https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=sLGkSlqLsL4
Welcome, everyone, to the monthly Q&A. And I also want to thank my Patreon supporters right from the beginning for all of the tremendous support they provide. It’s much appreciated. And I want you to understand that I’m doing my best to put your support into action, both in the production of videos. As many of you know, I’ve also been hosting a live meditation and contemplation and Qigong Sanya course class every weekday morning at 9.30 a.m. So I’m currently doing work on and trying to obtain funding for the next series after Socrates. There’s a lot that’s been done. It’s been publishing some book chapters with Christopher Master Pietro and articles. So I want you to know that I am working very diligently and I believe, honestly, very responsibly with the support that you provided me to try and turn it into, I guess, products, services. That sounds so capitalistic. Anyways, things that will benefit people at large as they attempt to wrestle with the meeting crisis and the meta crisis. So I wanted to assure you that I am working very hard and I feel that the last while has actually been very, very productive in terms of being able to afford people in transformation and in deeper discourse and deeper connection with each other. So thank you once again for enabling me to help so many other people. I’m very grateful and appreciative. So what we’ll be doing today is this is our regular general Q&A, and we will be first taking questions from the Patreon supporters. We will then take questions that have been texted in and then finally we will take any questions that are being sent in right now via chat. So let’s get to the first question. And this is from a very devoted and I mean that in a positive sense, the word participant within the Senga is Karima. I believe Karima is also active on the Discord server. Well, that’s another thing that has been set up by Brett. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to talk about that for those of you who are unfamiliar with it. There’s a Discord server. Around Awakening from the Meeting Crisis and Voices with Verveki and the Meditation and Contemplation course. So Karima is involved with all of this and she is she’s an important participant. And so Karima asks, well, first of all, she makes a statement and then she follows it up with a question. She said, we will not survive without adopting soulful living as the soul of humanity awakens. The unfoldment of higher consciousness will change civilization to a new era based on wholeness, interrelatedness and oneness. Can you not kickstart the religion that’s not a religion on a simple premise of recognizing with reverence and awe that we have a soul? Thank you. So this is a very pertinent question Karima is asking because there have been a series of discussions, one with Paul Van der Kley, another one with Andrew Sweeney and Christopher Matri Piechot and also overlapping with some discussions with Jordan Hall, where I’ve been exploring this topic, the topic of soul. So there’s a term that I’ve adopted for trying to describe this methodology. It’s not my term. So Kerry has a book on Augustine’s invention of the inner self. But he he says he dislikes the title. The book’s published in English, but he dislikes the title because the English word invention is not what he wants. He actually wants the Latin term inventio because the Latin word inventio actually straddles the distinction between inventing something and discovering something, which is actually very pertinent for a sort of a neoplatonic framework which Augustine belonged to. And so I sort of co-opted this with the term of reinventio. And so what I’ve been exploring in the dialogos is the notion of the reinventio of soul. And the way I’ve tried to understand that is instead of I’ve tried to sort of put aside the metaphysical and ontological heritage baggage, depending on how you want to view it and try to get a sense of it again from a phenomenological functional. And the idea that I have been exploring in the dialogos is that there is a capacity we have to come into a relationship between the moreness of reality that is afforded by the fact that reality is ultimately combinatorially explosive. Spinoza would like to say that it has infinite attributes. So between the moreness and then something that Collingwood made really clear and apparent in his philosophy of aesthetics and art, and I think it’s deeply convergent with a Buddhist notion, which is this notion of suchness, that everything, even this rock, has a particularity, an identity, the term is a suchness, a here nowness that is non-categorical. There’s a way in which this is, even if it’s a stone, even if it’s a black rock, there’s a way in which it is unlike all the other members in that category. Those of you who have followed the series, you know that I’m talking about relating to this, not in the having mode of having it as a rock, but in the being mode, right, relating to it almost like a bow, not calling it a person. But what I’m trying to get at is its particular suchness. Please be patient with me. I’m trying to get somewhere with this because I’m trying to get at how we can bring back an important notion. So if you think of the moreness as an experience of. The mystery of participation, the way we are coupled to a combinatorial explosive reality. And if you can think of the suchness as the mystery of our individuation, how our relevance realization is self-evolving in a way that never, never can be fully captured. I can never fully bring my process of framing into any frame. So there’s a mystery to my suchness and how I individuate. And of course, Young made a great deal of this. There’s a mystery to my. There’s a mystery to the moreness and how I participate. And there are states of being in which those are put into right relationship, almost like a stereoscopic vision and tight shot. She talks about this, right. The eye that looks out and the eye that looks in or Eckhart talks about this, the eye by which I see God is the same eye by which God sees me. So the idea here is we have a capacity to bring about this kind of and I’m using this as a metaphor vision. And it strikes me that that’s deeply resonant with the work of the philosopher, theologian Paul Tillich, who talked about we’re always in a tonus, a contrast between the tonus, a creative tension, opponent processing between individuation and participation. This is why I prefer Tillich over Young, because Tillich, I think, sees more correctly the existential relationship that we’re in. And so. I think of soul as that about us that leaves that tension, that leaves that tonus that allows us to phenomenologically experience. The connectedness, the moreness into suchness and the suchness into moreness. And I think it’s important to revivify or reinvent you this sense of what it is to know not as a belief, but participatory knowing, know that you have a soul as distinct from the way we have come to think of what ourself, what a self is or what a mind is. And so. I think that if we. Come to understand this, we can come to understand. That in addition to the ethical and existential commitments I have to you because you have a mind, I’m deeply aware of these and I committed to them because I’m a teacher. I take seriously, you know, there was an expression at one time where we’re talking about the value of education was growing up that a mind is a terrible thing to waste, that there’s reverence and awe for the human mind. And I