https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=FCvQsqSCWjA
There’s also something important, Jordan, in understanding that at least the traditional churches, at least the liturgical churches, that you don’t, you don’t, like for example, in the Orthodox Church, they always say, if the sermon is more than 15 minutes, it’s pride. It’s like, keep your sermons as short as possible, because you’re not there to encounter… No, I’m obviously guilty of that. Well, you’re not there. I mean, it’s propositional understanding is fine, but it’s participatory. Right? Church is participatory. So you enter into the church, like imagine an Orthodox Church, even a traditional Catholic Church, you have a space which is structured as the hierarchy, ontological hierarchy of being, and then you see these images which are patterned and are revealing to you these mysteries that are beyond words, and then you participate in the singing, these processions, and it is a participative thing. And so if you go there to kind of get knowledge, it’s not the same type of practice. And as you’re singing these songs, and as you’re hearing these hymns, all of a sudden, two images connect together. And all of a sudden, these things start to connect inside you in somewhat, in almost a kind of super rational way. And the insights you get, sometimes you have difficulty explaining them, but they’re very deep and they’re embodied as you bow down, as you kneel, as you eat the body and blood of Christ. These are different types of participation than just— And, Jonathan, I’m totally in agreement with you. And what did we do in our Catholic churches in the West? The same time we were presenting the Bible in this flattened out historical critical way, we also were flattening out our churches, emptying out our churches of just that mystical cosmic symbolism, the angels, the saints, color, the cosmic dimension. And we flattened them out and we made them like, you know, empty meeting spaces. Hello, everybody. I’m pleased today to have the opportunity to speak with people that some of you will be familiar with. They’ve been guests on my podcast and YouTube channel, sometimes multiple times. It’s always been interesting to me and to some of you, at least, according to the comments, I thought it would be very interesting to get these three gentlemen together with me and talk about meaning. What meaning means, what religious meaning means, more specifically. And we’re hoping to have a free flowing conversation to investigate that question from psychological, theological, and personal perspectives. And so I’m happy to have John Vervecky, professor at the University of Toronto, Bishop Baron, who’s a bishop, Bishop Robert Baron, and Jonathan Pagio, who’s an Orthodox Christian icon carver and now as well, frequent YouTube commentator and public speaker. And these men, I found my conversations with them always stretched my mind and taught me new things and made me think. And so I thought we’d see what we could all do together. So welcome, gentlemen. It’s a pleasure to have you here. Thank you. Thanks for having me. John, thank you very much. Yeah, John, I’ll start with you. So I’m going to ask you two questions. I’m going to ask you what you think meaning means. What does the term mean? What does it signify? And then there’s some implicit idea, I suppose, that meaning has different depths and that religious meaning is among the deepest of depths. And I’d like you to riff on that. We’ll go from man to man to do that. Then we’ll start talking as if it’s a conversation. Great. Thanks again for inviting me. And it’s a great pleasure to be here. It’s great to see you again, Jonathan, and it’s a pleasure meeting you, Bishop. So there’s a question, as you said quite correctly, that’s at the center of a lot of my work and also, I guess, my own personal project. I take it when we’re talking about meaning in this context, we’re using meaning as a metaphor. We’re talking about something similar to the way a sentence works. It has an intelligibility to it that connects us to the world in some important way so that we can interact with the world and so we can be informed by the world. And then what we’re talking about when we’re talking about meaning in the sense of meaning in life, not just the meaning of a sentence, the question to ask is what is that metaphor pointing to? So I’ve put forth the proposal that what that metaphor is pointing to is something that’s fundamental to our cognitive agency. And Jordan, this is something you and I have talked about before in other contexts, which is the problem of relevance realization, which is this deep, profound problem at the heart of cognitive science. You find at the heart of AI, many issues within cognitive psychology, categorization, communication. And this is of all of the information available to me, how do I zero in on the relevant information of all of the information available in my long term memory and all the potential ways I could combine them? How do I connect and zero in on the relevant information out of all the possible courses of actions I can undertake, the way I could sequence various things together? How do I select the appropriate sequence of actions? How do I do that? And the thing that’s mysterious and wonderful and perplexing and intriguing and I’m obsessed about is we’re doing it all right now and we’re doing it like this. And it’s not a cold calculation. I’m standing out, I’m salient, there’s an element of arousal, there’s affect, you’re caring about some information and you’re backgrounding and ignoring other information. So it’s this very affectively laden connectedness, because the idea of relevance realization is it’s not relevance, it isn’t in the head, it isn’t in the world, it’s in a proper real relation between the embodied brain and the world. This is what’s known as embodied cognition. This is the kind of cognitive science I am involved in. So the idea is this is a dynamical self-organizing process and you can feel it a little bit at work right now, as I’m talking, part of your attention wants to drift away and think about other things, right? This is like variation and evolution. Another part of your attention is focusing in and selecting and you’re constantly varying and selecting and you’re evolving in this dynamically coupled fashion, a salience landscape that makes you feel that you’re here now in this particular state of consciousness, in this situational awareness. So you’re deeply fundamentally connected and that is deeply central to your cognitive agency. If you don’t have that, you’re not a cognitive agent. And this is of course one of the things that has the whole project of artificial intelligence has disclosed. We thought that intelligence was mostly about propositional manipulation, right? Getting, you know, sort of coherence and instead, no, this dynamical embodied evolving connectedness is very central to our cognitive agency. So much so that it stands to good reason that it is a core motivational feature and dimension of our whole agency. So I talk about meaning in life and I use the word and I use it deliberately, but I hope it’s not offensively. I use the word religio to describe this connection because that’s one of the, that’s the meaning of religio, to bind together. It’s one of the purported etymological origins of the word religion and that allows me to now segue into what I would want to say religious meaning is. So I think when we are, here’s a metaphor and I often use this. A lot of our, a lot of the time our mental framing is transparent to us, like my glasses, we’re looking through it and by means of it. But there are times when I need to step back and consider this is what you do in mindfulness practices. I need to consider that mental framing and I might want to not only consider it, I might want to educate it. I might want to celebrate it. So normally religio is transparent to us and therefore it affords our agency. But there are things we do where we step back and we try to become more directly aware of religio in order to educate it, perhaps correct it, improve it, celebrate it. And when we’re doing that in a way that creates what I call a reciprocal opening, the opposite of what happens in addiction. Reciprocal opening is my agency is opening up, the world is opening up and I’m experiencing this inexhaustible fount of emerging intelligibility that’s not just conceptual but is this about this religio. For me that’s the experience of sacredness and so when religio, when we focus upon religio rather than focus through it in order to accentuate it and accelerate it so that we can come into the deepest mutual resonance between ourselves and the depths of reality, that for me is what religious meaning would be, the religio about the sacred. So that would be my initial answer. I hope that was helpful. Okay so I’m going to comment on that and I’ll make my comments about this question because I’m also a psychologist and then we’ll move to you guys, to Jonathan and to Bishop Aaron. So if you think, when you look at the world there’s a central point of focus and that’s mediated by your fovea and that’s at the back of your, that’s on your retina in the center essentially and you’ll notice that when you zoom your eyes on something that becomes very clear. It’s a very small area that becomes very clear and then you’ll notice that around that area it’s less and less and less clear until it fades out into nothingness and the nothingness you don’t even perceive. It’s just not there and so it’s high resolution in the center, lower lower lower way out here in the periphery you actually don’t even see color. You can’t tell that but you don’t and you’re better at detecting motion because maybe you should look at moving things and then the world vanishes. So and that’s sort of what, that’s very much like what consciousness is and you’re and also it’s associated with meaning because you focus your fovea on what’s most meaningful and those foveal cells are tremendously connected into the visual cortex. It takes a lot of brain to make those fovea work and that’s why it’s such a small area and we move it around instead of just having a retina that’s all fovea. We’d have to have a brain like this big to manage that. So okay so that’s sort of like a metaphor for consciousness and meaning and then I want to layer something on top of that metaphor so and this is something like the relationship between the conscious and unconscious and also the relationship between narratives and consciousness and consciousness and unconsciousness. So I’m looking at say John right now, I’m looking at his eyes because that’s what you do when you converse with someone and I’m doing that because we’re having a conversation and so I have this little frame of reference that helps me realize what’s relevant right now. My goal is to have an interesting conversation and I’m picking out the targets that I presume are relevant to that goal and then but then you might ask yourself well why that goal and then so that story that’s guiding me is nested in a larger story which is well maybe I’m an educator and a communicator and I’d like to bring this knowledge to myself but also to other people and then outside of that is another story which is well why am I doing that and well it’s because I think that it’s an interesting thing to do and it’s a meaningful and useful thing to do but it’ll help educate people and maybe that’ll make the world a slightly better place in some manner and then outside of that there’s another presumption which is well why would I bother trying to make the world a better place and maybe that’s because well because not suffering is better than suffering and because I think that that’s a moral way to act and I would like to act in a moral manner and then outside of that there’s yet another story which is well and that’s where you start to shade into the religious it’s like who exactly am I imitating when I enact that morality and I think that’s where we can have a particularly interesting discussion because I would say psychologically that implicit figure at the outer edge of the narrative structuring of my consciousness and meaning realization that would be something that’s psychologically equivalent to the the hero of heroes in some sense that would be culture free but in our culture in the judaeo-christian culture that figure is christ and so then there’s a then there’s this is independent of religious belief as far as I’m concerned now there’s an interesting relationship with formal religious belief but I think this is the way it works psychologically and I got some of this from studying neuroscience the same sorts of things john is studying but some of it from studying yung and you know yung proposed that at the very least speaking psychologically christ is the symbol of the self and what he meant by that is that christ is the symbolic realization of our culture’s determination of the embodiment of the ideal and it’s an image and it grips us it’s the thing we imitate or we fight against we’re in that whether we like it or not and then the question becomes for me okay that’s a psychological truth but it it can also be a metaphysical claim and an ontological claim and that and that’s where this starts to shade into the religious per se so that’s it for me so bishop do you want to take it from there yeah uh thank you first of all everybody thank you and jonathan and john to meet you for the first time at least virtually i’ve met jordan twice now virtually but good to be with all of you you’re all canadians right all of you are canadian born because all i can think of as you as you’re both were talking about londrigan i’ll get maybe back to him but one of my favorite philosophers the canadian Jesuit londrigan came to my mind a lot but to answer the opening question i guess i would say meaning is to be in a purposeive relationship to a value so i think certain values appear epistemic values of the the true moral values and aesthetic values so the true the good and the beautiful right the three transcendental properties of being and i think those values appear and i really like what you’re saying too both of you about attention what gets our attention what draws our consciousness why like you know william james says the the mind is like a bird that flies and it perches for a time it looks and then it flies again why does it focus on certain things and we call those values i would say and a meaningful life is one that’s lived in a purpose of relationship to values it’s