https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=eNLlIXodu6Y
Welcome everyone. Today I’m talking with Daniel Craig about a book project that we are working on together. Daniel is a former student of mine. He’s also done a lot of work putting together a set of conferences having to do with the effects of psychedelics on cognition and the way they might perhaps afford sapiential development and Daniel’s had a significant influence on my thought around those topics. Daniel is also somebody who is currently actually working with me on the book. We’re in the process of writing it right now. The book is called The Cognitive Continuum from Insight to Enlightenment. So let’s jump right into what exactly we’re going to be discussing. The title in particular is very significant. Would you like to provide an elaboration of why this book is called The Cognitive Continuum? Right. So the main idea about that is the thesis that there’s a continuum between the kinds of cognitive machinery that’s at work in something like insight problem solving, like when we have an aha moment and then that machinery is taken up and extended into something like what people call the flow experience. So we can talk about each one of these in more details as we go along and then in turn that the machinery, the flow experience is extended and accepted up into mystical experiences and then that machinery is in turn can sometimes have an impact on people in which they seek to transform the structure of their identity, the structure of their lives and that’s a transformative experience and then when that in turn is making available a set of practices and skills and virtues that allows people to address the perennial problems that beset human beings, problems of self-deception and self-destructive behavior, then we’re arguing at least that that’s at least a good operational definition of what it is to have achieved enlightenment and so in a sense, right, what you’re seeing is the same machinery being recursively accepted and expanded and complexified and so there’s a continuum and what that means is we can take some of the mystique that has been typically associated with things like enlightenment or even with mystical experiences or awakening experiences and by putting it on a continuum with this machinery that’s more readily understood and studied within cognitive psychology and cognitive science, we can bring a deeper understanding which of course affords both better science but we also are going to emphasize in the book how that deeper understanding affords enhancing people’s ability to practice a, well basically, a course of the cultivation of wisdom and enlightenment. That practical edge is I think one of the things that I’m looking forward to the most in elaborating this framework. We’re going to be providing some guidelines on how to structure your own enlightenment practice based on this definition. Now regarding the demystification, I want to talk a little bit about that because one of the interesting things about the kinds of experiences associated with enlightenment, if that’s the experience of divine union where you are, your ego is sort of shattered into the infinite expanse or the more visionary types of experiences, visitations by angels, demons, etc. You know the Buddha during his enlightenment process, he’s visited by Mara who tempts him with all of this visionary material and there is a very, very, it’s almost very likely that many times during the process of exploring these experiences that the content is going to be conflated with the reality of what’s happening, right? Because there’s this issue that you’ve talked about with higher states of consciousness, that they’re infused with the sense of truth and the sense of significance. Yes, very much. Yeah, so that’s one of the things that really interests me about these experiences. It’s a problem and I’ve presented some work on it, an issue I call onto normativity. What that means is, let’s say, I think it’s non-controversial to say that mystical experiences are some kind of altered state of consciousness. I think that’s relatively non-controversial. But these experiences tend to have, and there’s work supporting this by other people, Newberg, Yeaton, Taylor, people like that, but anyways, when people have these experiences, they’re very different from how they normally relate to their other altered states of consciousness. So for example, if you’re dreaming, when you wake up out of your dream, and notice how we use the awakening metaphor, when you wake up out of your dream, you say, oh, well, the dream wasn’t real. This is reality, right? Now, what’s really interesting is why that’s going on. And it has to do, I think, very quickly with the fact that we have this sort of overall pattern of intelligibility that makes sense, and not just in an intellectual sense, it gives us kind of a good optimal grip on the world. And when the dream state, we can’t fit that in, in any sort of coherent fashion to that. And so that’s not real. That makes sort of sense to everybody. What’s interesting is when people go into these higher states of consciousness, they do something very different. They come back and say, no, no, that was really real. And all of this, this everyday experience, is somehow less real, less illusory. That’s the onto part, being reality. The normativity that comes in, onto normativity, is that they feel called to transform themselves and their lives in often quite radical manner, so that they can come into a greater existential conformity to that increased realness. They want to get back to it. And this sort of speaks