https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=9D-4-Owzbh0
Welcome everyone to the monthly Q&A. I’m John Bervegi. It’s good to have you all here. You’ll have to excuse the headphones. We’re having to do everything virtually. Omar is normally present with me when we’re doing the Q&A’s, but he of course isn’t right now because of COVID. So this is so I could hear Omar, because he’s as always behind the scenes working his magic. So let’s get to it. We’ll answer questions from patrons first, and then we’ll proceed to some other questions. The first is from Claudia. She’s a patron. The question is, I’m interested in how you view the relationship between sacredness and truth, both objective truth and subjective truth. So the way I’d want to start by that is be clear about what, again, do I mean by the experience of sacredness, the experience of sacredness is when we’re presuming too much from what you guys have seen. Something is sacred to us when it is an enacted, imaginal symbol of some kind that we can use to access and accentuate, even accelerate the religio, this fundamental connectedness we have to reality. And we’re celebrating that. Normally we’re doing relevance realization and getting connected so we can solve our problems, but sometimes what we’re doing is we’re doing it just so that we can celebrate and activate that very process. So a prototypical example of this is music, we’re playing music and we’re really engaging all of the salient lands. Sometimes we’re listening to music for other reasons, but when we’re doing it like in an experience we might call sacred, we’re doing it because we’re celebrating and cultivating that intense religio. And when that religion discloses to us the moreness of reality and the suchness of particular things, the moreness is the fact that everything, reality is actually common and really explosive, it’s inexhaustible, the properties it possesses. And the suchness of is the fact that everything has, this is a Buddhist notion, but there’s similar notions in Western philosophers, that everything has a non-categorical uniqueness. There’s a sense in which everything is an irreplaceable event, irrepeatable event within the universe because it was only a particular constellation at that point, the suchness. So you might think of the morning so you might think of the moreness as the inexhaustible depths into which we participate, with which we participate, and the suchness is sort of the inexhaustible depths within which we individuate who we are. So I think sacredness at its most profound is when, and this is a notion derived from Tillich, is when the deepest participation in the inexhaustibleness of reality and the deepest individuation of how I am a very particular way or how that, a work of art is a very particular way. So when you see a work of art, it’s unlike anything else you’ve seen, although it discloses how much more of reality there is. And so sacredness is when the depths, mysterious depths of participation are resonating with this mysterious depth of individuation and there’s that tone-off, that creative tension. And what does that have to do with truth? What does that have to do with truth? Well, the notion of truth that I think it’s appropriate to is what Heidegger would call Altheic truth, Alictheic truth. So we tend to think of truth given the Cartesian framework under notions of objectivity. And then what we mean by truth there is the idea in my mind corresponds to what’s in reality, that’s objectively true, or subjective truth is, right, it somehow puts me more in touch with the inner aspects of my consciousness. Because unfortunately, Heidegger gave us these two diametrically opposed models of what’s real, the mathematical properties or those ineffable properties in how the mind touches itself. Like the way you, when you’re conscious, you know you’re conscious by being conscious. And so we’ve been playing with subjective and objective truth for all of that. Heidegger and other philosophers, but Heidegger has been deeply influential along, pointed out that what is more important is the common ground, what I call the transjective, that makes the relationship between the two of them possible. There must be some way, there has to be some point in me that touches and conforms with reality or else I would actually be subject to kind of an absolute skepticism. And so for, in this notion, truth is not correspondence, it’s not correspondence within an external world, it’s not coherence within the internal world. Truth is the reciprocal opening between them. The disclosure, the exemplification of how being grounds both the objective sense of truth and the subjective sense of truth. So we deeply experience religio and connectivity, the transjectivity of our meaning-making capacities, meaning cultivations even better. And therefore it is a way in which we can bring into awareness the ground that actually lies beneath subjective and objective. We can disclose the ground of being. And I think that aletheic truth, the kind of truth that I don’t like to use the word truth for this, but Heidegger does, the general word for truth is a little bit more rich. But anyways, that kind of aletheic truth is what grounds participatory knowing, the relationship that makes all of the subjective and objective things possible for us. A way in which we can go from thinking that, like I’m just discussing it like I did with you now, to actually dwelling within experientially and transformatively. So I hope that answers your question. Thank you, Claudia. The next question is from Ashraf Al-Khalib, also a patron. Do you have any fiction recommendations, whether related to the meaning crisis or not? I would love to hear about any fiction books or novels you think is worth recommending from fantasy to historical fiction and everything in between. So I think one of the premier books for understanding the advent of the meaning crisis within modernity is Moby Dick. Moby Dick is an astonishing book. It’s a novel that I’ve read that feels like, and I mean this is a compliment to both books, it feels like the Bible, it has the B. Timbalt reservoir and all of this complexity. I think, was it Kelly and Dreyfus in their book Things All Things Shining? Similarly, also recommend Moby Dick, a novel that really presents in mythic and lyrical form people sailing into, pun