https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=7hk09X5D1i8
Welcome everyone to our monthly Q&A. It’s great to be here again. And I want to begin as always by thanking the Patreon community for all your support for my work. It’s much appreciated. And for the general support, many of you send me encouraging emails and comments and tweets. And it means a lot to me. It’s very helpful to me and I really appreciate it. And as always, I want to thank my good friend Amar, who’s making so much of this possible for me. And he does this out of an ever flowing river of generosity whose source is deep within his heart. And so I appreciate that greatly. So we’re going to do as we normally do, we’re going to take the questions from the patrons first and then towards the end, we’ll open it up to general questions. So the first question is from Deb, who’s a patron. Thanks Deb. I recently started from lesson one in the meditation series John recorded during the beginning of COVID. The first lesson went quite well, most comprehensive and clear instruction I’ve ever heard. And the practice went very well. The second lesson on rooting is the same high quality content. However, during the actual guided practice, I became extremely nauseated, dizzy and felt as though I was centered in a lightning bolt coming from above me through the three channels and into the ground. It remained as I sat through the entire practice, eventually dissipating an hour or so later. Curious about what to do here. Is anything needed? Will this fade? Shall I query the sensations? Thank you so much. Sincere gratitude from Idaho. So Deb, that’s a problem that often occurs to novices somewhere in the first few lessons. There’s a variety of those. There’s the lightning bolt feeling, the electrical charge feeling, the feeling of being super heated or super cold, of being really distorted or floating or sinking below the floor. With ongoing practice, these go away, especially if you treat them as just other distractions to label and return. I’m wondering if you connecting to your body in that way is perhaps something you want to examine. You might want to take up a mindfulness embodied movement practice in order to introduce mindfulness into your body in a more ecologically valid way. So later on in the series, I teach some of the movement practices, the Qigong and movement practices. You might want to take a look at those. You might want to take a look at yoga. There’s online instruction or online instruction for Tai Chi Chuan. So that might also be a way of helping. It’s likely that at some other point in the practice, you might have other odd experiences that are going to happen to you. And again, generally, they are modified and ameliorated if we just gently keep going on the practice and treat them as distractions and also if we complement a seated practice with some kind of moving practice. Okay. So I hope that’s helpful to you, Deb. It’s a very good question. One of the things I regularly do is warn people who are taking up an extensive and I mean both in terms of the amount of material and also the amount of time and extensive mindfulness practice is that there’s a chance, a relatively significant chance that they will hit these kinds of very odd experiences. And the two things that you want to avoid are treating them as an indication of some movement towards insanity or pathology or treating them as indication that you’re about to achieve enlightenment. So those are the two things and people can get spun off in that in very powerful ways that are deleterious. Both of those are deleterious to the practice. So the next is a question from Dan, who’s a really wonderful supporter. I get to have some amazing conversations with Dan, mind-blowing conversations with Dan. So thank you very much, Dan, for your support. So he writes, the meaning crisis is particularly evident in the domain of work and business with corporations literally using the model of a corpse or a zombie. Yes, I know. There is a massive focus on effort, sorry, there is a massive focus of effort on applications of cognitive science to IT and automation while people have been largely forgotten and left behind by the AI race. Since business organization is an expression of the creative process, do you have any ideas on how to introduce cog-sci, relevance realization, salience, ways of knowing, and orders, etc. to a self-organizing community of people seeking to cultivate a more meaningful business enterprise? Yes, Dan. So I’m engaged in that project right now, and I don’t mean at just a theoretical level. Currently, the Vervecki Foundation is working with a business, and the business approached me, and not, I mean, I get approached by business people all the time from an exploitative mode, which is I want to be able to use your stuff to make more money, and I generally just ignore those people. But the individual who reached out to me, I won’t mention names, but they, very good faith, have excellent conversations, a deep and true interest in cognitive science, generally impressed by all of this, and they were already configuring their business in an important way to try to create, let’s say this, this is clearly and explicitly the case. The idea of working with the culture of business communities was central to their project, and they’re continuing to develop that, and they want the cog-sci to help them to develop that. So we’re trying right now to, we’re in a long and ongoing, fruitful and friendly discussion about how to carry out that kind of integration, how to take all of this material and integrate it with a business model and a business whose job it is to go in and help the culture of other businesses in such a way that their goals of being a business, but also of improving business culture, and our goal, the Breveki Foundation’s goal of trying to address the meaning crisis can come into a creative and mutually rewarding coordination and synthesis. So I don’t have any specific thing to say right now, Dan, but what I hope I’ll be able to do down the road is as this project’s unfold, we’ll have some very practical