https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=0NUb2HaElhA
Welcome everyone to another Voices with Raviky. I’m very excited to have John Stewart here. Some of you have been noting there’s been several people on here, Scott Jordan, Richard Blundell, who are talking about a bigger evolutionary metanarrative, deep time, and what this means for responding to the meaning crisis. John reached out for me, and this is very much his area of work. He does a lot of work on evolutionary theory. What I find comprehensively interesting about him is how he can reach into the nuts and bolts, and I’ve read some of his academic work about this, and that on the other hand, how he can reach out to people who are considering practices of transformation, what that means individually and collectively, and John is speaking to this whole gamut in a consistent and very powerful way. And so I’m very, very excited to have him here. Welcome, John. Thanks very much, John. It’s great to be here. So I’ll just quickly outline my background and then lead into why I reached out to you and so on. So yeah, basically, I’m an Australian-based evolutionary theorist. I’m a member of the Evolution, Cognition and Complexity research group of the Free University of Brussels. It’s a group led by Francis Haleygan, who is a well-known cybernetician, general systems theorist, big teacher thinker. I’ve had more than a dozen papers published in international science journals, peer reviewed in national science journals. And I’ve been, my main focus is to identify the nature of the big, the large-scale evolutionary processes that have tuned and formed life on Earth, and that most importantly will determine our future. It’ll determine where humanity can go from here. Yes, I was, however, I’ve never worked as an academic. I did my science degree at the University of Queensland, and towards the end of the degree, I surveyed evolutionary science to see, you know, whether there was a career in that for me in academia. I basically came to the conclusion that evolutionary science at the time, and this was the early to mid 1970s, was allergic to big picture, big picture thinking. It was more, you know, logical positivism, reductionist approaches to science. And in fact, it was intentionally put down that track by the, by meetings of the leading evolutionary science scientists in the 1940s as part of a profession building project where they decided to constrain evolutionary science away from the big picture stuff, particularly big picture human evolution because of the dangers, you know, and the controversy that that would, that would rise. So that was successful. The evolutionary science that existed in the, in the 70s, I didn’t want to spend my life measuring and counting, as I put it, because that’s what it looked like. It was like rats and stats in psychology. So in any event, my, but my, my central interest in my life was evolution and developing a big picture, understanding of evolution and particularly its implications for humanity. So that’s what I worked on, published papers and so on, as I’ve indicated. And what that led that, and what that led me to was to become what I would call an evolutionary activist. So an evolutionary activist is someone who understands the trajectory of evolution on earth and in particular where that trajectory goes into the future and what its implications are for humanity, how we organise ourselves and how we evolve ourselves individually and collectively. So broadly speaking, the big picture that emerges is that evolution is going somewhere, it’s not some random process, it’s going somewhere and it’s more akin to a developmental process. So on earth, we’ve had this stepwise increase in the scale of cooperative organisation amongst living processes on earth. And that stepwise process, key events in it were the first proto cells were cooperatives of molecular processes and then cooperatives of those simple cells became the more complex eukaryote cell and then cooperatives of eukaryote cells became the multicellular organisms, which were an example along with other animals. And then a further stepwise part of that process was the emergence of cooperatives of organisms, cooperatives of organisms, of multicellular organisms of which ant colonies are an example and human groups are an example as well. And then within the human evolution, we had a continuation of that stepwise process from kin groups to bands to tribes to agricultural communities and city states and empires. And now we have, so cooperation originally was between molecular processes at the start of this developmental process, cooperation was at the scale of a millionth of a metre. But the successive increase in the scale of cooperation manifesting as these, the sequence of the emergence of cooperative entities where each new cooperative is a cooperative of the entities that emerge at the level below. That process has continued with humans and brought us to where we are today where we have cooperation way beyond a millionth of a metre. And now we have cooperative organisations called nation states that manifest as cooperation between organisms on the scale of a continent, for example, and markets are extending that cooperation to a limited extent globally. And so that’s where we have a lot of cooperation. And so we have a lot of cooperation between the different groups of people that are in the same place. And so that’s where we have cooperation to a limited extent globally. So this developmental process, it’s really obvious where the next step is. The next step is a repetition at a larger scale of the steps that have occurred previously. So the nation states that are now destructively competing with one another, which is how each new level begins destructive competition. That destructive competition, which is manifesting as global warming, which is likely to end human civilisation in the century, that’s how destructive that competition is. And manifesting as the threat of nuclear war, that destructive competition can, as it has at previous levels, be converted to cooperation between nation states to form a larger scale entity. And it will complete the developmental process, this next step, because it will result in a larger scale entity on the scale of the planet, which is as large as you can get, obviously. And we can look at these previous steps in the evolution of cooperation, of increasing scales, to see how that will be achieved. Basically involves the need for global governance, the suppression and constraining of the destructive competition between nation states, the emergence of this global superorganism. Now, that brings me to a critical point that establishes the need for evolutionary activism. Broadly speaking, up until now, this developmental process has occurred automatically. It hasn’t occurred intentionally. It hasn’t been driven by consciousness. It’s been driven by natural selection, based on competition and the superior adaptability of cooperation. So, you make it very clear there’s a trajectory, but you do not see any teteology in it, and you’re addressing that point right now. So, that’s part of the reason for the activism. There’s no future that’s pulling us forward towards anything. There is just a causally driven process. And you also take pains to distinguish your thesis, this increasing holiarchy of cooperation from other theses about general trends in evolution. For example, you carefully distinguish the cooperation thesis from just the inherent complexity thesis. A lot of people talk that evolution just drives towards complexity, and then Gould and others have proposed there’s many counter examples to that. So, I just want, if you could slow down just a little bit and pull that apart. There’s no teteology here, and you’re not just saying, oh, things are getting more complex. You have a much more fine-grained proposal that you’re putting forth, and I think you make it more plausible precisely because of the specificity you bring to it. So, if you could just open up that a little bit. It’s non-teleological, and it’s not simply things are just getting more complex. There’s more going on in what you’re saying. Yeah, so, and they’re two very important points. Thanks for drawing them out. So, I’ve taken great pains in my science papers to emphasize that it’s non-teleological. There’s no pull from the future. And so, what it’s necessary to do to establish that is to identify the causal micro foundations of these trends. That’s what distinguishes it from the glorious work of Teilhard de Chardin and other big picture thinkers. So, they essentially identified patterns, and some people have been, like Ken Wilber does, for example, takes those patterns and attributes them to a pull from the future or eros, some additional force that’s inconsistent with and doesn’t arise out of the small set of physical forces that have been described by physics. So, my work focuses on identifying the causal micro foundations, and that’s the reason I call into the trap and it affects saving the big picture thinking of Teilhard de Chardin