https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=AYuKKYcYxSo
Welcome. It’s good to be here. I’m John Verbeke. This is my livestream Q&A. We do this every third Friday of the month at 3 p.m. Eastern time. For those of you who are joining for the first time, you’re most welcome. We meet here and we answer questions from the Patreon. The questions come from the Sangha that I lead. I lead a weekday Sangha at 9.30 a.m. There’s also people here from the Discord server. It’s been a great pleasure for me to notice a community. To my mind, it looks reliably like it is a healthy and vibrant and growing community and it’s flourishing. Maybe more than any theory I ever generate, that would be something I would count as one of my greatest successes, although it’s not mine alone. I’m sharing it, of course, with a whole bunch of people. As I said, we’ll take questions first from the Patreon supporters and then we will work our way through and at the end for questions that are coming through live on the chat. Let’s start. The first question is from Janet Stuart Miglior. She’s a Patreon. Thank you very much, Janet, for your support. It’s much appreciated. It’s a rather long question, but I think it’s a very excellent question. Please be patient as I read through it. Janet writes, I so appreciate what you are doing. Thank you, Janet. Thank you. In your lectures, you have touched on how inadequate our language is oftentimes. I agree. And from another angle, I recently joined a book club and we are studying examining nonviolent communication by Marshall B. Rosenberg. I’ll stop in the middle of your question here, Janet, to just let you know this is one of the books that I have on my shelf of reading. It’s part of this larger project I’m engaged in with Christopher Master Pietro as well as Guy Sendstock and Jordan Hall, Peter Lindbergh, about trying to bring back a dialectic practice that will embed us and help us to embody a dialogus. I’ll now continue with what Janet has to say. I’ve learned so much about identifying personal needs and being able to communicate them to resolve conflict. It really begins with seeing people in their humanness. That’s very well said. When I dehumanize someone, there is no meaning. Just my emptiness and righteous position. Self-righteousness. I’ll speak a little bit biblically here even though I’m not a Christian or a Jew. Self-righteousness is kind of a besetting sin of our culture and it seems to be growing in both prevalence and power. Janet continues, when I really see someone, compassion arises. Could this learned ability be classified as one of the psycho technologies? It seems so important and meaningful. There’s just so much going on in this really rich question and the humanness of this observation I think is so central. As I mentioned, and not to redirect attention away from Janet’s question but to make, I hope, a facilitarian affording connection, I’m engaged in a very long project with a lot of people and it will eventually funnel into the After Socrates video series about trying to bring back a practice that integrates aspects of intrapersonal mindfulness, interpersonal dialogue and transpersonal transcendence. So you feel the deeper connectedness with deeper aspects or layers of reality. And in the ancient world, this is the practice of dialectic. And it is so needed right now because dialectic, I think, is the practice that will properly coordinate and shape the collective intelligence of distributed cognition into the collective wisdom that is needed. And the wisdom that is needed right now. But notice how those two sides, at least two of those sides that I mentioned, and I think a third is also implied in what Janet asked. She talked about seeing somebody in their humanness. For those of you who meet on the Sangha, you know that we have a practice, a particular practice, and Janet asked about psycho technologies. We have a particular practice called meta, which is a form of reciprocal opening practice. It is a contemplative practice, and it is designed to get you to exactly that place where you are connected to people again, and you can see them more as they are and less – the way Janet puts it there is so beautiful. Less in this way. She says, like, when I dehumanize someone, there is no meaning in the sense of no religion. Of course, there’s meaning to everything you’re saying, and there’s all your ideas, right? Our ideas, so, so, so, right? But there’s just my emptiness and righteous position, right? Exactly. And so what meta does is it removes all of that machinery of self-righteous projection and tries to open us up again to reciprocal opening, to religio, to the deep connectedness that actually affords meaning-making between people and is lifeblood of distributed cognition. It gets it vibrant again. It becomes the place from which emerging patterns of cognition and culture can arise. And so is this a psycho technology? Yes, I think there’s psycho technologies here like the non-verbal, the non-violent verbal communication, Rosenberg, and so that’s the interpersonal. There’s the interpersonal meta, and I think that sense of getting to the more of the realness of other people is already starting to get that sense of the deeper connectedness to reality. So, yes, I think there’s a set of psycho technologies here, and I think there’s a couple of mindfulness practices, there’s some discord practices, and then they are being coordinated together within something like dialectic, and that’s affording dialogos, that reciprocal opening, that flow within distributed cognition that accepts the intelligence of distributed cognition, that collective intelligence towards collective wisdom. And as I said, affords the emergence of new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new new patterns, perhaps even a new grammar for culture and cognition. So thank you, Janet, very much for that excellent question. So the next question is from Dan, and he is a patron, and I get the great pleasure of every month of being able to talk to Dan at length. I hope this doesn’t trespass upon his modesty. Dan has a scintillatingly brilliant mind that moves in a multi-dimensional fashion with a kind of ease that is at times sort of like