practices in order to try and bring about exactly the internalization of these issues into business communities and cultures that you’re asking about. So I know that’s a bit of a kicking the can down the road, but what I’m saying is this issue is very, very important to me, and I’m trying to actually put something into practice as a really online, you know, boots on the ground, trying to get this question addressed and see how what needs to be done to actually make it work. And so I hope that given the reality of the situation, the good faith of all the individuals involved, that I’ll be able to give you a much more comprehensive answer down the line. So I think that’s forthcoming. The next is from Rachel Hayden, who is a patron. Thank you, Rachel. Hello, I hope you’re feeling well this month. A little bit better. Thank you. After last month’s Q&A, I happened upon Peterson and Seligman’s character strengths and virtues. Yes. When it comes to choosing virtue to develop in oneself and in communities of practice, would this be a good list to start from? I’m having some difficulty knowing where to start giving all of world traditions. Any advice for beginners? Thank you. I could also submit this question as a pen pal level question on Patreon, but I’m not sure where to send those to or am I supposed to wait for an email? This is fine. I’m glad you brought it here, Rachel, because I’d like to share it with everybody. The Peterson and Seligman is an excellent place to start, but then you also should take a look at the work by Schwartz and Sharp, especially the work on personal virtue, because they have a criticism of Seligman and Peterson, Peterson and Seligman, which is similar to a criticism that you might have heard me make elsewhere, which is the problem with what Peterson and Seligman do is they give you a list of features, a feature list. The problem there is, and this is why I think both Schwartz and Sharp are very on about this, which is the problem with that is they don’t tell us how to apply the list. What do I mean by that? One of the significant issues that comes up is how do you select which virtue to apply within a particular context? When there’s a potential conflict of virtues, how do you resolve that conflict? When there’s a virtue missing, how do you go about getting clear about how that virtue should be cultivated? One of the points here is that in addition to what I’ll do Schwartz and Sharp and then I’ll give you my take on it, in addition to whatever virtues you’re cultivating, I think that list is a good list to start with, but in addition to whatever virtues you’re starting with, you need to also be paying very special attention to the meta-virtue of wisdom, which is the virtue of trying to decide which virtue is relevant here, which virtue has more priority. They give many examples where the virtues come into conflict. They give the example of, you’re in a wedding party and the potential bride is trying on dresses and you’re running out of time and she asks how does a particular dress look? What’s important here? Kindness, honesty, rationality. Well, you might say, well, maybe not rationality. This is a romantic context, but maybe it is. It’s kindness, honesty. Now, they’re using that as it’s a fairly innocuous example so that people don’t get all bound up in the content. What they’re trying to show is in many life situations, we are bound to encounter these kinds of what’s the virtue I should be applying here? And if multiple virtues are coming up, which one should I prioritize? And so those overarching skills of wisdom I think are very important. That’s what they argue. I would go stronger. I think that every virtue not only needs to be consulting the meta-virtue of wisdom, every virtue should see itself as a way of being wise in a particular situation. And this goes to Aristotle’s distinction between Sophia and Phronesis. Freia is the grasp of universal principles of how to behave. And then Phronesis is your context sensitivity, how to apply it. And the wise person has it. Both of these words translate as wisdom. And the wise person is capable of doing that. So one way I do this is in this situation, what virtue should I be enacting? Well, what virtue is actually making me be most wise in this situation, giving me the most discernment and disclosing to me what’s most relevant or appropriate in this situation? And what is plugging into my sense of that I’ve integrated, I’ve sort of stacked the four kinds of knowing and they’re all resonating together. And I’m also resonating very well with the situation. I’m on guard especially well for the potential for self-deception, etc. So I tend to strengthen a little bit and say, well, what’s being wise in this situation? What virtue would give me the most insight into this situation while keeping me the most dynamically integrated within? Is it kindness here? Is it honesty? Is it courage? Is it rationality? Is it justice, etc.? So that’s how I would answer your question. A great list to start with, but I think putting the meta-virtue, Schwarz and Sharpe argue, of wisdom on top of it is very important. And then I argue that for a more almost Socratic vision that every virtue is a species of wisdom. As I often say, virtue is the beauty of wisdom and trying to see how that beauty of wisdom can be enacted in a particular context is what guides me in making those kinds of decisions. So I hope that was helpful, Rachel. So Kelly Myers is a patron. Thank you, Kelly. Asked a very long and extensive question with multiple parts. And for the sake of time, I’m not going to read it all because it’s quite long. But I’m going to basically summarize it in that Kelly was interested in a non-anthropocentric understanding of spirituality and perhaps virtue and meaning. So we are, of course, we have become incredibly aware of the dangers. And this is perennial, of egocentrism to a wise and virtuous life. But in the area of the Anthropocene, we are increasingly becoming aware of a species-centric, an anthropocentric understanding of meaning and value and virtue and spirituality that may be anachronistic