https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=oDVC-Y9CHiQ
Welcome back everyone to towards a meta psychology that is true to transformation and once again I am joined by my friends and co-dialogers Greg Enriquez and Zach Stein. Gentlemen, you want to say hello. Hey, hey, good to be back. Likewise. Long time no see. Likewise. So last time we went to the depths of the transformation, the juncture between is and ought and we really sort of problematized the largely unquestioned is, I mean in general unquestioned is ought distinction and we called it seriously the question and kept going deeper and deeper into that and that got us to some fundamental points and now in a corresponding and relevantly corresponding fashion we’re going to do a zoom out and somebody who’s really good at zooming out while not losing a grip on the zoom in is Greg Enriquez because he does it very systematically and very clearly powerful way and so I’m going to now turn things over to Greg. Wonderful. Thanks to you both for joining me in this particular episode. You know I corralled you both into this so that we could because for me I mean I’ve really enjoyed the arc of this conversation. We opened it up on the problematization and transformation. We articulated why mainstream psychology is not really up to the task. We articulated why it’s such a crucial interdisciplinary issue and then Zach of course has led us through a beautiful articulation of core human dimensions and relationship that steeped in an educational and developmental psychological philosophical view that’s rich and broad and then we brought our views to that to articulate hey how do we reflectively analyze this and then most recently on the problem to show I think what we’ve embodied is a de logos and a meta psychological perspective on some of core fundamental issues that are relevant to us as individuals relative to us as society but I wanted to have a final articulation of the meta psychology angle as we return to sort of the problematization of what psychology is that we did earlier and the thing because it’s sort of you know this is an obsession of mine what is psychology and its problem and I don’t know and I wanted you to spend some time articulating having us together the three of us I think afford a really unique to sort of say okay what is psychology in relationship to this meta psychology and what’s the what’s the subject matter of psychology what’s its institution where are we in philosophy if the field had a frame a clear identity I think that at least the identity that I would like to afford it its relationship between all of the questions that we’ve engendered the descriptive explanatory questions the ought questions the application the bridge to education the bridge to society would afford itself a lot more clarity than at least the current architecture that the institution of psychology is arranged in and so I’d like for us to talk a little bit about that and then what I’d like to do is as I back up into that I then have stumbled into or built a connection with some yogic philosophies that I really find to be very very fascinating and maybe some of the synergy between that and I know Zach you’re familiar with it and John you’re familiar with it in a way but then be like hey there may be an opportunity to really afford us a metaphysics that puts together a third person exterior epistemology with a first person interior epistemology in a novel way and that could provide the architecture perhaps to really ground our core is ought justifications for what we’re after so that’s what that’s what I’d like to articulate so if you recall the episode where we talked about the problemization of psychology you know I basically delineated the field as thusly it comes for me the word psychology has to be anchored in the context of modern natural science of course you can articulate it from a wide variety of different ways but if we’re talking about it in the context of the institutional identity that sits in the context of our current academic institutions and affords its identity in that regard at the very least we have to ask what’s its rooted implication in relationship to that modern natural science and to the extent that that fails I think the the enterprise of psychology is in trouble at least at any coherent level and to the extent that it gets absorbed by a pure natural science view that’s a very dangerous view as well so I think that psychology has got to sit with a foot in the natural sciences that bridge into the social sciences and then into the humanities and philosophy that’s where I see and it’s really is this kind of central hub discipline the current way the field organized itself was to try to apply at least in the western tradition western european tradition in the america’s tradition is to try to apply various frames to a specialized different aspects of mind to then explore them through the methods and epistemologies of science okay which means external observation measurement research organizations that try to build stacks of knowledge and then we talked about the actual schools of thought then as spectralizing different aspects of the field of mind either behavioral responses functional mental life internal systems of consciousness human justification at a higher level depending and then you get a breakdown of schools of thinking they can’t buy the 1920s by gotsky critiques this says oh my god it’s a nightmare they never fix it and then we have the you know the cognitive revolution comes along that adds some ontological generalizable weak computational possibilities at least for mainstream psychology but essentially you get a weak neurocognitive functionalism tied to a scientific method really epistemology that gives you your methodological behavioral approach and then you get about five percent of the field at least in america’s doing radical behaviors and so you get this methodological versus radical behaviorals institution that says hey we apply science to solve your your knowledge problems on behavior and mental process okay um so what i want to then say is that that that’s a completely inadequate as i said and then i want to talk a little bit about what’s a much more adequate way of operating and you know i bring in the tree of knowledge to afford a new vision for a naturalistic ontology so the tree of knowledge then it conforms to a standard natural science view sort of a common sense natural science view of cosmic evolution i would say that’s the kind of the broad scientific view now is it you know i an extreme physical reductionism i would say is in the minority you basically get a non-physical reductionism into emergence that’s the standard view um and i would i would call sort of big history an exemplar of the standard view of sort of common sense interdisciplinary science you start at the big bang big bang gives rise to particles and that gives rise to atoms that gives rise to chemistry it also gives rise to scale like stars then we could trail that up and we said life then happens at least in our particular planet life gets small at first and then it’s big and then all of a sudden you know down the lower we get humans and then humans explode into a new culture that’s the big history model okay um i argue that that’s the the time by complexity uh axes the time by i would say complexification thanks to john i use that word more i think that’s more precise is right uh but it’s not it doesn’t articulate the proper ontology okay the proper ontology is really understanding that there are fundamentally different levels of complexification at one like within matter and so that’s a jump from particles to atoms to chemistry that’s a those are levels of complexification and you can demonstrate levels of emergence and emanation across scale like solar systems may organize themselves in particular kind of ways but those kinds of emergencies are radically different than the jump that happens at the level of life okay and fundamentally the reason for that is the way life stores information cells process that information cells communicate with each other and then generate a variation selection and retention process that affords a complexity building feedback loop and gives rise to a new fundamentally different pattern of behavioral entities living processes so and the nature of that is sort of you use the word supervene on it i don’t really like that term whatever you talk about it in a number of different ways but it’s a higher fundamentally