https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=7gI0MgKpokM
Hello everyone. I’m frequently humbled and touched, motivated and encouraged when people contact me by email or texting or commenting or they greet me on the street and tell me that my work has been transformative for them. If this has been the case for you and also if you want to share it with other people, please consider supporting my work by joining my Patreon community. All financial support goes to the Vervecki Foundation where my team and I are diligently working to create the science, the practices, the teaching and the communities. If you want to participate in my work and many of you ask me that how can I participate, how can I get involved, then this is the way to do it. The Vervecki Foundation is something that I’m creating with other people and I’m trying to create something as virtuously as I possibly can. No grifting, no setting myself up as a guru. I want to try and make something really work so that people can support, participate and find community by joining my Patreon. I hope you consider that this is a way in which you can make a difference and matter. Please consider joining my Patreon community at the link below. Thank you so very much for your time and attention. Welcome everyone to another episode of Voices with Vervecki. I’m very pleased here to be here with Brendan Graham Dempsey. We’ve had a lot of conversations before but the one that’s most pertinent and there’ll be a link in the notes to this video is this is actually second part of a series and the first part is on Brendan’s channel and then I said well let’s hop back and forth between channels as we do this as a way of introducing our work to each other’s audience. First of all, welcome Brendan. It’s great to see you here again. I’ll let you say a little bit about yourself in a sec but I’ll first just sort of give a bit of a brief summary about what we talked about last time. I won’t take too long because people can go and watch the video but Brendan was challenging me in the right way, the Socratic way, to articulate what this revising, revisioning, renewing neoplatonism looks like today and we talked about the overcoming of some of things like the two worlds mythology and the interaction with and the potential integration with Zen and how neoplatonism and Zen could enter into a fellowship of opponent processing that would be mutually beneficial and this work has already been tried or at least initiated by the Kyoto school and a bunch of other things around that and Brendan has done some really excellent work recently about really wrestling with what we mean when we talk about meaning, making use of my work and other people’s work. I gave an excellent presentation at the Consilience Conference and so that’s sort of the background where we’re at and we’re going to try and pick up the threads around neoplatonism or maybe Zen neoplatonism and the emerging cognitive science etc. around meaning. And why that all matters. So welcome Brendan. Yeah thank you so much. I’m really excited for this. I really enjoyed our last talk and I got just from what I heard from people it also sounds like a lot of these things are really live for them too so I feel like we’re really exploring some important things and yeah happy to to pick up the threads and carry them further and see where it goes. So why don’t you tell everybody a little bit more about yourself because my audience might not know you that well. Sure so well you did a great service in coining this phrase the meaning crisis and kind of taking that forward and that’s a very helpful frame for me to talk about the stuff that I’m interested in which is within that context basically. So I do a lot of work in metamodern spirituality trying to think about what is spirituality, what is meaning making after postmodernism, what does that look like after you do deconstruction and critique and kind of unpack things to a sufficient level of deconstructive depth, what does it look like to reconstruct, how do we understand meaning and spirituality and religion after all that work gets done. And so a lot of people in this sort of scene this corner of the internet are I think particularly rightly fascinated by this topic and it’s very pertinent, very urgent. So that’s mainly my stuff and yeah I’ve been writing some books on this topic. I have like a metamodern spirituality series and the most recent book in that line was this emergentism work that I published I think earlier this year actually which is sort of looking at the broad kind of history of cosmic complexification and trying to sort of situate our sense of reality within the kind of cosmic evolutionary big time or deep time kind of big history framework in a broad sense. So also engaging with this issue of the religion is not a religion, some kind of religion beyond two worlds mythology. So a lot of our work is a very consonant for sure. So what’s most alive for you right now in your work? What’s calling to you the most right now? Well I’m working on this book called The Evolution of Meaning at the moment and you mentioned the Consilience Conference presentation I gave and it’s really that was sort of the beginning of this project that I’m working on. That presentation and the associated paper was kind of the the kind of kernel of the introductory chapter that sort of frames meaning and human meaning making within this broader complexification narrative linking you know what do we mean by this and has to do with you know individuals and transjective relationships with environments finding information meaningful in terms of viability and the flourishing of entities in their context. So using that as sort of a basis and then trying to see well given that information has sort of complexified over the eons through these different emergent levels of information processing such as the work that Greg Enriquez does really a great job mapping with the Utah framework from matter to life to mind to culture. If these kind of represent novel information processing systems and if meaning is in some sense a processing of information for viability then we can kind of think about the complexification of meaning through time. So then I’m really interested in seeing how human meaning is basically a complex form of this information processing and how does it look like for you know when we’re thinking about world views and god concepts and notions of the sacred. So it’s kind of it’s an ambitious you know work it’ll probably be definitely be my longest to date but that’s sort of what I’m really excited about so I’ve been doing some really deep dives and as you mentioned I’m drawing on your work as well for that in an important way when I consider the mind cognitive level of this process. Wow that was really rich. I’m really excited about what you’re doing. Greg and I are starting a new series together on the cognitive science playlist on my channel Transcendent Naturalism. We’re hoping you of course you’ll be a guest on there with us at some point. One of the one of the co-creators, co-collaborators of the overarching argument. So I’m wondering about what you just said. Any of course you know I’m in very deep and broad agreement with it in detail and in gestalt. So this question is not a challenge question like in that sense it’s like you get this model of meaning right and then and that’s sort of an epistemic aspect and then you can you can you can bring in something that’s sort of on the epistemic and the ontological which is intelligibility. The world makes the world makes sense to us and then you can sort of ask these kinds of questions. You can ask the question well cognition seems to be organized right this way levels bottom and reality is like we seem to organize that way and intelligibility is organized that way and they all seem to fit together in this really mutually supportive fashion and then of course you know the move I’m going to play here is well that sounds very much like a neoplatonic framework in which except you need you would you would need to place in equal stature emanation with emergence and my argument for that is emergence without corresponding emergence is emergence without corresponding emanation is just epiphenomenalism which gives you not of what you want out of your leveled ontology and so I’m just picking up on what we talked about last time and you see the the connection I’m trying to make do you think