because of the way in which we are coming to understand scientifically how embedded, how deeply, deeply ecological we are. And of course, how we’re coming to understand both scientifically and politically how threatened we are by not having a right relationship. And spirituality is ultimately about right relationship. We don’t have a right relationship with other sentient beings. The ecology broadly construed as the life system that is comprehensive throughout the planet, the mega or meta ecology, as people talk about it. And I think this is an excellent point. I think the cognitive science clearly points us in that direction. I think our current crisis points us in that direction. And so what I can say is I am reading on this. I’ve been reading books on what’s called spiritual ecology. I’m reading, you know, I’m going to be reading with Dan Schiappi, my very good friend Dan Schiappi, Timothy Morton’s work on being ecological. Some of the most cutting edge speculative metaphysics coming out of what’s called object oriented ontology, et cetera, and how that bears upon our relationship to ecology and how that bears upon the ecology is an example of what Morton calls hyper objects. And hyper objects are things that are best grasped by distributed cognition. And then what we need, there’s a spirituality there because we have to engage and activate distributed cognition and then put it into right relationship with that hyper object. And of course, that is going to have an important spiritual dimension about that. What does that mean? I don’t have an answer yet about that, Kelly, but I’m giving you where my thinking is at and what I’m undertaking to do to try and be able to say something that I hope is insightful and helpful about that in the future. So I hope that was helpful, Kelly. So now there’s a question from an anonymous patron. Thank you. What kind of adjustments, changes can clinical therapy mainstream CBT make to keep up with current times and modern crisis? So there’s quite a few. Sorry, and that’s not to diss CBT. CBT, although this is declining, still is one of those evidence-based therapies around. And we should pay attention to the fact that it’s declining. The more recent measures of its efficaciousness are not as good as they used to be. And that’s probably because CBT, the first and second generations were taught by people who were trained in other, what do I want to call them, homing orientations, like a psychodynamic approach or an existential approach. And therefore, there was not just the techniques of CBT, there was the techniques of CBT set into a much more comprehensive skill set for tapping into procedural, perspectival, and participatory transformation. And so one of that leads into my first proposal. My first proposal is CBT needs to enrich itself by setting itself back into a much more comprehensive set of practices that are about addressing the cultivation of skills and virtue of altered states of consciousness and of aspirational transformation of our sense of self and identity, the whole agent arena relationship. And there is a ready way of doing that. CBT basically abstracted most of its techniques out of stoicism explicitly. That’s acknowledged. What we could do or should be done is resituate CBT techniques back into the more comprehensive spirituality and philosophy as a way of life of stoicism, in which we are not responding merely to ways in which people are pathological. We are responding to the human need for existential growth and development, the cultivation of wisdom, and the development of those virtues that will allow us to respond, well, in a virtuous fashion, to the challenges we face. I think the movement to integrate CBT also with mindfulness practices is a very good idea. However, I strongly recommend that we don’t take the mindfulness version of mindfulness that is coming into North America and being increasingly commodified and reduced to sets of practices that will make you accept the horrible job that you’re living in. And Teasdale, I think, points to this. If we’re going to integrate mindfulness practices into CBT, we need to integrate the living ecology of mindfulness practices with CBT. And then I think there should be an indication of other aspects of the human processing that should be reintegrated into CBT. I’m thinking of other things that have good evidence-based behind them, for example, emotion-focused therapy, which seems to be a very powerful and good complement to CBT. So I’m very interested in this emerging modality, internal family systems theory, and I think that might be relevant, too. But I think the main moves I could recommend is resituate CBT within a practice, ecology of practices, called Stoicism, a philosophy as a way of life, integrate mindfulness, especially an ecology of practices of mindfulness, and perhaps pay attention at least to integrating aspects of emotion-focused therapy. I think also, and you already see this beginning in some aspects of emotion-focused therapy, like empty chair techniques, bringing in a dialogical discourse aspect to our therapeutic interventions would also be very good. Okay, I hope that was helpful. So, and now Rob Gray, who’s a patron, he’s a very good friend of mine, and he’s a very good I got to have a couple of meetings with Rob this week, and they were joyful. Well, was it this week, or over the last week or so, and they were joyful, and I thank Rob for that, and I thank him for his encouragement, his enthusiasm, and also his ongoing support. Like I keep saying it, having Rob in my community is a gift, and I am continuing to do that. And I think that’s a great thing, and I think that’s a great thing, and I think that’s a great Having Rob in my community is a gift, and I am continually grateful for that. So here’s his questions. It seems like some amount of isolation separation is necessary for growth, and some amount of connection and contact are required for flourishing. I’m curious if there’s a good minimum of each a person or group should aim for it, or if you’ve noticed people or groups are good about striking a balance between these two