https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=VSURwG1f_U8
Welcome everyone to Voices with Raviki. I’m very pleased to have Rick Rappetti here with me today. And I’m going to let Rick introduce himself and how we come to meet and how we’ve begun to interact. And I’ll turn things over to him. I’ll just do a brief preface and say, if you’re interested in meditation, mindfulness, and the connections to philosophy and wisdom, you better start reading and paying attention to Rick’s work because I think it’s really central and important. So welcome, Rick. It’s a great pleasure to have you here. Thank you, John. I’m honored to be here. I’m really not only honored but thrilled to have finally met you, met you remotely. You know, this is great. Really thank you for having me on the show. Okay, let me say some things about myself. I am a full professor at CUNY, City University of New York at one of their community colleges out in Brooklyn. We literally are on the beach at Kingsborough Community College. What else? I got my PhD from the CUNY grad school in 2005, which is a highly analytic philosophy department. So I’ve got my training is primarily in that. But I’ve been practicing meditation since I was a teenager and yoga since I was like 15. It’s just, you know, several decades ago. I’m a little older than I look. But I recently wrote a book. Well, I edited the book on what is it called? The Rutledge Handbook on the Philosophy of Meditation. Yes, which is in press right now. So it should be out in the spring of 2022. And that’s how I met John. Towards the very end, the book was due, I think September 30th or October 1st. And I think in mid September, I had a couple of folks, contributors, it was like 26 or 27 chapters, two of the authors were AWOL. And I was like, Oh, my God, what am I going to do? And one of them was doing this stuff on neuroscience. And I just accidentally fell upon your stuff, John, when I was really actually gearing up for teaching a course that I hadn’t taught in a few years, and I never taught it online, and all of our teaching is remote right now. And so I had to bone up on my pre Socratic and whatnot. So I’m doing all kinds of little YouTube searches for stoics and neoplateness and this and that and you know, whatever and some of your videos popped up. And after listening to just even one of them, I think, I was like, Whoa, this, this is great. And it’s part of a series. I went through the entire series. I don’t think I was even done. I think I was in the 30s or something when I when I finally decided, maybe this guy like, because your stuff is just so perfect for my collection. You know, most people who have your stature are way too busy, they’re not going to be able to do anything in a short period of time. But I said, it’s a long shot. Let me try. I contacted you, as you know, and you, you pulled a rabbit out of a hat in less than a month, I believe, which was your chapter for my collection, which to me is one of the best chapters in the collection. It’s a sine qua non, as far as I’m concerned, it had had to be in there. So it’s really like kismet or synchronicity or something that what seemed to be bad on my end, missing chapters turned out that there was space for you and that you could do it. So that was wonderful. Yeah, so let me say a little bit about the book. I mentioned before we started recording that I went to, you know, CUNY, well, I actually mentioned it once we started recording that I my training at the CUNY Grad Center was in analytic philosophy, which was very narrowly focused on philosophy of language, logic, science, that’s what I did my comprehensive oral comprehensive exams in and everything. And so my training has been very narrow, but like the context that I have to talk about before that, what led me to philosophy, just, you know, this is part of the who is Rick Rapetti, and how did he get here? And what’s it all about? Is I think I might have mentioned when I was 15, I accidentally started I was flipping through channels on a TV, which we did this way back then. Yes, I remember. And I saw two beautiful women in leotards doing this sensual movements and at 15 year old boy, it was, you know, my libido that was caught my attention. You know, salience was in my salience landscape, I stopped that channel. But I realized it was an exercise class. So I used to watch Jack Lillane had an exercise class that I used to do. And so I said, let me try this. I’ve never heard of this or whatever was a yoga class. And at the end of it, the teacher, his name was Richard Hittleman, which are kind of Anglican, Anglo kind of name, but he looked like Chinese or something. And that the two women in leotards were like, you know, European descent. But at the end, he had us in deep relaxation on our backs. And I had an out of body experience. Oh, that’s how ripe I was for this. Oh, yeah, I mean, I what happened was I felt like all this energy collecting in my head. And then my head felt like it was expanding and my body was shrinking. And then my body felt huge. And my head felt tiny. And that went back and forth a few times. And then I popped right out of my body, like a gaseous, spacious awareness over my head, looking down from the ceiling in my row. And I felt like it was a NOS kind of thing. I felt like this, this is the world. All that stuff that people say is true. Like I really like in an instant, I had this flash of it felt like a memory. Like, this is real. Yeah, no, like, there’s something going on here. What? And then I thought maybe I’m dead. And I got frightened. And I didn’t know if I could get back into my body. And I shrunk right back into my body. Right, right, right. So like that blew my mind. I hadn’t been reading about anything with yoga or meditation, nothing just happened to me. So, you know, like an Old Testament prophet or something, you know, I got zapped by something bigger than myself. Wow. I went out and got my hands on everything I could on yoga and meditation in the local library, you know, flipping through the stacks and whatnot, and started teaching myself yoga and meditation. Within a matter of months, I found a woman who had lived in India for like, I don’t know, 15 or 25 years, I forget the number, who had a meditation group in Manhattan in the basement of a church in Greenwich Village. One of my friends who saw me walking around carrying be here now all the time. So you’re into that. Our