they’re the kind of thing you’re arguing for is one that perhaps you know is deeply resonant with I get it a revised neoplatonic framework yeah I mean very much so and in the reason why our conversation and this topic is so fascinating to me is because I find a lot of incredible value in this material in platinus and I’ve been just fascinated with the whole tradition for a long time and its various extensions in kind of the western tradition more broadly whether that’s pseudo Dionysius or Dante who kind of poeticizes it and it’s always just very much struck me and I think that’s part of why I’m so drawn to this view the sort of cosmological view because if you read a work like you know yeah the the divine comedy you get this leveled ontology that’s very much informed by a neoplatonic framework of course blending with kind of a christian cosmology and a kind of grand narrative and it seemed like after modernity showed up and traditionalism was sort of kicked to the wayside that that just wasn’t possible it was sort of like no that’s not how the world works and and we kind of got this reduced flattened reductionism and so I see and yes emergent you know phenomena and complexity this incredible potential for regaining some of that depth literally that kind of that that layered depth to reality in a way that is very much in accord with you know our cutting-edge science so that’s why the whole topic is so fitting at the same time right I mean that doesn’t mean that they’re the same thing so they’re they’re getting at something that seems to be real and now we’re I think we’re trying to clarify what is that to the best of our understanding so I definitely see a lot of overlap there with with these traditions at the same time there’s another component which I think is kind of missing from it’s from what I understand the the kind of more platonic or neoplatonic tradition to be getting at which is I think that in that tradition there’s much more emphasis of conformity there’s a conformity kind of epistemology of like the mind conforms to reality yes whereas what I draw a lot more from is kind of a constructivist piezidian developmental perspective which is that that is kind of half of the equation right so if if that’s if the conformity idea is sort of one way of looking at epistemology and then you get like the Kantian you know Copernican revolution that’s like no it’s actually the mind imposes on reality I think if you actually synthesize both of those perspectives that that’s probably the closest thing so it’s this and that’s very much that transjective individual operating in relationship to an environment and sort of mutually you know making those things intelligible by adapting to which I guess you know Piaget would call accommodation but also assimilating to to be that kind of Kantian thing so I think that that’s an important element to bring into this mixture that that isn’t necessarily as pronounced in the platonic or neoplatonic tradition but should be foregrounded because it’s sort of a mutual creation of reality but creation of reality in the context of describing a real ontological world that exists and so I think you can kind of get both of those going on I think that’s excellent I mean yeah I tend to draw models as for ecogs I does from from biology and I think about there’s something sort of equivalent to there’s instead of biological there’s epistemic niche construction going on we’re shaping the environment as it shapes us and then we shape the environment and so there’s that loop yeah I very much think that’s the case now interestingly if you look at some more recent Christian Platonists I even think Neoplatonists and Catherine Pickstock’s astonishing book Aspects of Truth she has a whole chapter about what she calls the poetic argument for God and she tries to lay out this idea that it’s conformity but it’s I think a poetic where we read really bottom what we mean by poesis but it’s poetic conformity in that you’re also you’re not only conforming you’re serving to draw out what right there’s a sense of completing not finishing but completing drawing out adding on to what she called there’s it’s she said it’s something like identity without repetition like it’s like you draw what the thing is and you and you it’s almost like the the correspondence to platonic animesis well I’m I’m learning but I’ve always known this right and it’s like oh this is an this is a sort of a new a new aspect of the thing that was drawn out by human beings but nevertheless it somehow was always part of what that thing is and that’s what makes it good art and that made me think of Scari’s work about when we see something beautiful it has that it has that double call to us right like she gives the example of the beautiful tree and reminds us of all the trees we’ve seen before but it also says I didn’t realize trees could be like this right and it’s it’s it’s it and and and Pickstock is saying well there’s a lot more poetry on our knowing than we are properly given credit for and so she’s so there’s a there’s and I take her to be a really important figure in sort of modern Christian platonic Christian neoplatonic ontology her book is an ontological book aspects of truth towards a religious metaphysics and so I’m in complete agreement with you and and I mean it and gutta has similar things going on when he’s trying to see the herb phenomena and the earth right the the herb plant and all that and barthoff talks about this yeah there’s something about that that there’s a way in which we are drawn into conformity but we also draw something out of the thing in our conforming to it and so the model the the the model which is a platonic model of like of the love relationship where you’re conforming to the other but you also are there right they’re also being drawn out by that relationship I think that’s exactly right and I do think that that is something that um I think need it is being developed it needs to be talked about much more about this attempt to bring back uh the neoplatonic framework but I think Pickstock is doing an excellent job in aspects of truth yeah I mean it’s it’s gosh it’s such a rich and important topic and I I also you know cognize too that sort of my understanding of neoplatonism could probably you know it’s it might be more informed by some uh kind of flatter interpretations and no no I think your point is well said no no I really do think your point is well said I think well I think it’s so well said that people need to be response responsive to it and responsible to it and people are I think that’s what I wanted to say yeah yeah no I just think um you know it’s one of those things that I’m sure you could probably even read these original materials and draw out from those materials some of the intimations of some of these ideas and I’m sure some thinkers have done that um and so I’m excited by how the neoplatonic tradition even as it uh kind of enters into contemporary times is able to do that in foreground some of these things in important ways but I think it’s crucial because one of the dangers and we talked a little bit about this in our first conversation is that uh certain kinds of modes of interpreting that the kind of neoplatonic vision uh can can kind of gravitate I think towards this sort of um you lose particularity you lose individuation and you sort of become abstract in the sort of general and then you lose all the richness of reality and so there’s I think whereas what you’re kind of talking about the sort of participation which of course is a very platonic word but uh if you want to think about participation in um in well it could be the one I guess you could say but in this sort of process uh it’s one that doesn’t lose the individuating aspect it’s actually it sort of comes through the individuating aspect and uh so I like blending uh this sort of neoplatonic vision with something more like like Jungian individuation ideas right where like there’s something about a deep reality that we connect to that comes through precisely through our particularity uh and our our uniqueness that that we’re somehow kind of manifesting uh almost kind of idiosyncratic archetypes and that there’s something going on there um so yeah I think that that’s that’s another aspect um that I would want to bring into a kind of revised notion of what we might be talking about in this neoplatonic vision but then I’d want to know how we could make sense of that