https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=bPy6W-c5_9Y
Okay, we’re recording. Welcome everyone this is Voices with Reveke. Today my friend and guest is Laman Pascal, and I’m going to let Laman introduce himself and say why he’s here, and perhaps, you know, initiate the first topic he’d like to bring into discussion. So welcome Laman, it’s great pleasure to have you here. It is a great pleasure to be with you, John. I usually hate introductions. My tendency is to be like I’m just some guy. But at the same time, I’m not a modernist, integral philosopher, meditation and yoga teacher, do a lot of writing and do a lot of thinking, non dual theology, different definitions of religion. And that’s probably where I’d like to start is what’s a kind of new thinking meta level of what religion and spirituality are. So if we look at something like just modernism, tends to have this, in a way pejorative notion of what religion is, because it looks back at the traditional or just the immediately pre modern definition. It says, okay, these large, popular mythic membership groups with cosmological belief dogmas that you officially join that that’s religion. And it rightly tries to distinguish itself from that. Right. Zoom out. And you look at modern, pre modern, postmodern, archaic, and you line them up next to each other. You say, what was religion doing in all of these paradigms? When was it functioning well? What can we elicit from all of them? And how do we get them to complement each other going forward? Right. They get a very different view and a view that’s very amenable to science, I think. Well, you know, there, of course, I’m in agreement with you. I should mention to viewers that Lehmann and I have had several conversations already around these topics. And that’s precisely why I invited him on. I’ve often found what he had to say extremely insightful and provocative of my own thinking. So what would you say, like, what would you say, what definition, if that’s even the right word, I have kind of a little bit of a Wittgensteinian fear of definitions. So what would be the best characterization, if it allowed me a looser term, for religion that is more encompassing of this broader historical and functional scope that you put your finger on? Sure. A loose definition. And obviously, it encompasses a lot of things. It’s more like a flotilla of different functions. Right. But I would say very generally that it’s the cultural version of what spiritual practice is. And that involves bringing together different genres, different functions of human social experience and trying to integrate and coordinate them to the point where a numinous excess is produced, where a gestalt coherence, you know, we’re getting more than the sum of the parts out of our social practice. And then that becomes an additional energy that is capable of sacralizing people, relationships, cultural rituals, things like that. So I think when it’s working, that’s what it does. And the kind of organizations and the style that characterizes different religions, that’s an output of that process. I see. So let me make sure I’ve understood you, because I think this is really cool. So you’re talking about religion ultimately in cultural terms. That was the adjective you first invoked. And then you talked about social practices that are analogous to like what, like individuals do a bunch of things that fall under this loose umbrella of spiritual practices, things that in which they’re trying to bring about substantial transformation, afford aspiration, come into a more reliable continuity of contact with what they deem most real, what they’re ultimately concerned with, that sort of thing. And then there’s what you’re saying is there’s analogous social practices that are performing similar functions. And when you get, when a form, I’ll use this term, like a dynamical system, that gets some emergent excess so that the system tends to be present to people rather than just a foreground, I saw it, rather than just a background system of constraints that they’re operating within, it sort of presents itself to them phenomenologically. They get a, I believe you use the adjective numinous, right? They get some sense of an excess that it’s going beyond, that it’s affording more than it could before. Beyond a life of its own. Is that a fair representation of your point? Yeah, I think that’s very fair. It’s the social machinery of apotheosis. Right, right. And when it’s performing that function well, then it’s really religionizing. It’s really doing its job as opposed to, it might not be. You might have a group of people who think they’re religious and they’re not performing that function. So you’ve got to tease the definition apart. And I think it’s absolutely essential culturally because it’s what brings people together. In this numinous excess, it’s not just an aesthetic pleasure that we take in thinking of something as transcendentally wonderful. It’s also our mobilization energy. It brings us together, mobilizes us, which we need in order to face crises that we have. And if we don’t do that, then we kind of degenerate. That’s my generalized definition of nihilism. Not in the specific idea that we’ve lost the thought of being by focusing on the metaphysics of the beings or that I’m walking around saying, I have no beliefs. Not that kind of nihilism, but the much more general process of self-neutralization or of the nothingizing of our practices and our values so that we begin to regress because we lose the ones that we’ve attained. Right. So, yeah. So that, the two points here, the one is that that notion that it’s not just an aesthetic response, but actually an enabling and energizing phenomena. That reminds me of Stone’s work in a minimalist account of transcendence. I think he calls it minimal transcendence, where he’s trying to give, Stone has been consistent about trying to explain phenomena like transcendence in completely naturalistic terms. And he points to that fact. But he adds an element to it. Like you, he says, it’s not just aesthetic, but it has to afford. It’s almost like an insight, the way it makes it, you know, Bowdoin’s idea of an insight that it allows you to do things that you couldn’t previously do. So it’s energizing and it’s also insightful, but I take your point at a social level. But he also points out it also has a normative aspect to us. It challenges us. It challenges us to kinds of self-criticism and self-correction that we otherwise would not be capable of. Are you, are you happy with adding that sort of normative? I’m very happy to add that. I think that’s a big part of what it becomes over time. You know, as if this process is occurring and it moves forward through history, then it begins to gather to itself a variety of skills and insights and also acts like a memory of a variety of practices and skills and moves that forward. It wants to keep itself going. So it has to remember how to do those things. Right. So the other point I wanted to pick up on is the, you made a distinction between sort of different conceptions of nihilism and the one that you were talking about sounded, sounds very similar or overlaps to a significant degree with my notion of the meaning crisis. Is that a fair interpretation? Sure. I mean, the meaning crisis has sort of two aspects. One is there have always been meaning crises. Exactly. Society wasn’t doing its job getting up to date. On the other hand, there’s maybe something peculiar about the current moment. Yes, but maybe objectively. But the meaning crisis to me, why is it a crisis? It’s because we’re not getting a handle on it. We’re not working it properly to get the results we want. And therefore, the practices that we need in order to produce the capacitance to give us the capacity to handle that, those practices are absent. Right. And so the result of the absence of those practices is what I would call nihilism in general. We have to regress rather than progress. Right, right. That makes sense. So what then is, I’ve asked you a similar question in other contexts, and you often gave me a really interesting, what then is the relationship? Because now there’s sort of three things in my mind that have come up in the discussion. There’s what you’re calling individual spirituality. And I think of that as some kind of overall enhancement of a capacity for self-transcending and enhancing religio, that sense of connectedness that is so fundamental to meaning in life. Right. And that’s the spirituality, religio. And then, of course, that religio is connected to what you’re calling religion. And you’ve given me the social analog, which I really like, by the way. This is very cool. So, of course, they both touch on religio. And therefore, there has to be an important way in which individual spirituality and social religion relate to each other. What’s the nature of that relationship between them? Well, what I bring that up is maybe you want to criticize this, but many people today self-designate in the face of the meeting crisis as spiritual but not religious. So they try to, they see these almost in adversarial or at least oppositional terms. And yet, what you seem to be saying, because you’ve drawn a very strong analogy, and they converge on religio, they seem to actually be deeply interdependent in an important way. So that’s what I’m trying to provoke you to discuss. Yeah. So, I mean, if I’m thinking of religion as something that integrates all these different kinds of dimensions of social practice, one of those is spirituality. So there’s that part of the definition. But at the same time, there is this analogy where people today in the meeting crisis have a very, they still have a pretty good sense from their own internal life that there are practices that they could do to grow, to feel better, to have transcendent experience. They’re pretty confident in that. But they’re not confident that there’s a functioning analog in the society in which they live. They don’t see the coherence, the sacredness of the social system. So I would say that the current society isn’t up to speed in that same way, right? We don’t, we need to, they’re arguing that there has to be a religion that incorporates the current situation. And they’re looking around and they see religions that maybe are the residual incorporation of previous situations, but not something that handles the current situation. Right. So part of it is that you just focus on yourself when you don’t see the social thing working. Right. Now, I’ve argued that that has dangers associated with it, autodidactism, you know, bubble echo chambering and bubble chambering and things like that. Do you think, I get the critique. I get the critique that the nones are making that there and you make it sound, interruptive, I’m misrepresenting you, that you think there’s actually a needed functional relationship between the societal practices and the individual practices. They’re looking for them and they’re not finding them rather than they’re saying, I don’t need them. Like, there’s, I’m sorry, I know that sounds like a nuance, but there’s an important difference there. I think so too. Like, well, what I’m saying is people who make that claim about themselves, they’re making the critique. Yeah. Right. They’re saying, I looked around and didn’t find it. It’s not adequate. Right. And part of that’s your own responsibility. You should try to conceive of the religion that you could get behind, not the religion that you think other idiots are doing. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. But it isn’t largely there. Right. I think we need to have social coherence to the degree that it’s producing a shared experience of apotheosis that gives us a sense of the capacity and meaning we need to face the situations we face. People are suffering that lack. And so I’m spiritual. I can get peak experiences. I can get into flow states. I know there’s meaning in my life and I know there’s practices that will help. I don’t see a lot of success on the social front. So I’m withdrawn. I’m skeptical. I’m making that critique. But I think the point of that critique is that they are looking to it. They’re longing for it. I think the data bears that out. The problem, of course, when you have that, you know, that atomic spirituality is the meaning that the meaning that this existential meaning has virtually no impact on your communicative meaning or your capacity or your communal meaning. So these meanings that should be deeply interpenetrating, inter-affording, become segregated from each other in kind of a dysfunctional way. So here’s the here’s the question then that I think immediately comes to mind. Well, two questions then. One is one of the things I said that social systems are not providing us that would tend to stitch together the individual and the social, our wisdom traditions that we don’t seem to have any of those in the West in any kind of way that is consonant with other important normativities and normative systems like, you know, there’s obviously science that makes epistep and has epistemic claims on us that cannot be ignored. I’m not offering scientism. I’m saying that, you know, you can’t pretend that science isn’t important in your epistemic life. You can’t pretend without engaging in self-deception. You have the market, of course, that, you know, and Thomas Bjorkman has made a really good case that that’s now become our default deity in some ways. It’s the it’s the one normativity. And then we’re seeing right now in the current crisis, the COVID crisis, the market’s useless for this incredibly complex problem that needs, as you’re pointing out, it needs a socio-cultural response, not just a socio-cultural political response, not just a market response. So you’ve got you’ve got that. We don’t have the wisdom traditions that have the same kind of normative status as the market or science, for example, or the political arena. And then we also have perhaps exacerbating that or interacting with that is we’re facing a very pluralistic world now. I mean, this is part of what went into the many different and they shouldn’t be conflated. But the many different postmodern critiques often presuppose in a very powerful way, a deep kind of epistemic and sometimes even ontological pluralism. And so the question is, without so put the two together without, you know, well-established wisdom traditions and without and within an increasingly pluralistic world, how do we get that social cohesion that is so central to religion? Sorry, that was a long question, but it was there’s a lot I wanted to put into it. Sure. It’s a long question and it’s a huge topic. Yeah. I think the answers will come from all different kinds of directions. One of the things you’re talking about is the relationship between modern systems and the different kinds of postmodern intelligences that have arisen over time. Yeah. One of the things I think obviously culturally that we’re suffering from is our institutions are up to the level of our insights at the moment. Yes. Modern institutions have given us a lot of really good things, but they can’t handle accumulating dangers and surprises. Right. Our current kind of democracy and our current kind of economic market can’t prepare for an asteroid strike. Yes. Having difficulty preparing for a pandemic. It’s not handling the ecological thing. So there needs to be an upgrade of our governance and social systems to get on board with some kind of progressive insight. That’s sort of the bare minimum we need to do collectively. And I think a lot of people’s passion for progressive politics when they get into that is a sign of a kind of a quasi religious awakening. They know that there’s something down that road we could get to if we could get our systems in line with our best insights now. But the other part of what you said was the science part. And I think religion has always enfolded science. And the modern critique was that pre-modern science is not adequate. And that’s an absolutely appropriate modern critique. Yeah. You know, shamanism, Paleolithic shamanism involved Paleolithic science. Traditional religion involved traditional science. There’s a reason there was such a strong solidarity between Aristotle and the church. Right. That was the science they could get behind and they cultivated and protected that science. So at every stage of social and technological and knowledge sophistication, we have a new thing to integrate into our definition of religious cohesion at that level. Right. Right. So if we’re not doing that now, then we’re not getting religionization of the current cultural knowledge situation that we have. So then, of course, we’re not producing the extra. Then we’re not internalizing the extra. We’re not being mobilized by the extra. It’s not happening if we’re not enfolding science. That’s a really good point. Now, that again, I want to throw in the mix that very often, especially your example, Aristotle and the church, philosophy has played an important mediating role between the science and the religion in getting that envelopment to occur. And this, again, is where I’m concerned that because we don’t have wisdom traditions and we don’t have people cultivating a capacity for insight and innovation at a metaphysical or ontological level, that that enfoldment you’re talking about is very, very challenging for us. So what I typically see with response to the scientific worldview from religious people, one is denial. And that’s a kind of fundamentalism or literalism. And I think that’s a dead end. That’s not going to go anywhere. And then I think and then I see people adopting a kind of romanticism while science deals with the facts and religion deals with feelings or meaning. And there’s some truth to that, but that’s not going to get what you want. It’s not going to get that mutual enfoldment. And then I see, you know, people within the theological and philosophical arena trying to do what you talk about, trying to figure out. There’s some ways in which my work is trying to do that. How can we get a spirituality that is consonant and can unfold, you know, follow from and unfold that scientific worldview? And the difficulty I see with that is there seems to be a critique that’s often made of my work. So I’ll use my work as an example, but I think it would apply to the other people I’m referring to, is there’s a scalability issue that these attempts to see what Christianity brilliantly did, you know, between a couple of geniuses, you know, Augustine on one end and Aquinas on the other, is they figured out how to do that enfoldment, but do it in a way that could plug into, you know, the cultural permutation and, you know, and the way the culture permeates, you know, lives at all different scales and make that work. And so the challenge, and then again, here’s where the pluralism, you know, makes it difficult, right, because at least the church had christened them to work with, right, is how do we get that mutual enfoldment, which I agree with you. I mean, obviously I do. My whole series is around it in some ways. How do we get that enfoldment to work in a way that’s scalable? This is, you know, one of Paul Bandeclai’s ongoing and completely legitimate criticisms of me. How do we make it scalable, especially scalable within a multicultural kind of situation? Because we can’t rely on background cultural framework to do the scaffolding for us. Yeah, how do we make it scalable and scalable at a tempo adequate to meet our needs? Yes, yes. You know, Christianity was scalable, but it took a thousand years. Yes, yes. And this is Jordan Hall’s point again and again and again. Right. It’s not only that things are happening more quickly, the rate at which they’re happening more quickly is also speeding up. Right. So it’s got to be whatever it is has to go fast enough and also be updatable enough to go faster if it needs to. Yeah. I mean, one of the things we look at our systems failing, we’re constantly electing people who say that they understand the problem and are going to address it, but they’re going to do it in moderate or incremental forms. And that sounds very reasonable. Yeah. Balanced people. It sounds