and very, but no arrogance, no pretense, not even a self-centeredness attached to that. There’s just, and I use this word advisedly and as a compliment, there’s an innocence to it that is refreshing. So anyways, I just wanted to take this opportunity to publicly express the gratitude I have of getting to, one of the things I get when I get to talk to the various patrons is I just get to be, you know, having her talk about mid-sign, our humanness is being with and through others. I just get to be with Dan on a regular basis, and it’s joyful. So that’s all I have to say about that. So let’s get to Dan’s question. Could you please provide a brief overview of the relationship between the three orders? So the three orders that Dan is talking about here are in the series. They’re sort of the three dimensions of connectedness that a worldview should have in it, or at least the post-actual worldview had. There is the nomological order. This is the order of sort of how things make sense. And I’ll use an analogy that’s well-placed, by the way, I would argue. So, and this is, like in a video game, this is like the rules of that world. The nomological order, the rules that make sense of it, tell you how everything works, right? And then there’s the narrative order. That’s the story. And like in a video game, there’s a story about how things are going to unfold, and you know what your role is in that story, and you know what the problem is, and how it should be resolved, et cetera. And then there’s the normative order. The normative order is the order of how do you, well, how do you self-transcend? How do you get better? How do you become more real, et cetera? And the analog in the video game is how do you level up? How do you get level up? How do you level up? I would argue, and Chris, Master Pietro and I have argued, in fact, in a couple of places, that one of the symptoms of the meeting crisis is what’s been called the virtual exodus, people preferring to spend time in the virtual world of things like video games, and video game addiction is becoming a real malady, precisely because in those video games, the three orders are present in a way that is not present in the so-called real world. So the real, another book describing this phenomena is called Reality is Broken. Reality doesn’t seem to have these three orders, but human beings hunger for these order in a profound way. Okay, so those are the three orders, so let’s review the question again. Can you please provide a brief overview of the relations between the three orders and the four ways of knowing? Just to review again, the four ways of knowing are the propositional, about beliefs, the procedural, about our skills, the prospectival, about our states of consciousness, our states of mind, situational awareness, and those are co-defining, because we define situational awareness in terms of our states of mind, and our states of mind in terms of situational awareness, and then finally, our participatory knowing. This is the knowing that is the basis for all the affordability of the human being, and the knowledge that is the basis for all the affordances that opens up. It’s the way evolutionary biology, cultural evolution, and your own sensory motor evolution within the dynamics of your cognition are constantly co-shaping the world and you to each other, so that agent arena affordances open up. So Dan’s question is, is there a mapping between the four things of knowing and the three orders, and when an order breaks down, is it because of an under-emphasis or an over-emphasis of any one of the kinds of knowing? And so in one sense, I’ve given this a lot of thought, and in another sense, I haven’t given it enough thought. I have thought about it a lot, because I’ve tried to think about what the mappings might be there, and I haven’t come to anything that I’m sort of satisfied with. I don’t think there’s any one-to-one mapping or anything like that. I tend to think that all three orders, what an order does is it aligns and coordinates the four kinds of knowing so that you get understanding. See, understanding is different from knowing. Understanding is to grasp the significance of what you know, and a deep kind of understanding is to grasp the significance of different kinds of knowing, how in general your procedural knowing is relevant to your perspectival knowing or to your propositional knowing, and that affords deep understanding. And what that affords then is the alignment of the four kinds of knowing gives me a deep religio sense of my connectedness to myself, and then the understanding because of the relations of relevance and significance between the kinds of knowing gives me a sense of being very coupled to the world in the right way. And so I think that all of the orders configure all the kinds of knowing, but they do so with different emphasis. So I think the nomological order puts a lot of emphasis on intelligibility, how things make sense. The narrative order, you could also say is a kind of intelligibility, but it does something that’s really interesting. So in the narrative order, you’re making use of things like metaphor, symbol, and story. And what’s interesting to me about all of those is they involve nonlogical identity. So in a metaphor, you’re making use of the idea of nonlogical identity. So in a metaphor, I say two things are the same, you know, Juliet is the son. And of course, it’s not logical identity or categorical identity that I’m asserting there, right? And then symbols are metaphors in which something is typically being exacted in some fashion. And so there’s a mediation going on in an important way. And then in stories, you have that nonlogical sense of identity across time. You know, it’s the same person at the beginning and the end. And that’s what allows you to do, that’s what allows you to have a temporally extended sense of yourself. So you’ll do very, very bizarre things without even thinking about it because of your narrative ability. You’ll look at a picture of a two-year-old child and say, hey, that’s me. And the differences between you, you and that child are overwhelming. And the fact it’s not even a person there, it’s a picture. All the weird identity things you’re doing