https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=xJbN4WORilA
On the. Skip program I will. How will I have access to it? I don’t use Skype very much. Yeah, so it’s it’s pretty neat. It’ll just show up in our chat box and you can just download it directly. OK. Right, right, and it should come out in nice quality. We’re lagging a little bit here. Let me just check. Well, yeah, I’m on my fastest Internet, so I’ll keep that going. OK. OK, so I just want to say a few logistic things and then we can start. So first of all, I watched our first conversation again and I was. I can’t believe how great it was. I actually learned more. I think watching it a second time than being there in the first time. Yeah, it’s really neat and. By chance, we did talk a lot about religion stuff in the first chat, so hopefully we can get a really. I guess in more detail this time around, sure. Also, I just want to kind of affirm. I guess my value proposition of what I’m trying to offer here. I see a lot of engineers. I don’t know what kind like cognition engineers. I don’t know if that’s a word that makes sense for you, but what I’m trying to do is kind of. Like expose not exposed, but like to show the diagram from from within which all of this like sensemaking and engineering stuff is happening. So so that’s why I’m asking kind of like simple questions to try and get simple. I’m trying to make a nice diagram of what’s happening, right? And I’ve also prepared something. Which I’m calling a Socratic prayer. OK, OK, great. So yeah, I yeah, I hope you like this. So this is it’s prayer, but it’s it’s totally secular. You know this is just something it’s an experiment we can do right now and maybe it’ll help diet. The dialectic that’s happening, right? So I’ll just read what I wrote. OK. In dialectic, the conversation sometimes leads itself. We hope that this will happen and we can be in a properly submissive and receptive mood. We recognize that what we seek is not directly within our grasp, for if it were, we would already have it. By attempting to grasp it, we gain the chance of receiving it. By being sincere and eager in our efforts, we will surely succeed in time. Amen. Amen. I like that. That’s wonderful. Excellent, I’m glad you liked it. And of course, feel free to use that in any way you’d like to in the future. OK, great. Thank you. So where to begin? Is there anything you want to begin with? No, I’m open to just you initiating things and asking questions as you see fit. OK, excellent. So religion, that’s then the the first thing the topic of the day. Last time we talked about, and you mentioned how there are three big M’s. There’s the metaphysics, the mythos and the meta psychotechnology. Right, yeah. So I guess my first question is, what would, how would a wisdom culture be different from that if it is? How would a wisdom culture be different from that? A wisdom culture would have explicitly developed a psycho, a meta psychotechnology and a homing metaphysics for it and entered into a significant, reconstructive but respectful dialogue with the existing cultural mythos to try and integrate with that mythos mythos. So I guess I’m just going to start with that. So, you know, classic example of this is neoplatonism that really tries to develop the meta psychotechnology of dialectic then works out a metaphysics around the central notion of intelligibility as our main marker of realness. And then that metaphysics is consciously and deliberately integrated with the mythos and the metaphysics of the real world. And then it gets integrated with the mythos of the late antiquity, pagan mythos, and then eventually gets taken up and it gets integrated with Christian mythos. So there’s those two strands of pagan and a Christian version, the neoplatonism later gets taken up into Sufism as well, into Islam. And what you see is a reworking of that mythos and a sort of a reverse reworking of new practices, ritual practices, spiritual exercises to try and enact that integration of the metaphysics, the meta psychotechnology and the mythos. You can see that history actually really unfolding. And a lot of people a lot of distributed cognition putting a lot of work into it, both within individuals who are writing like these long, you know, repeated treatises and dialogues and write with other people. And then they’re also in dialogue. And then there’s a cross generation. So this is a very, very comprehensive lens on long term, long standing project, which is, I think, why verse Lewis and his work basically said that neoplatonism is sort of the mystical spirituality of the West, because that all that work was really dedicated to weaving those three together, explicating it, integrating it with rational practices of overcoming self deception, and, and enhancing meaningful connectedness enhancing religio, because that’s ultimately I think what it’s all about overcoming self deception, and enhancing religio. And they were wise enough to realize that religio is bound up with mythos with enacted imaginal pictures and propositions and practices. Okay, and am I right to say religio is connectedness? Or is it something more than that? Well, I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s something it’s, it’s just that, but it’s really, really important. I mean, religio is what results from successful relevance realization, permeating through all the four kinds of knowing. So you get the you zero in on the most relevant affordances and within participatory knowing, you zero in on the most relevant perspectives within perspectival knowing, and get the best situational awareness, and then you zero in on the best set of skills to learn or to apply or to transfer within procedural knowing and then you zero in on the best set of inferences to make on the basis of your propositional knowing. And so religio does all of that. So that you’re, you’re going to have to be more connected to yourself, so that you’re much more optimally gripping of yourself, like really well connected to yourself, to other people, and to the world, because though that’s, that sense of connectedness through all of those tiers of kinds of knowing, is what primarily contributes to people’s sense of meaning in life. And also, that affords them, the vertical affords them getting the two things that I think human beings most often seek the meta drives that are pursued by the meta psychotechnology, which is, you know, an inner optimization, a reduction of inner conflict of self deception, an optimization of functionality, and then, you know, a connectedness to other people in the world. So you get that reciprocal opening that’s so important, because connectedness to what’s real, and having that connectedness with as much peace of mind meant positively, not just negatively, I think is is optimal for human being. That’s why they enjoy the flow state so much. Okay. Would you say that religio is the experience of effective meta psychotechnology? Or am I getting that wrong? I think I think that’s to put it the wrong