https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=DofDymJbrqk
Welcome to Voices with Verbeke. I’m joined by my good friend and colleague Anderson Todd. Today we’re going to discuss the topic the Jung of cog-sci, cognitive science, and the cog-sci of Jung. So welcome Anderson, it’s great to have you here again. Thank you John, it’s always great to talk to you and so so great to see you in this new era where we live in a society of talking televisions. This is so natural now. Thank you for having me. So Anderson, could you just give everybody sort of a brief introduction to who you are? Some of my viewers have no doubt already probably seen you and I have had a couple of discussions, you’ve had a Q&A, but it would be good if you introduce yourself again. Sure, so I’m Anderson Todd. If you haven’t caught the previous thing, Anderson is my first name. Thank you Anderson Cooper for making my life easier. Todd is my last name. I don’t know if this was, I don’t think my parents considered the jokey effect of that reversal, but it has rendered me nearly internet invisible, but Anderson is my first name. And who am I? My background sort of academically is in cognitive science. I’m also trained as a registered psychotherapist and I have a pretty wide span of interest academically, but at the university I’ve previously taught in cognitive science. So I taught the fourth year capstone course on cognitive science and consciousness. I taught the first half of the introductory consci course and currently I teach the suite of interdisciplinary courses in Jungian theory. So that’s a full year course on Jung and then a half year course on the hypotheses of the unconscious. And then in addition to that, I’m a private practice psychotherapist and I’m pretty heavily influenced by depth psychology, although like many therapists I’m an eclectic. So that’s sort of my wheelhouse in general. So, you know, due to the work of people like, you know, Jordan Peterson and Joseph Campbell, Jung has gone through something of a resurgence and then you approached me with this very interesting idea and something I know you’ve put a lot of thought into, sort of Jungian aspects of the practice of cognitive science as opposed to, you know, particular theoretical claims made with a particular theory. But there’s something, you see some very important Jungian elements in the practice of cognitive science. And I think that’s a very interesting topic. I’ll briefly introduce what I take cognitive science to be. And then I’ll turn it over to you in terms of the Jungian interpretation of the practice of cognitive science. And then at some point we’ll invert things. And what can cognitive science tell us about some of the core Jungian constructs and processes? So I take it that many people will have probably seen a lot of videos where I’ve introduced the topic of cognitive science. So I’ll try not to make this too long. But for those of you who are coming at this, cognitive science is born from the idea that there are many different disciplines that study the mind. Neuroscience studies the brain and it uses its own particular tools, gathers its own kinds of evidence, etc. Artificial intelligence studies intelligence, but does it in a very different way from neuroscience. It tries to make machines. Psychology studies the mind, but it does this largely by running experiments on human behavior. Linguistics studies the mind, but it looks for patterns within language. And anthropology studies the mind insofar as it works in distributed cognition by doing participant observation of culture. So each discipline studies the mind at a different level and using different tools and different theoretical entities, different types of data. And it’s almost like they’re different countries speaking a different language. And the problem with that is that it’s very likely that all these different levels of the mind, the brain level, the information processing level, the behavioral level, the language using level, and the cultural level are not independent from each other. They interact and constrain and affect each other in powerful ways. And so cognitive science is born out of the idea about trying to find a synoptic integration, a way of bridging between those so that those various disciplines can more appropriately talk to each other in an insightful fashion, mutually and reciprocally inform and transform each other. The idea being that by having the disciplines more appropriately bridge in this way, we can get make some progress to getting how all these different levels of the mind causally interact and constrain each other. And then cognitive science is doing that, trying to afford this synoptic integration, this integrative picture, precisely because we’re in a very important situation, both epistemically and existentially. We have generated this powerful scientific worldview that generates all these explanations, but we do not have a good explanation of how we generate those scientific explanations or the meaning we generate upon which those explanations are dependent. And so we don’t, that’s the epistemic side, but what that means existentialism, we don’t belong in that very worldview that has so much normative authority over us. And so the goal of cognitive science is to figure out a way of re situating us back within that scientific worldview. So we both have a more complete epistemological picture and we can alleviate some of the existential distress people are feeling because human beings and their meanings and such do not seem to fit very readily within the scientific purview. So that’s cognitive science in five minutes. You guys know I teach a full year course on this at the University of Toronto. So don’t take that to be sort of complete or exhaustive, but I think it’s good enough to give Anderson some purchase to begin making his commentary. Yeah. So, you know, as we sort of discussed in your previous video, you know, both of these subjects, cognitive science and depth psychology, generally speaking, have been sort of fields of interest of mine for many years. And, you know, specific sort of research and academic interest for more than a decade now. But what sort of increasingly became clear to me as I was sort of doing work in both areas was the extent to which they were in fact kind of not just consonant, but I felt held sort of specific sort of inter theoretical material for each other, useful inter theoretical material. So, you know, when you’re talking about the kind of the synoptic integration, right, making these different countries of discussion, talking to each other, one of the things that that occurred to me pretty early on, I was interested in the work of Thompson and Varela in talking about neuro phenomenology. And it has sort of long seemed to me that depth psychology in some ways places a particular kind of emphasis on the phenomenology of psychological experience and sort of clinical and therapeutic experience, right, the experience of life, right, and what it is left to be and to become and to mature and so on and so forth. And where sort of academic psychology has largely it seems placed its focused on sort of explaining mechanism in a certain kind of sense, right, and zooming in on explicable mechanism testable mechanism and empirical findings in that way. Depth psychology placed its emphasis more on this phenomenological material more on sort of the felt and lived experience. And there is, I think, for many people who explore depth psychology in Jung, this, this sense of a certain kind of lack that lacks that underlying machinery, right, that it talks about things and yet it’s hard to sort of connect that phenomenological level with some kind of underlying underlying machinery that’s sort of more consistent with what we now know about the mind and brain function and and so on and so forth. But that also the sort of more academic levels of psychology often sort of fall a bit short in the phenomenological sense. It’s hard to figure out sometimes where some of these findings and theories and so on connect to our sort of lived experience. So that gap was sort of increasingly obvious to me, which, which began to sort of fuel the desire to bring it together. And when I started to look at things in terms of neuro phenomenology, it began to occur to me that this particular kind of Western psychological phenomenological practice that you find in depth psychology might in some ways be a kind of missing component for making this stuff work within the Western canon. Right. Where sort of a traditional neuro phenomenology with Varela and Thompson had had its emphasis right originally on kind of a Buddhist approach. Right. And that’s fine. But it leaves behind sort of a wealth of cultural material and experience that is unique to sort of the Western culture, Western culture and development. Right. And so bridging those things between Part of it is that and we’ve talked about this a little bit before, but in many ways, I think some of the late developments in Jung, the stuff that people find sort of hard to understand, but are often they’re attracted to it for the sort of esoteric quality that it has. So when Jung starts to get into things like synchronicity, and when he starts, particularly towards sort of the end of his career, he becomes increasingly interested in systems like alchemy. And that stuff is very, very hard for