there are really significant and profound. And so I think the narrative order trains us on nonlogical identity in order so that we can expand the sense of self. So it’s temporally expanded and it’s ontologically expanded. It’s expanded through time. So before you have narrative, children have a very limited sense of the past and the future. They don’t have that temporally extended self, but as they get narrative, it extends out. And about the same time, they start to get symbol, metaphor, and then they start to get And then they start to also extend the self nonlogically through layers of ontology. And what does all of that do? Well, I think that affords an enhancement, a deeper lived understanding of our participatory knowing, of our knowing by being who we are and what we are. And I think that’s important when we’re talking about the aspirational projects of trying to transform the self. And so that, right, the narrative order, I think, has a lot of emphasis on aspiration and the deep transformation of participatory knowing. So Daniel, that’s probably not what you were wanting. You were probably wanting sort of a clear mapping, but I do think that all of the, all of the things that you were talking about, each order aligns the kinds of knowing and then affords deeper kinds of understanding. But there’s also emphasis. And like the way I just gave an example of how the narrative order emphasizes nonlogical identity and affords aspiration and then affords the transformation of the sort of the transformation of the self. And so that’s important. So I guess that would mean to the degree to which we lose a sense of aspirational identity and aspirational practice, the narrative order might start to become impoverished, for example. There’s much more that needs to be worked out about that. I think it’s a really important question. And you can see, I’m just sort of like, there’s more of a, there’s more of a I just want to think about this and keep exploring it. But I hope that was at least a helpful response. And I’m sure we can pick it up in person when we talk later on in person. So thank you very much. That was excellent. So this is from Lysol Van Wick, who’s a patron, and she also shows up on the Facebook page. It’s wonderful to have you here, Lysol. I recently read Anakha Harris’s Conscious. Curious about your views on panpsychism. So panpsychism is something that keeps circling around in, around my work, because I do a lot of work on the nature of consciousness. I do a lot of work on what’s called deep-seed, deep-seed, deep-seed, deep-seed, deep-seed, deep-seed, deep-seed, deep-seed, deep-seed, deep-seed, deep-seed, deep-seed, deep-seed, deep-seed, deep-seed, deep-seed, deep-seed. I would point you, Lysol, to a series of videos that I’ve recorded with J.P. Marceau on exactly this topic, J.P. Marceau. I met him via Paul VanderKley. He went on Paul’s channel. And he was talking about his own personal, like he was having nightmares about zombies. So the meeting crisis was like, you know, I’ve argued that zombies with Chris and Philip, that zombies are, you know, a very powerful metaphor, cultural expression right now of the meeting crisis. And so he was being affected by the meeting crisis and it was even affecting him psychodynamically. It’s a sign of a good philosopher, by the way, if the problems of the civilization are embodied almost psychosomatically. So he was wrestling with that and then he started to become aware of my work and then also Jonathan Pachaud’s work, but he was also doing, he’s a graduate student in philosophy and he found panpsychism. And so he was originally proposing panpsychism as a response, obviously philosophical response, not a transformative response, but a philosophical response to the meeting crisis. And then I noted what he was doing and we got together and we’ve had a whole, we’ve had a series of talks. I think JP and I, there’s been two with JP and I and then we recently did one on good symbolism and then another one on the dialectical metaphysics and people like Aquinas, that hasn’t come out yet. And then there’s also two that JP and I did with Mary Cohen. So, Luzelle, if you could first of all check out, I think the first two with JP and I, there’s a long discussion and my argument in depth about panpsychism. So the thing about panpsychism is it’s, there’s a new version coming out that I haven’t seen yet. Sorry, that sounds really cryptic. But, so there’s other arguments out there and I haven’t seen them yet so I’m ignorant of them and I understand that I’m gonna need to wrestle with them and I will. But what I said in the versions with JP was that I think that in the end panpsychism, see the, why people prefer panpsychism over something like deep continuity? Deep continuity is the idea that there’s recursive acceptation. So you have biology and there are principles governing biological life and they get accepted into principles of psychological life and then they can get exacted into principles of rational life. This is a very Aristotelian idea and that’s explicit by the way. This is often what’s thought about in 4E cognitive science. When they say that cognition is inherently embodied, they mean there’s a deep, they don’t mean your body is just a place where cognition happens. They mean that the patterns and principles and processes of your body are continuous with, they inform and platform the patterns, principles and processes of your cognition. Now the reason why people tend to prefer panpsychism over deep continuity is because they find the issue that they think that there is a problem within deep continuity of what’s called strong emergence. So strong emergence is the idea that you get functions and patterns that are available at a higher level of organization that are not found at the level of the components. And so this is meant only as an analogy because the analogy is, the instance is actually what’s called weak emergence. Hydrogen and oxygen are both gas, but when they are properly integrated, you get water and water has all kinds of properties that are not found in hydrogen and oxygen on their own. So there’s emergent properties. And dynamical system theory, complexity theory, all of these things work on