https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ZxKPl0IYzOA
Do I need this on? No, because I’m through this, right? Do I need it up? You’re live. Oh. There’s nothing that we’ll be able to start in a few minutes. We’re going to be starting in a few minutes. Just working out some final bugs. Some of the comments are getting cut off on the side. Right here. That’s great. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We’re going to be starting in one minute. Just getting everything finally lined up. Okay. That’s good. These are good questions. Okay. Hello, everyone. Welcome. This is our first Q&A. We’ll be doing some more of these in the future. I hope you’ll be patient with me. This is my first time doing this, and I’m just getting familiar with all of this technology. I’d like to introduce two of the people that are part of my team and really help me with all of this. Come on in, guys, and say hello. Introduce yourselves. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hi, everyone. That’s Amar and Karina. Hi, everyone. So they’re going to be helping me out today, and throughout these – and you might at some time be receiving messages from them on my behalf, so please be open to that and responsive to what they have to say and do. Thanks. Thanks, guys. All right. So this is what I’m planning on doing right now. I’m going to spend the first 45 minutes going through the questions that have already been texted and posted on the videos. And what I’ve done there is I’ve tried to gather together clusters of questions, questions that all sort of belong together. So I won’t be answering so much individual questions. I’ll be answering questions that were posed sort of multiple times to me by multiple people. I, of course, can’t get to all the questions. And then in the last 45 minutes, sorry, the last 15 minutes of the hour, I’ll go through some of the questions that are live right now and try to respond to them. So one of the first set of questions we got was just general questions about how the series is going to progress. And I wanted to say first right off the bat that I’ve been deeply appreciative of the responses that I’ve been getting. The commentary, both quantitatively and qualitatively, has been excellent. There’s just been a lot of commentary. And so much of it has been insightful and philosophically reflective. And the way people are interacting with each other on the commentary has been respectful. And there’s been a pursuit of a common culture of open discourse and dialogue. And I want to encourage that. That’s exactly what I’m looking for. And I’ve been helped by the kind of feedback and encouraged about all of this. So many of you are asking how long does the series go? And the plan is, I hope you’re okay with this, the plan is to do 50, five zero episodes. And the idea is to split it between 25 episodes where I go over the historical argument, the historical analysis, which you’re seeing right now unfolding on the series. And then the last 25, I’m doing the cognitive scientific analysis of the processes of meaning generation. But of course, those are rough divisions. As we’re doing the history, you see me putting in lots of cognitive science. And as we do the cognitive science, I will be constantly eluding back and building on the history. And the idea behind that is we need this dual answer, as I argued at the beginning of the series, to really try and address the meaning crisis. So we need to have the historical analysis to tell us what we’ve lost and what it means. And then we need the cognitive scientific analysis to tell us about the cognitive processes and functions that we need to address if we’re going to respond and potentially awaken from the meaning crisis. Some of you have asked if the video series is going to be put into a book. So right now what’s happening is I’m continuing the series of books that I started with Christopher Mastropietro and Philip Misovic. Many of you are reading that. And again, I appreciate your feedback on that book, the Zombie Book. This year, there’s going to be a sequel to that book called Unsheltered, which will go over this genealogy of the meaning crisis in more detail. It won’t be a verbatim copy from the series, but it will be running the argument in a more literary form. In addition to that, there’ll be another book coming out called The Cognitive Continuum from Insight to Enlightenment, which will be about the cognitive science arguments about what’s going on in insight, what’s going on in flow, what’s going on in mystical experience, what’s going on in the higher states of consciousness. That’s going to be integrated together. And I’m working on that now right now with Daniel Craig and Madeline Abramian. So that’s also coming out. And that will have a lot of stuff verbatim from the video series and also from a series of talks I’ve given on altered states of consciousness. Finally, some of you have asked in connection with that, if I’m going to be doing any public appearances soon, I will be giving a talk at the upcoming conference by the Buddhism Psychology and Mental Health Union. That will be on March 30th. We post both on the video channel and on Twitter about that location. And I will be talking there about the work I’ve done on mindfulness and its connection to spirituality and the cultivation of wisdom. So the next series of questions actually relate to that topic of mindfulness. Many of you asked me if I could go into a little bit more detail about the distinction between meditation and contemplation. Now this goes to work that I published with the Ferraro in 2016. And the point I was trying to make there is that we in the West have tended to collapse mindfulness into a single practice, a single psychotechnology, usually meditation. Whereas if you look at the cultural ecology of mindfulness practices, for example, Buddhist countries, particularly of practicing something like the Eightfold Path, they often have a set of psychotechnologies. And some of them are meditative and some of them are contemplative. I myself was taught three psychotechnologies in an integrated fashion of a past the meditation Meta, M-E-T-T-A, often called loving kindness, contemplation, and Tai Chi Chuan. Now what’s the basic difference? The basic difference between them is that in Vipassana in meditation, you’re basically to use a