to that there’s this drive for human beings to, a drive for realization, in both senses of the word, like the sense of insight, and the sense of coming into contact with what is most real. Now, because of that onto normativity, as you said, people come out of it, and they feel called, and they feel called to what is most real. And what can happen is they can attach that to any particular propositional content or pictorial content they might use to try and make sense or interpret that. And so what can happen is that sense of onto normativity can get transferred into a kind of authority for their particular claims. And that can be very, very, very dangerous, because I think you can make a very good case, as we do in the book, that there’s a procedural, a perspectival, even a participatory sense. These are different kinds of knowing that in which we can make a good case that they’re being really optimized and enhanced in their function. So another way of saying it is your cognition is being made to function much, much better in its ability to sort of get a grip on reality and to coordinate the conformity of your sense of identity to how you’re identifying with the world and how you’re identifying the world. That’s all procedurally being enhanced. And that’s very different from whatever particular metaphysical claims people make, because people can come out of these experiences and they’ll say, oh, now I know there’s a god, or they can come out of these experiences and they’re equally ecstatic and say, now I know there’s no god. And so if you try and get any sort of consent, so this is not like a Huxleyan perennialism. I don’t think you’re going to find sort of a set of core propositions that everybody’s going to agree on, other than propositions that are sort of reflectively descriptive of the phenomenology. But any attempts to describe, to sort of extrapolate that because of the onto normativity into a claim about the metaphysical structure of reality, that’s very, very questionable. So the distinction we make is a distinction between giving up on the idea that we’re getting sort of arcane metaphysical knowledge of reality and instead think, no, what’s happening in these states and what they’re actually calling to you is towards wisdom and enlightenment. And you even see this in the tradition where, for example, the Buddha famously does not want to offer any metaphysical speculations, answer metaphysical questions, make metaphysical claims about nirvana, the state of enlightenment. Instead, he wants to help people cultivate the wisdom to realize that statement. Right. Relationships at the end of the day are the most important. Yes. Enlightenment is an existential mode, right? It’s a way of relating to self, to world, to other, which promotes an optimal sort of interaction. And within that definition of optimal, we also need to include a definition of ethics and how ethics manifests. There is no enlightenment without ethics. However, there could be wisdom. I think an interesting distinction that I’ve learned from looking into Jewish philosophy is the difference between you could call it microcosmic wisdom and macrocosmic wisdom, wisdom with a lower case or capital W. But wisdom is just a kind of expertise. In Hebrew, you can use the word wisdom to refer to grandma, who’s really good at knitting. She has wisdom in the skill of knitting. Yeah. But there’s something greater to that. When you say streetwise. That can be another kind of expertise. If you have to be streetwise, that might mean that, for example, you’re really good at physically defending yourself if you have to, which is not necessarily something that we really want people to have to be good at while it’s still a good skill. But one of the fundamentally distinctive things about enlightenment compared to just wisdom, per se, is the ethical norm that comes with it. There is no action that is unethical that is an enlightened action. I think that’s a pretty good standard to set for that. One framing that came up as you were talking about the auto normativity of the states and such is the difference between expression and explanation. So if you look into ancient philosophy, I have a double major in cognitive science and in philosophy, specialized in ancient philosophy. They do a lot of good thinking about things like prophetic visionary states of consciousness, which I’m particularly fascinated in. One thing that comes up is that the transcendent state, the transcendent quality of the universe, is just too much for human beings to handle. And this is something that you emphasized, I think, even in the first lecture of the Intro to Cognitive Science course, we are epistemically bound. There are very real constraints on our cognition, such that certain things we actually can’t know directly. So our cognition has all of these interesting mechanisms, these exaptation mechanisms, to cross reference information, to bounce information around different parts of the brain. So for example, in the psychedelic state, if you’re under the influence of LSD, there is an increase in activation between the part of your temporal lobe, which projects back into your occipital lobe. And this seems to increase the likelihood of personally relevant mental imagery coming into your experience. So your visual cortex in these states is actually translating non-visual information into a visual metaphor, so that you can more readily grasp the relationship underlying the image. And this comes up in the philosophy of Maimonides. He’s flashed out what prophecy is and how it works. And I think it’s a really good framework. He articulates