https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=-Uv8_xSAMs4

So welcome, so welcome everyone to Voices with Raveki. I’m joined again by my good friend Lehmann Pascal. Some of you probably saw the earlier discussion I had with Lehmann. Lehmann is an important figure within the Meta Modern movement and if you saw the last video you know he brings very eloquent and theoretically sophisticated articulation to his understanding and practice of Meta Modernism and using that as a framework with which to respond to issues such as like the COVID crisis and the meaning crisis. So welcome again. I mean it’s really good to have you here. Really good to see you again. You too John, always nice to talk with you. Let me tell you what’s been on my mind this morning that you picked from among them and we’ll go down one of those pathways. Sure, sure, sure. So I’m thinking about how the generalized set of shamanic practices maps on pretty nicely to what the future of humanity might need. I’m thinking a lot about the kind of the mechanics of split attention and how that applies to developmental practice, inner practice. I’m also thinking a lot about the danger of superficiality and meaning making. You know, the danger of shallowness of values and whether things, you know, if something inhibits the process by which meaning actually becomes an embodied experience. Yeah. Now we can have all the tools of meaning at our disposal but if it stays at the surface, what good is it? Right, right, right. That’s what’s on my mind today. Well, I find all of those interesting so let’s try and talk about all of them but let’s start with the last one because it’s always good to start with meaning I think. It’s a good place that usually sets up your thinking for everything else. So one of the, as you know, I think about this a lot too and I get asked questions about, you know, the dark side of meaning making and of course that’s completely relevant because I argue that the meaning making machinery is also the self-deception machinery. This is why I try to strongly associate and integrate meaning with wisdom and the cultivation of wisdom precisely because I think the meaning making machinery, while it does give us the connectedness, the religio, you know, a connectedness to ourself, each other and the world that enhances meaning in life, it’s also this very same machinery that predisposes us towards bullshitting ourselves and deceiving ourselves. So that’s an argument I have for why I think, I don’t think it’s a metaphysical necessity. I think it’s a practical, constitutive necessity that the cultivation of meaning and the cultivation of wisdom should be done in a completely interdependent manner. So from your point of view, what do you think are the mechanisms involved in, you know, there’s this first step where you recognize something and say, hey, that could give me some meaning. That’s got meaning all over it. I agree. I assert a value or I perform a practice and it’s right there for me. I could tell someone else that I’ve got this thing that’s enhancing meaning for me. But how does that, what are the mechanics of embodying that and taking that deeper and assimilating that? Because it seems like a lot of people stop at the first stage somehow, if that’s the right metaphor. Yeah, I think that is the correct metaphor. And part of what’s going on there, I think is modal confusion. And I’m not attributing this to you, but it fits the description where people get focused on an experience they’ve had. And they have this object. And the point about that is, I think that’s, well, first of all, it’s modal confusion. You’re missing what is most important about the experience in your trying to have it and recapture it again and again. You’re missing the capacity to not look at it, but look through it and see what you can learn from it that is transferable to other situations. And so, you know, this is, you know, let me use, you know, a martial art analogy, right? You find this stance and you do this move and oh, wow. And you just keep going back to that again and again and again. That’s actually not very good. What you need to do is try and spar with it, right? Try and spar with it. Put it into a problem that is beyond the comfortable zone that the experience is giving you and see if it facilitates insight and transfer and learning and a sense of challenge for you. Insofar, I mean, the Buddha warns about this, you know, consistently, and it’s something that the Western Buddhists don’t pick up on. You are not supposed to contentedness or self-satisfaction or even sort of wonderful feelings. The point about this, right, is transformation. The point about this is that you have cultivated, you realize in it a potential for a skill that can be cultivated that can be applied throughout your life. You shouldn’t be pursuing contentedness. That’s, you know, he worries about, you know, the contentedness of cabbages or something like that. You’re just with people who, and what they do is they get obsessed with it. And I mean, that’s even in some versions of the quest for the Holy Grail. The quest is found not when they find the object, but when they realize what the Grail stands for and how they’re supposed to change their whole view on life and their whole way of being. So I think it’s very important to do a lot of practices that see if you can translate it into, well, into a way of embodying it, but also much more importantly, a way of enacting it. So for example, let me, so we’re not talking just abstractly. Let me give one concrete example of what I’m talking about. So it’s very dangerous when people are meditating to think that sort of the point is to get away from their life and into this wonderful space. And then they want to get back to there. And it can be a wonderful space. Right. And I really want against that. And I tell people that what you need to do. So when you’re coming out of the meditation, you have an additional practice, right? First of all, you’re trying to integrate what you’ve cultivated in your practice with your everyday consciousness and cognition. And one of the things we do is we, we, we practice what traditionally called the five precepts, but I turned them into the five promises. What you’re trying to do is you’re trying to create salience tags, areas, important, you know, dimensions in life in which you have opportunity to integrate what you’re cultivating in your practice with your everyday life, to apply mindfulness, to apply meta. And so, you know, you, and so you recite these promises and the point of them, one of them is, you know, I promise not to speak mindlessly, very appropriate right now, but mindfully, you know, trying to, you know, in remembrance of the being mode, cultivating wisdom, because what that should do is train people to remember in the sense of Sati, remember how important speech is to personhood. It’s the thing that most turns us into persons, most turns us into moral agents, has the capacity to alter our cognition in dramatic ways. And so it’s just reminding you when you’re speaking to go, Oh, right, here’s where I should be applying mindfulness, not drifting into idle chatter, just spinning. And part of what that means, even more concretely within speeches, am I practicing this mindfully, cultivation of wisdom? Am I, am I listening? Am I entering into genuine dialogue? Or am I just monologuing? So I’m trying to give you a concrete example, I think the principle and practice of integrity, which I offer as a better virtue than authenticity, I think the practice of integrity, it’s a practice, it’s literally a practice of integration between your practice and your everyday life, you need all kinds of integration practices. That’s would be my answer then. You’re trying to find situations where you can apply the principle that you’ve already accepted. Right. And I like this thing about the, you know, the orientation towards comfort has a danger in it. Yeah, yeah. But it’s very similar to saying people are lazy, because there’s a, I suspect, a natural organismic reluctance to engage in effort in general, because it’s an energy expenditure. I’m thinking of, there’s a there’s a beautiful, like historical moment where Noam Chomsky defended this guy who’d written these Holocaust denial books. Yeah. And reporters said to him, you know, why did you do this? And he said, free speech only applies to things that you find abhorrent. Otherwise, it’s not even invoked yet. Yeah. Right. So there’s a there’s a difficulty in embodying a principle. It’s very easy to affirm a principle. And I’m assuming just because we try to conserve system resources in ourselves, that we will be reluctant to make the effort often that actually would bring a meaningful value forward into practice. Right. And so that that gets to the next things very much. I mean, Stanovic, Keith Stanovic, sort of the one of the premier researchers on rationality, talks about what he calls a cognitive miser, that the brain is always trying to get as much as it can for as little effort as it can. And the thing about that is you have to practice active open mindedness, you have to keep noting instances where you’re doing that, and then challenge it when it becomes apparent that that often is, it’s often locking you into superficial short term goals rather than long term deeper goals. So you have to practice that. But let’s, let’s go back to the things that empower and encourage people. So you also teach people in this practice of integration. Again, I’ll use a Buddhist framework discuss if I started there, I’m not saying it’s exclusive or exhaustive or anything ridiculous like that, just using it, because I’ve already brought it up. So it’s good continuity. So you train you train people to also practice the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. The Buddha doesn’t mean learning about Siddhartha Gautama. That’s not a waste of time. That’s a good thing to do. But what it means is, when you’re doing those moments of integration, take note of them. And I literally mean, take note of them, write them down, and celebrate the moments of insight. So as you know, if you’re keeping a