https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Nuj7VlT6Oo0
Welcome everyone to our monthly Q&A. We’re a little bit earlier this month than normal because I’m gonna be taking a couple of weeks off in December, sort of unplugging as much as I possibly can. So I hope this isn’t inconvenient for any of you and for those of you who are here, thank you for joining. So we’re gonna do the usual format. We will take questions from the patrons. And once again, I wanna thank all the patrons for their support. As I repeatedly say, I’m not deriving any income from this. All of that money goes towards supporting science, running experiments, and that this is happening, and to helping to finance the projects, the videos, et cetera. So thank you very much for that support. It’s much appreciated, it’s much needed. And if I forget at the end, I wanna wish everybody happy holidays and the best possible balance, maybe I’ll say optimal grip between safety and security on one hand and celebration and the spirit of the season on the other. So after we do the questions from the patrons, we will then at the end have a couple of questions, perhaps usually it’s two or three from the online chat. So let’s begin with an excellent question from an ongoing patron and supporter. She supports also with comments and encouragement and interaction, and this is Crema Cynthia Clayton. And her question is one that resonates very deeply with me at this time. Well, I’ll read the question, then I’ll explain why it’s resonating for me. And I’m not sure I’ll be able to give what sort of a conclusive answer. I wanna give a somewhat exploratory answer. So Crema begins, the word supernatural is problematic for me. Scientific investigation of the laws of nature is constantly expanding, and what is supernatural at one time is soon proven understandable. I prefer super mundane when speaking of speculative existence tucked within layers behind the visible universe. Supernatural seems inaccurate and debasing to describe the ineffable. Transjective practice like meta reaching into the beyond with awe and openness is a beyond non-natural for us, though initially perhaps it seemed supernatural. How do we define natural in these accelerating and revelatory times? So this question is deeply resonant with me. As many of you know, I’ve been having an ongoing discussion, actually more than discussion, often genuine dialogs with Paul VanderKlay, JP Marceau, Jonathan Pajot around sort of a family of issues that this points to. Because I also find the notion of the supernatural problematic, not only for scientific reasons but also in terms of, so many people say, well, science isn’t committed to a particular metaphysics. That’s not true. I mean, I understand what people are meaning by that is that you can, you know, science is a practice and the practice can work within various different metaphysics, I think that’s totally right. And that’s a legitimate point, and I acknowledge it. But on the other hand, science depends on, and I think Nicholas Maxwell makes this argument very well, but it’s an ancient argument. Science depends on the presupposition of the intelligibility of nature. And then once you get the intelligibility of nature, you get linkages to the idea of, well, what we want when we talk about intelligibility is we want something that’s rationally clear, potentially rationally explainable. And then you get arguments from Spinoza and onward that it doesn’t make sense to talk about two separate systems of intelligibility because then the relationship between them is non-intelligible. And therefore, if reality is ultimately intelligible, then that relationship, if it’s not intelligible, is not real. You see, it’s not, there’s deeply, there’s deep epistemological and ontological assumptions behind the practice of science. Now, again, I agree with Karima, and I agree with the people who make that criticism to me, and they say, well, we’re constantly rewriting our physics and our metaphysics, and that’s right, that’s correct. But the history, and so now I’m switching from an a priori argument based on the nature of intelligibility to an inductive argument. The history of science has been one in which, as we unpack things, we have not come across something that has led to a conclusion of an ontological bifurcation of nature so that there’s something that is accessible to science, and then there’s something that is, I wanna be careful here, because there are things that are in a sense are inaccessible to science because the scientific methodology can’t be applied to them, but that there’s an aspect of reality that could turn out to be inconsistent, incommensurable in its intelligibility with respect to what science is making intelligible and understood. So what that is a long way of saying is, I think there are deep connections between science as a practice and what’s called a monism, a view that reality is ultimately in some fundamental way one. And that of course goes back to Parmenides, and it is deeply through the neoplatonic traditions, which means it’s also been for long periods of time, millennia in fact, been invested with spiritual depth so that we had a sense of spirituality that was not involved with the supernatural. The supernatural of course originally didn’t mean what it has come to mean today, which is another world operating with an intelligibility and orders and laws, somehow distinct and different and incommensurable with our own. And originally what supernatural meant was literally was just above the natural world where the natural world was the world that we experience as constantly changing in our sense experience. And then aspects of the world that were nonchanging, that were eternal, not in the sense of being everlasting, but timeless like the laws of nature. So a neoplatonist