the mind is being cut up into a rational faculty and an imaginative faculty. When there are things that the rational part of your mind can’t comprehend, it overflows into the imaginative part of your mind. And your imagination then has to do all of these metaphorical, abstract, networking things in order to make sense of that which is too much for the rational mind to understand. So your mind is, in a very real way, simply trying to express things that it can’t quite grasp any other way. And if we look also at Carl Jung’s philosophy of dreams, one of the things that comes up, and I know Jordan Peterson has mentioned that, ideas will first show up to you in your dreams in their sort of inchoate form. And then as they become more and more refined, you are able to articulate them more. But at first, they might seem as though they have a lot of weight, a lot of magnitude. You might be perplexed even by a dream, even though it doesn’t have this auto normativity thing going on. There might be something that sticks with you in your dream, and you’re like, hmm, why is that happening? And why do I feel so compelled to dig deeper? So these imaginative flourishes that your mind is capable of performing are ways of getting us to comprehend relationships to self, world, other, which are fundamentally a little bit beyond our scope of understanding. And by continually doing this, we are continually expanding our capacity to know more, to integrate more perspectives, to internalize more perspectives, and to better be able to relate to a broader array of people. If we apply this frame, which has some roots in Asian philosophy, of what exactly cognition is doing when we are experiencing imaginative, interesting, elaborative dream-like phenomena, we can use that to integrate that content much more readily and to apply it to our lives. The fact that we can use that imaginal material in order to, as you said, to counteract pathological processes on one hand, and potentially afford a kind of flourishing engagement with oneself and the world, that’s exactly what we mean by this content doesn’t give you knowledge, but if dealt with in the right way, it can really afford the cultivation of wisdom. Right. It certainly gives you some perspective. Yes. Now there’s one thing, where is it going? There was something I wanted to talk about regarding the particularities of different languages used to train the brain. It’s coming back. Okay, so one question that I’ve gotten from a few people when I’ve been discussing my progress on the book is, why the term enlightenment? And I think that the whole idea set that we’ve been discussing here of, well, there’s a whole set of traditions which have this particular kind of language which helps you to train yourself in a particular kind of way, such that you can have more ideal relationships with self, world, and other. The term enlightenment is actually really important because it’s nested in with this network of associations coming from the spiritual heritage of intellectual history. And I think we would be very remiss to forego that for a more neutral term. An earlier term before I started looking into a lot of the stuff that I’ve used, which is analogous, is like cognitive optimization, for example. That’s a perfectly good neutral term that you could use, but it doesn’t really help us to yoke these ideas to the traditions that have provided us languages and practices that we can utilize to actually cultivate the state. I agree. And it’s not only the history that we don’t want to lose the thread of. We’re losing some of the phenomenology. Listen to the word insight. We typically use perceptual, attentional metaphors to try and explain significant cognitive changes. Insight, sight as being invoked. Enlightenment has to do with a transformation of your ability to look and see because now things are lit in a way that where they were previously dark to you. Now, of course, there’s other metaphors. Buddha means awakened one. The awakening is also a metaphor because that’s again, if you think about it, when you wake up, this is a very comprehensive transformation of your entire existential mode. And it’s not only sort of liberating you from the illusions of the dream. It’s affording you exploring and entering into a relationship with the wider real world. And so I think not only should we, as you said, not only should we keep continuity with this historical heritage, because we want to be able to connect that literature. It might not be as theoretically valuable as we people might think, but as we’ve just said, it’s sapiential value and it’s training valuable. It’s training value is undeniable. And we also want to keep, I think, the connection with this language precisely because that language, the terms that cognitive optimization, I think should be paired with things like enlightenment, because cognitive optimization gives priority to the functional aspect of what we’re talking about. Terms like enlightenment gives priority to the existential and the phenomenological aspects of what we’re talking about. Right. Different languages for different times, for different goals. Yes. Yes. Yeah. So one thing I want to talk about a little bit, which is relevant, because recently I watched one of your conversations with Jonathan Pagel. Yes. And there was a point where you had mentioned, oh, I’m not taking an eclectic approach to this. And he kind of laughed and said, I don’t know about that, John. Yes. So I want to talk about the differences between the kind of autodidactic new age eclecticism. You mentioned the perennialism of Huxley, which is kind of like the