way around. I think we have religio regard, I think religio is indispensable, unavoidable, human beings have to do have some degree of religio, or that means they wouldn’t be doing relevance realization, and then they’re not cognitively. I think what you get when you have a successful meta psychotechnology that is activating, accessing, accelerating and accentuating your religio, that’s when you get a sense of sacredness. So that’s what that’s what I would say that is a sense of sacredness. Yeah, sacred sacredness was a big topic last time for us that I could definitely go more into. Yeah. Would you say that sacred? I mean, it seems sacredness would is an essential aspect of religion. Would that also be true for a wisdom culture? I think so. I think wisdom cultures, insofar as they are pursuing that which, you know, sacredness has a primary function, it’s sort of the highest level version of relevance realization we do, it’s really optimizing and playing with it, serious play with it. And insofar as sacredness gives us that sense of peace, that sort of sense of home, but also that sense of connecting and opening up to a reality beyond our egocentric bias, right? So it has to, it has to both give us a sense of home, which is, you know, most powerful kind of sort of assimilation machinery we need, and a sense of the numinous, the sense of going through transformation, accommodation to reality that is beyond us that puts demands on us, that also affords growth, because it’s not just chaotic. I think insofar as the sacredness puts us into those situations for its own for their own sake. So sacredness is to basically seriously play within the being mode, with all of this machinery for a developmental purpose, you’re not trying to get any specific goal. I mean, people also have specific goals when they pray to the gods or things like that. But what’s across the board is what people are doing is very analogous to what they’re doing with music. They’re playing with sound and salience in order to really improve their sense of religio and celebrate it, just celebrate it. Because music is participatory, it’s perspectival, it’s procedural, right? It’s got all this stuff, and you’re just celebrating it and, right, and enjoying it. Enjoyment doesn’t mean just pleasure, it means that sense of being, you know, at one with yourself and at one with the world, but not statically, but dynamically. That’s why we that’s why Nietzsche said life without music would be a mistake. So music is my primary metaphor for sacredness. And that’s why music has been so deeply and all the way back to the upper Paleolithic transition has been associated with sacredness, sacred ceremony, sacred drama, sacred ritual. It seems to me that, you know, it’s hard using a lot of these terms, I don’t, there’s lacking a lot of clarity in English, at least, but religion is that it seems to me like religion is the manifestation and it’s like the building that has been built from the natural evolution of religio, like how religio happened within individuals and between groups, eventually it kind of stasifies, is that a word? It becomes static into a religion. Is that right? I think it I mean, that’s what many people like Winkleman and especially Matt Rossano and David Lewis Williams, which say with about shamanism. It evolves that way. I mean, religion and this is religion is bound up. And it’s bound up and it binds together our biological aspects, but it’s but also our cultural aspects. And notice the association between these three words, cult, culture and culture, right? Those are all bound up together. And so I think when human beings became cultural beings, and when they had to make sense out of their make sense with their capacity for self awareness, and in their need to justify their behavior to others and accept the justification of their behaviors from others. So when we get into meaning, and sort of the beginnings of normativity, that’s when you get culture. And I think that’s when religio moves towards becoming something like a religion, we start to create ways of trying to afford people being able to understand and follow the normativity of the meaning that we’re making. And so that we can have a common ground by which we can evaluate judge and each other and reflect on each other’s behavior, each other’s commitments. I mean, we’re the only animals that have to do that, right? I had a really extra conversation with Greg on reeks about this, the reason for reason. And does Berber and mercy in their book on the enigma reason is how, how much we are the only creatures that have to justify and argue about our actions, no other features have to do this at all. And that’s why we have such and it’s because of the mix of logos where that’s that, that distributed cognition, that spoken language, and that reflective self awareness, those are all bound up together. And religion is really about managing that is what Clifford Giltz called a meta meaning system. It’s about managing all of that machinery. So all of our individual meaning projects have a home have something they sit within that nurtures them, but also pushes them to grow and develop. Now that’s of course, we’re talking about religion in its ideal case. Right, we have we have to completely acknowledge that we have to have a balanced about this, right? We have to acknowledge all the ways in which religion could go wrong and has hurt and harmed people. I’ve been harmed by religion myself personally. But we shouldn’t do and this is one of the things I sort of critical of some of the new atheists about this. We shouldn’t make this criticism specific to religion, all of our institutions have been source of great, you know, terror and trauma. The state, of course, has been that the market has been that right in any any of these huge systems by which distributed cognition is constituted and regulated. Can is tremendously powerful for affording people meaning in life and the cultivation of wisdom, but also for stupefying them, except accelerating their foolishness and exploiting them therein. So I’m so when we’re talking about this, I’m talking about, you know, religion in an ideal case, like I would be talking about science in an ideal case, science is also, you know, science and technology are bound together, and they also have done horrific, dangerous things. But so we have to play fair, and honestly about this, but this phenomena, and this this argument I do take seriously is phenomena of the cultural enhancement of religio. That’s what I think is at the core of religion. I think this is in endemic and constitutive of our ability to become a person, the cultivation of personhood, because a person is someone who lives within a community of distributed cognition, shared meaning making, and shared structures of argumentation and justification. I mean, that’s what a person is. It’s a creature that has moral and epistemic status for us. So just before the personhood, my brain is fuzzy trying to get you up. Religio, right? Religion as like