friend, Patty has a meditation teacher. And I was like, Patty, I was there. And when I walked in, I felt like I knew those people. It was like my lost tribe or something. It was just this phenomenal feeling of connection, right, a sangha feeling. And I was hooked lock, stock and barrel. Once I met the teacher, she was just a very powerful individual. She was a like English woman, but she wore a sari all the time after living in India for decades. And I started having one mystical experience after another. And I was meditating, I became like an overnight serious yogi. I became celibate, vegetarian, I quit smoking, drinking everything. I was meditating hours a day doing yoga every day. I did this for years. And I had nothing like nothing but mystical experiences, precognitive experiences, you name it, all kinds of stuff that I couldn’t understand. That’s what led me to philosophy. One of my experiences in meditation was this feeling like almost omniscient, like I was in this realm of Plato’s forms, right, right, right, this vast space of intelligibility, to use a phrase that you use a lot. And it was, it was like beyond conception. And yet it was filled with understanding. Yes, the weirdest thing. Yes. And I remember coming out of it and thinking, that’s real. That’s more real than this. Yes, I can’t verbalize that. But I need to study philosophy and linguistics and things like that. In order to be able to try to even understand and communicate that and and improve my you know, relationship with that. And that’s what directed me to philosophy. But then when it when I got to the CUNY Grad Center, I mean, as an undergrad, you know, it was classes in ethics, political philosophy, this and that ancient history, blah, blah, it was all interesting and everything, but very little bit of it ever touched on anything remotely except Plato’s Republic, when he talked about the forms. Yes, I’ve experienced that. Yes, yes. And like, I wrote a paper about it, my teacher was very impressed with it. But that was the end of that. Right. You know, nobody else cared about that sort of thing. And he was surprised to hear that I really, really a Platonist. And I was like, well, in that regard, yeah. Yeah. So one of my other teachers in grad school told me, you have an unhealthy interest in the truth. Yeah, the same person, I won’t say his name, because I like the guy, he’s a good man. But he’s a very bright guy. And he’s got a great reputation. But I wanted to focus on cognitive science. Jerry Fodor was in the program when I was there. And Jerry, all these other pets, of courses with these people. And I took classes with these people. And I was like, I’m not going to take classes with these people. But I’m going to take classes with these people. I took courses with these people. And but this mentor of mine said, no, cognitive science is just like a blip on the screen. It’s going to go away in a short period of time. Don’t waste your time on that. Do you believe that? And I was like, really? He’s like, trust me, I know, I’ve been around. Yeah. It’s like, oh, okay. He discouraged me. And we had a concentration in cognitive science in the philosophy program. And I just didn’t do it. I almost majored in psychology when I was undergrad, because philosophy, I couldn’t seem to find enough there. My psychology classes, I tried that. That didn’t, it wasn’t enough. I was like, I knew some stuff that these people didn’t know. And I didn’t know how to articulate it. And now I’m finding out there’s tons of literature out there on this stuff. I just wasn’t directed to it, because I didn’t have proper guidance. But yeah, so even when I when I was in grad school, like I said, the focus was on philosophy of language and whatnot. And the time I decided on what my, what is that called, your prospectus for your dissertation. And I figured it took me a year after I finished all my coursework just to figure out a topic, because I didn’t want to write on any of that stuff. Right. And a fora and why material implication is different from ordinary if then, you know, all those kinds of weird issues that, thinking analytic philosophy stuff. Yeah. But I was interested in free will, because I had some genuinely precognitive experiences that I cannot dismiss on the standard scientific Occam’s razor error theory basis, which is what’s used normally to get rid of and discount those experiences like, oh, probability predicts that with dream shuffling every night and billions of dreams, some of them are going to, the brain is always trying to predict the future and all that. And so some of them are going to have some hits, but I’ve had some multiply complex precognitive dreams that others also had at the same time I had them that were verified and stuff like that. And so to me, just trying to figure out the temporal part, like, could there be free will? So it’s, it’s parallel to the thing about the problem of God’s foreknowledge and free will, right? But there’s a, there’s a problem of anyone’s foreknowledge and free will. So if you have a precognitive experience and between when you have that vision or dream or whatever it is, and when the event actually occurs, if there’s a, you know, like one of them was over a year between the dream and, you know, and some of them were even longer, so many contingent phenomena happen in between then and then, especially if there’s real free will, there’s any kind of real free will, how could that information be like, how could that happen? So that’s what puzzled me originally about free will. Like, you know, if, what is one of the arguments that Augustine makes, like, God is outside of time, so he sees all times equitemporally or something like that. But if that’s true, then every moment is kind of frozen, like a scene on a DVD video recording. And then it’s not moving. It’s, you know, this is a problem between Parmenides and Heraclitus, you know, so I’m like, I’m all over the place trying to figure this stuff out. But there’s, you know, I haven’t found, I’ve got some speculative ideas about what the metaphysics might possibly be. And but the challenge for me being so heavily trained at that analytic philosophy department is, how can I square all this with naturalism? Because, you know, you’re like, you’ve got to be a naturalist, you know, unless you really, you know, that professor of mine told me, you know, you have an unhealthy interest in the truth, like, do I really