seeking them in a very concentrated way now what’s religious value is a life lived in purpose of relationship to the supreme value the summa bonum to the the source of goodness truth and beauty which is god and you know what came to my mind as you were talking jordan was two things from aquinas one is probably the most misunderstood and overlooked of his famous five arguments is the fourth argument and it’s the most platonic of the of the five he’s usually aristotelian in form aquinas but number four is platonic and what he says is we experience things in the world as more or less true good and beautiful so just what i was saying we notice values and we also notice them ordered hierarchically they’re some that’s that’s truer that’s better that’s more beautiful then thomas says we only can make that calculation in implicit relationship to something we consider highest in goodness truth and beauty and the way it’s misunderstood is people think oh i guess well there’s a tall building there’s a taller building and boy there’s the tallest building there must be some absolutely tall building but he’s not talking about something as trivial as that he’s talking about the properties of being the good the true and the beautiful and being is by its very nature unlimited so therefore it’s true that we make those calculations we see those hierarchies only finally in relationship to an unconditioned i can use the more modern kind of kantian language some unconditioned form of goodness truth and beauty that’s religious meaning it seems to me is to be in purposive relationship to that the other thing from aquinas and i think jordan you and i talked about it last time we were together i love what you did there because that’s an implicit argument for god it’s in the second part of the summa from final causality every time i make an act of the will i’m seeking a good i’m seeking a value of some kind but as you say quite correctly and that’s just like a coin is that value nests in a higher value which nests into still higher value and so i can’t go on indefinitely that would make my act of the will incoherent so i’ve got to come finally to some summa bonum some supreme value that’s motivating me that’s religious meaning it seems to me is now to be in relationship to this most alluring horizon of all of desire now there’s lonergan again my canadian reference to be in relation to god lonergan said is to want to know everything about everything so that’s the the value the epistemic value of the truth but now in its unconditioned form i want to know everything about everything we call that in religious language the beatific vision or i want not just this particular good so i’m talking to the three of you now which i think is a good but it’s nesting as you say in a higher good and it’s still higher good and so finally i want not just this particular good i want goodness itself that’s a religious relationship so i guess that’s how i i’d approach it maybe piggybacking a bit on what you both said jonathan i think i mean i it’s interesting because that by the way thank you for making me last in this stacking up on everything that everybody said but i think that what’s interesting in what jon said in terms of relevance realization and in terms of this hierarchy of values that both jordan and bishop barron brought up the the thing that i might add at least in my perception is that first of all these this pattern recognition that we engage with and this hierarchy of values and just hierarchies in general they really are teleological in the way that bishop barron said that is that the reason why we perceive hierarchy is because we’re always judging or perceiving or trying to evaluate whether something is good and but the other thing that this does in terms of so it binds reality together right so you’re looking at something and you want to evaluate the apple and this this desire makes you see the pattern of the apple because you have to engage with it you have to relate to it you have to eat it so because you have to eat the apple that’s why you see it and that’s why you can perceive it and that’s why you’re evaluating it but this pattern that today a binding of religio that jon mentioned it stacks up so until now we’ve actually talked mostly about individual relationship this individual relationship with the field of being that presents itself to us the individual relationship with the the ultimate good but it also does something else is that it stacks up people together it binds us together as well and that’s in terms of meaning of religio in a broader sense that can also kind of help you understand religious practice why we get together why we sing together why we celebrate as jon mentioned why do we celebrate together because when you see the apple and you see a good apple you’re implicitly celebrating it it every act of recognition of a good is going to be a mini celebration but that stacks up together in terms of people gathering and singing and and processing and doing all the things we do in order to celebrate the highest good and let me let me just just intersperse something there from a psychological perspective well that idea of the mini celebration so there’s a technical reason for that in some sense so let’s say you specify a goal and that goal is is nested inside the value hierarchy that we’ve already described and so now you’re pursuing something of value if you see something that leads you down the pathway to that value that produces positive emotion technically speaking that’s dopaminergically mediated and and so that’s there’s psychological there’s a fundamental neuroscientific reality underneath the idea that to perceive something good in relationship to a higher good is a celebration and and that is it is definitely that that imbues our life with a sense of positive meaning and i mean that directly like meaning is derived from this nested hierarchy and then the perception of of valued what would you the that the perceptions of values that lead us down that pathway without that there is no positive emotion in in my in my understanding of it yeah and so the last thing i might want to say is that so in the same way that the world reveals itself to us as this hierarchy of the good in the same way that that we see that we it also reveals to reveals itself to us cosmically that’s why i’m saying it stacks up and that’s why there are these that’s why there are temples that’s why there are there’s the law of moses that was received on the top of the mountain that there is a cosmic revelation of the same pattern that you encounter as an individual which is in inescapable as an individual and so that is what ends up creating these revelations of you know of being into the world and binding us together as a as a body instead of just these disparate individuals and as jordan said it’s very appropriate to discuss you know what are these revelations and what do they look like and and of these revelations which is the one that binds the most reality together into itself and i think that that is when the the image of christ as being god man as going all the way down into death as reaching to the highest summit as as you know we we could i don’t want to go into his story too much but jordan you know that there’s a most of christ’s story seems to go to the limit of storytelling in all the aspects in which it goes right it’s like christ doesn’t just go down into the underworld and resurrect when he comes back up the underworld is empty and death is defeated and that’s the end and so it’s like that for almost every aspect of christ’s story where he reaches the limit of storytelling and so in that way it’s it’s a it’s it is ends up just being the fact that we recognize it that we’ve brought it together that we’ve celebrated it means that it is part of this kind of cosmic revelation and it’s something that we can look at objectively and talk about and discuss but it’s definitely there in our story as a as europeans as you know as westerners and and we’ve discounted it completely but i think we’re at a point now with this meaning crisis where we can go back and reevaluate it and understand it as this the possibility of these relevance realization patterns stacking up beyond the individual let’s say okay so so i want to comment on that revelation idea i’m going to go a little sideways here and so you might say that the standard view of the world now is that there’s an objective reality that’s devoid that’s made out of faint material things that’s the most appropriate way to conceptualize it it’s made out of objective things they exist independently of consciousness and we project a value structure onto them and with and when we die let’s say when there is no human consciousness that value structure is there’s no value structure like that there and so it’s epiphenomenal and evanescent it’s not a fundamental part of objective reality outside of subjectivity so now there’s a couple of problems with that viewpoint i would say first of all it isn’t obvious to me that we see objects we see patterns it’s not obvious that we see it’s it you can make a strong case and this was made by man who wrote an ecological approach to visual perception that what we perceive first and foremost aren’t objects we perceive meaning we perceive a falling off place if we get too near a cliff and even a six month old will perceive that children infants very very young perceive beauty they perceive symmetry they perceive value and so we don’t perceive the object and obviously project the meaning you can’t say that that’s the way the neuroscience of perception has laid out the world and then the last thing is is that the problem with the idea that we merely project meaning onto a meaningless objective world is that meaning is disclosed to us in ways that we can’t predict and that are outside of our our what would outside of it that the new knowledge that we don’t have can be revealed to us through the perception of value it’s not it’s not obvious how we can project that and then also have something new revealed at the same time so meaning is disclosed to us and the phenomenologists phenomenological psychologists made much of this in the like first third of the 20th century following heidegger so so anyways i’m going to leave it at that can i just jump in i go back here to ditrich von hildebrand’s famous distinction between the merely subjectively satisfying and the objectively valuable and i mean he certainly understood the play between the subjective and the objective and all the classical philosophers knew that acquaintance certainly knew it i mean if the the mind and the intelligible form light up each other he said i mean each each one illumines the other so i don’t think the pre-modern people had the sense of you know sharp demarcation of of the two nevertheless there’s a distinction i think jordan you’re hitting at it there we we feel the distinction between the merely subjectively satisfying and the objectively valuable the objectively valuable addresses me it it rearranges me it’s not something that i’ve i’ve configured or i’ve projected it it’s turned me upside down i think we all had that experience there was an article in rolling stone years ago and it asked a number of the famous rock and rollers what was the first song that rocked your world and i remember liking the formulation of that question because it didn’t say what’s the first song you liked it was the first song that changed you that rearranged your consciousness and i can i can name that very clearly my own case was bob dylan’s like a rolling stone it wasn’t the first song i liked but it was the first song that rocked my world and rearranged me and i think that’s what real value is like now bring it to the religious level now we’re in a biblical kind of framework where you know it’s not you who’ve chosen me it’s i who’ve chosen you and now when the summa bonum isn’t just dumbly out there waiting for us to rise up through some contemplative exercise because i mean the summa bonum of plato and platinus and con could all say yeah there’s a summa bonum but when it really gets interesting to me is when the summa bonum is after me the summa bonum is is trying to find me and is breaking into my reluctant and recalcitrant consciousness and now you’re talking about religious revelation but it has to do with that that i don’t know stunning objectivity the the good think of iris murdick there she was so strong on that theme that the good confronts us and it changes us and it doesn’t let us go and religious revelation is the sort of ultimate expression of that it seems to me i i i mean i’m this is something with which i’m in significant agreement but i think it’s also important to wonder together why this has become so problematic i think we’re in a meaning crisis so yeah and i think we should remember you know the factor i mean so bishop you invoked aristalt’s conformity theory and of course that was replaced by a representational theory of knowledge a propositional representational theory for various reasons one was trying to account for the copernican revolution etc we had nominalism that said those patterns aren’t out in the world and that’s why i keep saying jonathan is more radical than he sometimes realizes because he’s challenging a fundamental nominalism in his work yeah and conti contest is the culmination of that the real patterns are only in your mind and we have no access to the world and there’s reasons why we got there and and then of course there are you know related issues around ideas of levels of being which is you know i think you’re right all of you have said this and i and this is you know central to the phenomenology of intelligibility but it seems to be you know contradicted by something that you know starts with scottis and goes through ockham and goes into the heart of the scientific revolution is there’s no such thing as levels this is not a reality just is you know existence isn’t a predicate and those kinds of things now i’m not i’m not mentioning these things to espouse them i’m mentioning them to try and indicate there have been very profound philosophical historical developments that have challenged this uh phenomenology um and that part of the task um well sorry i don’t want to be presumptuous part of what i see my task of being is to try and take the very best of science and answer all of those challenges in a way that restores confidence in the hierarchies of intelligibility and the phenomenology of connectedness now that’s one thing i’d want to say the