https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=YaXWUE1SXpI
Dr. John Vervecky is an award-winning lecturer at the University of Toronto in the departments of psychology, cognitive science, and Buddhist psychology. He’s done a few TED talks and he’s rising in popularity now for work on the meaning crisis. And that’s what we’re going to focus on today. So, first of all, what is the meaning crisis? So the meaning crisis is an intersection of sort of perennial problems that human beings face and some specific historical circumstances that we’re in in the West. The perennial problems are basically under an umbrella. The idea is the cognitive processes that make us adaptive, that give us our intelligence to put a single term on it. Also are the very same processes that make us continually prone and liable to self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior. So across cultures and across historical contexts, people have come up with various sets of practices for trying to ameliorate those aspects of self-deception and self-destruction. And in addition, what they try to do is not only ameliorate the way that self-destructive, self-deceptive behavior makes us fit our environment maladaptively, maybe connect to our own agency maladaptively, connect to other people maladaptively, connect to our particular circumstances maladaptively. Not only do those practices try to ameliorate that, they try to also do the reverse. In addition to reducing the foolishness of self-deception, they try to afford an enhanced sense of connectedness so that one feels one is fully alive, fully agentic, fully connected to the world, fully connected to others, fully connected to a course of transformation and growth and development. And so those sets of practices that ameliorate foolishness and afford meaning in life, they’re broadly understood as wisdom practices. And what’s happened in the West is for various historical reasons, and now we would shift from the perennial problems to the historical factors, for various historical reasons, a worldview that gave us an understanding of these practices, valorized them, gave us guidance, gave us established institutions and traditions, basically that had, you know, a wisdom culture for us. And so that wisdom culture for us has largely disappeared. So while of course we have tremendous knowledge and information progress, if that’s the right word, I might call it into question later, but we have very much a wisdom famine. And so we also have very shallow resources in general for dealing with self-deception, self-destructive behavior, and for enhancing and affording increased meaning in life. And those historical forces are complex and I go over them at length in the meeting crisis, but we are basically suffering a wisdom and meaning famine because we don’t have a worldview that tells us how our wisdom practices should fit together, how we should collect them, how we should curate them, how we should correct them, how we should communicate them with each other. We don’t have a worldview that gives us a cognitive, existential, and even ultimately sort of metaphysical grounding for our cultivations of wisdom and meaning. So we have this scientific worldview in which we don’t find any kind of home. So Christopher Mastropietro and Philip Misovac and I call this kind of like a cultural domicile. Domicile is when you lose your sense of being at home, of belonging, of fitting, fitting in, not in the conformity sense, but fitting, being in continuity of contact with what’s real and what really matters. And so there’s two aspects to the meeting crisis. There’s a perennial one and you’ll see it in literature across the ages. People worry about falling into despair or finding life empty or worry that things are meaningless. And what’s happened is the perennial responses to that have been seriously undermined in our culture for a lot of historical reasons. And then they’ve been exacerbated and accelerated increase of a technological framing of who we are and what the world is. We see everything basically as objects and resources to be manipulated and controlled. And then that aligns with a pervasive market mentality in which the only sort of normative authority that’s still left is the market for people. A sense of everything being commodified, everything being sold and there’s, and I’ll use this term in a technical sense, there’s so much bullshit everywhere. And this has pervaded our political and cultural arena. So not only are we wisdom and meaning impoverished, we also feel beset by a lot of forces that seem to be degrading our basic sense of our humanity. So that’s what I would call the meeting crisis. Okay, that’s a great start. I just want to summarize it or super simplify it. So if I simplify it too much, you can let me know and we’ll work at it. I want to get like, I want to get really short. Okay. You know, because potentially I could actually, you know, talk to my students about this where in middle school, although it like you mentioned the West earlier and it does seem like this is not really happening in the East, although maybe it’s starting to happen. It’s definitely happening in Japan. It’s definitely happening in Japan. So you see the next generation coming up, but there’s a whole class of people that have sort of retreated from society of young people and retreated into the virtual world because they find that world has many of the features that the real world is lacking for them. So it’s definitely the case in Japan. I don’t know about other places in the East. Okay, okay. Excellent. So yeah, I agree. There definitely seems to be something happening in Japan. Okay, so you use the word cognitive faculties, I think I will just I will just summarize that as maybe the mind. It’s like, sure, we have a mind. And it’s, it’s an incredible tool. It’s also, you know, all right, I’m already talking too much. We have a mind. It can it can help us to grow and connect with the world, or we can use it badly and then our life similarly turns for the worse. And then we, we also have this, you know, culture and mythos mythology that that can help that not only gives us the tools to properly use our mind, but like a narrative framework so that we know who we are and what we’re doing, why we’re here. And the meaning crisis is, is most specifically the dissolution of that kind of culture. The wisdom culture. Yes. Yep. Very much. Yep. I’m fine with that. Okay, so I’m going to try and simplify it even more now. Okay. There’s wisdom. That’s good. And we also know that lack of wisdom is bad. And there needs to be a culture for of wisdom and for wisdom. So that as a society, we can stick together and that wisdom culture is rapidly decaying in the West and other places. Yes. Although there are clear signs of people increasingly trying to revive it. So there’s, there’s both sort of negative symptoms of the meeting crisis, the way people are suffering a loss of agency and suffering a loss of a sense of belonging to being. There’s the negative symptoms, but there’s also positive symptoms in which you see people trying to bring back stoicism and create these these like what we’re having right now. These new ways of carrying out, you know, what I would ultimately call philosophical discourse. We’re not just talking. We’re not just doing something, you know, to get something done. We’re trying to work on the meaning of things and the meaning of who and what we are. So I mean it in that sense, that ancient sense of philosophy, what I sometimes call philosophy. And so you see also, you know, and then, you know, the mindfulness revolution, there’s criticisms of it, but it’s nevertheless, people are trying to put together wisdom practices. Now what we’re discovering is that because again of our particular historical past, we’re tending to do this in a very fragmented and autodidactic and egocentric way where everybody is sort of on their own trying to cultivate their own little wisdom. Philosophy, wisdom, religion, and, you know, and I don’t want to, I don’t want to, I don’t want to just completely dismiss that because people are trying to ameliorate their suffering and afford meaning. And that’s a good thing. But, you know, the worst things can come from the best things turned bad. What I mean by that is this tends to create a really fragmented autodidactism fragments us from other people. So we can’t, we need, we have to work collectively to build an alternative worldview. Right. The idea that, you know, the idea that you can have your own worldview, I think is a serious form of bullshit. Because it’s, it sort of ramps up that egocentrism and that being locked inside your head and your own subjectivity and breeds narcissism and other things like that. Because when you’re when you’re autodidactic, all those proclivities towards self deception and self destructive