https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=9oSwVDDPXiU
Welcome everyone to the monthly Q&A. It’s a great pleasure to be here again. A reminder of what the format is. We will answer questions first from patrons and then questions also from people who belong to the Sanga and the Discord server and then open things up to the general chat. So I’d like to start first of all with a question from a patron, Rachel Hayden. I don’t know if I’ve interacted with you before, Rachel, so thank you very much for your support. And here’s Rachel’s question. There is a massive book list contained within the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series. Yes, there is, which I’ve just finished the series. Thank you for finishing that series. I know it’s quite a challenging thing to engage in, so thank you for doing that. Is there a recommended starting point for exploring these? I’ve already ordered Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt and Aspiration by Agnes Callard due to personal interest in these topics. And I noticed that a few of the books were either very highly praised, such as The Solarity of the Good by Iris Murdoch or mentioned repeatedly, such as Transformative Experiences by L.A. Paul. I do not have a background in Western philosophy, so I’m wondering if there might be a sort of general order to go in. Old to new, new to old, easy to hard, certain lineages. Thank you. So, Rachel, first of all, let me give you an order that I would recommend going through the books that you’ve noted here. I would recommend starting with The Sovereignty of the Good and then moving to Frank Frankfurt’s book Bullshit, then moving to L.A. Paul’s book, Transformative Experience, and then moving to Agnes Callard’s book, Aspiration. And the reason for that is because there’s an important sense with some of the books directly presuppose one another. So Aspiration presupposes that you’ve read the Transformative Experience. I think Transformative Experience is very much helped if you’ve read Sovereignty of the Good. Sovereignty of the Good and Bullshit also talk to each other in terms of contrast. So a general principle, though, that I thought that I followed in the advice I gave you is I went from old to new. And that’s generally a good idea when moving through these books. The easy to hard isn’t as good a strategy. Lineages are a little bit more challenging to work out. But a general strategy is to move through it chronologically because of the way in which later arguments and theories build on previous arguments and theories, especially when I’m using them within Awakening from the Meeting Crisis. So I would recommend pretty strongly that you go in historical order of the books that are found in Awakening from the Meeting Crisis. You might want to limit it to certain like genres or subgenres. For example, there you know, you might want to go in chronological order within sort of what you might call like theological thought or chronological chronological order within psychological thought, things like that. So generally going chronologically is the best. You may be able to subdivide it into some subgenres, but that’s usually the best strategy for the way I’m making use of the material within Awakening from the Meeting Crisis. OK, so the next one is from Stian, a regular patron. Good to see you again, Stian. I would like to hear you speak on some psychopathology in general and or confusion and psychosis in particular. That might not be your field of study, but I’m curious to hear. If not, I have another question. How is it going with your chocolate addiction? So my chocolate addiction is going fairly well right now, largely, but not keeping very much chocolate in my proximity seems to be a pretty effective strategy. So I think I will devote a little bit more time to your first question. So there’s a lot of work coming out that I think is converging on the idea that you could see psychopathology as lying on a continuum, and it is a continuum basically in terms of salient regulation or dysregulation, which has ultimately do with ways in which relevance realization can become pathological because it has lost cognitive flexibility. So on so there’s there’s Barak and Crispi, and then there’s the work of Oz and the work of Kapoor. I won’t go into a particular. The basic idea is this that psychosis is when the relevance realization and machinery is hyperactive in the sense that it is finding too many patterns that are not there. And so it’s grabbing too much information as relevant in an important way and realizing patterns that are not real patterns. Part of how this is probably happening is a decrease in the ability to distinguish causal patterns from correlational patterns. This seems to be the case. Within schizophrenia. Or the other end of the spectrum would be people who might be not noticing enough patterns. Now, this is called the autistic end of the spectrum, and it’s a little bit problematic because autism is itself a spectrum disorder. But the general idea here is there’s a family of disorders known as autism. And one of the features that they share in common is that people are not noted there. So if the psychotic person is seeing too many patterns that are not there, the autistic person is not seeing enough of the patterns that are actually there. So they are discounting too many of the real they’re discounting too many real patterns. They’re not finding salient enough and not finding salient enough. Real patterns. They’re not finding salient enough enough of the real patterns. And so what a lot of people are not talking about is strategies instead of trying to deal with the ideation, the ideas that people have or strategies that deal with the affect how people are effectively aroused or their affect is too intense or too flat. People are talking about how can we help modify and help people more properly regulate their their their salience landscaping so that we can bring people up. That’s the right word. Who are not noticing enough patterns as relevant. And we can regulate down people who are noticing too many patterns