want to stick my neck out and say, Well, you know what, maybe naturalism isn’t the way, you know, so I don’t know. This is something I’ve been struggling with my whole life since I’m a teenager. Right, right. That’s what drove me into philosophy. And that’s why I’m still practicing, I’ve been practicing meditation for over 40 something years and teaching it for many years. But I’m like, I’m like Voltaire’s Brahmin. You remember that little story? No, I don’t. Oh, it’s a great thing. I’ll send you the link. He tells a story about this Brahmin, who is very knowledgeable as all Brahmins are, you know, they can spout thousands of lines of the Vedas, and they know what all the answers are, they have the whole philosophy down, they officiate at funerals, they are the sources of meaning in that culture, they know what all the answers are. But this guy confesses to Voltaire, that he’s really agnostic, and he doesn’t really know if any of these things are true, and it troubles him. Right. But and then Voltaire says, but this is look at this peasant woman across the street washing her clothes in the river chanting to Krishna. She’s happy and blissful. She’s ignorant. And you’re knowledgeable, you’re unhappy. What’s more important, happiness or wisdom? Right. It’s a brilliant it’s like a one page or two page story. I feel like that guy, you know, yeah. That’s wonderful. Wonderful. Yeah. So but like, I know that I know that meditation is meaningful, important. It’s been the most important thing in my life. I don’t completely understand it. The metaphor, like, if you know a lot about like, Indian and Buddhist, you know, history, they’ve been, you know, debating this for thousands of years. So but even that, you know, I’m a person living right now with unanswered questions. And so I just this has become the focus of my work. Right after I got my PhD, I started working on free will. Oh, that’s what I meant to say. When I was looking for a prospectus, it took me about a year. I got derailed a little in my own tangents. It’s when I finally it’s wonderful tangent was wonderful. Thank you. When I finally when I finally decided I’m going to do it on free will, because that’s the topic that brought me to philosophy. This kind of like, how do you make sense of all this? When I told my advisor, who is Jerry Katz, who’s like the distinguished professor of philosophy, distinguished professor of linguistics, I was his personal grad assistant, I was I got a free ride as his assistant. You know, I was editing his stuff. My name is in a lot of his footnotes and everything. He was like, disappointed. Metaphysics. He was so disappointed. He was, you know, the attitude is something like Owen Flanagan once, you know, who he is, I’m sure. Okay, so I gave a paper on free will at Columbia University Ethics Conference. I was on a panel with other philosophers talking about free will at the conference was around the the conference was revolving around assessing his book, the Bodhisattva’s Brain. Right. But I was on a panel on yeah, it was all Buddhism and ethics and why so I was on a panel on free will and moral responsibility in Buddhism. I gave my paper well after Flanagan heard all these talks, he said, it’s kind of strange seeing this brilliant brain power wasted on free will. It’s the same attitude. He said, it’s kind of like the world’s best physicists working on cold fusion. Right. That was the analogy that he gave. And that attitude is still very strong about free will as if it’s kind of like a useless metaphysical subject. Right. But like, with this all this stuff about the self and Buddhism and impermanence and like, what is agency and you know, so there’s a relationship between my interest in free will and my interest in meditation and Buddhism and all that stuff. So I started writing on that. My dissertation was on free will, but most of my ideas in there were influenced by my meditation practice and Buddhism. So I tried to couch it all in terms of metacognition and self referential abilities being emergent and this and that. And so it was all about metacognition and increased agency and whatnot. And my advisors all tell me put the Buddhism stuff in the footnotes. Take it out of the body of the text. That was in 2005 that that was approved my dissertation. So, but once the dissertation was done, I started focusing more explicitly in almost all my writings on Buddhism and meditation and stuff like that. And so my first thing was I remember a bunch of articles about Buddhism and free will and meditation. I think meditation increases your agency while at the same time making your sense of self more permeable and flexible. So that’s what I was writing about. And then my first, apart from my dissertation being my first book, the next book I did was an edited collection, just like this one with Rutledge, but it was on Buddhism and free will, Buddhism, meditation and free will. And then I wrote a monograph on the subject, my own thinking, Rutledge, they published that. And now this is the next big project. And then the one, the one that you just joined in the handbook on philosophy of meditation, the next one will be my monograph on the same subject. So that’s where I am. That’s where I’ve been. Wow, that was fascinating. And the people, I find it odd that Katz was so opposed to it. He wasn’t opposed to it. He just didn’t. Oh, he was just different. I think he was hoping I would be like a protege or something and just defend his decompositional theory of semantics, which I loved. And I like it. I think it’s brilliant. But, you know, I just didn’t want to write on that stuff. Yeah. His book, The Metaphysics of Meaning had quite a bit of impact on me. Yeah, yeah, it’s a great book. So, I mean, like, there’s about 10,000 things I want to talk to you about after what you have here. That’s why I said an hour and 15 minutes might not happen. Well, maybe we’ll have, well, I’m hoping. Have me back another time. Yeah, I’m really hoping for that. I’m really hoping for that. So I guess the one thing I want to start in on is, I mean, I, well, you know, you’ve seen this series and I do work on it. I mean, you had what I would call a higher state of consciousness that led to a transformative experience. You have this experience. It’s of the really real. It’s more real than somehow your everyday existence. And you transform your life, right? You transform your life. You take a philosophy. You do