second thing now why are you doing that why why are you called to do that john do you well i’m called to do that because um well this is how i i i put it to my students who take my introduction to cognitive science we have a scientific worldview in which science and the scientists and their meaning-making have no proper ontological place we are the whole science and and we are the black hole within this worldview that dominates us and let’s let’s be very clear and this is how to grow point domination is not just id i ideational or even ideological it is woven into the fabric of our technology the ways we communicate it’s woven into our cognitive grammar we talk about like even the way that we divide subjective and objective one of gibson’s points right jordan you mentioned gibson is the notion of an affordance and an affordance is not properly objective or subjective the grasp ability of this cup is not a feature of the cup it’s not a subjective feature of me it’s a real relation between me and so i mean gibson what again gibson’s work is really profound this is like it’s taken up into 40 cardinal science he’s trying to he’s trying to challenge this grammar and there’s a whole bunch of us i don’t want to i’m in no way a singular individual although i might be a bizarre one but i i mean i represent a lot of people who are feeling called to the fact that this this lack of ontological placement and the fact how and the way it ramifies through you know our ontological technological structure and our cultural cognitive grammar the the very ways we think is causing causing massive suffering so yes i’m absolutely right i’m clear about that a bit i’m still unclear about exactly what you mean what is this black hole is i mean is this the insistence on the absolute distinction between the subjective and the object no like what is this black okay so i what is well what i meant i mean it’s related to that but what i was what i was directly referring to at the black hole is that science the science exists okay if it is what kind of entity is it and tell me using physics or chemistry or even biology use just though that ontology and those methodology tell me what science is and tell me how it has the status to make the claims it does and tell me how science is related to meaning and truth and how do meaning and truth fit into the scientific worldview they’re presupposed by that worldview but they have no proper place within it that’s what i mean so whenever we’re doing the science and saying this this is what the world is we are absenting ourselves from it we have no home in which we are properly situated and i think that ramifies through everything we think say and do to to each other and with each other in a profoundly corrosive way that’s what i mean by the meaning okay what’s the profound it’s caused enormous suffering it causes enormous suffering so i mean i was talking to somebody just the other day in australia and there are more deaths by suicide in australia right now than covid yeah in australia is one of the epitomes of you know the best countries in the world affluent liberal democracy not much conflict been at peace for a long time blah blah blah blah all the things that the enlightenment said would bring in unending happiness and what you have is spiking in suicide you have the loneliness epidemic you have the addiction epidemic you have people choosing to live in a virtual world rather than the real world you have all of these things that are pointing to the fact that there’s a significant stressor you have positive responses too you have the mindfulness revolution you have the resuscitation of ancient you know uh wisdom philosophies like stoicism you you have uh you know you have the work of people like right here i mean one of the things i i hope jonathan takes this as compliment because he knows that how highly i think of him i think one of the things that jonathan is doing with his work is responding to this suffering and the meaning crisis we were drawn to each other because we both saw the zombie as a as a mythological represent the culture was saying to itself we’re suffering a meaning crisis i’m talking too much i’m going to stop but jordan if we if we go back to the image that you use which is the idea that we project meaning on an objective world already you can see the alienation that is bound up in that very proposition which is okay so where are we then we’re not in the world we’re like these these kind of ghosts that are floating above reality like and where does that come from like where does that floating intelligence come from that’s able to separate itself so completely from the world that that it’s able to just analyze it objectively and then project and then realize that realize that it’s projecting subjective meaning on top of it and so when once i think that some of the work that jon’s been doing and some of the work that you’ve been doing is to realize this embodied reality is that we are in the world and we are part and parcel of the manner in which meaning even the world itself discloses itself we people who think they can imagine the world outside of human consciousness like where are they where are these signs where are they standing that they can tell us that we are projecting meaning onto the world are they like gods you know up in up in up in the world would never say that they’ve taken themselves out of the equation and so coming back into reality and understanding this image of communion for example like a lot of the images that jon is saying is really this image of communion is that meaning is relational that it’s communal that it’s all these things that can help us even understand once again what the religious patterns are for is to just hold it’s actually holding reality together and once we’ve once we’ve broken that then we get this increasing alienation we get the increasing fragmentation you know the suburbs as just a spread of people they don’t know each other they don’t have common projects that have nothing in common except that they’re living in in a in a just this equal space and so this kind of reducing of hierarchy in the world that they that the scientists wanted to happen it’s happened now to us and everything’s breaking apart and nobody can hear each other and and it’s a it’s a direct consequence of that thinking yeah there’s a lot that’s just stimulating my thinking here and one is i mean god i love the sciences but i hate scientism and scientism is all over the place in our culture i deal with it all the time in my evangelical work hearing from not just younger people from everybody in our culture that science is the criterion you know i i saw a video jonathan you and jordan were talking to brett weinstein and it was about i don’t know maybe something along these lines but he made very articulately intelligently but made the argument that the sciences the physical sciences belong in the supreme position vis-a-vis all forms of human knowing and i’m shouting at the screen no no that’s exactly where they don’t belong and that’s a form of scientism the medieval is called theology like the queen of the sciences well at least you’re that’s more appropriate you’re talking about god and the summa bonum having some kind of supremacy i also go right back to the classical world the sciences from a platonic standpoint they’re terrific but you’re just getting ever more precise accounts of the cave right of the images the fleeting even ascent images of the world to rise to higher forms of consciousness by way of mathematics first of all then then to the higher forms of philosophy metaphysics aristotle you know moving from physics to mathematics to metaphysics it’s not to denigrate for a second the sciences aristotle’s the founder of many ways of physics but it is to say there’s a hierarchy again there’s an epistemic hierarchy and science physical science does not belong at the top of it when it does something goes really wrong with the human and there’s a there’s a starvation of the spirit well and it’s hard to know how to take that seriously like let’s say that’s a fact there’s a starvation of the human spirit that’s a fact well is it a fact like a fact that emerges from physics well not exactly it’s a different kind of fact but what happens if we ignore it well people suffer and die and we don’t use the fact that in the absence of a proposition people suffer and die as an index of its truth not not from the scientific perspective that that isn’t the methodology of science but that leaves us with this problem of of meaning it’s sort of delivered to us and it isn’t something it isn’t obvious to me that science can address it at all i mean sam harris and other thinkers like harris have tried to put the value to bring the domain of value within the domain of science i think it’s it’s an effort that’s doomed to failure because i don’t think they’re of the same type i think that science by its very nature excludes it does everything it can to exclude value except john it leaves us with the problem you described which is the problem that jung addressed when he was tying the development of empirical science back to alchemy because and this goes back to the idea of the hierarchies that we started out with you know jung believed that he was really curious about why people ever became motivated to take things apart like scientists did to concentrate on the minute like that what dream drove them what fantasies drove them and for for young it was he found that fantasy in the thousands of years of work on alchemy and the alchemical notion was there exists a substance which eventually became a material substance whose discovery would grant upon its bearer immortality perfect health and endless wealth so the idea the dream was that substance could be found in the material world and that was a deep deep unconscious fantasy manifested in all sorts of images all sorts of bizarre images that jung had the genius to be able to analyze and understand he saw that as the dream that preceded the development of science in in in western culture thousands it took thousands and thousands of years to unfold this dream and scientists were encapsulated within that dream whether they knew it or not and so the prime example would be newton who wrote much more on alchemy than he did on physics and so and so john as scientists at least from the union perspective let’s say we’re necessarily motivated by a narrative that we don’t understand scientifically to engage in the scientific process per se and we’re so deeply possessed by that that it it guides and moves our perceptions without us as scientists even necessarily having to be aware that we’re participating in that narrative so to your point the whole enterprise is driven by a dream whose reality can’t be encapsulated within the process itself it’s a very strange thing i think it’s very interesting uh that dream and and and and sort of the undercurrents of development so substance goes back to hypostasis but of course there’s another history of hypostasis which is into the persons of the trinity which is a very different history and so there’s there’s no necessity that you go from hypostasis the grounding of intelligibility to materiality and of course what happened right was also the inversion of matter as pure potential to that which resists and yes so and i think that’s part of again about how a history of how um you know the the the reason was was supplanted by will as the dominant faculty by which humans understood and identified themselves i would like to say that that’s bound up with a couple other strands i’m not trying to do i wish i could do exhaustive history here but i took 50 hours to do it so i’m not going to try and do it now but you know you you also have like people like harris and others you have a deductivism model right which is i i whatever i can deduce from the science is real but in the neoplatonic tradition you also look at what is presupposed by your sciences and that is also a proper uh uh location for the real so i have to presuppose right the the intelligibility of the world in order to do science i can’t use science to establish intelligibility and then if i if i’m realistic about my science which i better be because that’s what scientists seem to be doing i have to be realistic about this intelligibility but that’s in the contradiction to the normalist presuppositions the flat ontology notice notice the contradiction notice the contradiction and reductionism so you have this whole tradition that says there are no levels of being get rid of all that platonic stuff but the bottom level is the really real level and all the levels above it are false that is exactly symmetrical to the upper level is most real and everything coming down from it is derivative there’s no deep difference this is part of the point i’ve made between an emergentist ontology it’s it is hierarchical and has levels and an emanationist it is hierarchical and have levels and so do you do you think dark and selfish gene is an example i think the idea that you can explain things in a purely bottom-up fashion this is part of the alchemical revolution it was like and i think and i agree with young on this maybe my interpretation is slightly different but you know there was a predominance of you know emanation and emanation as notology coming out of the neoplatonic tradition and we needed to rediscover we needed okay so let me address that for a second drag the christians in because one of the one of the one of the claims that one of the clint yeah i know one of the claims that that young made in his works on alchemy which are very very difficult to understand was that look um the christian revolution took place and spread across well across what became christian the christian cultures and the west broadly speaking and there was a um an offer of salvation right of deliverance from suffering and then and and and and the hope that christ would return in the kingdom of heaven would be established on earth or or something to that end and then thousands of years went by and the disquiet grew as that wasn’t revealed and the the the unconscious imagination looking to find a source of new knowledge that could redress that suffering and lack started to focus on this emergent this opposite emergent ontology that you described said we we haven’t paid sufficient attention to the reality of the material world maybe that’s what holds the key to the alleviation of our suffering and so then there’s a pull away from the top down this top down hierarchical