true. That’s what you want to hear. Same time, if you’re going to moderately bail out a boat and it’s filling up with water faster than you’re bailing it out, then that’s not even a plan yet. No, no, no. It’s a matter of the tempo being adequate to the moment and the scale of the aspiration has to be the starting point, I think. Oh, that’s not even saying that we want to address it at that scale, then we’re not going to get anywhere. Right. But then the problem of actually scaling up remains right. There’s lots of individual attempts, right. And science is full of people who are spiritual about their science. Yeah. There’s a lot of interpersonal practice methodologies. There’s a lot of ideas about how you refine systems to be more intelligent. And I think that’s probably where you need to go. Right. You need a smarter voting system. You need a smarter legislature. You need a smarter market. You need something whose objective interpersonal sophistication parallels the intensity of the shared mutual experience that we’re trying to get. Right. Right. Oh, so how do you implement that? You need to have a lot of shared interpersonal confidence to get a movement going to make that change whose leverage would scale the system up to a degree that would match that interpersonal experience. That was really good point you made about the way you need this tight connection, correspondence between you said something like your interpersonal sophistication. Right. And the, you know, the the overflow that you’re seeking that would give people. So it feels like a bit of a chicken and egg problem. It feels like people are going to have the confidence when they get the sense of the overflow, but they won’t get the sense of overflow until they have the confidence. And that’s kind of it feels like that’s the kind of the catch 22 that we’re about. That’s what I’ve been trying to do. This religion that’s not a religion. I’m trying to I’m trying to break that catch 22 in an important way. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, there’s a reason why it hasn’t happened yet. That’s because it has that structure. It’s not easy. You don’t know where to start. Right. And when you’re starting over here, it’s thwarting you here. If you start over there, it’s thwarting you here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Lots of people have to make attempts to start from a lot of different angles. Yes. Time in order to see if we can get that momentum going. And religion without a religion is a terrific project. And in a way, that’s what religion has always been. Yeah. In my mind, 90 percent of all religions didn’t think of themselves as religions. We call them that in hindsight. Yes, yes, yes. They were collective, spiritualizing attempts to grapple with the world that they lived in successfully and more than successfully so that it paid them back in a sense of transcendental meaning. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I suppose this is self-promotional, but it nevertheless seems independently relevant. The project I’m engaging in with, you know, Jordan Hall and Christopher Massie Pietro and Guy Sandstock and Peter Lindbergh and also with you, we’ve had a discussion around this, the whole Dia Logos project about trying to bring back dialectic precisely because it was a, you know, a meta-psycho technology in which there was an individual spiritual component of self-transcendence that was wedded with trying to bring about that interpersonal sophistication, right, that would would activate, you know, a flow state within collective intelligence and potentially bootstrap it up towards collective rationality and collective wisdom. So I see the project that the dialectic that affords Dia Logos. Logos is when that effervescence you talk about with that third factor, as Chris and I talk about, comes into being, right, and you sense it, what you’re calling the overflow, right? And so what I’m noticing is that you can take people who don’t have the confidence, right, that you’re talking about. And Peter and I are working about, you know, sort of stringing together a pedagogical program, a sequence of these kinds of practices. And I just had an amazing conversation with Nora Bateson about her warm data lab. That, I think that’s got to be included in this picture. But the idea as a teacher and a cognitive scientist is how could we put these together into a pedagogical sequence, a program that would optimize taking people from bad faith confrontational, you know, things into exactly what you’re talking about, that sense. And what I’ve seen is people that come in from multiple different perspectives into these practices, right? And if and they don’t even have to come in with good faith. That’s that’s Edwin Rush’s whole point with the empathy circling. But if they at least hang in there, they will get to a place where the third factor, the overflow happens. And then they start to catch. And then what I’ve been trying to talk about, because I think this is a important point of Socratic dialogue, is that Socrates wasn’t just giving us a competition in the good sense of the word of arguments. He was also giving a competition of ways of life. He was he was trying to exemplify. And I think this is what you’re pointing to with your term religion. I’m really liking this, that what this way of being in the logos is a way of life. And the idea is to make it beautiful, to make it attractive to people. And this is the way it could. The catch 22 that we’re banging our heads against. This reminds me of the catch 22 that Plato said about trying to get people to do philosophy. And this is not irrelevant because we’ve been talking about wisdom. He said, and I’m asking for charity on the part of the listeners because I know our current cultural political context. But he used the seduction metaphor. You have to be seduced into philosophy. Right. You have to be attract you. And this is similar to what Agnes Callard says about aspiration. You have to be drawn into it by a kind of, you know, perceptual beauty. And then that make that afford you enables you to see a more moral beauty, which then affords you to see an ontological beauty. And you sort of. And it’s only when you get to the end, you realize why you actually did the thing you did. And so I’m trying to suggest to you that. If we can get something. No, that’s too strong. Let me let me let me let me retreat back from that was that was way too strong. My my proposal is one significant way of trying to bring about the interpersonal sophistication that you’re talking about. Well, overcoming or at least addressing the catch 22 by this sort of beautification that adduces and draws people in right aspirationally is this this whole project of dialectic. And so and I know you’ve read at least the chapter that Chris and I have written and I wonder, like, is that is that something that you see as I’m not trying to call you into advertising? I want an honest answer from you. Right. This is a discussion. Like you see how I’m trying to situate this and how I want I want some sort of reflective comment on that project and the degree to which it might be useful. So pitfalls surrounding it ways in which, you know, I don’t claim it’s exhaustive. So obviously, what what needs to supplement it, what needs to go around it. Sorry, that was another big question. But, you know, this is why I take I take the catch 22 problem. I take the catch 22 problem and the intensification of interpersonal community and communication, which you put your finger on. I take that to be really central. That’s how I’m trying to address it. John’s project is layman Pascal endorsed. Here’s what I would say is, I mean, I think that’s in some ways the perfect project for the technological moments. Right. A lot of this in my mind goes back to McLuhan and the fact that we’re transitioning away from the book culture to the interaction, digital interaction culture. So that has to be the premise now rather than I agree about the book. It has to be an exchange based culture because that’s what we’re immersed in. So it’s very appropriate to that. But it’s also I agree it’s a large part of what the wise, the wisdom friends were doing back in the day. Right. And so there does need to be this process where faith is the output, not the initial requirements. Right. You show up to get show up to religion to get faithful, not because you already can prove your faith. Right. Right. You need to be seduced in. Right. There has to be a low barrier to entry. Same as a video game. Yeah. People are working on video games, which is I’m going to give you a flow state. Yeah. And a glimpse of another world. But we have to package it. We have to sell it to you. We have to make it easy. Yeah. The boardroom trying to figure out how to get you in. Right. Voting could be done that way, too, if we really wanted people to vote. Yeah. Yeah. So there’s a series of practices where it’s got to be really easy up front. And at the end, at some point, you are accumulating faithfulness. And down the line, you have to be able to output that into systems and practices to some degree. Right. It’s got to make that shift from I’m having personal experience. We’re having interpersonal experience. We’re having these epiphanies. How does that translate into structures? How do we use that to verify the level of sophistication we need in our systems? Now, the the the caution in my mind is to make sure we don’t mistake the intersubjective for the sacralizing per se. Right. Right. Because. Yep. Just because there’s an us doesn’t mean there’s an I thou mode yet. Yeah. The I thou mode is a we are actually producing this extra quality within the us. And that same extra quality can be produced subjectively or with objects. Right. I can consecrate my experience of things. So it’s not that we’re trapped in the I it relationship and looking at objects and we have to escape that into the interpersonal domain. All of these domains need to be studied in such a way as that they can be brought up to the level of production and then the use of the produced numinous