Towards a Metapsychology that is True to Transformation 4 - The Cognitive Science Show. (FyjsPtHG1VI)

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Welcome everyone to another episode of the Cognitive Science Show towards a meta-psychology that is true to transformation, a transformation very broadly construed but very correctly construed to be reaching into primitive learning machinery up until today. Especially we’re going to talk about issues of self-transcendence, the spiritual and religious dimensions of human development. Once again, I’m joined by my friends and just Socratic companions, Zachary Stein and Greg Enriquez. I’ll let them again introduce themselves briefly. I’ll set up the bridging platform from the previous episode. Zach will take the lead for a while and then we’ll shift into something perhaps a little bit more dialogical in nature. First, if you guys could just reintroduce yourself. Hey, Greg Enriquez, Cognitive Science Show probably knows me by now, so I’ll just say that. Yeah, Zach Stein and happy to be here, developmental psychologist and other things. We’ve been tracing out and very carefully, and I’m not going to redo the whole argument because it’s become quite complex without, I think, becoming unclear. I think the complexity has added to clarity rather than detracting from it. What I’ll just do is summarize where we’re getting to. We ended the last episode with talking about sort of two or three things that were in deep relation. One was the importance of the imaginal aspect of human cognition and behavior for development. This is connected to serious play and a lot of the issues that Zach was talking about in the time. I won’t go over it again, but the role of that kind of behavior within the Piagetian framework and how profound it gets was talked about. Many other things were talked about. That’s not all that was going on in the previous episode, but we were centering on that point towards the end and we brought up the issue about religion as the imaginal serious play that can afford development. Then this brought up the possibility, well, we can get sort of imaginally augmented real pattern detection and you could see religion at its best helping people to do this, the mythological, the imaginal, and therefore being a way in which adults can go through serious play and significant development, but Zach brought up also the very real and corresponding danger via Baudrillard that what we might be trapped within is the imaginal can become a self-enclosed simulation, a hyperreality that actually disconnects us from reality in an important way. That, of course, brought up for me the important notion of religio, which of course might be one of the etymological words for religion. It has to do with connectedness. Some of you know the work I’ve done on relevance realization, connectedness, meaning in life, and I wanted to understand the relationship between human capacity for reflection on how the imaginal was being used, connections between reflection, religio, and wisdom. Then that immediately brought up connections to what I hope will be the main part of our discussion today, which is the dimensions that Zach has highlighted in his work of development that have to do around insolent and spirit and self-transcendence. There’s going to be discussion about that, so I’m not going to try and foreclose on what that means. That’s precisely what we are going to try and explore together. First of all, gentlemen, is that fair enough where the platform problem is for us? Yeah, go ahead. Great, excellent. As promised, I was going to ask Zach to take the lead on this and start perhaps. What’s the religio reflection wisdom, and then how does that require us? I think it does, but maybe you disagree. How does it require us to spring in these deeper dimensions of development that we’re pointing at with these ancient notions of soul and spirit? Yeah, totally. It’s a wonderful platform for what I want to discuss. As I discussed in the prior ones, I’m a developmental psychologist, and I did a lot of work in cognitive development, Piaget and all that tradition. I also looked at everything that had been done in development, and some of that wasn’t about cognition. Some of that was about things like emotional development and ego development and the development of meditative capacity, the development of the ability to participate in certain religious rituals and be kind of anointed as having reached a certain capacity of religious initiation or something like that. So zoom across all these developmental models aided by people like Wilbur and others. What became very clear was that they’re not all comparable. Cognitive development, and specifically the people who proceed along a very advanced line of cognitive development, are different from, for example, people who are extremely mature and have extremely sophisticated character structures. This is a common problem in the literature, and also one of the obvious critiques of the cognitive developmental tradition, which is that really smart people, cognitively advanced people, abstract and complex, linguistically, mathematically sophisticated people, can be naive and immature and socially inept or worse. Sometimes you refer to that as cognitive skill development in some ways, or I think that’s a useful word to tie to that for people to track what your meaning is there. So I’ll just throw that out there. Cognitive is a pretty loose word potentially, so cognitive skill is a nice area anyway. Yeah, no, you’re right. Cognition can be defined as broadly as basically psyche. Some people make cognition and mind coterminous. I’m actually making cognition in a strict sense. It has to do with operations concerning space and time and things of that nature. Baldwin, who I’ve mentioned before, made a distinction between three major domains of development as a child grows. One has to do with concern with the objective world. There’s the classic phedian stages of understanding causality and things of that nature. There’s another dimension of development that has to do with the interpersonal world, specifically mom first, specifically attachment patterns and things of that nature. And then there’s another developmental trajectory that has to do with relation to yourself. Beautiful. So I, we, it developing asynchronously. And so this is my point. I’m defining cognition as those elements of psychological process that have to do with orienting the nervous system, the body and the mind to the existence of space and time and physics and those realities. And you can develop quite far along those capacities and not have as rich an experience in the social world in its many dimensions of obligation and commitment and value and things of that nature to become what I’ve called mature. So, and then self-reference, self-reflection, meditation, awareness, emotional self-regulation, emotional self-awareness, relation, development in the eye, which often feels more like wisdom than maturity. Well, I was going to say that because those dimensions, I tend to take a very broad notion of cognition because I relate it to knowing that was the original meaning. And turns out all of these are ways of knowing, I would argue, but that’s something we could talk about another time. I would agree. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, so if we, if we broaden knowing to me, what I call the four kinds of knowing that that’s how I understand cognition, but I don’t think that’s an important point here. The point I wanted to make was that, you know, something analogous or perhaps isomorphic goes on in the wisdom literature, properly called, you know, the psychology and cognitive science and neuroscience of wisdom, typified, for example, by the work of Monica Ardelt and others. We did this, Monica was part of the wisdom consensus paper where you talk about, you know, the cognitive dimension of wisdom, which has to do with understanding. She different, you know, she uses Keek’s distinction between, you know, descriptive knowledge, descriptive explanatory knowledge and interpretive. And when we’re talking about wisdom, we’re talking about that interpretive function. That’s the cognitive function, an affective dimension, which, as you mentioned, it has to do with attachment issues. And then a reflective dimension, which has to do with this meta-perspectival ability and that wisdom has to involve a very, I would argue, I don’t know, Monica would be happy with this language, but I would say they have to form a well-functionally self-organizing dynamical system in order to qualify wisdom. All of that is a way of saying that I think the wisdom literature, for whatever reason, I think it is independent, although some of these people have been influenced by the same influences as you, Zach. So I don’t know what the degree of convergence is, but anyways, there’s consilience between sort of the standard dimensionality that’s coming out in the wisdom literature and what you’re putting your finger on here. I think, I think it could be. Those three that identify in the meta-psychology as development, installment, transcendence, I see them everywhere. That’s why I like them as categories. They work in a lot of contexts. And then again, back to Baldwin’s, you know, it, we, and I being those basic dimensions. And then for transformation, you get something like skill development, something like personality development, which I call insolent because I’m in the tradition of that, that’s dealing with it that way. And then you get something like consciousness development or development of awareness or reflection, which is what’s, which is what is actually kind of measured or assessed in those meditative traditions that have thresholds of capacity from which you can bestow teaching. See there, I wouldn’t say consciousness precisely because of like, because of all the work, for example, Greg and I’ve done, I’m going to tell you, I think the, this idea of meta-perspectival ability is right. So mindfulness is clearly meta-perspectival. It’s the ability to take a perspective on your perspective forming abilities. It’s classically meta-perspectival. And when we’re talking about any kind of meta-cognition, we’re invoking a meta-perspectival