metaphor I use in the series, you’re learning to step back and look at your cognitive processing. So you’re moving towards the center, which is connoted by the word meditation, right, to mediate, is to be centered, right? And what you’re doing there is, for example, in Vipassana, the meditation practice that I teach and practice, what you’re doing is focusing on the breath that’s being generated in your abdomen by your breathing. So normally think about this, we don’t look at our sensations, we’re looking through them at the world and we are automatically rushing through our mental framing and our experience onto the world. And then what we need to do often is become aware of how we’re mis-framing our situations and our problems and then at a very basic level misconstruing them. And so what meditation does is it teaches you to step back and look at your sensations and look at the patterns and processes that are unfolding in the mind. But of course, if I simply stood back and looked at my glasses, right, that would render me forever incapable of seeing the world again. So in a contemplative practice, what you do is you’re now learning because of your awareness that has been afforded to you through the meditative practice, you’re learning how to re-look through your mental framing, become aware of it. And so your attention there is generally directed outwards. So whereas the focus in meditation is very sort of cognitive and unconscious and on consciousness, the focus in contemplation is on the existential mode that I’ve been talking about in this series. So you’re trying to see the process of how you’re assuming and assigning identities, you’re trying to see how you are fundamentally, what you are foregrounding and backgrounding in reality. So for example, if you’re contemplating the three marks of existence, you’re trying to learn to see the world as impermanent and interconnected. And this relates to the meaning of contemplation. It has its origin in contemplatio, temple, the part of the sky that you’re looking out to to get some sense of what’s in the depths of reality. So basically what you should be doing is practicing both a meditative practice to take the lens off so to speak by the analogy and to become aware of how you’re framing things. And then you need to practice contemplation, practice bringing into awareness how you are looking at the world, how you are assuming and assigning identities, what properties and relations, sets of objects, constellations of events, are you foregrounding, which ones are you backgrounding? And the idea is if I do both of those, if I practice those, I’m going to train the two things I need in order to increase my capacity for insight. But precisely because I’m doing a contemplative practice, this insight isn’t going to be like of a particular intellectual problem like the nine dot problem or something like that. It’s going to be an insight into my existential mode, the very way in which my identity is being co-created with the identity of the objects and the situations and the events that are occurring around me. So one of my criticisms, the criticisms that Leo Ferraro and I made was precisely that the West has tended to reduce the idea of mindfulness too simplistically to meditation and it has also tended to reduce what is being sought after in the meditative practice. It hasn’t been appropriately or deeply linked to the contemplative practice that is needed to afford a fundamental transformation at the level of your identity. So you’ll get those more higher up types of insights. You’ll get cognitive and intellectual insights if you’re practicing a lot of meditation and contemplation. There’s already experimental work showing this both for mindfulness meditations and contemplative practices like meta. And of course the other thing you have to remember is that those cognitive insights and the more existential ones aren’t independent. They influence and affect each other in a powerful manner. So I hope that gives you some sense of the difference between meditation and contemplation and why we need both. Some of you have asked me why I, what I think about Vipassana as a style. I’ve practiced a few other styles of meditation and I find Vipassana very good precisely because of the emphasis on the sensations generated by the breath. Paying attention to the sensations is a really powerful way to step back and look at the mind and the breath is a really great thing to follow because it’s always with you. It links the inner and outer worlds together. It seems to me, so now I don’t want to speak with false precision here. Just to answer that question with some sort of authority would mean I would have, I’d be a connoisseur of many different styles. This is the kind of thing you have to practice to get a sense of. I can compare Vipassana to meta, to some Zen, to some stoic meditative and contemplative practices, also to mindfulness practices like yoga and Tai Chi. And one of the things that I found is that the way Vipassana is designed is it integrates very well with the contemplative practices and the moving practices. So that’s how I would respond to the question about the power of Vipassana. Some of you have asked me how you go about starting a practice. I recommend very strongly that you need to get involved with somebody in person. Meditation is like making love, only in this sense. It’s something you have to do with somebody who understands it and has practiced it for you to get an understanding of it. Books are great and they should be read after or along the way. Now of course, the thing that you need to know about that is you have to be very careful about selecting a meditation instructor. A good thing is if you can get some sense of the tradition they belong to and see if it’s an established vetted one. See if they have been vetted by any independent organizations or groups of users. Also it’s important if you begin with the teacher, what is the focus? This is something I tell my students when I’m recommending what to do after they’ve taken the course I teach. What’s the focus? Is the focus the teacher or is the focus the teaching? Is the focus of the teaching on your transformation or on you feeling good? Meditation should never be a vacation from life. Meditation should always be an education about the depths of life. You should be choosing an