opposite pole. Yep. Those two poles, I want to avoid both. Yeah. So let’s chat a little bit about that. Where are we fitting into those poles? So, I mean, for me, and I think this is also the case for you, the model that I take from this is the model from cognitive science. And so as opposed to eclecticism, I argue that there’s sort of the most powerful, the most prescriptive vision of cognitive science is one of synoptic integration. And so what I’m trying to do as a cognitive scientist is I’m trying to pick up on the fact that we have all these specialized disciplines that study different aspects or levels of the mind. Neuroscience studies the brain, artificial intelligence, machine learning studies, information processing, psychology studies, behavior, linguistic studies, language, anthropology studies, culture. And they each have their own language. They each have their own methods of gathering evidence. And the problem that you face with that is that’s wonderful. And that’s given us this tremendous advance. But those different disciplines are correlated with particular levels of reality. Like I said, the brain level, the information processing, the behavioral. And here’s the thing. It is highly likely that those different levels, the brain level, the information processing level, the behavioral level are not causally distinct from each other. They’re interacting with each other. They’re constraining and affording each other in very, very powerful ways. And so the problem we have is we don’t have anything that’s talking about the relations between the levels because each one of these disciplines is pitched at a level. So what do we need? Well, we need a discipline that does synoptic integration. It tries to provide a bridging vocabulary, a kind of cognitive vocabulary, a conceptual vocabulary, and a kind of theoretical grammar so that you can get these different disciplines to insightfully talk to each other, mutually inform and transform each other in an insightful manner. That’s synoptic integration. It’s not saying that all the disciplines are saying the same thing. It is not saying that I can just pick and choose as I wish from each one of these in some eclectic fashion. It’s saying, no, no, there is a relationship. There’s a two-way movement of understanding. You can pull back towards a sort of an integrative stance. What’s the bridging language? Right? That’s half of what you need because that picks up on the interactions. But you also need to go back down into the particular disciplines for what their particular knowledge about what each level is doing. And I propose that we are using that same model when we’re trying to explain the cognitive continuum. We’re using the cognitive scientific method of trying to afford a synoptic integration, for example, between these discourses that have to do with the phenomenology and training and between the discourses that have to do with the functionality and the explaining. Right. So something that I was thinking about just yesterday as I was working on some of the writing is that it seems that one thing we might actually be doing is pulling another set of disciplines into this synoptic integration process. And that would be the more spiritual and philosophically oriented traditions, which are much more pragmatically oriented. Yes. And I think, I mean, well, philosophy itself has a huge and important role within cognitive science, precisely because one of the things that philosophy has been very good at is exactly this process of trying to get different domains of discourse and human endeavor and human existence to talk to each other reliably. You can even see this in ancient philosophy. The ancient philosophers are trying to say, well, you know, how does our ethics and our knowledge and our relationship to the gods, how do we get these to all talk to each other? So there is some sort of coherent integrated life that is livable for us. Stoicism in particular is a good example of that. Yes. Platonism as well. Yes. Very much oriented on living the good life. Yes. Right. And if we have a discipline studying the mind, then like, why would we also not want to study the good life as well? I think a good analogy in the ancient world, in fact, for modern cognitive science is ancient philosophy, because ancient philosophy isn’t as limited in its scope and self-identification as modern academic philosophy. I believe in modern academic philosophy. I’m not criticizing you. You do too, obviously. But what I mean is in ancient philosophy, you had something much more like the integration of what you might call modern conceptual analysis and theorization with what Hado called spiritual exercises. So you’ve got psychology and sort of philosophy and the best science of the time, the best training practices, the best pedagogy, how to educate people, how to inspire them to aspire. You’re doing much, much more. And I think that’s a little bit closer analogy from cognitive science. In fact, what we’re kind of doing, I think what you’re suggesting is we’re taking cognitive science and we’re trying to bring in that missing piece of inspiring people to aspiration and to afford them actually training that you see present in ancient philosophy. I would definitely concur with that. Definitely there is a lot of benefit to bringing back this sort of integrative approach. And on the note of the integrative approach, I think that’s a really good jumping point to talk about the role of mystical experiences and also how various traditions have gone about the process of particularizing those mystical experiences to fit the context of their time. There