would look at E equals MC squared and say, that’s supernatural because it’s not natural because it’s not an event. It’s not unfolding in a place. It’s not part of the natural world. It’s supernatural. Of course we would say, that’s ridiculous. It’s not supernatural because E equals MC squared is part of fundamental physics, is part of science, part of the scientific worldview. So I think the modern notion of the word supernatural unlike the ancient notion where it actually comes from, I can’t see how to reconcile it with both the neoplatonic heritage that is the grammar of our spirituality and the scientific worldview, including technology. And I’ll keep saying people who claim to not believe in science and then live their lives in wrapped in technology and their vocabulary permeated and pregnant with the vocabulary of technology are being disingenuous. I don’t think they’re being like malicious, but they don’t realize what they’re saying. And so for that reason, I have come like many people within cognitive science, for example, I reject supernaturalism. And of course that has come out in discussions I’ve had with JP and Paul about miracles. But it’s also come out on the other hand with discussions I’ve been having, especially with Jordan Hall about a reinventio of sacredness also with Andrew Sweeney and Christopher Mastipietro and Gaisence Stock and Greg Enriquez. So I think the word, what I’m saying is I think the word supernatural does more harm than good, both with respect to spirituality, at least our own spiritual cultural cognitive grammar. Cause I agree with first class that it is primarily and fundamentally neoplatonic. And it is at odds with the worldviews of Buddhism and Taoism that don’t make that kind of distinction. And it’s at odds with the fundamental presuppositions of the practice of science. So let’s put it aside. I like what Karima proposes, the supramundane where the mundane means what is disclosed to us in by our everyday consciousness, in our everyday common sense. And I think the task of science is often to challenge. I often teach science as the task of challenging the obviousness of common sense in order to disclose something that is beyond the everyday world. So I think that’s a great term, Karima. I sometimes use the word extra ordinary in order to convey the same thing with putting a little hyphen in to remind people what the word originally meant. We take all the words for depth of realness, like veritable or verily, and then we turn them into intensifiers, very. Really went from having to do with reality to just being an intensifier. We’re even doing it with the word literally as I often complain. And we’ve also done it with extraordinary. Extraordinary just means so, wow, that was really unexpected, which is not what extraordinary originally meant. So I think we do need terms for exactly your third point, which is when we’re engaged in transjective practices, especially those that afford self-transcendence and transformation, we need terms that point us beyond the mundane, the everyday life, the ordinary, the obvious, because that is precisely what we are in a very deep way trying to transcend. If you don’t think there are deep connections between the ego and everyday obviousness, I think perhaps you should go back and reflect and read more deeply about what the ego is. So that’s why people also try to use terms like transpersonal and trans-egoic to try and convey all of this. So we wanna be able to talk, I sometimes talk about a trans world, which is not another world, but it is seeing deeply in this world. So we see through to it, to aspects of reality and states of being for ourselves that have not yet been actualized or fully realized by us. And that picks up on Ursula Goodenough’s idea about transcendence into rather than transcendence above. All of this goes towards my deep and abiding concern about trying to exact spirituality from a two worlds mythology that puts it ultimately in conflict with a scientific worldview. And as I’ve tried to argue with our own spiritual heritage. So now to the difficult question with all of that as the precursor background, how do you define natural in these accelerating and revelatory times? So for me, I define natural as a conception of reality as fundamentally intelligible and where that intelligibility is bound up with rational self-criticism and rational self-transcendence. So the natural world would therefore never be, I wanna be very careful here. It will never be one that invokes forces or revelation from a supernatural domain. Natural is, I think what people are ultimately committing to naturalism is that all of our previous intelligibility may be significantly revised. I think of Kuhn and scientific revolution, but we will be able to revise it. We will either realize that was actually not true or we will realize, ah, this is, we thought it was true in this way, but it turned out to be true this way. What naturalism is, if I would put it in a slogan, is that there will be an ongoing epistemological monism that will always come into a greater and greater conformity. This is asymptotic. This is like Pierce’s notion of convergence, right? That we will have an epistemological monism that progressively but continually comes more and more into conformity with a metaphysical monism. That’s what I take natural to mean. And anything that wants to monkey with that and say, no, no, outside of that and claim special authority, special privilege, claim special substances and forces that whose intelligibility is in principle not accessible to our best efforts at rational intelligibility, that’s what we reject. And then you may say, but that could all, everything could turn out to be false. Yes, it could. Yes, it could. But that’s equally to all of our supernatural considerations, right? Once