instructor that is focused on the teaching and the teaching should be emphasizing transformation and challenging you to the growth and the awareness and insight that you are no doubt probably seeking. Now what I will tell you about this and this is something you should be open to is your reason for starting meditation will change. Your reason for doing meditation will change as you do meditation. You’ll go into meditation because you’re interested in relaxing or getting more peace of mind and as you go on and discover more why you’re doing meditation will change for you. I would recommend to you that that’s also a criterion you pay attention to. If you’re engaged in a practice and you’re not getting that sense of growth and that your understanding and the goals you’re pursuing are deepening in the practice, then again there’s a chance you want to reconsider where and who you’re learning to practice with. It’s better if you practice with other people because it generally means you’ll stick with the practice. If you practice on your own chances are you won’t keep it up. The next thing I would recommend to you is that you do not get into meditation by going on a retreat. Retreats are very powerful, very transformative and for that reason they can be very overwhelming and very disruptive. I would recommend taking a meditation course, practicing for at least a year before you consider going on a meditation retreat. I hope that answers a lot of the practical questions I received about meditation, contemplation, starting to practice the power of Vipassana. This relates to another bunch of questions that I got all around that are along the following lines. This is all really great theory, but how does this translate into practice? People are saying, is this all like other than meditating or doing CBT, what does this all come down to? Well, I mean, I don’t want to steal too much thunder from the end of the series because there’s going to be several episodes that are going to be directed at this. I’ve also got some videos out there giving some instruction on how to do some of these practices. Just to give a broad overview, what I’m going to propose to you is that we need a system of psychotechnologies that are integrated together for dealing with perennial problems that beset us as meaning-making cognitive agents. Of course, what those are, I haven’t talked about yet, but you’ve seen a few of them. You’ve seen the modal confusion. We’ve talked about the parasitic processing. The idea of the perennial problems are the following. We are vulnerable to forms of self-deception and self-destruction precisely because of the very processes that make us adaptive. The very processes that afford our adaptive cognition are exactly the same ones that make us vulnerable to self-deception, self-destruction. That is why they’re perennial problems. They are endemic to us as cognitive meaning-making agents. One of the things I would propose to you is that what we’re looking for is a systematic set of psychotechnologies. CBT would be one component of it, but I would suggest to you that CBT is actually part of a larger set of psychotechnologies called active open-mindedness. Mindfulness psychotechnologies would be some other ones. Low induction are other ones. Anyways, the idea is set. How do they organize together? That structural functional organization has to be directed to this. How can they, in a coordinated and integrated fashion, deal with the perennial problems that beset us in a way that is also responsive to our historical situation where we have got to with respect to the increasing presence in our life and our culture of the meaning crisis. There’s a lot of design demands on what we’re looking for. We need a set of psychotechnologies that are properly constructed in terms of our best cognitive science that would help us to best address the perennial problems and also have an intellectually respectful and I would even say intellectually respectable and even say perhaps potentially profound way of addressing the cultural historical situation that the meaning crisis has put us in. This idea about all this theory being translated into practice is exactly the T loss of this whole series. In the end, and this is why I’m teaching ultimately in the end, in the end I want to forward people away the systematic set of psychotechnologies, not because it’s exhaustive or complete, but as an exemplar of how people could turn all of this theory into practice and thereby address the meaning crisis both as a cultural entity and as a cognitive process that’s operational within their own lives and minds. So that, I mean, I don’t mean to, I’m not trying to dismiss by being promissory, but this is what the whole series is going to build towards and I’m going to also incorporate some episodes of giving practical instruction on how to do some of these psychotechnologies. I have a few videos out there already on that, but that is definitely going to be addressed. All right, so some of you have also asked me some questions about cognitive science and we haven’t gotten the series to the explanation of cognitive science. We’ve already filmed some of those, so I know what’s coming for you and I’m basically going to give a whole episode dedicated to introducing to you what cognitive science is, so that is definitely coming. But just to give you an idea, some of you have been asking me, because I’ve been referring to third generation cog sci, about can I recommend some books. Dawson’s book, which I have in my office, Mind, Body and World, I think is an excellent introduction to the three. Here, I’m just getting it now. Amar, thanks. All right, so here’s a really good book. I highly recommend it. It’s not an easy read. You do not take this book to the beach because you will get too engrossed in it and die of a sunburn or you won’t possibly be able to give it the attention it deserves. But this is an excellent book for describing the three generations. Really excellent book. I would also recommend you take a look at Mark Rowland’s book, The New Science of the Mind, because it gives an excellent presentation of third generation cognitive science and also discusses some of the issues that are central to it, like the ideas of extended mind and embodied cognition. So not a book that you could just pick up and read if you don’t have some