according to uh not just the original source material but also you know the more recent cognitive science and the way you are framing you know cognitive science ideas in terms of you know platonism and vice versa right so uh because like the one it’s a very easy idea to kind of lose the individuation and entirely right and so there’s yeah I I’m very that’s sort of a preoccupation at the moment is trying to conceptualize what this sort of um you know like Bonaventure called it you know the soul’s journey into god sort of a thing but there’s this this spiritual journey that um that does kind of culminate in something but it’s not the culmination in some kind of a abstract uh totally you know something stripped of particularity so anyway that’s that’s just no no no I think this is excellent I think you know there’s a there’s a strand in neoplatonism that falls prey to the Nietzschean critique um and of course in the late middle ages it was the difficulties surrounding the principle of individuation um that led to the birth of nominalism all right that the idea that no reality is ultimately these raw uh individuals and the categories are actually just mental projections on so there was there was a big swing uh I think a compensatory swing to use a Jungian idea um and I I do think that um I think for that reason that everything you’re saying is pertinent for me one of the ways I’ve been trying to think about how to address that is um by trying to bring in Zen uh that emphasizes the suchness of things right um and um the ineffable mystical aspect of the suchness of some right which is that about a thing uh that cannot be grasped by image categories exactly what you’re talking about it that right um and trying and trying to put that into relationship with sort of the the neoplatonic moreness that well yeah but this is part of it’s enriched and it participates in all of this and and and trying to understand um the relationship between those uh uh so one of the things I I I’m saying I agree with you and I recommend a tradition that is much more oriented towards um that the the ineffable here nowness suchness of something and put that into a deep dialogue with the the the neoplatonic so yeah I’m glad we’re getting into this because this is really this is the fertile ground I’m gonna mix metaphors here but it’s also the sort of like hazy veil that I’m trying to break through because I see something here and I’m trying to kind of making it intelligible um and uh and and for me it gets to this issue so last time we talked about you know it’s not about the journey to the pole it’s about the polarity definitely and I still stand by that yeah so yeah I want to kind of swim in that a little bit because um so one of the one of the solutions to this issue of that we were just talking about this problem of kind of you know particularization versus you know abstraction and categories and whatnot is that uh is through complexification um because when you get integration you can have differentiation of parts you can have particularity but then you get a higher order level of coherence right that you kind of get a one out of lower level parts so that you get sort of a a new simplicity right so you get a sort of a new simplicity right there’s something that you don’t lose the particularity you gain the sort of greater level uh oneness out of an integration of a bunch of particularities and so I find that to be a very um kind of happy solution to this that we can kind of have both of these simultaneously um but then for me when I think about that it winds up framing uh complexification as being sort of the the end um you know goal if that makes sense and I think that we’d have to rethink uh the kind of platonic soul’s ascent uh if we’re doing something like that um because uh you know when I read for example so platinus talks about um it’s in the fourth ennead where he says you know sometimes I’ve been sort of taken out of my body yeah I was just reading up this morning yeah oh cool uh and he describes this kind of mystical thing right but he describes what he kind of enters into as being you know without parts totally simple etc etc and so one of the things I want to wrap my head around is like what is that what’s going on there how do we understand that is that uh explicable through a complexity lens or is it actually the opposite is is the one that he is you know experiencing in that sense a regression to a kind of simpler uh kind of mind state uh in that polarity I’m not sure if I’m making sense but I’m making perfect sense okay yeah so here’s my attempt to answer that and like you said we’re swimming in vague waters and we have to help each other not drown as much as we can the buddy system here um for me the complexification is like the movement of the particle in the field right it’s how you know the fields there and and the one isn’t the one isn’t anything achieved by the complexification it is the that that which makes the complexification possible right so um like I say if you’ll allow me the analogy and it’ll break at some point so I get that but you know complexification for me is like is like how the particles are moving in the field and then you can’t right you you what you then want to stand back and say is yeah but what is the field right itself um and what platinus means by that is and he’s at times very unhelpful because he he uses maybe he couldn’t use anything else but he uses the two worlds language a lot um and but I’m saying we’re not committed to that um he’s trying to say yes but that complexification the the the principle governing the complexification can’t itself be complex or you’ll get into an infinite regress of explanatory principles right that’s the that’s the argument he’s basically making um like I say at times I’m sorry I’m sounding like I’m better than platinus I’m not I’m just saying to our ears when we’re trying to get past we’re post-nichean we’re post-nominalist and this two world stuff rather than being helpful metaphors is often distracting distorting metaphors we’re trying to put it aside right that’s part of the metamodern project that I as I understand it and so yeah it’s it’s that platinus is trying to say the one is that principle that principle it’s if you made if you sort of if you could put together notions of principle and affordance um that makes possible uh the complexification and remember I was arguing last time the complexification is simultaneously up and down right you don’t just right I won’t repeat those arguments but the idea is well the one is what binds all of that together so the process never loses a through light of intelligibility hmm so well to help maybe ground this in in kind of actual like praxis because one of the things that was compelling to me uh were some of these kind of cross-cultural and cross-contemplative studies that tried to look at okay well is platinus doing the same thing that you know buddhist uh monks are doing essentially right um and I guess I would just throw that out as a question just to kind of get some bearings a little bit when you when you when he describes his experience uh do you think that that sort of experience I shouldn’t even say the sort do you think that the experience he’s describing is more or less the same experience that people in other contemplative or meditative traditions experience or is it a different thing if that uh yeah so this is the the long-standing battle between the perennialists and the constructivists uh the so I also don’t want to I don’t want to take us too far afield I feel I don’t know I want to wrestle with this I think this is right I think this is right um you what I want to what I want to try to argue towards is the idea that you can have a unifying principle like the principle of evolution but that doesn’t mean that it produces homogeneous results because the principle is constitutively actualized in relationship to variable environments that are going to produce different organisms and I want to say something like um there’s something universal that is acting sort of analogous to a law in a scientific law sense which is and I think it has something to do with I mentioned to you last time where you can get to this place where you’re trying to relate to being and not to the beat not to beings not even the property that beings share in common but to being like the thing that Heidegger pounds over our head again and again and again right um where you