https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=dxfmX4QkEyw
Welcome everyone to this special episode of Voices with Raviki. This is episode four of our philosophy of meditation series. And as always, I’m here with my wonderful co-host, the remarkable Rick Rapetti. And I’m going to turn things over to Rick. He’s going to introduce our very special guest. And then we’ll start through our set of questions. But as usual, it’ll probably open up into more free flowing discussion. So first of all, I want to welcome both Rick and Thomas Metzinger. But I’ll pass things over to Rick. Right. Thank you. It’s great to be here, as usual, John. And this is really exciting to have Thomas Metzinger here with us. I’ve been a fan of his work. I’ve quoted his work in a number of my writings. Thomas is a philosopher and a cognitive scientist like John, author of a number of important works, edited collections, monographs, including Being No One, The Self Model of Subjectivity. The Ego Tunnel, The Science of the Mind and The Myth of the Self and his forthcoming book. I’m not sure if it’s out yet, The Elephant and the Blind, among many others. One of Thomas’s articles would have been in my edited collection, by the way, the Rutledge Handbook on the Philosophy of Meditation, which is what started this whole series here, which would have put him in a league with Lou Marinoff, a previous guest, John right here and me, among other guests who might be coming here. But Thomas was too busy at the time to write something new, unlike John, who rattled something off for me in like a month. And Rutledge wouldn’t accept anything published already, although Thomas offered to have us include one of his recently published articles on meditation. So that’s a little bit of the history of my connection with with Thomas. We always like to mention potential connections with previous or future guests on the podcast here. Lou Marinoff was on before, Pierre Grimes and John and I. We’ve all been on previous episodes, those first three, and this is the fourth. We’re all all of us that I’ve mentioned who’ve been here so far interested in the links between Buddhism, meditation, conceptions of the self and related ideas. And we share attempts to integrate meditation with science and philosophical analysis. Our next episode will host Evan Thompson. And Thomas and Evan are both philosophers doing work in for E.Cog Psy with research interests in contemplative science. OK, so that’s my my brief intro to Thomas. We will put his full bio and stuff like that in the show notes later on. But Thomas, tell us about yourself in your own words. Like, where are you now? What are you doing? And what should the audience know about you that I haven’t already said? First of all, thank you very much for the invitation. I was really unfortunate with your fantastic work. But the good thing is I was probably the first person on the planet to read this gigantic book you have produced cover to cover every single footnote. And in that forthcoming book, The Elephant and the Blind, I’ve tried to, you know, process at least some of the discoveries I’ve made in there. I thought it was really valuable. And I stumbled on a number of Anglo-Saxon authors in there I didn’t even know existed and found some really, really good contributions. And anybody who has ever done something like this and I have. Know what suffering it involves and how long you take to recover from this. I’m close to recovery phase two. I what should readers know about me? So I am now retired for more than a year. I’ve taught at eight German universities. The last 22 years, I’ve been at the philosophy department at the University of Mainz. And I’m also a long term practitioner of 47 years. Have done all the usual stuff, being to India and South East Asia, a lot of monasteries, done retreats and all that. But I’ve kind of always kept this secret. Has never been part of my public academic persona. So I’ve practiced very regularly and intensively since since I was 18. But only in the last three years, I’ve made this a topic. And on February six, you’re going to see this book, The Elephant and the Blind, which has more than 500 experiential reports where practitioners from 57 countries. This is not meditation research. Describe the experience of pure awareness of aware of consciousness as such. And this is in a wider framework right now. The framework is I’ve created a small research project called the MPE project. MPE is for minimal phenomenal experience, which simply asks the question, what is the most simple form of conscious experience? You know, there is something behind this, some theory of science intuition that one could develop a new approach to the problem of consciousness. Because as everybody sees right now, it’s stuck in wars between celebrities and different approaches and all that. So there is a type of explanation in philosophy that’s called a minimal model explanation, which has been carried out in different other domains in physics, in chemistry and theoretical biology, where you just try to describe the target phenomenon in its simplest thing. So I had in its simplest form, in its simplest appearance. So you subtract everything superfluous, you only take the core causal features, no possible worlds or anything, just what determines the actual occurrence and try to hone in on those properties that are really relevant for an explanation. So I’m trying in that book and in that research initiative to prepare, slowly prepare a new entry point for consciousness research, namely pure awareness, the phenomenology of pure awareness in meditation. And this doesn’t show anything, but we have there’s a there’s a long survey you can find on the web in PLOS. And one of the 92 questions we asked meditators was is this the simplest state of consciousness? You know, and we get a median rating of 80 out of 100 points there. So practitioners say, yes, that’s exactly it. It’s not only the natural state, but it’s also the most simple state we know, which doesn’t mean anything that people say something like that and are contaminated by their belief systems and their theories. This doesn’t show anything, but it supports my intuition that this may be a good starting point. So that’s what I’ve been doing the last three years. There are two or three papers out there, some some talks. The bad news is that the MIT press has created a disaster with the English version of the book, with a production time. Of four hundred and ninety four days. So you will only see this on February 6th. I don’t know what your production time was for your monumental piece. But there’s also good news, because I’ve always been a total like an open access pioneer for years, supported this. And the MIT press has now this fantastic direct to open program. This book will be freely available with no cost to all of your listeners. But only six of February. So this is where I’m now. It’s getting dark in Germany. Summer is definitely over. I’m retired. It’s it’s a transition period. And I’m I finished probably the last book in my life. So, Thomas, I wonder if I might ask you, if you could compare and contrast your minimal phenomenological experience, with Foreman’s idea of the pure consciousness event, in what way are they the same? In what way are they different? What are you trying to get at that in a way differently from what he did? Well, this is, of course, the same tradition. I mean, there was this huge 1991 Oxford University press reader, the problem of pure consciousness. And I am picking up that thread, but in a different way. I’m first I want to take the phenomenology much more serious than it has been taken before. I don’t want big theories. I think it would be a big mistake