and others. So, Teilhard de Chardin, you know, pointed to increasing integration through the evolutionary process, which is like this emergence of cooperation over increasing scales, but he didn’t identify any causal micro foundations for that reason. Basically, science hasn’t contributed to the development. One way I’ve described my project is to identify those causal micro foundations. Sorry, John, for interrupting. You froze there for a minute. Could you go back a bit? You were just talking about Teilhard de Chardin, and then you were contrasting, and then you froze. Could you say it again, please? Right. So, Teilhard de Chardin didn’t identify the causal micro foundations of the large scale patterns that he identified. The difficulty with that, or the limitation of that, is that until you identify the causal micro foundations, you can’t extrapolate. You know, patterns arise in clouds in the sky, and to extrapolate those patterns is a dangerous enterprise unless you can identify the causal micro foundations that form those patterns. When you understand those, you can then ask the question, will these same causal processes operate in the future? If so, will circumstances change to some extent? If circumstances change to some extent, knowing the causal micro foundations then enables you to identify what differences will arise in the future. It also comes with another issue, right? Which is, you know, evolution, when you’re trying to do these big picture things, you have to wrestle with the issue that evolution is going to fit to local environments, local niches. You need an account of the causal mechanisms that can account for that ability to fit to local environments, which a lot of these big picture views can’t do very well. But you make a very good argument that cooperation works locally, but will also be generally applicable. I think that’s a very powerful point that you make. If you could open that up a bit too, that’d be very helpful. Yes, cooperation is a meta adaptive trade. Right, right. Yeah, in the sense that it has local benefits, but those benefits extend more generally. So, I mean, broadly, it just comes down to this, that effective cooperation has general adaptive benefits because it enables specialization and it produces organizations of larger scale. The larger the organization, the more resources it can command, the greater the ability to modify its environment and so on. And I mean, that’s immediately obvious if you contrast the millionth of a meter scale of cooperation of the first molecular processes with a human organization on the start of a continent. We can terraform, we can change the nature of the planet for good and for bad. And we’re doing it for bad at the moment. But coming back to Tehadah Shardin, I read Tehadah Shardin first when I was an early teenager. And I thought, well, that’s all pretty obvious. You know, except for the religious stuff at the end, his extrapolation. And so when I go to university and start studying evolution and so on, I’m waiting, you know, in first year, second year, third year for the lectures on Tehadah Shardin and they never came. And partly that was because of the allergy to, you know, big picture thinking, but more so because he didn’t identify causal micro foundations. And therefore he didn’t ground his predictions and so on. So again, that comes back to this issue of, you know, common view amongst big historians and not so many published papers on it, but some amongst evolutionary scientists is that there is a trend towards increasing complexity and that trend has been criticized and so on. The trend towards increasing complexity is a very shallow and not a very powerful scientific regularity or observation or pattern. And that’s because, you know, there’s many, many, many ways to become more complex. Exactly. And there’s no inherent benefit in, you know, in complexity itself. So if you want to get into the business of explaining what is, you know, what trajectory exists and so on, complexity won’t get you very far because it doesn’t have causal micro foundations that point to the particular form of complexity that emerges and so on. And it won’t enable you to do the extrapolation thing. So, you know, if so, coming down to an evolutionary activist, an evolutionary activist is someone who uses the understanding of the big evolutionary picture to contribute positively to the future evolution of life on Earth and then more widely, you know, in the universe. So simply an understanding that the trend is towards increasing complexity won’t fuel or ground such a project or mode of being in the world or set of goals or objectives because it says, OK, the next step in evolution is for complexity to increase. So it begs the question of, well, what should I do then? You know, I mean, how do I increase complexity and so on? So coming down to this evolutionary activism, this is the, you know, the absolute key to what this big picture points towards. So up until now, the processes occurred automatically driven by natural selection, no intention involved or anything else. But when you get to the point of the emergence of a global super organism, the hatching of a global super organism, because this is like a developmental process where a chicken embryo develops within an egg and then hatches as a, and if you were a cell in a chicken embryo and you were conscious of what was going on and becoming aware of what’s going on, you’d see this developmental process where, yeah, complexity increases and structures appear and so on. And if you worked it all out, you might work out that this process is intended and shaped by past evolution to hatch a chicken. Well, similarly, we’re in a, you know, I’m arguing that we’re in a similar developmental process, but that happens automatically. So this is the difference to the chicken embryo developing. It happens automatically up to a point, but then it only happens intentionally. And the reason why it has to, it can only happen intentionally after a certain point is because natural selection requires large populations of competing organisms and the competition between them and the selection between them shapes the next steps and so on. When you’ve got only a small number of nation states competing and when the next step is the emergence of this global super organism, the global super organism isn’t in a population of competing global super organisms that will in effect through natural selection drive the further development of global super organisms. So what I mean by driving it further, you know, at the moment life on earth is in effect the development of the metabolism. And if we stumble into a global system, which we might, we almost did after the First World War and the Second World War, but in effect it was the, you know, that’s what the League of Nations and the United Nations were attempts to develop a global system, but in effect it was vetoed by the superpowers who didn’t want to subject themselves to a higher level of governance. You know, they didn’t need to, they had the power to advance their interests without that. So the, so our economic system, you know, might, we might stumble into a global system where we have global governance over the economic system and so on, but that is only a small step in the entification process that has occurred at all these previous levels. So the the entification process involves, would involve this incipient global super organism becoming an entity in the same right, developing the capacity to adapt as a co-herent and most particularly to use a term used by Stafford Beer, the great English systems theorist and Zen Buddhist. The emerging global super organism needs to develop the capacity to adapt to the outside future. So adapting to the outside future means adapting in interaction with your outside environment. It basically involves the development of goals and plans and strategies and actions. So it’s agency, it’s the development of agency. So that’s why I distinguish between sort of, you know, the next steps involved, we’re really at the metabolic level. The unification of the metabolism and the development of the capacities to act as an agent on the outside future. So where humanity, for example, with the human, the system of life on earth governed by humanity and might interact with, you know, other global super organisms that have emerged elsewhere. It’s the end of the process. There’s no natural selection. There’s no population of complete competing global super organisms on this planet that will drive that process. So it has to happen intentionally. So humanity needs to understand where evolution needs to go. It needs to understand the centrifugation process. It needs to see how we need to organize ourselves on a global level to drive the centrifugation process. The capacities that enable us to adapt to the outside future and develop our agency as a super organism. So that’s the key point. No, it was a bit boring to get in there. But the key point is that… Well, let me make sure I first of all, there’s a term that you’re using and you keep it keeps