the facilitator or… Yeah, yes. Yes, facilitator and home. And enhancer. So if it’s, yeah, so yeah, I like that facilitator. But it’s cultural. What does culture mean? We have a shared meaning making system that is not just in our head, it’s enacted, it’s all the four kinds of knowledge that coordinates distributed cognition and in the instance of religion, it coordinates distributed cognition. So it’s a system that coordinates the distribution of knowledge and in the instance of religion, it coordinates distributed cognition for the sake of enhancing all of that meaning making machinery that is constitutive of making human beings, making human beings into persons. To be a person is to be somebody who is enmeshed in normative systems. Okay, yeah, that makes sense. I’m getting jumbled in my head because to me, so I have two different lenses here, right? I have the ethos lens, which Aristotle and it really fits in to what you’re saying of like, the rational political animal in a city. That’s, that’s like a human being classic Aristotle, right? But then the other side is Ananda, which is like a soul and deepest part of what we are, it’s, it’s not actually human, you know, it’s, it’s pure light and pure love. And this human stuff is like this external layer that we have respect. And, you know, it’s part of our life, but, but it’s really the goal of life is to kind of unpeel that layer and kind of get more into unity with the inner stuff. Well, but look, but let’s, let’s go over to the other side, the ethos side, or the Ananda side, sorry, the Ananda side, let’s do the Ananda side. So you’re invoking light, right, and love. And the type of love you’re probably invoking is ultimately agapic love, which is the love that is not the, not the love of consumption, or even cooperation, but the love that is creative of personhood. That’s what it is. That’s why the metaphor, you’ll see it even in the Buddha, we’ll use the metaphor of the mother’s relationship for the child as the primary metaphor for Karuna. What does a mother do with the child? A mother gives the kind of love that turns a human being into a person. And we find persons intrinsically valuable. They are the they are the pivot points of all of our of all of our meaning making and valuation systems. And look at the light, well, what the light, right, that’s a physical thing, but you don’t mean physical, you mean something like intelligibility, that which makes sense, that’s what light things up and reveals their presencing and their being. You’re talking about a kind of identity with that that’s deeper than your own ego. And that’s, yeah, definitely talking about that. But notice how that’s also a meshed up with a lot of mythological language, you find the use of light standing for intelligibility, standing for being cross culturally. And you find that it’s catchy, it’s it’s memetic and memetic for for distributed cognition. That’s why you use light to talk about this inner suchness of yourself and its connection to the mystery of the moreness of the world. And you didn’t use a camel or apples or right. But you might use water. Yeah, why do you use water? Why do you use light? Why do you perhaps use fire? But you don’t use a table or you don’t use, you know, the car or a rocket ship or even something natural, right? You don’t use a desert typically, sometimes people do, but not very much. Right. So why what you have to answer is why do you use? Why do you pick those? Those are imaginal. They’re not just images in their head. They they’re images between you and the world and between you and other people. You have to ask yourself, well, why do you pick the ones you pick? Why do they catch? Why do they resonate for you? And what I would say is they they you pick the ones you do because they interface between your own individual relevance realization machinery and the relevance realization that the communities you belong to are trying to do. That’s how that’s how we zero in on the ones that really work for us. Did that help? Well, my personal experience kind of says otherwise, but they’re basically because there’s a for me, the Bhagavad Gita was a truly internal mystical spiritual experience, which had no relation to anything around me in the world, you know, so and and in fact, I, you know, I had to move to a totally different continent after. So, so I can see where that does fit in, right? It’s because it’s like, once it clicked, then it’s like, okay, now I need to go find my people and be with my people. Yeah, yeah. The insight doesn’t become institutionalized in the world for you or internalized in your psyche until it resonates in distributed cognition. And please remember what the Bhagavad Gita is about. It’s about integrating that vertical mystical, you know, at one minute with the divine with one’s duty, which is a normative duty to others, right? Those two were in are inseparably bound together within within the Bhagavad Gita. I’m not trying to identify them. I’m trying to say that they’re inseparably bound together. Yes. Well, then the beauty I think of the Western wisdom cultures, because, you know, it’s hard to even call them a religion. If you if you look at Buddhism and Buddhism compared to Christianity, Islam, Judaism, I don’t even think I would use the word religion to describe Hinduism, Buddhism, you know? Well, that’s interesting, because that I mean, that’s part of the problem of the word religion, as you said, it’s it’s actually a really recent word. Most cultures don’t have a word for it that is anyway separate from their sense of community or culture or, you know, their their person identity, their group identity and individual personhood. If you take worship to be the defining feature of religion, yes, then but the problem with that is that’s very, you know, that that that sort of limits you to space and particular periods in time. Because and then the line between worship and celebration and worship and reverence is really, really hard to maintain. So that’s I think if what we mean by worship is sort of prototypical Abrahamic worship, then of course, only the Abraham religions turn out to be religion that but that’s just because we’re being circular, which we’re saying only the Abrahamic religions are religion and because only the Abrahamic religions have the features and that’s kind of useless. So I think I try to reverse engineer it. I think what are the perennial problems that human beings are trying to solve and what sets of practices, ecologies of practices do they generate for solving and resolving and ameliorating those perennial problems? And then what does that look like in terms of the three Ms, right? That’s that’s that and for me, anything that is doing that and really reliably enhancing religio for people within and affording the cultivation of wisdom because those two are interpenetrating like we’ve been talking about, I call that a religion. But I talk about the religion that’s not a religion precisely because I think we need to. We need to. We need to