realize that the relevance realization process is itself irrelevant you get this sort of trans site rather than an insight um and I think that so I think there’s cognitive processes and the depth of being that is disclosed right uh correspondingly I don’t want to say correspondingly because people think of the correspondence through truth and that’s not what I mean resonantly okay that’s a better word so there’s this there’s a there are sort of universal cognitive processes universal dimensions or levels that are disclosed however how that is taken up how that realization is taken up such that it is transformatively relevant to the people who are undergoing it is by its very nature going to complexify to fit the complexity historical and environmental of the context that people are in that’s how and I think and I think the fact that we can’t resolve the perennialism um constructivism debate because we can’t and we keep trying to and we can’t um I propose this is like Hicks this is like Hicks meta argument uh Hicks argues that we can’t we can’t we haven’t been able to resolve any of these spiritual questions so the meta argument is we should regard the universe as fundamentally spiritually ambiguous uh and then that means we and then we should understand our our spirituality um in relationship to that I’m proposing something very similar I’m saying that I think um the attempt to resolve that question is is miss framing it in a fundamental way um so because I gave you you know I think a non-controversial example you have a universal principle evolution but that doesn’t mean that it produces the same things in fact the nature of the principle tells you it’s going to do exactly the opposite it’s going to and no pun intended it’s going to proliferate all right um it’s in its creativity so I mean let me know if I’m on the right track with this from what you’re saying um let’s say like you you have a a principle of differentiation the principle itself is is unitive but what is the content if we want to talk about that way is and so simultaneously you can kind of have university unity and diversity something like that you’re you’re able to uh experience the principle of plurality um and is it something like that because it would seem to kind of young came up and it seems like we’re moving in that kind of conjunction of opposites that like if you could experience maximal unity of principled differentiation then somehow uh that might be uh probably a mystical sort of um I think that’s right and think about I mean again as an analogy think about the singularity for the big bang all right it’s it’s an absolute singularity yet it’s a singularity that somehow contains within itself all of the principles of differentiation and all the laws that are going to fold out from that and then even as it unfolds the the unity underlies things and issues of you know not issues in you know facts around entanglement and relativity and all kinds of things like that saying there’s right um and so I’m trying to give a couple of examples one from physics and one from from biology is like actually when you’re pushing on the limits what you you get to is exactly what you’re you’re talking about and I think this is what DC Schindler was trying to argue when he says look in Plato’s critique of impure reason if the absolute doesn’t include the relative it’s not actually the absolute so yeah the principle uh right I would put it a little bit different I would say the principle about what we call unity and differentiation are in the one and and and then they both unfold um from it and within it always so how do you conceive of the contemplative or meditative process or practice um in the sense of you know because my interpretation of platinus is that he’s saying you know through contemplation I have these experiences that he describes right um so then the question for my mind and then this kind of brings in this cognitive science but I suppose it’s like well what is the mind doing in those circumstances that it is somehow being absorbed into the in you know well dot dot dot the one like how do we understand these practices as relating to this reality I think that’s a I think that’s an excellent question I’ve been trying to answer that especially in the mindfulness work I’ve been doing the article I published um uh in recently in Rick Rapetti’s anthology on the philosophy of meditation uh the thing I published on uh in hypnosis and meditation on reformulating the mindfulness construct I have another paper in submission for another anthology that Brian Ostafen is um organizing around this and what I’ve been trying to argue is that you have two two movements there’s a meditative movement of mindfulness what I call scaling down in which you’re breaking gestalts and you’re moving towards features and you’re doing transparency opacity you’re trying to get down to raw suchness right and then there’s a there’s a there are contemplative practices when you’re trying to gestalt out and get towards sort of this resonant at one mint um and again the point isn’t the polls and that the and the literature bears me out on this by the way I think um the point is to get better at traversing inside traversing within the polarity powered by the polarity so you’re so you make a distinction then and actually like a very profound one between meditation and contemplation yes yes okay because those these are often conflated as I was just doing myself yeah yeah because they’re actually essentially the very different suance of of both polls which is which is very fascinating then because it would seem that what platinus is doing or describing is contemplation uh which would be a very different sense so if we would when he talks about theoria is that yeah his word is very much a contemplative practice very much now interestingly we’re probably uh so uh if you think about two moments of insight um and I think there’s a continuum between insight and what we’re going to talk about what we’re talking about I should say there there’s one moment uh where you have to break an inappropriate frame and meditative practices are great for doing that and trying to get you back as much as you can open up to the new information the suchness right uh but there’s also practices that go the other way there’s practices that make frame open you up try to get you making greater gestalts that can incorporate this newness into a into a more encompassing and and richer model right and that’s what happens in an insight and it in itself organizes now what I want to propose to you is notice how those two can interpenetrate in a moment of insight imagine if you did these practices and you get something at a bigger scale that was like an insight in which the two become completely interpenetrating I think that’s what projna is I think that’s what projna is and this sounds very much than I’m getting a complexification picture from this if you if you focus on the suchness of things then you’re basically zooming in on the particularity you could almost say the differentiation every single moment is different every the suchness of things is by you know if you were to really emphasize it it is um it is like nothing else no a thing is like anything else because you have a category for which to subsume it in so it is just total differentiation but if that’s what the meditative practices are doing then by contrast the contemplative practices are trying to find the broadest levels of sort of categorization now if you’re if you’re able to do both of these things uh then what you’re somehow doing is categorizing the maximal amount of differentiation which would be you’re integrating the ultimate amount of differentiation which is what complexification is all about I don’t know does that is that yeah and you get Blake’s famous to see a world in a grain of sand right and there’s equivalents in the Buddhist tradition where you see all of the cosmos in in barley grain right and vice versa and you it’s it’s Spinoza’s Schianci into Ativa you see each premise in the entire argument and you see the entire argument in each premise right simultaneously now here’s the thing though at a functional descriptive level sorry wrong word functional explanational level um this is yeah there’s a kind of complexification but here’s what I want to propose to you if that complexification enters into this kind of poetic conformity with the complexity of reality you actually get a