intended, into the meaning crisis. So I think that’s an important book for the meaning crisis as a novel. Other ones, I mean Camus is very good, it was one of his things, both Le Trangé, The Stranger and The Plague. That one’s particularly relevant right now, I think are very excellent books about the meaning crisis. Now those are sort of more, and then I think I really recommend a book that’s sort of a more positive response that converges with a lot of my thinking and this has been pointed out to me by my friend who does excellent work on this, Sevilla King, on her channel, Quality Existence, which is of course Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I think you could make a good argument that Persique’s notion of quality and how it gets packed romanticism in the classical is very similar to mine, and Sevilla agrees with me on this, very similar to relevance, realisation and religio and deep connectedness. So I would recommend that as a book of fiction for the meaning, those are books of fiction on the meaning crisis. I’m trying to think of anything else that really bring it out in a very clear way, that had a deep impact on me as novels, but those ones definitely did. So I can’t think of anything within fantasy or science fiction that really picks up on that theme well. A science fiction book that I think deserves to be read more, and I have a special place in my heart for this book because this book really woke me up, it really shook me up, is a science fiction book by Roger Lazny called Lord of Light because what Lazny was doing in there, and he really planted the seeds in The Awakening, I was in a very enclosed worldview and he sort of cracked it open. He planted the seeds of the, like he’s exploring a relationship between myth and science and doing it obviously with a sort of a science fiction. Even the novel is really interesting because he really stays on this boundary, this liminal space between the fantasy novel and a science fiction and you could, it’s really beautifully written in that way and he’s evoking mythological themes but also problems that you know that science fiction addresses and he’s a wordsmith so it’s a wonderful book. And then lastly I think a book that should, I should have mentioned earlier that had another profound impact on me and again is, the reason it came up is because it’s more like a mixture of mythology and literature as a response to the mini crisis is Hermann Hesse’s Siddharta which I would highly recommend. So I think that’s a good beginning of books that you might want to check out and take a look at. They give you, they enrich your conceptual and linguistic repertoire such, I mean it’s important to have a richly varied and well-organized vocabulary. I know some people don’t like that and I understand what that means so you can get swallowed up in jargon but you know what I kind of want my doctor to have a lot of verbiage because I want her to be able to distinguish and lots of different things and get really clear pictures about things. So I think what people mean by that, what people mean by verbiage is they mean that the vocabulary isn’t doing any conceptual work and that can be the case but the other is also the case. A limited vocabulary can really limit the conceptual work you need to perform and so literature is very good for in a way that always has existential import because it’s also always training the perspectival knowing. This is work done by Keith Oatley showing that your ability to interact with literature is really predictive of your ability to pick up on other people’s mental states and deal with very difficult situations. So I think that it’s very important to recognize that literature can do a lot for us in this way and I think those are the old recommendations of books that come readily to mind right now. What is your, this is from Mackenzie Levitt, patron. Hi Mackenzie, it’s good to see you again. What is your perspective on the visionary experiences people experience in DMAE trips from a cognitive science perspective? So I want to be clear right that I’m not sort of advocating the use of psychedelics in any kind of unconstrained fashion. People should be aware that there are, I mean there’s not really a risk of addiction but there’s other kinds of risks associated with using psychedelics a lot. You can have some disruption to your perceptual processing and so again relatively small minority but it’s something to know about. Some people can sort of behavioral responses. So it’s really important to, and I argue for this repeatedly, to situate any use of psychedelics within a sapiential context in which you have really good knowledge of the causal powers of the substance and you also have practiced a lot of techniques for like wisdom cultivation, a lot of practices for helping to ameliorate self-deception. Within that context I think what psychedelics do from a cognitive scientist perspective is they basically are a disruptive strategy. So we can see, and I’m working on this with Daniel Craig and the Cognitive Continuum, from insight up to insight and shamanic experience there’s what are called disruptive strategies. These are strategies that are designed to help you break frame. They introduce enough criticality into your, enough destabilization into the self-organization of your cognition that it has the possibility of reforming, restructuring and getting into a different pattern, a comprehensively different pattern of self-organization. You do the same thing when you’re training neural networks. You train them for a while and then you throw noise into them and the noise actually breaks up their processing and then when they re-self-organize they’re not bound to the particular set of data that they were originally trained on. They’re capable of much more generalization. They can explore states of being that they can, and this form facilitates a restructuring, a dynamic restructuring and that means the areas of the brain that are typically not talking to each other talk to each other more and that’s, so that can afford tremendous insight. It can also afford tremendous bullshitting and so you need to really set that within an appropriately ritual context. So the next one is from patron Dan. Many people have recently been saying they value human connection and want to opt out of the virtual space completely due