https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=SVjM2K3kliU
Welcome everyone to our monthly Q&A. Sorry that we had to miss last month, but in some ways the world ended, so you guys know what was happening. But we’re reconfiguring the world right now, and so I’m in a different place, but we’re going to do the Q&A nevertheless. So let’s start. We’ll work our way down and see if we have a bit of time to take questions from people that are online chat. So the first question is from Clinton, who’s a patron. So thank you for your support, Clinton. It’s a fairly long question, so I’ll try and read it very carefully. I have to lean a little bit because of the way the screens are, guys. So let’s all improvise and adapt. So that’s an excellent question, Clinton. I would point you to one of the first talks I gave. I think it’s the very first talk I gave. I think it was a Mind Matters talk on altered states of consciousness. One of the things I was trying to argue, and I do argue, is that because these states put us in a situation in which our salient landscape is being transformed and being altered, they do make us tremendously liable, vulnerable to bullshitting, to self-deception. And so I’ve always argued, and I will continue to argue, that it is, I think, wrong both epistemically and morally to pursue these higher states of consciousness, these kinds of what you termed revelatory experiences in a fashion that’s independent from the cultivation of wisdom. I think that’s a deep mistake. I think we have to independently cultivate skills and virtues for seeing through self-deception, seeing through the ways in which we bullshit ourselves, and for tracking with good reason and evidence the real patterns in the world, and that that has to be integrated with the cultivation of higher states of consciousness, transformative experiences. I think the artistry by which we’re reformulating our sensibility in these higher cognitive states, higher states of higher consciousness, always needs to be wedded to the argumentation and reflection and virtue, the discernment of the sage. And so I think I’m going to take this as an opportunity of saying that I challenge the, I think, romantic interpretation of these states or the use of substances that engender these states in which the point is just to have an extraordinary experience that somehow expresses our true self. As I’ve said repeatedly, I think the attempt to demonize or deify any of our faculties or aspects of our psyche is a deep mistake, and that we are very prone to self-deception in such higher states of consciousness, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not valuable. The higher states of consciousness are optimized in many ways, propositionally and prospectively and participatory, but nevertheless, we need to bring in imported skills and virtues of rationality, not just propositional rationality, procedural, prospectable and participatory rationality to ameliorate the threat of self-deception that is attendant upon these states and also to resist the temptation to demonize or deify any aspect of the psyche, the depths of the psyche that we might encounter, and also to continually keep that exploration of the depths of the psyche wedded to the very careful pursuit of picking up on the real patterns in the world. So the next is from the patron, Connor. How would you compare and contrast belief versus making something viable for oneself related to escaping existential inertia and self-deception? So that’s actually good. So existential inertia is when we’re trapped within a particular worldview and we don’t know how to get out of it. Very often people go into therapy because, and this is where the answer to Connor’s question can begin, because they often have the correct beliefs. They might believe that they might believe that they’re being too avoided. They have a proposition that even might be well evidenced, justified, that they are sent to, but it is inadequate for them being able to become the kind of person they want to be. That’s why they go into therapy. People very rarely go into therapy without some belief-centric sense that something is wrong. They can usually state what is wrong, but stating what is wrong is very different from knowing how to aspire, how to engage in transformation, how to reconfigure your salience landscape, how to reconfigure the age-age arena relationship, how to find out, how to find different ways of being that will afford you getting out of the place where you’re locked or stuck. That’s what I mean about making something viable. For something to be viable is precisely when you get a stacking, as my friend Jordan Hall says, of the four kinds of knowing. When the propositional knowing is afforded by and in concert with your skills being powerful, and those skills are afforded by, are afforded by and in concert with your perspectival knowing, giving you good, reliable situational awareness, which is in concert with your participatory knowing, which is ways of adopting existential modes, forms of life, as Wittgenstein say, that properly co-shape you and the environment. And you know when these are working and you know when it’s not working, like when you go to another culture or when you’re in solitary confinement and things become unglued in that fashion. So viability for me means that you’re getting the stacking of the four kinds of knowing, such that you’re getting all of the ways, you’re getting all of the normative feedback that you’re connected to reality. You’re getting conviction of the truth of your beliefs, but also, and more importantly, you’re getting an empowerment of your skills. You’re getting a you’re getting a sense of presence in your situational awareness, and you’re getting a sense of the emergence of affordances that you and the environment belong together in a primordial fashion. So that’s how I would answer that question. I hope that was helpful, Conor. Mackenzie Levitt, patron. I always like getting questions from Mackenzie. I hope you’re doing well, Mackenzie. What role do you see your dialoguist discussion is playing in the current meeting Kairos, Renée Sucks? So that’s a really good question. And what I’m trying to do is afford a way of accessing and activating and accelerating collective intelligence so that it self-organizes, so it bootstraps up into collective rationality and