realization of a kind of absolute oneness because unpack that a little bit yeah well I mean so I’m going to play with a metaphor here right so when I grasp this my hand this and this become one right so although this is a complex thing and it’s complex it is it’s highly differentiated and highly integrated and that allows me to grasp the bottle but that that complexity affording me conformity actually makes me map at one with the bottle and I’m saying that’s that’s exactly how you’re optimally ripping reality in a particular way and so although there’s so I’m trying to say that both things are right at the level of how you’re describing what’s going on there’s this complexification but when the complexification sort of is in parallel conforming to the dynamics of the intelligibility of reality then you get a radical at one moment okay and then so this is really because now I it sort of sets itself itself up in my mind in terms of relating this back to meaning because well for many different reasons but you know again we were talking about earlier if we’re thinking about processing information for viability there’s something about this is where the conformity aspect I think makes a lot of sense because it’s a it’s a great it’s it’s viability enhancing to have an optimal grip on reality let’s say right so if you are able to produce greater clarity in a more accurate world model and be in greater actual oneness with reality then that will be perceived as a sense of this is a deeply meaningful salient and important kind of experience yes yeah so so so there’s that going on there which also I think in some ways helps to bridge back to something a question that kind of came up in our last conversation about you know the very notion of absolute meaning does that is that a nonsensical point because it depends some kind it depends on some kind of a you know transjective contextual relationship to establish but this would seem to approximate that in some way of course it’s defined by the context of an individual having the experience so it has it’s that transjective context but if the if the experience being had is with as much of reality as as sort of possible let’s say for that organism to meaningfully relate to then that would sort of be the maximally meaningful experience for that entity to to to have if that makes sense I think that’s right but but I guess I want to I want to I want to try and draw it out a little bit farther because we talked about the part like I’ve mentioned it earlier the possibility I want to put two things together remember I said you can you can you can concentrate on how sort of the complexification is disclosing the ligaments of the polarity of the field or you can just get the oneness of the field so imagine you’ve got this complexification coupled to complexification and but then what you’re what you do is you stand back you stand back and I don’t know what even what that means but you you take you you you move to deeper prajna in which oh but I’m not I’m actually I want to get the principle behind and the principle that’s being disclosed and then you realize it’s just one principle and that’s what I mean when you move to this place where the relevance realization the complexification of cognition the optimal gripping get you to this place and then you what you do is after you’ve optimally gripped you now can open your hand if you’ll allow me in a way you couldn’t before and and and and so you can move to you know the grammar to grammar that’s a metaphor I use like we’re complexifying our intelligibility with all the speech but underneath it is some unifying grammar and then presumably there’s some unifying grammar of the world and then I can shift to that and I drop away the complexification relevance realization and I just get that field to field principle to principle grammar to grammar thing happening. Yeah I guess I mean so there’s a lot there they would have to we’d have to unpack but I’m wondering I mean for me that’s still going to be situated in in an individual mind it’s going to be a an experience going on so it’s going to have a certain structure to it it’s going to be based on the complex organization of that human mind to have so it doesn’t there’s an apprehension or a sense of absoluteness to that but it’s still one deeply contextualized according to that. Well you never I mean you’ll never you only and this is where Proclus is good you never this is a correction I think he made to Platinus that’s a valuable one he said and this you’ll like this because this has Jungian I think it may be even influenced Jung he said you actually only come into a mystical relationship with the one in you like there’s the one is in you now that’s not a nothing because that’s the deepest way you can participate in the one but right it’s still the one in in you which he and he doesn’t mean your ego or anything like that. The difficulty I have with Jung is he tends to make that at least early to middle young I hold open space for later young I want that heard but right he makes it an intra-psychic event where for Proclus it’s not it’s it’s it’s it’s properly right an ontological event not just an intra-psychic event. Yeah I mean at a certain point then you have to bring in questions of you know idealism into this I suppose because like the ultimate how do I put this you know if there is going to be a total correspondence you’d have to remove any kind of separation so ultimate reality would somehow have to exist as a possibility within what we would think of as as as a minded experience but then you just you kind of flip the script and it’s like you know the mind is the totality so there’s nothing I’m that would I’m not sure if I’m yeah I don’t I don’t think first of all I I think you’re right many people make that move I don’t see anything gained by moving from yeah idealism I don’t I don’t think there’s any explanatory these the sort of arguments that you would use to get there via Kant are arguments that I would first use to undermine Kant in profound way you know and and and there are I mean we’ve had them from pick to on right and you know Kant says well you know what you can’t ever draw you can’t use cause which is relationship within phenomenal experience to talk about what it caused all of phenomenal experience so you can’t you can’t do metaphysics you can’t make arguments and infer God because you can’t that’s to extend the causal relationship beyond its proper domain and then he says well the thing in itself is nothing you can ever experience but it causes your experience it’s like you’re doing exactly what the thing in itself what you said you couldn’t do about God right and you get all these problems and yeah I I I want to I want to say we get to this place by really taking seriously at the very beginning transjectivity and intelligibility yeah so I think idealism is is to then undermine that very I agree that very yeah no I very much agree and I’ve I’ve also found it’s a it’s has it has certain seductive qualities to it because it it render it sort of answers certain problems but I find that the problems it creates to ultimately kind of be more problematic but that is but what I do want to try to dig into a little bit more here though is is given that then and by that I mean this transjective frame and you know I am still curious about what we might be able to salvage from this notion of an absolute or something and just to kind of like set this up a little bit right I mean there’s been this deep connection between neoplatonism and the platonic tradition more broadly with Christianity and of course in this context the one gets kind of syncretized with with God and then there’s the sense of you can talk you can think about the one in terms of you know the deity basically and so you get this I think a very interesting Christianized Platonism that comes from that which again comes up in Dante in a just very sublime gorgeous way and so that remains deeply attractive to me in a way of trying to see how it’s possible if it is to explore what we’re talking about within some kind of a of an other let’s say right if like if this God represents some kind of the this like I don’t know other a kind of ultimate other that we relate to or something you know how do we fit how do we how do we correlate some of that you know mapping to the mapping that we’re talking about well I mean I think Dante is a good place to start and the idea of