garbling every time. I think you’re saying antification. Right? The idea that it becomes an entity in its own right. And in some sense, it becomes an autopoetic thing. It becomes a self making, caring for itself kind of thing, if I understand. And then, yep. And then the metabolic path. Yes, right. And that’s sort of a bottom up. But there also needs to be an intentional top down element because we do not have the requisite variation in nation states or super states in order to evolve it by sort of natural selection means. Am I understanding your argument correctly so far? That’s right. And so two questions emerge immediately. One is, what does this conscious appropriation of this look like? What kind of… What does it mean for individuals? What do we need individuals to be doing? And secondly, how do we address concerns that people have about, you know, one world government and the… Orwellian concerns, just to put it under an umbrella of, I don’t want that. I have enough trouble… I can hear a lot of people saying, I have enough trouble living in a nation state that is already surveilling me and interfering with my life in so many ways. And I know you have an answer to both of those. What do individuals need to be doing in order to afford the appropriation of the responsibility for evolution? And secondly, how would that appropriation protect us, obviate us from sort of totalitarian possibilities? Okay. So what do individuals need to do? Well, first of all, individuals need to understand the evolutionary process and where it needs to go. They need to understand the trajectory of evolution on earth and extrapolate that into the future. And to do that, you need to understand the causal micro foundations to… Because you need to get into the detail. Yeah. Yes. Increasing complexity isn’t enough and so on. So when you flesh all that out, you see, for example, that the way in which these… Part of the earth has climbed the ladder of increasing integration. You see that level is through the institution of a new level of governance. Yes. So the… Or constraint, in the most general sense, I use it in my papers, is a set of constraints. And those constraints suppress the destructive competition that happened amongst the entities at the previous level. So the constraints, because they need to operate across a group and they need to suppress free riding and destructive competition. That requires power. That’s hence governance, hence constraints. Furthermore, the new level of governance needs to be able to support cooperation. So it needs to be able to control the group, extract resources from areas where they’re not of great benefit and move them to areas where they have greater benefit and so on and reward cooperation. Because I should mention that cooperation does not evolve easily. Yeah. Free riders are a problem, right? Free riders are a major problem. That’s right. So Richard Dawkins, famous free selfish gene, and while he’s resolved to an extent in later publications, the fundamental issue for evolutionary biology, and it was when I was doing my degree, is how does cooperation emerge when the cooperator is investing resources in cooperation and doesn’t necessarily capture the benefits of that cooperation. So the cooperation, the cooperator is being disadvantaged because the cooperator is investing resources in cooperation that it may not get any return for. So that’s the source of the tragedy of the commons. Multi-polar traps, collective action traps, at all levels, at human levels and extending right back to the first emergence of life. Yes. And that’s the universality of this mechanism that you need powerful constraints to emerge that punish the free riders, that make sure that taking benefits without giving anything in return, in other words, the absence of reciprocity, making sure that that doesn’t pay. So the constraints need to ensure that selfishness doesn’t pay, that cooperation in fact does pay. So doing that on the global level means regulating nation states, ensuring that war doesn’t pay, in effect doing what happened with the movement from disparate war in states in the United States to the formation of the United States by the establishment of federal governance that disarmed the states of America. So that now war between states within America is unthinkable, just as war between our left hand attacking our right hand is unthinkable and our souls sabotaging our body accepting cancer. We were free riders who needed to be constrained and punished, that it’s unthinkable within our bodies. So at the global level we need governance in order to create the conditions in which cooperation can emerge and flourish and the advantages of cooperation can succeed and so on. So that brings me to the issue, despite the fact that the United States of America were a wonderful example of the significance of governance, of a new level of governance that stopped civil wars and the death of hundreds of thousands of Americans killing each other, despite the fact that they’re a perfect example of this stepwise process. To support global governance in the United States is ranked lower than being a pedophile. And we have the evolution scientist, David Simeon Wilson, who’s gradually coming to the view that the next step is the emergence of a global super organism. He has a pro-evolutionary project called pro-social. He is clear of mention of global governance because it would attract criticism and undermine his good work that he’s doing at lower levels of organization. So in any event, what of the possibility that this global governance could be used because it has the power to constrain everything below it? Yeah, and exploit, right? Exploit, yeah. And basically that brings me to an interesting point, a critical point about the emergence of governance at all previous levels. How does it emerge? So cooperation doesn’t emerge easily, it’s undermined by destructive competition and free riding and so on. So governance, you can’t just wave a magic wand and it appears, how does it occur? Well, it occurs through the emergence of powerful organisms that have the capacity to constrain, control the behavior of smaller scale, less powerful organisms. So the RNA of the cell has the power to manage a cell, manage an autopoietic system, manage metabolism, manage an auto catalytic, collectively auto catalytic system and so on. But when it first emerges, in a natural step by step evolutionary process, it doesn’t do that. That’s a very complex thing for it to do. It doesn’t immediately leap farming a metabolism, because that’s another very useful metaphor here. The farming metaphor where you farm organisms. So it doesn’t leap into that immediately, it starts by exploiting. So RNA, initially, probably were free living, self replicating, large scale powerful molecules that move between auto catalytic, collectively auto catalytic sets and plundered them and moved on right to another one’s body. So it begins with exploitation. And then the RNA would emerge or the powerful end is merged, which discover ways of manipulating and intervening and farming the metabolism so that they can harvest an ongoing stream of benefits from it. And we see that in human evolution. The classic is Genghis Khan, who was a raper and a pillager. But in a couple of generations, the Khans produced Kubla Khan, who was one of the great rulers of China, who didn’t rape and pillage China any longer. He was a great governor, who was able to manage the Chinese system to increase its productivity and so on. So you do far better by effective farming than you do by raping and pillaging. So in any event, this is the kind of trajectory that occurs. So because a coincidence of interest arises between the governor and the governed, the governor becomes dependent upon the governed, the powerful entity becomes dependent upon the metabolism that it farms. And a coincidence of interest arises. So does this happen at the global level? Because no, what drives it is competition between managed systems. It ensures that the manager becomes a good manager, a manager that doesn’t rape and pillage, but manages the system, it manages to maximize its productivity and survivability, eventually survivability. So an alignment of interests from the manager and the manager, there’s more and more an alignment of interests. But again, that seems contingent on there being pretty stiff competition that’s going to weed out the more exploitative. And again, that doesn’t seem to be the case where we are. No, well, that’s this great transition we’re coming to where it can only succeed now intentionally. Now these automatic processes that I’ve described that are caused all this previous steps, we know they need to occur to in order for the global superorganism to emerge. But the processes that drive them unintentionally and unconsciously and automatically in the past no longer will drive it in the future. Therefore, you know, individuals and human groups need to become aware of these processes, need to see what needs to be done to cause the emergence of this next step, and then to put that into