https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=9XrZ0-dSezk
Hello everyone, this is a video that was originally on Kyle Maxwell’s channel, but we decided to repost it on my channel because it was a particularly good episode for discussing in depth the meaning crisis, especially for people who might be just starting to take a deeper interest in this topic. Kyle was excellent at drawing me out and drawing me into a deeper discussion and reflection on what the meaning crisis meant in a way that’s accessible to many people who might not be familiar with a lot of my other work. So first off, thank you, Kyle, and I ask all of you to enjoy the following recording. That’s what draws you outside of your egocentrism so that you actually realize something beyond all your framings and you actually come in contact with reality for its own sake. And here’s the thing, and this is what the research supports, Kyle, meaning in life is you want to be connected to something that has a value and reality independent of your egocentrism. That’s what meaning is. Hello everyone. Welcome to the Kyle Maxwell podcast. Today I am very honored to have Professor John Berbeke on today’s show. John Berbeke, I really appreciate your time and I’m really looking forward to this conversation. I’m happy to be here, Kyle. Thank you. A brief insight into John. John Berbeke is an award-winning lecturer at the University of Toronto on Psychology, Cognitive Science, and Buddhist Psychology. His academic interests include wisdom, mindfulness, meditation, relevance realization, something we’re really going to dive into, general intelligence, and rationality. John Berbeke, he is the host of the Meaning Crisis lectures on YouTube. It’s a phenomenal series. When I started watching them a couple months ago, I was just blown away. He’s spoken to leading colleagues in Canada, including Jordan Peterson. His work is just very amazing. This conversation, I’m really going to try to dive in deep into his work. Hopefully we’ll come out this conversation knowing a little bit more than we did going in. Thanks again, John, for coming on. I really do appreciate this. It’s wonderful, Kyle. Just a slight correction. I don’t know why you got that because there’s lots of stuff floating around on the web about me. I’m actually now an associate professor. I have tenure at the University of Toronto. Just to make that minor correction. My apologies. He is also the author of the book Zombies. I’m reading this right now. It’s really, really fascinating. I really want to get people to understand what you’re about, what your whole entire goal is with this. Please give the people a brief synopsis into what you’re about and what you’re doing with this, with your work. I guess there’s two areas that I do work in. My overall work is to try and integrate these areas together. There’s a body of scientific work I do. I’m a cognitive scientist. I do work trying to understand the nature of general intelligence, consciousness, rationality, wisdom. I talk a lot there about a process I call relevance realization. The other area is spirituality, where I talk about wisdom, self-transcendence, mindfulness, higher states of consciousness, mystical experience. I build a bridge between the two in terms of this framework of relevance realization. The reason why I’m trying to build that bridge is because I’m trying to address a problem we have, which I call the meaning crisis, which is people are starving for a framework that provides them with a sense of meaningful connectedness in their life that makes their life worth living. There was a poll done in the UK, I think in 2017, something like 89% of people think their lives are meaningless. We can get into this, but the research shows that meaning in life is very central. It protects you from mental disease, mental ill health. It’s predictive of you being creative, if you’re having good relationships, et cetera, et cetera. When people are starving for meaning, that has the effect of basically incapacitating them in fundamental ways. We can’t marshal the cognitive flexibility and the ability to transform ourselves in deep commitment that is needed for dealing with all the X-risk factors and the meta-crisis that Thomas Bjorkman and other people are talking about, the combination of looming ecological degradation, perhaps very significant, increasing political polarization and gridlock, increasing economic fragility, et cetera, et cetera. One question, what do you think, seeing that in culture, that this rapid growing of, I would say, nihilism, this loss of meaning, what do you think drove you to… It’s one thing to address this problem, to see that there’s a decline in meaning in life. Look at these polls and look at these facts. I want to know, what do you think drove you to want to address this and make it the core of your work? What do you think drove you to want to speak up and make content and do work to address this? What is your goal here to addressing the meaning crisis? What do you want to see within the next 20 or 30 years shining a light on these topics? What is your goal? There’s two things there. What motivated me is I went in a microcosmic fashion through something like what the culture has gone through without realizing that. I was brought up in a fundamentalist Christianity, a very sort of narratively rich worldview in which I had a proper place and role and I was taught how I could transcend myself and go to heaven. And then that collapsed for me. And I left and I had to deal with the trauma of that collapse. But I also had to deal part of dealing with the trauma was realizing that that had left a taste for the transcendent in my mouth. That this and I realized the again with therapy and a lot of work that the reason why it had such a hold on me was because it was plugging into some very powerful cognitive machinery. And I wanted to understand what that machinery was and that took me into relevance realization. And I wanted to address the issues around the self-deception that I had engaged in. And another way of thinking about this is and this is more the scientific side, but it helped to line up with the personal side. The very processes, the processes of relevance realization, recursive