience of getting too fixated on the features, suggestions of the body, feeling like everything is bound up in my throat, but I don’t understand why this happens. By the way, sorry, I don’t mean to pun, but that’s part of why it’s called choking. Everything is bound up in your throat. You get that feeling of, right? And so it’s like if you pay attention to your breathing too much in the like, and you get fixated on this and some people get fixated as opposed to meditating on it. And then they have, they start finding it difficult to breathe or the person who, like I said, in the martial art, they get fixated on the features and they can no longer do the block or the strike. It’s exactly that. That’s exactly what I’m talking about, Joe. It’s that you can’t, you’re so locked into looking at them, you can’t look through them. And without being able to look through them, you can’t see by means of them in order how to interact with the world. So you get cut off from the world. You get choked off from the world. So that’s the primary meaning of choking. There’s also the case where you get into a kind of endless analysis that robs your agency of ever getting the momentum to get going into the world. And so in those two, and they’re often interwoven ways, failing to make frame and step back into a better and hopefully more optimally fitting frame causes you to choke, get locked into your body, get locked into the features, get separated from your motivational machinery, and in all those ways be fundamentally cut off from the world. So I hope that answered your excellent question. Thank you for that question, Joe. We now move to a question from Andrew Alfred. Excuse me. Hi, John, I’ve been reading Francis Weller’s book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow. Great title. And he speaks of the darkness of Greece as providing a new way of seeing of a second sight amidst the lightlessness. Yeah, that really resonates with me. A lot of his ideas surrounding the necessity of grief relate to Bortoff’s writings on wholeness, though not explicitly. Oh, that’s very interesting connection, Alfred. Through my suffering research and personal development, sounds like you’re encountering grief. I can see the role that ritual plays in qualitative change and the role qualitative change plays in our ability to recognize affordance and transition into the new way of seeing. Excellent. Excellent. I don’t know if we’ve met yet, Andrew, even virtually, but I’m impressed by your question. I’m deeply in appreciation of you extending it to me. However, I’m having trouble measuring and mapping those change manifestations in the actual cartographic GSI data sets. Do you have any thoughts on how to measure qualitative change and orientation due to suffering? Thank you for your consideration. Your wisdom and willingness to teach has been invaluable to my life over the last years. Thank you, Andrew. First of all, as I said again, just want to pause and savor the question. I don’t know if you’re aware of it, Andrew, but I have spoken often and sometimes here about the importance of grief had extended discussions with layman Pascal and Bruce Alderman on rethinking religion about grief, especially grieving the death of God, which doesn’t mean the death of ultimate reality. And so I treat grief. I mean, as I related before, one of the wisest things that one of the wisest people I met in my life said to me is don’t get into a deep relationship to somebody who has not experienced grief, because grief is the only thing that takes you to the depth of your humanity in a way that also allows you to see deeply into other people’s humanity. And there’s great truth in that. There’s great truth in that. And that’s what I connect to your first part of your question. Grief gives us a way of seeing from our depths into other people’s depths that nothing else does. And that’s why very often the most important thing you can do when somebody else’s is grief is grieving is just simply to try to be fully, fully one more time, fully present with them and not pull away into abstractions of the truth. Into abstraction or denial or platitude or the attempt to give advice, but just remain with them in that place where the bottom is dropping out and staying with them again and again and again until the bottom dropping out also starts to become a way in which their world opens up. So I just wanted to say all of that because it’s really important. I suppose how I would measure qualitative change is the degree to which there is indication for something like I just said. The degree to which the grief is starting to afford wonder. And I don’t mean that in that. Whoo. I mean that in the sense of simultaneously questioning who you are and what your world is. And of course, that’s on the knife edge because we can fall off that razor’s edge into the abyss of despair. But what I would look for would be incremental increase in the steadiness by which the person is doing two things. Moving into wonder without falling into despair. And not attempting to immediately close off that wonder. But a willingness to return to it again and again and not in a merely repetitive fashion, but in a sense in which there’s increasing cognitive flexibility, their ability to zoom in, zoom out, their ability to complexify their understanding of themselves and their world, their ability to see possibilities for relationships and agent arena relationships. That strike them as novel and potentially beneficial. The degree to which they feel they this is a phenomenological are we are inhabiting their mind, re inhabiting their mind and body recovering it, but not the same way it was before they experience grief. And that would start to