to now start grandiose philosophical theorizing about consciousness without content and get all the armchair analytical philosophers to jump on this. My strategy is to just look what do real world meditators actually say from very different backgrounds and then bring in some new conceptual tools like predictive processing, things that weren’t there in 1991, make some hypothetical proposals. Could there be a deep active inference model of the pure awareness experience, for instance? So this book is basically teasing people. So to say, yeah, well, nice try. I can do this much better. If that works, that a lot of people say I can do this much better than this guy, then I’ll be completely happy. So I’m trying to basically prepare and stimulate research. And as you, of course, correctly ask, the question is, what does purity mean? I mean, what is pure about it? And the standard reading is it’s contentless. I don’t think so, personally. My question is rather what kind of representational content could be so abstract and so subtle that it is completely natural for human beings to report this as nothingness or emptiness or contentlessness afterwards? So I’m this very old fashioned kind of representationalist. And I think the representationalist level of description, if enriched by all the new developments, you know it all, John and cognitive science can still do a lot of good work. I’m not wedded to the representationalist level of analysis, but I think this can be taken farther. So further. So I think the idea is what kind of content would it be that makes everybody say this was a contentless experience? That’s what I’m interested in. One of my former students and now a co-writer with me, we published a paper last year integrating predictive processing and relevance realizations, named Mark Miller. And he’s sort of exploring the idea that and I wonder if this I know you don’t want to be drawn into heavy theorizing. So this is very, very tentative question. I’ll mark it clearly. But are you thinking of something that we’re talking about, like hyper priors at a very high level with the predictive processing and they’re therefore almost, you know, always transparent to the system because they represent sort of a fundamental formulation of the modeling of the world or something like that? Yeah, lots. So, of course, I’ve met Mark this March in Leiden. And, of course, I’ve bumped into his work and activities in the Internet many times. One of the very first ideas that came up is that meditation practice flattens the hyper prior landscape in the brain periodically. And the question is, of course, what could these use useful priors that were useful in evolution be? And one, of course, is subject object duality, that knowingness is not something that is actually everywhere. It’s epistemic quality, but that there is someone who is knowing right now. And of course, you have the same distinction. There is dual mindfulness. There are very clear and stable phenomenologies where somebody sits on their cushion and looks at pure awareness and can later report, I myself was experiencing a state of pure awareness. And of course, there’s also non-dual mindfulness. Yes. Where? And that is where it gets really interesting, gets into deep water. Awareness, as I said, can become non egoically aware of itself. So the meditator has seized or given way to something else. But that something else, as our data show, which I present in the book, is a form of self-awareness. Or can be doesn’t have to. But it can be it can be awareness awoken to itself. And there are all these. Metaphorical descriptions. Which are very hard to transport into scientific discourse. So a classical thing is, for instance, an emptiness that has awoken to itself. And this is also a huge problem of ineffability there. And the only thing the goal is very modest. Maybe we can make a little progress, you know, a little. Maybe we can get a little closer to this ineffable something. I’m not saying that we’re anywhere near of defining this. Right. So and so another prior is there is time. Another thing is. Most people would say you cannot have temporal experience and an experience of timelessness at the same time. But my data show that’s wrong. People like J. Krishnamurti have explicitly explicitly written about timeless change. Complete, you know, contradiction in terms. But our meditators from all over the world. Describe things like that, too, where there is a quality of eternity. And change going on. So there are real phenomenal states in real human beings, which don’t fit on our conceptual schemes there. And no, I’m interested in these things. I’m wondering if I get the subject object one, which is, of course, emphasized in a post Cartesian world. And the time and eternity point to another tradition. I wonder if another hyper prior, which the Neoplatonists, of course, played a lot with was the one in the mini, sort of where that also tends to disappear in a different kind of non duality. Because I do I do both Buddhist practices and neoplatonic practices. And and if this after the fact, like the metaphor for the subjective objective seems this way horizontal and the one in the mini seems this way, but they’re both non dual. I know that doesn’t make too much sense. But I know there’s a lot of reports from within the neoplatonic tradition. And I imagine, you know, related traditions, Sufism and things like that, where the sort of vertical metaphor and the overcoming of the one mini dichotomy is also experienced. Very, very important, John. So standardly in Western pop Buddhist pop culture, and a non dual awareness always means subject object distinction disappear. Yeah. But if you look at the material, more there are other very fundamental oppositions that can disappear. As you mentioned, neoplatonism, I mean, the motto in front of that book is actually a quote from Plotin, who says, if you want to understand a thing, you have to understand it in its purest form, because else you get distracted by other features that thing has. And I think the same is true for consciousness now. About maybe start with the subject object classic. So in the say in in the spiritual pop culture, there are a lot of people running around saying, yeah, non dual awareness is our natural state. And that’s how it is. And this subject object dualism, that’s a form of delusion. And you can see through it. But there’s a simple thing that almost everybody overlooks. And I call this the single embodiment constraint. So we are. By chance, we are systems that naturally evolved, where all their senses, eyes and ears and all their effectors are actually integrated in a very narrow space in in in in in in a region in physical space. We have a single embodiment. And over millions of years, we have learned to copy our genes to navigate a world without dying to control this biological body. And of course, there was only a single embodiment all the time. So this is like the super hyper prior. This is there is one entity controlling behavior, including mental behavior, like guiding your attention or something like this. I have a thought experiment in the book where you could imagine that an artificial intelligence has a non dual state of awareness, but controls, say, many hundred local epistemic agents, robots with sensors and effectors in space or on the planet Earth on its surface. It could see through every single one of them, using them as tools, administrating them. But it could still itself have a non dual model of reality, a non dual form of awareness. So we can imagine systems that would have multiple embodiments. It’s not a necessary feature. It’s just our minds are like this. And I’m also trying to tease everybody a little bit in the book