was a conversation that you had recently, which you posted on your channel about this sort of religion that’s not a religion. Yes, it’s one of the ideas that really stood out to me about that video was the idea of the trade-off between compression and particularization that you get in the process of taking a more sort of mystical experiential engaged approach to spiritual tradition or philosophy. So one thing to go back to that discussion about perennialism versus eclecticism, one thing that’s really important to notice is that the various spiritual traditions which are oriented towards something like enlightenment and admittedly they use different terminology for that. So just by using enlightenment, we’re already applying an integrative norm by saying, well, let’s explain these things by collecting the invariance and that’s our definition. But it’s also important to note which particular traditions are good for which things. So if you look at Christianity and Buddhism, which we’re going to be contrasting, there are certain trends of interpretation in those which are exactly the opposite. So Buddha comes from a rich family and he decides to leave that to live an ascetic life. He has first off the choice to do that and he has material comfort, whereas Christ is somebody who’s coming from a relatively poor family in a war-torn city and he doesn’t really have a lot going for him, but it’s by God’s grace that he is the Christ, the Messiah, and it actually flies in the face of the expectations of the people at the time because they’re looking for a son of David, the King, the glorious one who will be elevated to the highest position in society, etc. So that’s one thing that really throws people off in the early Christian age. They think, well, this poor worker type couldn’t possibly be that. How could that be the son of David who we’ve been expecting? There’s a great book, which I’ve seen you reference a few times, called The Religion of the Future by Roberto Unger. He does an excellent job of articulating the various different attitudes that can be taken to these sort of more universal spiritual phenomena. There is something like a perennialism going on because we all have the same neurocognitive constraints. As a result, we all have access to similar experiences. The experience of divine union is one of those. It’s something that just as a result of the particular kind of nervous system we’ve been endowed with, most, if not everybody, can achieve. Now, while that is the case, there is a perennial state of mind that people have access to. Based on the particularities of the context, people have to solve different problems. The problems that the Buddha is trying to solve are a little bit different just because of the society in which he lives. The approach that becomes dominant there is what Unger refers to as overcoming the world. He lives in a very rigid, hierarchical society where social movement isn’t really very possible. He sets aside a place outside of society to which people go. We work on just overcoming attachment, overcoming desire, and just being simply happy here and now. The Christian view, on the other hand, is very, very different. It’s something that many thinkers have argued has informed the products of modern liberalism and romanticism, etc. It’s hard to divorce those from the religious history. Within the Christian view, there’s much more of an imperative on transforming the world. Buddhism has very much transformed the self, whereas in Christianity, you have to participate in a community and actively transform your relationships and the society such that it is more worthy of God when he comes for the final judgment. One thing that’s going to become apparent in the process of this book is that we’re going to be taking lessons from different traditions based on which ones have the best language to explain and promote engagement with a particular issue. Buddhism, for example, and parasitic processing go very well together. You had a whole episode on that in the Awakening the Meeting Crisis series. But again, for Christianity, there’s other problems which that tradition is a little bit better suited to respond to. I think that’s excellent. One way of thinking about that, and it has to do with the broader scope of my work, you’ve heard me use this analogy before, is evolution by natural selection. The idea is there are perennial aspects, as you said, because across all environments, creatures have to adapt, they have to survive, they have to reproduce. What Darwin does is he comes up with the sort of universal principles by which that process occurs, but that doesn’t mean that all of the particular adaptations are homogeneous. In fact, what it predicts is exactly the opposite. In this context, this niche, adaptivity will look this way, we’ll have this morphology. It’s neither a kind of perennialism that every creature, because they’re adaptive, is ultimately the same, but neither is it a kind of relativism or eclecticism. It’s no, no, no. The very fact that they’re so well suited to these varying environments can be given a comprehensive, integrated explanation. That’s exactly, I think, what we’re trying to do here. We’re trying to show that synoptic integration tries to get both of those. It tries to say there are aspects that we can explain that are universal in the processing, but because of the nature of our explanation, that will predict that we should see that the various instantiations are going to be fitted to their historical cultural context. Platonism, I think, gives us a really good language for grappling with this problem. There is