https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=h-x4LFV_PfU
Welcome everyone to Voices with Reveki. I’m very, very excited about this session. So we have Zevi, now you just told me your last name and I forgot the pronunciation again. Slavin. Slavin. From Speakers of Unity. As many of you know from the announcements, this is part two of an ongoing discussion that Zevi and I are having on what you might call the philosophy and the cognitive science of mysticism. What do they have to say respectively? What do they have to say together? Do they disagree? And it’s been incredibly rich. I encountered Zevi not that long ago and it’s funny because we had an extended conversation. I feel like I’ve got a somewhat intimate connection with him, but I just met him not that long. I basically met him yesterday, well not in person, but virtually in person. And it was just shortly before that I had seen a brilliant video. I highly recommend it. I recommended it at the time. A brilliant video on whether or not Spinoza was a mystic and he laid out carefully a careful five-point argument. It was both extra-genical and logically presented in a fashion very reasonable and very plausible. It was a position that I also agree with for independent arguments, but I thought it was just well done. I highly recommend you check it out and the other work he’s doing on Spinoza. I’m intending to make my way through those. And then I commented on how brilliant it was and he reached out to me and he said he’d watched Awakening for the Meaning Crisis and so we thought we should start talking. But I think it’d be good right now, Zevi, if you took sort of center stage, even though there’s no stage, and talk a little bit about yourself. When I was on your channel, I did some of my autobiography and you alluded to some connections, but maybe open it up a bit more. And then where you’re coming at and then what are your main projects and goals for your YouTube channel, Seekers of Unity? Because I think it’s a channel that should have a higher prominence. So I’m going to turn it over to you. Firstly, thank you so much, John, for having me on. It’s a real pleasure to sit and to talk and connect with you. I think it’s a great opportunity to connect with you. I mean, we’re in a really fascinating space where we’re trying to find community and find conversation and find relation and find intimacy and doing it through screens is a very fascinating challenge. Whether at all we can create community and relationships like this is a great question. But if there’s anything that’s been proven for the past two days, there definitely is a possibility, at least on a one-to-one basis, because I do feel already quite close to you. And I think part of that is with your own theory of love, which is that there’s mutual and reciprocal self-disclosure. So you shed light of your story and your intimate and personal story, which was really very touching and resonated very deeply with me. So let’s respond in turn. My story is different as everyone’s story is in a beautifully different yet fundamentally sometimes similar way. I grew up in a Hasidic community. My parents were sent as emissaries by the Lubavitch Rebbe to Sydney, Australia, all the way from Brooklyn. And I grew up as something of an insider outsider because I was living within my own Hasidic community, but I was living within the broader Australian community. And then, in the end, I was an outsider both because I was a Jewish young child and young adult, and the Jew is in some ways the perpetual outsider historically. And so then as being a Hasidic and Orthodox Jew, even within the Jewish community, there’s again another level of outsiders. And a lot of a lot of that sense of of perhaps like an existential isolation was something which I which I didn’t necessarily cognize and understand consciously at the time as a child. But retrospectively, I could see how that was took a part in keeping my identity. And what was really a watershed moment for me, which I mentioned briefly in our first conversation, was discovering that not only were the ideas, the general sort of ideas of, let’s say monotheism or ethics, the Judaism teachers shared by the traditions, those are all kind of facade things, although, you know, as important as they are, and they certainly are. But what I found really blew my mind when I was 15 or 16 was that like the deepest secrets of the Jewish tradition, which was like the Hasidic wisdom, the Kabbalistic secrets, the esoteric metaphysics that I was being taught and in such a selective and exclusive way. And then, unfortunately, many of these texts still haven’t been, you know, taught to the public, haven’t been translated, are barely understood by people outside of the community. And then through a strange chance of occurrence and a novel that I was reading and mentions of initially Christian mysticism, I became acquainted with Christian mysticism with its very strong neoplatonic influence. And I later came to understand that there was a shared historical influence and shared philosophical language and shared metaphysics that were grounding these traditions. Which, but at the time, just discovering their commonality on a metaphysical level, so, so raw and so indisputably really knocked my socks off. And then, and then I, as one does, I got interested in Eastern thought, first through, you know, Huxley and Watts and Terrence McKenna and all those, but then more seriously and more academically. And then my focus is, my focus shifted more to really to Western mysticism and to that tradition that emerges from Plato through the Abrahamic faiths and beyond. And trying to, my real quest, I think since then, in some protracted way, and different themes have had different salient to me throughout time. For a long time, it was the theme of death and rebirth, immortality, that was a very strong theme. For another time, it was an associated theme of the theosis, hypnosis or apotheosis of the individual. They can be unified through different forms and different traditions, different points, pick up salience, and I was sort of kind of stitched together the salient ideas across the different traditions. And I think where it’s kind of evolved to, and it’s where it is now, and I think it’s still growing, still quite young, and it’s still part of the excitement is that I have no idea where it’s heading, is really looking at the deepest wisdom that each one of these traditions possessed that have been painstakingly cultivated over millennia of silent introspection, reflection and dialogue internally. And now, and although at SCAN moments in history, there were moments of contact and passing of ideas, which I’m also studying quite avidly, but more or less these things were done internally and now really on a grand scale for the first time historically, as an open marketplace of ideas, facilitated by things like the internet, by the technologies that we have. And the question is, are we going to utilize those technologies to enslave ourselves to the worst angels of our nature, to use Stephen Pink’s term, or are we going to allow ourselves to use this moment to find a unified narrative that can guide us both in our personal lives, in our interpersonal dealings, and in our relationship with the world around us, and perhaps where we can find a way to do that. And perhaps with something deeper or beyond whatever you want to use your language for the ontological reality that in the West gets a capital G. So, and I think those relationships are so critical and I think a lot of your work, and if I’m talking too long here you can interject, but I think a lot of your work on the meaning crisis is really looking at the same contemporary issue in a very related way. I mean, you, I think I think john I’m going to give away my age here but I think I think you started teaching when I was just a newborn. Yes. Yeah, that’s right. I don’t mean to give away your age either see the non disclosure here on both sides because because But, but I’m the tremendous amount of wisdom and knowledge and expertise that you bring to the fields from the from the scientific realm which is really your, your home which is that which is the cognitive science, I feel that in some way I have. I don’t want to say a comparable but but an equivalent intimacy with my own tradition of Jewish mysticism which I began to learn in the original tongue in the original text from the age of 13, beginning with memorizing these things by heart and then really 20 really trying to stand these things, deeply and philosophically. And I think, and I think that the capacity for for these ideas to lead to a life, a life of, of goodness of bliss of inner peace and silence of harmony of love one another instead of jealousy for one another. I think I think it’s so rich and important and unmissable. But I think that and this this, and I think that my unique contribution may be to bring the Hasidic voice and to bring the Jewish voice of Jewish mysticism, which, and we can get into the history of this but has been so often neglected in the comparative academic study of mysticism in general for very specific reasons related to Gershwin Shalm’s characterization of Union Mystica or the lack thereof in Jewish mysticism but for whatever the historical reasons, there’s a real need to to to bring a bring a perennialist Jewish voice back into the conversation and I use that word tentatively carefully because, as we discussed last time. And that’s and that’s really where I see my, my work, primarily focused and I think particularly here I mean, just before we started I don’t know if I want to mention politics because I really try to stay away from politics, because I think politics is fundamentally divisive and doesn’t do anything good for humanity at all. But, I mean, I’m living here in a region which is filled with so much hatred and so much animosity which is just absolutely heartbreaking and I think the only way forward is to change that hatred and somehow somehow move to a place of love so I do a lot of work specifically focusing on Sufi on the relationship historical and conceptual between between Sufism Jewish mysticism and many other areas like that. I think that might be, that might be enough of an introduction. There was maybe one or two other points I want to make mention but they’ll come back to me. So, I mean, when you, when you came to this realization. You know, it sounds fairly shocking, like, because you were, you were sort of grew up in a narrative of sort of this is where these mystical experiences are expressed or understood, and then you discovered the similarity. You know, in other religions and philosophical traditions. So I get the sense of how much of an epistemic shock that was for you, like what kind of an existential shock was that for you like was your sense of identity called into question. I think that that cause a rift between you and your community. I mean, I don’t want you to trespass on any confidentialities but I’m trying to get a sense of, because my understanding my, my understanding and both my and both my understanding my experiences. We’re not talking about even something like political beliefs when I agree with you about, I think they put us at the wrong level and they put us in the wrong framework. That’s why I have this slogan about stealing the culture. I agree with you so I’m, but I think the kind of things we’re talking, what you’ve been talking about what I talked about last time. These are more foundational these even are at the political level these are at like the ontological existential, you know, your cognitive cultural grammar level. And so for me, and I would, I would, I would hypothesize for most people, because there’s empirical evidence to support this when those are disrupted. That’s not just you know you’re not just angry or frustrated, or, you know, even passionately so like we see another, you know, ideological conflicts but it’s it’s more. Well, here, here’s, you know, a sort of a crooked guardian point. You can come to the precipice of despair. When you get this kind of epistemic shock that seems to, you know portend and indicate the depth of what is happening, the level at which it’s happening was that the case for you or how I guess that, again, I don’t want you to spill I’m not trying to be a I’m not trying to be a I’m not trying to be a I’m not trying to be a I’m not trying to be a I’m not trying to be a I’m not trying to be a I’m not trying to be a I’m not trying to be a I’m not trying to be a I’m not trying to be a I’m not trying to be a I’m not trying to be a Well, I need to I need to think back to that moment. Firstly, it was it was it was it was. It didn’t happen overnight, the way I’m not advising and now I’m telling it in 20 seconds, it sounds very great. It really sort of germinated over a period of years probably a decade in full. And, and, and I left my, I left my study of Let’s let’s frame it like this. Growing when you grow up religiously very religiously from, as you know, yourself, the fundamentalist Christian home. You’re not given the choice of would you like to be religious or would you like to be something other than religious or which religion you like to practice. And for good reason I mean, I mean, families that are raising children want to pass on what they believe is going to be the best chance their child to live a life of happiness and fulfillment and therefore they give them what they believe is the truth. And, and I, I have, I have only tremendous and infinite love and respect for my parents and for their parents, I could not have asked for a better childhood. Thank God from from here until until the end of days and to high heaven. I honestly think my parents are two of the most incredible people and inspiring people in my life, and that I know. But for any child that grows up religiously. There, there’s, there’s just, there isn’t particularly I don’t know what it’s like internally from the inside from another religion and Christianity may be different because of how it’s sort of become so pervasive culturally, but it’s something like Judaism. And I assume the same as for Islam and maybe for some other traditions to. There is no religion in Judaism, when you are when you are raised religiously like orthodox or ultra orthodox that it is your life. It’s not it’s not like there’s your life and then there’s Judaism. Yes, it is your life. So, and that and that really happens, I don’t think one has the independence or cognitive capacity to really question that at all. Until, until, at least in early adolescence. And, and I, and it’s, it’s not a bad thing I’m not saying that in a negative or a pejorative way. It was a very, it was a very great childhood to grow up with the traditions and with the culture and with the, with the calendar and with you know the life cycle events it’s really beautiful, beautiful tradition, which I still very heavily partake in and not speaking as if I’m some you know X. But what happens then when I think when one and in in in Judaism at bar mitzvah 13 for for males and 12 for females, there’s a there’s another like infusion of religious fervor and excitement you’re on this like bar mitzvah high, where like you’re the ritual commands that you do now begin to count for points like up until then was just practice, and you’re really riding on this high, and particularly within the community you begin to get the language of has he taught to you, which is Jewish mysticism you begin to practice prayer as a form of religious experience and worship, at least, aspirationally so, and it’s a very, it’s a very strong period and and what happens for many what happened to me is, as my own independence and my own cognitive abilities began to kick in, you began to self reflect and turn back on the mind and turn back on your practice be like, one second, why, why am I doing all this, why am I am I putting on feeling why am I keeping commercial work. Am I doing this because my community is doing it because