higher order level of complex adaptive organization okay um and then i and that’s big that’s exactly what big history says but big history then just jumps from there to humans okay as many different models do many biological physical list and biological models basically see life and then they go from life all the way up to humans all right i think that’s a that’s a big mistake because they miss mindedness they miss the emergence of mind uh what i would call capital m mind which i believe emerges from the same basic emergence and emanation feedback loops that have at least massive parallel meaning is the emergence of an information processing and communication system that affords a higher level of self-organization so the nervous system ties together bodies complex multi-celled systems and then affords the capacity for a sensory motor loop that enables their behavior as a pattern whole and all of our vocabularies about animal behavior hey that thing you know that gazelle’s running away from that uh lion and that’s food for the lion all of that i would argue is a particular level of complex functional analysis okay that’s radically different than we see uh in the living world in all the other kingdoms as complex and interesting as they are and i think that the proper definition for that is mental meaning that it’s an adjectives that describes the kind of complex adaptive behavior that animals with complex active bodies nervous systems behave in relationship to the environment okay why did i spend all that time in that because actually what that’s basically doing is it’s affording us an ontology of the the mental the beginning of mental is at the emergence of a nervous system of the complex active body at the cambering explosion and now that’s basically same when we say behavior and mental process that could mean six million different things asked renee decart asked george romanos ask any number of people they mean radically different things and we don’t have a shared understanding of what we mean by the mental this affords a joint point in nature that’s as clear almost i would argue as clear as the joint point between matter and life everyone in society and science has always agreed it’s like hey there’s shit that’s inanimate and there’s shit that’s animate and man that’s a big difference and you need some sort of science now how reductive and all this other stuff but there’s never been any doubt that the general concern with biology is to circle the broad domain of life you can debate exactly the essences that define it but in terms of the category family resemblances there’s no debate about what the general territory is around what you’re circling okay psychology lacks that that’s my my basic point is is that the science of psychology because people have so many different definitions of consciousness of psyche of human of animal and there’s so much ambiguity in nature and receiving that taxonomy we have not been able to afford ourselves clarity the tree of knowledge affords a particular opportunity for christmas and clarity and it says that we should divide the line in relationship to the cambering explosion and we should have an animal mental dimension of complexification that gets identified and associated with the what people just call animal behavior actually should just be called animal mental behavior and that is then grand’s one level of ontology and thus and thus there’s a dividing line in our systematic ways of thinking that says oh that’s what biology is the layer beneath that neuroscience is a layer in between a hybrid discipline between biology and psychology and psychology concerns itself with the behavior of the animals a whole at that level that’s the basic comparative psychology the same basic logic then and we’ve obviously been discussing this in many different those follows the evolution of animals insects invertebrates into vertebrates into mammals etc and then we get to primates then we get to our shared intersubjective and then we get symbols and then we get propositional language and then boom you get a human mind big bang that generates a culture layer on top of that what does that mean it means that we’re now in a totally different layer of behavior of mental behavioral process you know there’s a propositional culture socialization layer on top of what was the embodied layer and i would argue then that now you’re getting a radically different kind of behavioral process so behavior and mental processes have two totally different fields that we have not separated once the base animal mental in relationship to our experience that’s the primate and then there is the person which is the justificatory propositional self-reflective narrative and that’s a radically different field of behavior okay what does that mean it means that the institution of psychology should be divided between its base comparative and it’s human human psychology becomes a fundamentally different subset institutionally than the basic psychology okay and it’s as different as you know neuroscience now is now seen as a different it’s sort of branch of biology but neuroscience is a hybrid it sits in a hybrid between psychology and the biological sciences human psychology should sit as a hybrid between psycho base psychology and the social sciences and what should happen is human cognitive science what john is an expert in should then be merged effectively connected with human personality and then that should be connected effectively with social psychology and developmental psychology human developmental psychology and that should perform a coherent base on which then provides a potential ground for totally different class of sciences the social sciences and so what this gives you is a natural into human and then human is organized in that at that particular level and then you get the social sciences which actually the human and social sciences because of double hermeneutic provide create a whole other set of complexifications which we were talking about is an awk because the description is of the human and the nature of other types of things like artificial technology and other kinds of issues that merge at the behavior pattern create then a need to break the philosophy of social science as separate from the philosophy of natural science okay so so to me what’s all that and then i’ll say a few other things then i’ll stop that’s the descriptive explanatory bridge of natural into which places psychology in a in this hub place where basic connects down into biology and then human connects up and then that connects in the social sciences the justification line is unbelievably crucial both for the ontological description of what we do my dog benji has not been following this conversation well okay what we do in relationship to our behavior and the implications of philosophy like on is an art like studying rats and dogs is fundamentally different than studying persons simply at the level of way we describe them there’s no feedback that has all sorts of implications i’m going to ethically treat them but there’s no way you describe a rat and its behavior and amaze is totally different the way we describe humans okay and then the implications for society so the fact value distinction is completely different and much more convoluted because of the feedback loops in relation so there’s that and then the final distinction that i would make is then from the base attempt to describe and explain the animal mental and culture person level of the human and social psych then the issue of like what do we do with that knowledge to make desired difference in the world the both the application in general like application to education application industrial organization sport psychology application of psychopathology all of those actually are clustered of normative ontological confusing thick concepts that we talked about last time and there’s the development of like you know a licensed clinical psychologist that’s a psychological doctor that enters in and says hey what are we going to do to me the profession of psychology then is a third institutional infrastructure okay it should be very similar to medicine and biology that relation but in the world we only have psychology psychologists and psychologists and that term refers to academics and it refers to professional practitioners there’s no clear identity and if you look at the history of the american psychological association it’s constantly been battling over the last century about what’s