this universal, simple one which everyone can be able to contact with, but its nature is that it is absolutely simple, absolutely good, and simplicity is just fundamentally opposed to the kind of world that we live in. It’s like the opposite, almost. We live in the world of maximal complexity. Thus, simply residing in the unitive bliss of that simplistic, unitive frame of mind doesn’t really allow you the license to then collapse all particularity and complexity into that, because that’s not where we live. We live in the world of complexity. In fact, I think it’s like what you see in evolution, where you get variation and then selection on it, or what you see in machine learning. You get variation and then you get compression, but you cycle. You cycle. That’s part of what we’re arguing, too. What you should see is that this state, as you say, of unity isn’t to be equated with the cultivation of wisdom. It’s actually the ability to cycle and just enhance your overall adaptivity. That is how these states can actually contribute to enlightenment. That goes towards our point that we are not just taking the traditional meanings of enlightenment. We’re treating them with respect, but we’re not just taking them, again, because of the phenomenological language of training. We’re actually giving an operational definition of enlightenment in terms of its ability. We’re defining it in terms of these states that afford the ability for human beings to comprehensively address perennial problems, perennial problems of self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior, getting existentially confused in their modes, all this sort. We’re doing another cognitive science thing. We’re reverse engineering enlightenment in terms of, well, what problems should it solve, rather than trying to get in what seems to have been an interminable and irresolvable debate about from the phenomenology what enlightenment is? It’s sort of like, well, this is what we need enlightenment to do because given the nature of the machinery, the adaptive machinery, these are the kinds of perennial problems it’s facing. Enlightenment should significantly, reliably, systematically be able to address those. Of course, there’s going to be a component of that we can sort of specify in universal terms. Then we’re going to predict that there’s going to be ways in which, again, that adaptivity is going to be specified. I think it’s really important to emphasize that point you made, Matt, simply the occurrence of a mystical experience is on its own, not enough to guarantee enlightenment. The trade-off between the compression and the particularization is what’s really going to enable you to apply the potential of the unit of experience, which is why I’ve focused a lot in my own writing and my own research on the visionary experience. Because the visionary experience is one wherein particularization is ongoing. So you’re getting imaginative metaphors that you can grapple with, and maybe those metaphors are sort of a networking of various things that have happened in your life. I have to give this example because it’s one of my favorite examples, but the capacity for imaginative insight as a result of mental imagery-based experience, it’s so profound and so powerful you barely even have to try to make it happen, especially if you are under the influence of psychedelic compounds such as LSD, psilocybin, these things that allow your brain to really snap into new forms of order. There’s a paper that was published in 2017, I think it was, and the authors were merely exploring whether or not the imagery in the LSD experience was similar to the imagery that comes up in dreams. So they’re trying to look at a measure which is called cognitive bizarreness. It’s like an okay measure, but very subjective of course, you have to have a number of writers decide if it’s bizarre or not. So one of the people who are in this study, they have no mental health conditions, they’re just average as normal as you could possibly get because they’re just looking at this very basic functional thing, and they ask very minimal questions, so they’ll have the researcher in the room and he’ll just be like, oh, what do you see, what next, etc. And so one of the participants has the following experience. He says, okay, so I’m in a field and I see there’s a beach over there and there’s a pirate ship, I’m going to go hang out in the pirate ship, all right, now I’m in the basement of this pirate ship and there’s a treasure chest, I’m going to open this treasure chest and it’s empty and oh my god, I’ve been focusing too much of my time on work and neglecting my relationships, I really need to go like tell my wife that I love her. It’s so funny, like no intention at all, but already his imagination is just readily structured in such a way that there are meaningful insights lurking just beneath the surface of his imagery. Yeah, I think that’s amazing. I think, if you think about it, that movement between compression and particularization, well, this is part of what we are going to argue. It has a lot to do with the processes you need in solving an insight problem. You have to break up an inappropriate frame, you have to expand back out, but then you have to come back in and you can even see that playing out in shifts between the hemisphere, between the left hemisphere, which tends to emphasize detail step-by-step progress, the right hemisphere that tends to emphasize the gestalt, trying to gather it all together, and what insight is, is not to be in one place or the other, but to have this optimal kind of movement between them. But also, if we want