collective wisdom, so that the cultivation of individual wisdom and collective wisdom are in concert and mutually exclusive. Reciprocate opening each other up. And I think that is very important because it’s only in at the level of collective wisdom that we will appropriately learn how to relate to our intelligibility, regain our intimacy with intelligibility, our meaning making, and also get the wisdom to properly select that coordination. And that coordinate the colleges of practices that are going to be needed to reconfigure our ways of being, our ways of seeing and our ways of being. So I think the dialoguist, especially when it’s doing both of these, because that’s what the meta-psycho technology, using Jordan Hall’s term of ancient dialectic, did. It coordinated the individual cultivation of wisdom and the collective cultivation of wisdom in a reciprocally open fashion and gave people the serious play, the taste of alternative ways of being. This is the place within dialoguist where we can cultivate the individual and collective wisdom, like I say, in reciprocal opening, that also gives us a taste of a different way of being, a way of being that might help to reformulate our culture in general. And as I like to point out, this is not some utopian fantasy. Socrates was doing this in Athens while it was under siege for an extended period of time and in which people are, there had been a plague, a literal plague, and that had killed many of the Athenians and even Heracles, the leader. So Socrates was in a situation very much like ours, and he was practicing, well, I don’t want to be pretentious here. I’m trying to emulate, practicing something that bridges between what he was doing and all the emerging dialogical practices I see, like I said, circling, et cetera, bridge between them so that we can do what he did. He helped create a taste for new ways of being and afford the cultivation of wisdom within those new ways of being that permeated out through Greek culture and through Roman culture and laid in important ways the foundation for an axial way of being that, you know, then went into Christianity, et cetera. Was it perfect? Was it flawless? No. But did it, did it enliven, enrich, and expand the field of human experience in a profound way that was needed with the changes that were happening in the world? I would argue that it did. So I think that that is what I’m aspiring to, of course, with the help of many brilliant and talented people like Jordan Hall, Guy Sandstock, Peter Lindberg, Christopher Mastapietro, my beloved friend. So another question from Sergey, who’s also a patron. The question about meditation that concerns me for a long time is how do I know that I’m doing it right or rather than deluding myself? It seems that if I’m doing it wrong, it probably will just improve my skill of self delusion, rather than presence and mindfulness. So this is an important question. One thing I would ask if every this question comes up a lot, and so I’m not trying to pick on Sergey, I would ask people that ask this question that they what they then need to do is ask this question existentially. Right. Right. So you’re right. How do you know that you’re in relationship with being in your everyday life? How do you know that you’re in right relationship with yourself in your everyday life? And so I think you should fit all you should have a comprehensive and integrated questioning. And that’s part of my answer. There is nothing really in the meditation per se that will tell you if you’re doing it right. I can give you phenomenological tips. These are this is the language of training to help you get to a place. But that’s different from what you’re asking. You’re asking for yes, but you know what justifies this being the right way. So I use the example often that in meditating, you’re stepping back and looking at your mind rather than automatically looking through it. But because you might notice distortions in on the lenses distortion, distorting patterns, right? Processing in your mind. But how do you know that that was a distortion? There’s something on the lens. But how do you know what this is what you have to do? You also have to practice putting on your glasses and looking out and seeing if you see things that are not there. So that’s something that’s new. The meditation is working. If not, you’re getting, you know, insight so much in the meditation. But if you’re starting to have moments of connectedness, realization, insight in your life that track that solve problems, right? That reduce conflict that afford a sense of connectedness to yourself and others. So what’s more important than your judgment about whether or not your behavior is changing is the judgment of other people. And don’t go seeking it. If people come to you and say, because this is what I’ve noticed in other people who reported, people come to you and say, hey, what’s different about you? You’re a little bit more flexible. You’re a little bit more balanced. You’re a little bit more equanimity. You feel a little bit more centered. That’s how you know. And you also do the reverse. When you’re out in the world and you’re really connected, or you’re really in a state of flow, or you’ve had a genuine insight that solved a real problem, what does that feel like? What does that feel like? And use that as a touchstone when you’re within your meditation. What does that feel like? So you’re trying to create this loop, this self-correcting loop between, right, is what’s happening in my meditation and my contemplation transforming my action in the world in a way that can be called realization and are other people noticing that? And do those realizations reliably feed back into my meditation and help me hone in on what I’m trying to achieve in the practice? That’s the loop by which you decide if you’re doing it correctly. So I’m doing this because I’m not saying, I’m not putting it in quotations. What I’m doing is saying that you have to sort of take that provisionally because this is your, it’s going to get better. It’s like when you’re trying to do a martial art, when you’re trying to learn a move. The Tai Chi classics talk about drawing a circle with your free hand. You draw it really crapily, right? And then you look at real circles and you go back and forth. But then you start to also feel from the inside, oh, I can start to feel