place. So it involves new roles, new participatory knowledge, the role of an evolutionary activist, which then, so it can fundamentally answer the question of what should we do with our lives? What we should do with our lives is not to live to the dictates and satisfaction of our motivations and goals created by our past evolution. We should revise that salient landscapes that have been shaped by past evolution and engineer our own salient landscapes so that they’re aligned with the needs of future evolution. So what does that look like? That’s where your work really starts to intersect with mine, I think in very powerful ways. So what does that look like? Again, how are we recommending, how do we make this turn? This is a metanoia. How do we disease this kairos? This is a turning point. You’ve given us this grand metanarrative and you’ve given us a good, to my mind, structural argument why we’re at a particular turning point. Previously, this process relied, I don’t want to use anthropomorphic language too strongly here, it relied on these automatic processes, purely mechanistic in a sense, and we can’t rely on that going forward. We need to turn, and we need to turn in a way in which we’re re-engineering, cultivating, I don’t know what right the metaphor is, our salience landscaping, our cognition, our consciousness to help turn and appropriate these processes in an intentional and conscious fashion. Now that to me sounds like something, I don’t think you’ll object to this language, John, that has like a religious feel to it because it’s about doing something that religions have done too, which is propose ways of altering people’s consciousness and cognition and community and character and trying to orient them in a different way and make use of cultural processes as opposed to just biological processes for directing very large scale human endeavor. So I don’t think it’s inappropriate for me to hear sort of a religious or spiritual dimension to this. Does that land okay with you? Oh, absolutely, because there is nothing that’s excluded from consideration in relation to the evolutionary big picture. So there needs to be a thorough evolutionary understanding of the role of the emergence of religions amongst human beings in these processes. And basically religion is very important. There are sets of constraints that are reproduced across individuals so that they can act across a group. And their particular constraints that are pro-social, that is, they cause individuals who would otherwise act purely in their own self-interest, narrow self-interest, they cause them to act in the interest of the group as a whole. So the doing to others as you would happen to under yourself is a very pro-social injunction. It’s a wise way to organize a group to make it more effective if you’re in competition with other groups. The religiously constrained group can be far more effective at cooperating and competing with other groups. So no, religions, part of this, but it’s about understanding religion, understanding what functions it performs. Considering whether those functions, what relevance they have for the future. So you raised another important point there that’s just I got in relation to the intersection with your work and the religious connotations of what I’m talking about. Particularly so, it’s said that any properly developed religion needs two components. It needs a set of injunctions about how you should live your life. And as I’ve said, the evolutionary function often is pro-social to encourage pro-social behavior. So you need a set of injunctions in a properly developed religion. And secondly, you need a set of technologies that enable you to actually live in accordance with those injunctions. And religions that don’t have those technologies produce hypocrites, you know, people who can’t live out the injunctions and so on. So people whose religion tells them to love thy neighbor as thyself, but they hate any neighbor that’s not like them. That’s what it produces. The injunction is to turn the other cheek, but no, you’re you’re willing to go to war against Muslims or whatever. So it properly developed religion needs, but it’s exactly the same in relation to becoming an evolutionary activist. You basically have your set of injunctions that are derived from the evolutionary big picture. And they involve often will involve doing things different to what you’ve done in the past. And that might necessarily be intrinsically satisfying to you, given the predispositions that have been inserted in you by past evolution, cultural processes and socialization. So you need to be able to free yourself from the dictates of the past, the past, the salience landscape that’s been shaped by past evolution, genetic and cultural. You need to free yourself from that and instead find satisfaction in being an evolutionary activist and taking the steps that are needed to advance the evolutionary process on earth. Two things that you mentioned that fit right into that, if I can just interject here, you talk about self-evolution and you talk about metasystemic cognition or metasystemic wisdom. And these to me seems like these are some of you’ve sort of canvassed some of the wisdom traditions and religion and pulled these out as meta traits that are particularly relevant for being an evolutionary activist. Could you speak a little bit more towards that? Because I think that is specifically what we’re talking about right now. What does it mean to turn from the, you know, our inherited or biologically inherited salience landscaping to that, you know, that conscious appropriation of the need for to direct evolution or afford it for more enhanced cooperation? And you talk about self-evolution and metasystemic wisdom and I think that’s particular, that would be very helpful to, you know, really specify what we’re talking about here right now. Right, so self-evolution basically is the second component of any fully developed religion. That is, it’s the set of technologies that you use on yourself to modify yourself so that you can carry out the injunctions of the religion. So in terms of evolutionary activism, it’s exactly the same. It’s your serving future evolution as an evolutionary activist, not past evolution. So it might require you to have goals and take actions and so on that are different to those that you would take if you were dictated to by previous evolution. So you need to free yourself from the dictates of past evolution and you need those technologies. So it’s basically the same technologies that properly developed religions have but develop further and optimize to enable, you know, you to become an evolutionary activist and serve the interests of future evolution rather than past evolution. So that’s why I’ve plundered the resources developed and the techniques and practices developed by, you know, the spiritual and religious traditions. But the plundering process, the stealing of these practices, their appropriation involves basically, you know, a science-based process. Yes. So which desirably is the goal of cognitive science in general? I think so. Yeah. So if you look across religious traditions and religious practices, you find that the experiences are the same, you know, that they relate to. So they have different names for it. But the states that they create, these enabling states that enable transcendence of your biological and evolutionary past, they are the same. They’re the same kinds of states. They’re universal human potentials. But their justification to the states, the stories behind the states, hocus pocus. And they must be hocus pocus because they’re mutually contradictory. So they’re nearly all, even if you’re ascribed to, you know, one set of religious stories about these practices, you’re rejecting, you know, hundreds of thousands of other stories about them that are embedded in other traditions and so on. So the goal of science and its role in founding, you know, this pro-evolutionary view of how we need to behave as evolutionary activists and so on. The goal of science is to strip these practices of their hocus pocus, to understand them in terms of brain processes. You know, why are human beings an organism that’s organized in such a way that we meditate? You know, what are the brain processes, what are the affordances that meditation can provide and so on? And it’s only when you can build science-based models that explain meditation and the states produces, it’s only when you can do that, that you can optimize the technologies. So, you know, before the rise of industrialization, there were folk theories about all sorts of things and folk physics about all sorts of things and so on. But it was the replacement of that, it was the stripping of that knowledge because there was knowledge about physics and forces and so on prior to the first in European enlightenment and so on. That knowledge existed but it was embedded in the hocus pocus. So science in effect stripped the hocus pocus out, developed objective, you know, mechanistic models of physics and so on. And once it did that, it unleashed