journal of all you where you’ve caught yourself in self deception, you can just expand this, right? Don’t just note where you were self deceived, and you sort of realize it. Also note where you were insightful, or you sort of cut through bullshit to what’s really zero most relevant. So this is called watering your Buddha, it’s like a plant. And we have to actively celebrate this so that it goes from being something you enact to a presence within you. I’m not claiming anything metaphysical here, just saying, it starts to have it starts to get a semi autonomous, you know, your inner teacher thing, and that starts going to the Dharma. Learn. I mean, so for example, read some Stanovic, learn about the cognitive miser, learn about it. Because learning about this stuff, first of all, it motivates your brain to open this, the scope of its predictions and its anticipation. And in addition to doing that, you know, you’re not at least part of the resistance to deeper practice is not ignorance, at least you can alleviate how that is contributing to your inertia. And then the and the third is the Sangha, you’ve got to do this is why I’m so interested in dialectic and theologos because you’ve got to interact with other people who are engaging in similar similar practices. This means this is this is one of the tried and true things is why, you know, well, if you want to kick alcoholism, you got to get together with other people who are trying to kick alcoholism. If you want to lose weight, you got to get together with other people who are trying to lose weight. You want to learn a martial art, you have to go to a dojo, right? This is a deep principle, we most of our best learning is done within, you know, a participation in distributed cognition. So if people start to practice, and the thing about these things is they they have, although I’m pitching them as instrumental, they also have intrinsic rewards for them. So it’s nice to get that sense, celebrate that sense of your like, it feels good. It’s the brain goes, whoa, right. And also, when you’re learning new stuff, your brain goes, Oh, and, you know, and then meeting with other people and experiencing what you have aptly called overflow, or at least trajectory towards that is also deeply, deeply motivating to people. And so I think what you need to do is, like you have your practice, I sort of built a model here, then you have integration practices, the cultivation of integrity. And then you have these comprehensive practices that are designed to keep you aspiring and keep you motivated. I love all of that. It sounds like it applies very well to embodying a meeting making principle. Yeah. But I’m also thinking about the assimilation of perceptions. Right, there’s a, I don’t know how familiar you are with the Durjeffians, but they have this beautiful phrase, the food of impression sounds in us only as dough, and dough is the first note on an octave of assimilation. Right, right. Right. So that they, there’s a potential energy and stimulation and incoming possibility for salience, to engage just by beholding something. But in general, we either get carried away by the next perception, or there’s a kind of flatness to our beholding. So, you know, how do you think of more deeply assimilating perception? So I’ve been putting a lot of thought into that right now too, in connection with, there’s an interesting synchronicity between us here. Yeah, I’ve been putting a lot of thought into that because of dialectic and dialogos. Because, and this is actually germane to what we’re talking about. And this is an excellent point. It’s made by Christopher Moore, I believe, or I think Sarah Abba-Rappi makes the same point. Anyways, when you’re in, you know, Socratic dialectic, it’s not just that arguments are being compared. The dialogos actually is an exemplification of a way of life. Socrates is actually exemplifying a way of life, and in comparison to other ways of life. Because for Socrates, ways of argumentation and ways of life are bound deeply together. And then what you see is, that’s why beauty is invoked so often, beauty and love. You know, this is one of Spinoza’s great insights, right, in the ethic. He says, you know, the only thing that will, you compete against an emotion is another emotion, right? You can think all you want, but if you haven’t cultivated love, you’re doomed, right? And I think that, and Plato, of course, completely consonant with that as well. And so I am getting to the point. What that all comes down to is, you know, the role, the practice of the beautification of a way of life. And so, and what that requires is, I think, in addition to, you know, the practicalities of what I said, there’s a philosophical critique that has to be engaged in because of a cultural misrepresentation. Han, in his book, Saving Beauty, criticizes how we have reduced beauty, right, he calls it the aesthetics of the smooth. We like things smooth and shiny, because what we want is we want things that in no way disrupt us or disturb us. We want things that are readily, and we want things to flow smoothly. And we want, we like smooth objects, and we like, you know, our technology to have a smooth, like, and he talks about the aesthetic of smoothness, and he says, and we confuse it with beauty. We confuse it with beauty. What we reduce beauty to is ease of consumption, ease of use. And that, of course, is to remove a lot of what, you know, is central to beauty. When you read other people, like Plato, or, you know, Alan Scarry’s book on beauty, right, there’s this older sense of beauty that is captured when, like, when we say we’re struck by beauty. We’re struck by it, right. It’s disruptive. Rilke in one of the elegies says, you know, beauty is the sense of, you know, something like the sense of terror of an angel that is almost killing us, right. And so part of what it is, is to try to understand how to beautify the serious play that is not just training a skill, but is cultivating an attractive way of life for yourself and for other people. And so, what that does, I think, what that does is it starts to move us off of what you, I think, you’re calling a superficial response to our perceptual experience, and it starts to move us towards, you can’t, you can’t generate beauty, but what you can do is make yourself more and more receptive and open to it, and then the way you relate to it, when you experience it, try to, it’s the exact opposite in Plato, right. So our model, Hans Wright, consumptive model, the smoothness. For Plato, beauty is the doorstep to awe, and for Plato, you don’t consume beauty, and for Plato, you don’t consume beauty, right. Beauty inspires you to create. He says you want to give birth to beauty within beauty. The experience of beauty is a genuine experience of the impulse towards generativity, and also it’s aspirational, that the eros is no longer consumptive eros, it’s generative eros, and it’s the move towards, you know, hopefully generating for yourself and others a way of life. So I think reformulating what beauty means to us, because it’s the normativity operating, I think, on our perceptual world, the word aesthetics relates to sensation, right. I think rehabilitating, and I mean that in the sense of both reformulating and making it habitable for us again, rehabilitating beauty and then turning it into a practice where we cultivate the receptivity to it, and we cultivate the responsibility to it, the generative response rather than the consumptive impulse. I think that’s a powerful way, and you see it through very, lots of different thinkers converge on this idea, but like I said, Plato is in this respect my greatest guide. So I think just like I’ve been trying to open up, expand the notion of realness with the four kinds of knowing, I think we need to get back to beauty in a way that directly translates into the motivation for wisdom. You make me think of two things. On the one hand, there’s this tension in spiritual and religious history between the personal and the impersonal. Very often it’s presented to us as a journey away from the personal toward the impersonal, right, even as a journey away from the embodied to the utterly abstract condition. And so there’s a way of talking about consciousness practice, which is similar, very impersonal, in that you should learn to pay perfect attention to everything no matter what’s arising, or learn to practice intentionally noticing anything, and these are really useful practices. However, they’re distinct from a practice of impressions rather than perceptions, because the impression impresses you. You’re struck by something that’s peculiar to your sense-making system. So on the one hand, you could practice attending mindfully to an arbitrary stimulus. On the other hand, you could practice attending to something that your system has contributed to evoking as a particular unique impression of the world that stands out to you and has come halfway to draw you forward toward it. That’s exactly what I was trying to articulate with the notion of beauty. So the relevance realization machinery is sort of in one direction. It’s making things relevant to us, but it’s also that that relevance realization machinery is a vehicle through which a being can realize itself, put a demand on us. These two, I mean, again, Rilke, he sees the beautiful torso of Apollo, and what’s the final line of the poem? You must change your life. You must change your life. That’s, you know, and what’s his name? Yeah, Slaughterjick. You must change your life. He’s written a book about this in response to the meaning crisis, and that’s what I mean. I mean this sense of, like, what beauty does is it discloses. It’s like, oh, I didn’t know things could be this way, right? But it also puts a demand on you. It puts a demand on you that I have to, right, I have to, as Plato says, the demand on you is you have to make yourself, and this sounds, and I do not mean this cosmetically, right? You have to make yourself more beautiful, right? The proper response to beauty is to attempt to conform to it, just like the proper response to any deep normative standard, like realness, is attempt