as relevant. So one of the interesting things about this for me, we never wrote it down, which is unfortunate. But when I was originally working with Tim Lillicrap and Blake Richards on the original relevance realization paper in 2007, 2008, I remember going on a walk with Blake and he actually proposed that he thought that the relevance realization theory that we were working out would would be the basis for a way of re understanding psychopathology in a much more coherent and integrated fashion. And I wish we had made that an actual formal prediction because it looks like it’s coming to confirmation. And so that would be my answer to the question of what’s the relationship. What do I see the relationship between ideas around relevance realization and ideas about psychopathology. So the next question is from Karima, who’s a patron and who support both in terms of financial support and the continual contributions she makes to the Sangha, the Discord community. It’s fantastic. The Discord server community. So welcome Karima, as always. So Karima asked a question. Please elaborate on the five factors of inquiry and mindfulness, inquiry and mindfulness, meditation in regards to know things thoughts. This came up on the Discord sit today with some of us needing more definition. Physical sensations and identified emotions held in the body are more easily entertained for examination than our thoughts. Yes. So just quickly, what are the five factors of inquiry and mindfulness? The first factor of inquiry and mindfulness is vigilance. This is the capacity that gets us to move away from the familiar, superficial aspects of our experience and gets us to try and probe to what is unfamiliar, more profound aspects of our experience. Sensitivity. This is the factor that tries to set our experience back in motion. An analogy I use is let your experience unfold as a movie rather than being satisfied with snapshots that you take of it with your mind. Acuity. Acuity is to pull apart the different layers and components of an experience. So when you’re, for example, when you’re experiencing pain, you can pull apart sort of the felt nastiness, the tension, the emotional reaction, the sense of threat, etc. And then there is noticing. Noticing is to pay attention to three different sort of orientation centers. How is your body responding to this? How are you embodying this state? How are you emotionally responding to it? Not what are the particular emotions, but what is your like, what is your heart, your emotional center doing? Is it racing? Is it freezing? What’s it doing? And then what’s your mind doing? Again, not somewhat not what you’re thinking, but is your mind speeding up, slowing down? Is it fragmenting? Is it dulling? Is it sharpening? What’s happening? You apply the five factors of inquiring mindfulness on distractions. The idea here is so this is not something you do as a novice and not as a novice. You learn to step back, label your distraction, return your attention to the breath. And you do this for a long enough time until you get to a certain stage. And then what you can do once you’ve got some stabilization is when you step back and look at your distraction to the label it, you actually apply the five factors of inquiring mindfulness. The idea about that is that your distractions reflect automatic and often persistent patterns in how you’re making sense of things, how your mind works, your mind and body and heart work. And by doing inquiring mindfulness on your distractions, you could actually turn them from obstacles to meditation as arenas in which you train a more profound capacity for insight, Vipassana. As Karima rightly points out, applying the five factors of inquiring mindfulness to thinking is particularly hard because finding that space between being aware of it and being aware within it is very hard. So it’s sort of it’s relatively easy. It’s not super easy, but it’s relatively easy when I’m in pain, in pain that part of me can sort of step back and not be in the pain and look at it. It’s much harder to try to step back and look at a thought without being within the thinking process. Typically what happens and what happens for a long time for novices is when you step back and try to look at thinking, you either do one of two things. You fall back into the thoughts, you’re in the thinking and you’re wrapped up in the content of your thoughts and then you are you’ve lost mindfulness or you stay disconnected from the thinking process and it just sort of disappears away into nothing. OK, so one of the things you could do is and I did mention this when we talked about this, so I’m hoping I’m not just being repetitive. I hope I can bring it out in a way that’s that’s adjusted to the novelty of the situation for you guys. So one of the things that works, one of the tricks of the trade is to try and pay attention to the voice. So when I’m applying the five factors of acquiring mindfulness, what’s unfamiliar to me typically. So I’m applying vigilance as I try to not to concentrate on what my thinking is. Let’s do just with sort of inner sentences because I can’t do a complete lesson here. Right. So I do the vigilance because I step back and what I normally do is I look at what the content of my thought is. But in vigilance, I try to get below I try to get below that familiar service. I try to get at the voice of my thoughts and the identity bound up with that voice. Is it my voice? What age is the voice? What is it? A whiny voice? Is it a thrashing voice? So I pretend as if I like as if I was on a bus and there was somebody sitting beside me and I wasn’t looking at them, but they’re speaking a language I don’t know. And so I’m trying to pick up on their voice and then I’m trying to pick up on their age of their voice, perhaps the gender of the voice, the emotional state of the voice. And trying to and I try to be right. What’s sensitivity to that? Well, I’m trying to pick up on how that is unfolding. Is it unfolding rapidly? Is it unfolding slowly? Is other pauses or gaps in it? So we’ve got to have done the vigilance. I’ve done the