https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=dpz_0UxJH04
Welcome back Greg, it’s good to see you again and why don’t you reintroduce yourself again to… Sure, it’s really good to chat with you again John, I always enjoy my time and so yeah I’m a professor of psychology, I’m interested in sort of a meta-psychology view and what things are going to look like in the future. And all of a sudden it feels like the future is now, in a way that you know is quite dramatic since when I last spoke, you know I guess the seeds of that were in the air but I certainly wasn’t very conscious of them but there are you know lots been going on. Right, yeah I think there’s Chris, Master Pietro and I and Guy Sandstock and I have been talking about you know the interaction between this as you said, we were talking just before we hit the record button, this is probably you know one of the maybe the biggest events since World War II and how that’s sort of intersecting and interacting with you know already some existing background crisis we have, the meeting crisis and other you know socio-political and economic disparity and we see all of these things sort of rolling together in a really complex fashion. Jordan Hall calls it our unfolding meta-crisis which I think is apropos. Now you reached out to me, which I appreciate by the way, thank you, and saying you have some thoughts on this and obviously you have some relevant expertise and we talked about that in our last meeting together where you sort of unpacked in a very perspicacious manner the spirituality implicit and also needed within a therapeutic context but maybe you can bring some of that wisdom to bear right now. Sure. Share some of your thoughts about you know what does this mean for us, how can we respond to it. Well yeah, I mean I am you know like everybody I think that’s paying attention, I’m experiencing a significant wave of recalibration in my schema of understanding you know. I certainly like Jordan, like yourself, you know have a meta-crisis sense of the globe in the sense that our relationship with the planet, the complexities of our arrangements, are the way we make sense out of the world, the way we cultivate or fail to cultivate virtue and character and wisdom and all of that complexity was making us very vulnerable to a wide variety of different you know we had stacked fragilities which is something I think that you know Jordan Hall would speak about and inter-systemic dependencies in ways that we don’t understand that make a massive flux you know in those macro level systems really vulnerable to lots of externalities and contingencies that then will create waves of change that are very very hard to anticipate and I think that’s what we’re seeing. I think that’s a very important description. And so for me and I think that you know for all of us then what will happen is that you’ll start to then get an enormous sense of anxiety and I think you and Jordan spoke to this some in the sense that that anxiety will then start to look for sense-making systems, potentially transfer into fear and be like and oh my god this is it you know and then try to attack certain kinds of things because there’s a general, unprestatable, imagined threat future that’s a ill-stated problem that’s hard to solve. Right. You know and then what to do with that you know and so one of the things that I’ve been and so one of the things that I would want folks to think some about is the first I talk about awareness, acceptance, and change. Sort of developmentally those are big three like if I do psychotherapy, what is the work of psychotherapy? They almost always fall under one of those three categories. Right. We want to. Can you say it again please Greg? Because that’s a- Awareness so we want to create a metacognitive understanding of thoughts, feelings, relationships, situations, history and piece them together with more richness and sophistication and complexity. Okay so you want that. That’s one of the things that we do and we all want that in some ways. Right and then as you gain awareness then there’s this dialectic of well acceptance like how do we be with say pain or unprestatable anxiety. You know distress of whatever might be present in our psyche. How do we maintain that from a number of different perspectives? And also how do we become through active change you know and maybe imaginal structures of what we could be ideals, virtues, notions, symbols right to become better, grow to become more adaptive. And so you know so when I find myself in this kind of situation I’ll get bumped you know by the wave of panic say you know I’ve definitely sort of my daughter two nights ago had a really bad migraine she gets them maybe you know every two or three times a year she’ll get- Something with my son. So we were there and she was crying you know and my wife and I were there and you know normally you’d have more psychological resources right you know. But I will tell you watching my daughter cry in this context had you know had added layers of meaning right right right right because you’re sort of like okay there’s a I think there’s going to be a wave of suffering I mean that’s not very profound but it it will be quite intense and when you feel it in your heart and you get can get a little overwhelmed so I had to take a moment find my center line you know be in contact with that recognize what that means for me and cultivate a sense of curiosity with it a capacity to tolerate it really enhance my loving compassion for us as humans my daughter myself right and then just situate myself as motivated to what valued outcomes they are given the situation that I’m in you know so those that’s a that’s the calm mo kind of psycho technology that I talked about before and you know I so I’ve had maybe two of those two moments since this thing started where it really felt you know because I’m pretty pressed with all of