structure that christianity had imposed in some sense or revealed to the opposite and and now it’s swung way in the other direction and so could i just say one thing in the defense of the neo-platinus um which is you know if you read erigina and kusa you get to uh you get to uh and erigina’s clear on this you get a dialectical in the platonic sense not the hegelian sense in which the emanation and the emergence completely interpenetrate they’re both needed they then they interpenetrate each other and i would argue that what’s happening now is your people are moving especially in the philosophy of biology towards we need bottom up and top down as you know jordan this is rife through all of cognitive psychology bottom up top down thinking right and and that’s not just specific to the mind i think it’s now spreading out as no no this is how we should start to think about it but i think a more proper reading especially of the later neo-platinus points to that heritage within neo-platinism itself so it doesn’t have to be something necessarily foreign to christianity i would at least argue no saint maximus is a clearly a bottom up and top down at the same time in saint maximus’s cosmology you have the notion that you know this these revelations are both a communion of love and also a revelation from above and that there’s absolutely no contradiction between the elements coming together and coagulating in in this this relationship of love and in expressing this divine principle or this higher principle which is coming down from uh from above and in terms of jung’s theory i mean i don’t want to be picky about it that he kind of imagined this story you know alchemy came came very much from islam by the way it had a lot of its development was was in the islamic world even the word alchemy is is a is a is not a it’s not a western word and so i i think i find it a little too simplified to just say christians were waiting for jesus and then they created this this bottom up science there’s a deeper kind of transformation which happened in the west related to nominalism and to a kind of slow progression towards this separation of heaven and earth we could call it like this kind of ripping apart of the of the two sides which kind of led both to materialism and to all these esoteric things that were going on at the same time right it’s not true that materialism was on its own but there are all these kind of esoteric developments that were manifesting themselves we have to remember that decart spent his whole life trying to become a rosicrucian like these two things were it’s like a ripping apart of reality that leads into the new age into all this kind of neo spirituality and christianity’s true message is rather the incarnational one it’s the one that john said it’s it really is this binding of multiplicity and unity the binding of of of the the emanation apart and the this kind of emergent part together and so abisham sorry i i interrupted you know it’s very stimulating stuff and i i would add you know the structuring element in the summa of Aquinas is that so-called exodus raditus right all things coming out from god then all things returning to god and so god makes a world that’s good indeed very good but not perfect and part of the drama of salvation which is in the bible always cosmic not just human not just personal the drama of salvation is this wonderful process of raditus the return of all things to god the coming together from below if you want but under the you know the the alluring power of god’s love so that’s that’s one observation a second one about the sciences i mean i agree with there’s an army of scholars that say the condition for the possibility of the of the physical sciences in the west was christianity that is to say the fundamental assumption that the world is not god if you divinize the world you’re not going to experiment on it you’re not going to analyze it in this sort of objectivizing way so the world is not god it’s been created therefore it can be experimented upon it can be analyzed but then secondly as we’ve we’ve all been saying in different ways it is radically intelligible not just in a superficial way not just in certain parts but in every nook and cranny the universe is intelligible that’s a very weird thing the more you think about it why should that be the case and of course it’s coming out i would argue of a christian conception that the world did come forth the bible puts it poetically as a great act of speech meaning it’s in it’s imbued with intelligibility from an intelligent source well when you bring intelligibility and non-divinity together you get the rise of the of the modern sciences so they’re not the least bit repugnant to christianity on the contrary what is repugnant is this scientism and you’ve all been hinting at in different ways you know trace it to people like dacart but i i’m with john i go right back to dun scotus and and occam and the breakdown of a participation metaphysics and when you get this univocal conception of being and following from that nominalism and i would even dare say certain forms of protestantism are very much conditioned by that way of looking at things you get a lot of the problems we’re facing today i’m for a recovery of the pre-modern this wonderfully rich pre-modern of a participative view of being you know the world in god the world reflecting god not a world of separated things and god being the supreme thing among them so aquinas says that god is not the supreme being he doesn’t call him and sumo but he calls him ipsum esse to be itself so there’s a whole view of reality that’s implicit in that description of god and it’s that is repugnant to scientism in its various forms and i think that’s the key to recovering a lot of sense of religious meaning i i really liked the invocation of the participatory part of what i’ve been arguing is that the cutting-edge cognitive science what’s called for e-cognitive science is challenging the reduction of knowing to propositional knowing knowing that something okay yeah that what we’re discovering and you can even find you know specific kinds of memory for each one of these there’s also procedural knowing there’s knowing how to do something with skills there’s perspectival knowing which is knowing what it’s like to be here in this state of mind in this situation giving me situational awareness and then the deepest is participatory knowing this is this is the way in which we know by how we are conformed and transformed by others by the world so that our knowing of ourself that our knowing of this so you see this of course prototypically in the way you know your beloved you don’t know them by your skills or your proposition of course you know them this way but this is not the the essence of it the essence of it is the way you know you are conforming to them and you’re being transformed so your self-knowledge and your knowledge of them are bound together but these this is now becoming these ways of talking about other kinds of knowing and the way in which they you know are stored in different kinds of memory right procedural memory episodic memory that weird kind of memory we call the self this is now coming to the fore but here’s the point i want to make the point is right we’ve suffered kind of a propositional tyranny from occam on where we reduced all of knowing to the propositional and i would argue that most of what i called religio is being carried on by the procedural and the perspectival and the participatory and so that is in a fundamental way how it’s it’s not just out there it’s like right in the guts of our of our self-interpretation yeah the question i think one of the questions is what what is the ontological significance of that let’s say i mean one of the leaving aside the the truth or lack thereof of various religious claims one of the weaknesses i believe of the rational atheist’s position is that first of all that their argument is carried out almost entirely in the propositional landscape they treat religious they treat religion as if it’s a set of propositions that are in some sense expressed in a manner contrary to this propositions that constitute science and then i think well wait wait a minute guys you’re you’re missing the point here and there’s a propositional element to religious claim and i often think that’s the weakest element of but but what do you make of the fact that people have religious experiences what do you make of that exactly well you say well that’s epiphenomenal it’s like well yeah is it really like are you so sure about that so let me give you an example so i talked to ryan murorescu and carl rockewall back and they’d be doing some investigation into the illucinian mysteries and uh murorescu’s book is predicated on the idea that what the greeks were doing was using a an lsd spiked wine essentially to produce a collective mystical experience that and they had technologies to harness that so it was collective and that that constituted the core of the illucinian mysteries and that that enterprise was practiced by the ancient greeks for thousands of years continuously and that that experience was at the basis of the unity of greek culture but more than that that it was the fountain from which greek wisdom flowed and so it’s a revelatory hypothesis by which i mean sorry it’s a it’s a hypothesis about the function of revelation in a society if these drug-induced dreamlike states of religious experience are the fountain from which a culture like the greek culture emerges well what are we supposed to make of that ontologically i mean we’re great admirers of the greeks right we we see our culture as that’s certainly the rational element of it and perhaps a tremendous amount of the aesthetic element is deeply rooted in greek presuppositions it’s like well is that are the illucinian mysteries that religious element is that an aberration that within which everything else is embedded this is a this is a fundamentally important question it’s not something trivial i really don’t know what to make of it because it throws the whole problem of well the ontological significance of psychedelic substances into the mix and that’s a thorny problem if there ever was one that’s a problem of the lower meeting the higher that’s for sure but it’s not something that’s going to be a problem for the entire world and that’s a problem right these chemical substances that can reliably induce overwhelming mystical experiences you can just set that aside and say well that’s a form of insanity but it’s not schizophrenia it’s not obviously within the category of of mental illness and then and to you know to murray rescues hypothesis runs quite contrary to that not only is it not insanity it’s it was a vital source of of revelatory knowledge philosophical knowledge and and got the ball rolling in some sense so god only knows what to make of that but well there’s i mean there’s lots of experimental work being done on this right now the griffith lab i i did an experiment in my lab right it’s not epiphenomenal the people who have more mystical experiences have more meaning in life reliable correlation but yeah they become more open now the undergoes a permanent transformation at least long standing yeah yeah well a couple of years anyways and it’s not trivial it’s one standard deviation increase it’s a big difference man you have all of yayden’s work showing that when people will have these experiences they will reliably improve their well so so a good friend of mine who’s a genius by the way um and so i listened to what he has to say and he’s a technological genius he talked to me about his his mushroom experiences when he was a mixed up teenager you know engaging in various forms of delinquent activity and he said that from the after his psychedelic experience his sense of what was right and what was wrong was massively heightened and he abided by it from then on yeah and like i look at his life it’s like well you know you you’ve accomplished a fair bit and he’s a very solid person and quite the monster in in the most positive way and you know you can’t just dispense with that it’s like well it taught him the difference between good and evil and then he abided by that for the course of his life and and you know when when when griffiths griffiths people have his laboratory subjects have these mystical experiences and they quit smoking yeah and you think and if you take a look at this work you’ll see like it’s so it’s onto normativity people encounter what they call the really real um and it’s really unusual because normally what we do is we take these experiences that are disconnected from our everyday intelligibility like a dream and we say it’s not real because it doesn’t fit in people do the opposite with these experiences they say that was really real and all of this has to change to get closer to it now i think there’s a way though of starting i’m not this is going to be a complete answer jordan but i think part of the reason why we find it problematic these kinds of experiences and this is what some of the empirical work i did showed is because we’ve reduced rationality to inference and we’ve forgotten that rationality is broader and includes insight and if you think of how an insight works and you can see you can see a continuum between insight flow transformative experience even the flow experience has mystical aspects to it and people get into it on a fairly reliable basis right and what we have what we have to say is the core of rationality is not inferential coherence it’s the capacity for self-correction and insight is one of our most powerful ways of self-correcting i point to your own work you showed in some of your experiments that you know one of the things that predicts insight is the anomalous card sorting task right and you also showed that that predicts how well people are are overcoming self-deception you did the experiments on both of those right and that’s not the coincidence insight is one of the fundamental machineries by which we overcome how we’ve fundamentally misframed it’s a fundamental self-correction we need a model of rationality that includes them both let me ask you about that let’s go back to this nested idea right can i just say something about psychedelics which is important to mention is that i mean obviously a lot of people are talking about it right now and i did you know i did watch that interview with murer rescue and i think that in this question of psychedelics i think we’re actually seeing an increase of the problem that