its core identity and it landed on the idea that it was both because that’s what psychology did it created and basically a vacuum of confusion and then it decided the amalgamation of concepts should just jump into that vacuum and will be everything to everybody will both be a science and a profession will deal with nervous systems will deal with culture so my point of it is is that my meta psychological view and then i’ll shut up see if there’s anything to say because then i want to tie it to arabindo but basically is there should be three fundamental branches of the field a basic comparative psychology that essentially overlaps with ethology and behavioral ecology a human psychological branch that essentially overlaps a lot with human cognitive science and then into development personality and extends into social and those are tasked with describing and explaining in kind of a scientific epistemological way however the demands of the human sit in a social science epistemology onto epistemology which is different than a natural pure more base natural science okay and then finally there’s a jump to a different task because actually the value requirements of an application in profession where you’re actually tasked as a professional not to describe and explain change but to affect it okay now to describe and explain change has to you have to have ethics and you have to have epistemic value clearly but then to say hey this is this person that comes to you is suffering and they’re bad in some way and they all agree and then your task is decide what’s what’s a healthier more mature more adaptive more better way to live that requires yet another whole layer of expectation and a whole other layer of valuation in relationship with the judgments that you need to make in a whole set of training where different you know tasks to be behavioral scientists as opposed to being a cliche so those are the three great branches i would argue in terms of from an institutional perspective given where we’re situated now is it would afford sort of integrity clarity of in the institution i’ll stop there see if any but if you guys have reactions or questions to that because then i’m on a bridge then to the arabindo stuff but that’s the map that i wanted to so from a meta psych view hey what’s the institution look like here’s a logic for the institution um i’m quite familiar with this yep i don’t i don’t have much right now novel to say uh and i mean we did a lot of work at the more fine grain level in the thinking you know in untangling the elusive but and right you demonstrated uh you know in continual practice the ability to apply this framework in a really uh fecund manner um so uh yeah but this seems to me uh exactly also what zach wants which is you know the articulation of meta psychology is going in a lockstep with the articulation of your ontology and so the questions are constantly bouncing off each other and answering each other and so um um i think that’s um i think that’s one of the great advantages of what you’re doing um and you know you and i’ve had a private discussion about the mental and the cognitive and i like how that you know how that was how that was has been resolved um so yeah i sort of yeah no i’m sorry if it was redundant at all but it’s no no no it’s not necessarily redundant no no the apology is from me i’m sure for many people watching this it’s not redundant uh i just wanted to indicate that um my lack of having something novel to say is is because i’ve had a lot of opportunity and question and dialogue with you about this that’s why perfect yeah it’s it’s really interesting great because i think i mean i agree i’ve heard heard you and i’ve read uh read you uh on this and i think a lot about the way the psychology as a field was not institutionalized the way that other sciences were institutionalized it was a little bit like the poor kid on the block or something you know um and so we’ve talked about physics and many things of that nature but you know the kind of um need to and i’ve talked about this reify certain forms of professional practice and certain forms of institutional practice quite early talking about world war one when measurement in particular uh became the dominant way that psychology moved through the you know industrial organizational psych and educational testing and these things were were very large enterprises very early that employed many many many many many psychologists um and uh and so similarly you’ve had the growth of psychiatry continue to be mentioned um which is you know the use of uh you know pharmaceutical drugs to affect the behavior um and so that also is one of the ways that there’s been a kind of movement towards a institutionalization of psychology that was kind of driven by market demand for certain types of things rather than by let’s say principal logical view of what the field like would actually ideally be structured like and so if you can compare this to example uh for example like i mean maybe this is not a good example but you know the application of physics through engineering in nasa right where you’re you’re you’re designing something on the matter of the way it needs to be designed under conditions of environment like the moon for example where there was not a where there was not a competitive institutional forms of scarcity that drives certain reification of scientific total so this is what i’m saying it’s like psychology never ever had a chance to organize itself um now i will also say that other fields are in the same position like oh yeah or the distortion of the institutionalization of science in general there’s a great book by this guy david nobel because uh called america by design where he talks about you know the wedding between the military industrial complex and many many fields you wouldn’t think were actually tied in there like chomsky doing his linguistic work uh basically on the dole of the defense project i mean uc berkeley being built under that auspice in terms of its major scientific enterprises and so there’s just this way that you know so for example the hydron collider the hydron collider this is the largest scientific project it’s the some people say the largest project largest cooperative project ever undertaken by humans well the hydron collider it’s kind of interesting right now what is it doing what is it proving like how’s it benefiting me you gotta know how goddamn neutrons shatter well right and then there’s this question if it’s deeply driven by certain theoretical assumptions which some physicists think are not right so i’m just what i’m saying is that there’s been an obvious this absence of emphasis on psychology and a cap of of certain forms of institutional practice that could have emerged from the field of psychology and so the re-emergence of the legalization of psychedelics a whole bunch of other things are kind of maybe moving us in directions that we forfeited when we decided to basically pursue physical science and technological engineering of the externalities and interconnections of human life rather than looking to explore inner space if i can use a cheesy no that’s actually that’s actually a beautiful transition so what i’d like to then say is that that we’re at a time between worlds somebody told me that i don’t remember where i heard that but but i mean you know and so we’re reinventing ourselves we need an axial age bronze age kind of revolution at some level and maybe we can get the intellectual alignment correct and that’s where i’m so excited about a potential psychology at least that lays out an intellectually coherent argument that then bridges physics biology psychology into social sciences into the application with a degree of integrity and coherence that allows us to get a grip on the real and grip on a real in a way that fulfills us you know so what i’d now like to do then is just talk about my own narrowness in terms of the way i get trained so i get trained as an experimental i mean not you know empiricists certainly that they that the right justified level of knowledge is through the behavior exterior you observe stuff you measure shit okay and so and i carry that history but i’m breaking out of it in a particular way but it grounded me in terms of sort of what was legitimate and what was not a priori in many different domains that science had a particular kind of epistemic and really justified authority about what could legitimize what was you know okay and that i’ll bring that home to the here and now