introductory education on cognitive science or philosophy of mind. But that’s where I would recommend you look if you want to get some ideas about this. I don’t want to say too much more about cognitive science right now, because as I said, there’s going to be basically 25 episodes dedicated to explaining what it is and also giving you an example. I’m going to exemplify how you practice cognitive science. I’m going to do cognitive science with you as we move through the analysis of the cognitive machinery of meaning making. So I’m hoping between those recommendations, the explanation and the exemplification, you’ll get a very good answer to this question about what is cognitive science and especially what is third generation cognitive science. So the next series of questions had to do with this central theme running through it. So I really appreciate these questions. By the way, many of you are saying hello and hi and hi to everyone. And again, it’s great to have you all coming in and saying hello and sending me your comments and your support. So again, I can’t stop and say hi to everybody. But again, thank you so much. So the next series of questions have to do with this issue about difficulties surrounding integrating science and spirituality. And I think that’s very important. It’s the central problem in a sense that the series is trying to tackle, because how do I say this? I don’t want to be dismissive of other people’s work. It’s really important to me. Some of you may have heard this when I was doing the podcast with Peter Lindbergh and David Ghazouli about how important it is to exemplify a standard of practice for how we dialogue with each other. So this is in my mind right now as I try to answer these questions. It’s important to me that I do something answering those questions like what I have to do in cognitive science. And what do I mean by this? When I’m doing cognitive science, one of the things that I have to do, and some of you have seen it already in some of the videos, I often have to bridge between different disciplines. There’s a video at TEDx talk out there on cognitive science saves the deconstructive mind. And so if you want to get this argument into more detail, you can take a look at that. But the idea is there are many disciplines who talk about the mind at different levels. You have neuroscience talking about the brain, you have machine learning talking about information processing, you have psychology talking about behavior, and they use different methods. Psychology uses experimentation, neuroscience much more direct observation, machine learning, you’re actually creating simulations. They talk about different entities like neural networks or working memory. And so what you have to do in a cognitive scientist, as a cognitive scientist, is you often have to try and bridge between these disciplines. And the really tricky thing is to bridge in a way that respects what each discipline is doing. And at the same time, creates a meaningful connection so that they can mutually inform and transform each other in an insightful manner. And so I see what I’m trying to do. This project that I’m engaged with you people on is create that kind of relationship between science and spirituality, where I can preserve and respect what each one contributes, while also creating a conceptual vocabulary, a theoretical grammar that will allow them to talk to each other and mutually afford each other. We’ve got a cultural grammar that makes them antagonistic, antithetical to each other, disparate and disconnected from each other, fragmented. You can already see this. And so I and this is where I’m trying to not be dismissive of other people, but I do not like solutions to this issue that are dismissive of one side or the other of this relationship. So attempts to sort of undermine the legitimacy, the power, the importance of science and the scientific world view, sort of nostalgic attempts to get away from it or undermine it. I personally will defend science against those. I understand why some people do them. And by the way, this does not mean that people should not engage in philosophical critique of the scientific worldview. They should. Jonathan Pageau does this. Paul Van Der Klee does this. There’s good work. I have disagreements with them. I think there’s ways in which science can be defended and respond to some of their criticisms. But their criticisms, I respect them and they need to be taken seriously. And that’s part of what I mean by respecting this. But people who want to sort of nostalgically, you know, dismiss science and the scientific worldview under very pejorative terms like materialism. You know, you have to be careful about how you’re thinking about this. Right. Most scientists, for example, at least ones who care about the philosophical foundations of science. And there are many that do, by the way, wouldn’t consider themselves materialists. They would consider themselves physicalists. A materialist is somebody who thinks that the only reality is matter. A physicalist thinks, no, no, reality consists of any things that we can study in relation to the ontology provided to us by physics. So relations and time and space and energy and patterns and structural functional organizations and self-organizing processes like life and evolution. Those are all legitimate things. Right. So you have to be careful about your relationship to science. But on the other hand, you have to be very respectful. To spirituality, one of the things I regularly and reliably do is when I can do this, when I’m with people, my students in my classes, is I ask people, for example, who belong to particular religious traditions, if they felt that I was treating them in a respectful manner. And what I find very encouraging is that they will often respond to say that I what I said they found helpful or useful for them, deepening their own reflection and existential inhabitation of their own religious or spiritual worldview. So the difficulty is maintaining that equilibration, trying to generate a discourse that is mutually respectful, but is willing to provoke each side to be willing to change and reformulate so that insightful and purposeful communication and dialogue can occur between them. And so that is an overriding constraint throughout the whole of the production of the series. And when I’m