we’re talking about this kind of alienating problem which is that psychedelic seems like a very nice solution because there it is there’s the mushroom i can analyze the chemical substance i can i can so when we talk about the elucidation mysteries now everybody’s excited to talk about the spiked wine but no one cares to talk about the entire ritual in which this was embedded and it becomes this kind of weird reductive thing in which the tool that we can identify which is you know you can you can put it in a box and you can you can nicely identify it then everybody’s attention goes there right now because of our kind of materialism in our and our and so i find it very difficult because you know what what we saw psychedelics do in the 60s is that ripping open the veil supposedly in a world where the ritual around let’s say the coherence of society the place where society coheres together and engages in a common ritual and in common attention and in common storytelling and then we kind of throw this stuff out into a world that is individualistic and based on on everybody’s own little whims is not necessary is going to i think and we saw it happen is going to create these experiences that are frameless and instead of binding will will continue to kind of fragment our society i’m really worried about the psychedelics yeah can i just jump in and i’m sort of thinking out loud because i you know i really loved in what both jordan and john were saying is the the way the mystical is being described there’s something really right in that i think when you have a true mystical experience meaning an experience of of god of the sacred it does have those effects that it convinces you that’s really real as opposed to the world that’s it’s real but it’s not as real as that that now i’m clearer about good and evil i mean the authentically mystical i think has that but but when you talk about drugs and all that look for me it’s a closed book i’ve never experienced that myself directly but i’d also say this the great mystics in the western tradition think of john of the cross especially he was my go-to guy john of the cross probably had what we call extraordinary experiences certainly his colleague therese of avila did i mean visions and that sort of thing but what did john of the cross consistently say let go of them let go of them when people said oh what do i do when i have an experience see it it’s kind of a buddhist thing see it and let go of it john of the cross never wanted people like hanging on to the extraordinary vision or the extraordinary manifestation so there is the mystical for sure and and you know i use my platonic thing going from you know the cave going from physics to mathematics to metaphysics but beyond metaphysics there is indeed this mystical dimension of knowing so i don’t discount that for a minute but i’m also i’ve got a lot of john of the cross in me that says be very wary of hanging on to those and to jonathan’s point there about you know well if i just take this drug that’s going to be my my guaranteed path into the mystical whatever is going on there the real mystical you know tonight i’ll be probably in front of the blessed sacrament at some point with the rosary and believe me i’m not having any kind of lsd like experiences but that’s the mystical as far as i’m concerned so i’m trying to find what’s really good in that description of it i think it really is accurate but i’m wary of clinging to it one there’s one thing to be clear go ahead just to respond to to jonathan’s criticism i mean the point that jonathan is making is being recognized by people who feel first of all there’s a there’s a distinction even in griffith between a psychedelic experience and a mystical experience and secondly yeah okay most people are clearly indicating for example all the therapeutic interventions using psychedelic and the evidence is mounting that it’s not the drug that does it right it is the drug in in concert with the set and setting the therapeutic framework all of this other stuff has you have that i consistently argue for this you have to have this wrapped in a sapiential framework because it is it can just as much take you off into self-deception as it can into right into self-correction so i i but but i want to be clear that there’s a lot of people that take the criticisms that have been made here very seriously and it’s actually woven into a lot of the research yeah well it’s interesting with regards to the scientism issue so if you look at griffith’s research so you you see that his subjects take psilocybin and then they have a mystical experience and then they quit smoking or they’re less afraid of death it’s like and the way it’s written up in the journal is it is bottom-up drug effect because there’s no description of the content of the mystical experience it’s like well the drug produces a mystical experience and then people don’t smoke and and the scientific journal format only allows for that and so but then there’s this question that’s like this is a big question it’s like okay well why are these people no longer afraid of death like did that switch just get turned off well that’s not that’s not how it works there the whole view they have of reality has been reoriented in some manner and what manner it’s like well what happened exactly that’s that’s an even more key question and it’s relevant to jonathan’s point and then john to go after your you a little bit on this topic jonathan is pointing to something that’s that’s that’s a very intelligent caution and that is that i know you know that i know you know that and these these hypotheses of set and setting are they’re just the beginning of that surround that needs to be created to integrate these experiences into the broader culture they’re just they’re you know they’re not much changed from the early 60s while you have to be somewhere calm you have to be with someone who you know is going to take care of you it’s like yeah that’s we’re just barely beginning to to figure out what to do with this and then bishop baron like i believe for what it’s worth and i don’t know what you guys think about that i think that revelation is a psychedelic account literally oh the book of revelations i really believe that you bet you bet i think that the author of that had a psychedelic experience and all he did was write down what happened to him now it’s not that might not be right but it’s too grounded in the old testament that’s right the classic apocalyptic literature i mean it’s how it is going why is that why is that an objection why is that an objection he was grounded in that tradition and all of that tradition was was made vivid in imagery during the experience that’s not be not certainly not beyond the the confines of such experiences so and i think the church is going to have to wrestle with this seriously in the years to come because there’s an association between psychedelic use and revelatory meaning that the church is going to have to grapple with i believe there are plenty of months to have revelations and visions and have all these types of experiences but that don’t take psychedelics they you know it that it’s actually through asceticism and through transformation and i think this is coming back to to bishop baron’s point is that let’s say in the hesychastic tradition in the mystical tradition of the east it’s exactly like what he said about saint john of the cross they consistently insist that the mystic has to ignore all experiences because the purpose is not to have experiences the purpose is to be united with god to be transformed you know to be free of your passions to be free of the things that kind of bind you and it’s going to happen and maybe that can actually maybe be somewhat instructive for others but that’s not the point and so so i think that i can i understand it because there’s something about our world too that wants experiences right we we can we want to have these these exciting or very kind of exciting experiences but the real purpose is to be transformed which is why someone is willing to be martyred or someone is like that has nothing to do with like having a really great mystical experience there’s something about it really is about the transformation of the of the person into into the image of christ let’s say jonathan is it true i’m curious in the eastern traditions i don’t know as well but in in the west certainly the mystics all talk about god actively stripping these things away so even something like the great contentment i get in the beginning of my relationship with god my sense of of consolation to use ignatius’s term god will take that away because i’m not meant to fall in love with the consolation i meant to fall in love with god so i’m not meant to fall in love with the mystical experience or with the vision or whatever i meant to fall in love with god and so god actively jonathan cross will talk about the you know the dark knight of the soul and that’s really what he means it’s not a psychological state it’s it’s god actively taking away these experiences because there’s something else that we’re really talking about in the eastern tradition the highest point is is absence of all image and thought right yeah that that that you you actually don’t have any there’s no imagination there’s no thought there’s nothing there’s only this kind of pure presence and this pure light let’s say that kind of gathers you into god uh so it is and they constantly say the same thing they say all these experiences let them go you got to drop them you got to don’t become a guru and you know kind of teach out of your out of your little mystical insight but rather just drop it and keep going up the ladder let’s say right i mean i’m very wary of the idea that the communion cup the origins are in some kind of psychedelic experience i mean trust me it’s never happened to me i’ve been gone to mass since i was a kid uh because the reality of it is other than that i mean even if there was something and certainly the ellisonian mysteries have been well studied and perhaps there was a psychedelic element and so on but i would never want to put stress on that i would i would want to say that first of all if you talk i talked to aiden lyon who was right his book is coming out a psychedelic experience of philosophy of psychedelic experience first of all he doesn’t he doesn’t pin the term on the use of psychedelics per se it just means blind revealing experience so what i would say is that the substances are belong to a class that don’t require chemical substances so these are disruptive strategies you know jonathan mentioned you know eschisis right asceticism yeah the shamans chanting the drumming the sleep deprivation there’s a whole family of disruptive strategies but let me let me try and show you what i think this is related to if you are if you are trying to if you’re having a problem a problem because you’ve mist framed the situation and you’re and you need an insight what’s actually really good for an insight is to be moderately distracted from the problem or it’s like if you’re trying to solve an insight problem on the computer screen and i put a bit of static or noise into it that will actually help you break up the inappropriate frame and find a new frame you do the same thing with neural networks neural networks are trying to learn and you periodically have to throw in noise because if you don’t throw in noise they’ll get too narrow and too fixed on what they’re picking up on so this is this is and this is what i meant i did a talk about this it’s like insight requires these disruptive strategies and they look exactly the opposite from our model of rationality so i think a more appropriate thing because i mean i i see disruptive strategies in saint john of the cross i certainly see those and of course they’re all the way through the neo-platonic tradition and they can be cognitive disruptive strategies nicholas of kusa puts you like you know that an infinite circle is also a straight line and you go like that right so i i know i’m with you on that i’m with you no i’m with you on that i’m thinking of thomas merton used the buddhist term calming the monkey mind and he thought that was the purpose of the rosary yeah and i was conducting a retreat is about three years ago with the priests of dublin now i’m all irish so this is in my cultural dna but they were praying the rosary one night these about 60 men and they prayed the rosary which normally takes about 25 minutes to do it at an usual pace they finished it in about six minutes and it was but at first it seemed ludicrous but what it was doing was setting up just that kind of buzz that sort of mantra like quality that i think does allow something to happen that allows something to happen in deeper parts of the psyche deeper parts of the soul so i think that’s right i agree with those elements are there in the mystical tradition the jesus prayer too jonathan’s an example of anything yeah and so i for me as a scientist i’m studying these things like when i did the the one experiment i mentioned the content which i think is supportive of jonathan’s point isn’t the key thing that’s predictive of the changes in people it’s predictive of the relationship to meaning in life it’s actually the insight process rather than the particular phenomenological content that seems to be driving the transformation the christian aesthetic and the christian mystic this insight gathering or this kind of mounting up into insight is bound up in the transformation of the person in terms of their own passions and also the transformation of the community in terms of liturgy and participation in communion and so it’s buffered like it like i said it’s binding it doesn’t it’s not just someone you know doing something to get some insight but it ends up being this this binding of the of like if bishop baren was talking about all these monks sitting together doing the rosary together and then maybe going into liturgy and and taking communion together and working together and so there’s something more than just the just the kind of psychological or you know personal experience or personal healing from from this or that problem but it’s yeah it’s it’s it’s a holistic thing i hate using that word but it’s a holistic process let’s say well because both ways right the insight isn’t just propositional it’s perspectival and procedural and and and i think mystical experience is the most profound version of participatory knowing i mean i think and they can make a very strong new platonic argument