to conform to it. And so I think trying to give priority, let’s put it that way, giving priority to those moments of beauty, and perhaps they become experiences of awe, but moments where you feel this simultaneous thing, that reality is disclosing itself in new ways to you, and then there’s a demand on you to cultivate the skills that will maintain the actualization of those new opportunities. So that is how I practice. That is how I practice. Did that answer your question? The smoothness thing, the smoothness thing is interesting to me because I think, you know, there’s a critique there that’s completely valid, but at the same time, smoothness is a pretty good definition of beauty from one angle, and that the problem is maybe not so much the smoothness as laziness and passivity and how we receive smoothness, that we don’t have the energy or intention to smoothify things that don’t initially seem smooth. Yeah, I think that’s Hans’ intent. I don’t think he thinks the property of smoothness is itself intrinsically deleterious or anything like that. There are things that should be smooth, that goes with the question. I’ve often reached for that kind of a terminology to describe states that I’ve been in, you know, you fall into a state and fall is maybe not the right word because you’ve worked to get there, but where essentially the seamless continuity of being is what stands out to you in that experiential moment, the utter smoothness of everything, and then when you’ve had that, you can look at anything and go, somehow there’s a smoothness in there, even if it seems discontinuous to me. Yeah. There’s a possibility of experiential smoothness that I’ve confirmed in some other state. Yeah, I think that’s right, and I think, well, I mean, I had some concerns about when I was reading that passage in Han because of, you know, Tai Chi Chuan, and there’s a sense in which you’re trying to get a particular kind of smoothness, and so that’s why I answered, I think, so readily to your question. I don’t think it’s smoothness per se. I think what he, there are things that I think should have the aesthetic of smoothness. I don’t think he would disagree with that either, but what he’s saying, though, is that something else has been reduced to smoothness, which is beauty, and beauty isn’t smoothness, and it isn’t reducible to smoothness, and so it’s not the smoothness per se, or even an aesthetic appreciation for smoothness in things or practices. I don’t think that’s what he’s intending to convey. I think what he’s intending to criticize is the reduction of all of the properties and all of the potential and all of the power of beauty to the easily consumable smooth. I think that’s the point he’s wanting to address. Tai Chi is interesting in this respect because I think if a lot of people imagine what beautifying their lives would consist of, they might imagine themselves making movements more in keeping with the Tai Chi style and tempo, and there’s something really telling about that, that we have an intuition to move in that direction of activity. However, there’s also a danger of getting trapped in the, you know, everything has to be slow and satvic. To me, I’d like to use that as a segue to one of the other topics because the blending of attention streams is of great interest to me, and one of the things that is involved in the Tai Chi tempo is a sort of balanced split between the part of you that’s making the activity and the part of you that’s receiving feedback from the activity at the same moment, and they get into a kind of experiential parody, which is your internal cue that you’re doing the movement to your own satisfaction. There’s a blending of these two attentions, and there’s a nice balance between them. It seems like it pays us back something as we undergo an activity. Yeah, because I think first of all, that’s recognized in the tradition. Your intuition is accurate and astute, which is no surprise. You have a really good facility with looking at phenomena and then intuiting, and I don’t mean that in the romantic sense, but intuiting an important pattern or principle therein. In the tradition, they talk about the two eyes of Tai Chi, and so let’s play with them. One is the eye looking inward, sort of the introceptive, introspective, and introspection and interception are fused together. Looking into your mind space and feeling into your body space are fused together. That’s the inner, and then the outer is the tiger eyes. You’re not fixating on anything, but you have an eye that is like a tiger eye. It’s flowing over, continually flowing over, and then the reason why they use the two eyes is they’re invoking the stereoscopic fusion metaphor. You get to a state where the left and right visual fields are fused to give you depth, an added dimension to your visual experience. That’s the metaphor. When you get the inner, so first of all, there’s the, like I say, you’re dropping below our sort of culturally emphasized division between introspection and interoception. You’re trying to get the grounding awareness in which they are together, indistinguishably interfused, and then you’re fusing that in stereoscopic vision with the external thing, and then that gives you a new depth of experience that you can’t have when you’re merely looking inward or merely looking outward. I think that’s important because I mean, I think that’s enacted and expanded thing about what I talk about in the series where it’s Marla Ponty’s idea that perception is an action in which we are trying to find the optimal grip, and we move around it where we’re trying to get the biggest possible gestalt that doesn’t lose too many details and try to get too many details that doesn’t get us too close that we lose the gestalt. Of course, there isn’t an algorithm for that because the ultimate, the optimal grip is varying according to the needs of the situation. If I have to repair the button on here, then the gestalt is useless. I need to really focus in, but if I want to be using it, I’m going to have a different optimal grip on it, and I’m looking forward to my room because I can’t quite see it different. And so what that means, I think it’s tying it all together. I think part of the experience of beauty is the experience of a new way, a new kind of optimal grip, and this also goes back to my point that the relevance realization, the enhancement of it in cultivating reverence and wisdom also has to go with this divided attention thing because it’s like you’re going to find the optimal grip relative to what you’re finding most relevant, but if your relevance realization machinery is screw it all over the place, having the stereoscopically fused streams of attention can still really massively mess you up. You want an ultimate, you want an optimal grip, the inactive ultimate, optimal grip, not ultimate grip, optimal grip to be deeply integrated with an enhancement of your capacity for zeroing in on relevant information. That’s what I would argue at least. Yeah, I mean this gripping device here is useful because it’s very fluid and could be used to grip in a vast array of circumstances. Yes. So it seems like we could easily get trapped in a particular balances of attention, but if we could diversify and weaponize that to be available to all kinds of different scenarios, then we’d really have something. Well, a lot of different issues converge for me on the notion of split attention because I can see it underlying almost every kind of historically proposed self-development or spiritual practice, right? Whether you’re going to add an additional point of focus into whatever you’re normally focusing on or whether you’re going to try to bring mind and heart together or whether you’re going to try to balance self and other in exchange or the left and right brain or the, you know, all these things involve some kind of negotiated balancing that seems to pay off more than you put into it, gets an overflow out of that kind of parity. I agree because I think all of those things are various ways in which we’re playing with the salience landscaping and identity forming of relevance realization because relevance realization is about a dynamical system that ultimately balances between opponent processing, goals that are opposite in some sense but are also interdependent because they interact or states and processes, not just goals. And so, yeah, I think, I mean, even to embark on any kind of transformation is going to put you into that need to differentiate and integrate your attentional stream because you’re trying to, you know, you’re trying to couple your future self to your current self if you’re aspiring and if you don’t, right? And if you’re self-regulating, you have to expand your frame so you can pay attention to the deep future and then zoom in to see what’s really deeply happening right now. All of these things involve that kind of process and I think that’s a way in which we train, yeah, that’s a train but like also inhabit, we don’t quite have a verb for doing that, but cognitive flexibility, which is so predictive of insight, being able to get into the flow state, being able to deal with complex novel situations, yeah, I think so. And I think training those, training the complexification of attention, that’s basically what we’re doing, we’re differentiating it and then reintegrating, that’s how we get emergent attentional capacities. I think I don’t, by what I’m saying, I’m not dismissing your point, I’m trying to say, I think it’s almost inevitable because if we want to get new functions, we have to complexify other functions together and I think that’s what you’re pointing to. Self-regulation seems like a really key part of this because one of the areas where this shows up as a real concern is in, I mean, what we call cognitive dissonance. When somebody inhabits a space between two different pressures or strategies or perspectives and something in us rejects that space, we want to fall back onto a simpler model, so in order to stay there, you need not only the idea that you want to stay there, but you need to be able to self-regulate in order to not have a phobic response to the tension