the difference between drawing a good circle and a bad circle. And then, oh, and now I notice things about real circles that I wasn’t noticing before. And you do it until you can draw, right, a good circle, free hand. Okay? So that’s what I meant. It’s, you’re doing it correctly, but that correctly is always a self-correcting process within that loop. Okay, so Victoria, she’s a former U of T student of mine. And it’s nice to be in this, even if it’s only virtual and somewhat displaced communication with you again, Victoria. I hope you’re doing well. I hope your child is doing well. Is one of the rules of meditative questing, especially who am I, the dissolution of fixed identity? If so, could you please elaborate on that? Yes, it’s, I would put it more that it’s, yeah, that language is maybe a little bit stronger than I would like. I would say it’s more like loosening up the process of co-identification, the process by which I’m assuming an identity and assigning identities. And what I want is I don’t want that to be happening unconsciously, mindlessly, and reactively. I want to be able to bring some awareness in it, because if I bring awareness, then there’s the possibility of discernment. There’s the possibility of remembering, not just in thought, but in being, satee, remembering I am more and other than I am. And in a resonant fashion, that person is more and other than the identity I’ve assigned. And perhaps if I engage in the reciprocal opening, I can come to relate to that person not in having mode, but in the being mode. And perhaps not just that person, but the situation, but the person who is in that position. And perhaps, right, if I can more reliably remember to be in the being mode in relating to things, then I can afford what the being mode affords. I can afford development. And I can then see my identity as something that’s aspirational, that I’m not in the being mode. Rather than something that I have or possess or merely control. This is very much Socrates’ proposal to us. Christopher Moore, in his book on Socrates and self-knowledge, in fact, makes the argument that Socrates was offering the model of the aspirational self in the sense that I can be in the being mode. So the next question is from Dan. He’s a patron. Excellent. Some of the conversations I have with Dan are about the idea of the self-knowledge. And I think that’s a very interesting point. I really admire the flexibility, scope, and the dynamic quality of Dan’s thinking. His question is, what role, if any, do you think that hubris and nemesis are playing in the present unfolding of the material? I think it’s important, first of all, to bring that up. And I want to first, and this came up in a really excellent discussion. And there was good back and forth between Ray Kelly and I on this about, you know, that we have to be able to do this. So Zach Stein is making a very good argument that in the crisis that we’re in, and Jordan Hall has talked about this, and so have I, we tend to fall back on mythopoetic ways of thinking. Why? We fall back on mythopoetic ways of thinking because we tend to follow back on mythopoetic ways of thinking. It’s a way of trying to stack all of the kinds of knowing. So it has this great vertical integration. Mythopoetic patterns are also ones that have survived across the world. And so we tend to follow back on mythopoetic ways of thinking. And so they’re the most likely to be transferable to our current context. So they have great vertical and horizontal integration. But that doesn’t mean the mythopoetic stuff doesn’t come up with you. It’s not. without danger. I mean, so a lot of the mythopoetic stuff that’s coming up for people with the COVID crisis is kind of this weird, you know, almost Old Testament, you know, biblical, you know, deity. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous. threat and it’s vermiseries threat and艭 och magans ist behNIEblich an import landscapes �ule an ItSA 네가 z Gun ale Someone wie Schönheit. Ich ich ich. E informing Ueh chacun dem connen ayuda von dû.上, damit ich eine can come to mind. So the mythopoetic stuff comes up and the meaning crisis has left us in a place where we’re sadly lacking in the, you know, in a religious, sapiential education for how to properly relate to the imaginal and make use of it. And so there’s, that’s an issue and so this mythopoetic stuff can come up and it can be incredibly inflationary for us. It can give us a sense of undue confidence that we know what the right way to go is. And so while we shouldn’t try and shut off the mythopoetic, that’s also the wrong response because it’s coming up precisely because if it’s adaptive functionality, we have to bring a reflective rationality to bear on it. And what does that mean? That means that in addition, think about, and this is, you know, that goes back to the point I was making with Rafe Kelly, our culture has become really fascinated with the hero. And as Rafe Kelly pointed out, I’ve misunderstood this a bit because he thinks the hero archetype in our culture has been reduced to the warrior. And what we have is all of the yang of the hero and none of the yin, none of the receptivity. And so first of all, there’s that way in which we’re warping it. And so you can think about how the warrior archetype is so in sync with that kind of us versus them and the purity code and conquest and control, right? So there’s that confusion. And secondly, we’ve forgotten that, yes, the Greeks gave us hero myths, you know, Theseus and Odysseus, but for every hero myth, they also give us a hubris myth. They give us Icarus and they give us Phaeton and they give us Arachne, people who tried to conquer the domain of the gods, inflation, and were smashed because of that. And we got to remember the hubris side of, right, of our mythological education to counter balance the temptations towards inflation and a almost militaristic response. And I’m worried about the combination of this biblical language of days of judgment and this way of thinking, right? And the fact that we’re more and more calling it plague, right? And also this the militaristic language of we’re in a war, we have to fight it and conquer it. And we have to find out and the rise of all the conspiratorial thinking. So again, we have to be very, careful, right, with the mythopoetic stuff that comes up. And so we have to re-educate ourselves