to the dystopian surveillance aspect. Do you have any advice for such communities who plan to live without technology altogether? Wow, I don’t know if I have the requisite expertise to answer that. So that’s a really interesting proposal that people are trying to opt out of virtual space. So I guess the idea there would be to, maybe part of the thing is to look at communities that existed before the virtual space that were dedicated to the cultivation of wisdom. So the ancient philosophical schools and monasteries, I would recommend them because they have a much better track record than sort of communes. Communes have a really some work and others go horribly wrong and I’m not saying that monasteries and philosophical schools didn’t at times go wrong but they had a much better overall track record. So I would recommend taking a look at how those are organized, how they’re set up, how they create ecologies of practices. Maybe look at several different models and try and notice what seems to be shared in common between them as a way of organizing a community of people who want to cultivate together and collectively as well as individually an ecology of practices. That would be my best recommendation. It’s a really interesting question. It’s a very interesting question. The next question is from Karima, a patron. There are different types of monism. Spinoza adhere to substantial monism. Yes, but Spinoza’s notion of substance is not our notion of substance. It’s closer to because he’s deeply influenced by the Neoplatonic tradition, probably by Proclus because his treatise, the ethics, is very similar in sort of design and structure to Proclus’s elements of theology. So substance is the translation of hypostasis, the underlying principle of reality, the underlying principle, the most underlying principle of everything. It doesn’t mean underlying stuff. But was claimed after he died to be a pantheist. That’s not correct. I agree with many people who think that Spinoza is not a pantheist. So I’ll get back to that in a minute. He was called a god, a god of the universe, a god intoxicated man. I think it was Novalis that called him that. Yet this reciprocal process is unclear. So Karima then gives me two quotes. He says, Spinoza says, quote, the love of God towards man and the intellectual love of the mind, the intellectual love of the mind towards God are identical, right? And then he also says, he who loves God cannot endeavor that God should love which is one of my favorite quotes from Spinoza. So let’s do the first part. It’s very similar in a lot of ways to Eckhart’s claim. What’s interesting about Spinoza, especially if you read him in his similarities to Proclus, who’s one of the great neoplatonic philosophers, is the deep interweaving of a rigidly almost, rigorously, is that perhaps better? Yeah, a rigorously logical argument and a very mystical vision. And so that idea about the love of God towards man and the intellectual love of the mind towards God are identical, is very similar to Eckhart’s. The eye by which I see God is the same eye by which God sees me. So first of all, what does love mean for Spinoza? Love is joy caused by something external to us. And what’s joy for Spinoza? Joy is anything that increases our conatus. So what is conatus? So this is a really interesting idea and Nietzsche, I think, basically ripped off the will from power from Spinoza on this. I’m pretty sure he read Spinoza. Anyways, that’s another aside. So Spinoza thinks that the essence of anything is its specific endeavor to remain and be it. So for him, the structural functional organization of something is not just a structure. What it does is it’s a structure that’s used sort of in a modern language. It’s a structural functional organization that is resisting entropy, resisting breaking apart the way it’s organized together. So it’s a way in which something is self organizing to some degree, because even static things like chairs, we now know how the degree of self organization within them at the molecular level, etc. So for Spinoza, everything, right, it’s the essence of everything is its endeavor to maintain its being. And so joy is anything that increases that. And then love is joy that’s caused by something beyond us. So when we have an intellectual love for God, what does that mean? What does an intellectual love for God means? It means we’re apprehending God in a rational manner. We’ve done as much as we can to not have our ideas confused. And what we’re realizing is we’re coming into a relationship to God. And what does God need for Spinoza? God for Spinoza, and this is why he was accused of being a pantheist, and it’s wrong, right? He always used the phrase God or nature, God or nature. And what he was trying to do with that was not reduce God to nature. That is a mistake. It’s a very common mistake and an unfair mistake to Spinoza. A better way to think about it is like this. Here’s all of our God language, all the language in which we cultivate wisdom, blessedness, experience joy and love. And then here’s all of our scientific language about nature. They’re actually two, there’s like stereoscopic visions. They’re two different visions on the same thing. There’s a left and a right visual field, and they’re actually fused together for Spinoza. And that’s how we get an ontological depth perception of the underlying principle of reality. And when we realize that underlying principle of reality, that gives us great joy, because the realization of that, like it causes in us an increase in our pantheist, because God is that which is, God is the underlying principle that is constantly presencing. God is the underlying power of being. He’s the pure activity of being. And to come into relationship to him so that the mind conforms to him is to strengthen our canadus, the way in which the mind is self-determining, self-organizing. For Spinoza, the most important aspect of the mind is that there’s nothing beyond God or nature that determines God or nature. So God or nature is completely self-determining. When we become rationally self-determining in conformity to what’s the underlying principle of reality, we become filled with love. How is that God’s love for us? Well, because God’s love for himself is just, it’s not the emotion of love, it is just the expression of that pure activity of the power of