think what we’re seeing in our culture right now is we’re trying to get a sense of what is the appropriate reverence and awe for what a self is. And we’re very unclear about it and we’re wrestling with it. But I think what the religious traditions in their various ways have also tried to get us to remember. In the sense of Sati, get us to remember that we should have reverence and awe for this capacity of soul. And what’s what’s particularly interesting about that is it seems to be. It seems to be self reflective. What do I mean by that? Not only is soul something for which I should have reverence and awe, soul is exactly the capacity that is that I am relying on, that is affording the experience of awe, the experience of beauty, the experience of wonder. It’s particularly the way in which we can get a sense of how the true, the good and the beautiful actually converge in some way that we only have an inkling for. So I’m not I’m not I’m not sure that I completely agree with a cremous sense that there’s that there’s a sort of a worldwide awakening occurring or that this is a sufficient thing. But I do agree with the idea that trying to reinvent you because this is all of these are going to reinvent you reinvent you what mine means, what cognition means. That’s for the cognitive science. Reinvent you what self means. That’s why we’re doing all this work on modal confusion and the agent the agent arena relationship. And now we invent you what sorry what self means. That’s the reinvent you of the self is all that work on the agent arena relationship and then the reinvent you of soul as trying to help us to cultivate the virtue of reverence for the experience of awe, these experiences of awe and wonder that are so important to us. But we don’t know why they’re so important to us because they’re soulful, just like other things are wonderful. They’re soulful to us because they disclose to us the deepest possibilities of what we are. And notice how these three reinvent you are so deeply interconnected together. The reinvent you of mind and for cognitive science, the reinvent you of self and the whole agent arena idea and modal existence and overcoming modal confusion and the reinvent you of soul as this capacity, this fundamental existential ponance that most develops our humanity and personhood. So I would say that that interconnected manifold of the reinvent you of mind, self and soul is central to the religion that’s not a religion. I know there are there are people that are important in this community like Brett, who are at times unhappy with a religious term that carries with it all kinds of metaphysical baggage like souls or sort of ghosts trapped inside your body or stuff like that, which I’m not in any way advocating. I understand that and I do appreciate that. The thing is, I can’t find a good alternative for that term. And I do want to pick up like I did with the term religio. I do want to pick up respectfully that religious and spiritual heritage. But I want to vector it into something as Karima is foreseeing that could possibly afford what is needed for the religion that’s not a religion. We have to break up this idea of the monolithic mind that we got from Descartes, a completely self-enclosed computational machine that is just in the head and doesn’t go through any significant developmental transformation and that when it reasons, it’s a completely monologic thing. We have to break up that whole monolithic monad idea of who and what we are. And so to the degree to which the reinvential of these three and more than these three, but these three especially mind, self and soul can be undertaken, I think it is. None of it’s necessary, but it seems to me it seems to be very important, perhaps indispensable for trying to bring about what we’re trying to bring about with the religion that’s not a religion. That was a long answer because it was a very important question. And it’s really and you can you can sense that I’m caught between something that is very much drawing me, but also hesitancy because this is something that I’m still in the process of wrestling with and I’m really appreciative of the forum that Andrew Sweeney is providing, that Chris and I and him and he and I and Zach, where we were trying to do, explore in deep dialogos all of this reinventio in a deeply integrated and coordinated fashion. So I want to thank Andrew Publicry right now for doing that. And it’s a wonderful thing to do. OK, so let’s try and move on to the next question. Mackenzie Levitt, who’s also patron. It’s good to hear from you, Mackenzie. What are your thoughts on the book, Film Life of Pi and its relationship to the meaning crisis? This is a wonderful question. I highly recommend the film. I found the film just aesthetically to be one of the most beautiful films I’ve seen in my life. I believe it was Ang Lee, the director, but I might be misremembering. And so I apologize to the person who actually directed it. But I’m not aware of the cinematographer. I don’t remember. But. The Life of Pi. That’s something really, really beautiful because it brings out a contrast to my mind in such an aesthetically powerful, aesthetically attractive manner. It brings out a distinction that is actually central to the meaning crisis. So I don’t know how to do this without spoilers. So I’m just going to apologize. Don’t listen for the next 10 minutes if you haven’t seen the movie or read the book and you intend to, because there’s no way for me to talk about it this in depth, this point, without there being a bit of a spoiler. So let’s talk about the movie, because I think this will be more accessible to more people. So the movie seems to be centering around this question about how to think about God. Well, that’s, you know, wow. And, you know, there’s and the thing is. This is like when you’re doing sort of meditative questioning and you pick questions that present lots of obvious answers and you’re not supposed to just sort of reject those answers. Oh, no. But you’re not supposed to accept them either. You’re supposed to treat them as portals and see through them to what they portend. And that’s the kind of question that’s the way we should relate to this question, because, of course, a lot of obvious answers come up. Our culture is shouting lots of obvious answers around this all the time. So what the book does is instead of sort of confronting all of that, it sort of goes, yes, but and it sort of the movie and the book. So what it does is it says, OK, this question, how to think about God. And then instead, the person tells a story, right, tells a story of pie. And it’s the adult version of this boy who was given the nickname pie. And it’s right. And the adult is telling the story of this very heroic story in the union sense of a hero, a boy who’s been in a shipwrecked and is trapped in a lifeboat with a tiger and some other animals, especially the relationship to tigers. And, you know, and you think of Blake’s tiger, Tiger Burning Bright. So there’s all the all those illusions, all of this deeply archetypal stuff is being alluded to. You go through this whole story. And you see this and the boy is going through, he’s an adolescent, he’s going through these fundamental transformations in his confrontation with these animals, these sort of archetypal animals, but most especially the tiger and with himself and, of course, with the sea. And then the world is like it’s almost like a union synchronicity, although I have questions about what that exactly is supposed to be pointing to. But we’ll put