emergence. Now many people find the proposition that consciousness can emerge out of intelligent, non-conscious brain processes. They find that too miraculous of an emergence. And so they reverse the argument and say, it’s not that consciousness has emerged out. It’s that right there, there are there is some in some sense, there’s consciousness all the way down so that even parts of, you know, atomic particles, for example, have properly possessed properties of consciousness. They are instances of consciousness, not just things that support consciousness and living organisms, but even if there were no living organisms, no living organisms, panpsychism claims there was still consciousness in the world. Now, the problem with that is, to my mind, is the following, is that it actually doesn’t solve the problem it’s claiming to solve. The problem that is not liked about deep continuity is the problem of emergence. But I think panpsychism has an equally devastating emergence problem, which is, okay, I get it. So somehow this pencil is conscious, but it’s not conscious in a way that I’m conscious. It’s not conscious in the way that I, you know, a consciousness that supports, you know, reflective awareness. It’s not consciousness in the way that we can say it’s paying attention in any way. Right. And my consciousness, and I have explicit arguments for this elsewhere, they’re coming out in the new series that I’m doing with Greg Enriquez called Untangling the World Not, the Hard Problems of Mind and Meaning about the hard problem of consciousness. That’s going to be released next Friday. So, right, my consciousness seems to be deeply enmeshed with my intelligence, with my attention, with phenomena like memory, like what we were talking about earlier, that sense of self, like all of this subjectivity. And then, so then, what I can now ask is, well, how does that, how does this non-intelligent, non-personal, non-reflective, non-attention directing kind of consciousness in the pencil become this kind of consciousness, the kind of consciousness that I have behavioral evidence for and I have a direct awareness for? And the answer is, well, there’s some way in which these smaller consciousnesses are put together to make that kind of intelligent, rational, rationality bearing personhood in enhancing kind of consciousness. But then, OK, that’s just a kind of emergence again. What you’re saying is from the non-intelligent, non-personal, non-attentional, non-cognitive kind of consciousness emerges the personal, the rational, the reflective, the personal consciousness. I don’t think anything is gained. I don’t think anything is gained. And then you say, well, then they’re equal. And there’s a possibility there. I respect JP. I respect other people. You know, I know there’s a version of this coming out of Whitehead’s thinking that I want to learn more about. I have respect for this position because we all are struggling to understand consciousness. It’s really, really, you should be really wary of anybody who says, you know, this is it. This is clearly just the way consciousness is. You know, it’s all an illusion or blah, blah, blah. Right. Way more, way more care is needed about consciousness. Consciousness is the holy grail of cognitive science. And if you’re not a well-trained knight, you should not be on a quest for such a holy grail. So I think after and I mean this sincerely, after due respect to people like JP, I think that of the two, right, the emergence within consciousness within panpsychism and the emergence within what’s called the deep continuity, this one over here, this has all kinds of science and biology and it gives you all kinds of empirical evidence. This one doesn’t do that. And what kind of evidence do I independent evidence I have for that this has consciousness. That’s really difficult. Again, not saying the arguments are crazy. We’re not deserving of intellectual respect. I like the way that JP put it to me and I admire. That’s the right verb. I admire his honesty about it. He says that of the two, deep continuity is less ontologically risky. But he finds the panpsychism, although it’s more ontologically risky, he thinks it is much more consonant with his religious orientation. And I respect that. His religious orientation is one that is clearly enmeshed with the cultivation of wisdom. He’s a fundamentally good person. But he admits that if you don’t already have some independent commitment to a particular religious framework, you might not want to take that extra ontological risk. So, that’s a very long answer, I hope. And there’s much, much more to it. I think that the answer I gave is borders on being false because it is too brief. Some of you are going, really? That seemed really long, really long. And I get that. But a longer answer, I think, is actually needed. And I’ve already indicated there’s some new movements happening around this. The ideas of panpsychism. There’s been some excellent work done by my colleague, Bill Seeger. And I’ve started entering into a discussion with Matt Segal, a really wonderful person. We’ve recorded Voices with Ravehi. That’s going to come out. And he has a Whiteheadian approach to this. In other ways, his views and eyes are deeply convergent around the meaning crisis, et cetera. And so I look forward to maybe exploring this with him. Although, properly speaking, Whitehead isn’t a panpsychist. He’s a pan-experientialist, which is slightly different and sort of in between deep continuity and panpsychism. So these are very exciting times. There’s very interesting times, which also means these are not times of consensus. So I tried to give you my best answer in the time available and then indicate the videos with JP you should, between JP and myself, you could consider and other people’s work you might want to take a look at. OK, I want to pass now to another question from another patron, Rob. Again, Rob is somebody I get to meet with monthly and have the regular hour long discussions with Rob. And again, I love hanging out with Rob. I just love being there. Such a warm soul. Such a bright mind. It’s just pleasant. And that sounds sort of trivial, but it’s pleasant to be with. You know, he’s the kind of person that