like, and you build and you reorient to come into right relationship with that, which is exactly what, you know, that’s what a transformative experience is. And so, first of all, being able to talk to somebody with your astuteness about this directly is very exciting to me. Have you had, did you have like a single experience or did you have several of these experiences that were were like that? Multiple, multiple. It got to the point where, yeah, I mean, I was meditating like four hours a day. I would sit in meditation sometimes and be gone, like somebody kind of disappear and come back and thought it was 10 minutes or something and it was four hours, you know, this kind of thing. I was maintaining consciousness sometimes through falling asleep, this lucid, yeah, of awareness that I go to sleep. I’d be in these altered states all night, lucid dreaming, kind of out of body astral, travely kind of very, like some of those just to me, I know the terminology of lucid dreaming is when you know that you’re dreaming without waking up. That’s the standard interpretation, but I would like to have another word and I don’t want to just use the same word because everybody takes that word to mean that, but there have been dreams that are so real and so lucid in the ordinary sense of lucid. Yes, yes. Brilliant, clear, like what’s that word, entonormative that you use, right? They have such a reality to them that they seem more real than the waking state. I’ve had a lot of those and I call them lucid because I don’t know what else to call them, but I understand lucid one and lucid two, but I’ve had a lot of precognitive dreams, like really, like I think I mentioned, multiple precognitive dreams. I’ve had those kind of transcendent Samadhi-like experiences. I have all kinds of weird psychic phenomena, senses of telepathy, seeing people’s energy, almost like psychedelic experiences, but once I started doing this, I stopped taking drugs and all that. I did acid and stuff like that and peyote and all that. Actually, I should say that there was a short period after I got into meditation where I was still doing that stuff, but then at a certain point, I flipped and said, I got to stop doing that. This is better. One of my meditation teachers quoted some Indian guru who said something like, drugs are like plastic grapes and God is the wine or something like that. I like to think of these phrases and it just something clicks and I thought, yeah, and then Ram Dass is guru. Ram Dass was one of my teachers, by the way, I studied with him. He was a part of my sangha for a few years in New York City, that first teacher that I found. Maybe six months into my going to her weekly meditations, I finally talked my best friend into coming, Barry, real hippie, acid freak kind of guy at the time. I finally talked him into coming after he read, Be Here Now, because I carried that book around like it was my Bible. The first time he came, Hilda wasn’t there, Ram Dass was there in her place. He’s like, Hilda’s not feeling well. She asked me to substitute for her and Barry was like, oh my God, this must be the right place. We’ve got Ram Dass. After a short period of time of being in the group, there were all these little private group meditations going on, the splinters, that private little sanghas in one of the teachers’ basement for the elite followers or whatever. We jokingly called them the God Squad. I wound up getting right into all that in a short period of time. I had Hilda, Ram Dass, and another woman named Joya, who was a very spiritually advanced person. She was like a walking ball of psychic energy, what do you call it? Shakti or Chi, or depending on your tradition. I lost my train of thought. I forgot what question I was answering. Oh, did I have just one? No. It got to the point where 24 hours a day, seven days a week, I was in an altered mystical kind of state for a few years. I was in my late teens at that point. And then what happened, this is this interesting thing because you’ll like this story. Ram Dass had been with the group for a few years and he had a falling out with the other two teachers, particularly with Joya, who, according to Ram Dass, wanted to induct him into Tantric training. And Ram Dass felt like he was sincere about it because he’s gay and he thought he’s always been uncertain about his sexuality and he thought maybe this would be good for him. And he tried it, but he thought that she was more human than Tantric in the experience. I’m paraphrasing what he wrote about this. When he left, he wrote an article called Egg on My Beard or something because he felt bad because he brought all of his students to Joya and Hilda. And then he left. When he left, the other two teachers were pointing the finger at each other and Hilda said, yeah, yeah, it’s Joya. She’s kind of like, she got the power too quickly. She’s kind of like Darth Vader or something. Too much power without spiritual evolution enough. Her ego is still there. So they were all pointing fingers and they separated. And to me, I was with them for a few years. My life had been radically transformed. I mean, I really felt like one of the apostles with Jesus for years. And then as if there were three Jesuses and they got a divorce. Oh boy. It was horrifying. And I didn’t know what to do. And I kept wanting to be with all three of them. Ram Dass stopped being a teacher. He would give an occasional lecture in a public forum and I would go to that. But I kept going to Joya’s meetings, her separate little meetings, her sangha, satsang we call it back then. The Hindu name is satsang, a community of satsang, satsang is truth, you know, a community of truth seekers. So, and I kept going to Hilda’s, but then Hilda didn’t want me to go because I was one of her close people. And like there was no love lost between them. And they were, well, Hilda was vilifying Joya. Joya was not vilifying anybody. But so I was like that kid who was like, I’m not going to decide between my parents. But then Hilda at one point challenged me and said, look, if you keep going to Joya’s, you can’t come to the private meetings. You can only come to the open one at the church once a week. So I went there a few times, but after a while, I just didn’t like that whole scene. And it was a horrific loss of support for me. And even though ideologically and philosophically, I’ve always revolted against this idea that I read it mostly in these, you