agape right and what agape does is it turns around the arrow of relevance realization where the fundamental question and we are the beings whose beings in question so I mean the question of our being at that level is not how things are relevant to me it’s how am I relevant to reality right and that’s you know and and what you learn in the well I would argue and I think many people would nod yes is Dante is showing all the people that got that the wrong way around right all the hell is filled with all people who tried to keep the arrow this way and they were never therefore they never found agape they could never love wisely and I think sin is the failure to love wisely so what I would say is right um it’s the other but the otherness isn’t like another thing this is the problem when we talk about other it’s other than being another thing and so what a lot of the tradition I think recommends is think about instead of it being another thing think about it being that which turns the arrow of relevance around so that agape becomes possible for you and so that you can know reality agapically rather than just consummatively or even just erotically and so for me the absolute is that which right that which can the it’s it’s the inexhaustible source of intelligibility that can pull on me so powerfully that it can turn that arrow around that’s how I think of the absolute right and if I try to then say oh but this is how like if I try to then fold the absolute back into my egocentric framework then I actually loot and you can hear some levinas on what I’m doing of course right and right if it and for me this is this is like to say that my my beloved partner is other to me could sound like she is you know an alien to me and we’re foreign but it’s not that it’s that she can turn that arrow around in me in a powerful way that’s how I would recommend trying to think about that yeah I mean so you know in the final canto of the paradiso Dante sees the beatific vision and at the kind of core of it right it’s like these shapes that kind of resolve themselves like a trinity of shapes that resolves themselves into a human face which is like the christ face and then he kind of goes through that and then it’s like you know it sort of ends you know there’s more to the story that it’s so but it’s ineffable it can’t be explained but I think that recognition of the face if that makes sense like the ultimate kind of you know teleological end or whatever is a is a meaningful thing that I also think is deeply ingrained in our whole human spiritual proclivity to see something in the cosmos that is the other as also familiar to see like intentionality to see this sort of something you know deeply that I can relate to and so I’m wondering if if that face could be kind of metaphorically understood as the intelligibility that we ourselves find with you know with reality itself and notice how you know we have this verb to face and facing right and facing reality which is this and and and it’s Spinoza and this is not properly I haven’t seen enough I think Claire Carlisle talks about it but it hasn’t been talked about enough because you know everybody knows about the attributes in Spinoza you know there’s mind and there’s space right and all the extension and there’s all this stuff and the modes and the canadus and all that but and and you know and the three kinds of knowing and scans the intuitiva and all that’s important I’m not trying to dismiss it you have to really wrestle with but Spinoza also has this phrase that he uses periodically which he calls the face of the universe which is this really interesting and it plays this role that you’re you’re like it’s this it’s he doesn’t and he doesn’t ever try to like sort of explicate it or prove it or anything like that he just invokes it right and I think there’s something right about that I think there um there you know Alicia Urrara we talked about this last time you know that you know narrative can get our mind in the right sort of processing mode for tracking the way reality is unfolding and and it’s true that way not true because it’s its propositions are accurate right it’s it’s it’s it’s a it’s a modal truth rather than a propositional content truth right and I think the same way about this facing function that you’re talking about there’s something about getting into the I thou that discloses uh reality to us I think because the I thou properly turns this arrow around I think that’s what the I thou relationship uh I think the I it is the arrow going this way and the I thou is the arrow going that way and the I thou relationship like that relationship where we’re interfacing with somebody that facing function and Levinas picks up on it too um as well as Boober it’s like yeah there’s something about doing that it has all kinds of dangers anthropomorphism etc projection all that but there’s something about doing that that gets us into a mode of functioning that discloses reality in like it ushers us into the depths into a kind of ontological depth perception depth participation that is otherwise inaccessible and for me this is this is where the non-theism and the theism sort of are are on a horizon right I’m the non-theist who thinks uh like like Hick and others uh there there can be many faces and there can be things other than faces I think there’s other things we do that do that for us too um but the theist of course and Dante is a theist since there’s ultimately the best possible face um that’s the face of christ um and it’s interesting because of course he one of the things he has to do is he has to give up he has to reprior it Beatrice can’t be the ultimate face for him even though she’s transcendent and all of that he has to he has to love wisely he has to love his ultimate love has to be for what is ultimate yeah gosh yeah oh man there’s a lot there’s a lot here I mean so um I’m not sure if you’ve uh explored this one at all uh god without being by uh Jean-Luc Marion yeah I read quite a bit about it and then I’ve been reading DC Schindler’s critique of uh and and even more uh uh um Pickstock’s critique uh her critique and aspects of truth of of Jean-Luc Marion and his neoplatonism he’s deeply influenced by Dionysus she she has a very profound uh uh yeah criticism of interesting I’d be curious to know what that is but one thing that I really took away from that that work was the whole iconography or yes uh iconology I guess you could say um and and the the differentiation between idols and icons and all that it’s it’s a very very helpful thing for me but thinking about that the way that the face can be something that draws you beyond itself that it’s sort of the this abyss of you know increasing uh meaning but see what the face does right the face is the suchness of a person that portends the moreness of the person right which is like it’s bickenstein said like he said what is it we imagine when we imagine someone’s soul other than to imagine their face right yep but of course a face isn’t a soul right and but right uh yeah well I was gonna say yeah for me and and I think you can even there’s something about eyes in particular that are there’s a reason why symbolically they keep showing up because I think there’s something about not just faces but the the eyes being the windows of the soul but that part of the face that sort of is what draws you into the moreness even especially and of course the you know whether it’s the you know the these masonic images of eyes or the eye of Horace it’s always been a very profound image I think for that representation of of that iconographic thing that pulls you in there’s a there’s a depthness to it because you’re seeing into this surface that itself kind of pretends something much much deeper yeah and Plato has I mean and you know in Socrates the eye shows up in an interesting way because it shows up dialogically because Plato emphasizes he’s you he’s playing with what’s happening in dialectic platonic dialectic but you see yourself like literally in the reflection in the other people’s eyes but you also see them through how they’re seeing you and he does this wonderful thing about how the eye is exactly that place in which you not only get access to the person’s soul but you can refract reflectively get access into your own soul and the two start to call each other in a powerful way well and again I’ve been really blown away uh I think I first got this from Greg Enriquez’s work but I’ve been