behavior don’t have anything counterbalancing them. One second. Just give me your definition of autodidactic. Autodidactic is you do it on your own without entering into any kind of sustained community or tradition that provides you with a framework that can be seen as more encompassing and challenging to your own personal egocentric framework. So, basically, what’s the opposite of autodidactic? The opposite of autodidactic would be to belong to a community with some kind of tradition, some kind of collective intelligence being shared amongst distributed cognition, so that we can collectively create these ecologies of practices and create an alternative worldview that will properly home them. Okay. That’s why these discussions are so important and part of what we’re seeing right now in a particular crisis when with the virus right is we one of the, I mean, and I don’t want to make light of this people are dying it’s, I take that seriously, so I’m not trying to put that aside but that’s not the core of what we’re talking about here so I’m asking for people to understand that. Right. But one of the things that it’s revealing to people is how much how actually important because it was so backgrounded, but how much connecting to others in a significant way and working with others and being present with others, how much it really matters to us how deeply, and we tend to look we walked around outside and we were like inside like locked in and then we’re realizing, oh geez, I actually don’t want to be locked in like that I really need to be locked in. I really need to connect to the world to get outside of the prison of my own ego to can open myself up to other people in, you know, in various degrees of depth. And so, I think what we’re seeing is how important that kind of deep connectedness really is it was it’s been so backgrounded by our busyness and by our technology, and now the crisis is revealing how important it is and how actually it’s going to be something we really need to enhance if we want to get through this in the best possible way. Okay. I do want to talk about stoicism and my own personal experience there but the first. I feel like I should stick to my word with what I said in our, our first email exchange. The second question. How do we get out of the meaning crisis. And so to use our earlier definition. How do we, I guess, bring back a wisdom culture. Yeah, well, I mean, the, there’s two ways of thinking you should do that one is what you might call a top down, where somebody is going to construct some system where religion, and then impose it on people. The other is to just sort of hope that things are going to percolate bottom up various groups of people are going to somehow start forming communities get together. I think both of those exclude pursuit exclusively as a mistake. So, one of the things we need to do is, there’s all these emerging communities, and that’s great, but we need to get them talking. And not only do we need to improve the depth of what they’re talking about we need to improve the depth of how they’re talking to each other. So I’m doing a lot of work with Peter Lindbergh and Christopher master Pietro, and guys send stock and other people. Right. And you see a lot of work, you know, on platforms like rebel wisdom and future thinkers. And then we have a voice club, where people are trying to transform how we use dialogue to afford the cultivation of wisdom and use that as a way of trying to start to create a culture that can then act as a home, within which we can collect curate correct and vet. Now that brings me to the second point. I don’t think you should look for one practice one thing to do to ameliorate the meaning crisis, I think you need to do a bunch of things I need, I think you need. I think you need. Well, first of all, you need this kind of practice what I call the Chris and I call dialectic, where you really put dialogue. So we can just talk, and then dialogue is we’re trying to connect and then dialectic is where we’re trying to collect connect so we can do philosophy So that we can cultivate wisdom together. Right. So we need dialectic, obviously, to create that cultural home. But we also need, you know, meditative practices contemplative practices, movement practices. Right. So we need, you know, that’s why I talked to people like rave Kelly and the extraordinary work he’s doing on putting together, you know, an ecology of practices and his evolved moved play framework. So we need to create a colleges of practices because no one practice your cognition your mind is such an incredibly dynamic and self organizing thing. Right. You need that you need something you need a set of practices that are also incredibly dynamic and self organizing to properly try to transform your mind in the comprehensive and deep way we need to in order to start ameliorating the meeting crisis. Excellent. And just to add on to that last point. So, you know, you’re talking about an ecology of practices, which kind of reminds me of like diversifying a portfolio that might be a bad analogy, but Another effective method for me has been finding one practice and then kind of like, like doing it in as many different ways as possible. Yeah, so I want to introduce variation. I mean, that’s how you watch little kids. That’s how they learn. Right. So if they’re doing some tasks, they’ll come up with a strategy that solves the task solves a problem gets them to the goal, but they won’t initially stick with that. What they’ll do is they’ll create all kinds of variations, alternative strategies, and then they’ll put them into competition with each other in terms of, you know, maybe efficiency or which one most pleases mom or which one best connects them to their peers. And so they do something that’s very analogous to biological evolution. Right. They will do variation, and then they’ll put some selective pressure on it until they settle onto a strategy and then they’ll vary on that again. By the way, I think that’s an important model for how your how your cognition how your mind fundamentally gets a grip on the world is that process of variation and selection and evolve continually evolving its fittedness to the world. And so I think that is exactly how you should. So not only should you have a call. So you should have practices that have complementary sets and weaknesses. Right. We talked about that a minute ago, then you should do what you just said, you should evolve each practice, and they should also think about practices that rigid between the various practices that help you better sort of transition from one practice to another. Okay, that’s great, but we still need the overarching culture for the wisdom culture. And you can’t do that as an individual culture. Yeah, culture is not something called trying to invent your own culture with you is like trying to invent your own language. It doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s a deeply mistaken thing to do. Yeah, right. And so the only way we’re going to do that is if we become aware if we if we give up the idea that we are isolated atomic individuals in our head, and our subjectivity is all that really matters. And what we need to do is to get back to the fact that most of our is done like the way we network minds together the way the internet networks can you computers together culture networks minds together, so that they can solve these huge Titanic problems, we’re facing one right now that we can’t do a damn thing against as individuals, but we need to get as much right distributed cognition. Working together, and as much of that distributed collective intelligence we got to get it operating as rationally and I’ll say it as wisely as possible. And we need to do a lot of work to get that collective intelligence up to collective wisdom. That’s the problem. No, it’s doable. It is very doable. And the things that have done that in the past have been religions, religions have brought about that tremendous transformation of consciousness cognition character, and ultimately culture. We need something analogous in this discourse and that’s I’m not proposing a religion, but we need something analogous to religion in order in this collective discourse to create an there’s a deep connection between cult and culture, you can hear it in the word, they’re bound together cultists. Right. One thing I thought of, which I guess I haven’t thought of before, as a as a way to cultivate the dialectic. Well, the big problem I have is with these social media platforms like Facebook, even though you know I really, I’m totally capable of discourse and dialectic, but you know you started with a long comment and then it gets shorter and shorter and more and more divisive. You know, even among like, you know, two really smart, calm, relaxed, intellectual people. So I think, well, one thing we definitely