because for example as i you know emerged with my system i was like well this is really anchored in science and then people are like hey you should check out wilbur and i’m like well wilbur you know is he really anchored into an actual naturalistic ontology and so i would use that to be kind of dismissive and along those lines you know i got a book in 2010 actually this book i picked it up at just a greater psychology the psychology of sharia or bindu and then when i first read this book in 2010 where i was still in process of writing my book and i was growing a little bit in relationship to the inadequacies of the standard empirical program and of course i’ve always been arguing you know i was in it still at that time and we just need good meta-theoretical organization this paradigm is relatively healthy but over the last 10 years there’s really been a fundamental shift about the magnitude of the inaccuracy of the modernist paradigm and its capacity to appropriately evolve from the principles that it’s actually grounded in and that’s reflected in my own continued alienation about the inability of the system at least in my own obviously it’s egocentric it’s like here’s a fucking model that’s actually 10 times better than the chaotic organization that you have and every individual or conversation you have and everybody nods along with it and you can’t leverage the system at all to move in a coordinated fashion and in part because the theoretical argument that i was making actually is like your commitment to empiricism that you’ve actually institutionalized and the way you get all your grants is kind of you know weak i mean at least a huge amount of fucking chaos and an enormous amount of wasted energy. Not a popular view Greg. That’s not a popular view people are like okay behind the scenes actually it’s a popular view people are actually oh my god i always feared that this was a useless enterprise i mean i’ve talked to a lot of people who say that you know yet at an institutional level there’s no real capacity of the system basically like oh my god we have to actually stop first principles and you know what are you going to do retract all the damn textbooks it’s a nightmare so but anyway so then i get more and more alienated from the structure even though you know most my parents are professors i get embedded in the academy it’s like god what the hell is this so the bottom line story that and so then obviously i shift and go crazier and build gardens and things like that as just sort of different alternatives and my own consciousness begins to shift significantly in relationship to the really the harmony essentially between an exterior puricism and an interior puricism capacity but at the same time more and more alienation and as you know John and others sort of like kind of transformed did some wisdom energy transformation stuff so ultimately they bring you to the to the punchline of this is that a month ago or so i started reading this book again a greater psychology and so Sri Aurobindo is a great yogic philosopher and although i knew it i just heard it so differently as he starts to open up and he offers in this book a critique of psychology hey you guys do the exterior thing but actually 2500 years ago we started attending to the interior you know and my own language system on mind is the way of saying this is sort of like the way i define mine is like hey mind one is like animal behavior mind three is this justifying thing and mind two is this epistemological portal that you know has adverbial adjectival consciousness and is a witness function and essentially then it’s like oh that’s where we start as a yogi you know the yogic framing is to afford your capacity to create a feedback loop of witnessing the witness function and then engendering all sorts of psycho technologies that afford the expansion of that and the affordance of self-world insight in relationships the practices of that and then what happens to him in terms of like okay so through my own training and through other people who have this capacity to see the world what do we get well essentially what he articulates is just an unbelievable for me now it just sort of gives me chills it’s like oh actually there is down from your standard mind what he calls just standard ordinary mind basically into a vital capacity which i down into the sort of less conscient frames of biology and then underneath that is an even less conscient material reality that then drops ultimately into an energy system and then through that at the down you then go up into a higher mind and then he talks about an illuminative and intuitive mind and then ultimately an over mind sage-like view that then in its highest reaches touches a super mind coming off of a particular contact with the divine and and then he looks steps back and he says hey the consciousness the cosmic conscious serene of the awakening the dimensionality of awakening from energy to matter to life to mind and then ultimately in the over super mind creates this complexification view and you create then a whole oneness of consciousness awakening okay so yeah so now this is the experience of of course yeah that makes perfect sense i can line that completely up with the imagery that imaginal you know we can get into the ontological and metaphysical commitments but if at least if i’m reading well certainly he has contact with the divine and he may have more well he’s just got maybe he’s just more advanced he’s got deeper ontological insights into the reality but he’s not clear on what it is at a deep metaphysical level nor am i and at the very least the concept of it relative as its alignment is just enormously powerful at least as far as i’m concerned in the alignment so from my experience here i am experimental exterior behavior from the outside empiricism you now have a whole tradition that actually knows that eschews that in a particular way drops into interior empiricism and if we can build a metaphysics that actually aligns this continuum of awareness whatever from energy all the way up to the concept of god that affords a complexification that’s both as an interior exterior and metaphysical coherence then that’s the kind of architecture that i think would at least provide some kind of container to deeply inform potential transformations along the lines that we’ve been discussing so that was great so oh go ahead okay um i i’m not familiar with what’s the name again siri arabando and and by the way he is one of the most influential figures for ken wilbur just in terms of lineage so ken wilbur draws a lot of what he thinks about and you know a lot more than i is about this act but he i certainly my understanding is that shreya or bundu was one of the most influential figures for ken wilbur i think it’s pronounced orabindo oh sorry well shows you my ignorance that’s okay orbindo yeah he’s a big influence on and then you know i think probably millions of people around the world we spoke about him in one of the prior episodes i alluded to it and i definitely just want to take this opportunity to come back to it because it was very yeah so just to help me a little bit i’ve heard the name um and of course i i’ve read people within the yogic some of the yogic traditions um and also tantric and buddhist and dallas um and neil put i mean what i’m sorry and this has come out in the series that i’ve done with zevi sloven and then the series i’m doing with zevi sloven and guys i’ve thought you know a deep reflection on we use this term and it’s it’s it’s not a very helpful term but it’s the term that is sort of stuck we use mysticism to describe this the problem with the term is it could mean anything from a radical insight into the fundamental nature of reality to seeing fairies or right and so the term is really really equivocal and imprecise and it puts things together that often i would say don’t properly belong together um it doesn’t make distinctions for example clear distinctions unitive experiences and visionary experiences and prophetic experiences and so i just wanted to say that i’m using that term with a lot of reflective caution when i now ask this question is he properly understood given all of that caveat is he typically sorry i made a mistake not properly they just said we may not be able to properly use that term so i i’m correcting myself is he typically understood as a mystic is that is that is well i’ll put it this way because i’ve had three uh conversations with zevi so that’s about six hours with