relevance realization that are central to our adaptive cognition to making us intelligent also make us perennially susceptible to self-deceptive self-destructive behavior. And across cultures, across time, people have come up with ecologies of practices for ameliorating that self-deception and enhancing that sense of connectedness and that’s wisdom. And one of the things we’re starving for right now is wisdom. People know where to go for knowledge. They know where to go for information. They’re overwhelmed by it, but they don’t know where to go for wisdom. And it’s even more problematic because as they’re overwhelmed by more and more information and more and more knowledge is called into question, they are finding it harder and harder to discern between reality and bullshit. And so we need wisdom more and more. Our perennial proclivity for falling into self-deception is being accelerated by social media and our current culture. And so we need wisdom more and more and we can find it less and less. So that’s another way of thinking about it. And so I went looking for that wisdom and found exactly that, that I couldn’t find it. I went into academic philosophy, the love of wisdom, and I encountered the figure of Socrates and oh, wow, that’s what I want. I want to cultivate wisdom the way Socrates does. But then the topic of wisdom fell off the table. It went on in academic philosophy because it has other great merit to it. But I went looking for how to cultivate wisdom and I started doing tight training. And so as I was on this journey, I started to see when I started to talk about those topics to my students, their eyes lit up and they were like, and then I started to realize, oh, maybe I, you know, what’s what has happened to me is consonant with what’s happening with a lot of people. And I started doing the research in it. And I started to realize, you know, I’m not going to be able to do that. And I started doing the research in it and I started to realize that, yeah, there, this is a widespread phenomenon. It’s particular and it’s particularly getting worse in the younger generations. It has a lot of negative side effects, increased suicide, increased mental health issues, increased addiction, increased people sort of trying to flee from the real world into the virtual world. All a lot of pseudo religious behaviors, pseudo religious ideologies. Also positive responses. Wow. Well, that’s really remarkable because there’s a lot, there’s, I see a lot of what you were just describing in culture, people searching for those meanings and what I really want to get into is, is when they look for the, when the collapse of the culture, it creates such a, it creates such a hole. This is exactly what I was just talking with one of my friends, John, I was on his podcast. We were talking about how that, how that hole was right there in the 20th century when that German romanticism started to spread. And a figure came up, a figure came about and he said, I am the answer to this growing nihilism. And that started that movement. So it was really cool to see how one person can take, one person can look at a horrible situation and then put forth a plan and it could literally can go for the good of humanity. So, so to, to genuinely bring this relevatory idea, this, this, this sense of meaning, this sense of Socratic humility, try to insert these classical Western values back into society, something that you’re doing or someone can just as equally take, exploit that hole and say, I’m going to do something truly malevolent with this growing nihilism and with this. So, so what do you think? How do you, how do you, so I’m going to ask you kind of weird question. How do you, what this power you have, what this knowledge you have, how do you keep, how do you know that you’re doing something right with it? How do you know that you’re presenting or how do you, or maybe you’re not presenting an answer. I’m trying to open more questions, but how do you know that you’re genuinely doing this for the good and are you, are you conscious of how the fragility of this meaning crisis, the fragility of these ideas that you put forth, how do you know or how do you stay consciously aware that you’re, that you’re doing this for the good or good? How do you keep that power that you have? How do you keep that within and how do you, how do you not become, this is also, this is also a Socratic question. How do you not become corrupt with this, with this power that you have? That’s, that’s one of the best questions anybody’s ever asked me, Kyle. They want to write, so. Because this is a abiding, an abiding concern for me on a daily basis. And, and I’ve seen other people get spun out by addressing the meaning crisis and that suddenly people seeing them, right, almost sucking them into that vacuum. Yeah. And for me, I tried to come up with a set of guidelines, fitting my set of practices, my ecology of practices within a community that I hope keeps me on track. So I do, I mean, I regularly do an entire ecology of practices that’s designed to, you know, help me, you know, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to help me confront, you know, self-deception, self-destructive behavior, afford self-transcendence, those, those practices, some of them are individuals, some of them are collective. And I have taken Socrates as my sage, he’s one of my sages, but he’s my primary sage. I’m currently working on my next series, After Socrates. We filmed 14 episodes already and it’s coming out very soon. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, your assistant told me about that. Yeah. And so, I mean, I model myself on him, on Spinoza, on Siddhartha Gautama. Jesus of Nazareth still has a huge impact on me. I have a bunch of people that have ready access to me. I belong, I just went to the Respond Retreat in Vermont. We got together a lot of the leaders from these emerging communities of practice for the cultivation of wisdom and responding to the meaning crisis. And we’re federating together to keep an eye on each other and vet each other. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, then I keep, I keep my other, I keep one of my feet firmly planted in doing the science and continuing to do the science and subject my work to scientific rigor. And my hope is that if I keep, if I keep my promise to all of those and I keep faithful to all of those, that they will be faithful to me and keeping me from going off, off the tracking of the good. And so, but I’m always concerned about that. I reflect pretty much daily and I do practices to address. And I, and I ask and I, and I look and I try and build a lot of interventions around me to prevent that from occurring. Yeah, yeah. The reason I asked you that is because something because you said pseudo religious ideologies and something that that’s something I’ve been studying for the past, almost for the past two years. And I something somewhere where I think people do become corrupt and have become corrupt within history is, is that that temptation to create that sort of that totalitarian answer like this is the end. This is our unwavering theory of this like this is it. And this is perfect. This is this is the way it is. So I think so tell me if I’m wrong where I have this here I’ve identified ideologies as rigid belief systems that refuse to update themselves to out to outside stimuli pretty much. That’s how I defined an ideology. Would you would you agree? Would you agree? I would add, I would agree with it, but I’d add one dimension. It’s not just a real religious belief system. There’s also a deeper presupposition that all there is to knowing, and to becoming the right kind of person, our belief systems that there are nothing other than belief systems, and therefore, you have to protect your belief system at all costs, precisely because there is no alternative to your belief system other than other belief systems that are also similarly totalizing and aggressive and self protective. So I think part of the rigidity is built on the anxiety of those two things held together. The, the presupposition that all there are belief systems and the other ones that are also taking that totalitarian viewpoint. So yeah, I think that drives a lot of the pseudo religious behavior what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to get the connectedness that is meaning in life, that’s largely coming from all of the non propositional ways of knowing, we’re trying to get that through manipulating propositions and creating systems and sets of propositions. And of course, Socrates is the great antithesis to all of that. And the way. Oh, trying to follow life is not worth living. And the fact that he repeatedly shows that we can’t define most of the virtues, and that we can’t really define wisdom but we can properly love it and be in right relationship to it and be in right relationship to the virtues. And then what does that look like. And so that’s again what the next series is all about. I mean, I like the next series that I’m working on it right now is in large part motivated by the very question you asked me, I’m trying to give a deep answer to that question. And talk about, you know, especially all these new practices emerging practices these dialectical practices dialectic into the logos for tapping the collective intelligence of distributed cognition and educating it into the collective wisdom we need. In order to guide us. Thank you for watching this YouTube and podcast series is by the verveky foundation, which in addition to supporting my work also offers courses practices workshops and other projects dedicated to responding to the meeting crisis. If you would like to support this work, please consider joining our Patreon. You can find the link in the show notes. Do you think a factor of the meeting crisis is, because you talk because I looked into your work of your four keys of knowing a propositional participatory perspective out and what was the fourth one. Procedural. Yes. Do you think that. So right now are we. I think that dialectical. Do you think that we’re in a propositional tyranny right now because I use that phrase. Yeah, we’re in a propositional tyranny for a lot of historical reasons we sort of collapsed, all knowing to propositional knowing we’ve lost. Other forms of knowing are running in us but we’ve lost acknowledgement. Think of the word acknowledge and and recognition we fail to recognize them and and properly situate ourselves within non propositional knowing but that’s a big thing of what Socrates was trying to do is to get people to awaken to that propositional knowing and how it is so constitutive of the cultivation of wisdom and the cultivation of connectedness. Yeah, that’s a good segue. So, I want to define. So, understanding so getting emerging out of this propositional tyranny in utilizing and integrating these others, these other forms of knowing so participating in the world, and I was obviously for procedure knowing doing things acting in a road and this perspective I don’t know and taking a step back and looking at the world and having that kind of like a third party viewpoint. So, this kind of brings up this whole idea of relevance realization. So I want to define that. Well, I want to give like a summary of it and then I want you to tell me if it’s right if it’s wrong or then. Wow, that’s exciting. Go ahead. So here’s I’m looking at relevance realization. So, tell me tell me if I have this right. I will so here’s I’m looking at it so we’re surrounded by just surrounded by things we’re surrounded by facts, we’re surrounded just by outside impressions things are just there, right. And what, and the question that drove you is okay so there is a unlimited amount of things I could be paying attention to right now but for some reason some things come out and some things shine forth and have that and some things become salient towards towards me. And I exclude all that other stimuli and I zone in on this one proximal thing. And the idea of relevance realization is how what is driving that what is driving that process you you critiqued in the meaning practices, the homunculi theory so there can’t so there can’t just be one little person in there that is deciding what that is because then I go to the infirmary. So what’s causing that person to think about that. So what it is is, it is the ongoing is the self organizing process that doesn’t stop is self organizing in it constantly so back to the rigid