in terms of the ecology of, you know, the systematic relationship between myths and how they try to give us a virtual governor. The hero myth, right, it enables us, it encourages us, but the hubris myth, there are selective constraints limiting us so that we don’t become inflationary. We don’t be, we don’t give in to militaristic conspiratorial purity code narratives. So I think all of this is tremendously important. And the fact that many of us, right, are sort of religiously illiterate and also we’re illiterate because the way our culture has functioned about dealing with this mythopoetic machinery, that’s a worrying thing. And so I’m worried that what’s following, what’s going to follow on the heels, for example, of the COVID crisis is a sort of an accelerated, you know, mental health crisis. The meeting crisis is being exacerbated in many ways by this. So I think we need to be, I think that was an excellent question by Dan. I think we need to bring back the dynamic self-organizing ecology of mythology, of entire systems of myth, and use that in discussion with our best reflective philosophic, best philosophical reflection and scientific understanding so that we craft a virtual engine in which that, that mythopoetic way of thinking and being can come to an adaptive expression. So another question from David Swedlow, a patron, and I’m always grateful for a lot of the commentary and involvement that David has in my work. David’s question is the following. My contemplative work centers on how propositional trust differs from participatory trust and moves from a thesis of obeying external authority through the antithesis of listening to inner authority towards a synthesis of mutual authority between me and my arena. In participatory knowing this feels like the God that is not a God, but the temptation to give in to grandiosity becomes intense. You have a similar personal struggle as you strive to be of service to this effective moment. Can you talk about that? Wow, that is fantastic question. And it’s fantastic because let’s sort of work the way into it. So David is, you know, the God that’s not a God or the God that’s beyond God. This is Tillich. And Tillich importantly talked about these three ways in which we understand the authority, in terms of which we understand normativity. Tillich talked about heteronomous. That’s when we feel like there’s an external authority imposing on us. And then what we have largely done from the Enlightenment onward, I mean, like the historical period, is we have resisted arguments of authority, the normativity, authority arguments. At least we do that officially. And we have instead given our allegiance to autonomy. So what matters is autonomy and virtues like that, like one understanding of authenticity, not the Heideggerian notion, but a more prevalent common notion of authenticity. You know, and so this is I’m an autonomous, I’m a completely self-governing. And this is important and Kant was, Kant writes his three critiques, you know, pure reason, practical reason, you know, et cetera. And the point about this, and this is Habermas’s point, is autonomy, right, it’s an extent, it’s part of that Cartesian subjectivity that ultimately on the only authority on myself. And what’s that done for us? Well, that has fragmented these, because what happens is that reason, morality, and aesthetics, truth, goodness, and beauty are fragmented and separate. They’re autonomous and uncoordinated and incommensurable with each other. And this is ultimately not viable and livable for us. Truth, goodness, and beauty have to mutually constrain, affect, and interpenetrate each other. And some of our cutting-edge thinkers are getting us back towards. And so we have to get past the, you know, the heteronymous normativity that gives all power to objectivity and the autonomous normativity that gives all power to subjectivity. What did Tillich propose? Well, he proposed theonymous. He proposed that transjective one that David is talking about, that resonance, that unfolding. And that is, that was the kind of faith that Tillich was talking about that would get us into the God beyond all God. Now that, beyond all possible gods, beyond the God of theism. What’s going on there? And this is the caution, and this links up with what I previously said, that Tillich brings in. Tillich is reminding us that our relationship is transjective and participatory, and that there is a constant temptation to try and appropriate it subjectively or give it over to some objectivity in a process that he calls idolatry. And idolatry is exactly that. Idolatry is to have the idea that what I want to do is I want to foreclose on this. I want to foreclose it, and I want to come to some state of possession of the sacred. And if you, so for in my practice, what I regularly and reliably do is I engage in practices that are designed to foreground the participation and foreground the transjectivity and call me to the fact that, you know, and Calvin said this, you know, human imagination is a factory for the, you know, the ongoing production of idols. We are constantly tempted to idolatry. And so I daily remind myself that I make a vow. It’s kind of like between a vow and a prayer, in the sense of trying to affine myself and conform myself to the ongoing, you know, I want to come into a right relationship, an ongoing right relationship, conformity with this ongoing disclosure, the reciprocal opening. And so I make a vow to myself, you know, to remember the temptation to idolatry, either subjective idolatry of inflation or objective inflation of the great leader. That’s also idolatry. And we’ve seen, we’re seeing both of those right now, just like tigers let loose, right? And, you know, just to remember, like, how important humility is, how important it is to be honest, how important it is to honor and help other people to constantly look for self deception, for a sense of self importance, for self centeredness, for self righteousness. And so I engage in daily practices that try to foreground my salience landscape onto the participatory relationship with in trans activity, think about it in right relationship rather than as a tempted foreclosure and daily reminding myself of the temptation towards idolatry. So that’s, that’s, I’m going to, that’s the answer I’m trying to give you David. So we have another question from