orientations. Yeah, so that, oh, this has been on my mind off and on throughout the years because I was deeply impressed by this triangle of Jung, Tillich, and Buber, where of course, sorry, I actually, I would want to put Corban in there, but Corban wasn’t original in there for me, but he’s now in there too. But so in Jung, you have an emphasis on individuation, and in Buber, you have, of course, an emphasis on participation. And of course, what we know is there was a debate between them. There was a debate between them in that Buber was very critical of Jung. They basically accused Jung of Gnosticism, which is true, but it’s not quite clear why it’s a criticism. But part of what Buber was criticizing is that Jung was really significantly missing the existential aspects of human spirituality, to put a useless word on it. And so I think that there’s something to that, and I forget the name of the person who wrote it. I think it’s the, there’s a very good book on the Jung-Buber debate and showing how both sides were making very legitimate criticism. And then for me, behind that was Tillich, and Tillich was the person consistently arguing that human beings are constantly pulled between these poles of individuation and participation. And then for me, the answer to that, this isn’t going to surprise people in some ways, but it surprised me when it happened. The answer to that, because I didn’t see it initially, the answer to, I found the answer to that in Plato. Because what Plato argues, and I’ve made the same argument around the idea of anagogy, is that the internal direction of cultivating internal justice, getting all the parts of the psyche to coordinate and cooperate for the most mutual internal flourishing and the outward project of participating as deeply as we can in the real patterns of reality, that they are actually not, although they pull us in different directions, as Tillich says, and put attention in our being, they nevertheless are not independent. And Plato’s idea is when the individuation project is not being pursued, we experience inner conflict, and inner conflict really distorts our external vision. And that’s deleterious. And the opposite, right, so if we’re pursuing, if we’re trying to participate without achieving some kind of rational inner peace, then we’re liable to engage in all kinds of horrible projection and get caught up in reciprocal narrowing, et cetera. But Plato also sought the other. If you just do the internal thing, we’re not going to be able to do the internal thing, but Plato also sought the other. If you just do the internal thing, right, if you just, as he would put it, internal justice, and you don’t care about external justice, you’re going to ultimately give in to some of the greatest biasing factors there are in human cognition, egocentrism, my side bias, confirmation bias, that aren’t going to really be terrifically challenged by your completely internal move. That’s why I’m always suspicious of people who tell me it’s all just in your own consciousness. Maybe so, but that’s not saying I have the capacity to properly access it. I mean, you know, we do acknowledge, for example, that chimpanzees are wickedly intelligent. That doesn’t mean they’re capable of generating the appropriate theory of their own intelligence. So simply possessing a property does not guarantee the right ability to articulate and access it. And so the idea is what you need is you need to properly coordinate these so that you are cycling between them. And I think the group in history that got really good at that, Robert, were the Neoplatonists, because the psychotechnology, in fact, the meta-psychotechnology, or dialectic, is about both this vertical alignment within oneself, right, and with the levels of reality, and the external interaction with another who represents the otherness, the outside my egocentrism aspects of reality in cooperation with me. So the vertical and the horizontal aspects are supposed to be clicked together so that anagogy occurs. They mutually reinforce and support each other so that the individuation and participation aspects are appropriately in coordination. So I’m starting to craft the argument that the groups, the current dialogical groups, and I’ve mentioned that they’re all in emergence, that, and I’m looking at them and often doing participant observation, and I’m trying to see those groups that are trying to strike that balance in the way that it was struck within Neoplatonism and the practice of dialectic, and trying to use that as a justified metric for evaluating the degree to which these groups are most capable of affording flourishing in reality. So that would be my answer, Rob. I hope you found that helpful. The next question is Tostitos, who’s a patron, and thank you very much for your patronage. Can dreams be considered as symbolic processing? Can there be any insight generation within dream content itself that is not just due to awake interpretation of them? Does dream function contribute to getting wiser with or without awake analysis? That’s a really good question. So there’s a very interesting, and I keep dipping into a check to see how it’s going, debate going on about dream and if the function of the dream is more in the process or more in the content, and then there’s the specific. So what you get is some pretty clear evidence that REM dreaming, but also to some degree daydreaming, but REM dreaming is conducive to insight. But the problem with that is it doesn’t tell you, again, is it the process or the fact that REM dreaming is really disruptive of your normal processing and when you engage, when you wake up and you have to re-assimilate the weirdness, perhaps by trying to interpret your dream, that’s actually where the insight is afforded. Why might you think that? Because there’s overwhelming good evidence that incubation isn’t about passing information to your unconscious where your unconscious works on it and comes up with an amazingly brilliant answer because you have an internal genius. What the evidence seems to show is incubation, it works by getting you moderately distracted