zevi who’s educated me about his very erudite perspective powerful mysticism and his the youtube channel that he leads is called seekers of unity and so his fundamental issue is to expand consciousness to essentially see non-dual the non-dual reel of no or known relations in whatever expansion would be i read this book but christly because of my conversations with zevi i was prepared to basically like oh my god that’s what zevi’s talking about so there’s a huge aspect of this book in my estimation that aligns directly uh with zevi slavin’s angle on the mystic tradition that that’s very good in the sense of being very helpful to me because as i mentioned i had an extended series with zevi on the cognitive on cognitive science and mysticism and the deep connections uh the between the two of them and this is a a core dimension of my work i even have run experiments on relationship between mystical experience and meaning in life and so if if if what you’ve just said is true and i have every reason to believe that it is then that helps me understand what’s being spoken of here and now well i’ll give you just one other example so the the guide much of the guiding idea is sort of the death of the ego in various ways the death of the under you know the self-narrating justifying at least some aspect of breaking that up and then achieving from zevi’s discussion of he’ll have you know that that could um it’s another very very strong theme in relation yeah it is but it needs to be qualified i thought i did with uh mark miller former student of mine and now colleague we’re writing a paper together uh on you know there’s two debt there’s two kinds at least two kinds of deaths of the ego there’s a privative kind in which people are experiencing depersonalization you realization and that’s traumatic and horrible and then there’s a superlative kind in which people go be somehow they lose the sense of ego or self and this is all contested we talked about that right and that is somehow superlative what’s interesting is because of some of the cognitive science that’s emerged you know you can actually sort of look at what’s happening in people and i’m not being reductionist here but this is also pertinent evidence like the brain states in these two states are actually very different so right the way for example the insula cortex is correct is connected to the rest of the cortex is fundamentally different in these two situations so in depersonalization you see the insula being sort of isolated in a radical way and in these these no self-experiences you see radical connectivity there’s radical connectivity so one way of thinking about it is here’s sort of the norm in which the insula is trying to match inner inner sensory motor prediction and outer sensory motor prediction right here’s the norm and you can be below it with insufficient amount of connectivity but you can also be beyond it in a way that is somehow experienced as as profoundly good totally so yeah so i mean from my vantage point i’m when i say ego i’m different i definitely differentiate as you know from our conversations from the experiential self so the experiential self’s capacity for an intuitive self-world grip and the expansion of that to create connectivity that would be then mirrored in the ideally in a you know functional mri or whatever as opposed to the you know self-conscious narrator the kind that dissipates when we have flow experience yeah exactly the folks that that kind of dissolution of the hey i need to be right and my justification system is right and my extreme rigidity propositional knowing that defends both my version of reality and that egoic friend and the more natural egoic pride you know and they need to be somebody special in relation that’s the that aspect of the ego i think virtually all mystics well traditions in a wide and certainly here the the capacity to expand beyond that to begin trans justificatory egoic in that regard is pretty i would say is pretty consistent depiction yeah and and i i i think that’s exactly right and what i’m interested in is the reason i pointed to the different in functionality is there’s also a difference in in phenomenology that’s what i was trying to get with private right right supportive see so the deep personalization although there’s lots of similarities of the phenomenology right the depersonalization doesn’t carry with it what i call onto normativity right the the the superlative version carries with it onto normativity which is and this goes back to what we were talking about last time the auto normative is people do this really bizarre thing right so normally people ground real they’re in terms of the sort of maximal coherence maximal like in pragmatic sense right maximal coherence of intelligibility so people will typically say dreams aren’t real because this doesn’t fit into you know the intelligibility by which i make sense of the world etc etc or i took it you know that i i was drunk and that wasn’t real because and what’s really weird about these higher states of consciousness is people go into experiences they they’ve never had before because they’re leaving behind the normalization of the mattering narrative ego they get these experiences that do not fit in that are are almost lacking in content and then they but they say this they say that is actually more real than all of this they reverse the judgment normally they use all of this to judge things and to either accept them or reject them they take that as and they feel they’re fully justified in taking that experience to reject or at least call into question and they don’t and this is not just statements i mean the research shows that what they do is they attempt to transform their relationships their roles their identity their understanding of the world so they can come into increasing conformity to the auto normative to the really real and that goes back to what i was saying before about like the really real the realness is this thing at which you ought and this is the way it is they they come together in a profound way and the mystical experience i’m arguing now i’m making an argument is exactly the experience in when in which that that underlying oneness is exemplified in a way that drives people into profound transformation i hope that i 100 agree i’ll shut up in a second i’ll just i’ll just echo that because for me then what you’re in your language what we basically what emerges is a new schematic of the perspectival participatory intuitive grip of the world and then and then that grounds people in it and is a phase shift that affords a new transformation in that intuition and that is i mean we’re primates that are fundamentally anchored to that and then when people feel that that that speaks to them across multiple levels of being exactly and then i’ll reply to that and then i’ll let zach because so the basic proposal i’ve been making and why you see this kind of connectivity and kind of thing going on and it’s on the same continuum with flow and insight i think flow is an insight cascade i’ve got work on that but the point i’m making is like from so think about it this way normally when we flow we flow in a limited domain flow is you you have to have skills like right and you have to sort of expertise to get into the flow state and so normally flow is localized and then you get practices that generalize but here’s a proposal what have you got sort of flow at the level of sort of meta optimal grip you’re not flowing on how to get an optimal grip in biology or how to get an optimal grip in this relationship right but because you’ve got that ability right either spontaneously or through training what you’re doing is actually the expertise you’re flowing in is your capacity for optimal gripping per se and that’s why it’s this profound sense of unity intelligibility enhancement fundamental insight and if that and that’s a proposal by the way i’m not stating it as fact right but it’s it’s it’s evidence-based and theory-based what that means is that there is like there’s a justification for that because insofar as local flow it’s pretty clear now is optimal performance in both senses of the word people say this is the greatest this is the best i feel and this is the best i feel and this is the best i practice we know that flow is designating is it designating it perfectly but not no but nothing does so that’s not it but but it it reliably designates optimal experience and performance well then this right right the mystical experience the