Psychedelics and the cognitive continuum w⧸ Daniel Greig - Voices with Vervaeke (7A8H9XeOxv4)

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So, welcome everyone to Voices with Verveki. I’m going to be talking with Daniel Gregg and his, sorry, I got your name wrong again. Why do I do that whenever we go onto something that’s recorded? Let’s, we’ll start again. No, it sounded fine. I think it’s just like a syllabic thing. It’s a very, like it’s very close to other syllables. I think that’s all it is. Say it out loud. Daniel Gregg. Daniel Gregg. Am I saying it right? There you go. You got it. Okay. Let’s start again. I’ll just edit that out. Welcome everyone to Voices with Verveki. My guest today is Daniel Gregg and he and I are collaborators on a book called The Cognitive Continuum from Insight to Enlightenment. We’re working on that together. You might, some of you might have seen the Indiegogo campaign to raise money to help support Daniel as he endeavors to work on this project. I want to reiterate once again that that campaign is not going to bring me any income. I am a tenured professor with a nice stable salary. Daniel is not. The intent is to try and raise money for him so that he can put the kind of work into this that we both think it deserves. I know that Daniel passionately wants to give it because he’s deeply invested in this project and cares about it very, very deeply. So the broad purview for Voices with Verveki is discussions about sort of the relationship between science and spirituality in the context, the cultural historical context of the meaning crisis. That’s why Daniel is collaborating with me on Cognitive Continuum. What I thought we’d zero in on today is something that Daniel has some particular expertise on. He’s done quite a bit of work on. He’s had a huge influence on myself. And it’s perfectly pitched at the intersection between science and spirituality and the meaning crisis, which of course is what has been called the psychedelic renaissance. Before I turn things over to Daniel, I just want to acknowledge on both of our behalf We are both also deeply indebted to Anderson Todd, who has also done a lot of work with both of us and is also doing a lot of work on sort of the cognitive science of psychedelics. But today I want to focus on what Daniel has to say and what he thinks about the psychedelic renaissance, what it says about the intersection between science, spirituality, and the meaning crisis. And I do have a lot of things to say about it. Yes. So very happy to be talking about it. There’s a lot of issues that have been coming up as I’ve been sort of engaged in the Toronto psychedelic community and more broadly than that. So one thing that I think is an interesting problem. So a lot of people have been focusing on the psychedelic renaissance, but I think that that’s actually just one subset of a larger issue, which I like to call now the consciousness revolution. Right. Some people sharing memes being like, we need a consciousness revolution. But I think that it’s actually already ongoing and that it’s been quickening ever since the early 1900s. So maybe we could reframe it then. That what we should be talking about is a renaissance around the importance, the potential at least, the potential importance of altered states of consciousness. And therefore, we could see things as well as like the mindfulness revolution and the other related phenomena, even escaping into virtual worlds as ways of trying to play with altered states of consciousness as a way of responding to the meaning crisis. Is that a better reformulation, do you think? Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s great. And VR, meditation, psychedelics, there’s even like a whole bunch of weird practices emerging on the periphery. I think even circling counts, it’s sort of a collective altered state induction. Oh, I would definitely say that circling counts. I think, and you and I have talked about this, the proliferation of psycho technologies and supportive technologies for getting people into the flow state. I think also part of this as well. Yeah. And there’s also people trying to integrate virtual reality with like transcranial direct stimulation that will like kind of do some flow hacking as you’re involved in a fully immersive video game. So these potentials are really interesting, but also a little bit worrying. Yeah. Yeah. Because it’s not inherent to these things that we will use them for good. And in fact, I think there are a bunch of interesting cautions, which are some things that I’ve been playing with, perhaps including in the book. So for altered states in general and for wisdom, because in more ancient trends in philosophy, altered states and wisdom go hand in hand. Very tightly integrated together, deliberately so in fact. Yeah. And Plato’s got this one great dialogue, the Phaedrus, where he says, well, through Socrates, that altered states prophecy, it’s like a divine kind of madness, which is better than any kind of like sober waking state, because we get great things when we go into those states of divine madness. But there’s the issue of like, for one, false prophets, people who dress things up as though they are seemingly the answer to all issues. But then actually those were things that are going to accelerate or decline in disguise. There’s the issue of the tyrant, which comes out in Plato’s philosophy. So the person who has the soul most capable of being the philosopher king also, if raised in an unfortunate context, has the most power to be a horrible person, basically. And then there’s also the sorcerer. There is no sorcerer who didn’t first start off with a motivation towards the good. But the capacities and the powers that people get when they engage in altered state induction, they’re kind of value neutral. You have to do some extra work to yoke them to some idea of the good. Otherwise you just end up with a person who has a lot of power and a lot of potential for interpersonal manipulation. So if that person isn’t trained in ethics and in how to connect those abilities to some, what’s the word I’m looking for? Some broader, higher sense of the good, then yeah, we might end up with a society filled with sorcerers. So you’re arguing for a deep connection. I hadn’t thought about this before, but this is really interesting. I mean, so I’ve argued in one of the talks I gave about sort of a worrying possibility between altered states and bullshitting in the technical sense of the word and proclivity for self-deception. But you’re making a novel connection here that you and I have not discussed in depth. I’d like to pursue it a little bit here. I’m going to use a term from Weber, charisma. I don’t just mean it as we mean it today, which is sort of like kind of extra attractiveness. I mean what you’re talking about there, where people get a kind of oracular authority because they’re able to explore more of the cognitive space through their altered states of consciousness and produce what seem to be insightful or even inspirational proclamations or claims or whatever. So what you’re saying is there is, and maybe this was what Plato was in fact recognizing with the notion of, you know, of Mandyke, the mania, right, I believe, that individuals that come out of these states often have what Weber called a charismatic authority, which is not an authority based on institution or office or not even an authority based on sort of past deeds. It’s precisely an authority that’s based on this ability to seem to be a fount of insight and inspiration for people. Right, yes. I think that is definitely a possibility and definitely a problem to look out for. And the two, of course, problems aren’t necessarily distinct either, right? So one of the things that makes people susceptible to the charisma of others is also a susceptibility to bullshit as well. And also the charismatic person, this is kind of a weird paradox and this goes towards Tridder’s notion in The Folly of Fools that my capacity to deceive you goes up if I can deceive myself even more. Because if I can keep secret from myself the fact that I’m doing something deceptive, that actually enhances the confidence and all of the subtle cues that I’m giving you when I’m trying to manipulate and control you. Right, so I think that that thing you’re describing there is the character of the false prophet, the one who thinks he’s in line with the good, who says listen to me because I genuinely do have the answer. But I think so with the character of the sorcerer, we have something else happening where that person can be genuinely maliciously motivated. That person knows full well that they are utilizing charisma, that they’re using metaphor rhetoric to manipulate you and they’re doing that on purpose. Another whole thing that you’ve mentioned with wisdom is that there’s this capacity to see through illusion and into truth. Right, right. But if I can see where you truly are, if I can genuinely see where your emotions are and where your insecurities lie, I have a much greater power to control and hurt you. Yes, yes, yes. It’s funny, oh wow, that is so timely. So I was lecturing in Psych 371, remember that’s the psychology of wisdom course I teach at U of T. I was talking about various things and I actually stopped and I said with this kind of ability, I could actually be a terrific supervillain in both senses of the word terrific, really good but also really terror. It was funny at the moment but there was a bit of a psychological after chill and I went whoa, I sort of brushed up against something there. It was a very, very palpable experience. So that renders to me very plausible the idea that people could become sorcerers in the way that you’re describing. There’s the false prophet. What else, isn’t there also the possibility of people also getting sort of just overwhelmed by things, by getting either something like experimental neurosis or learned helplessness because they get exposed to state spaces within cognitive possibility that they cannot properly assimilate. Yeah, so I