between the attentional possibilities you’re going to try to integrate. I think that’s right and again, I think we’ve circled back to an earlier theme in a helpful way because part of that is to get, to remember, to realize because beauty is exactly that kind of thing. I think it’s an experience of something novel, unfamiliar, but it has a potential to be drawn into our current world and transform it. Beauty is a way in which we can learn to be positively disposed towards liminal uncertainty as opposed to the brain’s natural initial impulse, which is, whoa, I don’t like that, that’s really unfamiliar, I can’t predict what’s going to happen here. What’s really interesting about this is, especially when this constellation of things, beauty, wonder, and awe, think about awe. Awe should be one of the worst experiences that people have because when you measure what they say is, I get a sense of vastness and incomprehensibility and I feel so small and powerless. Well, if I just induce that in you, you’ll usually freak out, right? That’s why awe can get, can pass over into horror, but awe is actually experienced by people as so powerfully motivating that it is one of these experiences, not perfectly, not algorithmically, that has a strong tendency to motivate people to longitudinal transformation and change. There’s something in us, there’s an aesthetic potential within us, I think this is one of Plato’s insights, that we can nurture and cultivate, we can practice it so that when something awe comes up, we can move into that integration, that complexification, rather than backing away into the familiar zone of comfort. Again, I hope I’m not repeating myself, but I’m trying to show you what the connections are, I think. Yeah, I think the flip side of the same experience, you know, the more you learn that component, the more your brain is likely to recognize that when it sees the frustrated version, you’re a half a step away from the exalted version. Yes. It’s no coincidence that we use some of the same language for, you know, religious and even sexual ecstasy that we use for massive unacceptable thwarting. Yes, yes, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. We reach for the same words. Well, it’s even in related words, we have the word awesome, but we also have the word awful, because it has that, but you see, I, so this is much more speculative on my part. I think part of why we have an aesthetic for this is places where things that are, that we have a dichotomy between, but are, and we realize that actually they’re interdependent and opponent, right? These are, these are places of kairos, these are places of criticality, where these are actually opportunities for significant developmental change. And so again, I think we have, I think we have two choices about that. We can be passive and, you know, well, maybe three choices. Let me try it. We can be passive and just say, well, I’m just going to wait for those events. Then when they happen, you’re really not going to be able to, you know, properly assume. So many traditions say, practice on little things where there’s nothing major happening. So when the big thing happens, you’re ready to go, because if you try and cultivate it when the big things happen, you’re pretty much going to get screwed, right? Now, the flip side is also a mistake. I’m going to make, I’m just going to, the purely active agent, I’m going to make beauty appear before, that’s not going to work either. So this is why, again, I’ve been doing so much work on this notion of participatory knowing, right? Because one of the functions, I think, of participatory knowing that I haven’t talked that much about, but it’s in my thinking and I want to bring it up, is how it precisely steers us between the skilla and paribdis of passivity, pure passivity and pure activity. And it gets, well, it gives you participation. And this was really emphasized, it’s emphasized in all the traditions and it’s in the Slingerland’s book, right? Trying not to try, right? Where you’re trying to find and write effort, right? And all this sort of stuff. And so I think you have to cultivate a deep capacity for recognized and even beautified participatory knowing so that you come into those kairos with the set of skills you need, but also the proper existential mode for relating to them. Do you think these disruptions are, I don’t know how to say this, all of equal size? When you say awesome and awful, one sounds like it’s full of awe and the other one sounds like it has some awe in it, which might be a manageable amount as opposed to a complete overload. So are these situations where there’s a sort of absolute overwhelm in which you could go either way with it or is it more like there’s too much of it sometimes and other times it feels like almost too much, but really it’s a manageable amount or it’s at the edge of your assimilation capacity? Yeah, and I think that’s what Urielka was trying to get at in the Dunio elegies, right? And Fisher talks about that in his book, Wonder the Rainbow and the Aesthetics of Rare Experience, where he says what they do is they put you on what he calls the horizon of intelligibility. They put you into that place, I call it the trans world, it’s not like an other world, it’s a place between two different existential worlds and you’re there, you’re right on the horizon of intelligibility. You can still feel backwards to where you are currently, but you also have a portending and a portal, right? Those words are related for a reason, right? And so I think that it’s, I think it’s more like beauty is something where we have this awe and you know I’m working with Jennifer Steller and Michelle Ferrari and Jinsun Kim on this, but awe seems to me to be an indication of that you’ve got not an optimal grip on the phenomena because that’s emerging, but that there is speculation on my part, but I think there’s some sort of cognitive mechanisms that sort of subtracts and says you’re complexifying in the face of this and it’s starting to clear the signal, keep going versus ah, right? No, it’s not complexifying, it’s not gelling, signal is not clearing and I think that’s when you start to move in horror. I think part of what influences that is not only our optimal grip on the world, but our optimal grip on our seeing of the world. This is prospect and refuge theory, right? The womb with a view, as it’s sometimes called. So we are, there’s a certain aesthetics of participating in an environment that are important. We want to see as much as we can while being seen as little as we can because the first will help us find prey and the second one will help us avoid predation. So again, you have to sort of, there has to be not only an optimal grip on whatever the off-field thing is, there has to be a sense that you’re complexifying towards an optimal grip. I think you have to have a current optimal grip of how you’re seeing. So for example, a concrete example, you’re much more likely to get awe as opposed to horror witnessing a stupendous lightning storm if you’re standing on your balcony. But if you’re out in the open field, that’s a lot more oh no, right? Because you’re deeply exposed, you’re deeply vulnerable. So I think there’s a finesse to toggling between getting an optimal grip on whatever the thing is, and also that is being that this optimal grip and the optimal grip on sort of my placement in the environment, if you get those two together and they’re in sync, I think that’s what takes you more towards awe, right? If you’ve got a lack of an optimal grip but there’s nothing that much amazing happening here, you probably feel mild anxiety. So did that answer your question? Yeah, I think so, if I even remember what the question was. Was there a question? Yeah, the question was, you know what I thought of was in terms of seeing as much as you can while being seen as little as you can, right? That sounds like being an audience member. Think of Nietzsche’s first book about the Dynastian festivals and the birth of tragedy and his critique of Aristotle’s notion of tragedy, because he’s telling a story there of these ancient people gathering as the audience around this religious festival that we might call an entertainment festival today. And his critique of Aristotle is that he says Aristotle is too focused on the pathos that people were having going through these bad experiences and Nietzsche says no, if you were in the right state, if you were robust, if you had the right philosophy, if you were hearty, then you’re not experiencing the death of the hero as a tragedy, you’re having fun watching a piece of entertainment. You’re reveling in what appears to be a tragedy, assuming you’re coming from the right embedding to handle that. Right, I agree with that, but Nietzsche also, I mean part of one of the main themes of the birth of tragedy from the spirit of music is that the tragedy is a particularly powerful object, right? Not just in the cognitive sense, I don’t mean that good thing. The tragedy, right, what you have is you have the Apollonian hero, right, but you have the Dionysian chorus and his philosophy, as you know, is all about, and here we’re back to it again, it’s all about finding a dynamic optimization between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. His critique of Socrates, which I think is misplaced by the way, is that Socrates over-emphasized the Apollonian at the expense of the Dionysian. So I do think that both of what I just said are there. So part of what the prospect and refuge thing does is it interacts with two senses of realness that we have. The Apollonian sense of realness is things are real when they are confirmed, when they’re affirmed together, where they’re coherent, right? And the Dionysian is, no, things are most real to you when they catch you by surprise. And by the way, people do do that. They do use those two different standards of realness in a practical sense. What makes sense, and they can confirm that’s what’s most real, and then that which catches them by deep surprise is actually what’s real. And the reason is, even though they are not logically identical, they are, again, stereoscopic. You