being. So we should not be endeavoring to get God to love us in return, because to do that is a category mistake, because God is no kind of thing. God is an underlying principle of realization. And so when I’m realizing, God is shining into me, because God is the very principle of realization, both in the sense of understanding and actualizing. And at the same time, that is realizing me, that is actualizing me, drawing me into greater conformity with reality, increasing my capacity to be. This is why I encourage to be until it starts. He has a whole chapter on Spinoza. He doesn’t start with Spinoza, but he has a whole chapter on Spinoza. So you shouldn’t endeavor to have the no-thingness of God, if you’ll allow me some Buddhist language, to love you in return. There is nothing, there is nothing, there is no thing there that is loving you, separate from the way you are conforming to what is most real. Because that’s what the underlying final hypostasis, the underlying principle is. It’s the principle of realization, both the mental aspect of making sense and what we might call the physical aspect of actualizing things. And for Spinoza, he thinks these are the two main attributes. The structure of ideas and the structure of the world are just two different aspects of the same underlying locus, same underlying structure. So that’s a really cool question. Spinoza is really important to me. Many of you might have said, why is it going on about Spinoza? Spinoza is really important because Spinoza gets, like he’s right there at the same time as Descartes, the advent of the Psychic Revolution. The Protestant Reformation is a church. Spinoza is right there. He’s in a country that’s Protestant, but he’s also influenced by Jesuits. So he’s right in the midst of all of this, deeply, he’s brilliant, and he’s aware of what’s happening towards, with meaning in the scientific revolution, the Protestant Reformation, all the beginning of the religious wars, and also all of Cartesian science. And then what he tries to do is he tries to recapture wisdom, self-transcendence, and the cultivation of religio, sacredness of meaning within that emerging scientific Cartesian framework. So it’s a really pivotal piece. Spinoza, I should have had an entire episode on Spinoza in Awakening from the Meeting Crisis, but I couldn’t really fit him into the line of the argument. I do tend to talk about him when I do the series on the God beyond God, because I think he’s one of those people pointing towards that of non-theism in a powerful way. The best way to understand Spinoza is as a non-theist, I would argue. Okay, so a question from Rob Bay, who’s also a patron. Hi, Rob, it’s good to see you. Can you elaborate on the sage contrast of the hero architect positive by Campbell and others? Yes, and I want to do a shout out to Rafe Kelly, because he and I had an excellent, true dialogue, dialogos, in which he challenged me on certain things, and corrected me on certain things, and we went back and forth, and we both got to a place. The essence of dialogos is when two or more people can get to some place that they couldn’t get to on their own, some insights and realization. And so, because I was, you know, in some of the, one of the conversations I had with Anderson Tarr, I’ve been sort of critical of Campbell and other people, sort of valorizing the hero archetype. And then Rafe pointed out an important criticism of my criticism. He said that he appreciated that, but he thought that perhaps I was, and this might have been because of the kind of influence that Campbell had, I might be understanding the hero archetype just in terms of the warrior. And of course, that is something that our media does tremendously. And so, Rafe said to me, instead, isn’t the, he said perhaps a better model for the hero, a model that isn’t just about sort of fighting, a model that is, in which the heroism is more the heroism of transformation and transcendence and a kind of generativity. He said perhaps a better model, therefore, for the hero is the hero sage rather than the hero warrior. And I think that’s really, really interesting. Plato is playing with that, in fact, in the dialogs, because there’s constant comparisons of Socrates to Achilles and Socrates to Odysseus. And he’s trying to show how Socrates exemplifies a type of heroism, because Socrates was very heroic, even in battle, but he was heroic overall, a type of heroism that is deeply interpenetrating with the cultivation of wisdom, because the idea here is, think about the word encouragement. Genuine aspiration is going to take you through very difficult transformative periods, and one needs courage in order to get through them. But courage isn’t the same thing as just bravery or fortitude. Courage is being able to see through the illusions that fear can subject us to, so that we can remain connected to what is real and what matters most. And so I think the archetype of the sage hero brings out the importance of discernment, aspiration, and transformation in the heroic journey that is not typically met by the standard model, the warrior model, as the individual that goes out and slays the dragon and then brings the gold back. So that’s, I think, how I would answer that question, Rob. I hope that was of benefit to you. Tostitos is a patron. Do you have any cog-site insight into runaway anxiety processes such as panic attack? Is it a rapid reciprocal narrowing and a positive feedback loop between somatic sensations and thought processes? And what sector technologies could be cultivated to aid with them? So Tostitos, I’m going to point you to something. I have a video in the series. I can’t remember which number it is. I think it’s 12 or on Buddhism and parasitic processing. So parasitic processing is exactly what we’re describing, but it’s not just sort of, it’s reciprocal narrowing, right? Just like you said, but it’s reciprocal narrowing because what’s happening is all, many of the individually adaptive self-organizing processes within the brain have self-organized into a way that’s actually maladaptive and is causing reciprocal narrowing rather than affording reciprocal opening. And so part of the argument there is the only way you can deal with like a whole set of adaptive machinery that is self-organizing and dynamic, one-shot interventions will work. What you need is you need a