change translate those phenomenological qualitative reports should hopefully translate into behavioral measures of cognitive flexibility and a capacity for recognizing bias. Limited limitations in one one’s own perspective. And perhaps also a measure by their capacity to engage in more complex cognitive tasks. Now the problem with this, of course, is this will be very incremental and the phenomenological stuff, I suspect, perhaps I would even predict comes before we get it in place enough. So the functionality is reliably present so we can behaviorally measure it. But that’s how I would propose. Taking a look at it. This goes from some of the work on post traumatic growth and some of the work on grief and some of the ways I’ve observed in myself and other people, the processing of grief and how much it’s bound up with this capacity to transmute. The horror into something like off, which has a tinge of significant tinge of the negative to it into wiz into sorry into wonder, which starts to stabilize into a quest for deeper understanding, deeper wisdom, I suppose, along the way you could start to give people measures from some of the wisdom scales to see if there’s significant change in that occurring as they go through this process. Fantastic. Question Alfred. Thank you so very much for that question. The next question is from Stan, who we’ve, of course, talked before. How do you do Johnny V? How is it to be able to travel and meet people in person again like David from Rebel Wisdom, Jonathan and Jordan? It’s been fantastic. I mean, I’ve done a lot of work on how to try to get a lot of these practices going in the virtual domain, but there’s certainly secret sauce when you’re there with other people in person. There’s so the bandwidth opens up, especially access to the nonverbal communication and communing and conveyance. So it’s been fantastic. The travel has been a mixed bag. I’ve loved going to these places and meeting these people in person, but the travel has been very, you know, very spotty. Air travel, I have been stranded three times by Air Canada and at times given no resources by which to deal with the fact that I was stranded. When I went down to Austin to talk to Lex Friedman, I found out that my flight back to Toronto was cancelled when I got into the airport. I went to the kiosk to talk to somebody from Air Canada and there was no human being there. There was just a little sign saying my flight with my flight number had been cancelled and the recommendation that I contact transportation is that I have to be able to get to the airport. Transportation Canada, one of the government ministries, which of course is Monty Python, ridiculous and absurd. So that part hasn’t been great, but meeting people in person and getting to some of these other places has been fantastic. And if I’m not mistaken, you’re going to see Paul soon too. Yes, next weekend, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, I will be in Thunder Bay with Paul VanderKlay and Jonathan Pajot and a bunch of other people. And I highly recommend you get there. This is going to be the first time we are ever in person and the conference on consciousness and conscience. Conscience looks amazing. By the way, how’s Socrates doing? After Socrates is doing very well, if that’s what you’re referring to. We have 17 of. It’s not clear if it’s going to be 22 or 23 episodes. There’s a couple variables that will determine that. So we’re close to being done. I expect that after Socrates will come out in October. In October, I am. I’m very pleased with it. I both the changes in format, the professionalism of the film crew, Chris and the crew are doing amazing. And digging very deeply into this has been just wonderful. And I’m hoping that the way I’m feeling about it, the way the crew is feeling about it are accurate and that many people will find this a powerful and helpful series. So and then your final note is take care. You too. Great talking to you. And thank you for the questions in the comment. The next question is from Tim. Hi, John, I’m trying to understand that was better. So before I go on, you, you really have to do Dallas practices to understand that was. And I know some people are going to be upset with me when I say that. But it’s. Taoism, you have you really have to do the practices and the rituals and how they get you into the flow state and help you to transfer the transfer the flow state to many different domains of your life, how they get you to salience landscape differently so that you start to see the world through a Taoist lens. That is the primary way I recommend to anybody who wants to understand that was unless you go through the transformations engendered by ritual and practice. You cannot grasp the deep truths of Taoism. That was him like many other things. The truths of Taoism are only accessible through transformation, not independent from it. All right. So I’ll go on with Tim’s question, assuming that the average person’s current general scientific worldview says a human being’s purpose is something similar to Nietzsche’s will to power logic our deeds into the future efficiently. How is that reconciled with Taoism? I’ll read the rest of your question first. That was it says to flow with the unfolding of reality in our scientific reality instructs us to gain power. I want to challenge that, but we’ll come back to that. Wouldn’t it be proper for a person to fit into reality better by pursuing power? My understanding is that there’s no morality aspect to Taoism. The Taoist says the master doesn’t try to be powerful, thus he is truly powerful. The ordinary man keeps reaching for power, thus he never has enough. This is quotation conflict that today’s generally