to ask, well, why exactly does the state of mystical insight feel as though it’s so infused with truth that our normal everyday experience isn’t? Well, the right temporal lobe is also something that processes comprehension, right? There is hemispheric lateralization in much of your processing, especially when it comes to things like language and sense making, and your left hemisphere is more specialized in the production of language, whereas the right is more specialized in the comprehension of language. So you’re basically having like a tiny seizure in the area of your brain that processes comprehension. So, of course, you’re going to feel, oh, comprehension just immersing everything, because that’s where the source of the moment is coming from. Yeah, and it’s also that because it tends to move to that more gestalt, to overall integration, that’s also paired up with a sense of not just comprehension, but importance, because the gestalt things were usually, these are areas where we’re dealing with very messy ill-defined problems often that have a kind of urgency to them. So the left hemisphere is very good at handling their familiar well-defined problems. The right hemisphere is much better for unfamiliar ill-defined things. And typically, unfamiliar ill-defined things are either very threatening or very wonderful, and therefore they carry with them a portent importance. So it’s not only that you’re getting this enhanced sense of intelligibility, you’re getting an enhanced sense of, oh, this is really important. But as we’ve said, if you get caught up with the imagery and thinking it’s giving you a literal account, you can get messed up. But if you realize, oh, but that sense of importance is actually, if you’re solving problems, then something really significant in terms of training your processing is going on. So for example, we were following earlier work that I’ve done, we argue that what you can do is you can chain a bunch of insights together into getting an insight cascade, where one insight sort of provides and provokes another one and so on. And you can see people doing this when they’re playing jazz, or when they’re rock climbing, or when you’re sparring. And that’s how you primarily get into a flow state by doing that kind of thing. Now the thing about the flow state is, you know, Chick-Sat-Mahai calls it optimal experience. It’s of course related to our ideas of optimal gripping of reality, right? Because it’s optimal in two ways. Both people regard it as a really great experience, not pleasurable, but more this sense of discovery and importance and at one with reality. But also, this is where, well, think of the jazz musician or the athlete in the zone, or the martial artist, or the rock climber. I mean, athletes try to get into the flow state precisely because it’s also optimal performance. And that’s ultimately what we’re trying to get point people towards. Thinking about this more in terms of optimal performance rather than, you know, the semantic veracity of the propositions. So the nature of enlightenment, one thing that we’re arguing is that, well, it’s not really a property. We have in the historical discourse claims about enlightened people, but it doesn’t seem that enlightenment is best described as a property that a person can obtain. And if you look at, for example, the Christian, the Orthodox Christian writer from the fourth century, Gregory of Nice, is it Nice or? Yes, it is what I’ve heard. Okay. So he talks about epic tasis. That’s correct. Right. So that was great. I’m glad that you threw that my direction. So epitasis is described as, so it translates into like a straining towards and it’s this never ending process of trying to keep pace with this transcendent ideal. Yeah. It’s the idea that God is the inexhaustible of God is perpetually affording the self transcendence that human beings find gives them such a tremendous sense of connectedness to what’s most real. So it’s different from more typical mythology in which you what you’re what you’re what you’re trying to do, for example, perhaps in a Christian life is to get to a state of sort of blessed rest, a sort of a final place, a final position, a final status. And epic tasis was as much this interesting idea that what’s happening is instead, no, no, our relationship to the sacred isn’t to try and finalize any kind of grasp of it. I think about again, the analogy with evolution, there is no final fittedness for organisms. They constantly have to be evolving across generations or they will fall out of sync with reality. And so again, the epic tasis is is is that idea. And this is even picked up by people like Schlegel when he talks about the finite constantly longing for the infinite that so this that this understanding of and I like this, which is why I recommended it to you, because this notion of the sacredness of these experience does not give you this idea of, well, here’s the final content that I have to hold on to. It’s rather no, this is an ongoing performance of self transcendence. And what I have to do is find out how to keep the music flowing. I’m glad to use the music metaphor. As a musician, very accessible. I’ve been really bringing a lot of my experience playing music into looking at how to work with the flow state in particular, in service of this ideal of sort of keeping pace with the transcendent metaphor that I realized might be pretty good for this. And I hope that as science progresses, it doesn’t make this metaphor irrelevant. But the ideal of the transcendent, which enlightenment is oriented towards something like a black hole, you can’t really fully see