reconstruct re engineer and reinventio. The Latin word inventio means both to discover and to make so reinventio psychotechnologies and meta psychotechnologies and mythos, etc. That is independent from this longstanding heritage that we that we have from not. I don’t mean independent in that discontinuous, but we have to be independent. But we have to break out of the cultural cognitive grammar. That regulates. Our religious or religiosity, if I can put it that way, and even people who aren’t religious have religiosity because it’s bound up with a particular axial age two world metaphysics. And a particular history, the history of nihilism is high degree would put it that we have to break free from. We have to break free from that historical momentum and we have to break free from its attending constitutive cultural comor culture cognitive grammar. We have to get new forms by which we conceive of perceive of and act and enact our attempts to enhance religio and cultivate wisdom. We need new forms of that. Yes, I think it’s already happening. The one example that came into my head was Tony Robbins and other like, you know, new age gurus, Deepak Chopra. You know, here’s another funny thing with with the word game like guru. Now all of a sudden there’s marketing gurus. Yeah, you know, so there’s a lot of interface. Yeah, so we’re in this phase where like the synthesis is coming. And that’s why it’s I guess it’s confusing. A lot of this stuff we’re talking about Yeah, doing it as it’s happening. Yeah, I think people like Tony Robbins and Deepak Chopra to be symptomatic, rather than particularly affording. They tend to actually I think you’re right, they’re trying to create a more secular version of this precisely because they’re trying to escape that history. But they actually just tend to in many cases repeat, they just flatten and oversimplify the mythos and the cultural cognitive grammar rather than the deep thinking, the deep transformation and the very deep practice, both individually and collectively, that is needed to actually overcome it. Yes, I agree with you there. Yeah. Yeah. So I do see people I do, but I do also accept your point. I see lots of people both top down, meaning sort of scientifically, historically, you know, public intellectuals, whatever that is the intellectual deep web, you know, all these communities where they’re trying to recreate and reinventio. But I also see and I’m involved with lots of people who are doing the bottom up stuff, people building new communities of practices, new communication practices, new language of communication and connection and communion. And the dust is springing up all over the place to fill the void because many people find the actual age religions non viable to fill the void and to try and reconstruct a worldview that is somehow consonant with our scientific worldview, but does something that our scientific world doesn’t do, which is home us in it and afford us the aspiration to wisdom and enhance meaning life because the scientific worldview, while powerful, doesn’t do those important functions. So lots of people are trying to figure out what this new what this new mythos for religio will be the new meta psychotechnology, right? The new meaning. Right. It’s got to be something more than well being that can’t be enough. But I like sacred I think. So I think the last time. Well, I think sacred is important because sacred points to we need something that makes us feel like we’re connected to something larger than our egos, more real than our own our sort of individual subject subjective perspective that also challenges and demands us to transform in order to get some very deep truths about ourselves and each other in the world. Yeah, that’s that’s what we need. Just well being isn’t enough. Yeah, yeah. The reciprocal opening part of sacredness, I totally get. Now I think there’s one more aspect to it, though. For example, I really love judo. And it’s one of these things which it gets deeper, the more I get into it, and there’s reciprocal opening there. But how do I know? How do I know judo is sacred to me versus I just really, really, you know? Well, the thing is, when something is sacred, it should it starts to be like, like we said, it starts to become. So I use Corban’s distinction between imaginary, which is just in your head, and imaginal, right, it becomes an image, not in your head, but an image between you and the world. Image schemata to use a term from Lake often Johnson, even though I’m quite critical of their work in other ways, it becomes an enact. So you’re like I same thing with Tai Chi Chuan, right? The way I am my stance, my orientation, the way I get into the flow, the way I connect in Tai Chi that generalizes is it becomes a powerful portal, an image that is a continual portal, right for that reciprocal opening in many areas of my life, it starts to generalize. And so that and I my strongest realization for that was when I was had been practicing for quite a while. And I was just as you said, I was just really enjoying it. But my close friends and colleagues started saying to me what’s happening to you, you’re starting to think and write differently. And they weren’t seeing me doing Tai Chi Chuan, they were seeing me within an academic context. That’s how when it starts to permeate, right, and when it starts to act as a parameter on all of that interactional space, both the cognitive interaction and the embodied interaction. That’s when I think it starts to become mythos for you, it starts to become something that is sacred for you. Oh, okay. Okay. So we have reciprocal on this as kind of the mechanism by what happens and then the connection with or Yeah, with mythos. Yeah, enacted together and enacted mythos. Well, think about what you’re doing in June, you’re actually enacting all of these different postures and ways of thinking and seeing and being and interacting with other human beings. These are all image combata that really transform your access to yourself to other people in the world, at least if it’s pursued sapientially. I mean, and if you’re doing judo, you know, as it was intended, right, you know, or Tai Chi Chuan, of course, it’s a martial art for self defense. But it’s also meant to be a much more profound transformation. It’s supposed to be a wisdom, right cultivation practice. Yeah, I would actually call it a religion. Yes, the way that Yeah, yeah. It’s just interesting, though, right, like, when we use that word in English, we don’t think of, oh, I’m going to the dojo, and I’m gonna train for a couple hours. But in Japan, in the places where they these come from, it really is a religion. It’s very, you know, they have very formal. Yeah. Yeah, it’s there’s ritual. There’s sacred space, the dojo, which is like the temple, right? You have you have the bearer of the tradition, you have the master, who’s a guide. And he, he or she is not just trying to teach you, they’re trying to mentor you and inspire you to transformation, right? I mean, we’re again