my, because my parents taught me to. And I think, I think that’s a very natural period, and I think I never, I never, and some people in that period really go on a full swing rebellion, and really just go and bring everything and go, you know, dye their hair pink and get a tattoo, which, which happens. I never did that I always was a very well mannered always like a very well risk like respecting child. And, but I began internally I went out I began to go to my own question, and I began to look for ways that could that could make this practice meaningful for me, myself, and and beautifully enough that actually is encouraged within the community to to take the religion and personalize it and not just do it because it’s been taught for you to do it that way. And the first place that I was turning to consciously to try to try to make sense of things was to the scholastic argumentative, my monodian, ergo, the Thalian side of things, and even even engaging in and listening to sort of Christian apologists, trying to really, and going through like teleological and ontological and cosmological and fine tuning arguments, being like I really need to rationally make sense of this thing so I can really firmly believe it. And I guess that’s also by my disposition I want to I want to try and understand and grasp things rationally. And that project. Not that I was talking about this with anyone it was very private project, but it was really failing for me. Yeah, and with with discovering, you know Kantian critiques of these kinds of knowledge and, and, and the complexities of terms like like essence and existence which which you don’t really get in medieval philosophy but with with sort of with the with the brunt of modern philosophy that that project became more less less tenable. And, and, and, and, and there was, there wasn’t, I would say there was an internal loss of faith, where, where I was kind of keeping facade externally and keeping practice because I was blown community and I had my French circles but internally, it was it was just crumbling it was really just blow it over. And so two things happened simultaneously, one of them I’m more at liberty to speak to and one of them. I’ll have to maybe wait till I’m I feel ready for it, but but there was through discovering this comparative form of missus and through finding the, at least at that point, right, you know that more critical about it, reading cats and reading that whole school of scholarship, finding what I assumed was a universal truth that pointed to something which which I could really believe in. And that’s something which was, which which in many ways was so beautiful and which I felt to be not other than my tradition but the core of my tradition. Right. In a way that was that was vivifying and inspiring for me and a way that didn’t need me to reject anyone else in that process. And the universality of that. A lot of people when they when they go into comparative religion it destroys their own faith to me I had just the opposite my faith was already being destroyed. It was discovering the comparative element in in mysticism that allowed me to rebuild my faith, both, both rationally, because I think there’s very good logical argumentation for mysticism, and I’ve developed that case and we discussed last little I did a two hour segment with Justin sledge who’s a great PhD in philosophy who has his own channel here. So Tereka, where we really go into the nuts and bolts of that debate, and I think metaphysically there’s a very good case to make as you make as well. I think there’s a really good case to be made, aesthetically, there’s a real beauty there’s real there’s real poetic justice and resonance to it. And, and speaking about justice I think there’s also a real ethical vision that emerges from it, which, which I think is really incomparable in its power and beauty. So it’s on those three legs really that that I began to rebuild my faith in humanity in a new conception of the divine and letting go of your old conception of the divine to embrace a new one, maybe the most difficult thing for religious persons to do because the divine by definition is the most important, the most profound highest concept, definitionally, and allowing the death of God and to discover the God beyond God as a phrase that you’re often using is, is a terrifying experience, and the definitely I think that definitely was a death and rebirth, and I don’t want to make it sound as if as if I’ve discovered it and I’ve made it and I’m now here at the top of the mountain. But it’s a journey and it’s a beautiful journey. So, so maybe, maybe that answers your question a little. No, I think that was great. And I like the way you, you invoke the true the good and the beautiful and the fact that not only are they being sort of separately revivified, but they’re also being brought into the world of the divine. No, I think that was great. And I like the way you, you invoke the true the good and the beautiful and the fact that not only are they being sort of separately revivified for you, I get a sense that they were also their their potential integration and reunification was being revivified for you like you were like, it could be I mean people have experiences where the true becomes more important to them or the beautiful or the good, or perhaps even all three, but it sounds like it wasn’t just all three, it was it was like, like almost a neoplatonic right there just three different aspects of the same thing. Is that a fair, is that a fair description. Yeah, I think that’s actually very accurately and beautifully put and I think perhaps earlier my journey when because I was transitioning from trying to find truth, it may have been a truth factor which was more salient. But I think as my journey has progressed and matured, it’s definitely become the fact that that those three things are not separate at all. And we began to discuss this last time where I think that the metaphysic and the ethic and epistemology of mysticism are one. And there’s a performative beauty to this theory because I think, and I think this is where we may fruitfully disagree, I think there is actually a propositional value that emerges from this, and at the very bare bones of that it is the fundamental unity of all things, the fundamental oneness of all reality and that includes, it’s performatively beautiful because it includes that the internal structuring of the system itself, that the ethic, the metaphysic, the truth, the beauty and the good themselves have to be one as well. And I think that’s demonstrated beautifully in all aspects of the mystic system. Yeah, I’m thinking here of Habermas’s response to the problem of modernity, arguing that we, what modernity did was separate these into separate spheres, autonomous normativities, and that has turned out to be disastrous because we need them to function in some kind of tightly integrated manner, but we’ve set up a system of justification. And argumentation that prohibits that you can see him sort of wrestling with, is there a way to bridge between that and part of his part, I don’t think it’s exceedable part of what he’s trying to do with his universal pragmatics is to try and go from performative criteria to ethical criteria, which would then also bear upon you know our propositional statements, etc. And so I think, I think there, at least there, there is enough recognition at least of the problem of the separation of three normativities. Although that hasn’t led to, in general, I don’t remember seeing, I know Habermas has been recently considering religion, and more of his, but I don’t know if mysticism per se has been discussed much as a potential field in which we could come up with a new system. In which we could come up with answers. And I mean more theoretical argumentative answers to how we could stitch those normativities back together. That was something I wanted to talk about in. We can even the meeting crisis but you can’t talk about everything. I’m hoping to talk a little bit more about that when I do after Socrates, about because the suppress you see in Plato, and the fact that the ultimate is not the true but the good but also the one right and that he’s basically doing this. And so I want to bring that into the modern problematic of, we need, we need to, and you see, and there’s people that are deeply influential in cognitive science Achiller platinum, arguing for the breakdown of the fact value distinction that you know that you use to cleave apart, you know truth from goodness and things like that. And so I’m interested in that move and I’m going to bring it into the after Socrates discussion. So that that brings me to something if it. Oh, did you want to ask a question or can I just interject on that point. Yeah. I think that part of part of the problem of mysticism is that those three are so deeply interconnected into woven that in an attempt to try and articulate and express and present mysticism in a way that’s compelling and persuasive which is what I’m trying to do on my channel. It’s so difficult to pass those things. And separate because in language, that’s what you have to do. And that I think I think that that points to the fact of how deeply interconnected and independent and how one they are. But, but, but, but I think there is a need to present this as a way that is a real possibility for a really rigorous thinking person in the 21st century and I think one of the reasons why it’s something like how it mess is not approaching is because there’s still such a stigma against Because because we’re really just lacking that there isn’t even a consensus on a definition on the term. Yeah, yeah. I have an upcoming series which I want to work on which I want to do which is just defining this doesn’t be like, this is all the definitions that have been given by the great scholars, let’s put them into five categories. Let’s see like where the faults and strengths are. Let’s see how this terms evolved etymologically, historically, semantically, because we, it’s a category and it’s a way of thought which which which we so badly need to, to repair. And, and I think part of the challenge of doing that points to its to its value. And we touched upon this a bit. Maybe come back to it today, you know on this, the onto normativity, which seems to be beyond good and evil but it’s not just epistemic truth. And it somehow grounds all the kinds of knowing. So, I do want to talk about that. And maybe it’s actually related to the question I want to ask you. So, take this in the spirit of kindness, because that’s how it’s offered. So it’s more, it’s more about trying to draw you out. Because this, this is an argument that, you know, I made implicitly and I’m going to make it explicitly. I’m planning a third series after after Socrates, the God beyond God is going to be the title of it. Many people. In fact, you can make an argument even exegetically but I’ll just make it sort of more theoretically many people have argued that at the core of mysticism is some experience of non duality. I don’t like the word experience I’m going to use a word that I tried to make more prevalent in the meeting crisis, a realization of non duality because it’s, yeah, I think that’s a better way of putting it. Okay, so there’s the realization of non duality and then I would argue, and I don’t think I’d be alone in the argument, I don’t think I’ve represented consensus either. I don’t think I’m like a voice crying in the wilderness or anything like that. That many people see that there’s a deep connection between not non dualism and non theism as a position that transcends the usual dichotomy between atheism and theism, which seem to be bound into a set of propositions or presuppositions is perhaps stronger, that I think are transcended. And, and I think, at least retrospectively are critical of those shared presuppositions that the core of our spirituality is belief that the belief puts us into a relationship with some supreme being some super thing that that what we should be primarily looking at is you know the evidence that will decide the undecidable debate between theism and atheism. You know, I can go in more detail and just giving you the gist of the idea I think there’s about five or six of these presuppositions. But what I see, I’m impressed by, I’m impressed by the mystics often turning to language that is clearly and explicitly theistic Plato’s the good, right, a platinus is the one Eckhart’s Godhead, right, it’s been those is God or nature. I mean, it’s very hard to make that a theistic argument in fact, that’s one of the most interesting, I think that’s one of the most telling things about people are will will yell up and down confidently that he’s an atheist or he’s a theist, or is a pantheist which is effectively right. And so I think you can make the strong place that there’s clearly something in the non duality experience that tends to be retrospectively tied to a non theism that is seen as transcending the theism atheism debate. I’m particularly interested in that, because I think that might be relevant to something you alluded to already, which is a way of addressing the culture wars in a deep way that I think could be potentially not only just intellectually satisfying but point people to ways of life and realizations that could genuinely transform them so that they’re more compassionately disposed towards each other. There’s that and then I have, you know, then, and I think this is convergent with, you know, the argument that john Hicks makes in the interpretation of religion. The fifth dimension when he said the best interpretation to make of the perennial nature of the theism atheism debate is that the universe is in some sense spiritually ambiguous on this question that it provides, I think that’s a great meta argument, it provides enough evidence for both without enough evidence to determine the debate between either. And then he argues for basically a kind of non theism, he says, the really real can be, we can relate to it personally but we can equally relate to it impersonally. And of course that means, you know, he’s basically thinking of it as transpersonal. And so there’s also a deep connection that’s the third point of conversion, convergence, sorry, you’ve got sort of what I would say the mystical pointer, and then you’ve got the sort of the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the human’s. I think to me, that is the reason I bring out that and so I’m wondering what you think about all of that. That was a bit of a I was trying to keep it brief. but I’m. And I’m not telling you. Well, if And I’m not telling you. Well, if you want to, I’m not you. either but I’m not demanding from you you. whether it be the whether it be the well if you ever answer, so that if and even if they ask you that then you well if you ever answer, so that even if that then you when you listen to the up that there seems to be, you know, deep connections between the non-duality and the non-theism? Yeah, well that’s a huge question. It’s like the million dollar question. And I think that because it’s such an important question, it has to be approached so carefully and thoughtfully. Oh sorry, I hope I didn’t come off as trying to be exhaustive or complete. I was just trying to be justful. I was just trying to give you some background. And I feel exactly to what you’re gesturing. And it helps to explicate the question and to get it out there. But in another parallel universe, I could have stopped you five seconds and said, I know exactly what you’re saying and what you’re getting at. I think when it comes to God and God’s language, the language that we humans use to refer to the ultimate reality, it’s both such a stupid and trivial discussion and such an important discussion. It’s stupid because there’s a level of interaction with this discussion where people just want to hear a category. They want to throw you into the Atheist box, the Theist box, the Theist box, and that’s something which is