an enormous wave of creativity. Those models, those mental models, enable you to in effect experiment in your mind, you know, with how to optimize the various components of those models, how to, you know, embed them in an appropriate context, how to get them to operate in different contexts from those in which you might have originally encountered them and so on. So that objectification of, you know, the states and experiences that underlie religious experiences, that objectification of it is critical to, you know, creating a successful evolutionary activist. So let me see if I can map some connections here. Now I do want to come back to the metasystemic cognition too. Yes. So we’re trying to get people to lift their head out of the evolutionary trough, so to speak, right, and take a turn and change their fundamental orientation. And there’s lots of variation amongst religions and their claims, but I’m thinking, for example, of McNamara, you know, who’s done a cognitive neuroscientific and cognitive scientific work. You find universals of processes like decentering, which help overcome an otherwise unchallenged supersalience of an egocentric framework, and you get religion, various religions, again, I agree with you, they have a lot of local variation, which might have been part of their evolutionary success too, right, because they fit a particular context, right. They have a lot of variation about why they’re doing this or, right, the metaphysics around it, but they share what I would call the procedural and perspectival operation and participatory transformations, making people decenter, get less egocentric, and that allows them, well, we know that allows them to pursue more long-term goals, it allows them to cooperate. In general, if you do this with people, they can pursue long-term goals, they’re more willing to cooperate, construal level theory, etc. So there’s a lot of work that says, right, if we understand the functionality of this, then, as you said, we can more explicitly appropriate it, we can optimize it in various ways, and then what I hear you saying is, okay, let’s take that and then let’s optimize it so people turn to look at what’s the future, what is the future rather than being a salient landscaping that is bound to the past. Now, two things, and I did put a pin, I want to come back to the meta-systemic, but I can hear a lot of people, there’s two worries coming up. One is, well, we tried this, we’ve tried this before, social Darwinism, that was a disaster, and you alluded to that about the 1940s, right, we came out of two grand programs that claimed to see the future of human evolution, and they were pseudo religious ideologies, communism and Nazism, and they both drenched the world in blood. I know you’re going to be able to respond to this, so this is an open question, but I want you to be able to address people who that concern is rising in their mind. How do we make sure we don’t do that? And secondly, I can hear my more philosophically inclined people saying, oh, this is just the naturalistic fallacy all over the place. You’re confusing is in aught, evolution is a description of how things are, and then you’re turning it into a prescription on how we ought to behave, and how did you make that move? So, John, if you could reply to those, and then I’ll try and keep in my mind that I want to come back, because this self-evolution is really cool, and I want to come back to the metasystemic cognition, because I think that’s another really important thing, but I think it’s fair to say that those concerns I raised are going to be in people’s minds as they’re listening to you right now, and I know you have good replies to both, so I’d like you to address those right now. Well, yeah, first, you’ve reminded me that I need to finish off that fundamental question about one world governance, leading to exploitation. Yes, yes, yes. That’s right. So, the endification process has occurred previously, the endification that led to cells, the endification that led to multicellular organisms and so on, and we can see how that process needs to be arranged through some form of governance, suppressing destructive competition and so on, and how you need to align your interests not to lead to exploitation, and you see what effective management or governance of a cooperative collective, how it needs to be arranged, and how it optimises the endification process, because the end goal of the endification process of the global superorganism is to produce a highly adaptive global superorganism that can participate in the future evolution of life in the universe, link up with and communicate with and speak with one voice to other global superorganisms and do whatever collective activities they get involved in and so on, because this process on this planet’s happened elsewhere, it’s happening now, it’s happened before, it’ll happen in the future. So, if we look at the endification process, we see that this is why it needs to be driven intentionally as well. We see that endification, for it to be successful, for it to produce a highly adaptive entity, it needs to maximise the adaptability of its components or evolvability of its components. Right, right. It needs also to promote diversity, because there’s a very fundamental principle about requisite variety that emerged out of cybernetics and systems science, you know, 50 years ago. The principle of requisite variety, which is that you can only be adaptive, you can only be creative in so far as you have this variety within the organisation itself. Right, right. If you have a, yeah, so, and this is manifest clearly in, you know, scientific management, tabularistic organisations, they’re very good for, you know, a franchise model and running a McDonald’s franchise, but they’re absolutely hopeless. You know, so mechanistic forms of management and mechanistic forms of organisation and rule-based organisations that don’t maximise the evolvability of their constituent individuals do not lead to effective, evolveable, creative organisations. So I won’t go into more detail on that, but it’s very clear that the endification process that has to be intentionally driven cannot be authoritarian, cannot be dominating, cannot be, you know, a command economy sort of arrangement, so on. So the question arises is, how do you constrain the governance? And this is the fundamental issue. In the absence of this competition that shapes governance and constrains it and ensures that its interests are aligned with the interests of the governed, you need to constrain the governance to achieve that, in the absence of natural selection. So when, as human societies increased in scale, there was a reduction in competition between them, therefore a reduction in the force that would tend to align interests. So hence the emergence of democracy and the French Revolution and so on. They were mechanisms that arose to constrain the governed. The Magna Carta was a beginning one, but it was a pathetic, you know, overblown attempt at only, it was the nobles constraining the king, not the people constraining the king and so on. So there is an evolutionary trajectory there as well, an evolutionary trajectory that has lessons for the future. So global governance has to be set up so that the governance, the powerful governance is constrained itself to align its interests with those of the governed. So there’s a technology there that I won’t go into in any detail. So now you’ve raised the issue of the naturalistic fallacy. I’ll do it back next. So yeah, the analytic philosophers tell us that you can’t get a nought from an is, that any given set of facts about, you know, where we need to go in evolution doesn’t confound oughts about how we should behave here and now. The fallacy behind, underlying the naturalistic fallacy is that it presupposes an individual who has no warts, starts off without warts and asks the question, you know, how can I get an ought? And says, well, you can’t, you know, and which is, you know, absolutely true in logical terms. But the dead giveaway for the fallacy is that the analytic philosophers who say that, including Hume and others, then admit that they don’t live their life according to that at all. They live their life with oughts everywhere. If you drop all your oughts, you stop breathing, you stop, you know, you stop doing anything. Yes. And you can’t found oughts. So if you lived according to naturalistic fallacy, but no one’s ever lived, you can only die according if you apply the naturalistic fallacy. You can’t live according to it. So where that leads us to is to say, well, all human beings have oughts. We are not, the individual human does not start without oughts. The human being has oughts implanted in us by past evolution and socialization, cultural evolution and so on. So the issue becomes, is the desire to maintain the big show, the evolutionary show, the big picture, keep this whole thing going, surviving and thriving into the future, is that consistent with universal oughts that human beings tend to already be fitted out with. So it’s not a