by saying, I must come remind me to come back to your many and one issue. My claim is that consciousness is not a subjective phenomenon. So I’m saying conscious experience in almost all cases in human beings is a subjective phenomenon, because there’s a running self model knowing self that experiences all this is how it is modeled. And there is subject object duality. And then in a phenomenological sense, that is a subjective state. But there, if you look not at conscious experience, but as consciousness, the property of awareness, I’m saying this is not a subjective property. Right. And I deliberately tease people because I think all you know, there are so many readings of the term subjective and philosophy. There are epistemological readings, metaphysical readings, metaphysical readings, all that stuff. But I’m saying they’re all anchored, ultimately anchored in the phenomenology. That’s the substantial reading. And on that substantial reading, subjectivity is not a necessary property of consciousness, of the awareness as such. Of course, in an epistemological sense, say somebody sits on their cushion and has disappeared, the meditator has disappeared. And there is a peaceful, clear state of non dual awareness. This is still subjective in a weak sense that it happens in this individual organism. It’s a process in this specific brain. But it’s not even subjective in the sense that only this organism can introspect it. Because while it happens, it isn’t introspecting it. You know, there is no inward subjective perspective. But in a very weak sense, it’s a local phenomenon in a local nervous system. Okay. But that’s not a threat to the scientific worldview. And that’s not a dramatic thing. The interesting thing is the phenomenology of subjectivity. And now I must come back. You know, one thing I learned, I had sometimes it has been a torture writing this book, but some I’ve had some new insights. So now I don’t know how to pronounce this ancient thinker Santarakashita. Santarakashita. OK. Do you know the one or neither one or many argument? Yeah. Tell tell your listeners in proper English, please. Well, I’m not so sure I could do a good job of that because it’s something like Parmenides, you know, it’s a very complicated logic. But he’s kind of like a Zeno paradox guy in Buddhism, Santarakashita. Yeah. He just tries to show that all of our logical categories fall apart, really. So it’s a kind of negation via negativa. Pure awareness is neither one nor many. Right. That was also John’s point that he says this hyper prior. It’s either one or many doesn’t apply for this kind of phenomenology. For instance, we have loads of, you know, dozens and dozens of reports who say this is a space that has no center and no periphery. Yes. But then you get it from all countries. Right. All traditions. You get that. Yeah. So now. For the first time, actually, I saw a problem for the, say, the meditating self, for the very ambitious, the committed practitioner who has read fancy books and fancy discussions and now wants to become one with pure awareness. But how do you become one with something that is neither one nor many? Yeah. You cannot. You cannot become one with that. And I think that has, if you think about it, it has a very deep flavor. It also I think that is something that is relevant for practice and not only for logicians or, you know, Indian philosophy. And you cannot become one with it. You’re the problem. Right. Thank you for watching this YouTube and podcast series is by the Vervecki Foundation. Which, in addition to supporting my work, also offers courses, practices, workshops and other projects dedicated to responding to the meaning crisis. If you would like to support this work, please consider joining our Patreon. You can find the link in the show notes. I don’t know if you’ve read Slaterlin’s book on trying not to try, where he makes that sort of a focal challenge that he tries to wrestle with in the book and looks across both Western and Eastern traditions about that, that problem you just posed. Who is the author’s name? Edward Schlingerlin. Never heard. Sorry. Trying not to try. Yeah. It’s a great a great attempt to deal with that paradox. OK. Yeah, I do all my life. Well, a simple anecdote. I remember one of my earliest meditation teachers who was Ram Dass saying, you can never become enlightened because if it happens, you’re not there. Yeah. It’s kind of like reminds me of I forget which ancient Greek philosopher John’s better at remembering their names than I am, who said, where death is, I am not where I am. Epicurus. So where enlightenment is, I am not. And where I am, enlightenment is not. That would be my spin on that. That’s yeah, that’s very interesting. But, you know. So in this new terminology, John brought in, we have unconscious assumptions about the structure of reality, and they are not something bad, you know, as they are super. They express a form of biological intelligence. They are very robust. They’re over evolved over millions of years, but they also create a lot of suffering because, you know, evolution was never interested in the happiness of these copying devices. It uses these throw away copying devices, which we are that have even grown conscious self models. Right. A bizarre situation. And I mean, a very sober and naturalist way to look at this is can the model of reality that normal neurotypical human beings have, can it be improved? Can we have better forms of consciousness, valuable forms of consciousness, conscious experience that? Yeah, Thomas, you started writing about that in that article of yours, Mental Autonomy. Uh huh. Yeah. And then and then later one on in Aon magazine on mind wandering and mental autonomy. Already. This culture of consciousness. This is what you’re you’re you’re leading towards. Yeah. So there’s a strange thing. So there’s a small book. I’ve been speaking about this concept of Bewusstseinskultur, which very nicely translates into English as a culture of consciousness. And nobody was really interested. I’ve talked about this for a quarter century and about three years ago and there was massive interest, mostly from the psychedelic scene. And so this 6th of January, I published a small book, Heu Bewusstseinskultur, which is not available in English yet and which is an expanded version of the epilogue of that book. You will see a hope we find an English publisher at at some point. And the idea is very simple in that book. So you take Bewusstseinskultur, of course, as long roots in philosophy. You take an ethical stance to your own mental states and to your conscious experience. Doesn’t mean you find a solution. Doesn’t mean that anybody can prove what a good state of consciousness really is. But you begin also a societal discourse about what are valuable states of consciousness? Which ones do we want to show our children? Which ones can we force upon animals? Which states of consciousness do we die in? Which ones should be legal or illegal? And of course, today, what states of consciousness can we force upon machines in our future research, possibly? Right. So there’s this broad spectrum of ethical questions. And the second point is, if you’ve come to a conclusion, say you’ve come to the conclusion. The pure awareness experience is the most valuable state of consciousness I’ve known in my life. Then you begin to systematically cultivate this. And step three, and that’s already is you try to integrate this into societal practice, into the cultural life of a society. And one of the amazing things I learned through doing this book about pure awareness and doing this first survey, we’re going to soon going to publish a mathematically optimized survey also with Chinese as a language, with