know, contemplative traditions that you need a community. Because I had such a bad experience with community, I like resisted that narrative whenever I come across it. But on reflection, just recently thinking about it and having a discussion with someone else like you just the other day, I realized that I went through, which I didn’t mention yet, I went through a kind of dark night of the soul, really like negative, supernaturalistic, psychic, you know, mystical experiences. After I lost the connection with the satsang with the sangha. It sounded very traumatizing. Yeah. And I was, you know, I was in my late teens, I don’t know, 18 something 19, I forget the exact age, but I had all that. It was like I was completely psychically open, like my chakras were wide open, I was very sensitive, but I had no supports. Right. And so all of a sudden, I was having all these negative spiritual experiences. And it really felt like, like, I was waiting for myself to have a stigmata or something, like I felt like I was being attacked, you know, because I just didn’t have when prior to them splitting up, I was in a Garden of Eden kind of state, right? All the time, I was so in the flow, everything was so natural and connected. And then it just became very alienated. And I got I had a lot of weird overnight dreams, I felt like I was battling demons and everything. It just got too freaky for me. And I had some symbolic moments, like I had this one dream that was lucid, not, you know, I wasn’t awake. But it was actually my lucid dreams are almost both senses of lucid. In that period, because I would be awake, I would not I would be aware, I’d be conscious. Yeah, during the dream, and I knew that it was an altered reality, I knew I wasn’t in the waking world. So I it was lucid. But it was so normal for me that it didn’t hit me like, Oh, I’m in a lucid dream, you know, it was all the time for me. But one of them, many of them were so lucid, they were lucid in that second sense of more real than real. And in one of them, I was climbing up this tower, this wooden shaft, very high, and I knew that it represented my spiritual ascension. And when the higher I went, the thinner it got, it was wood, and it was being blown about by the wind, and it was rickety. And the higher I went, the more dangerous it was. And I was almost at the top. And I knew I if I went any further, if the whole thing would collapse. And so I just turned around and went back down. And after that dream, and a couple of other things like that, I had a whole bunch of these kind of, you know, noetic, omen like insights that let me know, I was playing with something that I was not equipped to play with, I did not have the right skills, I didn’t have the right development. So I decided I had a bunch of clues, like on what I could do. And I remember what’s his name? Ramakrishna, Sri Ramakrishna, Viva Kananda’s teacher in the 1800s. I don’t know if the Vedantist. I remember him, I remember reading that he smoked cigars or cigarettes or pipes, whatever to keep him in his body. That was one clue. And somebody else, some Buddhist, you know, shaman guy told his student that you need to eat meat or something, because you know, you’re too imbalanced or whatever. And, you know, so there was a bunch of these clues. And I just decided, I did this intense sadhana, you know, spiritual work, to that brought all this on, opened me up, I’ve got to do like a reverse sadhana. Right. And that’s what I did. So I started smoking and everything I gave up, I brought back. And I was like, I’m going to give up, I brought back. And there was another period of my life where I started doing everything again. And that was fun. It was like being born again in the flesh. I’m born again in the spirit. It was like going from a black and white world into a colorful world. Like I had ignored what in the two worlds ontology, I was not in the lower world. It was happy to come back to that world. And then I kept, all I kept was my yoga practice, my mantras, two mantras that I’ve been doing. One is like the Jesus prayer or from the Church Fathers, kiri-e-la-zong, you know, and om mani padme hum, the Tibetan daily mantra. You know, Ram Dass had taught me that, like he initiated me in that, and gave me a malar and all this kind of stuff and put me into samadhi. I had a phenomenal experience just being Ram Dass once. But like I kept what I thought would sustain me, because I knew I needed to keep my spiritual practice. But what would shut down the chakras and all that, whatever all that other stuff was, you know, I just tried to avoid anything that would like certain kinds of pranayama practices, you know, like chi cultivating practice. I eliminated all of that. I just kept a simple mantra, which I could do throughout the day, you know, while I’m jogging or whatever, doing anything, you know, and my mindfulness thing, which guess who taught me that? He was a member of that same group, Danny Goldman. Oh, wow. You’ve known a lot of the stars, that’s for sure. Danny’s name back then was Jagannath Das. He was one of, him and Ram Dass had the same guru, the little old man in India, Maharaj, named Kurali Baba. So Danny was in the in our satsang back then, and he taught me mindfulness. So I thought, yeah, that’s kind of clean and simple. And it’s, you know, there are places where you could go like insight meditation, whatever, where it’s just, there’s no guru thing involved. I was averse to gurus. I could see why. Anything Hindu, theosophical, anything that sounded like that, I just avoided it. I wanted something like Zen, but I didn’t know any Zen, you know, other than just, you know, whatever I could do on my own, you know, zazen or whatever, but I didn’t have any teachers, but I knew how to do vipassana. And so I’ve been doing that for decades as my primary practice and yoga. Wow. I mean, when you were doing it, you reminded me of Hessa Siddhartha. Yes. Very much, except you lived it. No, I was going to say that, but I don’t know if you would remember that scene, that part of his life where he stops being a Samana and becomes a worldly guy. Yeah, that image I got from him about color coming back. Right. Exactly. In this world, in world one. That was one of the two books that really opened me up in my late teens. Me too. So do you still have, like, do you still have mystical experiences or transformative experiences, or are you in a place where that’s no longer