think that’s definitely a problem as well. So with psychedelics, especially psilocybin, we’ve been looking at, we referring loosely to the scientific community at large, a particular kind of mystical experience, the mystical experience of divine union, which isn’t the only mystical experience, right? There’s body-based mystical experiences as well as more visionary prophetic states but this unitive state, well it’s firstly really easy to study because it has a particular set of phenomenological characteristics. It also has an epistemological advantage which is it generally doesn’t come with a lot of heavy metaphysical statements, which makes it, right? Except that it does, which is really funny. Okay, no, fair enough. It looks like it doesn’t, right? It looks like it doesn’t. The number of entities you’re involving and you’re describing something that’s fairly sort of abstract, but please go ahead. Yeah, you’re right in the sense that it is a little bit easier to get on board with from a scientific perspective. Now, one thing that I’ve always sort of been harping on as an issue with the scientific framework that’s come out of psychedelic research, so we have the mystical experience questionnaire, which is what the people at John Hopkins are using. One of the items on that questionnaire specifically is deeply felt and positive mood, but that completely ignores like the majority of Judaism, for example, wherein as per Proverbs, wisdom lies in the fear of God or the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. I think that there is a very real way in which terror and horror and fear need to be accounted for when we’re thinking about the variety of mystical experiences. Otto’s notion of the numinous, right? Yeah, yeah. It contains within it something that is horrifying in horror in the sense of a threatening sense that one is losing grip on reality. And cognitive resources are being overwhelmed, which is what I was alluding to a few minutes ago. So this seems directly pertinent. So is that what you’re talking about? Let’s keep terms. Let’s say there’s, let’s let the scientific community call what it calls the mystical, but then we’ll say there are numinous experiences just because I want to have different terms for talking about these things, right? I’m not making any deep claims here. This is merely pro tem, so for ease of communication, right? And the point is, these are both within the repertoire of altered states of consciousness that allow people to go through deep transformations towards increased wisdom. Is that a fair way to put it? Yes, definitely. Both the loving kindness kind of experiences and the ones that are horrifying can both be wisdom promoting, but not if you don’t know what you’re doing. And to go back to the point which got us here, which was the one you were making about people getting overwhelmed. I think that’s a very real possibility we have to look for. And there’s a guy, he’s a professor of religious studies. His name is Christopher Bech. He just put out a great book called LSD and the mind of the universe. I definitely recommend anybody who’s interested in seeing what the sort of darker side of psychedelic exploration looks like explore that particular book, because he explores states. So he did a series of experiments around the late 80s, early 90s, where he was trying to approach psychedelic experiences as much like an analytical philosopher as possible. So he’d do the same amount, he’d standardize the procedure, he did about a decade of psychedelic experiments where he’d go very deep into these experiences and try to map out what’s going on there. And he gets in touch with a lot of horrifying, terrifying experiences, where he’s confronted with an entity who commands him to tear apart his dark, something like that. And also he’s immersed in oceans of suffering. I think he calls it the ocean of suffering. And these are places that people can go and they’re no less or more mystical. But one thing that he mentions in his book called, I was the one that he released before this. It has something to do with the dark night of the soul, but on like a global scale. The name is escaping me now, but it has something to do with that. But he mentions that one of the qualities that most people associate with the mystical as per the scientific research is that they often can’t say anything about it, which is what makes it amenable to scientific research. It’s like, oh, you know, it’s just an abstract cognitive experience. But Beish says, you know, if you don’t know where you are, chances are you just got lost. Which I think is very good. If you don’t have anything you can say about it, then it’s really hard to integrate that experience into your everyday life. So it might be something that promotes a radical reorientation of your affect, of your ability to relate to people. But it’s just this cloud of unknowing that hangs in the background. But if you look at, for example, Bill Richards recent book, Sacred Knowledge, he talks about I find it really funny the examples that he uses for unit of experiences, because a lot of them have like really rich mental imagery. So they’re kind of already not the kind of experience he’s saying they are. But there is really no difficulty in people describing their unit of experiences if they’re able to integrate them. They have very clear language about it. They might say, for example, there’s a little bit more of this than I can render into words, but they are still able to articulate most of the experience. People have sort of ability to intelligibly ascend. I noticed that when I was reading Steve Taylor’s book, what was it? Waking up or his book on awakening experiences. Although many people say there’s something ineffable about it, they do, as you say, they are able to report transformations in their phenomenology, nevertheless. Now, the ineffability is interesting as well. So I think that there are definitely modes of knowledge which are pre-linguistic. Of course. Yeah. All of these perspectival participatory knowing. It’s hard to sort of relate to other people how I might relate to you here and now. There’s this sort of ineffable kernel of this particular interaction. That’s right. But I don’t think that that means that we can’t actually describe these things. I don’t think that they’re as ineffable as we think we are. I think that we just need to change our epistemological standards. And right now, literal language has a very high regard in the hierarchy of valuable knowledge. But one of the things that the introduction of psychedelics and mindfulness and these other consciousness altering techniques are bringing into our awareness is that there are many different ways of communicating things. And so I think artistic expression, you know, a painting, a poem, you know, a poem, I think can much more readily transmit to you the likeness of my seemingly ineffable experience in a way that I couldn’t with just literal language. So in Asiatic wisdom traditions, Taoism and Buddhism come to mind. Poetry is where most of the philosophical work is being done. Tao Te Chet, for example, is just an extended poem with verses. Or Nargajuna’s work is poetry, even though many people consider it, you know, world class philosophy. So the distinction between philosophy and poetry is not made in Asiatic philosophy the way it’s made in Western philosophy. Right. And I think we’re having a bit of a transformation in that. So I’ve been reading a lot of stuff about object oriented ontology recently. Oh, Harman and Morton. I like these people a lot as well. Yes, they have been. This has been a very timely thing for me to discover these particular theories, because in object oriented ontology, Harman says that we’ve actually been kind of mistaken all along making philosophy this thing where we try to point as clearly as we can to a thing. That’s not really what it can do. And it’s not really what it should be trying to do. And within object oriented ontology, aesthetics is actually placed at the center because art and metaphor are ways that we can communicate the thing in itself much more readily than we can with literal language. And Harman, I mean, I think I can make a strong case that Harman argues for that that is he argues for an inactive participatory notion of metaphor. It’s actually the way in which I mysteriously emerge from my own depths and also always mysteriously withdraw into my own depths. Right. That gives me the enacted I instantiate that I don’t just refer to it. I instantiate that. And that gives me a participatory sense of how this thing is always a thing beyond itself, how it always how it’s also emerging, always emerging from its depths and always withdrawing into its depths. Right. And another thing that I like about this is that he also claims that that sort of relational experience between myself and an object and myself to myself as an object is not unique to human beings. But also, you know, these two books are also somewhat withdrawn from each other at all times. Yeah, that’s one of his big criticisms of phenomenology. And that’s the way he’s trying to in some ways break from Heidegger as he thinks that I mean, his argument is that if there are no relations like that between objects, then we’re ultimately not realists. That’s part of the argument. Right. Right. But yeah, Harman is precisely the opposite. He says this isn’t something that’s very special. And in fact, it just is a part of reality that there is this sort of mutual withdrawal from all objects. That doesn’t mean things aren’t real. It just means that things are a little weirder than we might hope that they were. Yes. So and so you think that the object oriented ontology is basically providing us with a new epistemological and metaphysical framework that will revalorize aesthetics as a way of under. I mean, does it revalorize aesthetics or does it really I see Harman is really blurring. I know he uses that language. So I understand why you’re saying that. But I see him as actually deeply blurring the lines between aesthetics, metaphysics