need both of them for getting closer to realness. If you don’t ever have the coherence and the confirmation, then you’re not picking up on any patterns. You’re just, blah, blah, blah. But if those patterns are never broken by the Dionysian, then you’re going to get ossified and locked in. And so, again, I think that the prospect and refuge, you do want to be able to have the right relationship to the unfolding. And art, I see your point, art is a very powerful way of giving us prospect and refuge on something beautiful. I agree with that. I think that’s a profound point. But I want to emphasize that even within tragedy, you see this theme we’re talking about, about trying and what’s really interesting, I think, and this wasn’t explored enough. I think, well, maybe it has. I haven’t read all the scholarship on the birth of tragedy. But Nietzsche was really, and this is why I think it was, this is a theme. You can see some of his themes drift away and drop away. But this theme of the integration, the complexification of the Apollonian and the Dionysian runs through him completely. And that’s to be on the horizon of intelligibility. That’s the place between the Apollonian confirmed safety and the Dionysian prospect of challenge and change. Yeah, it’s a very, it’s definitely not my favorite of his books, but there’s something in there that’s at the core of his thought and is particularly relevant, I think, still going forward. I agree with you. His critique of Socrates, he’s using Socrates to exemplify something that happened historically. And I think he’s picking on Socrates unfairly because he’s trying to overcome his own initial love of Socrates. So he’s struggling with that. I think he’s quite right to call for a musical Socrates. And I think that in that idea of the interplay of the Dionysian and the Apollonian, and the idea that that can be brought forward to us in art and entertainment, so that we can see this process unfold, and even see the central representative of our coherent meaning making be taken to pieces, and then somehow come back together and live to fight another day. I think that’s a huge thing culturally for us to learn this process, right? In religious groups or philosophical groups, you could communicate very openly about it. Yeah. But in general, people would need to see the pattern happen many times to start to assimilate it, I would guess. I think this is very interesting what you’re saying about the aesthetics, because it leads me to this idea that that might be a way, again, not exclusive or exhaustive, but an interesting way of trying to distinguish art from entertainment. Maybe entertainment is the aesthetics of the smooth, and there’s nothing wrong with entertainment, right? But maybe art is the aesthetics of wonder, in the way we’re talking about it here. In the symposium, Socrates talks about how he’s Metaxu, and also how love is Metaxu, eros, because we try to get, again, on that horizon of intelligibility. When we love something beautiful, we love it precisely because we’re not completely conformable to it, right? There’s a lack. When we see something beautiful, it awakens a sense of lack in us, but also it impels us forward. It gives us some sense. It’s so interesting. I have in my signature thing, the script under my signature in Gmail, that love is its own way of knowing, and it’s the noticing kind of knowing, because it’s really interesting how love gives you simultaneously the sense of something you lack, which is the prospect, but it also gives you some intuition that it is achievable for you, or knowable to you. You can enter into a proper relationship to it. I think that’s exactly a place where you’re going to find real deep integration of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, and Socrates all about that kind of love. He deeply, deeply is. That’s why I think Nietzsche deeply misses. I think you’re right, because Nietzsche famously says, I hate Socrates. He’s so close to me, I’m always fighting him. I’m just giving a specific argument to your point that I think Socrates’ emphasis on the transformation of eros into anagogic, the ascent, is clearly where, because love is a place where we most deeply fuse the Apollonian and the Dionysian, and love is the proper response. Love and reverence are the proper response to beauty. Let me throw in a segue anecdote here, although I’m not sure if it’s a segue or a continuation. I’m thinking of a time that I went to an art exhibit with my father in Vancouver, and upstairs was a bunch of conceptual art pieces, mostly by young university art students. Not that that can’t be an amazing thing, but it sort of leaves you, each one you look at and go, is this art? I’m not sure what art is. What is art? Is the question each time. Downstairs was the Rodin exhibit. When you see a piece of Rodin or in a room full of them, you don’t think, what is art? You think, oh my god, what the hell is this? What was this guy trying to do? There’s this astonishing quality to it, a real surprise and disruption. And a demand, right? It demands something from you. I was, Mertis talks about that, the sovereignty of the good. It demands your attention, not in some sort of animistic sense, but it demands your attention in that part of the realization is the realization that it is due a particular kind of effort and due a particular kind of attention. And that again, I think, is that generative sense of beauty that I’m talking about rather than the consumptive sense. Yes. And it is very much where I wanted to go with that because I’m thinking of it in terms of timeframes. There’s a form of art where you go, oh yeah, sure, that’s neat. And every day you see it after that, you’re less impressed. And there’s this other form where initially all you’re confronted with is the demand. And every time you see it, you’re more and more impressed. You see more and more about it. There’s an analogy there with addictive flow states, which I know is something you’re concerned with because there’s this initial feedback that, yeah, upfront and it starts to trail off. And there’s this other kind where there’s an initial demand and it builds up. Yes, I think so. So if you take a look at like Scari’s notion of beauty, she talks about how it trains us for truth and justice, the experience of beauty. It actually trains us. And that’s what exactly we’re talking about here. And so she does this thing where she says you come upon a tree and it’s really beautiful. And then so part of it is a kind of what I often call moreness. There’s more to trees than I have previously realized. So there’s this aspect of it that encompasses all trees. And you’ve now seen something about all trees. There’s a moreness. But then she said, I’m using my language, not hers, but she points out, but then we’re also struck by the particularity of it, what the Buddhists would call the suchness of it, that the way it’s presented to us as it has a kind of uniqueness and irreplaceability and unrepeatability about it. And so again, I think beauty is playing between those two things. It’s giving us two senses of how things can be beyond our categorical scheme. One way, it can put us into sort of combinatorial explosion, right? Oh, wow, wow, so much more. Right? But then there’s also, you know, the non-categorical identity of everything, that beyond all of the ways in which it belongs to categories, this is its own particular, well, as the Buddhists say, it’s its suchness, because to put any predicate on it is to put it into a category. You have those moments, I think, in art too, where you see something where, oh, I didn’t realize a tree could be like that. Right? And then also, right, you realize, oh, there’s something non-repeatable in this moment that I shouldn’t be trying to repeat, because if I try to repeat it, I’m going to lose it. So I think what happens, right, is when the way it gets repeated is not repetition. It’s like instead what we’ve talked about before with sacredness, and I think this is what you mean, like here it’s supposed as a work of art, what you do is it transforms you, you go out into the world, right, and then when you come back, you see something in it you hadn’t seen before again. You’re not repeating the experience. What you’re doing is you’re repeating the process of transformation. And I think when we shift off, back to the beginning again, trying to repeat the experience rather than trying to cycle the transformation, I think that’s, again, that’s what we need to be doing, and that really ties in again to this other sense of beauty that I’m trying to talk about, and love. Yeah, addiction definitely has this diminishing returns problem with the attempt to repeat the initial experience, as validly beautiful as that initial experience might have been for that person. Right. It’s interesting with the tree, you know, the notion of the I-Thou relationship comes out here, because I can be like, I never knew that about a tree before. I’ve got the first and third person in there, but in perceiving, and this to me goes back to what I was talking about, about the assimilation of perceptions, this tree strikes me, and I’m partly looking at its unique intactness of its wholeness at the moment, which is something I’m cognitively stulting out of reality to some degree. Right. But there’s like a next note, right? If that’s Do, Re, maybe there’s a Me, there’s this next stage where it’s like the tree begins to lurk, where it has this withdrawn quality, this otherness, as if I’m in dialogue with it. Yes. Right? We’re not necessarily speaking, but me and the tree are kind of being balanced in my experience. Totally. We’re negotiating now. But that’s the heart of Gnosis, right? The heart of participatory knowing, that, you know, you know the tree by becoming sort of at one with the tree, right? You’re sort of personifying the tree, but also treeifying yourself in this resonant cycle, so that more of the tree is being disclosed to you, and more of you is being disclosed to you, but again not categorically, but, you know, I want to say expressively, but in Collingwood sense, but people will hear romanticism, but it’s