accepted scientific worldview. Okay, so let’s go through this. This is a very rich and very powerful question. So I’m trying to get at how you could get from a scientific worldview that we have a certain purpose. Since the scientific worldview is non-teleological, evolution is non-teleological. You perhaps might say that our genes are replicating, but of course they have no intent to do so. Nor are they trying to do so. So it’s not clear that that notion transposes well to them. Secondly, it’s very clearly now the result that you are not the result of just your genes. You’re the result of the dynamic interrelationship between your genes and your environment. Your genes are not static. They are regulatory as well as structural genes. There’s the whole epigenetic aspect to this. So the genes themselves are part of a dynamical system, which is part of your organism as a system, which is part of the dynamical system interacting with reality. And you are engaged in niche construction. You’re shaping the environment, which of course is shaping you both cognitively and biologically. And perhaps, of course, ultimately even phylogenetically. So the picture isn’t one of seeking power. If power means by that you dominating others or just merely having your genes survive. Because if your genes survive only long enough that the species you belong to will perish, that of course isn’t going to do so much for you. So do you want just the next generation to survive? Do you want the species to survive? Do you want the environment in which it is necessarily bound to also survive? Do you want the Earth to survive? Do you want the set of laws that make the solar system and this galaxy possible to survive? The point I’m making is you’re willing yourself into the future because you are not a singular atomic entity reducible to your genes becomes equivalent to you willing the whole of reality to unfold as it does, which of course is Nietzsche’s point in the eternal recurrence of the same. And of course, that will that is present is, as I’ve already mentioned, is nothing like your intentional state of will. It’s more like the fact that all of reality is self organizing in a way in which it is perpetuating itself. And then the Tao says, figure out how that’s working and conform to it. The power that’s being talked about in Taoism is not political power or physical power. It’s the power of being. It is not the cup, but the empty space within the cup by which the cup works. That’s also a quote from the Tao Teh Ch’en. The Tao is a well that is used, but never used up. That’s the kind of power it has. It is the power of water to seek the lowest and make itself affordable and available to all. It is the power of the mother to give birth. So insofar as all of those metaphors, symbolic metaphors participate in and point to the raw creativity of reality, the fact that we are part of this ongoing creativity says that what you’re actually doing is trying as much to as possible to creatively participate in that creativity. Let me remind you that Nietzsche’s example of the Ubermensch is not Napoleon. It is Goethe because of Goethe’s tremendous capacity for multi domain, multi dimensional creativity. Goethe is basically sort of an integration of Plato and Shakespeare within Germany. And so I mean, not literally, I mean in terms of his stature and his capacity. So then you may say, fine, I give it to you that the Tao is about this primordial creativity and we are supposed to align ourselves by living as creatively as possible, which means what? Well, if something like when we’re in the flow state where we are doing optimal creativity, optimal experience. And then you say, does that have any morality to it? Yeah, it does. And I mean, and this goes to both Taoists. I think people who say that Taoism has no morality, that strikes me as implausible as a scholastic claim. So I’ll just put that aside. I’ll take it that you offered it in good faith along the lines of, well, it looks like, you know, the notion of creativity has no morality bound up to it. But of course, creativity is bound up with notions of realness, of beauty. And many people have argued that flowing with reality, and this is where the Stoics come in, means getting an optimal grip on reality and enhancing your relationship to flow with it. And that that optimal grip is exactly what virtue is. That virtue, the virtues get us into an optimal grip with how reality is real in its creativity, how it is beautiful or capable of beauty in its creativity, and how it is capable of, well, a kind of goodness. And then you say, what is the goodness? And here’s where Taoism comes back in, because Taoism basically argues that you want to be in ratio religio. You want to be in right relationship with this real, beautifying flow of things. And that right relationship is gratitude. Because you are ultimately born from it, dependent on it, and you rely on the fact that it continues to generate itself in a way that sustains all of these beings, or the 10,000 myriad things, as Taoism would say. If you’re trying to get an optimal grip on the Tao and you have an attitude of fundamental gratitude and acknowledgement of your relationship to that fundamental creativity, Taoism proposes that you will inevitably treat other people in a virtuous manner. Now, we may question that, although I think there’s a good argument being made there. But to claim that Taoism is amoral, I think, is to impose an enlightenment idea, I mean, the historical period idea of what morality is onto Taoism, which I think misrepresents it. I do not think Taoism properly understood is in conflict with our generally accepted worldview, given the qualifications I’ve made in my answer to