element. Again, this is just being a little bit, maybe even nitpicky about terms, but I, that’s what I mean when I think, what I say, why I think that, that dimension particularly lines up with what you’re sort of that reflective self-understanding. If I’m understanding you correctly. No, no, I think you are. And like, I think about it with what are you operating on in those three domains in the domain of skill, it’s kind of language and certain kinds of capacity and facility with the world in the domain of in solman, you’re actually operating with image and imagination and relationship. And then this domain of transcendence, I place that you’re actually operating on consciousness itself. You’re working with awareness. And so that’s why I labeled it as consciousness because in those ones, consciousness is present and that you’re using consciousness, the grasp of consciousness works with language and with other people and those things. But in this domain, you’re with consciousness itself and operating on consciousness with consciousness. And what gets interesting is there is that that’s actually the root of things like emotional self-awareness and emotional self-regulation, which I place in that domain. And that’s where you can get, again, what alerted me to this was that I was encountering people who I understood as having undergone a lot of transformation in the sense that we’re talking about, like, but some of them were really smart and had never meditated a day in their life and were very disorganized. And you could tell, and then other people were really, really mature, but not super like intelligent in a classical sense and had no spiritual practice. And then I met other people who were advanced meditators and you could tell just by their capacity being with them, but they were not actually that mature or sophisticated cognitively. And so I was like, these are actually distinct. And so I started to see that these were relatively asynchronous forms of development that people could move in. And some different fields of developmental psychology or just psychology looked at them, you know, and what I call ensoulments, broadly speaking, the depth psychological field. I’m focusing mostly on the Jungian tradition, because it’s the one that I spent the most time in, but it includes the work of Freud and others, and specifically Harry Stack Sullivan, who I think is maybe one of the most important figures in that area of thinking about the way personality structures accrue over time in relationship to needs satisfaction possibilities in the social field, and those complexify over time. Just so different from trying to figure out how to circumnavigate the physical world. And so different from so I started to see these cleavings in this field of studying transformation, and realizing that, you know, there were ways of doing assessment ways of thinking about how the transformation worked, like, Piagetian stage theory works in narrow domains of what I’m calling cognitive development. Right. It does not work in the domains of personality and character development, emotional development, it just simply doesn’t. And those two never touch things that happen in meditative attainment and meditative transformation. This is a strong claim. And I’m saying it’s part of the cleavings and confusions in psychology, and in these fields that deal with transformation is that they’re mixing apples and oranges, and they don’t kind of realize it. Are they bridging? Sorry, let you go to what I mean is, they’re all related, ultimately. Right. So for example, like, you can see that there’s a meta trait of pursuing self correction in each one of these. Right. And then, and then I think I’ll turn it over to Greg in a sec, because I’m wondering with I see virtue as something that is trying to coordinate the development of these three. So they are mutually affording. And that brings up character. And that brings up one of Greg’s critiques of and then I like Greg talk, a person of standard weight, like we’re using the term personality here. And I hear you saying something other than how that is standardly used in psychology. And Greg has done a lot about, you know, the way standard personality theory, big five theory is deficient because it leaves out character as an important variable. So I’m seeing again, this makes me think of wisdom and virtue and character. And those are deeply interpenetrating ideas as being a meta trait. I don’t want to call it a traits, not quite the right word, but you know what I’m trying to get? I’m trying to get at a meta factor that is that is specifically directed to the problem of properly aligning mutual affordance and development between them. Yes, so Greg, I, sorry, I know that I was going to, I was going to allude to that, but I can weave that in. Absolutely. So the thing, here’s what I was going, which I think is complimentary, but when we were mapping the cell, we talked about sort of the experiential consciousness system. And then the first thing that it starts to do is it models the simulation of the paths of the self down various possible environmental agent arena relations. And really that creates then the first model of the self, which is an agent arena relationship across time. And that’s going to set the stage for sort of an instrumental control relationship because it’s not very social. Then we added a social self other grounded in attachment. And I heard you say, have first with the mother or with the caretaker. And then that to me, then that’s going to ground in Solomon and character. Ultimately the core sense of self and relationship to other, the image and affect constellation of what I would call character formation and character functioning, what we deal with in psychotherapy. And then finally, I just was finished reading a greater toward a greater psychology of the, on Surya or Bundo’s work as a yogi. Right. And basically that’s dropping into consciousness, what I’d call mind too, and getting perspective on the ego and affording the capacity to transcend the local perspective and expand that structure into afford a wise meta perspective on the world in relation and expand consciousness beyond the self in a particular kind of way. I see those lines as lining up pretty close to what I’m hearing in your- Yeah, no, and that’s not a, I mean, I’m very glad you brought Urbindo in, one is hesitant to bring in the great Indian mystic and sage and freedom fighter and prolific nominated for the Nobel prize by Adox Huxley. And his work influenced me greatly, especially in that domain of transcendence, because he actually lays out as, as Hinduism does and other meditative traditions do these developmental transformations of consciousness, stealing with itself, if I can put it that way. So it’s the hierarchies of meditative attainments and higher states of transpersonal consciousness, which I class in this domain of transcendence, which are actually not super unusual experiences. They’re just not, they’re just not named in our culture very well. And this is one of the things that Urbindo does really well because he was trained in England and, you know, was reading the Odyssey and the Greeks. And so he’s merging part of the Bengal Renaissance, which is an amazing occurrence. He’s merging the Western and the Eastern very well. So he’s a really good source to plug in for the kind of thinking I’m doing in the meta-psychology. And- I’ll offer, let me offer a quick comment, because it’s interesting, grounded as I am in naturalistic scientific psychology, and maybe in a unified theory, but 10 years ago, I got that book, A Greater Psychology, on his work, got into about 30 pages like, this is way too out there. I just re-read it two weeks ago. It’s like, oh my God, oh, I can follow the whole track through wisdom energy, the expansion into overmind. I have a whole iconic sun god that is the divine that shines back on me, see the desolution of the ego. I mean, you know- Your system is actually very, your system’s very Urbindian. And Urbindo sometimes described as having the most comprehensive system since Plotinus in terms of this full stack, great chain being kind of model. But he has the evolutionary, just like you do, Greg, with the key points. And he sees those nodal points going back to the Hindu- I was amazed. It really is amazing. And he goes capital L life, capital M mind, into matter. I mean, it’s like, what the fuck? I was really- Urbindo is not a joke. And it’s very interesting. And he himself, of course, was a serious mystic. So he has these first personal experiences that he’s giving account of, both of the imaginal, like you’re describing John, with the overlay. And this, so I’ll rewind. So that’s what I was noticing about character structure, was that the people I encountered in the material I was reading about character structure, it became clear that what the person does who is mature is actually overlays the world with the power of their imagination. Like they actually, that’s like you feel a sense when you’re with a very mature person, of their ability to create rituals spontaneously, just by virtue of having, because they’re such a, like they’re, they are expressing something, a potential of personality, which is aspirational for everyone in their presence. And so that this makes possible creation of a context. And then the manner in which they carry themselves, the manner in which they make sense of the properties of their own mind and their own imagination and these kinds of things. And so Urbindo had, in his own experience, in his own practice as a spiritual teacher, I mean, creator of the whole city, Auroville was created by the Indian government to honor him. I’m not sure if it’s still the case, but for a long time in Indian national TV, it was Gandhi and then Urbindo and then we moved on. So this isn’t, these aren’t the mystical rantings of some person who was not taken to, like this is a profoundly transformative experiences in his life, would be almost impossible to explain without expanding psychology beyond the dimensions of the West. So can we zero in on that connection right there? Because we’re all resonating on it. I can feel it. And for me, that’s a place in which let me call it the Baudrillard problem is coming to the