something you seek or that comes to you? What’s like, like, usually people do this and then they go down and then they then they learn to sort of do this, like, right, integrate. Where are you at with respect to that? Yeah, I’ve been reluctant to open any of those floodgates. I can imagine. Ever since that happened. So I have a good practice. When I’m more steady in my practice, you know, my practice goes up and down. Of course. But I pretty much, I do yoga virtually every day and I do various different kinds of little meditative things every day. And if you’ve been a multiple decades practitioner, meditation infuses a lot of your life. Oh, of course. When you’re washing dishes or what, you know, so many different, but I also sit. And but when I when my sitting practice gets a little deeper, I go deeper. But even if I’m only sitting for 20 minutes sometimes, or a half hour or 40 minutes or whatever. I’ll go in the zone where it’s a gnostic place. Yeah, where my philosophical concerns don’t matter to me at all. Yeah, it’s the weirdest thing. And when I come out of it, I’m like, I feel great. I feel connected. But then this skeptical philosopher addiction of mine comes back and I’m like, Okay, how could I, you know, how do I how do I integrate that? How do I so that’s why I’m writing all the stuff that I’m writing, because I’m hoping that just by keep delving into this and talking to other people like you and you know that this will this will grow. But I do believe that I’m moving back. I’m starting to feel confident and mature enough that okay, I was a kid, I had a libido, I had an ego, I had all kinds of stuff that I didn’t know about, like that you say, like 99% of what we do is not consciously calculated. But like, I feel, I feel kind of grounded enough. I’m not I’m not so worried about that anymore. But I’m very busy. So I don’t have time to meditate for hours a day. But I am moving in that direction. Yeah, yeah, that’s amazing. That’s amazing. I’m glad, Rick. First of all, I’m really glad to have met you. And I hope this is an ongoing thing. Oh, so do I listen to me after hearing all the things, not just the series of the 50 lectures, but a couple of these voices with Reveke. Just yesterday, I listened to something that published I think the day before, but it was recorded in September. The Four Horsemen of Meaning. Oh, yeah, that was awesome. Yeah, everything I listened to you that you’re on, I’m like, Wow, I wish I would have known this guy, you know, when I was in grad school, you know, my trajectory would have been, you know, I would have been more equipped, I think, to deal with the issues that I’m struggling with. But it’s never too late. But I even think that it might be the case, like, I don’t know, when you talk about providence and things like that, like, you know, I’m very skeptical of this mantra almost, it’s like a proverb, everything happens for a reason, you know, like, I ripped that thing apart with Occam’s razor and error theories, and like, there’s no way you could possibly calculate that or, you know, test that or anything. So like, it’s like useless. But sometimes is that there are other ways of understanding the same thing, like it maybe even if it’s just, well, it worked out for the best, right? Okay, so, you know, that’s that’s naturalistic, it worked out for the best. Okay, let’s go with that minimalistic version of it. But like, me struggling and going through analytic philosophy, going to it because of that vision that said, you need to study philosophy, not getting what I need, but becoming such a skeptic and an empiricist and everything, that that may be challenged, like, I really doubt my incredibly gnostic, noetic experiences, I’m capable of doubting them from a rational perspective, better than anybody else, I can, you know, I asked people, I’ll tell them, this is what happened to me, debunk it, right, but I could do it, you know, like this. Yeah. But I think like that was good, because, like you, you want to reverse engineer enlightenment, right? If I can address the skeptic in my own head to my own satisfaction, about the validity of my experiences, then I’ve done great work in my life. If I could share that with others. So I think my struggle, my existential philosophical, psychological, spiritual struggle is a good one. Yeah, I, wow, I think that’s, I think that it’s extremely well said, and extremely pertinent. Oh, okay, there’s one, there’s a thread I want to pick up. I want to ask you. Now, you said this, because I had a somewhat similar experience. I, you know, I break out of fundamentalism, I start doing all this stuff. And, you know, and I’m in the depths of the meaning crisis and all this stuff, my own personal version of it. And I get to university, and I encountered the figure of Socrates reading the Republic. And I have some of my first mystical experiences. You know, I remember having, I was sitting in bed, and I was meditating. And I had, I don’t know what to call it. It was both a visionary experience, a mystical experience of the platonic forms. And it was like, and it just sort of hit me like this. And it was very much, right? And it for me, it’s become like a touchstone, phenomenological touchstone taste. Because, and you, and you, and you spoke it to you, you have, you get to this place that is trans conceptual, yet nevertheless, completely impregnated with intelligibility in a way that’s, yeah, exactly. And amazing, and how the platonic stuff somehow is very good vocabulary for trying to talk about this. This is what I’ve been trying to articulate. And I think in a clumsy fashion, in many ways, because people will do the same thing to me is like, what, you’re some kind of neoplatonist, but you’re committed to your committed sciences. What’s going on? How does that work? And yeah, and trying to work that out. Very much. Do you still have that aspect of the phenomenology? Do you still get to that place where it feels like you’re trans conceptual, yet nevertheless, like it’s in it’s, it’s filled with impregnated with intelligibility. The reason I asked that is we did a we did an experiment in my lab. And it’s, it was odd that nobody was more of a correlational study, but right that nobody had ever done this. We wanted to see, is there a relationship between having mystical experiences and finding your life more meaningful? We went looking for the literature on this, expecting to find an extensive