matter of generating the big evolutionary ought from nothing. It’s about saying, well, you know, is the… It’s kind of a meta-ought. If that ought isn’t satisfied, all the individual oughts that people pursue will come to your mind. That’s basically the move you make, right? Yeah. So yeah, everything, all the struggle, all the thinking, all the theories, all the wars, all the sacrifice, everything that’s happened in human history, is rendered meaningless if we wink out of existence this century, as we quite possibly will. So it’s consistent, yeah, the meta-ought that’s consistent with and demanded by any ought generally that a fully functional human being has, demands the big evolutionary ought and founds the big evolutionary ought. So you’ve got this meta-ought saying, right, like we have to not only survive, we have to thrive, or out to everything. And then you’re saying, okay, we need to satisfy the meta-ought. Where can we look for our best chances of not only surviving but thriving? We can glean from the big history of evolution. What is the most plausible proposal for how to satisfy the meta-ought? And then we can consciously align ourselves individually and collectively towards it. Am I understanding you correctly? That’s, yeah, absolutely. So identifying a trajectory to evolution, and we might well have woken up in the universe that had no trajectory to evolution, might all be random crap, but no, there is a trajectory of evolution when you identify it. What a trajectory of evolution defines is what survives. So the trajectory at lower levels is, you know, a hell of a lot of organisms had to die because they weren’t on the trajectory, you know, in order to find the trajectory. But we can do it intentionally. We don’t have to be subject to natural selection. We can avoid, we can anticipate, preempt natural selection and do it ourselves. Yay. So one of the things the superorganism would do, given your previous argument, it would support like the diversity and the evolvability of its components, of smaller groups and of individuals. And you’ve spoken to that. And then I wanted to come back to the idea of meta-systemic wisdom, meta-systemic cognition, because it seems like you’re proposing kind of a way of thinking that will also help us shift our habits of problem solving from, you know, our evolutionary heritage in towards affordability and turning them towards affording the evolution of our future, I suppose, is what I want to say. So just to emphasise a point here that the trajectory of evolution involves this emergence of progressively larger scale cooperative organisations. But part of that trajectory is increased availability. So that frames the meaning. And evolvability is basically the ability to search possibilities based for effective adaptations. So you can search possibilities based by trial and error, which is what genetic evolution originally did. You stumble around in the dark until you hit on something’s works and so on. Or eventually you can search the space far more effectively by the development of human cognition in the form of mental models, where we form mental models of reality as best we can. And then in those mental models in our heads, we test out possibilities and see whether they’ll be effective and use their mental models to predict the consequences of those things we try out in our heads. So as the great, you know, evolutionary philosopher, Karl Popper said, in humans with our mental capacities, our ideas die in our stead. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah. So we form these models of reality. Ideally, you know, our models have got to include the last scale, the biggest picture of reality. Because as Teilhard de Chardin said, evolution is the line to which all other lines must conform. It is the meta-narrative. But it’s an expanding one because they’re view of evolution or evolve through time. But the ultimate step in evolvability is to use our mental models of the big picture. However, you know, we’ve been monumentally unsuccessful at doing that. Humanity has up until now. And to identify why, you know, I’ll distinguish between what I’ll call first enlightenment thinking and second enlightenment thinking. Second enlightenment thinking is metasystemic wisdom, metasystemic cognition, and so on. And you might well ask, well, what’s the second enlightenment? And I’ll tell you, it’s yet to come. But it’ll be as monumentally impactful as the first enlightenment. So the first enlightenment was the emergence of abstract rational thinking, the development of mental models that we could use logical principles to edit and to optimize and so on. And we could use abstract because logical principles are abstract. So they’re abstract rational, analytical rational models. But they’re models that, you know, like the analytic philosophers who are hopeless at almost everything, can only deal with mechanistic parts of reality. So Alfred North Whitehead pointed out, you know, nearly 100 years ago, that science can only deal with about 10% of the things that really matter to human beings, because the rest is too complex. And science can’t deal with complexity, because first enlightenment thinking, analytical rational cognition, can only come up with mechanistic mental models. And most of reality isn’t mechanistic. Most of reality is ceaselessly changing complex systems that are interacting and evolving through time. And you can’t think through it. You can’t reduce it to a set of interacting components that you can think through logically using first enlightenment thinking. So, you know, and there’s lots of ways describing this second enlightenment thinking, but it’s true complexity thinking. Yeah, so true complexity thinking, which, you know, some would say, you know, is emerging in science and so on, the, is second enlightenment thinking. But what passes for nearly all complexity thinking, whether it’s in evolution, physics, anything in the world today, is a analytical rational reduction of complexity. So the, because the only thing that’s publishable largely, you know, except in little niches in academia, certainly in science, the only thing that’s publishable is stuff that conforms to the tenants of first enlightenment thinking. So it’s got to be analysable, desirably mathematical, and basically mechanistic, be able to be thought through, be able to be, so you can’t through writing on paper or a set of words, describe complex phenomenon, because there’s so many interacting paths, you can’t keep track of them or whatever. So cybernetics, general systems theory throughout the 20th century, the great minds of the 20th century have periodically said we need a complexity science, you know, and they say there’s holism of General Smuts and the cybernetics wiener and so on. The Francis Haleygan, the leader of my research group, set up Principia Cybernetica on the web, you know, to bring cybernetics to the world and so on, and the Santa Fe Institute and then complex adaptive systems and so on. But generally that’s all the, when the great minds started moving, trying to develop true complexity understanding of reality, and tried to publish it, then first enlightenment thinking drags them back in again, like in the Godfather, because it applies first enlightenment thinking criteria to judge whether, you know, papers published and so on. So the, okay, so true complexity thing, so one way of describing it is that if you read a scientific paper written by a true complexity thinker, then they’ve used their metasystemic wisdom or cognition to develop a paper to derive certain principles that can be written in a paper and presented in a way that conforms with first enlightenment thinking. Then if anyone reads that paper, they won’t get the model, there’s no transmission of the model from the metasystemic thinker to them, the model that generated those. Right, right. Yeah, so that’s, so in any event, that’s a very brief. No, I want to stop, I want to actually stop on that. I don’t want to, that’s, I think that’s a very important point, right, there’s, right, the thinking that generated the theory, that theory does not then regenerate it in the people that are reading the theory, right, and so it is not transformative communication in any way, it’s merely informative and it’s referring to complexity, it’s referring to dynamic self-organization, but it’s not actually affording people thinking that way who are perusing these theories. Am I understanding you correctly? That’s brilliantly summarized. I should let you just write my stuff up and I can not reply. No, but I mean, in part of what I’ve been trying to do with talking about the multiple ways of knowing is to bring out that the propositional is insufficient for the procedural and the perspectival and the participatory, and we need ways of communicating and doing, you know, our epistemic projects that exemplify, right, you know, the perspectival and the procedural and the participatory. I’ve been trying to use this medium and I’ve been trying to create dialogical, dynamic, right, processes by which ideas are being