people to get purchase on if they’re thinking in rational terms. Right. We have a tendency to think of alchemy as being the sort of backwards proto chemistry that we left behind. But Jung sort of presents this argument that in fact what alchemy represented, right, especially for sort of its practitioners later, and they’re quite explicit about it in places, is a kind of inner work practice. He calls it a kind of Western yoga, right. Yoga in the full sense like the yoga, the connection to God. And so, you know, he talks about it as being sort of a systematized set of methods that one uses to do inner work in much the same way as Eastern systems do. Right. And that’s hard for us to wrap our head around without the underlying machinery. Likewise, when people talk about synchronicity, and for anybody that’s not familiar with the term or the police album, synchronicity is Jung’s interest basically in meaningful coincidence. Okay. So the idea being that you could have sort of symbolically meaningful coincidences which happened to you at certain kind of key moments of development or of sort of personal blockage. Right. And the thing about that stuff is it’s so closely to things like parapsychology, right, where we have a stock answer in, you know, in sort of standard naturalist science of saying, well, you know, like, probably those oddball experiences that you’re having are a function of you selectively paying attention to the probabilities and so on and so forth. But the thing that I was jumped out about that stuff to me was that that doesn’t really negate the experience itself. Right. And the experience is in fact very often a significant one, regardless of what you think about sort of the underlying metaphysics of what’s powering it. And so people have a hard time basically if they’re from a naturalistic, from accessing that kind of end of Jung, the esoteric end. But what increasingly dawned on me and I think, you know, in our conversations too, which sort of led to this, is that in fact, I think a lot of what Jung is getting at and what he would claim the alchemists were getting at is something that’s actually very, very akin to the goals of cognitive science. Okay, that’s really provocative. So you got to unpack the one slowly. Okay, so at the most basic level, okay, when he’s talking about things like synchronicity, he’s essentially speaking, as we talked about before, attempting to bridge the mind-body problem. Right. Right. His notion of synchronicity. Hold on, just to make sure people understand that. Sure. Mind-body problem is one of the core problems in cognitive science. This is the problem that the means given to us by the physical sciences, physics, chemistry, even some sort of the more engineering sciences like computer science, give us some very powerful ways of describing what’s going on in the brain. But that language does not seem, and notice we’re talking about languages, that language does not seem to transfer well to describing the mind, especially important properties of consciousness. And so consciousness seems to be something that many people find very problematic to try and give it a naturalistic explanation. And there’s all kinds of, and by the way, this is not some crackpot idea. Many people within the heart of cognitive science, really important philosophers and thinkers, have come to the conclusion that we might not be able to come up with a naturalistic explanation of consciousness. Many of them who think we can come up with a naturalistic explanation will admit that it’s a very famously a very hard problem. Right. Yeah. So for those that are familiar with the hard problem, it might be easy to sort of look at the wealth of brain imaging techniques and network mapping and the increasing sophistication we have on the physical side with regard to cognition and sort of hand wave away. It’s like, yeah, yeah, well, consciousness emerges from that. But actually, right, as David Chalmers, the hard problem demonstrates, there’s a really deep philosophical problem. And, you know, in some sense, right, the people that are supporters of the hard problem and the sort of irreducibility in some sense of conscious experience will basically make claims that land us in a kind of dualistic situation, right, like a Cartesian dualistic situation. Yeah, where we have these two fields and never the twain shall meet or some kind of panpsychism where some kind of panpsychism consciousness is a fundamental property distributed throughout all of reality. And sometimes people put sort of a quantum mechanics spin on that, etc, etc. Yes. So, yeah, you show up and are famously called this the world not. It’s not just a problem about us. When you try and solve the problem of the relationship between consciousness and the brain, you get into the sort of fundamental grammar of your metaphysics. Right. Yeah. And I think provided that you have a taste for a certain level of ambiguity and uncertainty, that’s a kind of delicious mystery to contemplate. Right. To think about the hard problem and to really, I mean, you know, even if you believe that it’s bridgeable, just ramming your head a little bit against the fact that it’s so hard to puzzle out can itself be, in my experience anyway, a kind of a delicious mystery to contemplate. Yes. But you always very concerned with this with with sort of the divide between the subjective and objective world. Right. Why? Why was he concerned with it? Well, he was concerned with it, I think, in part because, you know, although he was not, I think, primarily recognized as a philosopher, right, his, his system of thought is, is very philosophically oriented. He didn’t just want to map experience and find kind of clinical intervention. He wanted to explain in some important sense the nature of being. And because he was as concerned as he was with the kind of mythic level of experience, the archetypal, et cetera, et cetera, this necessarily sort of started to vault him into more mystical territory. Right. You start to get into the high reaches of that stuff and sort of mystical encounters with the self. And all of a sudden you’re having sort of metaphysical confrontations with the nature of being. Right. And so and on top of that, he had this long standing interest in things like synchronicity and parapsychology. And the thing about synchronicity, right, that that triggers him particularly is the way that seems to bridge that divide in the objective and the objective. Yeah, the striking way where sort of interior private subjective contents seem to periodically constellate in external things in the shocking way. These moments of synchronicity have sort of can have very transformative and therapeutic effects on people. That’s right. Yeah. So, so there’s a somewhat famous, you know, anecdote that he tells about having a client who was really locked in on a rational framework and couldn’t couldn’t kind of break through their fixations and had had this dream that they found quite affecting about receiving a piece of jewelry, kind of a turquoise scarab like an Egyptian scarab beetle, right. And in the middle of having this conversation where they were describing the dream, you know, young describes hearing this sort of tap tap tap at his window, and he gets up and he goes over to the window. And when he opens it up, there’s a rose chafer, which is a relatively for that part of Switzerland uncommon kind of beetle, but it’s like a greenish gold beetle, which flies into the window. And so he catches this thing in his hand and walks up to his client and says, here is your scarab, right, and presents it to her. And this this sort of breakthrough of what was seemingly a private inner material into something that was external in a meaningful way right the symbolic concretization in some sense of the inner blockage has this effective sort of shattering her fixation and then allowing the sort of therapeutic work to proceed. And that’s a relatively commonly described thing. People will often feel sort of locked in when they’re doing certain you know certain aspects of depth work, but then they’ll have a synchronicity and there’s something about the way that that seemingly bridges between their internal experience in the world where they experience a coincidence that really throws them that makes them feel richly connected to the world. Right. So, so, you know, you’re always interested in trying to figure out what accounts for this and from his perspective, it’s like well it seems to happen more often when people are in states of intense emotional activation. When they’re deeply fixated, and it’s often it seemed to Tim structured mythically. Now, I should sort of put caveat in, which is that his tendency then is to. He proposes basically a return to a kind of earlier notion of reality, the, the Eunice Mundus the one world. So he says there isn’t the world of the mind and the world of matter they’re really one thing, they just have an apparent division. And that the archetypes from his perspective are operating from this higher area, and they’re sort of pushing simultaneously into the two sides in a way that right that then demonstrates directly that there is a linkage between these two worlds right. So he was interested in that level. Now, the caveat is, I don’t necessarily think it personally, and this is where my work goes. I don’t think that you necessarily have to interpret it in such