Bengali and want to aim at a much larger end and keep it open not only for eight weeks, but for years. And I have practitioners from all over the world contribute to this. There’s this something I wasn’t aware of. And I think nobody really knows is how many people in America, in Germany, but in many other countries on on the world actually have such experiences and would not talk about them. They’re not part of a mainstream. But if they are asked in a serious, you know, scientific survey under conditions of anonymity, then. You you realize there’s all these people who are modest and quiet, you know, and never make a fuss, never go to the media and have that practice. And you realize the second thing, there’s a historically new situation now. There is. An almost secular meditation practice all over the planet. It’s not only India and Asia. We now have millions of practitioners, you know, started with hippies taking acid and going to India by the ten thousands and coming back and, you know, looking for a more sustainable way with these experiences, becoming monks. The role being becoming teachers in the West. And now we have this spiritual counterculture, which has many problems. But it’s a large group of human beings, you know, and all you see in the media is this, you know, all this capitalist self-improvement crap and, you know, the superficial. Mcmine’s, yes, we call it. But there are some people who’ve kept at this for five, for ten, for 20, for 30 years, they don’t talk, you know, but they’re there. And I think I didn’t know this, how many people there are actually who undergo deep experiences in this domain and keep quiet. There will even be there’s even a lot of people or even be there’s even negative self-selection, you know, that will be people who say, yeah, I don’t part. It’s a nice try, but I don’t participate in scientific nonsense. Why should I fill in a survey that are. Some Buddhists, some monks are not allowed to talk about their experiences. Right. It’s all. And many spiritual traditions discourage public discourse about your mystical experiences and that sort of thing. Yeah. There’s a kind of norm against it. I still remember ages ago, my first meditation teacher ever. I began with TM in the early, early days, said there’s always an option not to pull this onto the coarse grain level of language. And thereby maybe ruining your own experience is always an option not to talk about it. And. Some of the most valuable scientific subjects might actually be of that kind. A couple of things come to mind. Yes, please. I’m talking to much. No, no, you’re not. You’re the guest. You’re supposed to talk the most. That’s what’s supposed to happen. So. You’re talking about sort of these potentially better states of consciousness. And of course, there’s something very analogous going on. Robert Stenevich, what he said, which I should say, the robots rebellion, where he’s trying to get people to pursue improved states of cognition that overcome our evolutionary heritage. And the thing that’s interesting is I think there might be a potential convergence between them. Give me a moment. I’ll try to explain why. A lot of the cognitive biases seem to ground out in the my side bias or the egocentric bias. And it seems to me that trying to overcome those biases, you can’t destroy them because they have an adaptive function, but ameliorating them would need potentially support from being able to actually experience what it’s like to be a non egocentric organism or an agent and would thereby there’s a potential convergence between trying to improve consciousness, if I can use that language, and cognition in an integrated fashion. They could mutually support each other with also the improved cognition, perhaps reducing the tendency that people might have to jump to inappropriate conclusions about their conscious states. Does that strike you as a plausible proposal? Well, I would make this stronger if you are right in what you’re saying. It’s an ethical obligation to do that. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So I’ve been unfortunately, I’m this gloomy European. So I’ve contextualized this in two dimensions. I mean, we have a planetary crisis. We have the rolling climate catastrophe. And I claim things are not looking good at all. So the question is also, if you’re born in a historical situation like we are right now, I think a deeper question is, how do you preserve your own self-respect in a historical epoch where humankind is losing its dignity? Because what is happening right now on the planet makes it very hard. You know, there’s this Kantian notion of what dignity is, is that you respect all of humanity in every person that you encounter, the whole, the project of humanity. But you can also demand that everybody respects that in you. And I think the historically new situation right now is, you just cannot respect what human beings are doing anymore on this planet. You know, the way we act, we have known about this catastrophe for four decades now, for three decades, everybody in the West, moderately educated person has known this is coming. And the way we have been acting and the way we still act shows that we don’t respect, A, all those who come will come after us. In the future, who will suffer from that, but also that we don’t respect ourselves as a moral subject. I could go on a lot about this, but in that context, meditation practice and the thing John just said, it takes on in a new meaning. I mean, this exploration doesn’t, you know, it doesn’t take place in some spiritual Disneyland, but in a planetary crisis. And I think we are morally obliged to, you know, do everything we can do with science, but also with exploring altered states systematically to find out if there are still some windows of plasticity in the human mind. You know, that, you know, there’s all this romantic stuff, you must have heard it, you know. So the good thing about psychedelics is that they improve neuroplasticity and therapeutic applications. And the good thing about mindfulness is that it measurably increases cognitive flexibility. Maybe, as John says, maybe weakens some of our embodied biases. But we have to look at this much more carefully. We have to put much more resources into it. And there’s time pressure. I think it’s absolute time pressure, because this is not any old historical epoch in which we are living. This is a very special time. And there’s a window of opportunity that’s closing. And I also, how to say this, but what’s science culture and meditation practice, I mean, it also has to do with how can you do more even in this difficult situation? What can you do about burnout, existential despair? Can it help all those young people and all the climate activists who want to have been part of the solution, at least if there had been one, not to go crazy? I mean, they can’t do this for years. I mean, it breaks you. And I think there’s a much deeper perspective than these Western notions of dignity and political activism that is coming in through a serious meditation practice. But I don’t know if John likes the word. A very important word, a concept for me has always been intellectual honesty, is that you don’t, at least you have the intention to not lie to yourself. Of course, we all fail all the time, but you have that intention. And that intention to be intellectually honest is something that’s missing in the spiritual counterculture. I think something very cool started in the late 60s and in the 70s, that people left organized religion long ago, but took things into their own hands. And a spiritual counterculture developed in the 70s. But now, if you look at it, half a century later, it lacks intellectual honesty, and there’s