finding in lots of other places as well just the whole notion that self-consciousness it is dependent upon other relationships that totally language we are connecting with other minds so it’s only through the other that we can understand ourselves but I think what we’re getting at this whole topic this is really good this is I it relates to me for I think somehow when I use a word like god or what I think a word like god can mean in a in a very meaningful way that is not just you know equivocation but can really tie together various layers of a spiritual kind of tradition is that there’s something that we recognize in the universe that is like ourselves we find ourselves in the universe we find something intelligible there and if you want to use the image of the face or what have you I feel like that is in particular what’s so what differentiates the kind of secular materialistic reductionism of modernity from a more spiritual or religious orientation towards reality because I was thinking for a long time like what you know science gives us such a you could say an improved model of reality compared to say ancient maps of reality but it also seemed to lose something profound and it was like what is that we don’t find there that we found in this other place and for me it was we don’t find ourselves there we don’t look at the world and see ourselves now we have to be careful about that because as you said you know that’s that can be and I think most of the time often was anthropomorphization projection and sort of this animistic kind of blending of inner and outer worlds that we kind of put ourselves on reality but what I’m deeply interested in from a metamodern spiritual perspective is to see what legitimately exists in the world in the cosmos that is self-like that we can relate to and so this is yeah I’d like to kind of there’s a lot of fertile ways that I think this this topic could be explored but one of the things I want to ask you too though is to you know so you know the the buddha from what I understand would sort of just he wouldn’t brook metaphysical conversations about cosmology and stuff he’d be like it’s a waste of time right but I think especially if we’re talking in the context of kind of christian neo-platinism and the sort of syncretism between you know the ultimate one and god there is in the theistic traditions the sense of god the creator that god is the one who set it all up right so there’s that element which even in play-doh you know in the tamas there’s a demiurge and so there’s a similar kind of stuff there’s similar stuff to to be drawn there but so I would I would pitch that to you I mean do you take a more buddhist stance to be like no we we just don’t know where all this comes from or is there something meaningful to be said about looking at this incredibly complexifying universe and all sorts of uh just yeah let’s just say the complexity of the universe and potentially this ability to see something self-like in it and then maybe even to impute to that you know other uh the the role of of the self that that set it up so to speak does any of that uh what would you do with any of that that’s good um so first of all I’d want to make a distinction between you know horizontal and vertical causation um you can ask uh what’s the cause of it you can mean what was the first event or you could mean what’s the cause of it what’s the what’s the governing principle at work right now um I think science can really do the first question quite well um I am uh because your science is about tracking the relationship the lawful relationships the intelligible relationship between events defining processes finding forces all that’s so um the horizontal question I think is largely being answered um and of course you’re getting into problems with you know uh trying to get get something as the cause of the big bang and you’re running into these pseudo-continent problems of wait how can there be anything before the singularity that doesn’t and so um I I acknowledge that but uh if the question is where did we come from I think for me science answers that question very well um so I don’t think of um a grand artificer uh building the universe the way a human being builds a chair or something like that now there’s a notion of creation in erigina that’s very different which is creation is this process by which god flows out right and then flows back it’s the creation is actually the polarity and which in within which everything is found um and so it’s vertical uh and and then these are the kinds of questions science can’t answer because science actually presupposes um this dimension like it presupposes intelligibility like when we’re getting into this what we call the ontological and then if we’re asking the question what’s behind it all notice I changed the sentence right then I think the question uh is not one that can be answered just scientifically because it’s a question that probes into things that science presupposes um and for me we now come to the possibility that there are truths that are disposable to us only when we undergo significant transformation I’m just going to invoke a lot of arguments points that I have for which individually I have extended arguments that there are truths that are only disclosed to us in transformation that a lot of that transformation can only be afforded through imaginal engagement with reality and through aspirational and agapic engagement and when you put those together you have very often what I would call religious symbolism like the face now the tricky thing we have to get to is we have to distinguish between something that is epistemically indispensable for us uh to afford the transformation uh to uh to properly refract the disclosure so it’s accessible to us and the imaginal goes both ways right the ritual goes both ways um and and it binds the future self and the current self aspirationally all that stuff right I think you can make a very strong case for that uh being indispensable to us whether or not that makes it metaphysically necessary is a different thing for example I would propose to you that it is conceivable that there are there could be other intelligent beings who would have to have completely other kinds of imaginal things and the face for them would make no sense like an octopus like imagine a superhuman being like imagine a super intelligent octopus a face well I have face more of my brain is in my arms than in my face right and so it wouldn’t be um it wouldn’t be indispensable to them to have the face all right and it would be something else so again we have to we have to make a distinction between a function that I think is metaphysically necessary and then a particular way in which that function works for us given our kind of embodiment etc sure yeah and so I guess to dig into that slightly would be or um I mean let’s say when you talk about the big bang uh and we talk about what’s the narrative that science gives us um I mean I also totally agree I mean this is this is should be where we’re looking for for our answers of where do we come from uh but it also then sets up these questions and you hinted that there may be contian questions but they they do seem to be serious questions uh in terms of not just like well what caused the big bang but also we seem to live in a world that has a specific physical constants right and you get into things like the anthropic principle that seem to be like an argument where do these come from right and um so in in the in the realm of thinking as we were of whatever this um whatever this intelligible familiar sense is that we can identify in reality itself and the hypothesis that could be proposed of well whatever that is which would be much bigger than us might somehow have an intelligence that is like ours that we could somehow situate as being uh the kind of constraint conditions that that set up such a universe as ours I mean that would be one approach of course you could also well we live in a universe that uh that has basically evolving universes and every black hole creates a universe and it has its own constants etc but if but then you get this infinite regress where you would you know well what created the conditions in which you have an evolving universe of evolving universes etc um I’m kind of agnostic on this question I don’t know but I find it to be a very compelling one and I think that um the degree to which uh you know one engages the kind