a metaphysically strong way for it to be useful and significant, and indeed to contribute to a powerful explanatory framework. I think you can you can look at those kinds of experiences and ask yourself in a more naturalistic framework. Well, okay, so what’s going on there. If people having that experience. Is there a way that we can talk about that, that still gives us something useful to say about bridging this world, because, you know, this is my first point, I think. A big part of sort of this generation of cognitive science, and maybe cognitive science in general is specifically working its way towards that kind of Unus Mundus. Right, right, right, right, right. Yes. And so how does that link back to alchemy then. Okay, well, so I’ll give you the short form version and then I’ll unpack this. So, you know, alchemy, generally speaking, people tend to think of alchemy of sort of chemistry’s, you know, idiot kid brother or something. And that’s a bit unfair. You know, early, early alchemy, which traces back at least as far as the first century CE and probably further. If you if you look at some of the sources in the West, you know, comes as a sort of rich alternate tradition, esoteric tradition, and it hovers up all kinds of influences. So it’s closely associated with the Gnostics, the Neoplatonics, right, for reasons that we’ll touch on in more detail. So it’s pulling in this kind of alternate esoteric view that permeated the West at the time, but was sort of at odds with the mainstream, especially with Christianity. It was periodically in some cases. In fact, there was a pope, I think in the 1300s that straight up declared it heresy. So it was often forced to operate underground. But lots of the premises that alchemy is based in, especially in their Neoplatonic roots, I think have sort of a strong similarity to cognitive science. So for one. Okay. So what’s alchemy in the main concerned with? Well, it’s concerned with in the main, the transformation of metals specifically, but the transformation of matter. And its sort of core concern is the transformation of what it called the primal materia, the base material, up through a set of operations, right, to transform it into some higher state of material being. In some cases, that would be called the philosopher’s stone. In some cases, it was the elixir. In some cases, the philosopher’s stone was not in fact the gold state, but rather was a kind of intermediate transformative catalyst agent you could then use to produce what they called the philosophic gold. So that’s like the classic form you hear is turning lead into gold, right, base matter lead into high gold. Okay, and that all sounds pretty sort of abstract to us. And certainly there were some alchemists who were concerned with that on the strictly physical level. So there were always people that were interested in taking lead and turning it into actual gold to get rich. And there were always people who were concerned with what combination of, you know, chemicals and operations do I need to yield a potion of immortality, right, elixir of immortality. So there was always a relatively like a grounded version of alchemy that ran, but the alchemists also saw their operations as being spiritual operations. So they saw their work not merely as transforming one form of matter into another form of matter, but rather in sort of advancing matter up a chain of being. Right. And that draws pretty heavily from the Neoplatonists. The idea is that matter, right, so the alchemists are very concerned with the notion of self organizing matter. And the idea that they’re sort of midwifing it, right, that the operations are in some way hastening or facilitating a set of transformations that matter already wants to go through, that it wants to transform itself off a chain. So that’s really kind of interesting. And then another thing that the alchemists are concerned with, I’ll talk this back around in a sec, you’ll see them very often being concerned with the production of a homonculus. Now homonculus is a term of course it turns up in psychology, you get the sensory homonculus with the giant hands and mouth and genitals, and you get the sort of dreaded homonculus of infinite regress. Right. Right, the homoncular fallacy. But the homonculus that they were interested in producing was essentially speaking like a little person that wanted to produce life, often by bottling up sort of the core materials of life so they would, you know, read reproductive tissue, semen, blood, right, also base materials, seal it in an alembic and produce life. So here’s the basic link that I want to pitch. The alchemists are concerned with three things overall. They’re concerned with bridging the world of matter through to the world of mind and spirit, right, so they’re concerned with sort of showing the links that bridge those two things together, and thus closing that gap. They’re concerned with the production of thinking matter, in a certain sense, right, with the production of life. So in a sense sort of an artificial intelligence, a design stance kind of approach to losing stuff. And, and insofar as they are concerned with the spiritual transition, the thing about it is that they’re not just conducting those operations on the world, because they have a microcosm, macrocosm approach to this stuff. As they are transforming the substance of the world, they are simultaneously affecting those transformations in themselves. So it’s a spiritual discipline designed to refine, transmute, and make more complex their own being in an effort to heal themselves in some fundamental way and to heal the world simultaneously, right? These three things are also what cognitive science is basically concerned with. Cognitive science is concerned with collapsing the gap between world and the mind, right, to make that a continuous thing where we can show that this transition can occur and that there is a continuity between those two things. It primarily approaches that through a kind of design stance. So particularly with the early versions of cognitive science, right, the idea is that, right, under the sort of Aristotelian idea that the person who makes a thing knows the thing, right, if you can produce a mind, then you’re going to understand the basic principles of mind, right? And so you study through design, you study by making. And similarly, right, the production and the sort of experimental approach towards creating things like a homunculus represents precisely that kind of approach. If you can make a mind, if you can achieve these things sort of in sort of experimental enacted form, then you know what you’re talking about. Right, right. And notably that has lots of sort of metaphysical underpinnings like self-organizing matter and that kind of stuff that. Self-organization and emergence. Yep, self-organization and emergence. And the. Yeah. And then third, of course, you know, and this is not, you know, universal in cognitive science, but I think one of the underlying things that sort of informs the ethos is the idea that. Once we can, once we can collapse that gap and get the world connected back into a unis mundus, right, and once we can understand the mechanisms by which mind operates, we can then also intervene on ourselves in some important self-transforming way. And that’s fundamental to what the alchemists are doing when they’re talking about inner work. The idea is working outside yourself experimentally, you are simultaneously learning to transform the states of your own being. Right. So, so the fairly somewhat tongue in cheek, but not entirely tongue in cheek thing that I like to say in class when I’m teaching it is cognitive science is alchemy. I see. Cognitive science is, in my opinion, actually a more apt inheritor of alchemy than modern chemistry. Which is largely jettisoned, right, the the sort of secondary and interior and subjective components that alchemy was originally founded on. And so, you know, when the discipline splits, when we get chemistry coming off one side and we get this coming off the other side, sort of depth psychology makes the claim to grab that up. But I actually think that depth psychology, because it’s not done a lot of the work in finding the underlying ground, it has in some sense abandoned the side that chemistry was handling originally, right. And in fact, I think cognitive science is much closer to an inheritor for that that particular integrated aspect of that work. That’s great. Yeah. And of course, it’s, it’s trying to heal the world in a way too. Very much so. So given that, I mean, that you’ve made it, you know, that’s a plausible argument for an important similarity. What, what insight about, well, I suppose there’s insights go both ways. But what insight, I’m a cognitive scientist, what insight about cognitive science do I get from seeing it through the lens of it being a legacy from alchemy? Like, what, what, what, what, what does that, what, how does that inform and transform my conception? Right. Perhaps my practice of cognitive science. Well, so, you know, one thing is, at least, you know, when I’m thinking about this, it means that like, I mean, when we talk about neurophenomenology, right, in the, in the classic sort of Thompson-Varela fashion, you know, there’s sort of two sides to that. Right. You know, the idea is that what you want is highly trained introspectors, people who are capable