all kinds of weird stuff going on. So Thomas, I think you would find it maybe encouraging to know that a big part of my public work is to address this group of people and what I call their meaning crisis. Metacrisis, even, which is a collection of a variety of crises that John has put together as Metacrisis. I have to interject, John. I was about to say the very same thing. I just want to put it in one sentence. Thomas’s speech in the last 15 minutes or so almost sounds like preaching for what John is doing. Because John is trying to do that kind of work with figuring out what wisdom is and how to spread it and steal the culture. So John, tell me, how does your audience, an Anglo-Saxon audience, react to this when you’re doing this? So it reacts. I mean, it was very interesting. When I did Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, it’s 50 episodes and each episode is like an hour to an hour and 15 minutes. And many people said nobody will watch it. And they were dramatically wrong. They’re dramatically wrong. I think the first episode is around 630,000 views. The argument that I laid out there, it’s a very complex argument about trying to understand how did we get into this situation and what do we need to understand about human meaning making, consciousness, senses of reality in order to properly address this with the best scientific integrity while respecting the existing religious and philosophical wisdom traditions. And people ate it up, Thomas. People ate it up. And they ate it up and they wanted to know, okay, what do I do? How do I put this into practice? And I started a foundation. And Rick is part of that foundation, the Vervecki Foundation, where we have tried to help people to create what I call ecologies of practices, put together by the best sort of vetted science that we know, the best kind of pedagogical design principles that we can come up with, and trying to do this as virtuously and with as much virtuosity as we can. And it is really addressing a need. I was in London speaking at How the Light Gets in Festival, and the lineup was huge and it was standing room only. And that’s not because of me. It’s because I think it’s really because this is what people are telling me. I’m giving them a way to talk about this to each other, to think about it, and to translate it into viable practices individually and collectively. So that’s what’s happening right now. I mean, of course, Thomas, you have to understand, I’m going to acknowledge I’m speaking from tremendous selection bias and from my own career bias. But that’s what I can at least honestly report I see happening. So I have just created a charity too, the Stiftung Bewusstseinskultur. I have some seed money, but I need some large donors. So trying to do exactly the same. So I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about the project of a secular spirituality. And could there be a form of spiritual practice that is intellectually honest, and it’s not something like intellectual suicide? John calls it a religion without a religion, by the way. But I’ll tell you about my experience. So there’s a chapter 17 in that book, which nobody will like. And in that chapter, I say that almost all human beings have two fundamental emotional needs. One is mortality denial. And the other is something I call narrative self-deception. And I find it’s hard in my own life. But if one slowly and gently approaches this and says, you know, if you look at modern science and at the data and at rational argument, something that nobody of us wants to be true, looks like it is true that we’re mortal beings. And then you lose a lot of people for whom this is too much. Your standard Buddhists will come creeping in with something clever about substrate consciousness, and what links the incarnations. And if you then kindly say, but there’s no empirical evidence and no rational argument that something like that, or reincarnation should exist, then it’s already very hard for many people. Because the practice not only serves to cultivate certain states of consciousness, but is very natural. And I could go on for five hours about this for creatures like this for anti entropic systems, who were not meant to simulate any situations in which they do not exist anymore. That’s not it’s almost not conceivable. You know, you could go technical with mathematics and stuff about this. And mortality for many people, their psychedelic practice, or the meditation practice is something a strategy of mortality denials. I think there’s a very old human tradition and that tradition goes like this. We create altered states of consciousness through rhythmic drumming, through dancing, through sleep deprivation, through fasting, through prayer, through meditation, then our brains create altered alternative reality models. Step two, we interpret them like we please, like we please, you know, we have this raw material and then we say, I know consciousness can exist independently of the biological brain. I have been out there in all this. So this is very human. So the first thing I want to say is intellectual honesty, I find in my audience is something very demanding and also frightening. It takes courage. It’s easy to talk about it on a Sunday morning, you know, but to confront this in your own life that things might be different than you wanted to have them is another thing. Now, narrative self-deception, you just use the term meaning making. And if you excuse, this concept is complete bullshit. I’ll take a very conservative analytical philosopher’s point of view and say meaning is something that sentences and concepts have. And I think that’s a very important point. Events do not have a meaning. Lives are chains of events. That doesn’t mean that your life is meaningless in this emotionally negative sense, but it’s a category mistake. And what I find very, very often in myself, in the meditative community and spiritual practitioners is we create experiences of meaningfulness, the phenomenology of being touched, the phenomenology of being connected, the phenomenology of soundness. This all makes sense. And that’s good enough for us. We never ask these serious questions about is, what does it mean, the meaning of life? Does anybody know what we’re really asking for? So my first claim would be, you don’t know what you’re asking for when you ask about the meaning of life. So one way of being intellectually dishonest is to continuously create experiences of deep connectedness and meaningfulness. I don’t know, through MDMA, through tripping, through after a retreat, through being alone in nature, and then say, yeah, this is meaningful. But as such, it’s only phenomenology. It’s its only experience. And so this concept of narrative self-deception means that we all have a strong tendency to tell a life narrative, the journey of a hero, the journey of a great spiritual self, which is so earnest and so modest. That self practices for so many years. And it’s on a path, this romanticism of being on a path, or even in a tradition, in a lineage. That’s what I call narrative self-deception. That’s the mechanism by which this ego mechanism, the self structure, continuously bootstraps itself and tries to stay alive somehow. So this whole attempt to find the meaning of life and to make meaning, it’s a very, very dangerous thing. And if you talk about these things, I don’t know about your experience, in your context, that’s when people really run away. Nobody wants to look at that. Also, in their own meditation practice, that this might be a story you’re continuously trying to develop. Somehow all of us try to develop a coherent life story. But I think if Buddhism is true, there actually isn’t so much coherence there. I don’t know