quality. Right. That’s fantastic. That’s very good point. And this goes towards something that you and I talked about last time. I think you’re alluding to it. You know, the concern about when this is really working as opposed to when people are in some sense faking it. Now, we have to be careful about this because people often have to fake it to make it kind of thing. They have to play in order before they have to do serious play before they can actually make the transformation. So we have to be very careful about that. But I still I heard that that implicit critique in what you were just saying. And you’ve made it explicitly to me before. Maybe you want to address that, too, because I know you’ve also you’ve got you’ve got you’ve expressed concerns about and I agree with them because not only is there an analog. To sort of individual spirituality at the collective level, there’s an analog to self-deception. Right. And people there’s ways in which these group dynamics can fall in. You know, you have the fusion of responsibility is a classic example of how collective systems can really maladaptively make their individual members perform, things like that. So we know about a lot of negative biasing effects that also exist at the collective level. And I’m bringing this up on your behalf because you actually made this point to me, which was, well, what are we going to like? How do we take care of the shepherding and the curating and cultivating of the overflow? And as you said, it’s got to extend out into many of our existential dimensions, not just the intersubjective, but totally on board with that. But that just sort of ramps up the question, which is, OK, then we got to be really careful about also sensitizing ourselves to collective patterns of self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior. And I know that was a concern you expressed quite powerfully to me last time. So I want to give you a chance to address that. Well, whether or not I remember what I said last time is an open question. But absolutely upfront, fake it till you make it. There’s a lot of flexibility and openness in the foyer of the process. People have to get on board. And, you know, the less you require of them up front, the more you can get them into that system. And to scale up, it has to be really easy for people to get in. Yes, yes. Otherwise, it’ll remain an esoteric enclave. Yeah, yeah. That’s a very good point. So there’s that aspect. But there’s also the aspect of not fooling ourselves with intersubjective epiphany, because they’re very real and they’re very important. And there’s something people should be working on doing more of. We should be getting depth skill in that area. Right. But we shouldn’t necessarily mistake intersubjective epiphany for capacity to enact things as a group. Ah, I see. That’s the point. Yeah, that’s the point. That was the point. Now, I’m glad I posed my very long and convoluted question. I’ve had this experience, maybe you have, is there’s lots of really interesting practices where people can get together and they can work through their stuff in a way. And they move around, they get a collective high. And I think they legitimately are sharing a transcendence together. Yeah. But they don’t necessarily solve a problem. They don’t necessarily change. It doesn’t necessarily become a new way of living. Yeah. That’s what has to happen for it to affect the outside world. Yeah. And meanwhile, we know that there are different ways of organizing groups of people where you can get results that are smarter than the individuals in the group or results that are much worse than the individuals in the group. And often that’s somewhat independent of how they feel. Yeah. And a lot of people have schemes for solving problems that involve everybody feeling terrible and dissociated. It’s not ideal, but it does happen. Right. So there’s a difference between these two and we have to respect them, observe their distinction, tease them apart in order to think about how they can be better interactive together. No, that was excellent. I’m glad I asked the question because that really, first of all, that’s what you said last time, and then I think you actually explicated it very concisely and clearly now. This has been one of my standing critiques and it’s been well received, by the way, by people like Guy and others, that a lot of these intersubjective interpersonal communication practices are all about sort of getting that enhanced flow, the collective flow state and bringing about all of what you said. But there’s no problem. There’s no topic. There’s no problem. And this is what I say that often the fallout, the fallout, the fallout, the fallout Sophia is missing. Right. There we’re not talking about like a technical problem like, you know, should we buy more eggs or something like that? We’re talking about, you know, the deep problems, like you say, about ways of life, like bringing out in a philosophically problematic form ways of life, ways of being and wrestling with those problems. A lot of these problems, it’s not property. It’s not proper to say you’ll solve them because they’re issues about the fundamental nature of human being in the face of the mystery of being. And so, but what we can get is we can get we can wrestle with these problems the way we see, you know, Socrates and Plato wrestling with them or the Buddha wrestling with them, or perhaps even Jesus of Nazareth wrestling with them. Because, right. It reminds me that the word Israel actually means to wrestle with God. So that that we we as you say, we are. Coming up with deep responses, you know, transfer transformations in our ways of being that we can make deep commitments to. That’s the word I’m looking for. Not so much that we get, you know, a final solution. And I use that term explicitly because I want I want the dangers associated with that term remembered. Not that we get a final solution to these problems, you know, the deep problems of human being and ways of being, but that we get a way of life to which we can make a concerted commitment that will at least address the particular, you know, derivative problems that we’re facing. That’s what I see. In fact, as I see that was present in ancient dialectic, that problematization, that philosophical analysis. By the way, Nora is doing that with her warm data labs, right, where she has, you know, the various groups. I really like the machinery there. You have this you have the small groups and they’re talking about a topic. They’re problematizing it in this sense, like health, for example. And then people can move between conversations and disrupt and transform. And so you’ve got you basically you enact a dynamical small world network that’s constantly restructuring. But it’s not just about the intersubjective flow. It’s about trying to bring about, you know, these these existential insights that allow people to have a more deeper response to the reality at hand. And I think that is that the kind of thing you’re talking about? Because I think there are people out there. I’m trying to address that. I see Nora trying to do it. Guy wants to take circling and create what he calls circling 2.0 in which, right. One of my good friends in circling, Taylor, he’s getting people doing circling and then they’re running experiments where they then drop a topic into the circle and the circle, you know, pursues the topic. So there’s a lot of people that I think are really cognizant of that important critical point you just made that we’ve got it. We’ve got it. We’ve got it. We’ve got a couple. The intersubjective flow to, you know, philosophy in some profound and important way. I think that’s definitely. Yeah. I mean, once you have like we were talking about this, I mean, this process with this low bar to entry, but somewhere along the way, these additional concerns have to come into play. Right. And there have to be people there to put that in our mind. And a lot of these people who are doing these projects and they’re all over. There’s a lot of people doing good work and there’s been decades of people experimenting with these kinds of practices and then reflecting on those experiments and noticing where there might be shortcomings and then trying to tweak circling 2.0 for example. So the more people who try that and are able to share conclusions, if there’s a common set of principles or conclusions coming out of that, that will be very powerful to start something going socially. Yeah. I think you do need to start in a very open ended way up front. Yep. And the people who are doing this like Nora, she’s got a lot of experience already. She’s way down that chain. Yeah, very much. So people are going to come in and you’re going to do practices and practices and move them along to the point where they start taking responsibility for solving things and changing their lives. And I do agree that that’s largely what the exemplars of the ancient wisdom tradition were doing. Yeah. Socrates’ dialogues don’t end in a final solution to any particular problem, but they demonstrate his way of life. He changes the people around him. And it also gives you a sense of something we’re experiencing that’s super meaningful that we can use to validate or critique systems. Yeah. When Plato looks at society, when they talk in the Republic, they’re kind of bouncing the organization of society off the achieved personal and interpersonal successes. Exactly. Exactly what goes with that. Yes. Oh, that’s a beautiful way of putting it. Excellent. Excellent, Laman. Yes. Bouncing it off and getting that what goes with it, a resonance between the overflow state and a particular reconceptualization of a new way of being and the more specific socio-political consequences that might have. Exactly. That is beautifully put, well put. I’m going to pause it right here, Laman. I just need to go do something. I’m sorry. I just don’t want us to be interrupted. I’ll be back in one sec. I’ll just pause. Okay, we’re recording again. Thank you for that little intervention. So I think that point you just made, that idea, you get into the overflow