so stupid. And I think for someone like that, I’d rather not give any titles because they’re not coming to be challenged. They’re not coming to learn. They’re just coming to box people and there’s enough boxing in the world. But I think when we can open up these labels and open up these terms and see what they might refer to and what those references might imply about reality. See, I think the real question is, when we say what is the nature of the divine or how do you characterize yourself, I think what we’re really asking is what is the nature of reality and how do you see reality itself? And that’s such an important question because the metaphysical and the ontological convictions that we have about reality is what defines the way that we go ahead and live our lives and make our decisions to love. So the category of non-theism is a really fantastic one. And I think I may have actually heard you use it first. And the way that you use it, I think, is so spot on and so precise. And I haven’t heard you being used much else, which is a real shame. But the fact that the mystics in their either in their non-duality or in their unity point to something which is non-theistic is so blatantly clear. I mean, just to open this up for perhaps people who are less familiar with the history and literature of mysticism. Mysticism in the West as a tradition known as apophatic theology, which is literally the non-saying, the opposite of cataphatic, where we try to make positive statements. All we can say is that God is not, God is not, God is not. And then the same idea, neti neti, not this, not that. So there’s a great book for anyone that’s interested, Michael Sells, on the language of unsaying, which really explores Oh, excellent book, excellent book. Really, really. So the idea of that, whatever your conception of God is, that is not God, is like the basic premise there, because God is beyond our own conceptions of whatever that thing is. And the problem is that that same word, that same three-letter English word, God, for one person means something which is so ineffable and so sublime and so demanding and so and so and so and a perpetual existential challenge to the very being and behavior. And for another person, it simply means some sort of patriarchal, monarchical object, somewhere between here and Saturn, that is going to, that likes one flavor of pizza and doesn’t like the other and punishes one person, not the other, and has, you know, picks who wins and loses wars and is going to roast people for all eternity if they don’t believe in him exactly the way that they’re. So there’s a real tragedy and paupacy in our language here. Yes. When we’re trying to describe two things that could not be more diametrically opposed to one another. This is all on the theoretical, and I think for that reason, having a category like non-theism is such an important one, because it really, what it says is, is that this whole debate is a pointless one, because it’s really missing the point. If you think that there is some, you know, Russelline teapot object out there that either can or can’t, can be disproven, you’ve missed the point entirely. And like, get like, that’s, this is all on the theoretical. And I want to move to the personal here. On the personal side of it, one of my own biggest struggles, which I alluded to, when I was sharing before, was precisely this idea of the God of theism that I was raised with, the God of the Bible and the God of rabbinic literature and the God of Judaism. And the God that I was finding in my own, in the Jewish mystics and in the mystics of the world, seemed to me to be irreconcilable. And if there was any question that literally gnawed at my soul and kept me up from night to night, it was this question. And wherever I was, whenever I met a wise person who I felt like might have some insight, be they a rabbi or a pastor, a teacher, a grandmother, this was the question I would pose to them. And I sat down and I recorded these conversations. I have hundreds of such conversations and one day I’ll do something with them, God willing. But it’s a question which drove me crazy of like, this new God that I’ve discovered, which is beyond, which is the non-theistic, which is the, it seems so sublime and beautiful and compelling and challenging. What do I do with this old God, with my childhood, with God? And I still don’t know if I’ve reconciled that issue. And I’m in two minds about it. Part of me believes, part of me believes, first, initially, I thought I had to just completely eradicate that God, get rid of it. And I became like a militant non-theist. But then, and maybe in more maturity or in moments of softness, I’m realizing that maybe there is space in one’s life in moments of toughness where one can relate to the personified God, and where there’s a, God is a mother or father to cry to. There’s a very complex discussion in Hindu theology about the specific point, about the relationship between the two representations of God, Ishvara and Brahman. There’s a book from Rudolf Otto called Mysticism East and West, where he compares Adi Shankara with Meister Eckhart. And he compares his God, which is Deotas and Theos, so Deotas and the Godhead, and Ishvara and Brahman. And he really, and the point which comes out of there is not the point, which is that it’s like just obvious that the Brahman, that the Ainsof, that the one is just the real deal and the rest is just childish and leave that for grandmothers. It’s no, it’s that there’s actually a real place for a divine personification that we understand to be a mask of God and not the ultimate. And there’s room to incorporate that into a complex theology in Veltensheim. So this is why I don’t have a clear answer to this question. No, neither do I. Neither do I. But that’s, I wonder, can I, I didn’t want to interrupt you, but, and so you can pick this up as you wish. So I see one, one, I don’t know. Give me one second. I think I have a cup somewhere here instead of drinking out of the bottle like a hooligan. Okay. There it will be, it will be a little more dignified. So I see, and I see this in the New Age movement and I think of Deconnick’s book, you know, Gnostic, I forget the title, something like Gnosticism in the New Age movement. And she shows how a lot of sort of New Age ideas right now in various movies and popular media are just, you know, rehashing or re-presencing or re-presenting of Gnosticism. And Gnosticism is not a religion. It’s like fundamentalism. It’s a style of religiosity and it’s heterogeneous like fundamentalism is. And so I want that understood. But nevertheless, I mean, and you know, and I think the most apt description of Jung is not Christian. As some of the current apologists, my colleague, Jordan Peterson has been arguing, I think he’s more properly described. He seemed to self-describe as a Gnostic. And so, and Jung seemed to argue that it’s the default spirituality of human beings. I’m not quite sure about that. I think Hans Jonas is better that it’s sort of an existential, a mythopoetic response to an existential entrapment. And I’ve talked about this in some of the talks I’ve given on Gnosticism. But here, the point I’m trying to make is, okay, once those bookworms have probably properly set up a caveat for what I’m going to say, nevertheless, I could say is one of the temptations that I think immediately can occur to people when they get even an inkling of this. And I’ll call it the narrative god and the mystical godhead, right? The theistic and the non-theistic presentations is a temptation to Gnosticism because it gives a very ready answer for that. Well, you know, this thing here, well, this is the evil power or principality, to quote St. Paul, right? This is the demiurge, right? And this is the plenum, the plenum, right? The plenum void. And the reason why this seems so nasty and hostile and jealous and bloodthirsty is, right, etc., etc. And I see our culture as increasingly giving more and more language that sounds Gnostic. Here’s, I think, a key piece of evidence to support my claim. So what Jules Evans calls conspirituality, the idea that there are these grand conspiracies and conspiracies of conspiracies that are somehow running the world right now, these cabals. And of course, that kind of thinking has had as a terrific and I mean that the original sense of the word history of bloodshed and genocide attached to it. So this is not just sort of like, you know, believing you can talk to dolphins. This is a dangerous, I’m not saying that all of the Gnostics were like this. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that it seems to me that there, that the emerge, that one of the temptations, maybe that’s the word I’m looking for, of encountering that dichotomy and at least that the fact that it seems prima facie irreconcilable is a temptation to Gnosticism, which is not the same thing as Gnosis, but the temptation to Gnosticism and then there’s a temptation there to a dangerous kind of conspirituality that is becoming more and more pervasive and it’s seeping into the cultural and political domain. Like there’s, you know, you’ve probably heard the research that Republicans and Democrats are more afraid of each other than they are of foreign enemies, which is a bizarre place for democracy to get to. I mean, that’s a democracy, at least on the verge of cultural civil war, if not political civil war. So I wonder if you confronted that temptation at all, because I know you talk about Gnosticism here and there. I’ve seen a couple video titles at least. And if you did, what response you had of it and if you didn’t, what do you think now about that connection? Because I know you have addressed the topic, at least in part. So did that question make sense? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, again, again, I think the question deeply resonated me like from the very beginning. Right. And Gnosticism is something which I have been fascinated by. I’ve done work on Jung specifically. I did a series looking at Jung’s relationship to Jewish mysticism, both textually, historically, and conceptually. Harold Bloom’s work, sort of a poetic expression of Gnosticism has been very inspiring. Dame Frantisiates’ work on Gnosticism and Hermeticism. So these things have all definitely had their time to sit and maturate in my brain. I don’t firstly, what you’re posing as a challenge, as a threat, is a very real one. And I think to sort of expand it a little, and I think you’ll agree with this, and tell me if you do, because the divine represents the reality and the realm of that divine inhabits, when we say that there is a plenum or a godhead and a demiurge, we’re not just saying that there’s an evil entity, you know, the God of the Hebrew Testament, what am I saying? The God of the Hebrew Bible, which is evil. What we’re saying is that this world, which is the creation of the demiurge, it’s the two world mythology, which you speak about, that this world is fallen and corrupt and broken and shattered. And even, I mean, even Plotinus in his, even though he’s an anti-Gnostic in many senses, you see even in him the talk of matter as pervation. Right, right. Proclus corrects that, I think. Proclus corrects that, but yeah, but I think that’s definitely the case, yes. So I think that as we started earlier, when we speak about God, we’re never just speaking about God, we’re speaking about that entire strata of reality that it’s representing. And to like furricate those two realities and say this one is bad and this one is good leads to a fragmented consciousness and psyche. And I think Jung was very well aware of this. And I think that problem is all, I’m just sort of compounding the problem, then I’ll get to what I think may be my own personal response. That’s a good point. I’m in agreement with it. That’s a good point. I mean, yeah. Okay, so good. So and I think as well what you mentioned in terms of the American political scene, where I think that split reality, which happens sort of on the vertical, we introduce into the horizontal, where it’s us and them and they are the evil, they are the demonic, they are the demagogical, and we are of the light. And so I think that what happens horizontally happens and vice versa. I agree. I agree. I agree. Necessarily. And so the danger there is huge. Now to maybe answer the question. I think that in my own personal journey, there may have been some sort of upset because the relationship with God, particularly when it’s a personal God, right, which is the God that most children are given, when you’re upset with it, you’re upset with it personally. And there may have been some of that personal upset towards that character, that concept, that narrative. I was never really tempted to go down the Gnostic route of demonizing, but it was always a question of do I abandon it? Do I salvage it? Can I work with it? Does it need to be eradicated? That was more of the question for me. And I wanted to say this actually part of the previous answer, but it’s actually more relevant now. I think part of the, and this is my own conjecture, I think part of the genius of the Jewish mystical tradition, in addition to my passion for looking at the universality of mysticism, I also really want to know what is each tradition, what are the geniuses of each particular tradition? And that question is as important and as beautiful as the question of universality. And the two of them only strengthen one another. So when I turn to the genius of Jewish mysticism, and I break mysticism into experience, theory, and practice, and I want to know, so I’m asking what the geniuses in practice, something which many have spoken about, and I’ve spoken about, about how it integrates the spiritual with the mundane, with the material, with the everyday, which is not separate from what I’m about to say in the realm of theory. But I think the genius in Jewish theory is that there are many names for God in the Jewish tradition and that the catalyst adopt, but two prime names is God the tetragrammaton, the ineffable, the yud k’vav k’, which was only said by the high priest on the holiest day of the year, which Jews do not say. And most people who think they know how to pronounce it, are pronouncing it because they’ve just, you know, Romanized the, Latinized the word. But so there’s that God, the tetragrammaton, the transcendence, which is, and then there is God, which is Elohim, and that is God as manifest, as indwelling, as, and there’s sometimes there’s masculine, feminine process, which is invoked there, and the catalyst really have these two very strong categories, and the relationship between what’s pronounced as havaya, to not say the word, or shame, just literally the name, and Elohim. Havaya and Elohim is a very complex relationship, and the catalysts go at great lengths and work, first to establish what these two names mean, and how they’re different, and what their character, and what the constitution is, and I think that when we speak about havaya, we’re speaking about the non-theistic God, and we speak about Elohim, we’re speaking about what’s referred to in Kabbalah as the Yotzeber, as the one who creates the act of Genesis, the one who is the God in the Bible, what the Gnostics refer to as the demiurge, literally that’s, the demiurge is the builder, the creator, right? Yeah, yeah, like that’s what it is in Plato. He’s not an evil figure in Plato, by any means. Yes, not at all, not at all, and the Kabbalists say something which is radical. After spending tremendous amounts of time and effort to establish the independence, and difference, and character, and uniqueness of these two characters, they say that, they come to say that based on the only real affirmation of faith that Jews have, which is undisputed, because every other affirmation of faith really didn’t go down well in Jewish history, is, shema Yisrael Hashem Elokeinah Hashem Ahad, that, listen, O Israel, which is what the 12 tribes say to the dying father whose name is Israel, but it’s