developed rather than the monological mathematical presentation of a polished product. I’ve been trying to show people in a way in which they can participate in the process and be transformed by it even more so than adopting the particular propositional conclusions that come. So I’ve been trying to use this medium in particular to say, no, no, no, it’s really focused much more on this process and notice how, you know, how dynamic and complex this process is. That’s why I’m doing so many series where I’m doing it with multiple people because I’m trying to say, don’t pay attention. I mean, this is Heraclitus. Don’t just pay attention to what I’m saying. Pay attention to the logos. Pay attention to all of this self-organization that’s happening. So I think that’s another place where my work is converging with that point you were just making about, you know, the strangle, I call it propositional tyranny, the stranglehold that, you know, enlightenment 1.0 thinking has on people trying to communicate, right, the kind of cognition, the states of consciousness, the cultivation of character, the cultivation and participation in community tasks that is needed in order to address our problems. And the fact that we can’t, we’ve got to come up with different ways of presenting this other than the paper pencil publication methods that we are bound to in academia right now. Sorry, I’m going on a bit of a speech here, but I just want to say something in my own work that’s deeply convergent with that point that you just made. And so back to you, John. Yeah, about the medicine. What you’re describing is what I would call second enlightenment science, right, which does not yet exist. It’ll be a new, it’ll be a new, a genuinely new kind of science. It won’t be analytical rational. It won’t conform to the criteria and tenets of analytical rational science. To analytical rational science, it’s all hand waving nonsense. That’s how you see it at the lower level looking upwards. And in 2011, I co-organized the first planning meeting for the second enlightenment. Which was on a boat in Sausalito. And Otto Lasky was there, plus leading lights from integral. Sean Espoon-Hargans, Terry Patton was there and so on. Didn’t get very far because I don’t, you know, if you sit because the goal now is to have a second planning meeting for the second enlightenment. But sitting and I’ve been looking at it with a colleague and the first thing is to identify people who can contribute to it because the goal is to build an escalator. So an escalator is a set of practices and approaches that scaffold people moving from first enlightenment cognition to second enlightenment cognition. Right, right, right. You know, the technology, the procedural knowledge of how to recursively self-improve, you know, cognition and birth the second enlightenment. But there’s hardly anyone on the planet. And obviously that was why, you know, I was so excited to talk to you. Because you’re building that synthesis of, you know, right brain and left brain, which is needed for metasystemic wisdom and so on. So just to hone in on that just a little bit, because this again, I’ve noticed in your most recent writings that there is real convergence and synergy here. True systems understanding, the mental models that can represent systems requires the use of brain resources that are not thought-based. Yes. So they require, for example, something as simple as pattern recognition. Yes. So pattern recognition resources are not non-propositional. I mean, you can reduce them to propositions with a combinatorial explosion and yes, yes, yes, yes, achieve nothing but like a picture is worth a thousand words. But you know, you’re a human being, you don’t describe the picture in a thousand words, you show them the picture and and they’ll be able to recognise it and so on. So intuition, you know, images and so on. Those resources, because what you’re trying to represent with models of complex phenomenon is processes, you know, because in reality, there is no such thing as a thing. There’s no such thing as an object, there are only processes. There are only things that were something previously and that become into something different, you know, in the future. So how do you capture that in words? You can’t. How do you capture that in logical thinking? You can’t. You can’t capture it with analytical analytic philosophy. So you need these other resources to be able to build metasystemic cognition, models, complex reality. So how do you do that? How do you bring in these other resources? And that’s where, you know, I’ve stolen from the and plundered the religious and contemplative traditions because presence or no thingness, you know, as you sort of describe it, or the witness state or these states, de-centring, whatever, they involve cleansing consciousness of thinking still in the mind. So the critical thing to understand about consciousness in the development of higher cognition is that consciousness is very low bandwidth. There’s a user illusion that it can be infinite, particularly if you, you know, don’t contract consciousness down with thought or emotion. But that’s an alert. That’s a user illusion. You know, the this is the grand illusion, you know, of consciousness and so on. So it’s very low bandwidth. It’s so the bandwidth of consciousness is very easily taken up. It’s like consciousness, you know, liken it to looking at the world for a straw. Yes. And if you fill the straw with sequences of thought, then you don’t, you’re not recruiting any other resources, you’re not using any other resources. If you, you know, fill the straw with shallow emotional reactions and thinking, that’s all you’ll be aware of. So if you go into deep thought, the world just is, you know, you’re only aware of your deep thought. And most people are in thought, you know, we’re tyrannised by thinking at the present time. So we don’t have access to the unconscious mind, which is where this giant unconscious mind, we think that the thinking mind, you know, is who we are. And that’s, you know, that’s what determines our behaviour. But the unconscious mind, which operated before thinking ever arose in human beings, human beings still have relationships, you know, brought up children, did nearly, you know, lots of things that that complex things, did complex things more effortlessly than we do today. Because now we’re confronted with complex circumstances. And the idiot, the thinking mind is Shakespeare, you know, Shakespeare’s technical term for the thinking mind is the idiot. Right. It tells the tale of our life. Yes. The, you know, the idiot doesn’t have access to these sources. And the idiot, faced with complexity, starts thinking about it, trying to think it through, trying to reduce it, so on and fails miserably. So this giant, the resources of the unconscious, which is where our pattern, repetition, resources, our emotional system, our emotional system, which can appraise a complex social circumstance in an instant when we walk into a room, and we survey the room with a still mind. Yeah, we know what’s going on. You know, we immediately pick up factions and little things going on. And so I’m trying to think that through autistically, in the absence of, you know, these resources would bog us down. It’s like Conrad Lorenz, the great animal behaviourist, the example he says, if you want to paralyses the centipede, then you ask it, what its 100th leg is doing, 99th leg is touching the ground. So it’s interfering with these complex automatic processes with your conscious thinking mind. You know, you can’t, to try and regulate your body with this wonderful thinking mind, which we think is the whole show, is insane. You know, we don’t know anything in our body works, but thank God it bloody well works. So this is, so second enlightenment in science, second enlightenment in cognition, meta-systemic cognition involves the marriage of the bride and the groom, the marriage of right and left brain. Yes. It involves access to the resources, the unconscious, the non thought based, non conscious resources that just emerge into consciousness. You know, one thing that’s been said, it’s a very surprising thing when you first hear it from those people is that a properly functioning, self evolving human being, their unconscious mind will operate like their conscious mind does now. So impressions will penetrate straight through unimpeded to the unconscious mind and drag out relevant resources. While we think we’ve got to intervene with our thinking and figure it out and so on. So how do you do it? How do you access the unconscious resources, the unconscious mind, which is essential scaffolding for developing the mind? You know, between meta-systemic cognition, second enlightenment, thinking and science and science. You do it through presence, no thingness, you do it through still in the mind. Because what still in the mind does is unload the straw of consciousness, unload the thinking and emotional reaction from it. Still in the mind, that’s why it becomes spacious awareness. You’re still the mind. And it’s