that aside, right, because he also comes upon these. These venues, these places, these locations that are mythic in that they’re beautiful, but they’re not just right. They portend, again, they portend a deeper meaning and a deeper significance, and they have allusions to mythological experiences. Like it goes to this island and it’s alluding to, you know, when his mother tried to show him a picture of Krishna as the ultimate. And all of this stuff is sort of being. Actualized and put into association, but not in a clearly closed final form. It’s no, it’s it’s it’s left very things are very febrile and moving around. And so all of this is going on and you’re getting deeply engrossed with this whole thing. And then you find out that the story is actually in a deep sense allegorical, that it’s not an accurate depiction of what the boy went through historically. What the boy went through historically was actually an interaction with other human beings, and one of them was brutal and aspects of himself, his own tiger nature had come out. And you realize, oh, and in the movie, one of the characters sort of realizes this juxtaposition. And then the question, of course, emerges. Well, why did you tell the story this way to me? And then there’s the there’s the the answer is given. Well, this is this is a much better story. And there’s a part of us, a Cartesian part of us, because, well, how can it be a better story? It’s not historically true. It’s less. But the point is, the point is, you actually understand all of this archetypal mythopoetic processes that were at work in the adolescent and you get a deeper participatory sense of the transformation within himself, of how he was connected to himself and how he’s connected to the world and how he’s connected to his religious heritage. You get that much more profoundly than you would get in a literal propositional history. And then you remember this whole thing is an allegory. You’re reading a story or you’re watching a movie. And within the frame, you’re getting that this whole telling of his autobiography is a way of getting us to understand how we should think about God. We should be thinking about God right in the way in which the boy told the story, not so much as trying to capture the propositional literal truths. And so this is a distinction between a Cartesian notion of truth, which is accurate representations that literally correspond to the world. And Heidegger’s sense of truth is aletheia, which is to be in right relationship coupled to reality in such a way that there’s a reciprocal opening and reality can disclose itself to us insofar as we are receptive to the world. We are receptive and we will identify with a transformation, a transformative response that affords it coming into existence. This is understanding truth as a process, a moment of truth. And so the whole story, therefore, like is a symbol of and it’s designed to get you to enact, not just to think about. In its enactment, it’s trying to get you out of the Cartesian framework. The whole point of the story is to get you to enact the shift, almost a metanoia, from propositional truth to perspectival participatory transformative truth. And that that is the mode in which you can most properly ask the question about God. And I think that is a quintessential theme of the argument I’ve been making in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, that the deep recovery sati of the ability to shift out of a tyrannical exclusive mode of truth into this perspectival participatory transformative one that is appropriate for talking about what is ultimately sacred to us. That is a profound claim that I have tried to support. I mean, I’m not Heidegger or anything like that. All right. But I’ve tried to support with argumentation because I think the ability to recover that in an enacted existential modal transformation is part of what is needed to recover from the meaning crisis. So I highly recommend Life of Pine for exactly that reason. And I think when you many people love this book and they find it very hard and this is not a criticism of them. But they find it very hard to articulate why they find it so good. And the fact that his nickname is PIE, the mathematical formula, and yet that mathematical Cartesian way of thinking is being set into a more encompassing framework. Look, you see what I mean? It’s so rich and it resonates and reverberates in a way in which only art and literature can. Look, I speak, right? And I generate propositions and theories and I’m a scientist and that’s good. But there’s a sense in which you admit I don’t know if you’ve seen it. There’s that movie, you know, Contact, where they send the scientist who’s an atheist and then and she’s a scientist. And then she gets to that moment where she sees she’s exposed and she says, oh, they should have sent a poet. That’s what I feel right now. Right. And so that’s what I recommend for a way of trying to make a connection between the life of PIE and the meeting crisis. I would also point out that Amar is putting together and we’ve done some preliminary work on it, another series that I potentially we’re going to try and bring to fruition, COVID willing. At some point this year, Minding Media, in which myself and Anderson Todd and Leo Ferraro will do this exactly this kind of thing, try to see the philosophy within certain films and works of art, right, Minding Movies, Minding Media, and to try and get them into dialogue with the meeting crisis. So I hope that things will fall into place such that we can do that because I feel my own lack. And I’m not saying that with false modesty. I genuinely feel my own lack in trying to bring everything that’s necessary to be said. Oh, my gosh, that’s even pretentious to say that. But you know what I’m trying to gesture towards, right, that that much more needs to be done by artists and poets. This is why Andrew Sweeney getting into conversation with him has been so valuable. And so I’m hoping that I can move some way towards being responsible to that demand that certain things can only be properly disclosed artistically, poetically, poesis. It’s also why I write with Chris, because, man, the guy is just he speaks poetry the way the rest of us speak prose. And it’s a great gift. And I’m gifted to to have his profound friendship and collaboration. That was a that was a second really important question. And I wanted to address it at length. And I apologize for those of you who are waiting for your question. But both of these, I think, are pointing to things that are right on the cutting edge of what I’m working on right now and what I’m undergoing right now. So we have another one from Lucas G, who’s a patron. Hi, John. Deep thanks for your work. I practice Tibetan Vajrayana meditation involving visualization, mantra and shine abiding in what is. If that’s a term that’s been transliterated and I’m mispronouncing it, I apologize. What’s your opinion of this type of practice in terms of its capacity for developing transparency? Opacity, capacity and an ability for agent arena shifts. Also, what what practice am I missing in terms of keeping my biases in check? So I think and this is, again, something that. Again, it’s right on the edge because I’ve been privileged to be involved in being an area committee who superintendently works with the Vajrayana. Committee who supervising someone doing a PhD thesis. Next, or he also calls himself a leaf. And it was the thesis was on Barfield, sorry, on Barfield and Steiner, mostly on Barfield and about this