you adopt, like I’m really, hmm, I’m really critical in the philosophical sense of people that adopt lopsided Cartesian skepticism that bring out full blown Cartesian skepticism against science and then completely let it go when they turn to religion or they turn to their parapsychological pseudo metaphysical theories. Either apply it or don’t. Right, and if you apply it, good luck because you’re gonna get into skeptical solipsism that’s gonna degenerate into an unlivable, unviable nihilism. And then if you say, okay, that’s not the standard I’m gonna use then, use a consistent standard throughout. And I’ve tried to offer alternatives. I’ve tried to offer the idea of systematic and reliable overcoming of self-deception as a better and more livable and helpful conception of rationality. So the natural world is the whole world. But we have to understand that it’s not finished and it’s never going to be finished because of the inexhaustible nature, notice the word, of reality. When I say nature, notice what I mean. I mean the intelligible whiteness of it. Naturalism is the claim that the rational progression of our epistemology will continue to be a monism that tracks forever, but increasingly better, that tracks a metaphysical monism. That’s how I would define the natural. Okay, so the second question is from an anonymous patron. Thank you very much. Besides Socratic questioning, how does one handle transitioning from the demolishing and debunking argument frame to the dialogous frame when interacting with family, friends, or coworkers who are unfamiliar with your work in everyday life? So in the anthology that’s coming out, hopefully next year, it’s at the publishers right now, that is co-edited by my dear friend, my brother, Christopher Master Pietro, right? And we both have written and contributed to it. There is, I’ve written a passage where I’ve tried to lay out sort of a pedagogical program for how you get into dialectic and the dialogous. Dialectic is the process, sorry, dialectic is the practice, dialogous is the process that is realized within it. Just like there’s a relationship between we communicate in order to come into communion, that’s the parallel. And so there is a progression, a pedagogical progression that people need to move through in order to get to the place where they can enter into dialectic and to theologos. I mean, so they need to do mindfulness practice, they need to get into practices that enable them to shift from adversarial serosom processing into the beginnings of authentic relating, and from there they can go into circling practices, they need things like philosophical fellowship to then get the intimacy not only to be interpersonal intimacy but interontological intimacy so that they’re not only falling in love with other human beings, which is deeply important, but they’re also falling in love with reality again. And then after philosophical fellowship, you can move into, I would argue, dialectic and to theologos. But that transitional step is the one that the patron is specifically asking about. I wanna, there’s a growing library of books, and so I’m not gonna give you an exhaustive, I’m just gonna present three books about what you can do from your side. And these books are good because they pick up on an analogy that I think is deeply right, deeply correct, which is the martial art analogy and how we’re training a mind, we’re training a transformation of mind and body. So the first is this one, verbal judo. The second is verbal Aikido. And then the third is nonviolent communication. So taking up this ecology of practices, there’s a bunch of them and they fit together nicely. You get the two, of course, have the explicit martial art theme, but of course, both judo and especially Aikido, come with the commitment to nonviolent self-defense. And then that’s of course here. And then I would recommend you take a good look at Peter Lindbergh’s anti-debate as a practice, which is incorporated by the way into dialectic. And I thank Peter for that. In the anti-debate practice, what you do is, you go like this, you state something, and before I disagree with you, I have to repeat it back to you until you acknowledge that I have understood you. And only then am I allowed to offer a criticism. And when I make my criticism, you cannot just react to it. You have to first state it back to me until I acknowledge that you have understood me and you do that. You can then take that, and there’s a couple of videos that I put on my channel, Edwin Rocha’s idea of sort of empathy circling, which he specifically uses in order to help people transition from adversarial interaction to opponent processing. Let’s remember the difference between that. So in adversarial, I disagree with you in order to destroy you because it’s a zero-sum game, and I wanna take everything and not share with you at all, or share with you as minimally as I possibly can get away with, okay? In opponent processing, which is taken from biology, rather than the courtroom, what opponent processing says is, well, if I’m gonna self-correct, what I need is somebody who to some degree opposes me, but is in fellowship with me because they’ll be committed to the fact that I am also a good source of self-correction for them. And then we will mutually enter into self-correction with each other, and we will hopefully also share insights that come together. And so when you do these practices of the anti-debate, and then empathy circling, then what you start to get is you start to get that, these give people a taste and a way of how to get into, right, how to get into opponent processing rather than adversarial processing. And then once they get there, then they start to taste what can be actualized more in circling, and then that can be actualized in philosophical