need is a new platform. And we don’t really have a good platform. I was thinking like, maybe read it, maybe forms. There’s something there but it’s like, but even if we look at all of these like communication platforms, I still feel like, even if we find one good one, there would still be like an overarching culture that I guess it has to grow organically right and we have to do It has to grow organically. That’s the bottom up, but it also needs to be informed by our best historical and scientific understanding. That’s the top down aspect. We need to be doing both at the same time. I think one of what I was trying to put my finger on earlier is one of the things COVID-19 is showing us is it’s putting a, if you’ll allow me, an evolutionary metaphor. It’s putting selective pressure on us to come up with alternative ways in which we can carry out deep discourse that would afford something like dialectic. We’re trying to figure out basically, how do we keep a society and a culture running through these kinds of communicative platforms? I think people who, let’s be really brutally honest, this isn’t going to be the only pandemic we’re going to be facing. The causes of this have not gone away. The biological, you know, the permafrost melting, the rain rainforest being cut down, human concentration, massive globalism, like all the, none of those factors have gone away. So this is not going to be the only time this is going to happen to us. And so I think the people who, this is, I guess, the people who figure out how to do what you’re talking about, how to figure out how to get this into a more comprehensive collective platform, you know, where we can carry out this kind of dialectic, right? And we can scale it up and down the way we used to do, like with religion. That person will be, those people will be enormously wealthy, I would think. This is an opportunity. If people are looking for a business opportunity, a business opportunity that could help to change the course of history in a positive direction, this is the place to go. Right. And you and I are doing that at this very moment. So YouTube, that’s the one platform I wasn’t thinking of. So we’re doing… We’re doing it a lot with YouTube. And YouTube is, I think, really good at it. And I’m using it a lot as a platform. The problem with YouTube is it still tends to be passive participation for the vast majority of people. Yes. Right. And so you need to be able to, you need to, you’re either in, you’re either, you know, you’re either the person on the YouTube channel, or you’re a passive observer. I mean, you make comments, but, you know, I mean, they’re doing a little bit more. You’re doing premiering, which is a really good idea. And people, you know, chat well. Something’s on YouTube. They’re also creating watch parties. I know that Future Thinker did quite a few of those for my awakening from the meeting crisis, where people watch the videos together and then have a video, you know, group video chat and talk about it, which I think is an excellent idea. I see that I see it evolving, but it’s still like this, you know what I mean? It’s all over. But somebody needs to sort of, hey, here’s how we could, not somebody, you know, it’s going to be a group of people. But here’s how we could coordinate this all together. Right. Kind of reminds me of my music festival days. You know, you’re just in the middle of nowhere. And India is like this also. The whole India is like a music festival. That’s the best way to describe it. It’s just this complete chaos. But it you know, they all they’re peaceful, right. But then it just the energy just kind of like builds up from like the collective minds until eventually some leader just goes out and says, Hey, I’m going to go to the music festival. And then it just kind of happens. Well, I mean, so that means there’s a danger to all of what we’re talking about, of course, because there’s an opportunity for people to manipulate others because of the hunger for meaning and because of the hunger for home, cultural home. So yeah, I think that’s the way to do it. We have to be also very vigilant about that. We want to pick leaders who have given us good evidence and good plausible reason that they are deeply committed from a place of integrity towards wisdom and meaning. That’s the way to do it. That’s what we have to make central, not that they initially make us feel good. Right, right. Okay, so let’s talk about religion. So one thing you’ve said many times before is like people are looking for a religion that isn’t a religion, right? The religion that’s not a religion. Yeah. Yeah. So to me, that sounds like it sounds like exactly what I’m doing, basically, which is God. It’s God, but no church. Yeah, so that’s what a lot of what the so-called nuns, N-O-N-E-S, are doing, right? So they don’t, largely for when we haven’t gone into them, we keep alluding to them, I’ll have to do that again, but your listeners can know that, you know, I do discuss this at length in the series. But for a lot of historical reasons and some current reasons, many people have sort of turned their back on the organized religions of various kinds. This isn’t just, you know, particular to Christianity, for example. In a sense that, and here’s the thing that with the whole new atheism movement missed, the new atheism movement was all about, well, you know, what’s happening is that people are disbelieving in God or the sacred or something like that. That’s not the case with you. I put yourself out as an example, so I’m going to use you. That’s right. And so, no, that’s not the case. It’s not that these people are atheists. It’s that they find, and this is a much more important point, they find the traditional frameworks, the traditional religions, non-viable. They don’t connect. And if my argument is right, what people are deeply, deeply looking for when they turn to a religion is to enhance that sense of connectedness and to give them something that’s viable and workable in their lives for overcoming self-deception and affording meaning. And they’re not, they’re basically saying to the churches and the temples and the mosques and etc., you don’t do that for me anymore. And they also reject what we tried in the 20th century, which was, you know, pseudo-religious ideologies like, you know, Nazism and communism and they reject those because they saw the way they drenched the world in blood. Finally, if you allow me one more point, is that, you know, you can’t, people try to deny it, but you can’t deny the importance of science and technology and you can’t separate them. They’re not identical, but science and technology are woven together. They’re married together. I mean that in a very strong sense of the word. Look, we’re relying on science and technology for us to even have met, to even have this conversation. And if you try to pretend that that pervasive worldview is not seeped into the guts of your mind, that’s a deep form of self-deception. So what you need is you need something, right, that gives people, again, I’ll use that term, an ecology of practices that that’s viable to them, that they can somehow live with while they live in a scientific hyper-technological world, right, and gives them a real sense of enhancing their connectedness and enhancing their capacity to grow, overcome self-deception, to self-transcend. So that’s what a lot of people, people are doing it to various degrees of effectiveness. Some people do that through escape. They go into virtual games where they find a ready-set narrative and they find a ready-set, you know, worldview that makes sense and has rules and they find a ready-set way of self-transcending and leveling up. Some people escape. Other people choose to stay. I think that’s what you’re referring to and you refer to yourself and try and somehow make it work. But the problem for that is, again, the problem with what many people are doing is, as I said before, you can get isolated, it can be autodidactic, it can be fragmented, and that’s also something that ultimately frustrates people in kind of a profound way. Part of the connectedness you’re looking for is not just a deeper connectedness to yourself and the world. It’s a deeper connectedness to other people. And that’s very hard to do. And so that’s what I’m talking about when I’m talking about the religion is not a religion. Okay. Yeah, religion is like the fundamental thing here. It’s the problem and the solution, it seems. Yes, that is very well said. That’s what we’re saying again. It is both. That’s what I’m trying to capture with the religion that’s not a religion. Insofar as it’s a solution, we need what we’re talking to be a religion. But insofar as traditional religion is a problem, we need it to not be a religion. That’s exactly what I’m trying to convey with that phrase. But you put it nicely. It’s both the solution and