new way of seeing and what comes out in good to especially in the way he was responding to. Because caught perception and imagination like as as opposites as distinct from each other, whereas perception was purely receptive and imagination was purely create like purely projective and spontaneous. And they were therefore radically opposed to each other. And good to in conjunction, by the way, with what 40 cognitive science is increasingly showing, said, no, they’re actually like this. They’re deeply interpenetrating that in every act of imagination, you’re actually training perception and in every act of perception, you’re actually training imagination and they are mutually always self correcting. And so good to his new way of seeing was to explicitly try and bring that out. I’ve only had a little bit of Vajrayana practice, and so I do not want to be presumptuous. I’ve read about it and I’ve talked to people about it. So I have some sense, but the degree to which you are. Training that intertraining between imagination and perception, I think, is very, very important. And it’s something that I think should be incorporated into any ecology of practice, a practice that is. Directed explicitly towards the interpenetration between imagination and perception, I think, active imagination within the Jungian tradition does something similar. I think people who do work with lucid dreaming does something similar. I think people who do imaginal ritual practices like Tai Chi Chuan like I do are doing something similar because I mean, in one sense, I’m imagining fighting. It has in the classics fighting 10,000 opponents when I’m doing the form right so that when I’m actually fighting, there’s no one there. And so the idea is I use imagination to train perception and of course, using perception to train imagination all the time. The two eyes that I talked about earlier. So I think that’s an integral part of any good ecology of practices as to its capacity for developing transparency, opacity shifting. Of course, it’s going to help facilitate that because you’re training your attention to zoom in and out and you’re training it to zoom. If you’ll allow me up and down between top down processing, which is what imagination is and bottom up processing, which is what perception is. So not only the in out right, you’re also doing the up down the distal feature, et cetera. So I think it’s a powerful way of also training attentional scaling as well as training. Sorry, all of attentional scaling the up down and the in out. So that’s very powerful. I think what am I missing in keeping my biases in check? You need to be doing a rationality practice and people don’t like people. People will come along with everything. They’re just, oh, no, what happened? This was all going so wonderfully. We’re talking about imagination and perception and all. And now he brings up rationality. Well, because what rationality doesn’t mean, right? It doesn’t exclude, but it shouldn’t be reduced to logical management of propositional argumentation. Rationality is any systematic and reliable practice for overcoming self-deception. And the Vajrayana practices you mentioned therefore count as rational. But you need to have one that is specifically focused on this. You need to have practices that are designed to cultivate what’s called active open mindedness. You need to learn about all the individual cognitive biases. You can buy books on them that will teach you these are what the cognitive biases are. And then you have to practice every day looking for one bias, maybe the fundamental attribution error, maybe confirmation bias, maybe the bandwagon effect. Looking for those, catching yourself in them and actively opposing them, actively counteracting. You need to become aware of the kind of biases that take root within distributed cognition, like diffusion of responsibility and groupthink, etc. And try to afford ameliorating them when you become aware of it. And you have to practice this just like you’re practicing your Vajrayana. You have to practice it every day. You have to at the end of the day, write a journal. What biases did I catch? And then on reflection, oh, I was probably in that bias and I didn’t catch it at the time. And do it in a way in which you’re befriending yourself, not judgmental or harsh, but also not lackadaisical, because one of our most prevalent biases is that we are above average in our rationality and we are way above average in our capacity to overcome self-deception. It’s one of our most pernicious biases. So I would strongly recommend you take up a practice like that. And if you want a philosophical framework that properly homes and valorize it, I would recommend stoicism to you. I would recommend stoicism to you. OK, so we have another question from Ben PR, who’s a patron. Thank you for helping me refine a little better, make my sense making of the darker and not to equivocate that with my scars while co-becoming at transjectivity, if I have expressed that correctly. It sounds to me generally like you have. I have gone through a tiny transformation by realization. That’s great. I’m happy to hear that. What is the correlation between the nervous system’s neurological state and the phenomenology induced by psychedelics, certain states within psychotechnologies and mental illness being perceived as religious or mystical experiences that establishing these correlations explain the possible efficacy of psychedelics when effectively used in the treatment of mental illness? So that’s an important question. First of all, Ben, thank you for sharing that you’re going through what you call transformation by realization, which is a very nice turn of phrase. I might put it if you’ll allow me. I think you put it very nicely. I mean, I hesitate always to and because you allude to it, well, you more than allude to it, you state it at the beginning. I don’t want to present these states as unequivocally, unquestionably good. I want to present them as powerful with and I’ve tried to be consistent about this throughout, although at different times I give different things emphasis. These states are powerful and they’re powerful in affording, like you said, transformation by realization, not just an insight in consciousness, but an insight of consciousness, but they are also powerful in that they can afford massive self-deception, massive bullshitting of ourselves and also trigger, thereby, deeply defensive and reactive patterns. So that’s why I repeatedly argue that these experiences need to be set within a sapiential ritual context in which people have an independently running and supported ecologies of practice for dealing with the many ways in which we fall prey to self-deception and fall prey to reciprocal narrowing, etc. So all of that always being said, please. Let’s then think about the correlation between the psychedelic experiences and, right, as Ben puts it, the religious or mystical experiences. There’s a lot going on here. And for those of you who have watched the series, I have presented this at conferences, also on recorded talks, What’s Higher About Higher States of Consciousness, also a related talk about Gnosis. And there’s also an argument running through the episodes around the Buddha on higher states of consciousness and what is it going on in psychedelic experiences that is conducive to this. And I’m currently writing a book with Anne Gregg and he’s called The Cognitive Continuum from Insight to Enlightenment about trying to show how there’s a continuum between insight