fellowship and then dialectic into dialogus. But these three books, right, are about what you need to do individually in order to get the set of skills in order to enter into the anti-debate and in order to enter into something like empathy circling, or to put it more broadly, in order to try and transform adversarial processing into opponent processing in a way that makes it attractive. Now, I wonder, the last thing that my friends would call me is an optimist or an idealist. I’m under no delusion, you’re gonna meet the inevitable digging their heel assholes. That’s not gonna go away, but you are gonna meet them regardless. I mean, and Marcus Aurelius talks about that. He says, begin every day realizing that you’re gonna meet some people like that, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Your obligation, your moral obligation is to yourself to maintain the dignity of your own rationality and to offer a genuine attractive option to take up real rationality as opposed to pseudo rationality to others. And Plato makes the same argument. You know, you’re gonna always meet people who are interested in phileia and Ikea, the love of victory, rather than phileia Sophia, the love of wisdom. But what you, the responsibility you have, the inward responsibility to yourself is to always practice phileia Sophia. And the outward one is to always offer the attractive livable option to others of being able to undertake phileia Sophia with you and transition out of phileia and Ikea. And some people you meet will take that up. And you won’t know ahead of time, it’s been my experience, which of the people that are currently adversarial to you will be able to shift because you don’t know their situation. You don’t know their trauma. You don’t know their fears. You don’t know their insecurities. You don’t know their greed. Right, and you also don’t know certain aspects in yourself that might be preventative, right? So the best thing to do is to train like an athlete, athloid, the great feats, right? That’s what athletics originally meant. Train like a martial artist, your skills. Enter into the pedagogy. Try to get a set of transitional skills. You’ve got, right, the verbal, right, martial arts. And then you’re gonna move into anti-debate or empathy circling practices, but you’re gonna learn the skill of transitioning from adversarial processing into opponent processing in a way that makes it mutually attractive. And then perhaps that will lead people into taking up circling and then so on and so forth. So that’s how I would answer that question. I think it’s an excellent question. It takes, I keep coming back to it. I keep reflecting on the pedagogical program and here’s where the influence of Zach Stein, right, about education as enculturation is, and I wanna talk to Zach again, is becoming really, really central to me. Okay, so another, this is, you know, this is, this is, you know, there’s moments when I’m doing these Q&As that I, I actually put my phone up, do not disturb. When I’m doing these Q&As and I get a sense of what Aristotle meant or perhaps the times, but especially Aristotle, about, there are moments when we get to, sorry, please don’t take this as humoristic or blasphemous, but there’s moments when we get to touch the life of the gods because we could move into a space in which we are just being nourished by our shared love and pursuit of what is true and good and beautiful, like the ambrosia and the nectar of the Olympian gods. And I wanna thank all of you for these moments. And I hope, I hope I’m doing everything I can to make them possible for some, or perhaps it would be wonderful for all of you because life is hard and it doesn’t seem to be, that that’s gonna change, but these moments, these divine moments, these sacred moments, they’re the ones that make life bearable, that allow us to do what Nietzsche said, that we can say the great yes to existence no matter what it throws at us. I’m not sure I’m in that place, but what I am sure of is that these moments at least move me towards that place to which I aspire. So next question is from Leslie, a patron, thank you, Leslie. I have recently begun doing breath classes with Steve and I’ve had unusual visual experiences through his version of the Wim Hof system, which is a gentler version. I take it to mean that Steve’s version is gentler than the Wim Hof. I tried the Wim Hof version in an actual exercise and because of my man ears and my ear and because of blood pressure issues, I couldn’t continue with it. So I only have a passing understanding of it. I have some understanding of other breath work. I’ve been doing Pranayama for a long time and then some breath work like within the flow exercise that I teach some people. So I have some sense of this. So anyways, which is a much gentler version that I have never experienced in meditation and this happens quite quickly in my breathing sessions. So before I go on to your second question and maybe not to a second part of it, not to be too prejudicial, I don’t wanna pretend that I haven’t read the whole question that I have, but I wanna break here and I wanna ask, what’s the value of the extra visual experiences? Here’s my concern and I’m not making an accusation Leslie, I don’t know you. I’m expressing a concern. I’m expressing a concern that I’ve encountered in my own practice and in the practice of the people that I’ve been guiding. And there’s constant warning of this in many, many wisdom traditions, which is the seeking out of unusual experiences because they’re unusual, because they’re vivid or unusual or special. And the main concern has been that almost always the motivation behind that, and again Leslie, I’m not making accusations, is narcissism, that we are seeking for special experiences that will reassure us that we’re special, that we’re