you. And you can sometimes think about it like this. Which kind of universe would you prefer? Would you want a universe without living things or living things in it? Living things. Do you only want a universe with non-sentient living things? No, I want sentient living things. Do you want a universe with sentient but not sapient living things? No, I want sapient living things. And so you therefore express ongoing gratitude to the ongoing creativity of the Tao for generating a universe that is giving you all of those things that makes it, and this is the ultimate normativity, much, much better than alternative universes. So I hope I’ve answered your really good question, Tim. I want to thank you for it. I want to move on to the next question. This is from Charles. You say that you would like to be determined by the good, the beautiful, and the true, but doesn’t an action have to be done deep? Sorry, doesn’t an action have to be done deeply, freely in order to be good? I think I’ve answered this question already last time. Yeah. Yeah. If Charles, if I didn’t, I think I answered a question remarkably similar to it. So it could be memory error on my part, but I know I answered a question about all of that in great detail last time. So perhaps here’s what I propose, Charles. Take a look at the answer I gave in the previous Q&A, the one just before this, and see if that answer is satisfactory to you. I don’t mean that you totally agree with it, but you find it a respectable and satisfactory reply. And we’ll see then if you still want to re-ask your question and you can let us know. So I might be having, you know, memory is reconstructive, not accurate. And so I could be making a mistake. But I do know I answered something very, very similar to that in depth. And I’m requesting of you that you check out that answer. And then if you still want to come back, come back again with your question. So could you please do that? And then I’d be happy to take your question again. I just want to make sure I’m not just I want to answer you beyond what I’ve already said, if that is what you need for an answer. That’s what I’m trying to say. OK, so we’re going to move on to the question. Only Cohen. Hey, John, I would like to first of all thank you from the bottom of my heart for being such a virtuous role model to us all. That’s high praise. I’m a well aware of my vice, my vices and my faults. I thank you for saying that because it encourages me to continue to aspire to be a virtuous person. I take the fact that I am a role model seriously and I deeply do not want to be a virtuous person. And I deeply do not want to do what other role models have done in letting people down so that I feel very strongly called to that. Nevertheless, I’m also deeply aware that I am a very fallible, imperfect human being and I can’t hold myself to a standard of perfection. So. I just want to say thank you for saying that and I hope that I can in honesty and in true humility and I hope it’s true humility continue to aspire to being responsible in. Really good fashion to that call. So thank you for saying this. Having a figure such as yourself who might can hold highly strive to emulate is worth more than I can ever articulate. I was hoping that you could perhaps help set some light on the phenomenal characteristics of the DMT experience such as deity encounters. From what I gather from the neuroscience literature, it has something to do with a significant reduction in cortical activity, a mini-skewel increase in signal noise and a general increase sensitization of high level priors to bottom up signaling. But that doesn’t exactly explain the specificity vividness or overall coherence of the experience. Yes, I agree. I’m asking this due to my own difficulty in parsing between moving beyond a two world mythology and the other worldliness of my own past experience. Thank you. So I have not had a DMT experience. I’ve had other bona fide psychedelic experiences. I have sat with somebody who’s done DMT and talked to them before and after. And they had pretty much a lot of the archetypal experiences. So the way I would answer you, Omri, is to go back to and say, I agree with all of that. All of that neuroscientific explanation. But what it doesn’t give you is it doesn’t give you the functionality and the phenomenology that follows from it. In fact, what it often does is just as a correlational thing. Here’s what’s happening in the brain and here’s the phenomenology. But the functionality that bridges between those is often left absent. I take it that what psychedelics are doing is they are doing a systemic and therefore potentially systematic brain breaking, significant increase in entropy and therefore the criticality that drives the self-organizing criticality that is present in the insight experience. And I think, and if you accept the argument that I’ve made and published about that flow is an insight cascade and an enhancement of the implicit learning that leads to intuition in a synergistic fashion, then what psychedelics are driving is a flow experience that is enhancing our capacity very comprehensively, not for this problem. This is not an insight in consciousness. This is a restructuring of consciousness, of our cognition. It is that it is a trans framing insight and a trans framing enhancement of our consciousness. It is that it is a trans framing insight and a trans framing enhancement of our capacity for implicit learning and picking and increasing our intuitive optimal gripping on the world. It’s an enhancement therefore of our meta optimal grip, our ability to put in a place where we have better access to more and better individual optimal grippings that put us into apt relationship