experiences, flow experiences, mystical experiences, higher states of consciousness, transformative experiences and what we might stipulate to call enlightenment, which is a fundamental kind of an experience that can power a state of seeing and being that is set into an ecology of practices, a wise ecology of practices that really affords addressing the perennial patterns and problems, the perennial patterns by which we fall into self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior. So there’s a lot of argumentation out there that I’ve already presented on this. And I don’t think it is coincidental that these experiences often trigger mystical and religious responses because I think religio, and I tried to argue this independently, sort of just judge trying out existing arguments, religio, when we enhance religio for its own sake into experiences of beauty and wonder and awe and if we push it too far, we can fall into horror. And we find them so positively valuable. I think that’s the core of spirituality, of religion. That’s the religio part of religion, at least. And we celebrate it and we do it for its own sake precisely because what we’re doing is engaging in the development, the actualization of the deepest potential of our relevance realization machinery and our capacity for being in right relationship, deeply flourished, deeply flourishing coupling to ourselves, to each other and to the world. And so psychedelic experiences, when they are properly honed of the capacity to put us into that state where we are experiencing something like beauty and wonder and awe on the continuum of insight, flow, a higher state of consciousness, the sense of being called in a transformative experience, et cetera. And that’s why the empirical research, especially at the Griffiths Labs and also some of the work that Newberg is doing and some of the work that I’m doing with Jinsun Kim and Michelle Ferrari and Jennifer Steller and Brian Ostaphan about awe, all of it is pointing towards the deep connection. I’m going to return to this once again. I think it is a mistake to reduce this to just neurological states that have been created by the chemical interaction afforded by the drug. I think a much more, a broader developmental dynamic understanding needs to be brought to bear to properly understand why you see this convergence, because the convergence is not, I mean, there’s some convergence of content, but the content, what people, the beliefs in content, other than the metaphysical propositions, I’m not talking about the propositions in which people are trying to articulate, right, when they’re trying to articulate how they are coupled to themselves and to each other. I’m not talking about that, but I’m talking about like when people sort of pronounce the world has seven layers or ultimately it’s all just change or there is a God or there isn’t a God, because all of these things come out of these experiences. But the universals are much more, they’re much more, they’re much more not adversarial, much more adverbial universals, like there’s oneness and there’s deep pureness and nowness and connectedness and beauty and a sense of what’s most important, a sense of hyperrealness and a realness that demands change from me. I think we need to pay attention to all of that increasing empirical evidence, both the qualitative reports and the more experimental work is being done. And so what I think we should be understanding is that if we do two things, if we understand these states from a 4E cognitive science perspective, not just as neurological states, but as embodied, embedded, inactive, developmental, right, developmental dynamical systems, and then we and we also see that within the framework of a sapiential tradition, then we can get a good deep answer about why we see, we tend to experience a subset of these psychedelic experiences as mystical and religious experiences. So I hope that answers your question. It’s another, the questions I’m getting today, and I mean this, and I mean this is complimentary, they’re profound. And so I can’t answer them by like, oh, hippy dippy dippy doo, and here’s how I answer you. I’ve got to give a long answer because there’s a lot that’s at work in these questions. So this question from Rob. Hi, Rob, who’s also a patron. Is there anything like stoic poetry that you’d recommend as the more poetic text to do Lexio? He’s talking about Lexio Divina with. If there is not, do you have any Daoist or Budist source texts or commentaries that you’d like and why? And thanks, John and Amor, for all you do. Thank you, Rob, for thinking. It’s always appreciative. So there are a few sort of stoic hymns by Klinestaties and I think also by Zeno to Zeus. I don’t know if you’d find those particularly powerful. I, yes, stoic poetry, not too much of it has survived. I’m trying to think of a modern analog to it. I can’t think of anybody that comes to mind. There’s a bit in Gerard Manley Hopkins that feels like a lot of how the stoic sort of felt the vibrancy of the logos in reality. That’s definitely the case. But Gerard Manley Hopkins is a Christian. A Daoist text that’s like that. I think the Tao Teh Chen is really, really powerful. But sorry, I don’t mean to be disheartening. The Tao Teh Chen has to be, in order to do lexio with something like the Tao Teh Chen, it’s a good idea that you’re doing some Daoist practices as well. I like some of the qi kong or tai chi. Some of the qi kong I’ve been teaching or perhaps tai chi. So if you want to start using the Tao Teh Chen as a text or the schwanza, I would recommend also, in addition to doing lexio, I would recommend doing some appropriate Daoist practices as a way of properly setting the intention for the lexio and properly activating and actualizing the right mode, the right epistemic and existential modes for engaging with the text so that you can enter deeply into lexio divina. Perhaps, I mean, it’s, Alcinius’s book on the handbook for Platonism, it’s on Platonism, but it’s also from middle Platonism and therefore it feels a lot more stoic. It has a lot more stoic elements in it. That might also be potentially valuable. I’ve done lexio divina with that and found it valuable. There are also, I have a couple of the anthologies. There’s called sort of current stoic writing, and perhaps some of that writing is poetry rather than prose. You might want to check that out. You might want to also contact Peter Lindbergh, my dear friend, who is a very important person. My dear friend who runs the Stoa and he might have, he might know of or be able to put you in touch with somebody who could give you a better answer to your question. So Rob, that’s my best attempt to try and answer your question. Pastius is a patron as well. How to work with a punitive tyrannical superego. This question is really right for me. I, one of my dearest, deepest friends who has kind of access to the depths of my psyche, and I’ve written with him and collaborated with him, Leo Ferrero has told me that he thinks that at times I have a sadistic superego. And I take this very seriously precisely because I was brought up in a kind of fundamentalist Christianity, very, very punitive. It tells you that you’re born through no fault of your own. You are diseased with original sin and there’s nothing you can do about it. And all of your attempts to try and do anything about it are ultimately self-deceptive and self-destructive. And you’re trapped in it and there’s nothing that you can do except feel very, very, very guilty all the time about it and constantly