fore. And here’s how I want to phrase the question problem. It seems like we’re and I want to use this term and pick up on both meanings of it, given what I said a few minutes ago, it seems like we’re properly talking at the, for what you’re calling the insolvent dimension, if that’s fair, Zach, we’re talking about a virtuosity, both senses of the word of the imaginal. And I want to know what does, like, what does that look like functionally and phenomenologically? Because that’s the key of, you know, the distinction between imaginally augmented reality detection. And that’s what you’re talking about with overlaying the imaginal. That’s exactly what augmented reality is. That’s what we do, like it heads up displays and things like that, right? And the Baudrillard, no, no, this is self enclosed stimulation that, you know, that is what we’re seeing is increasingly dangerous in our world today. And so in both senses of the word, there must be some virtuosity to the imaginal. And we need to not talk about that abstractly, but concretely, specifically, and practically in the sense of what, how is it practiced? How is it developed? How do people acquire or cultivate virtuosity in the imaginal? And then if we get an answer to that question, I think that will help me more deeply understand what you mean by the insulment. I mean, I’ve done a lot of work. I’ve gone through Jungian therapy. I’ve done a lot of workshops. I’ve done IFS. I read a lot of Raft’s work and other people. So this is like, I’m not unfamiliar with this. And so I want to, and part of the issue I’ve always had with many very good presentations of the Jungian is I don’t know, there’s no, there’s no, I want to be careful and respectful, but there isn’t a clear stepping back and justifying the methodology in terms of a clear theory of the phenomenology and functionality of the virtuosity of the imaginal. That’s why I find Corban’s work, for example, much more relevant on exactly that issue. So does that make sense of what I’m trying to, like that for me, this is a knife edge issue. Sorry, that sounds threatening. I didn’t mean it to. What I mean is like, The soul’s on the knife edge, Zach. Playing with the etymology. This is a decisive issue for me. How about if I put it that way, right? Do you want to go Greg or I can go? Well, I mean, so one thing, I mean, I’ve listened to Zach’s presentation. So one way I’ll just say here, and then Zach, you can pick up on this. If we say one thing I want to say, I think, if we say one thing, I want to be clear about the insolvent versus sort of transcendent views are as different as I am steeped in psychotherapy, which I think Zach connects them to insolvent. So when I connect with somebody, I’m tracking their image-based affect, self-other attachment structures down through their shadow and what kind of neurotic entanglements they have and what is their fundamental character formulation. As a psychotherapist, I’m trained into exploring that. I read Aurobundo’s work 10 years ago. I’m like, this is bullshit. I don’t know what he’s talking about here. Okay. In other words, I’m underdeveloped at the transcendent mindfulness kind of dimension, or at least I don’t have access to that in the same way of access to insolvent. So at least as I hear Zach’s lines, I can then clearly differentiate actually my entire training in psychotherapy has oriented me to a particular character formation and development around the socio-emotional self-other modeling that affords capacity and relation that is deep, rich, or identifies when it’s maladaptive, immature, and neurotic. And that’s one level of development, but in relationship to being itself, in relationship to the potential symbols of eternity, in relationship to the expansiveness of transcendent consciousness. Well, that’s yogi psychology, which I now deeply appreciate, but I was not in any real position to do so based on my standard psychotherapeutic training. So I’d offer that as sort of just to make sure we’re in the same sort of thread of domain. And maybe Zach, correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s the way I’ve heard you describe it and internalize it, at least in my own. And maybe I can reply to that and then that would help Rick, it would help Zach. I’m not denying any of that, Greg. Okay. Right. Well, what I’m saying is there’s another dimensionality. That’s why I mentioned Corban. Gotcha. The discussion of the nature of the Corban or Ibn Arabi, right, where there’s this, there’s the Chedwick, there’s these deep discussions, Hillman, other, like, you know, there’s deep discussions of the imaginal wrath, right. If you don’t want to call it, I would call it cognitive machine because it’s a way of knowing, right. It’s a profound, it’s one of the lost ways of knowing, to quote Lachman. And so I’m interested in that. That’s what I was trying to get at with the phenomenology and the functionality. I want to understand, right, what that development looks like around it. But Greg, I’m not saying I want to leave out the connection to, you know, the Jungian, the psychodynamic. I want to see how they’re properly connected together. That’s the question I’m asking. Is that fair? Does that feel fair to you? Yeah. No, I just was more, I was just more clarifying my interpretation of the distinct lines of development that Zach has laid out. And then, yes, as we dive into that, then identifying the developmental structures and cognitive machinery and all of that that would afford that development is key. And yes, I think there’s a lot to be said about that. But I just wanted to make sure we were in the space of lines of clarity. Because I think, I mean, we, if this has come up, I think there’s deep connections between the imaginal as distinct from the imaginary, serious play and development. And we’ve already laid those connections. And I want to bridge them into this. Sorry, Zach, we’re laying a lot at your feet. I didn’t mean to, but I want this question, good problem formulation, right? Before you try to solve it, make sure you’ve got really good problem formulation. No, so this is great. So the place I plug in directly to this is, or is a helmet, right? Right. Yeah. Basically, it’s kind of a master for a couple years, just reading and reading and reading. And so there’s a couple of distinctions that help get some clarity here. And this is also a place where I got the form of soul spirit distinction, or transcendence and soulmate distinction. Right, right. From Hillman, his book on the difference between soul is excuse me, his essay on the difference between soul and spirit is key. So a couple of terms, right? Imaginary, imagination, imaginal. Yep. Yep. And then you’ve got within there, you’ve got symbol, image, archetype, right? If we can, and archetypal, actually. If we can clarify those, we actually do a lot. So imaginary, I think, is where we get the Bodriardian, worst of the Bodriardian. Yeah. For this, this is just imaginary in the sense of like, made up, just not real, no connection to reality. Imagination is, I take it as like a verb, like imagination is the power to work with either imaginary or the imaginal. That’s a problem with the term though. The term is actually deeply equivocal. And we have to be really, really careful when we’re using it. Exactly. So when I say like, that the domain of ensoulment has to do with imagination and image, and the imaginal, this is, I’m not talking about the imaginary, but I am talking about the ability of the human to work with images and to constructively work with images and also to receive images. And this is where we get to the imaginal. Right. And this is why when you’re looking at the kind of virtuosity in the ability to imaginally detect through imaginal projection, detect real pattern. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Well said. That’s exactly. So it’s a virtuosity through imaginal projection of detecting real patterns. And I want you to think about what happens here is just to take from the philosophy of science. Like if you don’t have a naive philosophy of science and you do like a model-based science, then your ability to run a fictional model helps you to frame patterns in reality you wouldn’t otherwise see that are framed by the fictional model. The work I’ve just published with Dan, and I mentioned that I think about the scientists working through the rovers on Mars and how they do all this imaginal work. They take these flat black and white pictures and they put color on it and they do this stuff and then they enact, I’m the rover now, and they identify with the rover and they do all this imaginal stuff because they look through that imaginal augmentation and that allows them to actually track the phenomena on Mars that they’re trying to study. They can’t do the field work without that imaginal behavior. And so what you realize when you start to work with imagination and specifically with received image, so this is dream work, right? So you have a dream. It is a product of your imagination. Yes and no, right? But it does produce an image or a series of images which you can actively work on with your imagination. And so what becomes interesting here as I mentioned was symbol and archetype and archetypal. And so one of the key distinctions I make in Jungian analysis is between the insolent work and the transcendence work and they’re doing both and they’re confused. Insolent work is about working on image and going into the uniqueness of the image and into the particularities of that image that have to do with you and you alone and your relationships and only your relationships. Working with symbol has to do with actually extracting from the unique, the universal property. Right? So if I have a dream and I’m in my boyhood room and there’s a crucifix on the wall and I’m on my knees, right? And I know my mom’s coming up the stairs, right? That’s a potent image. Now it includes my mom, my room, right? My house that I grew up in and I can work with the image in my imagination, keeping it in the domain of the archetypal. It’s an archetypal image, right? But I don’t have to extract the universal symbols of the cross, the mother, the kneeling, right? Those are symbol. And so those are different and they afford different kind