now taken to mean all of Israel, the people of Israel, the children of Israel, shema Yisrael Hashem Elokeinah Hashem Ahad, listen, O Israel, translated in English as the Lord our God, the Lord is one, but what we’re saying is that Havai, this God which is the non-theistic God, this God which is the one, this God which is the God beyond God, is Elokeinah, is that same God who is the personal God, is the same God who creates, is the same demagogical, because the mystic must fundamentally unite, these two things must become one, and the work of the Kabbalists is liachad yichudim, is to create unifications, is to reunify, often what’s described very erotically and sexually, is to reunify these two sides of the divine, and in every action that a Jew does, functioning within the Kabbalistic system, they’re working to create that union, there’s a Kabbalistic incantation or blessing, which is said before we make any, in certain communities, before we do any religious practice, which is, l’shem yichud kutsha brichu ashkentei liachadah, shem yudkei b’vav kei b’chudoshelim, that we do this in the merit of reuniting kutsha brichu, the divine masculine and shchina, and the divine feminine that indwells, this havai and Elokeinah, to reunite the letters of God and to make a complete name, and I think this notion, sorry if this is becoming a bit long technical, but I think this theoretical notion of the need to recognize that there are two different modalities and two different relationships here in the way that we relate to them, there is God, which is the non-theistic, and there is the God, which is the demiurge, the creator, the one that interacts, the theist, but those things are not separate, those things are somehow fundamentally one in perhaps a paradoxical way. I don’t know if I’m articulating that clearly enough, but that I think is what the Kabbalists are trying to get at. Is it fair for me to conclude that that’s also the position you are most sort of identifying with? So it’s a position which, it’s a position which to be honest, I’m wanting to believe in and read into the Kabbalistic system. There will be people will disagree and say that that’s not what the Kabbalists are doing, and you’re trying to reincorporate something, but to just extend it to the larger implications here, I think that because the divine means the world of that divine as well, when we say that those two are not other, what we’re saying as well is that heaven and earth are not other than one another. They must also be unified, that nirvana and sasara are not other, but they are also unified. Form and formlessness, yes. Yeah, so I think that challenge in that statement is the battle cry of the mystic, and I think what that means also horizontally is that we can no longer other what we perceive to be the other because that itself must be incorporated and unified in this divine oneness. So yes. So that’s a very powerful and provocative answer. I’m right now working my way, I’ve worked my way through Thomas Cheatham’s work and I’ve talked with Thomas, and now I’m sort of in along the way and I’m doing it more, I’m working my way through Corban, and Corban’s notion of the angel, and I don’t want to trespass onto your area, but he talks, because he talks about it obviously within Persian religiosity, which is not just Islam, by the way he’s also talking about Zoroastrianism, etc., but he talks about this idea that the angel is the imaginal aspect, which is, so again, you know this better than I do, and if I make a mistake you just jump on me and I won’t be offended, but I’m thinking of things like, where he talks about even in in the Hebrew Bible there’s, you know, the angel of the Lord or the angel of death, and somehow this is like an action of God, but it’s also something that for which God bears responsibility, like well who did this? Well it was God, right? And he talks about the fact that there is this, I guess the best way I’ve tried to talk about it, I don’t know if this is helpful, there’s this non-logical identity going on. So that brings up something very interesting because there’s two things that come out of that for me as a question, and I have this ongoing discussion with, you know, Jonathan Pajot around this, which is, because you invoke heaven and earth and he does a lot, and he takes a position, which you can see in at least some strands of Neoplatonism, of seeing this hierarchical, right? So the relationship between the Godhead and the God is a hierarchical one, where the lower is in some sense subordinate, these in the language, subordinate below, the higher, and of course there’s a sort of proposition that reality is therefore itself inherently hierarchical because of that, and you can see that in like I see, you know, the classic reading of Plotinus as an emanation, right? And it’s emanation all the way down and that’s why Plotinus thought the bottom level was evil because it was so far, so much less, so matter was evil for Plotinus, and I think in a very problematic way. And so that’s one thing that might come out of that. We say, well, the way they are non-logically identical is because they’re in a hierarchy. That’s one answer that has been given, and what I’m trying to do is sort of present that to you in a problematic way because I think there’s a lot of problems around that idea of, I think, you’ve probably heard me argue this, I think the ontology that I think is emerging within cognitive science in its discourse with science at large is simultaneously, it’s emergence all the way up and emanation all the way down, and at no place, right, can you differentiate those? And I try to do this with the radical imminence of the suchness of things and the radical transcendence of the moreness of things, both transcending our categories, both ends. So that’s one thing, one way in which, granted, let’s say we put aside narcissism, but one way people have tried to interpret the non-logical identities hierarchically. Another one that I think seems also, I want to present and problematize because I’ve talked a lot about it, and I’ve been in dialogue with people about it several times, Paul Van Der Klay and Mary Cohen and other people, is people say, well, you know where we practice non-logical identity, we practice it in personal identity, right, because I will look at a picture of myself as a two-year-old and go, there I am, and that’s not logical or categorical identity. And narrative, personal, so persons within narrative, and then they make that argument that ultimately it folds back into the personal and the narrative is fundamental, because that’s the only place where we get the non-logical identity to make any sense to us. And then you get and the two are often put together, you get personal narratives within hierarchy. And it seems to me, sorry, this is a bit of a long setup, but it seems to me, and I’ve been trying to say, it seems to me developmentally that the dialogos precedes and makes possible narrative, right, and that mysticism, right, and if you want to call this down here dialogue and this up here, dialogos, there’s something that takes us beyond narrative, that subverts narrative, so that we can, precisely so that we can enter into that the mystical version of non-logical identity that is inherently not hierarchical and inherently non-narrative. Yeah, that was a long way, but I guess I want to include you in, and I want to get you into this discussion, because this is sort of the meta discussion I’m having around the ontology right now. I’m so glad you posed that question, because it really is the logical follow-up to what we just discussed, and all I can really do here is share the metaphysics of the mystical tradition, which I know most intimately, which is Jewish mysticism, with the advantage of having a bit of philosophical and comparative literacy as well. So firstly, there’s a question of the framing of reality that we’re posing the question from. That’s ubiquitous in mystical traditions, where from a certain perspective, it will be true to say that God is not X, but from the other perspective, it would be ludicrous to say that God is not X, and we would have to, and both of those are true based on which level of reality you’re framing things on. And I think a conditional truth is not a difficult thing in any logical system or any everyday speech even. So that’s one point. Speaking more directly to the metaphysical point here of what you’re referring to, which Arthur Lovejoy refers to as the great chain of being, in a book that launches the entire field of history of ideas, which is called the great chain of being, which is then taken up by thinkers that are less academic. Ken Wilbur has made a big deal of this. I’m not trying to advocate for any particular thinking here, but the notion that almost every single mystical tradition has some sort of hierarchy of being to try and explain what they experienced, which was a fundamental unity and a multiplicity of reality. And to try and reconcile those two, because they’re incompatible, we must come up with some sort of great chain of being. And the problem with all these chains of beings, and the Kabbalists spend more pages than this than almost anything else, is that there must, however big your chain is… There’s always an intermediary level, right? There must be some point where you’ve gone from an emanator to emanation, right? And for the Kabbalists, does that happen in Keter? Does it happen in the essence of Keter? Does it happen in the upper essence of Keter? This is a never-ending debate. And so this is the attempt at answering it. It’s Neoplatonism, it’s Neopsticism, it’s Neolinosticism, it’s Sufism, it’s Christian mysticism, it’s everywhere. And Eastern mysticism as well. They have the same structures of reality. However, within the metaphysics of Jewish mysticism and other traditions, there is language, there’s three modes by which this hierarchy of being is supposed to be or perspectives on how it can be seen. And that’s very important because it makes it non-essential or non-exclusive. And it becomes… We remember that it’s just the finger pointing at the moon, it’s not the moon itself, and therefore there must be different ways that it can be understood and deconstructed and whatnot. And within the Jewish mystical tradition, we speak about three modes of divine world relation through this great chain of being. The first one is the simple one, which is the… As you’re saying, there’s the emanation. This is called Orm and Molly. It’s the light. Light is as much in Sufi and Persian as long as we’re just saying the light means the Nur, it’s the essence, the energy, the flow, the life force, whatever it is, the chi. The light is… Or is the term that the Catholicists use. So the light that emanates from the divine metaphor, which comes down to reality, comes down in a straight row and it goes back up and then so that chain up and down. That’s known literally as or yashar. It’s the straight light. And that’s one way. And that’s sort of what that means psychologically and cognitively is that that is the simple, we’re down here at the bottom, God is up there at the top, there is a continuum and we can ascend that Jacob’s ladder. The next way that… And that’s also seen as masculine because it’s phallic. Oh, right. I hadn’t thought about that. Right. Yes. The next way that we speak about the divine world interaction is seen by the Catholicists as feminine because it’s circular, which means it’s both of the womb and vaginal in that sense, which is or sovib. It’s the divine which surrounds. And it’s typically described as that which is too much to actually penetrate into the world, but influences from around it. But what that does is that creates a cyclical arrangement here. And it means that the top and bottom become really points of extremity along a circle and not along a linear line. And these things get very extensively elaborated. And the Catholicists describe really the cosmogony and the theogony of this that begins with a point, which becomes a line, which becomes a plane, there’s a very sophisticated geometrical, theological, psychological language around this. But so we have the circle relational, which means that everything is equidistant from the divine in some sense, which is that surrounding feminine, which is fascinating. And that begins to deconstruct our simple linear conception of reality. The next step which Jewish mystics and other mystics, which really just shattered this whole thing to pieces, is the notion of what’s referred to as as etsem or essence, which means that there’s no up, there’s no down, there’s no circle, there’s no line, there’s no integration of the circle line into a spiral. There’s only one thing, and that is the essence, that is the wujud of God in Islam, and that is the only thing in existence. And therefore, there is nothing which is non-essential and there’s nothing which is essential. It’s the absolute complete deconstruction of any category here, which means that the top and the bottom, these all become irrelevant because you can no longer have a top and the bottom when you’re speaking about essence. It’s the infinitesimal point, which is the everything, which is the nothing, and the essence collapses the whole system into a way where there’s no longer the possibility of talking about a material world, which is far from the divine, becomes impossible. And in fact, the way that the later Hasidic mystics speak about it is that actually in corporeal reality, we can come to reveal the unrevealable essence of God in the materiality of nature. And the language of essence becomes an explosive and dynamic theological and philosophical and metaphorical principle for the Jewish mystical tradition. And I think the same thing happens, and we spoke about this last time, the same thing happens in late stage Buddhism, where I think over there, the language is the inverse. It’s the non-essence. But once you’re at a point of essence or non-essence, the everything is not the same. So that’s in response to the first point that you made, but the Kabbalists will constantly use these three, even when they speak of the essence, they’ll switch back and speak about the straight light, they’ll speak about the round light, and they’ll be switching in and out of these metaphors based on what they need to do. There’s a real fluidity and flexibility in that. The other point which I wanted to make was referring to what you said about dialogue. Unless you… Should I go into that point or is there something you wanted to… No, no, no, please, please, please go into that point. So one of the… Again, another earth-shattering… Let me just open a window here. I can’t even say. Just getting a little toasted thing. So another earth-shattering metaphysical construct that the Kabbalists develop, and this really takes its full development in 16th century in the Galilee by Isaac Luria, who in Kabbalistic history, very much like in Jewish philosophy, there’s philosophy before and after Maimonides, in Kabbalah there’s Kabbalah before and after Luria. So Luria, based on earlier thinkers, it has its precedence in the Zohar and in Carte d’Avere, but he really brings this to its full implications, the notion of Tsimtsum, which is a notion which has become popular even outside of circles of Jewish mysticism. I’ve seen it even in some self-help books now. And the notion of Tsimtsum is this, that God is the only thing that exists. And within God, there arises desire to create, desire to relate, desire to manifest. Different languages used by different thinkers. But to have that, there must be some other which God can create or relate to or reveal to or be in relationship with. And what God does is God contracts Godself. That’s literally what Tsimtsum, Tsimtum is to contract. And God creates space for the illusion of otherness, where in that space, the omnipresence of God, and not just geographically, but existentially and metaphysically, is absent there because in the presence of that, there can