state and then you’re looking for resonance and rebound and resounding between and about your speculations in the good sense of the word where you’re trying to see, speculate. You’re trying to see in an aspirational sense an alternative way of being and what that might look like in terms of socio-political and cultural reformation. And the Republic is a great example. I think that’s a really powerful point that you made. So thank you for doing that. Yeah, that’s, I mean, it involves two things. You have to be up to speed on what the world is like so that you have that to validate. And then you have to be really friendly with, you have to be the philo of Sophia, right? You’ve got to be really familiar with and appreciative of, good friends with this experience so that you can then do that comparison. And a lot of the traditions, whether it’s interpersonal or personal, involve contemplative immersion and feeling into and becoming a better friend to that benevolent form of overflow. I think that’s really well said. Yeah, that’s really well said. Yeah, getting up to speed to it. And we do that with our minds too, right? Like if I have, I produce by practices or by grace, trans-categorial excess that I find delightful, then I can think about that. I can test my thoughts against it. That’s a system, right? Or then I can test it against my relationships. I can test it against how we’re organizing our society, things like that. That’s part of the way in which it does act as a normative guide on you. And Plato talks about that sense of beauty doing that for us. And it’s scary in her book, talks about how the way beauty sort of prepares us for insight and it prepares us for something outside of our egocentric framework, challenging us and drawing us. And so it even prepares us for treating things with a just kind of attention, because that’s what the experience of beauty, rather than just desire or pleasure, like you get a sense of you’re almost obligated to give this a certain kind of attention. And it’s drawing me beyond myself and it’s making me think about things in ways I wouldn’t have done on my own. And so that’s why it tends to act as a normative touchstone for us, the way you’re talking about. We can sort of bounce things off against that, if you’ll allow me, that dynamic beauty that’s unfolding in the overflow. So the question then becomes, I suppose. What do you do with that? Sorry, this question, as it was forming in my mouth, was ridiculously pretentious. So I want to ask this question with tremendous respect. And the people that I mean, dialogue, especially within the religious communities know the deep respect I hold their commitment to their faith. But what do we do? Still hesitant. What do we do with the existing religions? That’s a dangerous question. But it’s the kind of question we have to ask. Absolutely. And there’s a sense in which it doesn’t matter, right, which is to say healthy, developmental, successful practices individually and interpersonally are happening where people think they are in a tradition. Yes, very much. They are not in a tradition. Yes. We’re teasing apart success and non-success of practices. And you might think you’re not religious. You might think you’re religious. It’s not encoded at the level of mental self-categorization, right? Right, right, right. Between any two Christians, between any two Muslims, one of them is doing it, one of them isn’t. Same as any two faithless secularists. It’s the same thing. Right, right, right. So we need to appreciate, I think, religion at a deeper level than our nominal self-categorization and the surface level of our traditions. Yes. Within any set of cultural constructs and mental constructs, there is depth and success if you do it, but not if you don’t. Right. So I think that’s a good question. I think that was a good answer to my question. I think it’s really good. So there’s two things that come to mind. One is, you know, I’ve been privileged to have an excellent discussion recently with Andrew Sweeney and Zach Stein in response to his really good essay on the war in heaven. And I brought up with Zach, he brought up this notion of convergence and a different kind of perennialism. He’s not talking about the Aldous Huxley perennialism. He’s talking about, you know, a potential, a place of convergence, kind of a sacral commons. You know how at the university they have the commons, right? So a sacral commons where people can come in and where convergence is possible. But you’re not trying to you’re not trying to enforce conversion. You’re trying to enforce convergence so that we can talk and and afford. I’m thinking about the way within cognitive science that the psychologist isn’t trying to convert the neuroscientist into psychology, but what they’re trying to do is afford convergence between. And so you get deep learning, you get convergence and then you get variation through the disciplines and you get convergence and variation. And I think I’m trying to propose that as an alternative to we have to, you know, you have to we have to have the same religion, right? It’s more like, no, no. Part of what the religion that’s not a religion is, note that people will belong to many established religions or none. And yet, if they’re committed to convergence and not conversion, then we can get what Zach is talking about. And I think there’s a lot of people, like you said, within the I know because I get to talk to them. They’re amazing people. I have good faith and rich dialogues with, you know, with all of Andrew Clay and, you know, Jonathan Pagio and Mary Cohen and JP Marceau. You might have seen some of them. And I think those are all really valuable. So I know that there are people of good faith within the faith, if you’ll allow me that, who are capable, I think, of what we’re talking about, because I see them enacting it. But I do worry and I want to try and make it more a little bit more timely. The way in which we are, you know, we’re getting sort of something like a domicide and culture shock within our culture, the way we’re getting a reciprocal narrowing, our lives are sort of collapsing down. The way we have this nebulous ubiquitous thing out there that’s almost demonic and that it might be striking us and it might not. And we’re falling into purity codes, lots of purity code thinking in order to deal with it. And people are starting to invoke. Now, Zach had a really good take on this, but people are invoking a lot of religious language to talk about this. My worry is another kind of religion is going to be, especially one that is either or both deeply nostalgic in a fundamentalist way or deeply utopic in a fundamentalist way, that there’s an aspect of religion, right, that won’t like your answer. In fact, would rather you be an atheist. Then give the answer you gave. Right. I think I’m being very careful here. I clearly distinguish I’m not painting all religious people with this brush. I am not saying that I indicated specific groups of people, specific people that I think are opposite to what I’m talking about. So, but I think, you know, that sort of if you’ll allow me a pejorative use of that sort of Old Testament way, you know, that right, you know, a demonic deity demanding purity codes, an absolute adherent. I think that’s a great temptation right now. And I’m using that word because of its of its biblical overtones. I think there’s a tremendous temptation for that right now. And I see that like those people deeply. Almost, you know, violently opposed to what you just said. So what do you what what’s your response to that challenge? First of all, is it is that’s an old concern. It’s happened many times, right. Right. The Sufis have always had to hide out within Islam to some degree and within all the faith cultures. There have been people who were being more open and progressive with it and people who were closing down. And it’s not just the overtly religious. No, no. People who think they’re secular might also be moving into a stress based fall in line purity code mentality. Yep. Yep. Right. And maybe we’re a little bit safer because so many people will be doing it in so many different ways that they’ll get in each other’s way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I’m looking at all of that under the rubric of my generalized notion of what nihilism is. Right. Right. Right. These are regressions and under stress, people tend to regress. Yes. And if there isn’t a functional religiosity at our current level of sophistication, then people will regress to the last time they saw something like that. Yeah. And it’s very understandable. It’s it’s unhealthy in the sense that health sort of stabilizes you where you are and affords you the opportunity to move forward. Yes. So these are nihilisms, right. They’re going to run into things where they no longer care about a whole bunch of things. Those things count as nothingness. Right. And they’re going to roll back toward a simpler framework and try to stabilize there. And it’s that’s absolutely what a species or an organism or a group of people should do in a way. If they don’t have better affordances, roll back to the previous ones that worked we’re going to lose a lot of things, but we’re already losing a lot of things. So it’s understandable that that would happen. And I think it almost certainly will happen if there’s no better alternative. So we have to try to create the richness of the religion that isn’t a religion of the interfaith and trans interfaith sacred commons of a new kind of religiosity and hope and get these things going. These systems and the way that systems interact with interpersonal epiphanies. But a lot of that to me is framed, I think, like it was for Nietzsche. It’s framed around the idea of health. The more we know about health, the more we can be on guard. Right. So that people say to someone who’s falling into that mode, you know, that’s not good for you. Jim, you’re doing a disservice to yourself and your relationships. And we have these, you know, we have the doctors, we have the nutritionists, we have the therapists, we have