of paying attention to their own experience and their own cognition, their phenomenology. In a way so that you, when you intervene on it with various sort of techniques, right, you know, whether you’re talking about sort of strictly psychotechnological techniques, like meditation. sort of techniques, right? Whether you’re talking about sort of strictly psychotechnological techniques like meditation, or if you’re talking about strict interventions, like I’m very interested in psychedelics, and I’m very interested in non-invasive brain stimulation technologies, right? These various ways of intervening, you need the sort of the witnessing mind inside to have a sufficient degree of training and connoisseurship that it can track these small changes. You need sort of to be able to have the language to pick that up when you’re making the intervention to try to bridge those two things together, right? The fine details that let you connect it. So half of it is having that sort of acuity in your sort of ability to perceive and describe and experience. But the other half, a lot of the time of course, is about going back and looking at the texts and the bodies of training around people that have been doing that work, less with an eye to the neuro side and more with an eye to the phenomenological side. So looking at texts of sort of advanced meditative practitioners, right? And seeing in some ways where the language that they’re using around the kinds of techniques that they’re using to alter their mind, right? You take that stuff and you try to examine it in close detail, right? Understand what it is, and then you code it back into mechanism, right? You try to code it back into some sort of understandable mechanism, and there is this back and forth, this exchange, which allows you to refine possibly your understanding of the mechanism, and then use that in turn to understand what’s going on. So part of it is just that we have this huge body of Western esoteric doctrine, right? All these texts, and we live in a world where those texts are readily available to us in a way that they have just never been historically, right? This stuff was tightly guarded and hard to get access to. It was hidden, deliberate. So we have access to sort of vast amounts of this stuff, but what we don’t really have is something to put it into dialogue with, right? So that’s what depth psychology tried to do, was put it into dialogue with the psychology and phenomenology of archetypal experience and change and so on and so forth. I think that you can also, of course, put those kinds of texts into dialogue with cognitive science the same way that you would with other kinds of contemplative disciplines, and that back and forth can sort of clarify and hone both constructs if you’re willing to take seriously the kinds of experiences that people have written down in those texts, right? You have to sort of take them charitably and at face value, and well, face value, try to make sense of it in that way. So that’s one thing. But the other thing about it that I think is particularly- Before we go on, could you give an example of that first thing? Sure. Your second thing. Don’t forget your second thing, but maybe as you give a principle, give an example. Okay, so one example that I like to talk about, and I recognize that this is a high-level analogy, like the broad analogy in some ways, but it’s useful for that reason, I think. So one thing that I like to talk about is that sometimes they say that the essence of the alchemical art can boil down to a single notion, okay? Solve et coagula, right? So the principle of alchemy, the alchemical operation, solve et coagula was you dissolve and you solidify it. You dissolve and you solidify it. You’re sequentially going through this operation. But notice that it’s solve et coagula, right? It’s and, it’s conjunctive. The goal is that eventually you’re reaching a state of sort of simultaneity. To me, that sounds tremendously like integration and differentiation. Right, right, right. So when you integrate systems tightly, and when you differentiate them, you bring them apart. But if you simultaneously integrate them and differentiate them, you complexify them. And that specific complexification that you get through running through that process over and over and over again, right? And then simultaneously can be used in sort of complexity in dynamical systems to account for a kind of complexification. Thinking about solve et coagula in that way, for instance, has let me drill into sort of all kinds of techniques basically that alchemists describe. And to think about them in terms of, well, what would we be talking about if we were talking about these things in terms of, in terms of say, the integration and differentiation of brain systems. Right, right, right, right. For instance, right? So if for instance, you’re making the assumption that, yes, okay, they’re projecting into the outer material to do their work, right? But that fundamentally much of what we’re talking about is a kind of psychological experience. Then you can think about solve et, right? Dissolve and coagulate that complexification. And you begin to consider about areas where, for instance, like, so I think about this in terms of things like opponent processing, opponents and the transcendence of opponents. I think about it in terms of aspect shifting. I think about it in terms of Michael Apter’s reversal theory and the idea of being able to, or like, what’s this called? The Necker cube. Oh yeah, the Necker cube. Yeah, the Necker cube, but what the specific, anyway. That kind of aspect shifting, right? And to some extent how the integration aspect of taking sort of different streams of information and integrating them, right? While simultaneously differentiating them, it provides a lot of explanatory function and then I can kind of go into the text and pull out specific techniques and try to sort of run them through that formula to see what would that produce hypothetically? You know what I mean? So there’s a talk about meta-stability. It’s the state in the brain in which the brain is simultaneously integrating and segregating and that meta-stability gives you all kinds of emergent functions on how widespread and important this is in the brain. So is it possible to reinterpret what you’re saying that when the alchemists are doing their practice, it’s like a meditative practice that’s actually trying to engender a kind of sort of pervasive meta-stability in the brain? Yeah, so one of the most useful sort of concepts that I’ve put into my own work more recently to frame this off and connect the two is looking at structural dissociation. Neo-dissociative theory. So we’re used to thinking of dissociation in a psychological sense. Often we use dissociation strictly in pejorative terms. So when we talk about somebody dissociating, we talk about them tuning out, we talk about them sort of glazing over. From a clinical perspective, I mean, you do look for that, right? So if you’re describing something, you’re talking about a series of subjects with a client and all of a sudden they get like a flat, glazy, far away look, you often know that you’ve hit a nerve, they’ve sort of dissociated, right? And in serious cases of dissociation, people will lose access to affect, right? They’ll lose access to feeling, they may block memory. In really serious cases, of course, they can have shifts of identity and all kinds of stuff. And so we’re used to thinking of it as pathological and we’re used to thinking of it in pejorative terms. But of course, if the case that dissociation actually is like a central and necessary function to the way that the mind and brain are working. So we dissociate when we’re reading, we dissociate when we’re daydreaming, dissociation is integral to creative process. Dissociation seems to occur on the regular, for instance, when we’re asleep and dreaming. By which I mean that areas that are normally in close synchrony and communication across the brain, drift into, right? They’re desynchronized. So this kind of pattern of synchronizing and desynchronizing, integrating and differentiating is occurring all the time as part of the regular functioning of the brain and of the mind. And I argue that that’s sort of at the core of processes of relevance realization in some of the work I do. Right, yes, exactly. Yeah, full disclosure, I’m a non-orthodox vervecian and I’ve worked with John on enough stuff that we have lots of theoretical overlap because we’ve worked together. So a lot of this is gonna be bouncing out of your work for sure. But one of the things that I like to focus on in this respect is, so the work of RAS 2007, right? That put hypnosis on footing, right? How did they do it? Well, they did a hypnotic induction on suggestible subjects, but they did hypnotic induction and what they did was they had people basically lose access to literacy. Right, right. And in so doing, they allowed people to cut through the Stroop effect, the automaticity of the Stroop effect. Right, right. So when I talk about the Stroop effect, the thing that’s really interesting to me about Stroop, right, is first off, it sort of already breaks through the unit of bias, right? It sort of implies multiple streams of processing necessarily. Yeah, yeah. Of course it does. But the interesting thing about the RAS lab work is that what they showed is