it. It’s something that is a little bit beyond our capacity to comprehend. But it has an immense pole once you’re in its horizon. Yeah, so I think enlightenment is something like that. It’s an ideal to aspire towards. And once we do end up bringing our state of being, our existential mode into pace with the event horizon of the ideal, it will have more and more of a pole, more and more of a hole. And actually, there’s a great Buddhist symbol, which is used. It’s shown up in tattoos a lot because it’s been used a lot in the sort of sacred tattoo tradition, which is famous for from Thailand. But the symbol is it’s like a swirl, which starts out with like a lot of layers. And then eventually it breaks out of the swirl becomes a zigzag line and then a straight line upwards. And that’s supposed to describe the process of enlightenment, which is exactly, I think, consonant with this idea we’re getting at. It’s really complicated. You’re running in circles a lot. But once you get it, it becomes easier and easier to keep pace with it. Well, I like the zigzagging too, because the zigzagging is about it sort of picks up on the compression particularization. You’re moving between until eventually you arc into some optimal flow state. Excellent. Perhaps we’ll have to include that in the book. Oh, that’s a good idea. Yeah. One thing that I’m trying to do, which I think is important to mention as well, is to add a lot of art into this. I think that’s extremely relevant. And I think that’s, I mean, that’s kind of a godsend for our partnership because you’re bringing that artistic ability in that I don’t possess. And what you’ve probably seen in some of the videos and discussions I’ve had with people, I keep arguing that that we’re going to respond to things like the meaning crisis. It can’t just be even through, it’s not sufficient just to use theory or even to do ecologies of sort of practice. We need what Corbin called the imaginal. We need the artistic expression to link those two domains together to synoptically integrate them so they can insightfully inform and transform each other. To your credit, you can draw a meme nine dot problem. But yeah, so out of more serious notes, the inclusion of art is going to be something that I hope elevates people’s experience of the book as well. So I’m commissioning a number of artists to draw some pieces that are relevant to whichever perspectives we’re trying to elucidate linguistically. Because if we’re going to be taking seriously the ideas that we’re giving, there’s a lot of different ways of knowing and proposition is only one of them. And not everybody can access proposition equally. So in order to make this knowledge accessible, I think it’s really important to provide also a more perspectival participatory image oriented articulation of the ideas as well. I agree with that totally. And like I said, I think it’s a godsend that you’re bringing that to the book. Excellent. Thank you. I’m having a lot of fun. Well, that’s good. Fun helps. Definitely helps the aspirational aspect. So perhaps maybe we should go back now and talk a little bit about the campaign and what you want to say about it, what you want to explain about it. Sure. So I’m still sort of finalizing preparing, but the campaign should be launching. Actually, by the time this video is out, it will already be launched. So that’s not really relevant to mention. What is relevant to mention is that the link will be in the description of this video. So it’ll be easy to find. You’ll be able to find an elaboration of all of the costs that are associated with this. We have to pay these artists to draw these pieces. We also have to pay for the cost of actually designing the layout and the cover. And also I want Daniel to have an income. He’s putting in lots of time and effort on this. People should know, though, that I’m not taking any income from this campaign. Part of what many of you know is I like to try and afford other people’s careers and to get them going. And so Daniel is putting a tremendous amount of work of love into this book. Part of the money will go towards supporting his labor and the other things that he’s addressing. Yeah, definitely. It’ll make it more possible for me to get this done on time. Yes. Because we’re trying to finish by April 30th. Yes, we are. And I’m going to need to basically treat this like a full-time job if we’re going to make that happen inside. That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. So just to briefly touch on some of the perks, there’s going to be a unique piece of content from you, a paper that you’ve written. I’m going to self-publish that. So if you want access to some more John content, you will have the option to participate in that as well. There’s also an option to participate in the editing process. So you can sign up for what’s called beta reader privileges if you want early access to some of it, and also to give some feedback on what makes sense, what doesn’t, what you like, what you don’t like. That’ll really help us to make the book accessible to a wide audience while also helping us to gather the funds that we need to actually execute this. And there’s a lot else. You can go check that out on your own if you’d like. I don’t think there’s too much else aside from that to mention unless you have any final thoughts. No, just like I said, I think I’m very excited for this project going forward. I think this book is an excellent complement, and that’s how it was intended to be used, to the series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. So Daniel, thank you very, very much for your time. Thank you.