belief systems that don’t update themselves. What relevance realization is and what could be just be being wise. Wise. You could look at it that way is understanding that there is a ongoing process between things that are salient things that aren’t. And what is driven by what is saying what isn’t could be your reluctance or your lack of updating this process so so certain things are so if you’re noticing certain things that are becoming salient towards you that that perhaps weren’t, then that could be an indication that you are not paying attention or you are not. You are not focusing on how you are being how you are self deceiving yourself. So I’m looking at it as this is an ongoing process that constantly shows you okay so you paid attention to this thing or you paid attention to this girl more than you paid attention to what you’re supposed to be doing so maybe this could be an indication that you are not paying enough attention or you are you are not. You are not maintaining your your awareness enough it is an ongoing process so you’re never going to have this you’re never going to have a perfect sense of what is selling it to you when is it because that is that that is that that is that determinist. I’m never I’m never going to pay attention to other things that I want to pay attention to right now and you can’t do that. So what I’m looking at this so so is that so is that right that’s the first half. So is that so is that right that’s the first half. That was really good I mean, just maybe a couple points of emphasis that that capacity for relevance realization is pretty much, I would argue, what makes you intelligent. It’s what we can’t give to a AI right now to turn it into artificial general intelligence. And that that process is self organizing. Let’s do attention. It’s self organizing like the way evolution is self organizing. Part of your attention is trying to drift away right now as you’re listening to this podcast. Right. And that’s opening up variation. That’s the default mode network another part of your attention is putting selective pressure. So keep focused on the task. And what you do is you keep a little you keep a few of the variations and you bring them with you. So you have the next thing to say the next thing to look at, and then you vary out again you select you vary out again. And so you’re constantly evolving your fittedness. And just like evolution does not have a goal or a final life form. That’s not how evolution works is not working. Here it is here’s the final perfect life form. It’s not what evolution is evolution in fact says there is no such thing. What constitutes an organism being adaptive or fit is constantly being redefined from previous instances as the world constantly redefines and alters itself. Yes, so there is no final place. And when you mix and complete and totalize what you think should be paid attention to you are actually acting against that very ongoing process of evolution that is central to you being intelligent. And when that when when you when you turn around and instead of trying to totalize it with your propositional tyranny, and you figure out how to cultivate it think about what that means. Think about those moments when you realize that you found the wrong thing salient those are the aha moments moments. And think about when, when you think somebody was somebody comes into a really complex messy situation, and they just zero in on what really matters, and they fit themselves to it perfectly. And they often have an insight into it you go wow that person’s really wise, because they overcome all of this messiness and illusion and self deception, and they cut through to reality, and they. Pardon me, would that be the flow state. Well the flow state is an instance where we can experience that that self organizing cognitive evolution running really optimally, and you might think, and this has been proposed by some people that like Stephen bachelor said the Buddha was enlightened because he was in a constant constant flow state but not see we have very limited flow states we have a flow state where we’re playing tennis, we have a flow stable. But what if you could generalize the stoics talked about this where you could flow with the flow of nature. That would be a wise person. Yes. So that would be so so playing tennis that that would be more procedural flow states participatory flow state. So, it’s more respectable and participatory Yes, so that when that you are, you have sort of meta optimal grip on the world right you’re so you’re, it’s not, it’s you, you know how to flow here you know how to flow there you know how to flow there you know, and you know how to flow between all the different flowings. If I can put it that way. Yeah. Do you think people, it’s gonna be a weird question. I would say the idea of the so the theory of relevance realization didn’t interest me as much as the concept of the combinatorial explosion. I think that I think that aspect of it interests me. I associate that I associate the combinatorial explosion with, with that. I would say like the air like the arrogance of trying to know everything. Yes, yes, I think people I think when people, and that is that. So, so young talked about our reading this book psychological types and when he was talking about consciousness. He, he identified consciousness with that. What is like the ultimate discernment is like putting things in order, this is not, this is better than this. This is, or like organ self organizing, organizing things in a hierarchical structure where things make sense. And I think people, I think the in the in the urge to want to want to know that growing that growing I think it would be, would I be like a narcissism that that growing wanting to just to know just to want to know facts being stuck in that propositional tyranny. Do you think that that creates people to be susceptible towards that comments or explosion because they’re paying attention. They’re not, they’re not differentiating what, what is important. What is it they don’t have a value structure is just given by because this is something that I’ve best been just completely. I think the the acquisition of knowledge outside of a moral framework is a precondition of