of therapeutic relief. Like fleeing the uniqueness of my personality towards the universality of the experience I’m having is very helpful, but there’s also something about diving down and into the particularities. And this is where the psychotherapeutic is different from what’s called spiritual teaching, where the psychotherapeutic is resolving the shit with your mom, not with everyone’s mom in general, with your mom, right? In that bedroom. And so that’s insolent. Insolent isn’t about the universal self capital S. Insolent is about unique self. Insolent is about unique self. And unique self is not the symbol that stands for everyone. It’s exact and exactness. And it’s dealing with the finiteness and tragic structure of everyone’s actual unique story. Tragic in the most beautiful sense, in the ancient sense of everyone’s story. And that’s a very rich form of therapy. But it doesn’t discount the forms of therapy that bring you up and out of your unique story into a universal reflective space of symbol, consciousness, and unity with all things, which is where Ura Bindo takes people. Although he gets you back to the unique self, he takes you up and out of your little story and into this massive cosmic story that you’re a part of. And into the transcendent and into how every aspect of your life is actually a symbol of something universal, which is another form of imaginal overlay, but has transcendent dimensions to it. So when I’m doing, so, go ahead. Okay. So just to give you an example about just when I’m doing psychotherapy, the lens that I use for what I call the heart relationship system is the influence matrix. And what it basically does is it identifies the self other matrix on key process dimensions, meaning the patterns by which self other exchanges have unfolded and their meaning on issues of power, love, freedom, and ultimately a sense of relational value and social influence. And then these get emotionally charged in our important relationships and their fundamental meaning. And then they sit in individual’s developmental psyche, the triumphs and the tragedies and the traumas in relationship to that. And a huge amount of the work then is to metabolize that for them in terms of the unique image, affective meaning constellations that then what the fuck does this mean about me and who I was and who they were in this world? And so that’s the, you know, precisely. And then the image of the self that you receive from that past of history is the image that you hold of yourself. So doing imaginal work in the demand of insolence about working with a unique image of self that has been like accumulated to you through all of those pasts. So yeah, that’s very specific, sacred autobiographical. And one of the things we try to do is do all sorts of mentalizing. So mentalizing would be imaginal work in relation to what is mom’s thoughts, or can you even go back to yourself, your childhood self and relate to your childhood self in a different kind of parenting than maybe you received or the way in which your internalized interject critic has parented you in the past and cultivate a different kind of imaginal relationship with that space. So that was very helpful, Greg. That was very helpful. Thank you. What I heard, and you already invoked it, Zach, I hear Wilbur’s, you know, the pre-trans fallacy issue. And so pre being that we confuse pre-egoic stuff with trans-egoic stuff, and maybe Jung didn’t adequately distinguish between those, whether or not that’s correct exegesis of Jung, I’ll put aside. I think the distinction is independently valuable. And so here’s the, I think it’s non-controversial perhaps, that’s controversial for me to say, but meta-controversial, that the spiritual dimension has always been associated with this kind of meta-prospect, the word transcendence means it, you know, going up and above this, that somehow alleviates you or ameliorates egocentrism, right? This is one of the markers of maturity that isn’t adequately captured in some of the more cognitive models, the decentering, et cetera. These are typical, but the issue I then had, sorry, I hope this works, and I’m not trying to accuse anybody, but the language both of you were using for describing insolent was very egocentric, right? Me, Zaknis, right? And so I hear also, and is this the pre-trans fallacy? That’s why I introduced it. I hear Jung, for example, classically saying, no, in the end, this insolent move is not egocentric, because the ego is coming into relationship, and this is Achman, right? The ego is coming into relationship in its depths of something that is, you know, properly, you know, not egoic in nature, but to whom the ego has to understand itself in a grounding relationship. So there’s a ground, or Washburn talks about the dynamic ground, right? And so, do you see what I’m trying to get at? How, like, there seems to be both of these dimensions, if you’ll allow me this, are going trans-egoic in some more neutral sense, and yet, how do we preserve, like, what’s the difference here, and how does the insolent get beyond egocentrism? Is that a fair question to ask? That’s a perfect question. In my model, all three domains go beyond the personal, at their highest reaches, right? So, especially when you get into the advanced sciences, there is a form of egolessness that’s necessary to do the thinking, in the domain of development, basically, in the domain of skill development. And similarly, the selflessness that arises as a result of transcendence is kind of well known at your classical kind of Eastern enlightenment version of trans-egoic awareness and capacity. It’s mostly handled what I call the transcendent. What’s interesting is that psychotherapy in the West put a cap on personality development, and so, there’s this problem with ego and personality, right? And the personal, that’s another set of terms, ego, personality, personal. Zach, we talked also about personality and personhood as a little bit different. But that’s even more useful. So, there’s a form of personhood that transcends the egoic. There’s a form of personhood and a form, I think, of personality that transcends the merely personal. And so, these would be the dimensions of ensoulement that lead you through your personal story into a deeper story that’s about more than you, as opposed to negating your personal story as if it’s an illusion and doesn’t matter. Which is where the transcendent bias occurs. A lot of the people who simply talk about the transpersonal as if the person is an illusion. And this is the most dangerous thing that is occurring in the merger between capitalism and Eastern enlightenment traditions, is the elimination of personhood through a transcendent bias for understanding the transpersonal and the non-egoic. And it’s frightening because, it’s incorrect, but it lays the groundwork for quite a slippery slope, especially if you wet it with certain forms of postmodernism. So, it’s very important for me, actually, in the insoulement dimension to land that notion of what Gaffney calls the unique self, which is a form of personhood beyond the egoic and a form of personality beyond the merely personal. There’s another sense of ego, which is just the capacity for the psyche to organize itself. So, that’s a functional definition, which also is maintained in those two domains and which can be dysregulated by a transcendent bias. This is another thing I encountered in meditators. You put your finger on the whole, both individual and collective, spiritual bypassing problem, which has also become very prevalent today. And I think that’s important. And I’m glad to hear that being brought in critically. And the whole mindfulness thing is all about spiritual bypassing. But I also mentioned that the psychotherapeutic community insoulement at the personal, so it just becomes like endless shadow work from which you… That’s what I wanted to point out. Totally. Exactly. This brings back the virtue notion again. If these are improperly related, you get biases in both directions. You get the spiritual creating a spiritual bypass bias, and you can get the therapeutic creating this egocentric bias, the perpetual neurosis kind of culture that we can cultivate. And so, again, I think the relationship between these two dimensions, which is like, keep hammering on. Yeah, but I want to return to that because you mentioned that I never got to it, which was one of the goals of the meta-psychology was to look for the meta-factors across… Exactly. Exactly. That’s exactly. Well, just a really quick point, John, to connect to the insoulement issue. One of the things that you have spoken to, which really speaks to my work in psychotherapies from a cognitive recursive relevance realization, the reciprocal narrowing and self-absorption that the neurotic structure gets at. When you feel defensive, all of a sudden, the fear for self becomes pervasive, and it becomes reciprocally narrowing. And you then act in ways you project and then act, and often creates the vicious cycle. So what do we try to do? We create mentalizing. And what ideally we would also try to do is create the capacity to connect with people to afford mutual reciprocal opening, i.e., either romantic love or agape, and then the capacity to be, to hold that agopic kind of position that affords reciprocal opening amongst a network of relational souls, as it were, would then be a maturation beyond the self, but maintaining in the insoulement structure. That’s very… That’s good. So I’m hearing that, and I like what Greg just did, right? Because we fall into these Cartesian metaphors that are… So insoulement is not necessarily inner, even though it has to deal with… So it can very much be, are we reciprocally narrowing or reciprocally opening? And although it is self-relevant, it is not self-centered, ultimately. Or, I mean, we can play with what we mean by self. It’s not that ultimately you’re getting to… How I’m using the term ego is not just that function, the self-organizing function, right, on the psyche. I’m using it more specifically, right, when people talk about it in ego dissolution, the autobiographical self that claims to be the sole metaphysical locus of agency, which is… And that claim is undermined in flow states, it’s undermined in mystical states, etc. That’s what I’m talking about. And so there’s a way of… If agency is a proper part of personhood and reflective appropriation of agency is a proper part of personhood, which I would say it is, then we can get into states in which we are developing personhood that are not ego-centric. They are actually shutting off that narrative autobiography so that we can get to depths. And that’s what I was trying to point at. But then what we’re getting into is there seems to be some dialogical relationship between insolment and self-transcendence or transcendence. That’s what I want to keep coming back to. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be… No, that’s what I want to go. Yeah, yeah. Because that to me is… Meta-psychology, that’s where it can talk to us the most. Yeah. And so it’s between transcendence and insolment and what I’m calling development or skill development. I mean all of them. I mean all three. We’ve just been focusing on these right now because we’re trying to get… And that’s what I was trying to get. Because virtue has an aspect… Power, it has an aspect of skill to it, it has an aspect of character to it, but it has an aspect of aspiration to the divine in it. So the term virtue, if we properly unpack its history and etymology, is designed to try and talk about the proper alignment of those three dimensions in development. At least I would argue that. Yeah, I think that’s a great way to define virtue. I mean it’s just interesting because all three of them require one another to actually work. And that’s the problem with having a bias in either one is that it’s a performative contradiction because you actually need the others to do that thing you’re doing in any one of them. Exactly. So this is the mistake, classic mistake in education theory, which is to teach the kid math without giving them a good reason about… When specifically an emotionally motivating reason that attaches to his image of the self. And then once the math is learned, you don’t give him a thing to do with it that actually makes the skill more than what it is like the transcendent dimension. So if you just really simplify it, you think about the relation between them. If you want to do anything, if you want to change your image of yourself, you have to develop new skills and you have to get new consciousness. And if you want to develop a skill, you have to imagine yourself as the person who wants that skill, which is to say, you have to attach learning to personhood and you have to attach them both to consciousness. And that was interesting. This was Piaget’s notion of the grasp of consciousness. It was that thing that consolidates learning, that brings it into the total psyche and it becomes conscious basically. I have a concrete example of that. I was tutoring somebody, this has happened more than once, tutoring people in math and they, well, why am I doing this? Because they weren’t getting an answer or they get a market oriented answer because you’ll need to calculate your profit at some point. It’s like, you only need arithmetic for that. Like, what do we need? Arithmetic is calculation, but we ultimately want people to be able to prove things. Math is about proof, arithmetic is about calculation. I mean, proof in the technical sense, not in the epistemological sense. And I was saying, well, try this. Then I said, notice how your mind feels when you’re doing math. And they said, what do you mean? I said, well, for me, I get this kind of open, I get this clearness and I started to describe, imaginably, the phenomenological feel of math. And they went, oh, oh. And then I said, again, imagine being able to do that more often in other domains. I was basically doing Spinoza. And they went, oh. And then that was like, oh. And then all of a sudden, oh, well, I want to do this more. Because they saw, they tasted the developmental potential. But that’s why I keep coming back to, what’s the phenomenological functional features of this virtuosity? Because that’s what teacherly authority education, so that we can seriously recommend it to other people. I mean, again, to return to the simplicity of it, the classic example of the elder facilitating an imaginal recognition of real pattern is storytelling. Yes, yes. Storytelling. And so there’s something basic about narrative structure and imitation that allow for those kinds of contexts to be created of teacherly authority, like you’re describing. And teacherly authority in the domain of the imaginal is what Greg’s describing as his role as a therapist. Yes. Here’s the way to mentalize your memories and to rethink your mother and to rethink that pain. So there’s a type of very specific teacherly authority in the domain of ensoulment and the domain of transcendence. And you don’t want to mix them up. Because it’s actually a bad idea to give people advice to just simply transcend it. They also need to reimagine. Yeah, yeah, very much. And so there’s some kind of species specific trait that allows us to, through vicarious, empathetic kind of relationship, create imaginal containers in which other people can reimagine themselves, basically. Yeah, totally. This is what your mom does for you when you’re a kid. Some days, you’ll be X, Y, and Z. And if she says something bad, that’s not a good childhood. If she says something, there’s that sense of the ability to, like the contagion of the imaginal overlay and frame, which, again, back to Baldwin, he was seeing that. He was seeing this, you know, the mimesis, the mimicking. You know, he plugged into Tarde. I think that’s how you say it with the French, who’s the same guy that Gerard plugs into. And so there’s something deep in that domain of character in particular, of the imitative and the imaginal being very, very close. And it’s very close. And so often the therapist will model, even in their gesture and tone of voice, emotional self-regulation. Like they will change their body. Like those little, and this is again, as I noted with very mature people, they’re like, they’re holding themselves different. Like they literally raise the level of conversation by entering the room by virtue of the kinds of patterns of, of, of gesture that they have. And so the therapist aids in the empathetic re-imagining of the self by showing what it’s like to live in that imaginal space. When you are imagining yourself as dignified and worthy of respect, you sit differently. If you are dignified and worthy of respect and you sit that way, no one will disconfirm that. If you’re pretending to be dignified, but you’re acting like an asshole and you’re trying to sit that way, then slowly that image of self should change unless you control your environment so well, you never get the negative feedback. So let me narrow in even more then, because we’re getting, this is really good. So you, you, you did something that was really good. You said, but your mom can do it badly. There’s a normativity here. And that’s what I, so what’s the functionality and phenomenology that allow, that allows us to talk about, explicate the normativity, because that, that’s it back to the original question, right? The, right. And we haven’t wasted our time with, we’re doing the Socratic thing. We’re taking it deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper. It’s like, how do I know when I’m doing this well, as opposed to when I’m doing it badly and not just out there theoretically, but in here phenomenologically functionally. This is analogous to problem questions I continually get asked when I’m teaching people meditation. How do I know when I’m doing it well? Right. And, you know, it can’t just be that you’re having bizarre, unusual experiences. That’s just, that’s just too, that’s useless. It’s basically useless. It doesn’t, it doesn’t cleave apart, right? You know, normative development in the, in the, in the moral sense of normative, the aspirational sense, not statistical normative, the normative sense of development from the dysfunctional or whatever we want to call it. So this is the question I keep coming back to. And this is the question I keep probing in, I mean, I sound obsessional, but I keep probing in Jung and Corban and Ibn Arabi is like, yes, yes, I get everything you’re talking about. I’m talking about how about why these things are so important. Yes. Yes. Yes. But in the end, how do I practice this well? Right. In the end, I don’t want to, in the end, not, not, not exclusively, but in the end, I don’t want to know what to believe about this. I want to know how to practice it well. And that’s why I brought up this idea of virtuosity again. Like that’s what, sorry, I, I, I, but I keep wanting to driving in this because for me, religions had, religions had an answer to that. And one of the things what we’re facing is, and one of the things maybe a meta-psychology can help afford us is an answer to that question. Because one of Greg’s points is there is no unified normativity, even for psychotherapy. I hear him saying everybody’s got their different normativity all over the place. And so when you ask, is therapy going well, depends on who, which there, like which therapeutic framework it’s going really well. No, this is a disaster. Right. And so that’s, this is directly where I think the meta-psychology comes into the center of what we’re wrestling with here. But how do, like what are the, you know, and this may be unfair to you, Zach, and I don’t mean to put you on the spot, but you’re, you’re also very brilliant and you’re very sensitive. So, you know, I want to try and maybe we can all help. Right. And Greg is here and like, Greg is like a systematizer. Right. Right. So you know what I’m asking? I’ll stop. Yeah. How about I throw something out and then as you metabolize that. So, so this might not go as deep, you know, as you’re really asking the question, but here’s the basic framing in which I see. So in terms of pretty sort of recursive relevance realization mechanics, okay. The internal mapping of the structure is of the self other structure has capacities to pattern itself in a wide variety of different ways. The goal, the functional goal in my estimation was for the system to have a coherent realistic integration around the experience of known and valued. Okay. So