from the problem, not completely distracted because then you’ll lose touch with it, but distracted enough that it’s no longer your focal vision and then what starts to happen is it gets more flexible, malleable, and then when you return to it, that allows you to reframe it and that affords the insight. And there’s increasing evidence supporting that view. So that would suggest that it’s mostly the process. And for a long time, I thought the evidence was moving that way. Why? Because, again, insight seems to be largely driven by not the propositional content but by the procedural processing. So all of this was converging on this. But then you got something really interesting that came out that, you know, because reality is always more interesting than our fantasies about it, which means we pay a price for that, which is that reality can horrify us, which is that lucid dreaming is very conducive, it seems, to insight. And it seems like in lucid dreaming, people do have the insight experience within the dream space. And so it could be possible that it’s the being in an alternative space, in an alternative identity that’s adjacently possible to your waking identity, that that is, and that you’re in lucid dreaming, you’re confronting alternative perspectives, that that is a rich enough environment that it can be triggering a needed insight. So I definitely think dreams are symbolic processing. I used to think that, well, it was actually a bit of attention in me because I used to, I’d come to the conclusion that it was the act of interpretation that was crucial. And in that sense, I jumped off the Jungian train, although just like Plato is my first philosopher, Jung is my first psychologist. But notice what that doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean I stopped doing dream work. It means that, in fact, it says interpreting my dreams is the most important aspect of dream work. So that didn’t really disrupt the symbolic work around dreams. But I got interested in the possibility that the dream world itself might be a place like a church is a place for sacredness and transformation or a cathedral. It might be a place that has a numinous quality to it that could be particularly conducive to a certain kind of insight. But the problem I face is my mortality. I’m getting older and my attempts to try and trigger. So when I started doing all of these practices, I went through Jungian therapy and I was also doing all this meditation and that combination. I was having lucid dreams all the time. And then I added in the lucid dream techniques. It was very powerful for me. And then it sort of drifted away because I got taken up in another ecology of practices that were really important and also a marriage and things like that. But then more recently, I thought I should take this practice up again of lucid dreaming. And I’ve been doing all of the triggers and all of the things. And I did it very diligently and religiously. Sometimes my otherwise deleterious, sadistic superego is very helpful for me in that if I take on a plan, it will often keep me to that plan. And I did it and I did it and I did it and I had like one or two lucid dreams as where when I was in my 20s, I would have had and I’m not joking, I would have had like 20, 20 in the 20s. And so and apparently as you get older, that’s liable to be the case. So I haven’t been able to because I want to I haven’t been able to answer this question for myself. I’ve tried and I put considerable effort into it. But and there isn’t enough scientific research out there to give me resolution. So what can I say in summary? I think that dreams are a symbolic process and there’s clear evidence that the interpretation of the dreams will is a very important symbolic process that can engender insight. And of course, taking that interpretation up with somebody else like within Jungian analysis and dream work together, terribly, terribly fruitful thing to do. Terrifically fruitful thing to do. Are is there insight in dreams themselves? That’s a harder question to answer. Maybe, maybe, but not not convinced yet, not convinced. Okay, so that’s that. We’ll now move on to Karima’s question. Oops, I mismoved here. There we go. Hello, Karima. Always good to have you ask a question. She’s a great supporter. Thank you for your Patreon support. So on languaging, language used as a verb. Interesting. On languaging, I relate to new language you recently offered towards the definition of mystery. Please mention again. However, I’m confused about your warning and meanings of doing magic. Perhaps imaginary and imaginal are not clear to me, especially during our sangha practices. Are not evocation, invocation, conscious co-creation with thought, for example, group universal prayer, or the Buddhist practices of deity yoga or Tonglin white magic. I feel we inhabit a gloriously magical universe. Please clarify your meaning and warning. So first of all, on mystery, I’m not quite sure what language you liked about mystery. I pointed to the fact that what mystery means is that which closes the eyes and the mouth. And that there’s sort of two dimensions to mystery. There’s the moreness. There is that which is the way things are connected in a combinatorially explosive fashion. And then there is the suchness. There is the determination. The irreplaceable uniqueness. The non-categorical, individual raw uniqueness of everything that is also mysterious. And that those two mysteries are somehow non-logically one. This is one of the great claims of, convergent claims of many of them, the mystical traditions. And insofar as we are confronting mysteries such that it affords self-reincentive independence and self-transformation, I think we could make a good case for the mystical within a naturalistic framework. So my general criticism of magic, so evocation, invocation, I think those can ultimately be understood in ways in which, within a cognitive scientific framework, ways in which we are interacting, we’re activating, accentuating, accessing our transjective relationship with reality. For example, relevance realization is transjective. The