and and i think i agree with you jonathan i think i mean you you see this in some of the things i’ve been doing the ethnographic work on what people do the circling you you you can you can get uh you can get shared insight flow that doesn’t belong to any one person it belongs to the community as a whole and people right and and and i and i think that’s that’s very important uh for as you said making sure that this doesn’t i mean it’s so easy for these experiences to become a magnet of narcissism for people right and so the the de-centering that happens when we are immersed in something larger than ourselves which i think helps cultivate the virtue of reverence i absolutely agree with you i think that absolutely has to be the case and i’ve argued it repeatedly for that i hope i’m not coming across as trying to say it’s a it’s an individual personal thing that i’m talking about that’s not fundamentally what i’m talking about i’m talking about it being systemic in the individual and systematic throughout the community so okay so let let me jonathan i’m curious about this i mean i your cautions are duly noted on my end i i saw see what happened say in retrospect when the hallucinogens were introduced to western culture right i mean it didn’t work very well and look at what happened to timothy leary so for example i had his old job at harvard by the way oh i didn’t know that yeah yes many people have pointed that out to me jordan by the way yeah jesus of all the weird things in any case you know murcia eliana also believed that the true shamanic tradition wasn’t psychedelic driven no and that was an aberration i think he was wrong i really do believe that he was wrong and i think that and i i’m i’m also not entirely convinced that that the practices that you’re describing can produce experiences that are as intense as those that are produced chemically maybe they are but even if they are they’re not they’re not available to the typical person they take tremendous amount of training and then so that’s a big problem and then is that a problem is that a feature well it seems like well i don’t i yeah look it’s a feature too jonathan because maybe you need to do all that training to handle the insight you know and and i’m not trying to look for a facile solution here believe me but the church has a hard time attracting people at the moment and i don’t know what’s happening in in the broad church with regards to the sort of work for example that griffiths is doing and it’s not like i have the answers to these things but i i by we shouldn’t look to the psychedelics as a as a savior certainly but they should also not be discounted because they are the means by which people can have the sorts of experiences that the scientists the followers of scientism discount it’s right there it’s right there as proof in some sense in some sense i’d be more maybe that’s irrelevant to the church using the wisdom tradition jordan as you’ve been doing i mean the fact that you’re drawing a lot of people back toward christianity through the opening up of the bible and the the wisdom way of reading the bible that to me is a is a great way the churches can start drawing especially young people back it’s obviously working in your case uh you know we’ve got our problems and some of it came from the scandals certainly but some came from an exaggerated attempt to be relevant to the society and to sort of dumb down our language and to make it sound like an echo of the culture that’s what did us in i think in terms of attracting younger people but what you’re doing opening up the the scriptures that’s what the church fathers did and people are flocking to that because they they find in that the wisdom tradition and through the wisdom tradition they’re finding mysticism authentic mysticism a contact with god so i think that’s the route to go it’s we have to deal with our moral issues we have to deal with the scandals that’s for sure and we have to deal with this dumbing down of the faith and this flattening out of the faith that’s i think what what has really compromised our mission could i pick up on that you see any yeah sorry go ahead john because like i think this is part first of all i want to i want to challenge two things you said jordan um i’ve had both experiences and i i’ve had peak versions of both and i can’t find them ultimately distinguishable like through a contemplative practice and taking a psychedelic um they have and when you took a look at the research people say they can be the same they tend to orient a little bit differently the psychedelic experience the psychedelic mystical experience tends to on average be a little bit more impersonal the contemplative one tends to be a little bit on average more personal in the ontology uh but no no deep you know differences and the other thing i would say is you know i don’t know how much we have to rely on them i take your point that it’s instructive and i think the science should do it i i think it’s immoral to not investigate these substances because of the clear evidence that’s mounting for their ability to alleviate you know untreatable addiction depression uh a host of issues and so i i think we should keep doing the science i’m not but you know the research sort of reliably indicates that 30 to 40 percent of the population have these transformative experiences that’s what taylor says i think the problem is not an absence of the experience to go to bishop’s baron’s point i think it’s the absence of a wisdom framework that allows people to properly appropriate and metabolize these experiences so i i’ll do this with in my class i think i mentioned this to you jordan with my students i’ll say well where do you go for information the internet blah blah blah where do you go from knowledge science maybe the university and i’ll say where do you go for wisdom and there’s a deafening silence right and wisdom is not optional you can’t you can well you know what i don’t care about being connected and overcoming self-deception and harming other people because of the ways in which i’m willfully of course it’s not optional wisdom is a necessity it’s it’s an absolute prerequisite to religion yet our culture right has no no way in general of providing people with the sapiential framework to process these experience and also to have properly cultivated a prepared character for them when they do emerge so i would argue that that that’s where the the problem lies it’s not in the absence i think of these experience for people it’s the absence of a framework that allows and a worldview that allows people to properly process them and we’ve had a few centuries of christianity really kind of falling into the trap of of materialism first of all trying to constantly justify its stories through history and some statuette found in palestine or whatever like all these strategies to try to constantly justify the stories through the these scientific methods and at the same time focusing on the idea of being saved or going to hell and going to heaven rather than the more mystical tradition which is there it’s all there right it’s all there and it’s all available to us it’s just that the emphasis has been i think the wrong one in the past few centuries but it is possible and i think it’s happening now and like like bishop barron said i think jordan one of the things you’re forcing a lot of christians to do is to reconsider what this has to do with my life how it binds it together how it connects us together and we have the church fathers that that just right there it’s all there in in their in their teaching and it’s there in the liturgy itself and the imagistic vision of the chance and the the iconography and all of this is it’s all present we just need to kind of go back and help people connect things together so that they can have true experiences but we forgot a lot of our own tradition or we underplayed it i’ll give you one example when i was coming of age in the catholic church so you’re now late 70s into the 80s the way we were instructed in the bible so those of us preparing for the priesthood right to be preachers and to be spiritual counselors and soul doctors it was pure historical criticism that was a method of biblical approach that emphasized very much you know what was in the mind of the human author as he wrote and so using very rationalistic methods to kind of break the scriptures down break them apart but the whole idea of meaning about what the scriptures were telling us about god about our relation to god the mystical dimension of life that was all very muted as a result our preaching and i i accuse you know my own generation of this our preaching became very flat often very politicized maybe psychologized in in the worst sense of that term but the the mystical depth of the scripture we forgot we didn’t read the church fathers as they young himself said the first psychologists were the church fathers it’s dead right it seems to me so we do we share a lot of this blame here by we i mean the religions themselves we forgot our own best traditions and we allowed this scientism to hold sway and that’s why people are struggling so i’ve been trying to figure out i mean i really don’t know how i’m stunned at the the popularity of the biblical lectures i can’t wrap my head around it you know no matter how hard i try um and i can’t i can’t even judge their significance so small or great but they’ve attracted a lot of views so we’ll stick with that so then assuming that they have some significance i’ve tried to figure out well what was it that made them work why why did people come and listen to what i was saying about the though about genesis and i think partly it was because i wasn’t exactly telling people what i thought about them i wasn’t saying this is how you should read these stories i was trying to investigate something i knew was beyond my comprehension and i was doing that on my feet now i talked to someone this week who is quite explicitly religious and i could hardly listen to him because he kept telling me what was right he kept telling me the dogma it’s like well for are you so sure you know that and like who the hell are you to tell me that and that and it just there was just no meaning being revealed from that there was no investigation like i approached the bible as a psychologist in some sense but as if it was something i really didn’t understand a strange artifact god only knows what it is it’s this book that’s been around forever cobbled itself together in a manner we can’t understand it’s lasted for a very very long period of time it’s had an inestimable impact it’s full of extraordinarily strange stories that that we understand very little about in some profound sense and it was an investigation and i kind of pulled people along with me during the investigation and that that seemed to and and maybe when i when i go to church do i see do i see that do i feel that i’m being led along an investigation into the structure of deep meaning and the answer is not usually i i usually feel as if i’m being told what to think or told what to believe and that’s just that doesn’t seem to work it’s but the church father’s priesthood exactly the way you’re describing and we we luckily have some of these sermons like of augustin that he gave we’d say off the cuff there was a secretary out the crowd who would take them down he would probably polish them later but you get a sense of someone who’s doing what you’re saying i think thinking through with the text as he goes he was theologizing philosophizing but he was he was trying to draw his people he was a pastor augustin he wasn’t an academic he wasn’t a professor of theology at a university he was a pastor trying to draw his people closer to god and he learned the method by the way from ambrose when he goes to ambrose in milan he’s a he’s a manakee he’s not even a christian but he heard that ambrose was a great rhetorician so he went to hear his rhetoric and while he was there he learned the method of reading the bible which is this more allegorical spiritual method that’s what young appreciated that’s what you’re doing in many ways the young augustin learned it from ambrose and then he bequeathed that to us in his sermons and biblical commentaries but trust me when i tell you we didn’t study that we didn’t study that approach ours was a very scientific rationalistic approach to the bible and that’s why preaching is relatively bad i would say so you’ve in a way stumbled on something that’s very old you know but still has enormous power to transform people there’s also something important jordan in understanding that at least that the traditional churches at least the liturgical churches that you don’t you don’t them like for example in the orthodox church they always say if the sermon is more than 15 minutes it’s pride it’s like keep your sermons as short as possible because you’re not there to encounter obviously obviously guilty of that you’re not well you’re not there i mean it’s propositional understanding is fine but it’s participatory like church is participatory so you enter into the church you say like you imagine an orthodox church even a traditional catholic church you have a space which is structured as the hierarchy ontological hierarchy of being and then you see these images which are patterned and are revealing to you these mysteries that are beyond words and then you participate in the singing these processions and it is it is a participative thing and so if you go there to kind of get knowledge it’s not the same type of practice and as you’re singing these songs and as you’re hearing these hymns all of a sudden two images connect together and all of a sudden you know these things start to connect inside you in somewhat in almost a kind of super rational way and the insights you get sometimes your heart you have difficulty explaining them but they’re very deep and they’re embodied as you bow down as you kneel as you eat the body and and and blood of christ these are these are different types of participation than just and jonathan i’m totally in agreement with you and what did we do in our catholic churches in the west the same time we were presenting the bible in this in this flattened out historical critical way we also were flattening out our churches emptying out our churches of just that mystical cosmic symbolism the angels the saints color the cosmic dimension and we flattened them out and we made them like you know empty meeting spaces so there was a terrible rationalism that descended upon the church