and epistemology. Part of the argument is that separation is in fact inadequate in an important way. Yeah, I think I could get behind that because the idea basically is, well, how do we know things? Right. There’s something in here which is trying to address how we are epistemically bound. And if the parameters of our epistemology are such that it’s much more useful to relate to the universe if we personify it as some anthropomorphic thing, then that has priority over the literal description because the metaphorical rendering gives us a greater capacity to interact with something. It makes a worldview viable over longer periods of time. And I think that when we’re looking at what should have a center in our epistemology, we should be looking in terms of what is viable for the longest period of time. Because if like, you know, the so there’s another philosopher who really lines up well with these kinds of ways of thinking. His name is Federico Campagna. And I gave you one of his talks to add in the description of this video. Yes. Yes. So he argued one of his books. I haven’t read it yet, though. Yeah. So it’s amazing. Would recommend to everybody. It’s very elegant. And he really fully embraces this sort of aesthetic metaphysical blend. And so he bases his theories on an emanationist view via Plotinus. And then for each of the emanations that come out of the worldviews he describes, he attributes a particular character. Right. And that gives us an idea of, well, how do we relate to this thing? How do we relate to this particular aspect of this particular reality system? So the reality systems he’s describing in his book, Technic and Magic, are Technic and Magic. Right. And so Technic is building on Heidegger and his analysis of technology. And at the center of Technic is absolute language. So that’s very much dominant in the sort of scientific worldview. We think that we can break everything down into something like a set of atomic linguistic units, that everything is governed by rational laws and that we can reduce everything downwards into these sort of sentential linguistic logical laws. But then on the other side, there’s magic, which has at its center, ineffable being, the thing that cannot be immediately spoken, just the simple acknowledgement of the here and now. And what that view of reality promotes is a sort of wonder, a sort of awe, that everything is always overflowing what I can possibly know. And therefore, there’s a bit of a humility that comes out of that as well. Yes. Yes. And he argues that a lot of the issues that we’re having now, the meeting crisis, these sort of political conflict issues, those can be more readily addressed if we look at these sort of reality systems that we are implementing within us. So I don’t want to go too much in that direction, but I do want to at least highlight that. Let’s see if we can bring it back around. So is the is the argument that taking a look at these emerging, I’ll just call them philosophies, right? The like object oriented ontology and there’s related things around it. Are you proposing that that gives us a better conceptual vocabulary, better theoretical grammar for helping people to explicate, elucidate and integrate what’s happening when they have various altered states of consciousness? Yes, absolutely. OK, so I think that’s great. And I think that makes that would also given what you said about on wonder, right, that those, of course, while in Plato and Socrates, they’ve been deeply linked to wisdom and honing your capacity to realize what is significant as opposed to making evident what you think is just true. Right. So a sort of knowledge wisdom distinct distinction along that line. So here’s the question then. How do we how do we I think that’s a good argument, by the way, then. But how do we do that again without just giving license to people to fall into self-deception, to fall into sorcerous manipulation and to fall into false prophecy? How do we how do we so my question is, if we how do we if you’ll allow me to expand the notion of rationality to mean systematic and reliable overcoming of self-deception, especially self-deception that ultimately might not just be self-harming, but harming of others. How do we bring rationality into that way of thinking? Right. OK, so rationality is an interesting thing. And, you know, I want to just first highlight the fact that rationality doesn’t inherently mean this sort of like formal logic kind of way of thinking. And I indicated that right away. I mean, there’s rationality that extends beyond argumentation. In fact, I clearly argue that has to be the case. And there’s going to be rationalities of perspectival and participatory knowing rationalities that don’t work in terms of argumentation, but work in terms of attention, work in terms of processes of identification, work in terms of processes of aspiration, all of that stuff. And there’s other people arguing this. Agnes Callard’s book, Aspiration, argues for a whole new form of rationality. It has to do with transformation. So OK, so there’s two links that I want to bring into this space of reasons. One of them is a ontological argument. And the other one is a sort of cognitive functional argument. Sure. OK, so the first one has to do, I think, with, well, how do we connect to the real? Yeah. Now, I think that the cognitive continuum that we’ve been talking about, this function continuum that involves insight, flow and the mystical experience. What I think these are doing are linking us up with the real. I think that they give us a capacity to see through our own biases, see through our own illusions, to break our frames and to flexibly remake our frames in relation to that which is real. Now, I think that an important step in making the cognitive continuum do this is integrating it with much more embodied practice. Of course, of course. There is like a sort of there’s a right hemisphere dominance in this cognitive continuum. And an interesting thing about mindfulness meditation, for example, is that mindfulness in general, it helps to give you this ability to flexibly reorient, to be more cognitively flexible, to not be so taken by your own biases and such, to accept your own emotions and to not get too wrapped up in what your emotions present to you as being true. And there’s an important connection with mindfulness meditation to the right interior insula, which is a part of your brain involved in embodied awareness. Interoception. Yeah. And it actually does have direct links. It’s maintaining constant informational updates from visceral signals in your stomach. Yes, yes, yes, yes. And so one thing I’ve been thinking about in the last few days is that if we can have a clear flow between this brain body network, then we might be able to just have more computational power at our disposal. I think that’s I mean, yeah, I agree. And I think I think many of many Taoist practices are, are, are very important. Taichi Quan comes readily to mind about trying. I mean, there’s a way in which you can think about, like what they call chi as a resonance between that kind of interior flow, like you’re talking about, the connectivity and that being in resonance with your sort of coupling to the environment. And those two are in a deep kind of synchrony with each other in a powerful way. Right. So there’s the problem after you train this sort of network to have increased resonance within your sort of fully embodied network of processing and then trying to get that to sort of like match up with the world. You can’t just do this as an entirely internal process, right? You need to follow Hogarth’s recommendations for educating your intuition and make sure that you’re putting yourself within feedback environments that are giving you correct and accurate feedback. Right, right, right. So it’s not just about the network. It’s also about doing the individual practice such that you become more sensitive to feedback in the environment and then putting yourself in environments that have good feedback. Right, right, right. And so I think circling actually is great at doing this. One of the warm ups for circling that I’ve been really enjoying is you’ll sit with one other individual and you’ll have to say, so I’m observing, say that you’re wearing glasses, which makes me think that perhaps you like to read a lot. And then you have to say, I’m observing. And then you have to ask, does that land? And the person says yes or no. Right, right. They’re not often in our regular social environments do we get a chance to check our perceptions about other people. So this practice allows us to say, I’m having this inference based on what I observe. Is that observation correct? And the other person has a chance to give us feedback about that. So I think something like that in conjunction with a practice like mindfulness is a great way to get this flexible insight based cognitive continuum to link up and actually latch on to the real. It’s not enough to just train that function. It has to actually latch on to the real outside of oneself. Yes. Because it’s just as possible that you can sort of latch on to these worlds of your own making and become incredibly self-deceptive. Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure, for sure. So would it also be important to have, what am I looking for, a complementary practice in which you are also spending time in dialogue trying to get a more, what am I trying to say? I don’t want to just say coherent because that just sounds logical. I don’t know what word I want. You want to do something on the ontological side where you’re trying to get clear about what your implicit ontology is and subject it to as much self and other criticism as possible, bringing as much self-corrective individual and distributed cognition to bear worldview, your implicit ontology, and also try to get it to internalize the capacity to being self-correcting so that your ontology also isn’t just sort of ossified. Because I could see somebody doing the work, like you said, and then doing the Hogarth stuff that Leo and Ariane and I talked about in the article. They do all that, but nevertheless, they’re sort of committed to a particular ossified worldview, and that’s also going to lock them down in important ways. Yeah, so that’s where the ontological argument comes in. So that’s a great bridge. So for a while, I had been working with the Buddha’s pragmatic assessment of enlightenment, where you don’t really talk about the metaphysics too much because it’s not that practical. But as I’ve been reading object-oriented ontology and as I’ve been reading the work of Roberto Unger, I’ve been realizing that no, actually, we have to get the metaphysics right. Because if we don’t get the metaphysics right, then we might just be latching on to some world of our own imagining. Okay, well, let’s slow down here for a sec. You’re invoking a normative term, and it’s going to come with all kinds of connotations. Does right mean final, complete, comprehensive? What does right mean, the metaphysics, getting the metaphysics right? Are we looking for a kind of cognitive closure here? No, no, no. Okay, so for example, look, one of the main things in Roberto Unger’s metaphysics, which is ultimately important, is that the future is open, that change is the only constant. So there’s no closure. In fact, we always have to be sort of updating our understandings because we can’t really understand the things in themselves because as we’ve talked about, things are always somewhat withdrawn. All we do is reveal to ourselves what our current relationship with things are. So we have to take seriously our epistemic boundedness, and we have to use that. I think that quality of epistemic boundedness should have a central role in our understanding of metaphysics because it gives us a little bit of humility, right? It helps us to step down from the idea that perhaps we do have the final answer because yeah, I don’t think there really is a final answer. So, I agree with you. I agree with you. So, but notice how once you give up sort of an epistemology of certainty or completeness or closure, specifying what getting it right is becomes very problematic in some ways. So I would say that instead of a metaphysics of certainty, we can have a metaphysics of authenticity. We don’t have to have certain literal language about what the things we’re in touch with are to know that we are genuinely in touch with things beyond ourselves. So this sounds like something I was talking with Jordan Hall about, that we move to an where we emphasize continuity of contact rather than a coherent completeness of assertion. Yes, yes. So I want to flash out a little bit of some stuff that I’ve been thinking about with Timothy Morton’s idea of hyperobjects. Right. So, let’s see, where to start? This is like a pretty big argument. I mean, I guess I’m going to start with the most sensationalist statement and then step down from there. Okay, so everybody should caveat. Okay, right. Go ahead. Okay, so I think that in order to effectively integrate altered states of consciousness into our culture, we have to admit that the gods are real. Okay. So what are the gods? Okay. So Timothy Morton has this idea of a hyperobject. So a hyperobject is built on top of Harmon’s idea of what an object is. So Harmon first, let’s flush that out a little bit, says that objects are kind of a middling ground between two tendencies in philosophical thought to reduce objects either too little or too much. Right, right. So Harmon says that you can either try to undermine an object by trying to break it down into its constituent components, its atoms. And then there’s the problem of overminding, where we say that this thing is only its actions or its relationships. Yeah, it’s just a node in a network of relations. Right, and then it like passes away. Like Bruno Latour, I guess, is the guy who argues for that mostly. And I think even in a Buddhist metaphysics, this comes out. Yeah, I think there’s versions of that in maybe in Nargajuna or at least, you know, the metaphors of Indra’s net and things like that. Right. Yeah, everything is like relationally dependent. There is like no thing. So that’s what you could look at as an overminding view. So he says rather that there is something in the middle of these two, which is the object. And that object is always a little bit sort of outside of our capacity to fully grasp it. There’s always an element of it that withdraws. But based on our relationships with the object, certain parts of it show up to us in such a way that we can act on them. Because that’s also how perception emerges, right? Perception emerges in organism environment relationships. It’s sort of pulled into our awareness via consistent learning through sensorimotor loops. So that’s what an object is. It’s this thing which isn’t only its parts and it isn’t only its actions, but it’s this sort of middle ground between those things. So some philosophers are also talking about the intrinsic nature of a thing, trying to find a place in between components and network of relations. This is coming up, for example, in new arguments about consciousness, you know, Russellian monism and things like that. Right. Okay, so go ahead. So yeah, so I like that you brought the term in. So yes, you could say that there is an essence to a thing, but you and I only have an idos of the thing. There’s the real object and then there’s a sensual object of our imagining. So then we get into hyperobjects, which are not something that human beings can ever fully experience here and now. So Timothy Morton refers to climate change as a hyperobject. He’s really concerned. Evolution would also be a hyperobject. Yeah, you could say evolution. The agricultural revolution, I think, also counts for Morton. He has a book about that. Harman talks about, I think, what is it, the British East India Company? Yeah, yeah. That’s an example he takes from Leibniz, because he’s arguing against Leibniz, who says that that’s ridiculous. The British East India Company isn’t a thing. But what Harman’s getting at is the classic sort of emergentism argument. There’s something that emerges from these relationships, which is the thing. And you know, you could replace all of the parts and it could still be the same thing. So that’s how we know it’s not just the components. Right. Now, hyperobjects are really interesting, because those are also something that we have to relate to. But they put a very different sort of epistemic burden on us. You know, there’s a lot of conflict about global warming. People somehow think that it’s like not a thing, even though we can like see very clear trends in our statistical and mathematical analyses. But just because it’s a different sort of thing that we’re not really used to relating to, there is, it seems, a tendency towards not really fully getting the fact that this is actually a thing, because we’re used to things relative to human perception. You know, this computer, this mouse that I’m looking at, things are usually something that we can grasp, point to. But for something like global warming, it’s so big and outside of our comprehension. So can I ask a question here? Because I thought about this too. Why is it, because I think this argument is on the right track. So this is not meant to derail. Why is it that people have difficulty with a hyperobject like global warming, but they seem to have no difficulty with a hyperobject like the internet. So I think that the internet is still smaller than hyperobjects. And it also is something which really matches up with the metaphors that we’re using. So network theory is like super big and people love AI and all of that. And we know that brains have neural networks. So I think it’s a much more intelligible thing for people. Because global warming, it’s much more diffuse and like, it’s not an object that we really come into contact with usually. So we don’t really have an easy… So it’s not just the hyperobjectness, if I can put it that way. I don’t want to say objectivity because I will have the wrong meaning. The hyperobjectness, it’s also then a difficulty in framing it. Right. Okay. So that seems to be important too. So that’s where the gods come in. Okay, please go ahead. That’s how we frame it. We look at these things that are bigger than ourselves as entities, beings that have some kind of determinate force. They have a personality insofar as they inform our social institutions and they inform our individual everyday lives. I think that if we utilize this metaphorical language of saying, oh, the gods are alive and here are the behaviors that they’re having. But that’s a way of rendering this diffuse and very strange object very easily intelligible to us. And if we can get past the fact that we benefit from using these terms, not because they’re literally true, because that’s not how we’re using them. We’re using them as a metaphor to crack open something which is otherwise closed from us. I think that’s a very fruitful way to begin grasping things that are fundamentally beyond us. And that’s how people have always been using this. I think if you look at history, hyperobjects are actually exactly how spiritual traditions have been looking at their spiritual godlike forces. I mean, one thing that comes clearly to mind is neoplatonism. But that’s going to lead to a question. But first, you have the relationship between theoria and theurgia in neoplatonism. You have Iamblichus saying that the world of the forms is basically like you’re saying, it’s like a world of hyperobjects. And we have to relate to it in the kind of fashion you’re talking about. We have to understand it in terms of ritual, an enacted metaphor, ritual interaction with the gods. Now, there were arguments, serious arguments in the ancient world about that understanding. Let’s pick one god. That understanding of Zeus and what you might call the traditional understanding of Zeus. What I mean by that is there seems to be a tension within the proposal. I think the proposal is good. So I’m not trying to undermine the proposal. I’m trying to