to specific circumstances. Some of you know I compare that to like taking the fighting stance. I think that’s what’s happening. I think you’re getting the your mind and brain and your embodied mind is realizing in insight possibilities of consciousness and cognition that can disclose new patterns in the world. And that’s why allowing more bottom up information is so important to occur. I think in terms of the processing your brain flagging that and going this is really real because this is the kind of cognitive fittedness to the world that will track reality. I think your brain signaling that is like very, very important. And I argue for that in awakening from the meaning crisis around higher states of consciousness. And I presented this at conferences, etc. I published a bit on this, etc. The specific content is not important. The space elves and the flowering and all this because other psychedelics give other content. People go into these into psychedelic experiences and come out with radically opposed content. Now I know there is a God. Now I know there’s no God. Getting hung up on the content, I think, is to misunderstand. It’s very tempting, of course, and instead to pay attention to the process that has been right emerged in you and find a way to emerge that process independent of that particular psychedelic and its specific idiosyncratic phenomenal content. The entities and the way it portends to tell you about the kinds of beings that exist. So I hope that’s an answer to your question, Omri. It’s a very good question. And I thank you for asking it. We’re now moving on to Grant’s question. In what ways does social media incentivize the generation into phylo-nukia? Hopefully I’m using the terms correctly. You are. And you have any ideas of how a platform could technically structure conversation to promote productive dialogue? I’m working on an asynchronous debate platform and would love any help or direction. Wow, great. You could provide as to how to design interactions in a way that promote phylo-nukia. Thank you for everything you’re doing and for the positive effect that you’ve had in my life. You’re very welcome for that, Grant, and thank you for thanking me. So we have to be careful. The algorithms incentivize phylo-nukia adversarial processing in which I attempt to destroy the opponent rather than opponent processing in which we help each other self correct and find the truth. We have to be careful. We have to be careful because we’re dealing with a phylo-sophia dialogos because it plugs into evolutionary mechanisms, which is we tend to prioritize error. And that’s the kind of learning that indicates we’re failing or have failed over positive feedback. And that’s there’s all and this is part of predictive processing. There’s all kinds of evolutionary advantages to this. But that which makes us adaptive makes us perennially susceptible to self-deception. And I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. I think that’s a great point. 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I think would be a way of doing what you’re suggesting and of course. That could end up being economically lucrative in all kinds of ways. there when people are engaged in that kind of conversation they’re innovative they’re insightful they come up with new ideas that are generative many of them would probably be generative in a fashion that was economically viable a way of earning an income or generating wealth and so I think it’s myopic on the part of the current systems that they don’t lift their head out of the evolutionary trough to see the possibility that long term they could belong to a process and a system that could be much more beneficial overall even economically let alone in terms of virtue and quality of life so thank you very much for your excellent question Grant we’re going to take one more question from Eric Young and then we will move on to the questions that have been submitted live Eric asks would you encourage more artists painters and illustrators to engage in an active imagination practice like those Carl Young practiced I feel that this is the time that a small community of visual artists who are focused on the meaning crisis would be able to dive into the realms of imagination and engage with the archetypes that seem to be driving this kairos and Western culture if we have artists who engage with these new images through art and with each other through the logos hopefully they can discover a narrative or mythology that further unite people in awakening for the meeting crisis are you aware of any artists or community that are deeply engaged in this kind of creative effort you bet Nathan Vanderpool has it has been involved in Berlin with a community of artists doing exactly what you’re talking about I know that Alexander Zachary and I’ve spoken to her and she’s been sending me stuff has been doing tons of work she’s been doing philosophical fellowship with artworks building dialectic and the logos around it many artists oh what’s Joshua is it Joshua boy have been sending me their work in which they are doing exactly yes we need to have people that are committing individually and in community to imaginal work it doesn’t necessarily have to be active imagination there’s many other imaginal techniques that could be used but I get your point in order to generate the art that is needed and doesn’t have to necessarily be visual art as I pointed out there are musicians I get a cure the dawn and oh oh what’s the other person’s name they just sent me a piece they did called the logos and I forget your name I’m sorry so many people in the last three or four days have been emailing me putting the stuff around the meeting crisis to music