higher state of consciousness is similarly justifying right people’s claim that they are in a kind of profound optimal experience and performance with respect to reality and and so although they may spew very different metaphysical claims the claim that they’re somehow now enhancing religio in a way that reliably improves their lives makes them wiser i think that can be actually justified totally agree zach i’m sorry that was a bit of a snitch but i was trying to live with an argument fascinating conversation i mean this is actually one of my wheelhouses because i’ve really cut my teeth on ken wilbur and he really addressed a lot of these problems i think really well like in the 70s and 80s and you’re right greg that orbindo was a was a very big influence on ken but it’s interesting to note that there’s like a there’s a history of this conversation in western psychology of course william james like variety of religious experience of course is the place where this kind of begins and of course orbindo was a mystic absolutely i’ll get to that but he also read james read darwin and was educated in england and him in disguise of ebakananda you guys might know who at the parliament of world religions who met william james who brought hinduism to the west and was the first time that you had this kind of fusion and there’s other other places too when the british got up into tibet and you had this infusion but you get this meeting of quote unquote east and west right and so like there’s this lineage between orbindo and vivek ananda in particular and it’s that same attempt that orbindo is trying to do is bring the east and the west quote unquote together orbindo was a political radical during the occupation of india by the british and before gandhi was organizing guerrilla warfare was in prison for a bomb plot in isolation had a vision of vivek ananda who came to him so we’ll talk about visions we’ll talk about non-conceptual awareness higher states of consciousness versus just altered states of consciousness so there’s a lot of distinctions there and can get help there but so orbindo goes on to you know flee to french india would later say that during the time that he was agitating guerrilla warfare made sense but when gandhi by the time gandhi got to it then gandhi was appropriate and so you know in any case the point i’m making here is that he was trying to bring east to west so he was trying to do like vivek ananda he was trying to say you guys think you do science we do a deeper science and we’ve been doing it for thousands of years a greater psychology it was part of the it was part of the bengal renaissance it was part of the encounter of the british with not native americans but with the indian subcontinent which had civilizations that had been living on it with high culture and mathematics and all of these things and so there was this encounter which resulted in the bengal renaissance and orbindo ram krishna and ramana maharishi among vivek ananda and others are like these key figures we’re like ewing and other people are like whoa what are those guys doing and and james similarly and you know orbindo makes this argument like listen the it’s the interior sciences ken picks this up and we’re we’re working this with gaffney and then in the neo-perennialism that you know the argument against it is that well you know your subjective experience and my subjective experience are different and orbindo is like well not if you’re meditating well and you’re working with and you’re working with a community of practitioners who are all meditating in the same way and you’re talking about your practice and so orbindo tries to paint this picture of a kind of like verifiableism within the domain of interiority through collective communities of practice and ken kind of plugs right in there and he says there’s a broad empiricism again echoing william james wilbur and he’s saying listen like anything that is disclosed in first-person experience and verified in third-person experience and second-person experience which is yeah we’re getting into now something that fits these definitions of real yes yeah yes so once so once you get the opening of the interior sciences and you say hey actually those dudes in tibet were doing something really cool they weren’t innovating and like building bombs and stuff but they were going so deep inside with such rich community practice that they must have discovered something that’s true about the nature of reality and at least the human mind right and so orbindo was basically saying hell yeah we did and there’s a there’s a very rich architecture of mental phenomena that’s discoverable from these interior sciences and their rigorous practices and so this results in it’s interesting so again james picks up a little bit on this with the broad and you know the history of of the kind of like diversity of religious experience that once you start to study this stuff and it’s just the gates open right and this is like the problem with psi phenomenon and all of that stuff is that like it’s actually kind of a pandora’s box ontologically so it gets very difficult to handle some of these phenomena and and so that’s why orbindo’s like well that’s why you need to change your ontology you’re not going to be able to understand these things and so he posits the ontology downward as you postulated greg matter life mind but then you also posits the ontology upward and here’s where we get the full kind of neo platonic great change being that orbindo lays on its side and he’s saying like tlr deshardam that like the future is reaching back and bringing us forward so there’s all of these crazy assumptions which actually when you really look at cosmological evolution it’s pretty weird and based on a lot of crazy assumptions that’s not orbindo seem crazy because he drew them from the interior sciences is it any more crazy than the statements so i’m not going to get into that debate but so but in any case orbindo was prolific and so greg i would encourage you to read i’ve spent many years just really engaging with the work and so but yeah so now about a third of the way through life divine so yeah i’m getting into it and the and so the but the thing i wanted to bring up here was to john’s point of like mysticism being very poorly defined and and there’s a way and there’s a few people will we’re being the main one who tried to build taxonomies of these forms and it’s important to get it right because like just like there’s the derealization and then there’s the like egoless awareness there’s also like you know psychotic visions and religious visions right and then uh and so and you can go on to see that there’s like these interesting cleavings in the landscape of mental phenomenon once you start to look at these kinds of mental phenomena and it’s important to note that there’s looks like in a lot of the meditative literatures that describe increasing attainments of meditative capacity you have vertical stacks sometimes called state stages which unfold by sequence and you can’t get to one without getting to the other one first right so that those types of phenomenon occur and appears in meditative attainment but then there’s obviously other cases where you’re not going through anything boom something just happened and your state is completely altered right those have the quality of being you’re dropped into complete egosness or complete conceptless awareness languageless awareness sometimes it’s dark or light or undescribable so uh will cause us to causal uh the unmanifest then there’s other ones that happen in a flash that are actually rich with imaginal content right um and this is a different orb into it’s a different realm and so there’s this way of trying to think about how do we organize these experiences and it begins i think back with a laid with the book mysticism where there’s like nature mysticism and the theistic mysticism and then the the non-theistic mysticism and you know nature mysticism you’re you you don’t drop your senses and sense of self you’re empowered by your unity with nature and then you feel oneness with the web of life and you kind of like you’re still zac but now you’re in a way not zac but you’re looking and you’re speaking it’s nature unity but then the theistic mysticism different that’s an encounter with a non-human intelligence a vow type encounter which is very common to mystical experience of the kind where there’s visionary intrusion and other things where you’re actually communicating with