of neoplatonic framework that we’re thinking of in a theistic way I think that there’s something that might be there might be something uh to that that uh that issue of sort of of origins and and well okay well let’s let’s try um because I want to push back a bit a bit because like I said I want to distinguish the question where do we come from to from the question what’s behind it all uh which okay right and and so like I said I think the first one science handles well second one science is not set up to handle well I could also maybe I could clarify that slightly instead because the question for me is where do we come from or you’d have to clarify because it’s not just where do we come from I think we have the story of evolution so uh you know it’s sort of like what’s the scale that we’re talking about who’s and who’s we right so when I’m asking the question it’s not where do people come from I think we get that through evolution where does the earth come from we get that through you know these broad cosmic evolutionary stories but then it’s more like where does everything come from which I think really is the question maybe that you’re framing is what’s behind it all which yeah because if you frame the second question as you know where did it come from you just you get the infinite regress problem like this is heidegger keeps making this point when you’re trying to say why is there something rather than nothing and you think what I’m looking for is the first cause then you get to the first cause and it is either caused or uncaused and then you’re back to oh but why is that rather and you can’t give a causal answer to it so like you have to sort of drop like the the the like you you have to drop conflating these two and you have to say okay I’m not asking that question I’m trying to ask like what is the ground of being and for that like I say I think the platonic and neoplatonic tradition and the Christian neoplatonic tradition really wrestles with this but you know platinus is very clear that the one is not any kind of thinking agent right it’s not it’s it’s not intelligent it is the source of it is it is the parental ancestor of intelligence and intelligibility such that they fit together and so it is not itself intelligible or intelligent because you then lose its capacity to explain why intelligence and intelligibility are how they both are governed and governed such that they fit together and belong together and so for me that’s and I think this is a great argument and I and what’s interesting is it’s such a great argument that the Christian tradition basically has to acknowledge it and then tries its best to get around it in these various ways well that’s a question for you I mean I’ll frame it in this language and you’ll probably want to say well I don’t want to turn it that way but do you think that the way the the neoplatonic tradition gets Christianized deforms it in some profound way that that kind of causes it to be it loses more than it gains in that syncretism that’s that’s a really hard question and I’m not I’m not trying to dodge it it’s a really good question I think that you know and you can look and you look for something that’s convergent and other like what the Sufi tradition that’s also taking the neoplatonic and trying to wrap it into a different theistic thing and they of course don’t have recourse to the trinity or nor do they think they should make use of that as a way of trying to deal with this issue which says to me that I don’t think the trinity is it may be indispensable but it may not be metaphysically necessary to bring out the distinction I think I think creating the imaginal icons such that we can face reality and facing reality is the definition of maturity so we can in order to be spiritually mature we need this we need the imaginal face that both calls us beyond and turns the arrow around but also refracts the depths of reality I think this is indispensable and I think when Christianity did that and is and when Islam does what it does to try and make that work I think that and and the neoplatonists have this they have this in all of the theurgic practices right and and so I think those ritual those ritual facings I’ll try and play with that word are are indispensable and therefore they and the degree to which they genuinely help people cultivate wisdom and meaning they are to be commended the problem with them and you know this is my refrain that which makes us adaptive makes us simultaneously prone to self-deception they also come with the real ongoing danger of projection and anthropomorphism and I think when you when you make your particular imaginal facing a metaphysical necessity which I think has been a strong strain not the only strain a strong strain within Christianity for example but there’s a similar things going on in Islam uh then you tip the balance in favor of the anthropomorphism and the projection now of course there always will be the mystics who will try to recall people back right to say no no it’s an icon look through it it’s not an idol that you should look at and John Luke Marion is even trying to do that right now I think but that’s my take on it so this is why this distinction that I keep making between indispensability and necessity metaphysical necessities there’s something that is you know epistemically um indispensable to us because of our embodied embedded etc nature but that doesn’t mean it’s metaphysically necessary I use the analogy that um English is indispensable for me because of the way I’m embedded and culturally right and it has to be something like a natural language because I’m this kind of primate that evolved this way but I don’t think that means that cognitive agency depends on English that would be well clearly it’s false even on this planet and you know and it might be that you know if there are aliens they use something very radically different than language and so nothing even remotely analogous to English might exist so that’s what I try to I think I think right I I think the the Christian Neoplatonism does something indispensable but it errs when it thinks it’s make making a metaphysical claim and the way that metaphysical claim shows up and then I’ll shut up so you can reply is with exclusivity claims the exclusivity claims are the claims that seem to belie to seem sort to seem to bespeak that oh no no no no this isn’t just indispensable this is the only way this is the metaphysically necessary yeah yeah well who is the I think was a pre-Socratic philosopher right who who said that uh if if uh you know horses had gods they’d look like horses and and uh and we were talking about the octopus earlier you know if the octopus uh put quote unquote face to the universe it would look like an octopus um yeah I mean for me I I’m very compelled by this uh aspiration to want to uh find uh something beyond an impersonal universe uh but it doesn’t have to be a personal universe either it could be a transpersonal universe and so what I find attractive about the mystics is that there seems to be a sense of uh you can do the personal universe thing but there is then that god beyond that god and and that’s where that may be I mean even in Dante himself right he sees the face but then he’s drawn beyond it and then he doesn’t speak yeah exactly yeah exactly so um that that to me uh speaks to me and um I um there’s something I I know that for some people that would be a defacing of ultimate reality to take away the face of it as it were but um yeah there’s there’s a kind of a priest trans distinction there yeah but don’t don’t we worry about the person who is only in love with the pretty face actually doesn’t realize that they need to see through it meaning both by means of it and beyond it to the soul behind it I mean you don’t want a relationship with a magazine smile right uh right and so uh like there’s yeah there’s a dig there’s a big difference between defacing and there’s and interfacing right and so I’m sorry Brendan but we’re gonna have to draw it to a close the time flew by and um um this is this has been fantastic um I so this will be part two I think we’ll have at least another one back on Brendan’s uh channel um um I just uh I’d like to give my guests uh the parting word well thank you so much I totally echo that this is a blast I really appreciate it and uh yeah looking forward to continuing the conversation but thank you so much deeply appreciate it thank you so much