interacting with other people, I very much am trying to give people I’m a practitioner on both sides. I think that’s a fair thing to say about me. I’m a deep practitioner on both sides. And I’m also somebody who has developed by training because of my expertise is designed to build bridges between disparate discourses. So I’m not saying I’m not offering myself as an ultimate authority, but I think I have the relevant expertise to try and face that difficulty without trying to create sort of utopic visions or dismissive nostalgia or any of the any of the ways that try to deal with this issue of science and spirituality by dismissing one of the two poles. So that would be my answer to that. It is the central difficulty, but also to the degree to which we can succeed. It’s it’s one of the I think one of the great things we can possibly do for addressing the meaning crisis. I think any any attempt to address the meaning crisis that is not scientifically sound, I don’t think is going to get the cultural power and make the impact on cognition that it can in comparison to a scientifically sound response to the meaning crisis. I also think that any attempt to respond to the meaning crisis that just says that science can do this for us, that we do not have to pay attention to systematic sets of psychotechnologies, cultural institutions that engage our perspectival and participatory knowing and processes of transformation, I think should is also not going to get the ability to transform culture, consciousness and cognition and community in the ways that we need to do it without sorry, in order to address the meaning crisis. I got a question about many questions about enlightenment. Some of them were very technical questions about specific aspects of different schools of Buddhism. And I have a general policy that if I do not have the relevant expertise, I will not offer opinions on things. I think it is dangerous to opine without knowledge or wisdom. And so on those specific things, I’m afraid I’m not the person to answer your questions. I can answer questions about aspects within the passing tradition, broad principles of Buddhist metaphysics and how they relate to Western metaphysics. But on specifics about that, I’m sorry, I don’t have the relevant expertise to answer those questions. What I can say is and I’m aware of the potential hubris in this, but what I can say is what I’m going to try and offer you is a thing that bridges between the science and the spirituality and try and offer in this mutually respectful manner, a cognitive scientific account of what enlightenment is. The basic idea is that when we talk about enlightenment, we’re talking about a systematic set of psychotechnologies that brings about a comprehensive transformation in human beings such that they have an alleviation of the perennial problems that beset us because of the adaptive nature, the fundamental adaptive nature of our cognition and meaning making. And so I think we should stop. Sorry, that’s too strong. I apologize. I think it would be a good idea to just to not just look at people who claim to be enlightened and what their experience is like to try and figure out what enlightenment is. We’ve been doing that for a long time. And so I shouldn’t say we should stop doing that. What I’m suggesting is we should try and reverse engineer enlightenment. I mean, this is one of the things you do in cognitive science, you reverse engineer things. What do I mean by that? Let’s figure out what are the perennial problems that we need to have a solution to. And then reverse engineer, what are the changes in consciousness and cognition, character and community that would afford significant amelioration or alleviation to those perennial problems? And let’s call that fundamental transformation enlightenment. And however it might be ensconced within particular religious traditions or vocabulary is one thing. But let’s get at what we actually need to do in order to address these issues. If you don’t want to call that enlightenment and you want to reserve that term for a specific religious historical event or state, that’s fine. But that is how I’m going to use that term. And we are definitely going to talk in depth about that. Some of you are going to be tuning in this week to the next episode about the Buddha. We’re going to be talking about some of these states of awakening. And you’ll get the beginning of that argument taking shape. In connection with this study of Buddhist metaphysics, I was asked a really, really good question. And I want to answer that question because it gives me an opportunity to address something that I’m going to talk about later in the series, but I haven’t mentioned yet. So I’ve been asked, do I know anything about the Kyoto school? And the Kyoto school, for those of you who aren’t aware of it, was a movement of Japanese philosophers in the 20th century that purposely tried to do something very similar to what I’m trying to do in this series. Hence why the question was asked of me, no doubt. The Kyoto philosophers were trying to integrate aspects of Buddhism, most especially Zen Buddhism, but also some Pure Land Buddhism with Western philosophy, particularly the work of William James and the work of Martin Heidegger and also some of the early phenomenologists. So the Kyoto school is trying to do exactly, we’re trying to do something very analogous to this kind of bridging that I’m interested in. And so the answer to the question, do I know about the Kyoto school? The answer to that is a resounding yes. I have read several of Nishateni’s books. I would go so far as to say this. I once, I mean, it’s not an easy read, but I think Nishateni’s book, Religion and Nothingness, is one of the top five books I would recommend people read if they want a profound response to the metaphysical, epistemological and existential issues surrounding nihilism. It is a superlative. I don’t use this word often, but I consider that book a masterpiece. And I’m grateful for the fact that I got to read Nishateni’s Religion and Nothingness. I’ve also read a lot of Nishida’s work. Very, very interesting. Also, a lot of Masao Abe’s work. I particularly like some of the work that Abe did on Dojin and also some connections that he’s made to Jung and Tillich, which are very appropriate. So the answer is the Kyoto school deeply informs a