sensitivity, the acuity, right? But notice I already got some of the acuity going. I try to notice different components of this. Like I said, I try to notice the aspects of the voice that has to do with, you know. Is the voice my voice? Is it someone else’s voice? Is it the voice of the voice? Is it a voice from me now? Is it a voice from someone else now from someone else? Some other time? Is there one voice? Is there multiple voice? And so it is tricky to do these just in sequence because I go. But if I was to try and put it in the sequence, I shift to looking at the voice. I let the voice unfold. I pay attention to tempo, texture. I then pull apart these aspects of it. Right. And then I try to notice how my body, my heart and my mind are responding to that, that voice, how it’s flowing and the different parts that I’ve pulled apart with acuity. And of course, I didn’t do the fifth factor when I was talking about the five factors earlier. The fifth factor is reminding, which is I try to stay within mindfulness. I try to stay in inquiry through moving observation, through soft vigilance, rather than inquiry through the posing of questions, the the offering of inferential justification, explanation, etc. So I hope that was helpful. That’s a very tricky one. And it takes quite a bit of practice. But I can report is that when this gels for people, they often find it a very transformative experience, they often find it very transformative to realize that the voice in their head sometimes isn’t theirs. And I don’t mean anything psychotic about it. Or even if it’s theirs, it’s not it’s not them as an adult. It’s them as a 10 year old or something like that. So try that and see if that’s helpful. Rob, so Rob is a great patron, great supporter. I always enjoy spending time with Rob. So Rob writes, I think I’ve noticed people sometimes self-centred the words like have or having after diving deep into people like you or Eric from. Yes. While I understand language and perception are closely interrelated, isn’t it extreme to frequently reframe the language you generate into being mode style? I guess. Do you try to think and talk with being mode expressions or having mode expressions purposefully or does the choice of the words and phrases we use afford our inter and intrasyclic landscape through their use and expression? I think that’s an excellent question. I do try to correct my language so that my language is mode appropriate to the mode that is appropriate to the situation at hand. So if I’m in a situation in which it is appropriate to be in the having mode, I do try that’s usually something I can just allow happen. But if I’m in a situation in which the being mode is more appropriate, one of the things I do to try and trigger the restructuring into the being mode and maintaining myself within it is to actually use more being mode expressions and language. But notice what I said. That isn’t a across the board trying to replace having mode with being mode language. If that’s what’s happening, I would argue that that’s actually a misunderstanding of from and a misunderstanding of how I’ve been using from. The point is not that the having mode is bad or the being mode is good or that you should at all times and all places and always try to always be in the being mode. That’s a mistake. The mistake, right? The thing you’re trying to correct is modal confusion. Sometimes you should be in the in the having mode and therefore having language is completely appropriate. Sometimes you need to be in the being mode and therefore you can help to restructure that by using language that is more directly appropriate to the being mode. So I think it’s important to be sorry. I hope this doesn’t sound hackneyed or cliche. It’s important to be wise in this. It’s important not it’s important, right, to be flexibly responsive with a discerning eye to the situation you’re in, the mode that is appropriate and the language that is appropriate to that mode. For me, this is part of the promise I make when I’m doing the five promises, you know, in reverence and respect for the power and promise of speech. I promise not to speak foolishly or falsely, but to speak wisely in the aspiration to enlightenment. So noting how much speech and humanity are woven together, I always try to use my language wisely, but wisely doesn’t mean in a formulaic fashion, it means with reflexible discernment, like I just said. So I think it’s very important to to try to meet that promise. You know, it’s a version of the traditional training precepts, but it’s important to not meet it formulaically, but meet it with finesse and wisdom. So now a question from Alex Siminov, who’s part of the Discord Sanger. Welcome, Alexi. It’s always great to have you here. So this is a fair long question. I will try to go through it, I hope, at a reasonable pace so people can follow along. After I did a long contemplation of what is important in my life a few years back, I realized that two things are of crucial importance, self-actualization through work and family. I suspect that most people put these two on top as well, sometimes in different order, yes, but I found it impossible to make consistent progress on both at the same time. So for a few years, I had to sacrifice family part and go 100% optimizing for self-actualization through work. I believe this is the right way for a man to approach this prioritization problem in time. Attention and resources are not enough to attack both problems. That bears fruit, but it is a very lopsided way of living that is ultimately counterproductive. What would be a wise philosophical way to approach this challenge in your experience? P.S. I really like when you show applications of ancient philosophy practices to solve day-to-day problems like above. I can’t quite see all of the question. I do not like some of the latest. Let me see if I can move this a little tiny bit. I do not like some of the latest. Here it is. Discussions would seem towards more theoretical dimensions of philosophy. Yeah. So some of that. Yeah. So I’ll last a lot of the P.S. thing first. Yeah. So trying to