being expressed to you, as you said, in the being mode. It’s doing the reciprocal opening, very much, very much. And so the notion that comes out is a notion I’ve been talking a lot about recently, is trying to bring back the notion of faith, not as the assertion of belief, but as the coupling of the emergence of mind to the emergence of the world that puts us into ongoing right relationship with reality. So the model I have here is my faithfulness to my partner is not to hold, it’s precisely not to hold an unchangeable set of beliefs about her, or to try and completely grasp her, or have it fixed. It’s instead to get into a resonant adaptivity with her, so that as she changes, I can afford that, and I can adaptively change with her. It’s a continuity of contact, it’s a co-emergence, right, sense of faithfulness, rather than an assertiveness. And I think when people have this, you know, where beauty motivates them in love to be faithful to something like a text or a work of art, I think we’re getting into the realm of the sacred now, I really do. I agree with all of that. I think, you know, the resonance that’s implied by fidelity in any domain is what we’re looking at. But here’s something I think about a lot, which is one of the basic shamanic skills, I would say, is proprioceptive imagination. Oh, very much. Yes. I thought that immediately when you were talking about, you know, the tree becoming you. Yes. Yeah. Because if you try to imagine what it feels like to be the tree, or the jaguar, or whatever, you have a real, it seems to me you have an edge in terms of the skills necessary to undergo these experiences we’re talking about. And so that whatever allows people to be more capable in terms of interoception, proprioception probably sets them up to be able to have more of these experiences. I agree. I mean, so, you know, shamans are, I mean, this is why there’s a long tradition of shape shifting with shamans, right? Precisely because, and I talked about this in the series, so not only the spiritual value of being able to get into this gnosis with things, this has practical value. The shaman, and you have to remember, it’s like you’re taking your glasses off and looking at them, and then you put them back on and see if you look differently. So the shaman has a participatory knowing, enact, serious play, what it is to be the deer. And that will often help him be really good at tracking the deer. And so you get this corrective loop. And if he tracks the deer better, right, it’s anagogic. That feeds back into, well, that worked. And, you know, and then you get this cycling. So, you know, shamans seem like they almost have, you know, miraculous tracking abilities because they can really get into the head of the animals that they’re, right, that they’re, well, doing this kind of participatory knowing with. So I think participatory knowing, yes, has tremendous spiritual potential. But I think we particularly cultivated it because it was both socially, because doing this with other people, identifying with other people is really important. And I think it was also really adaptive when we were hunter-gatherers. It’s really powerfully adaptive for us. So I think that’s why we carry around this machinery and we try to exact it into so many different situations. I wonder how far back it goes, you know, because it’s not difficult to imagine that at some extremely primitive level that this is a useful skill even for a plant or a protozoa to be able to sort of to feel its way into the shape of something else. Which, you know, every plant has to do that with its niche. Yep. Well, I don’t know about the sentience of plants. It’s up in the air, that one. I do think there’s, I, so I’ve caught between two things. As you know, in my work, I really emphasize deep continuity between, you know, and Nietzsche said this, bring back Nietzsche, you know, the height of my spirituality reaches into the depths of my sexuality, right? So I agree with the deep continuity, but I think we need to remember something about us. We are the most self-malleable creatures on the planet. We often think about that, you know, cognitively we’re very malleable, but even our bodies, like we transform our bodies in ways in which other organisms just don’t do that, right? And our bodies are sort of multi-app for being trained into many different kinds of niches. It’s a weird, and so, and I think those two are not disconnected. The malleability of our mind and the malleability of our body, I think are really important. So while I do agree with the deep continuity, I think there’s something that’s especially important about us. There’s an important difference. We sort of have a neon tick, you know, amplification of both cognitive and physiological malleability. I mean, we’re so, part of the physiological malleability, of course, is, you know, interacting with tools and things like that, but we’re so weird that way. Like, imagine if we found a bunch of chimps training for racing. There’s something like that. What? What are they doing? Well, they’re just, they’re trying to build muscles and coordination patterns so that they can run faster than their cohort. It’s like, what? That would freak us out. Only we do that kind of stuff. Yeah, it’s a little bit fanciful, but to imagine the rest of the ecosystem observing us beginning to be, beginning to prep for things must have been ominous. I’m wondering here if you think going forward in civilization, you know, politically and ecologically and economically and everything we have to face going forward, whether this requires an increase in our malleability or not? Yeah, I think so. So let’s do the shamans again, because they’re very helpful. You know, the work from Michael Winkman and others, especially Matt Rossano, a whole host of people. I mean, it looks like, you know, shamans are often a small percentage in your population, like something like around, somebody quoted a four percent to me, and I take the person seriously, but I haven’t been able to track down the specific reference. But that seems, anyways, not problematic. Most of the people in your group aren’t shamans. Well, what was really important about them, and this is Matt Rossano’s argument, is our biggest advantage when we almost disappeared as a species somewhere between 100,000 and 70,000 years ago, right? Because we really bottlenecked. We would drop, our numbers dropped dramatically. And he argues, because there’s good archaeological evidence, that of course we started to evolve more cognitive flexibility and we started to evolve art and stuff like that. So that’s all constant of what we’re saying. But he also emphasizes that the shamans, what they did is they developed their shape shifting, their identity malleability, because they’re the people that help set up the trade networks. And that was our big and best response. What we do is we open up the economy of our existence so that we are not bound to just the local environment where we are. So the shamans, because of their shape shifting ability, were able to mediate between different communities, which is a freaking weird thing. Again, civilization is the skill of living with strangers, millions of them, right? And so they were able to mediate, their material shape shifting malleability actually afforded integrations between communities. And that’s exactly what we need right now. That’s exactly what we need right now. We need people who are we don’t need everybody to do that. That’s why I did a little preamble about the percentages, but we need a significant percentage of people that are recognized for this role and start to undertake it and be supported in some way by the society. I don’t mean by the state, but by the society for undertaking this task. I think that’s what we need. We need cyber shamans or something like that, right? Where that skill of being able to integrate across domains, I sometimes in a playful manner think that being a cognitive scientist is kind of like being a shaman, because I have to develop the capacity to integrate across these different worlds, these different disciplines that you speak different languages and have different customs and different ways of gathering their evidence. And so I do think that finding individuals who have the capacity for that kind of malleability and synoptic integration, I think that’s crucial going forward. In fact, I’ll be stronger. I don’t see how we’re going to get through all of this, unless we have more individuals like that, that are recognized and are in some way supported by their society. Yeah, there’s definitely this synoptic capacity is huge, I think, in what the shaman does. There’s this other thing of being something of a professional outlier. Oh, yes. Right. And how do you set up an institution in which the professional outlier of the village is taken seriously on topics that are significant to the villagers? I don’t know if you saw World War Z. Yes, I did. But there’s a beautiful part in there where the Israelis built an anti-zombie wall because they have this military doctrine called the Tenth Man, where if nine guys agree, the tenth guy is supposed to disagree and start acting on his disagreement. So the first nine guys go, yeah, there’s no zombie attack coming. That’s preposterous. The tenth man is supposed to take that seriously and begin preparing for the zombie attack. So he’s in a situation in which there’s an institutionally valued outlier, which seems to be part of what the ancient role of the shaman is. And right now we have a problem where a lot of the things that are really significant to the unfolding of culture outside of one, say, election cycle or business cycle, that these things are being spoken of by people who are a bit like outliers, but they’re not enfolded into the heart of our institutions. We’re not taking action on that information. We’re not valuing the outlier institutionally in the right way. It seems to be very problematic. Yeah, I think that’s right. I think that jives completely with the point I was trying to make about the fact that we neglect and marginalize these people. It’s also that we’ve lost the connoisseurship, the