lot of my thinking. And I will come to them when we get deeper into the towards the end of the series and we talk about current people trying to respond to the meaning crisis like Jung and Tillich and Corbin and the Kyoto school, etc. One thing I would want to say on this is, and I won’t get it in two minutes too much right now, but I’ve spoken this here and there, is the Kyoto school and people like Tillich and I would also argue Jung bring about a possibility of a particular metaphysics that is relevant to spirituality, which is the position of non-theism. And non-theism is the idea that the relationship to the sacred should not be framed in the grammar and language of either theism or atheism, but that it needs to that grammar, that structure needs to be transcended in a very powerful way. And we’ll talk about what that means and why I think that is particularly relevant to us today and why I think that is a good way of understanding one of the contributions that the Kyoto school has made to the project that I have the great good fortune to be engaged in right now with you. Some of you have asked about who’s my favorite philosopher. That’s an interesting question. It’s kind of like asking of all the people you’ve had romantic relationships with, who’s your favorite? It’s kind of a dangerous question because you’re afraid of being disloyal or undermining what past people have meant to you. I guess if I had to be Desert Island kind of thing, I just got this book yesterday. And so I’m really thrilled from it because I’ve read a lot of it. I got the I got the complete unabridged work in one volume of Plotinus. So that would be the book I would take to my the Desert Island. Plotinus is my favorite philosopher, not because I don’t have deep criticisms of him. And you’ll see some of these later when we come back to this non-theistic position that refuses to decide, like I think Nishatani argued, between emergence bottom up and emanation top down, emerge temporal emergence up and eternal emanation down. I think choosing or prioritizing either one of those, as we sometimes are led to do in either theism or atheism, I think is part of what should be criticized in terms of Nishatani. So I have criticisms of Plotinus along those lines. But nevertheless, I mean, leading Plotinus is such a joy. I mean, Plato is my first philosopher, so he’ll always have a special role. But the reason why I like Plotinus is because he’s got he’s this great he’s like the grand unified field theory of ancient philosophy, because in him you have integrated the science of Aristotle. You have the spirituality of Plato. You have the existential project of the Stoics. And when you’re reading him, the discourse is so beautiful. It’s simultaneously like this logical argumentation and this spiritual exercise designed to actually transform and alter your state of consciousness. So I find reading Plotinus, it’s like going to a dojo for your consciousness and your cognition. It is radically transformative for me. Another philosopher who comes sort of second precisely because of satisfying that broad set is Spinoza. And I like Spinoza because for me, Spinoza represents and I think this is kind of explicit. There’s at least some allusions in Spinoza’s title and some of his terminology to the Neoplatonic tradition. But Spinoza is bringing that whole unification that was afforded by the Neoplatonic heritage into the advent of the scientific revolution. So in about five minutes, I’m going to start addressing some live questions. I want to take one more question that people have been asking me in general. So these are questions around insight, because I’ve been talking a lot about insight and they want to know questions about what’s the relationship, why do I emphasize insight so much? What’s the relationship between insight and creativity, insight and wisdom? I have a much longer argument for that question, and you can go online. I have a YouTube series on my Thinking and Reasoning course that does extensive work on the psychology of insight and its connection to creativity. And I think the relationship between insight and creativity is quite deep. So trying to answer it in five minutes. So please, please forgive me if I’m seeming to brusque, but I’m going to try and give the gist of what I think the difference is. I think both insight and creativity are using the same cognitive machinery of reframing how we’re formulating our problems and sizing up situations. I think the difference, one of the primary differences is that insight tends to be focused on getting a solution to the problem. So it’s about problem solving. Whereas I think creativity, to pick up on Arlen and some other people’s work, I think that creativity is using that machine machinery to find problems. I think what’s interesting about creativity is finding a good problem and formulating it in such a way that we see its profound and important connections to other problems and then perhaps also insightfully responding to it. I think that’s the hallmark of creativity. And I think for that reason, that creativity involves not just this cognitive machinery of reframing our problems. I think creativity also involves a modal shift where we’re shifting into a way of interpreting our situation and our surroundings that is very conducive to the flow state. I’ll talk a little bit about this again later. Michael Apter’s work on the telek and the paratelek metamotivational states, to put it in sort of a phrase that I think is helpful. And Apter uses those terms. Creativity, you’re more in a work mode when you’re when you’re trying to get an insightful solution to a problem. But when you’re creatively doing problem finding, you’re much more in a play mode. And that has important impact on your modal relationship. You tend to be more often in the being mode rather than the having mode. And it also has important aspects on your motivational connection when you’re doing that. Now, I think the relationship between insight and wisdom is more profound. And I don’t think we should equate them, but I think there’s something central about the connection between insight and wisdom. That’s why I think it seems strange to us if we say, you know, sorry, it doesn’t seem strange to us if we say, well, that person’s not very creative, but they’re very wise. Yeah, that’s OK. Or, you know, that