there’s, there’s actual sort of an attachment structure that affords a particular way of being in the world that indicates good functional form. Right. And, and so it’s got, and basically, and you could just see this in basic, are you securely attached or insecurely attached. Right. And then there would be their processes by which then you want to consolidate the system towards that development. There’d be processes of, if you’ve had past trauma processes of metabolizing that trauma in particular ways that affords the signal of the trauma and the affect association to grant. What does that signal mean to you? And then how do you metabolize it towards a particular growth orientation? And I mean that, you know, sort of like that would afford coherent consolidation in relationship to a ground of being that is secure oriented towards a sense of being known and valued as opposed to a system that feels fragmented, broken and defensive in relationship to an enormous number of dialectical processes that are pushing against it. Okay. But can’t possibly be integrated. So if you do internal family systems, each one of these is a mode that attacks the other side and has a dialectical structure that is defined against it in a particular kind of way. So one, at least sort of one kind of mechanistic indicator of good functional form is the coherent integration of the self other object system to afford a sense of positivity out of which growth can be achieved as opposed to a defensive, rigid, fragmented structure that has enormous amount of conflicting polarization in relationship to it. That’s very helpful, Greg. But here’s how I want to respond to that. I would want to say that, I mean, Plato basically says that’s one half of how we get the normativity. And that’s the core argument of the republic. There’s the inner justice, but the inner justice has to be in conformity and resonate dynamically with the outer justice. We have to have an ontology that does justice to reality. So I was definitely, I’m inside the therapy room there with a psychological doctor lens that’s a end of one or a relational doctor of one, not inside the society that forms a social ontology that either affords that or not. Yeah, exactly. So that’s, but thank you. So you’re acknowledging, and I would go beyond the social environment. There’s ultimately a relationship to reality, to per se, really real. And I think that the spiritual has something to do with that, we make it bring it in. So for me, I genuinely mean the question I just asked a few minutes ago, like I’ve been trying to use an agogé and reciprocal opening and this kind of higher order dialogue, dialogue, dialogue logos between one’s ontology and one’s psychology, really understanding psychology as the logos of the psyche. And that, and that it like, we don’t seem to have, we seem to have these two meta drives, inner peace and being in touch with reality. And they have to mutually afford each other. And Plato’s argument, and I want to know what you guys think of it, is that’s the best we have. We don’t have any higher kind of normativity by which we can discover if we’re developing well or not. Now, I find that plausible, but I’m not like, yes, no question, I’m done. The Socratic part of you still wants to ask, because we’re here now, like, what’s the normativity feel like in its phenomenal, phenomenological functional presence? And can that be justified as a normativity? Because if we can’t do that, we’re ultimately, this is all sorry, and I don’t mean this dismissively. Zach, you know, I think your work’s great. Greg, you already know that I love your work. I’m not doing that. I want to see that. You’re asking a really deep philosophical question. It’s a very, very deep philosophical and super important one. And we touched on it briefly. So you remember, like, if we’ll just, let’s put transcendence and then someone aside and just talk about what I’m calling development, skill development, which was last night with the huge idea of levels. And that there were these feedback in that mechanisms between the sensory motor and the representational mind that allowed it to self-correct pretty spontaneously in relationship to reality. So that the reality dependence of the developmental transformations was clear and actually driving the transformation. And so that results in things like successfully walking, right? We don’t make school curriculums for walking. Yes. You don’t even really teach parents how to teach your kids to walk. I mean, maybe they do, because it’s an industry to sell books to moms, but you don’t really need to know anything. So special as an educator, your kid will learn to walk because it’s in the process of development, which is still a reality dependent process of development. Right. So that same analogy actually applies to the other two domains that there are lower order structures in insolvent. These sort of look like things like attachment, which are so kind of demonstrably dysfunctional that it would be akin to the kid like not being allowed. So this is actually a living experiment where there was a Chinese apartment building where the kids were, it was only concrete. And so they didn’t allow the kids to crawl because it hurt their hands and legs to crawl. And these kids were systematically kind of like developmentally stunted as a result of not being able to explore sensory space. So something like that can happen in attachment patterns where there’s a base and in those lower order levels where there’s clear feedback between the system and reality. So similarly with self-reflection, this occurs. And so that’s one thing I’m positing that there are mechanisms in place in those domains where we do have feedback with reality. That’s immediate. And which phenomenologically fucking feels that way. And like when you’re with, when the child is with a mother and the mother is neglecting the child, the phenomenological experience of the child is that it’s bad. Now, eventually they’ll try to get out of that and cover over neuroses and try to not feel as bad as they actually do, but it’s just, it’s there. And so similarly with the circumnavigation of space and sensory motor realm. Now here’s what gets interesting. The phenomenology of mathematics. And you already mentioned the phenomenology of mathematics. What is the experiencing, what is the experience of knowing that the equation is correct? What is the experience of knowing the equation is correct? Like that, if we can figure out that phenomenology in a way that doesn’t get us confused and postmodern, but actually gives us reality, then we can begin to work on the others. I would argue. And I think mathematics is pretty uncontroversially cognitively successful. And it’s also the case that mathematicians know when something is correct and when it is incorrect. And they don’t know that by virtue of doing experiments or statistics or anything like that, they’re using their mind. Now we could move that into AI systems and people forget how to use their minds to verify mathematical truths, but we can use our minds to verify mathematical truths. I believe we can also use our minds to verify moral and ethical truths. Now, most of our ontologies that we’ve been inheriting from modernism tell us that that’s not the case, or Abindo would laugh at that. He would say it’s obviously demonstrably the case that we know what’s right and wrong. So this is a classic platonic argument. You can’t come into the academy unless you can do math. Right. And it’s interesting, the math there is inherently geometry. So it’s bridging between the spatial temporal domains. And then of course, the same thing in Spinoza, right? And there’s this idea that there’s a fundamental connection between realness and intelligibility and the phenomenology and the functionality of math. It’s not that everything has to be done math, like Descartes says. That’s not what’s going on in Spinoza. It’s clearly not what’s going on in Plato because Plato never uses math except in Meno and a couple. He’s more about, no, no, again, how does your mind feel and function in this? And how does that give you an insight, a skill developing, a virtue developing insight into intelligibility and then through intelligibility because intelligibility and realness are like this, realness. Is it fair for me to make that connection? Yes, that’s the connection I’m trying to make. It’s not that think about those other domains like their mathematics, not at all, but mathematics is like a really interesting example of a place where there’s a phenomenological certainty that something is correct. And here’s the other thing that’s interesting. I mentioned in the domain of Insulman, the endogenously produced image and then also the received image, right? Right, right. Mathematics as well. Yeah, yeah. Any of the most advanced mathematicians who provide equations that are incredibly useful in engineering and concrete applications. So they’re fucking about as real as anything that we can call real in our Western scientific society, occur in dreams, occur in fumes and states of… And insight also. And also just flashes. And so this question of, how do you know when something is real in the domain of the Insulman and the domain of the imaginal? We also get into how do you know that the received image is significant and the ability that the received image allows you to reformulate your endogenous image of yourself, which is the transformation of soul in the domain of Insulman, the movement of the image, the transformation of the image of selves. That gets super interesting. And so that’s where the work of dream, and as I already mentioned, the work of allowing yourself to be in social relationships that can actually disconfirm your erroneous image of yourself or confirm the accuracy and shed more light on who you actually are, which you’re getting from your received images, from dreams or spontaneous imaginations about who you are, what you’re capable of. And so that sense of part of the answer in all of these, I believe, is also a particular type of social situation that allows for that base stack of reality-dependent development to continue up beyond where it’s easily reality-dependent. So monasteries are an interesting example of