talking the ideal, there’s lots of crappy dojos. And right, I’m not denying any of this. But, but I think you’re right. I mean, when when judo becomes that comprehensive way of life that’s bound up with enacted mythos, enacted ritual, enacted transformation, enacted getting together, communing with other people, training with other people, transforming with other people. Yes, it’s a religion very much. Okay, I want to bring some shoe leather about now. Well, I just kind of want to share with you my thoughts, because this come up in this past month, you know, especially with COVID-19 and like, this is an incredible time, of course, but more than that, it’s someone said it very well recently, it’s like, it’s a pivot point or something like that, where it’s, or a lightning rod or something, where everything that’s happening is, is being enhanced and exaggerated and exacerbated times 1000 million. So, for me, actually, how China responded exactly how I had expected them to respond, how America responded is exactly how I expected them to respond. But the consequences of very pronounced. But what I think the main weapon problem is now is hyper logos. I think that’s really what comes down to is too much logos. By that, I mean, I don’t mean in the divine sense. I mean, like rationality. Figure out your problems, instead of doing your problem. Well, so, first of all, I would, yeah, I wouldn’t want to equate that with logos with rationality, precisely because, as you said, logos is a much you even look at it philosophically, going back to Heraclitus, and then all the way through the Stoics and then the Neoplatonists and Plato, it’s not, it’s it shouldn’t be the idea is that human rationality can participate in the logos, but the model for the logos isn’t sort of human reason. Also, I guess what I where I would push back a bit is that I think figuring out your problems is what you’re going to do regardless. And the issue, I think what you’re objecting to is the idea of a purely propositional form of rationality. And this is part of what I’ve been trying to get people to remember that rationality isn’t just argumentation. This is why you see this in Plato and in Socrates, rationality isn’t just argumentation. It’s not just inference. You’re right to point out that rationality, how I would take it to mean is any systematic and reliable set of practices that helps you overcome self deception and helps afford enhanced connection, enhanced religio. That’s ratio. That’s the proper proportioning of things. Think about how that’s even a perspectival term. So when you’re doing mindfulness meditation, for me, that’s a form of rationality. Now you might not say it’s a form of reasoning. If by reasoning you want to say argumentation, that’s fine. But notice even in Plato, the exemplification of the logos isn’t just in the Socratic argumentation. It’s also in the right exemplification of a way of life. Socrates represents a way of life, a way of seeing the world, a way of aspiring, a way of undergoing deep and profound self transformation, a way of being called into beauty. I mean, Socrates is rational. He claimed many people say, well, Socrates didn’t claim to know anything. Well, actually he did claim to know. He claimed to know erotica. He knew his rationality was the rationality of knowing what to care about and how to care appropriately. And so this engagement, right, with ways of being and ways of seeing as well as just ways of speaking and ways of inferring, that’s what I’m talking about with rationality. And Agnes Kellard and L.A. Pollan, their brilliant work have shown that the aspiration to rationality cannot itself be an inferential process. You can’t infer your way to becoming more rational. And so, I mean, what you have to do is you have to go through some fundamental transformations that actually make you more rational and wiser that involve transformation of perspective, transformation of identity, transformation of the skills you bring to bear. So I’m using rationality and logos in that much more ancient aspirational and comprehensive sense. I think trying to calculate our way through our problems is what you’d be criticizing. That’s how Heidegger would put it. And I think while we should continue to do our science, we have to bring back all these other kinds of knowing and their attendant rationalities. So that’s what I really like that and agree with it. I’m looking back in my experience. I’ve been living all over the East for so many years. And maybe I can just, I hope you can help me draw out what the problem is here. It could be individuality. Maybe it’s hyper individuality. Ah, that I would agree with. See, so that came up in my recent voices with Reveke with my friend and colleague, Greg Henriksen, I released it actually yesterday. So here’s three other M’s for you that I want to challenge. We have this idea largely that comes out of Descartes and about sort of reason as monologic. It’s something you do as a monologue with yourself. And there’s increasing evidence that reason evolved to work dialogically, that we actually reason best in the sense of overcoming self deception and generating new ideas that enhance our connectedness. We do that best in distributed cognition. And then, of course, there’s the monophasic, the idea that there’s only one state of consciousness, one state of identity that you should be in in order to gain knowledge. Whereas, of course, in the East, as you’re saying it, they have a polyphasic culture. This is work I’m doing with Daniel Craig, where no multiple states of consciousnesses and multiple senses of identity and being are really actually needed in order for people to grow into wisdom. And I think we’re coming to realize, especially within developmental science and developmental psychology and developmental cognitive science, that that’s exactly correct. That’s exactly correct. And you even see a highly logical and rational systems like stoicism. You have practices designed to alter state of consciousness, alter perspective on knowing, like the view from above. So you want to reject the monological, the monophasic and the monolithic, right? That the mind is right, just is just propositional knowing. Right, that so you got to break out of all of those. And the thing about that is individualism tends to emphasize our version of individualism tends to emphasize all of that. But what the empirical research is showing is that individualist cultures are actually poorer at detecting self deception and engaging in self correction than more collective cultures. Collective cultures have their difficulties too. They’re not a panacea. They’re not a paradise. We’re talking about specific thing here. If we really want to do better, we do better when we are not individualistically oriented individualism. Now, individualism. Here’s the other thing, right? We have to resist the equating of individualism, which is a particular view of mind and identity with the moral notion of individual responsibility. Individual responsibility