unique, that we are deserving of a special pass or a special treatment by the universe. And that of course, as you can imagine, could get very dangerous. So I mean, and I often quote this, this is one of the Buddha’s, my most cherished lines from the Buddha, this is how you all know somebody’s life, this is how you all know somebody’s life, this is how you all know somebody’s not one of my disciples if he offers to perform a miracle. So the thing we have to, and I get it, this is really hard, it’s like steering between skill and caribdus, right? We want to open up in awe to the extraordinary without, and they’re so close to each other, there’s a lot of mythology about this, they’re so close to each other, but they’re also so different from each other, right? Because this is trying to get outside of the prison house of the ego, right? We’re opening up to the extraordinary, and over here, which is we want the unusual, the special, the weird, because that is going to gratify the egoic sense that we are after all the center. We really are after all the center. We knew it all along, we really did. Again, I’m not accusing Leslie of any of this. I’m stopping here because she’s given me the opportunity to say one of the things you should always ask yourself is why am I pursuing this? Can I give a good non-egocentric account of how this will help me to cultivate wisdom and virtue? And if you can’t, stop it, stop it. That would be like some, I think, core advice I would give. So Leslie goes on to say, traditional sitting meditation seems to be more verbal for me while the breathing is more visual, perhaps because I’m lying down. I’ve experienced bright colors, right? So this will often happen, and I tell my students, when you have the bright colors or the special sounds or the weird electric feelings or all of that, treat it as a distraction, go back to your breath. A tunnel that led to a misty opening that’s very shamanic and images of figures that have allowed me to make various associations and brought up powerful emotions. So perhaps that’s what Leslie is trying to say. Pointing to as this is a powerful technique, maybe analogous to the focusing practice that I taught in the Cultivating Wisdom series, right? That helps do this. But the thing about focusing is it doesn’t stop with bringing up the associations and the emotions. It is specifically a practice that is trying to bring them into intelligibility, not necessarily conceptual intelligibility, but the sense of, well, of a perspectival and participatory. So the point is that these things are brought up in order to articulate them, not always verbally, sometimes in a sensory motor fashion, sometimes through saying, ah, I see what this state of mind, what kind of perspective it opens up, or a participatory fashion, ah, this gives me a sense of self that allows me to see how I can move into a wider, deeper world. So there’s many ways in which we realize intelligibility, in which we realize and fall in love with realness. If that’s happening for you, then, and then of course, that was the intent of pranayama. The intent of pranayama is not to create unusual experiences, although it can, and some of the masters of it can do extraordinary things. But the point of it is to pursue a kind of integrating intelligibility that is ultimately healing and affording of opening up your life to the world, to yourself and other people in deeper connections. So those are my thoughts about breathing techniques. I think that if they are reliably, systematically, meaning going through many, right, in an organized and ordered way, and systemically going through many aspects of your cognition and your practices, if they’re reliably, systematically, and systemically conducive to the cultivation of wisdom and virtue without them having significant psychophysical health risks associated with them, for example, I can’t do a lot of these practices because of my manures, then take the practices up. If they are doing that for you, you can say, yeah, reliably, systematically, systemically, they are really helping to conduce me to wisdom and virtue, and I don’t feel like I’m putting my mental, social, or physical health in any kind of significant risk, then take them up. But if you can’t answer that question, or and or, if the health costs are great, then don’t take them up. That would be my answer to Leslie. I wanna say one more time that the caution I was doing at the beginning was not directed towards Leslie, it was afforded by Leslie. I want that clear remember. So we wanna now move on to Jackson, who’s a patron, thank you, Jackson. What are practices specifically for changing one’s role in a faulty, agent arena relationship? So I wanna give an answer to your initial, and I know it’ll be unsatisfactory, all of the practices. That’s what all of the practices are for, about addressing a faulty, agent arena relationship. But specifically the practices, the set of practices that are reducing self-deception, and the sets of practices that are affording aspiration. And I go over those in detail, the sequence of practices moving from epicureanism through, or practices accepted from epicureanism, stoicism, and neo-platinism, because those are the practices that help us simultaneously self-regulate and overcome self-deception. And they also afford aspirational self-transcendence. And those are the two sides, that’s the genus face of transformation. And that’s how you transform the agent arena relationship. You have to transform them by recovering an agent arena in which there’s reciprocal opening between the agent and the arena. So another question is from Eli, a patron. I practice as a, excuse me, I practice as a life coach. Here, I need a drink of water, my throat is getting dry. I practice as a life coach. I practice as a life coach, helping