evil. That’s how I identified it. I think when people become when they when, and this is this is your file in the field, file your file your Nokia, when people want to know knowledge for its own sake. I think they reach that common toro explosion, but I just want to, I want to know everything for me. I don’t want to, I don’t have that agapic relationship between me and the world. I want to just know stuff. And I think people don’t want when when your quest for knowledge isn’t isn’t embedded in that. Well, I isn’t embedded in it. That’s why you can’t do science outside of a outside of a moral framework because the actual just getting facts and grabbing things are just that’s common toro explosion. There is no barriers to which we should explore. And I think when when when you grow outside of that, well, what what there is no hierarchy of values. Well, why are we prioritizing this issue? Why are we focusing on this thing? Why is everything? Why is everything? I think that’s going on right now. Everything is salient. Well, the climate is a problem. Well, actually, well, this race issue is a problem. Well, this accident is a problem. Well, this famine is a problem. Everything matters. When everything matters. That is by definition that common toro explosion. Do I have do I have that right? That’s excellent. That’s why I kept saying yes. Yes. As you were talking. So when you when you when you want more knowledge from understanding and and therefore so understanding there’s a distinction that’s a really important distinction. There’s a distinction going to be everywhere. I’m sorry. I just have. I have a lot. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I think it’s good. Knowledge is when you have evidence, which can be other arguments or empirical evidence for a claim. Understanding is to grasp the significance of your knowledge. And of course, not just your propositional knowledge, your procedural knowledge, your knowledge or perspectival and your your participatory right and then understanding right should also be susceptible. Sorry, not susceptible. That should should be integrated with that’s even better integrated with an ongoing process of self correction is you bring in insight and wisdom like we’ve been talking about. So knowledge requires should be situated within understanding, understanding should be situated within wisdom because if you don’t have that, which will do is you’ll just go off. And like you said, common toro explosion and two things happen. One is you just got a proliferation of unconnected pieces of knowledge that lack when we do not know their appropriate significance. Yeah, we do not know how they’re making us susceptible to self deception. And that’s what’s happening right now. We just get this tsunami of information and we don’t we don’t really understand it. We don’t know how it’s making us prone, how it’s exacerbating our self deception. And so that’s happening. And then what you start to get is you start to get the anxiety around that chaos and the realization that you’re hitting it like you’re starting to get the sense of the common toro explosion. And then what people do in response, some people are caught up in that chaos. Other people respond to say no, no, no, what I’ll do is I’ll lock into, like you said earlier, a rigid belief system, and I’ll say, I’ll make that I’ll claim that everything can be fit inside that frame, and that it’s all I need. And so this is why you see these two movements in the culture, they’re actually bouncing off against each other, the chaos of unlimited yet but mostly useless information. And no, no, the response of I’m going to have a total belief system, and I’m going to everything can fit inside that frame. And, and I don’t need anything but that and I don’t have to change it or correct it. And that’s what’s happening in our culture right now. We’re, and those two things, they negatively sort of feed each other they provoke each other further and further. That’s what how I would respond to what you’re saying. Wow. That was really really good. I want to ask you a question about each other. But Nietzsche, yes. He had this quote. If you stare into the best, the best will stare back into you. What do you think that means. Well, first of all, let’s note that he’s doing a variation on a quote by Eckhart. Okay, okay. Part of the Christian neoplatonic tradition. Eckhart said that the eye by which I see God is the same I by which God sees me. Which is to say, my, the product. I, how I know is also how I am knowing, which is a very different model of knowing. And I think Nietzsche got to a place where he realized that kind of connectedness but in a negative way. So, what Eckhart is pointing to is that there is a deep, there’s a deep interweaving, but between how I understand the world, and then how the world shines into me. Right. Yeah, yeah. And that, and then, and Eckhart also understood that, that, that how God shines into me, God is also always withdrawing from me and drawing me deeper out so the eye is looking out, and God is more shining in but there’s that movement. And I think Nietzsche got to a place where he was staring into the, the combinatorial explosion of reality but through a very negative frame. Yeah, the abyss, the no thingness, the, this, however, our reality seems to withdraw, but he didn’t have right, the positive shining back into the negative, but he got a sense of that he got a sense. So he is, but I would say he, he is seeing that same relationship. Yeah, that Eckhart thought to God but because Nietzsche doesn’t have God. He has the lack of God. That quote is a very, is that experience was largely very negative to him. Yeah. Yeah, there’s a way of realizing the no thingness of your soul, and the no thingness of God. That isn’t nothingness, but is instead this ultimate opening up of your cognitive capacity for cognitive evolution for enhanced insight, wisdom connectedness both out to the world, and into the depths of the psyche. Yeah, I think it can actually it’s actually good idea to put Eckhart and Nietzsche side by side, and they’re, they’re, they’re talking about different aspects of the same thing, I would propose. Yeah, because like, like, that makes that makes sense. Because we talked