discriminating awareness to be able to distinguish these people from people who are just badly messed up or trying to con us. So we don’t want to mistake the criminal for the shaman and we don’t want to mistake the psychotic for the shaman. And so because we used to train individuals, think about this, we used to train individuals in that discernment. So there was an apprenticeship. The shamans were good at finding the other people that would be shamans, and that was part of their job. And the same thing used to be within the church. The church is, of course, subject to all kinds of critiques here, but the church for a very long time was successful. It did heinous things at times, but so has every institution, like the state and the market do, so I’m not picking on the church. But I’m thinking about how the church was able to cycle between the mystic and the priest. So the priest represents the orthodoxy, blah, but the church found mechanisms of sainthood and setting up new orders of monks. It found ways of trying to manage those. Sorry, that sounds like it was being purely instrumental. I think there was genuine love at times. But it found ways of getting these people into kind of, like you said, they are validated by the culture without the demand that they become completely conforming to sort of the standard norm. So we have been, we were never perfectly successful at this because we’re also human beings and we were prone to envy and pride and doing nasty things to each other. So I’m not speaking in some sort of rose colored glasses. But I mean, that lasted for a long time, right? The ability to venerate the mystic and give a place for that challenging voice within a longstanding traditional institution. So we can do it. We can do it. You know what’s really interesting to me about that is, because it’s happened so many times, it seems like it’s not dependent upon us remembering to do that. But rather like when things are going well, we spontaneously do it. And when things aren’t going well, we do the opposite, right? If there’s some basic condition of healthy social organization and healthy bodies and healthy minds and whatever that is altogether, you might say that that leads us to incorporate and take advantage of something that we’ve been doing all along. And there’s some process that goes wrong, which leads us to not do that instead to not just not incorporate the outlier, but to fall back into a purity and homogeneity mode. The problem is too much complication and we’ll just start cutting ourselves until we get down to an adequately homogenous zone. Yeah. And I think that goes towards the idea of scarcity mentality. So people do that thing you’re just describing. Typically when they’re in the scarcity mentality where some highly valued thing is diminishing for those people. Obviously it could be things like food or food, obviously it could be things like food or water or security, but it can also be things like meaning or participation, a sense of belonging to a group. These are all things that if people are starving for them, and I’m thinking sort of maybe Maslow or Aristotelian sort of hierarchy of needs, but when people are starving for them, I think that they do. That’s what scarcity mentality shows. People do this under scarcity mentality because this is to get you to try and hoard and exploit what is closest to you because it has a higher, it has a probability of one or close to one because it’s near you. Whereas that long-term stuff, oh now the probability is low and when it’s scarce, if it’s scarce here it’s probably not going to be found there at all. So I better hoard what I have here now and ration it out for myself and the people I want to survive. So I think scarcity mentality is really relevant to what you’re saying. And then that means we need a culture that is much more concerned with alleviating scarcity mentality in many, many different domains. And that’s a different way of thinking about the function of governance, right? There’s a full circle back to superficial meaning making here because if you confront a piece of art that you don’t immediately know what you’re supposed to do with it, then there’s a scarcity there and you might recoil rather than thinking that there’s an investment you can make. And at the same time you could have, as we all do now in the hypersomatic digital environment, there’s an immense number of incoming information streams. But if we’re not assimilating that, then even though we have all this data, we’re undergoing a meaning scarcity. There’s a scarcity of understanding which makes us behave reactively and acquisitively and it might even create this vicious circle where you then try to get more information and you still don’t get any sense of meaning. So you still got the scarcity so you try to get more information and we’re trapped. I agree. I think that’s very much a modal confusion around information. Yeah, very, very much. And you sort of get like junk attention because you’re paying more and more attention to more and more information but you’re not acquiring understanding or knowledge or even wisdom. Yeah, I think that very much is happening for us as a culture. It probably is one of the fuels of conspiracy thinking, right? Because I think people are, if they sense that, there’s a very natural impulse and in a way a healthy impulse to say, I need to weave a whole bunch of this together somehow. I need a more synoptic gaze. And I may be doing it out of this scarcity mode and therefore I’m failing and I’m grasping at things too fast and I’m not vetting the information properly. It’s actually a pretty good impulse to try to get this interconnected, even mythologically resonant overview of what’s happening when you’re faced by endless incoming information streams. Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, I’ve talked about the rise of conspiracy theories during this crisis, the COVID crisis. There was a video, it’s not up there anymore, that I did for Rubble Wisdom. David took it down, not because he doesn’t like the video but because he’s involved in investigating a conspiracy theory right now. Or sorry, he’s involved in investigating an individual who uses conspiracy theories in order to manipulate and exploit people. And he’s doing good work about that. But I’ve talked a lot about how conspiracy thinking, it just, and there’s experimental work to validate exactly what you said. If you put people in situations where they feel like they’re losing control, they’re much more likely to see illusory patterns, much more likely to accept conspiracy theories very, very much. So scarcity of control is really important, not in the sense of mastery but the sense of being able to interact effectively is definitely predictive. And what you said, looking for a predictive pattern is the brain’s initial response. And we’re disposed to be overly vigilant for agents in our environment. Again, prospect and refuge. Is anybody watching me? Is there anybody behind the trees? Right? You know, that’s also that. I think conspiracy theories tap into all kinds of adaptive machinery that has been constellated together into a very powerfully maladaptive and self-perpetuating and self-defending dynamical system within people’s cognition. I call that parasitic processing. And I think that’s very much the case. Now, the problem with people sometimes hearing me doing that, part of what happens is like this is the thing I do that pisses off the most people generally. One group of people are pissed off because I’ve sort of challenged their particular conspiracy theory. I don’t care if I upset them because I think they need to be upset. But there’s other groups of people who say, but there have been conspiracies, right? Like I don’t want to miss the real ones. And I think that’s a better way of framing this. It’s like, well, what are the best tools for distinguishing illusory conspiracies from finding the real ones? I think, and it’s a lot about, again, learning to pay attention the right way, discern, you know, practice in areas where you can check it, practice the skills in the little, right? Where it’s safe, where you can check it, and then gradually see if they’re transferable, right? Et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, when I think of conspiracy theories, which are very easy to dismiss as if they were a homogenous mass, I always say to myself like one in 10, one in 10 conspiracy theories is correct. I just don’t know which one. And at the same time, there’s another conspiracy that isn’t mentioned in anybody’s theory that’s too strange. They haven’t thought of it, doesn’t fall within their paradigms, and it’s real as well. But we’ve got to be, you know, discernment is invoked by both of those positions. You know what you said really interested me was the way we grasp for something out of scarcity and the possible ways of channeling that or using it productively. Like I do breath holding and cold showers. And I know you’re probably familiar with the Zen parable of the master who holds his student’s head under the water. And he says, yeah, when you want enlightenment as much as you want air, then you’ll have it. There’s this amplification of appetition that scarcity can be used to produce if it’s used within the right framework. Yeah, fasting, fasting is the, you find fasting, not only of food, but from sex or sleep, as strategies used throughout the world. Because I think that’s where we can use scarcity as a disruptive strategy, which, you know, shamans make terrific use of disruptive strategies, precisely because, as I would argue, we have increasing evidence that getting the right amount of disruption and distraction into your problem framing is provocative of insight. And so, or in your machine learning, you know, you let the neural network run for a while, and then you throw some noise into it, because that way it doesn’t overfit to its particular set of data. It allows it to generalize and become more resilient and pick up on, right, other things, other patterns, other places in the state’s face of possibilities. Do you think it also increases the amount of energy that we are