it’s always trying to toggle between and between those two concerns, allowing a discussion in which the philosophy is articulating the terms, bringing clarification, you know, making sure that when things are not confused or we’re not equivocating, introducing new conceptual vocabulary and theoretical grammar. And of course, that’s also responsive to my interlocutor, because where they are particularly put, pitched on where they are trying to modulate their cognition and consciousness in order to try and get a better optimal grip on situations. So I understand what you’re saying. It is a good also to always try and bring that philosophical understanding back into transforming how you’re actually at work in the world. And I just want to say how important this is. Alexi’s point, you need to be doing both and you need to be doing them both in a coordinated manner. And that’s why the Greeks actually had two words for wisdom. They had Sophia. And for these, and Aristotle particularly talks about this. Sophia is that project of right, trying to get the principles worked out. It’s much more it’s often called theoretical wisdom. I’m not quite happy with these terms, but perhaps they’re helpful. Where it from this is, right, is a contextually sensitive. How can I be wise and virtuous in this context? How can I bring the principles into practice? How can I actualize those principles within the process in which I am participating? And so wisdom always requires Sophia and Phonesis and the integration of them together. Let’s see if we can also now fold that back into Alexi’s question. So this is a perennial problem. It shows up in many sages, in fact, in different cultures at different times. So Siddhartha Katama famously, and of course, many people criticize him for this, abandoned his family after he had seen the four signs that sort of shook him out of his complaints, and woke him up to how out of touch he was with reality. When he decided he needed to pursue enlightenment, he abandons his family, abandons his wife and children. And of course, many of us would regard that as highly immoral. I regard that also as something that I personally find unthinkable in Frankfurt sense. It’s not something I could bring myself to do to that extreme. But Alexi points out that, OK, we might not be doing that, but the myth has relevance. The myth has relevance. Marcus Aurelius talks about the same thing about relating to his like his wife, things like that. It’s like we might we might not be doing the extreme, but myths often they make things more extreme. It’s like putting things under a magnifying glass. So that we can more readily see, we can more really get the joints, we can more readily articulate the pattern and the problem that we’re wrestling with. So the myth is relevant because we are often facing exactly the kind of question that Alexi asked. And this is a difficult question. It’s not a question that I can give you a rule for or an answer to. It’s like the question of how do I decide between justice and compassion? So Sophia can work out. We can and we’re doing a lot in our culture right now. We can discuss what justice is and can discuss what compassion is and can discuss their relative tradeoffs. You can do all that. That’s very, very different from the phronesis of, but what do I do here now? Jesus of Nazareth gave this amazing and it’s wonderfully famous parable of the prodigal son. And the prodigal son is exactly a parable in which there is no resolution. It looks like a narrative, but it’s not. It actually it actually explodes as a narrative. It self-destructs as the narrative, because the point of the prodigal son is there is no final resolution between justice and compassion. And at different times in your life, you will identify with the prodigal son or the elder son or the father. And to try and resolve between those things is actually an inhuman thing to do. Somebody says somebody who says justice should always trump compassion is becoming inhuman. Somebody who says compassion should always trump justice is becoming inhuman. Somebody who says here’s the authority that will always decide between justice and compassion is becoming inhuman. The parable of the prodigal son is profound, precisely because of how it introduces us to this. And then when Jesus of Nazareth says, and the kingdom of heaven is like this. Do you see what he’s doing? He’s saying the kingdom of heaven is a place in which we are confronted with the profundity of these irresolvable tensions. But we somehow have the wisdom to live through them in the best possible way on a case by case basis. So I’m doing this as a very long way of saying to Alexei, I don’t want to give any rule and there is no rule to give about this. I think what I would recommend to you is what I started this with, which was the answer to your the P.S. You need to do a lot of work practicing Sophia thinking about it. And I know you don’t like this as much, but you need to do a lot of work getting very clear about the principles. And then you need to do a lot of work in the mindfulness practices and the wisdom of Ipacia practices on bringing right on cultivating from this. Yes. But in this situation, what’s my contextual sensitivity? How am I rocking this situation? What’s my optimal grip on this situation? How do I be wise in this situation? Because every virtue is how to be wise in a way that’s appropriate to that situation. So I have to practice Sophia and for Nyssa Sophia and for Nyssa Sophia and for Nyssa. And then you will know. You will know that, right, with finesse, you’ll know at this point in my life, at this time, well, maybe no is too strong, but you will at least make a wise decision about how to balance the relationship between your commitment to family and your commitment to self-actualization. Tillett, the person who gave me this idea about how to understand these tensions, talks about the fact that we are perpetually in an irresolvable tension between individuation and participation. And again, if we try to resolve it or we try to come up with a rule for resolving it or we try and say