the things that are going on at least in the way my mind rolls them out but anyway I’ll stop there that’s a lot of no you don’t have to stop I thought what you were doing that was excellent yeah I reckon the application of the calm out calm MO and you are you know I think that’s very valuable and the way you just went through sort of very concretely what you did in the face of sort of meant mounting panic given of course the fact that we’re now all suffering cognitive overload and you know a sense of scarcity and a set you know Chris and I have been talking about how a lot of you know we’re going through an enforced period of you know reciprocal narrowing and domicide in which a lot of what we found to be home and the world is collapsing in and we’re feeling threatened even in our in our homes and and the meaning of everything is in question and so you know in that sense this is magnifying the enactment of important aspects of the mean crisis that’s exactly right that’s exactly right I mean I just happen to see someone psychology day a little bit that was trying to deconstruct some of the key elements of you diamonia you know in terms of purpose coherence of one’s life narrative and then it really hit on mattering and arguing that mattering was you know was and in this particular analysis mattering popped even more than coherence or purpose and yeah you know yeah you get this whole wave and you know those of us that are existentially inclined you know is always who always you know at some level of it confronted the existential absurdity and the inherent fragility of human life in general in our own human lives you know this is this is one of those moments at some level you know where you it is at least in confront some of that and and the struggle to matter and how to make sense out of mattering in these kinds of moments is I think what you know what what the human condition often finds itself as being about it’s uh uh uh the point about mattering is is so directly and personally relevant that’s why I was a bit of how to frame it um so amar uh who is basically my tech guru um he said you know one of the things because I’m sort of like how can I help and what can I do and uh we’ve been talking about doing this and he said well why don’t we release it now and we’ll just do your put your medication course online live stream free to everybody and I was I was surprised by how much having a concrete sense of being able to make a difference for other people and to matter to other people was actually also you know I don’t know what to say therapeutic for me uh that sense I could potentially help in some way I’m not trying to be presumptuous but you know people are saying it’s helping so I’m going on what people are saying oh absolutely absolutely right uh and that you know that comes again to this whole point of mattering of being right being not just how things are relevant to me but how I am relevant uh to outside of my over-centric framework and it’s interesting how much I mean I don’t like to use the cliche of the silver lining because it tends to be too dismissive but Peter Peter Lindbergh talks about this as being a kairos like a turning point because on one hand we’re getting this sort of you know domicile reciprocal nearing yes whole world view all of the all of the complacence obviousness hold on one second just one second sorry sorry I said a little bit uh no no and and yes go ahead yeah you know he Peter Lindbergh talked about we’re in a kairos because while we’re having all this reciprocal narrowing and domicile um as you just said you know mattering and you know directly connecting to other people is popping out as oh wait that that thing that I tended to background a lot is actually the foreground thing that you know I have to rely on that’s right that’s right and Chris and I were talking about you know that I actually cannot pause you there for just a second I think it’s so fundamentally actually in terms of realizing what’s relevant yes right I’m gonna put it in realizing what’s relevant your your capacity John to be in a position to offer the kind of psychotechnologies to individuals that they need at this moment to foster growth you know what in some ways that’s exactly what that’s the essence of what mattering is about is to socially influence people towards the the growth and meaning processes that they can enact you know and so it’s so it is something to be honored as exactly the kind of value and quite frankly if we think about what’s what the values that we need to embrace on the other side of this you know on the other side of the meaning crisis this that’s exactly that would be an exemplar right of the kind of things that need to matter so I just want to I just want to hold that and and honor that no thank you for saying that I think that’s right I think wisdom as both the the reliable ability to ameliorate you know the way in which you know these conditions can lead us into self-deception so that we have the discernment to see through you know the way all of this can cloud us of the ways and then the affording of the reliable affording of the these connections ultimately are constitutive of our humanity our sense of our humanity and our meaning yeah I think that wisdom is needed more yeah now more than ever and I don’t want to say that right I was mentioning to Chris the other day because we’re you know as you know Greg we’re doing this long project on dialectic and dialogos yes yes I was mentioning people forget that the platonic dialogues are often set in Athens the Peloponnesian war literally under siege and there has literally been a plague that has literally killed the leadership Pericles and Socrates is in that environment and yet he’s doing what he’s doing and so to to put him back into that context for us or at least as much as we can without being anachronistic I think is very apropos seeing the kinds of