about that with without the first time we talked about. And I asked you that because I asked you you know how do you prevent yourself with this power but this knowledge you have from becoming from from shooting yourself from that self deception. Because sometimes it’s not just happening with a lot of people I feel are happening to myself that we stare into. We stare into and I like that Eckhart addition because that makes sense because it’s like the preconceived notion that you have looking into the abyss that will inevitably dictate how you’re viewing it. Because if you’re staring into the abyss with the, I was talking with Don about this because, because let’s get this right because he definitely was critiquing and that quote was from the thing that I was from beyond good and evil. And I was reading his book will to power and he when he was talking about this, he said, nihilism stands at the door in society went from God is good. So I categorize that as there is a harmonious relationship between subjects and objects in the world. And we and obviously it’s never been perfect, but at least that we were grounded in that Judeo Christian ethic for thousands of years. We he said it went from God is good to all this false Buddhism of action. And how I how I read that was people go from God is good. So we’re in this harmonious relationship between subjects and objects a crisis, a crisis occurs and that jeopardizes that undermines our, our, our value system, which went in this case would be a Judeo Christian value system. And people just don’t lose faith in that and that system. They say, well, all is false. They say, well, this whole thing is the soul. This whole thing is just should be should be deteriorated and look in when people come to that realization. They’re looking into the abyss and they were saying, well, maybe all this is fake. So I asked you that question. What do you think he meant by that? Because don’t you? So do you think when we’re looking to the abyss and that abyss would be a failing culture or failing civilization? How important is it? And you said that they are says God looks at it. Well, what was that? What did he say? The same way by which I see God is the eye by which God sees me. Right. So if you so if you conceptualize God, if you conceptualize this abyss as something that as I’m going to word this. If you conceptualize this abyss as something that you cannot overcome or something that is going to destroy you or if you or if you conceptualize God as some other as some figure that’s picking on you or some figure that only wants to point out your faults. If you if you have pathologize this idea of God as something that you don’t you can’t see yourself ever being in a relationship with. How important is it that when we’re looking at culture, we’re looking at when we’re looking at difficult situations in culture, how important is it to keep that mindfulness that way? This isn’t this isn’t it like this. This is not going to be the end because I think that when some people look into the abyss or some people look at the deepest, darkest evils, once people look at the deepest, darkest goods, I think sometimes that can be intimidating. It can be intimidating if you’re looking at the highest possible good. Be like, well, I can never be that. I can never commit myself to these 10 rules. If you’re looking at the deepest, darkest evils, you could say, well, I don’t have it. I don’t have it. I don’t have it in me to attack this. I don’t have it. I don’t have the amount of good. I don’t think I’m good myself. Or maybe there is no differentiation between the deepest, darkest evils in yourself. Maybe you think you should be there. How do you think how important is it or what state of mind should you be when you’re looking at the greatest possible good or when you’re looking at the greatest possible evil? What state of mind should you be in to? I don’t know what the question was. What good state of mind should you be in? Because I think a lot of people get some, and that’s a meaning crisis because I think people don’t know which way to go. They conceptualize God as some gigantic, too abstract figure that, well, they could never see themselves ever being aligned with. And they look at the deepest dark, they look at the pathologies of the world, they look at everything that’s wrong, and they say, well, we might as well snipe and try. And when someone’s in the middle, they don’t know which way to go. What would you say to that person who is looking at both polars of the world? Maybe they’re standing in the wrong spot. I don’t know. But what would you say to that person who is completely undermined by the greatest possible good and the greatest possible evil? So I would say to them, I mean, one of the greatest books I’ve read in my life, and I’ve read it twice and studied it and talked to Daniel Zarubo about it, is Religion and Nothingness by Nishatani. And his critique of Nietzsche. You’re going to have to say that one more time. That was what? Religion and Nothingness by Nishatani. He also wrote a book just before that. The two books go together very well called The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism. And his basic argument is Nietzsche doesn’t doubt deep enough. He starts to look into the abyss, and the abyss starts to look back into him, and he starts to realize the inter-defining of those two. But he doesn’t take it deep enough. He doesn’t actually break out of the framework within which that is experienced only negatively. Now step aside for that for a moment and think of another area where you loop, and it’s a loop that’s involved with mystery. When you really love someone, you’re going to say, oh, he’s going to do romanticism. No, I’m not. This is Plato through and through. When you really love someone, there’s Iris Murdoch said, brilliant Neoplatonist, love is when you realize something other than you is real. When you really love someone and you realize that they’re real, you realize that there’s something fundamentally mysterious about them. No matter what you know about them, there’s more to know. It’s inexhaustible. Yeah. And you can play those idea of the sacred right? Yes, right. You realize that they right. Now that if you want to control