you know, sometimes you realize I do because I suffer from reticence sensitivity disorder and social phobia. And so I’m carrying around something like armor all day to do mindfulness on it. And that’s one of the reasons why I took up all these practices. Right. And then but there’s a part where I go, you know, in deep meditation, I feel that come off. Right. But I get that same feeling when I’m with Rob that that and I think that’s a blessing. So thank you for that, Rob. Here’s Rob’s question. If a reasonable wish, I love this good, if a reasonable wish granting genie. So you can’t ask the genie. My first wish is an is an uncountable number of wishes. If a reasonable wish granting genie could ensure the outcome of one project you are doing or would do, and this outcome would be the result of 10 years of effort and happen 10 years of now, what would it be? For example, what is a larger scope outcome of your impact on culture that would be interesting to see manifest a good time into the future? So I take it that the invocation of the genie means that this extends beyond what I see as currently available within the grasp of my rational planet. So I’m going to take that. That is the intent of the invocation of the genie. The project I would most like is if. The religion that is not a religion became a viable home for stealing the culture that and what I mean by that is that. My work, some my work and the work of others working with me contributed to. Affording all these emergent communities of practices and all these new emergent ecologies of practices around enhancing meaning, cultivating wisdom, reducing self deception, and they found a way to. Organize such that they were bound together, religio in a culture that offered a way of being and living that. Was. Satisfying to the human, the perennial human needs for wisdom and enhanced religio and communitas. And. At the same time. Enabled people to get free from the modal confusions and the cultural cognitive grammar that tears people apart, fragments them, destabilizes their sense of realness, and does this in a deeply coordinated fashion, both individually and collectively, but in a way that was in. But in a way that was in in consonance with, but nevertheless in deep dialogue with also the scientific worldview on one hand and the traditional religions to which we owe so much on the other in a way that all of the participants in that dialogue felt. Was fruitful, respectful, generative, insightful. If that. Came to be. That would be the most I. Could want for all of my efforts to succeed in if they could bring that about. That’s what I would like. Where people got a real sense of this is a viable way. We can never see the emergence of the next culture while we’re in the culture we’re in. Right. And it takes it takes. Sometimes it’s taken centuries, but a lot of things are happening much faster because of the increasing acceleration of the pace of everything. So. I hope that’s not grandiose. I certainly. I certainly don’t see myself as like the founder or leader or something of what I’m talking about, but if my work could help in concert with other people, many other people, and I’m meeting more and more of them all the time, if all of these. If all of these, I don’t know if all of the it’s almost like if all of these sounds suddenly found, they’re not going to be there. If all of these sounds suddenly found their natural frequency and came into concert into a symphony, not a homogenous noise, a cacophony, but a symphony of new intelligibility. New way of being a new culture for people. That would be what I would most like to see. So. So this is from Karima Cynthia Clayton. She’s a patron. She is also a deep, supportive and valuable presence on the Sangha every morning. So it’s always great to have a question from Karima. It’s a fairly long question, so I’ll read it through. So Karima asked, I plead guilty to spiritual bypassing. I’ve mentioned this in the Sangha. Two very similar notions. Spiritual materialism, which cutting through spiritual materialism is sort of a classic by turnpah and then a term that is increasingly coming out of psychotherapy, which is spiritual bypassing. Both of them share that people use. The altered states of consciousness and affect, right, as a way of avoiding. Avoiding darker aspects of self-knowledge, darker aspects of reality. To put it in a word, it’s a form of escapism. That’s what spiritual bypassing is. Spiritual materialism goes a little bit. It’s a little bit more pernicious in that you’re not only bypassing, you’re also gathering trophies of wonderful experiences that are the gems to put in your crown of narcissism that show how entitled you are to more and more attention and more and more attention. And more and more glorification. So that’s spiritual materialism. And so now, obviously, I’m being a little bit hyperbolic for the purposes of clarity. I’m pretty sure that Karima is not doing that as full blown. But we all. I think this I’m making a statement more of the all is more of an ethical normative than a fully sort of, you know, nomological scientific descriptive. We all, I think, should acknowledge how we can be prone to spiritual bypassing. And a maxim that I live by comes from Arthur Dyckman, and it’s repeatedly helpful to me that it’s ultimately not about altered states of consciousness. It’s about altered traits of character. If your character is not being transformed so that it is more reliably. Regulating your behavior in a virtuous and wisdom cultivating fashion, then. Yeah, then. You know, I mean, I shouldn’t tell I’m no kind of authority, but. It’s better off if you didn’t do spiritual practices. It really is. I know that sounds a little bit harsh, but I don’t want to be harsh. I want to help everybody that I can. But if you’re doing it for spiritual materialism or spiritual bypassing, if you’re not actually willing to look at the shadow sides of yourself and confront the hard problems of the world. If you’re not cultivating virtue and wisdom and virtue is the beauty of wisdom, virtue is the beauty of wisdom. You’re not doing that. And you should stop the practices because you’re actually. Bringing them into disrepute. Right. It’s very similar to