be nothing else. So God has to create a space where within Godself, because that’s the only thing that there is, there’s a space for God to not know Godself. This sounds like Erogena in a lot of ways. Yes, very much so. I did a video recently on Erogena and the parallels to Cappadocia are striking. Jacob Burm is also another thinker who, although there’s a historical actual connection there where he is influenced. So God creates space within Godself where God does not know Godself. I’m flipping here between the theological, metaphysical, and psychological language. It’s really a golden point. And God does that to create a space for Deologos, to have a space where God can re-enter that space, emerge as something new, and then begin to turn God’s face back on itself. This is also, I think, the neoplatonic idea of the nows, which is the image of God, which is able to turn back and look at God. Yeah, the news is that part that turns back and looks at that. Yes. And so in many ways for the Kabbalists, and this is a really brutal thought, we are that part of God, which was created in that space, which is able to not know God, but look back and try glimmer through the mystery to see ourselves. And really, if you’re looking for the place, for the profoundest expression of the creation of space for Deologos in the Kabbalistic literature, and that becomes a psychological programmatic in our own lives of how do we create space for the others in our life to allow them to come into dialogue with us. Because if we fill our own full spaces, there is no room for the other to love, to be in relation, to create, to express. That’s that scheme. Yeah. Han makes a converging argument in the agony of Eros, in his critique of pornography, because he says Eros actually requires a true recognition of otherness that can challenge you in a way that you cannot foresee or against which you cannot finally protect yourself. Whereas in pornography, you have what he calls the aesthetic of the smooth, where things are regarded as beautiful precisely because they in no way present the challenge of otherness. They in no way distract or disturb our self-recognition and our self-grasping. I thought that was a profound critique. I bring that up because it shows how, I think you could make a very, and I think Han is actually alluding to it because he’s ultimately making an ontological point. I know this because of the scent of time, right? In other books. Some people might be listening and say, who cares about all this arcane stuff? But the point is, right? If you don’t have an explicit account of realness, you are very much going to have an implicit one. It’s going to cash out in things like what we’re seeing in Han’s critique, how we have lost the capacity for genuine Eros and beauty precisely because we do not understand the necessity of otherness in order for proper self-transcendence and proper neologos, etc. So I just wanted to point that out. That leads me to another thing. This is not a complaint. Oh, you wanted to intervene. Go ahead. Before we move to another thing, let me just jump in on something you said there, which is there’s one author on mysticism. I’m on this quest, as I said, to read every really good thing that’s been written about mysticism, and that’s quite a bit. One of those authors is Michel Dicherts, who’s a French philosopher, postmodern historian. His work is one of the only works of mysticism, which I opened up. I’m like, and this is after reading many works of mysticism, and I understand the field a little. And when I opened up, I’m like, what the hell is he saying? You read Love for Bel Mystique, which is a, I mean, I’m still going to have to go back to it. When I encounter a book like that, I go back to it like five years later. I’m like, oh, okay, now I can tell. But he makes this sort of this aphoristic statement. He categorizes all of Eastern mysticism and all of Western mysticism. And I forgot what he said about the East, but about the West, he said, and it really caught me off guard. He said, Western mysticism in one word is the necessity for otherness. And in my mind, I’m thinking about unity, oneness, don’t do that. And he says the necessity for otherness is the essence of all Western mysticism. And at the time I was appalled about sitting with it, I’m like, this is exactly his point. But the ontological and existential necessity to discover ourselves necessitates the other. And that’s a profound, profound point. So thank you for saying that. I want your top 100 on your list of mysticism books. I mean, I’ve read quite a few myself. I’m interested in reading the auto book that you referred to. But some recommendations, Sebi, I would really appreciate. So two things. What you said about the Kabbalist thing, I had this amazing conversation, genuine, and on theories of everything. And Kurt, the moderator, was just fantastic at moving between debate and dialogos. And Bernardo was just an excellent companion. We disagreed and we argued, but we also… But what was interesting is he described metaphysics in some senses very similar, although it didn’t have the sense of normative necessity to it. But he has the idea that reality is ultimately one consciousness. He’s explicitly a monist. But in order to explain all of this, he has a theory of something like psychological dissociation. But it’s again, that somehow within… There’s places where it doesn’t know itself and it dissociates from itself. I’m sorry. I’m not trying to misrepresent or present his view simplistically. I’m just doing it for the sake of time. But it strikes me. It’s interesting that somebody, and I think rightly so, who is regarded as sort of a champion of the revival of absolute idealism within the philosophy of mind and within theories of mind in general, Kastrup, is basically proposing something that has some remarkable similarities to the Kabbalistic thing you were just… The Kabbalistic movement you were just talking about. And I think that’s very interesting. I want to think about that. I’m sorry. I just want to note it because there’s something going on there. I find it fascinating that something like this happens. It happens to me all the time. I’ll just be explaining something in the depths of one’s own tradition. And then someone coming from an entirely left field place would be like, yeah, I’m expounding the exact same metaphysics to a point of nuance, which is so… I was reading recently Randall Studson, which will be on that 100 list, the unity of mystical traditions. And get this, within the Kabbalistic tradition, there’s a two, 300 year debate about how to understand this act of Tsimtsum, whether it’s to be read figuratively or literally. And the nuances in that debate, I’m reading Studson, and the same thing is emerging in, I think it was in Bonn mysticism in a form of Eastern mysticism, where the exact same debates are being discussed about whether to understand their own form of occultation and concealment of the divine and that process of disassociation or othering. And literally the same moves are being made in people that have absolutely no contact. It blows my mind. And I think there’s a logical necessity that leads to this form of questioning. But yeah, and I don’t think anyone’s going to ridicule his ideas. I think he’s up to his fifth PhD now. What number is he on? I don’t know about that. I don’t know. I just know of two. Two were mentioned in the discussion. But that’s always amazing to see, to see an entirely disparate, I’m related to Phil’s conceptually, historically, but the exact same, the preciseness of nuance of the exact same debates that emerge and the same points that come out, just keep pointing back to how fundamental this is and how really logical this whole structure is. So, I mean, that brings me up to another point. Because when I see things like that, and I note them, and thank you for resonating with that. So there’s three responses, although maybe they’re just one response with different aspects. One is, part of me, the cognitive scientist says, wow, whenever you find something like that, like those kind of universals, you’re looking at the guts of cognition. You’re looking at the fundamentals of intelligibility. And then there’s another part of me, especially because I’m a four E cognitive scientist says, yeah, but cognition isn’t in the head. Intelligibility is a real relationship between cognition of the world. There must be something in the world that’s also fundamental. And there must be something fundamental in the way the world and cognition fit together. And so I’ve been trying to articulate that in terms of, in terms of, I think, very convergent with what you’ve been arguing here. So one of the things I’m taking away, what you call the divine, I call sacred, the sacred. I don’t think there’s much hangs on the difference there. That’s for me, for personal reasons, the divine tends to connote personalities in a particular way, right? Where I find that sacred, a more neutral term. So, and your basic claim is, you know, that sacredness and realness are inter-defining in a profound way. And I think, I think it’s fair to say I tried to argue something very, very similar in awakening from the meaning crisis. And some of the arguments I have going on about, you know, that sacredness is a way of getting, coming into relationship with the depth of reality and things like that. And then I tried to map that into, you know, something that I hadn’t, I don’t want to sound so promotional, but I hadn’t, I think this is at least autobiographically true. I hadn’t seen being done very much elsewhere. I’d seen seeds, but the idea that our sense of realness doesn’t come in a single channel of experience. That our sense of realness is the conviction of our beliefs. The sense of realness is the power of our skills. And all of these have become, I have, I want to say, I want to say that I’ve been trying to one time or another been taken as the, you know, the proper name for the sacred, right? That it’s also the presence within our perspectival knowing. And then ultimately, that the sort of fittedness, belongingness, togetherness of participatory knowing. And that all of those, although theoretically, I can do what I just did analytically, in our cognitive, I want to be, I even want to say our cognitive existential phenomenology, they are interwoven together. I think we’ve got a culture that has made us think that everything is reducible or all that exists as the propositional. But what I’m saying is that the sense of realness seems to be, well, maybe this will be a better metaphor. It’s multi-dimensional. It’s multi-dimensional in that when we’re pointing to realness, we’re pointing to that which is found, but not found uniquely in conviction, right? In power, in presence, and in fittedness. And the reason is because when you can have phenomenological experiences, and the existentialists are particularly helpful on this, where realness is, realness is undermined in only one of these channels, but it’s nevertheless profound. So, for example, presence. We know from VR, virtual reality research, that this varies independent of various, various similitude, right? You can have a very realistic virtual world, and people don’t feel it’s real, because they don’t get that sense of presence. That’s important in perspective. You, of course, get all kinds of weird derealizations that can be pathological, where the participatory is lost. Where people think that all of their loved ones are actually have been replaced by robots, even though everything, nothing else has changed factually. There’s that sense of fittedness gets damaged in the brain, and these, and there’s other symptoms where, syndromes with their own arm, right? It’s like, this isn’t my arm, right? It looks exactly like my arm, and I can move it, but it’s not my arm. There’s that. And of course, we have less pathological, although not necessarily less dangerous versions, in loneliness, right? And in culture shock. And so that’s where you can see the sense of realness disappearing at the participatory level, the perspectival level, the procedural level. Of course, we all know this when we feel very inept. Think of something like, although it is conflated with some of the other, but even like social awkwardness, and we get, right? We feel disempowered or futile. So one of the ways of making people feel that their existence is becoming unreal is if they’re procedurally inept. Their actions are futile. And then, of course, at the level of conviction and coherence, we know that, right? If things don’t hang together well for people, that can be undermining of their sense of realness and cognitive dissonances, festering and all that evidence. Sorry, that was a long thing, but what I’m trying to say is, right? I think I am in agreement with you about sacredness and realness, and the multi-dimensionality of realness is something that I’m trying to unpack in terms of its phenomenology and functionality. But I’m wondering, I’m sorry, this is mostly metaphorical to pose this question. Is the mystical experience like something in which, you know, the space-time continuum or the four-dimensionalities of realness is disclosed to the person? Do you know what I’m trying to get at? Because although we can in analysis and even in experience, you know, the dimensions can come apart from each other. Fundamentally, right, it doesn’t make sense that these are separate realities or anything like that, right? Sorry, this is very clumsy. I’m being procedurally inept here, but I’m trying to get at, like, I’m trying to get at what, I’m trying to move this into cognitive science, and I’m not trying to reduce it to cognitive science, okay? Very clear. But I’m trying to get in, like, what would that mean cognitively? Like, I can see these different, what I call the four ways of knowing, and they, analytically and experientially, they get pulled apart. But I also see that there’s some phenomenological functional continuum of them. And I’m wondering if the mystical experience might be a disclosure of that in some way. That’s independent from some of the other arguments I have about other higher states of consciousness. It’s a question that’s just forming in my mind right now. Yeah, so I see that you’re gesturing towards a question, so I’ll try to gesture towards an answer. That’s completely fair. That’s completely fair. That’s completely fair. So let’s begin with this. I think, firstly, the question of what is the real is such an important question, potentially the most important question. And the answer to which we give as individuals and civilizations is so determining of everything that flows from that. And I think some of the things that you mentioned have their place historically, and we know the acres of those things. So for both for someone like Hegel, where the rational is the real, and for someone like Aristotle, where the active intellect is the real, is the… For someone, and I think where this also meets with the political and the social is that when we speak about my other fascination, which is the deification of the human, it means the human becoming the real. That’s what the definition is. So based on what you think the real is, that’s what it will mean to become that. So in so many ancient civilizations, it was the emperor, the pharaoh, who became the god, who became deified. And what that is, that not only is a deification of the individual, it’s a deification of power, because it is the power that makes them god. And that sets up a pyramid structure of society where it is the powerful who are the closest to the real and the peasants on the bottom who are dispensable because they’re far from the real in that hierarchy of being. And I think this question is so important. What I see emerging from within, sort of moving from, to speak of my own tradition, moving from the prophetic message into the Jewish mystical message, which I think are deeply connected, both phenomenologically and conceptually and historically, is