investing in our active perception mechanisms? It can. I mean, scarcity can be something that motivates people, it energizes them, but scarcity can also erode their sense of agency. Think about that narrowing, it can be a reciprocal narrowing, like you get with the addict, and it becomes inconceivable that, because the addict is living with a perpetual kind of scarcity, right? But the world can’t be any different than it is, and the addict can’t be any different than they are. So, you know, scarcity can also drive reciprocal narrowing into which people get kind of a learned helplessness, right, a learned helplessness. So, yeah, this is why, I mean, it’s a powerful disruptive technique, which is, again, why you see it cross, culturally cross historically, but it’s also a particularly dangerous one, and this is why it’s woven into, you know, the classic example. The Buddha tries asceticism and rejects it, right? Precisely because it’s not clear that using scarcity as a disruptive strategy, it’s not clear that the benefits always outweigh the costs. This, I mean, last time we talked about my sense of how spirituality and religion are done through integrative production of overflow, but how that’s only half of it, the other half is entering into a relationship with this overflow and being able to use it as an evaluative device to analyze the rest of your life to some degree. There’s this sense in which you have access to this numinous fullness, and that can become the standard for action then, right? So that even scarcity could be ordered by your experience of a numinous fullness, but if it isn’t, then it’s kind of going in the opposite direction from that. Yeah, I agree with that completely. I think that’s very right. I see that also that even people have, even when you were doing the first stage of what you said, like shifting from intimacy within the overflow to intimacy with the overflow, like that’s the thing I’m trying to sort of work into circling practices, because the circling tends to be intimacy within the overflow, but there isn’t very, and I’ve been trying to say, well, zoom out, and then try to become, cultivate intimacy with the overflow, because that’s a different thing, and then like you said, it can then become an enacted, present normative field, right, by which you can explore things, cultivate discernment, you know, try to get new insight into how you’re formulating your identity in the world. Exactly, but it is telling, sorry, this is not meant to be self-promotional, it is telling that, you know, I have to say that, right, it’s like people can very easily, and I think you’ve kept putting your finger back on it, people can very easily get entrenched with just being in the overflow and never stepping back to come into a right relationship and intimacy with the overflow itself, and I think that’s a big part of dialectical practice, about bringing that, if you’re getting it through conversational, if you’re experiencing overflow in a conversational discourse manner, then part of dialectic is to do exactly that, to shift off of intimacy within overflow to intimacy with overflow. Yeah, the most generous definition of religion, I think, involves a social process which calls us to do that, and which cites something that’s additional to or even beyond mysticism in terms of its responsibility for engaging that, like even what we just did in discussing the numinous overflow, right, we’re now faithful to the Lord, so to speak, right, we’re invoking it, we’re referencing it, we’re honoring it, calling it forth. Yes, I think faithfulness to the logos is exactly at the heart of dia logos, by way of, by means of it, right, it’s a faithfulness, like we talked about earlier, to the logos, and especially insofar as the faithfulness to the logos affords people to, well, cultivate wisdom and love, etc. Yeah, I totally think that. I should get going soon. There’s an interesting thing there with certain mystic states and certain psychedelic states, thinking all the way back for humanity, put people in a situation where I think they see that sort of even visually, like I recently did a talk on entheogens, and it’s not a huge part of my life, but I’ve had a few interesting experiences, some of them, the sense of the numinous other that comes forth in the exchange, it is almost something you behold, right, the the the languaging of the divine person makes a lot of sense, when you see there’s some other, you actually see it, it’s not just in you, and it’s not just in the other person. I would have this experience in Buddhist class as well, as if something was sneaking out the back of my head, and also looking at me through the teacher’s eyes. Very much, very much. You know, Chris and I, in the chapter we wrote on Gnosis and the Second Person, we talk about this as the third factor, like the third, you’ve heard of the third man factor, where people are in situations, and they, people sense another presence, other than the physically, and I don’t mean anything supernatural, I think was in Shackleton, even though they were on an expedition, and they all sort of sensed, they had a sensed presence that was not any of the people there. Geiger has a whole book called The Third Man Factor, this is well documented, and the third man factor capacity definitely is activated when you’re doing these circling practices, and Chris and I call it, therefore, the emergence of the third factor, or geist, because we’re trying to get something, the German word is nice, because it moves between mind and spirit, and sort of, you know, it’s much more comprehensive than any of the terms that we typically use. I think, yeah, I think people get the sense of that, and they start to relate to it as an entity. Interesting in the, in sort of recent psychological, cognitive scientist literature, and philosophical literature on what is called we agency, that emergent factor that above and beyond us, the we, the distributed cognition is doing something. They talk about it now as like a philosophical zombie, an intelligence emerges, there’s no consciousness to it, right, but there’s an intelligence that emerges, and it seems to be a real sort of, a real sort of thing, in that it can solve problems that the individuals can’t solve. So I do think there’s good sort of, there’s good emerging cognitive science to underpin everything we’re talking about here, and therefore help us get a better relationship to it, but I’m also intrigued by what you said about certain states that that becomes thin aesthetic. It goes from being a sensed presence to being a visualized presence or an encountered presence. I remember, I won’t say when because I don’t want to, there was a time in my life very far removed from this time in my life, let’s say, in which I did psilocybin and did Tai Chi Chuan, and she is kind of like the internalization, it’s the sensed presence of the Tao, right, you know, is an imaginal transjective thing between you and the world, and it uses all these musical metaphors that we’ve been using, you know all this, I know you’re familiar with the literature, and so I have powerful experiences of that quite regularly, right, and that’s how you learn how to fight with it and stuff like that, and there’s nothing magical in the supernaturalistic sense, but when I was doing it, there was two aspects of it that were really cool. So I saw blue fire, I had a synesthetic experience of the Chi as blue fire moving all over my body, and what was really kicked it into high gear is there was this little girl and she came and she was staring at me with like saucer eyes, and somehow I almost fancied that she could see the flames as well, because you know you’re in a sitting state, she was definitely picking up on something more that was happening to me than what was normally present, because she was looking at me with, and again this is not about me, she was looking at the event that I was involved in with wonder, almost awe, and was like whoa, that’s a very powerful experience. So yeah, I totally think that there are places where we synesthetically start to visualize or even have, hear that third presence. My girlfriend and I always have to reach for this, we just call it the third in general, that our relationship is playing a role in our relationship in addition to the role that we’re each playing, and it really doesn’t, you can’t really describe it properly without that additional factor. Yeah, and this is why I’ve, I mean part of the reason why I’ve spent so much time trying to get out this notion of transjectivity is because what we’re talking about is not sort of objective and it’s not merely subjective, it’s transjective in a really really powerful way. The relation itself, what we’re saying is the relation itself, not the relata, but the relation itself becomes real, actual, actualizing, it’s acting, the relation itself, and so I think that’s really really important, and again I’ve mentioned to you this before, I’m just impressed by how people from various backgrounds, often very secular, both in the religious sense and the more general sense we have now, they will talk about this with religious language, just spontaneously, because no other language is close enough to hit it, and that tells us something, that tells us something about what we need to be doing. Leymann, I gotta get going. Okay. Sorry, that’s kind of a shock, I did try to mention it a few minutes earlier, but you didn’t quite hear me, and then you said something that was really interesting and profound, and they got caught up in it. We just keep going indefinitely, I’m sure, next time. Yeah, so I would very much like to make this public, are you okay with it? I think this was a valuable conversation. I’m fine with that. Okay, cool, thank you. These are great topics, anybody should be happy to hear them. Yeah, I mean, I really like, like I said, I like your way of, well you have discernment, and I just want to honor that in you. So thank you very much. Thank you, John, I appreciate that. Oh, you’re welcome. Okay, so we’ll, I’ll see, I’ll talk to you again soon. Yeah, we’ll set something else up soon. Okay, take care. Bye-bye.