all these people throughout our society and their job in a way should be to keep people from regressing under the impact of stresses. We’re dealing with traumatized people all the time. We have some tools at our disposal. And if we mobilize them correctly, that’s a buffer against a lot of this. People come back from the war and their brains are messed up. But we have physical, mental, you know, neuroelectric scans. We can work on their brain patterns. The more technology and dispersal of health protocols we have, I think the more we can buffer that and the buffering may give us the time to grow the kind of religiosity that will provide a progressive alternative to regressive religion because we need one way or the other. That’s really cool. Because I’ve been largely because of Hans work, right? I’ve been largely critical of the fetishization of health in our society because it’s often served. He points out it served, you know, the function of as a god for us. And it has this huge narcissistic element to it. But what I hear you doing and what really caught my attention is you’re actually you’re proposing a reformulation of what health means. And I like this idea of right that part of what ill health means, that this means is when people regress because of stress, because of scarcity or stress or because also the opposite, there’s a lack of positive affordance. So there’s there’s famine of affordance and there’s also scarcity, right, of other things in their life, scarcity of meaning making, for example. And the idea that what we should do is because we’ve already committed so much and with good reason, by the way, to health, if we could shift it off the narcissistic health image, you know, the eternal youth, that the goal of health is the eternal youth that will not suffer death and will always have as much sex as they could possibly want. If we could, you know, if we could shift that the paradigm of health off of that to the individual. Well, let’s put it, let’s put it, the individual that’s aspiring to wisdom, that that’s the paradigm of health and that we could get our understanding of health, we could use the health machinery and the normativity attached to health to really move people into considering meaning in life and not regressing in the face of stress as deeply central to human health, because it’s precisely the place, to get back to an earlier point, where the individual project and the social project touch each other. This different notion of health that you’re proposing. I think that’s brilliant. I think that’s brilliant, Laman. I think that’s really brilliant. I have a kind of a typical attitude, which is don’t, don’t seed the battlefield in advance of the battle, right. Which is to say, from my way of thinking, we can put an expansive, positive spin on any concept rather than attack the concept as if it represented only its most regressive and calcified version. Right. Right. Say, you know, what do we want religion to mean? What do we want science to mean? I don’t just mean 19th century Newtonian science at the expense of every other valuable part of life. I mean, the science that incorporates everything we think is important and true and the religion that does that and the health that does that. Health is in some ways uniquely situated if we treat it in a positive, expansive way, because it’s at the intersection of, of individual and society and ecology and meaning, right. It’s meaningful, ecologically resonant, individual and cultural value of some kinds when we, when we do it right. But that’s a, that’s a sweet spot that accesses a lot of things. Yeah. So, so tying health more deeply to what Bishop calls well-being, right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Well-being, I mean, in the Nietzschean sense as well, about the great health. Yeah. Right. That you have to have your needs met in order to get these overflows. Yes, totally. Totally. Yep. Totally. No, I just, and the way you riffed on your insight was also wonderful. Yeah. That, that strategy of reformulation rather than mere rejection. Um, uh, and there’s a sense in which metamodernism as a whole is trying to do that. It takes postmodernism, it takes, it takes seriously the postmodern critique of modernity, right, but then it proposes not being satisfied with rejection, but doing what you just did, you exemplified the metamodernist attitude there. No, no, take the critique seriously from somebody like Hahn, for example, but in the face of it, reformulate it in a way, uh, that becomes viable for us once again. I thought that was excellent. Yeah, I think that’s at the heart of the metamodern, the integral, the, you know, there’s a dozen different ways to frame what this new bigger perspective is. Yeah. But it’s really the critique is, uh, assimilated as the precondition for the correct definition. Yes. Right. It’s not that it’s faulty because we critiqued it. The critique is specifying what the new version should be, the one that meets those critiques. Right. Right. Right. Well said. Very well said. And that of course, uh, just to do some advertising again, that’s, that’s a dialectical process. That’s exactly what a dialectical process is. It’s not just simply oppositional argumentation. It is a process in which you can internalize critique in a way that transforms it into a virtual engine that generates affordances of, you know, a reformulation, a renewal insight transformation. Exactly. I think that’s exactly the point where, where critique is welcomed as part of the way in which you bring about the opponent processing that gives you the self correction that affords self-transcendence. I think, I think that’s, that’s, that’s a crucial, that’s a crucial move you just made there. Yeah, absolutely. And it’s, I mean, that opponent processing, I mean, that’s the, that’s the sharpening of your Zen blade, you know, how else can you become properly adapted without opponent processing? Yeah, totally, totally. I totally. And that’s interesting because it strikes me that your insight about expanding health could potentially be integrated with, you know, things like the deep continuity hypothesis to move on within 4E cognitive science of seeing deep continuity between our cognitive states and our biological states. And it seems to me that that expansive notion of health that you’re proposing would be very well situated within that continuity hypothesis that our cognitive machinery and our biological machinery ultimately share, you know, important structural functional organization and operational principles. I think that those who actually would go together very, very nicely, I think. Yeah, there’s a, you know, to come back to Nietzsche again, who’s bubbling up for me in this conversation, he has a line somewhere where he says, you know, if you think you have reduced the soul to something about the body, you haven’t dispensed with the soul. You just don’t really know what the body is yet. Yeah. The body is capable of doing that thing you were calling the soul. You haven’t get rid of the miracle. The miracle is still there. You just have to think of it as really intimately entangled with the physiology and ecology and sociology of what we exist in here. Yeah. That’s what I’ve been trying to talk about sort of in terms of the philosophy of science, but that comes out of cognitive science practice. Rather than reductionism, you know, the soul is nothing but this chemical process in the brain, you’re getting what you just did, which is reciprocal reconstruction, both of the ontologies change until you get a dialectical convergence in which what you end up with is something radically other than the two things that you oppose. You don’t reduce one to the other. They both go through reciprocal reconstruction until you get to a place that’s other than the two that you started with. They provide the constraints that enable you to produce the excess. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Now, I was thinking about this the other day, you know, when we think of the sacred as transcategorial, there’s different ways to think about that. This is a total segue, by the way. Transcategorial for a lot of people, that means something more primal than any of the categories. Right. But there’s a metaphysical flavor to that. It could mean something synthetic whereby we’re putting things from multiple categories together in convergence to produce this. I like that one because it’s actionable. Yeah. Or it could mean something that shifts around. Yeah. Right. Which is to say, you know, if you laid out on the floor a big map of all the categories of the possible types of perspectives and experience that make up the universe and there’s a mouse under the thing and it just moves around indifferent to the categories. Yeah. So there’s at least three ways. Which of these ways do you think of the transcategorial as being? All right. So I think of it mostly the second with a little bit of a variation on the second, but I think it falls into of the three you gave me. I’m not trying to be intercategorical in my answer to your question about the transcategorical. I think I see it like the second but proposal, but in this way, first of all, I think of the sacred having to do with that, which, you know, I want to make a distinction, not between only horizontal categories, but also categorical differences between levels of being. So I tend to think of the spiritual that’s going to relate to the sacral in terms of that, which, you know, crosses between the categories of the cognitive, the existential, and ultimately the ontological. And it crosses between them. And in crossing between them, it does something like, I talk about the trans world, it’s not like you’re going to another world because I don’t want the axial age stuff. What’s the trans world? The trans world is it’s like Tolkien’s recovery theory, a fantasy. So, and this is how I’m starting to think more and more of the sacred, the idea of the sacred. Tolkien’s notion of fantasy was not escapism and not alternativeism. It’s not this is an alternative world or I escaped to that