like I’m not a spiritualist. It’s very similar to like I think that psychedelics, not a cyber, they’re powerful. And when they’re set into a spiritual framework, they have been and should be treated by indigenous people as, you know, as sources of sacredness. And I think that’s very important. But you can take all of that and take it out of the point. The point of the psychedelic is to give me the cognitive flexibility within a ritual framework so that I will undergo deep transformation, altered trait of character. You can take all of that away and they say, no, I just want to have an altered state of consciousness. Woohoo. That’s why I don’t think there should be any legal prohibition on psychedelics. But I think that people we should create a strong cultural normativity, like in indigenous cultures, that they should only be used within a ritual context. In order to afford the experience of sacredness, in order to empower aspirations to virtue and wisdom. So in the same way, undertaking spiritual practices for spiritual materialism or spiritual bypassing. It’s better than you just don’t do them at all, then. Because many people are going to see those practices and see the narcissism and see the escapism and the avoidance, and they’re going to assume that those are necessary features of those practices. You shouldn’t do that. You don’t have the right to do that. Many people have sunk time and talent. Some of them have put their life on the line. Socrates dies for what he was trying to teach. His practices should be used with respect, with reverence. You can’t revere something if you’re self-centered about it. Reverence is the virtue of finding value in something beyond, bigger than yourself. Sorry, but that was a very important point. And Karimu is just introducing it. And I want to talk about that. That was a very important point. And Karimu is just introducing it. And I wanted to unpack it for people because it’s something that I think is very important. You can tell I feel very strongly about it. OK, so let’s go back to Karimu’s question. I plead guilty to spiritual bypassing. It’s been said positivity is my middle name, creating harmony, avoiding conflict. So you’re very high in agreeableness, probably, perhaps also in openness as well. Like Pollyanna using pink glasses to see the world I wish to see. Yeah. As I need the rest of the question back, it’s been moved. Sorry, I didn’t get to finish the question and it’s been moved on the screen for me. Is there any way of getting that question back, Amar? There it is. Thank you, Amar. Sorry, that’s my fault. I’m taking too long in this question. It’s not Amar’s fault. Like Pollyanna using pink glasses to see the world I wish to see. As a facilitator for UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center Science of Happiness course, I overemphasized the positive and avoided the negative, taught detachment and idealism. Yes, I’m not distracting myself or others from facing our feelings, as there is something very necessary about being who and where you are. And I endorse checking in and not checking out. How can one regulate spiritual bypassing and withdraw the BS from positivity? Thanks. So this is where the we have to really open up things that have been confused together, pull them apart. We have to learn and understand so we can experience the deep difference from between meaning and subjective well-being, feeling good or positive or contented. Meaningful meaning is to be appropriately right connected. Aristotle said it, right? It’s not about being angry or not angry. It’s being angry at the right time, to the right degree, for the right reason. If your anger is how to be rightly in right relationship, appropriately connected to this situation, it is if it is a way that affords you being wise, then it is appropriate to be angry. That’s why you have anger, which we often. That’s a very negative thing. And I’m a Canadian. We don’t like anger. Oh, no anger. No anger. Right. So I get it. But our culture has done has confused and says, well, meaning in life is just contentment. No, contentment is how the self has been sort of, you know, strengthened or supported. But that’s not the same thing as meaning. Meaning is about mattering. It’s about being connected to something that has a value beyond the self. The emotion associated with that is joy, which is very different from what we call happiness. And then what we’ve reduced happiness to is we’ve reduced happiness to a particular subspecies of pleasure. So we have to unpack all of these things. We have to pull them apart. And we have to say, look, if what I’m after is responding to the meaning crisis and meaning in life, then the touchstone of progress and success is not subjective well-being or contentedness. We are going to have to encounter things that are negative. They are affectively negative. They may be disturbing to our worldview precisely because we are not seeking subjective well-being for its own on its own exclusively. We should not say we should not seek it. I’m saying we should we should not make it the only thing we seek. And if we remember that some of the most meaningful experiences in our lives also had significant negativity in it, then we can start to understand that there is an appropriate relationship between the negative aspects of things and the cultivation of meaning. I think back on some of the hardest periods of my life, but they are the periods also that were the most transformative and therefore the most meaningful. That’s often the measure of meaning. How much transformation occurred? Were those pleasant or positive moments in my life? If you’re talking about affect, no, they were. But they were because of the transformation that they empowered, they were the most meaningful. We have to get off a normativity of contentedness. It’s not enough. Now, some of you who are doing the wisdom of Hypatia course with me, you’re saying, but what about ataraxia? And you know, I have a more a more complex notion of ataraxia. I won’t get into that right now, but that’s what that’s just what I would indicate where I would go in order to answer those questions. Here’s a question from an anonymous patron. I would really like to get into