things that come to be central when as I was saying earlier you know the complacent obviousness of common sense or the sense of you know the unquestioned sense of technical mastery we have over things when both of those so-called certainties are revealed to be the paper tigers that they are all right then right the question of wisdom and meaning becomes central I understand you know that right now we have to give priority to survival in some important ways but in the end it I and I think you I want to turn it back over to you because you you sort of said something about this in the end it’s not just sort of health that’s the issue here right absolutely not yeah I mean it’s well-being I mean and and it’s well it’s virtuous well-being you know it’s you diamonic structures uh you know of of being uh that I think those of us that care about the meaning crisis would say that we have drifted from if we understand ourselves our relationships to ourselves to each other I we it in relationship to the planet and the harmony we we have not you know we’re cashing bad checks you know right and and those externalities are building uh and we’ve lost a bit of our way in relation uh and and that is the great hope that I have for the this virus is that in many ways it’s um and I want to be clear I say this as somebody you know I’m a full professor with tenure and there are a lot of people that are have a lot more vulnerabilities than I do so I don’t I don’t want to say this glibly because I’m somewhat safe although I have my children I have my parents I have lots of people that are actually potentially going to be vulnerable here but I really do think that what we need is some leadership that just holds the suffering and the pain of this and at the same time helps without being glib or trite recognize that there’s opportunities and affordances for wisdom in this thing yeah deep deep recalibrations I mean this is probably going to be the best year ever for the planet in terms of over the last you know within the last 10 15 20 years in terms of carbon footprint and things like that as the GDP comes down uh there’s a lot of things that aren’t being burned and damaged and happening and there’s an enormous opportunity for us to then potentially shift uh like I’ve been talking about zoom topia you know it’s like hey you know I’ve had more great conversations on zoom over the last two weeks than I’ve had you know and that there’s no carbon footprint there there’s lots of good wonderful connection uh we thought we formed certain kinds of communities um seeking those kinds of they feel healthy um so I’m I’m thinking about kind of the processes by which we hold and attend to uh the kinds of events that I you know had with my daughter and things like that and come together and know that family’s going to be stressed and and at the same time we need leadership we need guidance we need we need hope we need movement uh towards valued states of being and I really do believe there are in fact my old mentor and still good friend sociologist Joe McCloskey I just put up on my psychology today blog you know the pandemic silver lining playbook and he narrated after identifying the yeah after identifying the dangers and the pain there really is a lot of potential opportunity here for growth in an adaptive direction so let’s talk about that because I think that was very well said what you just uh what you just said so there’s definitely that opportunity uh there’s also a lot of threat you mentioned that earlier there’s a lot of threat in which people could try and find you know the the lightning rod to discharge their fear if they could try to transform their fear into anger so that they can feel that they have a narrative that gives them some action to perform these are all real dangers you would know that better than I in fact I’m sure you see that kind of transference and displacement going on when in therapeutic context happened it’s happened in a clinic room here and there so you know what I’m referring to um I think there’s also um a danger of nostalgia which is let’s get back to normal as soon as we can um and I think that’s and I knew this came out in the discussion I had with Jordan Hall I think that’s a grave mistake I think thinking that this is going to be the only pandemic that we’re going to face in the next 10 years um is I I think that I find that highly improbable I think all the factors that made this happen are still in place and are going to ramp up once again if we don’t make significant systemic changes um and we won’t have the you know the the economic leverage uh to do what we’re doing right now um multiple times and we’re going to wear things down and so I think there’s a danger of nostalgia which is let’s get back to normal and let’s just pretend you know that’s never going to ever happen again I think that’s a threat that we have to take very seriously uh because nostalgia’s can be uh very sort of welcoming in in their uh EarthSat’s homecoming that they sort of give you right and then the other fear I have is a fear of the kind of utopia in which people use this as an excuse for claiming justification for their particular ideological vision sure right because you can see that happening too you can see people saying aha you know I told you and you know and so those strike me as both uh very significant dangers what are your thoughts about that oh absolutely I mean you know the the uh I mean first off uh I I encourage anybody to take a they just put it up over on rebel wisdom Daniel Smokdenberger’s sort of risk assessment analysis uh from two days ago or whatever uh and he’s a you know in my opinion a very very clear systemic thinker very much uh and so if you if you want to wonder about whether or not the systemic interdependencies and certainly Jordan Hall does this also very well the systemic interdependencies that we have stacked as a system of