if you would agree. Well, I would make a distinction, which I’m talking to hear John’s answer here, because he’s the Mr. Meaning Crisis solver. So, okay, but I know what his answer is going to be. Tell me what the meaning crisis is so that I understand. Well, before I do that, I would make a distinction, which is a very important one. I think talking about the meaning of life is, as you put it, a bullshit. It’s a waste of time. I think it’s to make a metaphysical proposal. I think meaning in life, that sense of connectedness actually has a fundamental functionality to it. I think it has to do with a core problem that’s even within predictive processing, which is how organisms zero in on relevant information, while ignoring irrelevant information. And relevance is that kind of connectedness. And relevance is important for all problem solving. So I don’t think that’s illusory. And I think my argument is that the phenomenology of meaning in life, when it isn’t bullshit, is people are talking about the degree to which they are able to get that kind of relevance realization going. And it shows up in things like insight, the flow experience, and also wanting to be connected to projects like the one that we were talking about, about trying to save the world and things like that, where you’re trying to determine what is most relevant and what you can be most relevant to. And I think if you switch it, I think the term meaning is at best a metaphor. And I argue that repeatedly. And if we switch it over to these two meta problems, which is predictive processing, how do we best anticipate the world? And then relevance realization, how do we deal with the combinatorial explosiveness of information and optionality, as we anticipate the world more and more into the future? Then I think you’re talking about something very fundamental to being a biological living agent, an autopoetic agent. And so I what I’ve tried to do is to get people to shift to that sense of how they should interpret it. And if that argument takes, it gives them, in fact, I often use it to challenge the narrative bias in a significant way. And one of the things you can talk about, for example, is that the research on meaning in life shows that purpose, which is a narrative goal, is not the most important dimension of people experiencing meaning in life. Are they connected to something they judge to be real? Do they make a difference to it? Those are the things that sorry for the pun matter in important ways. And I think they are very important for understanding what we’ve actually lost when people are talking about being in states of despair, being in states of alienation, being overwhelmed by anxiety, and more importantly, not knowing how to deal with the self deception that weakens and severs that appropriate ability to zero in on what is most relevant in any context. And I think that’s a hallmark of the wise individual, their capacity to zero in on what is most relevantly real in this situation, and how can I make myself relevant to it. So that would be my response. So I understand this really well. Did you want to say something, Rick? No, I was just going to say, John, you didn’t give the summary of what the meaning crisis is. Did you want to do that too? Well, the point is, to put it in a nutshell is, you know, there’s two issues, there’s overcoming our proclivity to self deception. And we’re very complex, recursive, dynamical systems. And we need ecologies of practices like the Eightfold Path, we need many practices that are balanced and counterbalanced against each other to intervene. And then we need, you know, we need places that we can trust where we can go to learn and practice those. And of course, that used to be religious context, and that’s gone for us. But that doesn’t mean that functionality doesn’t need to be addressed. It does. So another way of putting it is the meaning crisis is something in the West like a wisdom famine. People do not know to go where they have an intellectually honest, to use your terms, plausible possibility of becoming wiser in the way I just described. Yeah, super. You know, what I like best, I think I understand this well. What I like best is this insisting on relevance is subversive. Because in my view, we are living in a culture of superficiality. Yes. Of committed, I think in English, one would say committed superficiality. So everything from the economic growth model to which we are addicted, you know, co2 footprint and all that is an avoidance of getting too deep. It’s an avoidance of relevance. Yes, because people sense they might have to change their lives. And I think a very, how to say very simple, and politically subversive way without being either right nor left nor anything would be just to insist on this question of what is really relevant. And we reiterate this, you know, just insist this. John, you John likes to tell the story of Socrates going through the market. What does he say, John? Look at all the things I don’t need. But also Thomas that neither right nor left, but in a sense, you know, deeply subversive in a meta political way. That’s again also something that I am arguing for. And I think you picked up perfectly on one of the implications of what I’m saying. All right. So one fact we have to I only found this out. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard this research by this woman Tatiana Schnell about existentially in different Yes, yes, I cite her work in my work. Yes, so do I. So there’s about a quarter at least of the population who just doesn’t care about all these issues of life and meaning and relevance. And who fare pretty well with that. They don’t have any big problems. That’s the annoying thing. The general quality of life is a little lower than the average, but they don’t have psychiatric diseases or problems. They just don’t care. And one thing one has to put on the table is that all these existentially in different people are of course doing enormous damage to the atmosphere to future sentient creatures on this planet. But then of course, there are so the world’s sense culture for me has to do also with asking what are the necessary preconditions that say a young human being can even discover this question of relevance and stay with this. What? Yes, because we have this, you know, superficiality industry now, you know, all the algorithms, the first contact with AI went completely wrong. We, you know, we have all these systems who just aim at maximal engagement on that screen for their customers, you know, and who destroy minds and suck off attention, extract attention, the attention extraction economy, and the attention extraction economy, as Tristan Harris and people like him call it. I mean, that creates superficiality. And that creates something. I don’t know, John, is there have anybody done research on something like relevance blindness? I mean, what does it take to make a human being insensitive to these issues? Not I don’t know directly that the paper I published with Mark and Brett in December in phenomenology in the cognitive sciences was using the integration of predictive processing and relevance realization theory to talk about the autism psychosis, schizotypical psychosis spectrum. And you can see relevance realization issues in terms of people overfitting and underfitting to the data and not managing bias variance well, and how that shows up and explains a lot of the symptomology. So not quite relevance blindness, but at least maybe relevance distortion. I we made an argument that that this continuum that it has a pretty good explanatory and empirical basis to it can plausibly be explained in terms of, you know, salience, dysregulation, the relevance realization machinery