that, right, this minor intervention of words and a certain kind of attention could dissociate, right, a module of processing that’s normally so tightly integrated with automaticity that we actually can’t consciously intermittent, we can’t turn it off. Most the robust effects. Right, right. It’s a whole cottage industry and it’s a really powerful effect. So, okay, so if sort of hypnotic and trance practice can do this thing where it can take a module and sort of dissociate it out from regular functioning. And if we know that dissociative processes are sort of occurring regularly in the brain anyway, part of what I’m suggesting is happening in something like alchemical practice is that projective psychotechnologies are being used to selectively dissociate aspects of the mind. And that has a few sort of effects. One, any two modules that are previously integrated that start to dissociate from each other, there’s a certain point at which they’re going to start to experience each other as other. Right, right, right, right, right, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, so when you experience certain kinds of dissociation, right, when people are say, derealized or depersonalized, right, you know, they get a certain amount of dissociation and then the component that drifts apart from the main portion that is sort of supporting their consciousness, this outside chunk seems alien and weird. Right, right. We can see this when people, for instance, if you see people that have their corpus callosum surgically covered and they’ll get alien hand syndrome. Right, describe that quickly. Yeah, sure, alien hand syndrome, I can’t remember the French term, but it’s alien hand syndrome is the term. So, you know, when they pioneered a set of surgeries for severing the corpus callosum, the band of connective communicative tissue that links together the hemispheres tightly, and they did it originally to stop certain kinds of sort of runaway seizures, right? And it can be pretty effective. And initially speaking, when they did these surgeries on people, they were like, oh, they seem to be behaving just fine, but it turns out that, you know, if you look at the work of Gazzaniga and people like that, we’re looking at in the 70s, there are a bunch of things that you can do that demonstrate that actually the hemispheres are operating almost sort of independent consciousnesses. They have sort of. And I would recommend Ian Magocres, a really important book, The Master and His Emissary. Yes, yes, absolutely, that’s a great book. In some cases of this corpus callosectomy, you’ll get what’s called alien hand syndrome. And what happens is that the non-dominant hand starts to take on autonomous behavior. So people will go to open a door and the hand will close it, or they’ll pick some, I’m not gonna do this, because I’ll knock coffee all over myself, but the hand will like swap things out of their hand. Sometimes the hand will choke them, like it seems to take on a seemingly kind of autonomous thing. Now, in and of itself, you know, we’re like, okay, well, that’s weird. But I think the thing that you have to consider is it’s like, okay, well, if we’re assuming for a second that the non-dominant hemisphere is what’s operating this, the non-dominant hemisphere is still doing a lot of information processing. Yeah. Like it’s no small thing to see that somebody else is opening a door and close it. That requires a lot of information processing. I think of it sort of in the same notion as blind sight, where there’s a certain amount of processing. So there are cases like this where there’s sort of physical change, right, which then can cause autonomous behavior. And we see that as weird and highly anomalous. But my point is, when these systems dissociate normally, right, under normal conditions, they already other in that same way, right? The behavior of the arm others to us. It’s outside, alien hand is outside our regular consciousness. It’s still obviously doing things that require cognitive processing, but we don’t have access to it. And our agency doesn’t connect to it. It just seems to behave in this. It’s connected to us, but also it’s not us, right? It’s not us. Yeah. I would connect that through to all kinds of comparable kinds of psychological experiences that people have, like the third man phenomenon or apparitions of the dead. People see the recently dead quite often, like it’s surprisingly common. But also, you know, things that are considerably sort of more, in a sense, mundane, like hearing voices, which is very, very common, especially under conditions like sleep deprivation. And of course, as I like to talk about dreams, right? Where the event is, I think as most people would consider it anyway, the event is internal to the brain. It’s internal to the mind, right? And yet there are sort of complex actors in the space that we don’t have direct control over, that we are not deciding on. And that’s even more in lucid dreaming. Right, well, yeah, even more in lucid dreaming, but in regular dreaming too. We have a dream, we don’t set the stage, we don’t decide what’s happening. And even in lucid dreaming, one of the things that’s so weird about it is you do have more control, but you don’t have perfect control. And things push back on you and surprise you. Yeah. So if we’re assuming that these are sort of normally integrated portions that dissociate and other, then we can sort of look at it and say, okay, this is a regular part of the functioning of the mind. Right, is that periodically it goes to these integration and disintegration cycles. I think that using a psychotechnology like alchemy essentially allows you to somewhat take control of that process. Because you externalize it projectively and then you manipulate it, and then that is re-perceived. Right, and so there’s an idea somewhat popularized by Stanovic, which is the Nerathian bootstrap. And I stumbled across this, I think it was in the Robot’s Dilemma, that was where he talks about that. Robot’s Rebellion. Robot’s Rebellion, yeah. So the Nerathian bootstrap comes out of the work of Otto Nerath, and basically it’s looking at the question of the ship of Theseus, right? So the classic ship of Theseus is, well, you have a boat and you replace the mast and you replace the boards and you replace the figurehead, masthead, whatever. You replace all the pieces, is it the same boat? And the answer is yes, because the boat is a pattern. But the question that Otto Nerath got at was like, okay, but let’s say that you want to replace a piece of the boat. Let’s say that you want to replace a board, pry a board up. How do you do that without damaging all the connected material, right? And when Stanovic looks at, he’s looking at specifically propositional beliefs. So let’s say you have an erroneous belief and it’s interlocked together with a bunch of other things. How can you sort of get a bootstrap to get yourself off the deck long enough to be able to pry the rotten board out and replace it while not sort of sending the rest of your belief system haywire? Right, right. So that’s how Stanovic uses it, this concept of the Nerathian bootstrap. I think that these sorts of projective psychotechnologies, essentially speaking, are using techniques of dissociation to isolate out components of our functioning so that we can operate on them independently, but also so that we can bring to bear the machinery that we normally use to interact with other people to interact with portions of ourselves. Right, right. Yeah. That’s interesting, that’s interesting. So I just make sure we don’t lose the thread. This is a very good example of the first point that you were making about the way in which cognitive science is sort of a modern day version of alchemy. And that one of the things we can get from this is we can use cognitive science to go back and reappropriate, because of that deep kinship, we can use cognitive science to go back and reappropriate these alchemical texts and practices within a cognitive scientific framework and perhaps regain their efficacy or perhaps even enhance their efficacy. Yeah, and so, if I wanna just make it go each way, the idea is that, of course, reinterpreting the sort of depth psychological take on alchemy as a form of inner work using cognitive science material, like neo-dissociation, like mutual modeling, like certain kinds of dynamical systems and network theory, that kind of stuff, can bring an appreciation to that material that lets you get into the text and have a clearer sense of what this might mean at a more mechanistic level. Like, what are we talking about in terms that science can grasp, can understand? But also, it’s the case that, having done so, there are specific techniques that emerge in alchemy, right? That when you go through the body of those techniques, that has really interesting sort of reverse bearing back on the understanding of some concepts within, I think, cognitive science. Please. Okay, so one that I try to communicate to people, and it’s difficult to communicate, but there’s an equation that I sometimes like to make. So sometimes for cognitive science students, one of the equivalences, and I don’t wanna literalize this too much, but we can play with it a little bit, is to connect together the capital S self in Jungian thinking, right, with the kind of notion of fundamental framing with relevance realization, right? Right, right. So