in ways that seem seems to be happening like happening with value to other people there’s a lot of this going on Eric a lot of it and my response is do more I’m not an artist we need more visual artists we need more dancers I’ve been participating oh with Candida Thompson and they’re there they’re a dance well they’re kind of a dance and music group and they’re putting on like a choreographed dance and image presentation of TS Eliot’s the Wasteland and that you know and I’ve been involved with them about connecting that to the meeting crisis and they’re touring parts of Europe doing all of this so it like so much and there should be so much more all I can say is please do more please more do more of this individual and collective acceptation of the imaginal into helping people more deeply and resonantly awaken to the meeting crisis so that’s what I want to say thank you so much for that Eric and we’re now going to switch to the questions that came from the live chat I want to thank all patreon subscribers and everyone watching right now your support is absolutely crucial to producing these videos and for you know producing the science and the and series the series like after Socrates for generating responses to the meeting crisis so thank you very much so the first question Peter Rosquist Rook Vist asked thank you Peter for your question what is the danger of miss what is the danger of misunderstanding a copy how is it that you project what you love onto the other which I had a little bit more context for the question but there is that danger in that I think I think you might be eluding I’m not sure and if I’m misattributing I apologize where I talked about you know Paul and agape and he tends to project onto God his own inner conflict and so yeah the danger is you’re trying to you love in order to create a person and you may implicitly take you yourself as the best model of what a person is and therefore as you’re attempting to create a person you are unconsciously shaping them into yourself and this can oft times then lead into you living vicariously through them and of course the prototype of agape is the parent relationship to the child and one of the perennial temptation of a parent is to live vicariously through the child in a way that doesn’t give the child what is ultimately essential to personhood which is the process of self-creation self-interpretation so that’s how I would answer your question thank you Peter the next question is from confused philosopher that’s a very epistemic we humble name so I appreciate it what is the relationship between adjective of qualia the imaginal contemplation and top-down processing sorry your question is so good it’s overwhelming me and I’m laughing at my own inadequacy not at your question so I think the imaginal typically because it does not involve picturing things in your mind but salience landscaping in an adverbial fashion that is congruent with what you are imagining yourself to be puts clear emphasis on the adverbial qualia I think contemplation when it shifts from contemplating particular beings even systems of beings and moves to being itself a state in which relevance realization I think realizes its own irrelevance and all we are left with is the external equivalent of the internal event of the pure consciousness event but calling them internal and external already is very problematic and so I think at the height of contemplation you’re just getting the the eternal now the completely everywhere all at once here and the unity the oneness of the adverbial qualia at the height of contemplation top-down processing I think the top-down processing is ultimately adverbial because you cannot see the eye you can only see you cannot see the fundamental framing you can only see what has been fundamentally framed and that is why it is a no-thingness and therefore it has no proper qualities to it other than these adverbial ones that I’m indicating so I’m answering a question kind of in by negation that I think the imaginal contemplation and top-down processing ultimately point to the priority and I think in the cases that sort of mystical experiences the opt the ultimacy of the adverbial qualia and so where is the adjectival and all of that I don’t know as I said adjectival qualia I they still remain they exceed I’ve given good arguments that they are neither necessary nor sufficient for consciousness they are absent in multiple object cracking our basic salient stating of the world they’re absent in our deepest meditative state of the pure consciousness event they’re absent in our most profound contemplative experience resonant at one minute so I don’t deny their existence I don’t know what they do because they don’t seem to be needed for a lot of what we’re talking about what I can say is I don’t think we should hold our understanding of consciousness contemplation the imaginal top-down processing hostage until we’re given an explanation of adjectival qualia it may be that with adjectival qualia we are just epistemically bounded we do not have the conceptual machinery to render them into things other than themselves explain them in terms other than circularly of just referring to them such that we can explain their emergence their existence their functionality and maybe that is distressing like I said when I when I no longer held adjectival qualia in such high regard because they don’t seem to be necessary or sufficient for any of the things we’re talking the fact that they may be epistemically bounded with respect to them struck me now is plausible because at all levels of our cognition we had epistemic boundedness I can’t even fully conceive or perceive this object so I hope that’s an answer that you