and have a complete envelopment of that person and consume them, then that’s terrifying to you. That’s negative. That mystery means lack of certainty, lack of control. Sartre said hell is other people. He experienced that as an abyss. But play it Plato and other traditions and Eckhart’s part of that tradition saying no, no, no, that’s what draws you outside of your egocentrism so that you actually realize something beyond all your framings and you actually come in contact with reality for its own sake. And here’s the thing. And this is what the research support supports Kyle meaning in life is you want to be connected to something that has a value and reality independent of your egocentrism. That’s what meaning is. Love requires that relationship to mystery. And that is actually what gives you a sense of meaning. Nietzsche is on the edge of it, but he doesn’t pick it up because as you know that person, they also know you and they make you realize and become more aware of your own mystery. Where do you wear like deep meditation? Where is your ego coming from? Or think about this. Whenever I think I know myself, I’m looking at my body, I’m looking at parts of my mind, but I’m not aware of the part of me that’s doing the looking. Yeah. And when I try to become aware of that I can’t become aware, I can never become aware of the part of me that’s doing the framing of reality. It’s not a thing for me. It’s a no thing. I can only be it. I can only realize its mystery. I constantly try to frame it and I can’t. The world’s the same way. I constantly try to frame it and I can’t. But though in love, the no thingness of me and the no thingness of you come into that reciprocal opening, that resonance, so that we get more and more deeply connected to the depths of the world while never being able to exhaust it. The Tao is a well that is never used up, to quote the Tao Teh Chuan. That’s the answer. The answer is to learn how to see and be such that you can fall in love with the depths of reality within and without and together. Wow. So do you think when people become depressed or when people are becoming anxious, do you think that… Ask them what they’re asking them what… How are they feeling to love wisely? Look, we think of look this is our problem in our culture. We think that love is a feeling or an emotion. It’s not. Feelings aren’t emotions. Feelings are like you have to interpret your feelings in order for them to emote you, make you move, energize your movement, emotion, right? And but love isn’t even an emotion. If I love someone, when they’re absent, I’m sad. When they’re present, I’m happy. When they’re threatened, I’m angry. Love is a agent arena binding. It’s an existential stance, right? And so you have to say depression, anxiety is telling you that your fundamental orientation is actually not putting you into resonant communion with the depths of reality and the depths of yourself. What are you going to do to challenge that orientation? Depression and anxiety are both telling… anxiety is you’re getting the combinatorial explosion and it’s overwhelming you. Depression is you’re getting how you’re trapped inside of it. But they’re both indications that your fundamental orientation needs to die. And that’s why we commit the act of suicide, because we misunderstand that message. But this is Nishatani’s point. Nichi didn’t let his fundamental orientation die. He was still within a Cartesian framework of subject and object and the will to power and dominance, etc. He needed to let that die in order for that abyss to abyss resonance to actually become the love of the depths of from the depths of your being to the depths of reality, which many people call the sacred God, the Tao, etc. That’s right. And what you need to do, and you need help. I’m not saying do it on your own. You need really significant help when you’re in the depths of this. You need to learn how to let that die so that you can love again more wisely. That’s great. I want to ask you one last question. Sure. I want to ask you what is, what is true. And how do we, how do we know what is true. Well, I don’t think we have a single sense of true. We have the truth of our propositions. But we also have the truth of our skill like his aim was true. We have a sense of the truth of our perspectival knowing which are sent as our sense of being present. And our sense of, of, of, Do you think truth would work the same way that you were describing that love. So when you love when you love someone that means that. Well, I was going to get to that. That’s another sense of true at the participatory level. It exists, it exists outside of your outside of your proposition. I think it’s what I’m trying to say is that when we’re talking about true, we are actually talking about four things. True beliefs, effective skills, states of mind, right, that put it make us present and agent arena relationships that keep us true to reality. And love is a way of being true to someone. It doesn’t mean that you’ve grasped all their, all their facts. That’s ridiculous. It doesn’t mean that you that you can completely control them with your skills, but it means you have to have a set of beliefs about them. A set of skills, as a know how to be really present and commune with them, and also be have that reciprocal opening with them, religio, be true to them faithful to them. And when all of that is aligned, and they’re mutually supporting each other, then what we constantly see in retrospect, as we self transcend is how we were previously in error. How we were caught up in illusion or self deception. I think truth is an act in which you you you may it’s a comparative act. Ultimately, when you self transcend, you say this is more real. And that allows me to say that that is less real. And we keep doing that we keep saying, this is more real. That is less real. This is more real. That is less real. So I that’s the nose’s model. We only realize truth sort of retrospectively. Yeah, through that, the comparison between now and before that transcendence gives us. Do you think the maximum the truth will set you free. Do you think that what you’re being set free from is that propositional tyranny. I think you’re being set free from propositional tyranny is