there’s an authority, that’s the father figure in the prodigal son who can always decide this, we lose our humanity. The way we preserve our humanity and the way we act best is to deeply cultivate Sophia, deeply cultivate for Nyssa and then let them self-organize in the situation, in the context. That’s the best advice I can give you. So the next question is from another patron, Vida. I’m not sure I’ve met you before either, Vida. So thank you for your support. Regarding wonder versus curiosity, in a group last night, the facilitator offered a process in response to your comments about wonder to say, I wonder, to ostensibly create a mind state of wonder, result in my group analysis and critiqued, guised as wonder. Yes, it’s, I understand the point you’re making, right? Wonder seems like an organic mind state and can’t really be contrived in group processes, can it? It can, but I understand the point you’re making. The only times I’ve actually gotten to what I think you prescribe here is in Cohen practice, see Bring Me the Rhinoceros or Madhavika dialogues, but those require a foundation of understanding Shunyata. My question is, is having a temporary mind state of wonder enough of a boost to move one who is stuck in looping conceptualizations and develop more meta-awareness or prajna? PSI evidence that folk also think wonder means regression to childhood. Yeah, that last one, that wonder means regression to childhood. That’s due to decadent romanticism. Yeah, and that’s, you know, the idea that wonder is something like what we have in childhood. Woodsworth is sort of a classic example of that. And I think that needs to be seriously challenged. Like Socrates said that wisdom begins in wonder. And you mentioned Cohen practice and Madhavika dialogues, things like that. I think and they and that they require the understanding of Shunyata. I think that Socratic dialogue also has the same thing because of especially for its capacity to bring people into a state of aporia. So I think simply asking, I wonder, I agree with you, people, if they haven’t practiced, even if they have a conceptual distinction, I think of just Sophia, not for you, even if they have a conceptual distinction between wonder, curiosity, if they haven’t practiced, right, they have to practice in for Nises, the distinction, they’re just going to fall into the conflation at a procedural level of it, as you indicated. They’re just going to fall into critique and things like that. So I think what’s needed and this is started the work, a lot of the work that I’m doing with Christopher, Master Pietro and also with guys, Henstock and Jordan Hall, Peter Lindbergh and other people are doing it. There’s all these things emerging around the process that I call dialectic. And what I mean by that is that a practice of. Questioning, but also drawing people out, amplifying them, getting them to reflect. It’s a it’s an ecology of practices that then fits into a higher order ecology of practices. And what it’s designed to do is exactly provoke wonder. It’s designed to get people to call into question through a perspectival and participatory transformation, how they’re seeing things and how they are showing up, how they’re seeing and how they are being in a coordinated fashion. That’s why almost all the Socratic dialogues centered on topics around virtue, because when people. Start to reflect on virtue, they they typically will bring in they’ll tend to bring in more perspectival and participatory knowing. And so I do think there this is something I take very seriously. I think there are ways of getting people oriented that way. That’s one part of it. And then there are ways of getting people into the flow state within distributed cognition and the flow state is a cascade of insights. And if you get people in a flow state within distributed cognition and they’re doing Socratic dialogue, they will you’ll tend to get a self-organization, an emergence of wonder that starts to happen where people first start wondering about what they’re saying. They wonder about other people. But then they start wondering about the very process of intelligibility, the very the way things are unfolding for them. I think when you get that kind of deep Socratic wonder, that can be a powerful way of shifting people in the way you’re asking about. But I think that requires a pedagogical program of practices to get people to do that on a powerful basis. I think simply using the sentence string, I wonder, would be inadequate. I think even having just the deliberate intent, I’m going to wonder instead of being curious, is insufficient. You have to engage. Of course, you should be doing that. You should be doing the Sophia. You should be doing the theoretical reflection. But you need the Phonesis practice if you’re going to actually engage in wonder as something distinct from curiosity and engage in it at a level that’s deep enough to engage for spectra and participatory knowing in something like a flow state so that deeper transformation is actually possible. OK, so now we’re going to get some further questions. This is from Zazian Doshchanov, patron. What are your views on emotions, mental states and mental disorders as dynamic computational processes guiding our and the self-organizing system of mind and body? First, that’s the first part of the question. Second, do you think there are analogous processes on the level of society or civilization as a whole? So first the words emotions, I’ve already spoken about mental disorders when I answered Stian’s question. Mental states, that’s an ambiguous term, if it means consciousness, I’ll have to put that aside. So not quite put it aside. That wasn’t the right way what I was thinking. What I meant was what I was putting it aside in my mind, because I was putting it into a sort of category of a theoretical category. I think mental states, if we understand them as states of consciousness, that is basically perspectival knowing. And so I’ve talked a lot about perspectival knowing and how it works in terms of salience landscaping. That’s how it overlaps with the stuff I’ve said about