counteractive dynamical system. You need an ecology. This is precisely why I advocate for an ecology of practices. You need an ecology of psychotechnological practices that will intervene in a highly dynamic and self-organized fashion simultaneously in parallel at various points in the dynamics of the parasitic processing because that’s the only way to have any chip. See, when you build an adaptive system out of adaptive mechanisms, adaptive, it adapts as you try to get rid of it. And so you have to have something as comprehensively adaptive and resilient and dynamically self-organizing as it is. That’s why you have things like the eightfold path. It’s a dynamical system that can counteract parasitic processing in a way, as you rightly point out, it generates reciprocal narrowing. So the thing to do is to think about an ecology of practices. I think you should have, within mindfulness, you should have a meditative practice, a contemplative practice, and a moving practice. You should cultivate active open-mindedness. You should take up some practices that help you to internalize the stage. This involves often reading texts in both an aspirational philosophical manner, also reading them as Lectio Divina so that you’re reading them for their transformative potential, not just for an ascent to the propositions they’re presenting. So I talk about this in ecology of practices and how you could set them together in some of the practices and how you could set them together so they got complementary sets of strength and weaknesses, and then they can mutually strengthen and afford each other, and then you can apply that to that kind of runaway parasitic processing. So I have an article in a book on the scientific study of personal wisdom. It’s a chapter on wisdom that lays all of that out. I have several talks on my channel about all of that, so I hope that’s helpful to you. Hi, Paul VanderKlay was in the chat, just said parasitic processing is episode 13. Thanks, Paul. For those of you, Paul has put up on his channel earlier this week, and I just put up on my channel today. Paul and I just had a really wonderful dialogos recently. I really appreciate the insight and the good faith, the good character, and I really like Paul a lot. He’s an excellent interlocutor, and it is always a joy to be in dialogue with him. So thanks, Paul, for giving the number. It’s episode 13, and again, just thanks for all of the wonderful work you’re doing and the wonderful conversations we’ve had. Deeply appreciated, very deeply appreciated. Zolt is also a patron. You recently recommended Washburn’s The Ego and the Diagrammic Ground in your meditation course. It was my first exposure to transpersonal psychology, and I found it deeply relevant to my experience. Can you recommend other core readings in transpersonal psychology or more general theoretical work about awakening and ego transcendence? Yes, there is a book. Okay, I’m going to do something weird. I’m going to step off camera because I can actually go and get my book. So just hang on, guys. I’ll be here one sec. Well, here’s one advantage of COVID, eh? Not to make light of something that’s horrible, but at least where all my books are so I can very easily recommend them, get them. So you want the Wiley Blackwell Handbook of Transpersonal Psychology. That’s very good. I think the work of, I really recommend the work of Jorgé Ferrer. So Revisionate Transpersonal Theory, I think is very important. He’s got an excellent anthology, which you’ll see has had a huge influence on me. It’s called The Participatory Turn, Spirituality, Mysticism, and Religious Studies. And then he’s got a book of his own essays, Participation in the Mystery. So I know a favorite in transpersonal world is Ken Wilbur. I have not read any Ken Wilbur, and I know Doshan would be, if he’s watching, he’s going to read it. So I did, on his recommendation, on Doshan’s recommendation, I did order the book, The Religion of Tomorrow by Wilbur, and I’m going to start reading it. So I’m not going to say anything about Wilbur until I’ve read that book. Obviously, the title is deeply relevant to my project, I guess, of the religion. It’s not a religion, but I highly recommend those books to you as being, I think, especially Ferrer. This guy, like the philosophical profundity that he brings to transpersonal psychology is much needed in transpersonal psychology. So I would recommend those books to you. Almo, is also a patron. Is there a relationship between emergence, emanation, synthesis, analysis, and induction, deduction? Are these all synods, or is there a difference? And if there is, can you please clarify it? Yes. So emergence, emanation is, I think, ultimately an ontological claim. It’s a claim that, you know, things interact and they have emergent properties. That’s emergence. And then emanation is that there are eternal, in the sense that they’re not bound by space and time, principles that emanate, that actually, emanate isn’t quite the right word, because it makes it sound like they’re spatial. But if you’ll allow me that, right, they are participated in by all of reality. And so I think that should be, we should really keep emergence and emanation for ontological relations. So synthesis and analysis are, that’s a much more general term. And, you know, synthesis is just putting it together. Analysis is breaking it apart. And I wouldn’t put that together with emergence and emanation. I wouldn’t pair that. I don’t think, like, synthesis is emergence and analysis is emanation, or the other way. It’s a little bit more like, you know, like in deep learning. The principle varies in its instantiation and then is compressed in its return. That’s sort of the model. These are all spatial metaphors and therefore it should not be taken as being literal pictures of ontological relations. Induction and deduction, I see what you mean by induction is sort of building up upward. Induction is sort of a bottom-up like emergence and deduction is sort of top-down. Again, so that’s a logical relation. It’s a relation between inferences. And so it’s more epistemological, whereas emergence and emanation, I think, are more ontological. I also think that the processes that most closely correspond in the epistemic processes that most closely correspond to emergence and emanation are not actually induction and deduction. But