non-human intelligence so theistic we’ll call broadly but there’s other forms you know angelology demonology etc non-human intelligent mystical experience and then there’s just the like i said the unmanifest the face before your parents were born causal awareness deep dreamless sleep that all of those are in play in orbindo’s mysticism acts them like this where you move out of the mental into a form of nature mysticism into a form of theistic mysticism into a form of unmanicest mysticism and then at the top of that the whole thing grabs in the non-dual which is his move back down so he’s not escaping up and out he’s saying we need to actually bring the full stack into material reality which means it’s actually literally transforming the nature of my own cellular material by being in touch with the supermind so we’re like oh that’s a weird thing to bring to a psychology conference now greg well i don’t talk to you stand up to the apa and say that and so this is the thing is like once you break into the interior sciences the claims made by these traditions about what’s discoverable within the interior sciences are as radical as the claims made by those physicists who talk about the big bang and you talk about string theory and stuff that we actually really don’t understand even though we think that the smartest guys on the planet ask them about moral and ethical and religious things and why do we do that they’re physicists right but these interior sciences guys who’ve worked for you know sometimes in decades in communities of practice for centuries tell us all kinds of stuff and so this gets back to the imaginal work that reveals true reality and how do we tell the difference and so there’s massive controversy about all of these guys that i mentioned about the bangal renaissance or bindo in a controversy in the sense of like well from a scientific perspective they’re all charlatans right from a scientific perspective they’re resuscitating ignorant religion and etc right so the defense of the interior sciences against the quote exterior sciences and the legitimation of it is was the main thing that ken will work was trying to do in his career basically he was trying to say hey guys science is awesome but this stuff that we do in meditation and the religious geniuses right or bindo i would say is a religious genius religious geniuses are coming up with stuff that we need to take as seriously as we’re taking stuff like physics for example or as we’re taking reductive you know psychology and comparative psychology and things like that and you know and maslow is in the mix there with his self-actualizing and peak experiences and so there’s been some conversation but there’s been no way to bring some of this quote unquote evidence to bear because it’s non-admissible in the court of public opinion and especially scientific orthodoxy and so that has always been this issue why ken for example sits on the edges of the academy was dismissed when in fact he’s done some of the most rigorous work on exactly these precise issues around mysticism and and transformed experience religious movement things of that nature so yeah so i i second your and applaud your pursuit of or bindo i’m curious to see how you bring him in to mainstream psychology journals in a in a serious way where it’s not just a curiosity from another culture but actually no we take orbindo’s writing seriously in the way that we trade for example like you know a study seriously where some dude made up a metric of a bunch of likert items and created right publishes it they’re like oh that’s real science or bindo who takes a lifetime writing books and doing like we’re talking when i’m talking like a casual meditator no and that’s the other thing to remember here is like you read or bindo you think you get it but probably not like that’s a mental projection of an experience which you haven’t had the years of meditation and practice and religious community to attain the kinds of insights that orbindo’s speaking about are also in the model of intersubjective confirmation of first-person experience it has to be a community of the adequate yep so so if you if you’ve been meditating for 20 years and you start to have meditative experiences and you go to your colleagues who’ve never meditated and you say hey i had this experience there there’s no way for them to understand what the hell you’re talking about if you go to other meditators even in other traditions who’ve meditated for as long as seriously and you describe that experience usually you can start to be like oh that’s and then you can start to talk about your shared experience of the first person phenomenon to get at this reality which is what the inner sciences are trying to discover so yeah there’s this there’s this tricky moves that need to be made to reintroduce some of these as valid trajectories of exploration again i think mazl is worth mentioning here because this is this is about the advances in positive psychology yeah book i’m reading right other book is transcend by scary yeah see what that’s like an updated uh this is an interesting update about yeah there’s issues with that book too because or because he’s trying to resolve it in a non-religious manner whereas orbindo says there’s no other solution but to do it right well that that to me is i mean this just right on the sort of the doorstep of what’s from my at least where i am in terms of what i’m metabolizing uh but what i wanted us to sort of you know sort of end with at least is a emerging architecture that afforded perhaps a new opportunity to build the exterior classic science modern empirical natural science view of the world with an interior view and that’s essentially what my own at least experiences where i’m sitting at least with utah has a capacity to begin to build and of course the work that i’m doing with john and you and and all of this is like no okay yeah it’s it’s tough and there’s a lot of things to be sorted out but damn if there isn’t an outline that is beginning to emerge out of the fog that would afford a degree of coherence and we can see about what ontological commitments that that would entail but in relationships are sort of just a broad swath of conscious awareness in the universe and what that would mean across particular kinds of identifiable dimensions i don’t know i’m fucking seeing that on the horizon so my entry into this because i said i don’t know this work in particular but i was i my entry is the kyoto school nashita was profoundly influenced by james and also by heidegger and then nishitani and that was also the attempt to bridge between the east and west and i’ve been following the kyoto school for quite some time and the issue of intelligibility for example comes out in nashita’s work and then the other the tradition is you know that is the neo-platonic tradition because in neo-platonism there was a time in which the meditative or meditative contemplative practices and the you know the philosophical scientific practice of trying to make sense of reality were deeply interpenetrating and mutually supportive so our view are almost i would say prejudice that they have to be and take in an antagonistic relationship is just not true to history and it’s also not true cross-contextually cross-culturally so just that i wanted to put that on the table that our presumption that the relationship has to be antagonistic is exactly that it’s an unjustifiable given history and cross-cultural investigation it’s an unjustifiable presumption now that doesn’t mean we come up with a solution but just digging in our heels and say no no never that that’s an unjustifiable stance as far as i can tell well just had a personal narrative you know the the at least in october when i had a you know perhaps my you know well however where the hell it is on some stack i don’t know but basically i dropped as you know john i dropped into that particular and that was actually afforded to a particular angle on what the universe was as a beam of energy information that i put my consciousness in particular lens with and then actually my justification system dropped out and i’m like oh my god i’m feeling wisdom energy and then i’m just going to go for a walk remember john i was texting and all that you know right and then you were like hey that’s kind of like cheap right and it’s like you know i mean that to me is like hey at least at a phenomenological subjective version of reality it’s like damn i mean there’s something there well that well thank