abase yourself to an authority that has absolute dictatorship over you. And that’s all you do is permanent genuflection between, sorry, permanent genuflection towards this being who will save you even though you in no way deserve it. And I’ve talked about this in the series and how this, of course, is breeding ground, really rife breeding ground for narcissism in our culture in very powerful ways. And why I bring it up, of course, is this kind of upbringing, man, does it put inside you a sadistic superego. And it’s a very powerful thing. I’m constantly having to note how it can get activated and then I have to be careful around how it is making me reactive to certain ways in which people are talking or thinking. When I was doing the episode around Luther in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, I probably, I was trying to be very self-aware. Some people said, you know, I got a little too maybe angry sounding, but I want to, I mean, and I mean this respectfully, thank God for Paul VanderKlay because he had a very appreciative and other Christians had a very appreciative response to that episode on Luther. It’s a long preamble because it’s an important preamble because I want to tell you, I want to try and make clear to you that I deeply understand what you’re talking about. I deeply understand what you’re talking about. So how to work with a punitive, tyrannical mind is, I can even at times be sadistic. The Strambelas have a song, We Don’t Know I Believe It Is, and there’s a part in the chorus where there’s something in my mind that’s killing me. And I really get what he’s singing about there. How to work with a punitive, tyrannical superego when engaging with one’s ecology of practices. It seems to be able to parasitize, excellent, excellent way of putting it, any practice with an imperative forceful attitude, even in recursive manner. You must not be forceful. Yes. Yeah, I know that. That the adaptive resiliency of these deeper complexes of parasitic processing. Yeah. How does one break the cycle and afford an agapic compassionate grip on self-transformation? Well, first of all, the fact, and you’re alluding to it, the fact that you’re engaging in an ecology of practices is part of the answer, I suppose. I want to be really hesitant to say, I don’t want to make it sound like, well, you do these four things and then, oh, you’re free, because I’m not under the hubristic illusion that I’ll ever be free from this sadistic superego. What I hope to do is ameliorate it somewhat reliably so I can reduce the self-harm and the other harm that it drives. So that being said, engaging in an ecology of practices, and you have to engage in it for a long time so that it becomes a correspondingly complex and adaptive and resilient entity that can wrestle in a complex and adaptive and almost like a martial art fluency way with that parasitic processing. That’s ultimately the most fundamental answer. Any sort of isolated technique I would give you or say to you now will be parasitized, just like you mentioned. It will just be drawn in and taken up by this. So that’s, I’m going to make use of a Buddhist framework here. That’s the Buddha part of it, that participating in and deeply internalizing a counteractive dynamical system. I think you want to enter into the third thing, which is dharma, which is learn more about, from probably a psychodynamic perspective, how there are various therapeutic interventions and interactions that can help you to deal with a sadistic superego. And try to incorporate that into your ecology. So this is where I think the psychodynamic domain can afford some very beneficial help. So I would strongly recommend you becoming more familiar with the work of my dear friend and colleague Anderson Todd about all of this aspect, because I think you might find that particularly helpful. You might even consider that, and this doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you, right? You might want to enter into a therapeutic relationship just to get the dialogic response going. I knew that was helpful to me. I went through Yomiyin therapy in order to wrestle with that. I think that’s the most important thing. And then Sangha, joining a community of fellow travelers that can see your biases much better than you can. And this is what I keep saying, that we should give up the idea of monologic reason. We should give up the idea of sort of the individual, what is the individual, what is the individual, and what is the individual. And I think that’s a very important idea of sort of the individual, which is not giving up individual responsibility. Individual responsibility, that’s what I’ve been talking about all along here, but giving up the idea of the self-enclosed, self-sufficient individual, and that reason is a monologic treatise, blah, blah, blah, right? But that our capacity for self-correction pales in comparison to the self-correction that others afford us. If we enter into bounds of bonds, I should say, and also bounds, that works too, bonds of genuine phylia, genuine fellowship and friendship, and a commitment to each other, and a commitment to a process of reciprocal opening, and the affordance and the celebration of the expressions of agape and connectedness and flourishing and insight and transformation like we’re doing here now. So that’s what’s helped me. That’s what continues to help me. And so I don’t want to give anything to you from rose-tinted glasses. I suspect there’s a sense in which, so here’s the darker news. You’ll probably be wrestling with this for a very long time, maybe all your life. But here’s the good news. You can wrestle better. You can wrestle well, and you can ameliorate things a lot, and you can reliably reduce the self-harm. I don’t mean physically cutting yourself. I mean psychological, emotional self-harm. You can reliably reduce the self-harm and the other harm. And I really wish you well in that endeavor, because as I said, I identify with it very profoundly. I’ve been over the past few years and having to work on the Awakening series and all this other work I’ve done with people has made me, because I’ve been trying to pull apart my appreciation of Christianity and the Gampé from the way, the particular version that I was brought up. Look at what my hand is doing. Look what my hand is doing, the way it traumatized me and raked and shredded me in powerful ways. And even saying that, I’m trying to let go of the tightness of the resentment and try to open up again. So I hope that’s helpful to you. I hope that is really, really helpful to you. Okay, we’ll be shifting to live questions from the chat. I want to thank the Patreon subscribers and everyone watching right now. Your support, of course, is very crucial to produce these videos and for supporting the science we’re doing to find solutions to the meaning crisis. This is from Self-Conscious Gilder. My first question, when I have a difficult time finding solutions to the crisis, I seek guidance from people like you. Where do you go to or what do you do in difficult times? So I have… I’m trying to think about how to frame it. The fact that I sort of teach and lead a saying doesn’t mean that… Look what’s happened in my previous answer. That’s also deeply helpful in nurturing and nourishing to me. So there’s that. I turn to people who are beloved. I turn… I am… I’m deeply grateful and privileged to be in relationship with an astonishing woman who’s soulfully deep and beautiful. And I don’t just mean physically. She’s physically beautiful, but I