needs to be cultivated. It always has to be cultivated. It’s important, but we have a very good evidence that doesn’t require the particular ideological framework that we call modern individualism, which I think is something we need to be a little bit more critical of. So that’s I would agree with you. I think that’s a deep point. That’s a very deep point. Here’s one thing that I love. One thing I love most about most of these Eastern cultures and especially their languages. In Chinese, especially there are like a dozen ways to say yes or no question tags. So the typical way the Chinese speak and also true for ties, Vietnamese. This is the normal way here. You say a statement and then yes or no. There’s literally a dozen different ways to do this in Chinese. So because I think that’s one big reason they can kind of stay really well, they can stay collective because they’re always pushing for a yes or no agreement or disagreements. Yes. And disagree is actually okay, because at least you know that you disagree. So you can still kind of be still be together and work through it until you get to the agreement. It’s always pushing further towards agreement. Whereas English. Oh my goodness, I really don’t like English anymore. It’s there’s so many opinions. And it’s and it’s all it’s great for poetry, right? And music and and this sort of stuff. But like you detecting self deception in ourselves and others, the the Chinese and the other Asian languages here that give give you a huge leg up because it’s very binary and very logical and quick to see what’s going on. You know, I think that’s right. I think that makes sense that you would that you’d find that those features. Yeah, so the I mean, my understanding is that there’s their disagreement is understood as opponent processing, which is a biological form of self regulation, right? Where you have two systems that are constantly acting as, you know, checked and balances and pushing and pulling each other. And because in the idea is that that’s how the process of self correction is actually created opponent processing. And so what’s happened in the West, this is, you know, with work I did with Leo Ferraro, is that that opponent processing has has devolved into purely adversarial winner take all processing, where by Philo Nikea, the love of victory, which Plato argues is the biggest obstacle to the love of wisdom, the love of victory has taken precedent in a powerful way. And so the point about the logos is to bring back Phylia Sophia as an alternative to Phylia Nikea, the love of victory and bring back instead the love of wisdom. So dialectic is to try and reverse engineer the psychotechnology, the meta psychotechnology that will bring this about. And then when you get into that state, it’s like a collective flow state in which you can you can definitely disagree, but there’s a point of processing. Because then you write there’s both negative and positive disagreement, you can disagree with somebody to say no, and you’re sort of holding back and when we’ve prioritized that very, that as oh, that’s the primary way. But there’s also the what you might call positive disagreement, whereas you’re at you want to go further or deeper or riff on what the person has said you want to provoke, right. And if these two are held together as equally valuable, the overall project is, can you and I get to a place together, where you couldn’t get to individually and where I couldn’t get to individually. And that when that starts to happen, and we start to get a cascade of those, and we start to get a flow of being in a place where, you know, getting to a place in our insight in our intelligibility, our ability to make sense of ourselves, each other in the world, we can get to a place that we couldn’t get to individually. And then we’re getting to flow, my friend, layman Pascal calls this overflow, which is a wonderful term, if we can get into overflow, I think that is where we do our best reasoning and our best, our best transformation. And we also feel at our best, we this is a way of life. It feels like this is how human beings are supposed to live how they’re supposed to dwell with each other and on the earth. Yes, that’s the feeling of judo for me. Yeah, judo is doing that same thing that that dialectic flow in a physical domain. And that’s why I Yeah, yeah, go ahead. Yeah. Well, that’s why that’s my that’s why I brought in the Socratic Prayer is to is to is to frame, you know, what we’re doing in that way, so we can have a better way. Just hopefully it’ll work better. That’s all I do want to say again, I forgot. Oh, I just wanted to say one more time, though, ethos. I sort of interrupt you. No, I want to say again, though, that I don’t want to you. I would want to put on a pedestal, right collectivist cultures, because they also they’re also problematic in certain ways. So I just want just wanted to state that. I mean, that’s not where the conversation is going right now. So I don’t want to derail it. But I don’t want to be misinterpreted on this point either. Right. So go ahead. So so prayer, to me, it’s really interesting. I’ve never studied prayer. I’ve, I’ve only done it a few times. But the one time I didn’t really worked. It was it was really simple and effective process, which I think for me is better than decision. So what I do is, I, I have an intention. And I try to or desire even, and I try to clarify it in my mind. And then I express it to the world or to God, and then let go, let go of any outcome that’ll happen from that, and just repeat that process. And the one time I did it, that it worked instantly. And I got into this incredible focus state of learning, which I haven’t been into since. Yeah, there are powerful ways I mean, so prayer is dialogical in nature. And when so there’s research showing that when people pray, like, so they had like an experiment where they had people pray to God who are believers in God versus praying to Santa Claus, and very different parts of the brain are activated. And so prayer is a way of getting into a dialogical mode with, right with your relationship to aspects that are mysterious to you of your own unconscious, and then also not aspects of the world that are mysterious to you. You know, because they’re the depths of the world and the world is combinatorial, explosive and complex. And so prayer is a way of putting you into a dynamic sort of dialogical preparedness that can really access your relevance realization machinery in some very, very powerful ways and help to sensitize you to well, as you said, to learning to seeing patterns you didn’t see before, and realizing things you didn’t realize before. And I don’t believe in the supernatural for lots of reasons that I’ve articulated elsewhere. And so I don’t think of prayer as actually invoking supernatural forces on our behalf. But I do acknowledge that prayer can have that effect of putting people into a powerful state of preparedness in perception and in cognition that helps them see, get an answer from