people who struggle with addiction, anxiety, depression, wow, phew, that’s hard work, noble work. Often things that are noble are hard. I’ve benefited immensely from your series on awakening from the meaning crisis. Thank you for saying that. I’m glad that that’s the case, genuinely. Finding it useful to integrate the ideas into my life, to enhance my sense of meaning. In a coaching slash therapeutic role, what are some key ways to help, oh, sorry, I put a word in there that’s not in there. What are some ways to help clients integrate these ideas when they might be resistant or have difficulty in getting past their feelings of stuckness, hopeless, meaningless, or pointlessness? So as I said earlier, practices of sort of nonviolent communication, communication into communion in which you’re helping people to transition. This is kind of the initial thing, transition from adversarial processing into opponent processing, which you’re already doing to some degree, are very helpful to get the process started. I imagine you’re already gifted and trained in that because you’re a coach and doing therapeutic intervention, and that’s one of the key skills of a coach or a therapist to get people to transition from adversarial to opponent processing. And if you don’t think of therapies about opponent processing, then, I don’t think you’ve done therapy is what I would say. So once you’ve done that, practices that help people to get that, an inner dialogue going that is commensurate with the outer dialogue. The focusing practice is very good. Some practices, dream work practices, I talked about all of this at length. There are videos out there available to get just an inner sense of dialogue going for people. And then you need practices of serious play. And I talk about this in various parts in the series. I have a couple of talks out there on this. Serious play is the way we overcome existential inertia and existential ignorance. Therapy is a point, a place of serious play. And in order to get an idea of how we engage in serious play, I point to a video I’ve released already, and then a video I’m going to release shortly. This is two dialogues, dialogue, in fact, with Nick Winkelman, who wrote The Language of Coaching, because Nick’s work, and he is trying to integrate his work, we’re explicitly working together with my work, is all about how we use the language of enacted analogy in order to engage in the serious play that will get people to see from the inside. So they’ll get the gnosis, they’ll see from the inside and taste the path of transformation that’s available to them. And so Nick’s book, of course, on The Language of Coaching, I would hardly recommend for doing that. And I’m trying to figure out a way of getting that into the pedagogical program, a stage in the pedagogy in which people are being more specifically trained in in and out of dialogues and the serious play within them and between them. So that’s what I would recommend. And you said, do you have any reading recommendations on helping others through this process? I appreciate the work you do. So Eli, I’ve given you some recommendations and I hope they’re helpful to you. Rob Gray, patron, thank you, Rob. Rob, I’ll say it every time, I’m so glad that we have this ongoing relationship. And Rob is just, he’s a great companion on the way. And he said, I’ve been trying to reread Evan Thompson. Evan has had a profound influence on me. Evan is brilliant. And I’m happy we’ve been colleagues and even friends, like we still are friendly colleagues. Evan’s in BC now, so we don’t communicate very much. But I communicated with him, it was odd. I think it was a couple months ago when his house was actually under threat of forest fire. But I’m hoping to have some dialogues with Matt Seagal and Evan. I sort of threw that idea out for this year, but this year’s been so crazy. I foresee it probably would happen probably more like May and June, but it’s definitely gonna happen. Anyways, for those of you who want to get to the first year to get to the philosophical depths of 4E cognitive science, well tasting along the way some of its spiritual potential, Evan Thompson and his mentor, Francisco Varela are the two best people to read. So I’ll continue Rob’s question. I’ve been trying to reread Evan Thompson and he has some great lectures on YouTube too. Yes, he does. And Varela, and I was wondering how your relationship and interaction with Evan have changed your thinking on wisdom and cognition. Can you give one or two examples of before, Evan I had of you practice of, but now I please be as nuanced or complex as you like. Before Evan, who was basically the gateway figure for me into 4E cognitive science, I don’t even think, I didn’t think there was a philosophical cognitive scientific topic of wisdom. In fact, my own personal experience had led me to the conclusion that there wasn’t such a thing. But after I encountered Evan’s work, and initially I was very critical of it, like the embodied mind, but I kept coming back and I kept seeing more and then I started interacting with Evan. And it actually happened because I was at one point teaching his son. Wonderful, wonderful, well, he’s a man now. He was a wonderful boy and then young adult when I knew him. And so I came to know Evan more personally and more and more. And then I started to get, I started to grok what he was doing. And so Evan made possible, Evan and Varela, Francisco Varela made possible for me the connection between the wisdom I was cultivating in the Buddhist and Taoist practices and the cognitive science that I had been practicing. Up until that time, I had been practicing, and I’m still very grateful for this. I’d been practicing a form of cognitive science, first generation, a little bit second generation. It was due to the work of a