person, right, doesn’t have a lot of scientific knowledge, but they’re very wise. Yeah, we can sort of. Yeah, I get that. Wisdom isn’t the same thing as knowledge, not the same thing as But if we say, you know, that person’s wise, but they’re not very insightful, that mode, like when I do work on this, right, people know that’s wrong. Wise people should have insight. That doesn’t mean they’re necessarily better at things like the nine dot problem. But to pick up on one of the metaphors that I’ve introduced in the course, right, as the child is to the adult, the adult is to the sage, you have more advanced cognition because you’ve gone through developmental stages. And you can think of those developmental stages and Piaget as systematic sets of insight. It’s not an insight into this problem or this problem. It’s finding a systematic pattern of error and having an insight that transforms all of those problems in a coordinated manner. And so I think that when we’re talking about wisdom, we’re talking about a systematic insight that puts us through a developmental change. And also the level of the insight is not just cognitive level, it’s the existential level of the actual project by which we are engaged in assuming and assigning identities in the world. One more quick shout out before I turn to some of the live questions. So there’s been general questions about how to make my work more accessible. I would point to you to an excellent series of videos that are being done right now by Think Big Animation. The videos are very high quality. They’re about 15 minutes long each. They’re animated and they give excellent, in my opinion, overview, summation, insightful presentation of this argument in a way that is very accessible. I’d also point to the work of Paul Van der Kley. He has released a whole series of videos where he’s commenting and criticizing in a constructive and respectful manner. I would also point out my work, and I deeply appreciate of that. And many people are saying that they’re finding his exposition helpful for understanding the work that I’m doing here now. OK, so I want to now turn to some of the live questions. Again, I can’t promise to get to them all. So let’s begin with some of them. Where would you start with Plotinus? Well, here’s the thing. Don’t start with Plotinus. If you start with Plotinus, it would be like jumping into a black belt class, right? That would you’re going to get you’re going to get kicked to the ground intellectually. I would recommend that you first of all, read some Plato, because Plotinus sees himself as an intellectual descendant of Plato and an interpreter of Plato. And then I would highly recommend that you read some books by Pierre Hedot first. I would recommend that you read What is Ancient Philosophy by Pierre Hedot and that you also read The Simplicity of Vision by Pierre Hedot explaining to you Neoplatonism. You might also want to take a look at some of the works of Arthur Vosuus. There’s a book called Platonic Mysticism that I think is an excellent introduction to all of this. After going through that introductory material, reading some Plato, then I would recommend you start with Plotinus’s treatise on beauty. I think that’s a good place to start and a way of trying to get access into Plotinus. And then you might want some commentaries to guide you through the various Aeneids. So that’s how I would recommend doing that. Yes, we are going. I’ve been asked the question, are you going to set up a way that the community can help support you financially? First of all, just heartfelt thanks that many of you have been saying you want to donate and support. First of all, I want to make I want to make something clear. I want to treat any of those donations under the intent I think they are given. They are intended to afford doing this video work. And I think also I’m going to interpret them as also supporting the science. I have a lab here, the Consciousness and Wisdom Studies Lab that is generating a lot of this work and very happy to work with these bright minds. And so the money that’s going to come via the Patreon account that we’re going to be setting up very shortly is going to go to funding this kind of stuff, the videos, but also to helping to fund the direct research and science that makes this work possible. So very, very much. Some of you have asked, how have my own teachings affected how you live your life and your parenting? Wow. So. I mean, I’ve asked people if I if I live authentically, if I really do try to practice what I preach to use a phrase that I think is inappropriate to me because I don’t consider myself, no, I do want to take up the role of a preacher. That is not who or what I want to be. So I really try to go ahead and understand in my own life the issues that people are facing and the skills and virtues they need to cultivate because of some of the problems and the difficulties that I’ve faced in my life. And how how I conduct myself in my personal relationships and trying it is. So the problem with this is there’s no way of doing this without coming across with the false pretense, right? Of faux, you know, humility, but humility really matters, right? And not being arrogant and really trying to own up to the mistakes I have made in my life with people seriously make amends and also seriously trying to scaffold and encourage other people without falling prey to egocentric narcissism or arrogance. And the teachings have helped me when I’ve succeeded and they’ve corrected me when I failed. And so that’s one of the most important ways in which they make and continue to make a deep impact on my life. So thank you for asking that. When I’m filming in front of a class or just a camera, I am in front of just the people, but the wonderful team I have, they come up in the credits at the end of every video with Alan, Will and Ryan. And it’s intriguing and it was challenging for me when I was first doing this because I’m used to teaching in front of people and I get responses back like people laughing or at least smiling or nodding. And, you know, Alan and Will and Ryan are doing their best to not make noise and not distract me. So they’re very much, you know, not usually responding. And so that’s that’s been really interesting for me as trying to learn how to talk. Some of you made some comments and you have to understand we’ve