Karima, Cynthia Clayton and Karima is also partaking in the meditation course. So I want to answer her question. She’s been somebody that’s made some wonderful comments on my video series, and like I said, she’s always she’s very diligent in the meditation course. So thank you for that, Karima. Thank you for your participation. Her question is rather long one. I feel that this pandemic is an evolutionary driver. Global crisis is for change and offer opportunity for a paradigm shift to tell a new story of who we are and our goals for humanity. In your recent talk with Thomas Björkman, Thomas Björkman was he’s the person from whom I learned this idea of the meta crisis. You define the future state as not physical, but a state of being of mental emotional mastery, leading to personal enlightenment and universal goodwill. You spoke of the notion of trust, daring to let go with a collective leap of faith and opening a space for an emerging collective imaginary. Please define collective imaginary and other aspects of the new reality we can help to birth giving birth. That’s that’s also a Socratic metaphor. Socrates compared himself to Midwife. And remember that the word concept ultimately comes from the verb conceive, which ultimately means the ability to give birth. Ultimately, our deepest conceptions should be giving birth to new ways of being in which personhood and the community of persons who is, you know, is afforded and improved. So, uh, so I was took I was talking to Thomas and Jordan about this and also with Chris and with Andrew C Sweeney and Zach Zachary Stein, who’s written some extra excellent work on how we’re in this. We’re in a critical period, a period of criticality where the system can really organize itself. And, you know, I’m calling it a kairos where, you know, normally, you know, the course of events is like a river and it’s sort of inertial inevitability to it. There’s very little we can do. But what happens and this is also a notion that till it got from Christianity that I got from Tillich, when you get a kairos, you get the fullness of time that that course actually, like, let’s say, like, we’ll play with it, it erodes or changes the bank of the river. It’s like the course changes the conditions. And now there’s eddies and there’s a chance, right, that the system that the course of the river could change. And now actions that normally would have been just absorbed and overwhelmed by the inertial flow actions, this is called sensitive dependence on initial conditions, actions now become very powerful in the sense that previously, what would have been a smaller insignificant action can have huge ramifying effects. And so what we need is we need, you know, a kind of way of relating to kairos time differently from our normal experience of time. And I’m going to use the distinction from Pascal. Pascal made a distinction between the spirit of geometry and a spirit of finesse. The spirit of geometry is that’s how we have normally experienced time. It’s, you know, it’s like it’s mathematical, it’s calculatable, we can project what’s going, we can calculate, time is unfolding, it’s the spirit of geometry. But when you’re in kairos, you have to move to what Pascal called the spirit of finesse. Now finesse, and notice how this makes sense with respect to kairos. The spirit of finesse is that combination of procedural and perspectival and even participatory knowing that’s the right, it’s about timing and placing. Because when you’re in the kairos, the timing and the placing of your actions can have huge consequences. And so you need to have that cultivated sense of finesse. And so if you have that cultivated sense of finesse that puts you into a continuity of contact, so that you’re in right relationship to the course of events, and you can, right, you can with your actions have that discernment, the right timing and the right placement. So think about the example I sometimes use. Like if you, like, when is the right moment to first kiss someone? And the spirit of geometry won’t work for you. You’ve got to be in the situation, what Nora Bateson calls the warm deity. You have to be immersed in, you have to have a procedural and perspectival and participatory immersion in the complexities of the dynamical system that it’s unfolding. And you have to reconfigure yourself. You have to become yourself an unfolding dynamical system so you can affine yourself, so you can get into resonance with that. And so you know now is the right moment, and the timing and the placement. And if you discern it right, if you are coupled to the course of events in the right way, and you kiss her the right way at the right time, the course of events of your relationships change, and something comes, a new way of being comes in to being for the two of you. The same thing. That’s what I’m trying to get out with the sense of faith. I’m trying to get that sense that you’re in the spirit of finesse, and you’re getting that resonant, right, resonant coupling to the dynamical system. You yourself are a dynamical system in conformity with it. And you are getting a sense of timing and placement so that you can maintain that continuity. You can be in right relationship with it so you can follow and participate and help direct the course. And what we might be able to direct it to, because in a kairos you always have opposite things that are equally potentially available, right, and that’s why everything is in the balance. And we could go, we could discern what the opportunity for moving to a situation in which we have, we get a normativity other than the normativity of just producing and consuming and busyness and business that we have, we bring back the normativity, the important, because this is what we’re discovering. We’re discovering that a lot of the stuff that was putting so many demands on us actually falls away. Now, I’m not trying to be dismissive of people who are sick or are suffering economic hardship. That’s real and that has to be addressed. I’m talking about the people in which, what’s coming to the fore is a lot of the stuff that was consuming their time and their identity has fallen away. And they need more resilient and deeper resources of meaning. Can we move to a culture of wisdom cultivation, meaning facilitation, in which trying to create communities in which personhood is the thing that we most