refine it between a theistic interpretation of a god and a non-theistic interpretation of a god. So that seems to be a relevant thing. And then the other thing I would bring up is, well, how do we interact? Given the criteria that you’ve put out here, which I think is right, my, I want to say, you know, like Corbin’s sense of the imaginal, right? Image in the imaginal sense, not as just an inner picture, right? It has more to what you’re talking about here. If I have this image of the hyperobject, it should afford a kind of enhanced interaction with it. It should afford me being able to get into the continuity of contact, interact with it in some viable way. What would that look like? What would that look like? So that is a great question. So prophecy, I think if we look at the philosophy of prophecy, we have some answers. So Moses Maimonides’ view of prophecy is that, well, he contrasts. So he’s got a book called The Guide of the Perplexed, which really systematizes all of his philosophy. He tries to sort of ground a Jewish theology with a lot of Aristotelian sort of terms. And he contrasts the view of philosophy or the view of prophecy that philosophers have to the view of prophecy that people have within a Jewish context. And so Plato is one of these people, as we mentioned earlier, he’s like, yeah, so altered states of consciousness where you get these prophetic visions. It’s like a divine kind of madness where you get abstract information from the gods. And anybody could have that happen. It’s a gift when it happens. Now, Maimonides makes very clear that what prophecy is doing is it’s rendering things beyond our understanding into our understanding. When there are things that are beyond our capacity for rational intellectual understanding, there is an overflow of that which we can’t understand into our imagination. The imagination is all of this sort of metaphorical cross networking in order to render intelligible to us that which was previously unintelligible. So visions are a function of the imagination, which is picking up on patterns in the world that are different than the patterns that can be had via logical literal discourse. So for example, if I see a person come to me, if I’m Isaiah, in the book of Isaiah, and a bunch of angels come to me, and they give me a mission on behalf of God, well, I could have thought all of those things on my own. But there’s firstly a much more enhanced sense, there’s like an imperative to this vision. It wakes up your emotional energy. And also interacting with a person is very different from interacting with a proposition. So by rendering something intelligible via the attributes of the person, you are rendering it with a set of influential properties that differ from those of propositions. So you’re creating an enhanced ability to reason about things in a sort of nonlinear fashion. Now, where my modernity says his view differs from the philosophers, because all the things I just said are also accepted by the philosophers he’s talking about, the Aristotelians, the Platonists, etc. Even the Stoics were down with this. They were like, yeah, God has to exist, because how could we know things about the future and dreams? Like, that’s obviously proof. But there’s a very important hyperobject in Judaism. That hyperobject is Yahweh. Yahweh is a particular hyperobject that marries the hyperobject of the Israelite people and pulls it into itself. And when a Jewish prophet is experiencing prophecy, it’s the hyperobject of God interfacing with the imagination of the individual to provide revelations about what that hyperobject wants it to do. Right. Yeah. So I think that we actually can interact with hyperobjects in this sort of way. I think that we can pick up on social patterns, on cosmic patterns, and that we can make sense of them through dreams, through visions, through these sort of abstract altered state experiences. So let’s go back to climate change, your example then. Because I have, so there’s a concern. So I’ll ask a question. You’re not proposing that people have visions and dreams as a way of competing with climate science for claims about what’s going on? No, no, no, no. Just for getting insights about how to act. Right. So while I think that’s important for people to hear, right? So you’re not, in fact, your argument sort of commits you to the idea that you’re not proposing this as an alternative way of generating competing theories that compete with our best sort of scientific practices. You’re proposing it as a way of, I don’t know what the word is here, I’m not happy with it, but I’m going to use it as a sort of concretizing ability to interact with hyperobjects so that people are no longer sort of caught in a cognitive miasma with respect to it. Yes, yes, yes. It helps us to sort of cut through our bullshit to help us to see what is the most relevant way to act in regard to some sort of ambiguous large phenomena. Right, right. That’s interesting. That’s very interesting. So tie this back, because I like it. Tie this back to altered states of consciousness, because what I could hear you saying, I mean, is something like, well, you know what altered states of consciousness do? They open up the implicit learning machinery. They open up the insight machinery. They bring in all kinds of patterns that might be good clues, maybe that’s the right word, or traces or signs of how I could viably come into a relationship with hyperobjects. Is that the connection? Is that how I should be seeing this? Yes, absolutely. It’s a way of enhancing our implicit learning machinery. I think that’s absolutely correct. And also of revealing that which is implicit within us. Well, that’s the insight aspect of it too, I would say. And if we don’t see that this is an option for us, then we go blind to it. I want to say more about that. That was a really pregnant pause. I want to unpack what was in the pregnant pause there. Okay, okay. So that which we see is always somewhat determined by that which we think we can act on. This is where companionist stuff about the metaphysics comes in handy. Because with the metaphysical system of Technic, we see everything as some, you know, the forest isn’t something that we just can enjoy. It’s not a living being on its own. It’s a set of resources waiting to be extracted into some other thing. This is a Heideggerian idea. Yeah. So, Technic drives us to see the world in terms of things that we can pick apart and manipulate. But that view also prioritizes literal language and sort of does away with the sort of like wishy-washy imagination. But if we recognize that because of our epistemic limits, we have to know things at least at first in dreamlike phenomena, then that opens us up to the possibility that when we have dreams, when we have visions, when we go into a deep psychological state or deep psychedelic state, that the psychedelics aren’t only revealing us information about our personal psyche, but that they are picking up on patterns at large in our communities that have been ingrained in our implicit learning machinery. Then we can take those visions more seriously and we can see them for what they are. Because the current model of psychedelics, which is using them in psychedelic psychotherapy, it does sort of overly individualize the person. So I think that there’s a number of things we have to reformulate when we’re thinking about how to effectively integrate altered states into our communities. And this overminding, undermining problem that I mentioned isn’t happening just for objects, it’s also happening for people. Of course. So we undermine ourselves by thinking that we’re individuals and we overmine ourselves by thinking that we’re only a group. But the middle ground between that is that we understand ourselves as a member of a community and as a member of a community, each of us has access to different experiences, different environments where in our implicit learning has sort of picked up on the greater whole in which we are situated. And then we can take seriously people’s dreamlike revelations. We can engage in dialogue about them. If we don’t fixate on the content too much and say, oh, the content is literally real. And if we don’t overly individualize the content by saying, oh, this is only about your personal psyche, then we can see that other option for action where these are revelations about implicit patterns that we’re picking up on. So this seems to me to be deeply convergent and perhaps it would be strengthened by connections to like, you know, again, Corbin’s idea of the imaginal or what I’ve argued for in terms of the transjective as trying to get us away from the exhaustive categorization of things is either subjective, which is the purely psychological interpretation of the content of the altered state of consciousness or purely objective. Well, it’s just literally true. And I mean, in that direction lies, in both directions lies a propensity for a kind of madness. The first can lead you down sort of a narcissistic hole and the other can lead you into, well, a kind of delusional state. So we keep wrapping around that, right? Because every time, see what I see happening, and Dan, I do not mean this as a criticism, this is an observation, but I see happening is we confront a problem and then we pursue how things, we need to open things up, but then we need to also always counterbalance How do we constrain it so it doesn’t go in all of these ways we introduced at the very beginning? Setting up the right context. It sounds to me like in addition, I believe you already agree with this, but I just want to get it out there so we can talk about it and involve our viewers into participation. In addition to all of these revising the metaphysics and getting sort of individual sets of practices, there’s a way in which we need to build a lot of multiscalular and mutually affording mechanisms of self-correction. Yes, yes. I think one of those is by developing communities where we have very clear roles, right? Not everybody has to be the prophetic mystic, right? That would