vulnerability uh listen to that and and whether it’s a pandemic or whether it’s a financial crisis or whether it’s a release CRISPR virus you know biotech technology that somebody builds or whether it’s a particular type of uh weapon deployment we there’s the vulnerabilities that we have in relationship to our systems uh and their and their global interdependencies that are poorly understood yet known to be intertwined in a particularly vulnerable and potentially highly fragile way is why those of us that think big about these issues know that the the system is fragile you know if there’s a there’s a profound fragility uh that resides in relationship to our current system so those people that want nostalgia you know my my point was be very aware that you we were living on borrowed time you know I mean we were living on borrowed time we were not in a healthy we were addicted to certain kinds of things yeah yeah and and what I say you know and I try not to say this politically but I I my assessment you know is we elect president Trump for a number of different reasons but when people say that he’s authentic one of the things that they mean about him is that he represents a particular type of archetype um and I believe he represents a particular type of archetype that we’ve been living off of you know a shallow consumeristic kind of narcissistic me first egotistical frame of reference that basically he was like that is what we are and I somebody vote uh democratic I’m also saying I am Trump you know and and we kind of have to recognize that there so when I if I were here people say we just got to go back the good times were good in certain ways but we were building a nested set of fragilities that were very very dangerous we were not anti-fragile integrated coherent you know and and our inability to respond to this is is just diagnostic of that and there’s other systems that are going to be coming and hitting this thing and we can only take so many we’ll see how this one happens you know we’ll see if this one works for us so I think that we need leadership that says this is a at the I hope this will be a somewhat painful but not catastrophic wake-up call and that better be a wake-up call to say that we were addicted to things that are dangerous to be addicted to meaning that we have gotten into duke a parasite site mind structures that have narrowed our field of understanding and we need to use this to wake it up so so uh and at the same time the world is changing so much that anybody has an ideology that thinks they know what the future is right that they know what the answers are in terms of what 2030 2040 should look like there’s great ancient wisdom traditions and a lot of intelligent thought about the kind of collective intelligences that we need to bring to bear but those things are going to emerge and they’re going to have to grow from the ground and I don’t think anybody says that they have a prescribed ideology that has it all well whatever right wow very eloquently said greg that was really wonderful I wanted to uh and thank you for uh alluding to some of uh my work and what you were saying there I appreciate it indeed I was um so what you said uh and I like the way you you you you pointed how there’s a common thing and and both the utopianism and the nostalgia are getting it wrong which is sort of uh the emergent complexity and how much uh how much ignorance we have in the face of it um I think that’s really really very well said I wanted to bring up one point uh that Johannes Anita Hauser talks about um and um it’s uh he and uh Guy Sendstock have had some I’ve had one with Johannes and then uh Johannes and Guy and I had one um he brings a sort of a heideggerian critique uh okay on this and one of the things he’s been talking about recently and and it converges with stuff Chris and I are working on is uh how how what’s happening right now has what it’s thrown us back onto the sort of the god of our world which is our subjectivity right and you you alluded to that with our narcissism right and so right we’re and we’re being sort of forced now and this is almost like you know a kirk of guardian moment we we sort of well I am I’m self-made and it’s all you know and so you have that that you know the intense authority of our of our subjectivity and now we’re actually being forced to it and the point is we finding that what is supposed to be the om phallus of the world I am the center of my subjectivity in the cartesian cogito and all that right and we’re finding wow this is actually really shallow this doesn’t have any of the depth or resources from which I can give birth to the wisdom and the growth I need and we need put it even better in order to respond appropriately to this crisis and I think that’s I think that’s a very important point uh that you know that this challenges uh that whole orientation which I think you rightly point out trump exemplifies as an archetype that shallow all-consuming self-referential subjectivity yes I mean and and that’s why we’re that’s why we’re psychically fragile yes you know uh and and and so to to then say you know I matter because I have this degree from you know from some ivy league and I matter because I’ve climbed the barcode matter and I matter because I have a 4 000 square foot house and I matter and now all of a sudden you see this wave of economic collapse in a particular way right and then you’re like wait a minute I do I do all these toys make me matter which of course everybody on their deathbed realizes not all the toys you’ve been colluminated that makes you matter anyway right it’s the it’s the positive wise impact that you’ve had in the world that ultimately allows the subjectivity to reflect on itself with some degree of existential stability and now what I think is happening given our culture and its corruptions uh is is yeah but this is going to be an existential crisis for a