one thing but I think you’re being set free from all kinds of error and self deception, all of all of the kinds of knowing can go wrong. Right. Your skills can misfire and misplace. My uncle used to play both golf and hockey, and every time he started golf, his hockey swing would interfere, and he had. And every time he went back to hockey his golf swing, so our skills can also be go awry we can apply the wrong. We can have the wrong state of mind and and size up the situation inappropriately. And at the deepest level we can assume the wrong identity and assign the wrong identities. I can be with my, my romantic partner, and I assume the identity of a professor and assign the identity of student to her, and that is going to mess up how I am being properly bound to her. All of the ways in which we know can all go awry. And truth is that which makes them stop going awry so we realize reality better. I’m using realize in both sense of make real and come into an understanding awareness of that’s true truth is an act in that sense, it is bound up with self self transcendence has to be made flesh. I think that’s that’s why that that’s is on making the word becoming flesh because I think if you think about truth in mere in just merely proposition or dialectical terms. Yes, yes, it would be amorphous it will be ongoing, but it would only it would only be trapped in that ego centric model how you were explaining I think truth is that which exists outside of the propositional in what is that is that is that is that genuine a gothic love for the for the sense of being. Yes, it can’t be something strictly propositional because of the strictly propositional that that, by definition, that is that ego centric that propositional well I’m saying that that’s how you get stuck in that in that relativism, because you know people are always saying well, well that was your truth, or, or who’s truth are we talking about here that’s that postmodern that if an interpretation. That’s, that’s a, that’s a misuse of the term, we have for that we can talk about opinions or viewpoints, we should, we need a word for. Like and true and real we’re supposed to be those words for pointing at what is beyond us that we can wait we can independently converge upon reality. And so I think you’re exactly right about that I think the, I mean, I’m not a Christian but the great truth of the incarnation is exactly what you just said that the logos, the principle that we’ve been talking about here this principle by which reality and we fit each other and meet each other and shape each other that right that that became flesh that that we need to relate to it, right, as we would relate to a full person with all of these levels and ways of knowing, and that that is bound up with a gapay that that wanting to matter to something other than yourself. That’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that’s that the the picture of the future is a jackboot on somebody’s throat right when you get into that notion that truth is nothing but the capacity to dominate, then you lose the ability to be wrong. And what people don’t realize is when you lose the ability to be wrong, you lose the ability to be right in both the truth sense and in the virtuous sense. And they don’t realize that they’re engaging in a performative contradiction. Well, if it’s all just my truth, your truth, and I can’t be wrong, but then I also can’t be right. But they secretly believe that they are right. And so they’re actually contradicting themselves in a profound way. I was really, really good. I really like that quote. You lose when you lose ability to be wrong, you lose ability to be right. That’s just how it works. That’s how it works. I think there are there. I hate to use this cliche is the same, the same side of the coin. Yeah, two sides of the same coin. That’s, that’s how it works. That’s how, if it, if you say it’s shining in and real and true. You also have to recognize it’s also always withdrawing in behind you and there’s things you’re not seeing relevance realization, things you’re not realizing things you’re not paying attention to. And so there’s always the chance, really, really, really always the chance that you’re wrong. I really, I, I, this conversation flew by. I really appreciate your time I lied to you. I have one last question. And it’s going to be really, really quick. What is our solution to the meeting crisis? Well, what do you, what is it? If you could say one sentence to end this on a very cliche note to help this meeting crisis, to help these people who are lost, who don’t know, who maybe have no idea about anything we’re talking about or lost, they’re not enlightened, any of that stuff. To the average person. What is their, what is their hope in this meeting crisis? And what would you say to that person? Maybe can’t understand all this relevant and all these like big technical terms that what would you say to that one person who is stuck in that state of anxiety is nowhere to go. He’s in a comatose explosion. He can’t differentiate. What is your word of advice to that one person? Stop focusing on just your beliefs. Pay attention to the other kinds of knowing your skills, your states of consciousness in mind, your traits of character, and therefore cultivate virtue because that’s what a virtue is. A virtue is a proper coordination of all of those oriented to connecting you to reality. Develop the colleges of practices for cultivating virtue, both individually and with other people, such that those virtues also organize into an overarching capacity of insight, understanding, enhancing your ability to zero in on what really matters and become wiser, individually and collectively. That’s the answer to the meeting crisis. Thank you, John. Thank you for coming. I really appreciate your time. Thank you, Kyle. I wouldn’t mind a copy of this and so I can put it on my channel. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ll send this to you immediately after this. Okay, I need to jump. Thank you. Yeah, me too. Thank you. I really appreciate your time. This was wonderful. Keep keep keep coming. Man. Keep doing what you’re doing. I will. You keep doing what you’re doing. We’ll talk again. Thank you, John. Okay, bye bye.