this. It’s really interesting to go on a meditation retreat and then come home as opposed to just stay and not leave. And so under what conditions can one actually display certain capacities in a way that they could be disconfirmed? So if one claims to have certain types of spiritual capacity, has one been put in a situation where that could actually be disconfirmed? Similarly, if one believes that they’re ethical in a certain way, or that they have a potency of archetypal personality, are they actually in situations where that can be disconfirmed? Or have they created situations that systematically allow for it not to be disconfirmed? So these are the kinds of things that led us to say that, no, there are domains in these where if we set up the social situation right, that it’s we know the same way you know that math equation, which no one has ever run before, you know it’s correct anyway, even though no one’s ever run it before. Similarly in these domains, if the social situation is right and there is reality in the room, then you’ll know. And I think that’s the experience people have, especially when a bunch of mature people get together and there’s an ethical situation that emerges. But that’s the proper Socratic question. The proper Socratic function is exactly, this is what I’m trying to get at with DioLogos, where we are set up to, we’re trying to set up discourse within distributed cognition, where people are not just communicating but communicating with each other, so they can do exactly that attuning or misattuning with each other to try and do exactly what you’re talking about. That is like, that’s one of the design features of dialectic at the DioLogos. Yeah, so it’s not an answer, it’s definitive, it’s like a process, a commitment to certain kinds of process and their domains of ensoulement. What gets interesting is, yeah, it’s not about what I’m saying and testing the cognitive truth of what I’m saying, it’s about who I’m being and testing the worth and value and legitimacy of who I’m, who I think I am. Exactly, people, what happens is people get a sense, right, they get a sense of the relationship between, you know, I’m trying to be, there’s a deep connection between getting into right relationship with others, reciprocally opening, right, or revealing of reciprocal narrowing, right, and getting into right relationship with the particular propositions, the theoretical, the topic, the topics that we always do dialectic at the DioLogos about are exactly virtue, the virtue topics, what is honesty, and what happens is people start, of course, definitionally, you can see them doing the stochastic thing, they move away from the definition to, well, I got it, I don’t really know, but I have a sense, and I got into this, I started to really understand what it might mean through the connections I was having to other people and what I didn’t know and like, people move from possessing a proposition into, and I’m playing on this, obviously, into proposing a way of life, and that’s a very, that’s a very different move. Well, and then also, beyond proposing a different way of life, claiming to be an exemplar of that way of life. Those, for me, those are inseparable. Inseparable, okay, interesting, yeah, so that then means you’d need to be in a context that could disconfirm that. So that would be right, yeah. There has to be one where there are very, almost measurable variable, management of variables, you know, because people can tell when you’re, when you’re being, like, what you’re doing is really heightening the flow state within, between individuals, a reflective flow state such that people get very finely tuned at when people are checking in or checking out or being manipulative versus being participatory and open to transformation. So you get this distributed cognition machine, the spirit emerges that, right, it starts to govern and regulate, these are not the right terms, but they’re closer, right, how people are tuning and tracking and maintaining religio with each other on an ongoing basis. So one of the things that this get me thinking about, let’s see, it’s a slightly different angle, but it’s the, took me in the direction of sort of what I would may call meta normativity and the hunt for, like, as I honed in on systems of justification as being these propositional networks that are coordinating and legitimizing is an ought, then the question emerges, well, are there meta cultural systems of justification that transcend local emerging cultural context? And I think that the answer is, yeah, there really are at a pragmatic level. So for example, I then looked at, well, what are the kind of global systems when people get together and have to negotiate what they actually agree on, what emerges in relationship to that? And I argue that actually what ultimately sort of sits on my signature line in my, is B, that which enhances dignity and well-being with integrity. And I arrived at those through an analysis of sort of global systems of justification, where the dignity refers to, is a reference to the core value that undergirds the United Declaration of Human Rights, where all of, it’s the most conceptually agreed upon document across different cultures, whereby how do we confer justice in relation? How do we understand when somebody, when you would be able to sit from an external cultural perspective and say, Hey, that’s not okay. What would possibly ground that? And the argument was actually, well, we don’t know, agree why people have dignity, but if we confer dignity, then you can confer justice as a justification and relationship to action. And so dignity becomes, and that’s basically means the person has fundamental aesthetic value and respect, and you can then twist that in terms of fundamental, and then there’s incremental in terms of, well, that’s a dignified act or an undignified act. And then well-being at the World Health Organization, the commitment to, you know, basically flourishing biologically, psychologically, and socially in relation to, as opposed to dysfunction and distress across those different dimensions. And then ultimately science and other orientations towards honor, integrity, truth, and justice. And ultimately those do kind of translate into true goodness, beauty kinds of tripartite, but actually they do speak to a potential global meta normativity that would be cross-cultural in some regards. So one of the criticisms, this is very good work, Greg, and you know, I think highly of it. One of the criticisms that has been made within postmodernism, some, the aspects of postmodernism that I take serious, you know, is that that’s ultimately a form of humanism and that it still locates value ultimately within human beings. And then the argument is that has been a framework that has contributed to our environmental crisis in a very significant way, because, right, we need to be, or the object oriented ontologists say, we’re making human beings half of all of ontology, and do they, like, what, and can we justify? And so one of the issues would be, we don’t have a similar document. We’re trying to forge one right now, the IPCC, about the environment, but we’re having a double of a time getting anything that isn’t just merboly merboly. I mean, we’re getting lots of great science. What I mean is we’re getting lots of great science about, look at what’s happening, but when we try to get, like, a philosophy of what we should do, it’s seriously impoverished. It’s seriously impoverished. So do you understand that? Of course. Yeah, yeah. And sort of, this is sort of, this is situating at the expansion of a particular normativity that is located in human knowledge in a particular way. And this relationship with other sentient beings, with the organization of the universe as a whole, I mean, I think those are, I consider those to be, you know, sort of open and unresolved questions in many regards. But you consider them important too, though. But absolutely. Right. The expanse of the properness of the boundary in relation is a beautiful transcending question to reflect on. How to justify various lineages in relationship to that. You know, I mean, I would say, you know, in relationships like human-centeredness, like people will accuse this of sort of, hey, that’s an anthropomorphic and my own response is, okay, you’re driving down the road, right? And all of a sudden, a little kid runs out from one way and a squirrel runs out from the other way. And it’s like, you know, if you choose this kid that you’re going to run over, then there’s a particular reaction in relation, right? They’re certainly, so anyway, this whole issue of what is actually human exceptionalism and human normativity versus other kinds of domains is a beautifully and brilliantly tricky question. It is. And that’s a well-posed thought experiment. Here’s the other thought experiment on the other side. There’s a child, and if you let the child die, you save the Amazon rainforest and renew it for a thousand years. Totally. Now, when you ask people that question, they’re like, oh, I don’t know. And then you can even do this thought experiment. And a hundred years from now, human beings are going to all be gone. So it’s not how the human beings can use the rainforest, just the rainforest for itself. People still go, gee, I don’t know. Right. And so what I’m saying, and I’m not making a, I’m not saying we should kill the child. That’s not what I’m doing here. I’m trying to get at that there does seem to be a growing sense that while there is a sacredness to human life, right? It’s not, it’s not, I don’t know. There might be some idolatry attached to that. If I can use a biblical religious language. And I don’t know if that’s even the right way to pose this. I’m really hesitant about this because I don’t want to come off the wrong way, but I’m trying to get at something. If we’re committing to expansion across our ego, there is no other option but to drop into, you know, trans, ultra humanistic positions, right? I mean, what does it mean to be a another, what does it mean to be the squirrel? What does it mean to be the Amazon? What are the valuations across a wide variety of different domains? And that’s a, you have to drop into those perspectives. And one of the things that