lot of people because that collapse onto subjectivity is going to realize a shallowness and this is what the work of the you know through the coronavirus suffering and the post coronavirus reality if this is a wake-up call and actually it’s sort of well very well positioned to do it because we’re going to be alone with ourselves right um with lots of time on our hands and and a lot of fiddling about what matters um and so one of the hopes is that this can knock a system uh to waken to the the existential uh realities that I believe the psychic soul into spirit really requires uh to to have uh to have integrity coherence purpose and mattering so I mean that was well said and and then you you of course and I think you did it very thoughtfully as you always do you invoke some you know terms laden with a spiritual and religious heritage spirit you know uh and soul um and of course there’s a difference between you know uh you know when Descartes thought that he could capture uh what had previously been meant by the word soul with with that moment of self-consciousness I think that was a really pivotal pivotal that I uh maybe pittable uh shift in our cultural cognitive grammar uh but this brings me to the point uh um that I wanted to say more explicitly a lot of people are facing this kind of crisis let me let me let’s do a bit of history so you mentioned world war two right and then right after it of course is world war two part two which is the cold war right and what you see in America that’s people think of it you know that it’s been this steady decline in for example church attendance and religious affiliation but you see after world war two you see this huge spike right in religious attendance affiliation okay right and so what I mean is people have tended and and that’s just one example of a long-standing pattern that when people face these kinds of civilization worldview to domicide things they typically have been able to turn to a religious framework to give them something to take them out of their subjectivity give them some access to wisdom literature and you know where I’m going with this of course which people know you know we don’t have that right anymore and pretending you can’t just you trying to take on a religion you currently don’t have is like trying to say you have a friend that’s not currently your friend it just doesn’t work right it just doesn’t take sure yep nope so there’s a sense in which um you know large segments of our population are facing this not only do they have the shallowness of consumerist subjectivity and the fragmentation and the fragilities of the meaning crisis attended upon all of that is of course they don’t have access to religious and wisdom traditions that can put them in touch with the resources they need in order to do the waking up that you’re talking about it’s one thing you know to sort of impasse in the nine dot problem it’s also another thing knowing how to move out of and you know create a more encompassing framing that allows you to get unstuck um brilliant there was this guy that put out this 50 lecture series like to become aware of this process and how we might awaken from it i don’t know you should check it out it’s really good um you know so for me i you know you and i have been wrestling in parallel with very similar kinds of dynamics so you know in terms of my history i’m raised uh as you know sort of in the new atheist tradition of dawkins um and over the course of my maturity i guess if you want to use that term not in a pejorative way but just certainly in my own thinking especially as a psychotherapist and then building a system of understanding uh that set the stage for me to transcend what you know i came to see ken wilbur calls it the the naturalistic scientific view is sort of a materialistic flatland a reductive flatland i’ve had encounters with people coming back from you know the first year of college oh i realized that i’m just a bunch of chemicals right it’s like you know that kind of um and i had a bit of that you know and then i’ve realized over the period of my own evolution and the system that i built how unbelievably horribly misguided that is it is profoundly misguided um and there is an opportunity to develop to an awakening view um so so i’ll just go back and then we can fill this in a number i i think there is a way to develop a religion that’s not a supernatural religion of course of course to put to put it in the terms that you and jordan hall have been dialoguing a lot there there really there really is uh uh and i believe that part of the success of humanity as we’ve transitioned over these next three decades is discovering precisely that is discovering precisely how to make sense out of that claim with coherence and conciliance and uh and a degree of sanity um because listen obviously this naturalistic scientific frame that we are handed uh that you know maybe aristotle sort of intuited but he didn’t have access to you know the dualistic certainly a naive concrete dualistic world for many of us is well we’re not going back there you know um but at the same time the idea so when i use the word soul i’m actually using it in a pretty close to aristotle in sense uh the old term as you know is psyche and it’s really the form of your life at a bio-vegetative animal sensory motor and human rational way right and and and i want my soul to approach uh to be a participant in eudaimonic ways of being you know maximizing well-being and that point uh that that sort of absolute high point is trying to that’s where my spirit i would say would reach to so what is the best that i can be you know in relation so if for example if you if you are you’re working really hard you’re bringing your psycho technologies of meditation and buddhist wisdom and education and pedagogy to a wide variety of different people that are then can utilize that for their own growth well that’s a