relevance of something is co-determined by me as a autopoetic thing and the environment in terms of a complex and continually reshaping thing. And so the fittedness between the environment, the affordance, is not in the environment or in me but between us. It’s not captured from a first-person perspective or a third-person perspective, but more second-person perspective. And so invocation, evocation, things like that. Insofar as they do these two things in a coupled fashion, they empower my discernment so I can see through self-deception. And they afford the disclosure of what, of real patterns that I otherwise would not be paying attention to, I think that they can be called wise practices. I take it that what generally people have meant by magic, and this is not what some of my colleagues like Junson Kim mean by magic, what people mean by magic is that there are supernatural forces at work and that they can be marshaled in a way for bringing about supra-causal effects, secret causal pathways by which events can be constrained, often for egocentric purposes. And even in the ancient world, although they weren’t talking from our naturalistic science, if you take a look within Neoplatonism, they make a distinction between theurgia and sorcery. So even though they don’t have a scientific critique, they have a rational and a moral critique, which is the mindset of sorcery is an irrational mindset. It is a mindset that puts aside the concern for self-deception, puts aside trying to fit your experience into an overarching and coherent worldview. So it fragments worldviews, it encourages self-deception, and then it’s often assimilated to egocentric and narcissistic projects. So although they didn’t make a scientific critique, they made an epistemic critique about the irrationality and they made a moral critique about the immorality of magic. So I would, I’m completely happy with those arguments about the irrationality and the immorality, and I would add to them a scientific critique in that we have to pay attention very, very carefully to the nature of the causal, the real causal patterns and the real system of constraints that we’re plugging into. I think there is a proper role for metaphysics in our worldview, and some of the work I’ve done with Greg recently, Greg Enriquez points to that, or some of the discussions I’ve had with Paul VanderKlay or Jonathan Paget. We had an interesting discussion, Paul and JP Morceau and I about miracles. And it was interesting in that discussion that we got to a point where I asked them, I asked them, is the placebo effect a miracle? And what was interesting for me as an outsider to their shared Christian tradition is they split on the answer. JP seemed to be pretty clear, although I’m opening him, JP is a friend, and I don’t want to put words in his mouth, he may have changed his mind upon reflection, and I’m hoping to hear that. So I’m reporting what happened at the time. He said no, it’s not. And Paul said yes, and then he was sort of startled by it himself, and he thought about it, and then he’s come back in a couple videos and tried to explicate what he meant by it. And the fact that there is such a split between two people who are sensitive, good faith, really good faith, bright, courageous, dialogue partners, who both come from a tradition that at least officially acknowledges supernatural miracles, the fact that they split tells me that the notion is becoming an unwieldy notion when we talk about things being magical or miraculous. And when Paul said the miraculous, what it does is it takes all the undeniable strangeness and brings it, gives it a coherent light. It’s like taking the chaotic light of ambient light and making it into a laser. A miracle takes all the weirdness and then makes it coherent for you. And then I said the problem for me for that is that Einstein did that. There was all these weird, really weird, and we forget how weird they were, anomalies from the Newtonian perspective of Brownian motion and the orbit of Mercury and all kinds of other stuff. And he took all that weirdness that just had no place within the scientific worldview of Newton and he did special and then general relativity and he brought it all together. And he did that because of his, he was in part motivated by his awe for the mysterious. Now, is that a miracle that satisfies Paul D’Effinet? And Paul was like, maybe. And then, if that’s all you, sorry, and I don’t mean to be dismissive here. If that’s all you mean by a miracle, then I think we should just drop the term out of our language and drop magic out of our language because we are, we’re doing anachronistic equivocation where we’re making use of these facts that these words used to mean something much, much more indifferent. The thing that was subject to the rational and moral critiques and subject right now to the scientific critique. And if that’s, then we should drop them out of our language and use alternative terms. And that’s why I do prefer this language of the imaginal versus the imaginary. I think the idea of the secret that if you really wish for something and send that out to the universe, the universe will respond to you, I think that’s bullshit. That’s bullshit. It’s a self-deceptive thing because of the six million people who no doubt wished with the deepest prayers and wishes that they could possibly have in the concentration camps for a miracle or some magic and it didn’t happen. And it is insensitive and cruel to pretend that we have this power when we don’t. What I want to point to is Frankl in the, in the concentration camp coming up with logotherapy and actually helping people preserve their dignity and their humanity while they’re in the concentration camp. That’s what I think we should be paying attention to. And that is imaginal. That’s not imaginary stuff. This is the use of imagery and metaphor and play to access and accentuate the transjective realities that we participate within. So, and so I think it’s very, very important to make this distinction. I understand it and I try to indicate these terms are sliding around a lot. And insofar as