mental pathologies. And then the salience landscaping will also map onto what I want to talk about with emotions. So following on some sort of seminal work by by Ronnie D’Souza and then and also especially by Keith Oadley, and then following up on work by Reed Montague and others. I want to say that emotions are a particular way in which we’re doing salience landscaping to be angry is to be like to be here now, to be, you know, in this state of mind here now, salience landscaping in a particular manner. And that makes sense because the process of relevance realization is not cold calculation. This is what I mentioned Reed Montague. The difference between you and a computer is you care about the information you’re processing. Why do you care? Well, first of all, you can’t process it all. Neither can a computer, but it doesn’t doesn’t matter to the computer. You can’t process it all. And you care about information because you’re trying to find the information that will help you care for yourself because you’re an autopoetic thing. You are constantly taking care of yourself because you’re constantly engaged in the project of making yourself, making yourself at many levels, making yourself as an identity, yourself, making yourself as a mind, making yourself as a living thing. So emotions are ways in which that affect that character. Look, when I’m doing relevance realization, I’m spending my very precious and very limited time and resources, cognitive and conscious processing, and I’m spending it on trying to find what will matter to me most, sometimes literally matter to me, like what’s important to me, take into me, what will literally help me keep making myself biologically, cognitively, consciously and ultimately existentially. And so emotions are the way in which relevance realization, the caring that is an integral part of relevance realization comes into working memory as a particular kind of salience landscaping that then helps me find those affordances given to me by participatory knowing that I can make it makes obvious the affordances that should be happening here. Notice how emotions come with this tremendous amplification of what is obvious and what is obvious to do and what is available to you right now and what the opportunity for action is. So that’s what I think. That’s what I think all I could say right now. That’s not all that can be said. I hope it didn’t sound like I was saying that. That’s all I can say right now about the interconnections in terms of relevance realization theory and related ideas about prospectable and participatory knowing. You can see how we can talk about in an integrated fashion. Emotions. Mental states, at least states of consciousness and mental disorders. Is there something analogous to emotions at the level of distributed cognition? I think very, very much. I think that groups are also caught up in the project of trying to use their limited times and resources and that they are trying to often care about the information that is needed for the group to take care of itself, for the group to maintain its existence. And of course, that can fall into a vicious form. One of the besetting sins of bureaucratic forms of distributed cognition is that project of maintaining themselves becomes so paramount that they get sort of reciprocally locked into it, reciprocal narrowing. And everything else falls right into abeyance. And all that matters is the information that will help to maintain the existence of the institution. And you can get something that looks very much like stubbornness, and you can get very much like sort of something like rage when the integrity of that project is threatened. So I think there’s something very analogous. We’re now moving to live questions from the chat. I want to thank patrons, subscribers and everyone who’s watching right now. As always, your support is very crucial to continuing to produce the videos I’m producing to support the science we’re doing. As I mentioned, the contributions have already funded two very I think what are two two excellent experiments. So thank you for that and everything we’re doing in general to try and find solutions to the meeting crisis. So the first question is from somebody I’m very familiar with and always pleasure to interact with David Svedlo, who is also a patron. We seem to be actively coherent, continually of contact and a lightning strike of a more energetic expression of the we. Do you sense your present awareness of the collective here nowness? To clarify my meaning of lightning strike, I believe the strike is the essence of the meeting crisis, not so much a problem to be solved, but an expression to be realized. We seem to be actively coherent continuity of contact and a lightning strike of a more energetic expression of the we. Yeah, I think David, you’re saying this sort of you sense this happening sort of culturally in general right now. I very much have that sense, too. Yeah, yeah, the here nowness, that there I think I’m sensing this sort of a zeitgeist to use some Hegelian terms of exactly what David is saying. And when I’m certainly when I’ve gone to some conferences, I just wow, I can’t believe that all of this, all of these different communities of practices and ecologies of practices are springing up in which in various ways what David talks about are happening. And I think that’s very much I think it’s very much the response to the meeting crisis, very much like an awakening to it that is enmeshed with it. And I think the way David is talking about and for me. I tend to be by constitution and because of my own sort of pathologies and character flaws, I tend to be a pessimistic person, a pessimistic person by nature and. And of course, there’s events happening, especially on the Canadian, especially south of the border that can throw gasoline on the fire of despair. But. Seeing all of this, what David is putting his finger on and how powerful it is and how. It’s so enlivening to people when it happens to them and they they they this is why I’ve been taking up a lot of this talk about sacredness, because the language that