mean like she’s a beauty of mind and a beauty of spirit and a beauty of mind that I can’t even describe. And I’m not saying that she’s beautiful, but I mean she’s a beauty of spirit and a beauty of soul. And I’ve been with her now for close to five and a half years. I can reliably turn to her and she is deeply and often transformatively helpful to me. I have my son who is a constant companion. He is the best at shooting little powerful little arrows to break any hubristic inflationary bubbles that are forming in me. So that’s very helpful. And a fantastic set of friends, Amar is one of them, who are just there for me reliably. And then I have the path, what I call the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. And I have internalized sages and saints around that. Of course, really important to me, and I’ve two decades of work on this, is that the work in play, serious play, Socrates and then also the whole Neoplatonic tradition, but great poets like Rumi and Rilke, great philosophers like Plotinus and Plato and Spinoza, I turn to them reliably and they’re there for me. And I have turned, as I’ve said, to professional therapy when I felt really stuck in my life. I mean therapy, I both wanted to understand it, but I also needed to be transformed by it. And those weren’t, those were actually deeply in sync with each other, chirotically in sync. So that’s where I’ve turned to. And through this series, I’ve come to meet people that I’ve turned to, like Guy Sandstock and Jordan Hall to get discussion. And even the people, like I’ve mentioned that I work with, who are also dear friends, like Leo Ferraro and Anderson Todd and Chris Mastropietro. I have, and I’ve been really trying to wake up to this over the last couple weeks. I have so much, so many people that I love and who love me deeply and who are supporting me in everything I’m doing. I feel tremendously grateful and tremendously supported. So I hope that answers your question. So, Ben Gao, I want to explain parasitic processing to a friend who seems to be suffering from it. Can you recommend a succinct article or video? She does not have a cog site background, but is in therapy. Yeah, if you can get, there’s a blog, so it’s really popularized in the good sense of the word, on this by Mark Lewis, on reciprocal narrowing and addiction. So I recommend that. And then if she wants to deepen that, she could read his autobiography, Memoirs of an Addicted Brain, so she can get a first-person perspective on it. But I would strongly recommend the work of Mark Lewis, for sure, especially that blog. Joyce Liu, hi, Joyce. I find it hard to imagine improvement during mindfulness practice, so there’s a lack of direction during my practice. Can you help me imagine how the salient landscape changes feel like? So one of the things I regularly recommend is not to especially look for the changes in the practice. Arthur Dyckman put this really well one time ago. It’s not about altered states of consciousness. It’s about altered traits of character. I think I come back to that again and again and again. Instead, try to pick up on, as you’re doing the practice, moments outside your practice where you’ve had an insight, where you’ve caught self-deception, and then answer your question. What did it feel like? What was my salient landscape been doing such that I became aware of my self-deception or such that I was able to, oh, I can enhance my connectedness here. Yes, this feels more real. This feels like I really understood her. We really connected. If you sit back outside, if you try to get a non-perspectival, non-participatory sense of this, it’s not going to work. And if you try and realize it just in your meditative practice, chances are it’s not going to take. What you’re doing is facilitating the sensitivities and the sensibilities and the skills that will then germinate as an enacted virtue in your life. And when the virtue, in virtue of that virtue, you start to undergo these transformations, then look for the phenomenology. And I mean this seriously. Try to remember it at the end of the day. Celebrate it. Write it down. Not inflationary, but so that you can build up this felt sense of what it’s like. And then that will start to carry naturally into the meditative practice, and it will start to go like this. So, Intelli-Chal-Tayal, which is sort of, I believe, an adjectival version of Aristotle’s notion of an Entelechy. With all the focus on locus and intelligibility, I was wondering what was the place of Eros and Dionysian. I think I take it you’re meaning Dionysian in the Nietzschean sense rather than Dionysian, Dionysius, the Areopagite, the really important mystic. And the religion that’s not a religion. What do you make of Nietzsche’s the will to assist him as a lack of integrity? Well, given that Nietzsche, we’re acting in reverse, given that Nietzsche really exemplified that, and I think he really, there’s a sense in which the notion of ecology of practices is deeply reflective of that Nietzschean sense of trying to get many voices at work. And what’s my criticism Nietzsche is he stayed at the propositional level mostly, and therefore he tried to capture in a multi-vocality what I think should be the multi-vocality what I think should be captured in a multi-praxis. So I think that there is a kind of integrity when you switch over to embodied practices and ecology of practices. It’s not the integrity of systematic logical coherence. It’s the integrity of a dynamically adaptive and evolving self-organization. Now, I now focus on, there’s been actually in some of the recent stuff I’ve been writing with Chris, Eros, the role of Eros within the Logos, which is a deeply platonic notion, contrary to I think Nietzsche’s misrepresentation of Plato. The Eros within Logos is something that Chris and I are writing about and exploring. So I think that the ability to break frame, which the Dionysian represents, is just as crucial as the ability to make frame, which is what the Apollonian is, and you need a dynamical opponent processing between them. And I think there is always a relationship between Eros and Logos, but I think one of the things that happens when they, one of the marks of right relationship between Eros and Logos is that Eros doesn’t get reduced to just a static conceptual coherence. It’s, right, it is the evolving gathering together of things that come to belong together in a mutuality of enhanced and increasing relevance realization, and the Eros is transformed when it is no longer reduced to just the oneness of consumption. Plato talks about when the Eros is brought into right relationship with Logos, via the Logos, via the encounter with Socrates, that the Eros goes from being consumptive oneness to generative oneness, that what the erotic impulse is transformed into, I want, when I encounter beauty, I don’t want to consume it, I want to generate more beautiful things. I want to generate beauty within beauty. And so I think the relationship between Logos and Eros is really fundamentally important, and we can see how Logos, we can look for marks of right relationship within Logos, and marks of right relationship between them, between us and them, and marks of right relationship and when we see both of those, I think that’s an answer to your question, and I think that also is completely in sync with the Dionysian need to break frame and the Apollonian need to make frame, and how it’s only the fluency between them that affords insight and ongoing dynamic adaptivity. So, ABCDEF, do you have a tentative time