that the prophet comes to tell the people that against, I think the predominant theory is that the power is the real, which I think in today’s world also has a lot of purchase with what do we see in the real today? Is it status? Is it celebrity? Is it money? Is it social media influence? What is the god of these days? Exactly. Have you seen a TV show called American Gods, where as something becomes more salient in the public’s mind, the mythological character bursts into a sort of battle with each other, and the new gods come. So you can imagine like the God of TikTok taking down the God of YouTube. But this really happens in a very meaningful sense historically. So I think for the prophets and the Jewish mystics, they’re fighting against the God of power and association of the real with the powerful. And I think what they promote instead is an argumentation. And this is still gesturing towards an answer. I don’t think this is yet answering your question. They argue that it is kindness and love and concern, which is the real. And it’s in those both phenomenologically, that when we’re in an act of service and kindness to the other is when we feel most fulfilled and most present and most alive and most real ourselves. And to be God is to imitate God, imitatio die, which means that, and this is explicit from the Tamil all the way through, that just as God is merciful, so too shall you be merciful. Just as God is kind, just as God is forgiving. And this is repeated in Islamic literature, takes a huge significant amount of Christian literature. So firstly, the notion of identifying, again, of co-identifying the real with the divine, with the aspiration of the human, both individually and sociologically and societally, and allows us to frame our goals and directions. And I think that’s perhaps why in last conversation, I kept trying to wedge into what in your domain becomes more of a, I think, a supremacy of some extended form of cognition, realization, to insert there the necessity of the ethical, of the loving, of the kind, of caring. And I think that it’s true phenomenologically as much as it’s true metaphysically. So the question then is, is there a convergence of these modes? Is there a place where the realness of love, of power, of presence, of knowledge converge into one space? And I don’t know. It’s a really, really great question. My intuition is, is that the mystical realization, better word than experience, is not a monolithic thing. It is every, the human brain is so complex, they’re different from another. And there’s so many ways that it instantiates and manifests and appears and we become conscious of it, that to say that there’s only one form, I don’t like the sort of the facile typologies that were done by people like Stace and Zane. I think that’s a waste of time. But to really begin to explore on a phenomenological and on a cognitive and on a scientific level, what is the texture of that experience and what is becoming real for the individual in that experience? And inactively, what is in a transformative mystical experience, which is a phrase which is so important, which you stress so much, going forward in life, what does it compel one to be more real in is also indicative of what was real in that experience for me. So I don’t have an answer to that question, but my intuition is that it’s multivariate and complex and there’s elements of one another and there may be sort of a space where they do converge and that may be some sort of, I don’t like this game of better and worse, ultimate and lesser. It’s not a great game and mostly when it’s done, there’s an agenda to promote one sort of thing over the other. So I try to avoid that, but it’s a fascinating question and that’s my gesturing towards an answer. No, thank you for that and if I didn’t pay enough attention, I didn’t take enough care around a potential side effect that was not intended and I was not trying to create some simplistic or reductionist taxonomy. What I was trying to get at is something else. It’s work I’m doing, well, the work I’ve already been done, but also it just emerged for me in this dialogue, right? But on a theory of understanding and one of the distinctions between knowledge and understanding is knowledge is evidence that justifies your claims where knowledge is your ability to grasp significance so you can apply it to your problems or problems very broadly come through. So this is a distinction that’s sort of emerged separately within the philosophy of science and in the psychology of explanation understanding, but they’re converging together. One of the criticisms I’ve made of my own theory, cognitive scientific theory of wisdom, is that it didn’t have a proper theory of understanding within it. So I’ve been trying to think about understanding. One of the great privileges I have is I get to try out ideas on my students and they give me feedback and one of the things they’ve like when I make the distinction, and this distinction was also made independently by Monica Ardelta as a psychologist and making use of the psychological work of John Keeks, the distinction between what he calls descriptive and interpretive knowledge, but it’s basically the description between knowledge and understanding. And if you ask people in general, you know, what is wisdom more about knowledge or understanding, they will almost universally say understanding. It has a lot more to do with understanding than knowledge. And I think that has to do with, you know, the stuff I argued elsewhere about it being an enhancement of our capacity for relevance realization, etc. But then when I’ve talked about this and I proposed this idea and I said like, so it is, you know, the original meaning of proposition is to propose, right? I propose this idea that when we’re talking about understanding, we can talk about, you know, grasping the significance within a particular kind of knowing. Like, you know, I understand X if I grasp its, you know, implications as a proposition. That’s a standard definition, by the way, of understanding. And, you know, and then we talk about, you know, you really understand a skill if you can transfer it to a new situation. This is important in the martial arts. Can you take it from the dojo onto the street? Then you really get it. Then you really get it, right? So you can see that there’s a kind of understanding that has to do within each kind of knowing. But then I said, isn’t there the case that there’s a kind of understanding that’s between all the kinds of knowing so that you grasp the significance of your participatory knowing for your perspectival knowing and your perspectival knowing for your proposition? You get, you basically get a positive manifold of the grasping of the significance. And when I propose that idea, their eyes light up. They all go, yeah. And that’s, and they say, they almost, they say, like, no, that’s not proof of anything other than, you know, the intelligibility of the idea, right? But, but, but, but they, but they, and they all, they almost always say, yeah, and that’s what the wise person has. The wise person doesn’t have the individual ones. They probably have that to some degree, but they have the manifold, the manifold understanding where, you know, they grasp the significance, not only within the kinds of knowing, but even more importantly, between the kinds of knowing. And so, and what, you know, the experiment I, I ran in, in my lab on mystical experience and meaning in life showed that it was the insight component of the mystical experience that was doing most of the heavy lifting in contributing to the meaning of life. Yes. And, and, you know, an insight is, you know, an improvement in understanding. In insight, you’re changing relevance, not evidence, right? Typically, right? Yeah. And you’re making new connections. And so that’s, that’s the basis of my question. Like, it seems like, you know, I’ve got at least empirical evidence that the insight component of mystical experience is contributing a lot to the enhanced transformative potential, the meaning in life potential. And then insight seems to be, you know, a powerful kind of, of understanding and the deepest kind of understanding. This is very much a circumstantial argument and I’m aware of that. So it’s an argument more just to see, I’m just trying to share my thinking with you. I’m trying to say, you know, mysticism seems to be the most, at least I have empirical evidence that seems to be the profoundest kinds of insight, the profoundest kind of enhancement of understanding. And then independently over here, it’s not great evidence, but it’s at least the beginnings of anecdotal evidence, right? That, you know, the deepest kind of understanding is this manifold understanding and people are willing to, they seem to be pretty universal and saying, that’s the kind of understanding that the wise person has. And this is what I’m trying to get at the argument. I wasn’t trying and I don’t want to try and reduce it all or anything like that. I’m trying to get at, right? Is there, is the, okay, I’ll weaken my question then, because I think your critique is valid. Could at least a cognitive dimension of mystical experience be an insight, a powerful insight of a very strong manifold, a kind of multi-dimensional unity between kinds of knowing that brings a profound kind of understanding that would be deeply transformative individuals. That’s the hypothesis I want to now put forward. So you gave me a chance to revise it because you made a good critique and now that’s what I’m trying to get an inkling towards. Yeah. Yeah. It’s a really, really, it’s a very like pinpointed question. I want to begin by saying, based on something which you said, which is that there’s the correlation between an idea which emerges from the Jewish tradition very strongly that there’s a strong correlation and necessary correlation between wisdom and humility. I want to have the humility to say that most of my thinking is not in this space of epistemology, even writ large. And my thinking is much more religious and metaphysical. So I want to begin by saying that it’s a pleasure to engage with this thinking with you, but I’m punching beyond my weight and added my space here, which is fun, which is good, but just as a form of humility. I hope I’m not being discourteous to you. I don’t want to put you at any kind of disadvantage. No, no, no, no. It’s great to have that challenge, to think beyond my own areas of comfort. And I appreciate the challenge. Thank you. So to share perhaps, I want to comment on both the phenomenological side of the meaningfulness of that insight, about insight, and also on a theoretical side. Again, I’ll bring in the Jewish mystical theoretical perspective, which is what I do have to share. So I’ll give the Jewish side first. Within the center conceptual apparatus of the Jewish mystical system is the spherot, which I think for you would be very fascinating in the way that it’s framed particularly by the Chassidic tradition, which is that the spherot simultaneously is the shape, the morphology of three things, of the psyche, of the world or reality, and of God. And it’s all of the three things simultaneously. And the spherot are 10 things, 10 attributes, 10 modalities, 10 energy, whatever it is. There’s no definitive translation. And because they map all three, I think that’s very resonant with your thinking that it is what’s happening in, which is what’s happening out, which is happening. It’s that three-way direction. And this is sort of really a map for that. So with that introduction, the first, the spherot are divided horizontally and vertically. There’s also different, there’s the spherot, based on what we said earlier, that there’s the divine straight light, the spherot on the straight, the spherot in the circle, and then the spherot, which combined the two, which is the tree of life formation, which everyone knows. And that’s basically the crystalline structure that emerges from the initial first shattering of the spherotic instantiation, which then, these are all very rich and difficult metaphors, but all which have very, very important meaning, which I’m working to expound. So in the crystalline tree structure of the spherot, the spherot are divided into left, right, and center, masculine, feminine, and integration. And there’s also top, middle, and bottom. Bottom is expression or speech. Middle is feeling, is internally processed of our own emotions. And the top three are the cognitive, the intellectual, the mochan, literally the brain of the divine, the God of mind, the God of man, and the God of the world. And the first three spherot, not counting keter, which is sort of beyond the spherot, is kachmah, binah, and dhath. And I know these are terms that you’re familiar with because you do discuss dhath particularly in your series. But to give, I have a one hour class on each of these, but to give it two seconds, definitely, I do recommend if you want to learn more for the audience and if you’re ever interested, please do check that out. But kachmah, in one word, is insight. It’s that flash of inspiration. It’s the, you’re walking through the darkness of the forest and you see nothing and then a lightning comes and for a second, everything is illuminated. For a second. It’s kachmah. Binah, and it’s the yud, it’s literally the point. It’s the small, it’s the infinitesimal. Binah is the hay, it’s the expansion, it’s the feminine, it’s the womb, it’s where we begin to take the seed of kachmah and give it limbs and give it shape and give it dimension and analyze it. It’s analysis. It’s the ability to think about past and future, which doesn’t exist in that flash. That’s binah. Dhath, as I assume you know, but for the audience listening, dhath is the integration of both of those two. Yeah. And channeling it into the being, it’s the embodiment. It’s moving into dimensions. It’s when you feel it in your kishkas. Dhat, after, is put by the neck because it’s also the bottleneck of things that stay in your mind that don’t get into your body, into your heart, is because they don’t pass metaphorically. Oh, well, that’s interesting. Yeah. They’re literally constrained by the neck. Pharaoh, all the villains in the Torah are associated with a different psychological challenge. Pharaoh is the neck. Pharaoh is the one who stops those things from coming down. Really? Oh. Yes. But the point which I wanted to get to was, after that very elaborate introduction, is that part of the complexity of the srirat structure is that each of the srirat are within each of the srirat. So you have kachmah in binah, kachmah in dhath, kachmah in dhath. Right. So the very strong metaphor. Right. Right. And binah in kachmah, binah in dhath. Right. And it’s in that interrelationship. It’s the paths of wisdom, the nisivot kachmah, the paths of wisdom, which are the interrelationship between those points. So it’s not just, it’s not just understanding, it’s not just internalization. It’s interrelativity between them. And there’s one a bit longer than a month in the Jewish year, which actually going through now, which is the counting of the omar, the srirat, which is 49 days, it’s seven times seven, where we, well, every single day, we look at one of those things. On one day, we look at kachmah in binah, kachmah in dhath. And then the next week is the week of binah, beginning with binah in kachmah. And we do that whole process. Wow. So that, without getting into any specifics, just pointing the direction of that same thought being explicated by Jewish Kabbalists hundreds of years ago, which may be fascinating to, if you’d like to look into that. That is, that is very fascinating. That’s very cool. Well, you’ve, I mean, through both of my discussions, you’ve really piqued my interest in Kabbalah. And like I said, I, at some point, I would like to have a discussion with you about the connections between, we alluded to it, but maybe more full blown discussion. I’ll take a look at the video first, of course, you