people use about this is the language of sacredness. And and and I had a really amazing conversation with Tim Adeline on voice craft with he was moderating with Forrest Landry about the whole problem. So people are making it central, both at the level of Sophia and the level of How do we take that ephemeral coherence and how do we make it more longstanding? Not in the sense that everybody’s always blissed out, but how do these ephemeral coherences plug into a cultural disposition of of awakening in that way? So the fact that that’s now becoming a central question and mine is brilliant as Forrest, but I think that’s a really important question. The fact that that’s now becoming a central question and mine is brilliant as Forrest are putting are turning towards it. I think all of that is so deeply, deeply encouraging. I don’t believe in teleology. I don’t think that anything’s in the world making that happen other than us and the intelligibility that’s available to us in the world. And so I do think it is still a race. I do think it is not a foregone conclusion, but I find it deeply encouraging. And so I share your recognition, David, and it’s having a profound effect on me and it’s helping. It’s sensitizing me to seeing it more and more. I hope it’s not confirmation bias. There’s enough people doing this independently like yourself. That leads me to believe it’s not confirmation bias. Here’s a question from Kira Kroger, who’s a regular from who is a regular from the meditation live stream. Good to see you again, Kira. Are you familiar with Tyson Yonka Porta, who wrote Sand Talk, the Jordan Hall is recommended? So all I can say is on the basis of Jordan’s recommendation, I have bought the book. I have bought the book. It is sitting on my bookshelf. I can look at it right now, but unfortunately, I had not had the chance to take it up. I am looking forward to doing this. So right now I’m currently ignorant. I purchased the book and when I get a gap, I intend to read it. And so perhaps at a later date, I’ll be able to give you some more reflections on it. You so maybe you can come back to me in a little bit more time. I don’t want to speak out of ignorance. I’ve seen him talk. I think he was at the Stowe Stowe by Peter Lindbergh. But it’s not enough to go into depth or to answer to answer your follow up questions. So there’s now a Jim’s J.M.E.S. To what extent do we need narrative for identity or relation to the world and each other if the Deologos is the way forward? Man, is this a question I’m wrestling with right now? It was it was that was a question that was at the center of the excellent. We all agree it was excellent. Deologos between both Paul Van de Klay, Jonathan Peugeot and myself. And then I did a follow up with Jordan Hall. It was also excellent. A deal was deeper than narrative. The point I was making there is that. Deologos is deeper than narrative. Narrative comes later in development. It has to be extensively trained, deliberately practiced, whereas Deologos comes naturally to human beings and it comes earlier. Children are into Deologos even before they’re right there, sort of full fledged cognitive agents, and you can look at the work of Thomas Sallow and all the stuff that’s going on now, even around language acquisition and think about what would happen if you took dialogue, at least even dialogue out of narrative. If narrative would collapse. And I mean also internal dialogue. Narrative would collapse to something much more like chronology. It wouldn’t be the same, but it would it would lose a lot of what makes it distinct from mere chronology. So I think Deologos is deeper than narrative. And then I’m teaching a course right now on on the on the elusive self, the nature and function of the self. And this question about how much we definitely need narrative to train identity, to make it temporally extended so that I can identify with the non-logical version, so I can engage in non-logical identity with myself as a five year old or with myself as an 80 year old. And that’s important for moral responsibility and long term planning and adaptivity. So narrative seems to be central to that. But we shouldn’t confuse the language of training with the language of explaining. The fact that narrative helps me to train identity doesn’t mean that it is necessarily constitutive of identity. Galen Strassen in a very famous article, and he’s done some important work on the nature of the self, argues that he doesn’t experience himself in a narrative fashion. And he’s, of course, a profound philosopher. He’s a moral agent. Of course, he does experience himself dialogically because he writes these articles somewhat monologically. But he’s at least enters into dialogue with other people. There’s lots of people in the poor E cognitive science who are talking about identity being much more an embodied, embedded, enacted thing that is that is occurring before we have full blown propositional representation and language. So I think that narrative and then and then you get the other end. So I’ve talked about how it proceeds and grounds and deeper. And then you get the post narrative, the mystics consistently telling us we transcend beyond narrative. We get to something beyond narrative or you get, as I mentioned earlier, get a figure like Jesus of Nazareth who and also tremendous. Also examples from the Sufi tradition of people using narrative to self destruct people beyond narrative into a post narrative mental state because narrative works in terms of a stable roles, a problem resolution, etc. And the whole point, again, of the Prodigal Son is there is no such resolution. You put back into a dialogical mode that is post narrative because the dialogue is dialectic between the the the the the the the tension points. It was the tonus. I’m constantly I’m constantly dialogically moving in a post narrative fashion between justice and compassion, between individuation and participation. So I think we should think of just I think we should think sort of narrative as something that is indispensable at a stage in development, kind of like, you know, I’m