already filmed 25 episodes because I can’t make improvements about some of these. I have made the improvement of only using the black marker, like some of you said. I will try not to say so much. We’re going to talk about that later. I think you’re now getting the sense that there’s an overarching large argument. I will try not to keep doing that and I’ll try not to keep saying right as a filler word. Some of you said, could you stop doing that? I’ll try and pay attention to that. But it’s been very, very interesting doing this filming and trying instead to picture you guys out there and what this might be meaning to you and being respectful and to try and getting you to focus on the work. So don’t forget there will be 50 episodes for those of you who have just tuned in. And so there’s a large overarching argument. The first half is the historical analysis and the second half is the cognitive scientific analysis. I got a question here. I refuse. I refuse. Sorry. I refer to you as a mystic when describing you. Does that shoe fit? Well, I have had very powerful mystical experiences in my life. I continue to have them and along the lines of some very good research done, for example, in the Griffiths lab and elsewhere, work done on transformative experiences. Those have made a huge difference and impact on my work. I hope that I’m coming across as not just a mystic in the sense of just relating sort of a first person account of transformative processes. I also want to come across as a scientist who is explaining how people can cultivate these experiences and why they’re transformative. And also, I want to come across as a practitioner that will integrate my first person perspectival knowing of this, the scientific understanding with some good, if you’ll allow me, engineering of the psychotechnology so that other people may learn how to generate these states and also integrate them into a worldview and existential framework that will afford them being appropriately transformative in their lives. Do I have any thoughts on how to make the pursuit of wisdom a more widespread social project? Well, that’s one of the reasons why I’m doing the video series, why I’m continually giving podcasts, talks about wisdom. I mean, what I would love to do, what I would love to do would be to start to set up schools. Sort of, I hope this is understood correctly, secular monasteries kinds of things, because we miss that we no longer have that institution in our society where people can go and learn both about the science and the practice of these. I should mention that I’m also involved with a business with Peter Kosar, Anderson Todd and Leo Ferraro, the Sophia framework in which we are trying to create workshops on how to cultivate wisdom and to take this into the so-called real world to make an impact on the broader culture. So I would like to create networks of this, and of course, that is a daunting task, not only in terms of its explicit project, but putting in tremendously effective, I would need safeguards so that this network of secular monasteries did not fall into any kind of abusive system. And like I said, and coordinating that with the kind of work we’re doing with the Sophia framework and creating the workshops, we’re trying to also create a phone app. So there are many things I’m trying to do to do this. I’m trying to encourage other people that I get to discourse with to talk more often and more frequently about wisdom, its relationship and difference from knowledge, its relationship to altered states of consciousness, its potential relationship to the meaning crisis, things like that. Some people are asking, through your experience, do you believe public schools can teach the tools of Vipassana in a non-theistic manner? Yeah, I think they could. I think if that non-theistic framework was emphasized, that would make it doable for people in a way that was respectful. I do have one concern about this, and I think it’s a concern that needs to be taken seriously based on the work of Willoughby Britton and others. We don’t have any good evidence or very much good work on the effect of these practices on young children. We know that if you engage in these practices, they are transformative, your cognition and your culture. Sometimes the transformations can be quite powerful, quite emotionally demanding and challenging for people. They also are altering, there is increasing evidence, they’re altering the wiring of your brain. So I hesitate about introducing meditation, especially Vipassana, to children before we have some good science, so that we can do a proper and informed cost-risk analysis, cost-benefit analysis, I should say, or risk-benefit analysis. That’s what I’m trying to say. We need to do that in order to, I think, properly decide if we should implement things like Vipassana in the public schools. Are you planning on writing a book based on your Meaning Crisis lecture? As I’ve mentioned, I’m writing a series of books. There’s already the Zombie Book, working with Christopher Master Pietro on the sequel to that. There’s the Genealogy of the Meaning Crisis, which is called Unsheltered. And then there will be two books developing the response to this, the Cognitive Science and then the overall response. So that series is coming out. The second book in the series should come out this year. There’s also another book that, as I’ve mentioned earlier, some of you just joined, is going to be the Cognitive Continuum from Insight to Enlightenment, sort of unpacking all of the cognitive machinery that’s involved in insight, flow, sensibility, transcendence, awakening, enlightenment. So that’s definitely going to happen. So unfortunately, we’re coming to the end of our time. And I want to again thank Amara and Karina for all their work. Always thanking Alan and Will and Ryan for all of their tremendous work. Many of my co-authors, who I’ve mentioned, like Leo Ferraro and Christopher Master Pietro, the ongoing support and friendship of Anderson Todd. And all of you guys for this just tremendous enthusiasm. I promise you we are going to do this on a regular basis. There’ll be another one of these coming fairly shortly. And so I look forward towards getting more of your questions and doing this again. I really, really enjoyed this. Thank you very much. And I hope all of you have a very, very good evening.