people are using the terms, and I’m pretty confident this is how Prima is using it, miraculous and magical universe, she’s using it because she wants to, she wants to, I’m hoping and I’m suspecting this is the she wants to conduce us into the transjective state of awe. Awe is imaginal. It is a transjective state. It is a, it is a right, something between you and reality. It is being, awe doesn’t exist in the world and it doesn’t exist in your head. It’s between you and the world. It’s a way in which you are discerning and the world is disclosing itself and both are being transformed before your eyes and a truth that is only available in such transformation is being revealed. And so insofar as we talk that way in order to conduce people into transformative awe and help them train the virtue of reverence, I’m all for that language. But for reasons that I articulated both ancient and modern or current, I thought I think we should drop that language out. I think we should drop that language out and perhaps replace it with some other language that doesn’t carry the heavy, heavy burden of history that that language does carry. Okay, we’re not going to shift to some live questions from the chat. I hope that Karima, I hope you didn’t find my answer too brusque or harsh. I was really trying to answer you comprehensively and sincerely and as insightfully as I could. So we’re shifting to live questions. I want to thank the Patreon subscribers and everyone watching right now. Your support is crucial to continuing to produce these videos and for supporting the science we’re doing to finding solutions to the meaning crisis. Noam Aronovich, any thoughts on Jewish wisdom cultivation? Yeah, I wish I knew more about it. I wish I knew more about it. I’ve read a little bit. I haven’t engaged in any practices. I’ve talked to people who do Kabbalah and the overlap between Neoplatonism and Kabbalah. But also, of course, I’m also interested in, you know, work the wisdom cultivation that’s come out of Buber and I’m doing more intense work on that right now. I’m about to read a couple of books, both at the theoretical and practical level because I want to bring that into my After Socrates series precisely because I think Buber is a direct descendant from Socrates. The existential, therapeutic, transformative, spiritual practice of dialogue, I think, is exactly what Buber is doing and that little string also is what Socrates was doing. At least I will argue that. And so those aspects of things will start to give me perhaps a little bit more of a taste. I need to know more. I’m largely ignorant and so that’s where I have to stop. I want to know more. I have a sense from the taste that I have that there’s great value there. It would be good to enter. I would like to enter into, because I do it fairly regularly with Christians. I’ve done it with really good Muslim interlocutors. I would like to do this with somebody who is interested in my work, with somebody from the Jewish tradition. That’s a great idea. I think I’d like to try and make that come about. Oh, so here’s a question from Joyce Liu. Hi, Joyce. It’s great to have a question from you. I’ve been practicing mindfulness meditation for months now. The feeling of resistance built up into anxiety which undermines the quality of my practice and causes me to procrastinate before sessions. What to do? Two things. You need to take up a moving mindfulness practice. Tai Chi Chuan, yoga, Chi Kung. Much more moving mindfulness practice. That is the way to first get you back into the flow state and a flow state for mindfulness that acts as a motivational counterbalance to the anxiety. Secondly, when your anxiety comes up, forget about doing any of the practice, even the centering and the rooting. Just start meditating directly on the feeling of resistance in your mind and body. If you’ve gotten far enough in, start applying the five factors of acquiring mindfulness. Say to yourself that you’re always already meditating because you can always already be meditating on the resistance that’s coming up. Over the last two weeks, there’s been some events in my life that have been triggering some really profound psychological processes within me. Going back to some trauma, they have been tempting me into projective irrational behavior. I have been doing and then also trying to undermine my regular practice. What I’m recommending to you, Joyce, has been especially powerful and useful to me in the last two weeks. Directing meta towards the resistance is also a useful practice. Take up a moving practice. You’re always already meditating. Go right into applying the five factors of mindfulness on the resistance feelings in your mind and your body. If that’s all you do, that’s all you do. Eventually, it will open up. Direct meta, if you can, towards it. Open up a space in which it might save yourself. Can you be other than you are? I will be other than I am so that I can hear you. Can you be other than you are and I will be other than I am so I can hear you? Give the anxiety the possibility of restructuring itself so it can talk to you with something other than the language of people. With something other than the language of pain. Hopefully, you’ll find that some helpful advice. We wrestle with things at times that they because they’re trans egoic, they tempt us with an unearned claim of authority. We have to be real. We have to pay attention that there is something that needs to be addressed and listened to. This is basically the central task of therapy. We have to listen, but we have to insist that the listening isn’t the voice of God. That it’s instead a voice that we can enter into discussion with, into dialogue with. While it insists, we counterinsist, but hopefully in a way that affords a cooperative restructuring on both poles so that a real dialogue can open up. Robert has asked a question. I hope I didn’t mispronounce your last name. Everybody mispronounces mine. Towards the end of awakening from the meaning crisis, you mentioned meta-psychology, which you plan to make a future series. Can you recommend any books or publish on this