the problem. So maybe, do you mind if I share some personal experience? Please. So I’m unbelievably fortunate in my life. But speaking just on religion, I was 24, 25, and I wandered into my apartment and I saw a copy of the Bhagavad Gita on my countertop there. Never heard of it before, which is strange, right? Because I used to be a hardcore intellectual. Now I’m more into, I’m just not nerdy about it, I guess. But it’s a habit, so I can’t fully kick it. And I don’t want to. So I picked it up and I was like, whoa, this is so cool. And I read the whole damn thing, every verse, and literally a month or two, a couple months later, I actually met Krishna inside myself. Right, right, right. You had a mystical experience. A very profound mystical experience. And that’s why I’m in China now. Because shortly after that, I lost all my friends. They all thought I was crazy. And I found myself in Thailand teaching English on a whim. Right, right. But here’s where it gets really interesting. So I can’t believe how this happened. So I read the Gita and I understood it all, and I was able to incorporate the wisdom without ever needing another devotee, a church, a temple, anything. But it can’t last forever. So a couple years ago, I had to go to India, and I got to go to the home birthplace of this. And that’s what I did. And oh my god, some pretty bad experiences there. So I went to take a beginner disciple course. This was like the most level zero, level one I could find, which was a total cost of 1,000 to the church to you know, like, yeah. Yeah. And also, just finally in closing, so I’ve always been against dogma in general, and organized religion in all institutions, I’ve never had an attraction here. But what’s interestingly happened to me is I’m, I’m now even more against it, I think, than a lot of nuns. And but I’m actually very religious, I practice, I chant almost 2000 mantras every day. Right, right. That’s that’s more than that’s a couple hours. It’s the only thing in my life that I that I do strictly. Everything else, I might change a little bit, you know, I change the time I brush my teeth, and different things. But every single day, there’s this one thing I do. And yeah, Yeah, can I respond to that? Because I think part of the what I’m talking about when I’m talking about the religion, that’s not religion is again not to is not to try and create a single thing. What I what I’m trying to talk about is a culture, maybe, you know, where you as you know, as a devotee, the whole, you know, wisdom tradition surrounding Krishna, right? I’ll call it Hindu. Usually, usually our version of Vedanta, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. That you can enter into deep communion, communication and community, with people perhaps coming from a stoic tradition, or people coming from a Christian tradition, or people who, right, or not of any particular tradition, but their mystical experience was of the emptiness that was found within Buddhism, or the glory of God, you know, that’s associated with perhaps aspects of the Sufi tradition or something like that. That’s what I’m talking about. I’m talking about not getting everybody to share a set of dogmas. That’s part of what we have to give up. That’s part of what we have to give up. We have to give up the idea of a shared set of doctrines as what binds us together. And instead, can we go back to the idea of a shared set of processes? Look, we’ve done this in the secular world, although it’s breaking down right now, we figured out that we don’t have to all share the same view, right? What we have to do is all be committed to the same processes of democracy, self-correction, you know, legal proceedings. We have to commit and share. And what’s happening is we’re losing that sense of that, which I think is very dangerous for us right now. Right? And we’re trying to shift back to like, what’s happening to somebody in the United States? We’re trying to get no, everybody should believe the same thing, which I think is a disastrous idea. Instead of it’s no, no, you and I can believe different things, but we both share a commitment to a process that we think is more important than our individual views, because the process itself is before us and after us, and it’s self corrects and it affords our self correction. And part of the difficulty I see that’s happening with us is that we’re not able to do that. And part of the problem right now is we’re losing that ability to commit to the process, a shared commitment to the process of communication and communion and collective intelligence and distributed cognition. And we’re going back to like this old model, which I think is a disastrous idea. No, no, we got to all believe the same thing. And I want to be really clear that I’m not proposing that, you know, everybody should be a devotee of Krishna or Christ or Siddhartha Gautama or Socrates. I’m proposing we need, you know, we need, in fact, what they even had in the ancient world in the West, they had four wisdom schools, you know, the Platonic, the Aristotelian, the Stoic and the Epicurean. And they all got along together. They were all mutually supported by the Roman Empire, right? And I think that’s the kind of thing I’m trying to talk about, because I think we only need an ecology of practices, we need an ecology of communities. And one of the things that I’m grateful for is growing up in Canada, where we have, for very good historical reasons, we have a long tradition, and I deeply believe in, you know, multiculturalism as an idea, where you can have communities living together because of a shared commitment to processes of communication, communing and collective intelligence. Can I share another experience? Sure. So, I guess maybe the first big mystical experience I had was reading Aristotle, actually. Yeah. I was 16 and… Which treatise are we reading? The Ethics, Nicomachean Ethics. Yeah, of course. I was also really lucky I got the best translation, because, you know, these with all these ancient texts, the translation is so fundamental. It’s so important. I totally agree. Years later, I tried reading a different translation of it. I couldn’t get through the first page, I was like, this sucks. But… No, totally, good translation really matters. I had a similar experience when I read The Republic by Plato for the first time. Excellent. Well, this experience I had was really powerful. It’s like meeting God, but I mean, not as like… So, what I think happened was I met my own past life. So, like, it was literally like the first sentence or within the first paragraph on the first page, my inner voice that was saying the words was no longer my voice. Yeah, I think people have had this experience. Yeah. Oh, cool. I teach a meditative practice, in fact, where people learn to listen to the voice of their thoughts and they often discover that that voice isn’t their voice. Is that a Buddhist practice? Yeah. It’s one way in which you apply the five factors of inquiring mindfulness to distractions, especially when the distractions are thinking. So, one of the ways you want to be able to step back and be able to look at the process, which goes back to what we were talking about a few minutes ago, rather than getting involved with the content of your thoughts. That’s very hard for people to do. One way to do that is to focus not on what’s being said, but on the voice of your inner speech as a way of being aware. And that of itself as a practice is valuable, but it also can often be a revelation to people because I remember I taught one student, and he had been sort of… I could tell he was sticking with the course I was teaching. He was diligent, but I could tell his enthusiasm was kind of middling. Then I taught him this and he sort of went and then he came back the next week and he was totally changed. That was like, I now see why I’m doing this. He said, because I realized for the first time that the voice inside my head was my father’s rather than mine. He had this profound sort of realization of aspects and dimensions of the mind that his ego framework had not been directly aware of. How that was manipulating his behavior, causing him to fall into self-deception in ways, of course, that he was not aware of. And so that’s a very profound thing. And of course, you can have it to varying degrees. In the neoplatonic tradition, people often talked about an amnesis, this kind of remembering your… I don’t want to say your true self because that sounds very romantic in a way I’m critical. But remembering the depths, recovering, recollecting the depths of the psyche. Wow, I’m really stimulated up here. There are just like two or three really good thoughts at the same time and I got all jumbled. Alex, what we’re doing right now is exactly what I was trying to point to a few minutes ago. I’m not trying to convert you and you’re not trying to