world. The idea is I go there and I experienced something like culture shock. I have to go through this sort of significant transformation in my way of being to be in that world, to really be in that world. And then I returned to this world. And like at the anthropologist who’s gone to another culture and returns to their home culture. And so she can now see things in her home culture that she could never see before. Right. She can see through the cracks of the categories that for everybody else seem like the wall of being right. The wall of their metaphysics. But she says, actually, there’s all these gaps that you’re not seeing and I can see them. She recovers. Right. The that and I see that when people are going trans categorical, they’re doing that trans world thing. They’re going out so that they can come back and recover the relation, the relationships between the categories in a dynamic and transformative way, which I think falls under your synthetic proposal, if I’m understanding it correctly. Yeah, I think so. The word synthetic isn’t quite glorious enough process, but there is there’s a sense of an activity and a function and a production. Yes. And a use to that experience. If we’re able to use it. And that’s another big part of this is, you know, can you handle the intensity of the numinous? Yes. Right. And I think if you’re if you’re if you’re working it in an organic way in yourself, you know, and self regulating that process, then you can have a pretty good experience of it. But it can be overwhelming for people if they’re not ready or if they’re rigid or in any other way unhealthy, so to speak. Yeah. And I think that’s one of the things we’re facing collectively now, like some people are getting sick, some people are dying, some people are going into fiscal collapse, but everybody is facing traumatic weirdness. Yes. Right. The sense that there’s something available in the system now that’s just so peculiar constantly and that we don’t have a place for it. And that’s one of the things religionization has to do is provide us with the technology to deal with the trans categorical in a way that doesn’t traumatize us. I think that’s excellent. So there’s I think, yeah, I think the notion of the sacred should always have this opponent processing between that which homes us and that which exposes us, has us confront the numinous always. And Chris and I have argued that explicitly. So I’m in total agreement with that, because that’s what you need for that’s what you need for systemic relevance realization. Your culture has to be able to move between the assimilation of home, the assimilation to home and the accommodation in awe or even potential horror of what’s outside and only when the culture can do opponent processing between that afforded by something like religion. Because I think the sacred traditionally cross culturally, cross contextually has always been that dynamic opponent processing between that which homes us and that which could potentially horrify us. So there’s a long tradition of speaking about the fear of God. Yes. It’s like we are all born with that phobia. And one of the ways to correct the phobia is voluntary exposure therapy. Yeah, you have to go back and forth in order to get familiar with it. Yeah. So that goes to the second point I wanted to bring up, which goes to the work that I’m doing with Daniel Gregg on the on the on the cognitive continuum. So if the thesis is right and it’s a scientific thesis, so I think it’s plausible. It’s not established. I’m not claiming that. But other people are converging on it like Newberg and others that there’s a continuum between very low level fluency of processing insight. Like when you have a hall moment flow, the work I did with Leo and Arian on flow is inside cascade, mystical experiences, awakening experiences, and then, you know, full blown, you know, you know, transformative experiences. If there is that continuum and what we’re doing is recursively accepting and complexifying to a kind of a circuit reuse to use Anderson’s term, Michael Anderson’s term, the same machinery. I think you could situate progressive desensitization into the gradual movement along the cognitive continuum, teach people the disruptive strategies that are very low level that bring about insight and then teach them the strategies that are needed to get into flow and so on. And then you can take people again. And so I think there’s also a progressive program for moving along the cognitive continuum that you could probably pedagogically sync up with that progressive program for teaching people the interpersonal things so that you could get that that exactly what you’re proposing. You could get the progressive desensitization along the cognitive continuum that is in sync with people being able to more and more readily move into the overflow. I can think of no reason why that wouldn’t work. Maybe it won’t, but it’s definitely worth trying. Well, I mean, at every step of that process, there’s an encountering more richness and more detail. There’s an encountering intensities and trying to assimilate or adapt to those intensities. And there’s a bringing together, a making coherent of what you’ve got, exactly where it operates sort of as a whole and maybe it was more than a whole. Yeah, that’s very constant in all those steps. Although health is also an important factor in that, because you’re doing it with people who have bodies, right, and their ability to do this thing is going to depend on, you know, whether they have pain in their abdomen, whether they’re getting enough water, whether they’re breathing correctly, whether their muscles can allow their heart to expand or not, all these sorts of things. Totally, totally. And that comes up practically in, like, as I said, I’m doing a live meditation class right now to try and give people, well, some of what we’re talking about right now directly in response to the COVID crisis. And so, you know, and it’s a course in that it’s exactly like we just talked about. It’s progressive. You know, it takes people through this, you know, constantly, gradually expanding, you know, exaptation and exposure. Right. But along the way, right, you have to pause, you have to have question and answers because people do have problems with the body, with the breath. And so it has to be this, you know, it has to be very, it’s, you know, it’s something that really has to, I want to be careful there. I mean, I think you can learn a lot from, you know, a meditation book, but I think meditation is like making love. Right. If you only reading about it, you’re really not capable of it. Right. In an important way. And, you know, and that’s the central metaphor in the tradition I was brought up in that, you know, that meditation is your meditation and contemplation. You’re learning to befriend yourself the way you would befriend another person. You can’t you can’t sort of be friends with somebody just by, you know, reading a book. You have to do this, this whole other thing. So I take very seriously what you said, because I see it on a daily basis about, you know, trying to finesse in Pascal’s sense of the word, trying to you can’t do the spirit of geometry. Right. You have to have the spirit of finesse. How you finesse this, you know, this progressive, you know, expansion, exaptation, increasing exposure, but increasing, you know, building a person’s faith in the sense we’re talking about it here. That that sense of continuity of contact, of adaptivity. Right. With, you know, the vicissitudes of the fatalities of human existence. Yeah. Getting that to work very, very carefully. Yeah. There there there there there. And that’s why, you know, Socrates was ultimately really worried and Plato was about writing things down because capturing that finesse in text is very hard. But we have something different now. We have this. Right. We have this. We have these things that are every every second. What’s happening between you and I is deeply Socratic, but we can record it permanently like we used to do like text. And notice the weirdness because I’ve been talking about this, people, the weirdness of the medium itself to bring up on your McClure point. Like, look at how big your face is to my is like if we were if our faces filled our visual field, we’d be really close in real life. Right. And that’d be like really socially awkward. But the medium accepts that kind of proximity. And although we’re present to each other, there’s no spatialization. So there’s no way in which we’re marking status or role with space. Right. And we’re and we’re sort of lit. Right. And it’s so I think it’s not that Weinstein picked up on this, but I’m trying to do more with it. We’re kind of like in a we’re back to what we used to have when we were in campfires. Right. With the brightly lit faces closely, no spatial marking of, you know, of status, everybody. And, you know, this this this communal thing. And so I’m hoping that because we have the virtual space, we can be able to see the virtual campfires and that because they symbolize, because they join together, things that we thought were previously oppositional to each other, which is the finesse of dialogue and the permanency of literature joins them together symbolically and exacts this primordial is primordial sociality, because we’ve been sitting around campfires across several species for probably at least, you know, 800000 years or so. Right. And Matt Rossano has talked about how that has just put the zap on the evolution of our cognition and our intersubjectivity. So this weird combination of transcending, you know, oral finesse and textual permanence, and yet also harkening back to the primordiality of the campfire. I think the medium therefore holds something really, really precious, a really precious opportunity for us. Yeah. Right. It has enormous potential if we use it right. Yes. You know, you either move beyond literate into non-literate or you move beyond literate into transliterate. Yeah. It brings back the oral and archaic and melds it together with the winds that we got from the cognition of reading and writing. Yes. And I think it’s one of a dozen really good arguments for why shamanism is central to the new scientific religious awakening. Right. Right. The thing I wanted to say was, in addition to all of those practices, right, bringing people in and teaching them the skills and they get a little better and they get a little better and down the road, they’re introduced to some more of the problems where they could use the successes. That whole process is also always under attack, needs to be protected. Yes. Other people who might exploit it from individuals exploiting it themselves. Yeah. And this is one of the pieces of religious wisdom is. Yeah. There are demons, there are vices, there are intention like processes. That are trying to subvert the successful process. Yes. Right. We are intentionally withdrawing, collapsing, sabotaging ourselves. Or, you know, and it’s debatable whether we say we’re doing it on purpose or whether we say by viewing it through the lens of doing it on purpose, we gain some leverage over it could go away. But there is a, you know, a demon is your problems translated through the lens of intentionality. The demon wants this to happen to you. And nihilism is like that too. It’s not just, I’ve run out of meaning. It’s, I will there to be a void. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very much. Yeah. I smash everything outside of me down. So that was the emptiness inside of me. Yes. Very much. We’re going to be teaching each other to be vigilant and robust against our sabotage attempts, systemically and personally. Yeah. So part of the wisdom tradition has to include that. And I mean, of course, and that was the, and you know, the religious institutions did provide that. They provided protection mechanisms. Now the protection mechanisms can be like an autoimmune disorder. They could, they, you know, I’m thinking of what happens, you know, with, with the holy Inquisition and things like that. Right. You know, the attempt to protect, because I mean, originally, you know, the attempt to protect people from heresy was exactly what you’re talking about. It’s right. Now, whether or not all the heretics are demonic, I’m not, I’m not agreeing with the church’s history. But I’m saying they were trying to, they were trying to create the functionality you’re talking about. They’re trying to protect, right. And properly protect the health of people as they’re moving through this very vulnerable transformative process. I get that. I do worry about that. So let me, let me be clear. I think your point is exactly right. That’s what you heard me constantly saying. Yes, yes, yes. Throughout. So it’s very clear that I agree with it, but I’m also aware of verse Lewis’s argument that, you know, the hunt for heresy in the West really laid the foundation for totalitarian thinking and totalitarian practices, because it’s a kind of, it can degenerate into a purity code kind of thing. So doing, teaching people and coming up with ways of protecting them, I think is. It’s absolutely necessary. I don’t, I, it’s, it’s, it’s unavoidable, but I think attendant upon that is exactly the danger that I’m expressing, which is these things, these things that are supposed to be the immune system. If you’ll allow me the analogy, protecting the nascent spirituality and religion. Can become autoimmune disorders in a powerful way. And so what, what are your thoughts on that problem? That problem of trying to afford the functionality, but what, what kind of things in general, you know, I’m not asking you for. Specific things, cause we can’t do that yet. What are the principles for dealing with that threat? Generally speaking, there has to be on the one hand, a really well understood sociological critique of those processes. Yes. We all have to study those. We all need to be better at decoding the ideology and systemic processes that we’re embedded in. That’s a really important skill going forward. We need to see those things. Sometimes people are hysterically exaggerated in calling out fascism, wherever anything goes wrong. Right. But that’s, that’s a dysfunctional or primitive version of something that’s really accurate, which is we have to be on guard against these regressive collapses in the systems we’re using. And you need a meta view in order to do that. Right. Traditional societies couldn’t tell when they went astray. Yeah. Modernity looks back and maybe dismisses them all as being astray, but it can’t tell when it’s doing its job or going astray either. So you need this meta view with something like a health and development orientation. Yeah. And a deep sense of how systems function, especially social systems. Otherwise we stand around constantly looking at the failures of our social systems. And it’s not just, you know, heresy and people being burned at the stake. It’s the constant failure of our legislature to move us forward and update us. Probably. Yeah. Totally. Like that. Yeah. A large part of it equally is the individuals have to have the emotional and physiological and cognitive capacity to tolerate strange sensations and weirdness expansion, right? Yep. Yep. They can’t feel that if they can’t think, well, maybe it’s okay to be heretical. Right. That’s a risky emotion in the bodies of people. And you have to be able to relax and feel into that. You have to have a background of many practices of relaxing and feeling into uncomfortable things so that in the moment you can go, let’s hold on. Maybe this needs to be protected against, or maybe I’m just reacting against the weird feeling here. Yep. Right. Then that opportunity is something that comes out of a practice, but also comes out of bodies being healthy enough to let strange sensations go through them. Bodies and minds. Bodies and minds. Yeah. And hearts. Yep. Bodies and minds and hearts. So this, I mean, this dovetails, I think with one of Zach, Zach Stein’s central arguments that, you know, the religion that’s not a religion and the reconstitution of the wisdom project are inevitably bound up with, you know, a significant pedagogical reformation, reformation, right? You know, the way we’re educating people, we’re now educating them under the sole normativity of the market. We used to educate them also under science, but even that’s now being more and more co-opted, but what can this do to make us better producers and consumers? Once again, as I get labeled with this unfairly, I’m not some sort of raving anti-capitalist. I’m just, I’m criticizing the market does things. Yes, it does. But to believe that it does all things and it does things, to believe that it’s omnipotent and omnipresent and omnibalevolent is, I think, foolish idolatry. And so one way is to follow up, and Zach explicitly agreed with this in person, you know, that we should be educating people not just under the normativity of the market. We should be educating them under the normativity. Well, like you said, of, you know, spirituality, the religion that’s not a religion, wisdom, and how to protect that, you know, often vulnerable individual or vulnerable group that’s going through some liminal, transformative transition and transformation. Yes, I think our education system has to be really broadly reconfigured. And we’re actually in, we’re right in this, we’re doing it right now. We have to. The virus has forced us. That’s part of his point, to consider deeply things that were no, erratical. No, you can’t educate people that well, maybe, maybe you can. Right. And so there’s, I think that that what you just said dovetails very, very nicely with his overall argument about, you know, just a fundamental need to transform our pedagogical vision, like at a very, very deep, very deep level and a very comprehensive level. No, I agree with Zach completely. That we, I mean, a huge part of all of this is reformulating what our basic educational principles are. Yeah. Right. And that’s going to go, that’s going to run against ways in which they’ve been currently adapted to be exploited by particular versions of markets. Yes, exactly. Well said. It’s going to go up against a whole bunch of people’s anxiety about making any change to those processes. It’s going to run up against the problem of we don’t necessarily know what are all the changes we need to make. Yeah, exactly. Right. And what’s the difference between knowledge and understanding? What does it really mean to assimilate something? How do you get better? How do you grow? What, what actually does that and what never mattered in that process? Those are deep questions and that’s a big project. And it’d be, yeah, I think, and you know, of course there are also questions that Plato famously brought into the dialectic questions about education and he proposed all kinds of educational reforms. You know, some of them I’m critical of, but the intent and what he was trying to do was I think meet the demand that Zach is pointing to. Well, I think that’s sort of a good place to wrap it up. And if we go too much longer, nobody will watch this video. This was wonderful. This was really wonderful, Lehman. I mean, I had high expectations because I know you already, but you, you, you, you went beyond them. So this was really rich and I think very valuable to a lot of people. And I expect you and I will be doing this again. I, I’m inviting you to come back on to Voices with Reveke again and we’ll have another dialogue. I, I, we, I see that, I foresee that you and I could have an endless series of deep dynamic dialogues. And so I’d like to invite you back again. Absolutely. I’d love to do it. I like you a lot and like a lot of people, I really appreciate the effort and the work you’re putting into all these things, the way you think through stuff, the way you language things. People are finding that very useful. These different projects you’re doing, I think are making a difference to people. So I appreciate that. I’m happy to be a part of it. And I like you a lot. So definitely let’s do another one. Thank you. Thank you, Lehman. And I like you a lot too. Okay. Like I said, thank you very much. And we’ll talk again soon.