you for that great that’s and i was and i got to participate but i’m going to try and circle this around because i think so i was pointing towards the mystical experience mystical realization i prefer using mystical realization over mystical experience for some of the so there’s mystical realization points to this you know the the the dow point where the is and the are are are are are indistinguishable because they come from a common origin like the realness the on for normativity all that stuff but correspondingly to that and this was i think really well articulated in you know platenism the work of pearl p e r l really brings this out on new platenism is the idea that we have a we abandon in modernity that there are truths and not and this doesn’t mean propositional truths are meant as ways in which we couple to reality in a way that we can’t couple to reality and we and reality are more able to disclose who we are and what reality is that’s what i’m talking about when i talk about truth here almost in the sense of betrothed right one of the original etymologies for truth trough right right the idea that there are truths that are only accessible after we undergo significant transformation right and that’s part of what’s been driving our whole conversation here the the the the you know the the i don’t know what to call it the the proposal uh you know yet typified in day card that no no all you need is a method right a method and that will be universally applied and that so transformation loses its ontological significance right it loses its it’s it’s the idea that there are aspects i’ll use the matter i don’t like inner and outer but i’ll use it right now right there right there there are ways there are dimensions of the inner world and the outer world that are not disposable unless those two have gone through transformation and some deeply coupled fashion that’s you know that’s the main that’s the driving engine in platinus’s argument it’s like you you can’t this deeper level of reality is inaccessible to you until you’ve gone through these transformations and you can’t do these transformations like independently from the way in which reality you’re participating in reality and for me i mean that was one of the reasons that you know i i i wanted to engage in this project because i mean what we keep coming back to and you know and both of you zach and greg you like you in different ways you have i think made this point which is no no like you you really can’t get at um you know what we are and what our relationship to reality is and what reality is without undergoing transformation and i think the mystical tradition is the main source of evidence broadly construed for exactly that claim and what we have to remember is cross-culturally and process historically that has been taken very very seriously it’s like yeah yeah deeper aspects of reality or deeper knowledge of myself i can’t get that unless i go through some huge transformation and we replace that with no no no i don’t need to change i just need to use this method and it will take me to the depths of me and to the depths of reality and i think what fascinates me about the mystical tradition is it’s kind of living proof that that cartesian proposal is ultimately incomplete i’m not saying that you know we can’t use methods and the scientific methods there’s more than one by the way the scientific methods are very powerful but the idea that we don’t that the the mystical proposal the mystical exemplification is no no your fundamental access to reality within and without is dependent on transformation in a profound way and that is you know precisely i think that i think that’s where our conversation about transformation and mysticism are meeting for me that’s how i’m seeing the relationship between them yes no totally and that’s what Urbindo would say again he’s compared to Plotinus because he’s he’s got the hierarchy of knowing and being and you can only get an experience of that being if you move up this hierarchy and they’re completely coupled and yes it’s interesting the way that notion transformed with the onset of modernity you know there wasn’t an absence of the notion it just kind of went underground because you still haven’t you still haven’t science like especially nowadays this notion of an expert right which is someone who by that definition kind of knows something you don’t know by virtue of like putting in 10,000 hours or whatever the technical definition is so this notion of epistemic asymmetry epistemic asymmetry is related to teacherly authority is right worry about a lot and so yeah so it’s a very interesting problem and the root of transformation and so like you know the the well there’s several things to say or one is that there’s there’s a difficulty in it because the the very because you can trans as we’ve talked about you can move through transformative processes that do disclose realities but narrow limited bandwidth realities yeah yeah so it’s kind of like saying listen you’re going to transform you’re going to develop that’s going to disclose more reality so pay attention to how you’re transforming and developing because that will literally become what you are and know and and feel with with your being and so this is the deep philosophy like philosophy of education question the learning is inevitable if you spend all day playing video games you will learn to become extremely good at video games right like don’t pretend that’s not going to happen and similarly if you just learn with italian school then you’ll just be really good at what to tell you in school so there’s this question about like you know once you move out of a psychology that’s static and move into one that’s diachronic and move into one that’s about learning fundamentally over being our static trait then you have to start being much more concerned about amelioration of behavior and change of behavior and education of behavior because if it’s like oh your iqs that at 10 that’s what you are good like that’s a static non-diachronic way of characterizing a trait oh you’re introverted okay that doesn’t change yeah like and so there’s this way that the non-diachronic psychologies make us inattentive to how rich the transformative nature of the experience is and how ontologically world the worlding that comes from it right to get to a good that like there’s this like unfolding of greater worldedness and so yeah that’s directly tied to that i mean this is kind of the whole theme that we’ve been talking about yep all the lots of actually and even an ironic twist the nature of reliability and validity in measurement basically creates realities that are essentially then are translated as fixed because this is the reality that you can document and translate across generalizability so the one of the interesting things about measurement is finding the things that are reliably measured which then they don’t change anyway that’s a i know we’re running low on time you’re right and that’s like again that’s a meeting the codification of measurement as the dominant professionalization modality of psychology led to the reification of these mongrel concepts that are anyway so this is fascinating well i’m going to draw to a close yes i think we’ve we’ve uh we’ve uh like i feel like we are now resonating like almost holographically through the whole of the our dialogue together and that’s a good thing my intuitive grip on the world yeah so i wanted to thank you both for this uh this wonderful journey we take together genuine dialogos you know where i feel i got to places i couldn’t get to on my own and i hope the two of you found that as well and for me that’s one of the defining criteria uh for genuine dialogos and so if you have any you know i’m really glad we had this this is what i was this last session in particular in terms of the the description of an architecture of meta-psychology around a logos that then bridges in terms of its potential of making associations and then really a potentially emerging coherence that can really um you know be up to the task true to human transformation i i think we you know i see an outline for that in this dialogos and i’m deeply grateful yeah i’m just grateful and kind of honored to be just chatting with you guys about this stuff it was felt very productive and and then also like something you do for its own sake so it was a good it was a good experience thank you very much gentlemen i’m going to uh end the recording and we’ll all talk again soon later