convert me. That’s not what’s happening. Yeah. If we give up trying to convert and get back to conversing rather than converting, I think we can make a tremendous amount. Because what we can share is we can share processes of insight. We can share the process of transformation. We can share processes of connection. Okay, so I got one thing. I’ve never heard this before. Maybe I’m the first guy doing this. But the fundamental shift that I’m seeing that’s really beneficial in my own life is changing God from a noun to a verb. Yes, yes, yes. So that’s… Yeah, that’s very much a way in which… I’ve heard that often expressed in the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah. Because God’s name is actually more properly thought of as a verb than as a noun. Wow. Another thing… I think what you said is important. See what I mean though? See how if you shift from God as a noun to God as a verb, it orients you towards process and it starts to orient you towards practice. And it starts to reconfigure your worldview so that you can re-home the practices that you’re finding personally transformative in your own life. Right, right. So if we have God as a noun, like say Krishna, and Krishna says, oh, look at me. Here’s my peacock feather. I like cows, so you have to be good to the cows. That’s where people get lost is they focus on the too much on that, all that baggage from the noun. Right, yes. So another… This I guess is not fully relevant to like a wisdom culture. I’m thinking more about individuals. What I think a lot of Westerners are missing is a Bible. And I don’t mean the Bible, I mean a Bible. Something that to me a Bible is like… It’s the rock bottom. And the ceiling at the same time. So it’s like you… It could be a text, it could be a doctrine. I mean, I have a very loose definition of this. But it’s like… It keeps you like safe and at home. Like you always know where you are, but at the same time you cannot transcend your Bible. Because then it’s not a Bible, right? But also if you sink down all the way into the depths, the Bible can still… Your Bible can still bring you back up, all the way up to the top also. Yeah, I think that’s well said. So this is especially work that I’ve done with Christopher Master Pietro about trying to… Re-understand sacredness. And what makes something a sacred text? Part of what I’ve tried to understand that is, is instead of trying to understand it as the unquestioned set of doctrines, instead you understand it as a text that you can continually go back to and the text grows as you grow. Yes. That’s beautiful. Right? And then we could also make that even more dynamic in that we could try and create something like an online compendium of texts that many people have found have this sacredness to them. Because actually the Bible, the Bible, is not a book. It’s a book of books. And there’s no reason why we can’t have a book of books that we’re collectively writing and rewriting and kind of like what Wikipedia does. In which constantly doing that so that people, as you say, have a home, a place that they can… But it should do both, right? It should both home them and it should also call them from home. It should give them a place that they can return to when they need to heal, right? And when they need to feel connected and belonging. But it should also challenge them to go beyond, right? To grow. Because if they stop growing, then they’ll actually lose that. If we reformulate sacredness as the text grows, as you grow, if you stop growing, then you’re actually going to lose sacredness. Because the text is then going to just become a dead, right? Dead set of print. Yes. Dead set of propositions is maybe a way of saying it. So I’m kind of hoping we can… Because we already have, and I do this in some of my courses, we already have this way of getting collective intelligence to create a text that no one person is the author of. And it’s constantly dynamically shifting and evolving. We can do that. We’re already doing it in other domains for practical educational purposes. We could improve upon it and develop it. So what we’re trying to educate now is not a particular course or a particular topic, but the kind of education we’re talking about when we’re talking about people, right? Becoming persons within a community of persons. People belonging to a tradition of wisdom. Excellent. So what I’m doing is since I have my own two Bibles, Aristotle’s Ethics and the Bhagavad Gita, which are… That’s great. Yeah, you know, they’re not from the same continent, of course, or the same culture. But for some reason, they both are perfect for me and they go together at the same time. And because I have just these two texts, which are not that long to fully envelop my whole identity, my whole life, I can put anything that comes into my consciousness, my relationships, whatever. I just fit it into the jigsaw of these two Bibles and I know exactly where I am. So what I’m doing now… That’s why my name is Ethos Ananda. So Ethos stands for Aristotle, basically, in the West and all that stuff. And Ananda is bliss and yoga and all that Eastern stuff. Right. I’m sorry, I’ve been misnaming you throughout our whole conversation. I have many names. Alex is fine. Ethos is like my brand name. You know, you can call me Ethos, that’s fine. My devotee friends, they call me Ananda, actually. Right, right. So, yeah, so what I did was, and I’m a terrible marketer, so I don’t know how to really push this out, but I basically converted Aristotle’s ethics into an actual Bible. So, because Aristotle writes in this very kind of dialectic or dialogue fashion where he’s kind of like, and then let’s think about this and Plato said this and this and that. So I took all the important points and I numbered them. So it’s just like reading a Bible where it’s like verse one, verse two, verse three. Right, right, right. I got it down to 400 verses. So I think for those people who are looking for something like that, which I was, it seems like I was and I still am my whole life. It’s just like who I am. I’m like hungry for this stuff, wisdom, I guess. Like I’m so hungry for it. And I’m just lucky, you know, it just came into my life. But I’m sure there are people out there who, you know, they’re looking for it. I don’t know how to get this to them, but I just, it came to this day where I was like, I got to write this out and I got to just like do this. You know, part of my karma. That’s really great. I think there’s lots of people who would benefit from that. And I think there’s lots of people who want to be doing that. I mean, again, that’s what we see happening on these collective forums where people try to create a collective document rather than an individual document. Right, right. And, you know, it’s really another excellent thing is having a master. So a Bible, a Bible is so cool because you can look up to it like it’s your master, but you also can stand on it. But having like, so Aristotle is actually my master, like in my heart. I talk about this. You have to have a sage that you learn intimately, not just learn about. You have to learn how to intimate, imitate, internalize it. You have to learn how to internalize a sage. Sounds like you have, and this is something I also recommend, sounds like you’ve internalized two sages. And that, and that’s a good thing. That goes towards what I was talking about before about an ecology of practices and an ecology of communities. Yeah, very much. It’s very important to find a sage that you can learn about intimately so that you can imitate and internalize them in a profound way. Yes, that’s really important to transforming not just your beliefs, but transforming your ability to envision the world and to transcend yourself. Okay, okay. So like I said before, I’m mostly just lucky. So I have a hard time actually figuring out how I got here. But what would you say is the difference between like, oh, I’m studying Kant, I’m studying Locke and Hobbes, and they’re pretty cool, versus this guy is my master? How can we help people find that difference? I think that the sage is somebody who is sacred in the way we talked about. That as you grow, they grow for you, and that happens typically. And that the growth that they’re creating is not just a growth of theoretical ability or even philosophical understanding, but it’s the kind of growth that is the comprehensive transformation of a human being as they aspire to be someone they are not, as they aspire to be wiser than they currently are. And that’s what a sage is. A sage is somebody who reaches you now, who can reach into you now, but is also reaching from where you will eventually be. That’s very important. Yes, yes. So the language here is really important, I think. It always is. Language is really important. Taking great care. This is why I so admire, he’s a dear friend of mine, my co-author and