and there was nothing, right? That was my experience as a philosopher. Like there was some stuff out there. I just couldn’t find it. Well, so we ran the experiment and what we found is yeah, there is a relation. And what’s interesting is it’s not so much any of the phenomenological content that is in that is carrying the correlation. It’s the machinery of insight. It’s that sense of the dawning of new intelligibility and the opening up, you know, the moment of insight is itself ineffable, right? And that is the thing that’s actually what is carrying doing the heavy lifting of mediating between the mystical experience and the enhanced meaning of life. So that’s why I’m asking you, do you still get that sense? And the reason why I’m interested in that, sorry, I’m talking too much. The reason I’m interested- No, no, no, you’re not. I’m loving this. I’m getting as much from this as you are. Trust me, if not more. The real interest in this is because I’m interested in, you know, the, you know, I’m working on this proposal. That’s what it is. Some kind of continuum between things like fluency in the cognitive sense, insight, flow, mystical experiences, et cetera. And flow has that sense of in it too, right? At the heart of flow is the sense of ongoing discovery, but the, you know, the verbal machinery is shut off and you get a lot of that happening. And for me, that has a pedagogical value because I don’t know if you know, Chick-Sat-Mahai just died. Oh, no. Yes. But one of the things there is the- That was great work that he’s done. Yeah, great work. His point that flow is universally accessible and therefore one of the true universals. For me, when I try to talk to people about this stuff, they’ll often look at me like, like if I, but if I talk to them about insight experiences and then flow experiences and then say, okay, can you take that and then do this? They often go, oh, yeah, I’ve had that experience. So if you present them with sort of the typical like lingo of the mystical experience, they’ll often go, but if you do this, they’ll go, oh, I’ve had that. I know what you’re talking about now. And that’s why I’m asking you, did you, is that still part of the phenomenology for you? That sense of being on the horizon of intelligibility? Oh, yeah. Like I said, you know, even in a 20 minute meditation, I feel like I get in the zone. It’s that space where I know I’m connected with that. Even if it’s ineffable, it’s real. And that’s why I said like, when I’m in that place, I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And like the skeptic in me is not there. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes it has a shape, some aspectual shape to it. Yeah. Yet I don’t care about that as much. No, no, no. It’s just being there. Like just the fact that I can go, it’s like the watering hole for my soul or something, you know. Yeah, yeah. I sometimes use the metaphor of the fount of intelligibility. Yeah, I like that. Yeah, right. I’m so glad I got to meet you. So I’m just going to introduce it to first of all, right now, explicitly, I’m inviting you back. Let’s set something up soon. Let’s maybe even do a few. Oh, totally. I’m afraid. Excellent, excellent. Because this is just, this is the beginning of a very fruitful discussion here. So one thing, and I know we won’t be able to like, finish this or anything. That’s okay. We’ll be back. We’ll be back. But like what, and this goes directly to the book, right? What is the, what is what, like, and you said you’re writing the monograph. So it’s fair for me to ask this question. You’re reflecting on this. What is the connection between philosophy and the, you know, meditation contemplation, right? And, you know, and I understand there’s two different meanings to this word philosophy. There’s what you and I were both thought I was brought up in the analytic tradition too. It’s the conceptual analysis and reflection on the, you know, fundamental conceptual structures of language or science or, or maybe art, right? You can do that if you do it right. Right. Stuff like that. All of that. Philosophy of X. Yes. Yeah. And I don’t begrudge all of the tremendous tools that that education gave me, but then there’s philosophy, like the way Pierre Rodot talks about it. Philosophy is a way of life, the cultivate, the love of wisdom, the transformation. And so I’m sort of asking you a double question. What’s the, let’s call the first one philosophy and the second one on philosophy. Okay. Right. So what’s the connection between meditation and philosophy and meditation and philosophy? How’s that for a very open-ended and provocative question? You know, that’s a perfect question for the editor of the book. I should be able to sketch some kind of an answer to that. So look, you know, I wish, like I said, I wish I had studied with you when I was in grad school. I only found out about Hado’s work, you know, after grad school. Yeah. I only found out about it. Yeah. After I was done, I was already teaching and everything. But yeah, I love that approach and I’m like learning a lot, but like that’s, that’s the contemplative path. If you’re a meditation practitioner, you’re doing philosophy as a way of life already. So we’ll put like, there are, there are crossovers between the two. I mean, there are many people who do philosophy as a way of life, who have no interest in the kind of work that analytic philosophers do. Yes. And I’m also, this is another thing that I’m learning just from listening to you. I’ve had a very hard time penetrating continental philosophy because I got a training in analytic philosophy from undergrad straight through grad school. And it was always treated as hooey because it’s hard to get through the language and the metaphors and all that kind of stuff. And it’s so abstract and it’s not like the logical deductive in the same way that you know, Cartesian law, you know, so, so I never learned all that, but now I’m really seeing a lot of brilliant useful stuff in that, like in phenomenology and in Heidegger and all that, that shows the connection between the two. Right. But one, I’ll tell you one of my meditation teachers, a woman in the Burmese, you know, she was one of Goenka’s students. Her English name is Ruth Denison. I don’t know if you know her, but I know of her. Yes. Dhammadena is her, her spiritual name. Well, I did a retreat with her and I remember she defined just off the cuff in like one of her