know, connections between Spinoza and Kabbalah. Spinoza, for me, is such a pivotal figure. And maybe we could come back and have more of a discussion about Spinoza in this context, because I see Spinoza as wrestling. Spinoza is very much a heroic figure for me. For one thing, he’s Socratic in that his philosophy is not just theoretical, it is transformative. He’s like Socrates, he’s aspiring to a blessed life, the life of blessedness, right? The best possible life for a human being. It’s philosophy in the sense of Pierre Hadeu, and he’s personally courageous and heroic, the way Socrates was. Even his enemies had to admit that he was a virtuous individual. So that’s, so whereas I find people like Leibniz distasteful, I don’t like to pay attention to Leibniz as a person independent from him, right? Because the fact that he used Spinoza under the bus is one of his biggest sins to my mind. That’s all aside. Okay, but Spinoza for me, so he’s a good choice, but he’s also an exemplary figure precisely because he recapitulates within the heart of the scientific revolution. He’s a, you know, I think it’s fair to call him a disciple of Descartes. He, of course, is a significant innovator, but he is Cartesian through and through in many ways. In the heart of the scientific revolution, he is, right, he’s basically taking up the ancient project of the good life, and he’s trying to put it back into what I think you could, I think reasonably, given his own ontology, you could call it naturalistic framework. And so he to me stands as, and I’m glad he’s going through a revival right now, because he stands for me, each one of these is contentious, you know this, anything you say about Spinoza, like anything you say about Jesus of Nazareth or Socrates, you’re going to get 10 people disagreeing with you, right? But for me, he stands as the epitome of somebody who within a naturalistic framework is still nevertheless proposing something deeply continuous with the entire Socratic Neoplatonic tradition. And there’s even a mystical component, as you’ve argued, and I agree with that argument. And he’s doing that within the scientific revolution, within the naturalistic framework. I think he’s also proposing, I would argue, a kind of non-theism as an alternative, because he was seeking to get beyond, you know, as many people were at the time, you know, they’re still living in the rain shadow of the religious wars, and they’re trying to get beyond that. And that’s clearly on Spinoza’s mind. And so for me, he’s an exemplary figure to go back to and look at because of the promise he holds for giving us some significant clues on how we, right now, where we’re at the sort of maybe at the other end of the scientific revolution, it’s sort of coming to, you know, it’s now become the established world of you. Can we look at Spinoza as a way of helping to wake up from that, the ways in which that worldview is ontologically and existentially, and as you rightly point out, ethically and aesthetically, insufficient and inaccurate. And I think Spinoza holds out the real possibility that somebody can be deeply rational, deeply mystical, deeply naturalistic, deeply, etc., etc., etc. And I know you’ve done quite a bit of work on Spinoza. And so maybe we could at some point have an extended discussion around that. Sort of Spinoza in the light of the meaning crisis might be the way I’d like to talk about it. Yeah, I would love to have that conversation. Spinoza for me is a hero as well. And I relate to him in many ways personally, someone who also grew up in a restrictive Jewish community, someone who also challenged himself to think independently, someone who was also an auto-diadact. There are many points just on a simple narrative level, which I feel very much a kindred spirit with, and not to compare myself to a man of that stature. But that’s definitely something which is a great conversation. On the previous question, there was two points which I wanted to cover, which I only did one, which was the theoretical, the other one is the phenomenological. Oh, please. Yeah, if you’d allow me this. And this is something which I feel there’s like a rubbing up against your theory in general, which I know that you appreciate, so I’ll share that. But I would love to talk about Spinoza. I really would. Not that I think that Spinoza is too generous as a rationalist and a mystic, just by the way. No, no, I’m not saying that. But an exemplary figure. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And he’s exemplary also within the very specific nexus of the emergence of the scientific revolution. Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. In terms of the phenomenology of the meaning that emerges from the mystical experience, which you at least now postulating that it emerges from some form of understanding of the, I don’t want to actually straw man or misrepresent your position. And you just said that. So I’m not going to try to repeat it. But from how I understood it, it’s something which happens, there’s an internal cognizing where the human sees their own internal structure thinking and how that is reflective and co-creating and co-totals to the reality out there. And that itself is the meaning generating apparatus. My feeling listening through all of your lectures, in addition to all the good feelings of learning and being challenged, was that from my own reading of the literature mysticism, which means both the mystics themselves describing their experiences, that means both historically and contemporaneously people, because it continues to happen, and reading the analysis of it from scholars that are looking to study in philosophers and reading the theoreticians within the traditions themselves. If you would ask me what phenomenologically, because the fact that people come from that experience and they describe it as inherently meaningful is a synchronicity that’s given. If you had to ask me what is it that is causing it to say that, I would not have jumped to your conclusion. I would have said something different. I’m not sure exactly how to articulate it, but maybe together. And this is something that you yourself mentioned as well, but I think is understressed, which is that there’s a sense of the inherent rightness and place. And I don’t want to use the word order, but that things as they are are good. There’s a Christian female who says, Julian of Norwich, all is well and all shall be well, is what she comes to experience knowing. And it’s that deep sense of knowing that all is well, it’s all good, it’s all okay. And I think this is integrated into what you discuss who’s at Salacious, the poem from Eckhart, where there’s this non-teleological mode of being, which is being for itself. It’s the blossoming of the flower, which blossoms because it does, which I think you so beautifully correlate with the expansion of the universe. And that, I think, itself is meaningful because it collapses the distinction between means and ends, where our means and our process itself becomes the end. And the act of being itself becomes a meaningful thing to do. And for me, when I think about that, it’s much more grounded in the body, not to say that that for is not embodied, but this is really in the being of the body. For me, at least, it’s in moments of intimacy, of intimacy in worship, in erotic intimacy, in intimacy with nature, where one is sitting and releases all of their narratives of self and all of their, and it allows themselves to, I’m sort of grappling with poetry here because I don’t know how to express this non-poetic. No, no, it’s fair. It’s fair. It’s good. And very clear. And for me, that’s not something that happens cognitively, even cognitive writ large, even the way that it’s something which is much more fully ontological. And I know that you say that cognitive is the ontological, but this is like, to me, I don’t know why I keep pushing up against this, but it’s so much more, it’s the very, the trouble is that any word which I’m going to say is a word which you’ve already sort of co-opted. But it’s in the kishkes of the individual where everything is and is perfect and is beautiful and is bust. Yeah, that’s the most I could do for it. Well, that’s good. I mean, and we touched on this last time, but I get the sense that although you’re responsive to the answer, you found my answer still insufficient. You’re still rubbing up against it. So I’ll just recapitulate what I said, maybe as a way of trying to get what’s helping you to refine where you want. So I said, like, when I say cognition, I’m not talking about cognition, I’m not talking about computation of the brain. I’m talking about like your full body is involved, the participatory knowing, the way you’re enacting, embedded in the world. And you acknowledge this is deeply embodied, this is deeply embedded, there’s deep continuity between my cognition and my biology. All of this I argue for explicitly. And so when I’m talking about the manifold, I’m talking about that. I’m talking about something that’s going to, like, it’s going to link into, it’s going to link downward towards the biological principles that are running the individual cells, and then upward into or outward and upward into, you know, the ligaments and sinews of your worldview by which you’re getting your sort of fundamental patterns of intelligibility. That’s what I’m talking about. But you want to say, sorry, I’m not trying to box you in, I’m just trying to make clear what I’m saying. But, and I do think, and I do talk about reciprocal opening, that it’s co-created by the world and us. It’s not, it’s like I resist both empiricism inward and romanticism outward. So I’m definitely not a romantic saying we’re projecting a meaning onto the world. And I’m definitely not an empiricist saying we’re just simply consuming it. But I take it that you think there’s, there’s some, and I’m sympathetic to this. Here’s why I’m sympathetic to what I hear, what I think I hear you say. Like, again, this sense of auto normativity, the sense that people find realness inherently valuable in a way that transcends aesthetic, epistemic, and moral value, and that they are willing to, and auto normativity is a way to transform their existence, to conform to this. Because it in itself is somehow intrinsically, the word is not quite right. It’s good, but in Plato’s sense of the good, right? It’s not good in our current moral or consumatory sense of good. Am I getting closer to? Yeah, let me maybe point, like phrase it in a more pointed way. To use something which is not quite esoteric or transcendent as a transformative mystical experience, something which is more mundane, which is more relatable, I think, in a moment of, let’s say, loving sexual intimacy, right? Which is an experience which many people know, where there’s a sense that this moment is the only thing that matters in existence. And if this went on forever, that would be fine. And if all of these distance was just for this moment, that would be sufficient, particularly in a deep inter-person. Is that a space that I can conjure that you agree with? Totally. And I mean, if you remember the series, I explicitly talk about this as the final moment that ultimately stoicism sits on that point of joy, where joy is not pleasure, but exactly that moment where you say, if I live forever or I die tomorrow, there’s no difference. That’s exactly the point. Yes. Okay. So then let me ask you then, would you describe that experience as a cognitive experience the way that you’re using cognition? Yes. Okay. Okay. Because I think that what your ultimate… Well, sorry, I’ll be very careful here. I think cognition is ultimately about connectedness and seeking a kind of optimality in that. And I think that that doesn’t have to just be… And I explicitly argue this in my argument for higher states of consciousness. It doesn’t have to be this moment of connectedness or this, but connectedness per se can reach an optimal state. And people get variations on a continuum, the flow state, those moments. And for me, that is at the core of what it is to be a cognitive being, is to couple to reality in that way. Okay. I guess then I’m going to have to keep trying to work to familiarize myself with your language and the way you’re using these words, because at this point then I feel like it’s just sort of a semantic or a linguistic blockage, which is what she’s coming up through. It could be, or maybe, and I welcome that because that’d be great because it’s great when friends realize that they’re not actually in disagreement. But it could be also a friendly disagreement. It could be that at some point, maybe this is… I don’t know. I might be putting words into your mouth and I apologize ahead of time. I think that’s an experience that requires a cognitive agent. Like that moment you point to wouldn’t exist without sentient cognitive agents. So that I agree with 100%. Okay. Okay. But let me… It’s funny actually. This is a bit personal, but this morning I woke up, I was sitting in bed and I was thinking about my day, kind of like thinking about… And I was looking forward to the end of the day, which is now for it’s night outside, and I was looking forward to talking with you. And I was thinking, I was running through my head about the conversation we had, as one does, and enjoyably so. And I thought to myself, let me try and sort of take on or embody John’s form of reaching towards, on his continued towards the transcendent, transcendental experience. And at least maybe the way I understand it, I began to sort of move towards what I… Some sort of phenomenology of a flow experience. And in my mind, that was the wrong existential posture to be moving towards. I’m sitting in bed. If I want to move towards how I conceptualize the transformative mystical experience, not that I planned on getting there at 7 AM, but at least to be in that space to start my day on a good foot. It had nothing in my mind to do with the flow state and to any of that language around it. In my mind, it had to just do with simply trying to be silent and trying to be as bizarre as that mysterious as it is to be in my body, to be present, to be… There was nothing flowy about it. And there was nothing… It didn’t seem to move onto that continuum as you phase that. And that’s just a personal anecdotal reflection. But yeah. Well, I think we should maybe draw this to a close. We’ve been two hours and that’s usually much beyond what I do on Voices of a Breveki. I think that’s a valuable point. I try to make it that… Let me try and give you a quick analogy. And this is work I’m publishing with Dan Chiapi. Because I think it’s of the same genus of the problem you’re posing. Okay. So remember we talked about VR, a sense of presence. Yes. And you’re invoking something like a sense of presence. Yes. Okay. And so a proposal of how they get VR. One of my students, Gary Havahonison, has actually proposed that what gives people a sense of presence in virtual reality is the flow state. And that seems very plausible because it’s not very similar to that people can get into the flow state. They get a sense of presence with Tetris, which is like, what? That doesn’t look like the world of VR. And so I think that’s a very important point. And I think that’s a very plausible thing. And I think it’s a good paper. And I think it points to an important thing. But here’s the thing, and this is the problem that Dan and I, Dan Chiapi and I are wrestling. There are scientists who use the rovers on Mars, get a sense of being on Mars as the rover. And there’s no way they can be getting into the flow state because of the time delay. There’s no joystick control. All they’re getting is batches of photos. And their use of the technology is not to get into the flow state. And so they’re getting into the flow state. They and they’re using all this imagine where they imagine being the Rover and they will actually enact the Rover I don’t know if you’ve seen in me at all, right and they’re doing all of this stuff