if we look at these various components of the Jungian psyche, okay, yes, we have the ego, our self-conception, and we have the shadow, we have all that material. But somewhere sort of above all of that, and yet somehow, it is both the totality and the center of all of that is this notion of the Jungian self. And experiences of the self, when people describe experiences of the self, often are coded in religious terms, right? So people have religious experiences, right? But the idea in depth, like in Jungian thinking, would be that really what you’re doing is having an encounter with the self, this central component. If you think of that for a second, and you’re like, okay, well, what would it really mean to have an encounter with the portion of your mind that is the portion, right, the portion of your mind portion, or the aspect of your mind that is the ground from which all other mental events emerge? What would it be like to make contact with something that does not experience opposites in some important sense, and that is precategorical in some important sense, and presyntactic and pre-semantic, right? Something that is the generator of meaning, but doesn’t itself become like… Doesn’t fall within the, like it’s generating the framing that makes meaning possible, but it’s not any of the content within that, that kind of thing. Right, yeah, so if we think about that from just like from the phenomenological side, the point that Jung makes about the encounter with the self being indistinguishable from the encounter with God, right, is that when we encounter this portion of the self, for one thing, it responds to sort of symbolic language and tends to speak in these terms, not because it’s imprecise, but because the kind of information that has can only get through to us in these concentrated, massive, sort of mystical symbolic bursts. It’s just the only way we can access that stuff is when it breaks through into phenomenon, we experience it in that way. But if you sort of consider it in the other direction, it’s like, okay, so if we can somehow get our consciousness in touch with this sort of fundamental ground of cognition, this thing is the maker of all worlds. Relevance, realization in that way. Right, so this is what direct encounter with it, right? So this is a convergent argument with a lot of arguments I make about there’s sort of a spiritual significance when we try to relate to and enter into symbolic communication with the machinery of relevance realization. Yes, yeah, and certainly, like I shared that idea. To me, the… But you’re adding something to it. What you’re doing here that I didn’t do is you’re bringing in a lot of the archetypal phenomenology that the Jungian theory has and a lot of the work around that. So what you’re saying, if I’m getting this argument correct, is we can understand a particular kind of experience, we can grasp its phenomenology in terms of… Well, first of all, we can understand it ontologically as a relationship to relevance realization, massively recursive on all the stuff I talk about in this series, but that that relationship has a phenomenology that can be very well explicated and elucidated by making use of the Jungian framework. Is that what you’re pointing to? Yeah, and in fact, in many ways, the Jungian and depth psychological framework represents a somewhat… I have a lot of respect for these people, but it nevertheless represents a somewhat imperfect and slightly blunt version of that. And that the original text, in fact, if you can go back and start to get at them in a certain sense can give you sort of phenomenological signposts on that experience that are remarkably powerful and often counterintuitive. Example of that? You said you’ve got so many proactive things. Sure, so, okay, so one thing that I have, that I like to talk about in this respect is, very often it’s the case that the sort of interior version of alchemy that’s championed by Jungian people focuses on the idea that some of the standard alchemical operators and substances and things are representative of effective and cognitive states. Right, so for instance, salt, okay? Salt in the alchemical corpus is often related to weirdly bitterness instead of saltiness. But nevertheless, it’s like bitterness, right? Okay, and so there will be things in these texts where they’re like, look, if you have such and such and such state, what it requires now is this to catalyze it and transform it. Okay, so strictly from a depth psychological perspective, there’s an idea in which something like bitterness, having a note of bitterness in your experience, being slightly bitter about something, it’s not someplace that you wanna stay, but having a note of bitterness in your experience also segues into having a more complex and integrated emotional state than was previously available to you, right? I know that you and I have both shared the idea in the past that it would be difficult in some ways for me to have a deep and engaged human relationship with somebody that I felt hadn’t experienced some degree of tragedy. Yes, some degree of grief, yep. Yeah, having a sense of tragedy in the world and I’m a pretty optimistic person, but nevertheless, having some contact with that aspect of reality is just important to facilitating what? Depth of character. Now, we think about some of the complex emotions that people have that we develop as time goes on, right? Little kids don’t have a concept of the bittersweet. Right, right. Right? Little kids can’t pick up, say, the nuance. This is almost the opposite of alexithymia. They can’t pick up the nuance, say, in different states of nostalgia, but there’s such a thing as a rancid nostalgia and there’s such a thing as actually a warm, pleasant form of nostalgia, like a great form of nostalgia. There are lots of these relatively complex feelings that we have that we consider part of our maturation, right, that exist as an integrated state. The alchemists talk at some length about the introduction of bitterness to transform other kinds of effective and cognitive states, right? And the thing that I have said a few times, I’ve tossed around, and maybe as, again, I’m being a bit of a provocateur, but the fact that we can, synesthetically and otherwise, dynamically interconnect different portions of our processing and our cognition, right? The same thing that basically blocks us from being able to raw power crunch through that because of combinatorial explosion to explain what’s going on in the connectome also means that the states of interconnection, which are possible within the mind and the brain, have not been exhausted by human experience. Right, right, right, right, right, yeah, yeah, yeah. Part of the complexification of our cognitive and emotional states is the simultaneity, the synthesis, right, and the transcendence of opponents in some cases of different states that then leverage themselves up in a higher and higher states. So like, if you think about prajna, for sure you’ve talked about, I would assume, on. I thought, well, I don’t think, I’ve talked about it in the series, Awakening from the Meeting Crisis, for sure. But you wanna give a rundown? I’ll just describe it sort of briefly here. There’s different, of course, different traditions have different meanings attached to it. But one is, prajna is a state that sometimes affords or is identified with wisdom because it’s a state of non-dual awareness. You have sort of, as far as you could possibly go inward with meditation and as far as you could possibly go outward with contemplation, but you’re having them simultaneously at the same time. And this is actually the state that’s most sought after because it is the state that is most affording of self-liberation, self-transformation. That’s how. Right. Okay, so essentially speaking, what you’re talking about there is a state of cognition, partly of sort of construal, partly of identity, right? It’s got an altered state kind of character to it, right? Yep. And you’re talking about taking two states that are themselves relatively difficult to cultivate, right? And doing so in a way that allows you to gradually integrate them into some higher state that in some sense transcends. That’s the bread and butter of alchemy. This transcendence of opposite stuff, right? And the unification of opposites is sort of central to their discipline, right? And so they have huge bodies of sort of literature that would describe in some way, right? So when you look, for instance, at the alchemical symbolism and you look at the divine union of the sun and the moon, so you’ll get the images of the king and the queen in various states of like union or coitus, right? And then being buried together and then emerging as a kind of mystical mafridite, right? A figure that partakes of the solar and the lunar and male and female and is a kind of a divine, right? Saying that transcends. This is all the kinds of symbolism that they use to talk about precisely this kind of like cultivating different states and then being able to synthesize them together. And they also have a really well sort of articulated set of taxonomies and operations for different states of synthesis and what it takes to synthesize things. So to ground this out again, okay? There’s an example that I’ve heard you use sometimes when you’re talking about aspect shifting, where you talk about the mother-in-law who