evaluate ourselves by, rather than, you know, wealth. We’ve gotten messed up in a lot of ways. We’ve confused wealth with subjective well-being. Wealth initially, wealth is initially very powerful of increased subjective well-being. It gets you out of poverty and you get subjective well-being, that sense of, it’s good, I feel good. But then it plateaus and it takes huge differences in wealth to make small differences in subjective well-being. So we shouldn’t be using wealth as our only metric of subjective well-being. And secondly, we shouldn’t be confusing subjective well-being with meaning in life. They aren’t identical. They come apart. They come apart when you’re engaged in the agapic project of having a child. When you have a child, your subjective well-being collapses. You know, everything about your subjective well-being, your health, your sleep, your eating, everything is challenged and diminished. Why do people do it? Because meaning in life goes up. They feel connected to the project of meaning making that is person making. We need to reorient our culture so that meaning making and person making have as much a normative demand on us as the production of wealth. I’ll say it once again. I’m not a Marxist. I’m not saying that wealth is evil. I’m saying let’s go back to being rational about wealth. Let’s really understand its relationship to happiness and then reconfigure our culture more appropriately. I am willing, and I have already enacted this, I’m willing, and I know a lot of people are, I’m willing to take a systemic reduction in my standard of living. We’re all doing it right now if I can trust that I’m participating in a process that is going to afford me more meaning. So I want, you know, I want to try and cultivate in myself and help cultivate in others that kind of faith. Not the assertion of some utopic certainty or some nostalgic certainty, but that finesse, that continuity of contact that puts me into right relationship with the unfolding dynamics of the kairos so that I can help tip the balance towards bringing back a way of being in which wisdom and meaning are at least as important culturally, not individually, autodidactically, but culturally to us as wealth is. That’s part of what I see happening. I know that Thomas argues this. Thomas has argued that what has happened through the Enlightenment and the postmodern critique is that we have, the Enlightenment basically undermined the normativity of God and then the postmodernism sort of undermined the normativity of science and reason. But what happened is that the market was left as the sole normativity, the sole God for us. And that’s a very dangerous place to be. We should always have multiple sources of normativity that can act as significant checks and balances on us. So that was a long answer, but I think that was a really important question. I tried to answer it as comprehensively as I can. Here’s a question from Rob, who’s also a patron. Is the world doing good problem formulation on the COVID epidemic or in what way could we be framing this better? It’s hard to answer about the world because there’s significant differences between different countries. I’m a Canadian and I see there’s very significant differences between how Canada has been handling this and, for example, how the United States has been handling it. And that’s not just my opinion. I’ve been in communication with lots of Americans and they’re sort of saying that there are significant differences. And I think that’s so answering about the world as a whole is difficult. One thing I would say about that is I think the problem formulation needs to be more expansive. And I tried to indicate how we’re still locked into the political market arena as our only normativity, our only way of evaluating this. And even if we take the notion of health, the notion of health should not just be biological health or economic health. The notion of health has to be also existential health and mental health. And I think that already existential and mental health issues, and if you’ll allow me, spiritual issues that weave them together, these are already taking a significant toll on people. The loneliness, the experience of domicile, right? Like I said, a sense of being almost in a surreal existence. Lots of people are using that adjective now. Everything feels surreal. That’s a canary in the coal in the coal mine. Pay attention to that. That’s important. I think we need to start broadening what we mean by health because if I think we’re facing, you know, a mental health slash existential slash spiritual crisis of synonymous proportions and it’s already starting to unfold, and we need to think about what kind of interventions we need to put in place to respond to that. So I want to thank the Patreon subscribers and everyone watching right now. It’s always really great. I love these questions and answers. And you know, and many of you, you know, questions we have to put aside for maybe another time. I try to usually only answer one question per patron because we’re trying to get as many questions answered as possible. Your support, the Patreon support, of course, is crucial to continuing to produce these videos and for supporting the science that I’m engaging in and also the practical instruction like my meditation course that I’m offering online to help find solutions and viable responses to the meaning crisis. We’re going to shift to some live questions from the chat. One is from David Cardo. What is your take on this statement? We should abandon all religion altogether and replace it with the very useful field of philosophy. So in one way, I agree with that, and in another way, I disagree with that. And so that sounds terrifically Canadian, eh? So let me try. I think a better way of looking at it because that’s kind of a dichotomy that we inherited very deeply from the Enlightenment and the idea that all of tradition was something that we had to reject. And that was important because, like I said, that was getting out of that sort of heteronomous notion of normativity and developing autonomy. And that’s something that was exemplified in the philosophical work of people like Descartes and Kant. But if you go earlier, the distinction between philosophy and religion breaks down if you look at the whole neoplatonic tradition or you look at somebody like, you know, Socrates or