philosopher by the name of Jerry Fodor, a very computational model. But after Evan and Francisco Varela, while I moved into Buddhism, the convergence between Buddhism and cognitive science, the dynamical systems approach, biology as the primary source analogy for how we understand cognition, sense making and meaning. So Evan, I owe a lot to Evan. And that’s just as simple as it is. I hope that answers your question, Rob. Evan is a really profound thinker. I mean, I’m struggling here because I’m trying to convey, the words are inadequate. For those of you, a good introduction to him that’s not at sort of the depths of cognitive science might be his book, Why I’m Not a Buddhist. Because while Evan is a really profound thinker, of cognitive science might be his book, Why I’m Not a Buddhist. Because while Evan did a lot to bridge between Buddhism and cognitive science, he also has some very deep criticisms of that. And that shows you also his intellectual integrity and honesty. So I hope that answers your question, Rob. So another question or comment from Stian, who’s a patron, thank you. Will the upcoming anthology be available in any digital formats like Amazon Kindle? We’re hoping to get it published through Open Book Publishing, just like the Zombie Book. And therefore it will have a free to download electronic format. So the answer I think to your question is a resounding yes. So we’re now shifting to live questions from the chat. I want to thank you to all Patreon subscribers and everyone watching right now. Your support of course is very crucial to producing these videos and for supporting the science and the philosophia we’re doing to find solutions to the meeting crisis. So the first question is, Stian and Robert, how are you doing? Well, that’s nice. So perhaps that question is referring to my health. I’ve been to a specialist on some new medication that is helping to moderate. You can’t cure it, but it’s moderating my manures for which I’m very grateful. I mean, I still have attacks, but they’re less frequent and they’re less intense. All of my close relationships are flourishing. I’m looking forward, I’m gonna be spending a virtual dinner with Amar. And so I’m looking forward to that. I feel like I’m thriving right now. And the work that I’m doing is, it’s vocational. It’s not just occupational or professional, it’s vocational. I’m feeling I’m being called to many of the projects and I’m being called into DLogos and Phylia Sophia with other people. I just feel, I feel called, I feel blessed. I’m looking forward to, I’m planning on taking off as much as I possibly can the last two weeks of December. I’m plugging as much as I can. Don’t worry, I’m meeting with Amar. We’re gonna have some things scheduled for release. And I’m gonna be doing one thing. I’m gonna be doing a follow-up. Some of you saw it earlier this week with the discussion with Greg, Greg Enriquez and Jordan Hall. They both requested, very kindly, but insistently, that we have a follow-up and we’ll record it on the 23rd and try and release it. But that’s the only thing I’m planning on doing in that break and I’m planning to take a lot of time off. I’m reading, I’m starting to get some space because I’m done teaching right now and I’m starting to read again deeply for nourishment. I’m reading some amazing books, Technique and Magic by Campagna, a book on the ineffable and its metaphysics by, I think, I believe her name is Jonas, brilliant book. I think it’s Zwicky. I can’t quite remember the name. It’s The Experience of Meaning, which is really bringing out sort of the philosophical depths from Gestalt psychology and the kind of meaning that I’ve been talking about a lot in The Experience of Meaning. And then I’ve started a book by, oh, what’s the person’s name? I’ve just been reading it all day today. Oh, I’m sorry. But the book is this book on Meister Eckhart as a Christian philosopher. And it is brilliant. All these books are brilliant. And they’re all, and they all sort of have, they all sort of called to me and drew themselves together to me. And they’re all talking to each other. I’m reading. And this is just so nourishing. And so I wanna be doing a lot of that over the holidays. So I’m looking forward to that. So, I mean, I always feel a little bit guilty about this because I know that a lot of people are suffering right now because of COVID. And I take that seriously. I keep trying to do things that help sincerely with the help of other people. But I’m doing really well. So thank you for asking. Thank you for your work. My question is, how is the anthology of the ecology of practices coming along? So I’m not quite sure what you’re referring to. I think you’re referring to the anthology that’s out right now, the anthology on inner and outer dialogues because it’s about exactly that. It’s done. It’s done. It’s been sitting at the publishers now for two or three weeks. I’m hoping we’ll hear back from them in January. And then after that, there’s about a three to four month process usually. And hopefully, April, May, the beginning of spring, it’ll be available. It’ll be there. And I’m so proud of this anthology. So proud of it. And all of the people that contributed to it. There’ll be a couple of launch parties and I hope we get all of the authors there together. It exemplifies dialectic into dialogos. Dialectic into dialogos. And it also explicates and explains. I’m really hopeful that many of you will find it very helpful. So Jen Bear Whistle, Bear Whistle, sorry if I’m mispronouncing it. Could you name some current concrete practices that could complement Buddhist meditation, mindfulness concentration, and a balanced ecology of practices? Yes, the one that I most consistently offer and that I published on is that you need to be taking up active open-mindedness that complements. It