lectures about to lead a meditation. She said, Oh, mindfulness is just extraordinary attention to ordinary experience. And I fastened on that. And I thought philosophy is extraordinary attention. Oh, beautiful. Beautiful. Yeah. And I’ve, I’ve been using that and I’ve added like, well, for the Western analytic non, not, not necessarily continental, but maybe it might apply to that as well. I’ve added to that. Like I changed one word instead of analysis, but no, attention instead of extraordinary attention to ordinary experience. I said extraordinary examination of ordinary experience. That’s what more, what goes on in academic philosophy, right? Whereas maybe in the filosofia, the mindfulness thing is perfect the way it is. But like, so then there’s this distinct, I’m trying to get out too much of all at once. I’m getting excited. I share it. I know that happens to you. But I’ll add this phrase, extraordinary examination of ordinary experience and the concepts, language, beliefs, theories, worldviews, et cetera, arising in connection there with, right? So then that captures, you know, Western philosophy, but it also captures a lot of Indian philosophy. Yes. Because you’ve got both things going on in the history of Buddhism and Nyaya school and all the, you know, the six orthodox schools of Indian philosophy. And in, well, Taoism, I don’t know enough about how that fits in with Taoism because Taoism is pointedly less conceptually oriented and more comfortable with the indescribable nature of the ground of being and all that kind of stuff. The Tao is not the, you know, the spoken Tao is not the Tao. So we don’t focus on the spoken part that much except pointing, you know, but so that’s part of my answer to that question, right? That, you know, they can both be considered part of some, and the language isn’t perfect, but there’s some meta category that includes extraordinary examination of ordinary experience and the language and all that stuff and just attention to and transformation of, like what I’ve heard you say, the train, when you get an insight, you realize I have to train this. Yes. This is my equipment or whatever you say, transparency and opacity shift. You realize the way that I’m operating might be a problem. Yeah. And you start paying attention to that and making adjustments to that and disciplining and training that. So if you do martial arts, which I know you do Tai Chi, I believe you said. Yes. I’m a fourth degree black belt in Japanese karate. Yeah. So yeah, any kind of training, like I love that training, by the way, my sensei retired years ago and then he died a few years ago. I kept practicing on my own. I tried a couple of other schools, but I was never happy with them. But I did a Tai Chi for about a year when I was younger. I love that too. But yeah, I mean, any kind of training like that, you become aware of the glasses. You work on sharpening them. So like, I mean, it’s hard to really come up with perfect definitions. I mean, I have an article in the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Philosophy about, it’s called Meditation, where I try to define meditation. And that’s almost impossible. It’s like almost impossible to define philosophy. Yeah. Because you’ve got Western and with among Western, you’ve got analytic and continental, and then all the subdivisions, you know, you’re a rationalist, you’re an empiricist, you’re a pragmatist, you’re this, and all that’s academic. And then there’s the hado stuff, you know, and that hado stuff is more like mysticism and spirituality and, you know, the contemplative path. There’s no easy answer to that. That’s what the book is about, to try to straddle that out. Yeah, yeah. So, do you have an answer to the question that you asked me? Well, I like what you said about extraordinary attention on ordinary experience, and then extraordinary examination, which sounded very Socratic to me, like extraordinary in a particular way, in a Socratic way. Yeah, it should be a hyphen in extraordinary. It’s not like, oh, that’s extraordinary, like, it’s just more than ordinary. It’s a heightened, above ordinary. Yes, yes. I agree. And the other thing is, yeah, I’ve struggled with this distinction between examination and attention. So, you know that as a meditator, you can just glue your focus on X. Yes, yes. Just keep it there. Right? That’s a training. Right? That’s only one part of it, though. Right? Then there’s the, where you’ve got your attention on the one thing, which is like, you’ve shuttered in your lens so that you’re only paying, but then within that zone, within the focal field, you can really be examining everything that’s going on. Right? So, but you could pay attention without examining, and you can examine without that kind of attention. Yeah. And so that’s great. And then there’s all those different definitions of mindfulness, like in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition and the Zen tradition, like, they all grab on one or another aspect of that. Exactly. Exactly. And different, they argue about it. And, you know, like to me, it’s like, well, those are all great tools. They could all work together, you know. I’m a little iconoclastic about traditions because of my experience. I’ve been kind of forced to find my way. Like, I’m like, okay, I have the honeybee philosophy. I go, okay, you’re a teacher, a teaching, a philosophy, a doctrine, whatever it is. If there’s something in there I could use, it’s pollen, I’ll take it, I’m going to make my own honey. And I reject these traditional things, well, you’ve got to do it this way. In our system, you start, you go there, and then the next step, and you know, I’m more like Krishnamurti, you know. You and I are like that too. So I interrupted you, but are we out of time? I don’t have a watch handy. So I know we are. I got another meeting I got to get to. And so I want to, I’m going to ask Madeline to set up a meeting as soon as possible between us. And we’re going to be good. So we can keep this going. We can keep this going. We’ll come back with your question to me. I’ll answer it. And we can get logical and keep going. I’m extremely excited about this, Rick. Thank you so much. Me too. It’s not often that you get to speak to somebody on your level who you can get something from and give something to. So that’s what this is all about. This is fantastic. All right, John. Thank you. Great. Great. Awesome. Thank you.