dear friend Christopher Master Pietro. You get to see any of the dialogues that I have with him or any of the dialogues he has with Guy or with Andrew Sweeney, right? He’s eloquent and precision. It’s lyrical without being in any way merely ornamental. That is really, really conducive. Really, really conducive to a kind of profound clarity of realization that you don’t get if you just care about the product and the bottom line of your language use. If all you’re after is, again, I want you to hear this point, not let’s go through a process together, then you don’t take care with language. But you know what? If I take language from you, you lose most of your humanity. This is like a Buddhist principle and a Platonic principle. You don’t take care, very, very like mindful care of your language. You’re ultimately not taking care of your humanity. This is one thing your colleague, Jordan Peterson, did a good job, I think, bringing into the culture. It’s so weird. I always knew that, but I saw him and how he was really taking care of how he was speaking, and I just found myself doing that. And now I’m like, I would I would almost rather die than just then to just find myself catching out stuff I don’t believe in saying stuff. Life is not worth living. Socrates famously said you just said it there. You’d rather die than live the unexamined life. I agree with you. And coming to a place where you can honestly say that for yourself, I think I mean, Socrates is my sage. I think that is one of the crucial moments on the path to wisdom. The unexamined life is not worth living. Yes, that’s I think that’s a bit higher than a white belt. That’s like a green belt level, maybe. Yeah, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t. No, I’m not saying that’s the realization that sets you on the path. Yeah, I didn’t know. I didn’t think you were saying that. I was just, you know, trying to. Sure. No, but I think it’s something that tells you that you found your path. If you if the path that you’ve put your foot upon has you honestly, unauthentically come to a place where you from the guts up, not just here, but from the guts up, you can say, as you did so spontaneously unauthentically, you basically said the unexamined life is not worth living. I’d rather die than not take care of how I’m thinking and how I’m making sense of things. That’s it. That to me, for example, of everything you said, and I’m not dismissing everything else you’ve said, but of everything you said, that is what gives me the most confidence in you right now. That that moment. Okay. Mystical experiences are important. And you know from my work, I talk a lot about them and transformative. That’s important. And you know, and I’m not again, you know that I’m not trying to be dismissive of everything else you said. No, I know. Yeah. Yeah, but that that for me. It seems like it’s because like, because a mystical experience, you know, you can just have it and forget about it. But when you when you can integrate it to the point where, yes, eventually, hopefully you can spontaneously authentically say something as I did. That’s a much better sign. Whereas just saying, you know, I took some mushrooms, man. It was dope. Like, you know, exactly. One thing you talk about with Jordan Hall and others is psycho technologies and meta psycho technologies. Yeah, that’s right. So to me, I like this language. Oh, and another thing about the language, what we really need. And you already described this perfectly. I think what like sacred like like we need like like you. You did it so beautifully. But if we get it in one word, so we know then then we can really make progress very fast across the board, you know, for religious people, for non religious people. I think it’ll just like be a nice rocket. I’ve tried to do it with two words. So that’s the best I’ve done. I tried to capture it with a sense of reciprocal opening. Something is opening up the world and opening up you in a reciprocal fashion. That’s what’s happening. It grows as you grow the world. You start to you start to it’s like a lens. Right. Eckhart said it. The eye by which I see God is the same eye by which God sees me. Right. And so the sacred is reciprocally opening. It’s taking me into the depths of what’s ultimate in reality. And it’s taking me right into the depths of what’s right. Rounding my entire psyche and it’s reciprocally opening me up. That’s how I try to get it as compact as possible. So psychotechnology for me that includes prayer, meditation, NLP, CBT. Would you also include all of these things? Yes. I mean I have some criticisms of NLP, but let’s not get into that right now. The the what it what it’s trying to be though. I’m trying to be as cautious as I can. Is a psychotechnology. CBT clearly is. I think prayer is meditation, contemplation, and those shouldn’t be identified. They’re different practices or psychotechnologies. Tai Chi Chuan is a psychotechnology. Right. Yoga. If it’s basically created by collective intelligence and it’s standardized in some fashion such that it is not just learnable by you, but internalizable by you. And it will have a comprehensive effect on many domains of your life. Then it’s a psychotechnology. So the prototypical example I have is literacy. Literacy is a standardized way of representing language. Right. So that we can afford and you can deeply internalize literacy. You can’t look at words and not read them at this point. It’s called the stupor fact. Right. And so if you practice mindfulness long enough, it’s a standardized way of training your attention. If you practice it long enough, it’s internalized. And like literacy, you lose you think of all the domains in which you use literacy. That mindfulness is then usable in multiple domains or the way I have of habitats, the way I have of inhabiting my body and inhabiting my environment, taught to me by Tai Chi Chuan, that becomes also deeply internalized in domain general. It shows up in multiple domains in my life. See, this is the difference between having a psychotechnology and just acquiring a particular skill. Okay. Okay. I see. When you learn tennis, right, tennis isn’t designed to fit your cognition and enhance it in a way that will be comprehensively applied to how you connect to other people, the world, yourself. It’s pretty much, you know, in this very limited domain. And again, there’s nothing wrong with skills are important. They really are. But a psychotechnology is much more comprehensive and it is deeply connected to and dependent upon collective intelligence. Okay. Okay. So now I think I see why you’re saying NLP may not be a psychotechnology. Yeah. Because there isn’t really a culture for it. It’s just a skill. Right. But the thing is, though, from my own experience, it’s a much more effective skill than CBT. And I’ve heard about that. What NLP needs to do, and this is not a criticism. This is a statement, although it might sound like a criticism. NLP needs to work to get the same kind of theoretical status and empirical evidence that CBT has for it. And it has not done that successfully. I’m not saying it can’t. I’m not making a criticism. I’m making a statement. Right. Yes. And I would agree. I think the reason for that, and we don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to, but I love NLP. I find it so fascinating. The main reason I love NLP, though, is Dr. Bandler, the co-founder, reading his books is like so much fun. Because half of it is just saying, yeah, I walked into some mental hospital and that guy had schizophrenia. I went bam, bam, bam, not anymore. He’s just like a crazy wizard guy. Anyway, maybe it doesn’t matter. Oh, I think because it’s such a playful thing where the focus is on just doing it, the people who are really good at it will never waste their time doing double-blind studies because they’ll just tear their hair out. And they could be doing so much more cool stuff. But we can forget about that. We should talk more about meta-psycho technology. Yeah. And I’m glad you brought up Jordan. I mean, some of the most important conversations I’ve had in my life have been with him. He’s a fantastic person to have a discussion with. We’re becoming friends, and I value that a lot. And it was him, it was he, sorry, who gave me the idea of a meta-psycho technology. That what I was talking about. And then this is what I think dialectic ultimately is. Dialectic is a meta-psycho technology that basically it puts you into, right? It puts you both into the worldview and into collective intelligence in a way that is needed if you’re going to have that machinery at work that we’re talking about for collecting, curating, and coordinating ecologies of practices. That for me, the ancient practice of dialectic as it was practiced in the Platonic and Neoplatonic schools, all the Socratic traditions, is I’m trying to understand it. That’s