is not properly doing the opponent processing, etc, etc. So made that argument that but I don’t know about a scientific study. Now, one of the things we did in our my book with Christopher, from at a Pietro and Philip Misovic is we tracked on Google, the predominance of people invoking and claiming or citing bullshit, because we talk about bullshit as a disconnecting relevance to from reality and then for right making it just run amok. Right. And what you can see is we got the graph about bullshit just like arcing up and spiking over the last couple of decades. But that’s all I know, Thomas, those are the two things I could answer you with. That’s of course, a bewusseinskultur, a genuine culture of consciousness would have to tackle these issues head on. Yes. You know, because we are surrounded by this cult of superficiality. And the thing is, if you destroy people’s minds, and if this seeps in children and young people, you know, I never did what my father told me. But now that he’s dead, and I’m old myself, I see I did all this, I do all the things he did, you know, model learning, you know, social model learning, children don’t care what what their parents say they see they look what they really do. And they pick up these good or bad habits. And if we get model learning for superficiality, you know, in our cultures through generations, then we’re really doomed. You know, so we also need something. I think, English terms are earnestness or existential seriousness, we need a culture of existential seriousness. And that’s of course subversive, this will explode everything. But then of course, I mean, we have this discussion here. But the coke heads on Wall Street have all the power and, you know, and do, you know, do the damage to this planet. So at one point, if I think of for sense culture, I mainly think of an intellectual honest meditation practice, as an epistemic practice, that is, as something that aims for a kind of knowledge that cannot be found in sentences in words in language in theories. But in something we call experience right now, but which are actually models and brains, which also, you know, carry information and knowledge, but in a completely ineffable way, that kind of practice, an epistemic practice, but there’s this other there’s this political aspect, you know, if one wanted to have a Wurzansk culture, a radical culture of consciousness, it would actually have to be something that politicians have to be afraid of. You know, it would have to be something that is, on the one hand, peaceful and nonviolent. But on the other hand, which makes it impossible for the institutions to ignore it. Because you know what I mean? Yeah, I do, Thomas. That’s what I mean by my phrase, steal the culture. Steal the culture? Steal the culture. Yes. Right. And to create a counterculture that becomes a viable competitor to the existing culture. And in that sense, could steal it away. The model I have historically is, is, you know, early Christianity, building alternative communities and networks of communities, new practices, new ways of being, that eventually stole the Roman Empire away from its typical orientation. Of course, it was then corrupted. But the point is, it did happen. Or the Bildung movement in the Nordic countries, that helped move the Nordic countries out of authoritarian agrarian societies into democratic, you know, some of the places that reliably score in the top 20 for where people want to live in the world. And there was an actual movement, the Bildung movement, and it actually worked. And all these secular monasteries stole the culture in a powerful way. So we have historical precedent. This is not impossible to do. Yes. So I just brought, I just had these memories, you know, when I finished high school, I did my first big backpacking trip ever. And I flew into Montreal and I hitchhiked all across the Trans-Canada and for five months and down, I just had to get to Haight Ashbury, although I knew everything was over. I just had to get there and back up. And then I got stuck in the Kamloops Christian man’s hostel without money. And I still had to hitchhike through the plains. And I was searching and you know, for communes, I wanted to, and there were two books, which were in my backpack for the whole trip, hitchhiking, I guess, 42,000 kilometers or so. There were two books. One was the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. And the other one was a book by a guy called Theodor Roshak called The Making of a Counterculture. Yeah, I read his book. So at that time, you know, 1976 or something, those were the two most important things. And now it sounds nice to talk about a relevance, spiritual practice based counterculture and all this. But then we have 8 billion people on the planet. And how many of them can even afford to have the kinds of discussions we are having right now, you know, how many of them even have the option? Democracy is going down since 2009 on the planet by objective standards. I was recently on a panel and there was a Chinese human rights lawyer and she said, you have to conduct these discussions in the West. You have to think about this hard and come to good solutions. We can’t. We are 1.4 billion people in China. We can’t. Are you aware of the responsibility you have in the free parts of the world? But then, you know, we are only a small part of this rich, educated part of the world. And what I find very difficult also to accept emotionally is given the pressure through the running, rolling climate catastrophe, the time pressure, whatever it is, this would have to be scaled very fast. 8 billion people on the planet. And I just don’t see this happening. So I don’t think there’s a teleology and I don’t know if I’ve been optimistic, but I’m also talking to people in government and people who are connected to influencers, trying to, even people inside the AI community, trying to get more and more people engaged with this, the people who actually do pull those levers. Can we disrupt the Molokian machine enough that this becomes at least a real possibility and not just a conceptual possibility? I do a lot of work on that. And the foundation does a lot of work. And I’m part of a network of such communities trying to address that. I totally agree that the proposal of stealing the culture without addressing the machinery that’s at work, that’s chewing up planet and chewing up a lot of people on the planet, those have to go together. I haven’t had an opportunity to say, I spent a lot of time working on those problems and trying to talk to people who I think it is reasonable to believe could make a difference around this, around issues of governance, around issues of governance, but also issues of, can we reorient globalization? Can we reprioritize certain things? Last year I was in Prague, the International Symposium on Democracy and talking about, well, what can we do to try and re-conceptualize so we can re-inhabit democracy in a new way? Because democracy has also started to decay in Eastern Europe because now that they’re getting away from the glow of the revolutions, they’re starting to say, and this is it, and what else? And trying to work with the people who are working with there to try and keep, well, more than keep democracy alive, to re-conceptualize it and what can we do practically and what can we do philosophically? Sorry, I’m going on. I’m just trying to say, this is a long way of saying I deeply agree with you and I don’t just agree in word, I agree indeed. I try to do a lot because I agree with you. Talking about what we’re talking about without also a proper and reliable responsibility to these larger issues is a kind of, I would say it’s a kind of hypocrisy and I ideally want to