like I said, I think, you know, it’s compression and variation, I think, which are deep parts of deep learning. So I think that rather than the logical machinery being the best epistemic correspondence to the ontological relation of emergence and emanation, I think that rather than the logical machinery of induction and deduction, I think the learning machinery of compression and variation is a much better affining analog for emanation and emergence than induction and deduction. So I hope that was a helpful answer for you. Okay, everyone, as always, great questions. And some of them took a lot. And I wanted to answer some Spinoza questions at length because I felt an obligation. Spinoza is deeply important to me. I’ve read the ethics twice, religiously, like, you know, not just trying to get truths or arguments, but trying to go through it as a spiritual exercise for affording transformation, while, of course, also pay deep attention to the arguments. They’re inseparable. And it always bothered me that I didn’t give enough space in the series to Spinoza. So I hope I didn’t trespass too much. And I thought Karim’s question was really, really important. So we’re shifting now to live questions from the chat. I want to thank the Patreon subscribers and everyone watching right now. Always, guys, always your support is crucial to produce these videos and support the science we’re doing to find solutions to the meeting crisis. As you all know, I’m not gathering any income from the support. It’s all being funneled back into I donated all back to the Reveki Foundation, which I cannot just take out. It’s properly, you know, incorporated as a non for profit and it’s independent. So that money goes in there. It is specifically to fund video productions like I’m doing and to fund further scientific research. So it’s greatly, greatly appreciated. So we’re going to switch now to questions from the chat. So I’m not connected. So this is someone anonymous, a patron. I’m not connected to any educational institution. So how can I get access to your written work or paper? Yeah, that’s difficult. I know because of all the copyright restrictions. I think what I might want to do is set up with Amar, maybe a Google Drive where we could put at least, you know, preprints or final drafts, because I have to be careful about copyright of all of my work so that people could get access to it. I’m going to talk to Amar about that because he’s capable of bringing into being things that otherwise have not yet been in being. So I want to be able to do that. I’ll try and make that available to you. Another patron from the chat, Ivor, how do you differentiate between spiritual bullshit and spiritual progress? So going back to what I said about allostatic truth and affording reciprocal opening. So looking at the statements made by people, I think is not going to get you what you need. Truth, the distinction between spiritual truths and non-spiritual truths, at least one of the distinctions, is that spiritual truths are ones that are only realized in transformation, in self-transcendence, unlike other truths, right? What I do is I just consume information. So the thing to do is when you put it into practice, what you want to do is see the following. Does it start to afford reciprocal opening? And more importantly, are other people noticing that you are acting less foolishly, more wisely, that you are less getting spun out, that you can more adaptively respond? And then internally, are you coming into like more of a, you know, of an inner dynamic equilibration, not equilibrium, but the calibration, the inner conflict is going down, and there’s much more of a sense of an inner dialogue. Neither one of them on their own should be sufficient, but our boat, when you’re putting the spiritual recommendations or propositions into practice or principles into practice, is it affording the reciprocal opening such that you are becoming more mindfully wise, insightful, adaptive, able to cut through crap, zero in on what really matters in a situation? And is that in residence, mutual affordance with you coming into a kind of what Plato described as an inner justice, that inner conflict is being reduced, there’s now a sense it’s being replaced by inner dialogue, and that dialogue is affording the ontological depth perception, and the ontological depth perception is affording the inner dialogue. I think what I’m arguing for, you’ll probably recognize it, reciprocal opening, anagagay. If putting it into practice affords anagagay, not just noticed by you, but noticed by others, and noticed by others in you, across many contexts in your life, and across many different internal states that you find yourself in, then I think you could say, this is not spiritual bullshit. So I think that’s the best recommendation I can give for that. Paul Davies, do you know of any recent and reliable critiques of Julian Jane’s origin of consciousness theory? The origin of the book that’s being referred to is the origin of consciousness and the breakdown of the bicameral mind. I don’t know if it’s a direct critique, but I recommend a book that I think supersedes that book in its understanding of the relationship between the hemispheres, which is Ian Mcgillipris’ Master and its emissary. I’ve had a wonderful conversation with Ian. I hope you have another one. It’s on the Rebel Wisdom channel. James had a theory, James had a theory, not James, that the left and right hemispheres were more bicameral, were less integrated than they are now, and he speaks about this sort of being the case in the Bronze Age. So the left hemisphere experienced the right hemisphere as sort of divine voices suddenly speaking to people. You might think of Socrates’ divine sign telling him not to do anything immoral and things like that. Of course, you can have those experiences somewhat like that. In meditation, you’ll sometimes have this experience, and it doesn’t mean you’re going insane. You might hear your name shouted and nobody’s around, right? Or you can have what’s called the third man factor that’s a book by Guider, where when people are put into very extreme situations, they get a sensed presence beyond them. And that probably lines up with, you know, the two hemispheres are probably, you know, working in very different ways. And so it might be that the right hemisphere