spiritual endeavor as far as i’m concerned right and that’s that simply means that i value you i see that as virtuous i look up to it i see it as something that you know uh and that if we all did uh you know uh i think jordan peterson gets this right when he says you don’t have to believe necessarily in a heaven and a hell in any uh supernatural sense you just need to go to the gulags or go to the auschwitz right and and come to my family when on a good day and the difference between gulag you know my jewish family is like there’s a big difference uh you know and mattering uh to have a loving family where people are respected and held as opposed to something horrifying so those are very that’s what matters uh and that’s what grounds a value system and if you try to cultivate your life to live to that and aspire to what it could be in an imaginal sense man you know that’s realizing what’s relevant and uh gives us something to to live for that was very well said you you’re you’re sorry this isn’t supposed to be a left-handed compliment you’re extremely eloquent today i’ve got lots of zoom practice these days really really flowing really well uh yeah i like the way you sort of uh you know that that maybe the central task coming out of this is to discover in a in a practicable way i don’t say practical anyway anymore because i do i reserve that for what it now denotes right i want to talk about you know a way that can be put into practice what this religion that’s not a religion is going to look like and help um i i i think that getting into these kinds of discussions so we can marshal the distributed cognition so that we can help conduce it into existence because it’s already emerging i think in an important way um i i do see that as one of the central tasks facing us right now and i’m hoping that as this community this dialogical dialectical community forms that we will get increasingly better at translating a lot of this theory into lives into lives and relationships and you’re you’re you i think you will have a particularly important role to play in that precisely because i mean you already have this overarching you know the tree of knowledge and you’re doing all this work on trying to get all these various levels uh you know uh integrated in um i’ll use your your adjective in an Aristotelian fashion which i think is a powerful uh model to follow but i think i mean your particular expertise i mean there’s a sense in which you know the cognitive um the existential um the ontological having to do with your worldview right and the aspirational you know all come into the nexus of the therapeutic situation and you’ve had to you know so i see spirituality is having to be what you know what it activates all the kinds of knowing and activates them across the cognitive the existential sure ontological right and i know that you see you see something very analogous to this in your work uh and and i’m not i’m not trying to you know background the theory you’re doing but what i’m saying is your expertise also because like i said the therapeutic context is you know in some ways um the closest we have right now uh to the Socratic encounter now i don’t think it’s the same and i think you would agree with me on that and you know one of the work that i’m trying to some of the work i’m trying to do with you and especially with Chris and Peter and Guy and Jordan is yeah but how do we take that when you know here’s circling out here and here’s here and then how do we get back to what Socrates was doing with those things which is also the Philosophia the Cultivation of Wisdom um so i think you have an important role to say to that well i mean i thank you uh and yes i mean i there i would uh you know i’ve been doing therapy for what 25 years or so it is a crucible you know it really is it’s a crucible of encountering i mean people you come into therapy because of some soul spirit concern and in the generic you know my life’s either not going very well or i’m having an existential collapse crisis i can’t make sense you know out of what i am and what i’m doing and i’m in a panic mode or i’m in a depressive shutdown mode or you know that’s that’s that’s what it’s for right um but what i’ve actually it’s interesting that you say that because it’s also the case that i’m actually in this context and maybe over the last two years or so i’m really frustrated with what i see as the institutional barriers that are built up around the psychotherapy world okay and meaning like you know it’s like uh so much so that i mean i need to have it but it’s like i want to give up my license and just go and talk to people about like the secrets that we built in the therapy room and then and then we carve them out as this sort of confessional and then we have all of this stuff that oh and and then we do this horrible thing kind of like the psychopharmacology although they do it in different ways like oh well now you have a certain negative level of negative affect well you go see an expert they’ll help you figure that out right we do not want to farm out all of the psycho technological wisdom to to secret isolated confidential rooms with professionals that’s not what we want to do you know we want to take that knowledge and we want to insert that knowledge as clearly and applicably to to to the wisdom of the dialogue in real indigenous human exchanges i mean that’s what we really want to do right so i want to connect with you guys and and connect to bring all of this stuff out of the therapy of course with specific you know psychological health related issues in particular of course we need a professional context but we want to generalize that stuff out yes yes and we want to generalize it too because of course as you know as much as we can personally reflect it is the vast majority of our health let’s face it is embedded in the society in which we live yes yes right so we need to