thinking of Piazarian stage, but that if we lock into that as the final word on development, we are actually cutting ourselves off from the deepest machinery by which identity is formed and how that deeper machinery could propel us beyond. A narrative identity, an egocentric identity to what has been sometimes called the non self, the true self, the self beyond yourself, et cetera, and where people claim to find a fullness of being. The next question is from Tracy. Oh, I get to learn your name. This is the original naked blonde writer. First of all, Tracy, now that you’re here more directly. I want to really thank you. Your your honesty and your courage for. Disclosing the struggles you’ve gone through and the way you have been so kind in the words of encouragement you give me by saying how the work I’m doing has been helpful to you, I want to thank you because that has been deeply helpful. It’s been deeply helpful to me. It. It means a lot when I can see people responding deeply. To what I’m teaching in a way in which they confront some of the most. Profoundest challenges facing them and they confront it with. A transformation that carries them or at least is carrying them through those challenges, so I want to thank you very, very much for how you do all of that. It means a lot to me, so thank you very much. Your question is, you said before that it’s not good to meditate when powerful emotions are in play, how to stay on track while coping. Here’s Tracy’s relating. Cp Cp t cds, that’s chronic post traumatic stress disorder, flashbacks and fears. So what I totally I think for you, for your situation. Yes, I think especially because of the depth of what you’ve done. I think engaging on on. Using the five factors of acquiring mindfulness on those emotions that are coming up in flashback and fear is powerful. I think directing meta towards them is a powerful thing to do. The thing I’m going to talk about on Saturday, especially complex, not chronic, I think it might be complex. I’m sorry. It’s both complex and somewhat. I’m sorry if I made a mistake there. I apologize. Being precise about these things is important. Amar just corrected me. So thank you for that correction. So. Some of the practices I’m going to be talking about on on on Saturday with stoicism, especially the view from above can be very powerful, also the act of open mindedness practices that help you learn how to challenge the biases that are at work with an emotion. As I said earlier, emotions are powerful salience landscaping and they’re adaptive, but because they’re powerful, the adaptive, they are also powerfully biasing and they can be powerful sources of self deception. And so also learning how to recognize by making some mistakes and slipping up a little bit. But I hope it was still resonant enough that people were able to get into it and pick up on the flow of it. I want I want to thank you all for for joining me in this Q&A. I always find these Q&A so nourishing. That’s why I wanted to be here. I really wanted to be here. Would have been easy to just say, no, I’m not feeling well, but. The questions are getting longer, but not in a verbose fashion. They’re getting more complex. They’re getting more profound. They draw me out more. They lead me to thinking that, you know, to making connections that I haven’t made before, even seeing potential pitfalls in my thinking. So just thank you so much. We do this every third Friday of the month. I want to thank all the supporters over Patreon, if possible, please consider supporting me via Patreon. I do not get any income from Patreon. I do not take any income from it. That money goes into the Vervecki Foundation. It supports further video work, serious work. It supports direct experimentation in labs about addressing, getting information, science for addressing the meeting crisis. Please consider it. It would be very helpful. You can support my work on the meeting crisis at patreon.com slash John Vervecki, all one word. Please note we have a Discord server where people are having some really interesting conversations where this can be continued. You can check the description for the link to this. Every Saturday morning we are doing a we meet and we sit and then we have Saturday Senga, a Dharma day in which I teach. We have well, I have taught everything that I can currently teach from the Eastern traditions of Buddhism and Taoism. I’m now trying to teach everything I can from the Western tradition, following McClellan’s The Wisdom of Ipacia, going through Epicureanism, not just the Sophia, but also the Phronesis. We’ve started now moving into Stoicism. We’ve done some of the Sophia last Saturday. We’ll do a bit more and then we’ll go into the Phronesis. Some of the practices and then we will move into the Epicureanism as primary school, Stoicism as high school. We’ll move into the University of Neoplatonism. So thank you so much to Amar who was there. He’s making everything work. He’s behind the scenes curating. He’s correcting my mistakes. He’s he’s one of my dearest friends. He’s my ever, ever reliable friend. Right. A friend in need is a friend indeed. Technomage there. He he he rescues me frequently and with a generous and good spirit. So I thank him very much for that. So I hope to see you all next month. Please invite other people to join. Please invite other people to take a look at the meditation series, to take a look at the Voices with Reveke, take a look at Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. There’s a new series coming down the road. We have a new series out there with my good friend and colleague, Greg Enriquez, Untangling the World Not. Just filmed the seventh one today and released the third one today. And we are really wrestling with the nature and function of consciousness. Down the road, we’re going to have a series on the elusive self. And then hopefully when COVID lessens up, lightens up, sorry, bad verb there. And we also and the funding is there. The very big series, which I put in so much work into after Socrates. So looking forward to seeing you all. Take care, everyone. Bye bye.