sees her mother-in-law as being boorish. Yeah, okay. And the idea is that there’s a kind of aspect shift that can happen where you can undertake a charitable reinterpretation, where first you’re like, well, they’re boorish and they’re loud and they’re pushy, but then you flip it and you’re like, well, but they’re forthright and they’re honest and they’re direct and they’re right. There’s a way to charitably reinterpret that to flip the aspect on it. Similarly, when you’re talking about the unification of opposites in Deppsych and in alchemy generally, right? Very often you’re dealing with pairs of opposites and part of the manipulation that you’re going through psychologically is a set of aspect manipulations to make them less directly opposed. So, black and white, those seem pretty opposite to people, but are male and female actually opposite in that way? Some people would say so. They’d be like, yes, men and women are opposites. And that’s where you get this like men are from Mars, women are from Venus, the gender war stuff. But there are obviously ways of looking at it where you’re like, well, not only are they not opposite in the sense that black and white or black and not black are opposite, right? But that they really actually have a great deal of commonality between them, right? And being able to go through that kind of shift around your thinking with it, being able to pick up on the commonalities and so on and so forth is part and parcel of being able to bring them together without getting a kind of categorical rejection or repulsion between them. Alchemy is full of this stuff. And so, yeah, yeah, I could go down this rabbit hole forever. And I won’t, not today anyway. Yeah, so there’s sort of bodies of material there that I think have a lot to tell us if we can plumb them charitably and with this particular eye. Not only tell us, but train us. The idea is we could, what I’m hearing you say is it could train us so that we could fine tune our phenomenology and our phenomenological interventions in ways that would themselves be revealing, but also in ways that would be more theoretically consonant with some of our cutting edge constructs from cognitive science. And therefore we could get those two domains to be talking to each other more readily. Is that a fair? Yeah, that’s exactly right. And again, I toss this off when I say, because any two areas can theoretically be connected together and in a bunch of different ways in the mind, and they can theoretically, you can have sort of different kinds of synesthesia. I think a lot of development is precisely that kind of complexification towards these increased states of synthesis and the fine tuning of categories of stuff that we see in Piaget. But part and parcel of that is that this tells us a ton about effective development, cognitive development. It tells us a lot about altered states, because part of the problem of the taxonomy of altered states is also that it’s like, how do we fit a framework? Well, if you can connect things together and that yields an altered state, then the potential state space of all that stuff is enormous. And so partly looking at it in this particular way, it gives a kind of a training framework where you can begin to consider that and stop trying to sort of exhaust the space. Yeah, yes. You know what I mean? Yeah, so that’s really cool. So there’s a sense in which we could use an archetypal phenomenology in conjunction with a sort of more standard, you know, Marlowe-Ponty, where that’s what Evan was using, Evan Thompson. And we can bring those together. And then part of the thing we could do with the complexification is it’s also complexification that can be reflective. It can be complexification that gives us an increasing fluency of how we are relating to and being coupled to, you know, all of these subconscious, unconscious, cognitive processes, the relevance realization, machinery, et cetera, et cetera, that have both a important cognitive function for us, but also a spiritual significance to us. Is that? Yes, that’s right. So there’s sort of, there’s kind of three, you know, outcomes in that sense, right? You know, on one hand, it, yes, it gives us that sort of increased language and grammar and training the brain. We’re also transforming ourselves. I mean, that’s central to the alchemical property. And, you know, looking at this- I should go back and say that was precisely Murdoch’s point too about the aspect shift with the mother-in-law. Murdoch’s point was, it’s not just that you reframe the mother-in-law, the daughter-in-law, the other way around, it’s not just you reframe the daughter-in-law, the mother-in-law has to reframe herself. That’s right. She has to say, well, wait, what kind of person was I that, because I was mis-framing them, and then what kind of person do I need to be in order to now properly relate to this aspect shift? Yes. You can’t keep the two separate from each other. That’s right, and that applies, and this again, is sort of central to the alchemical as above, so below, you know, macrocosm, macrocosm principle. You know, as you’re doing this kind of categorical, but if you’re exploring it- Well, you can cut out for a second, Anderson, as you’re doing this kind of what? As you’re doing this kind of, this kind of categorical transformative work, right, with your own cognition, your own affect, and so on and so forth, right? Because of the as above, so below, microcosm, macrocosm principle, you can be doing it theoretically, right? And you can be just talking about theoretically, but if you’re doing it, if you’re doing it as a practice, then simultaneously you are indeed affecting your perception and experience of the world, but also, right, and your relationship to the categories and people within the world in that way, but also you’re talking about altering your internal constitution. You’re talking about doing essentially therapeutic work in that sense, which is to say that like, there are plenty of pieces of your mind at any given time that are working at cross purposes to each other. They get in your way, and it causes you, ego you, problems. Like, why can’t this piece of my mind behave? Why can’t that piece of my mind behave? Lots of therapeutic technique, if it comes out of a somewhat psychodynamic frame, is concerned with attempting to sort of improve relations and communication. It’s like the play-doh, getting justice from the psyche. Yes, yeah, well, and so that’s the thing. Part of this is you’re instituting a kind of, set of techniques that enables you to transform the community of yourself, which simultaneously transforms the community of the world, because they’re all running on the same machinery. And like- So there’s kind of an internal distributed cognition as well. Yes, yes, absolutely. Because at the end of the day, it would be the homuncular fallacy to think that your mind doesn’t in some sense break down to sub-components that have less functionality than the top level, right? And so there are sort of demi-people. I mean, that’s sort of central to the, this is central to the psychodynamic ideas, that you have these sub-components, and they might not be as smart as you, and as skilled as you, and as whatever, but like to some extent, they have their own perspective and their own goals. And if those people aren’t on the same page, if there’s miscommunication, and if they’re at each other’s throats, like alien hand, this is gonna cause you real problems. So doing this kind of work in this way has, it has theoretical impact, but also we’re talking about simultaneously changing your experience of the world and your experience of the self and the connection between those things. That’s amazing. Well, I think so. A question comes to mind that I’ve sort of been holding off on. So is the reverse the case? So obviously, I’m gonna fall into this category. Are people who are practicing cognitive science, co-cognitive science, doing a kind of crypto-alchemy unawares? Well, I haven’t thought of it that way. Yes. Okay, can you say a little bit more than just yes? You’ve out-alchemy’d the alchemists to explain the obscure by means of the yet more obscure. You’re so deep into the crypto, you don’t even know. Yeah, in a sense, I think so. I mean, if you subscribe to this particular interpretation of what’s going on in alchemical work, then yeah, in a sense, what cognitive science is attempting to do, I mean, it’s the same aims. It’s the same aims. And of course, lots of cognitive scientists aren’t going to take this particular kind of phenomenologically focused approach to things. Lots of people are primarily concerned with sort of the biomechanics and sort of the production of AI as a mechanical production and so on and so forth. But that’s a bit like saying the people that were just concerned with producing the homunculus and didn’t give a damn about the philosophic, they were just very homunculus focused. If I can just get this matter to produce a thinking being, damn it, then I will understand what’s happening. Well, that’s what we’re talking about. And I guess that brings me back around to the synchronicity piece. So, you know, synchronicity is sort of the odd man out if you’re trying to- Well, I’ve always found it, as you know, deeply problematic. Well, me too, and not least because I’ve experienced them. So this is the thing, right? You have an experience of this kind, and