the world in that they realize and see things they wouldn’t otherwise realize and see. That’s why there’s many forms of prayer like the Centering Prayer and the Prayer of the Heart, even within Judeo-Christian practices that are not petitionary, you’re not asking for anything. You’re just, in fact, you’re just trying to come to that state of, you know, receptivity and preparedness and openness and connectedness. And as you say, focus, you’re sort of putting yourself into the machinery to get into a flow state with respect to the world and hopefully a flow state that’s also, you know, connecting you to new patterns that are important for the challenge you face. So yeah, that’s how I would, that’s my take on that. Okay, excellent. Full disclosure, I’ve been fasting today and I’m realizing that’s why I think I’m thinking I’m all doubled up and a little tired. You seem fine to me. Once we started, I kind of like my battery’s turned on, which is so another important word is faith. And yeah, like prayer, where we technology, right? So where would faith fit in within religion, within the three elements? Yeah, yeah. Well, I’m having a lot of really good discussions about this with, you know, Andrew Sweeney, Christopher Master Pietro, Jordan Hall. I think of faith, you know, it’s a practice, but a full person practice that couples the emergence of mind. So I don’t mean new ideas. I mean, like developmental emerging, the way an adult’s mind emerges from a child’s mind, the emergence of mind to the emergence of the world. So what patterns that are emerging that are crucial for you, like to zero in on as really relevant and really mattering. And so faith in that sense is the the coupling the wedding and I mean the, you know, I want to invoke the sexual metaphor because the off the Hebrew word has that sexual connotation. It’s like sexual intercourse, right, is to have you couple you wed the emergence of mind to the emergence of the world, so that you come into an ongoing right relationship with the world, where right relationship means you can follow the course of things you are sensitive to kairos you sensitive to how things are turning, and you’re sensitive to when you need to stand back and allow and when you need to intervene and notice how this overlaps with wisdom when you need to intervene. So my model for this and this comes out of the is your faithfulness to your your partner, your your romantic partner. Right? It doesn’t mean that you have a stable set of beliefs, or that you have a complete account of them, or that you even have sort of an absolute certainty about them because of the fact that they are going to change and grow. What it means is you have found a way of staying in a continuity of contact with who they are and how they’re growing, so that you can afford a copy, you can afford their growth, and you are sensitive, you don’t know where it’s going. But you have that online sensitivity to how they might be at a turning point in their life or something crucial, like cross or crisis, which means judgment, you’re there and you can sense what and you got you know when to move in when to move back, you have finesse, I was talking with Paul Van de Klay about all of this finesse about how to maintain that continuity of contact, so that your what emerges in your development, right is affording for your partner’s development. That’s what it is to be faithful to someone to commit to that because you find that connection to them. You find it ultimately beautiful for you. It strikes you as deeply good, not just morally good, but deeply a good way of being. That’s what I mean by. Yeah, the example of being faithful to like your partner is a great example. I think I’ve heard that one before, actually even in sermons and other places. I did see your Paul Van de Klay conversation. There’s one thing that bore its hole into my head. What was that? Well, in one word, it’d be ethos. So I think as Paul was talking, this ideal person who can kind of respond effectively to the crisis and he was not sure like who is this person, what does he look like, how do we you know, do this. To me, that’s ethos. It’s easy for me to say that I’ve held this all well, but in a very different situation. I’m in one of the best cities in China, is one of the best countries in the world to be in right now because of. Yeah. But it seems the thing that I always come back to for ethos or our character and what it means to be a really well developed character is you could call detachment or indifference. So someone who is totally beyond the crisis won’t even talk about it. And that’s what I do. That’s what all my Chinese neighbors are doing. They just don’t even talk about it and they don’t romanticize the language. So in Chinese, they have a word for coronavirus. It’s like bingda. It’s two syllables. It’s a very simple word. And as far as I know, that’s all they talk about it. But in Asia flatten the curve and social distancing and con what is it? Contract tracing or like there’s this. There’s a whole new language of it developing now. And to me, that’s that’s the opposite way that you want to do it. The developed character says this is just a you know, this is a little like hiccup and I’ll just you know, do some breathing and then it goes away. And the opposite way is like, Oh my god, oh my god, different things going on. Well, I guess what I would say about that is I agree with the developed character. I mean, but there’s a difference right in that, you know, China has a totalitarian regime that was able to top down, do all of what needed to be done. The West, you know, Western democracies, we have to talk a lot about it because that’s how the government operates. I, you know, I, well, I would appeal to Aristotle to you on this, right? My I think detachment doesn’t mean indifference. At least not the sense of Yeah, yeah. They’re not the same thing. Aristotle, you know, Aristotle example is angry. It was as famously as anger. He says, you know, the point is not to be angry or not angry. The point is to be angry at the right time for the right reasons to the right degree, right? And I think so I think bringing our problems solving abilities to bear on this individually and collectively, you know, at the right time for the right reasons to the right degree is what we should be doing. And I think that’s going to look different for different cultures, because different cultures have organized or organized politically and socio economically differently. So they have to dispose of their resources in different ways. I do think you’re right that and I like what Jordan Hall has to say about us. He said we have to steer between what he calls pent panic and anti panic. Panic is like you’re talking about people are like, alright, and anti panic of people are just saying, oh, there’s nothing there. It’s a hoax. It’s not real. We don’t need to do anything. And we got to avoid both of those. I mean, it’s the golden mean of Aristotle, we have to find that and I think that’s the mark of good