create a society that is conducive to wisdom and psychological flourishing that’s that’s the responsibility and i actually i don’t know that psychology especially not with its focus on individual psychotherapy i don’t know there’s been that great in in helping right you know in society i think it cloisters a lot of stuff away i think it slices a professional knowledge that shouldn’t be professional i think it should be and and so i we have to get out there and and hand the psycho technologies and embed them in the communities and the relationships that we live in right this is socrates in the agora right socrates is walking into the market right right and we need philosophy we need pedagogy we need psychology all to come together as part of society not as a siloed separate isolated things but as real world around the day or dinner table realities that are part of and parcel to the human experience yeah i agree i think that’s very well said i think that’s very well said so that brings me again to um what do you think needs to change then institutionally because you and you sort of invoked i believe like an institutional prison in some ways an institutional prison or a cloystering or a warehousing like a lot of these images came to my mind when when you you were speaking so passionately well i didn’t have the language before i sort of entered into the you know the meta modern community which i know that you know and learn things like the blue church from jordan hall and that kind of stuff and i sort of feel trapped in that in retrospect i feel trapped in the blue church of psychology both inside the academy inside it’s psychotherapy and i actually see it now as they try to follow i mean you should i think they’re opening up of course because they have to but some people as they try to follow the rules of confidentiality and it’s state licensure and because everyone now is you’re trying to do therapy and now all of a sudden you’re doing everything telehealth and everyone disperses to their homes and what is okay and i get it it’s complicated but it’s just so out of date it’s just so archaic and just so misguided it’s just like the whole blue church narrative writ large so in the sense that the institutional ways of thinking inside let’s say inside the academy okay so inside the academy i kept bumping up against classic empiricists you know with the theory is like sort of like well show me the data it’s like well okay let’s have a conversation how’s that for data you know it’s like no there’s and then the postmodern so so what do i what do i hope i hope that we let the lesson that we learned from this is that we were in a vulnerable spot okay i hope that the people can see that what we need to transition from uh is what i would call late stage capitalism so so capitalism did a great thing in turning uh in many ways i believe that i’m somewhat of a human exceptionalist i believe you know humans are exceptional and confer value to them although all sentient beings weren’t that but humans are special and we did a lot of good things and pulling all the resources from many of the resources from the earth and doing stuff like this look at my house it’s great right um but at the same time you know and i know and everybody thinks about this issue knows that people around seven and a half billion people can’t live like you and i have become accustomed to living and are striving and so many people are striving to live from a capitalistic materialistic way they just you can’t put that kind of pressure on the planet right um and and what does that mean and and we don’t need to okay so so we need to change what we’re valuing from the the capitalist materialistic greed culture which we have justified for a whole host of different reasons some of which natural science in its self-centered referential control system has legitimized in an unjustified way because we’re a lot more communal than western science would suggest we need to shift so what i i talk about sort of okay mass capital took care of the more or less started to take care of the first levels of maslow but the back levels of maslow need serious attention and we need to come together as serious communities to cultivate our sense of relational value in the relational world to cultivate our embrace of wisdom traditions that enable self-actualization transcendence whatever you want to call it but growth we need to come together and embrace our existential condition and and have conversations like this i mean think about this this is we get together it didn’t cost us anything you know other than a zoom thing it cost us no carbon footprint you know we get to connect we get to learn we get to share you know it’s what socrates wanted i mean he’s wandering around think about what he had to deal with right i’m in a leather chair bitching about wow god this is a really tough time and it’s like well actually i got a stock fridge a lovely wife blah blah blah everything’s fine i’m like i’m biting my nails can i cope it’s like well actually things could be worse so i have a couple things to say to that one is you know people will they historically they will take a hit to their standard of living if they get some some sense that they’re going to get an increase in meaning in life people will reliably do that and i’m wondering if the crisis the virus crisis makes that now apparent to people apparent to people look you’re actually taking significant hammering and again like you i do not want to be dismissive of people that are going through significant economic hardship right now that’s a real thing it’s a real thing and i want to acknowledge it but um right just to note that you know the realization i suppose that outside of impoverishing people which we have to avoid right absolutely i was kind of impoverishing people we can actually do with so much less if we right if that actually creates a space drives