if you, I think, are sort of flexible around thinking about it, you slosh back and forth in your interpretations, right? It sort of, it forces the improbability, the seeming improbability of it, begins to try to force interpretations on you, right? And there’s a kind of like, there’s a breakthrough mysticism that comes with just having it because you’re like, what are the odds of this? Like, it seems so meaningful and significant and related to me. And you can get really hung up or you can go one of two directions on that. You can either reduce it and say, whatever, this is just like a garbage artifact of my cognitive biases, right? Or you can be like, oh, this is very clear evidence that the universe is a meaningful narrative place that is trying to deliver me personalized messages. And honestly, I think that sometimes there’s utility and value to moving into one of those other states, right? Despite the fact that from the naturalistic framework, the universe is not a narrative, at least that’s our current mission, right? Nevertheless, sometimes feeling that the universe is narrative can have a utility provided that you don’t get fixated on it. But the other thing is this, it’s like looking at, so being sort of metaphysically agnostic about what’s happening a little bit, right? And just being like, okay, the experience is however, that encounters with the self, encounters with the deep self, which are sort of mystical encounters with something that seems divine in its productive abilities and such, right? Has this ability to break through this gap and make it seem as though things are, that I’m meaningfully connected to the world in some important sense, and that I’m producing meaning in the world and stuff. That to me sounds like a very direct experience of relevance realization occurring outside the conscious bounds, but in this utterly breakthrough way. Oh, that’s interesting. That’s interesting. Your mind is constellating the world in some really important sense. And that sometimes the system gives you one of those, basically, I think, as a kind of, like throwing a long length of insight, right? To break you through, especially out of sort of a state of paralysis, right? If you’re in a state of sort of depressive paralysis. Or if you’re going with this too. And if relevance realization is ultimately a transjective thing, something that’s being co-created, coupling between the dynamics of the brain and the dynamics of the world, attributing agency to either one of those is kind of misplaced in some way, right? So the world is as much responsible for that relevance, the emergence of that relevance as the brain is. Is that partially what you’re? Yes, yeah. And so in that sense, right? One of the- Most synchronicity as an enacted symbolic apprehension of transjectivity. That’s a really interesting reinterpretation. Oh wow, that’s really cool. Yeah, so that’s kind of, that’s where I’ve landed on it. Now, that doesn’t mean that I never entertained the, whatever probabilistic error interpretation, I never entertained the- Oh yeah, of course, of course. It turns out that it’s the mystical savior interpretation. But, or I’m super special. Thank God, I was beginning to feel like I wasn’t. Typically, in fact, when people can get kind of hooked, for lack of a better term, on it, right? There’s a, you can get into kind of a schizotypal tumble where you start to, you know, it’s an over-experience pattern, right? And so synchronicity can run away with people. But when it’s one of these like, Dirk Bracke kind of things, where it’s breakthrough experiences, yeah, what you’re getting is a direct point of contact with the way that you and the world and the systems of meaning are both emergent and co-created, and that you have a kind of identity yet not identity with the ground of the thing that makes you and the world and fits them together. It’s a direct and symbolically compressed experience of that thing. So of course it makes you feel special and important, because it shows you that the world is thinking you and you’re thinking the world. Yeah, that’s really cool. That’s really, really cool. In that sense, at the high level, like it’s about the construal of it, I think, that, right, and that doesn’t take anything away from it. In the same way as it doesn’t really take anything away from it, in my experience, if you have a kind of encounter with the mystical and you interpret it as a self, and you interpret the self as the underlying machinery of your cognition, to me, for some people, that’s going to be like, oh, what a drag. That means that I didn’t, in fact, make contact with the creator of the universe. But to me, I’m like, but yeah, you did. Yes, you did. You had contact with the creator of the universe, and it’s completely allowed. It’s inside the rules. It doesn’t require, you don’t have to break any of the basic rational rules to do it. It just means that you have succeeded in getting some point of contact with the thing that creates the only universe you’re ever going to experience, and you within it. So an altered state of identity, an altered state of construal, an altered state of affect, and so on and so forth. Anyway, yeah, that’s… We’re coming to where we should probably close this off. Yeah, yeah. But so you’ve mentioned this to me before. A lot of the stuff, and you’ve now, a lot of the insights were novel to me today, so thank you for that. But you have mentioned to me in the past that you’re putting this basically into a book of some kind, is that my understanding? And what’s the progress and state of that book, and when do you foresee it coming to… Well, so the emergence of COVID-19 has had obviously some unusual impacts on that. In some ways, it has been, in some ways it’s accelerated things. In fact, I’ve sort of made the alchemical comparison. It’s like we’re all sealed in the Alembic right now. So people’s psychological state is really set to boil because we all have a cork in it and we can’t go out. I’ve sometimes called this the involuntary monastery. Our whole culture has been shipped off to the involuntary monastery. So in some ways, the theoretical work around it has been, and also I’m sealed in here with my library. I got 3,500 books in here that need reading. So yeah, so that’s accelerated somewhat. I’m hoping to sort of, I’ve begun sort of writing out some of the chapter outlines and structuring things a bit. I’m hoping to sort of attach it in earnest starting later this month. And the working title, which is a bit glib, is Shapeshifting, a Practical Guide. But yeah, it’ll connect together a bunch of this stuff. It’ll connect together Jung and Corbin and cognitive science and a lot of my new dissociative theory, my work on lucid dreaming, altered states. You’re also gonna be writing something for the anthology that Chris and I are putting together on inner and outer dialogues. Yeah, yeah, so that’ll in fact, probably those two things will themselves be in dialogue. So yeah, I’m gonna be writing about Jung and Corbin and the imaginal and some of the aspects of inner work, particularly things related to what we’ve talked about here, probably not with exactly this framing. And I probably also will touch to some extent on some of the sort of triangulations of Corbin and Jung against newer neo-Jungians like Wolfgang Gigerich. I had sort of some interesting critiques of the imaginal and of the image as the focus for doing this kind of work. So yeah, and when that’s pretty soon too, I think I’ll probably be writing that in May. Yes. Well, that’s great. Well, thank you so much. That was really, really cool. I really, that was really intriguing and a lot of the insights are really, really thought-provoking and I think they’re like, they have at least initial theoretical plausibility. I’m really looking forward to you writing this. Yeah, oh, well, I would like you to read it. Literally, I’d like you to give it a look over before I send it out. Yeah, I’ll be counting on that. Yeah, no, clarifying a lot of the stuff has been good. I mean, some of it has built on lectures that I’ve given for classes in the last few years and so going back and sort of extracting that material and refining it. I’m trying to get it in a more end-to-end way. Obviously, I’m sort of talking, shooting from the hip a bit here, but I have whatever loads of sources and references that need sorting out to sort that out. But yeah, I’m looking forward to it too. I’ve been doing lots of work in the area. And actually, well, for anybody that is interested, I’ve been recording, because all lectures are online lectures now. So I’ve been recording some of the final classes for some of my young courses on the subject. I released the first half of the alchemy lecture that I did for my young class. I’ll forewarn people it is four hours long, but I’ll send you the link to that for the second half. The second half is kind of mid-production, so I’ll send you that link too, and if people are interested, they can check that out. Great, okay. I’ll get all the links that I can for Anderson. We might put in a link for the Stroop effect for those, because we didn’t really explain it, but we’ll put in a link so people can check that out. And I’m sure, well, I know, I’m very confident you and I are going to talk again. Thank you very much for coming on Voices with Reveki. It was a great pleasure. Thank you, John, it was a pleasure.