Augustine or Augustine, depending on the pronunciation you want to use. I think that we should broaden the notion of rationality so that it starts to overlap again with wisdom. What is primarily important about rationality is overcoming self-deception, not just the logical management of argumentation. And we should give up the monologic understanding, the autonomous understanding of reason as something that I just do as a monologue. There’s more evidence coming out that reason is better understood in terms of distributed cognition, that’s something that is done in dialogue. It’s also we should understand that we have multiple kinds of multiple ways of knowing. And so that being rational propositionally is not the same as how one is rational procedurally or prospectively or in a participatory manner. So, you know, there’s ways of self-deception in participatory knowing. We could get into the reciprocal narrowing of addiction where the identity of the world and our identities collapse and become fixated into an automatic, you know, and reactive and unconscious and limiting way. That’s right. That’s part of Mark Lewis’s notion. So how you deal with addiction is not through argumentation. You have to afford people reciprocal opening. You have to get that’s how you overcome that self-deception. Soon as we see that, that what we broaden the notion of rationality and we make it dialogic, that of course, right, we’re talking about wisdom and dialogue. That’s very philosophical. But we’re also invoking, right, as I said, we’re also invoking those forms of communication that bridge between the kinds of knowing we’re going to the mythopoetic is going to come up. Imaginal, the symbolic ways in which the unconscious and the conscious might talk to each other ways. And look at my gesture. My gesture is a way of bridging between perspectival and participatory, sorry, perspectival and propositional knowing. And we know that it’s doing something above and beyond what I’m doing with my speech. How do I bring gestural in the imaginational end? Because it is doing some of the important work in my information processing. So to be philosophical and look and understand and reflect on that and try and free it from self-deception and improve its ability to connect is going to involve me with the gestural, with the imaginal, with the existential, with the symbolic. And that’s also religious in an important sense. I think what we want is we need, right, a philosophy that’s more capable of being religious in this sense, according to a kind of Socratic faith, the kind of faith that I was talking about earlier, the faith of finesse. And we need a religion that is much more philosophical, that remembers that what it’s about is religio, connectedness, overcoming foolishness, affording wisdom, and making persons within communities of persons. So that’s how I would answer that question. Another question from Amal. What’s your perspective on the inner struggle of freedom and duty? Should one pursue their personal desires if it means destroying loved ones? No. I don’t, I’m not quite sure. I want to, I think I get a sense. I don’t think Amal is referring to just somebody who’s viciously selfish. I think he’s talking about some of the wisdom archetypes, the sage archetypes like Jesus, who said, if you’re not willing to abandon your mother and your father, you can’t follow me. Or I think of Siddhārtha Gautama, who abandons his wife and child in order to become the Buddha. And then you get into the dangerous territory, and I’m always uncomfortable when you move into Kripa Gaurd’s, the teleological suspension of the ethical. So I don’t think, first of all, I don’t think you should pursue personal desires at the expense of others. I don’t know how you would justify that. And I think that’s, again, to be trapped within autonomous subjectivity and the way that fragments us and undermines meaning. Meaning is transjective. It’s not subjective. It’s not objective. And so learning how to live transjectively is going to be the best way to afford meaning. And also cognition, embodiment, and embeddedness, and distributed cognition are not separable from each other. They interpenetrate. So I can’t see any justification for sort of trying to abstract your personal desires from that dynamic matrix, first of all, and then giving some sort of special privilege priority to it. Also doesn’t seem to be anything that I could justify. So I’m going to say that that’s probably not the intent of the question. The question is, what do you do when you see individuals like Jesus or Siddharta? And the way I try to understand that is in terms, and the way I try to not just fall into the dangers I see attended on Kurt Kripa Gaurd’s notion of the teleological suspension of the ethical, that somehow there’s a higher purpose, that we have to really limit it and constrain it. And I think that in moments of kairos, some of the deepest patterns that we have of connecting to other people are in play. Right? And what’s going to happen is those people are saying that their affinity and their connection to the logos of the kairos, of how it’s unfolding and self-organizing, and making a new way of being possible needs to be given priority at this time, precisely because we’re in kairos. And there’s an important way in which the field of human experience and being can be fundamentally expanded and enriched for many, many people. And so when it is clear that that’s the case, then one should do that. And so I think what that means is the only time in which you’re allowed to make that kind of sacrifice is when you’re in clear kairos and you have the kind of overwhelming calling by that kairos, and that is going to afford you becoming, well, the messiah or the Buddha. And since that’s highly unlikely for most of us, I would say that that calling better be really, really powerful, and it better be leading to a progression that is reliably being recognized by other people as opening up a new way of being that is the appropriate course of action in the kairos. So that’s how I would try and put some very significant limitations on trying to adopt the example of Siddhartha or Jesus of Nazareth. Rowa Ayyanas, if introverts are adapted for social condition situations, what are introverts adapted for? So I think introverts are adapted for, we have these two drives, Tillich talks about them, the