affords opponent processing between, there’s an opponent processing between mindfulness and active open-mindedness that goes deeply into the opponent processing between our insight processes and our inference processes. And so you need to take up active open-mindedness. I’ve given several explanations of that, especially in the wisdom, cultivating wisdom with John Brevicki when we did the wisdom of Ipacia course and I supplemented McClellan’s work on the Stoics by going into teaching active open-mindedness. I will also talk about this again when I start doing filming after Socrates. But the practice that you really need to complement mindfulness practices with is active open-mindedness. So Stephen Phan, do you see ways of merging phenomenological accounts of spirituality with science? Yeah, Stephen, I mean, sorry, I was gonna say something quickly and if I said it quickly, it would convey arrogance. So I’ll say it more slowly and hopefully with the proper respect. Everything that I’m trying to do is trying to do that. So I’m trying to get, because the way I see the bridging going is there’s a bridge between the phenomenology and the functionality and that’s where the psychotechnological practices happen. And then there is a bridge between the functionality and the causality and that’s where we get into the science. And that is the strategy that I have been trying to use to bridge between the phenomenological and the scientific. It’s all through my work. The recent series that I did with Greg Enriquez on consciousness, on tangling the world knot, was exactly an ongoing dialogical argumentation. It was dialogical and shared, exploring how we can move in an integrative fashion from the phenomenology to the functionality to the scientific account of the underlying causality. But I think, I mean, if you’re trying to talk about functionality without talking about causation, like, wow, what does that mean? And then if you have a phenomenology that doesn’t give you a functionality, why should you care about it? So you want your phenomenology to, you know, interpenetrate and be interpenetrated by the functionality. And then of course the functionality has to be, right, has to be consonant with your best understanding of causality, which is what science is. Science is the practice of overcoming self-deception so that we can get at the causality of things. Now, I happen to think that we have to expand causation from just event causation to something analogous to Aristotle’s formal causation, structural functional organizations. Notice the word function is in structural functional organization. That’s what the whole dynamical system approach is. But that’s exactly how I see we can merge these things together. There’s convergent things. Evan Thompson and his neurophenomenology is another way of trying to bridge between phenomenological counts and spirituality. Next, a question from DL. Are you familiar with Alan Watts’s book and lecture? Is there anything specific that you appreciate about his worldview? Yeah, I’ve read two of his books on Taoism, The Watercolor Sway, which I found beautiful, but his lectures, Tao Way Beyond Seeking, those really spoke to me and helped really enrich like feedback into how I practiced the Taoist practices. And the wisdom of insecurity was particularly helpful for me because it helped me see a deep connection between the sort of psychodynamic concerns and spiritual concerns. So I found that particularly helpful and useful. So those were the aspects of Watts that I’ve read and I found very helpful. And I have one more question I wanna take it because it’s from somebody it’s great to hear from. Allora Cotter, a former student of mine, I hope you’re doing well. Do you think that creative therapies, dance, trauma are more effective than traditional therapy and that they can afford participatory and perspectival knowing in a way that talk therapy might not? Yes, I mean, there’s no reason for them to be exclusive or adversarial, right? But I think creative therapies like dance and drama do things that the talk therapy can’t do and that people should, I mean, you know I was gonna say this, even within the therapeutic context, people should be pursuing a self-correcting, self-affording ecology of practices. There should be therapies of talk, there should be therapies of dance and there should be therapies of drama. Now many therapists already do this. In fact, some like emotion-focused therapies already getting you to do drama and some movement and many people are integrating emotion-focused therapy with CBT, people are integrating mindfulness with CBT. That’s been going on especially following Teasdale’s work. In family systems therapy, people are often are using drama and sometimes movement in order to try and bring out aspects that are typically not accessed and activated by the more traditional talk therapies. So the answer is yes, the answer is very much yes. So thank you all for joining me in this Q&A. We are doing these every third Friday of the month. As I said, this month it was different because of the holiday season. Starting in the new year, we’ll be doing exclusive Q&As for patrons. So we’re gonna be switching, we’ll have a general Q&A and we’ll be having exclusive Q&A for patrons and I want to once again thank you, the supporters over at Patreon. And I want to remind everybody that you can support my work on the meeting crisis at patreon.com slash John Ravichy, all one word. As always, I want to thank my dear friend, my beloved friend Amar and I hope to all see you next month. Please take good care, stay safe, but celebrate the season as you best see fit. And I hope that the advent of the new year brings with it for you a new horizon, a new horizon of what’s possible and profound for you. Thank you very much, one and all.