is presenting itself to you as an independent consciousness. The split brain evidence seems to indicate that the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere can sometimes operate as what looks like autonomous consciousnesses. So all of that is very suggestive. But what many people find wrong about James is the idea that people were, you know, comprehensively bicameral, and we should reread all of ancient literature to be sort of very bicameral, that it’s an indication of the bicamerality. I think reading Ian’s book showing how interdependent and giving a much more nuanced understanding, and I do this also in my series. I talk about a much more nuanced cognitive understanding of the left and right hemispheres and how deeply integrated and inter-affording they are. And I would recommend Ian’s book as something that I think gives you, it’s not a direct critique, but it gives you a much more comprehensive, much more rigorous and well-researched account of the relationship between the hemispheres. Michael Schreck, how do you see the difference between wisdom, intelligence, and knowledge? I know some mystical traditions put a big importance and difference between intelligence and wisdom. So I think of intelligence as your capacity, your capacity to be a general problem solver. And then I think of rationality as being your ability to deal with the self-deception that arises in from your general intelligence as you’re trying to solve your problems. The very adaptive machinery that’s at work in our general intelligence is the same machinery that subjects us to self-deception. That’s why measures of intelligence are only weakly predictive of measures of rationality. You have to learn a lot of, you know, you have to basically internalize a lot of psychotechnologies. You have to use your intelligence to learn psychotechnologies, metacognitive interventions, and cognitive interventions so that you can ameliorate the self-deception that comes out of the activity of your intelligence. That’s rationality. But of course, we, as I’ve argued, and I won’t repeat the arguments, we have different kinds of knowing. We have propositional knowing that leads to theory. We have procedural knowing that leads to skills. We have perspectival knowing that leads to situational awareness, a sense of presence. And we have participatory knowing that basically affines us to the world, that opens up a field of affordances for us. And so each one of them has different standards of realness, like truth and power and presence and belonging. And so that means that we need multiple kinds of rationalities because we can, the way we’re self-deceived in our attentional process is different from how we’re self-deceived in our inferential processes. And so we need a bunch of rationalities, a bunch of systematic and reliable techniques, psychotechnologies, for ameliorating self-deception. And then what do we need? Now we have all of these rationalities. We need something that coordinates them together into a mutually supporting ecology so that we’re getting a rationally self-transcending rationality. All of these rationalities are, they form an ecology of mutual support and mutual affordance so that we get the best possible capacities for self-correction and self-transcendence. And I would argue that when that is integrated with, when that rationally self-transcending rationality is integrated, and it has to be with the proletic rationality of aspiration and deep understanding, a capacity for deep understanding as opposed to just knowing, because understanding is grasping the significance of your knowledge. So if you have that higher, that rationally self-transcending rationality, and it’s also integrated both proletic rationality, the rational, the very process by which we aspire to more rationality and wisdom, and we’ve done all of that is deep understanding, enhanced relevance realization, really grasping the significance. I would call that wisdom. I would call that wisdom. I hope that answers your question. I think it’s Gorm or Gom. Do you think it is in any way helpful to reframe philosophical skepticism as simply the letting go of the impossible search for final absolute descriptive truth? So it’s a portal, not an endpoint? Yeah, I think that’s an excellent way of thinking about it. And there’s different kinds of skepticism. There’s sort of like Humean skepticism, which is purely propositional, epistemic, and then there’s the skepticism of pyro, and that is, many people, there’s a book called The Greek Buddha, and there’s another book on pyronism, Pyronic skepticism that compares it to Buddhism, because the Buddha famously didn’t want to make metaphysical statements because he was a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, he didn’t like the way they seek closure. We know from Godel, you can’t have both, you know, completeness and consistency. And so part of it, part of, and you can see pyro as being influenced by Socrates. Part of what you’re seeing there is what Socrates was doing with Aporia, bringing us to a place where we have to acknowledge that there is no way to get any final comprehensive account. And to always relate to our, especially our propositional knowledge, as defeasible, as defeasible, and that of course what the history of science shows. And so I think that’s an excellent way, especially like I said, if you look at pyro, it’s much more of a spiritual exercise, getting to the place where you don’t overly identify with that part of you that makes assertions. You, in fact, they even recommend that, what is it, isothenia, when you try to balance, you know, arguments that lead to this conclusion against arguments that lead to that conclusion, until you get a place where all that argumentation falls silent. I don’t recommend getting rid of all argumentation. I think you need it for science. But I think what pyro was trying to do is exactly what you’re saying. He’s trying to show, first of all, how that is not to be identified with the mind. And when that falls silent, right, he got what you call adoraxia. You got this deep peace of mind and a sense of being consonant with nature in a profound way that was not expressible in words. So while I don’t go as far as pyro does, I do say that I do agree with your thing that we should treat skepticism as a portal. And so that’s why Socratic