definitely result in madness. For example, Augustine in his confessions, he mentions multiple times that his mother has dreams which seem to be in touch with God. They’re like hidden insights which seem to be in touch with a greater good. So I think that we can admit that everybody has these things, like your dreams, they’re probably picking up on something, if you interpret them, you’ll get some genuine information. But then there’s that, but the Christians would say that prophecy has basically ended, right, which is coming from the Jewish context. After a while, they’re like, okay, this alternative consciousness thing, it’s a bit too much. We’ve had a lot of prophets, we’ve had a lot of social change as a result of these visionary experiences, but no more. That’s it. So historically, the tendency has been to constraining the access that people have to prophetic revelation and to only accepting the most minimal versions of them. But I think that there is the opportunity for a new social role, where we do have people who are sort of mystical prophets, and we trust their judgments more than others. We have an institution that trains these people, which helps them to constrain their imagination, but we have to look seriously at the imagination and its abilities for producing effective information. And so I think that something that’s going to help is that if we recontextualize what to do as art, I think it becomes a lot more easy. The way that we understand art now is very different from how art has been understood a thousand years ago, right? So people who were going through the religious revolutions of the Axial Age, they didn’t have the understanding of art that we do, and religion and art was always very closely interwoven. Now that’s caused a lot of problems where some people are like, well, okay, no art at all, or if it’s art, it should only be in the service of God. I think that if we look at artistic expression, if we look at the expressive arts, you know, performance, visual art, music even, as a way in which people can latch onto hyper objects, which give us an impression of our imminent future, if we recontextualize it out of an overly religious context and into an artistic context, that the problem becomes much more tractable. Hmm. That’s interesting. So what I mean, that brings me back to a point. So again, I mentioned how poetry and philosophy were interwebbed together. So isn’t that also going to require a reformulation of our cultural notion of art? Because we’ve tended to, you know, we tend to have an overly romantic, and I mean that in a philosophical sense, interpretation of art, and we’ve sort of divorced art from philosophy and the cultivation of wisdom. So the prototypical artist is not, the prototype for an artist is not someone seeking wisdom. In fact, the prototype for artist is often, you know, the romantic, inner conflicted individual who is ultimately on a course of self-destruction, but nevertheless sacrifices it, you know, the Van Gogh model of the artist, right? I mean, there’s also another model of the artist, which is just like, oh, I’m just like a really flighty person with a lot of creative energy, and I just create shit. I don’t really know what it means. And look at all this cool stuff. What is it? I have no idea. Yeah, yeah, right. Both of those. Both of those are sort of, you know, within the pantheon of the romantic understanding of the artist. It sounds to me like you are proposing something other than that. So what is it? Well, so I think that, you know, if we understand ourselves not as individuals, but as members of a community, then we can look in terms of how do we form communities such that we can make the most of the potential of the artist. I see artists as people who have a lot of creative potential, but not really a lot of top-down processing to constrain and direct that potential. Some people are blessed with that ability, but not everybody. And I do think that the culture we live in does provide… It makes it easier for people to go about the rapid content generation without consideration kind of thing. And there’s obviously going to be information in there that’s really important and interesting, but that need for artists to always produce, to always get the next thing out so that they can always be making sales and sustain their lifestyle, et cetera. I think that that is negative for artists. I think that it creates an impetus for them, which doesn’t give them the time to actually sit down and sort of take a more slow and mindful approach. Now, this is actually… Isn’t there also… Don’t let me disreel you, but I mean, we also have a mythology of sort of art being very individualistic and subjective and expressive, right? Yes. Yeah, we do. And I think that’s transforming a little bit. So I gave you some resources to put in the description of this video for art collectives that I think are good examples of how to go forward. So there’s this art collective from the UK called Kamatica. And I watched a talk from the founders… The founder gave a talk at a conference called… What was it? Breaking Convention. And her name is Maria. She was talking about how not everybody is ready to sit down and do the work of meditation. So how do we get people to engage in the transformative experiences that will reorient their perspectives towards something that’s better for us? Well, we can use what we know from ritual and shamanism to create performance art pieces that give people these kinds of transformative insights. Because not everyone’s willing to sit down and do the work of transformation. A lot of people are very afraid of changing their worldview, they’re very attached to the way they see things. But everyone loves to be entertained. So it’s really easy to sell tickets, get people in an event for a performance art piece. But if the artists are keeping in mind wisdom, these higher ideals of connecting people with hyper objects of these cultural entities that we’re all situated within, but perhaps can’t quite see, that’s a great way of recontextualizing the artistic process, I think. See, I left a link for Maria’s art collective. I think that’s a great way to go. Now there’s also this religion that’s not a religion thing. Now I think that this is a great thing, and this is something that I really want to work on next year. I think that the religious revolution that we need is going to be also an art revolution. And so I think that we need people who can act as artistic directors, who can create an institution where they network with artists to create a bunch of insightful art, art that encodes information, that are insights waiting to happen. Because that’s exactly what religious art is. Especially when you get into the more occult domains of things, everything’s encoded in these interesting symbols. Now I think that we can do that in an open and ongoing fashion, such that we can maintain contact between these symbols and the ever-changing hyper objects of our cosmos and culture. So I think that by understanding religion as art, and by creating a religion that’s not a religion, but through more of an art collective model, networking a bunch of artists with creative potential, with people who can play the role of artistic director to constrain and hone the sorts of things that these artists are channeling, I think that that’s a great way forward. So that’s great. Thank you for explaining that. I like that connection. And of course, by art, you mean also a lot of performative art too, right? So because what’s also happening all around the world is people might not see what they’re doing as art. I’m thinking of the live action role playing games that people engage in, like the Jeep Forming in Scandinavia, or the resurgence of improv as a way people are trying to respond to the meeting crisis. Improv people might see what they’re doing as art, but it overlaps a lot with the Jeep Form that people are performing, and they might not see it as art. But it sounds to me like those things would clearly fall under what you’re calling art. In fact, they might be even more relevant than just sort of static objects, because they tend to be dynamical systems themselves, and therefore, they’re best for giving us a participatory knowledge of complex dynamical systems, both in our culture and our environment. Yeah, I’m really glad you brought up the role play connection, because I think that that’s super important. And with the LARPing stuff, the live action role play, often people are going away for a weekend, and they’re just trying to escape their everyday world, and they don’t bring anything back. Yes. But I think the notion that you talk about serious play, of religion as a space for serious play is something that is going to be a foundational element of this religion that’s not a religion, but is also an art collective. And so what I see the religion that’s not a religion looking like is something like a marriage between Disney World and the university, except it cares more about your well-being than it cares about your capital. That’s great. That’s almost a poster. That’s fantastic. I like that. So again, trying to keep a line of continuity going through it. So psychedelics would be sort of fitting into, you know, they talk about set and setting, but we’re talking about, I talk about, you know, inactive and framing. And so the idea is this artistic community and this new ecology of artistic practices would be that within which we would put psychedelics and other altered states of consciousness as a way of affording a constrained and viable serious play. Did I put it all together well? Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s exactly correct. Now that also must be contextualized with a particular problem. So I think that psychedelics, they open us up, they bring us into touch with certain things in our implicit learning systems that we haven’t been quite aware of, and that they have the capacity to connect us to various socio-cultural hyper-objects. They also can afford, you know, the possibility of a dynamic self-organization that we can’t sort of get to on our own, right? The idea that they introduce a kind of noise into the neural network and allow it to explore a state space that it normally can’t get into. Yeah, yeah. And I think that that’s how it’s sort of providing revelations about implicit learning. Oh, I see. I see. I see. Okay. Now I get it. Okay. Keep going then. Cool. Yeah. So, okay. So with the overly individualized model of psychedelic psychotherapy of saying, here, let’s get you in, let’s solve your particular problems, and like, let’s make it such that you can go back into your community and nothing about that community changes. Right. And I think that what some papers come out would show actually that if people aren’t receptive to the sorts of insights that people have in psychedelic therapy when they go back home, that the efficacy of that treatment is blunted by the context they’re in. Oh, but this is all, I mean, not to trivialize, but actually just reinforce your point. This has always been the idea, right, of therapy that you have the triad, right? You have the pharmacological intervention and you have the therapeutic intervention, but you also have to have the social intervention, where the person won’t actually, you know, the full recovery that you’re after. And I think that accounts for enlightenment and wisdom as well, because you can only be as enlightened as your community lets you. Ah. Yes. Which is why Plato thought, you know, if we have the philosopher king show up, what’s going to happen? He’s going to be crucified. He literally says that, which was like very strange and something that the Christian theologians later gravitate on. Yes. I know they liked that. I mean, there’s an insight there. You know, and no prophet is honored in his own home to actually speak the words of Jesus of Nazareth. So. So can I, there’s just one thing that I want to get out, which I’ve been sort of building up to. Oh, okay. Sorry. We’ll do that. I’ll just mark my question and bring it back later. Cool. Okay. So if we don’t mindfully connect the psychedelic experience to particular hyper objects, particular processes, which are in the best interest of both the individual and our communities at large, then the insights and the openness that we get from these kinds of experiences will just latch onto whatever is at hand. And right now we are situated within the hyper object of capitalism and that has very real effects on us. Right. And so we have to be very careful because we are beginning to get into a stage where psychedelics are being commercialized. There are now psychedelics and investment conferences opening up. There was one in Toronto recently. There was one in New York a few months ago. And especially the people who have been making money off of cannabis, now that that’s legal, they’re thinking that the same thing is going to happen with psychedelics. And so capitalist motives are going to be parasitizing the potential of psychedelics. So there’s a story which I would recommend everyone who’s concerned about this problem to read. It’s called, we will call it Pala. I gave you a link to put in the description, so it’ll be there for those who want to look at it. And it describes the story of a woman who has this insightful LSD experience. She’s like, oh, I want to bring like love and joy to everybody. So I’m going to open this therapeutic space where people can undergo guided psychedelic sessions. And for a few years, it’s kind of what she wants. People are having these meaningful transformative experiences. But she requires to, in order to keep this business going, she has to take on the typical capitalist business model, where she has to get investors. The investors become part of the board of directors. They make a lot of the decisions. And so this story tells the process of what happens as the market fragments and as more competition emerges in the market surrounding psychedelic therapy. And so we have, for example, as she becomes less competitive than these other psychedelic therapy groups, she has to do things like put capital at the front. Because even though the investors are first motivated, because they have people who could be helped by psychedelics, what they actually care about are returns on investment. And so her company is put at the center. That’s what’s valued. And so that distorts people’s behavior. And so her company becomes something like a hyper object. It becomes something that has a life of its own and a personality of its own situated within the larger hyper object of capitalism. And so she ends up getting fired from the board of directors and it becomes something other than her because she doesn’t want to put capital before her patients. And the board of directors is like, well, sorry, no, that’s not really going to work for us. So now we’re going to sell this off to a big pharma company. And so what they use are like, it’s really well laid out this story and they use a lot of illustration, which is really good. So, for example, as a means of increasing their earnings, they provide discounts to people who have just come out of a psychedelic therapy session for signing up right away, which is extremely unethical because you’re really, really suggestible and open after that. So they can really easily get your cash. They also then begin to instead of having people do integration sessions, they give you a lot of information about what they can do to help you with the integration for you. And then the app collects information about you. And then based on its inferences, it gives you notifications at certain important times, such as six months ago, you said that this experience changed your life. Imagine what another one could do. Oh, I see. Right. So there’s this very real danger that these capitalist motives, which are very deeply So this circles back again to the beginning, where we keep coming back to also the three problems associated with altered states of consciousness. Yes. Yes. Right. Exactly. So another thing that I’ve been constantly referring to is the classic worry of the devil, because the devil, he’s not like a scary, demonic dude. Right. But he’s a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, I mean, I think that I take that very seriously. I mean, obviously there’s issues here. You know, from critique of the possibilities of deep modal confusion about having it. I mean, it’s not only our culture is the way we think. It’s a lot of the ways that we think, you know, we think about how to think about how to think about the world. I mean, there’s a lot of things that we won’t be able to do. We have to be able to talk about our culture. it’s not only our culture is the problems around capitalism, there’s problems around narcissism, people would go from understanding psychedelics as a way of becoming and instead what they’re trying to do is have as many experiences that provide autobiographical evidence of their uniqueness, their importance and why they’re special and things like that. And there’s, and those two things, those two forces are at work. It’s precisely because we are in a large, complex market that we tend to feel that we need to emphasize our uniqueness, but at the same time, we want to, we’re conflicted about that because we also need to follow whatever trends are going because we want to belong. And so what I’m saying is it’s a very complex set of forces that are going to be at work. So I think, you know, there’s, there seems to be to me that we also need something like, I want to be really careful because I do not think that getting into a particular ideological stance is helpful here, but we do need to see something like, well, something like what I see going on with my discussions with Jordan Hall, sort of a level of social cultural critique that is not primarily politically motivated, at least in the standard sense of politics, but is motivated by, like, so for example, when I’m making a criticism of capitalism, wow, but you know, it’s the best system. And then you’re being a Marxist and it’s like, no, that’s not what’s going on here. What we’re trying to understand is, Thomas Bjorkman makes this very clear in his most recent book. You know, he said, you know, as religion left the field, you know, and sort of the Enlightenment as being the overarching authority, and then now science is leaving the field under sort of postmodern pluralism. He said, by default, all that’s left is the market. So people are now accrediting to the market, the same kind of divinity and the same kind of absoluteness and certainty. The market is as fallible as any other system or institution we’ve created. Does it do a lot of great things? Of course it does. But to then conclude that it is perfect and complete, and we’ve come to sort of the final stage of socioeconomic evolution, we’re at the end of history, I think that’s just an absurd and indefensible claim. So what I’m trying to say is, we need a kind of cultural critique that isn’t truly ideologically motivated. It’s trying to get us out of what, trying to treat, here I’ll use the language we’ve sort of crafted together, it’s trying to treat capitalism as an object, not undermine it or overmine it, but trying to understand it as it is, so that we can more appropriately relate to it. That’s the kind of critique I think you and I are talking about here. Yeah, yeah, I think that you’ve always been clear about that kind of critique of, you know, we can talk about these things objectively and not be like ideologically motivated and perhaps actually the answer to these things isn’t at the level of the political problem, right, which is the criticism you’ve lodged against Peterson. He wants to overly politicize things and that’s just an effect, it’s not really a cause, right? It’s causing other problems but it’s not like the cause. And so that’s why I really enjoy the book Technic and Magic because, you know, he also is trying to address these sort of more political and social problems but he’s saying, look, we actually have to change the reality systems that we’re