your meditation series, but all of the sitting I already do for my job has my knees and back aching. Would it be possible to practice meditation while on a treadmill or elliptical at a slow speed? Yes, I’ve also got standing and moving practices that I’ve taught. So if you go to the meditation series, there’s lessons. I believe that starts on the lesson 11. There are standing and moving and meditative ways to practice meditation. There’s also a practice coming out of the wisdom of Hypatia course that the Sangha is doing right now, which is a walking practice you do called savoring. You could look up that and you could also do the basic meditation practice while on a treadmill or elliptical slow speed. Very much. Yes, totally. And there’s like I said, there’s a whole family of practices out there and they’ve all been recorded. And I think that’s what I would recommend. And I think that’s what I would recommend. And I think that’s what I would recommend. And I think that’s what I would recommend. And I think that’s what I would recommend. And there’s like I said, there’s a whole family of practices out there and they’ve all been recorded. And if you go through the playlist on the lessons, you’ll find them. OK, we are now shifting to live questions from the chat. I want to thank once again the patrons, subscribers and everyone watching right now. Excellent questions from the patrons. Just fantastic. And of course, always your support is crucial to producing the videos and for supporting the science we’re doing to find solutions to the meeting crisis. So as many of you know, all of the income from the Patreon and the advertising and everything, I don’t take that as income. It goes into the Reveke Foundation and the Reveke Foundation, of course, you know, it funds the video work I’m doing, etc. But we’ve also funded two experiments, our first two, and I’m very happy about that. I think I mentioned that last time. And so I want to thank everybody for making I’m trying to create a process in which we can make a difference both in terms of educational content and dialogic content and also in terms of, you know, research science. We can make a difference together to the meeting crisis. So here’s a question from Node in a network. Oh, that’s an interesting self-designation. Have you heard of Don Hoffman? Yes. He is a professor out of California Irvine. I’d love to see them talk about meditation and Don’s mathematical theory of consciousness. So there are several mathematical theories, many mathematical theories of consciousness out there. So I’ve heard I’ve heard some of his work. I think that Greg and I will Greg and Rick is that I will do a bit on him. And so, again, I’ve only I’ve commented a couple of times in another in fact live stream Q&A that I only know I’ve only seen Hoffman’s work. I’ve seen it firsthand, but not what I would call his primary work. It’s more sort of at a popular level. I have questions about his idea about consciousness being that our experience is fundamentally illusory because of the model of consciousness that I have questions about that because it still seems to be locked in to a Cartesian frame. Work in a particular way. I mean, Descartes proposed basically that it’s not Descartes and at least Barkley proposes all of that in a very important way. So, but I don’t want to say too much because I need to learn more. And like I said, I will I will talk to Greg and we’ll take some time to respond in depth on untangling the world not to Hoffman’s work. Okay, so and the next question is from Mark Lefebvre Hughes, who’s a regular on the meditation live stream. He’s also one of the people that helps to manage with along with Brett the Discord server. So it’s great to hear from Mark. How do the four types of knowing relate to psychological additions or are there more are they more abstract and require other components to relate to psychological issues? Yeah, I think they’re more abstract because I think they they they they relate to sort of particular kinds of memory and the degree to which you could understand many psychological conditions as to as to two functions being distorted. One is a memory function and one is salient dysregulation. And of course, both the kinds of knowing, sorry, all the kinds of knowing are ultimately grounded in relevance realization and then how that comes up in into perspectival awareness with salience landscaping. And so that’s, of course, abstract because it’s shared by all all forms of cognition I have argued. And then the four kinds of knowing sort of plug into the four kinds of memory, you know, obviously semantic memory for propositional procedural memory. It was for procedural knowing, perspectival knowing gives us what’s called episodic memory and participatory knowing gives us the kind of memory made famous by tolding, which is auto-noetic. And so you can see many psychological conditions as malfunctions of one or the other or both of these functions. So I’m just working on we’re going to meet with somebody who’s doing work on this. I think I’m going to mispronounce the name, but there is it is it bad cock and crispy? I always anyway, they have proposed that you can see all psychopathology on a continuum from sort of we have to be really careful about these terms, autism, broadly construed and psychosis. And basically all of these, it’s sort of that the autistic people tend to overfit and not see enough connections and the psychotic people tend to sort of overgeneralize and they see way too many connections. And so and then if you can sort of put that together with the work of Kapoor and also others that schizophrenia also Ramachandran is a salience dysregulation order. And so all you can see all of the all of the spectrum as salience dysregulation, you’re not getting an optimal grip, as I’ve argued, your optimal gripping is off. And so your presence, your situational awareness is skewed, etc. So that’s one function. But you can also see a lot of psychopathologies as distortions in particular kinds of memory. Obviously, some of them are because people are damaged and they get memory dysfunction because of the damage. You can also see certain disorders as the auto-noetic machinery of the self is not