individuation, and it overlaps with Jung’s notion and participation. And what is it we’re most trying to do in individuation? It’s not the romantic notion of realizing our true self that was always there or collecting our autobiographical specialness. The idea is a complexification that reduces inner conflict and affords optimal functionality, and therefore is in service of the other drive, the drive to participate, the drive to be connected to reality. But the drive to connect to reality should be internalizable and afford us better at complexification, getting the emergent functions that reduce inner conflict. So if extroverts are great at participation, introverts are directed towards the adaptivity of trying to realize inner peace. Of course, what we want is an optimal relationship between them, which is why probably in evolutionary terms, we tend to get a distribution of our population between introverts and extroverts, so that we have lived reminders of the importance of the connectedness to the world and to each other’s and lived reminders of the importance of the connectedness we have to ourselves and inner peace. So this is a question from Nicholas Ingram from Twitter. Is it possible to turn a thou into an it by expecting thou to be a thing that transforms you? If so, how can you tell if you’re doing this? So this goes directly towards the heart of what I was saying earlier. You turn a thou into an it when you make it an idol as opposed to a symbol. When you start looking at it and trying to figure out what are the ways in which I can manipulate it and control it, right, at it and trying to figure out what are the ways in which I can manipulate it and control it, right, so that I can come into full possession of it. Instead, if you can, right, and that’s a having mode and it locks it down. Instead, you have to always relate to something as a thou, and I think this is one of the deep insights of Neoplatonic Christianity, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, to relate to something as a thou. And what’s the name of the guy who wrote God beyond being? Oh, I can’t remember his name right now. Anyways, that’s a book that talks about this at great length, the distinction between the icon and the idol. In the idol, you sort of completely consume something with your gaze and you completely appropriate it. In the icon, you’re always looking through it. You’re relating to it in a being mode, and you’re trying to open yourself up to it so it can open itself up more. Sorry for using itself language, really, right, so that it can thou self it more so the inexhaustibleness of the thou can shine through more and more. This is how you relate to your beloved or how you relate to a work of art or how you relate to a beautiful environment. So I would say take a look at are you in a relationship where you’re looking at an idol or are you looking through an icon? Because if you’re looking through an icon because you want, you’re acknowledging that it will always withdraw beyond your grasp. And when you, the more you acknowledge that, the more you let the inexhaustibleness of it shine through to you. And that’s the way how you can, is a thou, this is where we can get confused, right, that the thou always shines. But it’s not just the shine of salience. It’s the shine that is simultaneously giving us insight and new intelligibility, but also telling us, right, giving us the remembering, you know, of hubris and the reminder of inflation. It’s a shining that’s also telling us that it’s always inexhaustibly beyond us. So the people that I love the most, that’s one of the things I’m trying to do in my meta practice that I teach you. It’s a way of reminding, not in your thoughts, but in your being, in your existential mode. It’s a way of reminding yourself to get into the being mode of people and relating to them. It’s something you have to practice, to practice and practice and practice. And I encourage you to keep doing so in these very dangerous times. Being lovers in a dangerous time is a really noble thing, hence the Bruce Coburn song, right? If we can, because when we’re in scarcity, it’s so easy to become cognitively inflexible and go and lock down into just the having mode, control and consumption, and then modal confusion is rife and trying to remember to be lovers, not just romantic lovers, but lovers in Plato’s sense, the lovers of wisdom, the lovers of being. That’s really important, remembering that, remembering that. Okay, thank you so much for joining me today for this Q&A. Now we’re doing these every third Friday of the month. I hope this worked for you guys. I hope it worked. Thank you so much for the supporters on Patreon. Your support helps me to keep doing this, and I hope this isn’t pretentious, but I hope that my work is helping others, and so you’re helping me help others, and that’s very important. Please, if you get a chance, suggest my work on the Meeting Crisis to others. They can watch the videos. Perhaps you might want to consider supporting that work, that work and the work I’m doing, like the meditation course or the voices with Reveki Diologos things that I’m doing. That would be very helpful to me. We’re doing meditation class every day. Sorry, let me be very careful. There’s a meditation course. I’m teaching it live streaming. We do it weekdays at 930 EST. Monday is Dharma Day. I teach an important principle. We do an exercise so you get an experiential understanding, and then we sit, and then there’s Q&A, and then Tuesday through Friday we meet, we sit, there’s review, and a longer Q&A. If you want to join us, you’re very welcome to do so. You can go on any one of the videos and you’ll find a link to the previous sits and the previous lessons so that you can catch up and join us. I would recommend doing this, by the way, learning to, you know, meditate and contemplate for discernment and Socratic faith is really, really needed right now. So I want to finally thank my dear friend and techno major, Amar, who has been here behind the scenes as always, making sure that technology, the god that limps, manages to keep walking, you know, harmoniously forward for us so that we were able to do this all together. So thank you very much, thank you very much, everybody. Thank you, Amar, and I look forward to our next session together in a month’s time. Take care, everyone.