us into making more meaning which is what’s happening right now right and socrates used to wander into the marketplace and say look at all the things i don’t need um as a way of trying to exemplify that and of course then diogenes took it much much further so i think that’s a that’s exactly right in in the sense that um the you know there’s an opportunity here to realize in the deep sense of the word that you know how that how much we can reduce the pursuit of the lower levels of maslow’s hierarchy and how we can transfer a lot of that effort into the higher levels i think this is a real opportunity we have right now of realizing that’s exactly well that’s that’s a wonderful summary of what i think are the silver is the silver lining in this uh if they’re you know and and and that’s what i have actually said you know again not minimizing what people have to go through but the fact of the matter is it’s actually very well placed you know this virus is in many ways ironically very well placed to potentially help us to wake up to how to reevaluate our value system and start the processes by which we can live lives in ways that are much more sustainable and harmonious with mother earth and things like that yeah i like the the idea of that it’s it’s almost like a rock bottom realization that can wake somebody up out of addiction we’ve yes yes uh jordan actually jordan hall you know offered that uh in one of his frames in one of the things that i saw and that’s exactly you know we get addicted to our materialistic uh standards of living and that’s what and and then we would be afraid of change and indeed now change is coming and there’s a lot of reasons that some of us are you know uh hell i’m in pretty good spent and i’m feeling it and i think you’re feeling it too in the level of stress at times right um and that’s inevitable that’s part of what change is if we can keep the heads about us if we can build the kinds of clarity of the valued outcomes that we have through this thing on on the other side of this thing uh i really do believe that you know five years from now 10 years from now you look back and it’s like actually wow we are we’re much more coherent we’re much more resilient we’re much more on a sustainable path we learned a lot from that um and actually that we’re we’re better off for it yeah that’s so part of it has to do with getting the three p’s back together uh that you pointed to as being separated from each other you know reintegrating the psychotherapy with the pedagogy with the philia sofia i mean we those have to come back uh together again in a really powerful way if we’re going to make a fundamental transformation in what we care about and how we care about it that’s exactly right in fact that’s that’s really what the passion of the unified framework and tree theory of knowledge thing that i built is about is is although my first focus was on psychotherapy you know that’s what i encountered the spiritual encounter of the psychotherapy room and then wanted to bring the best of what i could to from all the various perspectives and i sort of backed into well how do you put all these things together and then i woke up to the fragmentation of knowledge problem you know which you know wake up to in terms of you know capital c s cognitive science right it’s just there’s a real problem of our language systems not talking to each other they’re siloed they have anchor points and but they’re really at a macro level they’re really basically pre-paradigmatic in the way they relate to each other they fragment us in a profound way fragment the crap out of us you know uh and they certainly they fragment you and i in the academy you know uh and and and then they can’t translate into society obviously if you and i have trouble as academics talking to each other jeez how the hell do you get that out into and the dinner table kinds of stuff so if we can yoke if we can build frameworks realize relevant information necessary to pull together you know uh love of philosophy pedagogy the psychological knowledge that we learn for the 21st century then we can unify our knowledge systems in particular way build practices that are engaging in that and that’s that’s an integrated coherent society there’ll be a lot more resilience these kinds of things yeah i think that’s very well said very well said we only have a couple minutes left this has been fantastic like really you’ve been on fire today so thank you for that and and thank you for agreeing to come here and talk with me i really appreciate it and like i said i see you your your particular knowledge and wisdom have any important role to play in all of this i just wanted to give you uh you know in the last couple minutes we have an opportunity to any sort of summative uh converging thoughts you want to uh express before we uh we come to close i i think the the main thing i would say is i i really do believe that we have sort of a a we i it opportunity uh meaning how are we going to relate to it as nature the virus our institutions how are we going to relate to ourselves uh how are we how are we going to come together i think the the virus is scary uh there’s a lot of stacked uh worries we’re probably in some for some dark clouds um but there really is an opportunity here uh there’s a really opportunity to connect uh to learn how to cope together to confront some existential realities and to thrive on the other side of it as a psychotherapist i’ve seen that many times i think there’s an opportunity for a collective uh trauma but a collective post my my mentor master degree laurence galloom was all about post-traumatic growth right and and how we grow after trauma so i’ll hope for us uh to uh take this blow come together uh reconstruct an identity and foster post-traumatic growth on the other side of it great thank you so much greg so thanks for having me here i really appreciate the opportunity