why I’m working on my next video series after Socrates. Trying to understand, and this is work that Chris and I have been writing about, ancient dialectic, and I want to put it into a deep, I want to use it as a template. I’m not trying to go back to the past. I’m trying to salvage what I can from the past and put that into dialogue, and I’m intending that word, with what is emerging now. All of these practices of discourse and collective intelligence so that we can try to get a meta-psycho technology analogous to what dialectic was in the ancient world, which was the meta-psycho technology for all of the wisdom traditions. My first question is, how does dialectic give us a worldview? So, you have to understand that dialectic isn’t just argumentation, right? So, the Platonic dialogues are the premier place to look for what’s going on, right? So, there’s argumentation that’s also integrated with the process of encountering a sage, internalizing the sage, having moments of insight, having your very sense of identity called into question, being inspired to aspire beyond yourself. All of this is happening within a forum in which people are doing two things in a deeply interwoven fashion. What they’re trying to do is they’re trying to get collective intelligence forming, because you’re trying to get all the different perspectives to talk to each other. Having perspectives and character talk to each other. What’s happening in the dialogues is you’re not just seeing competing arguments, you’re seeing competing visions and competing ways of life, and they’re trying to come into an appropriate mutual transformation of each other. So, dialectic is that, but dialectic is also something you do individually. It’s something in which you’re trying to learn how to move up and down, if you’ll allow me that metaphor, your worldview in a disciplined manner so that you can get a deep understanding of the grammar, the cognitive cultural grammar of your worldview. And so, you’re doing this, if you’ll allow me these two gestural metaphors, with your worldview, and then you’re doing this with all of your perspectives and ways of life. And then you’re trying to weave that together with argumentation, trying to get our best discourse practices. And that’s why dialectic is where you need to go if you’re going to try and create a new culture of wisdom. The thing is, in my head, I see what you’re saying, but I don’t see how it can grow from just two smart guys in the woods. So, that’s the question. Well, first of all, you can get multiple people doing it, and this is work I’m doing especially with both Chris and Peter Lindberg, right? You want to get basically a program of practices. You want to start with something like Edwin Royce’s notion of empathy circling, which you do with four people, because what it does is it moves people from bad faith to good faith dialogue. And then you might want to do some basic circling, what Guy Sandstock talks about, where you just work on the community, and you can do that with multiple people. And then you can get people to start to bring in some aspects from things like insight dialogue. And then you can bring in aspects of, I mean, I’m working on all of this right now with people. What you can do is you can take people through a sequence of practices that takes them from adversarial doctrinal conflict into what you and I are doing here and now. That’s the work I’m doing with both Chris and Peter, and Guy Sandstock especially, and Jordan Hall, and the people within my own particular circling group, and the people I’ve been meeting like Edwin. I’m doing participant observation. I’m not just theorizing, I’m going in and immersing myself in this as much as I can, participant observation, trying to get the truth that can only be realized through transformation. And then taking that, this is what I mean about the bottom up and the top down, and then saying, okay, how could we possibly optimally configure a program of these practices that could take anybody on the street and take them through this? I mean, I can’t give people their motivation. What I can do is offer people, here’s something that will take you there. Excellent. Do you know, can you mention any other concrete examples of meta-psycho technology? I’m still trying to like get a good picture of what it is. Well, so if you think about an ecology of practice, and then you have to have something that taps into the collective intelligence of the community by which decisions can be made for the community as a whole. So meta-psycho technology must include a community. It must be more than one person, right? Yeah, because again, we’re back to you can’t create a culture on your own. That doesn’t make any sense. So, yeah. So if you think about what you see, sorry, I’m not trying to force this by being a fallacy of exclusiveness. But let’s take a look at the church, right? You have all of these ecologies of practices. People are praying and they’re doing all of it. But what you have is you also have this way in which groups of people get together. They have conclaves or they have councils in which, and what do they do? They discuss and argue, and they try to get a process by which they’re constantly adjudicating the ecology of practices that make up their tradition. So not only do you see it within the philosophical context, what I’m talking about, you see it within religious context, too. Now, the problem is how do you do that without, you know, binding people to an unchangeable creed? That’s the difficult part. So that could be where a lot of Western religion is failing. The psychotechnologies are still there, but the meta-psycho-technology is like, where is it? You know, like especially in like the Catholic Church, for example, you have a very well-structured hierarchy, which is really excellent, you know, for doing what that’s good at. But for a continuous evolution of practice, it’s going to fail. Yeah, I agree. So this is the trick, right? The trick, right? The difficulty is, right, is your meta-psycho-technology and your metaphysics are deeply interwoven together in a profound way. Yeah. And so you need to set up like patterns of the meta-psycho-technology in which what you just said is made central. I would even say made sacred, which is this. Above all, what this has to do is it has to be able to evolve, right? It has to be able to evolve. And here’s what Jordan and I have argued that, and this is not a foreclosure argument. I would not dare to pronounce on an entire religion and say it’s doomed. OK, I think that people who do that are seriously either arrogant or naïveté, right? Or naive, I should say. But Jordan and I and Chris and I also as well, right, we are not anti-religious. I want that really clearly understood. But we feel that the established religions, the interweaving of their metaphysics, their mythos and their meta-psycho-technology, those three are deep. The three M’s are interwoven together. You have a two worlds myth. You have a particular kind of supernaturalistic metaphysics, and then you have a meta-psycho-technology attached to all that. They’re interwoven and interdefining. We think that is so bound to a rate of change and an obsolete worldview, try not to be harsh here, that we do not think it is capable of evolving in ways that are needed for right now. That’s the problem. That’s part of what I think Jordan means when he’s talking about the blue church and the red church and he’s talking about game A and game B. That interweaving of mythos, metaphysics and meta-psycho-technologies in the established religions, you see it happening in other religions too, right? It’s happening also within Buddhism as it’s coming into deep contact with the West’s meeting crisis. I think the other thing I want to talk about is, you see very famous people, people that I know personally, some even, I’ve met them personally, or that Stephen Batchelor, or I know him as a colleague and a friend, Evan Thompson, people who are deeply important in the Western Buddhist community who have both published books on why they’re no longer Buddhists. Stephen is published after Buddhism and Evan is published why I’m not a Buddhist. They basically say that the idea that Buddhism, for example, is somehow an exception to this problem that I’m putting my finger on, they basically criticize that and say no, it’s not an exception. It also is falling prey to these kinds of problems that you and I are talking about. So we need, this takes us back to the religion that’s not a religion. We have to tip the balance, right? Because the rate of change was what it used to be, we could give priority to being very conservative in the evolution. But one of the things you notice in biological evolution is the rate of change isn’t constant. The rate of change has to shift as the rate of change in the environment shifts. And we’re