like or at least you find responsive and thought-provoking so thank you for that question and now the next question is from Mark Lantre how do you practice not allowing yourself to be overwhelmed with despair by falling in love with the world and that’s not a Hallmark colored answer that’s a difficult and powerful thing to do you cannot reason your way and Spinoza the most logical mathematically precise of the rationalist knew that we cannot save people from despair or from egocentrism or narcissism and by the way all of those are deeply interwoven at the beating core of the narcissist decaying heart is the a bit the abyss and the abysmal pain of despair people think think about our word desperation despair people do things in desperation and when you see the desperate stupidity and irrationality of the narcissist pushed to their ends then you know what’s at what’s in their heart what’s in their heart of hearts it’s been always a new that we can’t get people out of the despair and the narcissism by reasoning he knew that in the end only what he called the intellectual and his word for intellectual doesn’t mean what we mean it means it’s like the Greek word knows news I should say that contemplative theoria right that intellectual in that sense the conformity through contemplation with reality such that one realizes in both senses of words once participation in depth with our reality is realizing itself only that only that intellectual love of God or nature ultimate reality will save you from despair and of course you can’t really practice love this love is something you have to participate in is an existential mode you can set up an ecology of practices that are make will make it more likely that you will fall in love with yourself with other people and most importantly and needed for both of the previous ones with being itself do practices that constantly increase the probability and afford you falling in love that way reciprocal opening that is how we practice not falling into despair if you try to if you try to reason against it or reason out yourself out of it it will only morph and use your reasoning to further the despair I hope you find that a helpful answer mark thank you very much for it next question is from Charles Pratt do you ever get bored bored of being I want to think a moment that was a really good question I know when I’ve been in periods of my life in which I was overwhelmed by a personal internalization of the meeting crisis that I could at times experience a significant on you we because the absurdity and the alienation and the anxiety often provoked a deep sense of frustration and there there are times when I forget I forget the depth to which I am beholden and I sometimes feel like reality falls short of my expectations and just saying that aloud that makes me laugh at the absurdity and and the the how innate my egocentrism is in that statement so at those times I do have that but I can honestly say that they are much their frequency their duration and their intensity has diminished significantly for me as I have been more and more homed within the ecology of practices that I’m engaged in and now it’s more and more the other case that I’m startled by how I’m called to love in ways that weren’t available for me before so the answer is it used to be yes and quite prevalent I can’t say that it never happens to me but I can say that it has as I said diminished very significantly in frequency duration and intensity that’s the best and I hope honest answer I can give you Charles thank you the next question is from chopped citizen would you view the internet as a large ongoing transaction of humanity perhaps a teleologic evolving interaction taking humans to the next level of enlightenment I think it’s definitely it’s definitely part of transjectivity and virtuality in general is is it possible that it could be a teal a teal logic evolving interaction yes is it so now I don’t think so I think the evidence for all the bad faith both human actors and algorithmic actors and not only individual agents but hyper agents and and and systems and networks that are pulling people away from virtue connectedness reciprocal opening wisdom I think the evidence for the prevalence perhaps even the pop pop prominence of that in the internet I think is significant and real I think you’re pointing to a genuine possibility for the internet but one that is not guaranteed and that’s where I would probably drop away from the teleologic but one that requires our response and are taking on the responsibility to make it so and that is one of the most significant moral and existential challenges facing us right now and it’s one in which I do not see the legacy religions on the whole notable exceptions of individuals my good friends Paul Van der Kley Jonathan page Oh JP Marceau but on the whole I do not see Christianity or Judaism or Islam taking up that responsibility I mean if they would take up the responsibility that I’ve just outlined to the degree intensity in which they’ve taken up other causes then I would I would soften my judgment that the legacy religions are not capable of helping us awaken from the meeting crisis all right this has been wonderful as always so rich so juicy thank you for joining me for this QQ&A it will be released as well as the one from last week on YouTube for all to watch thank you for all of the wonderful support especially from the patrons at patreon please keep going because I hope you can see that I’m doing a lot I’m keeping going and I ask you to keep up both your financial support and also your moral support and encouragement thank you so very very much thank you for your time attention and commitment take good care everyone