and it dried us up in many ways you know so i this is again my mea culpa as a catholic i think we passed through a period that was really problematic and and recovering the sources the you know resourcements we say right recovering the the great sources of the bible and the fathers that’s what that’s what we’re talking about what the bible had by its nature what the fathers understood that’s what we need to revive the church i think so look but bishop you’re doing something right obviously you’re attracting some online attention some substantial online attention and jonathan the same is true of you and well jon it goes without saying for you to some degree because you’re a professor and you have that whole you know that whole world at your fingertips in some sense and you’ve been very successful at that but in the more specifically religious domain the more specifically christian domain you two are having some some public success what are you doing right do you think i’ll let jonathan go first well i actually i think you know i think bishop barron and i are are doing very similar things which is why i’ve always felt akin to what he’s doing i’ve written for his for one of his publications i always felt we’re close in the approach which is first of all a avoiding just argumentation but rather this kind of presentation of beauty you know bishop barron also even in his publications in this desire to kind of have a beauty first approach this kind of encounter with these powerful patterns of being and you know how they kind of point to christ and i think that showing the deep coherence the deep narrative coherence in in scripture and then pointing back out to the world and saying this deep coherence in scripture you’re going to encounter it in movies and in all these cultural phenomena that you’re going to see you’re going to encounter the same deep patterns that you find in scripture at a lower level we could say but that all of these kind of culminate into and so it really is like a meaning first approach and a beauty first approach i think which is which is which is attracting people because the insights they get at first they can’t i have people who watch my videos for two years and tell me they don’t understand what i’m saying and i’m like well why are you watching my how can you’ve been watching my videos for two years if you don’t understand and they seem to express that they get these insights and they can’t totally explain them and and then it keeps them kind of wanting to to continue on in in on this path let’s say towards ultimately a lot of them end up moving towards christianity and entering a church at some point yeah my thing has been beauty and truth i mean so don’t dumb it down i live through dumbed down catholicism and it was a pastoral disaster you look at all the surveys i studied them very carefully why young people are leaving the scandals come up the scandals will be mentioned but by far the most prominent reason is i don’t believe the doctrines i never had my questions answered it’s in conflict with science it doesn’t make sense they’re intellectual problems well yeah i get it we dumbed the project down for about 50 years so smarten it up and and reintroduce people to this tradition we’ve been talking about the second thing is the beautiful we also as we dumbed it down we also uglified it you know we de-emphasize the beautiful so one example you know we put out this word on fire bible so the text of the of the gospels but it’s a bit like an illuminated manuscript idea that we surrounded it with glosses from the fathers and the popes and the great theologians but also lots of artwork lots of color so i want to reintroduce people to the bible but not in a flat rationalistic way you know so that’s what i’ve been trying to do i well i was certainly attracted to jonathan to begin with because of the quality of his artistic endeavor like this absolute he’s absolutely beautiful and archaic yeah traditional let’s say not archaic traditional this traditional medium that he was revitalizing and in such a stunningly beautiful way and that’s that that was the entry point into getting to know him and getting to understand his thought and yeah and beauty isn’t the thing you can’t argue against today beauty just smacks you and and and that’s really something so and you can also help people notice that it’s like well notice beauty book beauty brooks no argumentation right what do you think that signifies what’s it pointing to is it pointing to something higher it certainly seems to what might be higher we need to figure that out well it’s the least threatening of the transcendentals in the post-modern context so people today you say here’s something that’s true who are you going to tell me what’s true i got my own truth even worse here’s the way you ought to live here’s the good who are you to tell me how to live but the beautiful doesn’t preach in that negative sense it it just is you know it shows itself so it’s more winsome and so it’s a more it’s a less threatening way into the project so that’s why i’ve tried to lead with it especially in a world that’s ugly like our world is just so ugly you know the modern the modern world is just so banal that you know there’s a reason why tourists go to cities and visit churches even though they’re not christian and they don’t care about it because they go someplace and they’re looking for a beautiful for beauty and then they end up in a church rather than in a mall yeah and that’s definitely worth thinking about you know and the intent incredible value that’s to be found in those unbelievably beautiful beautiful constructions it’s like what is that beauty and why do we experience it there those those lattice like creations of stone and crystal with color and the addition of the music that all goes to your liturgical point the drama that’s part of that and and and the celebration of beauty which is definitely absent in the modern culture yes yeah when i was a student in paris i’d go there all the time and shart to me is the most beautiful covered space in the world but i remember this years ago i brought a classmate of mine so a priest from chicago to see shart and we walked through and i explained everything we looked at the windows and all this and he said gosh it’s something uh it’s just too bad it’s so liturgically off and i knew what he meant because i was forming the same way you know that i know the church would be in the round so we could see each other and there should be clear sight lines and you know should be brightly lit and all this stuff and like you said shart cathedrals liturgically off is like it’s the supreme liturgical space in the world but that shows the the quality of the bad quality of the formation that we got in my generation um my experience with christianity has been different and um so i was brought up in a fundamentalist christian family family and so i very much um was traumatized by that and um i think if you talk to some of the nones i think there’s a mixture like you said i don’t think the scandals which the media likes to focus on are not the primary factors right not what the research shows one is this issue about intelligibility and i want to talk about that and the other is there i i meet a lot of people are attracted to my work because they because they’ve had similar histories not just specific to christianity i’m not beating up on christianity i’ve had people coming out of other traditions islamic buddhist this is possible um in all of uh the of all of the traditions i’ve encountered um so i i think uh what there’s two things i want to say and they’re not intended to be pushback but they’re intended to open up questions which is uh and this is where jonathan and i also we rub up against each other but it usually creates a good friction and good sparks and maybe uh it’ll call forth a response for you too bishop um i think the project is not to try and resurrect um neoplatonism or the neoplatonic structure uh i mean aquinas sorry augustine wasn’t only uh you know taught by ambrose he explicitly talked about you know platonist and the platonist and the mystical experience the neoplatonic mystical experience he had and how important that was etc and it’s clear that it’s through pseudodionysis and maximus and so i like um and so i think the project if i were to put it if we want to reach the nuns is to show them a reconciliation a profound one and here my ambition runs not personally but the ambition of the project towards aquinas or maximus which is to show right to revise that neoplatonism and perhaps it’s a neoplatonic christianity but i’m not going to be specific about that right now to show how it is profoundly uh you know to do a reciprocal reconstruction between the neoplatonism and the scientific world view and there’s a lot of people doing that right now i think we we need we need a post-nominalist neoplatonism if i could put it that way in a profound john you you opened that that uh selville with the statement that you are traumatized by the fundamentalist christianity yes very much and that that’s that’s not irrelevant to the selville and and and to the nature of your project and and it’s something we should discuss too because you also brought up the idea of reconciliation it’s so people have left the church but in some sense the church has alienated people from it as well and some of that’s the scandal and some of it’s the sort of experience that you described yes people have been left with a with the horrors of childhood experience that were a consequence of their religious education and i’m not trying believe me i’m not trying to attack the institutions per se but but it’s something that they need to deal with it needs to be dealt with it all of us need to deal with not they there’s no they here you know what i there’s no they here we have these problems we have this meaning crisis it’s everyone’s problem so it’s there’s no they in some sense but but so what has that done to you let’s say with regards to your appreciation of christianity per say well first of all i want to say that those two things that we talked about the one that bishop baron brought up about and my response to it is i think we need and maybe jonathan will have a response because he has this model of christianity going through a resurrection cycle itself so maybe there is a possibility for our discussion but i think we need to i think we need a reciprocal reconstruction we need a post-nominalist uh form of neo-platinism that will provide that bridging and i do not think jordan that the lack of that is unrelated to the trauma that i experienced because of there was no bridge take that apart take that apart okay because there was no bridge it was easy to give me an either or isolating choice you’re either in this world view or you’re in that world view and that one’s demonic and if you go over there you’re lost there is a deep connection between the lack of bridge between the religious world view if i can put it that way and the scientific world view that allowed for that kind of tyranny over my mind that i found so deeply traumatizing those are not separable phenomena that’s what i’m arguing they are deeply interpenetrating and mutually supporting that’s how i experienced it and what opened me up was a science fiction book that showed was a book by rogers alasny lord of light that showed the possibility of wonder and self-transcendence within a scientific world view that’s what blew me open out of fundamentalism yeah well lots of people who are follows their scientism let’s say find their religion in science totally totally that’s where literature grabs them right that’s that’s where they’re grabbed by the religious and i mean star wars is the classic example of that for sure definitely so and that’s you know that’s worth pointing out to these these rationalist atheists that’s fascinating to me fun and when i deal with atheists online which i do a lot very often i’d say when you scratch the surface of a really angry atheist you’ll find as you put it a traumatized fundamentalist at first that surprised me now it doesn’t anymore that when i press a little bit and probe a little bit it’s someone recovering from just the kind of traumatizing experience that you had as a kid so that makes sense to me yeah i want to be clear i i wouldn’t self identify as an atheist that would no no i wasn’t just in that no but but i think just to your point that i understand that the severe reaction to it that people would have did you what did you think of the point that i made that there’s a deep connection between sort of the the psychological trauma and the fact that it was facilitated by this gap uh yeah right religion and science that is very much the enlightenment grammar that we’ve been given right and and see what i find attractive about the neoplatonic tradition was the idea of rationality and the mystical being deeply interpenetrating but we can’t leave it as it was is what i well i think we it needs a fundamental uh reorganize but but and it needs to connect to this fun there’s a there’s a huge thing happening in science at least the science that i that i where the fundamental ontology is coming into question the way we have seen the beginning of the 20th century there’s a golden opportunity here there’s a golden what do you see happening i mean what do you what do you see because you’re far seeing so i want to know like what is it oh boy i don’t know i want to take that but thank you for that um well what i see is this i see i see that we are there’s we’re moving back to the understanding uh that we need the emanation with the emergence not throwing out the emergence but we need the emanation with it for let me just see you give you one example so when you in cognitive science even in biology we are getting to the point and and and you know aerostata would like this um and maybe even more uh platinus where we we we understand possibility as a real thing so for example right and this this lines up with some eastern traditions so i’ll do this sometimes i’ll put a pencil on the table and i’ll roll it and this goes to like cutting edge work by alicia aurora was honest my students why did it roll and they give the standard sort of newtonian answer because you pushed it right and then i’ll say think think think what are you not seeing think thinking that what i said it also rolled because there’s a flat table and there’s open space in front of it and it has the shape that it has there are in addition to causal events there are constraining