avoid that, both in my own action and in the people that are working with me. Yeah, it’s the question, what role a genuine, honest spiritual practice plays in that kind of situation. Maybe we also have to learn to fail gracefully. Most people don’t really want to hear that because there’s this suspicion these are unpolitical people anyway. They just want to withdraw into some Disneyland, private Disneyland or something like that. But it’s difficult. One would have thought that Germany is immune, but we now have 20% of the population supporting an extreme right-wing party. It has happened here too. Of course, in Eastern Europe, most of these people are in former Eastern Germany, so they’ve never had a democratic tradition. They don’t have that experience before 1989. Of course, that’s the problem in Eastern Europe too. The experience hasn’t been there over generations and much deeper mechanisms like corruption are still there. Yep, very much. It’s a problem and it now really becomes very clear that democracy is something you have to afford also. You have to be able to afford it. You have to have a pretty stable and a high standard of living so people are ready to make these kinds of experiments. As soon as it gets shaky, as soon as it gets unstable waves of migrants coming in or so, it’s like dropping down to more primitive forms of social organization, to tribes, to xenophobia and our whole history comes back. I was shocked. I have actually quoted this at the end of the ego tunnel. The head of the Weizmann Institute many years ago said that the 20th century may go down in history as the century of democracies and pointed out that this is actually a very young phenomenon and a very tender cultural phenomenon. Freedom of speech, democracy and all these things that have developed in some parts of the world and that it is a realistic option that it might go. It might not go the way we think that it all turns into authoritarianism. We might all get ruled by a new case of billionaires and tech companies or so, non-supernational entities that suddenly control everything, AI companies or so. This is a very critical situation and things are accelerating. The main question for me is also how can one have this practice and also be open-minded, intellectually honest, accept empirical evidence and rational argument without overburdening oneself, without freaking out or burning out? How can all this be done for a normal person who has a job as a sustainable practice because you cannot face all these problems at the same time? That’s part of the challenge, I think. And I have to open it up. I have no answers. Well, it’s maybe not a permanent answer or a perfect answer but Sean has been pushing for anybody interested in these concerns to cultivate an ecology of practices just to keep themselves grounded, centered, rational, reducing their vulnerability to self-deception and all of that. We are all limited in our scope and where we are in the world and what the circle of our influence is. So, we do the best that we can. I want to bring a little attention to the time because I believe we’re at about 75 minutes or so. Yeah, we need to roll it up. We need to roll it up. But you can finish that thought, Thomas. Then we’ll bring things. Nice. I wanted to just relate an experience I’ve had in these three years beginning this research project about pure awareness. I’ve talked and corresponded with many meditators and it’s very clear that many of them have taboo zones and things that cannot be criticized or, you know, put into questions. In the book, I relate very briefly an experience. So, as a young man, I was attending the talks of J. Krishnamurti in Switzerland and in India, often was strongly influenced. At one time, I had a chance to talk with him all alone and I told him that I’ve just had a practice of yoga and breathing exercises and meditation for four years and all the good that this has brought about. Then he asked me a really nasty question, one of the nastiest questions I’ve been asked. Can you, not intellectually, but on the basis of your experience, make the difference between what of all these good things in your life came from the actual practice of meditating and what came from the fact that you found something, you know, in this insane world? That was a nasty question to ask. It took me years to get over it. I think we are these beings, we’re all trying to find something, you know, something that gives us a sense of security, thematic coherence in our lives. That is part of the problem, this urge to somehow find a back door about mortality, meaning making, all the things we talked about in this wonderful conversation. We’re all desperately trying to find something and in a way, people who have found something are dangerous people. They become missionaries, they have something to defend, they will have certain things that are not open to rational criticism anymore. I think that’s part of it, also to become aware of why am I doing all this exactly as you said, Rick. Do I really not want to deceive myself? Or maybe a little bit? You get what I’m trying to say. Somehow this has to be part of the overall project. Yeah, I love the way that you put that and I love your emphasis on this kind of setting aside our bullshit and our concerns and all that and just being honest about what we don’t know and what our needs are and how easily we fool ourselves, especially in this domain because of all the rich meaning around the kinds of things that we’re all interested in here. So bringing that back to the purpose of the podcast, I want to say we normally, and I think I sent you my list of questions, we normally interview people and ask them the same bunch of questions. I didn’t ask you any of those questions, but you answered most of them anyway. No, you answered the most anyway. How do you see meditation as a part of philosophy and this and that? You answered all these things anyway. So it’s been an absolutely wonderful conversation. I’m so happy that we finally met you and got you here. John, you want to add anything to that? I just wanted to say this has been a great pleasure. I think in many ways we were discussing a Socratic ideal about knowing what you don’t know and being very honest and courageous about what you don’t know and being open to rational exploration around what you don’t know. This is something that I’ve been strongly advocating for. This was one of many points, Thomas, where what you were saying and what I’ve been arguing for converge or resonate with each other in a powerful way. I found this a very exciting and interesting conversation. I just wanted to thank you. Now, I’d like to underline also one more thing. I want to underline one more thing. One thing that you said that really resonated with me, and I think also it represents my attitude towards like the Rutledge Handbook on philosophy meditation for me and probably all of John’s efforts is that we hope that we’ve done something that makes it interesting enough that somebody else or many others will come along and do a better version of it. That’s my attitude towards our role here. I think we all come from the same place. We think we’re on to something worth doing and we hope that it survives us. That’s one of the things John says. How do you know you really something has value for you? You want it to succeed even in your absence after your mortality ends. Well, thank you also for all the work. This has been a wonderful conversation. It’s been great to meet you. But for all the work you’ve put into setting this up and making this possible, it’s easy to watch. But people out there probably don’t know how much work and preparation it all takes. So thanks for that. Thank you very much.