existing within such that we can see other possibilities for action as available. Yes. And if we take care of the small things and the big things, we’ll take care of themselves. You know, self-organization is a powerful force. We’re not going to get outside of the fact that large systems of organization are going to happen. So the take that I’ve always taken to politics is that I think that every individual should take on the ethic of the anarchist. I don’t think we should try to be like an anarchist state but we should all take on the basic principles of voluntary cooperation, mutual aid, and direct action. We should all help each other and we should all act on the problems that we see relevant around us and not wait for some other higher power to do that for us. I think that that’s a really good thing to internalize on an individual level. If we all try to engage through open, honest, mutual cooperation, I think that’s a really good way to solve the larger problems. Take care of the small things, the big things will take care of themselves. And then the larger problems, which might be addressed by metaphysics, come from having discussions like the ones that you’re having through the series and through having something like the art collective religion that’s not a religion. Yes. Because that’s a space where we can go and practice and rehearse and get in touch with a participatory sense of these alternative worlds. Ultimately, I think the framing for that religion that’s not a religion should be that, oh, this is like an alien thing which has landed on earth. It’s getting you in touch with some other universe, some other dimension. You go and you participate in the system of that dimension and then when you leave, you take little bits of that dimension out into the world beyond you. Yeah, it’s a recovery theory. Tolkien actually proposed that in that anthropological model for fantasy literature. The idea is you go into the alternative world, you get identified with it. It’s like an anthropologist going to another culture. And the point is, when you go to that other world, you can then, you take off your cultural glasses. And then when you return back to this world, you see it anew. And I’ve been trying to get to the idea of seeing religions that way, that what you’re doing. But the point of it is there are these imaginal places where you go and then the point is not to stay there, not to take them literally. The point is to come back and see this world in a different way. So I recover this world as opposed to moving to the other world. I’m exploring this as a way of trying to get outside of the two worlds. The idea is to get to the other world, the two-world mythology. To reconfigure, so this idea of the trans world. It’s not an other world. It’s you go into this imaginal thing so that you come back into this one and recover it in a powerful way. That’s cool. I didn’t know that about Tolkien actually. I appreciate that. And I can definitely see that in Lord of the Rings because it is very much a critique of the industrialization of the time he’s living in. So actually one thing that I was just thinking today as I was brainstorming for this, which got brought to mind again as you were talking about the two-world thing, so I think that we are situated within a platonic view of the two worlds. So the one core distinction that I see between Aristotle and Plato is that Aristotle recognizes that potentiality is really important, but then Plato says potentiality is actually more real than the actual world itself. So Plato doesn’t distinguish. He says that the potential world is more pure because it’s not corrupted by the process of becoming. It has not only the same, but more of an ontological status than the world of everyday appearances. But I think that that is not correct. I think that we can sort of put that to the side. We can see that potentiality is a thing that genuinely is real, but it’s fundamentally different from that, which is actual. So when we go into this institution, whether it be a religion of times past, let’s say Christianity, for example, we can go to Christianity and by participating within that community, we discover the possibility of God, and we actualize that potential by bringing to light that potential through the community and how the community interacts. So it’s like we realize and bring to life God. We discover and life to the potential of God. Which is a transjective way. And again, it’s not that God’s in the other world. It’s that God is a way of, like I say, God is this way of going out and coming back and recovering our world. That’s what you’ve just described in a powerful way. So I was reading Being Called, which is an anthology. Oh yeah, Yaden’s book. I’ve got the same anthology. I haven’t started. Don’t say too much because I don’t want you to spoil it for me. Go ahead. I will spoil the intro. Okay. So Martin Seligman, he’s the founder of Positive Psychology. One of them, yeah. Yeah. So he goes off on this really weird tangent. I love it so much. Life is becoming so weird and we just got to buckle down and accept it. So this guy who’s a well-respected psychologist, really well-known, published so many articles, classes are taught throughout the world based on his teachings. And he’s like, yeah, I think that science fiction is a really useful place to get some insights about how the experience of being called by some higher power actually works. And so he refers to a story by, I think this story, you know, it’s blending in my brain right now. I have to follow up on it, but he talks about Isaac Asimov and about Arthur C. Clarke. And one of these authors has a story where there’s this supercomputer on a spaceship and the universe is cooling down. And so the people are like, okay, so how do we reverse entropy? How do we reverse this process so that we can live indefinitely? And the computer says, well, you know, there’s not enough information for a meaningful answer. And then so this goes on through a series of stages. The computer gets more complicated and it gets more information. The people keep asking it, okay, so how do we reverse this? And they’re like, you can’t make a meaningful answer. And then when all the people have died and we’re almost at like the heat death of the universe, the computer says, let there be light. And so the insight is that, you know, God isn’t the creator, but God actually comes at the end. Yeah, this is a White Head sort of had this idea in some ways too. Yeah, I think that’s like an interesting way of looking at things is we can identify a particular kind of potential and we can realize it. And this is a technique that’s used in narrative and in storytelling a lot. A core difference that emerges at the end of the book can recontextualize the entire thing such that it’s brought into a new light. I was just going to say, Uriero makes great use of that about how narrative actually gets our cognition, not just the content, but gets our cognition into the right form for tracking complex dynamical systems in the world precisely because of that huge temporal scope and the ability to reorganize at a multi-scalar level. Nice. So I feel like she’d be on board with the art collective religion. Yeah, right, right. That sounds cool. Okay, well, I think I got to go soon. So I think we should, this sounds like a good place to sort of wrap it up. Is there any final thoughts you want to express? Anything, do you feel any threads that need to be sort of quickly gathered together? Yeah, I just wanted to highlight a few other directions that I think psychedelics can help us with. So I think that everyone should have access to rites of passage, so transition into adulthood, something perhaps in middle age, maybe marriage and death. I think that that’s going to be necessary. And then I think that other people can do the more or less. I don’t think that most people will value from having frequent psychedelic experiences too often, but rites of passage is super important. And I also wanted to highlight some places that I think are fruitful to explore. So bodywork in psychedelics hasn’t really been explored yet. But I was at a conference in Prague, which was called Beyond Psychedelics. And I was talking to a juggler there. And he said that jugglers love LSD. And every time he’s learned a new really complicated trick, he’s learned it while he’s on acid. Oh, really? Right. And so it actually enhances your body awareness. It opens you up to more clear updates from your embodied signals. So I think bodywork is something that we should be integrating into psychedelic research, tai chi, acrobatics, yoga, that kind of stuff. And then also expressive arts like theater, art, things that involve perspective taking. Yeah, for sure. For sure. Yeah, those are the only things I didn’t get across that I wanted to get across. Otherwise, yeah, this is a great place to end. That was a lot of fun. And it helped me to put things in a little bit more clear language than I had before. Well, thank you. And I want to remind, see, you’ve all watched, you see what kind of work Daniel is capable of generating. So please, we’re definitely putting this link in. Consider the Indiegogo campaign. Consider supporting the work. This is the kind of work that’s going into the cognitive continuum. Oh, I also want to mention that, you know, I’m integrating this idea of utilizing artistic metaphorical expression with the book. That’s why I’m hiring artists to provide some illustrations. Exactly. Thank you for pointing that out, Daniel. Thank you for pointing that out. Yeah, so we’re enacting the insights. Yes, we are exemplifying and enacting them. We are not merely referring to them. And we’re trying to work out what that would actually instantiate like. How would you actually put this into practice? Not just talk about it, but trying to work it out in the creation of the book itself. So I’m going to end on that note. And like I said, I’m very happy with how the discussion went. And thank you very much, Daniel. Yeah, that was a lot of fun. Thank you.