And there’s no way it’s the flow state, but they’re nevertheless getting presence. Okay, and the argument I made was right, it’s not to think of the flow state like I get it the language of continuum is misleading because it sometimes just means more of Right, but the idea is fluency and insight in the flow state are all ways in which we are sort of Expanding the scope of our optimal grip Which didn’t does not necessarily always translate into So what’s happening is these scientists are not getting into the flow state, but they’re using that They’re anthropomorphizing the Rover and they’re techno more fizing themselves So they get a participatory relationship and they even say weird magical things about it like they’ll say things You know, I was gardening and my right wrist got stuck and then I went and to the lab and Spirits right wheel was stuck. And well, I don’t know There’s some kind of weird sympathy and they laughed because they’re scientists. They don’t know what to do with that. Okay, so I’m just I’m not I’m not I’m not counting and seeing their their metaphysical claims I’m pointing to their there’s a phenomenological experience and it’s pronounced in them, right? And so it’s clear it’s not in the flow state, but they’re getting a kind they’re getting a powerful sense of identification and it’s effective It’s it’s it’s a distributed kind of optimal grip Yeah, what I was trying to get at now, I think there are mystical experiences that are just enhanced flowy experiences I’ve had them you can get them in Tai Chi, right? You can definitely get them in Tai Chi, right? And so it’s but I’m not trying to say that every mystical experience is like that But what I’m saying is mystical experience is kind of meta optimal grip It’s an optimal grip on your optimal gripping and that doesn’t have to be one that’s requiring a soup, you know You know a tremendous amount of metabolic metabolic effort or anything like that it can just be that you right there’s the sense of I Don’t know I should be using words rather than gestures, but no, I love by the way I love that you use gestures because because so much of this is nonverbal I’m for the first time like thank you for the first time I’m actually beginning to get a sense of a texture of what you’re describing and it’s beginning to resonate with what I know Of mysticism right in my own experience in literature That was very that was very very helpful in in what you just described and that was an insight moment for me So so so thank you. Well, you’re welcome and and to be fair to me and to you when I when I when I’ve sort of proposed The cognitive continuum it was much more Just quantitative difference, but after doing this work with Dan, you know on the Rovers on Mars I came to the realization know there’s something within flow that’s being carried on not necessarily the flow experience per se as I said You can get mystical experiences out of super flow My dow is practices afford those and that was it was the religion of flow in many ways right, but I also acknowledge that I don’t think that’s a Necessary feature the necessary feature is that is the meta optimal gripping and so what I typically use and you might appreciate this given your Your morning experience. I use the metaphor of taking a stance in martial art Okay, I’m actually not moving at all when I take my stance I’m absolutely still and the point is that’s a useless thing. That’s a I don’t fight with this at all, right the stance What is that? It’s a meta optimal grip. I’m getting a place think of it. Think of it like a possibility space Here’s all the moves I need to make Here’s a place that puts me sort of optimally equally distant from all of those and that’s what I mean by a meta optimal grip That’s the analogy now and Maybe it’s not a coincidence that it’s an analogy. That’s actually a state of stillness Yes. Yes, there’s that that the there’s a merger some somehow is a merger there of stillness and motion where they They coexisted in that space. Did you just just as a curiosity when you were formulating your continuum? Hypothesis was that being done in conjunction with hoods work? Because he has his own form of continuum No, the I mean I Part of it was was sui generis to me and then the convergence argument I found was in Newberg and Newberg in Something about how enlightenment changes your brain I think I Fear I’m misquoting and I forget the second author on the book with him But he actually proposes a cognitive continuum that was the person who I was using as sort of with a foil in the contrast I had already proposed in what I published in 2018 the continuum between fluency insight and flow And then when I did when I was starting to do the experimental work on mystical experience I was also seeing evidence that the insight machinery was fundamentally at work. Yeah. Yeah I mean, I’d be curious just personally to know sort of what you’re at another time because this is sort of reached it and And but what what you’re I mean the theorists who were trying to explain this thing cognitively and scientifically people like Who was it Arthur Dankman and and who would have all those figures? I’d be curious to know what your thoughts are in them in general and I find their experiments was to be to be really to be Really great. I want to just just before I mean, you’re the host there So you’ll you’ll bring things to it and if you if you allow me I Wrote up a question that I had which which at least I want to put out there Nothing it’s an important one and hopefully you’ll see some for the future that we can get a chance to talk about it. May I Please please okay Here’s his his the way I wrote it You said rightly in your lectures that the propositions are useless because this isn’t about propositional knowing it’s about participatory transformation This isn’t about some secret metaphysical knowledge. It’s about getting wise practices for transformation And then and then about combining those with the best science investment of physics and in a very beautiful way that you put it To see what these higher mystical states of consciousness can afford for us that we must not confuse the rationality of wisdom with the rational knowledge Really great great line so So this idea that that mystical experiences don’t impart actual accurate of such propositional knowledge Which I say and I think you say rightfully so because that leads to all kinds of weird Inconsistent strange conclusions people think all kinds of strange things But I want to try and propose That that there may be some sort of knowing which we can come to through the experience which is justified Which I think I think William James and others describe as the noetic property the knowledge and I think I think the knowledge that emerges If we can reduce it to a proposition is simply the proposition that everything is one or as you put it yourself that the agent Is to be identified to be made at one with the arena That and my question to you is it it’s a bit of a long question, but is not the the primary illusion that That we humans hold which you refer to which we must transcend that we’re not one without with with everything around us and and by transcending that limiting self-conception and the Sort of all the good things that come with that the eradication of jealousy and the arousal of care and intimacy for others Is that not itself wisdom to see through that illusion to live at one with ourselves with everything around us with reality itself? And is that not in some sense a proposition not a proposition which one has but a proposition which we can be and which we can enact and And I think to make it to make the final point here I think that the value of trying to distill a proposition from this convergence of the mystical experiences and traditions is a worthwhile endeavor Even if granted that this knowledge this gnosis can never be put into true propositional form because it’s so categorically beyond that the reason why it’s still valuable to try do something like that is because if we can have any hope for peaceful coexistence of humanity and between us and the natural world between and internally we do need a truth a meta narrative a story a myth which We can live by and what better truth what better myth than that proposition that all is fundamentally one Okay, well let so I’ll I won’t completely answer I’ll just give a preliminary thing and I will promise that you and I will either on your channel or my channel will will have a discussion Around just this topic. So we’ve got at least two things. We’ve got this spinoza talk and then we’ve got this one. Awesome. Oh So I mean in this this and I did mention in the thing that you know I like neoplatonism because it has it has the you know It has the you know, it has the theory and the three ergic practices, but it has an independent I mean a standalone argument that doesn’t depend on mystical experience In fact, there’s a debate about how integral, you know Gears and another’s debate about how much the mystical experience is needed for Plato’s argument And you know Gearson says he’s not denying the mystical component But he thinks the argument can stand on its own as an argument and that’s what that’s that’s what that’s what I was taking As my model that you have an independent account of your ontology And then you find you of course try to seek and this is part of the manifold. You try to seek a consonance with Between your best theories and your best theory as I sometimes put it So If if if it’s so I am allowing a role for the theory to impact and constrain the ontology So, but that’s still maybe not what you want and that’s fine. Yeah, but but but one thing I want to say is In this notion again of intelligibility and understanding. I think I think the core of neoplatonism comes down to this understanding presupposes that reality is ultimately one Because understanding is all right. It originally was Interstanding and then we turned it into understanding and it’s related to substance and all that all that wordplay But understanding is always here’s a bunch of things and here’s the unity under them Here’s a bunch and then here’s the unity of the unities and that’s why scientists without realizing that are seeking the grand unifying theory Why right and there’s a presupposition that reality comports, right? And so I do think that neoplatonism isms argument is that understanding and there so we use understanding for the cognitive act and Intelligibility for the property in the world and they’re co-determining. I think of them as polar elements within a shared phenomena Right that understanding intelligibility pre presupposes monism Against William James, by the way So that’s where I’d be in disagreement with James because James thought and this is what I’ve always and that I’ve always found problematic in James And I think spinosic just gives the pounding arguments on this, right? If you have two things then you’ve got to have some third thing that explains the relation and that Etc and all that and that’s that unifying thing is the ultimate and that argue and I think that’s the classic neoplatonic insight and so if I’m gonna give a qualified thing and it’s still not going to satisfy you but but I Hope you feel it’s at least moving like we’re getting a movement, right? If mystical experience Gives the kind of understanding I was talking about earlier Then and if understanding presupposes a kind of monism there is a connection between Mysticism as driving understanding and a metaphysics that supports that understanding in order to exist Yeah, that’s that’s a that’s a really really really really exciting Avenue to explore and I think it connects both of those discussions of this question and the spinosic question and and and I I never mentioned it But but my own my own feeling is that that the proposition to best not to be derived from the experience but from the theory itself so I I’m in strong component with what you’re saying and I I would love to get into that because it’s really something which I’m working on My on my own to say what is the best case the best metaphysical case for that? So that’s that’s that’s awesome. Thank you. We’re great There’s a there’s a book by Nicholas Maxwell who I had the pleasure to meet he talks about the car The comprehensibility of the universe as the fundamental presupposition of science. Yes. Yes, and then and Berman is making a Just a brilliant case that science depends on sort of platonic forms that Brilliant but brilliant tightly argued and in very current. So anyways, let’s call it. Let’s call it quits there We’re doing the John Paul Sartre thing. We we we don’t end anything. We’re just abandoning in it when it’s convenient But this was wonderful. Thank you so much for coming on. This is part two and maybe we’ll ping-pong back Maybe we go back to you for part three and we can come back here for part four and we’ll and we’ll have a four-part series on Maybe we can call it something like the philosophy and cog sigh of mysticism because Or something like that where we’re trying to get we you know, we’re coming at this from different angles But where they reach enough towards each other where we get I think very we we get into the logos We we we play off of each other and things emerge So yes, I John I want to say thank you to you for your graciousness and your and your your humbleness in in dialogue I mean I I’m I’m probably young enough to be to be your child I have I have no I have no official standing or recognition I’m just a guy who’s interested in the topic who picked up books and started reading and then was and and your your your your willingness to to engage seriously and respectfully and and and and and and as equals in conversation is is just astounding is absolutely if Even if nothing here the conversation for the very fact that of your willingness to to to engage with this with such good faith Is itself I think an inspiration to to to so many and to to myself in the future of God willing so So and and I mean I thoroughly enjoyed it to be able to to really It’s it’s it’s so rare that I get to actually talk at this level about these topics with anyone And and and the and the disciplines that you bring into this which which one of the things that you bring into this Which which ones are I’m totally unaware of and your real grounding in in the in the sciences and in the experimentation And in the philosophy is just so much fun and and I hope one day we get to sit down in person as well I would love that. I would love that very much. It would be great to spend some extended time In person together. I think I you know You know dia logos some of the constituent components of it are serious play and we talked about serious play already There’s serious play but there’s also So Well, I like I I feel that I was coming to insights in the dialogue with you that I had not gotten to on my own um And that I get to places that I got to places that I couldn’t get to on my own And so for me, those are the two so two of the defining characteristics of the logo. So, um, and so thank you very much I and thank you for what you said. I aspire to that that to me Is um the socratic ideal that I aspire to and when it happens, I feel grateful because the more often It happens the more likely I in an aristotelian fashion to train the habit which will become the virtue Uh, so thank you. Thank you for for being such an excellent partner. So We’re going to keep going on this and we’ll keep doing more. Um, this is wonderful Yes, this is a discussion that needs to happen. This is you know, a very deep discussion between I mean You know a really carefully thought out rationally reflective Appraisal and appreciation of mystic mysticism and mystical and sort of the best cutting-edge cognitive science we have Yes, I I think it’s the conversation that needs to be happening right now. I agree. I agree. I agree And uh, and i’m honored to to be partaking in it Well, we’re going to talk again soon my friend. So thank you