properly or is the is one of the one or more of the memory systems off or not properly linked to the others. For example, some disorders seem to come from the fact that attachment hasn’t been properly created between human beings. So you don’t because of impairment in the use of narrative, for example, so you don’t get the right agent arena participatory knowing generated, etc. And so I think that the relationship is therefore not directly direct mapping. But insofar as the four kinds of knowing talk about various recursions of relevance, realization, especially around salience, and they map onto kinds of memory. And you can see all the psychopathology as some way in which salience regulation and memory functions are failing to be appropriately cultivated for optimally gripping in various ways. So I hope that answered your question. Mark’s very good question. Last question is from May M.A.I. April. But that’s a very sweet name. May April. It’s it’s it’s sorry. It just it feels like spring. Your name. And I meant it as a compliment. I hope it I hope it didn’t come off as condescending. That was not my intent. What kind of knowing does Taoism refer to as the doorway of truth or J. Krishnamurti? So that kind of knowing. And that’s interesting. Because the I think that the what’s actually being talked about there isn’t properly a kind of knowing. It’s a way in which all of the knowings are properly coordinated together so that they are mutually transformative. And so that the participatory knowing is going through the greatest amount of transformation. And so I tend to think of that having to do more with understanding and wisdom. And I think it’s important and I’m having some very good discussions with people on the Discord server. Mary Cohen about this. I think it’s very important to not conflate and confound knowledge and wisdom. And the reason for that is our culture is not lacking in knowledge. And if knowledge was sufficient for wisdom, we should be the wisest culture of all. And that is not the case. And so a healthy understanding or a healthy sorry, an understanding of a healthy distinction between knowledge and wisdom helps to explain an important aspect of the meeting crisis. And so I think and Krishnamurti clearly says this, you know, truth is a pathless land. There is there is no knowledge there in the sense of anything that you can bring back. You can’t bring back facts. You don’t bring back skills in any that somehow reveal what that pathless land is like. There’s there’s a no thingness to it. I mean, you could be deeply at one with it. But again, if all you’re getting is an altered state of consciousness, Krishnamurti would be echoing Dyckman and saying, forget it. Don’t do that. It’s about altered traits of character. If you’re not if it’s not transforming you, you haven’t got it. There are many truths that are only available in transformation. We can only there are many aspects of who we are that are only realized in in an aspirational fashion. This is something that many of the wisdom traditions, many of the wisest people converge on. And so I think that the what you have, I think the people that the Taoist sage or the Krishnamurti sage or the Neoplatonic sage or the Buddhist sage, they have found the proper. And this is an idea ultimately that I owe to Plato. They have found the proper alignment that brings the deepest understanding, which deeply affects the wisdom of the people. It’s the alignment that brings the deepest understanding, which deeply right. And understanding means insight. It means seeing through self-deception. It means enhancing religio. It means right. The cultivation of virtue. It means the coupling of of you to reality in a way like the Taoist being one with the Tao flowing with nature. But the stoics, the stoics use the same phrase to talk about what they were after. And all of that, that’s ultimately right. It’s wisdom. His wisdom is about that transformation. This was Socrates’s great insight. The natural scientists of his time produced many truths, but those truths weren’t transformative. They had knowledge. There’s no wisdom because without the transformation, there isn’t wisdom. So I would say to you, it’s actually wisdom deeply, deeply understood. OK, so thank you all for joining me on this Q&A. As always, you can see how I get into it. It’s wonderfully affording for me for DIA logos in dialogue with these questions. I get to a place that I couldn’t get to on my own regularly, reliably. So thank you for that. We do this every third Friday of the month at 3 p.m. Eastern Time. Again, thank you for all of the supporters of Patreon. You can support my work on the meeting crisis at patreon.com slash John Rovecki, all one word. I want to thank again all the people from the Sangam. Many of them were here. All the people from the Discord server, many of them were here. We have a Discord, as I just mentioned, where people are having some really interesting conversations. They’re doing many of the practices that you’ve heard me talk about or allude to in the Q&A today. A reminder, you’ve heard me mention this. We do a meditation set every weekday morning at 930 Eastern Time. We have gone through I think it’s about 15 lessons in total, drawn from the Eastern traditions, the Buddhist and Taoist traditions. We’re now shifting over to the Western wisdom traditions, making use of a book called The Wisdom of Hypatia, going through Epicureanism into Stoicism into Neoplatonism. And I agree with Arthur versus Lewis, very well argued, that Neoplatonism is the spiritual cognitive grammar of the West. It is at the heart of the wisdom traditions within Judaism, Christianity, Islam. So I want to thank my dear friend and techno major Mark, who is there, make everything, making everything work. And I’m deeply appreciative of it. So thank you all of you all for being here. Thank you for your time and attention. Thank you for your continued support. Maybe you send emails and comments to me. I can’t respond to them all. Please don’t think I’m negligent. I’m very grateful. I find them all very encouraging. It’s very, very helpful to me. So thank you all very much. I’ll see you all next month. Next month. Take good care, everyone. Thank you.