Aquaria, which is sort of a more limited view of what, a limited version of what pyro is doing, that is nevertheless incorporated within argumentation, is so valuable to me. And I think I’m recommending it to all of you is potentially valuable. Ben BR, I do not believe in the supernatural or the paranormal, but at times one can sense dark energy. Is that all in my imagination or a projection of my psyche? And so I don’t know you, Ben, and I don’t know much about the phenomenology, but there’s a possibility that what you have is what Kraban called the imaginal. So there are images that are subjective in our head, but there are image schemacas that are transjective. There are images that capture the grounding relationship between the world and you. And they therefore, their symbol on, they bridge between the world and you. And so they have to be, they present themselves to you inherently in a symbolic fashion. And so perhaps your dark energy is an enacted symbol that is actually putting sort of aspects of the psyche that are being disclosed, and aspects of the psyche that are not otherwise being disclosed into aspects of the world that are not otherwise being disclosed. So rather than thinking about projection, think about maybe what’s happening is two things are resonating through this imaginal image with each other. And that therefore this might actually portend that you’re going to have maybe a transformative insight that will, you know, what I call a trans-framing, not just an insight into the world or an insight into yourself, but an insight that simultaneously in a couple of fashion transforms your agency and the arena of your action. So again, I don’t know you, I don’t know your idiosyncratic history, I don’t know the depths of the phenomenology. So take it as a suggestion for an alternative frame of interpreting that that might actually help afford a kind of transformation for you. Andre Ferrer? Hey Andre, good to see you. I would like to ask you if you have any ideas or if it is possible to use this practice by itself or in combination with some other practices to help with rebuilding the shattered past, future, and present by some life-changing events as betrayal, breakup, sudden change, of interpretations one’s environment. I don’t know what this practice is. Do you mean, I believe you’re in the meditation and contemplation course that I’m doing. And so I think that set of practices, as I said, is good. That’s why I’m teaching it to you. It’s very powerful, but I think it needs to be integrated with practices that cultivate active open-mindedness. As I’ve already mentioned, in addition to the meditative and contemplative practice, you should have a moving mindfulness practice. I think you need to have a practice that is dialectical in which you’re integrating active open-mindedness into your inferential processes. I think you need practices that help you internalize the sage. I think if you get a complex, in the sense of a complex dynamical system set of practices, that can be very powerfully applied to the way in which the past has wounded us and maybe misdirected us. So I’m speaking of this not only clinically in terms of the research I know, I’m speaking of this personally and how these practices were of a big benefit to me in times when my life fell apart because I had been deeply hurt or wounded in some fashion. So everybody, I’m sorry we can never get to all the questions. This was a great, wonderful set of questions, deeply appreciative. I hope you found the answers helpful. Thank you for joining me in this Q&A. We do these every third Friday of the month at 3 p.m. ET Eastern time. I want to thank the supporters of Patreon. I want to mention to people you can support my work on the meaning crisis by going to patreon.com slash John Vervecki. Your support is much appreciated. As I said, it is not income for me. I channel all back into producing these videos, doing the doing the work I’m doing and running scientific experiments in my lab. You should also note, this is thanks to Brett, we have a Discord where people are having some really interesting conversation. There is a description in the link where you can go and meet a Virginian community where people are talking at length about all of this work that I do. I’m deeply appreciated and grateful for that. They have different discussion boards and channel and the platform is just fantastic. I had the recent voices with Vervecki with Tyler and on the Discord server. I think it’s entitled DIA Logos on the Discord. I recommend looking at that because he really gets the philosophical, philia Sophia, sapiential potential of this both for individual cognition and especially for distributed cognition. Please check out the Discord and please check out that video because I think he’s a really beautiful soul, too. It was just wonderful to be in DIA Logos with him. A reminder, some of you know this because you’re here from there. We do a meditation class and sit every weekday morning at 9.30 Eastern time. Not this coming Monday because it’s a holiday. If you have not joined and you want to join, I recommend clicking on one of the videos, going to the link and then going back and looking at all the lessons. Not every video is a lesson but there are some that are specifically, these are the lessons I teach on Dharma days. If you go through the lessons, because what it is, the course is a progressive course where practices and principles build on previous practices and principles. You can catch up on the entire course and then join us when you want. It’s a wonderful sangha, a wonderful community that’s forming. Not only for the value of the practices that are being taught but being able to participate in that really flowing, distributed cognition of the sangha that is forming around the course I think would be enormously beneficial to people, especially right now. Thank you to my dear friend and Technomage Amar, who’s always behind the scenes. Unlike the man behind the curtain that you shouldn’t pay attention to, we should pay attention to this man behind the curtain because he’s no wizard of Oz. He’s a true wizard who makes things happen for me continuously and reliably. So thank you very much to Amar. Thank you everyone for your time and attention. I’ll see you hopefully at the meditation class and if not, hopefully the next Q&A. Bye-bye.