entering a period of very rapid change. And it’s not only that the change is increasing, it’s the rate of change is increasing. And so we can’t have a conservative evolution constraint anymore. We have to push it more towards creativity. It has to be much more fluid and flowing right now. And so Jordan and I suspect that the established religions aren’t capable of shifting the mythos, metaphysics, metasequence technology in such a way that it will be able to get out of a largely conservative bias in how it constrains the evolution and move much more into a more creative bias in how it directs the evolution. Sorry, that was a lot to say, but that’s a very important… No, no, that was very good. That was very poignant. The last sentence there was amazing. What I’m thinking to myself is from being, you know, I guess, deeply involved, at least to whatever degree I have been, I don’t see that changing. I mean, even… But I think it’s worse than what I’m saying, because even if there’s a religion without a religion, I think even that will eventually have this conservative bias. It can. And it can. And one of the hopes is that we could get it… We could get it at least enough to… What do I want to say? Global enough, pluralistic enough that the conservative bias can never take root sort of comprehensively. It would be something in which it might do it here, but right. That I don’t know. And now you’re asking me to pronounce on areas where I don’t have very much confidence, because there’s not a lot of knowledge upon which I could make a claim. I’m trying to articulate a vision that I think is viable. And again, I think it’s very important that you, and you’ve allowed me to take you as a representative of the nuns. Again, notice what’s sort of a point for you that it’s like, I just don’t see them capable of doing it. Right? Which is not, I don’t believe in God, or I don’t… It’s just like, no, no, I just… They seem, if you’ll allow me this adjective, and I don’t mean it to be insulting, so I’m trying to choose it carefully. There’s people I deeply respect, like Paul VanderKlay, and Jonathan Pageau, and Mary Cohen, and Jay, and myself, right? They matter to me a lot, and they’re doing really good work. But many nuns, N-O-N-E-S, find that the established religions are ossified. They’re ossified. They don’t feel that they have that vitality of self-transformation that is needed at the fundamental level. So one thing, you know, you’re mentioning Paul VanderKlay and Jonathan Pageau. One thing that’s so cool that’s happened to me is I’m like, my media that I listen to is almost entirely Christian. Yes. Like there are, you know, Krishna devotee gurus out there, but they say the same thing every time. And it’s like, you know, like when there’s a really good personality and I like their voice, you know, that’s great. But beyond that, it’s like… And this is why I’m very hesitant. You heard me earlier. I expressed what I tried to express a conclusion that Jordan Hall and I share, and Chris and Master Pietro and I share. But I was very clear that I’m not pronouncing a foreclosure on Christianity. I think I feel… Trying to… That those four people, or was it five I mentioned, they represent what Christianity needs to be doing. I do not. So let me say this very carefully. They represent what Christianity needs to be doing, but I am not convinced they are representative of Christianity. Let me be clear. I’m not calling their identification in question. I think they are sincere and true Christians. No, you said it very well, I think. Okay, okay. And, you know, I hope I’m in the same boat, you know, with my own church and faith, whatever it’s called. Oh, geez. There’s one example that came into my head from… Like there’s… Oh, there’s too many examples of this ossification. It’s a good word for it. Like, these incredible scholars, they… You know, some of these guys have PhDs in Indian theology from, you know, really excellent people. They did this huge seminar or conference on Bhagavad Gita and the ancient Vedas. And they… Like nobody showed up from the central temple church authority. They said, oh, we’re busy. It doesn’t fit our schedule. And it’s like, come on, you can’t do that. No, that’s true. You thought, so I have to be going. We’ve been talking for about an hour and a half. Is there any final question you want to ask me or anything you want to do of a summative nature? There is one thing that… Yes, Paul van der Klay spoke about this and it stuck with me big time. The now versus the eternal. I think that’s a fundamental… Or the always. Yeah. That’s… So, okay. So I guess where does that… Okay, let me get my thesis and see what you think. Okay. So as I was saying earlier about the Bible, like a Bible, people don’t have a Bible or a sacred master. Another problem here in this meaning crisis is that people are staying too much in the now. And they’ve kind of lost a connection with that eternal realm, which… Okay, I’ll stop there. What are your thoughts? Oh, I think that’s really important. I think that’s really important. And I think that we need… That’s why I tried to talk about those two dimensions. This dimension is the dimension where we’re communing and we’re trying to evolve of dialectic. This is the dimension of the emanation and the emergence. This is the dimension of the eternal dimension where we’re talking about the depths of reality. So this is like the depths of reality and this is the evolution of realization. And we need them constantly talking together. You and I have to be constantly evolving in the now, what’s needed, if you’ll allow me this, in order to reach and help the nuns. And I don’t want to sound patronizing, but that’s what I’m trying to do in some sense. But that has to also do this. It has to give people the sense of connecting to what’s most real, what’s ultimate. And so that’s again why I think dialectic is important. Those two dimensions of dialectic, right? The levels of reality and the stages of realization have to be constantly kept really tightly communing together within the process of dialectic. And you see it in Plato. For example, in the dialogue, Socrates will come and you’ll see Socrates adjust. You can see him evolving so he fits the person he’s talking to. And you can even see it within the same. So there’s the now, right? He’s fitting, he’s fluid and adaptive, and he’s not trying to bring anything to closure or completion. But nevertheless, we’re getting discussions of the levels of reality and what is most real. Both of those are happening, woven together. Okay, yeah, Socrates, excellent example. Okay. I think so. I think so too. Part of what I’m trying to do is recommend him more strongly to us as a culture. Again, not because I think we can return back to the ancient Greek world. I’m deeply critical of nostalgia, but because he serves as a valuable template for what we’re trying to bring, give birth to right now. And Socrates called himself a midwife. Right, yeah. Model and paradigm for trying to give birth to something that is not yet fully born. Seems like there’s a very Christian story to it Socrates and his death, you know. Yeah, and there’s probably people have argued there’s probably historical connections between the Socratic legend. Right, and how it gets taken up into some of the story of Jesus’s passion. And that would make good historical sense to me, given that Jesus is, he’s moving around in, you know, the, I can’t remember the Greek name, there’s 10 Greek cities. He’s actually living in a very Hellenized part of Palestine when he’s doing his mission. I think it was, who was it who was arguing about he has in fact some of the actual tropes of an itinerant, cynic philosopher. He’s not, he is not just a cynic philosopher. I’m not saying that, but there’s clearly a cultural influence. He’s also deeply influenced, of course, by the Israelite prophetic tradition. He seems to be wedding them together in some really powerful and interesting way. And so it’s there might have been that Socratic model, probably the enacting Socrates not speaking Socrates but enacting Socrates was probably an influence on him. And I like what you did. You fulfilled your promise and you did it in a really graceful manner of trying to, you know, simplify without dumbing down. You know, the kinds of stuff I think about and trying to articulate for others. So thank you for that. Genuine. Thank you for that. It’s totally my pleasure and my honor. And it’s so beneficial for me as just from a purely selfish perspective. But but others will benefit too. So that’s, you know, it’s beautiful. Right. Okay. Well, great pleasure meeting you, Ethos. And please, like I said, send me the files and let’s do this again. That sounds excellent. Thank you so much, Professor. Thank you. Call me John. Okay. Okay, John. Thanks. And have a good day. You too. Take care. Bye bye. Bye bye.