for the book release? I’m not sure which book you mean. Chris and I are working on an anthology on inner and outer dialogue via Logos, dialogues, if all goes to plan, according to plan, maybe later this year. The book, the cognitive continuum, I think that’s also maybe the end of this year, early next year. Daniel is working really, really hard, and thank you all for who helped with the Indiegogo campaign, helped fund him during COVID so he could continue in-depth work on this. Those are the two ones perhaps that most readily come to mind. Perhaps you’re also talking about the Meta Modern Reader in which the chapter that Chris and I have an article coming out. I believe that’s going to be sometime later this year. Sorry, that’s all very vague because I’m not quite clear which one you’re referring to, and of those three that come most readily to my mind, as you can imagine, COVID has put all deadlines into this weird sort of space, so I hope that’s an answer. So, Sways of Love, can you please explain and expand on what you mean from multiple realizability, especially referring to organic versus mechanical intelligence? Thank you. Multiple realizability is this idea. Multiple realizability is… It’s bound up with terms we people use all the time without fully appreciating them, and this is the distinction between software and hardware within computer science and computer use. Right? So, think of a program as software and think of how that program could be run on many different pieces of hardware. I could be running Word in this computer, or this computer, or this computer, or this computer. I could even be running Word on machines that are not built like the standard computer is. I could be running it on something that’s been organized like a neural network. What it’s made of can vary. Computers used to be much larger and have transistors, right? And now they have microchips, and so even the material… So, the physical medium within which the software has to run… So, the physical medium is the hardware, and the idea is I can run the same software on many, many, many different kinds of hardware made of many different kinds of physical stuff. And so, it’s a mistake to try to understand the software by looking at this particular hardware. Right? So, here’s the software, and oh, well, I look at how a Mac runs, and that will make me understand how the software runs. Well, that’s not right because that same software can run in many different machines made out of many different things. It’d be like trying to understand chess, but you find people playing chess, and let’s say the pieces are made out of plastic. You say, aha! I know what I’ll do. I’ll study the material that the board and the pieces are made out of, and that will help me to understand chess. And you’ll go, that’s not going to get you. Chess doesn’t work that way. You can play chess with pieces of plastic, pieces of wood. You can play it electronically. You can play it just with little marks on pieces of paper. It’s multiply realizable. Now, what that means, therefore, is that you can’t reduce the software, make it identical to any particular hardware. What this means, by the way, and most people don’t realize it, is that there’s actually a deep, people think that these two things go together and they’re just really happy bedfellows, right? Which is artificial intelligence and neuroscience. Yay! They’re actually kind of opposed to each other because neuroscience says, well, I’m going to understand the mind by looking at a particular kind of hardware of the brain. And artificial intelligence says, no, no, that’s the wrong place to look. You should be looking instead at the software because the software is where you’re going to understand. The hardware might turn out to be largely irrelevant, like the plastic of the pieces in chess being irrelevant to understand chess. Now, I’m presenting these as extremes, of course. What that means is we have got to examine that very computational metaphor. First of all, it challenges the idea that we can simply equate mind and brain, but that doesn’t mean that your mind is some ghostly thing that can float free from your brain. You say, but I can move my software program around. You can, but you can never have software that’s not running on hardware. I can’t smash all the computers and then the software somehow floats into some metaphysical heaven. That’s a deep mistake. On the other hand, as we move into cognitive science that is much more embodied and embedded and extended and enacted, we’re coming to understand that cognition is not independent from biology, that there’s a deep continuity. Now, it doesn’t mean we can’t have artificial intelligence, but it tends to point towards this idea that if we want to create artificial intelligence, we’re simultaneously and in integrated fashion probably going to have to create something like artificial life, life that is genuinely autoproetic. Multiple realizability is just a fraught topic and it is a central topic when I’m trying to introduce cognitive science to people because it gets you deeply thinking outside of our common sense obviousness about mind and brain. Oh wow, that’s way more complex than I thought it was. Then once you challenge that common sense with the computational metaphor, you then challenge the computational metaphor with 4E cognitive science. Then you’re very far from the cultural cognitive grammar by which we have always talked, at least since Descartes, about mind and body. That’s where multiple realizability takes you. Okay, we’ve gone much longer than we normally did and I guess Ammar thought that this was just flowing wonderfully and I always just bow to his expertise and his judgment. I want to thank you for joining me in this Q&A. I guess many of you probably got a sense that I really got into it and I found this a very, very powerful session. So I want to thank everybody very much for that. Sorry we couldn’t get to everybody’s questions. Your questions will not go into the void. They will show up on the next Q&A. Some of you may want to bring them into the Q&A at the end of the session if there are more practical questions and I’ll try to address them there. We’re doing these every third Friday of the month. We’ll do another one in July. Again, I want to thank all you supporters, Patreon. You help keep a lot of what I genuinely think is vital work going and I deeply appreciate that. You can support my work on the meeting crisis by going to patreon.com slash John Verbeke and I do appreciate. I don’t draw any income from this. This is all about the work. It’s all about the work. We have a Discord server where people are having some really interesting conversations. You can check the description in this video for the link and we have a lot of people on there like Paul Vanderklee, Jonathan, so not Jonathan Hall, Jordan Hall, Greg Henriques has been there, Guy Sendstock has been there, so many people that are on Voices with Verbeke and up there and I’ll name it Pascal. I highly recommend going to the Discord server. You’ll just find a really vibrant community there, a vital discussion about all of my work and everything that is sort of spinning off from it in a healthy fashion. A reminder that we’re doing the meditation and contemplation sits every weekday morning at 9 30 Eastern time and finally I want to thank my dear friend and Technomajor Mar, my beloved son Jason. They’re always in the background helping me and again all of you. Thank you one and all. Goodbye and I’ll see you from now. Take good care.