the mystical tradition makes clear is that ultimately, right? There is something more real, more valuable than, I mean, there’s the one, right? And so, like, but on the other hand, like that is never separated from, yes, but it has to mean that human beings are cultivating wisdom and virtue. I don’t want to present them as oppositional, but I’m trying to get them, like I’m asking the question about what’s the right relationship and how do we get, how do we respond to the postmodern critique that we’re off, ultimately doing, you know, a very complicated Renaissance humanism kind of thing. And that’s been problematic. I mean, I think the way to respond to the postmodern critique is to abandon modernity. Like I’m in favor of a, what I would call a post secular way of theorizing some of these planetary issues. I don’t think we can resolve the issue by saying, well, we don’t know where human dignity comes from, but we’re going to respect it as an aesthetic value. Like it’s kind of bizarre given the prior justifications given by humanity for human dignity, by the great religious traditions. Exactly, exactly. It seems to have extremely actually immature, kind of childless and naive answer to the question of why is the human valuable? And I think the deep confusion around the place of the human in the web of life also has created a lot of confusion and nihilism. And so I think, yeah, we’re going to be looking at, because of the nature of some of the kind of planetary changes underway, a reemergence of religious solutions to the meta normative planetary framework. And so this is going to just directly back to Urabindo who said, who, you know, and the reason Huxley nominated him for the Nobel Prize because actually was a perennialist, right? Perennial philosopher. And so the work that I’m doing with Gaffney and Wilbur is in that direction of a neo-perennial solution to this problem of a planetary meta normative structure. Most of the world is still a member of one of these religious traditions, by the way, secular West. Yeah, yeah. Vast, vast majority of the billions upon billions of people are believing religious traditions. And so the idea that like, we’re going to resolve this in a humanist secular way is colonialist, frankly, like, and I’m going to use that postmodern term to gain credence with the postmodernists, who I’m actually arguing against by saying that though there is actually a very real universal reality that unites all of humanity and its spirit. And this is what Urabindo would claim. And it’s phenomenologically accessible. If you move through the domains of ensoulement and transcendence and don’t just get so hung up on becoming smarter and smarter and smarter in domains of operational efficiency. And so it’s the absence of synchronous ethical and spiritual development in our educational systems that makes it appear as if there is no moral universal, when it’s just as tangible as these abstract math equations we’re having kids do in the 12th grade, but we don’t bring them up and into a moral consciousness or culture that makes it possible. Right. And this is exactly what’s emerged in the whole tree of knowledge. Like, so for example, you go back to sort of the energy real ontic infinity of Big Bang, but really for me, the icon of the elephant sun god is the infinite imaginal of positive wisdom potential. And that’s as orienting and clear in everyday coordinates as anything in relation. So for me, at least, as a naturalist, I can totally see, speak, feel, and orient towards that. Well, what I want to say, given what you just both said, and to bring back the thing again, right, is biblical notions, and there’s analog in the Greek tradition of being in the image of God. And the image of God was an image in the imaginal sense, right, that integrated the soul and the spirit. And notice that the value is ultimately not in us. We’re valued precisely because we are the image of God, which is not anthropocentric. That’s what I meant by how the religions did this. And they gave a proper functional image for relating the soul dimension to the spirit dimension. And they’ve allowed the possibility with that framework of what I would call uniquely human anti-valiant, which they would call evil, which aligns with the same domain, which is that it’s not just about you, man. Like you’re actually tapped into broader universal properties of the universe. And so that sense of the transpersonal, that the opposite of the human is not the animal, the opposite of the human is the demonic. And that’s important to understand. We don’t regress to a state of being like monkeys, we regress to a state of being like demons, because we have the infinite in mind, and can apply through idolatry, the same energies we should be applying to the actual infinite and the real, to the pseudo image of it. And so that has, I think, one of the solutions to the climate crisis is, in fact, dealing with it as more apocalyptic, like actually dealing with it as if you’re dealing with hospice, instead of trying to talk someone who’s dying into being optimistic that it’s all going to work out. And the only way to do that is to actually take religion seriously again. So the degree to which we’re all uncomfortable individually dying, because we have no idea what that means, is the degree to which that the cultures will become incredibly dysfunctional, as the global situation becomes more intense with the climate crisis. And so this is where I’d rather be in a fundamentalist country, with a bunch of people who believe in God, then in a country, when the shit gets hits the fan, then in a country has no idea what the meaning of human existence was ever about, or if their own life means anything, or if the entire civilization was for nothing, that we’re all just matter in motion, etc. Like the epistemic and ethical nihilism sinks in. And so I think we actually need to not have the climate conversation be about how to fix it, but how to die well together. Because that will give us the actual relationships necessary to fix it. If we keep relating to one another as if some of us are getting out, and some of us aren’t, which is how it’s going now, right, maybe the vaccinated get out of the unvaccinated or something like that, right, but we’re creating scapegoats of people who will not escape. And some people who will. And so that’s the opposite of the way we need to think. There’s no escape hatch, every scapegoat goes in deeper. That’s what the insouled realize that the transcendent don’t. And so there’s a deep concern I have that, yeah, in particular, the West is going to go insane through the absence of the kind of neo-perennialist evolving meta normative framework. It’s Conrad’s statement, Marlowe’s statement about Kurtz. He was clear in his mind, but mad at his soul. That kind of madness. That’s what you’re talking about. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Because the scientific, that’s clear in the mind. Like we see it coming, the scientists aren’t right, but we’re mad in our soul. We don’t know how to absorb the truth. Part of darkness. Yeah. I think we should draw close here because not because I think we’ve come to like a moment of repose, but just we’re now treading into some deeper waters. I think we should explore again, maybe next time, maybe if you do one more of these, one more of this together or maybe more, but at least one more in which, because I’d like to talk more about this. We talked a little bit about evil. I think we should maybe talk a little bit more about that as a developmental possibility. There’s something related to evil, but not the same as evil. And I’m sorry, I’m invoking the biblical tradition because it’s the one, it’s the imaginary that seems most pertinent right now, which is sin, which is some kind of defect in being the image of God. It’s a fallenness. And of course, I understand that mythologically. And those aren’t exactly the same thing. And trying to work out what that means about insolent and spirit and development, because this again is, again, we’re getting, and I really like the way we’re getting into the depths of the normative question and the functional phenomenology and the phenomenological functionality at the core, because I think we’re really now hitting at the depths of, well, for lack of a better term, adult development. I think this is, these are the central questions for, by which we can appropriately and normatively, not just explanatorily, we can appropriately talk about adult development. It’s such that we could make justifiable criticisms about why that adult is not properly developed. And Zach, you were already doing that a bit with the word mature, but you’re, and I don’t mean this as an insult, I mean this as a compliment, but you’re deepening that word beyond how it’s normally used. You really are. There’s a lot that’s being laid into that word that needs to be unpacked in connection to the conversation we just made. That sounds great for a future. These are conversations that psychologists aren’t supposed to have these conversations. These are like philosophies. Okay, so before I end, I always like to, I’ve set a problematic for next time. And give both of you gentlemen any final summative or cognitive words you want to give for. No, I mean, I really enjoyed it. I think that we’ve honed in, I think you’re right, John, we’ve honed deeper into this core crux of the issue, which I think this whole issue about what are we trying to transform and what’s the normative dimension in relationship to this is very, very profound. What are the elements? What is the normative dimension? What affords a justification across a wide variety of different domains? It’s something that our field doesn’t, psychology doesn’t struggle with anywhere near the depth. And I really do like, I feel that there’s at least potential to deepen the orientation toward that, if not resolve it, but deepen the orientation toward it. Yeah, I kind of said my bit there with the joke about the psychologist, but this is just such a blast and these waters are very deep. And so it’s been gratifying. It’s been very gratifying to get this deep. So thank you guys. Well, all right. Thank you both gentlemen, and I look forward to our next time together. Great.