conditions that are just as real and they are as much explanatory of how things operate as the bottom up causes so think of a tree you have all of the events causing the structure but the structure why does the tree have the structure it has because it increases the probability that a photon will hit a chlorophyll uh molecule it’s structuring possibility into potentiality and that’s just as much needed to explaining a tree as the chemical events causing it we need both to explain life to explain cognition and more and more people like eastman’s work there’s a lot of people from sort of the white headian uh philosophy of physics are saying we need that even for our fundamental physics because we can’t reconcile bottom up quantum mechanics with top down relativity we can’t do it because and we keep trying to make it it’s got to come from quantum up to the relative the relativistic which is you know top down but i would argue the fact that we’ve tried this strategy and we keep trying it for 40 years and it’s failing is probably a reason to think that maybe we’re framing the problem fundamentally wrong way and we have to think about no no no we have to give up a purely bottom up we have to make the top down as real to all of our explanations that’s happening in the science right now now to my mind and i don’t mean to be insulting because i don’t want to be reductionistic but that sounds a lot like a lot of the language i hear jonathan using and i i agree jonathan it’s not identical but you and i have good conversations around this there’s a we can talk to each other there’s a there’s there’s you know a chance of real communication even communing but that i don’t think that’s specific to us i think that’s a very real possibility right here right now there’s an opening up of the space that’s happening now and and i think people who are tuned to it can notice it and it does have to do with what you’re saying in terms of this kind of limit of science and the problem the observer and all of these realities that everybody’s trying to deal with and it’s like it’s almost like a zeitgeist and it’s interesting because your experience you talked about of being traumatized and then having this separation of the two world views it really is akin to the way i was trying to describe at the outset yes in a separation between let’s say the religious in a very in a very kind of moralistic and legalistic and and uh you know materialistic way and this kind of rise up above of these esoteric things that kind of came up in the west whether it goes into theosophy into all these different very very popular you know all the occultists all of this stuff was very very popular we we tend to ignore that but it was extremely had a lot of effect on culture and so that’s why it’s interesting because some people today to me will say things like oh you’re you’re saying occult things because because i’m actually trying to connect reconnect these things together right to reconnect these things that went up too high and these things that went too low into this top down bottom up reality when you read same acts with the confessor you really do have exactly that structure that you’re talking about and and i think that can if you read san griego venice and especially the mystical like the more mystical fathers i think that like you talked about pseudodionysius i there are some theologians right interesting theologians right now that are positing dionysus’s theory as a solution to the problem of complexity and emergence they don’t want to come on my channel yet because they’re still working on their papers but it’s happening right now like people are talking about it and thinking about it yes can i suggest something this comes from uh cardinal george of chicago who was kind of a mentor to me and he was a brilliant guy and he used to say we we start the religion science thing the wrong way because it’s too much a polar opposition that we should work on the recovery of philosophy as a rational path and what i think he meant was a lot of people especially young people think the only rational path is the scientific one that those are simply coterminous to be rational is to be a follower of the scientific method and so if religion isn’t that well then it must be irrational well if it introduced philosophy as indeed a rational path that the most brilliant people in the tradition have have uh have practiced it but it’s not a scientific path it’s it’s rational without being scientific and that might open the door cardinal george used to say to thinking about religion is also a rational path that’s not scientific um i think it’s hard for younger people to even to imagine what that is rational means scientific we can we can we can help them out to some degree i mean i titled my first book maps of meaning for a very specific reason is that the this narrative structure is a map yeah this and that what that means if that’s true and i do believe it’s true and i studied a lot of the early work on hippocampal function from animal animal researchers and they they made some real fundamental uh discoveries in the field of cognition it’s like we we need a map to traverse the world it’s not optional without a map you’re lost and to be lost is is a terrible thing and so and and there’s rationality in the development of a map there better be because otherwise it doesn’t get you to where you want to go and you certainly want to get away from being lost let’s say and science is not a map it’s a description of the terrain without direction yeah there’s direction there i suppose but it’s implicit the scientists impose that direction by following the dictates of their intuition of meaning but science itself doesn’t offer a map right well there’s no rationality outside of science okay well they let the irrational people design the map well that’s what’s happening with the politicization of our culture right right so the religion and then the rationalists you know they say well if we weren’t religious and we weren’t superstitious well everyone would be rational it wouldn’t the world be a better place and i think no the religious would drop into the political and then you watch what happens and we are watching what happens because there’s no domain for the religious now no specified domain so tiny things become imbued with religious significance because there’s no proper place right and that’s a that’s not good and so it’s it’s not that it’s not impossible i mean i don’t see i don’t see a flaw in this claim i can’t see a flaw and it’s like don’t we need a map well can science provide that map i’ve never heard a thoroughly critically scientifically trained deep philosopher make the case that science can provide the direction for ethical behavior and that’s the map what’s good where should we head so well then what do we do with that there’s nothing there’s nothing there’s no map no and that’s why i objected so much to that claim that that science belongs in the highest place that’s not the physical sciences are the queen of the sciences that can’t be right because that’s that’s saying the one that can’t provide the map is governing all the other ways of knowing and that can’t be right but i think we have lost a sense of that and again i think as a religious person i’ll take some responsibility i think we have not been great at providing the map and we have to recover that for sure well bichette i i i want i think this follows from what you and jordan were talking about one of the problems invoking philosophy is is which one do you mean do you mean academic philosophy or you mean the philosophy that pierre haddo i know has has brought back where that one i think is better yeah the it’s a way of life well yes and what i would what i what i would point to is that that points us to a kind of what are we what’s the difference between the academic philosophy and i have training in that and philosophy as a way of life and it goes to you know points that jonathan was making about you know the how much the transformation look the the cartesian claim is that truths all truths are available to a method you go to earlier you know the neoplatonic tradition right there it’s like no no no there are some truths that will only be disclosed if you go through fundamental transformation and then and then so we have to talk about the the rationality of transformation which is about you know the procedural the perspectival the participatory transformation and the thing about this and this is what’s really exciting is a lot of the work is showing that you know i’ve got a a series of right now doing with gregory kesson’s x-stine that you you can’t infer your way through transformation this goes to i mean the person who wrote the book on this is la paul i know lori she’s a great philosopher tight analytic argument to make the point you can’t infer your way through a transformative process and so you have to ask the question okay is it just willy nilly no what do human beings actually do what kind of rationality agnes callard did this in her book on aspiration she calls it proleptic rationality what kind what is the rationality what does it look like when people are you know going through fundamental transformations in order to conform to reality that’s their way of getting at the truth rather than marshaling a method and so it does it go back to my point again we need to expand the notion of rationality and the way it was exemplified in philo in philia sophia rather than the way it is exemplified i would say in still to a large degree academic philosophy i went into yeah i agree can i invoke your the academic philosophers have the same problem that bishop barron described about the priesthood yeah that’s how it looks could i invoke your to me your countryman again lonergan you know we had those four imperatives if you want to know the world you’ve got to be attentive be intelligent be reasonable and be responsible and he describes all four of those but his point was we tend not to be those four things the mind has fallen it falls away from attention it doesn’t see what’s there or even like john to use your stuff it doesn’t maybe make the right siphoning moves to say let me be attentive to the right things it’s not intelligent which for him meant it doesn’t have insights so it doesn’t discern intelligible form it’s not reasonable meaning it doesn’t make judgments so i’m looking at a phenomenon i say it could be this could be that but i never make the judgment to say no that’s that’s truly what this thing is and then finally it’s not responsible meaning it doesn’t follow up the implications of its judgments but what he was getting from his own christian tradition i think was the deep sense of the fallenness of the mind the mind is it’s it’s not it’s not a wreck but it’s compromised and it needs to go through a disciplinary process it has to go and that’s i think what pierre adot and those people are recovering from the ancient world is you had to go through plato’s academy was not a classroom where you sit and take in play time plato’s theory of the forms it was a way of life and you learned a manner of of being and and knowing and so on so i think that’s true in in in any intellectual discipline you’ve got to be converted and you have to acknowledge and we have to acknowledge your sin in a way that your mind is is not what it should be and you got to go through a discipline and that’s what we’re doing now well gentlemen we’ve we’ve we’ve passed our two hour mark and so um i think and i’m starting to drift somewhat so i’m going to call this to a halt i think somewhat arbitrarily unless there are pressing issues that any of you would like to conclude with maybe a concluding statement from sure i mean i think that first of all jordan thank you for the opportunity for us to talk to speak to each other i never met bishop barron i i had some admiration for him and obviously for you and for john and um i think that these discussions are very fruitful and i think that these especially as people watch them it’s because it’s obviously not just happening here people watch them get engaged and kind of people who haven’t listened to john’s things or haven’t listened to bishop barron things are mine you know to kind of see what is what is the discussion happening now because a lot of the things we brought up are are really on fire in terms of subjects in the world and so need to be continuously explored and we need more people to to dive in and so thanks for the opportunity john i i i want to reinforce what jonathan just said it’s been wonderful the two hours flew by for me it was wonderful to meet you bishop and i think we could have some wonderful conversations in depth about you know the project of perhaps integrating neoplatonism and science i think lana grinn would be help and you know insight of course was crucial to that so i i really appreciate all that um yeah i just wanted to say that um i take the meaning crisis very seriously um and i think covid has made it worse i’ve got a lot of evidence for that and um i don’t think i think the the vein i think it’s a vain hope that everything’s just going to go back to the way it was i think that is not where we should place our existential or epistemic bets and i think we need to ramp up the project of getting the call to a sapiential framework in a way of life to people out there so that’s what would be my final word bishop yeah mine again is just to thank everybody i enjoyed it immensely and i agree with john the time flew by and i found it fascinating um yeah the recovery of the wisdom tradition over and against this deadening scientism the recovery of value over and against this equally deadening culture of self-invention that i just generate my own values i think that i mean bores me to death and i think that no it bores me to death and i think it’s killing people spiritually so the recovery of the wisdom tradition the recovery of objective value culminating speaking as a as a catholic bishop in uh in god the supreme value that’s the key to meaning well thanks very much guys for participating in this i really appreciate it and i’m sure we’ll i hope i pray all of that that we’ll have a chance to converse again and that people who are listening um are benefited by this and that we do this immense technology that we have at our fingertips so surprisingly uh ethical justice and help help dispense whatever wisdom we’ve managed to cobble together to as many people as we possibly can and invite them along thanks god bless you all thank you you