topic? I hope I can. This is going to be ruthlessly self-promotional. Christopher and I have put such a book together. It’s an anthology which we have edited and which we have contributed called Inner and Outer Dialogues, which is an anthology about the meta-psychotechnology of dialectic, a meta-psychotechnology that endangers the process of dialogos, which I argue is the needed dialectic into dialogos is the meta-psychotechnology. We need to properly access the collective wisdom of distributed cognition and transform it into the collective intelligence and transform it into the collective wisdom we need in order to collect, collate, curate, coordinate emerging ecologies and practices. Hopefully that book will become a great source of information that book will be coming out early next year. There’s an earlier book called Cohering the Integral We-Space, but I don’t think it does the job that Inner and Outer Dialogues do. And then, of course, the series that I’m talking about is called After Socrates, and taking a look at some of the emerging literature about Socratic dialogue, Gonzales’ book, Dialectic and Dialogue, Asara Abou-Rappi’s book, Socratic Ignorance and Platonic Wisdom, Christopher Moore’s book, Socratic Self-Knowledge. Those are excellent books for really appreciating the depth of dialectic into dialogos. But hopefully my book, well, our book, not just Chris and I, but all of the wonderful contributors like Greg Enriquez and Paul VanderKlay, and Sevilla King and Thomas and Elizabeth, Laman, I can’t remember everybody, Ali from Rebel Wisdom. It’s just ah, the book exemplifies what it is calling us to. And hopefully the book will serve to call people to the vocation of dialectic into dialogos. Here’s another question, and it’s going to be the last question for today. It’s from They Call Me Ken, and the question is, What technologies can John recommend for hacking the umvelt or the realm of immediate felt experience? So there’s a practice that, well, there’s many practices. I think getting into embodied flow states like Tai Chi Chuan are very important for that. But there’s also a practice from the Epicurean tradition, the savoring practice, which I think is really, really important for doing that. It’s often done best when you’re walking in nature. And so what you want to do is you want to first try and sort of silence, create a silence. Try and find a space between the sentences and scenes within so you’re not tempted to look within. Try and find that space, and then open that spaciousness outward. You’re trying to get a salient inversion so the external world is way more salient to you than the internal world. And you have to practice that for a bit until that silence sort of catches. And then you want to open yourself up. You want to open up the bottom-up perception, and you want to just start noticing all the rhythms and the textures that are around you, all the patterns that are unfolding. And then you also want to bring in a top-down aspect, all the patterns that you’re aware of, not because you can see them, but because you’re aware of them mentally. This is called prehension. They’re perhaps more comprehensive or more abstract. And the way in which that mind is helping you seek out and notice more perceptual patterns, and you want that to be flowing back and forth. And so what’s happening is you start to just become aware of around you all the patterns of intelligibility, but not abstract. You’re trying to not be abstract when I talk about that prehension. What you’re trying to do is use that capacity of your mind to rise up, to open up the space in which all of these experiences, all these patterns of experiencing, of sense-making, all the texture gradients, all the rhythms, all the layerings of texture and rhythm, and the way in which they’re all making sense to you. There’s a musicality to it, and you want to just sink in, soak up that musicality, almost as if you’re going to sing yourself into it, and then just open and then put yourself into like a state of wonder. You’re opening yourself up to implicit learning. There’s more patterns than I’m aware of, and that’s the prehensiveness aspect. There’s more patterns than I’m aware of. There’s more patterns than I’m aware of, and I’m opening myself up as you continue to walk, and you’ll find that you are diving very deeply into felt experience, and the felt realness that’s at the heart of felt experience, and the felt peace, the felt joy, the pure joy of pure being will be available to you. Because in the end, that’s what the Epicureans are about, coming to realize that after our basic needs are met, all we really want is ataraxia. We want a freedom. We want that pure joy of being to flood our being. So thank you all for joining me for this Q&A. We’re doing this every third Friday of the month through December. We’ll be moved, so follow me on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, or subscribe here to be notified. Things are going to move around a bit in December because it’s December, and the world does this wonderful sort of crazy collective insanity that are the holidays, and I like it. And so please be patient and more flexible during December. I want to thank all the supporters over Patreon. You can support my work on the Meaning Crisis at patreon.com slash John Rovecki, all in one word. We have our final Saturday Sangha tomorrow. So we were doing the weekday meditating with John Rovecki. That course finished. We then moved to the regular Saturday cultivating wisdom with John Rovecki. And that’s going to come to a close this Saturday at 10 a.m. Eastern Time. But all of the classes and all of the sits and all the Q&A and all the discussion, it’s all on YouTube. It’s all there, all there for free, and I hope you’ll find it useful and valuable. And I want finally, once again, to thank my dear friend Amar, and I hope to see you all next month. We’re still living in dangerous times, but as Bruce Coburn said, we can be lovers in a dangerous time, not just romantic lovers, but philosophical lovers of wisdom and virtue. Take good care, everyone. I’ll see you next month.