character. And that goes back to again, the person who has the golden mean is the person who can stay in continuity of contact with the situations because they don’t get polarized into extremes, so they can stay and shift with things as they’re moving. So that’s that’s how I would that’s how I respond to what you said. Okay, okay, cool. So another thing I’ve been noticing, this is also why I’ve chosen ethos and Nanda is because these all different dimensions live on. So to me that the cultural dimension is is qualitatively higher than social, political, economical. I agree with you on that. So while while yes, we can say the Chinese system is better equipped to handle such a thing, which it is, what’s really more important is the culture. So I agree with you on that. Seeing around here is like, when it’s in the middle of the virus or before after they’re just they’re still just Chinese people, you know, they still like it’s like nothing has happened for them. Because they that’s their culture. They like their could be just 1000s of years of nonstop cultivation, character and whatever else they’ve been doing. But they just there’s no panic. They don’t want really telling example of this was a there’s a video of an old lady being you know, quarantine by the police into a van. And she was saying kill me kill me. Now, that’s really interesting because she’s being literal. She’s, she’s not saying I can’t help saying that. I just don’t I’m I’m over all of this. And the fact that give me any kind of trouble. It’s like just kill me. And that’s a very different response from it is very different. West. Yeah, I agree. I agree with that. The cultural level is really important. I do I think I think it is more important than the political level or the socio economic level. I do. I agree with you on that. It’s it’s hard to see some. You know, I don’t want to go too much into the modern events stuff. Oh, here’s thing in my notes that I think an interesting religion. Transcendence. So the that whole game of like, how to make sense of the world and like, and is this fake news? Is this real news? When you’re fully grounded in religion, that process, it’s not like it disappears, but it, it becomes pushed down to a much like lower level where it’s not as important anymore. Does that make sense? I think so. I mean, I mean, Paul Van der Kley has this wonderful thing where he says politics is about the now and religion is about the always. And so religion tends to put you into the domain of perennial problems and perennial patterns. And so those are these are much more comprehensive, long term, bigger scope. And in that sense, what we find significant or what we find really matters are salient landscaping really changes. That’s why you do for the view from above at the same point, like it changes. When you do the view from above, you see the bigger picture, as we say, the bigger patterns, right, the things that actually matter across time and space more reliably. And I think one of the things that religion does is exactly that it puts you into participatory contact with these bigger patterns, these perennial patterns, these perennial problems. And in that sense, it alters what you care about. We’re back to Socrates, you know, educating what you care about and caring about it in the right way into the right degree. And this is Aristotle too. You know, he’s he’s the grandson of Socrates, right? That is, I mean, intellectually, I mean, that that that’s, that’s, that’s, I think that you’re right that when people who live, well, again, when the religion is about what we’ve been talking about enhancing religio and ameliorating self deception and affording wisdom, then it does all of that, of course, but religion can also be a place where people go to play politics and play socio economic games and to pursue ideology and to oppress other people. I mean, so we again, we’re talking about, I know, a particular way of understanding religion in its ideal form. Yeah, I need to get going soon. ethos. But so I wanted to give you also a chance. I didn’t want to just end. Like if you want to, you want to, you know, a sort of a summative thing we can come to, you know? Yes, yes. Thanks. I think that’s good timing. As far as I don’t know, there’s too many different threads here, right? So yeah, something hope I hope we can really make some kind of summary here. Something about Okay, how about this? But just faith. Sounded a lot like connectedness to me and a lot like religio. So yes, tell me what do you think? How do those correlate? I think faith is a commitment to a wise way of being that has the capacity to reliably enhance religio. Okay. Oh, perfect. You say that the lack of mythos is the one thing that separates a wisdom culture from religion. I don’t know. I think I mean, look at the example with judo, you called it religion, because it’s very hard to find people cultivating. Because like I said, it’s part what’s one of the three M’s, right? It’s very hard to find people cultivating wisdom that aren’t getting involved with mythos. Right? Remember, we talked about neoplatonism. I think the mythos is right. And mythos means not just images, it also means actions, rituals, right, gestures, things like that. I think that you’re going to find mythos wherever people are aspiring to, you know, comprehensive transformation and training. Okay. That’s the only way to access a lot of this machinery. It’s like what we’re talking about with prayer, it’s there’s certain ways of being that that’s how we access both, you know, within you know, the levels of the psyche and within the levels of the world. It’s the only there’s ways that you know, they’re indispensable to us in accessing those those levels. And that’s where mythos, those enacted imaginal patterns are just indispensable to us. I think the difference is between a wisdom tradition and religion. If we want to make a distinction, I think the only place you’re going to be able to make a distinction is when you’re again, when we’re back to making worship, the defining feature of religion, rather than the cultivation of wisdom. And then again, I think we’re back to the circularity of what we’re just only the Abrahamic religions are religions, which, okay, if that’s what you want to do, but I don’t know if that does. I don’t know if that does us any good. No, that’s, it sheds light on it, I think. Good, good. Great. Thank you again for talking with me, John. It was good. Appreciate it. Yeah, I look forward to to doing another one of these. And I like, you know, I like the way you keep trying to get it, you know, very sort of concrete and specific. I think that’s very, very helpful. And I like the way we had a lot of good, you know, back and forth. I think that was really excellent. So thank you, ethos. I really enjoyed it a lot. Thank you. Okay, great. So it’s probably about lunchtime for you. Yeah. Yeah, I’m going to go get something to eat. Yeah. Okay, cool. Enjoy your lunch, and I’ll see you soon. Okay, take care. Take care. Bye bye.