why it feels so good because you don’t have all the negative thinking and the negative emotions arising and so on. But most importantly, so that’s that you’ll get that on the meditation couch. But the evolutionary activist, you know, isn’t about cleaning the straw of consciousness on the meditation couch. He wants to awake or she wants to awake in the midst of ordinary life. Right. And neither do they want to do it in a specially convened, you know, group that has particular practices and so on, while that can be instructive and beneficial and so on. But the, you know, the Holy Spirit might visit, which is, you know, collective presence, the Holy Spirit. Yes. The evolutionary activist needs to awaken in the midst of ordinary life. So being the present, not embedded in thinking, have a still mind, be in spacious awareness when they’re doing what they normally do in ordinary life. So when they relate to another human being, so in the circling process that you’ve been involved in, it’s magnificent for relating, for producing, you know, states in which individuals can connect and relate more deeply than they ever have before in their existence. So collectively, they will hizzle each other. So hizzle is HSL, hear, see and love. So if you’re in the state of presence, no thingness, the witness state, then you’ll experience other human beings, you will hear them deeply for the first time, see them deeply for the first time. And you love them, you love everybody, because there’s no thinking going on, labeling, you know, and so on. You’re just pure awareness, pure impressions going through to your unconscious, interpreting them without thought, and therefore interpreting and understanding every nuance of their behavior and facial expression, and within the context and doing that far better than your analytical thinking mind could ever, ever do it. So that’s, yeah, that’s in, you can create a special environment that facilitates that and scaffolds that, but the end goal for the evolutionary activist, because it’s not just about producing, you know, deep and profound experiences, it’s about being more effective in the world. Yeah, yeah, I agree. I think of these practices, and I’m trying to get also build practices that transfer from those training situations into life. The issue of transfer, I think, is really paramount. And I think about it as you’re sort of learning enhanced relevance realization, and then the idea is to take that into the world, that capacity for enhanced relevance realization. I agree with you that that’s why I’ve been trying to foreground this whole issue of transfer of practice. You can get caught up too much in the wonderful phenomenology of a practice, and not actually been practicing it in a way that affords that transfer outside of where, you know, outside of whatever the training context is. People do need training context. They need to simplify situations. They need to, you know, they have to face utilization deficiency. No denying that, but that can become very almost incestuous and insular, and people can get caught up. What did you say? I didn’t hear you, John. So you’re talking to me? Yeah. Oh, no. Yeah, it’s a form of spiritual masturbation. Yes, yes. Masturbation is the delinking between, you know, a way of stimulating positively our head on its system, delinking it from any evolutionary purpose. Oh, I see. I see the metaphor. Oh, that’s wonderful. Yeah. You can masturbate physically, sexually, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually. Yes. Yeah. The issue of transfer, I think, needs to be made paramount. And that’s also a pedagogical issue. This has to do with, and we can talk about this another time, you know, that the framing of pedagogy itself is also something that needs to be taken up into what you’re calling second enlightenment, because the way we do pedagogy now is we are orienting it increasingly short-termism, increasingly just for how we can insinuate people into the market. And we’ve lost the intergenerational aspect of education that is so important for the very project you’re talking about. If we do not see ourselves as bound to the generations before us, and especially the generations after us, if that’s not a primary thing our education is inculcating in us, then the projects that you and I are talking about here right now are not possible, right? If people have not got that commitment and that cross-generational identification going, then, you know, none of this is going to, well, I would argue the attempt to bring about evolutionary activism is bound to fail, because people are just going to say, I don’t care. I don’t care about the next generations at all. So people can masturbate at all levels. They can also commit suicide at all levels. Yes, yes. I joke about, you know, the kid who goes to school and does first grade and refuses to move to second grade and he stays in first grade all his life. Or you can go, you know, graduate and refuse to go to university, or you can refuse to go into some wider environment and refuse to know about your nation’s political system and so on. So you commit suicide to the wider context. So there’s evolutionary suicide, so people can say, yeah, I don’t care about the future. And now there’s practices where you can take them through envisaging and feeling their way into the future and so on. There’s things you can do there. But there’s something I want to mention just quickly on the religious and spiritual traditions, that one way of characterizing, you know, this, the need for transformation into the midst of ordinary life is to say that, you know, there’s two large processes of self-development, the right-hand path and the left-hand path. The right-hand path is the traditional spiritual contemplative tradition path. And that leads, its goal is absorption in the absolute. And the maximum for the maximum for the right-hand path is thy will be done. So it’s not about enhancing agency. So the left-hand, sorry, the left-hand path, it’s about developing agency, developing capacity, developing effectiveness in the world. And its maximum is my will be done. So now it can be, you know, misused as well, you know, through Satanism and so on. But broadly, you know, there are very similar technologies between the two. However, the right-hand path, the absorption in the absolute, doesn’t use the technologies, doesn’t use presence in and so on, in order to build enhanced capacity agency and so on. Yes. Well, the left-hand path is all about appropriating those techniques and using them. So it’s that transformation thing. It’s about, yeah, there’s freedom from and freedom to spiritualities. Yes. Exactly. Yes. Yes. So arguably, the spiritual traditions that have survived till today obviously have been subject to evolutionary processes, selection processes. And the, because every part of this planet has been subject to more or less continual war and mutual destruction, yeah, for thousands of years, then any spiritual tradition that focused on increased agency and capacity to act in the world would be a threat, you know, to one side or another. It would be selected out. It would be obliterated. So the most benign form, which is the right-hand path, the vile will be done, you know, the monks in robes, in arcs, Noah’s arcs, which are monasteries, you know, high up in the mountains. That’s survived till today. And it’s now our role, you know, as, and this is part of what the West can bring to the extraordinary discoveries of the Eastern spiritual tradition. What the West can do is to translate, is to appropriate those right-hand path absorption processes and practices and use them for enhancing agency and effectiveness and so on in the service of our future evolutionary needs. Yes. Well, John, we’re going to have to, we’re going to have to bring it to a close. You and I will talk again, of course. I think this was just a good primer for, so people can get a sense of what you’re doing and why you reached out to me and why it’s good that we’re talking. So first of all, I’d like you to come back and do another Voices with Verveki and we can go back to some of these other points and these other themes and open them up again. You said a lot of things, and I mean, this is a compliment, that were very provocative and I’m sure some stuff’s come up, will come out in the comments and commentary and that. So there’s going to be lots to do about this, but I always like to, first of all, I want to thank you. And then I always like to give people like the last sort of brief word before I close off the recording. Is there any final brief thing you’d like to say? No, I think I’ve said enough provocatively. Yeah. And, but I really appreciate talking to you. I mean, on a personal level, yeah, it’s just wonderful to talk to someone with is developing meta-systemic cognition. So it’s extraordinarily rare in the world, like, unfortunately, because we need it to survive and thrive. Well, thank you for saying that. And I agree with that. And I obviously see that in you, which is why we were able to resonate. So thank you again very much.